Taelin Kaan

*1*
10 Aran
(The next day)
The Year of our Founder 3003
Capitol City, Country of Arana

It was a warm sunny day.  The sky above her was a wondrous rich blue and in the North sky their biggest moon sat in its full moon glory against that perfect blue.  Nala was unboundedly happy on this beautiful winter day.  She loved the sunlight; more specifically she needed sunlight, and the winters in Arana were particularly difficult for her.

The flea market south of the Docks was crowded with people and stalls, bright colored materials flickered in the sunlight above her and the smells of cooking meats permeated the air.  It was noisy in the market with people’s voices and yelling but in the background she could also hear the gentle melody of someone in the crowd playing a soulful song on their flute.

She pushed her loose brown hair behind her ear absently as her eyes gleefully swallowed the assortment of pretty jewelry on the stall in front of her.  She only had a little bit of money; for the first time she’d won a game of cards with the others and part of the pot had been a lone twenty dollar bill, but she wanted to buy something small, something that wouldn’t be eaten or broken or lost or even stolen.  Something she could buy that was just for her to hold onto and treasure.  Being a Rebel meant accepting the kind of poverty that made you cold and hungry frequently with no privacy or possessions of ones own.  And she wanted something special to remind her of what might be possible one day when the Rebels were no longer at war with the Agency.

Reaching one hand out she touched a pretty blue gem that was set into a plain silver necklace.  It was beautiful but it was also thirty dollars and therefore too much.  In fact everything on that jewelry stall was too much.  But she allowed herself a moment of fantasy imagining that she would buy it, that she would wear it and keep it safe next to her heart.  Then, she moved on to the next stall down the narrow street.

A line of children chased each other between the crowds towards her, they were laughing playfully and making a good show of being a bunch of innocent children playing in the street.  But Nala knew better and turned away from the line of children as they passed her so that the pickpocket at the end of the line of children did not take her precious twenty dollar bill out of her pocket.

Further along the narrow street ahead of her there were food stalls.  Beyond the food stalls through the smoke and sounds of cooking she saw another jewelry stall and headed straight for it.  The food smelt amazing as she walked past, there were flat breads cooked on hotplates and folded up into a parcel then filled with various meats and salad, another stall owner was cooking some kind of meat paddy and making burgers, and on the other side of the cooking stalls there was a huge display of different fruits and vegetables.  Her stomach grumbled as she walked quickly past.  She would buy food once she’d found something special.

The second jewelry stall was filled with all sorts of junk jewelry made from plastic and painted up to look like metal.  But, there was a small locked case in the center of the stall with some nice pendants on chains and a few plain metal rings.  The rings held no interest for her; rings can be stolen or lost easily, but there was a pretty metal pendant on a leather plaited cord in the shape of a Mern jumping out of the water.  Having grown up on a coast where those creatures frequented, Nala was drawn to the image it was a lovely subtle reminder of home and even better the price was only ten dollars.  She smiled excitedly at it through the glass.  The pendant was exactly what she was looking for.

“Please, can I have the Mern pendant?”  She handed the bill over to the burly stall owner and he looked at her in confusion.  She remembered then that in Arana they were called ‘Whales’.
“Oh, sorry, the whale pendant.”

“Sure, sweetheart.”  He handed her back some change and lifted up the metal case to unlock it.  “Would you like a bag?”
Nala smiled politely and shook her head.  “No, thank you.”

As she walked away she stared at it sitting in her hands.  She traced the shape with her thumb and felt stupidly happy to have something of her own that wasn’t clothes or cutlery.   Lifting the leather cord over her neck she let the pendant fall under her shirt out of sight; no one else but her needed to know it was there because it was her secret.

She turned back around towards the food stalls to get one of the stuffed flatbread meals but didn’t notice the tall darkly dressed man step out of the crowd towards her.  Only after handing over the last of her money and turning away as she took a bite of the hot yummy food did she see the man and stop in her tracks.  She knew his face and he knew hers, but it wasn’t a positive kind of knowing.  In fact it was the kind of knowing that made one run as fast as one could in the opposite direction.  And that’s exactly what Nala did: she yelled, dropped the food and turned tail in the other direction.

Her heart was beating loudly in her chest as she ran fearfully away.  She could not allow him to get her.  She had to run.  She had to get out and back to the Rebels where she’d be safe.  There were so many people to dodge around at the flea market and the narrow street was long as well.  It made running at any speed dangerous but she had to keep running, had to get out into the normal streets where she could loose him easily.

