Predestiny

by Phipps, C. T.

  “Robbie, we should talk.”

  “Not now, you psycho.”

  I thought of Jane like family. As if she were my own flesh and blood. But the truth was I really didn’t know her at all. The girl was quite literally a stranger from a strange land. And for the first time since I met her, the thought of us becoming closer scared the living hell out of me.

  I just needed to be alone.

  Away from all the people who wanted me to be something I wasn’t.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  I’ve never considered myself to be much of a brooder, yet here I was, lying on my bed, brooding.

  There was so much on my mind that I didn’t know where to begin coming to terms with it all. I felt overwhelmed, drowning in a whirlwind of chaos that I had zero control over and wasn’t even my fault. Or was it? This all started because of the Scorpion. Because of the man I was destined to become.

  Beyond Anna and Jane, beyond my dad and Colin Reilly, even beyond the assassins coming to kill me, he was there, looming over me as some dark specter in the distance. I couldn’t stop thinking about him and the terrible future he created … or is it that I would create? Damn it! How could someone that didn’t even exist yet cause me this much grief?

  For nearly an hour I stared at my bedroom ceiling, doing anything I could not to think of him. I even tried to make some headway into the copy of Frank Herbert’s Dune that I hoped to have finished last summer, but I was only a few chapters into it. Every time I picked it up, Anna distracted me with some business about H.O.P.E., so it sat on my shelf, long overdue from the school library. I took it down and plopped back on the bed, planning to finally make some progress, but all the talk of desert landscapes only made me think of a certain arachnid that I wanted to keep out of my mind.

  I tossed the book over to the nightstand and buried my head into the pillow, wishing the world would just go away. The irony wasn’t lost on me, but then again, nothing was more cliché than teenage angst.

  I don’t know how long I stayed in that position. Could’ve been a few minutes or even a few hours. Maybe I dozed off or possibly smothered myself. My luck just wasn’t that good.

  What I did know was that the next thing I recalled was a knock at the door. Given I locked the front door and only had given one person the key, I knew exactly who it was. I didn’t look up from the pillow, even as the bedroom door creaked open and I could sense Jane poke her head inside.

  “What’s up?” she asked, softly.

  I didn’t look up and kept my eyes embedded in the darkness of the pillowcase.

  The door creaked open more and I could hear her footsteps as she fully entered the room. “You know, I still don’t understand the meaning of that expression, despite hearing you say it all the time. Because then I have other people happily telling me ‘it’s going down’ and I can’t keep track of which direction is good and which is bad.”

  It was easy to forget sometimes that behind Jane’s rough, badass exterior was a girl who more or less was completely clueless about the world around her. It was cute in a psychotic kind of way, and I found it hard to stay mad at someone like that for long.

  I eased up on the pillow and sat up. “I’m sorry I punched you.”

  “I’m sorry I beat you up,” she retorted.

  I still hadn’t looked at her but could tell by the tone of her voice that we shared similar expressions. Finally turning to look at up at her, I gave the girl a half-hearted shrug. It was the universal sign of a teenager putting something behind them, regardless of the time period when they grew up.

  “Ehh. I kind of needed it,” I finally admitted, only half joking. “Especially the verbal abuse. With my dad gone, who else is gonna ridicule me?”

  Feeling more comfortable with our reconciliation, Jane moved up to sit beside me on the bed. “Why did you storm off at the school?”

  “It’s just…” I looked away, trying to come up with an answer that didn’t make me sound like a jerk. “I needed to be alone and think.”

  “About what?” asked Jane, obliviously naïve to the insanity she’d brought down on me.

  I could’ve ignored her ignorance. She did come from an entirely different world, after all. Watching people die while others tried to kill you probably wasn’t that big of a deal for Jane. But my little bout with anxiety caused me to be a little more dramatic as I got up and started pacing around the room. “Oh, I don’t know. Where should I begin? Butterfly is ruining the country and there’s a group of time-travelling assassins coming to kill me. And then there’s you and Anna pulling me in different directions. Not to mention the fact that my dad was just murdered trying to save my life. Oh, and I have to somehow prevent my fate of becoming a genocidal dictator that destroys the world. Other than that, my life is just peachy.”

