The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

“The assignment is routine,” the Colonel said as he gave us the updated dossier on our next target. “We are to secure the target and bring him back here to the Institute. He is a twelve-year-old boy.”

The Colonel gave me a smirk that said: Finally, here’s one you won’t try to fuck.

I fired back a smirk of my own that said: Finally, here’s one you won’t try to shoot.

Because really, what grown man needs a firearm to handle a twelve-year-old boy? Just knock the phone out of the kid’s hand and he’s reduced to a helpless emotional wreck. The same thing applies to a lot of grown men too.

“So why us?” I asked. “This sounds like standard recruitment stuff. Why send an operations team instead of a recruiter?” Junior would be tagging along. He’d passed all of the previous evaluations, and this would be a sort of final exam, to see how he handled himself on an actual field job. The brass handing us a softball assignment for his trial run made sense, but something sounded too easy. This just didn’t seem worth our involvement when the Institute had a whole corps of recruiters whose job was to spot, tag, and bag budding young Talents for “recruitment” and send them back to the Institute for evaluation and training.

“The boy is precognitive. He can foresee the future. Exceptionally accurate, but short-term—so far, reports indicate he can foresee up to about twenty-four hours in advance.”

I nodded. Okay, so I should have read the preliminary dossier last night instead of fucking around with Junior. But I could wing this. “So he’ll know we’re coming,” I mused. Precogs are rare, the rarest kind of Talent—incredibly valuable, and often the least reliable. The future isn’t always a set path—precognition often involves foreseeing multiple possible outcomes. Glimpses of the future don’t always tell which possible outcome is most likely, how to get there, what really happens, or what the long-term consequences will be. Too many variables. But there had to be more to warrant our involvement. “So ... the brass doesn’t want a recruiter fucking this up. Still ...”

I noticed the detail just as Junior enthused, “But we’re going to Darven! I think that’s so cool!”

The Institute had no charter to operate in clan counties. A functional precog was important enough that the Institute was willing to risk an international incident in order to get him.

Okay. Maybe this wasn’t such a softball assignment after all.

Junior hadn’t been out of the country before. I had, often, plus I’d been to Darven before. It’s a culling country. If we got in and out without running afoul of the local authorities, fine. But if not, the Institute probably wouldn’t get its precog and might have an international incident on its hands, which wouldn’t reflect well on any of our performance evaluations—assuming we lived through the experience. Dead people don’t need performance evaluations.

The Colonel said, “We have reason to believe the local government may have learned of him, so we’ll have to move quickly to find him and retrieve him. We’ve got a ticking clock on this one.”

And there it was, the stinking turd that justified bringing us into the picture. Government interest virtually guaranteed a clash with the local military, which virtually guaranteed a shoot-out. The Colonel must have practically creaming his pants with anticipation. Eww.

By early afternoon that day, after a high-speed flight to a friendly neighboring nation and then a commuter flight under aliases into Darven itself, we were in a rental car in Javennek, a mid-sized coastal resort town some distance north of the capital city of Darvenek. I’d been to Darven before, but not to Javennek. The last time I was in Darven was six months before, when I encountered Dion and used him to get information that led to his half-brother being apprehended. This time, I spent the trip trying hard not to think about Dion. Junior spent the whole trip practically vibrating with excitement—which, as a telepath, was exhausting for me to be near. The boy seriously needed to work on not broadcasting his enthusiasm sometimes.

Darven is a clan nation. They breed selectively for genetic consistency, and the Darven-clan standard stresses curly blond hair within a certain color range, two allowed facial types, five body types. “Full-clan” standard Darvens are easy to identify, but individuals are hard to recognize; since they all look nearly identical, they’re difficult for outsiders like me to tell apart, at least not without checking their thought patterns for confirmation.

Darven-clan people don’t like out-clans. And they really don’t like Talents. The whole purpose of their eugenics program originally was to breed out the Talent gene. The few “throwbacks” that manifest they handle by culling, a government-sanctioned program that’s a fancy way of saying they killed Talents there, on sight. If the government got its hands on our little precog, chances are he’d be foreseeing a very short future for himself.

