day followed the same pattern as the last, their bodies yet needing rest and fuel. They ate more, rested more, spoke of things Stefan had never spoken about with anyone.
“Telekinetics are a very useful designation,” he told her where she sat beside him on the small sofa in their hotel suite, the two of them involved in demolishing a room service meal set out on the coffee table in front of them.
“Try this.” She fed him a small bite of a pastry of some kind. “Yes?”
Nodding, he took it to eat the rest. She’d easily understood what tastes he could and couldn’t tolerate, was skilled at finding things he could eat. “Is there more of this?”
“Yes.” A smile. “I put the rest on the counter, so we’d have more space here.” Sipping at a glass of water, she said, “So because telekinetics are so useful, you’re of more interest to the powers that be?”
He nodded. “We’re almost always taken for very early training, and inducted into the Council’s superstructure on some level.”
“Don’t the families get a say?”
“Of course. A child is a family’s genetic legacy and a Tk is a financial one as well. Most families are agreeable to child Tks being trained under the Council’s aegis because it can be expensive as well as difficult to train us—we can be volatile and inadvertently dangerous.” He telekinetically lifted and “threw” the serrated bread knife in a silent demonstration of the chaos a child might cause.
Chapter 8
Stopping the knife’s trajectory before it hit the wall, he brought it back to the coffee table. “Once trained, we earn excellent incomes; if the family didn’t agree to a lump sum when they signed the child over to the Council, they later receive a percentage of the adult child’s income.”
Lines on her forehead. “Is that usual?”
“Yes. In many ways, Psy families are as linked as changeling packs and human family groups.”
Tazia was silent for a long time. “But to give up a child . . .”
“Yes.” He’d thought about the duality of loyalty among his people more than once. “Yet consider it from my mother’s point of view. She cared for me, of that I have no doubt.” Even a Psy child could tell when his mother’s hand was gentle on his head, when his hurts were tended to with more than cold distance. “But she was an M-Psy, a medic. She didn’t have any idea how to protect a telekinetic child from his own power.”
Seeing he had Tazia’s full attention, he continued. “According to my records, one day when I was just over a year old, I apparently broke every glass in the kitchen while playing. My mother found me sitting on the floor surrounded by shards of glass. It was a miracle I hadn’t been sliced or cut.”
“My God,” Tazia gasped. “If you’d crawled over the shards . . .”
“Yes. So you see, when my mother arranged training for me, she did so out of a need to protect me from myself.” Stefan had never felt anything but grateful to his mother for that. “She also never gave me up totally as some families do. I came home after school, and I knew I had a choice about where I would go with my life.”
“Didn’t the Council object?” she asked. “Since telekinetics are so rare?”
“I’m sure they must’ve pressured her, but even the Council can’t steal children, though I’m sure some children are simply taken, if their parents are too weak or too low-profile for anyone to notice if they have an ‘accident.’” Stefan had no illusions about the leadership of his race. “But my mother was a respected medic, well published in her field.”
“You don’t think the landslide was caused by a Council Tk, do you?”
“No. There was too much damage—the Council lost an adult telekinetic in the same event, as well as a cardinal telepath. It was a natural disaster.” A disaster that had forever altered the course of his existence. “My mother was the last of her line, and after her death, my care fell to the state.”
“What about your father?”
“He had no rights per the conception and fertilization agreement that resulted in my birth—and, given the Council’s interest in me, he made no move to void the agreement and gain custody.” Even now, though Stefan knew his father’s identity, he felt no sense of kinship—the other man was a stranger to him. “As a result, I ended up where my mother had never wanted me to end up: