Pair-Bonded (an Institute story)
by Wrestlr
3.
Some unfamiliar noise on the street awakens you. It’s still dark, well before dawn. You roll off the mattress in this unfamiliar building and edge yourself toward the window. Nothing. Stretch your Talent gently, probing for nearby minds. Nothing you can detect. A false alarm, but you’ve learned to be cautious.
Don is still asleep, on his back, using up slightly more than his half of the mattress. The sheet clumps at mid-thigh. He dreams. He has an erection; the head of his penis and nearly an inch of shaft peeps out about the waistband of his pants, just to the side of his navel. Probe into his head through the bond. You can’t tell what he’s dreaming, but the hormones and chemicals that give you both morning wood are dancing through his system. He looks so sexy, lying there asleep and aroused like that. You wonder whether he dreams about you.
This is one of your favorite things to do.
You kneel by the bed because you don’t want to disturb him. You awoke with semi-wood too, which faded under the fear caused by the noise, but now comes roaring back. Unfasten your fly. Unzip. Ease your pants to mid-thigh. Your erection bobs in the night air.
Where’s that rag you used earlier? Pick it up. It’s still damp in spots from earlier. You’re going to need it again.
Stroke yourself. Don looks so sexy. By now you’ve memorized everything about his body, but it still fascinates you. Probe gently through the bond. You don’t want to disturb his sleep or his dream, but you’re planning a little mischief that will bring you both pleasure. Tickle the parts of his brain that glow brightest when he is aroused. The erotic response spreads. His dreaming areas are lighting up.
Stroke yourself. Your hand feels good on your cock. Send the sensations through the link into Don’s mind. Use them to amplify his excitement.
This feels good. Don moans, locked in his slumber, feeling good too. Rub the rough rag against your balls—the damp spots are your cum and Don’s, mingled. Something about that seems so sexy to you. Tweak Don’s arousal higher. Manipulating him like this makes you feel so mischievous. He’ll never know. He looks so sexy, lying there, as if he’ll let you do whatever you want. What you want is to cum. You want to make him cum too. You’ll use your orgasm to trigger his. You want to give this to him. It’s nearly happening. Feel your balls buzzing. The little jitter of sensation around your cockhead makes you want to stroke harder, faster, needing to get off now. Rub your balls again. Your cock is close, closing fast. You breath comes ragged and fast. You’re seconds away. When it happens, you’ll feed it all through the bond. Don will feel you cum; he’ll feel everything. That will make him cum too, in his sleep. He will dream he experiences two orgasms, point-blank. You’ll experience his too, a bonus.
Your dick feels so good—you’re getting closer—closer—your balls are tightening, almost there. Don’s stomach muscles flutter. You have to concentrate, manipulate his responses carefully—you don’t want to over-stimulate him—not yet. His arm shifts a little, then a leg, just a little, reacting to the pleasure tipping him toward the point of no return, the point you’re approaching now, almost there. Another few strokes and you’ll be ready to push these sensations at him through the bond and make him cum—another few seconds and you’ll be cumming—another few—
Don surprises you: he climaxes first. His stomach muscles flutter again. His cockhead pulses and shoots out the first of his load onto his abdomen. His orgasm slams through the bond into you, and you gasp, caught off-guard, as your head erupts, your balls erupt, and your dick erupts. You barely get the rag in front of your cock in time to catch your load.
The intensity leaves you blind and gasping for several minutes. Finally you can open your eyes, look down. Your cock is still semi-hard in your hand. Wow. Definitely stronger than you expected—nearly made you pass out.
Use the rag to clean your hand and cockhead. You’re still gasping from the intensity. Tuck your dick away and refasten your pants. Slide back onto the mattress alongside Don. Wipe his substantial cum off his stomach with the rag. One spurt ran up alongside his closest nipple. As you clean away the semen, lean in and give that nipple a soft kiss. Toss the rag to the floor, and settle in alongside Don. His hand slides toward you, finds your arm, as his sleeping mind reassures itself of your presence. Kiss his shoulder. Close your eyes and enjoy this mattress, this afterglow, Don’s warmth beside your skin and his presence in your head, as his slumber drags at you though the bond, making you drowsy, dragging you down again. Close your eyes in hopes of sleeping for another hour until dawn.
