by Kelli Kimble
“Yes, sir,” Elton said.
I nodded.
“I stood in as your guardian,” Father continued. “I’ve informed the school that you are my niece and nephew, and your parents perished in the lab fire on the north side of town. You may live with me if you wish, but I understand if you’d like to make other arrangements. Nimisila, your aunt is willing to care for you, and Elton, your brother has, of course, said he’d assume care of you. I’ve grown to care for both of you and would be deeply humbled if you should choose to stay. But, that’s up to you.” He glanced around the room. “I do have an above-ground house we’d reside in. We’re only here because I wanted to make sure your abilities could be contained while you learned to properly control them.”
I glanced at Elton. His jaw was working, but I couldn’t read his expression. “I don’t want to stay with my aunt,” I said. It popped out of my mouth before I even knew I was saying it. I’m sure I looked even more surprised than Father did.
“So, you’ll stay with me, then?” he asked.
Whoa, Nim. What are you doing? Elton asked me.
“I can’t stay with my aunt,” I explained. “She turned us over to Mrs. Darit. She doesn’t care about me at all.”
You can’t be serious, Elton said.
“Then, it’s settled,” Father said. “We’ll be leaving tomorrow, so you might want to pack your things.”
I stood and looked down at Elton. His eyebrows were squished together, and he shook his head. I didn’t answer him; instead, I went to my room to pack my things.
He followed and closed the door behind us. “What about our plan?” he asked.
“What about it?” I opened the armoire and began pulling my clothes off their hangers.
“I thought we were going to get rid of Father,” he said, hushing his voice and glancing back at the door. “You can’t go and live with him.”
“He doesn’t have anyone,” I said, “and neither do I.” I turned back to the armoire so that I didn’t have to face him when I said it. “I don’t want to kill him anymore, anyway.”
Elton grabbed my shoulder and spun me around. “How can you say that? We agreed we’d kill him after we got what we came for. It’s done. So, let’s get rid of him.”
I shook my head. “No. Look. This might seem stupid, but he’s shown me more care than I know what to do with, after what happened to us. I don’t see the point of getting rid of him now. I . . . I like him.”
Elton stood there, blinking. Then, he frowned. “You don’t see the point?”
“No. Look. You were right about monstrous acts. We’ve killed enough people. Let’s just get on with our lives. We don’t have to dwell on what happened to us anymore. What happened . . . it gave us gifts. Powerful gifts. Killing him will only make it more difficult for us to make our way.”
Elton didn’t answer. He left the room, and I heard his door slam a moment later. I winced. I didn’t want him to be angry with me. I just wanted all this hate to go away.
◆◆◆
In the morning, Father fixed us breakfast, and we sat down to eat. He was busy chattering away about the lives we would have on the outside. He seemed unaware of the tension between me and Elton.
When breakfast was done, he took us to the elevator. We rode up to the shed in my backyard, and when the doors opened, Weasel was standing there. He regarded Father with a glare but grasped Elton in a bear hug. I’ve been searching for you since you left, Weasel said.
I’m all right. Let’s just go home, Elton said.
We’re not just going to go home, Weasel countered. Someone has to pay for this.
No, Elton said, moving towards Weasel and shaking his head. Weas, I just want this to be over and done with. Please, let’s go home.
Weasel reached out to Elton, and Elton fell into his outstretched arms. He clutched Elton to his chest with one arm and raised the other.
There was a flash and a bang—a noise I’d grown accustomed to. But, I wasn’t expecting it, and I couldn’t deflect the bullet. Not the first one, anyway. I turned the rest harmlessly away, until Weasel had spent his ammunition.
Elton fell to the ground, jerking. Weasel bent over him, dropping the gun. But, as soon as he touched Elton, his joints seemed to stiffen. He tipped over on top of Elton.
“No! What are you doing?!” I yelled.
“Don’t touch them,” Father said. His voice was calm and cold.
