AngelWatch Ch. 07

"I am, silly girl."

"No not that, you're just looking for intentions and evidence of traps. I'm here alone though, read me, Keiko, all of me."

"That takes forever and there's nothing in you I want to know about. And even if you came alone, Windy will have you tracked. So I have to knock you out and leave."

"I'm much harder to follow than you are." She held out her fingers. "See? I burned off my fingerprints for this. I sprayed my skin with a plastic clear spray to bind my scent better. People don't see me because I'm not pretty and don't talk to strangers and I don't carry anything electronic, and these are new clothes. And Angelwatch is too busy looking for you to spare anyone for me, so we have a few minutes to talk."

"Sorry, nothing to say."

"Read me."

"Why?"

"I'm what you are looking for."

"You're not a rapist, Marcy."

"Rapists are your excuse Keiko not your goal and I know that because I read very very well and you aren't even trying to block me. I'm what you're looking for, read me, Keiko, every corner and as deep as you can go and remember I don't know how to block so it isn't even hard."

Reading -- especially the kind of slow, deep reading Marcy was talking about -- is fascinating, even a bit addictive. It's as close to seeing the world through someone else's eyes as a human can get. I didn't get to do it anymore -- it requires lots of time and a subject whose willing to sit there and basically do nothing but daydream under your guidance, for hours. Windy had done it to me when she'd first met me, as she'd fixed me up. I'd done it a few times within Angelwatch as an exercise. I didn't have the kind of life which allowed for it anymore.

And there was no denying that Marcy, with her utterly contorted views of the world and of human contact, would have been a fascinating read.

But just because she believed she wasn't being traced, didn't mean she wasn't. In a world where tracking devices were about the size of a thick quarter, proving she wasn't wired would have involved shredding of her clothing and a body cavity search. And I had no idea how to search body cavities, other than sticking fingers places and hoping. I couldn't even be certain she hadn't been knocked out, and had one implanted somewhere.

So now I had to send her to sleep, pack up as quickly as possible and run. I was already mostly packed; I'd always known that a visit from Angelwatch was always a matter of when, not if.

But... she couldn't have been traced. If Angelwatch knew where she was, she'd never have made it here. Windy would rightly consider me a danger to Marcy and would have stopped her from actually meeting me. Unless that's what they wanted me to think? Everything is complicated when your adversary is a clever alien psionic do-gooder.

Screw it.

I knocked Marcy out and caught her as she fell. There was no need to get heavy-handed (heavy-brained?) with her; she herself was not malicious and didn't deserve my ire. I lowered her to the floor, and packed up my bathroom supplies and the three outfits in the closet -- I never kept more than that out at one time. Two large suitcases in hand, I headed for the door, spidey-sense tingling because everything is nervewracking when your adversary is a clever alien psionic do-gooder. But even with my brain turned up as far as it would go, I couldn't find a reader anywhere. Poor foolish Marcy really had come alone.

This is where you'd expect a twist in the story. Windy had some amazing high tech cloaking technology and could creep up on me undetected. Or the black helicopters drop out of the sky and net me. Or they'd diddled Marcy and now she was actually a powerful writer and was about to get up behind me and blast my brain. This is where the hidden strength of Angelwatch should be revealed and the evil bitch -- me -- gets taken down by the super sci-fi alien device or the truly cunning plan or the overwhelming might of Angelwatch's super-secret black ops HALO team.

But, no. Angelwatch is a very low technology operation. It had to be. Specialized high tech gadgets require big research teams, big budgets, and difficult-to-hide testing. Your comic book heroes might have secret underground labs, but out here in the real world, those labs have to be constructed and stocked and restocked and run up big electric bills and have wastes to dump and personnel who talk too much. It's hard to hide that kind of work. Even governments end up with secrets leaking out; Angelwatch can't ever take that risk. So no amazing technology; the fanciest hardware used is magnets. Ditto on the black helicopters and HALO teams and other do-you-have-any-idea-how-much-budget-and-personnel-it-would-take-to-maintain-it military strengths. And if Marcy could have been diddled to have more powers, it would have happened long ago.

Angelwatch is what it is, individuals contributing time. There's computer expertise for a few members, and basic training in martial arts, spying, doctoring and disguise for everyone, and the rest is just reading and writing and keeping an eye out.

