#institutionalised dehumanisation

He flicked the radio on, blaring voices spouting something inane. He jumped stations a few times, looking for something with music. He found something that sounded like country, listened to that for a minute or two, before flicking it off again in annoyance.

Of course Julie didn’t understand, because this was flat-out crazy, and Danny knew it. He didn’t know how it had come to this. What had he been thinking? What did he think he was achieving? This had been a mistake, from start to finish.  

“Um. Handler? Danny?”

The white line on the road jerked and veered wildly in front of Danny as he swore, curbing the impulse to whip around and look behind him.

Fucking hell. Keep it together enough to drive, will you?

He spared a glance in the mirror. Sure enough, the Path was sitting up, looking small and hunched and incongruously clean in the grubby back seat of Danny’s old car. His thin pale fingers clutched at the black seatbelt.

“Jesus, kid,” Danny snapped.

“Sorry,” TJ whispered. “Sorry, I’ll – I’ll be quiet, I’m sorry...”

“No, I - ” Danny breathed out heavily through his nose, made his hands relax on the wheel. The way TJ was lately, Danny couldn’t raise his voice without the poor sod thinking he’d done something wrong. The way he cringed from the nurses, from other handlers, from Danny himself sometimes - it made Danny think hard, vicious things about whoever had been assigned to him before.

How could I have just gone on to the next job and left him there?

He tried to make his voice light. “No, kid, not your fault,” he said. “You just, uh, startled me. Didn’t mean to wake you, we’re hours away from where we’re going yet.” For God’s sake don’t ask me where that is, I don’t fucking know.

“I was awake,” the Path said, a wispy thread of voice from the backseat. “Um. Danny?”

Danny grunted to show he was listening.

“Are you really stealing me?”

Damn it.

“How much did you hear of that?” Danny asked, his stomach sinking. He’d thought TJ was safely asleep. Idiot.

“Um. All of it,” TJ said. “You said – Danny, you said – why do you think someone’s going to kill me?”

“I – well, because…” This was stupid. Why was Danny floundering for words in front of a Path? Danny could only catch the occasional glimpse of the Path in his mirror, and blindfolded TJ wasn’t capable of looking at anything, but still he had to fight back the feeling that TJ was looking at him accusingly.

“Because you’re sick,” he settled on eventually. He blinked hard at the wavering road in front of him, resettled his grip on the steering wheel. “And… and you’ll get better if you have time, TJ, but they don’t want to give you that time. Because it isn’t… ” The end of the sentence died in his throat. Because everyone’s too busy. Because there’s a contract. Because you’re not important enough.

Because it isn’t cost-efficient.

“Did they tell you that?”

“No,” Danny said. “I just… I can see how it’s going to go. That’s all.”

“Oh.” TJ’s voice was thin, quiet. He shifted, overlarge scrubs rustling. “So… so that’s why you’re stealing me?”

Danny winced. “I’m not – TJ, stop saying that. I’m taking you to a different Agency where you’ll be taken care of properly. It’ll all be okay, all right?”

Danny wished the Path hadn’t overheard. He wished this conversation could have held off until they’d stopped; he couldn’t assess the Path’s body language. Fuck, Julie had said that word, described this as ‘stealing’, and maybe now it had stuck in TJ’s head.

He wondered what the hell went on in that head sometimes; how did a Path see the world? Not how normal people did, clearly. Obviously a Path wasn’t really capable of understanding right and wrong, and the law, and morality. But... TJ had seemed to understand a lot of the things he’d read for the court. He definitely understood what ‘stealing’ meant.  

Danny was half waiting for TJ to challenge him on it. They’d worked a case a few weeks ago, theft of a car and some power tools – perhaps TJ was now going to ask Danny what made this any different, why they’d helped send that person to jail but now Danny was taking off with Agency property.

Danny sighed. No, you idiot, he thought, exasperated with himself. Poor fucking kid’s probably a bit preoccupied with the whole ‘they’ll kill you’ thing. Pull your head out of your ass.

In the end TJ said neither of those things, though.

“You’re still going to be in… in a lot of trouble,” he said instead.

Danny laughed, a harsh, coughing noise that surprised him. “Yeah, kid, probably.”

“What if you can’t find another Agency?” TJ sounded calm, reasonable.

Danny resisted the urge to swear. It’s a good fucking question, isn’t it? “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s… it’ll be fine. It’s not your problem to worry about, kid, so just - ”

Danny’s phone rang.

The sound filled up the car, irritatingly cheerful electronic trilling. Danny knew who that would be; didn’t even need to look at the display. TJ subsided into silence. Danny drummed his gloved fingers on the wheel, gritted his teeth, wished he had a cigarette or a coffee or fucking something to calm himself down with.

If Danny really intended to make a run for it, he ought to throw that phone out the window and keep on driving, he knew. People could track you with those things.

But keep on driving to where? In the end, Danny didn’t have any real idea what he was doing. And the only one around to talk to in this car was a Path.

So he took a hand off the wheel and hit the button that answered the phone.

“Danny,” Julie said, her voice filled with relief. “Thanks for picking up.”

Danny made a noncommittal noise.

“Danny, where are you?”

He glanced around. Danny hadn’t driven in this area much; he didn’t know what the street was called, or even really what suburb he was in. Not much in the way of signs to help him out, either. But did that matter? He might have answered the phone, but Danny wasn’t at the point where he was willing to give Julie either of those things.

“You’re sending people out after me,” he accused her. “The cops, or, or an Agency acquisition van.”

“Danny, I want to help you, I - ”

“If you wanted to help me you could have heard me out,” he snapped. “But you’re not going to, I can fucking tell.”

“Hey, you’re the one who hung up on me, remember?”

“Yeah, cause you weren’t listening to me!” Danny said. The scenery sped by, a patchwork of industrial-looking squat concrete blocks of buildings and what looked to be neglected empty land, filled with scrubby trees and patchy fields that were more weeds than grass. He tried to keep his voice down, keep calm, but it grated and wobbled in his ears regardless. “You didn’t have any intention of helping me with TJ, you just lied to me to shut me up when you said you would fix it.”

Julie was better at lying than she’d been before, but the seam was still visible to Danny. The point where she had just started agreeing with anything he said in an attempt to get him to do what she wanted.

“No, Danny,” she protested. “Look, Danny, I just – I don’t know this Path, okay, I don’t know what your situation is, but I want to help you. So if you want to talk about the Path, okay, let’s talk. I’m listening.”