Javennek was a dichotomy: a former center of commerce fallen on hard times, except for the parts that catered to the tourist trade, and the beaches meant it still had a thriving business as a trendy resort town. Lots of beachfront hotels and tropical lushness for the tourists on the ocean side of the city, and lots of disintegrating factories, warehouses, and urban blight on the inland side, left over from the economic collapse that left most of the locals dependent on either the tourist trade for a living or organized crime. Corruption was a way of life here.

Fortunately for us, even the cheap hotels were in the touristy side of the city. Just in case we needed the cover or had to stay the night, the Colonel booked us into two rooms: one for himself, the other for Junior and me. That was fine by me. The Colonel probably thought putting Junior and me in a room together was a way of telegraphing that he viewed me as little better than a glorified babysitter. Me, I viewed it as a brief respite from a man who slept in a bulletproof vest and teddy bear boxer shorts, with more firepower stashed under his pillow for ready access than most police stations. Certainly Junior was better scenery. Maybe I could take advantage of his crush for another all-night tour of his tonsils and ass.

We stashed our minimal bags—this was no vacation—and met back in the lobby twenty minutes later.

The dossier had been light on a few facts, like exactly where this boy lived. Finding him wasn’t going to be as simple as driving our overpriced rental car right to his door. Still, compared to our usual assignments, this one was a walk on the beach—maybe literally.

“Well?” the Colonel scowled at me over his trademark sunglasses.

Shit flows downhill, as saying goes—although in my experience, its mode of transit has always been more projectile—so I turned to Junior and said, “Well?”

He blinked behind his own brand-new sunglasses, which I suspected had been purchased from the hotel’s convenient gift shop minutes before our lobby rendezvous. “Uh ... The dossier said he makes cash doing ‘fortune telling’ for tourists on the beaches near the trendier hotels. We should start there. Scan the crowd. Look for a booth or see if anyone has seen a sign advertising psychic readings, or if someone is thinking about this amazing fortune teller. That might point us in the right direction.”

Well, give Junior a cookie. That was exactly the plan I would have come up with. Really—I would’ve.

The Colonel looked at me smugly. “Maybe I should give him your job. Thirty seconds, and we already have a plan that doesn’t involve you fucking all the bellhops.”

Grr. I volleyed back with, “Or you threatening the concierge at gunpoint.”

Casual clothes. For the Colonel, it meant no bulletproof vest, at least not on the outside of his clothes where people could see it. For Junior and me, that meant no Institute i logo on our clothes to warn the Normals. Junior was nervous about that at first, because the need to be marked at all times was instilled in Institute recruits from day one, but I reminded him that our laws didn’t apply here in Darven. Too, we were there incognito. Tee-shirts, shorts, sandals. The ear bud and hidden microphone I used to stay in touch with the Colonel were nearly invisible. Junior and I were just two tourists out for a stroll along the beach, while the Colonel stayed hidden and did ... uhm, whatever he did as our backup. Tee-shirts and shorts don’t provide much cover for his concealed weapons. Close proximity to salt air and beach sand probably wasn’t good for his favorite firearms anyway.

The day was beautiful. The sand and sea, beautiful. The crowd of tourists?—A nearly deafening mental cacophony as we fished through the tide of thoughts roaring around us. Imagine trying to listen for the sound of a mouse coughing under the symphony hall stage while the orchestra blasts through the more strident passages by Wagner.

Listening in on the innermost thoughts of one’s fellow humanity ranges from the completely inane to downright scary. One minute I was sifting through stultifying crap like that guy over there—How do I tell her I’ll need a second job to pay for this—or that woman over there—Did I remember to turn off the stove—and the next I’m wading through the sick filth of the overweight man over there who was thinking about the time he raped a barely pubescent girl and without a hint of remorse—Yeah, she was begging for it, I bet that one there would beg for it too, pink bikini, she’s just asking for it, or maybe that one ... Ugh. I didn’t have time to plant a compulsion for him to turn himself in to the authorities when he got back home, but I memorized his name and address. After this mission was over, I’d pass the information to the police. Fortunately, as an Institute-certified telepath, my testimony would be admissible in court and the authorities could follow up on it by bringing this asshole in for questioning. He’d probably crack within minutes.

