Hey Jude

When we arrived back at Wiley's apartment he led me into his study, a room I hadn't been in before. It was fairly standard as studies went. A shelf, a filing cabinet, some drawers, a desk, a swivel chair, a computer. There were a few strange knickknacks on the shelf along with a selection of books, but nothing that weird.

"What's that?" I asked, pointing to something long, thin, and pointy mounted like a trophy kill over his desk.

Wiley glanced at it carelessly. "I slew a unicorn."

I took a step closer and leaned forward to see it more clearly and yeah, it did kind of look like an animal horn. It was even the right spiral shape for a unicorn horn. Not that that meant I believed him, and I was sure to put the full force of my scepticism into the look I gave him.

"Well, okay, it wasn't a unicorn," Wiley admitted. "But I did slay it."

"And... you decided to keep a trophy?"

"Only because it looks like a unicorn horn," Wiley said, a smile spreading over his face. "The demon itself was no harder than average to kill, but preserving the horn was a bitch. Demon remains decay fast, even bone, and it's not easy to stop that process. That it's still in one piece, in all its glory, is thanks to the efforts of some of the top scientific minds in this base."

"And they did this... so you could have a trophy?"

Wiley grinned. "People like me."

“Yes, though I’m not sure why.”

Wiley booted up his computer and checked his email, and as there was only one chair I just kind of stood around feeling awkward. When I got tired of that, I occupied myself with examining the contents of his bookcase. In amongst his books were one of those drinking bird toys, a giant chunk of quartz as big as both my fists, and a Newton's Cradle.

There were more books on demons on the shelf, too, and I pick one up at random to peruse while I waited.

"Don't touch that," Wiley said without turning around.

I paused, book still in hand. "Why?"

Wiley gestured vaguely. "You can come up with your own cheesy line about a rabbit hole and you not being ready. Suffice it to say, though, certain information is classified and while I'm not generally a stickler for rules when I'm not being mind controlled, it's for a good reason."

"No fun," I said, but I put the book back down.

Wiley pushed his chair back and stood up. "I'll get you those books I promised you tomorrow," he told me before leaving the room. A moment later the front door buzzed.

Wiley returned to the study shortly after with Sal and an Asian guy in his mid-twenties following behind him.

"Evan, Jude," Wiley said, pointing from me to the Asian guy in turn as he said our names. "Evan, you can access the gate blood test records, can't you?"

Evan frowned and shook his head. "I can, but I can't show you. That's confidential information."

"We might be able to use it to fuck over McCartnnon," Wiley told him.

"Ooh!" Evan exclaimed as he headed for Wiely's computer. He sat in Wiley's chair and clicked through a few folders, opened a program, and typed in his username and password.

"You're brilliant," Wiley told Evan.

"I just typed my password in..."

"Brilliant," Wiley repeated. “Now before we do this, who wants to place bets on the quantity of demon blood running through McCartnnon’s veins?”

“It’s not zero?” Evan asked. “I was under the impression it was zero.”

“You can bet zero if you like.”

Evan shook his head. “No way. I think you guys are working on more information than me. I refuse to participate.”

"Stop stalling for dramatic effect and just do it," Sal told Wiley.

"Fine. Evan?"

Evan typed in McCartnnon's name and McCartnnon, John came up in the search results. Clicking on the name revealed a table full of data I couldn't interpret.

"Oh, wow,” said Evan.

“Just so you know, if we’d been making bets I would have won.”

"What?" I asked, staring at the table and trying to figure out what they were seeing. "I have no idea what any of that means."

"See this?" Evan circled the cursor around one of the numbers in the table, 47.3. "That's the percentage of demon blood detected in him. It's close to fifty, so he's almost certainly half demon."

Like Zion, my brain immediately supplied, but I quickly pushed the thought away. They were nothing alike.

Wiley tapped the desk with his fingers for several seconds, silent while he thought, and then scrutinised me for a moment. "You know, the dangerous thing about assumptions is they can make you miss contradictory data. I wasn't paying attention — when you go through the gates and they test your blood, how many times does the machine beep?"

"Uh... twice, I think?"

Wiley gave a satisfied nod. Apparently that meant something. "Evan, look up Jude Severn."

Evan turned to me, his fingers hovering over his keyboard. "Do you consent to sharing your records with us?"

I shrugged. If these tests were to determine how much demon blood people had in them, my records would probably be pretty boring. I wondered if they'd be able to tell me my blood type. I'd always wondered what mine was. "Sure."

Evan typed in my name and Severn, Jude came up in the results. Clicking my name revealed a table of data similar to the one that had housed McCartnnon's information.

"Knew it," Wiley said immediately, and poked a finger at the relevant number. 5.2.

"Wait, what?" I asked. Shouldn't it have been zero?

