Free Runner (Sam Dryden Novel) by Patrick Lee

way, he supposed, that was the whole truth. Until her memory came back, Rachel would be limited to mind reading. That was a passive ability, like hearing, or feeling pain. The rest of her capabilities were active, focus-intensive skills. With her memory blocked, she didn’t even know she had them.
    “So lay it out for me,” Marsh said. “What exactly is happening? What are you asking me to step into?”
    For a moment Gaul didn’t respond. A bright yellow open-top Humvee went by, down on the highway. As it passed below the overlook, the three girls inside screamed laughter, the sound of it immediately washed away in the same wind that blew their long hair around. Gaul watched the vehicle slip away down the coast toward Santa Monica. What would it feel like to be that carefree? To not know how much the world was about to change.
    “Martin?”
    Gaul blinked. He turned back to Marsh and stood up from the rail.
    “I won’t go into the details of what happened at Detrick,” Gaul said. “Except to say the research there ended five years ago, and the work was taken up by private interests instead. Defense contractors.”
    “Plural?”
    Gaul nodded. “Two of us. My company, Belding-Milner, along with Western Dynamics.”
    Something flickered through Marsh’s expression at that. He looked like a chess player assessing some new arrangement of pieces on the board. Easy enough to guess what had struck him: Belding-Milner and Western Dynamics had been rivals forever. Bitter ones. Everybody knew that. Marsh’s eyes narrowed for a tenth of a second as he filed the news away.
    “You both took over the research,” he said.
    “We each took it over,” Gaul said. He watched Marsh pick up the subtle point of the wording.
    “Each company working independent of the other, you mean. No sharing.”
    “No sharing,” Gaul said. “I’m sure the government was happy enough to run it that way. In spite of what you hear, they’re okay with a little competition now and then.”
    “So who won?”
    Gaul looked down. He felt his jaw tighten. Bullshit for the sake of saving face had never much appealed to him. “The other guys. In five years our research has yielded almost nothing. Western Dynamics had success right from the start.”
    Marsh waited for him to go on.
    “As of now, they’re beyond just doing research. They’ve got a finished product in final trials.”
    “What kind of product?” Marsh asked.
    “People. I don’t mean test subjects—actual operatives. Loyal personnel.”
    “And these operatives are … also mind readers.”
    Gaul nodded.
    Mind readers, among other things.
    The operatives at Western Dynamics could technically do all the same things as Rachel, though that was like comparing junior high chess club kids to Gary Kasparov. Rachel was almost a god next to them.
    “So where do you come into this?” Marsh asked.
    “I come into it a few months ago, with a phone call from a good friend at Detrick. Head of a small working group following up on the old research there. He had information about a test subject from back then—a girl. The events that ended the research at Detrick were … traumatic. But this girl had not only survived them, she’d escaped. She’d been free all this time since then, five years, but there was a chance to … reacquire her. My friend wondered if Belding-Milner wanted to head up that effort.”
    “And gain something you could use against your competition.”
    “All’s fair.”
    “She’s a kid, Martin. What were your people going to do with her?”
    Bloom where we were planted.
    “Nothing harsher than necessary. Most of the tests we had in mind could be done with a few drops of her blood, or functional MRI scans. But our first move was to set up narcotic interrogations. Her knowledge alone had to be worth looking into.”
    “And?”
    Gaul sighed. “She knew something, alright.”
    “What did she know?”
    Gaul was quiet a long time. Far to the southeast, a big yacht