When the barely lightening sky wakes you later, you lie there on the mattress and look up at the clouds through the window. This used to be one of your favorite things to do in your life before: Wake up early, and watch sunrise build in the sky.
You know soon you’ll have to rise and start back to your safe house. Don still half-slumbers beside you—you know through your connection that he is not fully asleep. He has enjoyed the rare luxury of this mattress too, and is unwilling to officially wake up until he can no longer deny that dawn has arrived.
Don says you’re maudlin when you think about the past, as you do while you watch the last stars fade in the lightening sky.
Four years ago you escaped. Don learned to live on the streets quickly. He kept both of you alive while you figured it out for yourself. Even then, Don was the strategist. He knew the two of you couldn’t go back home. He knew your best chance was to go far away, hitchhike, to where no one would know you or see your photos on the news as the announcer intoned, To report information regarding the whereabouts, call ... Lay low, off the grid, under the radar.
Three years ago, after the Institute’s agents nearly recaptured you in yet another close call, the third or fourth such, you came south, leaving the Federated States entirely for the clan countries, where officially the Institute has no charter to operate. Clan countries do not allow the Institute to operate within their borders because they claim the Institute is unneeded. The clans’ eugenics programs that produce nearly uniform faces, hair colors, and body types have also selectively bred out the Talent genes. Any throwbacks detected later are dealt with by culling, a fancy word for state-sanctioned murder. This is what you risk if the police ever catch you. But you’d both rather live under the risk of culling than turn yourselves over to the Institute.
Your days can change from mundane, almost boring, without warning to sudden run-for-your life terror. You and Don never stay too long in one place. Even in clan countries, you’d stumble across places where special people had managed to hide. Each time the Institute started nosing around, you’d hear about the disappearances—the girl who said animals talked to her, the boy who could tell you in perfect detail what would happen to you tomorrow—you’d hear about these special people going missing, and you would disappear into the night, heading farther and farther south, until a few months ago you ended up here: Darvenek, a resort city, the capital of Darven.
You stay near cities. Resort towns are best. In cities enough people are out-clan, either not compliant with whichever clan’s breeding standard or just out-and-out foreigners like Don and you, that you two don’t stand out.
You’ve been in Darvenek nearly six months. The beach resort north of the city is popular with tourists. You and Don go there often to help relieve the tourists of their cash. You learned long ago that youth is a saleable asset—and that tourist resorts are frequented by people with ready cash and by youths like yourselves looking to make the sale. Don at first tried to find women who were willing to buy him meals, drinks, clothes, or gifts that he could sell later. But you discovered almost immediately that the men instead are the ones who understand that their money buys them access to your youth. Men understand the transaction in which they trade their cash for your time.
You didn’t agree for the longest time to have sex with ever-renewing stream of the tourist men, wanting to save that part of your innocence, hoping Don would agree to be your first in spite of his preference for women. But your Talent made you well-suited for the work. You could sit with the men on the beach and see in their memories what they wanted, could weed out the risky and the dangerous.
The first time you let one of the tourist men suck you happened long before you came here to Darvenek. At the time, you were a month shy of your sixteenth birthday. The tourist offered too much money for you to refuse. Afterward, when you showed Don the money, enough to buy food for the two of you for a week, he was angry, hurt. You thought Don was jealous of the money, that you had earned so much more from a man in one night than he did from women in an entire month. You could feel Don’s anger through the connection. But as he ranted, you realized the real reason, and that became one of few nights you and he had slept separately since the link bonded your minds. He had felt everything. Every teasing tongue-lick, every tickle, every thrust of the mouth down your shaft, the weird feeling of the warm wetness of his throat, then the pleasure that unfolded once you became accustomed to it and his tongue worked its magic. Don experienced everything through the bond. He was jealous, but of the sex. He loved you in his way, enough to feel possessive of you, and you being with someone else that first time enraged him. That night, he pushed you away, refused to let you calm his anger. You had misread the cause of Don’s jealousy—more proof your Talent wasn’t like other Telepaths’: you knew the effect, but you could not always see the cause.
Don tried men too. If you could make such good money off the men tourists, so could he, he declared. You thought he was acting out of anger still. Though he did land a few, he didn’t like sex with men, so he stopped. The money was not worth how degraded the sex with men made him feel, so different from how powerful he felt during the act with women. You didn’t begrudge him his times with women, even though you felt everything he was doing to them with his tongue and fingers and cock, and everything they did to him. You had as much right to be jealous, maybe more. He was popular with clan girls who wanted to piss off their families by being with an out-clan boy, or who wanted to see for themselves if the rumors about out-clan cocks were true.