“Talk about….” Danny glanced up to the mirror. At TJ still sitting there, turning his head this way and that.  Making Danny think vaguely of a baby bird, head too big for its little neck. Listening to everything they were both saying. “Look, he’s not dangerous or anything.”

“Okay. Danny, is… is TJ…” Julie’s voice hushed, suddenly, as if she was talking about something obscene. “Danny, are we talking about the child of someone you know? Or your child? Because…”

“Wh- No!” Danny yelped. He took his eyes off the road to gape, horrified, at Julie’s name on the display for a moment. The car wavered underneath him and he dragged his eyes back up.  

That was… a thought. Jesus Christ. It had somehow never occurred to him. Danny wasn’t anywhere near the point in his life where he’d be contemplating babies, but even so – even so – how had he never thought of that? That if he did, there was a non-zero chance they might be…

“I’m talking about an adult Path,” he said, to Julie, forcefully. “Not a child. He’s not related to me in any form. He’s my Path from work, just a regular assigned… fuck, you know what I mean!”

“Uh huh,” Julie said cautiously. She sounded relieved; papers shuffled again, and Danny suspected he could hear her typing something. “All right. What class is he?”

Danny let out a breath, trying to calm down. “E,” he said. “We worked in, um, Criminal Justice. The courtroom mostly, sometimes the police station.” He chewed his lip, considered and rejected two or three different sentence beginnings. “It’s fucking hard work, OK? It’s difficult, the readings are always long, and it’s bloody dark stuff sometimes, and they never….”  

“Class E? OK,” Julie said, gently. “Where is, um, TJ now, Danny?”

“He’s here,” Danny said, exasperated. “I can see him right now, okay, he’s still got his blindfold on and he’s in the back seat and he’s not causing any trouble. He’s never caused any trouble, even though he’s been treated like shit.”  

“He’s in the back? He can’t touch you?”

“What? No?” Danny glanced in the mirror. Still just a puzzled TJ, seatbelt done up, eyes covered, hands in his lap.

“Okay, good.” Julie started speaking rapidly, urgently. “Danny, I really really need you to pull up by the road and wait for me. Okay? You’re not going to understand why, but we did this in training, right, so I need you to trust me. You’re probably confused and that’s okay…”

“What?”

“Danny, you know that Paths can affect people’s minds - ”

“You think he got to me? You think that’s what this is about?” Danny shook his head, bottling up the stream of swearwords that wanted to escape. Julie thought that TJ was somehow making Danny do this? TJ, visibly upset by the change in routine, shaking and frightened at getting into a slightly different car, who’d been in a hospital bed with tubes everywhere and dried blood all over his face just a week ago? “You’re wrong. Dead wrong. How would that even - ”

“I know that what you’re doing probably makes perfect sense to you now,” Julie interrupted, her voice somehow managing to be both soothing and urgent. “You just have to trust me that it doesn’t, Danny, okay? You can’t rely on your instincts now.”

“Fuck’s sake, Julie - ”

“Nothing is the way it seems. It’s not your fault. You’re in the presence of a Path; they get into your head, they can make you think or feel whatever they - ”

Danny growled in frustration. He hauled on the steering wheel, hand over hand awkwardly, to navigate a turn. “Julie, cut the crap! Trying your scaremongering bullshit on me like I’m some clueless layperson? He never fucking touched me, and he’s fucking E, he’s not even capable of that!”

“Danny, you may not know as much about him as you think you do,” Julie insisted. Some of the cool soothing quality frayed away from her voice. “Come on! I know it’s hard but think. You know why we take the precautions we do, you know the damage that can be done! It’s not your fault, you’re confused. Once you tell me where you are - ”

“I’m not confused,”Danny snapped. He felt sick. If this was what Julie thought, there was no chance of this turning out all right. Not within any Agency. It didn’t make sense but had that ever mattered to Agency management? “I’ve never been confused.”

“- once I know where you are I can help you, okay? We can sort it all out, for you and TJ both, it will all - ”

“Sort it out!” Danny snarled. “Oh, yeah, sure you fucking will! I know how you’ll sort TJ out!”

“Danny - ”

“This is bullshit! I’m not going back to your goddamn cold-blooded, two-faced – uh- ”

Danny caught his breath. The metal barrier that lined the road, painted with yellow chevrons, was coming up fast – way too fast.

Fuck, there was a turn, he hadn’t seen -

He slammed his foot onto the brake pedal and wrenched the wheel to the left; metal grated and squealed in protest.  The car was sliding – Danny’s seatbelt was digging painfully into his ribs as the world swung back and forth violently, and he realised in the half-second he had that the car was fish-tailing as it hurtled towards the metal barrier and the downward slope that lay beyond.

Somewhere in the background, Julie’s voice was asking something, pitched high with concern, but it was drowned out by the screeching of tires and the sound of TJ’s frightened yell from the backseat.

He tried to make sense of what was happening, mind floundering. This wasn’t how things normally went when TJ left his cubby for work, or meals, or checkups. The wrong order of doing things, the wrong time, the wrong day. Had TJ somehow confused things, made a mistake? He’d felt wrong - weak and confused and shaky - for days, ever since he’d left the infirmary, but not like this. Were they changing things or had TJ forgotten this, too?

Danny made an impatient noise, took the shoes away, pushed the shirt insistently into his hands. “Sorry, kid, I know it’s all out of whack,” he said, his rough voice oddly quiet and yet urgent. “But this is really important, okay? Just put them on, quickly.”

“O-okay,” TJ agreed, fingers fumbling to find the hem of the scrubs.

Danny shifted from foot to foot, as if the bare moments that it took TJ to pull on the shirt and the shoes was too long to wait. Then he grabbed TJ by the upper arm and took him out of the cubby, into the corridors of the Agency.

Danny was moving unusually fast - TJ lagged behind for a moment before realising that and matching his speed. Quick short steps, Danny’s fingers a firm but gentle pressure on TJ’s shoulder.

It was quiet, quieter than TJ had ever known the Agency to be. The whirr of fans and air-conditioning, the faint sound of a car from outside, no other voices or footsteps to distract from the soft background hum of the building itself. Maybe it was really early. TJ was momentarily soothed by the familiar pattern of turns, even if they were going by very fast.

Danny didn’t pause before the exit, like he normally did; there was nobody there to call out to him or to accept whatever paperwork or authorisation he usually gave them. He went straight out through the doors, towing TJ by the arm. His breathing seemed to be a bit fast.

Outside, it was damp and a little cool; there wasn’t much traffic noise or traffic smell.

Danny took TJ through the parking lot, stopped with a murmured word and opened the car doors, all as normal. He went to guide TJ into the car as usual, hands on shoulder and head, but there TJ baulked.