Focus on the mission , I told myself. That guy’s just a distraction.

At some point, Junior peeled off his tee-shirt, whether because of the heat or just to catch some rays, as we strolled and probed, which added a whole new level of distraction for me. I was too professional to get a crush on a trainee, but I could certainly appreciate a good-looking young man when I saw one. No harm in that.

After we’d walked nearly the whole length of beach adjoining the tonier hotels—and found a whole lot of nothing, might I add—I hauled us over to a beachside drink stand. Tourists come and go, sure, and we were only scanning surface thoughts, but no one seemed to have fortune telling or psychic readings on their minds.

I needed a drink. I slid myself onto a barstool under the shady eaves of the drink stand. Junior slid onto the one next to me, his back to the bar, still looking away through his sunglasses at the ocean, apparently playing the distant younger trophy-boyfriend. So rude—obviously I was only a couple of years older than he, far too young to be his sugar daddy. If he hadn’t been so intent on scanning the crowd and doing a thorough job on the assignment, I’d have been insulted. I decided to be impressed instead by how easily he fell into a role that seemed perfectly to fit the context of our upscale tourists cover story.

The handsome barista was a poster boy for Darven-clan breeding. Fortunately, I found the look hot as hell. Curly blond hair. Golden skin. Athletic. Shirt open down the front. High-wattage smile. Yum. He probably found his looks to be quite an advantage in attracting patrons and increasing the size of his tips.

I flashed the handsome barista my best big tipper smile and said, “Something cold and non-alcoholic for my boyfriend and me. I don’t care what. Surprise us.” If Junior could play the part of the disaffected wealthy, so could I.

The barista returned two minutes later with a big grin and two fruit-and-umbrella concoctions that looked almost syrupy sweet. I took the tip of the straw between my lips, sucked in a sip ... and nearly went into a sugar coma.

I forced a smile. “Delicious.” At least it was cold and wet.

“Thanks,” the barista grinned. “It’s my specialty. Most people think it’s too sweet ...”

Well, score one for the collective intelligence of the rest of the human race. Maybe the Darven-clan had found a way to breed out tooth decay.

“Oh, no—it’s perfect,” I assured mister barista. The ability to lie convincingly is required for field agents. And I inwardly smirked when, in the corner of my eye, Junior took a sip and had to stifle a cringe. Only my telepathy told me how hard he was having to work to keep his mask of disaffected boredom in place; visually, his face barely flinched.

Time for the real reason I sidled up to his booth. I’d decided we had the right tactic, but the wrong audience. Locals like this guy were more likely than tourists to have information about fellow beach buskers. “My boyfriend here is a little ... distraught. See, he never likes to leave the bedroom until he consults with his psychic advisor back home, but he hasn’t been able to reach her today. You wouldn’t happen to know of someone around here who does psychic readings?”

The barista looked me in the eye and cranked his tip-calculating smile up to eleven. “Matter of fact, I do, but I haven’t seen him today.” This would normally have been the part where he expected me if he knew how to get in touch with his psychic friend and then we would barter a little “finder’s fee” or maybe a blowjob—or both—so that I could show my gratitude.

But there, plain as anything in the front of the barista’s thoughts was the image of a Darven-clan boy, maybe about age twelve or thirteen, who he associated with the idea of psychic readings.

I slipped my telepathy into the barista’s head so gently he never noticed. Never noticed how his mind went blank for a few seconds as I sorted through his memories to learn everything he knew. Yeah, this kid in the barista’s mind definitely seemed like our target.

I withdrew. The barista blinked. “Well,” I said, pushing a generous amount that would more than cover our drinks and a big tip across the bar to him. “We must be off. If you see your psychic friend, tell him we’re looking for him. But if he’s psychic, he probably already knows that, right? Heh. Come along, Ju—baby.”

