by R. T. Lowe
An excited squeal from behind turned Felix’s attention to a game of foosball Allison and Caitlin were playing against a couple of guys from Satler. Allison spun the handle and shouted triumphantly as the ball rocketed past the other team’s goalie. Caitlin, looking as drunk as everyone else in the common room, bounced up and down with excitement and gave Allison a hug. Play resumed and Allison threw herself into the game like the outcome actually mattered, encouraging Caitlin, who evidently had never played before, and hurling playful taunts at her opponents, distracting them with her wit and her foul mouth. But from the way they were looking at Allison with their hungry eyes it was something else causing the most damage to their chances of winning. Caitlin was undeniably cute, but standing next to Allison, she seemed somehow diminished, like a child.
Felix watched her, feeling a warm rush of emotion he couldn’t quite articulate, like a ball of string he didn’t know how to untangle. He thought about everything they’d been through. The things they’d seen. The things they’d done. Ordinary people couldn’t even begin to comprehend what they had experienced. There was so much between them now. Allison dropped her hands from the handles and turned her eyes to him, cocking her head questioningly with a smile. He smiled back, and when she saw his crooked grin, her smile grew wider and she waved him over.
“You think she’s into Grayson now?” Lucas was saying with laughter in his voice.
“Huh?” Felix said, distracted, turning back to Lucas. “Grayson?”
“Check out the pool table.” Lucas tipped his cup to indicate the far end of the room. “First Allison and now Harper? What do they see in that asshole?”
Harper was leaning over the table, cue in hand, while Grayson Bentley, the president of the Student Union and the son of California’s Governor, stood behind her, close, one hand on her stick, guiding it as it struck the cue ball and spun off like a knuckler. Harper laughed, her blonde hair cascading over her shoulders, and placed a hand lightly on Grayson’s chest. She took her time walking around to the other side and Felix’s eyes followed her, taking in the perfect body she was putting on display tonight, teasing every guy in the room. From where he stood, it looked like she was wearing a bodysuit, leaving almost nothing to the imagination. He didn’t feel jealousy—or so he told himself—but watching her flirt with Grayson bothered him. But why, he wondered, should it bother him? They were just friends now. Now? There had never been anything other than friendship, only the prospect of something that had never materialized, but still, he felt…bothered. And the fact that he felt bothered served to bother him even more. He began to feel hot and his stomach spouted up something acidy that he swallowed down, bitterly, like the taste of throw up in his mouth.
“I think I need some air,” he said to Lucas.
“Yeah, it’s getting toasty in here. I think it’s all these chicks sweating me.” Lucas laughed as if he wasn’t being serious, but now there were four girls standing off to the side, shadowing him, just waiting, Felix supposed, for an opportunity to hang out with a celebrity. “You gotta figure a lot of ‘em are feeling like they had a near death experience today, and you know what that means, right?” Lucas grinned. “They’ll be all about living for the moment, and what better way to do that than partying with a reality show idiot like me? Have I ever told you how much I love my undeserved fame?” He smiled at the girls and they giggled nervously, gathering around him, interpreting his smile as an invitation, which it clearly was.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” Felix said, telling himself not to look in Harper’s direction as he headed out of the room and down the stairs to the lobby.
“Well if it isn’t Felix August, our very own football hero,” a voice trilled from behind.
Felix stopped before the doors and turned around. It was Amber, the first member of the ERA he’d ever met, and the girl who’d practically begged him to have sex with her in his dorm room after the party at Satler last semester. He had nothing against Amber and didn’t stress too much if he couldn’t avoid her and bumped into her in the Student Center or wherever—he’d done nothing to embarrass himself as far as he was concerned—but he wasn’t in a talking mood at the moment and the lobby felt hot and claustrophobic. He just wanted to be out of the dorm and alone, away from the noise and the faces and the heat.