Sometimes he shared himself with you. He frequently allowed you to jerk him off, even reciprocated some of the time. Now and then he would allow you to blow him, but he never blew you back.
The night of your sixteenth birthday, one month after his jealousy over your tourist blowjob, Don surprised you. You were climbing into the makeshift bed in your safe house at the time, a warehouse near the shore. Don had an erection. You thought this would be one of the nights he allowed a blowjob, but he had other plans. He pressed you down on the bedding, on your back, and climbed between your legs. He took your cock in his mouth for the first time.
He sucked you and licked you and nibbled at your ball sack, a trick you decided he must have picked up from one of his few male clients, since you couldn’t imagine any woman knowing to do that. Your back arched, and you came in moments.
Don was not finished. He hoisted your legs and fumbled with a condom, fumbled with his fingers in your hole. Soon he was fucking you for the first time. He was angry, jealous again from knowing he was not the first to taste your cock, but he was the first to enter your ass. Before that moment, you had not been completely sure a penis really could fit into an ass—you’d suspected stories of butt-fucking were a myth, like unicorns. It hurt, but this was Don doing it to you. Soon it felt better, then best of all. He was the first in your ass, but he fucked you slowly, gently, tenderly. This was, you realized, his way of saying he was sorry, that he loved you, of marking you as his. Your hard-on returned quickly but he would not allow you to touch it.
He pushed your legs down and climbed atop you. Another condom, this time for your cock, and he sat back, taking your dick into himself slowly. You felt jealousy too, knowing you were not the first to fuck him, because you’d felt through the link his pain and rage each time he had let one of the tourist men enter his ass in return for money, but part of you was also pleased: pleased to have an experienced lover who knew what to do, no ignorant fumbling; and pleased that this was Don, finally giving himself to you, nothing held back, as you’d dreamed of for two years.
Sensations flooded you, though your body, through the bond—the tight clamp of his ass on your erection, the way he experienced your dick in his asshole, more times than not rubbing a special spot up inside.
Afterward, after you’d orgasmed from just minutes of the sweet tightness of his ass, so warm around your shaft, your cum boiling up into him like lava, after he’d jacked himself and spurted his jizm onto your chest, he pressed his finger to your lips, meaning no talking. Though he considered himself a lover of women, not men, he loved you in his way, a way that still confused him, so different from everything he thought he knew about love before the bond, so much more intense. He knew you now knew how he felt, in ways that transcended just telling you with words, or even emotions glimpsed through the imperfect lens of the bond you shared. You grinned and nodded to let him know you understood. You decided this was the best, most perfect, birthday gift anyone had ever given you.
Your current safe house, to the west, is much better than the one in which you gave the last part of your virginity to Don. The previous tenants had abandoned the building but inexplicably left the electricity service on. You and Don do not use the lights or the electricity—no sense advertizing that someone is squatting there—except occasionally when Don allows you to recharge your music player, the only thing you have left from your life before. You’d long ago outgrown the clothes and the shoes you’d been wearing when you escaped. You took nothing else with you. All you have left is the music player that was in your pocket when you were taken from the school. You had to get another charger for it, but that was easy. You don’t have a way to download onto your player the new music that you hear at the resorts or in the streets, so all of the songs on it are those you loved four years ago. You’re eighteen now, but you still love to sit in the dark and listen and dream of your life before panhandling, thieving from tourists and street vendors, occasional prostitution, Talents, and the full-time paranoia about whether today, tomorrow, next week, is the day the Institute comes for you again.
Don says you’re being maudlin when you think about the past and might-have-beens. You tease him back by asking how a jock like him knows what the word maudlin means. You both laugh. He likes the little reminders of his days as the up-and-coming athlete, who would have been a favorite to make first-string quarterback the following year. If there had been a following year. It’s been a long time since he was a high-school jock. He’s nineteen now—he’s already a man.
Your current safe house also is much better than this one where you’ve just spent the night, the building of unknown purpose with a mattress on the floor.