What was that about? Junior sent at me as he scurried to catch up.

I know where our target is , I sent back. We’re heading there now.

Where is he? Is he here?

No, he’s at his home, probably. I know where he lives now. He’s precognitive, remember? He probably knows we’re coming for him. If I was a twelve-year-old boy who knew twenty-four hours in advance that people were coming to get me, I’d want to spend that last day with my family.

The Colonel drove. The Colonel always drives. That man can’t be separated from his firearms and, if there’s driving to be done, he can’t be separated from a steering wheel by anything short of a mortar round. And knowing the Colonel, he’d consider a mortar round to be foreplay. Eww.

Our target lived on the far side of Javennek, just outside the city, where the outskirts faded into the surrounding jungle—an area that could be described flatteringly as unspoiled but more accurately as undesirable. After leaving the resort area, the transition to this encompassing squalor and ruin was surprising. I was glad we had the Colonel along.

Darven’s roads had gone to shit ever since the PETA Party took over the government a few years ago. The road became gravel. The house at the end of the road was ramshackle. The boy stood out front. “Hello. You’re here,” he said, merely stating the fact with a trace of impatience, as we got out of the car.

That’s when I realized. Sure, knowing the future must take all the surprise out of life, one spoiler after another, which probably sucked at birthdays and other gift-giving occasions; but the worst part about being precognitive was probably the waiting, always waiting for the next foreseen future event to occur in its own sweet time, and then the next one ... I decided I’d stick with trying to figure out the present, thanks.

I introduced myself and my teammates. Junior said, “Hey,” with a little wave. The Colonel just scowled.

“I’m Yan,” the boy said.

“You know why we’re here?” Of course he did. I could see it in his thoughts without even trying to read them.

He nodded and pointed to what, in a previous life, must have been some tourist’s backpack, discarded when it was nearly worn out. He had repurposed it into luggage for his few belongings. “I’m packed. Please let me say goodbye, and ... Oh. Watch out.”

That’s when the old woman ran from the house. “You’ll not take him!” she wailed and swung her frying pan at my head. I ducked but—wham!—she caught me in the shoulder. Had Yan not warned me, she might have fractured my skull.

She collapsed on the ground, crying, clutching the boy to her. “Ma’m!” he scolded. “I told you.”

“No, no, no,” she mourned.

I straightened up and tried not to wince. My shoulder would be one big bruise. I motioned to the Colonel that I was all right and to put his gun away. No need to shoot the old woman. Not yet, anyway.

Despite what the throbbing in my shoulder claimed, she wasn’t a threat. She was very old—apparently she had no money for the rejuvenation treatments at the local McFleiss franchise that the better-off Darven-clan members used to stay young and clan-standard pretty. If it came to a physical fight, I was betting I could take her without the Colonel’s help.

“I’m sorry,” Yan said. By way of explanation, he introduced us to her as Ma’m Mar’shon, using the local honorific for grandmother. “She raised me after my parents died. She does not want me to leave.“

I nodded as if I understood. Maybe I did, in a way. I’d been recruited when I was eleven, just a little younger than Yan, and I could barely remember my family. I remembered they seemed relieved to get rid of me, the problem child who could read and control minds. I hadn’t thought about them in a while, and familial was not a word that described my interactions with the Colonel or anyone else at the Institute. But I knew what leaving someone behind felt like.

“I’ll go with you,” Yan said to me. “I’ve never been on an airplane before. Thank you for giving me the window seat.”

I raised an eyebrow because I’m not the sort who plans out every detail that far in advance. I hadn’t even thought about seating arrangements on the trip back. I was beginning to think having a precog around could be annoying.

“Will I like it there? I will be happy, yes?”

“It will take some adjustment,” I said, because that was the truth, “but yes, you could be very happy there.” I understood why he was asking—he wanted his grandmother to hear reassurances. Maybe too, he wanted to hear them himself, to know he was picking the right possible future. What we were discussing, after all, lay far more than twenty-four hours away.

