Connor asked, “So what’s with you and all the other people wearing tank tops instead of normal uniform shirts?”
Pitch replied, “We’re the Enforcers. Sebastian likes us to look like tough guys, so we settled on sleeveless for our uniform.”
“So how did Sebastian get to be in charge like this?” Connor asked.
A girl in the crowd walking alongside them said, “Dude, Sebastian is awesome!”
Connor, Linc, and Pitch all turned to look at her, and she said, “Hi Pitch. Tell me about the newbs.”
He blushed and stammered a bit, trying to respond, until Connor realized that this was the black-haired girl who had called him nosy last night. He wanted to make amends for overhearing her, so he spoke up.
“I’m Connor Merritt, and this is my friend Linc.”
“Like in Legend of Zelda?” she asked.
Linc laughed. “I get that a lot. But no, it’s like President Lincoln. Lincoln’s my real name, everyone just calls me Linc.”
She had black hair that she wore in a tomboy cut. When she grinned, it was wide and infectious and showed off slightly crooked teeth. Pitch obviously couldn’t take his eyes off her.
She said, “I’m Spooky. You had breakfast with Kila this morning; I work with her.”
Connor blinked. “Wait, how’d you know we had breakfast with–”
She grinned again and interrupted. “That’s why they call me Spooky. I don’t read the assignment boards; I help make ‘em. See you guys around!”
Linc laughed at the expression on Connor’s face. “This place is awesome, huh Con?”
Connor just shook his head. He looked over at Pitch, but the other boy was barely aware of the two “newbs” anymore. He was lost in gazing at Spooky’s departing form.
“Wake up, Lover boy,” Linc said, giving Pitch an elbow to the ribs.
Pitch blushed and shook his head to clear it.
“Kinda awkward liking a girl who always knows the truth about you,” he said.
“When is talking to girls not awkward?” Connor responded.
Pitch grunted by way of reply.
They reached the assignment board. It wasn’t much different from an ordinary cork bulletin board that you might find in gathering places at any high school or college. But instead of colorful flyers announcing meetings or job openings, there were official looking documents that started with someone’s name – at least, with their nickname in the Legion – and ended with Sebastian’s signature.
There were none for either Connor or Lincoln, but their eyes followed Pitch’s to a document headlined with his name. It read:
PITCH
Lead Enforcer on Terp’s team. Fly with Wings, Terp, and Stone to Avalon Harbor on Catalina Island. Look for a brown-haired girl in cutoff jeans and a light blue blouse. She’ll be near the dive shop. She has the ability to walk on water, and knows it, but doesn’t know what to do with it. Explain her ability to her and bring her back here.”
Official orders from
SEBASTIAN CREST
Pitch turned to look at Connor and Linc. He said, “Looks like I have work to do today guys. And a promotion too! Lead Enforcer, not just Enforcer escort. Must have done all right getting you guys out, huh?”
Lincoln high-fived him and said, “Congratulations, man!”
Connor just kept staring at the board.
Pitch said, “You just met Terp at breakfast. A lot of times he gets these jobs because the newb can’t speak English. Stone and I are there to protect them in case the government shows up. Wings is flying us there in his Cessna.”
Connor asked, “Not in the C-130 we stole last night?”
Pitch laughed. “No way man! That plane is probably on every government watch list in the world right now. Wings has a private plane that used to belong to his stepfather. We use that most of the time. Anyways, I’m sure Sebastian will find you two soon and get you something to do as well. You guys have fun; I’ll see you at dinner tonight!”
Indeed, Pitch had barely left when Sebastian walked up to Connor and Linc.
“Walk and talk with me, boys,” Sebastian said. “I like to take some time to teach all the newbs about the Legion.”
He led them off down a hallway and talked without looking back to see if they followed.