Dodging around a group of children and a large clothes stall she caught her foot on something and found herself falling down to the grubby street.  The nearby children chortled and ran away.  She tried to get up quickly but it was too late; the man had caught up with her.  He pushed her back down to the ground with a foot and towered menacingly over her.  Fearfully, she crawled backwards trying to get away from him but backed into a wall.
“Nala Bree, I don’t suppose you have the money you owe me?”  He was a dangerous man and his deep rough voice mirrored this danger.
She tried to gather her strength and glared at him in defiance.  “I don’t owe you anything, Bruiser.”
“I’m afraid that you do and with an attitude like that you’re not going to like the payment terms.”  The broad shouldered man grabbed her arm and roughly yanked her up to her feet.

*2*
10 Aran 3003

“Come on, Tae, push harder.”
Tae’s head was thumping something awful and he was getting sick of Kita’s ability to run circles around him telepathically.  He mentally dug his toes in to push against Kita’s mental shield but he could not move it at all.
“I AM pushing hard!”
There was a mental chuckle. “Push harder then.”

For a moment he just wanted drop everything and walk out of the room in frustration.  It seemed stupidly unfair for Kita; a 4/5 Telepath, to make him; not even a 2/5, compete against him.  But, not being the type of person to quit he gathered himself mentally and used his frustration to fuel him.

He closed his eyes to concentrate and pushed firmly against Kita’s mental shield. It didn’t feel like it was working but he kept pushing hard against it.  Then, he sensed something give way and Kita called out in surprise.  “Woa, Taelin, stop!”

Tae opened his eyes and stared in surprise.  Kita was on the floor up against the far wall and stretchers from the nearby sleeping area were scattered around the room in an almost perfect half-circle of impact around him.  He blinked and looked at Kita.  “What happened?”

Chuckling slightly, Kita brushed at his shoulder length blond hair and stood up.  “You pushed with your Psi PK.  You’ve got an impressive thrust there, Taelin.”
He gave Kita a cynical smile.  “It would be more impressive if I knew how to turn it on and off.”
“It’s just a matter of practice, just like anything else.  Do you want a break?”

Taelin rubbed his temples to try and get at the pain in his head.  “Thank you.  Don’t suppose you guys have any coffee?”

“Sure, but we don’t have waiters.  Come into the kitchen and I’ll show you where everything is so you can make your own.”
He grinned as he followed Kita across the room to the kitchen area.

The second floor of Hilla Norman’s base was bare; most of the level was one giant room.  One end of the room; near the roof stairs, was empty and Kita and he had been training there most of the morning.  Next to that area up against the right hand wall were rows of stretchers where everyone slept (though, now most of the stretchers were scattered all over the room on top of each other and thrown against the walls).  Left of the sleeping area were two kitchen benches, a fridge and a small battered oven.    On the other side of the long room there was another stairwell and doors that led off to large bathrooms.  The floor coverings in each area were different, so he guessed that at one time there were probably walls bisecting the huge second floor into separate rooms but that must have been a long time ago.

Kita walked calmly into the kitchen area and showed him the labels on the cupboard doors.  “See, easy.”
As Tae bent down to get a cup from the cupboard labeled ‘cups’ he felt a tickle in the back of his head.  He stood up quickly and stopped to listen with a deep frown on his face.
“Did you…?”  It came again but was a little stronger the second time around and there was an odd vibration in his mind similar to when he’d called out to Nama that horrible day when the assassin took out his Cell.

It faded away again and he looked up into Kita’s frowning face.  “Did you feel that?”
A blond eyebrow lifted up at him.  “Feel what?”

Then someone connected to him telepathically.  It was a rough connection and it prickled painfully at the edges of his headache.  The mental voice that spoke to him was pained and so incredibly afraid.
“Tae, help me… please…” The voice started to fade and then disconnected abruptly but it was enough for him to recognize who it had been.
“Nala?”  He tried to reach out to where she’d been but she wasn’t there any more.

“What’s happening, Taelin?”  Kita’s relaxed mood was edged with confusion and a sense of underlying tension.

He turned away from Kita with a deep frown on his face and he wondered if he could get to Nama from this distance.  “My friend Nala is in trouble.  Just a moment.”

Reaching out mentally he knew where Nama should be; on the other side of the city closer to the docs back at his base, he’d never stretched that far before but he had to at least try.

His reach felt a little like a hand stretching over the distance between them and it was surprisingly easy.  There was a sense of direct connection. “Nama, where is Nala?”
“Out shopping, why? …Where are you, Tae?”
“At Hilla Norman’s base… Nala just called for help… telepathically.”

Over the distance he sensed confusion. “But, she’s not a Telepath?”
“Well, she is now… she sounded like she was in danger, do you know where she went?”
“Not really. She said she was going to some flea market near the South Docks to spend that $20 she won from me last night.  Can’t you just trace her telepathically?”
“I don’t know how.”
“Of course you know how, you found me didn’t you?  I’ll grab some extra weapons and go down to the flea market to go looking for her.  Let me know when you get a location and I’ll meet you there.”
Nama disconnected too quickly leaving Tae’s ears vibrating oddly.

