The Strangeness Within Pt. 07

"It's OK," he kept saying as he helped her lie back on the bed. "You just tell me what you need from me.

"I'm sorry," Esther said again. "Oh, this is so unfair. Just use your tongue, and try to keep me from coming too quickly. Remember how we did it out on the rocks? That was some of my best thinking. I need all the time I can get."

That was how Mark and Kat found them shortly afterwards. Of course they didn't say anything, and Javier tried not to notice them. He focused on the rhythm of his tongue, the feel of her skin and her fine fur, the feelings he didn't have words for. He loved doing this for her, and he always would.

* * *

Javier's tongue moved with an inexorable beat: in, out, in, out, matching the small motions of her back on the bedspread. His hands moved more slowly, tracing her nipples, her breasts, her freckled patches, the fingers finding new paths. Javier was good at this, better every time.

Kat glanced at her again, and she smiled at the other woman. Kat didn't quite know how she fit into Javier's life anymore, and that was unfair. But they could work all that out later. For now, she had a job to do, and Javier was doing everything he could to get her there.

She closed her eyes, letting her senses expand gently. She was terrified of looking too closely towards the Unit's facility, not knowing or understanding Franklin's abilities. But at least she'd found the important computer room. Her mind reached for the tiny sounds, the vibrations, the smell of ionization and the warmth of the machines. The room she was in faded, and she searched. Not for a person, but a machine, with its much simpler rules and sensitivities. It should be easier, but it wasn't something she'd practiced.

Javier broke his rhythm to kiss her, once, his lips pressing reverently against her small hole as though she could kiss him back. And soon after he resumed his pattern, she gasped lightly. There it was! She felt the humming and patterned lights as though it was a familiar person, Kat's detailed description of the router solidifying into this very real mass of black metal and circuits.

"Faster," she murmured, and Javier immediately followed. Her body sang with arousal, her mind opened like a flower, and she *listened*. There was data flowing into and out of the router, some of it from elsewhere in the building, but none from the outside. It had that capability, though. She needed to break open the lock, the way Nicola described. But her hammer would be as soft as a butterfly's wings.

Time itself seemed to slow, and the data in the wires spread out in her mind's eye, glittering and floating slowly along a river. The code for a soft hardware reset was simply another pattern of lights, reaching a slightly different set of registers. It was phenomenally unlikely to happen by accident, and yet from time to time little fragments joined together by chance. It was a puzzle, a laborious and pedantic one compared to the way she called to a sensitive person.

And yet she had the growing certainty she could do it, if she had the time. Already her body was shaking, tiring of holding itself so perfectly balanced near orgasm.

There! Her body tumbled inexorably to her orgasm, and in the last instant she did — something. Then she was moaning and coughing and laughing, because Javier was tickling her and she loved him so terribly.

"Kat," she croaked. "Now."

* * *

By the time Esther got dressed, Kat was utterly absorbed in her laptop, typing furiously and biting her lip. No one dared interrupt her.

Five minutes later, Kat whooped in excitement.

"I'm in!" she shouted gleefully. "Someone reused a password. Sloppy, sloppy. Now, I have to hide myself."

It was a full hour later when Kat was satisfied. She'd hidden her incursion as best she could, and the virus was loaded and waiting. All it needed was a single command. She logged off and unplugged the modem.

Javier handed her the phone. "You get the honors," he said. "What an amazing job."

"All thanks to Esther," Kat said. "I can't believe what she pulled off. We make a hell of a team, don't we?"

Esther smiled, then kissed Javier.

"Couldn't have done it without you," she whispered, and he hugged her tightly.

Kat reached one of Lukas's aides, and their conversation was brief. She would trigger the virus at ten to midnight, and the raid would begin immediately after. Until then, they had nothing to do but eat a late dinner and sit tight.

Esther found herself wanting to pace along with Mark. She knew what was bothering him, because the same thing was bothering her.

"I should be going with Lukas and Nicola," she said. "I'm probably more resistant to Franklin than anyone. Abuela thought so."

"And how will you explain that?" Javier asked. "We talked about this. It's incredibly dangerous, and you're so important in ways that have nothing to do with Franklin. And what could you do in there, anyway? You're not good at fighting."