“Some day, huh?” she purred, sauntering slowly toward him, giving him an opportunity to check her out: wild mane of long strawberry blonde hair, black boots, black leggings, and a shirt that didn’t have enough fabric to cover her flat tanned stomach. “Interesting way to start the semester, don’t you think?”
“Hi Amber,” Felix muttered, glancing at the doors, wishing they were to his back and he was outside filling his lungs with cold air.
“Everyone’s up there”—she raised her sultry brown eyes to the ceiling—“acting like it’s the end of the world. Drinking. Dancing. Yielding to temptation.” She stepped closer, slipping her fingers through the loops of his worn jeans, brushing against him. “I live here, you know. Third floor. Why don’t you come upstairs with me? I have another tattoo I can show you—and it’s not on my arm.” She bit down on her lower lip, smiling seductively with her eyes. “No one has to know, Felix, if that’s what you’re worried about. It’ll be our little secret. I’m not looking to be your girlfriend.”
An Ed Sheeran song played in a room down the hall, mixing with Adele’s pounding bass from upstairs. Felix took Amber by the wrists and edged back, looking her straight in the face. The lobby lights, already dimmed for the party, began to flicker. “I’m not going to fuck you, Amber. So leave me the fuck alone. Please.” He turned away and gave one of the doors a hard push with his forearm, the winter wind on his face feeling like a blessing from above.
“Forgot your coat?” Amber remarked, her voice somehow different, sober.
Surprised by the comment, Felix put a hand to his gray thermal, stopping, holding the door ajar.
“At the very least, I think it’s sweater weather,” she added coyly. “I like how that shirt hugs that deliciously muscular body of yours, but I don’t think it’s really adequate with the temperature hovering in the high thirties.”
Felix mumbled something about forgetting to bring it and set off down the stairs.
“You think you’re too good for me?” Amber shouted after him, stepping out onto the stoop. “I know where you’re from, Felix. And you know what?” She was screaming at him now. “You’re gonna pay for this, you white trash piece of shit! I’m too good for you! So go fuck yourself!”
Felix walked ahead, distancing himself from the rage, shutting it out of his mind, concentrating on his breathing. He’d done nothing to Amber. She had no right to be pissed. She was just crazy. That’s all. Block it out. Those were just words. Let it go. The air was cold, but it didn’t hurt, not like it used to before he learned the truth about the world. He closed his mind to that too. He didn’t want to think about the Source, or Lofton, or Drestianites, or Protectors, or Numbered Ones, or anything else. He felt the cold. He breathed it in.
He walked.
Chapter 16
The Test
Felix’s leg was buzzing. He opened his eyes, feeling for the vibrating phone in his pocket. The dog, a border collie with one blue eye and one brown, worked its tongue along the bottom of his shoe. Felix’s foot flinched and the dog jumped off the end of the flatbed and scampered away down the road, yapping merrily. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and checked his watch in the pale light: morning. Barely. The truck bed was grimed over with dirt and moldy rain sodden leaves, the back window busted out, the steering wheel and stereo removed. He stood and stretched, brushing the leaves from his damp butt. In the distance he could see Little Ben, Stubbins Stadium and the rest of the campus spread out before him. To the east, the sun struggled to breach the horizon, hanging low and coppery in a misty depressing sky.
How the hell did I get here? he wondered dully, hopping over the wheel well and heading down the same road the dog ha
d disappeared down a moment before. He cast a glance at the truck and laughed to himself. It was on cinder blocks and the engine had been cleanly harvested. Not exactly the most comfortable accommodations he’d ever slept in. His phone vibrated again. He took it from his pocket and read the text: “Your friends are in grave danger. Rock quarry in no-man’s land. Two miles west of 48th Street. Silo with the eyes. Time is of the essence.”
He blinked, clearing his head with a shake.
‘Silo with the eyes’?
Was this a joke? He read it again, more slowly this time. He called Allison. No answer. Then he tried Lucas. He didn’t pick up. Staring out at the campus below, he called Caitlin and then Harper. No one answered. Anxiety—and fear—flared in his stomach.