“Nama’s right, you know.  You can find her the same way as you found him.”
Tae blinked at Kita in confusion, and he laughed good-naturedly at him in return.  All this laughing at him and telepathically running circles around him was getting irritating.

“You have almost no shielding, Tae, a 1/5 Telepath could have overheard you.  The only difference with your friend is you don’t have an exact location.  Hold onto the memory of her mental energy signature and reach out for her.  You’ll sense the rest.”

Nodding, he closed his eyes and focused his mind.  He didn’t know what he was doing but it sounded like it should be easy.  As he reached out, he found to his surprise that the further he reached outwards the more he sensed some kind of connection or a direction to follow that got him closer to where her mental energy was… only it was an instinctual thing and not a directly conscious thing.  It was hard and it took much longer for him to find her but eventually he followed that instinctive direction to her mental energy.

He didn’t have to fully connect to her to sense that she was in a great deal of pain and distress.  She was somewhere dark and cold, and she was terrified.
“Where are you, Nala?”
There was the sense that she was crying. “Tae, help me!  He’s going to kill me!”
“We’re coming to find you, where are you?”
“Please hurry!  It’s the Ace of Spades Casino… please… oh no… he’s back!  HELP ME!”

*3*
10 Aran 3003

About 2pm
Capitol City, Country of Arana

The Ace of Spades Casino was the richest casino in Capitol City and; as all police and many Rebels knew, it was also the central base for a national criminal gang.  Maybe “gang” was the wrong word.  That makes it sound like the Spade’s family network were a group of thugs they were that as well but they were also huge, organized and extremely powerful.  Because the Agency dealt only with Psi and Talent affairs or affairs that threatened Aranan security as a whole, and the police were grossly under funded and under manned the Spades family and their affiliates ran their organization mostly unchecked.  This made them the most powerful private organization in Arana second only to the MegaCorporation Conglomerate (or MCC), which was an international trading and finance company spanning all of the Great Five Nations.

So, on a scale of one to ten; ten being very likely death and disembowelment and one being a cakewalk, going into the Ace of Spades Casino guns blazing to rescue Nala was about a fifteen.  If they weren’t Psi Rebels what he was thinking of doing would be very certain suicide.  And even though the three of them were Rebels it was still quite possible that they’d not get out in one piece.

Tae sighed with frustration and looked up at the huge building that dominated the Northern side of the Capitol City skies.  It was a wide curved concave building a hundred stories high and entirely covered in dark reflective glass windows.

“Are you sure you want to do this?”  Standing next to him on the sidewalk Nama looked worried.
“No.”  He gave his old friend a small grin of tense amusement.  “But, Nala is in there we have to try.”

“So, what’s the plan then?”  On the other side of him Kita brushed at his shoulder-length blond hair with one hand.  He looked calmer than Tae and Nama but there was a restlessness permeating the air around him.

Tae frowned and looked back up at the huge building as he thought about their situation.  “Well, if we have even a chance of finding her we should be as discrete as possible.  The direct approach would probably be terminal.”

Most of the higher levels of the building were hotel rooms or offices.  So, it was likely that there would be some kind of direct security preventing them from simply wandering around the place.  The only truly public area of the building was the large casino that covered most of the ground and second floors.

He looked at Nama, then Kita.  “I think if we go into the casino separately we might be able to sense where she is in the building without being noticed.  From there we can decide on the path of least resistance to get to her.”

“Sounds wise.  See you in there then.”  With that, Nama stepped off the curb and started across the road to the entrance of the Casino.

They waited until Nama’s broad form disappeared into the busy entrance before he and Kita stepped off the curb as well.  As they reached the footpath on the other side Kita turned right and towards the hotel entrance.

Tae kept on walking ahead in the direction of the casino doors.  A crossing took him over the double ended driveway that allowed limos from the road right up to the entrance to drop off important people and then back out onto the road.

He felt a little nervous at going into a building filled with an army of violent criminals dressed in three piece suits but more than anything he was actually furious.

Nala was the last living adult of his old Cell they’d known each other for three years and although not close he considered her a friend.  She’d never been in the Agency and as far as he knew Nala had been a Rebel since she was fifteen when her mother died and could no longer protect her.  She was just a girl; a young woman with an innocent happiness to her and no obvious strategic or monetary value.  What possible reason would these people have for taking her?

The Spade’s family; like most criminal groups, knew to avoid the Rebels because that would mean not only dealing with the devastating abilities of Psi and Talents, but also potentially coming into blows with the Agency; no one wanted to deal with the Agency.  Why would they attack a Rebel knowing that they’d risk dealing with the Agency?

