“We aren’t here for service,” said Calan, “we’re trying to find her sister Mikki. We think she might be working down here somewhere.”
“We don’t have any Mikki here.”
“Have you heard of her?” Calan asked calmly, reading his mind as he mulled over the question. He knew all the females in that brothel and none were called Mikki. “Thank you for your time.”
Calan shared his assessment with Ajha silently and indicated they should go on to the next establishment. As Calan had read him, none of the women employed there resembled the woman he had seen in Ajha’s memory.
Ajha was only a little disappointed because she didn’t expect to find Mikki at the first place that they looked. She liked that Calan had called Mikki her sister. Even in these circumstances, people were a little more sympathetic to a person looking for kin than a friend.
They went to seven brothels and got the same answer. All of them were owned by Redmyn Berke, the ones Calan had gleaned from the overlord’s mind.
As they walked the street between establishments, he opened his mind to random thoughts trying to find someone thinking of Mikki. He knew it was a longshot, but he had to try something.
There were three other sides of Starport city with brothels and clubs to search through. But that exploration would have to wait for another day. On their way back to the hover tram, they heard a woman screaming and crying from a secluded alley.
Calan took Ajha’s hand, and they ran for the alley. Three guys had a young woman partially undressed. Two were holding her down, and one was trying to rape her. She struggled as hard as she could but couldn’t pull free. There was no doubt that she did not want what was happening to her.
Calan and Ajha stopped about fifteen feet from the where the men were holding the woman. “Hey! Let her go!” Calan shouted.
They paused long enough to assess the threat. The biggest one laughed as he looked at the psion mates. They didn’t seem like much of a threat to him. “You think you can make us?”
“I know it,” Calan asserted coolly. “One last chance---let her go.”
“Hold on to her. I’ll take care of them,” the biggest guy pulled a big combat type knife and began stalking them.
Ajha gasped.
Calan raised his hand as if signaling him to stop and flung the man into the air and against the brick wall twenty feet behind where he had stood. The thug hit the wall and plummeted to the ground leaving a streak of blood down the wall. His scalp split open on the rough wall, but the thug had only had a concussion.
Calan made a slight gesture at each of the other men as if to flick them away from the woman and slammed them to the ground. All were injured, but none were dead. Calan only felt a minor twinge of guilt for hurting them as he and Ajha ran to help the woman.
She was bruised and bleeding from her lip and half naked. Calan caught her before she slumped to the ground, and Ajha went to the woman’s other arm to help her walk between them.
“Is there somewhere we can take you?” Ajha asked her.
“Away from here,” she moaned.
“We’ll take you back to our Refuge. You will be safe there,” Calan said. Even as he said that he was scanning the area with his mind for signs of further danger.
They walked with the woman until they felt safe enough to stop so Physician Calan could quickly assess the woman’s injuries. She had some broken ribs and some internal bleeding from being punched multiple times to subdue her. It seemed probable they would have killed her by the time they finished using her.
Calan let himself fantasize about killing them, but he wouldn’t. Instead, he used his mind to repair her injuries while they were still minor. He was in good health and strong enough that it didn’t deplete him much.
“What’s your name?” Ajha asked gently.
“Holly Jacob,” she murmured. “I got caught trying to escape. I would have done them if they’ve let me go after, but they were going to kill me as a lesson to the others.”
“They were,” Calan stated. “They will be hurting for a while. Do you feel better now?”
“Yes, thank you. You’re a minder, aren’t you.”
“Psion is the correct term,” Calan said. “We should go before someone else comes looking for you. We’ll take you back to the Refuge. You will be safe there. No one will make you stay if you don’t want to. We are building a community there where people can live without fearing their neighbors.”
“Will they want someone like me living there?”
“You mean a woman who did what she had to do to survive?” Ajha asked as they started walking with Calan leading the way back to the hover tram. “I bet no one asked you if you wanted to be a hooker for no pay.”
“No, they dragged me there kicking and screaming. Then they gave me a beat down and said I would either fuck who they told me or I would fucking die.”