"Resist Franklin," she said. "Protect Nicola, maybe. I don't know."

Esther shook her head. They'd already argued about this and she'd reluctantly agreed with the others. She would have to do what good she could from here. What she hated was her guilty relief. Franklin terrified her, and yet Nicola was accepting an even greater danger.

Finally, the time edged close. Kat nervously tried logging in, and they all relaxed when she succeeded again.

At the appointed moment Kat hit the enter key. Within seconds she was booted off her connection, and she smiled in satisfaction.

"That's a nasty virus all right," she said. "It's out of our hands now."

She made the final call to Lukas. Esther could feel the team assembling, a small fleet of cars converging from all directions on the parking lot behind the building. Quickly she found Nicola.

"Javier, hold me tight," she said. "I'm going to try to protect Nicola from Franklin."

A minute later, there was a muffled boom in the distance.

"What the fuck was that?" Javier blurted.

Esther almost laughed in amazement.

"They blew a hole in the side of the building," she said. "I didn't see that coming. Nicola's gone right in with the others."

There were about thirty of them, and they were all wearing strange equipment. An instant later she understood.

"Gas masks," she said. "They're throwing exploding balls of gas. People inside are coughing and falling over. It's brilliant! The Unit wasn't prepared."

But that wasn't entirely true. The conference room they'd broken into was secure for the moment, but from further inside the building, she felt people approaching. When she finally risked extending her senses, she gasped.

There were dozens of men and women with guns. And some of them were highly sensitive and moving far too fast. They were like Andrew. Lukas had been wrong, or else Franklin's fear of Lukas had outweighed any other concerns.

"What is it?" Javier whispered.

"Too many," she coughed, trying to understand what was happening. There were some gunshots.

Mark made a horrible noise and ran to the door. Almost too late, Esther reached for him and *pulled*, stopping him in his tracks.

"LET ME GO," he roared. "My choice, Esther. You have to!"

Esther was crying, but Mark was right. She let him go, and he shot out of the room like an Olympic sprinter.

Esther ignored the cries from Javier and Kat, and focused on the melee in the office building.

Lukas's team and Myra Jackson's recruits kept throwing the smoking bombs, but a few of them were already down on the floor with gunshot wounds. Reluctantly they began to return fire on their own friends and colleagues, but now the swirling smoke and the gas masks played against them. Some of the men and women facing them had the changes, and these adversaries were advancing steadily even as they coughed from the gas.

Tentatively, Esther picked one of the most sensitive men, and she *pushed* on his attention. He stumbled slightly, glancing behind himself, and then continued forward.

There were too many, and there was something worse. All of them were being helped, their attention kept forward by another presence: Franklin.

She could feel the sticky strands of his attention, and as she nervously expanded her senses she began to understand his power. Even now he was calling for reinforcements from outside the compound. He had to be knocked out soon, or everything would come crashing down on them.

Tendrils of his attention moved towards their masked team, but there were no easy targets. That was when she realized Nicola and Lukas were gone.

She found them quickly in her panic. They'd quietly disappeared into a side stairwell, and now they were bounding down towards the underground levels.

Esther realized this had been Lukas's strategy all along. He would sacrifice the entire rest of the team to the main resistance, and then go for Franklin on his own, with the only person who could speed his journey: Nicola and her lock-breaking skills.

She hated him for it, but it made a kind of sense. And she had to protect the team in the lobby. She had to protect everyone if she could. It was Franklin who was propelling this fight, not the poor enslaved men and women.

She pushed, and she pulled, and the advance slowed. A woman with the changes tumbled to the ground and succumbed to the gas. But there were dead and dying scattered on the floor. She couldn't do anything for them. For all her efforts, bullets kept flying in the smoke. And there were other fights happening. Strong men and women ripped gas masks off of the invaders, took ragged breaths, and dealt crushing blows in the process.

And then Mark burst in like an avenging angel.

He found a mask right away, pulling it unceremoniously from a dead woman. She'd never seen him move so fast, and she feared what he was doing to himself. But he was all controlled fury, grabbing and breaking guns, wrestling with their owners, leaving one after another unconscious man or woman behind. He moved through the defenders like a scythe, until suddenly an enormous man barreled into him and knocked off his mask.