In his anger, it was his instinct to simply run in and take out anyone who got between him and Nala; to protect her and get her out of danger.  But, it was lucky for her that he was much smarter than this.

The entrance to the casino was ornate with two stories of rainbow reflective glass, polished metal framing and an ornate glass archway above him leading to sliding doors and a high roofed parlor.  The two men in red bellboy uniforms who stood either side of the archway outside looked bored and tired.  But Tae sensed an underlying awareness in them and saw the telltale shapes in their long jackets that were likely to be weapons.

Inside, he looked up at the high roof of the parlor pretending to be an excited tourist or a first time visitor.  He wasn’t particularly interested in the architecture but as he stared up with feigned interest in the wide glass cone-shaped ceiling he reached out mentally for Nala’s location.

There were many people in the casino even this early in the afternoon.  He sensed many of them having fun while they lost their money to the crooked gambling tables.  To his left he sensed an area where workers counted money and employees bitched about their employers as they ate their lunch in a lunchroom.  To his right were scattered groups of minds sitting and eating their lunch in a resturant setting and beyond them was a mentally quiet space, which if he understood the basic layout of the building correctly should be the hotel section of the ground floor.

He pushed out further towards the back of the building past the gamblers and the drinkers and he sensed an area of despair.  One mind in particular was thinking about killing herself because she’d be debt-bound to the Spade family as a sex worker to be beaten and degraded for the rest of her life.  But, she told herself that she had to find a way out instead, that the Spades would win if she jumped off the building and ended it all.  Sweeping his mind away from the woman he stretched out through the rest of that grim area.  And in one corner next to the telepathic clutter of what he assumed was a kitchen he sensed a pit of despair, terror and pain.

Nala was alive.  She was in a bad state but she was alive.
“Nala, we’re here hold on.”

*4*

The ground floor of the casino was huge and virtually heaving with celebrating drunken people. The waitering staff dressed in smart uniforms; black waistcoats pinned tidily over long sleeved white shirts and long black pants or skirts, flitted expertly around drunken patrons with drink trays of wine glasses or gambling chips for the card tables. The noise of the rabble was only barely louder than that of the techno music pumping out through hidden speakers in the ceiling. The purely physical side of the casino ground floor was overpowering on its own with all the motion and noise, but, new to his Psi sensitivities Tae found the whole situation almost too much to bear.

The telepathic noise chattered forcefully and painfully in his mind, and Tae wished for a moment to go back to the days when his head was only interrupted by the thoughts of others when he touched them. The wave of empathic clutter was more subtle but no less overwhelming. It was like a wave that ebbed and flowed; etched with patterns of drunkenness, random flares of the emotive peaks and troughs of winning and loosing, and smattered randomly with an underlying tension. All of these emotions pitched towards different corners of the room back and forth like great ocean swells.

If he hadn’t been so mad he’d have felt nearly seasick in fact if it weren’t for Nala and this deep cold anger of his he’d never have wanted to go into such an environment with his newer Psi sensitivities at all. But he was none the less here in this Empathic and Telepathic soup, and he stubbornly focused on his single purpose: he must find a way to get to Nala.

She was in a section behind the far wall on the exact opposite side of the vast heaving room to the main entrance. He’d already walked around the room to look and found only one door near to where she was; the others had agreed with him that the door was probably the fastest way to get to her. But the trouble was that it was guarded by a broad Ronan man. The man’s dark coal-colored face was very cold and of what Tae could pick up empathically from the tall man this outer coldness mirrored a deeper inner coldness.

On the other side of the door he knew there was a hallway and the man guarded not only the door but the prostitutes who worked in rooms off that hallway. He had a fairly clear image of what lay behind the door from the guard’s unprotected mind, but still, in other circumstances he’d have wanted more prep time before doing anything. Unfortunately there wasn’t any more time; Nala was on the other side of that door somewhere and she was hurt or dying, so they had to go now.
“Ready?” He called out telepathically to the two other men somewhere nearby in the casino soup.
“We’re ready, Tae,” answered Nama, “On your mark.”

With a deep sense of determination Tae turned away from the pokey machine he’d been pretending to play and walked straight towards the Ronan man and the door.

Tae hadn’t ever met or been close to a Ronan before and he was surprised by how tall and broad this man was. Tae was pretty strong and tall for an Aranan man but this one dwarfed him both in height and in the broadness of his chest. He swallowed and tried to look drunkly confident as he approached.

As he spoke the man leant down to hear him over the music. “I hear you’re the man to talk to about getting some special entertainment?”
The man’s cold expression didn’t even falter. “Two hundred dollars per hour, you pay up front.” His accent was crisp and oddly different to the Aranan way of speaking, he sounded almost aristocratic.