He said, “I got caught by the government, just like you. I was held in the same building. They were trying to figure out a way to run a practical application test on me, but I wasn’t cooperating at all. I knew I could turn invisible, but I wasn’t going to just demonstrate it for them. I made sure never to do it while I was in captivity. I was saving it for the moment when I might be able to escape.”
“Then one day the wall of my cell just came crashing down. I leapt back; it was lucky I didn’t get crushed. Anyway, there was Pitch on the other side. He says, ‘I’m breaking out of here. Looks like you need to, too. Come with me if you want.’”
Sebastian concluded, “Then he walks through my cell to the opposite wall and shoves that down with his mind, too. He just kept doing it until we reached the outside. Eventually, the government stopped sending soldiers after Pitch had thrown enough of them like ragdolls.”
“Ever since then, I’ve been gathering other people with these superhuman abilities, preparing for the day when we could take the fight to the government.”
Linc asked, “Do you have to have a special power to join? I really want to be a part of this.”
Sebastian replied, “Well, you have two options. For one thing, you might develop powers of your own. We’re still studying this. We don’t know exactly how it works, but we’ve definitely seen it happen. We’ll get someone into the legion base that has nothing remarkable about them, and sooner or later they start healing or whatever. The three things we’ve noticed that they all have in common is they hang around us, they have absolute confidence and belief in themselves, and they want it bad enough to do anything to get it. People like that end up developing a power sooner or later.”
Linc replied, “Oh, I want it. I want it that bad.”
Sebastian nodded. He said, “There’s a second option for you. Come on. You may be able to learn how to help with prisoner control.” With a glance at Connor he added, “Maybe you can do this, too, at least until you get your powers sorted out.”
Linc seemed glad to have a way to contribute, but Connor didn’t like the sound of this at all.
“Prisoner control?” he asked. “There are prisoners here?”
“Come with me,” Sebastian replied.
He led them to a room protected by a metal door.
Sebastian said, “It’s made to open easily from the outside but from inside you can’t open it at all.”
Pushing it open, he led them inside. There, they saw six small cells – holes in the rock walls with a barred door closing them off.
Four were empty.
One held a pudgy brown haired boy who wore glasses and sat slouched against the wall of his cell, crying. Another boy, with a crew cut and a goatee, sat outside his cell, talking quietly to him.
The other held the auburn-haired healer.
Her eyes flashed with anger when she saw Sebastian. “I would like to leave here, please,” she said. She gave the impression that she had said it many times before and expected to say it many times again.
Indeed, Sebastian only nodded at her and walked on past, intent on the boy with glasses who was crying. Linc followed Sebastian right to him, but Connor slowed down, staring at the auburn-haired girl behind bars.
His thoughts locked onto the scene of her healing the government soldier in defiance of Connor’s orders.
“I didn’t tell him,” he whispered so quietly it was barely more than mouthing the words.
She nodded, and Connor felt a huge sigh of relief slip out of him. He didn’t want to be at fault for her condition. Reluctantly, he walked forward to where Sebastian and Linc stood in front of the chubby boy’s cell. As he drew nearer to them, Connor confronted a fresh s
hock.
“You’re fat,” the boy with the crew cut and goatee sitting outside the cell said. “No one likes you. They all laugh at you behind your back. Girls all think you’re embarrassing. None of them would ever go out with a fatso like you.”
“Hey!” Connor said loudly. “What’s going on here?”
“Prisoner control,” Sebastian replied. “Pudgy here is a TK. Telekinetic, like Pitch. If we don’t keep him under control, he’ll use that to break out of here.”
“And how exactly does that justify bullying a kid who’s already crying?”
“I told you, fear and doubt kill your abilities,” Sebastian replied. “When we need to control someone, we find out what gets to them – what really causes them to doubt themselves. Then we shove that in their face until they can’t use their ability. You have to keep it up, or they get over it and start to get their powers back.”
Connor crossed his arms over his chest and set his jaw. “And why exactly do you need to control him?”
