He shrugged. “Anyway, all of a sudden I go from that to a so-called war where people are killing each other, either with guns or with telekinesis or whatever. I can’t just say, ‘OK, people die in war, no big deal.’ First I have to get sold on the idea of war, and I’m not sold yet.”
Anna nodded. “I’m one of the people with special abilities, and I don’t see myself as being in a war. Well, not a physical war. We’re at war with evil all the time but not at war with people.”
There was a long pause. Connor was trying to think of the next thing to say. Maybe something about how her hair was a contrast – dark and shining at the same time. He wanted something that would feel right, not awkward and out of the blue. He wanted to say something that would invite her to tell him more about herself. But he waited too long, and Anna spoke first.
“So is that the full story?” She asked. “You didn’t like Sebastian’s violence and war talk?”
Connor replied, “They… they took me and my friend Linc into their dungeon. They were holding prisoners there – prisoners who had special abilities but didn’t want to join the legion.”
“Dungeon?” Anna asked. “Did they really call it a dungeon?”
“No, but that’s what it was. Prison sounds too antiseptic. The way they treat their prisoners is the way you treat someone in a dungeon, not a prison.”
“What do you mean?” Anna asked.
Connor answered, “How are you going to imprison a person who can move objects with his mind? He can just pull a stone loose from the wall and hurl it against the bars of his cell, right? Or maybe he can just bend the bars himself and walk out. Either way, an ordinary prison isn’t going to do much good against a person who has superhuman powers.”
Anna smiled at him and leaned against him to give him a friendly nudge.
She said, “This is the part you don’t have to explain to me.”
He blushed, saw that she was smiling, and smiled back. “I forgot. Flake told me you did that yourself once. But to stop someone from doing it – someone with powers, I mean – Sebastian has a system.”
“He says if you don’t believe in yourself, your powers won’t work. So when he wants to hold someone prisoner…”
It was hard to say. Connor wanted his words to illustrate exactly how sickening it had been. He didn’t want her to think that he’d just been over-sensitive.
He went on, “So to keep this one guy from believing in himself, Sebastian had someone in charge of belittling him. He sat there making fun of him, telling him how he was fat and no one would ever like him. The poor prisoner was curled up in a corner crying from being put down so much, and this member of the Legion just kept telling him how no girls would ever like him.”
“I wanted to punch Sebastian right then. He’s a bad person.”
Anna’s hand brushed his.
Really? Please please please…
But it was only a comforting touch. She didn’t hold his hand.
“That sounds horrifying. You made the right choice,” she said. “I wouldn’t be part of something like that either. Was that boy their only prisoner?”
Connor shook his head and replied, “No. There was a girl who could heal people. She had red hair like you but lighter. Almost brown. She was older than me. I think maybe in her twenties. She and I met before I saw her in the dungeon. When we were escaping from Area 51, she went to heal a wounded soldier, and Sebastian ordered her not to. He said the soldier would try to stop us. But when Sebastian’s back was turned, she healed him anyway. I guess Sebastian must have found out she did that.”
Anna seemed more affected by the story of the healer than of the telekinetic boy. She looked away from Connor, out the window, and asked, “Was she being… well, tortured isn’t exactly the right word…”
When she trailed off, Connor said, “Sebastian calls it prisoner control. And no, they weren’t doing it to her. She was just a healer. That doesn’t give her any special ability to break out of prison. And besides, I bet they would have a hard time doing it. She seemed perfectly calm. She just kept saying she would like to leave whenever anyone interacted with her. She had to be one of the calmest, most collected people I’ve ever met. They’d have a hard time shaking her belief in herself.”
Still not making eye contact with him, Anna mumbled something that sounded a lot like, “I’ll bet.”
Then, aloud she said, “It’s actually not about belief in yourself. It’s about trusting God. That’s what makes the abilities work. Like me. I don’t believe in myself. I don’t teleport places because I have enough confidence and self-esteem that I know I can do it. Those are false explanations.”
“What actually happens is I trust God. I want to be in a certain place, so I pray and ask him to put me there, and he does. Earlier on, when Mr. Moses was first helping me learn how to do it, I used to think a bunch of dumb garbage like, ‘What if I wind up in a bad neighborhood and I get shot?’ or ‘What if I accidentally teleport myself six feet underground and suffocate?’ But I realized something. There’s nothing “magical” about teleporting. It’s not me doing it. God is the one who moves me. And he loves me. He’s my father – my dad. My father isn’t going to move me to a place where I suffocate and die. He cares for me too much.”
She finished, “That’s how what they were doing to the prisoner works. You get the person’s attention locked onto an area of his life where he doesn’t trust God. We all have them. Sometimes it’s about money, or popularity, or…” she paused and then continued, “I don’t know, family or whatever. I know God; I trust him. But sometimes, my family… I just get really wrapped around the axle about some of our drama. Then I don’t trust Him with it. I feel the need to fix it myself, and worry about it myself, and control it myself. I’ve already tried it once. I can’t just teleport back to my family’s house whenever I want. Because I don’t have enough trust in God in that area of my life. So this boy in the prison, he probably has problems not trusting God about his looks, or popularity, or girls, or whatever. To control him, they get his mind stuck on that, and his powers don’t work.”
