The Thought Pushers (Mind Dimensions #2)(36)

Given how void of emotion her face usually is, her disgust is that much more striking.

So, as I was beginning to suspect, Leachers are Readers. Leachers are considered an abomination by the Guides, just as Guides—Pushers—are considered a crime against nature by Readers. This isn’t that surprising. Two groups who hate each other will always vilify one another.

Until now I had the Reader outlook, and I assumed Pushers were diabolically evil. After all, one of them killed Mira’s parents, while another one, in Caleb’s memories, wanted to blow up the Reader community. A Pusher also tried to kill me at the hospital. Or have me killed. That Pusher/Guide was likely the same one who killed Mira’s parents. So in my short experience with them, Pushers don’t have a good track record. But I can do what they do, and I’m certainly not a lost cause. Liz being one of them confuses things further. She’s a good person. At least I thought so before I learned that the Liz I knew is not the real Liz.

I also realize something else. Clearly, Pushers/Guides can’t Read/Leach the way I can—she’s condemning the Reading ability, in fact. Nor did she expect a Reader to be able to pass that test with the secretary. All this adds up to something I already suspected: I am something different.

I decide I’m going to call Pushers Guides in my mind going forward, since it’s a nicer term, with the exception of the f*cker who’s trying to kill me. He’ll remain the Pusher.

“Why are Leachers so dangerous?” I ask, realizing that I’ve been quiet for too long.

“That’s harder to explain without going into some history. I have to warn you, no real records of the time I’m going to tell you about exist. A lot of this is verbal tradition combined with hearsay and conjecture,” she says and proceeds to tell me a story, a bit of which I already heard from Eugene. She doesn’t talk about how phasing into the Quiet works or go into Eugene’s Quantum Mechanics theory. Instead, she tells me something that sounds like an origin myth.

As she explains it, Guides and Leachers started off from the same selectively bred branch of humanity. It all started, as these things sometimes do, with a crazy cult. There were people who began a strange eugenics program. It focused on breeding people who had one thing in common: they described the world slowing down when they were under extreme stress and having out-of-body experiences in near-death situations. This breeding, over many generations of arranged couples, led to a branch of humans that could bring about, at will, something like a near-death experience for variable lengths of time—only back then, they thought it was the spirit leaving the body. After this point, the breeding focused on extending that length of time in the spirit world—what I term the Quiet.

Almost a century later, two new aspects manifested among the people who, at that point, could spend some minutes in the spirit world. Some could Read, or Leach, as Liz put it, and some learned to Guide, or Push, as Readers would see it. The cult split into two groups. At first, they just lived apart, but soon, each group started to view the other as heretical. There was a leader on both sides, and Liz’s version painted the Leacher leader as particularly evil and responsible for starting the war between the groups that would go on for ages.

Later in history, one Leacher was advising Alexander the Great, according to some accounts—or, according to others, Alexander himself was a Leacher. In any case, in the process of conquering the city of Thebes, he destroyed almost the entire Guide community of that time, along with six thousand regular people. And this was just the first of the genocides that Leachers tried to commit against Guides, according to Liz.

“Do you now see why I had to make sure you weren’t a Leacher—as unlikely as that possibility was?” she says when she’s done.

“No, not fully,” I reply honestly. “I mean, what happened in history sounds really abhorrent, but are modern-day Leachers so bad? Plenty of countries and ethnic groups have dark histories in the past, but now they’re mostly civilized. Just look at Europe. Why do you think Leachers still want to wipe us out?”

“Because they tried to wipe us out as recently as World War II,” she says harshly. Then, moderating her tone, she adds, “Granted, that is now also history. Personally, I just don’t trust them. They view everything as wrongs done to them, and they’ll never forgive and forget. With their skewed perspective, they’ll always want to get revenge. Of course, there are many among us who feel stronger about this issue than I do—and many who are more liberal and think bygones should be bygones. You’ll probably meet both kinds, though most of my friends hold liberal views. This is Manhattan, after all.” She smiles at that last tidbit.

“Okay,” I say, though the idea of meeting more Guides seems of questionable safety. “So why did you think it unlikely that I was one of them? If one can Split, isn’t there a fifty-fifty chance that the person is a Leacher?”

“Actually, the chance is more than fifty-fifty in Leachers’ favor. There are more of them than of us—which is why I had to be extra careful. As to why I suspected you were one of us, well . . . you look like a Guide. Many of us have the look I’m talking about. It’s a certain facial bone structure, a prominent nose—the look of a born leader, if you will. Of course, these things alone are not very reliable. A much bigger clue for me was the fact that you were adopted.”

“Oh? How would that be a clue?”