by Leigh Walker
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xxoo
Leigh Walker
About the Author
Leigh Walker is a full-time writer who loves Outlander, Game of Thrones, and The Walking Dead. She lives in New Hampshire with her husband and their three children.
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SNEAK PEAK OF BOOK #2!
Intuition – Chapter One
Coming September 15th!
You can pre-order Book 2, INTUITION, here: INTUITION (The Division #2)
Fresh Meat
“Everyone, this is Micah Stevenson. Micah, this is your new team.” Cranston motioned for him to take a seat.
The boy, who had chocolate-brown skin and wide-set brown eyes, clutched his notebook and slunk into his seat without looking at anyone.
Cranston resumed droning, continuing with his lesson about the branches of government.
I leaned forward in my seat and tapped the boy on the shoulder. He cringed away from me. “Hi,” I said, “I’m Riley. And I don’t have cooties, I swear. You okay?”
He nodded, but he kept his eyes trained toward the front of the room.
After class, Micah sprung from his seat, but I caught up with him in the hall. “Hey, Micah.”
He didn’t stop walking. “Hey.”
“You’re the new boy, huh?”
He shot me a sideways glance.
“You can talk to me, all right? Because I’m the new girl. So I feel your pain.”
He stopped walking. “I’m not new.”
I’d heard Micah had been transferred from another cell, a group vaguely referred to as “the Others,” but I didn’t know anything else about him. “Well, I know you’re not technically new, but you’re new to our group, so…”
“So?” He kept his voice low, but not so low that I failed to hear its unfriendly undertone.
“I’m just trying to be nice so you don’t feel alone.”
I had my reservations about The Division, but I’d decided to stay. The least I could do was make our newest member comfortable.
To be honest, ‘decided to stay’ might be an inaccurate way to describe my situation. Since I’d been recruited, I’d learned I was telekinetic and had been genetically engineered to be part of the group. There wasn’t a lot of free will involved; it was more of a lack-of-meaningful-choice situation.
“I appreciate that—you being nice,” Micah said. “But I’m pretty sure there isn’t anything you can do to help.”
“You mean… Wait, do you mean I can’t do anything to make you feel less alone?”
He sighed. “Yup, that’s what I mean.”
“Is that a race thing?” I blurted out.
Micah surprised me by laughing. His laugh was strong and deep, like a tuba gurgling. “You think I feel alone because I’m black?”
“Right—but it’s not like you’re the only one who’s different around here, Josh is half-Puerto Rican. Kyan’s Asian. Rachel’s Indian, and the twins were raised as Jehovah’s Witnesses—”
My words were cut off by Micah’s howl of laughter. He leaned against a locker for support. “You really are as crazy as I heard. We’ve got a telekinetic, a telepath, a transporter, an empath and a couple of precogs, and you think I feel alone because I’m black.” He stopped laughing and gave me a long look. “Like I said—as crazy as I heard.” Clutching his notebook, he stalked off.
“What’s his problem?” Finn came around the corner.
Blindsided as always by Finn—his tall form, his thick, spiky brown hair, mesmerizing brown eyes, square chin, and the biceps peeking from beneath his T-shirt—I momentarily forget everything else.
Finn laughed. “Riley, focus. Enough about my big biceps, even though I can’t ever really get enough of your obsessing over them.”
“I know,” I said absently. My eyes traced the lines of his hulking shoulders. Did he just come from lifting weights?
“Micah. You were thinking about Micah, remember?”
“Huh?”
Finn flashed his dimple, and I realized I was ogling him. Again. I coughed then glared at him, as though it were his fault.
“Enough with the dimple. You’re going to blind me with that thing.”
He smoothed out his features. “Tell me about Micah.”
“I think I upset him.” I miserably twisted my ponytail. “I don’t know. I think I put my foot in my mouth. He seems pretty miserable, and I said I could help because I’m new, too, but then I asked him if he was lonely because he was black, and that made him crack up—”
Finn laughed again. “Did you explain that you’re from upstate New Hampshire? And that you don’t, err, get out much?”
