The Fire In My Eyes

by Christopher Nelson

  “Why not? It's just water,” she said. “All I'd need to do is heat them up enough to make them dry. Can't be too hard.”

  “Like you said, it's just water,” I reminded her. “Plus, what would happen if you walked inside completely dry after that rainstorm? What if someone noticed?”

  She leaned back and rested her arms on top of the bench. “You're right. I wish we could just use our powers openly. I don't care what other people think. There are people who are smarter than me, faster than me, prettier than me, all sorts of normal people who are able to do things I can't just because I don't know how. Everyone has talents. Why do I have to hide mine?”

  “People fear what they don't understand,” I said.

  She glanced at me and sighed. “I know, I'm just whining. Don't take it so seriously.”

  The sun vanished briefly behind a cloud, then came back out. I wondered if my friends were considering going right back to try the picnic again. The sky was clearing up and the storm was receding off toward the east. It was considerably warmer than it had been just ten minutes ago.

  Nikki poked me in the side. I flinched away. “You look like you're bothered by something,” she said.

  “Just thinking about everything I've learned,” I said. “Mostly about today.”

  “What have you learned?” she asked.

  “That the Establishment is hiding a lot of things from us,” I said.

  She shrugged. “Big surprise. Did you see their database yet?”

  I nodded. “Just a quick glance.” The program that Alistair had given me linked directly to the organization's databases. A quick look at what was available had shown many documents aimed at trainees, and much more that was unavailable at my access level. I hadn't browsed much more than the summaries, since Max and Drew had been popping in and out all weekend.

  “You should read over everything in there as soon as you can,” she told me. “There's a lot of information for trainees that'll help you learn what's coming up. Did you know there's a branch of telekinesis focused on control over biology and physiology? It's called biokinesis. That's how they heal injuries so quickly. I've actually started to think about taking more courses in human physiology and anatomy so I can understand more about what my mentor is teaching me. She's really smart and she's great at explaining things.”

  “I wish my trainer was that nice,” I said.

  “Yours isn't?”

  I laughed. “He can't stand me. Thinks I don't take any of this seriously, thinks I should never have been given a second chance, probably thinks I should never have been born. I'm dangerous, a loose cannon as far as he's concerned. His method of training is to tell me what he wants me to do and bitch at me until I figure out how to do it.”

  “Doesn't sound like a healthy relationship,” she said.

  “Relationship?”

  “I can talk to my mentor about anything,” Nikki said. “Anything at all. She's like a big sister. I feel bad that you don't have someone like her teaching you. It can't be doing you any favors, with what you're learning.”

  I agreed completely with her. Learning from Shade was adversarial and difficult. Still, it motivated me to beat his expectations. “He does push me.”

  “Pushes you to what? What sort of things can you do?” she asked. “Any special abilities you've come up with yet? Anything to focus on?”

  I shrugged. “Nothing that he's mentioned.”

  “What, you can't make things out of thin air?”

  “I've never actually tried,” I said. Something in her teasing tone made me want to try it. I had no idea how to do it, but it couldn't be that hard. If I formed something in my mind, and pushed things together to make it, it would probably work. Shade had told me that working with telekinesis was self-limiting in terms of danger, so I could just give it a shot.

  I stood up and tapped into my power, slowly turning up the flow, pushing it as far as I possibly could before losing control. I imagined a long-stemmed rose, similar to one that I had given to Stephanie, once upon a time. The image hung in my mind and I focused on it, deciding to make it smaller, a miniature rose that I could easily hold in my hands. I cupped my hands in front of me and imagined the rose right there, lying across my palms.

  My power surged out of me in one huge gasp. Blue and green energy swirled around my hands and coalesced into the rose I had imagined, lying across my cupped palms. My legs shook and I dropped to one knee. Nikki grabbed my shoulder to keep me from toppling sideways. “What did you just do?” she asked. “I've never felt anything like that, and I felt it even without trying to sense anything! It was like lightning struck, right there at your hands, but there was no thunder, just an echo in my mind!”

