Mind Reading 10

For the past hour, various Consortium employees who’d dealt with Hesset’s mercantile interests marched past them, one by one. Paldor, with his usual jolly expression, asked them a few questions about how things had gone, what they felt about the cooperation between the two organizations, and so forth. Each gave his or her own answers and was dismissed. Jace kept scribbling.

All he could think, in those moments when he was entirely inside his own mind, rather than partly within someone else’s, was Be innocent, be innocent, be innocent.

His head throbbed and his eyes blurred with exhaustion. Never before had he attempted to read so many minds in even a single day, let alone an hour, and he truly didn’t know how much longer he could keep it up. Even though all he sought was innocence or guilt, honesty or deception, the fact that he’d already managed as many as he had was nothing short of astounding. He credited his few training sessions with Tezzeret for teaching him such fortitude.

Still, Jace was on the verge of asking Paldor if they could continue the hunt tomorrow when he glanced into the mind of a skinny, uptight records-keeper whose name he could not recall, and he found what he sought.

Jace sighed briefly. He’d known it was inevitable. How else could Hesset have known the Consortium was coming after her, let alone exactly when? But still, he’d hoped.

In a predetermined signal, Jace ceased writing, lay the quill down beside the ledger, and firmly closed the book.

Paldor nodded and gestured with a pair of pudgy fingers. Only as a pair of guards clamped his arms in brutal, bone-bruising grips, did the archivist realize he’d been found out—and what must be in store for him at Consortium hands. He shrieked, screamed, begging and blubbering for mercy until his voice faded away down the distant halls.

Through it all, even as he contemplated many forthcoming hours with the traitor in the complex “discipline chamber,” the jovial expression on Paldor’s face never faltered.

“Write down anything you learned from his mind that might prove useful,” he said to Jace, raising his ponderous bulk from behind the table. “And then go get yourself a drink. You look like you could use it.”

***

Agents of Artifice, Chapter 11