coffee mugs, doodles on art paper and lots of names with arrows pointing at other names pointing at question marks, mostly because we didn’t really know a whole lot more than we did before.
“What did you do to the shooters at the cemetery?” Max asked again. When she didn’t answer immediately, he explained, “You made their guns fly away. They got naked without a peep.”
“Can’t you do that?”
“I want to know how you did it. Their goggles were supposed to hold down outside influences like us.”
“I don’t know exactly.”
“You usually make guns fly around without knowing what you’re doing?”
“I don’t usually deal with people with guns!” she answered, again as though fighting to get the words out. Or fighting to control herself.
“So you took their guns-and cell phones,” Max said. “And goggles. And clothes. And you broke the killer’s bones.” Having seen her temper, I wouldn’t have kept pushing this point but that didn’t stop him.
“I–I didn’t,” Kate protested again. A long moment passed, the two staring each other down across the table. Then she added, “Not on purpose. He really did kill my father! It was in his head. He drove the car himself, so no one would botch the job. He ran over him twice to make sure he couldn’t survive and then just drove off.” The tears were brimming but she fought them off stubbornly, heroically. A long moment passed in silence.
“But not on purpose isn’t the same as I didn’t do it, is it?” Max said finally. “What did you know when you marched down that hill into the face of six people with serious guns and bad intent?”
“I knew I was sick of guns,” she answered fiercely. “I knew you were coming from Dave.”
“How did you know that?”
“He told my father that, if anything happened to him, you’d be coming.” This was a shock to me but Max just smiled, as though it confirmed something he’d already been thinking.
“And what else did you know?” he said, voice softening.
“Why is it so important?”
“If you’re really fooling yourself that you didn’t make those things happen, I need to know it.”
“You don’t need to know anything about me.”
“And if you broke his bones at ten feet without meaning to, I would think you’d better know it. People like us can’t afford illusions about ourselves.”
“Why? The psychiatrists are all booked up?” She was building up a slow boil again; I started looking for a soft place to land.
Max eyes flared. They seemed to draw up into his skull. I felt his voice coming at me through the floorboards.
“Our illusions have consequences. They have a way of becoming real.”
Kate’s face went paler, if such a thing were possible. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Where is this boyfriend of yours? Where’s your roommate?”
“I–I told you. They-they went camping. They made plans… a long time ago.”
“You just buried your father.”
“You can’t expect them to feel the way I do.”
“I could expect them to go to the funeral for your sake.” Kate’s jaw was set but her eyes were nowhere near as confident. “Does Morgan share Steve with you when she’s around? Or are you the only one sharing?”
Max was inches from her now. His voice was so soft, I couldn’t believe I really heard it. I saw his lips moving but the words seemed to come from inside my head.
“Your feelings run very deep; they frighten you. Millions of people with the depth of a coat of varnish are frightened by their feelings. And you carry oceans-so I understand your caution.” He stared into Kate’s eyes like he was pulling her inside-out through them. “But instead of learning to deal with the power of them, you’ve gone into hiding. You’ve taken partners who don’t touch anything in you and given them free reign. It’s safe-you know they’re only using you for sex and company-you’re in no danger of feeling anything that could get out of hand. Your career keeps you at an academic distance from all of human history. You’ve got the illusion of a life but no nourishment. The longer you bottle those feelings up, the more powerfully they’ll spill out in the end.”
His eyes were hard on her and for a moment she looked stung, almost shamed. But then her face turned defiant. She took him on and stared him down.
“Funny-from what I’m reading, you’ve spent the last twenty years hiding-from everything.”
Max didn’t bend. “I said I understood-I didn’t say I was different.”
The place was quiet for a long moment before Kate gave out a long sigh.
“Okay,” she admitted, “when I came down the hill, I knew I wasn’t going to let them kill anyone else. And I knew I could do something about it.”
She was confiding now instead of confronting. But her voice gained strength as she went.
Tauber came out of the kitchen with a fresh pot of coffee and refilled the cups.
“Well now, that’s the thing, ain’t it? Knowin’ you can do somethin’ ‘bout it. There’s somethin’ big comin’ down in the next day or two and we seem to be the only ones in the world who can do somethin’ ‘bout it.” He clicked his cup into hers. “Yer daddy’d be with us if he was around.”
She was wavering, still conflicted. “They’re defense contractors. Let the government squeeze the purse strings-they can stop them.”
“They don’t need the government’s money.”
“They’ve got Jim Avery!” I burst.
“ Your World? On TV?”
“He’s the bankroll,” Tauber said.
“Hmph!” Kate puffed. “That’s some bankroll.”
“They’ve got all the connections in the world,” Max said, looking intently at her again. “No one will ever investigate your father’s death-or Dave’s. They’ll be papered over. No justice for them if we don’t make it ourselves.”
You could see this pound its way into her. She’d been holding herself in ever since the funeral and now every feeling in her simmered just an inch beneath the surface. Max sat up and his voice was straightforward, unemotional.
“I’ve spent twenty years,” he said, “hiding from what I am. Sounds like you’ve done the same. And we see the results: I’ve lost my best friend; you’ve lost your father.”
Kate was struggling now. “There’s got to be an answer,” she whispered. “There’s got to be hope.”
“Ya want Hope? Avery’ll sell it to ya, sixty bucks a barrel,” Tauber said with satire in his voice. “He’s the OPEC o’ Hope.”
Kate wheeled around so fast, we all jumped in place. “I’ve heard that!” she hissed. “Where did I-? From the man in the car! When I got home from… identifying Dad’s…body, I went into the kitchen to make coffee and I got this weird headache, like the back of my skull was hot. A probe. Dad used to probe me in high school, to make sure I hadn’t gone over some boy’s house.” Her voice wavered again and now she kept talking despite tears rolling down her cheeks. “It was the guy in the van parked across the street.”
“You can handle probes?” Max asked.
“I was a good girl,” Kate answered, lifting her chin. “When my parents made me promise never ever to do something, I only tried it a couple times.” She flashed a sly smile, almost despite herself. “Besides, I had to learn so I could go over the boy’s house, didn’t I?” Her smile faded fast. “So I followed the probe back to the guy across the street and started riding his thoughts, letting them carry me, for hours at a time.”
She saw Max’s eyes on her and she reddened.
“I had a hard time making friends, okay? I was the eerie girl in middle school who talked to herself and commented on what people were thinking instead of what they’d said out loud. Eventually, you make use of your advantages. I started getting into boy’s heads. It got me a better class of dates.” She laughed and placed her cup in the sink. “Anyway, when I got inside the guy across the street, I found out about the big operation-he’s doing security for the flight.”
“There’s a flight?” Tauber asked.
“Definitely,” Kate answered. “More than one-he’s in charge of his and two others. And there’s more besides.”
“Then they’re not goin’ to Langley,” Tauber concluded.
