Mind Power

  Mind Power: Perceivers #4

  A Science Fiction Telepathy Thriller

  Jane Killick

  Elly Books

  Contents

  Newsletter

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  The Perceivers Series

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  Keep in touch with news of Jane Killick’s new releases, special subscriber discounts and even free stuff at: janekillick.com/newsletter

  One

  The teenager’s desperation broke into Michael’s mind. Her emotions were so strong that they burst through his everyday filters like a gust of wind through netting. There was a craving inside of her body and it had taken over her mind. She needed money, she needed the drugs and she hated herself for it.

  Michael – crouched out of sight behind the pre-packaged food aisle of the mini-supermarket – had been planning to pick up a collection of different soups for lunch, but was tempted by a special offer and bent down to take a closer look. The interruption of the teenager’s strong emotions made the letters of the advertising sign blur in front of him and he put a hand on the cold, steel shelf to steady himself. He had the power to block out her mind, and he would have already raised his barriers if he hadn’t also perceived her thoughts: When shall I pull out the knife?

  Michael left his shopping basket and paced past the packets of dried pasta and instant mashed potato to the end of the aisle. He put one hand in his pocket and felt for his phone.

  His perception was hit by the sudden fear from a second mind, as man a cried out somewhere near the cash desk. Followed by the sound of empty cardboard boxes crashing to the floor.

  “Give me the money from the till!” demanded a female voice.

  Michael looked out from behind the aisle to see the terrified face of the wizened man who worked in the shop. The warm smile he usually used to greet his customers was gone. In its place was a face as pale as rice paper with two sunken eyes which stared at a kitchen knife pointed at his chest. The blade wavered with the shaking withdrawal symptoms of the drug addict who held it out towards him. Michael couldn’t see her face, as it was shaded by the hood of her top which she had pulled up over her head, but he could perceive her desperation as loud as ever. He had no doubt that one false move would cause her to stab her victim.

  The cashier must have felt the same, as Michael perceived his thoughts: Everything will be all right as long as I do as she says, it’s not worth risking my life. It was more like he was trying to convince himself than he actually believed it.

  Coins jingled as the cashier opened the till and scooped what few notes there were from the tray.

  Michael pulled the phone from his pocket, fumbling as he turned the switch to silent, and dialled 999 for the police.

  The young woman snatched the money from the cashier’s hands. “Twenty quid?” she said.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” cried the man, holding up his hands in a defensive position. He stared, again, at the knife. “Most people pay by card these d—”

  “I need more than this!” she screamed. She pushed him back against the stacked shelves with her fist of scrunched up notes. His body banged against a display of alcohol. A bottle of Bell’s Scotch wobbled as he struck it with his elbow, then overbalanced and smashed to the ground.

  The drug addict didn’t seem to notice as the smell of whisky rose into the air. The only thoughts Michael perceived from her was the realisation that twenty lousy quid was only going to buy her one fix.

  “Give me more!” She put the knife to the cashier’s throat and Michael felt the man’s fear turn to terror. The man’s eyes looked beyond the robber and out into the shop. They locked on to Michael’s gaze. Help me! said his thoughts.

  The tinny and distant voice of the emergency services operator twittered from the phone in his hand. Michael suddenly realised that he couldn’t reply without being overheard. He took a half step out from the end of the aisle and held up the phone screen to show the man that the line was open. Even though he couldn’t transmit his thoughts to him because he was a norm, the man seemed to understand.

  “Please don’t stab me!” The cashier shouted loud enough for his voice to be picked up by the phone. “How about cigarettes? I give you cigarettes. Robbers take cigarettes.”

  He turned from the knife, grabbed cigarettes from the shelf and stuffed them into a carrier bag.

  The young woman, using that strange instinct that non-perceivers have, must have realised something was not right. She swung round without warning and her bloodshot eyes immediately found Michael standing next to the display of tinned baked beans with his mobile phone held out in front of him.

  In that moment of shocked silence, the operator called out. “Hello? Which service do you require?”

  “What’s going on?” said the woman. Michael saw the dark lines of her face for the first time, so sunken that it looked like Halloween make-up.

  The phone was in his hand, Michael couldn’t deny it, but he could tell a version of the truth. “I called the police. They’ll be here any minute to arrest you. You better run while you have the chance.”

  But he’d mis-judged. Rather than being scared, she was suddenly furious. She turned on the cashier so violently that he dropped the carrier bag of cigarettes and stumbled backwards. She swung the knife at him like a sword and it sliced his arm. He cried out as his other hand grabbed at the wound and blood oozed between his fingers.

  “What did you think you were doing?” she screamed, spitting abuse in his face and jabbing him with the point of the knife.

  Michael perceived the rage as it burned through her mind. The craving for the drug had taken away her humanity and filled the void with feelings of revenge that threatened to turn to murder.

