And somehow it worked-or seemed to work. Mr. Z stopped shaking his head regretfully and looked thoughtful. At last he shifted his jaw, drew a deep breath, and nodded.
"All right, I'm willing to give her a chance," he said. "I'd like to see a little more penitence in her-some signs of remorse-but I trust your judgment, Joyce. And we could certainly use another remote-viewer."
He turned to give Kaitlyn a benevolent smile. "You and Lydia go along to dinner. I want a word with Gabriel."
It's over, Kaitlyn realized. They're not going to kill me; they're going to feed me. Her heart was only beginning to return to its normal rate. She tried to hide the trembling in her legs as she followed Lydia.
But it slowed her down, and before she could get out of the front lab she heard Mr. Z speak to Joyce again.
"Give her a chance, but watch her. And have Laurie Frost watch her, too. She's intuitive; she'll pick up on anything subversive. And if she finds something. . . you know what to do."
A sigh from Joyce. "Emmanuel. . . you know what I think about your 'final solution'-"
"We'll send her out on a job soon. That ought to prove something."
"Kait, are you coming?" Lydia called from the kitchen.
Kait went through the door, but dawdled on the other side. Mr. Z was speaking again.
"Gabriel, I'm afraid you've been careless."
Gabriel's voice was restrained but defiant. "About the shard? You haven't heard"
"Not about that," Mr. Zetes said in his unhurried way. "Joyce explained that to me. But there was a man found half-dead on Ivy Street. He had all the signs of someone drained of life energy. The police have been making inquiries."
"Oh."
"Very careless of you to do that in our own neighborhood-and the man might talk." Mr. Z's voice dropped to an icy whisper. "Next time, finish the job."
Kaitlyn was shivering when Gabriel came through
the door. She was barely able to give him a smile of gratitude.
Thanks.
He shrugged. No problem.
Dinner started off quietly. Joyce served bacon cheeseburgers, fare that never would have been allowed in the old days. The psychics eyed Kaitlyn from around the long table, but didn't say much. Kait had the feeling they were biding their time.
"So where was everybody this afternoon?" she asked Lydia, trying for normalcy.
"I was in Marin. Riding lessons," Lydia said in subdued tones-she never seemed to talk loudly around the other students.
"I was asleep," Gabriel said lazily.
No one else answered, including Joyce, who returned to the kitchen. Kaitlyn dropped the subject and ate fries. It was interesting, though-the ones who'd been out were also the ones who would have been involved in testing. Could they have been in San Francisco? In Mr. Z's house-with the crystal?
She made a mental note to follow up on the question.
What Joyce said next might have been coincidence.
"So you've seen the isolation tank."
Kaitlyn almost inhaled a fry. "Yes. Have-has anybody really been in that thing?"
"Sure, it's cool," Bri said. She shut her eyes and leaned her head back. "Cosmic, man! Groooovy." Her expression of ecstasy was marred by the fact that her open mouth was full of half-chewed hamburger.
"Shut your face, you slut!" Frost snapped, flicking a pickle chip at her.
"Who's a slut, you bimbo?" Bri returned cordially, chewing. "Jimbo bimbo. Mumbo jumbo."
They both laughed: Frost shrilly, Bri gruffly.
Jackal Mac glared. "Quit with the freakin' noise," he said brutally. "You make me sick with that freakin'
noise." He had been eating with fervent single-mindedness, the way Kaitlyn imagined a coyote might eat.
"I like to see girls have a good time," Renny said. He was eating with finicky precision, gesturing with a french fry. "Don't you, Mac?"
"You making fun of me? You making fun of me, man?"
Kaitlyn blinked. It was a non sequitur; she didn't follow Mac's logic. But it didn't take logic to read the sudden fury in his slitted eyes.
He stood up, towering over the table, leaning across to stare at Renny. "I said, you makin' fun of me?" he bellowed.
Renny let him have it with a hamburger in the face.
Kaitlyn gaped. The hamburger had been dripping with ketchup and Thousand Island dressing. Renny had thoughtfully removed the bun, so Jackal Mac got the full benefit of the condiments.
Bri shrieked with laughter. "What a pitch, what a pitch! Pitch, snitch!"
"Think that's funny?" Jackal Mac seized her by the hair and slammed her face into her plate. He began to grind it around and around. The giggles turned to screams.