This was wrong. The car was wrong. The door wasn’t the right size, the seat was too low, and the inside of the car smelled odd.

“This isn’t – the car,” he said jerkily, frozen half in and half out of the door. Unease twisted and fluttered in his stomach, and Danny had said it would be okay and that this was important, but, but it was all so weird. The clothing, the quiet Agency, Danny’s silence and palpable tension. Now this? Something was wrong.

Danny pushed TJ’s shoulder and he folded, going forwards into the strange-smelling darkness.

“Yes, it is,” Danny said shortly.

“No, it’s not?” TJ protested, his hands fussing in his lap, flinching away as he touched the unfamiliar fabric of the car seat. He twisted his fingers into the hem of his shirt. “’m sorry…”

Danny clicked his tongue, pulled the seatbelt over TJ. “Shh. It’s okay. It’s my car.”

“Oh.” TJ sniffed again, and realised that the car, though it was definitely not an Agency one, did smell slightly familiar. Danny smelled like this sometimes, and so did people in memories TJ had read. Cigarette smoke?

With that realisation, he relaxed a little into the seat.

“Attaboy,” Danny said absently, patting him on the shoulder. “Fuck. Fuck, here we go.”

And then he was gone, the car door slamming and closing TJ into the car while Danny walked around to the front. The car was noisy as it started, and Danny muttered something unintelligible and irritable-sounding as it started to move.

“Are we going to a job?” TJ asked, a little breathlessly, after the car had been moving for a while and Danny had stopped making the irritable noises.

“Not exactly,” Danny said. He sighed. “How are you doing today?”

“Fine,” TJ said, like he was supposed to. And he was, fine. He’d had nightmares but he’d already forgotten them all.  His head and chest hurt, but vaguely, formlessly.

“All right. That’s something. Jesus.” Danny sounded, if anything, more stressed than he had in the Agency, but when he spoke again TJ thought he was probably trying to hide it. “You’re not going to need to read anything today. It’s too complicated to explain what we’re doing, but everything’s going to be fine. Just sit tight back there, kid, okay? We’re probably going to be driving for a while, so go back to sleep if you want.”

“Okay,” TJ said, tentatively. “I’ll try.”

He closed his eyes behind the blindfold, tried to nestle his head against the unfamiliar seat, but he didn’t think he was going to be able to sleep. He was tired but not drowsy anymore, unsettled and fragile. It was as if TJ was a too-full glass of liquid, and the flurry of activity had disturbed it, and if he moved too suddenly it sloshed about.

The car drove on, into the unknown; it didn’t feel the same as Agency cars, not as smooth, different noises. No readings today. He hugged that thought to his chest, and hoped that Danny was right.

TJ shifted, startled, when some time later Danny started speaking again. He’d missed it – had that been an order for TJ? Danny was going to have to repeat himself, but that was okay, he probably wouldn’t mind…

The car filled with the sound of a ringtone. Oh. Danny was just making a phone call. TJ let his head fall back against the seat again.

The voice that came out of the speakers next was polished, rapid-fire.

“Hello, this is Juliette Nguyen, Southwest Star Telepathic Solutions counselling department. How can I help you?”

“Ah… hey,” Danny said, sounding pained, awkward, his voice suddenly higher-pitched and more uncertain than TJ had ever heard it. “Julie, hi. It’s, um, it’s Danny Tavai.”

The new voice was silent for a moment.

Danny breathed out, sharply, as if something had hurt him. “You know, um, Danny, I was in your class at -”

“Danny!” the voice was abruptly much brighter, less polished, containing the edge of a chuckle. “Of course, Danny, hi! Good to hear from you!”

“Yeah, hi,” Danny agreed, sounding relieved and embarrassed in equal measures.

“Man, it’s been a while,” the voice of Julie went on. “We should really get the gang together for coffee sometime. I’m just so busy lately, I never find the time to message you all… Are you still at that Agency in, where was it…”

“Nah, nah,” Danny said, interrupting, dismissive. “I’ve, uh, had a few job changes in the last few years. Congrats on your, uh, promotion, by the way.”

“Thank you,” Julie said, a touch of the polish coming back, smugness detectable even to TJ. “Are you still in the industry?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I am.” He coughed. “It, uh…”

“How’s it going?”

There was a long silence, filled only with the ubiquitous hum and rattle and distant roar of the car.

“Hey. Danny? I think you cut out.”

“No, I’m here.” Danny’s voice was low, rough. He chuckled; it sounded forced. “I just… honestly, Julie, me and the industry… it’s not going so great.”

TJ shifted his head against the seat, brow furrowing under the blindfold. Danny was upset. What was Danny upset about? What did he mean? By ‘the industry’ she must mean Agencies, but that didn’t make sense. Danny was a great handler. The best handler.

Deep down, TJ did know that might not strictly be true; Danny wasn’t all that popular with the other handlers. He pushed that thought away as being disloyal. Danny was a great handler, he told himself defiantly, people at the Agency just didn’t have the knack of translating from Danny-speak. If they did they’d know.

The woman on the phone sounded uncertain, now, too. “Oh. I’m… sorry to hear that…”

“Yeah, it, uh… the current Agency I’m working for, it’s going under,” Danny said. “I’d call it mismanagement, and to be honest with you, that’s not even…” He heaved a sigh, and there was a thump, like a fist on plastic. His voice distorted. “Fucking hell. Sorry, Julie…”

“No, no, it’s fine!” Her voice, electronic and faded, overlapping the flood of Danny’s words.

“Look, I know none of this is your fucking problem, and I’m such a shitty fucking friend we haven’t spoken in years, and you’re way too important nowadays for random fuckwits to just call you up with problems. So I know I’m pushing it, all right, I know and I’m sorry.”

“Hey, whoa -”

“I wouldn’t call you if it wasn’t important. I’m just – I need your help. Or, well, I need to ask you a question, a really fucking weird question...”

“It’s okay, Danny,” Julie said, sounding worried, a little hesitant. “I’ll help if I can. Do you… I mean, look, I don’t know if we’re hiring right now. No promises, but I could definitely put in a good word if you apply to anything…?”

TJ took a sharp breath, fingers clutching at his scrub shirt. Danny leaving? Danny getting another job, somewhere else, with this shiny-voiced woman he already seemed to know and like? The Agency ‘going under’ – under what? he wondered, panicky. Did Danny mean the Agency was going away? Could that even happen?

“No, no,” Danny protested. “That’s not… that’s not why I’m calling. I mean... thank you. That, uh, that means a lot. But I’m not job-hunting.”