Connor shifted from foot to foot. He was glad Anna wasn’t looking at him because he was afraid to meet her gaze. But when he tried to peek at her from out of the corner of his eye, he saw that she was indeed looking at him.
She asked, “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” he replied.
“No, tell me. You don’t believe me, I can tell.”
“It’s just…” Connor replied. “I don’t know…”
Anna moved to stand in front of him, hands on her hips. “Spit it out,” she said.
Connor was surprised at the change in her demeanor. She had never acted this confrontational before. He filed it away for future reference. Anna didn’t like it when people disagreed with her.
Connor backed up a step and said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean anything by it.”
Anna visibly calmed herself.
She said, “Sorry. Whenever someone acts like they’re just dismissing me, or not taking me seriously, it really sets me off. My big sister’s always done that to me and over the years, it became kind of a trigger for me. I’ll try not to get in your face, but what is it you’re having trouble understanding?”
“OK,” he replied. “Here’s the thing. I just told Mr. Moses earlier, I haven’t been in a church since I was in middle school. I don’t go around trusting God. I don’t think about him at all. So if using these powers is all about trusting God, how come I’m involved at all?”
Anna gave him a sly grin. “You’re actually not using any kind of super power. You’re the one who doesn’t want to risk being shot again because the idea of your skin being like armor seems crazy. So you’re actually not trusting God and not using power. You prove me right.”
Connor sniffed and said, “That’s different.”
But inside, a small voice reminded him of the part of the story he left out.
You did pray before you got
shot.
Anna only smiled, so Connor continued, “OK then, what about the people in the Legion? They’re doing evil things. Killing people, trying to overthrow the government and take over, and tormenting prisoners. How can people use trust in God and God-given powers to do the things they do? Pitch was ready to kill me when I tried to escape, and he was using powers to do it. Did that come from his trust in God?
Anna shook her head and said, “It’s not like that. Every good gift is from God, and God is always good. But people… not so much. People make free choices. Sometimes they do the right thing but sometimes they do the wrong thing. People do evil things. And people turn God’s good gifts to evil.”
She went on, “God gives a person the gift of eloquence. It’s humans who pervert that gift and use it to persuade other people to lynch somebody in a mob. God gives a person strength, but it’s the human who misuses that gift to hurt other people.”
“And this ‘Pitch’ person. He was the guard you had to fight when you were escaping, I guess? Well, God gave him the ability to move things with his mind, but it’s Pitch’s choice to use it for evil ends.”
Connor said, “But take your explanation of your own power. It’s not you who move yourself from place to place. It’s God who moves you, you said. So what about Pitch? Applying your example, we would say, ‘It’s not Pitch who moves the rock that flies at me, it’s God.’ I’ve been away from church a long time, but I know God is too good to do that.”
“Evil counterfeits good,” Anna said. “If God has something good that he does, evil will make a fake of it. So Pitch… God creates the ability to move mountains. But God won’t participate in doing evil. So as a means of tempting Pitch, evil creates a counterfeit of that, and lets him use it.”
Connor said, “Evil… you’re talking about the devil, aren’t you?”
Anna replied, “Demons, devil, Satan… they’re names. Sometimes people get hung up on names. I just say evil because that’s less of a stumbling block for some people. Evil is real. There is an evil spiritual force in the world. You know it as well as I do. When a psycho thinks he hears voices in his head telling him to kill, or when a person sits outside a prison cell mocking and belittling someone until they cry, you see real evil at work, tempting and tricking humans into making bad choices.”
Connor said, “I hope you’re not trying to tell me they’re devil worshippers or something. Sebastian and the Legion have a completely logical explanation for how they get their powers. They think that people get special abilities from being in the legion, having total self-confidence, and wanting the powers bad enough to do anything to get them.”
Anna replied, “To me, that sounds exactly like how the devil works. Hang around people with bad motives, worship yourself as a false god, and want something so bad you’re willing to do evil to get it. I’m not saying they’re devil worshippers. For all I know, they may not even believe there is such a thing. But whether one believes it is real has never mattered to evil. All I’m saying is the situation they created for themselves leaves them open to a lot of temptation. I’m not surprised if some of them receive an evil counterfeit of the good Gifts.”
“A person can have miraculous Gifts from God, or they can be tricked into using an evil counterfeit of those gifts. Either way, it looks like superhuman abilities to the rest of the world.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Connor thought about Anna’s claim that spending time with people like the Legion could expose a person to some kind of supernatural evil. He didn’t like it very much.
Connor said, “My friend Linc is still with them. In his case, I know for sure he’s better than this. I’ve been his friend for years, but he wants to be accepted really badly, and he loves the idea of being on the side that’s going to win a fight, and the Legion offers him that.”
“Tell me about him,” Mr. Moses said, walking up to the two of them.