“Stop hurting them, then,” I said, snapping my eyes to him. “Just leave them alone.”
“You saw what he did,” Father replied. “This is self-defense.”
“It was self-defense,” I said. “Now, you’re just hurting them on purpose.”
“They don’t hurt anymore,” he said. “It’s all over.”
I looked back at Elton. He was lying face-down with one arm stuck underneath him, and Weasel draped over his back.
Neither of them was moving.
“They’re . . . they’re dead?”
“Shh. There, now. They won’t try to hurt us anymore,” Father said. He’d come to my side without me noticing, and he patted my head.
I jerked away. “They weren’t hurting us,” I said. “One of them was harmlessly trying to hurt you, and I protected you. You didn’t need to hurt them, let alone kill them.” I clenched my fists. I could feel my abilities starting to fire up to the edge of my control.
His finger hovered over the button of the device in his hand. “I don’t want to use this,” he said. “Not on you.”
My teeth gritted together with the effort of containing my thoughts, and I took a step away. “But, you wanted to use it on him?” I asked.
“It was always you,” he explained. “I knew from the beginning, before Mrs. Darit started recruiting. You were always the target.”
My anger started to dissipate in my confusion. “But . . . but, why me?”
“You had natural abilities. All the tests said so.”
“You were testing us? In school?”
“In school. At home. When you played. Everywhere. Telepathic abilities don’t need a classroom to be measured, Nimisila. You had the strongest markers of anyone, whether they had an implant or not, and your abilities have become greater than I could ever have imagined.”
The rage inside me redoubled. I wasn’t just a thing to be tested, poked, and prodded.
Father’s eyes widened, and he frantically pushed the button. The jolt clamped my mouth shut so hard, I could taste blood. The pain was bad, but thanks to Mrs. Darit and the doctor, it wasn’t the worst thing I’d ever felt.
I closed my eyes and envisioned whatever was causing the pain, making it swirl around inside my body, creating a vortex. The pain eased, and my concentration increased, and when I opened my eyes, Father tripped over Elton and Weasel’s bodies as he cringed away from me. His eyes were open so wide that the whites were visible all around the irises. His mouth was contorted into an empty scream. He held up his hands to fend me off, but his fingers curled uselessly into claws. “Stop, Nimisila,” he croaked. “Please.”
But, his begging only made me angrier. His head tipped back, and the tendons in his neck stood out like ropes against his skin. The exposed skin began to ripple, like water disturbed by a pebble, throwing off bits of itself at the crest of each wave. His skin dissipated, revealing muscles and bones. His eyeballs no longer had eyelids, and they were rolling around in their sockets. “Nimisila!” he called out once more.
Then, with a quiet puff, his body flew apart into tiny flakes of dust and blew away.
I fell to my knees. The physical pain was gone. But, I’d never be the same.
Epilogue
Aunt Rue did let me stay with her. She was afraid of me, but she let me stay, and just as Father had promised, a spot was being held for me at the regular school. I attended for a while and tried to make it work. The other kids knew there was something different about me and whispered behind my back. Rather than hurt them out of anger, I dropped out and stayed at Au
nt Rue’s to care for Arisa. I don’t think Aunt Rue minded taking advantage of a free babysitter, but she was disappointed in my decision to leave school. I couldn’t explain; she didn’t know I’d killed all those people.
Eventually, she introduced me to a friend of hers, someone she said would know how to help me. Her name was Gayle. Gayle had an implant, but she could speak. After a time, I found out she’d had a sister, whose implant had failed when she developed an inoperable but benign tumor. She told me stories about how her sister had defied her role and had been punished, and one of her punishments had been to oversee a group of outsiders who had been drawn into the city for labor. Unfortunately, she’d fallen in love with the leader of the outsiders, and they’d fled. Gayle had long been waiting for her sister to return.
“Do you ever think about leaving here?” Gayle asked me at the park one day. We were taking turns pushing Arisa on a swing. “Just going outside the city and striking out on your own with a new life?”