"We figured out that McCartnnon is controlling people with some kind of psychic ability," Wiley explained to Evan. "As it was explained to me by a psychic ten year old — don’t ask, I’ll get to that later — it works by making anyone listening think whatever McCartnnon says is true. So if he says you will do something you will believe it and you will do it. Jude said he seemed to be immune, so looks like there's a good chance he's right."

Evan looked about as shocked by that as Wiley and Sal had been when I’d told them, but both of them were more focussed on the puzzle at hand than on his reaction. They didn't bother to wait for his response before continuing their conversation.

“What would that make Jude's ability, though?” Sal asked. “How would he counter that?"

"I'm not magic, guys," I protested, but nobody seemed to be listening. I mean, sure, I’d readily accepted that I seemed to be immune to whatever McCartnnon was doing, but I hadn’t been thinking of it as anything meaningful. I had been thinking of it like an immunity to a disease. Just... a thing.

"He could have some kind of ability to counter the abilities of others," Wiley suggested. "But I doubt it. Something psychic is my bet."

"I'm not psychic," I insisted.

"For a minor psychic ability, you probably wouldn't know," Sal told me. "Often it's just dismissed as being good at reading people."

"I don't know that I'm particularly good at reading people."

"Well then let's look at the base requirement for countering McCartnnon's ability with a psychic one of your own," Wiley said. "Can you tell when people are lying?"

I opened my mouth, automatically wanting to say no, to deny the whole idea that I had any kind of psychic ability. It was a crazy theory. But... well, yeah, I had to admit I usually could pick out lies.

"Yeah," I said reluctantly. "I guess. But—"

"I'm going to tell you some things," Wiley said. "After each one, you tell me if I'm telling the truth or lying. Okay?"

Reluctantly, I agreed.

"I have a brother," Wiley began.

I knew it was true instantly, but now that I knew we were looking for a psychic ability I was paying more attention to how I knew it. I couldn't quite place my finger on what had tipped me off, though. "True."

"I have an older brother."

"False," I said immediately. There had been something there, a slight mental itch indicating the lie.

"I have a twin brother."

"True."

"I am twenty five."

"True."

"I have no living relatives who share my abilities."

There was that mental itch again. "False."

"I have a brother and an uncle who share my abilities."

"True."

"The underpants I'm currently wearing are red."

I raised an eyebrow at him. "False."

"Black."

"False."

"Pink."

"False."

"Blue."

"True."

"Green."

"...True."

"Is anyone else starting to feel uncomfortable?" Evan asked suddenly, and I realised he was sandwiched between where Wiley and I were standing on either side of the chair he was sitting in. "Because I am starting to feel really uncomfortable."

"I think I've proven my point, anyway," Wiley said. He pulled down the side of his jeans just far enough that we could see the top of blue and green striped underpants. "He got all of the answers correct. Could either of you done that?"

"I did feel something," I admitted. "Nothing when you were telling the truth, but just a little itch when you lied. I never really paid attention to how I knew people were lying before."

"Well, there you go," Sal said, giving me a warm smile. "You're psychic. How do you feel about that?"

I scrunched my face up uncertainly. "I'll get back to you on that."

I wondered how Mikey would feel about all this. Perhaps I'd never really been destined to live a normal life. I wondered if I should tell him, if not about everything else then at least about my ability. Would he even want to know, though?

I couldn’t help but wonder if my psychic ability had something to do with why he could see me. It was an idle thought at first, until I started considering all the people he could see. Zion, a half demon. McCartnnon, also a half demon. Me, psychic apparently. His mum was the only aberration from the theme, but she was genetically related to him so it was reasonable to assume that might be a factor.

I was distantly aware of Wiley telling Sal and Evan about the kids we'd found locked up and about our intention to free them and take McCartnnon down, but I was having a hard time paying attention. Since finding out about Zion's strangeness I had wondered if there was something odd about Mikey too, but until now I'd never really had any confirmation.

"You okay, Jude?" Sal asked, startling me out of my thoughts.

I nodded reflexively but then thought better of it. Maybe they knew something. "Is there such a thing as someone who can only see people with demon blood in them?"

Sal looked confused, but answered anyway. "Well, there are people who can do that selectively, yes. They can kind of... filter their vision, so that the only people they can see are demons or humans with demon blood. It's a useful ability."

"But not, like, all the time?" I asked.

"A mutation could break the ability, make it malfunction," Wiley said. He was watching me curiously. "Or a conflict of abilities. Sometimes if a person has more than one ability, they can clash and mess things up."

“I have a friend who can only see a few people. His mum, me, McCartnnon, and a friend of ours who's half demon,” I told them. “I'm kind of noticing a pattern now.”

"So instead of people he sees nothing?" Sal asked.

"Well, so he says. He doesn't walk into people, but he doesn't seem to have much concept of where their limbs are." Mikey had tripped over peoples' legs more times than I could count.