This man vastly outweighed Mark, and he was strong enough to pin him down. But Mark struggled, and when Esther yanked hard on the attention of the stronger man, it was all over. Mark retrieved his mask and moved quickly to the next man.

The team was rallying behind Mark, and a new round of smoke and gas bombs began to turn the tide. They pushed further inside, and Esther quickly checked on Nicola and Lukas.

They'd had an easy time of it so far, with Lukas only leaving a single unconscious man behind. Somehow Lukas knew exactly when to slip inside a door, and when to make a mad dash along the corridor. They were deep below ground, rapidly approaching the place Esther feared to probe. Franklin's lair.

Suddenly she felt something wrong with Mark. He was slowing, and then he froze.

An alien tendril of sensations was enveloping him. With disgust, Esther pushed back, but Franklin was too subtle, and too experienced. Mark bent down in confusion, reaching for a weapon.

"Mark!" she yelled aloud, and she *pulled* him back to her, away from this horrible place. Franklin's assault redoubled, and Mark was caught between the warring sensations. She could feel the trembling of his body, the confusion as he tried to sort fact from fiction, and she cried and scrambled to pull harder.

And then a single shot struck Mark in the chest. He crumpled and was still.

Esther began to shake, her vision falling away until all she saw was Javier's hands holding her tight, and all she heard was Javier's terrified attempts to reassure her.

With a huge effort, she began the simplest meditations once more. Her mind touched Mark's body, and he felt like a corpse.

There was nothing she could do for him. He'd been shot before, and he'd survived, but this time it was right in his heart. Perhaps he could recover from it. But she needed to see to Nicola. She didn't have the strength for anything else at the moment.

She could feel Franklin everywhere, his questing tentacles extending even beyond the building, and she had a sudden terror. He might have felt her. Probably he had felt something, given how easily she was perceiving him. She might be well-hidden in her person, but he must know someone was opposing him.

But her protection of Nicola seemed to be holding. She watched in amazement as the pair reached another reinforced door. Nicola put her hand on it, stood utterly still, and then said something quickly to Lukas, making a quick motion with her hands. A second later Lukas sliced through the wall with a short length of metal he carried, and he ripped away some electronics. The door unlocked and they kept moving.

They were barely a hundred feet from Franklin, and finally he perceived something. In an instant all of his attention focused on the hallway, and Nicola stumbled. Lukas looked at her, but Esther's protection held for the moment, and they continued running down the hall, until they reached the final reinforced door. Esther poured all of her energy into hiding Nicola. And in one shocking instant, Franklin seized control of Lukas.

Lukas punched Nicola so hard that she flew back against the opposite wall. She put up her arms, trying feebly to ward him off. But now Lukas was fighting Franklin with his own ferocious will, and Franklin reached for Nicola as well.

All of Esther's protections were shattered now that Franklin had seen Nicola through Lukas. A frightful calm settled on Esther as she realized there was only one choice remaining.

"Franklin!" she shouted out loud, and simultaneously she dropped all of her own veils.

For years Esther had hidden herself. Don't be conspicuous, Mother had always said. Don't show off, and don't ever be noticed. Even after Nicola and Javier had helped her overcome much of her instinctive body modesty, those instincts had continued to shield her. And now she was naked, utterly exposed to the sight of a monster.

Franklin immediately recognized the danger of his new opponent, and for a brief instant his mind turned all of its awesome power onto her.

She'd picked the wrong side. Lukas was killing Nicola, even as she watched. But no, of course he wasn't. He was the one who'd recruited her, though, and everything that had happened and everything that was going to happen was his fault.

She cried and held onto Javier while Franklin whispered terrible things about the people she loved, his power somehow turning her own thoughts against her. But even as he did, she understood she could stop the horrible sensations at any time. She was stronger than Franklin, but she could not let him realize it. Something else was tickling her mind, but she couldn't give it any attention.

Dimly she felt Nicola pointing to the door, and with a burst of strength Lukas smashed straight through. Franklin's attention vanished from her mind and he pointed the handgun at Lukas, but in that instant Esther smashed Franklin with every ounce of her strength, and he froze.