You reach over. Don half-sleeps on his stomach, still enjoying the luxury of a real mattress, his arms folded under his head as a makeshift pillow. You rub your hand comfortingly back and forth, alongside his spine, not really massaging, just stroking, caressing. The side of his mouth curls, a partial smile, indicating he likes the sensation, as it eases his transition toward wakefulness.
There’s no sense delaying any longer. The sky outside is glowing enough that dawn has arrived. Sit up. Your bladder is urgent—you need to find a place to piss. Then you need to face the day, find food, maybe money too; you need to survive.
Stand up. There’s a sink in the adjoining room, which looks to have been some sort of work area. The water isn’t on, naturally, but your bladder needs relief now. Unzip, and piss into the sink. The drain is clear, and your stream disappears down it.
“Nurrrrmm ...” Don moans as you sit on the edge of the mattress again and pull on your boots and shirt. His sound protests the lack of your hand on his back, protests the way your actions make the mattress move, the light through the window that means the night has passed. He rolls over and sits up, and you’re stunned all over again by what a handsome man this formerly hot-ish boy jock is growing into. What you feel for him is too jumbled to define easily: love, lust, respect, a thousand kinds of need. He senses your feelings through the bond and smiles sheepishly back, still uncomfortable with the words after all these years, but you feel an answering echo of your feelings from his side of the link.
He yawns and stretches, sits up, rubs the stubble on his chin. You watch the easy play of his muscles as he hauls himself to the end of the mattress, pads over to the sink to relieve his bladder too. He sits beside you on the mattress and fishes on the floor for his shoes.
Something’s ... not right. You edge your way toward the window, but before you can peek out, you feel it: that itchy feeling is back, faintly, in the back of your head. By now you know what that means. Your Talent reacts when telepaths are nearby, like an early warning.
Ease your eyes around the edge of the window, and there they are in the street below, not that far away. Six men in urban tactical gear made to seem inconspicuous on a city street, like dark clothes, cluster around a nondescript minivan that’s a bit too nondescript; its lack of scratches, dents, or busted windows or mirrors makes it stick out in this neighborhood. One of the men turns and you see the i logo in white on his gear: Institute. But why are they flying their mark in a country where the Institute isn’t supposed to operate?
Don is finishing with his shirt. You snap your fingers to get his attention. The rest you convey in your simple nonverbal signs. Tap the side of your head twice: Telepath. Point out the window and show him six fingers: Six people, that direction. Two waves of your hand: Two blocks away. Jerk a thumb toward you: Coming closer. Don nods once, quick and curt.
Grab your pack. You’re ready to move.
They haven’t entered the building yet. They don’t know where you are, but they know you’re in the area. Last night’s police report—a sudden fire, an officer with inexplicable nerve injury to one arm where an out-clan graffiti punk grabbed him—must have set off alerts. But the Institute must have already been in the area, if it had these agents ready to move in just after dawn.
You follow Don along the hall, going the other direction. The way you came in last night will put you closer to the men, so instead you have to find another exit.
Another door is chained shut from the inside, but a nearby window opens when Don pushes. Your pack, and then you, drop out into an alley. Sometimes you think this side of town is nothing but alleys. Don drops down beside you. He points in a direction. Shake your head—no—you sense minds coming from that way. He points the other direction, and you nod.
From the opposite end of the alley, closer than you thought, you hear a man’s voice boom: “Hey! You there!”
That’s your cue to run.
“Stop!” the officer yells again. A gun fires behind you, and the bullet chips a brick two feet about your head as you round the corner, right behind Don.
The agent must be a lousy shot to have missed you and Don at this range, you decide. But why guns? you wonder as you duck your head and push yourself to run faster. You’ve heard the stories—the Institute can send agents who can crush your minds like bugs, or surround you with a wall of flame, or stop you a hundred other ways before you know what’s happening. It also has Normal human agents. But would they shoot first? This seems calculated to make you rabbit. You wonder if you’re being herded.