"Does he know why he is how he is?" Sal asked.

"I don't think so? I don't know. I think he knows more than I did before I got involved in all this, but I'm not sure he has much of a grasp of the bigger picture. I don't really know how he knows anything, given how few people he can see."

"I'd like to talk to him," Sal said. "I don't know what I could do to help him, but I'm a bit of an expert on different abilities and how they come about."

"Okay," I said with a shrug. "He'll either be happy to have new friends, or angry with me for getting involved in all this. He did kind of warn me that keeping my head down where all this weird stuff was concerned might be a better idea."

"And with everything you've seen so far it might look like he was right," Wiley said. "But he was wrong. In the long run, you'll be better off with us. Maybe your friend could even get a job with us too, after McCartnnon is ousted. Finders are useful."

"Finders?" I asked.

"Like what it sounds like your friend is,” Wiley said. “They're useful in picking out people with demon blood from a crowd. They can also determine if someone is a carrier of demon blood even if they have no associated abilities. We haven't figured out the genetics of all these things, so a DNA test tells us nothing. What we detected with the blood tests at the gate was a particular extra something in your blood which makes your ability work. People who are only carriers don't have that, and some kids don't develop it, and their abilities, until they hit puberty. Finders are the only way to detect them.”

"I know some people who'd love to know if they carry any demon blood before they have kids," Sal said. "Healing abilities are notoriously difficult. If both parents are healers, there'll be about a one in fifty chance any child they have will be a healer and about a one in ten chance that they'll have enhanced personal healing, since that's the ability healing is a mutation of. Of those kids who don’t end up with either ability, many will still be carriers of the gene and have the potential to pass it on, but they generally won’t know for sure unless a Finder confirms it."

"One in fifty... and that's if both parents are healers?" I frowned. "Healers must be insanely rare."

"Well, yes, we're pretty rare," Sal confirmed. "But not as rare as you're thinking. There's been a bit of selective breeding going on, though I don't agree with it."

"Ah, the schools.” Evan’s face scrunched up in distaste. "Were you...?"

Sal’s lips pressed together in a tight line and she shifted around to lean back against Wiley’s desk. "Yes, I was born in one of the schools.”

“Schools?” I asked cautiously. I’d never seen Sal look so tense.

Sal inclined her head, her hands gripping the side of the desk and her gaze distant across the room as she explained. "Healers donate their eggs and sperm to the program with successful embryos implanted in surrogates. The resulting children are trained as either healers or fighters, depending on how their ability manifests. If there is no ability, they're trained to fulfill other useful roles. It's officially a flagship program because it effectively manufactures vital staff for various Ark sites, but the schools in and of themselves are not fantastic places to grow up. I'd say they've bred far more attachment disorders than healers."

"I take it you won't be giving them any of your eggs, then?" I asked.

A bitter smile curved Sal’s lips as she finally turned to look at me. "No way, though they keep asking. If I ever have kids I want to know them, I want to raise them myself. I work unpredictable hours, though, and I'm not sure I'd want to bring children into..." She made a vague gesture, and Wiley made a sound of understanding. They exchanged a look between them, and Sal didn't elaborate.

"So anyway, your friend could potentially get a job with us," Wiley said, and then reassured me, "A safe one. With his ability, it would probably be pretty difficult for him to get a job anywhere else."

"He's throwing a make up birthday party for me this afternoon, since McCartnnon kind of ruined my actual birthday for me a little," I told Sal. "You can tag along if you like. He's making cupcakes."

"Cupcakes, you say?" Wiley asked. "I'd better come too. For... moral guidance?"

"He's pretty good at baking, actually," I told Wiley. "Maybe he'll let you take a few back with you if you play nice."

"Why don't you ever bake for me?" Wiley asked. "I think I might be mentoring the wrong teenage boy here. Think he'd be any good at fighting demons?"

"Nope. Pretty sure he's a pacifist. I don't know if he's even capable of violence."

"Guess I'll just have to send you to a baking course, then."

“Are we done here?” Sal asked. “I need to go close up clinic properly before someone turns up at my door and then bleeds out when I don’t answer it."

Wiley made a shooing motion. "Yes, go. If you're not back before five, though, we're going for cake without you."

"You wouldn't dare," Sal said, and gave him a light punch in the arm before heading for the door.

"Healers punch like sissies," Wiley said to her back, then laughed when she flipped him off. When the study door closed behind her, Wiley's expression turned serious as he faced Evan. "You can't tell anyone about what we've found out, okay? We have to be very careful about who we approach about this. Even people who might otherwise be on our side could betray us if McCartnnon's gotten into their head."

"I was thinking," Evan said. "We should skip out on the weekly base assemblies. I can edit the records to indicate we were present. Any contact with McCartnnon is dangerous, so we should do our best to reduce it as much as possible."