“He doesn’t want to join the Legion,” Sebastian replied. Then, pointing to the healer in the other cell, he added, “Neither does Little Miss Goody Goody over there.”
“Um… couldn’t you just let them go?” Connor replied.
“For one thing, they’ve seen our base, they can help identify people here, and they can tell the government some stuff about how we operate. But more to the point, we don’t let the government get its hands on people with powers. We can’t. Think of power like Pitch used last night, but in the hands of the government. Think if they had healers; every soldier we took down would just get back up.”
As they looked at the healer, behind them Connor heard the disturbing patter. “Fat boy. No one likes you. You’re so pathetic.”
“How come you’re not doing this to her?” Linc asked.
Sebastian replied, “She’s just a Healer. It’s an awesome power, very useful, but does you no good when it comes to getting out of cages, so she doesn’t need to be controlled.”
“I would like to leave here please,” she said, smiling, as soon as Sebastian finished talking.
She was older than Connor, maybe like a senior in college or even graduated already. He couldn’t have told by her appearance, but her composure and the sense of calm were a dead giveaway for someone more mature.
Soon, though, he was distracted by hearing the prisoner control again.
“Reject. Loser. Tub. How could you ever think anyone would like you?”
Connor wanted to walk over and tell that boy to shut up. He wanted to slap him. What were fighting skills for, if not to stop bullies like this?
“So, this is prisoner control,” Sebastian said, interrupting his train of thought. “It’s one of the best uses we have for people without any powers. Linc, you stay here and learn with Kyle.”
He waved at the boy with the crew cut and goatee.
Then he said, “Connor, it might be good for you to stay and learn this, too, at least until you get it worked out in your head about your powers.”
It was all Connor could do to stay civil as he said, “I think I’d rather go back to my room and spend some time ‘working out my powers.’”
He turned on his heel and walked out of the dungeon.
Stalking back to his room with his fists balled up, Connor nearly walked right into Spark, the boy from last night whose special power controlled the weather.
One of those tank-top wearing people – a woman this time – saw the collision and stared at them suspiciously.
The bald boy stared at him, and Connor thought for a moment he was angry or ready to strike. But instead, he asked, “What’s eating you?”
“This place is what’s eating me. I’m not sure I want to stay,” Connor replied and brushed past him.
CHAPTER EIGHT
As it turned out, Connor didn’t know where his own room was. Although Pitch had told him it was ready, he had never shown him where. Instead, he went to Linc’s room and flopped down hard on the cot.
For a while, all he did was stew in his anger going over that scene in the dungeon: that boy was curled up and crying and the other one sat there making fun of him and belittling him.
All of Sebastian’s talk about how they’d be running the government instead of running from the government or about how people with greater abilities should lead – all of that was too big to seem real.
Bullying, on the other hand, was easy to believe. Connor had seen it himself. He’d seen it when kids did it to Linc at first, and he’d seen plenty more of it, and he was not going to be on the side of bullies – even bullies who just saw it as a tactic to keep their mission secret.
As he lay there thinking, everything became clearer for Connor. Ever since God had answered his plea for help at the convenience store, he had been making the wrong choices. It was wrong to run from the scene of the crime. It was wrong not to trust Ethan Moses and Anna Wales. And it was especially wrong to have fallen in with the Legion. Whatever was going on in the world with this business of abnormal abilities and powers, Anna and Mr. Moses were very obviously better people to be around than Sebastian.
I’ve been making the wrong choice at every turn, but I can point to one place where I know what the right choice was. I should have joined Anna and Mr. Moses. So that’s what I’m going to do. They told me I could find them on the top floor of Sol Tower, so that’s where I’m going.
The hard part was figuring out how to get there. Sebastian had made it clear that for a person with powers, leaving the Legion was not allowed, and they would probably consider him a person with powers, even if he didn’t.
