Rook

guard passed by, I scuttled carefully across the lawns toward one of the buildings. They didn’t even have floodlights! I blended in well in my black, but I wasn’t naive—I knew I wasn’t invisible. There were some fixed security cameras, but my rudimentary surveillance had turned them up with ease.
    I slipped between the cameras and pressed myself against the wall, where a bush had been permitted to grow. Crouching down, I was fairly well concealed. I took some long, deep breaths and tried to calm myself. My heart was about to climb out of my bottom, but I was secretly kind of thrilled. My plan was actually working. I was almost ready to check out the door to the nearest building when I heard a sound—and I froze.
    There was a metallic
fnikt,
and a light gleamed as a man lit a cigarette, not two meters from me.
    Oh. My. Holy. Fuck.
    Just thinking about it, I want to throw up. This guy, with a gun, had come out of the door for a smoke. And I had been about to walk around thecorner and bump right into him. I wasn’t shaking. I was rooted to the ground, which makes what happened next even more unexpected.
    I reached my hand out, around the corner, and brushed my fingertips against his wrist. Electricity coursed between us, and, well, you know how it goes.
    In fact, you’re the only one who knows.
    It was just the slightest of touches, but I reached out from inside and didn’t let him feel me or see me. Did you know you can do that? Everybody’s eyes have blind spots, and I created a new one that encompassed me. In fact, it wasn’t just a blind spot. I cut myself entirely out of his perception. I could have stood in front of him and screamed, but as long as I kept contact with him, he wouldn’t know I was there. It took concentration, but I managed it.
    Now, I could have forced him to walk into the building, but it’s very, very hard to compel someone who’s conscious to do something without his knowing about it. And I didn’t want him to realize that anything strange was happening that night. So we stood there for several minutes while he smoked and I sweated.
    I took the opportunity to examine the guy. He was dressed in a green uniform with no insignia. He did, however, have a name tag that read
GUSTAVSON .
Finally, he flicked his cigarette butt away, turned, and went back inside. I, having carefully moved my hand from his wrist to the nape of his neck, followed him.
    We walked down a long, tedious hallway. The interior designers for this estate, apparently having graduated from the same school as the architect, had elected to go with cinder-block walls painted the color of bile. The walls gleamed nauseatingly under the humming fluorescent tubes, and it was kind of like walking down someone’s well-lit large intestine. Now, if you ever get a free moment and would like to set yourself a little challenge, try this. Find somebody who’s taller than you (shouldn’t be hard), put your fingers on the back of his neck, and then try to follow him as he walks around briskly. You can’t break contact with him, and it’s not a good idea to step on his heels. So I was trotting along after Gustavson, awkwardly nipping along on my tiptoes.
    We passed doorways, but fortunately we didn’t pass any other people. If we had, I would have had Gus shoot them and then abruptly reevaluatedmy plans. Instead, Gus walked into his office, which turned out to be some sort of security hub. There were some monitors, and for a horrible moment I worried that there might be an alarm going off, that I had missed a camera. But all the outdoor views on the monitors were ones I’d carefully avoided. No alarms were sounding. I was becoming less and less impressed with this place’s security. My guard settled back into his chair, spoke an authoritative “All clear” into his walkie-talkie, and peered without any real interest at the monitors. This was not terribly revealing. So I touched his mind and soothed him into a very deep sleep.
    Then I took a closer look around. On the monitors, I saw shooting ranges, a driveway, and a helipad. There were also some indoor views, and it was these I was most interested in. All of them had their lights on, which seemed like a shocking waste of electricity, but maybe this was because there were no windows. I saw a garage with some cars and trucks all painted an uninteresting brown. I saw a large room that seemed to be a distressingly cheap combination of dining hall and gymnasium.
    There were