“The walls are four feet thick concrete. Nothing can penetrate them. The environment here was created to simulate the outside world but with massive precautions. The Commission tried to accommodate everyone’s abilities, but sometimes they get hit with new ones they didn’t foresee. Check out the dead trees over there in that room. I heard that the phyter who was training this morning had an ability that could destroy, using airborne elements around him. He could summon all of the noxious particles in the air and combine them to create a deadly force. Judging by the plant life in here, it looks like he’s got it down pretty good!” Chace joked.
The excitement coursed through me when I thought about what my gifts could be. Since I, and maybe even my parents, didn’t know what abilities we had, it was all anyone’s guess. Anxiety found its way in too, when I looked around the gigantic, inconceivable place that was going to be the one classroom I didn’t mind going to.
“Okay, Lex, let’s see what you got,” Chace said while he fluttered his fingers as if to fight me.
“You’ve got to be kidding me!” I said lightheartedly. I walked closer to him. “What do you want me to do?”
“Feel it, Lexi. Just feel it. Close your eyes, focus, breathe, relax and you’ll feel it. It’s in there. I saw it. You have to harness it and release it. It will come out however it wants.”
I tried so hard not to laugh. For some reason, the whole thing just struck me as so outlandish that I almost couldn’t hold it in. The last thing I wanted to do was make him mad enough that he wouldn’t train me, so I did exactly as he said. Focus, breathe, relax. I didn’t know how long I stood there, probably looking like a huge idiot waiting for something to happen. It seemed like only a second or two passed before the overwhelming urge came over me. The warm sensation I felt at Aunt Fay’s piano was back, and traveled down to my fingers again. Only this time, I couldn’t fight the urge to swing my arm in a windmill pitch motion. My limb had a mind of its own and I don’t remember exactly what I did. The trance broke with a huge crashing sound, and Chace laughing like a psych patient. I opened my eyes, afraid to assess the damage.
“Damn, phyter, that was great for your first try!” A blanket of thick, black smoke formed into little cloud puffs that rose to the top of the factory ceiling. The entire wall stood smoldering, with Chace at the foot of it, rubbing his shoulder and smiling a huge grin at me.
“I... I can throw fire?” My voice was low and soft. My mind couldn’t soak up what my body had just done.
“That would be a yes!” He lifted my arms to investigate my hands. “Look at that, Lex. Not even a change in skin color! A lot of phyters hurt themselves in the beginning. I’m glad to see you’re not one of them. You’re gonna be great!”
It stopped being amusing. It became very clear to me that Chace didn’t dip anything he said in powdered sugar before spitting it out. Being gifted was a very big deal and I had to take it seriously, because it was serious stuff. “Why are you holding your shoulder? Did I hurt you? Oh my God, Chace, I’m so sorry.” I was worried.
“No, no hon, I’m fine. You didn’t hit me or set me on fire or anything.” He laughed loudly. “It was just that the force you put behind that delivery was so humungous it sent me flying across the room!”
“Can you throw fire, too?” I checked my hands to see where the flames came from. Everything looked pretty normal to me. How trippy.
“Nope. Not one of my fortes, but I’ve managed okay so far with what I got,” he joked. “So that’s how you harness the energy of the gifts. As you get more comfortable, it’ll only take you a hundredth of a second to use it. You should be able to use more than one gift at a time, too. That takes a little more practice.”
“Can we try something else?” I begged.
“Yeah, but let’s not get carried away. You need to perfect each of these gifts. It’s not a good idea to work on too many at once. But I think one more shouldn’t hurt. Oh, and Lex, don’t try these outside of this facility. You have to have absolute control over your abilities before you can use them, here or anywhere else,” he warned.
“Fear not, Chace!” I joked. “I’m not stupid. I wouldn’t do anything without your say-so. For now, I mean. You know I don’t do well with authority,” I snickered.
I took my spot in the middle of the room again. Focus, breath, relax, I repeated in my head. The swirling colors, just like I saw at the café, closed around me in a funnel cloud. It felt weird. Almost like coming to after you’ve passed out. The dizziness set in fast and made me a little nauseous as I floated in that colorful tunnel. I was alone, and scared to be. I couldn’t see the factory or Chace. I blinked my eyes and tried to open them again, only to see the same colors dancing around. The nausea got worse as the colors swirled faster and my body became weightless.
“Chace! Damn it, Chace!” I screamed. The bright colors turned to shiny silver and gold and enveloped me in a snug hold before they spread out and became wavy, floating walls. Calmness came. Silver and gold, I thought to myself. The colors of my aura. How strange. I reached out to touch the glimmering walls that didn’t scare me when they pulled my fingers through. The liquid continued flowing around my hand, which was gripped by an icy breeze. When I poked my head out, something yanked me hard and fast until the rest of my body was out, too. I landed on my feet, standing on a pylon off Liberty Pier in the Hudson River. “Chace! Chace!” So much for the peaceful calm; I almost peed my pants. The wind gusts blew off the river and made me shiver fiercely. I panicked, knowing I had to get back to the factory before my trembling sent me plummeting off the pylon. The two vise-like hands that gripped me under my arms came out of nowhere and appeared to be connected to nothing. Out of fear, I closed my eyes. That’s when I felt a strong, squeezing tug, much like being sucked through a vacuum, and I tumbled onto the factory floor, with Chace wrapped around me.
“Thank God!” I said as I nuzzled against his chest, shaking with fear. “That was so damned scary! I don’t... I... I don’t get that one. What was that? I felt like Alice in friggin’ Wonderland!”
“It’s okay, you’re fine now.” He stroked my hair and rested his chin on my head. “I will always protect you, Lexi.” After a very long hugging session, he broke our hold and rested his hands on my still shaking shoulders “But now you can protect yourself, too. You have the ability to suspend yourself. It’s how you can hide in dangerous situations and not even another gifted one can see you. The only problem is, you have to know how, when and where to get out of suspension. You’ll always wind up in the vicinity, but you want to know exactly where you’ll wind up so you don’t hurt yourself. It was just a little mishap that you ended up in the Hudson. Look out the window. It’s only a few hundred yards away. Not bad for a phyter!”
I looked out over the harbor and saw where I had been a few minutes earlier. “How did you get me out, though? Did you hear me calling you? Did you feel something? Did you see something?”
“All of the above. I heard you, felt you and saw you. I have the same gift. That’s how I knew how to get you out. You’re doing great, Lex. You’ll have this nailed in no time.”
I hoped he was right. I had to have all of my abilities perfected before I left. That was the only way I could go back and forth between worlds without William or Chace’s help.
“How long?” I asked.
“Why? You in a hurry?”
“No, just curious.”
“I don’t know how long it will be. No one does. You don’t control when the abilities surface, you can only control how you use them. I think we’ve had enough for one day. Let’s go grab a bite and head home.”
I didn’t push the issue. He would have known I was up to no good. I knew he couldn’t read my mind, but I had to figure out a way to control my energy so when the time came, he wouldn’t know I was leaving.
After we wolfed down some burgers at the corner grill, we headed home, talking about lots of irrelevant things. Chace didn’t really like talking about being gifted and everything else that ca
me with it. Since that had been a big part of his life, he must have been bored with it all. He never said it, but I was sure there had to be times when he just wished he were an average high school quarterback. His face brightened every time we talked about the fun times we’d had together when I was a norm. Reminiscing about our childhoods, our parents and the funny things we did always made him happy. As we neared Far Hills, I asked one of the many questions that had been plaguing me.
“When we travel to the other world, what happens to us? Physically, I mean.”
He glanced at me, and then back at the road while he inhaled deeply. My guess was that it was complicated, and explaining it to a norm wasn’t going to be easy.
“Did you ever see the old Star Trek episodes? You know, when they go to the transporter room and their bodies get disassembled, travel through space and then reassembled on another planet?” he asked.