  Jane simply shrugged off my rant. “It could be worse.”

  I stopped pacing back and forth and turned to her with half a smile. “Since when did you get a sense of humor?”

  “I’m serious,” she said, staring back at me blankly. “It really could be worse.”

  I rolled my eyes while resuming my anxious march around the room. “I don’t even want to know where that statement is coming from.”

  “Well, let’s deal with one problem at a time,” said Jane, sounding way more levelheaded and rational than I was used to. “We obviously can’t do anything about Butterfly right this second and there are no assassins busting through your window, so forget about those right now. What about me and your girlfriend? Maybe I can help there, considering I’m one of those people.”

  I was so stunned that my feet ceased to move across the room. Jane actually sounded like a logical person. Was she always this sensible and I just never noticed? Or was my staunch pragmatism finally starting to rub off on her? In that case, was her inclination towards violence also rubbing off on me? Now that was a scary thought I didn’t even want to consider.

  Either way, the girl made sense. I appreciated her being here for me, so I decided to be honest with her in return. “I want to make you both happy but I don’t know how.”

  She looked at me sideways and I could practically see the gears turning in her head. Usually that meant I wasn’t going to like whatever she had to say, but given the way our conversation was going, I tried to think optimistically.

  “I know this is probably against my better judgment,” she started, “but why don’t you stop thinking about what other people want and start thinking about what it is that you want?”

  It was pretty insightful counseling. A real Oprah moment and totally out of character for Jane. Then again, she probably learned psychological coping her first day in assassin boot camp.

  Still, I took the girl’s advice and confided in her. “A part of me wants to listen to you about these assassins. Mainly the part that doesn’t want to die. But the reason I fell for Anna in the first place is because another part of me wants to help people. I guess that’s what eventually gets twisted into becoming this Scorpion persona, and I know that’s the reason why you want me to stay away from H.O.P.E., but…”

  I was ready to go on but trailed off when I saw Jane sitting on the bed and listening to me with this big, goofy grin on her face. It almost appeared awkward, especially given the fact that I was just dumping my mental baggage on her, so I had to call her on it. “Why are you smiling?”

  She answered with a question. “Do you know why I didn’t kill you back in Chicago?”

  “You didn’t want to be a murderer anymore?” I guessed, shrugging my shoulders.

  She looked at me with a hopeless grimace, as if I should’ve known better. “I’ve been killing people for a long time, Robbie. It’s a part of who I am.”

  I didn’t even think of an alternative. Just shook my head. “Then no, I don’t know.”

  Jane patted right beside her, signaling me to sit. She started to explain only after I had joined her on the bed. “I’ve only ever known the Scorpion to be the monster he was when I was al
ive. I mean, I knew he wasn’t always like that. He must’ve been a kid at some point in his life, but it wasn’t until I saw you at that protest that it really hit me. Killing you wouldn’t be killing the Scorpion because that’s not who you are. Not yet, anyway. The Scorpion wasn’t born overnight. He was made over time. Carved from experience and tragedy and tribulation.”

  Jane paused for a moment, allowing me a chance to realize where she was headed in her story before she got there. “The kid I saw at that protest wasn’t a monster. He was just like everyone else that was there, fighting to make the world a better place. Yes, that drive inside you to do what is right is probably the same thing that fuels you into becoming the Scorpion. But I thought maybe, if somehow, I could guide you down a different path, if I was here to make sure the road you take in your future is different than the one you were on, we could harness that greatness into a force for good rather than the evils the Scorpion will be known for.”

  “Do I look like a revolutionary to you?” I asked, skeptical of her ambitious plan.

