Not that they’d bother her once she was done with them.
In fact, she’d dealt with a whole lot of men over the past year and a half. She’d made them cry. She’d made them scared — so scared, several of them pissed their pants and shit themselves. She’d enraged others to the point of animalistic frenzy, and had made more men fall in love with her in a month than all the boys there ever were in her neighborhood growing up. There was one guy she could’ve sworn she’d even made… well, he left the room in a hurry after she let the lust slough off him. At the time, she’d thought it was hilarious. Looking back, it just made her a little sad, and a little scared, too.
Then there was the guy who had a heart attack during an experiment intentionally designed to provoke fear. Thank God he lived, because it had taken all her newfound discipline not to blast anger and sadness and rage on everybody in that goddamn room for putting her through that.
The person in charge of her evaluation turned out not to be Danny but someone named Detlev Bronk — what a name that guy had. Middle-aged, graying scarecrow of a man — not what she’d expected from a government spy. He was the one who had come up with the whole plan to help get her curse under control. She was skeptical at first — how can you control a curse, really? If God or the devil decides to mess with you, what can a bureaucrat in a bad suit do to make it all better, even if he was some kind of pioneer in biophysics?
It turned out that Detlev’s big plan was practice. Over and over and over; several times a week, in fact. Sometimes, the people they brought in were volunteers, and sometimes they didn’t even know they were part of an experiment — not exactly a surprise she’d wish on anyone, but it was the Army, and she learned pretty quickly that they could do to their soldiers whatever they wanted. So, they would travel from base to base around the country, never staying for more than a few weeks or a month of testing before packing up their things again and heading on to the next one. She’d been to eight different bases since leaving California, enough that eventually they began returning to some of the places they’d first visited to experiment on the same test subjects a second time — she guessed they wanted to see the effect of repeat mind-fucks.
But they were all the same, first-timers or not. She let herself loose, and they folded like a bad hand. There were a few who managed to keep it together, like Danny. Maggie liked the little bookworm, and he came to visit and check on her regularly. There was a sense of compassion about him that her other handlers didn’t have. She’d thought about using her Enhancement — that’s what he kept calling it, but no matter what silly name the government wanted to give it, she would always think of it as her curse — to get Danny to tell her more about what was going on. But she liked him too much for that. Besides, she’d begun to develop her own rules about how she chose to use her ability, because the US government sure as hell wasn’t going to cry foul about ethics. She was a tool for them, and she knew it. She just didn’t know exactly how they were planning to use her — which was another scary, lonesome thought that would sometimes plague her in the middle of the night.
And even if she felt inclined to get Danny to talk, she knew there would be consequences. When she met with Bronk — or any other people for training or therapy — she was under “remote observation.” Most rooms had microphones, and one even had a massive camera that Bronk said was for television (it was the first time she’d ever seen a television camera before). Either way, Maggie was always monitored, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. If she tried to use her Enhancement on the guards, or on Bronk, they’d know about it fast — and she had no idea what would happen to her, other than it’d probably be bad. Everything she did, every place she went… secrecy and paranoia were right there with her. Sometimes she felt like a prized pupil, but other times she felt like a guinea pig or, worse, some kind of threat.
It made sense, of course, since she guessed she was pretty unique, but… it was tiring. All of it. Constantly observed and monitored, keeping her ability reined in when she got depressed or angry or lonely or just hot for company. It was like she couldn’t have any emotions of her own, because of how dangerous it could be for the people around her.
She did get a nice present for Christmas, though. Over the holidays, they flew her all the way out to an island — probably in the Caribbean, but they never gave her specifics — and set her up in the best little cabana by the beach, stocked with great food, a radio, plenty of books. And they left her there for four days, completely by herself. It was so freeing to just have a good cry, to laugh, to let her guard down and take a walk without being monitored or feeling like she might hurt someone.
Yet at the same time, being completely free on the island only made her “normal” routine — if you could call it that — feel like some kind of captivity by comparison. She was a guest and a prisoner at the same time, and while she was never mistreated, she wasn’t free to deviate from the schedules set before her. When she was on the island, she thought about swimming for it, but she figured she’d drown before she reached another island. So, after vacation was up, it was back to work — back to therapy and testing and practice and lots of discipline training. All the while, in the back of her mind, she hoped they’d let her go back there again for a little taste of freedom.
But that wouldn’t be anytime soon. Maggie had been at some base in New Mexico for a few weeks. Now she was on a ratty cargo plane heading west — and she wasn’t alone. For one, there were two armed guards, both sitting as far away as possible, just out of the demonstrated range of her ability. Of course, she could get up, take two strides, and make them go fetal before they could reach for their guns, but… best to let them have their sense of security.
They were still close enough for Maggie to “feel” their emotions, though — a surprising but not unwelcome development as she honed control over her Enhancement. And what was more, when she focused on it, her range was even greater. She could feel the boredom of the pilot, for example, if she concentrated on it, the nervousness of the copilot — probably aiming to please his senior officer — and the weary vigilance of the guards.
And there were others on the plane, much closer to her — her fellow passengers. One was an old black man, dressed in simple clothes, who had kind eyes and two lifetimes’ worth of struggle written on his face. He’d been helped aboard by a couple of military policemen who were surprisingly gentle with him, and he sat now with his back against the bulkhead, eyes closed, resting. He seemed content, surprisingly. That was the last thing she expected.
Across from the black man was someone Maggie took to be his polar opposite: a smartly dressed blond young man who fidgeted with his seatbelt straps and paused to glare disdainfully at the black man from time to time. He was all nerves, masked poorly by an insouciant grin and given away by a clenched jaw and bouncing leg. Then again, maybe he just had to go to the bathroom. But his green eyes held none of the serenity of the old man; they shifted and darted, suspiciously taking in everyone on the plane. When they fell on Maggie, she could practically feel him give her the once-over, and the grin that followed sent a shiver up her spine. She was sorely tempted to give him a dose of fear or sadness, but she knew she’d get in serious trouble for that. Too bad.