“I’ve just finished my training,” Junior piped up. “The Institute took some getting used to at first, but I loved it there. You’ll learn to use your Talent in ways you’d never expect. I wouldn’t trade my time there, what I learned, or the friendships I made for anything.”

I shot the Colonel an expression that said, See?—Sometimes it’s okay to be a people person.

“Thank you,” Yan said. He put his hand on my arm. “Please, no guns.” He cut his eyes toward the jungle near the house. “Guns make everything turn black.”

Why did he do that? The only reason we carried our concealed pistols was in case of trouble. I made a quick telepathic sweep of the nearby areas and ... came up with nothing.

No—not nothing. I sensed just the tiniest little something, like a bit of static where there should have been nothing. I focused on it. Five faint bits of static. They felt like the electronic “background noise” I picked up from the blocker caps Normal staffers at the Institute wore to keep telepaths out of their heads. There, just a few dozen yards inside the jungle. And they were getting closer.

“Five bogies coming our way,” I whispered to the Colonel. “They’re shielded. Safe to assume they’re hostile.” I kept the same thought at the front of my mind so Junior would pick up on it—good boy!—which he did. His face went pale.

The Colonel whispered back, “Must be the government, coming for the boy.”

Yan looked at us and said, “No, they’re not coming for me.“

Fuck! Somebody had tipped off the local government that the Institute had a team on their turf.

I’d worry about that later. I drew my pistol. The Colonel, of course, already had his out.

Yan gripped my arm again. ”No guns. If shooting begins, people die.” He looked at Ma’m Mar’shon.

I understood. She would be one of the casualties.

“Okay—change of plans,” I hissed at the Colonel as I tucked away my pistol. No guns—great. “Get them inside. Stay with them and keep them safe. Junior, you’re with me.”

The Colonel’s scowl could have stopped a charging rhinoceros. He did not like being ordered around by a Talent, especially since he was the handler and I was the handlee. Or maybe he just didn’t like the handlee denying him a gunfight. For the Colonel, that was probably the equivalent of getting grounded on prom night after he’d already bought the corsage and condoms.

“No time. Do it,” I growled at him.

I ran, and Junior followed, around the corner to the side of the house closest to the jungle—closest to our incoming visitors.

“I don’t get it,” Junior said. “I don’t sense anything.”

“You’re looking for the wrong thing. You know how blocker caps can give you a headache when you’re around them too long? Look for that.”

Junior’s telepathy flared. After a moment, his eyebrows went up. “Shit!”

We needed a plan, and quickly.

“Get your clothes off.”

Junior blinked at me. “Huh?”

“Get your fucking clothes off!” He probably thought I was joking, but I was tugging my shirt off over my head. Junior did the same thing. We were both naked within seconds.

I fell to my knees and slammed my face forward into his crotch. His cock started hardening when my lips hit it.

Junior hissed: “You sure about this? Now?“

I came off his dick and quipped: “What could possibly go wrong?” Junior responded by sending a mental image of our bullet-riddled bodies and lots of blood. Obviously he’d never been around lots of blood before because he didn’t quite imagine the color right, but I didn’t tell him that. Hey, Junior, I sent back as I grinned and licked at his ball sack, welcome to the glorious seat-of-your-pants world of field operations. Now shut up, get hard, and make it look good!

He got the idea. By the time I got a decent fix on our visitors, he had an erection and I was sucking away at it with gusto.

Blowing Junior was a false flag operation to distract our visitors. Whatever they’d expected to find, stumbling across two male tourists fucking outdoors definitely was not it. There they were, twenty yards away from us by then, just inside the edge of the jungle, moving into a position where they could see the house—and us—but were still hidden in the dense foliage. I knew this because their team leader, such a smart guy, decided to get a better look at us through a pair of binoculars—which partially nudged his helmet and its blocking technology back off his forehead and let a little of his thoughts bleed out. He muttered something that in his thoughts meant, Fucking tourists. It must have been a pun in the local dialect, because he heard a couple of his squad members chuckle quietly at the joke.