Wiley grinned and clapped him on the back. "See? This is why I brought you into this. Clever."

Evan clearly enjoyed the praise but was doing his best not to show it, ducking his head and trying to force his lips from curving into a smile. "That's all, then?"

Wiley nodded. "For now. We'll be in contact."

I strolled out into the living room while Wiley saw Evan to the door. It was too close to five for Wiley to decide it was time for more training, so I figured it was safe to relax. I sat down on the sofa and stared up at the ceiling.

A few seconds later Wiley flopped down next to me, letting out a sigh as he went. "Well, this has been quite a day."

I made a sound of agreement. I'd had a string of 'quite a day' days, and this was honestly the best of them since now I actually had some direction, but I definitely felt drained.

"You know in a way it's actually a relief, finding out what he can do. I've done some things I'm not proud of at his command, and knowing I was probably literally unable to disobey is kind of comforting."

It was kind of weird, having Wiley be open and honest with me. No snark or mockery, just the truth. I felt like any response I gave would remind him who he was talking to and he'd stop talking to me like a normal fucking human being, but I had to say something. "Yeah, I guess it would be."

"But mostly it's just creepy. Mental badtouch. I mean, what are the limits of his ability? Are there any? Like, if he marched a toddler in here and told me I would kill it, would I?"

"Maybe. Or maybe he'd have to be more tricky about it, tell you the kid was a demon. You said you can tell the difference, but that's with a clear head. I bet the scientists he has working with the kids have enough experience to be able to generally tell the difference, and I doubt they know the truth of what the kids really are. So I guess, yeah, he'd probably be about to convince you to kill a toddler." I paused for a moment as I realised what I’d just said. "Annnd that really wasn't what you needed to hear right now. Sorry, I'm tired. Er... I'm sure you'd be able to resist him if you were adequately motivated?"

Wiley was grinning at me, so clearly I hadn't upset him too much. "I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that someone whose power is detecting lies might not be too much of a natural at telling them. Even pretty lies."

I made a face because yeah, actually, that was pretty accurate. Well, not that I thought I was particularly bad at lying when I set out to, but I did tend to avoid doing it. In cases where I wouldn't want to be caught lying, anyway. I had lied to Mikey a thousand times over the years, but usually I didn't intend for him to believe my lies. Between us, lies were our way of indicating we didn't want to talk about something. They didn't need to be believed.

"You don't seem to be very pleased about your superpower," Wiley observed.

"It just... complicates things. I mean, if I found out I had x-ray vision or something, then sure, that'd be cool and I'd be all over that. But this... I kind of already knew I could do it. I mean I suppose I'll trust my instincts more now, but other than that it doesn't change anything. Just turns something that was simple into some whole big thing."

Wiley gave me a look that was strangely sympathetic. He generally relished my suffering so much that I hadn't realised that was an emotion he was capable of. "I get that there's a lot going on so this just seems like another thing to deal with on top of everything else, but it's important. You'll be a valuable resource when it comes to taking down McCartnnon because of it, but it goes beyond that. This place, the things we have going on, they're high stakes. Being able to find out if someone is being honest with us could prove invaluable."

"Yeah, I guess," I said, just because I felt like I ought to say something. Perhaps 'thank you, that made me feel better' would have been the most socially healthy response, but I didn't think we were quite to that level of civility yet.

"If we pull this whole thing off, I’ll buy you a car," Wiley said.

"You'll buy me a car?" I asked skeptically.

"Yeah, a good one," Wiley promised. "I don't know if you're aware of how likely taking on McCartnnon is to get us killed. A car is kind of a small thing compared to your life. But if you get something bad for failing you should also get something good for succeeding, right?"

"Honestly, fucking that bastard over is a pretty good thing in my mind, but hey, not gonna say no to a free car."

"Ah, cupcake time," Wiley said as stretched his limbs out and stood from the sofa. He reached the door at the same time it buzzed.

"Well, if anyone died in my absence from the clinic their bodies were removed and their blood cleaned up by the time I got there," Sal said cheerily after the door hissed open. "The janitors here are amazing, so who can really say for sure?"

"I wonder how you even end up as a janitor here," Wiley mused. He stepped out of his apartment and waved at me to follow them out. "I mean, anything else you have to be the best in your area or have some kind of special power."

"Well, like I said, they're the best janitors. They excel at it. I'm sure someone just noticed their natural talent and decided they deserved a six figure salary as reward for their greatness."

They kept up this banter all the way to Wiley's car. They completely ignored me, but honestly I was glad. I was tired and I just didn't feel like talking. Listening to them, though, and seeing how they could find humour in life despite everything that was going on, was kind of relaxing.

I fell asleep almost immediately once we started driving. It had been a few days since I'd had a proper night's rest, and it was soothing to feel the car's gentle vibration and listen to the white noise of tires on road.