For the thousandth time, you’re angry that the nerve damaging side-effect of your Talent doesn’t work over distances. That would be useful as an offensive weapon. Even being able to sense Don’s thoughts the way you can do only close-up might give you a tactical advantage if you could communicate over greater distances, like now. The parts of your Talent that do work long-range won’t help you—reading the agent’s memories or emotions won’t get you any closer to an escape. Don’s power works across distances, would make an excellent weapon. But, as he points out: agents and police officers, or even buildings, bursting into flames would attract all the wrong kinds of attention. Anyway, Don still clings to one part of the less-worldly schoolboy that he used to be: he does not want to hurt people unless he has to. It occurs to you, also for the thousandth time, that most of what your Talent does is hurt people. Maybe Don’s right; maybe you’re turning maudlin. But you decide to debate that with yourself some other time, when you’re not running for your life from gun-wielding agents.
Four blocks, five—how far will you have to run? How far can you run? Your body has limits. This part of the city does not wake up at dawn; you and Don are the only ones around, aside from your pursuers. It’s too early, and there’s no crowd into which to disappear.
A man sticks his head out a plate-metal door across the street and ahead of you. “Hey!” he calls. “In here! Quickly!”
Don veers toward the door. That itch in the back of your head reminds you there’s a telepath out there somewhere, and you follow Don inside.
The man shuts the door. Bent forward, hands on his knees, Don pants. You join him, gasping. This building used to be a warehouse, maybe still is. It’s mostly empty space. Hide here, or charge out the back and keep running—you’ll have to make a decision and soon.
“Thanks,” Don huffs, stalling to catch his breath and make his decision.
The man who called out to you is obviously out-clan. He is also old, probably close to three times your age, which seems ancient to you.
“Forgive the subterfuge,” the old man says, “but I thought it was time we met.”
Don frowns, confused.
“A minor deception,” the man clarifies for Don. “Those weren’t Institute agents, but my men. I thought it an expedient ruse to flush you out of hiding. Otherwise we might have played cat-and-mouse all day.”
But the telepath ..., you think, remembering the itch in your head that hasn’t completely gone away.
“—Is right here,” the old man nods, touching his own forehead.
That he read the question in your thoughts is proof enough for you. You narrow your eyes and try to find your next exit without revealing your intent.
The old man, though, is more intent on his pitch. “It’s overdue that we met. I’ve been aware of you two for some time. Small-time players, wasting your potential on petty theft and prostitution. But your activities in the last few days have increasingly encroached on my territory, and your actions last night brought police attention practically to my doorstep—”
Don begins, “Sorry about—”
“Don’t interrupt. You might have even brought attention from the real Institute, had I not ... adjusted those officers’ memories following their encounter with you. I’m tired of expending my expensive resources to clean up after you without getting something in return—”
Don: “We don’t have any money—”
“Hush! Rude boy. As I was saying, this incautiousness cannot continue.”
You look at Don. He looks at you. He scratches the side of his head with one finger: Crazy, meaning the old man. Though the bond, you sense Don coiling, ready to run. He cuts his eyes right: meaning, That direction.
“I’ve worked too hard in carving out my little niche here.”
Glance that way and see a door. The itching in the back of your head, infuriating because this ancient telepath is so nearby, makes concentrating difficult but you understand what Don intends. Looking back at him, you narrow your eyelids halfway; meaning, Understood.
“I have too much at stake to see it all come to naught because of a couple of rogue hoodlums like yourselves.”
Narrow your eyes. This telepath is doing something, but what? His talking is just stalling for time.
Wait for Don. Be ready to follow his lead. He’ll give the signal any moment now.
“As a fellow unaffiliated Talent, just like yourselves, we share a lot of the same concerns.”
You think, Well, that’s true.
“We all want to carve out a little niche for ourselves. Find a place where we can profit from our skills, away from the cops and the Institute and anyone else who wants to oppress us.”
You think, That would be nice ...
“It’s in our best interests to work together. You two make a good team. You want to stay together, don’t you?”
You think, Don and me ... together ...?
“No more life on the run. I’m offering you a place to stay, food on the table, and a little money in your pockets at the end of the day.”
You think, That sounds so nice ...
“All I ask is that you to come work for me. I control a large operation here.”
You think, He does have the control ...
“I have places for both of you here. You have the potential to be so much more, under an experienced mentor. I will be that mentor for you.”
You think, He does have the experience ...
“You can be part of something so much bigger and stronger than just the two of you running small-time scams on gullible tourists.”
You think, So much bigger ... and stronger ...
“Come, come, boys. I’m waiting. Refusal is not an option. You’ll find I always get what I want.”
The itching in your head is so fucking annoying—you can’t focus. Won’t this old man ever shut up?