  Without thinking, Michael wrapped his thoughts around the knife. He felt the cold metal of the blade and the hot sweaty plastic of the handle where the drug addict held on to it. As soon as he was sure his thoughts had control of the knife, he willed it away. The blade flew from her hand, as if yanked away by an unseen wire, and clattered to the floor behind her.

  Confusion clouded her mind. She looked at her clenched hand where the knife used to be and she blamed the cashier. Without a weapon, she swung her fist at his cheek and it struck his bone with a crack. He slumped to the floor where she kicked him twice before fleeing out of the shop.

  Michael dashed behind the counter to find the man doubled over in the foetal position among a scatter of cigarette packets. There was blood on his cheek, blood on his arm and blood on the opposite hand where he had clutched his wound, but he was still conscious.

  Michael squatted down next to him. “Are you okay?” he said.

  “What happened?” he groaned.

  “I don’t know,” Michael lied. “She went mental and threw away the knife.”

  “You stopped her,” said the man.

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “You did! Thank you, thank you.”

  His phone was still conn
ected to the emergency services. He asked for both police and ambulance, gave the address of the shop and refused to give his name.

  “Police and ambulance are coming,” he told the man. “You’ll be all right.”

  At that point, another shopper came in who said she used to be a nurse and started doing sensible things like wrapping up her jacket to use as a pillow for the man’s head.

  Michael took the opportunity to leave. On the walk home, he deleted all the memory from his phone and removed the sim card just to be safe. He deposited one in a public rubbish bin and the other down a drain. He had broken his promise to himself that he would never use his powers in public.

  When he got back to his flat, he realised he’d been a bloody idiot.

  Two

  Michael sat on a wall by the entrance to the University of Nottingham and looked up at the white of the building reaching into the blue sky. It gleamed as a monument to learning, even if a closer look revealed the cracks in the render and the smear of green where algae grew on the patches of damp. But it didn’t matter to him. Against the odds, he had been allowed to study there. He’d chosen an electrical engineering degree course because machines couldn’t be perceived. To build or fix a machine he had to be like any other norm and understand its workings. If he’d taken English literature or history, he could have always cheated by reading the lecturer’s mind.

  The cold of the wall soaked up through Michael’s trousers into his buttocks. He didn’t know how much longer he could sit there before he stopped being able to feel his bum altogether. The sunshine was warm on his face, but it was halfway through the first term and the air temperature indicated the season was rushing towards winter. Instinctively, he reached into his pocket for his phone to check the time, then remembered half of it was in a bin and the other half was down a drain. He thought of opening up his perception a little bit to hear the thoughts of the passing students, some of whom were clearly rushing for their classes and might have an idea of how late he was. But listening to the unfocussed babble of a crowd thinking all at once about their everyday, insignificant troubles was more uncomfortable than not knowing the time. So he kept his filters high and their thoughts as background chatter.

  At last, among the miscellany of passing faces breathing out steam into the crisp morning air, he saw Ian and waved.

  Ian was short for a guy, but physically fit beneath the floppy anorak that he wore. They had become friends after meeting at the university running club which Michael had discovered was another place where being a perceiver gave him no advantage. It didn’t matter that he could perceive his opponent’s plan for winning a race if he couldn’t physically run fast enough to catch him.

  “Micky!” said Ian, waving back and trotting over to the wall. “I’ve been texting and texting. Were you out on a bender last night or something?”

  “Dropped my phone down the toilet, didn’t I?” Michael lied.

  “What did you do that for?”

  “I didn’t do it on purpose,” said Michael. He changed the subject. “I wanted to catch you to ask if you’re still up for doing some training together – if there’s still a spot open on the marathon team.”

  “Alice’s leg isn’t going to un-break itself, so I don’t see why you couldn’t have her spot.”

  “Good.” Michael wasn’t a talented runner, not like Ian, but he loved the solitude and the challenge in making his body go further and further each time. At first, he thought that he’d hold Ian back if they went running together, but now he thought it would be the best way to push him to succeed. He didn’t mind that he would have to devote hours to it, because it was hours when his mind didn’t have to perceive anything.

  “So you didn’t get my messages, then?” said Ian. His hand dived into his pocket and pulled out his phone. “There was an armed robbery at the end of your road. The police issued the CCTV. Wanna see it?”

  The rest of Michael’s body turned as cold as his buttocks. He hadn’t thought about the shop having cameras. Cameras that were spying on his every move. He hopped off the wall and felt the increased blood flow to his bottom. “Haven’t you got labs to go to?”

  Ian was studying physics and spent a lot of his time in the university physics labs. “No one cares if I’m a few minutes late,” said Ian. “You’ve got to see this, it’s gone viral. They reckon there’s a ghost or a poltergeist in the shop.”