I shrugged. “Nobody ever leaves the city,” I said.
Gayle’s eyes focused on something far away. “Tabby did.”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t know how to survive outside the city. Nobody did; that’s why people went to the shanties instead of leaving.
“I know she’s alive out there,” she told me, “and I know how to find her now.”
“Really?” I asked. “How?”
She turned to me and gave me a crooked smile. “You.”
Reclamation
Book Eight of the Repatriate Protocol Series
Kelli Kimble
Chapter 1
“Wake up!” Gayle said, pushing against me with her foot. “There’s something outside the shelter.”
I blinked my eyes open, but it was a useless gesture. It was unbelievably dark, and the cloud cover was keeping the moon and stars out of sight.
“There, do you hear it?” she said. I could feel her arm searching the air, trying to grab a hold of me. She found my forearm and grabbed my wrist.
“I’ve got it,” I said. I stretched my mind outside the shelter and felt for movement. It was to my left, and I moved towards it, even though trees and underbrush blocked the way. There was a rough breathing sound, a sort of sniffing. Then, a sneeze.
There was something there.
A small tree was beside me, and I imagined it cracking off at the ground, right at the base, and falling towards whoever it was. There was a series of pops and cracks as the tree broke off and gained momentum on its way to the ground. It crashed against another tree and stopped.
Whatever it was let out a high-pitched yelp, and I felt it move away quickly.
Leave us alone, I said to it telepathically. There was no reply—except for an even faster skittering against the leaves as it made a hasty retreat.
I waited a few more beats, but I couldn’t sense it anymore. It was gone, scared away.
I concentrated on the pull at my belly and snapped back into my body. “It’s gone,” I said. I yawned and stretched, then curled back up inside my bedroll. My eyes were becoming accustomed to the dark, and I could see her faint outline, sitting straight up and listening intently.
“What was that noise? What if there’s more?” she asked. Her voice was smooth and calm, but I knew she was nervous. We hadn’t anticipated how difficult it would be to live outside the city, and except for my abilities, we had no weapons or manner of defense. It was understandable she would feel vulnerable—but I was frankly a little tired of her panicking every 15 minutes.
“I’ve checked, Gayle. There aren’t any more. Whomever or whatever it was, it’s gone. The noise was just me scaring it away.”
There was a moment of silence, and she let out a long, pent-up breath. She laid back down in her bedroll. “If you’re sure, then.”
“I’m sure.” I blinked my eyes shut and willed sleep to come. It would likely be hours before Gayle managed to get back to sleep, and one of us needed to be well-rested.
I rolled onto my other side and checked again to make sure we were alone. The only living things I could sense nearby were small—mice or squirrels, maybe. My eyes slid shut without further hesitation.
In the morning, I woke to the sounds of birds and wildlife. It was hard to believe how much louder those sounds were away from the city. Gayle was softly snoring with her pillow over her head. I wriggled free of my bedroll and left the shelter to stoke the fire. I looked around for a bit of kindling and came across the tree I’d knocked over. Some very large, dangerous-looking pawprints were imprinted in the mud near it. I quickly tamped them down with my foot, looking guiltily over my shoulder to make sure Gayle hadn’t seen. If she had any idea how large it had been, she’d never get another moment’s sleep.
I took out the tablet Gayle had been using to navigate to our destination. Her sister, Tabby, had given it to her, but it wasn’t native to the city. It came from the outsiders, the ones whom Tabby had fled with. The tablet appeared to be a thin block of clear plastic—until it was touched. Then, it acted like a computer—though one with a lot more power than I was used to.
The tablet opened its view of the map we’d been using. Gayle referred to it as “the mountain”, and it was the origin of the outsiders Tabby had come from. Gayle thought if she went to the mountain, she’d either find her sister there, or I’d be able to use my abilities to find her. I’d told her many times my ability didn’t work that way; I couldn’t just reach out and find a particular person anywhere in the world. It was questionable whether I’d be able to find Tabby, even if she’d been in the city. I’d never met her and had no idea what she looked, sounded, or felt like.