  “Well, you hit me in the face,” she said with a proud smile. “Let’s call that a baby step.”

  I leaned in and sarcastically stared into her eyes as if I noticed something new in them. “You did find a sense of humor, didn’t you?”

  “Maybe you’re rubbing off on me more than I’d like to admit.”

  At least she confirmed it. Still, I didn’t want to think of the flipside to that equation, so I quickly stood from the bed and changed the subject. “All right. So you think I can be a good version of the Scorpion. Where do we start?”

  She put her elbows down and leaned back on the bed, almost like she didn’t take our conversation seriously. “You’re forgetting the main reason why I don’t want you out there drawing attention to yourself. There’s still a group of assassins who want you dead.”

  Her relaxed position was a stark contrast to my irritated stance. “So I’m just supposed to abandon Anna and H.O.P.E.?”

  “I told you,” she said, shrugging her shoulders. “If you want to be an activist, then I need to be there by your side, guiding you along the way, and I can only handle one problem at a time. Until these assassins are taken care of, you need to stay out of sight.”

  “So what if they never come? I just have to spend the rest of my life like a hermit while Butterfly controls the world?”

  Jane nodded her head with a reluctant grimace. “It’ll be better than what the Scorpion has in store.”

  “You don’t know that,” I said, practically pleading with her. “What if the future we create is worse than the one we’re trying to prevent?”

  Jane took a deep breath and stared at me, annoyed. She looked like a parent who was just asked a really simple question by a kid that she had no desire to answer.

  Yet she reluctantly did anyway. “Most of the world’s religions aren’t actively practiced once the Scorpion starts his crusade, so my understanding on the subject is very limited. But the place I come from, Robbie, is the closest thing to a Catholic hell I could possibly imagine. Anything, no matter how horrible it might seem, would be better than allowing that to happen.”

  Her analogy seemed grimly dramatic, even by Jane’s standards, but it really put the brakes on my optimism. I was just about ready to slump back down on the bed and concede her point when a crazy idea popped into my head. “Why can’t we do both?”

  “What are you talking about?” asked Jane, genuinely puzzled by the concept.

  I began to pace again as I explained, mainly because I was making this up as I went. “We keep thinking of this as an either-or situation. Either I fight Butterfly and allow the Scorpion to rise or I sit back and let you deal with the assassins. Why can’t we do both at the same time?”

  “Robbie, we’ve already had this argument,” said Jane with a grimace. “You engaging Butterfly is what led to the Scorpion’s rise. I won’t allow it.”

  “Yeah. But what if I don’t fight them directly? What if there was a way to bring them down from the inside out?”

  Jane appeared skeptical of the plan. “And how do you propose we do that?”

  I kept marching back and forth, rubbing my chin and staring at the ground, hoping something would spark a little inspiration. It took about three trips across the room, but the opportunity hit me so hard I stopped mid-stride, ecstatic, and turned to Jane with my face completely lit up. “The field trip!”

  She did not share my enthusiasm, mainly because she had no idea what I was talking about. “The what trip?”

  Her ignorance of such a simple concept, even one our class had been planning for weeks, did not dampen my spirits. “Mr. Welles’s field trip to the local Butterfly building. It’s perfect. We can sneak away from our tour, break into their computer servers, and steal some dirty secrets that will expose them for the shady, corrupt, corporate fascists they are.”

  Jane still seemed doubtful of our prospects, but she leaned forward, at least intrigued by the idea. “You really think a little exposé on the Butterfly Corporation will stop them?”

  Having protested Butterfly while also having a parent who idolized them, I knew this subject better than most and was confident it could be done. “Everyone thinks that Butterfly gets their power from Monarch, but it doesn’t. It comes from people like my father who stand by thinking that megacorporations are the answer to all their problems. If we can show them that isn’t the case, then we can weaken Butterfly’s hold over us, and if it can be weakened, then it can be destroyed.”

