Mind Games Read Free Page A

what it would be like to be Cubby. Cubby has faith in life the way you might have faith in a five-star hotel: it’s a world of sunny swimming pools, plush towels, and capable people at the front desk, and your happiness is the number-one priority. I want more than anything to live in Cubby’s safe hotel. To go through one day without health fears. One day.
    An hour later I’m all ready for work in a pink tank top and nubby white skirt I’d stashed at Cubby’s, and I’m down on the river promenade buying a tall, extra-strong coffee from an elderly vendor. The city paid all kinds of money to make the promenade pretty, but thanks to the rumors about telekinetic pickpockets and mind-control muggers, it’s deserted. And, of course, the Brick Slinger doesn’t help. I don’t care; I refuse to let the crime wave dictate my movements. Though I do keep my cash pinned to the inside of my purse.
    I arrive at Le Toile Boutique, the fancy dress store I manage, right on time. Marnie and Sally, my favorite underlings, are unpacking scarves from China. The scarves have tiny, angry-looking faces on them, and the girls joke about Le Toile’s owner being drunk when she ordered them. I lean on the glass counter watching the upscale shoppers rifle through the racks of dresses. A few of them wear steel-reinforced safari hats in pink or beige, the latest in protective headwear. We tend to get a lot of the horsey set in from suburbs like Ellsworth Heights, though I don’t know where they got “heights,” since the land here is flat for miles.
    My thoughts keep going back to the restaurateur. How could he tell about the vein star? Surely he was just a highcap telepath, reading my health anxiety. That’s all.
    I sigh. I can still picture my mother at the kitchen table in front of her medicines and vitamins.
Never take aspirin for a pinprick headache
, she’d tell my brother and me,
because that’s an indicator of vein star syndrome, and the anticoagulant effects of aspirin will only speed the bleedout
.
    The doctors and most everybody else thought she was an alarmist—until she died of a ruptured vein star. I was thirteen. I went through the years after that in a haze. I get this pang, thinking back on it, wishing I could havebeen there for her. I can only imagine how alone and scared she felt.
    Dad had health issues, too, though his tastes ran more to a widespread Ebola outbreak. We had a stash of level-four respirators, a year’s supply of food and water, and the weaponry to defend it. After Mom died, Dad got even more into protecting us. That’s where Shady Ben Foley and the land came in. Freshwater stream. Defensible elevation. After Foley was through with us, we were so poor we had to eat up all the food we’d hoarded.
    Dad became reclusive after that. He worked as a programmer, rarely emerging from his bedroom. My older brother moved to Brazil, and as soon as I finished high school, I moved from our rural town to bustling Midcity. I bleached my dark hair blonde, got a job at fancy Le Toile, and started a new life on the sunny side of the street. I thought I’d be free from the family legacy of fear, but it followed me—my very own portable prison.
    I try to convince myself that the restaurateur didn’t really see anything wrong with me—he read my fear of vein stars, that’s all. But what if he’s a medical intuitionist highcap? Is it possible my condition is graver than I thought? Now I really wish I knew what the guy was. On the websites you can find lists of what abilities the different highcaps have, from the common telekinetics to the rare dream invaders. The one thing they all have in common is that a mutation heightened their brain capacity in some strange way. And that most people pretend not to believe in them but secretly hate and fear them. Except for Cubby, who simply doesn’t believe in them.
    “Are you okay, Justine? Did you have insomnia again?”
    Marnie and Sally stare at me with concern—an