  “I have no idea,” I murmured. The rose was still there, even after my power had vanished. I could feel its slight weight. It was no illusion. Unlike the red rose of my imagination, the petals of this one were a delicate shade of blue-green at the edges, shading to a pure sky blue at the center. The stem was brilliant living green. I felt as if I could plant it and it would grow, though I knew that it couldn't actually be alive. I held it out to Nikki. As soon as she touched it, it scattered into a spray of blue and green sparks.

  “How did you do that?” she breathed. “It was real. I could feel it, even if it didn't last.”

  “I wish I knew,” I said. My exhaustion was passing rapidly, but I had no desire to exert myself again in that way again. “I just imagined it and willed it into being. Forced it to be real.”

  She shook her head. “I've never heard of anyone being able to do that.”

  “Did you like it?” I asked.

  “It was pretty,” she said. “Why blue, though? Aren't roses supposed to be red?”

  I got to my feet. Her hand lingered on my shoulder. “Damned if I know. I imagined it as red, but it didn't cooperate. I don't know how I managed to pull that off.”

  “I wish it had stuck around,” she said. “I'd have liked to keep it. I've never had a guy buy me roses before, much less make one for me.”

  “Maybe I'll try it again some time. Or I could just buy you flowers.”

  She giggled. “I'd like that. Should we go inside now?”

  “I think so,” I said, and offered her my arm.

  Chapter Fourteen

  By July, I thought my life was perfect. Practicing my psionic powers was paying off in many ways. I lost weight and grew stronger. Drew kept asking me what my secret was. My self-confidence increased as well. It wasn't just due to getting in shape, it was also due to spending more time with Nikki. She became such a frequent visitor, Max joked about making a spare key for her.

  We spent much of our time together practicing. She took her psionic development seriously, and demanded that I keep up. I was months behind in actual technique, but my strength already matched hers. When we both worked toward the same goal, I tended to use brute force, while she tried to finesse it. I learned more from her than she did from me.

  Not everything in my life was sunshine and rainbows. My grades started to decline, even in easy classes. I didn't study. I had better things to do. I wasn't in any danger of failing, but my GPA dropped.

  Learning from Shade wasn't much better. His method of training changed from adversarial to combative. He drilled me mercilessly. “You have potential strength,” he told me. “Emphasis on potential. We have to develop it further.” We glossed over fine control and more advanced telepathic techniques, lingered a little on topics concerning psionic control of my physiology, and ignored any focus on endurance. While my endurance was building slowly, he never pushed me for long periods, simply had me expend my power in huge bursts.

  The morning of Independence Day, Shade sent me a brief telepathic message while I was in the shower. “Special training,” he said, then showed me a location and directions on how to get there. It looked like a high school sports field, a strange location for special training, but it would be empty at this time of year. I groaned, but acknowledged his message
with a quick mental nod.

  I turned the shower off and tele'd a message to Nikki, letting her know and that I'd meet her when I got back. She pouted, then sent good wishes for the session. He'd never called me out for special training session before, and the way he had presented it made it seem urgent.

  Even in my good physical condition, it took a long time to hike across the harsh urban terrain of Troy. By the time I arrived, sweat was rolling down my face. He awaited me in the center of the track, arms crossed, sunglasses in place. There wasn't a drop of sweat on his face, even though he was still wearing his heavy trench coat. That annoyed me. “Are you still wearing that thing in the middle of summer?” I asked him.

  “It's a fashion statement,” he said.

  “Fashion for mass murderers, maybe.”

  He didn't reply, simply walked away toward the starting line on the track. “Have you ever run a two hundred meter sprint before?”

  “Maybe back in high school,” I said. “The gym teacher wasn't into running, he'd usually just have us jog a lap at the beginning of class.”

