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The day after Lyta lifts Garibaldi's block she spends mentally glancing over her shoulder. It's a stupid instinct, one completely useless to her now. She's half-irritated with herself for it and half-relieved that she still retains such a strong vestige of humanity. The strongest mark of all, perhaps, this cloying stink of fear. It is wretched, of course; wretched and provincial. Anyone would think she wasn't on her way to being not human at all. She wonders how Delenn stands it, this almost-memory of a former self lingering like a phantom limb.
It's stupid, anyway. She's in a bunker in Mars, behind the strongest lines of the telepath resistance. She sleeps the sleep of the dead.
Except... Except.
Except her side hurts where she fell against the barricades when the protesters charged in the last assault. A war between the best and brightest of homo superior, and she's crashing into hi-viz bollards like a food rioter in Mars Dome. She must have landed wrong, is all, because every time she breathes in she can feel a sharp spike of pain in her chest, splintering out with every movement. Once upon a time, Kosh would have made the pain go away, and Stephen would have bound up her rib for her and looked at her like he looked at all his other patients. Just another body in his infirmary, human or not. She has neither Kosh nor Stephen out here, the poor little rich girl, trapped between states. All encompassing, awesome and stupefying mental power - stupidly tender innards. She's a doomsday weapon in a meat wrapper. It's just not right.
Lifting Garibaldi's block had been easier than she had expected. She wonders what that means, whether she missed something or whether it wasn't about the block at all. She tries to figure out what additional angle there might have been to it, and whether she'd miscalculated when she'd sat down opposite Garibaldi and sliced into his brain. No surgeon, her; more akin to a butcher. She'd pushed at all the tender bits inside him 'til he looked like he couldn't stand it any longer, then pushed a little more. Like lancing a wound, the block coming loose spewed forth over Garibaldi's mind in a helpless flotsam of fury.
After he was done beating his chair into splinters and turning his fists into pulped meat on the walls, he'd nodded stiltedly at her and stood to leave. All done, then, her part finished. Except he hadn't left at all, had he? He'd raised a hand to his temple, and then to his chest, as if she had sliced into more than just his mind. "I feel..." He'd trailed off, staring at her, staring through her, his expression somewhere between sorrow and bliss. "I feel -"
What had he felt? She hadn't cared to look, not when the strain was writ plain across his face, prematurely aged through impotent rage. Garibaldi's hand had tightened on his chest before he crumpled back into his chair. She had time to think, I've killed him, before he took a shuddering breath and started to weep, the tears more a physical release than anything else.
She could not think what to do for him. Even inside his mind she didn't understand him, did not comprehend the relief that poured from him at this release to action. And so she, the revolutionary leader, rageful and fearless, had sat in her chair and watched a mundane man vent his fury, with a numbness that did not bode well. Perhaps it's just as well she's not expected to lead the charge from the front.
Garibaldi set off a few days later, convinced that an old-fashioned approach would smoke out the snake where fancier methods had failed. Maybe they would. She was not sure of anything anymore. He's still in her pocket, still an ace in the hole if she needs him - she's not that stupid - and what he does in the meantime is his own business. Kill his tormentor. Have a holiday. Bind up his knuckles.
Mundanes. Their world is even worse than hers.
*
On your desk, in no particular order, you have: casualty lists, returns on investment figures and several asset files. Also, unless you are very much mistaken, there is an honest-to-God force depletion report lurking in there somewhere.
Force depletion. Anyone would think you were fighting a war.
*
It starts off simply enough: she’s not ready. The first few months of any revolution are crucial, and she is incredibly ill-prepared to deal with what comes barrelling out at her from the darkness. Overconfidence nearly kills them all. She patches up the rearguard, and plants spies where the lines are weak. She’s strong, and the blocks she sets up in the minds of her volunteers seem sturdy enough. Still, it’s a shock when the bodies start turning up, one by one, a bloodied mess inside their heads. She gives instructions that they be buried properly, and makes provisions to improve the blocks in the next round. The bodies – slowly, slowly – stop turning up. The blocks are holding.
