Free The Handler by Susan Kaye Quinn Page B

peered down the vast middle of the factory floor. Dust motes danced in the forked streams of light from the high windows. Racks stretched to the ceiling, cluttered with parts for machines that stopped working long ago. It was a warehouse of the past, guarded by white, concrete columns and overseen by the unblinking eyes of plasma lights dangling overhead. Once transformed and forced into the future, it would be large enough to sleep a small army. More jackers were trickling into this nether region of Chicago New Metro every day, but they were forming the same lawless Clans that had fought each other for years. Bringing them together would take more than simply clearing out an abandoned door factory. Our mission was to liberate jackers, not fight them, but we would have to earn the respect necessary to lead them forward.
    It’s your words, not your ability, that will encourage others to follow you.
    My mother’s words were still fresh, whispered in her lab at the University of Chicago, where my parents’ neuroscience research covered for the real work they did: preparing for the revolution. My childhood was non-stop training for the day when jackers would fight to be free—when we would become the dominant species. When I would fulfill the mission they had entrusted to me.
    Their lives, all their work, would be meaningless if we failed.
    To bring the Clans together, we needed a coalition of strength, a core group of jackers with extraordinary abilities who could move the revolution forward. Kira was the prototype, the ideal kind of jacker that we needed to recruit. The chat-cast chatter said she possessed unusual abilities, like my sister and me. More importantly, a revolutionary spirit seemed to animate her. She single-handedly took on the entire system with little more than her words and a camera phone, having never fired a shot. We needed someone like her to replace what we lost when the accident claimed my parents’ lives. In the end, they had given us every tool to fulfill their vision of the future, save one: their presence, fighting by our side, when the time came.
    I strode toward the center racks, determined to get the transformation under way, when the sound of pounding at the door stopped me.
    “Expecting anyone?” Anna asked, pulling a dart gun out of a cabinet drawer. We had only recently fixed the obsolete punch-code lock that held the front door shut.
    “I have a recruit coming today,” I said, “but not until this afternoon.” While handling instincts was a highly unusual and useful skill, I was deficient in the normal mindjacker abilities that whoever was pounding on the door would expect. And I doubted they just wanted to talk. “Perhaps you should answer the door.”
    Anna pointed her gun at the metal door, no doubt reaching out to mentally surge against the mindfield of the person outside. Anyone trying to jack Anna in return wouldn’t get past her mind’s barrier, but if they tried, they stood a good chance of being jacked or shot. People quickly learned not to mess with my sister.
    After a moment, a broad, unnatural smile sprung to life on Anna’s face. “We have a visitor!” The gun clattered when she dropped it on the counter, and she practically sprinted to the door. I stared open-mouthed after her—Anna was never giddy, even when she was a five-year-old girl on Christmas morning. She was born serious. But her instinctual mind had warmed to the sunshine yellow of unfettered happiness as she skipped toward the door.
    Something was definitely wrong.
    I reached beyond the door just as Anna threw it open, gushing, “Welcome!” to the woman who stood outside. She was young, and her long red hair writhed in the wintery breeze, each wisp seeming to undulate on its own. The woman’s mind jumbled flashes of color in a strobe-like effect that I couldn’t quite grasp. I tried to handle Anna’s placid yellow instinct into something a little more alarmed about the unknown jacker striding past