It was time for me to leave London. Angelwatch had a big presence here, also in Tokyo (of course), and a number of other major cities. But Africa, South America and Eastern Europe were poorly covered. Eastern Europe was probably my best option.

Then my spidey sense went off. Marcy was waking up.

I spun around and saw her struggling to sit up. She should have been out for hours. I cursed, fluently. I was going to have to do to her what I'd done to Elena, fuck her up pretty bad.

"Don't", Marcy said, thickly. "Don't hurt me. I'm not a threat. I wake up easily from being knocked out and I know you just want to hit me harder but that will damage me and you must not do that, it's wrong and I don't deserve it. That's how you justify lashing out in your pain, because the victims deserve it but I haven't done anything bad and so I am safe."

Fuck this shit. She was right, she didn't deserve what I could do to her. But I needed her to shut up, so I blasted her with the sensation of physical pain, and she screamed and curled up in a ball. This didn't do real damage, mental or physical, but she'd be incapable of moving, speaking or reading as long as I kept it up. If I balanced it right I could even get her to crawl away from me. But there was nowhere I could usefully make her crawl to. There were no rooms in this apartment I could lock her up in that would hold her for even five minutes.

Sobbing, she turned her eyes to me, and then began crawling. Towards me.

I turned the pain up as far as I knew how to make it go. She threw up, but she kept crawling towards me, spasmodically thrashing. I remembered from somewhere that some autistic people processed pain differently than normal.

She just kept coming, crawling like an agonized spider. All I was doing was torturing her pointlessly... cursing, I stopped writing, and she curled into a ball again, crying and throwing up repeatedly.

"Marcy stop," I said. "Leave me alone."

"No," she said. "You come with me or I follow you."

With her vast skill as a reader and her ability to wake up that quickly, I was screwed. I could knock her out again, and hold her unconscious, but when I left I'd have to let go of her brain, and she'd wake up. I could tie her up but she'd start screaming and these walls were thin. Tie and gag her. No, people can still scream through gags, unless you fill the mouth with so much cloth that you risk suffocating them. Hit her over the head. No. I didn't know how hard to do that, I might kill her.

Her range was obviously phenomenal even without a magnet, and it wasn't like there weren't magnets all over the apartment -- microwave, dishwasher, washing machine, speakers, phone. (Angelwatch gets special training on finding magnets, which I'm sure is no surprise.) If she got loose she'd find me quickly. I could wrap my head in foil but then I couldn't write people and hide from them, and I'd be easy for witnesses to remember.

Think Keiko think!

There was no other option. I had to kill her, or mess her up so badly she'd risk dying.

But she had to deserve it. She needed to have done something wrong, something worth killing her for...

Cursing again, I dropped the suitcases and went back to her, and took her head in my hands. And started to read, deep.

As I've probably mentioned, mind reading doesn't get memories. It gets... I suppose there will never be a word for it. Most reading is about finding the places to touch to write. It picks up surface emotions easily, and what I like to call unconscious emotions as well. I can sometimes pick out a person's deepest fears and hopes, and every once in a great while I can get a "picture" of what someone is thinking about. But what you can get, with a long, deep read, is an emotional map. I can tell if a person is kind or cruel, smart or foolish, wicked or pure, many such things... I can know what you are like.

Marcy just lay there and let me look. After a moment she raised her hands and took me by the wrists, and moved my hands off her head; I remembered she didn't like to be touched. So we sat on the floor, just two minds visiting places normal humans don't know exist, and moments passed.

She was, I thought, the strangest person I'd ever read. There were huge pieces of her emotional framework which were completely missing, and what had filled in the spaces looked entirely random to me. Her sense of time was warped. Her perceptions of the world were wildly skewed towards sight and taste and smell; hearing and touch were bizarrely scrambled. She was neither kind nor cruel; she had no reference for these things. In some ways she was more alien than Windy.

But what came boiling out of her, what was undeniable and overwhelming, was her innocence.

It was hypnotic to look at. There was so much she'd never understood or had no interest in understanding. There was no desire for personal gain. No sexual experience whatsoever outside of the very basics of self-pleasuring. No craving for affection and none of the evil things we do to ourselves or others to get it. The place in a soul where most people have vast, complex, twisted, intricate shapes, was in her a sphere. It was impossibly simple, entrancingly pure, beautifully harmless.