Julie sounded surprised. TJ tried to breathe properly again.

“So what… what can I do for you, Danny? You said you had a question?”

“I have…” Danny took a deep breath, in the front seat of the car. “You’re going to think I’m fucking crazy, all right, but I didn’t know what else to do, and I’m sure we can – we can figure something out together, right?”

“Sure,” Julie said, cautiously. Rustling came through the speakers, as if Julie was moving things around in a hurry. “What’d you do?”

The silence in the car continued for another long minute. Something at the front clicked and beeped impatiently until Danny turned it off. The car took a few turns, left then right then right again; TJ let himself sway with the movement, one hand hooked into the seatbelt.

“If you got hold of a Path,” Danny blurted. “Through, I don’t know, weird circumstances. You’d still take it, right? Your agency would take him on? What would you do with him?”

“Weird circumstances?” Julie’s voice sharpened, shifted up in pitch. “Danny, what on earth…”

The car roared a little louder; took another turn, without the warning beeps. Danny’s voice was low, stammering and falling over itself. “Please, Julie, I know this is really fucking screwy, but hear me out, okay? If there was this, um, this Path, and it was going to be d-decommissioned or it was sick or something like that, and the Agency it came from was going under, and it somehow ended up in your facility then you c-could assess it and see whether…”

“Danny.” Julie’s voice was flat now. “It’s starting to sound like you’ve stolen a Path.”

TJ’s fingers curled around the seatbelt.

“Look, it’s not like I fucking…. Broke in with bolt cutters in the dead of the night!” Danny snapped. “He was in one Agency, later on he’ll be in another! I have good reason to – I just thought, if I fudged some paperwork on my side, I could get you contracts and ID numbers and, and, and…”

Danny’s voice trailed away into the crackling silence on the other end of the phone line.

“Look, Julie, if you’d worked in this place you’d understand,” Danny said eventually, his voice defiant. “It’s – it’s stupid and wasteful and cruel, and I can’t fucking… do anything! I just need – I just need to fix this part, okay? Just this one thing, and I know I’ve thrown my career down the drain, all right, I fucking know. But I need to fix it.”  

It’s starting to sound like you’ve stolen a Path. TJ swayed in the backseat, braced himself against the door with one hand as his head spun. Had TJ been stolen? Julie seemed to think so. Danny seemed to be having trouble arguing with it. Am I the thing he needs to fix? Why?

Sudden movement and shuffling from the speakers, and Julie had launched into talking again, smooth and rapid and efficient.

“All right, Danny, you’ve gotten yourself into some really impressive trouble this time, but thank God you called me,” she said briskly. “I can definitely help you.”

“You can?” Danny hissed in a breath. “How are you gonna…”

“First. Where is the Path? Is it with you?”

“Yes, I have him here.” Danny sounded exasperated. “I’m trying to do this as by-the-book as I can, Julie, I’m not going to wander off and leave a Path somewhere unsupervised. How stupid do you think I - ”

“Are you driving? Where are you?”

Danny paused. “Yes,” he said slowly, grudgingly. “Why?”

“You need to stop. Just like, pull up somewhere, doesn’t matter where.”

“Why?”

“I’m going to send some people to meet you. Pull up somewhere and stay on the line with me, okay?”

Danny groaned. “Julie, I was hoping you and I could fix this by ourselves without involving anybody else...”

“That’d be... difficult, Danny, I don’t usually deal directly with acquisitions, or other Agencies. What was the address of your Agency?”

TJ could hear Danny’s hands tapping on the plastic of the steering wheel again. The sun was starting to shine through the car window, warm on TJ’s face through the blindfold.

“I’m not dealing with them again,” Danny said, through gritted teeth. “The Path’s not going back there. Don’t call them, Julie.”

“I’m not saying you have to stay, Danny, but I -”

“I’ll talk to them later if I have to, but not now,” Danny snapped. “First I wanted to drop him off with your lot!”

“You asked me to fix this, Danny, how about you let me try?” she shot back. “I’m too far away to meet you in person. You are driving around God knows where with a stolen Path in your car, you know this isn’t going anywhere as long as you stay out there outside Agency control. You need help.”  

“I know, but -”

Julie’s voice softened. “It’s okay, Danny, you called the right person. Let me handle it. I can call in some favours and I can sort this whole thing out, but you have to trust me. If you don’t tell me where you are, I can’t do anything.”

The car sped up, engine complaining as Danny pushed it harder. Something rattled in the boot, and TJ caught a startled breath.

“No,” Danny said firmly. “No, Julie, this isn’t going to work. If I take the Path back to the original agency, they’re going to kill him. That’s why I did this whole fucking… going back there doesn’t fix this. He needs to go to someone else. You need to promise me that’ll happen.”

The pause was only half a second. “Yes, you’re right. Of course. I’ll manage something. He’ll be fine, Danny, I’ll figure it out, I promise.”

The car swerved, taking a corner too fast.

There was silence for a long, horrible moment. Then TJ heard the sound of someone shifting amongst bits of debris and fabric. A swearword, drawn out and slurred.

TJ shifted in place, trying to find a position that wasn’t as uncomfortable, plucked awkwardly at the seatbelt strap. It hurt. He wanted it off. He wanted to get out of the car.

What had happened? Danny had been driving, and arguing with his friend from the other Agency, and then – and then – had the car crashed? Was that what had happened, that brief couple of seconds of being thrown about violently?

The phone voice was silent now. The car creaked, plinked, tiny noises in the quiet. Danny’s breathing was loud and harsh panting, from somewhere in front, that TJ could hear even over his own breaths.

“Danny?” TJ asked again.

Danny grunted, moved, and made an odd noise. High-pitched, wordless. Was he hurt?

“Kid,” Danny’s voice said, hoarse and faint. “Oh, fuck. Ah, shit – damn it – damn it – I can’t…” He puffed for breath, the movement subsiding. “TJ, are you – are you – hurt?”

“No,” TJ said, frightened. He wasn’t, was he? He patted his arms, shifted his legs to make sure he was telling the truth. He ached, the seatbelt hurt, but he had had worse.  Nothing was injured. “No, I’m not – are – are you?”

“Fuck. Yeah. Yeah, I – TJ, I can’t come and – come and let you out, s’rry, fucking… fucking legs’re… you should, y’should….”

Danny’s words trailed away, became unintelligible. TJ felt cold fear starting to creep around his chest and stomach. Danny was not supposed to sound like that. Danny was supposed to tell TJ what to do.

“Danny?”

