Psychotrope by Lisa Smedman Page A

they were staring at something directly ahead of them . . .
    Timea shook off the uneasy feeling. It was just coincidence that all of their eyes had steadied at once.
    The kids were just fine.
    The dozen children in the room were a mix of races: human mostly, but with a smattering of the other metatypes of the Awakened world. They probably knew they weren't welcome in this part of town, but the promise of the clinic had drawn them, just the same. And they'd probably faced much worse, in their short lives, than a few racial slurs. Take the slender elf girl whose delicately pointed ears bracketed the electrode net that encircled her head, for example. The sore on her ankle looked like a bite of some kind, and was probably infected. And the burly troll boy who sat at the terminal next to her had a puckered scar on his cheek that might be an old bullet graze. His horns were just starting to bud at his temples; he couldn't be more than six.
    The other two metas were a stocky dwarf who sat hunched forward in a battered vinyl chair, his face already showing a downy beard at just eight years of age, and an ork boy. With his gnarled face and jutting brows, that one was harder to put an age to. Timea had to take his guardian's word for it that he was between the ages of six and twelve, as stipulated by the benefactors of the Shelbramat Free Computer Clinic.
    Timea had to smile at that one. Benefactors. More like beneficiaries.
    Some days, like today, she had doubts about her job. Sure, she was helping the best and the brightest kids to escape the squalid streets of Redmond. But the nagging questions remained. Why didn't any of the kids who were selected for the
Shelbramat
Boarding School
ever respond to her e-mail? Why did the school's headmaster, Professor Halberstam, politely but firmly rebuff her every time she asked if she could visit the facility? She might have popped in unexpectedly on her own by now, but for the fact that Shelbramat was down in California Free State, not here in Seattle.
    Timea had her suspicions. The "boarding school" was probably little more than a front for a corporation that recruited the next generation of wiz kids and put them to work as deckers. The "students" probably spent their days running the shadows for the corp, snatching data from its competitors. Children of the barrens and streets, these kids were expendable; even if they were brain-burned by black IC, their parents weren't likely to complain. Not with the hefty stipend these guardians were paid upon acceptance of the child at the boarding school. And best of all for the corp, the kids were a deniable asset. They probably didn't even know that they were working, let alone who for.
    They were being used.
    But what was the alternative?
    Timea stared down at one of the girls, a human about ten years old. Her neatly braided corn rows with their bright pink ribbons were a stark contrast to the torn clothes and dirty synthleather sandals she wore. The girl reminded Timea of herself at that age—a skinny waif with ebony skin and eyes that warily took the measure of every adult she met for signs of betrayal. Timea suspected that the girl's story would be much like her own: a father lost to a BTL overdose; a brother burned to death in a drive-by fire-balling; a mother who sat and cried each night at the sheer futility of trying to keep a family together in a decaying urban landscape but who still had enough hope to tie pink ribbons in her daughter's hair. But this girl didn't have the crisscross of faint scars that marked the inside of Timea's left wrist. . .
    She shook off the memory, focusing on the here and now. The responsibility of caring for her aging mother and two younger sisters—not to mention her own two-year-old son Lennon—now sat firmly upon Timea's shoulders. She needed this job. And she'd worked fragging hard to keep it, polishing her vocabulary at the same time that she honed her decking skills, deleting the gutter talk from her