but the prevailing mood on the home planet about such cases was one of peevishness. People didn’t want some crackpot getting between them and their quest for the perfect lawn.
Then, a month ago, he leapt from his irritating but fairly benign protests to setting off a pesticide loaded bomb in a mall, killing about a hundred people and making the place into a toxic waste site. He used the same kinds of pesticides he was protesting, the ones everyone said were safe. Alex supposed in that sense, he’d proved his point.
He told the Planetoid testers that the world was clearly going to hell in a hand-basket, and he just wanted to help complete the process. Get it over with, he said. Put humanity and the earth out of their mutual misery. Because of this, testers said his core fear was death, which had transformed into Thanatos syndrome – a complex similar to Stockholm syndrome, where death was the captor.
Thanatos driven prisoners saw themselves as kidnapped by death, and overcame their relentless terror by becoming friend, partner, lover, to their captor. It was a common syndrome of the Killing Times, and they still saw it pretty frequently on the Planetoids. It made sense as Farley’s core fear.
All this was the kind of reaction Alex would expect to see in a man exposed to Artemis, but it could also be intergenerational trauma or even some genetic defect created by exposure to biobombs. His crimes didn’t necessarily connect him to Artemis, but his work history might.
He had a degree in mineralogy and geochemistry and started his career with Galactic Net Communications, doing bench-work with transmission lodestones. He moved on to Assured Insurance, where he tested post-disaster materials for toxic elements. After two years there he quit, and in what seemed to Alex a most unusual career move, he went to work for La Femme, women’s beauty and health products, doing lab work in vitamins and makeup.
He left them less than a year ago, and from what Alex could tell, went on to be a free-lance madman. And Rachel’s research had turned up one small piece of information that, for Alex, connected the dots into a cohesive whole.
All the companies Farley worked for were different divisions of one large parent company called Global Concerns, Inc. That company had invested enormously in the initial moon mining concerns, and had gone on to throw all its weight at the Hague to prevent a ban against it. Now they controlled the biggest lobbying efforts for a moratorium repeal. In a small side jaunt in her research, Rachel also learned they already had an ad campaign ready for the many uses of Artemis compounds.
When Alex read that, every fiber of his precognitive capacities started to hum in recognition. He figured if this case wasn’t filthy with Artemis, he’d just have to hang up his title of Adept.
What he read next, from Rachel’s research on Board governor’s memos, made him also figure he and Jaguar were about to dive head first into a political and corporate quagmire. That was why, though it was well past midnight, he sat in his rocking chair facing the window that looked out over the replica of Lake Ontario, reading over the files one more time.
They told him no more than they had the first three times he read them, so he tried another source. He closed the file, let his hand rest palm up and open on top of it, breathed himself into the empathic space he knew best.
Sometimes he would sit like this for an hour, and emerge with nothing more specific than an intuitive sense of the next action he should take. Tonight, he was lifted and tossed roughly into an image that sizzled its way across his mind, and just as quickly disappeared.
The moon as a woman curled in on herself, bleeding from a gaping wound in her breast. A man whose face he knew flying to her, pouring something from a vial into the wound. Medicine? Something to heal?
No. Poison.
Searing pain and fire that he felt in his own body like a knife. He jerked back from the shock of it, gasped for air. Then, darkness.
Alex opened his eyes, stared down at his hand which was now a fist. That was it, he supposed. And it was enough to give him food for further contemplation.
He was deeply absorbed in considering it when he felt warmth at his back.
He didn’t shift. Didn’t lift his head or twitch. He just sat and felt it. Warmth. Like breath applied by a mouth held close to the back of his neck. It glowed and spread through him, and he let it, without moving. Warmth explored him, and he let it.
Jaguar.
He hadn’t heard anyone enter his apartment, but he never heard her when she chose to be silent, and he never missed her when she chose to be heard. He caught the scent of sage and smoke in her hair, and her warmth was balanced as the earth, holding fire at its core.
“When you make love,” she asked, “do you keep your eyes open, or closed?”
He let the question settle in someplace where it wouldn’t cause too much trouble. Then he smiled.
“That depends, Jaguar,” he answered, without lifting his head.
“On what?”
“The woman. The context of the lovemaking. With certain women I won’t name, I can’t imagine ever turning my eyes away again. Would you like specific examples and illustrations?”
He felt her shift behind him. He had disturbed her. That was a good thing.
“Your point,” she noted. “We’d better move on. And by the way, the women all have Phase Psychosis, induced by exposure to Artemis.”
He twisted in his chair and faced her. She resonated fire and moonlight, held calmly in her skin and her eyes, beautiful and distracting. He didn’t have to ask if she was sure. He knew from what he’d seen, and he read it in her flesh.
She walked around to stand in front of him. “My guess,” she continued, “is that it’s heavy and direct exposure, over a fairly long time.”
He held her gaze steady. “What makes you think so?” he asked.
“I can smell it,” she said.
“Pardon?”
“I smell it. In their sweat. Direct contact. Not airborne.” She stared at him hard, daring him to tell her she was wrong. He didn’t.
Instead, he kept his dark gaze steadily on her sea eyes while he reached up and took her hand. His thoughts moved into hers easily. They’d done this so many times, in so many ways, there was very little to block contact unless one of them chose to actively push the other away. She didn’t choose that tonight.
Show me, he requested.
Easy as a sigh, she opened. She drew him in to her experience, what she saw and felt from the women in the sweat lodge. He felt the swirling of energy that told her what was happening within them. Wordlessly, she took him through the entire sweat, through their experience and her own, including her vision in the sweat lodge.
Both the content and the feel of it almost jolted Alex out of contact with her. Blood on the moon, and a man with blood on his hands. And the first man she saw – he startled at the brief glimpse of a face, so soon covered in blood. His surprise was so sharp that Jaguar halted in her sharing.
Alex?
Okay, Jaguar. Just – give me a second here.
She