No answer, only breathing.

TJ gripped tight to the seatbelt, the fabric smooth and shiny-feeling under the pads of his fingers, tiny threads catching under his nails. He gulped for breath, panic rising.

“Danny, I should what?” he wailed. “What am I supposed to do? Danny? Danny, you need to tell me what to do next!”

TJ’s voice bounced back at him from the small enclosed space, too loud, too much, and Danny still didn’t answer. Something clinked; TJ’s faded secondhand memories filled in possibilities. Broken glass, stone, metal? The broken glass in his mind’s eye was painted with blood.

No, he thought, shoving that back forcefully. No. There isn’t. You’d smell it, wouldn’t you?

The car was so hot. TJ thought he could still feel sunlight on his upper arm and his face.

What had Danny been about to say? He’d said that he couldn’t get TJ out of the car. Then that TJ should do something. Maybe he’d meant… TJ should get himself out?

TJ’s fingers found the fastening of the seatbelt. How did you… He fumbled, found the right place to push, click.

He found himself sliding across the tilted carseat, grabbing at the door to hold himself still, as the belt slithered back to wherever it went with a whirring noise. Okay. Okay, now open the door. He tried, twice, fumbling at the handle. People did this all the time, right, they were supposed to open from the inside, it shouldn’t be – that – difficult -

He got it open a crack, but it closed again immediately, the weight of metal pushing it shut. TJ chewed his lip, took a deep breath… then reached up, and pushed his blindfold up over his forehead before he could change his mind.

The sun was bright, pouring in through the car window, little motes of dust twirling and catching golden in the air in front of his face. TJ squinted, blinking down at his clenched fist in his lap until he could see well enough through half-closed eyes to work the door handle.

Eventually he clambered out of the car, thin-soled shoes slipping over the rubber and plastic, and stood beside it.

It was… too much, out here. Too bright. TJ shaded his eyes, holding his hands up like a child pretending to use binoculars, blinking aside tears.

The sky was… the sky was… too big. He whimpered involuntarily, stumbling away from the car. A vast bowl of blueness that might suck him up and into it if he wasn’t careful, if he looked at too much at once. He carefully directed his gaze downwards, focusing on one thing at a time.

The ground was yellow-green grass, knee-high in places and mixed with weeds. It was torn up in great gouges leading up to the car, ridges of mud with grass blades pressed into them.

The ground sloped away from the car, upwards to – TJ chanced a quick glance up, to see a metal barrier hidden behind more weeds, and then more hill and trees further along. The road was that way. He was dimly surprised at how far away it was.

The car was a dull blue, boxy and shiny like a beetle, lying all askew with its right wheels half-buried in dirty water and weeds and the left wheels not even touching the ground.

The car crashed, he found himself thinking, numbly. It hit the barrier and went over it. Now it’s lying on its side, on the slope. There’s broken glass and plastic on the ground. His arm hurt, and his head. He couldn’t see Danny at all…

TJ realised that his lips had been moving, half muttering. He shook his head, frustrated with himself. He pulled the blindfold off his forehead, scrunching it up in hands that shook. Stop it! This isn’t a memory. Nobody needs you to say it out loud. This is real. This is happening now.

And there’s no ‘he’. There’s just you.

All there is here is you. Danny can’t tell you what to do now.

He walked, dreamlike, around the car, the mud soaking through his thin shoes and getting his feet wet. The front of it was crumpled – cars weren’t supposed to do that – shards of orange plastic mixed garishly with the grass.

And Danny was in the front seat. At the first glimpse of him, a brief flash of dark fuzzy hair and a bulky shoulder in a uniform visible through the broken window, TJ gasped and squeezed his eyes shut. That was wrong! TJ wasn’t supposed to see Danny!

He was still in the car, he couldn’t get out. Did he look hurt? It was wrong that TJ had seen him!

TJ stood there, eyelids scrunched closed, in the hot dark dizziness of the sunshine. The world was spinning slowly around him.

I can’t look at Danny. What if I take his soul?

TJ didn’t have the faintest idea… how exactly a Path would take a soul. People, both handlers and his caretakers back when he was a child, had always acted like it was something he would just sort of instinctively be able to do. But he didn’t know how, so that meant he also didn’t know how to not do it, right?

But Danny was hurt. TJ didn’t know how badly. What if he needed TJ to do something?  

“Danny?” TJ quavered. “Danny, I’m out of the car.”

There was no answer, again. Was Danny unconscious? Or awake and not able to talk for some reason? TJ caught his breath in a panicked sob.

Think, okay, think. He needed someone to tell him what to do, but there was no-one.

So… if someone told him to do something… what would that be? Could he guess? Figure out what the right thing to do was even if there was nobody to tell him?

Simplest, safest answer was almost always to sit still and wait. If you hadn’t been ordered to do anything, that was the same as being ordered to do nothing. Right? So TJ should just sit down here, in this ditch, and wait for somebody from the Agency to come and get him.

He did so, wobbling a little bit, sinking down onto his rump on the uneven slope. He folded his hands in his lap, trying to calm his racing heart. It was going to be okay. Even if TJ and Danny were alone now, it wouldn’t be for long. The Agency would send people to get them. It might take time, but they would.

Only.

Only Danny was hurt.

What if by the time the Agency got here he was…. Worse? What if he died? What if, while TJ was just sitting here in the dirt, Danny was bleeding or suffocating or dying? What if the Agency never came – TJ remembered with sudden painful clarity that Danny had never told Julie where he was.

He whimpered, his hands twisting in his shirt. He didn’t know what to do!

What do I think Danny would say if he could?  

Well if I knew what he’d tell me to do I would just do that, wouldn’t I!

This was so hard. What did Danny say when things were hard? He would swear and be annoyed but he’d tell TJ to push through the pain and do the job in front of him. He’d tell TJ he was tough and he could do this.

Come on, TJ, he thought at himself, firmly, trying to infuse his inner voice with Danny-ness. Think it through, step by step. Easy does it. TJ was okay at following other people’s trains of thought, but this was so much harder.

If sitting still and waiting wasn’t the best answer, what else could TJ do? He could… find somebody else, another handler. Could he use the phone Danny had been using to call Julie again? Or the Agency?

TJ carefully, slowly cracked his eyelids open, and peered at the car. Sunlight dazzled off glass and metal. Somewhere in there was Danny’s phone… right? Could TJ use it? Oh, that felt wrong, that felt like a bad Path thing to do, but it was the only way TJ could imagine of finding another handler.

Of course, it might be broken. And TJ didn’t know how if he could even find it, let alone use it to call someone specific...  

He could get up and go walk for help.  

TJ slid his eyes closed, to better contemplate this thought. It also felt… kind of bad. Danny’s voice echoed in his head. I’m not going to go off and leave a Path unsupervised. An unsupervised TJ was a bad thing that needed to be kept away from people, right?

But the Agency didn’t know where TJ and Danny were, and they wouldn’t know unless they happened to find them. Right? So TJ needed to go somewhere he’d be more likely to get found. Then the Agency would know where Danny was and they could save him!

TJ took a deep breath, set his shoulders firmly. All right.

He got to his feet.

“Hey Danny,” he said, voice wobbling only slightly. He looked deliberately away from the car, as if he was talking to the stand of weeds a few feet away, and pitched his voice loud enough to carry. “I’m going to walk up to the road, and find some people. Okay? Everything – everything is going to be all right. Don’t worry, I’ll put my blindfold back on as soon as anybody’s around, and I won’t touch anyone, and, and, and I’ll be careful.”

He waited for long enough to know Danny wasn’t going to say anything.

“Pull his weight?” Danny snarled. We can’t afford? If this is a money thing, does this asshole think putting Paths in the infirmary on a fortnightly basis is cheap? He made a frustrated gesture in the air. “He’ll do two or three days of readings, tops, and then he’ll be right back in the infirmary again. He’ll pull exactly zero weight then!”

“Tavai, I’ve heard your thoughts on this, but there’s nothing else to be done,” Ethan said. His gaze flicked to his computer screen and then back to Danny, clearly wanting to get rid of him.

Sometimes Danny thought that the higher-ups thought of Paths like the computers they sat in front of all day. Not working, shut it down and fire it back up again immediately. They’re fucking flesh and blood, you utter gaping asshole, you brainless idiot, it doesn’t work like that.

He took a deep breath, pushed his anger down to boil and churn away in his belly. No matter how much Danny wanted to pace back and forth in front of this stupid bureacrat’s desk and give him a piece of his mind, that wouldn’t achieve anything. He made an attempt to speak calmly. “Look, Ethan, you think I’m exaggerating here, but am I usually wrong? If you’d – ”

Ethan pushed away from the desk with a violent movement, glaring up at Danny.

“Jesus Christ, Tavai, I don’t have time for this,” he snapped. “Do I look like I care?”

Ethan didn’t usually raise his voice, but he did now. Danny was surprised enough to let himself be talked over.

“This is not important! I honestly cannot express how low on my priority list this is right now.” Ethan gestured around to indicate the Agency building as a whole, frustration colouring his movements. “Look around, Tavai! Lift your nose from your own work for half a second! Read the writing on the wall. Everybody has bigger problems to worry about than your broken-down fourth-rate Class E. Frankly, so should you! So go find one of them and stop bothering me.”

What the fuck?

“This is my job,” Danny said, slowly, his own voice a little distant in his ears. “What do you mean I should…”

“Not for much longer, it probably isn’t,” Ethan said, exasperatedly. At Danny’s look of confusion and outrage, he seemed almost to deflate.

“Damn it,” he sighed. “You must be the only…” He shook his head.  Pulled himself closer to his desk and started to rearrange himself, hands folded in front of him on the desk, sympathetic expression. “Look. Tavai. Danny. The Agency’s going under. You must have noticed that.”

“I – yes,” Danny said. “For a long time, it’s been…”

Ethan waved a hand as if to shoo that thought away. “Well, it’s a few weeks off being official. As far as I know, the contracts, the assets, the Paths – they’ll end up being divided up among whichever of the other Agencies wins the negotiations. I think Southwest is getting the lion’s share at present, but that might change. Who knows.” He cleared his throat. “My point is. Your dedication to doing your job is commendable, but nobody would blame you if your energies were being directed more towards coming out of this in a good position. Everybody else’s are.”

Danny stood there, in the office, and felt the most useless he had ever felt in his life. He grasped after the shreds of his anger, but it seemed to have disappeared, leaving him empty and stunned instead. He had no idea what to do with his hands; they hung at his sides.

“Okay,” he said, rallying a little. “Sure. I see your point. But if that’s the case why does it matter if my Path goes back to work or not? Surely I can – ”

Ethan closed his eyes, seeming to steel himself. “Orders are orders. This place is still running, Paths are still working, we need yours to pull his weight. And I need you to get out of my office and let me work. Keep your head down. Whatever.”

“But the Path will overload again,” Danny insisted. “How is that keeping my head…”

Ethan shook his head, as if he couldn’t quite believe Danny. “Not my problem. And it won’t be yours either, not for long. Let it go, Danny. Either he’s strong enough to take it, or he’s not. Assuming he is, he’ll get signed over to whichever Agency, and it’ll be their problem.”

A stray thought crossed Danny’s mind, would they take us together? A unit? Which was a stupid thought.  Danny didn’t have the clout to insist on something like that, and even if he did, people pulled strings so they could get Class A’s, strong Paths and prestigious assignments. They didn’t pull strings to stay with burned-out broken-down fourth-rate Class E’s…

It got overtaken by another, worse thought. Either he’s strong enough, or he’s not…

“Take my advice, Danny. Go make some calls and set up some job interviews,” Ethan said, all fake warmth and good will, and Danny wanted so badly to punch him in his smug face, tell him exactly where he could shove his condescencion. “Let it go. And get out of my office.”

Danny left.

There seemed little else to do.

He sat alone at his desk, staring at the blank wall, turning a pen over and over and over in his fingers.

Danny ought to be pleased to have a chance to leave this place. Wasn’t he always saying what a shithole it was? An excuse to leave, and it wasn’t that Danny couldn’t hack it or couldn’t work with people, it was just that the company went under. It happened. Try again, somewhere new, fresh start.

Why did he feel this desperate, irrational rejection of the idea?

Because TJ won’t make it.

You don’t know that, he tried to tell himself. He’s tough, and if he can just get through the next few weeks, maybe another Agency…

Danny swore out loud, and it didn’t help. He stood up, turned and threw the pen at the wall - furious, and abruptly close to tears.

Danny knew better than that. How many more collapses and breakdowns, mindwipes and infirmary stays, would TJ get? Before it was, quietly, more cost effective to just… not? What other Agency was going to want to take that on?

Yeah, well, that’ll happen whether I’m here to see it or not, he thought, roughly. What am I gonna be able to do about it? They don’t fucking listen to me now.

So maybe Ethan was right.

Maybe it was time to let this go.

There was no reason for that to make Danny feel like this, sick and furious and like he was the scum of the earth.  