Of course, knowing part of what he was thinking and hearing meant I was in his head. For a telepath like me, knowing what he was thinking and controlling what he was thinking were just two sides of the same coin. All I had to do was concentrate a little—while keeping up the pretense of blowing Junior—until I could muscle my telepathy past the outdated blocking technology in his helmet.

Put down your weapon—those men are not your targets, I sent into his mind. Marksman rifles. They were ready for the Colonel. Why risk an up close and personal firefight when nailing him from a distance would do the job? Chances were, the Colonel would win any gunfight that could be described using the phrase up close and personal—but he could be killed just as easily as anyone else if the shooter caught him by surprise with a bullet from a distance.

Take off your helmet. Tell your team to remove theirs too. This close, the blocker tech in their helmets definitely felt like an older version, but was still effective. I’d have a headache soon from the strain of punching through even the partial block. The presence of blocker tech showed they were ready for me too, but fortunately with my face buried in Junior’s crotch they didn’t recognize me. Or maybe they didn’t think I was as big a threat as the Colonel. The Darven-clan tend to deal with Talents by culling, so these soldiers probably didn’t understand how telepathy works, especially if Smart Guy here didn’t think twice about knocking back his helmet to get a better look at two fucking tourists. They certainly understood how to cull, though. After all, bullets from a distance would also deal with a telepath just fine.

And being shot at during a blow-job would be a mood-breaker.

Curious. Come closer. You want a better look.

Junior of course knew I was up to something; he felt my telepathy blazing even if he couldn’t tell what I was doing. His body stiffened, and not in the good way, when Smart Guy emerged from the edge of the jungle and kept coming toward us. Junior tapped my head and mumbled, “Uh—”

It’s okay , I sent to Junior without taking my mouth off his rod. I’ve got him.

Smart Guy kept walking our way. Back at the edge of the jungle, the four blond heads of his teammates popped out of the vegetation. Helmet-free. Vulnerable.

I came off of Junior’s cock and looked their way. I got the leader and the two on the left, I sent to Junior. He nodded, and I felt his telepathy reach out and caress the other two’s minds.

Smart guy and the two teammates on the left. I sent into their heads: Fascinated. Mission can wait. Curious. Come closer—get a closer look.

Smart Guy was already halfway to us. The other two took a hesitant step forward, then another, and soon were walking too.

Horny. Needy. Nothing else matters. Overwhelming. Horny.

Junior picked up on my commands and relayed the same to his two. Would he pick up on my next command too?

Strip.

Hands worked clasps as they walked. Buttons. Snaps. Shirts fell away. Hopping on one foot, they tugged off a boot, then the other. They never took their eyes off of us. Zippers. Pants were dropped and stepped out of. The soldiers kept walking toward us. Junior’s telepathy fired alongside mine.

Horny. Hard. Submit. Obey. Nothing else matters.

Five prime specimens of Darven-clan breeding stood in front of us, naked and ready to do our bidding, all curly blond hair and lithe muscles and erections. I happen to find the Darven standard hot. These five men looked nearly identical, nearly clones of each other. Their dicks were their major differentiators, an extra half-inch here, more girth there. Perhaps the Darven-clan hadn’t quite gotten around to standardizing that body part as successfully yet.

Well, I always complained that evil geniuses never throw armies of hot soldier-clones at us. This would have to do.

Junior leaned closer to me and thought, I don’t have enough condoms for this.

I shot back, Just pray that the lube supply holds out.

They probably considered us the exotic ones, since both Junior and I were darker-haired and obviously out-clan. We were the outsiders in their country.

I reached out and wrapped my hand around a Darven dick. Was it Smart Guy’s?—He seemed a couple of years older than the others, but otherwise was identical in looks. I didn’t bother checking his thoughts to confirm. I just closed the distance between that cock and my mouth and began to suck. A little tweak of the next closest Darven mind, and the next thing he knew, he was sprawled on the ground between my knees and licking my hard shaft.

“That’s a good cock-sucker,” Junior growled at another man on his knees as the man slobbered on Junior’s shaft. “Lick it. Lick it good.” So Junior was equally adept at playing the dominant side of telepathic submission games too?—Another point in his favor.