I was suddenly sobbing, and I did what no sane reader ever does, and turned my reading upon myself.

It's not something that truly works. The thing doing the reading moves, and in moving blurs what is being read. Windy had warned me not to even try; of course everyone tries it anyway but you never get what you are looking for. But even in the blur of self, I could see that I was no sphere of beauty. The contrast was horrific; too terrible to take in.

"No," said Marcy. "You are looking at yourself from the wrong place, you need to move more towards... sorrow and shame."

Sorrow is an easy place to visit but shame is a place no one can go; to survive you need to keep it away from you. Again, no words can describe this, but even as I tried to take her advice I struggled to hold myself steady against the impossible furious wind that sprang up in my mind, pushing me away.

"No," she said again, "Listen to me, you can't go straight against it hard you have to move at it non-aggressively, you have to be accepting of the wrong before you can see the wrong, this is easier for me than it is for you because I have accepted myself and I have so little shame and yours is so vast but if you let go of it you can get near."

"Never let go of your shame or it will destroy you," I gritted.

"False," she snapped. "Let the dog off the leash and it will bite you but it will not kill you. It only hurts and for you it will hurt very much but you can't have what I have until you let that happen, let it tear a hole in you and then you can enter that hole and from there you will see yourself clearly, as clearly as you ever can."

Her words made sense to me -- which I'm sure sounds bizarre to you -- but her advice was impossible. All irrational fear is really self-loathing in another form. I fear the vicious dog because I am like that myself, I am cruel and violent; deep down I always have been, even before Ink. Some fear spiders because they are afraid of being entangled by their own imaginations, becoming the weaver trapped in the web of their own desires. There's something awful in everyone. If we were perfect and sure of ourselves, we'd have no irrational fears at all. I was very imperfect and full of fears and terrors; and she was asking me to let the thing I was most afraid of in the world, attack me.

"I do it often," she said.

"I can't do it at all," I sobbed.

"If I could write I could help you. Windy can write."

"No! She'll chain me up! I have to be loose to destroy the evil!"

"You are the evil," she said, flatly. "You raped Elena. You're the thing you fear most in the world. Windy just did you wrong, she misses things sometimes. I know about Ink, he raped you and you became pregnant with him and now you are him and you swallowed Keiko and she's terrified and looking for the way out. But you have to get in to get out. You are cruel and you are frightened and they are the same thing. Odin had to stab himself with his own spear, his own power to gain knowledge, why do you think there is any other way?"

I didn't know how this had happened. Marcy was turning me inside out without anything but a few simple reads and some nearly incomprehensible babbling. She didn't have a single weapon, unless innocence is a weapon. Maybe it is. It's not one I know anything about.

In savage horror I blasted her as violently as I could, with self-loathing. And as she collapsed I leapt up and ran, grabbing my bags. I'd probably killed her, but she'd deserved it for being what I could never be, despite all my power and all her brokenness and weakness.

To a sinner, sinlessness is a sin. I judged her guilty of innocence and the sentence was death.

Sobbing and almost blind with shame, I ran outside for a taxi to Heathrow.

++

The journey to Heathrow was a nightmare. The traffic, and the unrelenting fear...

I hate roads. They take you past so many people so quickly, and sometimes powerful emotions come sailing out at you, claw through your mind and pass on. It's hard to block all the time.

I wasn't sure if I'd killed Marcy. I'd hit her so savagely. No. I needed to think about the airport, and buying a ticket with the limited cash I had.

Deep down I knew what my plan had to be. I didn't like it, but everything aligned. I would become a whore.

I would be the best whore ever, being pretty and very, very capable of giving pleasure. And I would meet men, so many men. The bad ones would die, the good ones I would make... pets out of. Men make sex toys of women all the time; I'd return the favor. I'd command top dollar, so money wouldn't be a problem again. And I wouldn't be raping anyone, because men wanted to give what I demanded of them; you can't rape the willing, and all men are willing. Or they are when you look like me.

