ago?”
I smiled back and shook my head. “I don’t think so. Two weeks ago, I would have had to kill somebody.”
He frowned. “I don’t see why.”
“Everything was too new. You were all on short fuses. You and Ada hadn’t gotten together and mellowed each other, so one or both of you would have been against me. If you had, Karl probably would have, too. He was about ready to strangle me anyway, then.” I shrugged. “This is better. People have had time to cool off.”
He gave me an odd look. “What do you think might have happened if you’d waited a little longer than two weeks, then, let Jesse and Rachel do some mellowing?”
“Jesse and Rachel weren’t mellowing. They were feeding on each other’s hatred, building each other up to jump me.”
“You know,” he said, “I got the impression at first that you just threw this meeting together on the spur of the moment.”
“I did.”
“Yeah. After two weeks of watching everybody and making sure your timing was as right as you could make it.”
Clay Dana came over to where Seth and I were talking. Close up, he looked sort of gray and sick. I thought he must have just had a bad bout of mental interference. “Congratulations,” he said to me. “Now that we all know the new pecking order, do either of you have any aspirins?”
Seth looked at him with concern. “Another headache?”
“Another, hell. It’s the same one I’ve had for three days.”
“From mental interference?” I asked.
“What else?”
“I thought you weren’t getting as much of that now as you used to.”
“I wasn’t,” he said. “It stopped altogether for a few days. That never happened in the middle of a city before. Then, three days ago, it started to come back worse than ever.”
That bothered me. I hadn’t paid much attention to Clay since he arrived, but I knew that anything new and different that went wrong with him, with his out-of-control mental ability, would eventually get blamed on me, on my pattern.
Seth spoke up as though on cue. “Look, Mary, I’ve been meaning to ask you if you
could figure out what was happening to Clay. He’s been in really bad shape, and it just
about has to have something to do with the pattern.”
“First the aspirins,” said Clay. “Find out what you want after?Hey!”
That “Hey!” was almost a shout. I had gotten rid of his headache for him fast?like switching off a light.
“Okay?” I asked, knowing it was.
“Sure.” He looked at me as though he suddenly wanted to get away from me.
I stayed with him mentally for a few moments longer, trying to find out just what was wrong with him. I didn’t really know what to look for. I just assumed that it had something to do with the pattern. I took a quick look through his memories, thinking that that uncontrolled ability of his might have tuned in on the pattern somehow. But it hadn’t in any way that I could see.
I scanned all the way back to the day he and Seth had arrived at the house. It was quick work but frustrating. I couldn’t find a damned thing. Nothing. I switched my attention to the pattern. I had no idea at all of what to look for there and I was getting mad. I checked the pattern strand that stretched from Seth to me. Seth was in mental contact with Clay sometimes to protect him. Maybe, without realizing it, he had done something more than protect.
He hadn’t.
I had nowhere else to go. There was something especially galling about suffering a defeat now, just minutes after I had won my biggest victory. But what could I do?
I shifted my attention back to Clay. There was a glimmer of something just as I shifted?like the glimmer of a fine spider web that catches the light just for a second and then seems to vanish again. I froze. I shifted back to the pattern, bringing it into focus very slowly. At first there was nothing. Then, just before I would have had a strong, clear focus on the pattern strands of my six actives, there was that glimmer again. I managed to keep it, this time, by not trying to sharpen my focus on it. Like looking at something out of the corner of your eye.
It was a pattern strand. A slender, fragile-seeming thread, like a shadow of one of the comparatively substantial strands of my actives. But it was a pattern strand. Somehow, Clay had become a member of the pattern. How?
I could think of only one answer. The pattern was made up of actives. Just actives, no latents until now. No latents period. Clay was on his way to transition.
The moment the thought hit me, I knew it was right. After a ten-year delay, Clay was going to make it. I tried to tell myself that I wasn’t sure. After all, I had never seen anyone who was about to go into transition before. But I couldn’t even make myself doubt. Clay was going to come through. He would belong to me, like the others. I knew it.
I brought my attention back to Seth and Clay, who stood waiting.
“That took long enough,” said Seth. “What did you find out?”
“That your brother’s not a latent any more,” I said. “That he’s headed toward transition.”
There was a moment of complete silence. Then came quick, bitter disappointment radiating from both men.
