Deadly Relations: Bester Ascendant by J. Gregory Keyes Page A

try to talk about me or this incident. If you do that, you will find yourself having a nasty recurring nightmare each and every time you close your eyes. It won’t be pleasant.”
    Then he just probed a bit, ran his mental fingers over the contours of Hech’s mind - enough so the cop could feel him. Almost as an afterthought, he touched him with the shock stick again. That should keep him quiet for the next few minutes, anyway.
    He opened the door, saw and felt no one in the corridor. He went out and locked the door behind him. Then, straightening, he walked back the way they had come, trying to exude confidence.
    “Act like you belong somewhere, and people will think you do.”
    Teacher Diebold had told him that, years ago. Outside, city rushed by, the jumble of the industrial district, with buildings like giant pipes and vast, rusted machines-and glimpses of the skyline now and then. He made his way to where he had spotted Brazg, and his heart fell. She was nowhere to be seen.

Chapter 4
    For a moment he stood rigid. Had she been warned somehow? She might have detected him the instant he walked past her on the train, gotten off five stops back while he was hiding in Hech’s cabin. Suddenly things were a lot less promising than they had been. He had assaulted a train cop and had nothing to show for it.
    Once Hech figured out that Brazg was gone - and his connection to her as un-provable as his assault on Al - he could bring charges with impunity. Scans weren’t admissible in the courtroom, so it was just Al’s word against his. Any jury would favor a mundane - after all, teeps weren’t allowed to serve on juries.
    The relief was almost dizzying when he realized that Brazg had left her seat only to join the impatient crowd waiting to deboard.
    Got you, he thought, breathing for the first time in a significant number of moments.
    And he followed her off of the train into a chaos he could never, in his wildest dreams, have imagined.
    Al had read about Paris, of course, the City of Light. He had imagined it as a place of ancient, eldritch beauty, a sort of fairyland of beret-capped artists and thinkers basking leisurely and thoughtfully in the gentle glory of the past. At night it would be a city made of stars, a constellation brought to Earth. That was what he had imagined. It wasn’t what he saw.
    The Gare de Lyon was a severe and spacious building, rebuilt sometime after the last World War, when it like much of the city-had been blasted by terrorists. AI’s fast impression was of a large oven full of rats, just beginning to warm up. The rodents - instinctively beginning to understand their fate - were squirming, writhing, clamoring to get out. Except their dim little rat brains didn’t know where “out” was, so they just formed a struggling mass.
    He had never encountered struggling masses before - not in Teeptown, not in Geneva. He lost sight of Brazg within seconds, caught a glimpse of her moving quickly, lost her again. She was in a hurry. Al picked up his pace, trying to weave through the crowd. He cracked his blocks so he could get a telepathic whiff of Brazg. It was as if a thousand people all tried to shriek something very important at once. He gasped, involuntarily slapping his hands to his head, his head which was expanding like a balloon, stretching thinner, thinner.
    The crowd became a series of vid stills, each different, the thousand motions between each unseen. The mind-roar went in and out, as if he were a radio with poor reception. Then he managed to shut it all down and realized he had slumped to his knees. People glanced at him with expressions ranging from neutral to irritated as they made their way around him.
    He shook his head and stood again. That had been stupid. And he had no idea how long he had fugued. Probably only seconds, but he glanced at his watch, then remembered he had not glanced at it before, so he still didn’t how much time had passed. He looked wildly around, wondering what