  “A what?”

  Ian was already looking up the clip on his phone. “It used to be a house, apparently, and someone got murdered,” he went on. “No one wanted to live in it so it was converted into a shop and they say the victim still haunts the place.” He gave his last few words a sinister tone like a dramatic TV voice-over artist.

  “If it says so on the internet, it has to be true,” said Michael, sarcastically.

  But Ian was already showing the screen of his phone to Michael. He couldn’t help but watch as he recognised the mini-supermarket, even though the camera angle was from high up behind the cash desk. The hooded figure of the robber – her face hidden – was leaning over the cashier who had his back pressed against the display. She jabbed at his chest with the point of the knife. Then the knife suddenly flew out of her hand and out of frame.

  “Did you see that?” said Ian.

  Michael wished he hadn’t. His chest tightened at the realisation that his telekinetic power had been caught on video. “It’s a hoax,” he said, trying to be dismissive. “Someone probably tied a wire round it and pulled it out of shot.”

  “It’s genuine CCTV footage issued by the police,” said Ian. “Look again.”

  Ian was already hitting the replay button, but Michael had seen enough and backed away from his friend. “I’ve got a lecture to get to. See you later.” He turned and ran to the lecture hall.

  But it didn’t matter how fast he ran, he knew that there would be no running from the internet.

  The television talked to itself in the living room of Michael’s flat. He’d left it on because he liked the background noise and every now and then something interesting came up on the news.

  He had escaped to the kitchen where about the only thing he had left to eat was pasta and pesto. He would have gone to the shop to get something else, but after the events of the previous day he daren’t show his face in there again, and he couldn’t bring himself to go all the way into town just to get something for dinner. So the pan of pasta bubbled away on the top, sending splashes of water onto the hob while he looked into the depths of the pesto jar and tried to work out if it was safe to eat. He’d forgotten to put it in the fridge after the last time he’d used it and there were a couple of small fluffy bits on top. He decided, if he scooped them off with a spoon, the bits underneath would be all right.

  The timer on the oven pinged to say the pasta was cooked. He turned off the hob and took the pan to the sieve which sat ready and waiting in the sink. A cloud of steam mushroomed up into his face as he emptied the pan and he breathed in its starchy cooked pasta smell. Using a fresh spoon, he dolloped a heaped serving of pesto into the still-warm pan and stirred. The olive oil began to simmer and release the smell of basil, pine nuts and parmesan. He tipped the pasta back in the pan, gave it another stir and put the result in the bowl he had waiting.

  Leaving the washing up for later, he took his meagre dinner through to the living room.

  Despite the second-hand furniture, it looked nothing like the student digs some of his friends lived in. He kept it clean and fresh, he hoovered once a week and opened the window to bring in fresh air. He even dusted occasionally.

  It was a legacy from his time in the Perceiver Corps and their fastidious army rules. His background of living on an army base meant he had very few possessions to clutter up the place. He’d bought a saggy sofa and armchair with springy cushions from the internet, while the nest of tables he put his dinner on came from a charity shop on the edge of town. The TV was the only thing he had bought new and he’d paid a lot to get one big enough
to look like it belonged in a four-bedroomed house instead of a single-bed flat. He didn’t care. He liked the way he could watch people on it without having to perceive them.

  The springy cushions of the armchair sank around Michael’s bottom as he lowered himself onto them. He reached over for the bowl of pasta and pesto and took a wary bite. The richness of the cheese, the nuts and the mild piquancy of the basil filled his mouth. He smiled; there was no earthiness of mould or bitterness to suggest something that had gone off. He ate the second bite with greater confidence, as the woman on the news with perfect hair and a red jacket turned to her next story.

  “Government sources have denied reports that perceivers are being used in courtrooms to test the honesty of witnesses in murder trials,” she said. “I’m joined by our reporter, Sian Jones, who broke the story. Sian, what you make of this denial?”

  The picture on the screen cut to a wide shot to reveal the newsreader with the perfect hair was sitting next to another woman in a black jacket with blonde hair tied back in a ponytail behind her. In contrast to the newsreader, she looked tired. She had broken the perceiver story the week before and had been all over the news ever since. Michael was fed up of hearing about it.

  “What’s interesting about this denial, is the government hasn’t come out openly to refute the story,” said Sian, lifting a stray strand of hair with her middle finger and tucking it back behind her ear. “It’s almost as if they’re trying to brief against it without having to lay their cards out on the table, which could be embarrassing if they’re forced to admit it down the line. As we reported yesterday, a number of people have come forward with compelling evidence that perceivers have been used in at least two murder trials that we know of to read the minds of …”

  Michael had heard enough. He looked around for the TV remote control and saw it was on the arm of the sofa where he had thrown it after turning on the TV on the way to the kitchen.