Lukas had the gun in a half second, and then there was a bloody hole in Franklin's head.

Without even pausing, Lukas carefully arranged the corpse with the gun in hand. Then he collapsed on the floor, barely conscious.

It was over. Franklin was not physically strong the way Mark was. To her relief, she realized she could hear Mark now, and he was breathing.

Nicola seemed stunned by the whole scene, and so Esther gave her a very slight nudge. Lukas hardly seemed to notice when she disappeared, picking up speed as she retraced her steps.

Without Franklin's direction there was confusion among the Unit's employees, and the remaining members of the attack team were steadily moving through the building, encountering little organized resistance. The large conference room they'd broken into at the start was littered with bodies when Nicola arrived, but the conflict had moved on.

She found Mark almost immediately, and with a grunt she got him over her shoulders.

"It's over," Esther said, shaking her head and looking with wonder at the other two. "We need to help Nicola."

"Did we win?" Javier stuttered. "Is Mark all right?"

Of course they had no idea. She quickly filled in the details for Javier and Kat.

While Javier sprinted over, Esther sat with Kat and continued to describe what was happening. Myra Jackson had survived, and she found Lukas with Franklin's body. The two of them shared a long silence, and then she helped him to his feet. As others arrived, the story of Franklin's suicide began to spread.

Esther didn't know how they were going to explain all the dead. They weighed heavily on her, all the faces burned irrevocably in her memory.

Abuela could have stopped it somehow, could have found another way. But Abuela was gone.

More than ever Esther needed her advice. Because she'd made a mistake, one Abuela might have warned her about.

When she'd opened herself up for Franklin to see, she had felt another presence, or perhaps more than one. Listeners, from an immense distance.

She'd been so provincial. She knew there were those with the changes all around the world. Abuela had even implied it was foolish to assume either of them was unique.

Protect yourself first, Abuela had told her. It wasn't an easy lesson to accept, and even now she didn't think she accepted it. But her own advice to Mark was also true: they couldn't solve every problem. And she had so much still to learn.

...*** Epilogue ***...

"No, no, that's not going to work," Esther said, standing up and gesturing at the board in frustration.

Raj paused in his work, waiting for a clarification, but as usual she couldn't express herself properly.

Professor Anatoly Kuznetsov pushed back his chair with a snort and shook his head at Esther. "You're going to kill both of us. Raj, why don't you keep going, even if our young apprentice has taken the wind out of our sails. Esther, try not to interrupt until you actually see what's going to blow up with the argument. Consider it a training exercise if nothing else."

"I'm sorry," she said. "Sorry, Raj. I'm being so impatient. It's just, this is all so important, isn't it?"

Raj nodded understanding, and Anatoly sighed. "Sometimes I think both of you have a little too much zeal. Maybe I'm getting old."

An hour later, Esther met Javier at the bus stop as usual.

"Great news," she said. "The admissions office says a spring admission is possible, and Raj says that unofficially I'm nearly guaranteed. How about you? Any luck on that project?"

"I broke down and asked Kat," he said. "She's not the teaching assistant for *my* class, so surely that's all right? Anyway, it was only a stupid mistake preventing it from compiling. That's how it always goes. Oh! I heard from Nicola. She and Mark want to have us and Kat for dinner this weekend up at the camp, like an early Thanksgiving. How does that sound? They're practically family, right? I told Mamá I'd be down there next week, but no reason I can't do both if I'm willing to drive a whole lot. And Mamá also wants to see you, of course."

"It sounds perfect," agreed Esther. "Like something worth giving thanks for."

She thought of the last Thanksgiving with both her parents, two years ago. Mother smiling through her pain while Esther and her father followed directions in the kitchen. A tight little family who would do anything for each other. As the tears began to fall, she tried to explain to Javier. They were good tears. She could remember every detail of that day, and soon she had him wiping aside tears as well.

She had a family again, and she'd do anything to protect them. Abuela had been wrong: that was the place to start. And Abuela in her old age had attempted to be family for everyone she could. One day, Esther would do the same.