The music was so loud that Tae was surprised he could hear him at all. Tae frowned, lent forward towards the man and put a hand to one ear. “What was that? I can’t hear you?”

The Ronan lifted his voice and repeated himself in that odd accent and Tae continued the ruse; shaking his head with a frown. He pointed to the door and pushed at the man’s mind the idea that he might hear him better on the other side of the door. The broad Ronan man turned almost immediately and opened it stepping into the dimmer space behind it. Tae followed him into the much quieter hallway.

“I said it’s two hundred an hour, and pay up front.”
Tae nodded and pretended to think about the price while he waited for the other two. The door opened and Kita and Nama stepped into the hallway behind him their weapons came up quickly to aim at the Ronan man who stiffened. Tae lifted his own weapon out from under the back of his shirt.

“What’s your name?” Tae asked firmly.
“Taan, my name is Taan.” The man wasn’t afraid if anything he seemed to be more upset that he’d fallen for such an obvious ruse than actually afraid of being at gun’s end.

“Taan, go to sleep.” Behind him, Kita’s command was delivered with very little verbal force but the tall Ronan man instantly closed his eyes and slid slowly down the wall to the ground as if someone had injected him with a tranquilizer shot to the neck.

Tae turned around to give Kita a look of surprise; he was met with a confident almost cocky smile.
“I’ll show you how to do that later.”

The hallway was fairly wide and quite long. The carpet was new and kind of an off-blue color, which reminded him oddly of his time with the central city precinct. The space looked like a hotel corridor with many doors along one wall and tasteful but boring wall hangings and pot plants placed fairly sparsely along its length. At the nearer end the hallway it stopped at a blank wall and it was at this end that he knew Nala to be. He couldn’t sense her any more, which meant that she was either unconscious or they were too late. Looking in that direction he paused; wanting to find her but for a moment not wanting to find her dead.

Before he moved towards the room at the other end of the hallway a rough looking man barged through a hidden door. He glared angrily in their direction and skulked up the hallway towards them.

“You better be here for the whores.” The dark-haired man was all shoulders with a square stocky body but also tall. It was plainly obvious to Tae; and probably the other two as well, that this man was in charge.

In quick succession three things happened: one of the room doors opened and a dark-haired woman stepped out into the hallway right next to the angry man, at this point he saw their raised weapons and with a surprised cry from the woman he grabbed her by the shoulders pulling her around in front of him and forcing her body between him and their weapons.

“Even if you kill me and get away, you’ll still die. No one messes with the Spade family and lives.” The man snarled at them over the terrified woman’s shoulder his square face had warped into something alien by his obvious rage.

Reaching the short distance to his new friends mind, Tae spoke Telepathically. “Would you mind, Kita?”

The man’s face suddenly screwed up in pain and his body stiffened so that he let go of the terrified woman. Tae stepped forward and offered her a hand. Afraid, but calmer than one might expect, the woman took his hand and let him pull her behind them. He smiled at her and in that in that moment of contact Tae ducked into her mind to get more information from her. He also dimly recognized her as the despaired voice he’d sensed earlier.

With the woman; Rachel, behind them and their weapons, he stepped towards the man whom she knew as Bruiser showing to this unpleasant man his own cold anger.
“Well, Bruiser, the Spades started this they should already know not to mess with the Psi Rebels.”

Bruiser’s square face relaxed slightly as Kita must have let go of him to allow him to communicate. Bruiser’s face relaxed into slightly fearful puzzlement. “What? We haven’t…”

“Nala Bree. Where is she?”

“That whore is dead!” For a moment the man’s rage flared out hotly from him to overwhelm Tae’s own anger and he suddenly had the ridiculous urge to rip out Bruisers throat. But he allowed the rage to flow out of him again and when it cleared properly Tae sensed with some tension that the man believed wholeheartedly what he said about Nala being dead.

His own voice was colder than he’d ever heard it. “For your sake, I hope you’re wrong.”

He turned away from Bruiser back towards the door where he knew Nala was.  The other two would secure Bruiser until he got back.

*5*

Tae hesitated at the faded wooden door with his fingers hovering over the handle.  If she was dead she deserved to be found and buried with her mother and if she was alive she’d need immediate medical help.  This hesitation only served to make his tension worse and with this realization, he took a deep breath and turned the handle.

The room was dim and dirty.  The light overhead flickered and didn’t do near enough of a job to bring light to the corners of the room.  The wallpaper was faded and peeling at odd places and there was no furniture in the room just a stained faded grey linoleum floor.  She lay on her back in the middle of the room unmoving.  One arm was splayed out at a strange angle from her elbow and he realized grimly that it must be badly broken to rest at such a terrible angle.

For the first time he felt a deep pang of real fear that bordered on terror.  She had to be alive.  She just simply had to be.