She is nothing if not a quick study.
Overconfidence, on the other hand…
(It takes her a while to realise why the bodies have stopped, but by then it’s almost too late.)
*
This is not how you intended things to go, of course. It would have been better if the spies had worked, or if the bodies kept turning up. That way, at least you’d know what had happened to them, your brave volunteers. Easy enough to know if the suicide bomber had succeeded; less so if the bomb was in their minds. And the Corps… well, those bastards had some tricks up their sleeves, too. You find that out the first time a volunteer comes back acting erratically: re-programmed, it seemed. Your best technicians work on him for two days before they, too, start acting strangely and you have the whole place blitzed clean.
You honestly did not think they’d stoop to this.
*
It’s more difficult than she imagined to de-fuse the worst parts inside her. They’d lit up plenty quick with Shadows crawling over her brain, but nothing had shut them up since them. It is difficult to think clearly with that raw power pressing down, smothering her under the weight of inaction. She thinks that she may have turned to this war in a bid for sanity, at least in part. It is simple enough to envisage a future without the Psi Corps; less so to imagine her own place within it.
Bester’s smirking face swims to mind often enough during this. Unlike Garibaldi, she does not imagine any particular methods in dispatching him, or even focus too much on the logistics of it. She’s too busy trying to work out what she’d do if Garibaldi succeeded, and there was no Psi Cop Bester to send her back broken children with timebombs in their brains, frantically trying to tell her that something is wrong.
(The last one had muddled up the names of her siblings, and if anyone had known anything about her that would have been their first clue. But that’s the thing with telepaths: everyone is so scared of what they’d find, no one dares to look.)
She has come up with a world that looks something like this:
On the fringes, there are mundanes. Or maybe they’re the centre. Anyway, she doesn’t see genocide as featuring in her future, but she doesn’t much care what happens to them either. Mundanes, then. No Psi Corps; maybe the telepaths should have a planet of their own? Byron’s dream. But she’s enough of a realist to know that genocide is not far off, then, on that planet with skills everyone would want and envy and fear. And if they’re far enough away, not even telepaths with line of sight could protect against fire. (She wonders if the torching of this hypothetical Eden would look anything like the burning of Narn or of Centauri Prime. There are precious few worlds out there that have survived the fire, who would volunteer to be the next target?)
No brave new world, then. But living on Earth would surely be untenable, not with the Psi Corps gone. She is under no illusions about the loss of a symbol and neat uniforms and what that would mean to all those 99.9%, shoving their siblings and offspring and friends into that panopticon. The system only works if everyone is watching everyone else.
So what’s left?
*
Bester – whatever else he may have done - taught you a lot in your time under his tutelage. Some of it was about strategy, and logic, and patience. A lot of it was about where he saw his place, and where he saw yours. (They were not the same place, but both still better than where he saw everyone else.) Mostly, he taught you about fear.
Some days, you almost want to thank the bastard.
*
She works out pretty early on that she is useless as the leader the movement want her to be. No fault of her own; she’s plenty strong, but not suited to thinking through strategy. She chooses advisors and tacticians and planners, and otherwise devotes herself to figuring out the things they can’t.
The Corps teaches many things, not all of them useful in a revolution. No one other than Bester thought to teach her any world-building. Sadly, this pupilage the thing she must draw on most often. Let her tacticians choose how to win the war; she must make sure it stays won. They will do her fighting for her, if only she can tell them what they’re fighting for.
Freedom, she wants to tell them sometimes, but she cannot allow herself to sound so naïve. And how can she convince them when she cannot even convince herself?
*
You map your weaknesses in a systematic way.
Byron, first and foremost. Press that button hard enough and you lose your temper and drop your shields.
Your time on Babylon 5. Kosh. Kosh II, and the wet slimy feel on him inside your mind, so unlike Naranek. No no no; there, at least, you have some help to lock that part up tight.
