Would you mind telling me why?
Croyd's answer was instant. All-cells monitored by hidden fiberoptic lens. Essential/escape plan to blank monitor in Dervish's cell ...
Mind explaining the rest of the plan?
Shad swayed as a mental picture invaded his mind. Croyd wasn't telling him the plan, just broadcasting the action as it happened, slices transmitted from other people's heads.
At the moment he was looking down at a pair of elderly black hands that held a cup of tea. Tea leaves swirled in the bottom of the cup.
I say this moment be's auspicious. An old voice, speaking with an antedeluvian rural accent Shad couldn't place.
Shad was outraged You're having your tea leaves read?
Croyd didn't reply, but the mental channel switched. Suddenly Shad felt himself in a small body that didn't feel right at all - center of gravity all wrong, weight distribution strange. His mind was heavily concentrated, straining a power that wasn't quite clear to him.
Click, click, click. He realized the body was female - that's why the center of gravity was wrong - and that she was trying to push buttons. Buttons that weren't actually in sight. Croyd had to tell her where they were, in what order to push them.
The buttons, Shad figured, that opened the electric cell doors.
Splitscreen. Suddenly he was in two heads at once. The other had to be a guard, because he was wearing a brown uniform shirt and sitting at a console filled with television monitors with views of prisoners, all except for the one turned to Jay Leno.
Lots of prisoners, though. Jokers, mostly, but he recognized himself hanging upside-down in the corner of his cell. There were other natlike prisoners who presumably had a hidden ace or two.
And one old black man, shrunken in his prison coveralls, staring into a cup of tea. What the hell had he ever done to get here?
Now.
Croyd's command rolled into Shad's head. He strained his power and ate the electricity from the distant source. And he watched, through the guard's eyes, as one of the little monitors went black. But the guard barely paid attention, he was watching Leno.
And then Shad was in another head. The walls loomed in toward him, as if they were seen through a distorting lens. Everything looked terrifying. Little creatures, half-seen things with scaly glistening bodies and silver fangs, slithered in and out of vision. Sometimes they offered advice; Shad could see their lips move. But he wasn't receiving audio and didn't know what they said, and for that he was grateful.
This was a maximum security sanitarium, after all. Some of the inmates had to be genuinely crazy.
Dervish. Croyd had given Shad the madman's name.
Titanium bars slid, and then the point of view spun into the corridor. Walls and cell doors swam past. Shad realized that Dervish wasn't walking straight, probably couldn't: he spun as he walked, turning circles.
But he moved fast. Out of the corner of the guard's eye, Shad saw Dervish coming - a massive long-armed torso above tiny crooked legs, knuckles almost dragging, evil red eyes and a shaggy mane that covered head, shoulders, upper arms. The guard half-rose from his seat, held out a hand, stop, and then Dervish swarmed onto him, and the guard's point of view thankfully went blank.
Apparently Dervish wasn't up to pressing the buttons that opened the cells, because the woman's point of view returned again, and she strained once more to the limits of her power.
Shad's door whirred open, the one time that had happened since he'd been here. He was out in a shot.
He ran to the console and stopped short, his heart crying, when he saw Dervish crouched over Ramirez's body. The huge joker had pulled off an arm and was eating it like a turkey leg. He looked up at Shad and growled. Blood matted the hair on his giant chest. Shad called the photons to him, shrouded himself in night, and then cautiously moved to the console and began pressing the numbers Croyd gave him.
On the monitors he could see people wandering out. A big joker in the lead, with claws and a set of wolfs fangs set in a pointed snout. She would have looked like the Wolfman if she'd had any hair, but she was bald, and bright orange to boot. The woman whose telekinesis had opened the doors came next: her Caucasian body was shaped like that of a nat, but she had a nose that drooped past her chin, and earlobes that fell past her shoulders. Shad wondered why she hadn't had cosmetic surgery. She was followed by the old black man, still holding his cup of tea.
Then came a muscular white man, hard-eyed, wearing a muscle shirt and prison tattoos - and hatred warred with wariness in Shad's mind as he recognized the man. He called himself the Racist in the same way that John Wayne was the Shootist - he was fast, supposedly capable of two hundred miles per hour on the straights - but he was a racist in the other sense of the word, too, a member of the Aryan Brotherhood. Some of his tattoos were swastikas. He'd been an ordinary stick-up man until he'd volunteered in prison for an experiment with the wild card virus, and to everyone's surprise he'd drawn an ace and escaped prison. Not that he'd stayed out of the slams for long - Straight Arrow had caught up with him and held him in a cage of fire.
Shad wondered idly if he should drain the Racist of all his photons and leave him here on the prison floor.
No/forbidden. Racist/Mark Wagner is necessary to plan.
Just thinking. That's all.
Shad watched, and pressed more buttons. A dark-haired white woman came out, attractive and anonymous in prison coveralls. A long-haired, long-bearded man in his forties whose brain had literally exploded out of his head, running down over his ears like oatmeal boiling out of a saucepan. Shad knew of him - he was an old hippie who'd become a projecting telepath, able to make others experience his psychedelic visions. Not surprisingly, they called him the Head. He sold his talent to young acid-head wannabees - it was illegal to deal drugs, but not to get others stoned by telepathy. There'd been some interesting court cases, and the Head had won them all.
Until, apparently, the case that put him here.
Next came a joker who puddled into the room, looking like fifty gallons of lime Jell-O - no skeleton, no visible organs, nothing but shimmering translucent green. He was followed by a chitinous creature in black armor, with a vast, swollen head and side-mounted eyes. This turned out to be Croyd.
There were more levels to the complex, more electric locks, more guards - but no more master control rooms full of cameras, no reason for Shad to use his power. Witchy picked the locks, seeing through Croyd's mind and reaching out with her TK; Racist and Dervish took care of the guards, always messily - and the last door, the door to the outside, opened with a simple push.
Cold sea-air blew in. Shad filled his lungs with it, let it slide over his tongue. Felt it fill his heart.
The smell of freedom. Nothing was going to stop him now.
Everyone held hands. Shad called photons and covered the whole group in darkness.
Holding hands, they shuffled out of the building. Governor's Island was a curious mixture: there was the Coast Guard establishment, frame buildings filled with high-ranking guardsmen and their families, serviced by their own ferry that ran back and forth to Manhattan. Green lawns ran down to the water's edge. The snug family dwellings of the Coast Guard shared uneasy quarters with the wild card psychiatric facility and its dangerous collection of aces and jokers, all confined in the concrete monolith on the south side facing the rubbish of the Rox across the bay. And then there was the old stone bulk of Fort Jay, with its display of rusting cannons dating to the War of 1812, ready to contest the passage of King George's frigates.