But Gayle was sure, and I was tired of feeling like an outcast in the city, so I’d agreed to come with her. Besides, who knows? Maybe we would stumble across them with sheer, dumb luck. Even a blind squirrel sometimes finds a nut, right?
I traced the route we’d already completed on the map with my finger. From here on out, it was going to get a lot harder. We were entering rocky terrain that was moving up in elevation—and whatever had come sniffing around our shelter last night was still out there.
I sighed. Gayle was exhausted already; she was out of shape and tired from nights of worrying. It seemed like turning back would be the smart thing to do.
But Gayle would never agree to that.
A sneeze came from inside the shelter, followed by the honking sound of her blowing her nose into a hankie. She started every single morning that way, not getting out of her bedroll until the ritual had been performed.
The third morning, I asked her how she got herself to sneeze like that. “It’s all mental,” she’d said. “You just have to inhale through your nose—over the tickly part near the top? Then, when you start to get a good tickle going, you just look at a bright light. A sneeze will come out. Guaranteed.”
Now, I said, “Good morning,” to her over my shoulder.
“Yeah,” she said. She didn’t believe in certain social concepts—one of them was meaningless greetings. She rustled around, then emerged from the shelter, dressed. Her short hair was sticking out in every direction, though.
I stifled a smile.
“No breakfast yet, eh?” she said. She stretched and walked around to the other side of the fire, then started the preparations for breakfast. After five days, we were running low on food. That was not a good thing. What were we going to do when we ran out?
She cracked our last two eggs into a pan and set it on the fire. “Keep an eye on that? I’m going to get some water,” she said. She picked up the canteen and set off through the woods, towards a water source we’d found yesterday, before we set up the shelter.
The fire was hot, and the eggs were already bubbling. I grabbed a stick and stirred them until they scrambled. It would only be another few seconds before they’d be overcooked. In my mind’s eye, I kept watch over Gayle. She stomped through the underbrush, oblivious of the small creatures she was disturbing. I yanked the eggs off the fire, but i
t was too late. At least, this time, they weren’t burnt.
She returned with the canteens, slurping from one as she handed me the other. “We need to get moving, I think,” she said. “Looks like it’s getting to be past mid-morning already.”
I didn’t tell her that it was almost 11. She’d needed the sleep, and I didn’t want her to feel bad. I pointed to the tablet. “I found some data in there that can help us find something edible,” I said. “There’s all kinds of plants we can forage for.”
“Great,” she said, curling her lip. “I’ve always loved vegetables.”
“I didn’t say we had to like it. It’ll be better than starving.”
“Agreed.” She squatted down beside me and started to pick at the eggs with her fingers. We didn’t have the luxury of any kind of utensils, except for a few knives—but I preferred to keep mine in the sheath on my belt.
I dipped into the eggs, too. They were rubbery and a little bit crunchy. Not my best effort. But, I never, ever wasted food. I’d eat it, even if it was burnt black.
“Which way are we headed?” Gayle asked.
I pointed towards a distant hill that was littered with boulders and loose rocks. “That way,” I said.
She turned and squinted towards it. “Nothing’s ever simple, is it?”
“Nope,” I said.
We finished off the eggs and the water. I started packing up for the hike ahead, and she went to refill the canteens and clean the pan. I was rolling up my bedding when I felt a sudden tingle down my spine.
Something was wrong.
I reached out for Gayle, stretched away from my body, and scanned the trees towards the stream where she’d gone for the water. She was there, lying on her back, an arm stretched over her eyes, as if she were afraid to look at something. I looked for whatever it was that had scared her, but I didn’t see anything. I snapped back to my body and ran to her physically, pushing aside branches and tripping over roots on my way—even though I could’ve just flown to her.
