Page 38 of Spark Transform

Lunesti helped Minder Corps people wean themselves off the vicious enhancement drugs and taught his patients how to cheat the CPS’s regular and random compliance tests. Soleil taught Canals kids how to look out for each other like Jumpers did. Charrascos uncovered dark CPS secrets and humanized the people who got hurt by them. Her work made the agency bleed all across the galaxy, not just in one stinking city.

Suddenly, everyone else was standing and looking at him.

“You’re the last, Chalio.” Be’un’s sharp tone blended command and satisfaction.

Epiphany washed over him. Be’un’s secret plan promised a blaze of glory... but that wasn’t the only thing he was good for.

“I hope you gut-burn the ratfuckers.” He stood. “But I’m out.”

After a quick gasp, Be’un’s fists tightened as she clamped her jaw shut. Shakti put a hand on Be’un’s arm.

Renner wished he dared use his talent to drain any energy weapons Be’un carried, but he couldn’t risk it. Shakti’s active sifter talent would detect his activation, even if she didn’t recognize the talent behind it.

Helios sneered in contempt and looked away.

Renner walked with a calm he didn’t feel, pulled his cloak from the holdfast, and exited, listening intently until the door irised closed.

He quickly ducked into the cloak as he threaded through the used-goods aisles that were as jumbled as his emotions.

Lunesti, standing just inside the store’s entrance, turned to face him.

Surprise bloomed in Renner. “Waiting?”

Lunesti’s head tilted diffidently. “Hoping.”

Renner didn’t know what to think about that. “Metro station, then?”

Lunesti nodded and waved the store’s door open. They walked together into the dark and the rain.

After he left the metro, Renner realized he had no place to go until his dawn pickup appointment at the joyhouse where Lunesti was a medic. Maybe he should go back to thinking of him as Haseem, his friend from Soleil’s martial arts studio. They’d likely both cratered their cred with the resistance group.

With nothing better to do, he headed for the soup kitchen, hoping the daylight raids had left it standing.

They had. What’s more, despite the torrential downpour outside and the leaky roof over the former storage units and warehouse, business was booming. Punctuated conversations mostly centered on the raids.

The CPS publicity spinners proudly took credit for destroying a rotting Canals warehouse a kilometer north, which had stored and distributed blackmarket clone and reverse drugs. Somehow, that was supposed to excuse the deaths of several dozen squatters, many of them kids.

Giant-sized charity director Kooga looked down at him with her eerie cybernetic eyes. “Job terminé?”

“Not ended. Night off.” He stooped to pick up a discarded mealpack container. “You find a janitor yet?”

Kooga’s laugh boomed. “Jus’ you, bel homme, ‘cause no other sot want that push-pull.” She patted him gently on the shoulder with her bare biometal cybernetic hand. “Next time, make ‘em give you an upfront, so you can eat avant payday.”

He smiled in spite of himself. Only Kooga would call him a handsome man and a fool in the same sentence. He would have accepted the free mealpacks if he needed them, but it made him more comfortable to offer the trade.

As he wrestled the ancient cleaning bot into position in the covered courtyard in the center of the warehouse, he wondered if Kooga would be interested in going to Soleil’s martial arts studio. The unorthodox training style seemed to help the other ex-Jumpers work around the effects of waster’s disease. The students worked diligently because they privately believed Soleil had somehow arrested her own disease progression.

Renner’s fractured memories included the evening when Davidro had interrogated Soleil with his fists, then had Renner use his talent to inflict more pain. She’d laughed in Davidro’s face. In return, he’d ordered Renner to deliver her to her death.

So, of course, after he was fully healed and needed to learn to defend himself without using his talent, the unsubtle, malicious universe had sent him to Soleil’s studio.

Instead of killing him, she’d forgiven him. They were even, she’d said, because he’d deceived Davidro and helped her escape. And unlike the annoying red angel, Soleil had willingly filled in blanks in his memory of that evening’s events.

Davidro had resorted to torture because his other pet minders had failed to breach her mental shields. Everyone knew that Jumpers couldn’t be minders, so she shouldn’t have had them at all, much less been able to fend off multiple high-level telepathic assaults.

He carried a full load of discards to the noisy recycler. In the middle of emptying the container, a sudden thought struck him.

Charrascos needed those shields. They’d be with her everywhere, even when he and her team couldn’t.