Kneeling next to her he reached to her neck to feel for a pulse.  Her neck was warm and through the touch of her skin he sensed to his deep relief that she was alive; unconscious and terribly pained, but alive.  Her face was bruised and puffy, her long brown hair was scattered messily around her face on the dim linoleum.  A thin string of blood ran sideways from her mouth, down her cheek towards her ear and dripped slowly onto the floor.

Through her skin he felt a mental shuffling as she floated gently back up to the surface of consciousness.  In some way she must have sensed him.

She coughed wetly and flinched.  Deep brown eyes opened and looked up at him.  There was relief there in her exhausted eyes as she recognized him.  Then something flared up from her that surprised him completely; a deep passionate affection.  He realized then that she loved him or at least that she had a terrible crush on him.  He smiled gently at that unmasked affection.

“So… ” His voice was gentle as he smiled mischievously at her.  “I didn’t know you were a telepath?”
She tried to smile but her swollen face made it look more like a grimace.  “… I didn’t know either!”

“Can you stand?”
“I don’t know.  My arm’s broken.”  Her uneven voice sounded distant and he realized that they’d probably have to carry her.

He wiped his face with one hand and thought for a moment.  With this new increase in Psi sensitivity he could no longer block what he got from touch.  This would make it impractical and dangerous for him to carry her himself because every pain she felt would overwhelm him and they still had to get back out through the casino floor.

He mentally reached out to the hallway.  “Nama, would you carry Nala?”
“Of course.  How is she?”
“Bad, but alive.  We have to get her out of here.”

Nala’s eyes had closed again but he sensed that she was still partially conscious.  “Nala, we’re going to carry you out of here, but it’s going to hurt.  Ok?”

She replied with a slight mental nod but nothing more to suggest that she’d heard him.

He stepped back when Nama came into the room; allowing him the space to carefully pick her up like a baby.  She let out a deep moan of pain as they moved her broken arm but she did not open her eyes.

Jaw clenched from his rising anger, Taelin turned and stalked out of the room into the hallway.  He walked right up to Bruiser’s square form and punched the bastard in the face as hard as he could.  Bruiser fell straight down to the floor from the impact.

“If you go near the Rebels or Nala again I will personally come back down here and kill you myself.”

The man looked up at him from the ground, a deep fiery hatred clear in his dark eyes.
“She owes me money.”  His voice dripped coldly with that same hatred.
“Not any more.” Tae responded through gritted teeth.

Bruiser began to stand again, back a few steps away from Tae.  He seemed to be trying to retain some dignity in this alien situation where he was not the one in control.  “It doesn’t work that way.”  He grinned darkly.

Behind him, Tae sensed Nama standing with Nala in his arms and could feel her terrible pulsing pain.  A wave of his own fiery anger flared out of him in one direction with a distinct sense of mass to it.  It blew through the hallway like a wind, blowing the pictures off the walls and the pot plants over onto the floor.  When it reached Bruiser it lifted him swiftly up the corridor to the very end and crashed him hard against the far wall.  The gangster fell down and lay on the floor unmoving.
“It does now.”

When Tae turned around towards the exit door, he saw the young dark-haired woman, Rachel.  She looked fearful of him; her light green eyes were wide and her body trembled slightly in her fear.

His anger cleared suddenly and he remembered her earlier thoughts of suicide and being trapped.  Specifically, he remembered that she desperately wanted out.  Maybe they could help each other because they still had to get out of the casino in one piece and it would be easier with her help.  He walked towards her calmly.

“Rachel, we need a hostage to get out.  I won’t hurt you, but if it comes to that do you think you can convince them that I will?  Can you do that?”
She frowned at him, still afraid, but with a surprising firmness in her voice.  “Can you get me a new life?  A new identity?”
He nodded and offered her his hand.  She took his hand gingerly and he carefully pulled her into position in front of him.

—

They walked slowly and carefully through the throng of people.  The mood of drunken celebrations seemed to contradict starkly with the grimness he felt inside himself.  For some reason the mood in the huge room didn’t impact on him quite as strongly the second time through the crowd and he wondered absently if part of shielding was simply having an emotion on the inside that was stronger than the outside rabble.

Leading the other two through the crowd, he held Rachel fairly close to him with one hand holding her firmly around her upper arm.  He hoped that they wouldn’t need to resort to a hostage drama with her because he knew first hand from his years as a cop it never came out with any level of predictability or guarantees.  But at least this way with the young woman there was some kind of insurance for them and, of course, she got to get out of a bad situation.

Ahead of him the double doors which lead to the outside world were getting nearer over the heads of the crowds.  Unfortunately they had to move slowly because although Nala was a small build and Nama was quite strong, it was still difficult for him to carry her through the crowded casino at speed.