  Jane stood off the bed while looking at the floor and thinking about the possibility of success out loud. “And if Butterfly is gone…”

  “…there’s no reason for the Scorpion to exist,” I said, finishing her thought.

  She looked up at me and nodded, her face subtly smirking with excitement. “Then I can convince the assassins to abandon their cause. This might actually work.”

  Jane then stiffened her back upon realizing the obstacles we would most definitely have to face. “But how are we going to sneak into the building’s restricted area? I’m sure the place is like a fortress.”

  “You’re a highly trained assassin,” I said, shrugging my shoulders like it was no big deal. “I’m sure you’ll think of something.”

  My laid-back confidence failed to change her expression. “I didn’t say ‘how am I going to sneak in?’ I said ‘we.’ I’m not letting you out of my sight.”

  “Then train me.”

  The words just came right out on their own. I didn’t plan on saying them. To be honest, I hadn’t even thought about having Jane teach me how to fight. But still, I didn’t regret saying it. In a way, the idea seemed right.

  “Whoa,” responded Jane, her dumbfounded expression clearly showing she wasn’t expecting me to say it either. “Wait a second. You throw one punch and all of a sudden you think you’re the Master Chief?”

  I loved the fact that she was settling into our time enough to make such a niche cultural reference but had to press that aside to focus on the issue at hand. “You said it yourself that I’m capable of greatness. Maybe it’s time for me to own it.”

  Jane looked my scrawny body up and down, obviously sizing me up. She didn’t jump for joy, but the fact that she crossed her arms with a smirk was as positive a sign as I was going to get. “All right, Robbie. Let’s see what you’ve got.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The house’s basement was mostly used for storage, but my father had tried to set up a gym there when he’d been interested in making a man out of me. Like all of his plans for my future, they lasted about a week before he abandoned them. I tried not to let those feelings affect me as I helped Jane clear out the boxes and set up the equipment I’d need for fight training.

  “I don’t suppose you’re going to teach me how to do those amazing flips and punches you do,” I said, remembering her fight in the parking lot. “Some of that stuff didn’t look human.”

  “A lifetime of conditioning mixed
with specialized supplements. Better living through chemistry in the future.”

  “So none of that for me?”

  “Not anytime soon, unless you want me to break into a Monarch lab.”

  “Maybe later,” I said, half joking.

  I’d changed into a pair of black sweat pants and a gray hoodie. Jane had changed into black slacks and a tight purple t-shirt. She had a tote bag with a change of clothes beside her.

  “Where did you get those clothes?” I asked, wondering how she’d gotten a whole new wardrobe since I’d last seen her.

  “I stole them,” Jane said, shrugging. “I’ve also got cash, weapons, and some electronic equipment to help us sneak into the Butterfly building.”

  “I think I should feel bad about this,” I said, not really caring all that much.

  “We’ve got the fate of the world resting on us,” Jane said, picking up a bottle of water from her bag and taking a drink from it. “I think the ethics of preventing mass genocide and world devastation justifies a bit of petty theft.”

  “Yeah,” I said, shaking my head. “How did the world get so screwed up? How did the Scorpion go from fighting the corporations to destroying the world?”

  “We’ve talked about it enough,” said Jane, more annoyed by the question than I expected. “You need to stop worrying about a future we’re trying to prevent.”

  “I just figured the more I knew the easier it would be to avoid,” I argued, walking over to the exercise mat in the middle of the makeshift gym. “I’ve learned a lot from that history book and you did a good job filling in the blanks. But I still can’t believe someone could stray so far that they would ruin an entire planet just to accomplish their goals.”

  “You don’t have to believe it,” Jane said, frowning. “You just have to focus on the present. Decide who you want to be here and now, because no good can come from your obsession with the Scorpion.”

  She had me there. I literally had no response.

  As I stood silently on the mat, Jane walked over to join me while expanding on her previous comment. “It’s like driving a vehicle. If you focus on something too much you start heading in that direction without even realizing it.”