He started to run.
***
Allison sat hunched over the steering wheel of Felix’s Wrangler, looking up at the spray-painted graffiti eyes staring down at her, red and menacing. The finely crushed gravel scarcely made a sound as the tires rolled forward. The rock quarry stretched out into the distance, gray and dirty, dug out of the earth in the shape of a horseshoe. Huge machines—long armed conveyors reaching up to the sky; square structures topped with steel drums, big on the bottom and small on top like wedding cakes; containers and barrels with wheels and pipes and thick black belts—broke up the dreary landscape like prehistoric beasts frozen in time.
“This has to be the rock quarry,” Allison muttered.
“What is that anyway?” Harper yawned from the front seat, leaning against the glass. Caitlin was also in the front seat, as was Lucas whose lap they were sharing uncomfortably.
“They take big rocks and make them smaller,” Lucas replied and spat out a hair—Harper’s—sticking to his tongue.
“You actually sound like you know what you’re talking about,” Caitlin told him, hugging her arms to her chest.
“There’s a processing plant not far from my town,” Lucas said. “We used to go out there at night and break beer bottles.”
“Sounds like something you’d do,” Caitlin remarked drolly.
Allison steered them toward an outbuilding that sat across from four enormous silos, yellowed and rusting, each supported by steel beams that rose higher than the top of the Jeep.
“Long way for Felix to walk,” Harper observed, staring idly out her window, her mouth curling down with distaste.
Allison glanced at the odometer: nine miles from campus. It wasn’t like Felix to act so mysterious, but Allison had told him to “blow their minds” and she thought that’s what this was about. Felix was going to tell their friends about a secret world, and words alone wouldn’t be sufficient. To do it here made sense in a way. If you wanted privacy, you couldn’t ask for anything better than an abandoned rock quarry beyond the residential section of no-man’s-land. They’d driven in silence after crossing 10th Street (the western border of campus), staring out at the decaying neighborhood that had collapsed when the industries supporting it went bankrupt, but not before those businesses contaminated a huge swath of land, the toxins and other environmental waste rendering it unlivable for the next hundred years. People still lived on the wrong side of 15th—mostly squatters, drug dealers and others plying their illegal trades—and the Portland PD, for the most part, stayed away, ceding it to society’s seediest elements after the city had cut off the power and all other public services long ago.
“You sure he didn’t say anything?” Caitlin said, twisting her neck to look down at Lucas.
“I told you I didn’t see him after the party,” Lucas sighed.
“Right,” Caitlin said with fake cheerfulness. “Because you didn’t go back to your room last night, did you? I wonder why that would be? Would it kill you to keep your penis in your pants for one night?”
“It might,” Lucas said seriously. “What do you care about my penis anyway?”
“I don’t care about your penis,” Caitlin stammered out and made a retching sound.
“Stop!” Allison said chidingly, her eyes scanning the area, searching for Felix. “I can’t hear with you guys fighting.”
“I’m not fighting,” Lucas complained. “I’m too hungover to fight. I just got his text. Just like you guys. He wants to ‘show us something at the rock quarry past Forty-eighth.’”
“So then where is he?” Harper asked, her tired eyes half closed.
Allison wheeled the Wrangler around, stopping next to the building—broken windows, corrugated metal roof, filthy strips of insulation poking through splits in the siding—and cut the engine. “Let’s have a look,” she told them and got out of the car, coming around the other side to open the passenger door since the locking mechanism had snapped off and couldn’t be operated from the inside. The engine crackled and hissed as it cooled, the only sounds disrupting the odd silence of a place that must have created more than its share of ear-splitting noises when in operation. Harper, Lucas and Caitlin clambered out and buried their hands in their pockets, looking around warily, standing close to the car.
