She grinned slightly and pulled over a couple of chairs from the table, one for her and one for Kimmie, but put them behind me.
“What are you doing?”I asked, trying to turn around without the full range of motion yet.
“Relax,” she said.“We have to deal with this hair.Or whatever you want to call it.”
“I’ve seen worse,” Kimmie said staunchly.
“Where?On a homeless person?”
“Yes.”
“It’s not that bad,” I protested, as the girls all but attacked my poor head with a couple of combs they must have brought with them.So this ambush had been planned.And it felt like they were trying to pull the hair out by the roots.“Ouch!”
“You’re a big, bad war mage,” Jen said.“You’ll survive.”
“Yeah, but will I have any hair left?”
“We’ll do our best,” Kimmie reassured me.
“What does that mean?”I asked, slightly panicked now.
“Have you considered a pixie cut?”
“Stop it,” Sophie said.“You’re freaking her out.”
“Well, it’s either scissors or it’s gonna hurt,” Kimmie said.“It’s like, you’ve got mats in here…”
“Were,” Jen said.
“We don’t get mats!”I snarled and tried to get up, only to be forced back against the chaise by a couple of torturers.
“You were going to tell us about when you learned how to read a dead guy’s mind?”Sophie reminded Jen.
And that’s how I knew it was bad-bad, whenthatwas the redirect.
But it worked.“Anyway, while I was at the facility, some of the Corps showed up with a dead guy, to see if anybody could read his final thoughts.He was a war mage who’d stumbled into the local HQ and died almost right after, before he could tell them what had happened.They were hoping for a description of the killer, a clue, anything, but their bokors had come up blank, so they brought him to us.”
“That ability isn’t in your file,” I said.
“Yeah, because the Corps doesn’t know I can do it,” Jen said.“The facility just lumped me in with their students; I guess the mages had asked for all the necros they had, and they sent me along with the rest.The Corpsmen didn’t look too happy about that, and put me last, as if they didn’t expect anything from me.”
Or because they weren’t the unfeeling automatons people often believed, I thought, visualizing the scene.The dead body on a slab, the clinical room, Corpsmen in long leather coats wafting about their legs slightly in their masters’ agitation, because, along with a bunch of necromancers they didn’t trust, was this tiny girl with big eyes and a blond bob who shouldn’t have been there.I was surprised they’d let her stay.
“But the brain was aging fast,” she added.“So they didn’t take the time to argue.A mind is only readable for maybe an hour after death, and this one was near that when we got it, and then they put six people before me.”
“But you got your turn,” Kimmie said.
“Not… exactly.Right before I was supposed to have a go, the healer called time, and everybody started filing out.But I grabbed the dead guy’s hand anyway.It wasn’t as easy as touching the head, as my power had farther to go, but I could feel it surging up his arm, through his neck, and finally, finding a tiny spark, far inside his brain.
“And it was fascinating, because that spark exploded, like I was suddenly inside a theater with screens all around, flickering with images.Some were too decayed to make anything out, just flashes in between static, but others were clearer, and when I exerted power on them…”
“What?”Sophie asked, leaning in.
“They brightened and came to life, like a full color movie with surround sound.It was crystal clear, only that particular scene was pretty boring: just him playing catch with his dog.They’d said to target the last memory, and I didn’t think that was it—”
“And what was everyone else doing while you were watching ‘movies’?”I asked.
“I don’t know; all I could see was what was inside his head.But I felt somebody grab me, and I resisted, because I wasn’t done yet.I’d found another ‘screen’ that I thought might be the right one, and was trying to pull it closer, but they were stronger than me and…”