Don’s looking at the old man. Is he considering the man’s offer? That fucking itching is everywhere in your head, won’t let you think. You look at the man too. He just stands there, smiling patiently, waiting for your answer.
Don walks over to him. Not the move you expected, but it feels right. There’s something roiling though your bond. Something slips away from you and you don’t feel wary any longer. You feel such trust. You walk over to the old man too. You kneel. Don kneels beside you. Head bowed, eyes downcast. Waiting. The man, the Master—yes, it feels good and right to call him Master, to give him the respect he deserves—puts a hand on your head, Don’s too. How could you have ever wanted anything other than this?
“One way or another, I always get what I want,” he says again, as though gloating.
You feel such devotion to him now, such loyalty. You want only to let him show you your place in the world.
He keeps his word. He takes good care of you and Don. He gives you and Don food, clothes, a place to live. The place is a small apartment in a housing building—run-down, yes, but far better than the safe house where you’d been squatting, practically a palace. You have a living area, a bedroom, a bathroom all to yourselves, and even a kitchen. There’s electricity, running water, a toilet that works, a television, a large bed with soft pillows. He even provides a charger for your music player, to replace the one abandoned at your last safe house.
He’s a good mentor too. He turns you into enforcers. Don responds immediately, provides an immediate return on the Master’s investment in the two of you. The maximum area Don can combust is about the size of a basketball, but he can send his Talent from place to place to place and cover an entire building in quickly. All he needs is a line of sight. In moments an entire warehouse can be engulfed in flame. In seconds, a whole store front window can be simultaneously bright with fire and black with smoke. The Master’s rivals don’t understand what is happening—their guards barely notice the handsome young out-clan man walking on the sidewalk across the street and, in the chaos following the sudden fires that destroy their drug labs and front operations and warehouses, they don’t make the connection. Since the rivals do not understand the cause, they don’t understand the source. Manipulating them into blaming and attacking each other is easy for the Master. The Master’s mercenaries, all just as devoted and loyal to him as you are, know Don in the cause. They nickname him a Darvenek word that means the hot head. The rash of fires, the destruction, disrupts the fragile power structure in the criminal underbelly of Darvenek, and the Master is poised to take over as his rivals lose infrastructure and status.
His work with you requires more time. Your Talent isn’t telepathy, the Master explains. It’s similar but not the same. The Telepath misread the keys on how your Talent works. Telepaths “talk” mind-to-mind. Your Talent lets you talk brain-to-brain, more at the level of nerves and cells than concepts and thoughts. It’s a lower level than telepathy—no communication of complex ideas—but that explains why you’re better at reading memories from people, or emotions. Memories in part are encoded as chemical combinations in nerve cells, and emotions are partially the result of hormones and chemicals acting on the brain. Beyond that, it’s just a matter of decoding. It also explains how you can do what other telepaths can’t, when you touch someone and suddenly that part of their body is paralyzed—what you can do to nerve cells in the brain, you can also do to nerve cells in the body; you can interrupt their functioning; if you concentrate harder, you can cause them to suicide, to shut down or die. The Master shows you how you can paralyze or kill with a touch: heart attacks, seizures, nerve cells are so fragile and these are all your weapons now. You don’t want to hurt people, but you want to please the Master, to earn your keep, to repay him for the time and attention he has invested in you, so you put your regrets aside and try hard to fit the role he lays out for you.
The Master’s men know what you can do, though they try hard not to show their fear. They avoid getting too close to you, knowing your Talent is strongest through physical contact. Their terror stands out, so easy to see for someone like you who reads the chemistry of emotion and memory. They nickname a Darvenek word that means the one who touches. It also means demon.
Even the Master keeps his distance unless necessary. No one is brave enough to touch you except Don.
The Master also tries to explain how the bond between you and Don works. He explains that, because the Telepath misread your keys, he didn’t create exactly what he intended to. That’s why the connection hasn’t faded, has become such a fundamental part of you. You don’t understand the chemistry, or the biology, whatever—you have insufficient background to understand. The Master talks about vasopressin and dopamine, and regions of the brain, and their effect on mating and selective affiliation. All you understand is this: The bond you share with Don is the only one that transcends the devotion you feel toward the Master. The Master uses a phrase for your connection to Don: pair bonding. That, you understand.