My heart raced—my nervous system was in fight-or-flight mode. Everywhere I reached, my hand touched a smooth Darven-clan cheek, the strong bone of a jaw, the blood vessel pulsing visibly at a throat. I felt their hands on me. I reached for the swirl of hair on the back of a neck and pulled forward, my cock disappearing whole into another mouth as the soldier looked up in complete submission, open mouth packed full of my dick.

One soldier pushed another down by the shoulders with one hand, brandishing his cock with the other, the blunt raw head of which his kneeling teammate tasted with his tongue. The kneeler was Smart Guy. I shared his sense of the fat end of his teammate’s cock sliding into his mouth, round and warm and slick as a freshly peeled boiled egg. While he was distracted by sucking the other’s cock, I searched through Smart Guy’s memories, looking for clues on who sent them. The orders came from higher up than usual; but other than that, Smart Guy knew nothing directly, nothing useful. Too bad.

Beside me, Junior drew up another soldier’s foreskin with his fingers and stretched it away from the head and kept pulling until hair and balls crept up the thick shaft. I watched Junior gather those balls up into his mouth individually in their soft hair sack while pulling firmly on the foreskin. I’d have loved to have watched longer, watched this game play out to its inevitable conclusion. However ...

I extracted myself, naked, hard, from the writhing mass of bodies and pulled Junior out by the arm too. But I haven’t cum yet, he protested, the thought of blue balls firmly in the front of his mind.

Later for that , I snapped back. More important concerns.

The smart play would have been to kill these soldiers or at least scramble their minds permanently. In my experience, enemies left dead or with little more than gray gelatin between their ears usually don’t show up later to shoot at me again. Institute field policy said to always go with the smart play, then get the fuck out of there. Fortunately for these soldiers, I wasn’t the Colonel. I already had too much blood on my hands. How did you do it, Cowboy, kill without remorse? The military trained you to be a killer, but you held on to your squeaky-clean code of ethics, except for that one mistake that led to our encounter. If it weren’t for the fact that you kept on killing for a living after you left the service, you could have been a damned Kid Scout or something. And you, Dion, general jack-of-all-thugs and no stranger to killing people yourself? Was it just something you had to learn to survive in the underbelly of the cities? How did you do it?

I was only a handful of years older than Junior. How had I gotten so jaded so quickly?

I didn’t scramble these soldiers’ minds either, not permanently. These were just cannon fodder, just following orders and not calling the shots. Call it an attack of conscience. Or a need to conserve my telepathy in case I needed to really exert myself again later. Or maybe even a need to keep from exposing Junior to the dark side of field operations yet; I liked his youthful naiveté—maybe I should try to preserve it a little longer. I wouldn’t be able to hide frying the soldiers’ minds from a fellow telepath.

I used a lighter tactic. In five Darven-clan soldier minds, I made sure they had no clear memory of us, and I projected irresistible orders: So incredibly horny. Fuck until you’ve cum twice, then sleep for hours. Nothing will interrupt you.

Junior and I were dressed from the waist down and still pulling on our shirts when we sprinted back to the other side of the house.

Naturally, the Colonel scowled at our obvious getting-dressed-after-fucking routine—and at the gargantuan bulge in Junior’s crotch. I flashed the Colonel my most professional stoic expression. “We were set up,” I told him, “but we handled it. They didn’t know anything useful though.”

“We leave now,” the Colonel said. Because obviously sitting around and waiting for more government troops to show up after their first squad failed to return wasn’t a good alternative.

I looked at Ma’m Mar’shon. A telepathic caress, and she sighed and slumped in her chair. “She’s asleep,” I assured Yan. Asleep and no longer with any memory of us. I hid those memories where her conscious mind wouldn’t find them, not for a while anyway. Since the government would almost certainly question her, as far as she knew Yan had just vanished. Maybe she’d decide he ran away. Maybe she would mourn for a while, but her life would go on. The government would leave her alone once they were sure she knew nothing. I didn’t know whether the Institute would ever allow Yan to contact her or visit; she might never learn what happened to him. That might seem like a cruelty, but better she not know, at least for now. If she told the wrong people about those three nice men who came to take him to the Institute before we got out of the country, things might get difficult for her.

