The Thought Pushers (Mind Dimensions Book 2) Read Online Free Page B

Darren, disassociate as I have done during other Readings. This time is different, of course, since I still feel Caleb here. I feel his excitement. He clearly appreciates Haim’s fighting style more than I do.
    “ Don’t distract ,” Caleb’s thought comes, and I let Haim’s memory absorb me again.
    “Azor, esh li maspik,” Moni says after five minutes of brutal attacks. Not surprisingly, that means ‘stop, I have had enough.’
    We graciously tell him he did well and that he’s welcome to return.
    The next opponent enters. Then another. It must be ten or more in a row. None of them are a challenge. This is another part of the training that we hate. We fight almost robotically, letting our thoughts drift to the upcoming quick trip to the United States. We’re concerned that this training module will make us develop deadly habits, like thinking idle thoughts during a fight . . .
    I, Darren, disconnect again, only to have Caleb mentally convince me to find another recent memory of the same kind. So I do. It’s nearly identical to the previous fight, but Caleb wants to experience it. And then another. And another.
    We do this over and over, reliving at least a week—if not two or three—of non-stop fighting. It all starts to blur.
    “I can’t take this anymore,” I think at Caleb eventually. The fatigue that I feel is not physical, but mental. Somehow that makes it more potent, inescapable. The human psyche isn’t equipped to do what we’re doing right now. I feel like I haven’t slept in years, haven’t rested in millennia. I’m forgetting the time when I wasn’t Haim. I can’t recall a moment when I was not doing this accursed fighting.
    “Fine,” I get a response back. I feel a sudden, enormous sense of loss. It’s as though the whole universe imploded.
    After a few confusing moments, I understand. Caleb got out. I’m here by myself—no longer part of the joint-mind being.
    Not willing to spend a millisecond longer than I have to in Haim’s head, I instantly get out as well.
     
    * * *
     
    I’m back in Haim and Orit’s kitchen in the Quiet. I look in shock at Haim, who’s still frozen—with that wax-statue smile directed at his also-frozen sister. He doesn’t look nearly as dangerous as I now know he is. In that, he’s unlike Caleb, who always looks kind of dangerous with his badass manner and that gleam in his eye. And now that I’ve gotten a glimpse inside Caleb’s fucked-up mind, I know that he’s even more dangerous than he looks.
    I try not to think too deeply about what I just experienced. It’s too late, though; the violent images run through my mind, and I’m overwhelmed. It’s not Haim’s memories of the never-ending fight that do this to me. It’s Caleb’s. Those things he did to the Pusher are disturbingly fresh, replaying in my head over and over. I sit down at the breakfast table, in the empty chair next to Haim’s sister, and try to take a few calming breaths. If I wasn’t in the Quiet now, I think I would be sick.
    “Are you okay, kid?” Caleb asks quietly.
    “No,” I answer honestly. “I’m far from okay.”
    “For what it’s worth, I am never doing that again,” he says, to my huge relief. “Your mind is too twisted.”
    “What? Mine is too twisted?” I say in outrage, weariness momentarily forgotten. The gall of this guy. I’m not the one who tortures and murders people. I’m not the one who took some kind of weird masochistic pleasure in brutal training. I didn’t ask someone to Read a killer, so I could become an even better killer myself.
    “You’re one odd puppy.” He smirks. “But it’s not just that. I really hated that feeling in the beginning, when our minds Joined.”
    “I thought you’d done this before.”
    He looks serious for a change. “This was different from the other time I did this. Too strange. Way too deep. We didn’t experience each other’s memories to the same degree when I did it before. This time, it felt