Telepathy

As he pushed and elbowed his way through, Jace carefully cast out with his mind. Remembering every detail of Tezzeret’s lessons, he touched first one, then another, spreading himself as wide and as thin as he ever had. He couldn’t read a single true thought this way, but then, he didn’t need to. Most of the crowd felt little save boredom, maybe casual excitement or—near where Kallist and Xalmarias fought—a growing fear. Jace hoped, prayed, that even his casual touch would alert him to another killer in the crowd, that the sudden bloodlust of a coming attack would warn him before a Consortium blade took him in the back.

And then the emotions around him turned to panic as a dozen people screamed, their eyes turning skyward. Jace immediately dived to the ground in a roll made awkward by his lingering shortness of breath, coming to a stop beneath a cheap vegetable stand. Only then did he look up, and he wondered if it wouldn’t have been better to keep rolling.

It flapped through the air above him, awkward but frighteningly swift. It had somehow sprouted wings that it had lacked the last time Jace saw it, that horrible night in his room, but he recognized the old man’s cackling face, the scorpion-like stinger that quivered, eager to strike, above its back.

***

Agents of Artifice, Chapter 21