Kaitlyn was now gasping. Frost plunged her long nails into a bowl of coleslaw and came out with a juicy handful. She threw it at Mac, but it scattered over the table, hitting Renny, too.
Renny seized a bottle of Clearly Canadian water- the fizzy kind.
"Time to go." Gabriel caught Kaitlyn by the arm
above the elbow and neatly lifted her from the chair out of the way of a burst of carbonated water. Lydia was already scuttling out of the room.
"But he's going to kill her!" Kaitlyn gasped. Mac was still grinding Bri's face into the plate.
"So?" Gabriel piloted her toward the kitchen.
"No, I mean, really. I think that plate cracked; he's going to kill her."
"I said, so?'"
There was the sound of shattering glass and Kaitlyn looked back. Jackal Mac had stopped grinding Bri's face; Renny was now slashing at him with a broken Clearly Canadian bottle.
"Oh, my God-"
"Come on."
In the kitchen, Joyce was washing dishes.
"Joyce, they're-"
"It happens every night," Joyce said shortly. "Leave it alone."
"Every night?"
Gabriel stretched, looking bored. Then he smiled. "Let's go up to my balcony," he said to Kaitlyn. "I need some air."
"No, I-I want to help Joyce with the dishes." There was no point in trying to deceive him about such a minor thing, so she added, I want to talk to her a minute. I didn't have time earlier.
"Suit yourself." Gabriel's voice was unexpectedly cold; his expression was stony. "I'll be busy later." He left.
Kaitlyn didn't understand why he was angry, but there was nothing to do about it. She was a spy, she had information to gather. Picking up a dish, she said abruptly, "Joyce, why do you put up with it?"
"With Gabriel? I don't know, why do you?"
"With them." Kaitlyn jerked her chin toward the dining room, where yells and crashes could still be heard.
Joyce gritted her teeth and scrubbed viciously at a greasy pan with a soap pad. "Because I have to."
"No really. Everything's so crazy now-and it seems like it's against everything you believe in." Kaitlyn was getting incoherent-maybe the scare before dinner was still affecting her. She had the feeling that she should shut up, but instead she blundered on. "I mean, you seem like the kind of person who really believes in things, and I just don't understand-"
"You want to know why? I'll show you!" With a soapy hand, Joyce seized something that had been on the counter, underneath the Chinese take-out containers.
It was a magazine, the Journal of Parapsychology.
"My name is going to be in this! The lead article. And not just this." Joyce's face was contorted, it reminded Kaitlyn of the way she'd looked when she'd held Gabriel's bleeding forehead against the crystal, trying to kill him. Overcome by maniacal passion.
"Not just this, but in Nature, Science, The American Journal of Psychology, The New England Journal of Medicine," Joyce raved. "Multidisciplinary journals, the most prestigious journals in the world. My name and my work."
Dear God, she's a mad scientist, Kaitlyn thought. She was almost spellbound by the ranting woman.
"And that's just the beginning. Awards. Grants. A full professorship at the school of my choice. And, incidentally, a little trinket called the Nobel Prize."
Kait thought at first that she was joking. But there was no humor in those glazed aquamarine eyes. Joyce looked as insane as any of the psycho psychics.
Could he have hit her with the crystal, too? Kaitlyn wondered dazedly. Or could it be some sort of cumulative effect from being around it, like secondhand smoke?
But she knew that no matter what the crystal had done to warp and magnify the desire, it was Joyce's desire in the first place. Kaitlyn had finally discovered what made Joyce run; she had just seen into the woman's soul.
"That's why I put up with it, and why I'm going to put up with anything. So that the cause of science can be advanced. And so I can get what I'm due."
As suddenly as she had grabbed it, Joyce dropped the magazine she'd been shaking in front of Kaitlyn's eyes. She turned back to the sink.
"Now, why don't you take a walk," she said in a voice suddenly gone dull. "I can wash the dishes by myself."
Numb, Kaitlyn walked out of the kitchen. She avoided the dining room, went through the front lab and up the stairs.
Gabriel's door was locked. Well, she should have expected that, really. She'd managed to offend two of the three people who'd championed her tonight. Might as well try for a perfect score, she thought philosophically, and headed for the room she was to share with Lydia.
But Lydia proved to be impossible to offend or talk to at all. She was in bed with the covers pulled over her head. Whether she was sulking or simply scared, Kaitlyn didn't know. She wouldn't come out.
So moody, Kaitlyn thought.