Gloved fingers pried at his, trying to make him let go.

TJ whimpered. He curled his hands up into fists instead, still folded up as small as he could get. The hands, large and warm, kept on touching him – pushing his arms away from his head, smoothing his hair back into place, patting his shoulder roughly and insistently.

“Come on, kid, where are you? Let go of your fucking… come on back, now. There. Hey. Kid.”

TJ took a deep breath, letting himself be pushed and dislodged from his tight ball, becoming more aware of where he was. He was sitting in a hard plastic chair. His mouth tasted of blood, and his breathing was clogged and heavy with the iron-thick smell of it. The warm bulk of his handler, Danny, was leaning over him, nudging him back into reality with rough touches and words.

“Hurts,” he whispered.

“Yeah, kid, I know.” Danny’s hand thumped him on the shoulder, shook him gently. “Shit, for a second there I thought...” He made a harsh noise, breath leaving his mouth in a hiss. “Never mind. You did good. Did real good this morning.”

But… TJ sniffled, feeling something warm and wet drip onto the back of his hand, where he’d placed it onto his knee. I messed everything up, again. If I did good why do I hurt so much?

He had a dim idea that courtroom days hadn’t always been like this. That they used to just be difficult work, not something that left him hurting this badly and wishing desperately that the day would be over. He thought – the memories he waded through used to hurt less, didn’t get into his dreams and fester as much. It felt like so long ago.

“Did I really?” he asked, his voice a low croak. Colours and shapes seemed to swirl behind his eyes, the normal darkness of the blindfold sickly whirling. “But I – ”

“You did fine,” Danny snapped. “Here. Drink this.”

Something was pushed into his hands, smooth and cool and beaded with moisture. TJ sat up obediently and lifted it to his mouth. Just water, cool and flat-tasting, immediately tinged with blood.

He swallowed it past a surge of nausea. “Do I have to go back in?” he asked, pitifully, miserably. It seemed an insurmountable certainty, looming over him, impossible to contemplate and yet inevitable. TJ didn’t think he could go back to another reading. But he had been thinking that for a really long time and yet…

“Fuck no!” Danny’s hand slapped on the table surface, making TJ jump. “Once you look alive again, we’re going back to the goddamn Agency, and mother-fucking Ethan can just shove it up his ass. I send you back in for another reading, it’ll just fucking overload you. Again.”

“Ethan?” TJ said, bewildered. “Again?” That had been a lot of words, he tried in vain to follow them. He thought it had been a no? His head hurt, so much, like it had been broken apart and now every time he moved it grated. “Do I… I don’t have to…”

He heard Danny give a heavy sigh. “No, kid, no more readings today.”

TJ sighed in relief, his shoulders slumping. He drank another swallow of the water. He could go home, to curl up in his cubby, maybe sleep, maybe later get clean… although he knew no amount of soap and warm water would get rid of the ugly, cruel thoughts bobbing about under the surface of his mind.

After a minute or so, when the water was nearly gone, there was a crackle and rustle of packaging, and something else was put into his hands, rough and sticky. TJ just held it, listlessly. It was probably a muesli bar. He didn’t want it.  

“Come on. You need the sugar.” Danny was moving around, putting things away and slapping folders around, making more noise than he needed to; he was angry, but not with TJ. “It’s your favourite. Apricot.”

TJ lifted it to his mouth absently… but then he paused.

“How do you know?” he asked, the words coming out thin but clear. The water had been maybe too cold; he found himself shivering. He clamped another hand on his wrist to hold the muesli bar still.

“What?” Danny’s phone was making blooping noises, rapid and impatient sounding. He sounded distracted.

“It is. My favourite. But how did you know that?”

“You told me.”

TJ tipped his head to one side, shuddered and rode out the wave of sick pain this caused. “Did I? I don’t remember…”

The beeping stopped.  

“Uh-huh. Eat the damn thing. We’re on our way in a minute.”

 ~

 TJ shifted in the bed, uncomfortably. The infirmary was… loud. Machinery noises, electric beeps, the sigh of air conditioning and ventilation filled his ears, nothing like the quiet and calm of his cubby.

Not loud enough to drown out the argument he’d heard outside the door of the room earlier, a familiar loud harsh voice and several softer ones. But loud enough that TJ couldn’t sleep now. His head still ached, though nowhere near as badly.

He could hear the scratching of a pen, too, from beside the bed.

“Handler?” he whispered into the darkness.

The scratching stopped. Danny grunted. “Yeah, kid?”

“Can I… ask you a question?”

A heavy sigh, the noise of someone shifting in a chair, the clink of something being put down. “Not getting any-fucking-where with this report, so you might as well. What?”

Maybe this was a bad idea. TJ hesitated, but this had been fluttering at the edge of his awareness for hours, and Danny wouldn’t be angry, would he? TJ felt pretty sure that Danny didn’t usually get angry, though he wasn’t quite sure where that conviction came from.

“Apricot muesli bars,” TJ said eventually. “How did you know?”

Another sigh, heavy through the nose. “You told me. Like I said.”

“But I didn’t?” TJ protested. “When did we talk about that?” Conversations about non-Agency things were rare enough that TJ treasured almost all of them, turned them over and over in his mind in his cubby at night. He was sure he would have remembered.  He couldn’t remember ever talking to Danny about his favourite anything.

“Yeah, well, it was months ago.”

TJ put his head back on the pillow and lay still for a while, listening to the beeping. He tried to count backwards. And it was a stupid thing to be worried about, really, but… no matter how he did it there just wasn’t enough room. TJ had 4 days at court a week, so – if he counted back from non-court days, estimated that way… how many weeks…

“You’ve only been my handler for a little while,” TJ said, weakly, confused. He was being disobedient, argumentative, a bad Path, and for something so petty… but this wasn’t making sense.  It hadn’t been months.

He could hear Danny shifting around, the hiss of his breath, fidgeting. His voice, when he spoke, was odd. Tired. Sad.

“Shit. I’ve been your handler for over a year now, TJ.”

TJ felt the way he did when he misjudged how many stairs there were, but worse, in his whole body, like a hole had opened up under his feet and he had fallen into it. He searched in his mind for more memories of Danny, a year’s worth of memories, and there was nothing there.

There was nothing else either. When exactly had he started doing readings for the courts? A long time, maybe a year, but… He recalled his last handler, a clipped voice that had never said more than two unnecessary words to him. When had she changed to Danny? What had his first court case reading been? If it had been a year that should be so many readings, way more, he remembered it being okay for a while and now it was so hard but what had happened in between?

“I – I don’t remember,” he whispered.

A heavy sigh, from Danny. The words came slowly, reluctantly. “No, kid. You don’t.”

“What – what happened? Why is – how do you – ” His hands curled up against the cool material of the infirmary sheets, and he shifted his head fretfully. He must have done something wrong, but what? It felt like there had been another TJ all along, one who’d done and said things that this TJ had no idea about. A machine somewhere beeped faster, and the bed seemed to be swaying underneath TJ even though he knew it wasn’t.

“Hey, hey, none of that, whoa,” Danny said sharply. The chair creaked, and big gloved hands took hold of TJ’s and pressed them still. “Shit, I shouldn’t have… look, kid, TJ. I know you don’t remember. But that’s OK.”

TJ shivered. His head hurt. He felt queasy. Everything was swaying and moving around him, nothing was solid or dependable. Except the hands on his.

“It is?”

Danny made an indecipherable noise, like half a chuckle or a huff and annoyance. His hands pinned TJ’s to the sheet over his chest.

“Yeah, kid, it is,” he said. “It’s fine. Don’t… worry about it. Everything’s working just as it’s supposed to, and you haven’t done anything wrong.”

TJ let his head loll back against the bed. Deep breath, in and out.

“Do you remember?” he whispered. “The whole year?”

Danny’s fingers squeezed his slightly. “Yeah, kid. I do.”

That was something. The year was not gone. It still existed, somewhere, even if TJ no longer had access to it.

“Then… I don’t need to?” TJ asked, quavering. “That’s why it’s okay? You remember it all so it’s okay if I don’t?”

“Sure. Yeah.” Danny’s voice was still odd, quiet, rough, tired. “I’ll always tell you whatever you need to do, so as long as you listen to me everything will be fine.”

TJ nodded, slowly. This was not his cubby, he didn’t know what was happening, nothing made sense. But there was a thread to hold onto, something solid and warm and real.

Danny knew what was going on, so TJ didn’t have to. As long as that was the case, everything would be fine.  

He heard a creak, a hiss of indrawn breath. His handler said nothing.

“You thought, he’s going to hate me. Yesterday.” TJ took a deep breath, feeling like he was walking forward into an unfamiliar room with no handler to tell him where to step. Nerves made him twist his fingers in the hem of his shirt, worrying at the seam, and he tipped his head to point it at where he thought his handler - Danny – was standing.

Danny shifted, the sound of clothing brushing against clothing, breath hissing out between his teeth. “Kid, you – ”

“You think I’m going to hate you because you made me sit still for the nurse, b-but – but I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t hate you, because you’re nice. You, you, you only m-make me do things when I’m s-supposed to do them but things get bad and, and then I panic and I don’t,” TJ babbled. “That’s my fault. I’m sorry. You’re always so nice to me the rest of the time. It’s been weeks and you haven’t even hit me once, not even when I mess up readings or fight you. So. So I don’t.”

He fell silent, kept his head tilted up, waiting for what Danny would say in response.

“Right,” Danny said, and his voice was low, gravelly, and TJ wasn’t sure how to interpret that. “That’s – good. I’m glad.”

“Because you like me,” TJ blurted. He found himself leaning forward in the chair, his fingers curling around the edge of the hard reading-room table. “Don’t you? I thought at first I had to have imagined it but I didn’t. You think I’m good? You like me?”

Danny was silent for a long moment. His voice, when he spoke, eased TJ’s fluttering stomach almost immediately, because it was low and rough and shaky, and not angry at all. “Jesus fucking Christ, kid. What’s gotten into you?”

TJ ducked his head, let his hands fall still into his lap. “Don’t you?” he repeated.  

A rough splutter of half-formed laughter, a scrape of a hand over stubble. “I wouldn’t – well, I – It isn’t that - I don’t know that, ugh... ” Then Danny moved, pulled a chair out from the table with a scrape and a thump, and dropped down to sit across the table from TJ. “Well, fuck. I spend half my damn life here, don’t I?” Danny said, almost a growl or a snarl but not quite making it. “Be pretty fucking miserable if I hated you, wouldn’t it? God knows I don’t keep coming in because the bosses are so great, huh?”  

TJ felt a smile spread across his face, without his volition. I knew it.

“Look, kid, you do good work, all right?” Danny said, still in that brusque voice, like he was angry but he wasn’t really angry. “And you don’t give trouble. Not like some Paths. So long as you keep it that way, all right?”

“Yes,” TJ said, his cheeks tingling a little, unfamiliar with the strain of the smile that didn’t seem like it was going to go away any time soon. Danny liked him, thought he did good work, didn’t want anything bad to happen to him. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had somebody like that, but he thought it might have been back before he’d started training, a long time ago. “I will.”  

Danny shifted in the chair, pulled a folder towards him, sighed heavily. “Look – what exactly did you read? Yesterday?”

“Mostly, um, that,” TJ said. “You were scared I’d hate you. You were… angry at the nurse. You felt bad about frightening me. That’s, um…” He cast his mind back. “You thought that I didn’t trust you enough yet. You thought ‘it’s too soon’. Something about a Class A?” He paused. That part hadn’t made a lot of sense. Danny didn’t work with any Class As, he worked with Class Es like TJ, didn’t he?

“And?” Danny prompted him. “Anything else?”

“Then you looked at me – and you saw that your wrist was, um, touching me and you realised what was happening and you were upset and then it stopped.”

“You didn’t go any deeper than that?” Danny’s voice sharpened, became more urgent. “This is important. You only read those surface thoughts? You didn’t see anything else?”

TJ’s brow furrowed under the blindfold, the smile gone. He shook his head, slowly. “It wasn’t on purpose,” he said. “I didn’t – I didn’t try to see anything else. Just that little bit, just what you were thinking right then.”

He heard Danny breathe out, long and slow. Something hard, a pen maybe, went tap-tap-tap-tap-TAP-TAP-TAP…. Tap. Tap.

Tap.

“All right,” the handler said. He pushed himself to his feet, the chair scraping backwards. “Since it was just that, we’re going to leave it there, all right? I know you didn’t mean to, and you didn’t read anything important you shouldn’t have, so we’re both going to just put it behind us. Don’t talk about it again.”

“Would we be in trouble?”

“Maybe. I’d rather not have to deal with it.” Danny’s voice went more insistent. He moved around the table, and laid a hand on TJ’s shoulder. “Do you understand me? TJ?”

He nodded. “Yes, Handler.”

I like you, too. I hope I never get a different Handler.

Don’t talk about it again. That was okay, they didn’t need to.