The First Ones. Zha’ha’dum. Talia. Kosh.
Kosh. Kosh. Kosh.
Talia, you realise sometime later, is the gateway drug. Somewhere out there is a crystal with her on it, Kosh once told you, and although you have no idea why this would be true, you have no doubt that it is true. Somewhere out there is Talia, sealed in a little box, and the world-as-it-was is sealed in there with her.
You do not know whether it is captivity, or blissful ignorance, which frightens you most.
*
In between choosing targets, she takes to designing cities. It is not that she plans to demolish any cities in their entirety, of course, or that she still holds fast to the colony idea. But city design – that is world-building, surely. Proof that she has honourable intentions; exculpatory evidence.
*
This war you did not expect. It comes in increments, inching across space. It is not about a far-off threat, but the one nurtured close to home, in smart uniforms and a polished badge pinned to its chest.
This war is about you.
You don’t see yourself as a revolutionary leader. You certainly don’t see yourself as a terrorist, although every media outlet insists that it is so. Maybe it is; you’ve killed enough to qualify for either title. It’s easy enough, these days, and bombs are the least of the weapons in your arsenal. It is telepath against telepath,, and not even the privacy of your own head is sanctum enough.
*
After she fixes Garibaldi and stops glancing over her shoulder, she gathers enough of her wits to break down what she learned; what she came for. Garibaldi is a loose cannon at this moment, and irrelevant. He might be successful if bringing Bester to heel, or maybe not; ultimately, it doesn’t really matter. She has what she needs.
It’s true that it takes her several days to process it all, but in this instance, it is better to be thorough. She takes that block apart thought by thought, layer by layer, like peeling an onion. He taught her how to do this, ironically: he showed her the process, bit by bit, on a convicted child molester. He showed her the strip – peeling back each layer of psyche, psychosis upon psychosis, to find the real fear beneath and amplify it a thousand-fold – and then the re-build, and the block. He showed her his signature, woven in between each layer, so that every telepath who touched that mind would know, Bester did this, and this is why. And he showed her, finally, how you could find out so much more than the weaver ever intended you to find, if only you were patient. It took her a long time, standing there sweating in her Psi Corps uniform, her badge stuck awkwardly to her chest, to follow the train of thought inside the child molester’s mind. It took her hours and hours and hours until she finally saw a thin glimmer of understanding dawn, and knew that she understood him and his petty, twisted little fears and desires. By the end – by the time when she could have answered a question as him and passed any polygraph – she wanted to take the world’s longest, hottest shower, and scrub herself clean.
It never goes away, Bester had told her after a moment. After this – after we are through – you’ll still be able to draw on him sometimes, and use how he thought. “What he’d thought?” she’d asked aloud, almost stumbling over the words in her panic at the thought of having those thoughts trapped in her head.
Bester’s smile was thin. No, my dear. How he thought.
In so many, endless ways, that had been worse.
She gives thanks for it now, that horrible filthy feeling in the back of her skull that never quite goes away.
Little by little, she strips down that block until every little assumption Bester had made about fear and trust and loyalty is laid bare.
*
Your ability to predict what’s coming next is close to uncanny. Yesterday, you discovered that one of your new recruits was a spy.
They had not expected you to be present for the training, and perhaps that is why they thought to sneak her in. Or maybe it hadn’t been that at all, and the girl’s fate – and the girl’s face – did not matter. Maybe it hadn’t been about planting a spy at all, but about planting doubt. And what are you doing if not sitting here, almost fretting about a girl wearing Talia’s face? You’ve already killed her once, and what they say is true: the second time is always easier.
You still mostly leave the plotting to the tacticians, being busy with predictions and goal-setting and world-building. These days, you mostly focus on the structural weaknesses in society rather than in buildings, and your volunteers no longer expect a bomb strapped to their chests.
*
By the end of the second week, she’s worked out how the bastard thinks.
*
Word among the rebels is, you’re leading them to a new utopia.
*
fin