I was surprised, but I wasn’t afraid. I didn’t think for one minute that he was going to use me or anybody I knew for food. “What kind of people taste best?” I asked.
“People with a certain mental sensitivity. People who have the beginnings, at least, of some unusual abilities. I found them in every race I encountered, but I never found them in very large numbers.”
I nodded. “Psis,” I said. “There’s the word you need. A word that sort of groups everybody’s abilities together. I read it in a science-fiction magazine.”
“I know about it.”
“You know everything. So people with some psionic ability ‘taste’ better than others. But we’re not still just food, are we?”
“Some of my latents are. But my actives and potential actives are part of another project. They have been for some time.”
“What project?”
“To build a people, a race.”
So that was it. I thought about it for a moment. “A race for you to be part of?” I asked. “Or a race for you to own?”
He smiled. “That’s a good question.”
“What’s the answer?”
“Well … to get an active, I have to bring together people of two different latent families?people who repel each other so strongly that I have to take one of them to bring them together. That means all the actives of each generation are my children. So maybe the answer is … a little of both.”
Maybe it was a lot of both. Maybe he hadn’t told me just how experimental I was?
just what different things I was supposed to do. And maybe he hadn’t told Karl, either.
I got out of bed trying to ignore the parts of me that hurt. I took a long, hot bath, hoping to soak away some of the pain. It helped a little. By the time I finally dressed and went downstairs, nobody but Doro was still around.
“Tell me about it while you’re having breakfast,” he said.
“Hasn’t Karl already told you?”
“Yes. Now I want to hear it from you.”
I told him. I didn’t add in any of my suspicions. I just told him and watched him. He didn’t look happy.
“What can you tell me about the other actives you’re holding?” he asked.
I almost said “nothing” before I realized it wasn’t true. “I can tell where they are,” I said. “And I can tell them apart. I know their names and I know” I stopped, looked at him. “The more I concentrate on them, the more I find out about them. How much do you want to know?”
“Just tell me their names.”
“A test? All right. Rachel Davidson, a healer. She’s some relation to Emma. She works churches pretending to be a faith healer, but faith doesn’t have anything to do with it. She?”
“Just their names, Mary.”
“Okay. Jesse Bernarr, Jan Sholto, Ada Dragan, and Seth Dana. There’s something strange about Seth.”
“What?”
“Something wrong, painful. But no, wait a minute, it’s not Seth who has something wrong with him. It’s Seth’s brother, Clay. I see. Clay’s a latent and Seth is protecting him.”
“Doesn’t it bother you that most of these people are shielded?”
“I didn’t realize they were.” I checked quickly. “You’re right. Everyone but Seth is shielded. Hell, I’m still shielded. I forgot the shield was there, but it is. Not even thinned a little.”
“But you don’t have any trouble reading them through it?”
“No. It’s one-way communication, though. I can read them, but none of them have managed to find out who I am. And none of them realize when I’m reading them. A while ago, when Karl was reading me, I could feel it. I knew when he started, when he stopped, and what he got.”
“Can you tell whether any of the others are closer to you, closer to Forsyth now than they were when you first became aware of them?”
I checked. It was like turning my head to read a wall chart. That easy. And I noticed what I hadn’t noticed before. “Two of them are a lot closer. Rachel and Seth. They’re approaching from slightly different directions, and Rachel’s coming much faster, but, Doro, they’re both on their way here.”
“And the others?”
I checked again. “They’ll be coming too. They can’t help it. I see that now. My pattern is pulling them here.”
Doro said something that I knew had to be a curse even though it was in a foreign language. He came over to me and put his hand on my shoulder. He looked worried. That was unusual for him. I sat there knowing damned well that he was thinking he was going
to have to kill me. This pattern thing wasn’t part of his plan, then. I was an experiment going bad before his eyes.
I looked up at him. I wasn’t afraid. I realized that I should have been, but I wasn’t. “Give it a chance,” I said quietly. “Let the five of them get here, and let’s see how they react.”