  Shade shook his head and pointed at the line. “Start here. Run around the curve and down the straightaway.” He pointed at the finish line, halfway around the track. “Ready?”

  “Hell no, I'm tired from walking all this way.” I wiped sweat from my forehead. “You want me to just run it normally?”

  “When have I ever wanted you to just do anything normally?”

  I sighed and stepped up to the starting line. If he wanted me to run it with psionic assistance, fine. I could do that. I trickled power from my mind into my body, preparing for the exertion. The key to physiological control was balancing psionic power with what the muscles demanded. Too much power would exhaust the mind, too little would exhaust the muscles.

  He held up a stopwatch. “I'll be at the finish line. You'll hear the signal to start. As fast as you can, or I'll make you do it again.” He spun and jumped away, bounding all the way across the center of the track in a single leap. The grass rippled as he landed, then I felt the thump a heartbeat later. The bastard made it look so easy and natural. I could understand the concept, a psionically assisted leap while using telekinesis to carry himself through the air. Poor man's flight, he called it once. It was beyond me now, but that would change.

  He lifted the stopwatch in the air and I settled into what I thought was a running stance, balanced up on my toes and ready to sprint around the curve. A crack of thunder echoed across the field and I took off running, sticking to the inner part of the curve, speeding down the straightaway. My body felt light. The world blurred past me. I passed the finish line and pinwheeled my arms, trying to stop before I ran out of track.

  I turned and Shade was already there. “Seventeen point eight,” he announced.

  “That sounds pretty fast,” I said. I took a deep breath and stretched my arms up over my head. “I bet I could do better if I hadn't been tired when I got here.”

  “The world record is nineteen point nineteen seconds,” he said. “Set by an Olympic gold medalist.”

  I looked down at my feet. They weren't on fire. I had just beaten a world record and I wasn't even winded? “You're joking, right?”

  He held the stopwatch out to me. It was exactly as he had said. “Slow,” he said. “But not out of the expected range of a trainee. Most kids at this stage can do it under eighteen.”

  “How fast do you run it in?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Between fifteen and sixteen.”

  I was impressed in spite of myself. I clamped down on that feeling and tried to focus back on what was going on here. “What else did you bring me here to do?”

  He gestured at the football goalposts at the close end of the field. “Lift that at least six feet high and rotate it all the way around, then put it back where it was.”

  It was the largest thing I had ever attempted to move with telekinesis and I wasn't sure I could do it. I walked closer to the goal and tapped into my power, as much as I could keep stable, then made a lifting motion with both hands. With a creak, the enormous posts lifted up into the air. I had to concentrate completely on it so that it wouldn't tip over. When I was sure I had it stable in that respect, I spun it slowly all the way around, then slowly dropped it straight down into the hole it had come from, nudging it from side to side to make sure it went right back in. Sweat was pouring off me by the time I let go, and the entire thing creaked again. I held my breath, terrified that it would fall over. It didn't and I sighed in relief.

  “Adequate. Passing grade,” Shade commented.

  “What is this, a test?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said, but telepathically instead of out loud. “Now, telepresence. Show me.”

  The only facet of advanced telepathy that he had taught me was telepresence, the mental realm where we could have extended conversations, instead of just tapping quick telepathic messages back and forth. It was similar to a phone call, as opposed to telepathy being more like text messaging. Telepresence was based on a subconscious feeling of comfort, a location where we felt safe. Inviting someone to come into that realm was only possible because of how safe it truly was. Attacking someone from within their own mind was foolish, to put it mildly.

  My mental realm was my room back home, the place where I could go to be alone. Dad never came in, Mom was never around to come in, and my friends rarely came over. I had added to that room in my mind, shifting the computer to the corner furthest from the window, out of the way. The posters along my walls and ceiling were gone, and the paint was no longer a dirty white, it was a deep navy blue. Instead of having the windows closed and curtains drawn, I had them both open, letting the sun shine into my room. Right where the sunlight hit, I had a pair of plush chairs and a small table between them.