And the appearance of Smart Guy’s team with marksman rifles suggested someone already knew we were on the ground. They might know our whole itinerary. We needed to change our exit plans.

The Colonel headed for the car with Yan’s pack and tossed it into the trunk. We’d be heading directly back to the airport. Yan was too precious a target to risk. The Institute would arrange for covert operatives to retrieve our few belongings from the hotel later.

That headache I’d anticipated was already starting, but we still needed to do this by the book. “There’s one more thing we need to do first,” I told Yan. “It’s standard procedure. You understand?”

He nodded, looking me directly in the eye. “It’s okay. You’re going to give me the window seat. Promise?”

As my thoughts slipped into his head, I said, “Sure, kid. I promise.”

He grinned. “Good. Because I did not actually see that part. I have never been on a plane before. I just wanted to make sure I got a window seat.”

I raised an eyebrow. Someday, this kid would be a one crazy little firecracker.

I needed to deactivate his Talent for a while. Doing so was standard procedure for the recruitment of new Talents. Being taken to a new place, a new life, like the Institute was stressful, and budding Talents sometimes lost control or lashed out accidentally. A newly manifested telepath might accidentally fry someone’s mind. A telekinetic temper tantrum might do significant damage. And don’t start me on the kind of chaos a pyrokinetic could cause if he lost control. Deactivating recruits’ Talents until they could be evaluated and quantified was a useful safety measure.

I glided through Yan’s mind, so gently he wasn’t aware of my intrusion. Talents have mental keys that are used to trigger them. I felt for the keys to activating Yan’s. As I probed, I got a sense of how his Talent operated. It was like looking up into the sky on a clear night, and potential future events and alternatives were like tiny stars, so incredibly distant only a dot of light could be seen. His Talent acted like a telescope. Aim it at the really distant ones, and it didn’t magnify things enough—the thing was still just a bit of light. But aim it at closer events, like pointing a telescope at the moon or the closer planets, and suddenly the more detail appeared. Maybe his Talent didn’t tell him how things led up to that point, or what would happen next, but he could see as much as he saw, and maybe could see a way to get there, and sometimes that was enough. Enough to be helpful. Maybe enough to be dangerous too. I sure hoped his Ma’m had given him the moral grounding to handle this kind of responsibility, because I’d hate to face Yan if he turned into one of those evil geniuses. I was betting he could scheme up more successful plots than building a horde of killer robots.

Yan put his hand on my arm, a gesture that was starting to unnerve me. “Wait,” he whispered and frowned. I felt his Talent flaring again. He hadn’t learned to control or target it yet. I hadn’t entered the part of his mind that interpreted what he saw, so I couldn’t see what his Talent was finding. I’d learned enough about his keys to know he could use it much more efficiently with a little training. Heck, if I just massaged this particular key, just a little, he’d—

He grunted. I wasn’t sure if I’d hurt him or exactly what I’d done, so I backed off.

His smile crimped, as if apologizing. “You’ll see them again. Soon. If you go with them, it won’t always be easy. There’ll be trouble sometimes, but overall you’ll be happier than you can imagine.” His Talent went quiet.

Vague little tease , I thought, being careful to keep that thought from bleeding out where Yan would hear it through our connection. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what future he had foreseen for me, so I didn’t pry deeper to learn what he meant. I deactivated his keys, numbing those parts of his mind so that he wouldn’t be able to activate his Talent by himself for a day or two. By then, we’d be back at the Institute, we’d have handed him off to the induction personnel, and Yan would be some other babysitter’s problem.

One last telepathic nudge as we climbed into the car, and I initiated a little light euphoria to keep Yan smiling, happy, and feeling good, focused on the adventure to come rather than what he was leaving behind. He wouldn’t have to worry about homesickness until later.

As we drove away, he didn’t look back.