His men know you and Don are practically a couple, except for Don’s periodic dalliances with women. The men call you two together a phrase that means the salt and pepper shakers, useful alone, but always part of a pair.
Weeks pass. Months. The Master’s influence in the Darvenek underbelly grows, thanks in no small part to you and Don, the Master’s salt and pepper.
A door explodes into flame. From the room inside, the shrieking of women. The Master’s mercenaries kick open the burning door. The elements of surprise and shock work well for you. The mercenaries shoot the last two bodyguards dead with silenced pistols before the bodyguards can recover from the suddenness. In moments, the men have the Master’s rival on the floor at gunpoint in the middle of the room, the grandmothers and wives and teenagers and children of his family cowering and crying and screaming against one wall.
Don has done his part. Your turn. You march into the room like an avenging young angel dressed in black. Don follows, a half-step behind you and just to your right. You look down at the man pressed face-down on the floor. He is yelling, crying, begging. He thinks he is going to die. If that were the Master’s plan, this man would already be dead with a bullet through his brain. No, the Master has something worse in mind. That’s why he sent you.
Your expression is impassive, perhaps just a bit condescending. You don’t say a word. Your silence and youth chill them far more impressively.
The man begs, pleads for his life. He offers you money, houses, cars, anything. He offers you his teenage daughter—a virgin, he claims—only please, please spare his life. Seeing you unmoved, he offers his son. You walk over to the boy and girl, neither much younger than you. They tremble by the wall but do not cower, putting up a braver front than the screaming old women. You will, of course, accept his tribute. Put a hand on the girl’s jaw, then the boy’s, turning their heads as if evaluating the bargain. The son and daughter are young and comely enough; they will make good whores in the Master’s brothels. The Master is always looking for pretty faces and pretty bodies, to compete with the McFleiss franchises popular with the tourists.
You weren’t sent to kill this rival, but he doesn’t need to know that yet.
You reach into the boy’s brain, and the girl’s, and flood them with happiness and cooperation. The chemistry of emotions comes easily to you now. Nod your head toward the door—the mercenaries understand. The boy and girl go docilely when two of the mercenaries grab them and haul them through the smoldering doorway. The girl grins giddily and waves and calls out something like, Bye-bye, Papa.
The rival isn’t begging any longer. He is weeping, though. He waits for the inevitable. One of the mercenaries pins the rival face-down with his boot against the rival’s spine, his gun barrel poked to the base of the rival’s skull. The mercenary pulls back as you move closer. Plant your boot between the rival’s shoulder blades. Lean forward to get a good look at him. Say nothing.
This rival—does he have a name? Do you care?
You turn and put your hand on his left thigh, then the right. Repeat this for his right arm, just above the elbow, then his left arm. At each touch, nerve cells convulse and explode. You imagine the doctors will tell him something later like, Nothing more we can do. They will use phrases like catastrophic localized nerve necrosis and paralyzed for life.
As an afterthought, you reach one more time and grab his cock and balls between his legs, through his pants. This time, your touch takes from him the ability to make new heirs.
The Master has remade you into a weapon, his weapon. He points you at the target, and you get the job done. What you’ve done is worse than killing this rival. You’ve humiliated him. You’ve taken his limbs and left him quadriplegic. You’ve taken his daughter, his male heir, his manhood. He lost something worth more than his life today; he lost his status, his respect. He is no longer a threat. His organization will collapse into chaos and power struggles. The Master will reassemble the pieces under his own control.
You know you shouldn’t enjoy this, but you do. Is this how Don feels when he lets his Talent out to play? No wonder he both craves and fears it. Look around. This room is filled with bundles of nerves and brains: the family members who won’t hush their squalling, the mercenaries who try hard not to show the adrenaline-soaked fear that shines brightly in their brains. Your Talent could do so many naughty, nasty things to all of them.
You feel a tug through the bond. Don. A reminder. You force yourself to turn away from the wall of screaming meat.
No, you decide, Don’s right—restraint is better, more judicious. You’ll keep your Talent bottled for now. You’ve done enough. You got the job done, maybe even exceeded the Master’s expectations when he sees you’ve brought the rival’s progeny as a bonus.
Turn and stride from the room. Don and the remaining mercenaries follow in your wake. You came, you saw, you touched. The entire operation took less than ten minutes. The Master will be so pleased.