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“Gone for two and a half days and you think you get to just walk in here and ignore us? This isn’t a charity operation, Armor, it’s a Federal office.” Hennesy, who according to Vinny was my subconscious avatar of high standards and hard work, came charging into the makeshift work area I’d set up at the FBI headquarters looking positively livid. My subconscious sure knew how to pick its avatars. “First your damn Constellations threaten to pull you off the case and keep you out of the office for forty eight hours. Then they say you’ll come back. Then you show up three hours late. What kind of a joke do you think this is?”

“I’m being perfectly serious, although I’ll admit I should have cleared my activities through you this morning,” I said. I hadn’t because I wasn’t sure Mix would agree to pass on the message for me – or let me so far off the reservation. Aurora had been nervous about me looking any further into the fugue trap I’d found on my ‘day off’ and any hint Mix got that I was still pursuing that angle was sure to make its way back to the Constellations. Galaxy’s insistence on working through designated intermediaries had its drawbacks. “I’ve been off the reservation, but for good reason. There’s an angle to this I’ve been following up on my own and at this point I think I need Bureau resources to keep looking into it.”

Hennesy fumed, looking like he needed a couple of days off himself. “This had better be good.”

Persuasion isn’t my forte but I did my best to make what I’d discovered during the dive on the Backboard servers and my subsequent talk with Vinny sound convincing. Unfortunately as I went through the chain of events it started to sound flimsier and flimsier, even to me. There wasn’t anything directly tying A.J. Jackson to the events of the last few days, there wasn’t any reason to think prying into a conspiracy theorist from Arizona would shed light on terrorism in California and there wasn’t any reason I could think of that therapeutic fugue state tech might tie back in to it all. Part of me was beginning to wonder if maybe I should try and get a job crafting theories with Jackson rather than investigating with the FBI.

For better or worse Hennesy didn’t see it that way. He just listened to what I had to say, thought about it, then walked out of the cubicle. Left to conclude I had his blessing for the moment, I went back to poking through various government casefiles and databases in an attempt to locate some of the people whose names Vinny had given me. I was have depressingly good luck.

While Vinny and I have pretty exclusive lines of work it’s still pretty easy for us to lose track of people. Vinny works alone and, as I’ve noted, the Gifted have good reasons to avoid each other most of the time. The  Venn diagram of people we’d lost track of and people who had dropped off the grid was nonexistent and none of the people I could find looked like they were in any way associated with Jackson’s media or infotech work. I had a lot of names to check on but I was more than halfway done when Hennesy returned with Eugene in tow. “Okay, Armor,” he said. “Run all that by Fitzgerald for me.”

He’d found an expert. How nice. I did as the man wanted.

Once he’d heard it all Eugene paused for a few minutes, working through the implications, then he said, “Follow a strange line of questioning for me. How many psychometrics are there in the US?”

“Maybe four thousand,” I replied immediately. “It’s hard to tell.”

“How hard?” Hennesy asked. “I thought there were only two groups of you.”

“Yes, but we don’t have a radar or genetic test we can do to locate each other. You can recognize certain mental habits that sane adults with the Gift have to develop to stay alive and sane but normal people develop them sometimes, too.” I pointed at Eugene. “It’s like seeing a redhead. I can assume there’s a good chance Eugene’s of Irish descent but until I do some research it’s not a guarantee.”

“True enough,” Hennesy mused, eyeing Eugene’s hair. “So you assume some percentage of the psychometric population is outside of Galaxy or the Masks. Do you know how much?”

“We know about ten percent of them choose not to join either organization. We presume between twice and three times that number have never heard of us or have and choose to remain independent, but we’ve never heard of them.” I shrugged. “It’s not an exact science, but we assume the breakdown of the sane, adult Gifted to be about forty percent in Galaxy, thirty to forty percent independent, twenty to thirty percent Masks.”

Eugene leaned forward and asked, “How many insane psychometrics are there?”

I froze for just a moment. Then, “I’m sorry?”

“You’ve qualified all of your numbers as dealing with sane psychometrics, yes?”

“Yes, because our abilities take a toll on our sanity. Not everyone learns to – or wishes to – safeguard against those costs.”

“What percentage of the population is that?” Eugene asked.

I was tempted to ignore the question, it was a very sensitive topic among the Gifted. But I could tell he thought he was on to something very important. “Maybe a third.”

“Do you monitor them?”

A shudder ran up my back. “Monitor how?”

“To see if they recover.”

“We can’t recover from-” And suddenly Eugene’s line of reasoning made sense. “You think the fugue state I found was used to cure a mad psychometric.”

“A therapy trap,” Hennesy muttered.

“I know that it’s axiomatic among the Gifted to say that you can’t recover from insanity,” Fitzgerald said. “But maybe one could. Maybe A.J. Jackson knew a psychometric who went crazy and tried to cure him or her. Maybe that’s why he built this fugue state you describe, rather than just buying a commercial fugue trap off the market. It wouldn’t have done what he wanted.”

That was certainly possible. But, just like Aurora, I dealt primarily with the intersection physical things and the Gift. I didn’t know much about how we dealt with purely mental things. “I don’t know if we track insane psychometrics or not. I’ll need to make some calls. Possible take it all the way to the Constellations.”

“Before we spend too much time on that,” Hennesy said, “I need to know if it’s relevant to this investigation. I’m sure curing mental illness is very important to Galaxy but it’s not going to stop whoever is terrorizing Silicon Valley if there’s no connection between Jackson, his Backboard project and the attacks of the last week. Would curing an insane psychometric help him pull off what’s happened?”

I thought about it for a moment, then shook my head. “No Gifted person I know has ever been insane. I have no way of knowing…”