Looking around him he frowned; he still hadn’t seen any security guys.  He hoped, perhaps naively, that they hadn’t been observed yet.

None of the crowds seemed to notice them; as if they were under a spell of denial and could only see what they wanted to see.  It was a bit strange and Tae found it oddly disconcerting but he was aware enough to see that it was also a good thing; maybe they were going to get out after all.

Finally, they breached the line of doors into the more spacious parlor and sped up towards the exit.  As they jogged out of the doorway there were sounds of confused angry voices behind them; probably from the bellboys, but they kept running.  He let go of the young woman’s arm so that they could both run freely.

“It’s too far to walk to either base, where do we go now?” He asked his two companions as they jogged out towards the road.
Nama responded firmly.  “The Cathedral is only a block or two away.  Father Owen can look after us until we can arrange transport.”
“You know Father Owen?” Tae asked with confusion.  He wondered when that had happened.
“What, you think you and your sister are special?  He allows us to use the Cathedral as a safe-house for some escapes in exchange for specific trade items for the monastery… has been for a year or so now.”
They ran across the road together and into a side street away from the sight of the casino.

“Oh, ok, whatever, as long as we can be safe.”

*6*
Voices

Nala lay somewhere warm.  She felt safe; safer than she had in a long time.  The world turned sedately around her in a drug-induced semi-consciousness.

Wherever she was (did it matter where she was?), she floated comfortably on a bed of soft warmness flowing slowly in and out of consciousness.  In the ebb and flow of awareness she heard snippets of conversations around her; both voiced and unvoiced, but much of it made no sense to her.  She wasn’t really thinking about what was being said or done around her merely experiencing it with an oddly vivid sense of the present moment; a sense that she had never nor would ever feel again.

“… She’s beaten pretty badly, so badly they broke both bones in her lower arm and a few ribs as well.  She’s lucky not to have internal bleeding.”  That female voice was familiar… someone who had cared for her; made the pain go away.

“… Will she be ok?”  The second voice was barely audible but definitely male.
There was a sad sigh.  “Yes.  I think so, poor girl.  Just keep someone with her for the next 24 hours, if her condition changes before I get back I don’t care how secret she needs to stay you must get her to a hospital… and I’m not joking.  If this girl dies because of all your secrecy I will come back here and hang you by your ears!”
The male voice laughed.  “We’ll keep an eye on her, Karen, don’t worry about that.”

The voices slowly started to fade from her again.  It was like someone was slowly turning the volume down to the point where she could understand no more words.

Nala sunk again into the familiar mindless painless nothing.

Sometime later, the flow lifted her gently up into the slow spinning that was semi-consciousness again.  Voiceless words flowed over her and she sensed someone sitting next to her in the room.  Somehow she knew he was male, maybe someone familiar.  But she wasn’t conscious enough to really identify their name or add a face to it or even know what a face was to begin with.

His voiceless voice was dark blue and deep; somehow warm and wonderfully embracing.  In her strange state of being she liked this voice; she felt safe with this voice.

“Sir, you should have seen Tae… I’ve never seen him like that before… he was magnificent…”
“What made him so impressive?” The second voice was somehow icy and seemed to be somewhere else; Ice Voice was not in the room with Friendly Voice.

She heard Friendly Voice sigh. “I’m not sure how to describe it.  No one said he would lead the rescue team; he just stepped into that role without even trying.  He just simply became the Team Leader.”

“But you have more experience in these kinds of things wouldn’t it have been wiser for you to have taken Point?  Even Kita has more combat experience than Taelin.”
“But that’s just it, he did everything right neither of us could have done the mission any better.” There was a pause in the voices and the silence of the room filled the gap with a weighted mass.

Then Friendly Voice spoke again breaking the odd heavy silence.
“Sir, you do realize he’s new to his distance Psi ability so he has little to no shielding.  He did this whole mission unshielded.  I don’t know about Kita Oran, but I certainly couldn’t have done that well unshielded.”

There was a sense of surprise from the Ice Voice. “He was unshielded?”
“Yes, sir.  Almost totally.”
“That is impressive.  What ratings does Kita think he could get to?”
“Right now, he has the telepathic range and force of a 3/5 Telepath, Kala says he’s about the same rating Empath and he has 3/5 PK thrust.  That’s untrained, mind you, but it’s a phenomenal increase from a rating of less than 1/5 to 3/5 over only five weeks.”

Ice Voice had a quiet introspective sense to him. “There is definitely something special about the Kaan siblings.“

Then there was a mental sigh. “I have to go now, Nama, when I get back in a month we’ll have that Telepathic meeting.  See if you can get Tae trained up with some control over that time and he’ll have an invitation to the meeting.  I want to see what kind of pathway he carves for himself and the Rebels… it will probably be something no one expects.”
Friendly Voice laughed both in Nala’s ears and in her mind. “No, doubt, sir.”

