Jack spent the night awake, staring at the roof of the RV. Mia slept soundly, draped over his side. Plagued by doubts, he paid little notice to her firm, hot body next to his. He didn't know whether to tell benevolent mentalists about the necklaces that protected against mentalism, or to leave them exposed to Shauna Patrick and her master.
Mentalism granted practically absolute mastery over any mind whose state and thoughts a mentalist could match, even for a split second. He had felt the temptation to abuse such power lurk in the hearts of several of the benevolent mentalists he had found in New York. They were members of supernatural societies and they toed the line, but Jack feared that they would skip over it, if they had the instrument of concealment at hand. Plus, if they felt the necklaces touch their skin, they might learn how to replicate their effects on their own, thus allowing them to cloak their minds in the same way as he did.
Usually, mentalism required that a mentalist become the person whose mind they're intruding into, even for a moment. It was hard to violate another person when you could feel them and their thoughts and feelings as clearly as if they were your own. The cloak-hole technique gave no such insight. Jack could only hear the thoughts he was specifically looking for. It would be easy to disregard the other person's emotions if you didn't have to feel them.
If these mentalists figured out the cloak-hole technique and that ability made them go bad and mind-rape other people, Jack would feel responsible.
On the other hand, if he didn't tell them about the necklaces, sooner or later, Patrick and her handler would get to them. They would take away the mentalists' sanities and wills to live.
Ever since his father had told him about the Navy officer he had been named for, Jack had tried to live his life in accordance to that man's teachings. Lying in bed and enduring the humid heat, he thought of them. Good men had a duty to serve the greater good every day of their lives, Jack White had taught his father. A good man was always ready to honor his own worth and the worth of others by standing up against evil wherever he found it.
Those were ideals to live by, but Jack couldn't figure out how to apply them to his current situation. Tell the mentalists about the necklaces and risk them becoming evildoers, or don't tell them and leave them exposed to the current evildoers?
He didn't feel like it was his place to decide the fates of hundreds, or thousands of people. He wasn't an elected official. He never signed up to serve.
Didn't I? This trip was my idea, no one asked me to make it. And here I am, stumbling on the first step
. He let himself wallow in the yearning to just go home and forget about all this.
While his mind spun in endless debate, sleep managed to creep up on him. He dreamed he was in a field. It was autumn and decaying leaves were everywhere. A sudden gust of cold wind made Jack shiver and curl up. It blew the leaves off the ground and revealed Jack was in a graveyard. Tombstones stretched out as far as Jack could see. The names on them were of all the mentalists that had suffered at the hands of Jacobs and his master.
As Jack's gaze fell, he saw that the five tombstones nearest to him bore the names of Jamie Jacobs and his four goons. Rotting, skeletal hands suddenly burst from the loose soil and reached up to seize him.
Jack startled awake in his bed. He wiped the sweat from his brow and gulped air. The dogs woke up and watched him with raised ears. He calmed them with a gesture. Mia rolled off him and he got up to wipe himself down with a towel. The night was oppressively hot and humid, even without a nightmare-induced burst of adrenaline sweat. He lay back on the bed and his mind resumed spinning in its cycle of what-ifs.
By the time dawn finally broke, he came to a decision. It was dishonorable to think of the benevolent mentalists he had seen as just bad guys waiting to happen. They had banded together and done good. Those had been their choices in life, so far. They deserved to know. It was his duty to help them in any way he could.
He would tell the benevolent mentalists about the necklaces. Just as they deserved to know about the danger that was out there, they also deserved to know how to protect themselves from it. In the end, he was laying the responsibility at their own feet. If they chose to go bad and hid it from everyone else, he was not to blame. In his mind's eye, all the suffering they
could
cause was secondary to all the suffering Patrick and her masterwill cause.
After all, everyone can be a rapist, or a murderer, but the vast majority of people chooses to not rape and murder other people.
He beat back the small voice in the back of his mind that tried to point out that the vast majority of humanity didn't have the option of making strangers do their killing and raping for them with mentalist impunity.
If I decide that benevolent mentalists, people who have already chosen not to abuse others in such a way, aren't worthy of my faith, then where do I draw the line?
He got up and typed up second letters for those mentalists, in which he told them about the necklaces. He signed them with "Half a league onwards", the second verse from "The Charge of the Light Brigade", one of the few poems he knew by heart from start to finish.
Mia woke up by the time he was done and they had a breakfast of bacon, eggs, toast and sausages. The dogs scarfed down bowls of kibble. Jack pulled out of the trailer park and drove them north. He stopped at the first print shop they passed, and again had the letters printed without traces that could lead back to him. He tossed them into a mailbox in the next town they passed through.
"So, where are we going?" Mia asked as they entered Connecticut.
"Well, I was going to drive us to Augusta, but...I'm having second thoughts."
"What do you mean?"
Jack sighed. "I originally made my cross-country tour plan with the intent to stick to the major population centers, where I was more likely to find mentalists. I'm not so sure about that anymore."
Mia frowned. "What? Do you wanna stay in, like, the woods...or something?"
"No, it's just," he trailed off. "For instance, our recent stay in New York was a mistake. I wasted almost half my radius on the Atlantic. I didn't feel any mentalists on ships passing by the shore."
"So, you wanna stay away from the sea?"
"Yes, we need to keep inland. When you try to cover the US with a bunch of circles, you either have a lot of overlap, or a lot of gaps in between the circles. I mean, I'd prefer overlap to huge gaps, but they are both unavoidable. I'll have to waste half my radius on the sea again, sooner or later. I need to re-think my route. I'll pull over here and you take the wheel, ok?"
"Ok."
While Mia drove them north, Jack modified his route. He'd have to stay in coastal places a few more times, but he felt confident he could cover the entire US, including Alaska and Hawaii, in less than forty stops. For his next stop, he chose a small bed and breakfast in a historic house some twenty five miles west of Augusta. It would allow him to see the whole of New England, while wasting little of his radius on the ocean. It would also let him see all the way from Boston to Quebec and Montreal. He was curious to know if Jacobs' master had confined him to national borders, or not.
When they stopped for lunch at a roadside diner, he brought the laptop and showed Mia where they were going to stay that night. The website boasted of internet access, a premium cable package in every room and ensuite bathrooms. That was more than enough to sell it to Mia. The drive north was uneventful and provided them with many opportunities to admire the beautiful countryside.
The people running the B&B were an elderly couple named Rick and Mandy. Mandy had a long face, covered in wrinkles. Her skeletally thin hands kept rubbing one another, as if she was spreading an invisible cream on them. Her husband had a prominent pot belly. His head was bald and covered in liver spots, which simply drew the eye away from his hawkish nose. They both greeted Mia and Jack warmly. They lured their young guests to a table in the large, downstairs sitting room with trays of freshly baked cookies that smelled mouthwatering.