“When I was a freshman in high school, Linc transferred to my school from out of town when his parents came to Vegas to work. It’s hard to be the new kid, and a lot of people picked on him. You know how it is…”
Anna and Spark both nodded.
Connor went on, “So I kinda tried to befriend him. I don’t like seeing people get bullied. I started taking him to my uncle’s karate class with me. It’s a pretty time-honored formula. Take a nerd, teach him to fight, let him win a couple times, and the bullies stop picking on him. I figured it would work for Linc.”
“But Linc’s always had this darker side to him. He liked being able to fight back. He liked it way too much. The first time he tried, he broke a kid’s arm. Sure, the bully might have had it coming, but it was still pretty intense. It only made everyone else ostracize him more.”
Connor paused for a long time and then he told them all a story about him and Linc.
***
“I’m like the only white belt here!”
The dojo had a hardwood floor, with punching bags hanging in corners, mats down on some portions of the floor, and almost 20 other students in various stages of warming up.
Linc was correct. He was the only beginner at sparring practice. They had been studying basics for a while now, but the practice fights were optional for beginners. Linc was the only one who had chosen to come.
Connor said, “Don’t sweat it. The teacher’s really good at pairing people up in ways that are helpful for learning, not humiliating.”
They began the class. Students were paired off. Lower ranks were placed with a higher ranked student from whom they could learn. Unsurprisingly to Connor – the instructor was his uncle, and he knew him well – he was paired with Linc.
“Relax, man,” Connor said, seeing the expression of fear on his friend’s face.
He continued, “My job here is helping you learn to fight. I’m not going to hurt you. Try taking a swing at me, just to get the feel of it. Not the face, though.”
Linc raised an eyebrow dubiously.
“Um…”
Connor laughed. “Relax, man. Trust me, I can take it. That’s what we train for here. Just land a punch so you can know what it feels like to do it.”
Linc jabbed his fist right at Connor’s chest. It obviously wasn’t full force, but it was hard enough to be a real punch. It hit Connor, who looked down at his chest, looked back up at Linc, and smiled.
“So there’s a lesson about fighting. Don’t bother hitting a guy in the chest. The rib cage is right there, and it’s super strong as bones go. A really experienced fighter can do a lot of damage hitting a guy in the chest. But as for beginners, and most punks you’ll ever fight on the street, punching a man in the chest is the least efficient way to fight.”
Connor walked his friend through the elements of hand to hand combat, until at long last they were circling each other and trading jabs and kicks back and forth. The more experienced boy wasn’t really fighting; he was just providing a live target with which his friend could learn.
And Lincoln was learning. He picked up on waiting for the opponent to punch and then hitting the area that hand had been guarding. He picked up on hitting soft targets, like the sides and midriff. Lincoln was a natural fighter.
Connor made a point of leaving openings in his guard stance that made it possible for Lincoln to hit him. That was the point – for the less-advanced student to learn. As he began to see those opportunities well-enough to land a punch, the grin on Lincoln’s face grew larger every time.
“You’re favoring your left hand,” Connor said as they sparred. “You always attack with your left, never your right.”
“I’m left-handed,” Linc replied, getting the words out between gasps as he tried to catch his breath.
“Yeah, but right now I don’t have to guard my left side at all. I can just hit you with impunity with my left hand, because you pretty much never hit with your right. Don’t build a weakness in your fighting, man. Bad habits are hard to break.”
“It’s working well enough for me to hit you,” L
incoln replied. “And most of the people I run into in school won’t be black belts. I like feeling like I can fight and win.”
***
Connor finished his story with a sigh. “That’s me and Linc. We’ve been friends for years. And I just left him there. I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to leave because I saw how evil the Legion is. He wanted to stay because he thought the Legion was the greatest thing ever. The way he was talking, I was afraid that if I told him my plans he might rat me out. I don’t know what else I could have done.”
Anna touched his hand again. “God always has the last word, Connor. Lincoln isn’t lost. You can still bring him back.”
He didn’t feel like anything he might say would be right so Connor just remained silent.
Anna asked, “What about the other boy? The telekinetic who was being tormented. For that matter, why not… the woman who could heal? Why didn’t she… why didn’t they come with you?”
Connor’s mouth hung open. In a single question, she had exposed something he had never thought of. Red spread rapidly across his cheeks as he realized his terrible error.
“I…”
Anna canted her head to the side and looked at him.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“I… Anna, please don’t … I forgot! I forgot them. I never even tried to get them out. I just left them behind.”
Connor collapsed back into one of the chairs around the conference table. “I never even tried to help them. They’re being held captive. They’re living through mental cruelty and verbal abuse. The thought of trying to get them out never even crossed my mind! Oh God, I’m so ashamed!”
He put his face down in his hands.
“You left her–” slipped out of Anna’s mouth, before she clamped it shut. She whirled away from Connor and stalked a couple paces away.
Ethan Moses went over to Connor and sat down in the chair next to him. He rolled it out to where he was sitting face to face with Connor and leaned forward.
Sons of Thunder Page 11