That meant if he tried to just walk out, he’d wind up in the dungeon. He probably wouldn’t have to deal with someone like Kyle belittling him and trying to bully him, since even if he did have a power it wasn’t one that would help him get out of a cage, but the dungeon was the dungeon, either way. He didn’t want to wind up there.
Which meant he would have to sneak out.
That, of course, presented challenges of its own. He didn’t really know the layout of the base. Other people – Enforcers, most likely – would probably try to stop him from leaving, so he’d have to leave at night when everyone was asleep.
And then it hit him. He had probably made yet another wrong choice when he’d spoken to Spark as he left the dungeon. What if Spark ratted him out? He shouldn’t have revealed that he might want to leave.
Stupid, Connor!
He lay down on the bed, then got up and paced, then lay back down again. He had a whole day to kill until everyone was asleep, and he’d left his phone at home at the start of this whole adventure, so there wasn’t even Clash of the Clans to keep him distracted.
Doubts nagged him. What if the Enforcers had guards posted? What if a member of the Legion who had an ability about telling the future already knew he was going to try to leave?
A general increase in the noise level from the halls drew him out of Linc’s room. Connor saw that everyone was heading back down to the mess hall. It was time for lunch. He joined the throng.
The cook – Pitch never really made it clear whether “Guy” was his name or just slang – had done just as good a job as he had at breakfast. A seemingly-infinite number of Chicago-style pizzas had been put out on the serving table waiting for members of the Legion to come take slices. Connor helped himself to four slices of the meatiest one he could find and then looked around at all the tables for a quiet place to sit. Without Pitch and Linc, he didn’t really have any friends here, unless you counted the girl in the dungeon.
There was no good place to sit by himself. The nearest free space was right across the table from…
Connor groaned.
…Spooky and Kila.
His eyes shifted hurriedly right and left, looking for someone else he knew – anyone else – but then his luck ran out. Spooky waved him over.
The girls were the last two people on earth he wanted to be around right then. Kila could tell th
e future and Spooky… well, she had a way of knowing things about him, and she worked with Kila. Whatever her power was, it wasn’t good for a guy who was thinking about running away. Connor really didn’t want to sit with them.
However, deliberately avoiding them seemed like it would just make them suspicious. And besides, they were pretty girls, and they wanted him to come sit with them. Whatever his mind might try to tell him about the risk, he was still a teenage boy. He went over and sat down.
Spooky gave him that big, infectious grin with the teeth that had not had braces. “Hey Kila, you met Connor this morning, remember? The boy whose skin stops bullets?”
Kila’s hair was somewhere between light brown and blonde. It was hard to tell. She didn’t smile, and held her head slightly back from Connor and at an angle, meaning she was literally looking down her long, thin nose. She crossed her arms.
“Last I heard,” she said, “he wasn’t sure about the whole bulletproof thing. Something change?”
Connor just shook his head without speaking. Kila’s attitude made him certain she knew. She acted like he was the scum of the earth, and he could only think of one logical reason for that. If she could tell the future, she must know about his escape attempt tonight. His heart threatened to explode out of his chest it was beating so hard.
Spooky shrugged. “I didn’t know he wasn’t sure. I’ve never really talked to him about it. I just know his skin stops bullets.”
Swallowing twice, Connor managed to ask, “Is that your ability? To know other people’s abilities?”
“Sometimes, I just know the truth about people,” she replied. “Not necessarily the future, like Kila. Not necessarily their powers, like I know about you; just some truth about them. Like last night when we were making up assignments for today. All of a sudden it was just there in my head. ‘Pitch is ready to be an Enforcer lead, not just an Enforcer escort.’ So that showed up in his orders for today.”
Connor felt sweat breaking out on his forehead. “Do you… well, I mean… is there…like, you know… anything…”
Kila rolled her eyes, and Spooky laughed. “It’s the first question both of us get asked by every newb. ‘Can you tell me anything about myself?’ It makes Kila mad more than it does me.”
Sons of Thunder Page 6
