“Clay lost any chance he had for becoming an active over ten years ago,” he said.
“Ten years ago he didn’t have the pattern to help him along.”
“I find it hard to believe the pattern is helping him now. How could it? What did you do?”
“I don’t know, exactly. But it must be the pattern. What other new thing has there been in his life in the past two weeks? He was a latent before he came here. And if I can push one latent toward transition, why can’t I push others?”
“Oh, my God,” muttered Karl. I ignored him.
“Look,” I said, “we actives were all latents once. We moved up. Why can’t others?”
“The others weren’t bred for it. Clay was, and I can see now that you were right about him. But that doesn’t mean?”
“You can see?”
“Of course. How could I have raised generations of actives if I wasn’t able to judge my people’s potential?”
“Oh, yeah.” The ones who tasted good, yes. “Doro, I want to try bringing other latents to transition.”
“How?”
“By doing to them the only thing I’d ever done to Clay before today. By reading them. Just reading them.”
Doro shook his head. “Go ahead. It won’t work.”
Yes, it would. I felt sure that it would. And I could try it without even leaving the room. I thought of two of my cousins, a brother and sister?Jamie and Christine Hanson. We used to get into trouble together when we were little. As we grew older and started to receive mental interference, we got more antisocial. We abandoned each other and started to get into trouble separately. Doro didn’t pay any attention to Jamie and Christine, and their parents had given up on them years ago. No transition was supposed to come along
and put them back in control of their lives, so, let alone, they’d probably wind up in prison or in the morgue before they were a lot older. But I wasn’t going to let them alone.
I reached out to the old neighborhood, got a bird’s-eye view of it all at once. Dell Street and Forsyth Avenue. Emma’s house. I could have focused in tight and read Rina or Emma. Instead, I followed Forsyth Avenue south past Piedras Altas, where heaven knew how many of my relatives lived, and on to Cooper Street, where I had even more family. On Cooper I recognized the Hanson house and focused in on it.
Christine was inside screaming at her mother. I noticed that she had shaved her head?probably more to get on her mother’s nerves than for any other reason. I didn’t pay any attention to what they were fighting about. I read her the way you skim pages of a phone book looking for a number. Only, I wasn’t looking for anything. I noticed that she’d been pregnant three times?one miscarriage and two abortions. And she was only nineteen. And she’d been with some idiot friends when they decided to rob a liquor store. Some other things. I didn’t care. I just read her. Then I went after Jamie.
I found him sitting on an old sofa in the garage, fooling around with a guitar. I read him and learned, among other things, that he had just gotten out of jail a few days before. He had been driving drunk, smashed into a parked car, backed up, drove away. But somebody got his license number. Ninety days.
Now that he was out, he couldn’t take the running battle that was usually going on inside the house. So he was living in the garage until some money came his way and he could get his own place.
I shifted my attention to the pattern. I knew what to look for now. My experience with Clay had taught me. Slender threads, fragile, tentative, soon to grow into the real thing. I found them stretching between me and both Hansons. Both of them. They were mine.
I snapped back to the library, excited, elated. “I did it!”
I’m not quite sure what expression I was wearing, but Doro frowned and drew back from me a little.
“I did it! I got two more! You’re going to have your damn empire sooner than you thought.”
“Which two?” He spoke very quietly.
“Hanson. Christine and Jamie. They live over on Cooper Street. You used to see them around Emma’s house sometimes when I was little.”
“I remember.” He stared down at the table for several seconds, still frowning. I assumed he was doing his own checking.
Karl reached over and touched my arm. “Show me,” he said.
Not tell him, show him. Just like that. And just minutes after our little conversation in the hall. If he had caught me in any other mood I would have told him to go to hell. But I felt good. I opened to him.
He looked at the way I had brought the Hansons in, and he looked at my memories on Clay. That was all.
“You want to build an empire, all right,” he said when he was finished. “But Doro isn’t the one you want to build it for.”
“Does it matter?” I asked.
And Doro answered. “No, it doesn’t. All that matters is that you obey me.” There was something frightening, something too intense about the way he was looking at me.
It was my turn to draw back a little. “I’ve always obeyed you.”
“More or less. It could get harder now, though. Sometimes it’s harder for a leader to obey. And sometimes it’s harder to be lenient with a disobedient leader.”
“I understand.”
“No you don’t. Not yet. But I think you’re capable of understanding. That’s why I’m willing to let you go ahead with what you’re planning.”