  The door to my room opened and Shade stepped in. The sunlight from the open windows faded and the temperature dropped. “What are you doing?” he demanded.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “Take control, you dumbshit!” he said. “You trust me so much you'd let me affect your own mind like this? Never let anyone do this to you!”

  The paint on the walls burned, shifting from navy blue to scarlet, then to black. It wasn't what I had defined. I forced my defenses up, demanding control of my own mind back, cursing my lapse. The walls grew hazy, then the paint returned to the color I had originally specified. The temperature rose back to what I found comfortable, a warm summer's day with a breeze swirling in through the open windows. The sun came out from behind the clouds and Shade made a sound of disgust, then sat in the opposite chair. “This chair is too soft,” he complained.

  “Good,” I said. I made the chair even softer, then placed a cup of coffee on the table between us. “I'm glad you dislike it so. Serves you right for pulling that shit.”

  He took the cup of coffee and lifted it to his lips. He grimaced and placed it back on the table. “Can't pass you on this. You let me influence your own mind without even a protest until I told you. Stupid, Parker, and that's being nice about it.”

  I kicked him out of my mind and let the mental realm dissolve. “You didn't even warn me you were going to do that.”

  “Do you think people are going to warn you before they attack?” He shook his head. “If I had been serious, I could have made you my puppet before you kicked me out. You're far too trusting.”

  “If I can't trust my trainer, who can I trust?”

  He grabbed me by the front of my shirt. I tried to pull away, but his telekinetic grip was too strong for me to break. “You don't get it. You trust too easily. Someday, you're going to trust the wrong person.”

  His face was far too close to mine. I wanted to spit in his face, drive the bastard away. “You're trying to tell me that I'm already trusting the wrong person, aren't you?”

  Shade grinned at me. “Of course you should trust me. You can trust me as far as you can trust Alistair.”

  “I trust Ripley,” I sai
d, grinning back. “Maybe a little farther than I can throw him. But you, the only thing I might trust you to do is train me properly, but I don't think you're even doing that, just pushing my strength and not teaching me anything I really need to know-”

  He spun and flung me headfirst through the air, aiming me toward the goalposts. I desperately tried to reorient myself in midair and take control of my trajectory, but he was controlling my flight path and I couldn't focus enough power to break his grip. I passed between the goalposts and arced toward the ground. I couldn't even bring my arms up to cover my face. All I could do was close my eyes.

  When the impact didn't come, I opened my eyes. I was hanging a handful of inches above the ground. A ladybug on a blade of grass twitched her antennae at me, seven spots on each wing. A breeze touched that blade of grass and she flew away, just in time. Shade dropped me and I bit my tongue as I bounced off the ground. I flipped over onto my back and jumped to my feet, but again, he was already there. His hands slipped around my throat and I froze in place. He could strangle me without even using his psionic power. With his power, I was sure that he could crush my neck with a single squeeze, and there was nothing I could do about it. Helpless. The man had me cold. I hadn't felt this powerless since I was six years old, and this was the strongest I had ever been.

  “You seem to think I'm training you incorrectly,” Shade said, his breath warm on my face. “Maybe you think I'm doing it wrong, that I'm doing things in an unorthodox manner. Maybe you believe all trainees are trained alike. Maybe you think you should be trained like your girlfriend. Am I right?”

  His hands tightened slightly. All I could do was nod.

  He lifted me off my feet. “Don't ever accuse me of not knowing what I'm doing, Parker,” he said. His tone was calm, bitterly calm, even as he lifted me higher. I gasped for breath. “Don't ever accuse me of that, or assume that, or even think that. I know precisely what I'm doing with you. Alistair knows precisely what I'm doing with you. He approves, don't you realize that? You won't find any sympathy if you run to him, crying that Shade abuses you. He already knows. He watches. I think he likes it.”