Free Archon's Queen by Matthew S. Cox Page A

you’re right. I’m getting lucky. I should stop taking zoom. Not good for me.”
    “Anna…” Penny gave her a mother’s scolding look.
    She stared, focusing her telepathic voice into Penny’s mind.
There’s something wrong with me. The zappy thing happens on its own. I can’t control it. Whenever I get riled up, it just goes off willy-nilly.
Anna waited for the startled expression to fade from her friend.
Soz. I don’t wanna say this out loud. Yes, I’m a telepath.
Anna hung her head as if confessing to a heinous crime.
I started taking zoom to hide my power… I just… It’s such evil shit. I lost control.
    Anna’s face reddened with shame.
    Penny prodded her in the arm with the child’s shoe, squinting at her. “What about li’l Twee then. She’s fond of you. You’re the tough street-bitch she thinks she is.”
    They both laughed.
    “She sees you using, she’ll pick it right up too. You don’t want that, do you?”
    Anna stared guilt into the floor. As the line drew closer to the door, Penny stopped talking. When it came her turn at the window, she showed her ID card and smiled, speaking only Hindi at the flustered young man behind the counter. The little boy in her arms grinned at him, as she had asked him to, and the two of them vanished through a doorway into the checking room.
    A moment later, the next clerk waved Anna over. “Name?”
    “Annabelle Emily Morgan.”
    “Gander into that then.”
    He pointed at a small box mounted to the frame of the window. Dark brown rust peeked through flaking lime-colored paint above and below the mechanism to which she pressed her forehead. She hated the way the metal smelled, hated the way the breath of the previous fifty people pooled within the hollow confines of the machine enclosing her face. Flickering bands of blue and green light went up, down, and crossways over her eyes. When it beeped, she leaned away, blind for several seconds from the glare.
    “Righto. There you are. Bloody shame about your father, that.”
    “Thank you.” She offered a pleasant smile.
    “Been three months since your last visit with the doc. You’re due up for another psych eval.”
    “There’s been a bother with the authorization; I’m just waiting for NHS approval.”
    It was a lie, but a believable one. Half the room behind her moaned in a shared complaint about the agency’s pace.
    “Hope they get that sorted for you. Need a shrink to sign off on your dole, or you’ll have to get a real job.”
    “I understand.”
    The limp sense of indignation at yet another person belittling her barely registered. Better they thought of her as a freeloader or a harlot than they learn what she really was. She shied away from holographic posters on the walls, asking “concerned citizens” to identify potential psionic terrorists so the government can keep everyone safe.
    “Right then, through the door on your left.” The man closed his window, vanishing through a small access way.
    When the door slid open, she followed him into a cramped exam room. A sleepy nurse waited by a paper-covered table. Anna shrugged out of her coat and climbed onto it amid crinkling. She lied her way through questions about drug use, enduring another light in her eyes and other discomforts of an abbreviated physical. Once again, Penny’s skilled hand at makeup covered the red squares on her arm. Any medtech who cared could spot the derm tracks with ease. In this place, they only wanted to process people fast. During a few prior visits, the techs gave her sympathetic looks, silent offers of help. No one wanted to deal with the proverbial paperwork of filing a report about her using. Toward the end, the wide-bodied nurse came at her with a portable medical scanner, touching it to the skin of her bicep.
    Anna closed her eyes, cringing from the mild burn caused by the flickering electrical discharge. Silicon smoke hazed the air between the three of them, and she sat in silence waiting for the public