“That’s what happens?” My shock was easily noticeable.
“No. Just curious if you’ve ever seen them.” He laughed at his own wisecrack.
“Nice, Chace,” I whimpered and smacked him in the arm. “Really, tell me what happens.”
“No one really knows what happens. My mother says a team has been working on that for quite some time now. But we do know that the other universe is not what it was originally thought to be. The myth, well that’s what it is to the norms, was that it was an exact duplicate of our world, which would mean there were two of each of us. But that’s not what it is. It is an entirely different universe with entirely different people. Everything that happens there is strictly due to instinct, balance and fate. The people there are as human as they are here, but they’re not clones of us. There is only one Lexi Blane. Too bad, though. What a great world it would be if there were more of you.” He smiled, a little embarrassed though, because I ignored the comment.
“Well, wait a minute. How was I in a coma in the hospital here and still with my parents in the other world?”
“That’s a whole different theory, Lex. If you would’ve died, you would be in the other world with your parents right now. If the accident had never happened, you would have carried on as you were, and your gifts would have surfaced months ago. But being stuck like that in a coma, and because you’re gifted, it’s almost like fate didn’t know what to do with you either. So in that circumstance, and as far as anyone knows, only in that circumstance, there are two of you for a brief period, until you go to one world or the other. But you only have one mind, one spirit and one soul. Your comatose body didn’t need any of those so you had them in the other world. It’s a hard concept to grasp, but think of it as having two hands that only work one at a time. Whatever happens to your physical body will be carried with you to whichever universe you wind up in. It’s a good thing you didn’t take up skydiving while you were there!”
I started my nervous habit of twirling my hair around my fingers. Skydiving repeated in my head and I jerked my hand from my hair. The scar on my hand, the one from the Bahamas. Chace knew exactly what he was talking about. He was a boatload of information and probably my only resource to tap into, at least for now. For the first time in my life, I felt stupid, and I was down on having to be guided in even the smallest, most trivial things. It reminded me of how dependent I was on my parents. I hated the feeling of being so needy and it sucked in a big way. I knew the quicker I learned, the quicker I could become Miss Independent. I had to speed things up, so I capitalized on the time we had in the car to fire whatever questions I could think of.
“Does anyone from the other world ever come here? I mean, like, to live permanently?”
“Nah. They know we exist since a lot of them came from here, but they don’t come back. It’s a one-way street. They think we screw around with fate and are so much more ‘unbalanced,’ as they call it, than they are. Even if they wanted to, which they never would, they aren’t allowed to, according to the Universal Laws. What they don’t realize is that it’s their perfect little world that’s responsible for giving rise to the many beings that are out of control there. We know of some, but not all of them. They’re harmless when it comes to the norms, who don’t even think of any evil existence in their little bubble of destiny. But when our gifted ones go there to help out, every dark being gets their freak on! I guess that’s the price you pay for having such a perfectly fateful world. Did you get all that?” He laughed.
“Ugh! You know, Chace, nothing fazes me anymore.” I bit my lip hard enough to taste the salty iron in my mouth. I thought about what I just said. I’d been thrown into an incredible, and at times unbelievable, reality and still hadn’t lost my mind. Not bad. Chace must have read my energy because a tiny smirk upturned his lips.
“You’re doing so well, Lexi. Everything you’re going through now has been with me my entire life. It’s all I knew, so it was pretty easy for me to fall in line. It was like that for almost all of us. You just had to be different, as usual!” he snorted, trying to pull me out of the funk I was creating for myself.
I gave him a half smile. “It’s not really that bad. It’s just frustrating. Being blindsided is starting to get on my nerves!” I let out a low giggle. “Do you know everything about both worlds? It seems like you do. Like you know more than the average gifted person.”