There was a sense of disconnection; an ending of the conversation.  She didn’t know what it meant only that now it was just Friendly Voice in the room with her and no other voices disturbed the air or her mind.

Friendly Voice shuffled nearby and she was aware he came closer to her.  Something warm touched some kind of appendage of her consciousness… it was her hand… yes… whatever a hand was, Friendly Voice touched it.

His baritone speaking voice was calm and gentle in her ears.  “I know you can hear me on some level, Nala.  Do me a favor and don’t tell Tae what I told Hawk; let it be our secret.”

A hand lifted from hers and there were other noises of material moving.  Then something cold touched the palm of her hand.  “This fell from you last night when we brought you here.  I think the chain must have broken.  I’ve never seen it before, but for some reason it makes a lot of sense for you to have a whale pendant because you’re joyous like they are; joyous and innocent.”  His voice broke slightly.  She heard him swallow and then with an uneven voice he continued.  “So, I fixed it for you.  I traded my last bottle of homemade whiskey for a proper tempered silver chain so it won’t break now.  Here, I’ll put it around your neck for you so you won’t loose it again.”

Nala felt something too close to where there was pain… her face?  She wasn’t sure… but her understanding of things fell slowly sideways and she didn’t know what was happening or who she was.  She fell into the numbness of nothing.

It was some time before she came out of the numbness again.  This time what brought her up into consciousness was pain.  She was more aware than before.  The mattress under her felt harder than was comfortable and parts of her back were numb and sore as if she’d laid there for a very long time.  It was warm around her with the heavy blanket on her chest and she heard the distant sound of singing; like the kind you’d hear in a church with a collection of voices raised together in a perfect almost divine harmony.

Someone held her hand, her other hand and arm was aching something terrible and she remembered the voice that had said she had a broken arm.

Through the touch on her hand she recognized the mental energy of Taelin.  She wanted to smile but her body refused to move, even to smile.

“… Listen Nala… I don’t know how I’m going to tell you this when you wake up… but… I know that you like me… um… in the romantic sense…”  His voice sounded so uncomfortable, so gentle.  Her heart widened happily and she knew that she didn’t just like him: she loved him.
“… I wish so much that I could feel the same way about you… I don’t want to see your sad face when you wake up… I wish I’d realized this before… I’m so sorry…”

Nala felt sad.  Not for her unrequited love; she’d sort of realized that he wasn’t interested in her like that a while back, but because she knew he felt bad for not loving her as much as she loved him.  And because she loved him and she was a lot more mature than her eighteen years she tried hard to form the mental thoughts to comfort him.  She wanted to tell him it was ok and that she didn’t expect anything from him.  But she couldn’t: her body and her mind wouldn’t quite respond.

“Nala?  Can you hear me?”  His voice sounded puzzled and a little surprised.  She tried again to say yes, yes she could but it wouldn’t come.  Pushing firmly at her mind and body she kept trying to give him a sign that she was there and that she could hear him.  Then… something moved!  Her hand moved!

“You can hear me?”  He sounded sad.  “I’m sorry, Nala, really I am.”

Taking more control of her hand she gripped his tighter.  Her lips parted in her concentration; she couldn’t speak but she pushed her thoughts towards him, past her mind, past the surface of her body and into the surface of his mind.
“… It’s ok, Tae, don’t feel bad… I already knew…”

“I’m still sorry.”

“Don’t be… you moved the earth to find me…  you care about me… you’re my friend… that’s all I ever wanted.” Her body still wouldn’t do more than twitch and she ached something terrible all over but at least she could communicate telepathically.  She felt his thumb stroke her hand absently.
“I am your friend, Nala.  Don’t ever doubt that.”
“… I won’t…” She tried to smile but only felt the sides of her lips twitch slightly.

There was silence for a little while and his thumb continued to stroke the top of her hand.  She sensed the question before he said it.
“Nala, I just have one question.  Why did Bruiser think you owed him money?”

She didn’t want to tell this story, but knew she couldn’t not tell now that he’d already asked.
“My mother… when we moved to Arana… we needed legal papers… Bruiser offered them to us in exchange for work…” She paused as a sharp pain shot through her right elbow into her lungs and she let out a moan of pain.
“Oooh… my mother found out too late that it was a trick… to debt-bind her… he worked her so hard it killed her… and when she died, he came after me… but I found the Rebels… I found you…”

There was silence and then she sensed him intending to ask the next obvious question.  She didn’t want to have to answer it; she couldn’t tell him where her and her mother had come from.  So she changed the subject before he could ask it.

“Painkillers… can you get the painkillers now?”
There was a chuckle.  “I’ll go get the doctor.”