I'd build up power and influence this way, I thought, as I struggled out of the cab. I decided I didn't want to pay the cabbie so I knocked him out. I wouldn't be coming back to London after all.

So where was I going? I stumbled into the sprawling lobby, wracking my brain for obscure places, which, because they were obscure, was hard to do. Um. Latvia. Was there really such a country or was that just a made up name? The price of being raised American is that you don't really know if Ubetchastan is a real country. Wait, no, there's a map of the world, what a cute thing to have in an airport. And Latvia existed! Capital... Riga. Ok, so let me find the departure board -- wow. Riga rated four flights a day from -- wait, was there really an airline that called itself Wizz Air? Seriously? Ok, forget Riga...

It was suddenly raining out. I'd thought it was clea-

Red rain, falling.

Oh... shit.

She was across the lobby and making her way to me. And waving. Of course she'd be waving. And smiling.

"Keeeeeeeiko!"

I'd kill her. Well, not literally. Ok maybe yes literally. But not in a crowded lobby. And hell, I didn't even know if I could.

"Wiiiiindy!" I mean what else was I going to do?

We ran towards each other and hugged.

"Nothing stupid," she whispered. "Video cameras everywhere."

"...said the girl who extracted a witness from a murder scene. You've gotten desperate."

"You've made us so."

We unhugged and stepped back. Smiling. We're girls, we're good at this. Well, I was a girl and Windy was a practiced actor.

"Coffee?" she said.

"Love some." We both hate the stuff.

We found some. We were both reading wildly, each other and everyone around us. "Awww," I said. "You came alone?"

"Everyone's so busy."

Right. At airports, ferries and boats, and major roadways. Angelwatch London, fully deployed.

We sat.

"Pity about the rain we've been having," I said. She hadn't let up on the image of red rain, falling.

"It's needed," she said. I shrugged; that conversation was a dead end.

"Clever," I said, dropping into sotto voice. "You dispatch Marcy to flush me out, and spread the net and wait."

"Marcy wasn't sent out. Hunting was her idea. There was no point in trying to stop her. But once she was out I realized she'd flush you out eventually, so yes, we spread the net."

"So you tricked her into looking for me."

"Don't be absurd. You can't easily trick someone like Marcy. The way she reads?"

"So I guess she lived?"

"You did her very little harm. You can't blast someone with self-loathing when they've already come to terms with themselves. You couldn't have chosen a worse attack. And I believe that was deliberate."

"Not consciously deliberate."

"It still makes you a better person than I feared."

"I can't be redeemed, Windy. I am coming to like what I am."

"You'll be the only one, then."

"You know that's false. I can coerce people into liking me, even loving me."

"But that won't count. And the Keiko I knew could do that without powers. Without coercion at all. But I think she's dead."

"Yes, she was the first one I killed. Let me leave, Windy. I'll go far away and do my work where it won't matter to you."

"I'm not human. And therefore I'm not tribal - I don't favor one kind of human over another. Anywhere you go you're a danger to people who cannot defend themselves. You must be stopped."

"Then put out a kill on me. You can't, you know."

"I tried. Marcy blocked the vote."

I sat there, stunned. Completely stunned. I had believed Windy would never give up on me. And Marcy, who I'd ineptly tried to kill, had been the one who saved me?

I couldn't take it in.

"I- I don't know what to-"

Windy chose that moment to attack.

I was terrified. Completely terrified. Windy is not human. Reading her is complex to say the least and she blocked with the best of them, making her a terrible and powerful opponent. She was also the girl who had once stuck a knife in my arm, and between the two she was perhaps the only person I was legitimately afraid of. I had, I knew, more raw strength than she did, but she had expertise, and she'd been deep in my mind and knew where everything was. Her attack looked like nothing I'd ever seen before and I panicked and stabbed back ruthlessly, with the deepest, darkest, cruelest despair I knew.

And then I was looking into her sad, unblinking dead eyes.

"W-Windy?"

She didn't react. The dead do not hear. The dead cannot hear.

++

I shrieked and ran in terror, out of there before anyone could notice her limp figure slowly sagging to the floor. Behind me, people would slowly -- oh, so slowly! -- see her collapse, and approach her, and find she was dead, and call for help. Maybe -- maybe the doctors could restart her heart. Maybe-