“Felix!” Allison shouted, breaking the quiet, her breath puffing out white in the frigid morning air. “We’re here! Hey Felix!” He should have made his appearance by now, she thought, beginning to worry. His text had hit their phones two hours ago and it said he was already at the quarry. He had to have heard the Jeep, one of the noisiest rides she’d ever been in. So where was he? She shouted his name again, thinking something had to be wrong. The text? Was that it? She should have talked to him before rousing her friends from bed and trekking out here. Relying solely on the text was stupid. What if someone had hacked Felix’s phone? Wasn’t that how the Faceman had tricked Felix into entering that house in no-man’s land? She told herself to stay calm, though something was definitely wrong. She could feel it in her bones. She pointed at the Jeep and said, “Everyone back in—”
“You don’t know me,” a voice called out calmly, “but I believe you met my sister.” A man and a woman emerged from behind the building, striding toward them. The man, wearing dark pants and a medium blue overcoat, was tall and lean, his high patrician nose giving him a look of annoyed superiority. He held up a finger and the woman—young and plain with straw-colored hair and dressed like she was on her way to a freshman Philosophy class—stopped obediently. “Her name was Tripoli,” he continued, his English accented yet clear, “and I am here to avenge her death.” With a quick movement of his hand a knife appeared, long, silver and shaped like a crescent moon.
Allison backed up a step, focusing her eyes. A glance at the knife informed her she was dealing with Protectors. The man looked to be a few years younger than Tripoli—the leader of the group of Protectors who had tried to kill her and Felix at the Cliff Walk—though the resemblance was obvious, right down to the disdainful downward turn of his thin lips and the gracefulness of his movements. This is my fault, she thought, heart thumping loudly in her temples. The text must have been a fake. She had allowed them to fall into a trap, she realized, looking out at the road, hoping to see Felix running toward them, hand raised, seconds from raining down death on the Protectors. She saw nothing, only the chain link fence and beyond that a two-lane road with weeds snaking across the blacktop. Allison was on her own this time. No safety net to catch her in case she fell. Strangely, the realization that Felix wasn’t there to protect her didn’t cause her fear, it gave her a thrill, a jolt of adrenaline knowing she was tight roping a razor thin line between life and death.
Harper screamed, backing up against the Jeep, bringing her hands to her mouth.
Allison reached across Caitlin and Harper and grabbed Lucas’s jacket, yanking him toward the front of the vehicle, causing all three to stumble toward the headlights. “Don’t run!” she ordered with a quick turn of her head. “Stay there!” If one of them broke from the pack, the Protectors would cut them down in a heartbeat, like cheetahs bringing down a frightened gazelle.
The man stood watching, running a finger along the edge of his deadly blade. “I’m go
ing to cut off your head, and me and Komi”—his eyes flitted in the direction of the woman who had also drawn her knife—“are going to play catch with it.”
Allison’s friends were all screaming now, clumped together behind her. Allison didn’t require their help, she only needed them to stay out of her way and do what she said. Her pulse raced, but her hands were steady, her mind clear. Protectors were just people, she told herself. Just like the shooter in The Yard; the guy in the body armor thought he could handle her because she was a girl. She’d caught the misogynistic disbelief in his eyes when he saw his rifle in her hands. He’d thought he could overpower her and take it back, like plucking a lollipop from the mouth of a toddler. How did that work out for him? Allison had wrecked his face with his own gun. She knew the Protectors weren’t dumb thugs like the shooter—on the contrary, they were trained from birth to kill Sourcerors—but they would underestimate her all the same. The man was clearly thinking he could kill her without the aid of his companion because she was standing there doing nothing ten feet behind him. Allison didn’t care about his relationship to Tripoli, but he obviously wanted revenge for his sister and he was determined to do it alone. Which meant he was already angry. If Allison stoked those hateful fires and made him even angrier, he might become reckless, and reckless people made mistakes.
Allison squared her shoulders and looked the man in the eye, announcing in a clear, unwavering voice, “I remember your sister. Tripoli, right? She was that scar-faced bitch on the Cliff Walk. We broke every bone in her body before we put that fucking hag out of her misery.”