“I don’t know everything. No one does. But don’t forget who my parents are. What goes on between my family members can’t be scrutinized by the Commission. It’s not like they have cameras everywhere or plant people to spy on us. They aren’t bad people. I hope I didn’t give you that impression. They’re actually like family, and they have eased up on a lot of old restrictions. They just want us to stay stealthy to protect ourselves, and the rest of the world, from complete chaos and mass hysteria. Think about it. If the other world ever got the upper hand, it’d be over—for all of us. It’s better to keep it all very quiet. You know, kind of like the government keeps Area Fifty-one a secret. It’s safer for everyone.”
I laughed at that, but stopped myself fast when I felt Chace’s glare. “What?” I asked as I shrugged my shoulder.
“Lex, really, you have to take it seriously. You have to get a grip. You’d be putting yourself in danger, way over your head, if you don’t know what you’re doing.”
“Sorry,” I mumbled. “I guess if alternate universes and magical powers are real, why wouldn’t aliens be too?” I said sarcastically. I puckered my lips to get the smile off so he would finish what he wanted to say. He rolled his eyes and gave his head a quick shake.
“The laws are sometimes strict, but the system really does work. The Commission is a tight-knit group, as you’ll see when you meet them. They don’t own you, Lex, so don’t worry about that. It may seem like it at first, but you’ll see. We’re all in this together and they do afford us an awful lot of perks. So, do I know more than the average gifted one? Yes. But there’s so much more that all of us still have to learn. Almost every assignment is full of surprises.”
He glanced over at me, taking his eyes off the road for only a second. My insides tingled when he put his hand on my knee. “You can ask me anything, sweets. I know it’s a really tough road to travel, so if there’s anything at all you need, I’m here for you. I’m sure you have tons of questions. Who wouldn’t? No one would expect you to learn and understand everything so fast. You always know where to find me. Anytime, day or night.”
I knew he meant it. He had always been my confidant. I did have so many questions. So many, like How long has the other world existed? How long have we known about it? What about these defectors? What do they want? Will they hurt me? Can they kill me? But my biggest question, which I would never ask was, Could I give the gift back and become a norm so I can be with my parents and William? I wouldn’t dare ask that question. I had already given it enough thought to come to a decision, regardless of what the answer was. If I went and that caused trouble for me or between the two worlds, it was worth the risk. I was ready to take whatever punishment I had coming. I wo
uld rather not exist in any world than exist without William and Mom and Dad. Chace would understand, someday.
“You’ll be sorry you said that! You have no idea how many thoughts are running around in my head. I could bombard you at any minute!” I joked.
“Bring it on, Lexi babe. The sooner you know it all, the sooner we can get back to normal.” We looked at each other and had a big belly laugh at that notion. ‘Normal?’ We were anything but normal.
Chapter 13
I Think I Can
For the next few weeks, I dragged myself through the halls at school, my body too tired from the intense training to move any faster than a slow shuffle. William’s nightly visits got longer each time, too, so I was never well rested. My insides felt like they were being torn to shreds every time he had to leave. I didn’t know the details of the laws and it worried me that if something went wrong, I wouldn’t see him again.
The sensations came over me a lot and I let them consume me without resisting. It wasn’t easy keeping track of them and I was pretty sure I let a few of them escape. Even with my exhaustion level toying with the idea of shutting down my body, I didn’t miss a day of going with Chace to the training facility where he worked my ass off.
“It’s for your own good, Lex. You’ll thank me one day,” he promised on the one Friday he worked me later and harder than ever.
“Yeah, right. You sound like my father, you know,” I retorted while huffing deeply enough to be hyperventilating. With my hands gripping my bent knees, I dropped my head low between my legs and gagged.
“Lex!” He caught my limp body and sat on the floor, my sweaty head in his lap, my chest still rising and falling fast.
“I’m not a phyter,” I said. “I can’t keep up with this anymore. This is your life, not mine. I’ll let the abilities pass and just be a norm like my parents.”
“No, Lex. You are a phyter. We need you. I need you.” The look in his eyes didn’t need to be backed up by the sincerity in his voice. They screamed the message to me so loud that if Chace wouldn’t have said another word about it, I would have come up with the same conclusion. It was my destiny.
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