I put my hands on my hips. “Don’t make fun of me. What’s his deal, anyway? And who is this group he came from—the Others?”
Finn waved me off. “We can do Twenty Questions—or more likely Fifty Questions, since this is you we’re talking about—later. You’ve got mail.”
He grabbed my hand, which never failed to make me tingle all over, and dragged me down the hall to the mailroom. The Division had taken over a previously occupied high school in Bangor, Maine. The city had built a new school, and the old school had been donated to the Federal government. It was home for now, while we finished basic history lessons and did more extensive tactical training.
When we were done in Bangor, we were being deployed. No one knew when this would happen. One of my teammates, Josh Lafontaine, had put money on two months. One of my other teammates, Emma West, had put money on two weeks. Everyone sided with Emma because, as our resident precog, she could see into the future. Josh claimed he was developing his own precognitive abilities, but no one believed him. He said he would prove it to us. But I’d put money on two weeks, even though I hated to hurt Josh’s feelings.
We reached the mailroom. Rachel, our team’s resident teleporter, was sulkily assembling small piles of mail. Her perfect black hair snaked down her back in two French braids. “Well, if it isn’t our team lovebirds.” She rolled her eyes and tossed us each a letter. Rachel, who looked like a supermodel but ate like a pro-wrestler and rarely deigned to speak, made eye rolling look cool.
“Gee, thanks.” I practiced rolling my eyes back at her, but I was sure it just made me look like I was about to have a seizure.
“My pleasure. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to hit the gym, which sucks less than the stupid chores Cranston keeps assigning us.” Rachel stalked off, her long, elegant legs gracefully carrying her down the hall.
If only I could stalk like that… I tended to stomp.
“The chores are pretty annoying,” Finn agreed, “but it’s not like we have anyone here to help us, right? We need to stay incognito.”
“Right.” Cranston had me scrubbing vegetables and cleaning toilets, chores I could most certainly live without. Still, we needed to keep our location secret, so we weren’t hiring any outside help. Everyone had chores. We were making sacrifices as a team.
Finn scowled at the envelope he held.
“Who’s that from?”
He didn’t look up. “My mother.”
He must miss her.
“I do, Hanover. I really do.”
“Finn.”
He looked up. “Huh?”
“Stay out of my head, and stop calling me Hanover.”
He nodded, distracted, and went back to scowling at the letter.
“Aren’t you going to open it?” I tried to soften my tone.
“Yeah, maybe later.” He shoved it into his back pocket. “What’s your
s?”
I turned the postcard over in my hand. It was postmarked from Florida. “It’s from my Mom. I guess she went to the Keys, after all.”
Dear Riley, it read.
I miss you! You-Know-Who will most certainly redact this, so I’ll keep it simple. The weather in Florida is nice. It’s so wonderful of the XXXX to pay for my trip. I’m staying at a four-star hotel. Wish you, XXXX and XXXX were here. And XXXX—I’m telling you, that boy likes you. Hope you are well, honey.
Love,
Mom
A breathed a sigh of relief. My mother hadn’t said anything too controversial, although she’d still managed to get her postcard redacted.
“She sounds good,” Finn said.
I didn’t know if he’d read over my shoulder or had listened inside my head, but I supposed it didn’t matter. “Yeah, she sort of does, huh? And she thinks a boy likes me.”
Finn grinned. “Go figure.”
We headed back down the hall. “Why don’t you want to read the letter from your mom?”
“Honestly? I get a little sad.” Finn shoved his hands into his pockets. “And as that’s not in keeping with my macho image, I prefer to read her letters in private.”
“Does she write you often?”
“Every month.”
“That’s nice.” I didn’t know what else to say. We weren’t allowed to write our parents back. It was a one-way relationship. Finn hadn’t spoken to his mother in years.
As The Division’s newest recruit—next to Micah—I’d been allowed to see my mother at the end of the summer. But Cranston, our superior, had said nothing about the future. I didn’t know if I’d ever see her again.
“You might,” Finn said, apparently unable or unwilling to stop reading my thoughts. “You never know.”
Having a telepathic boyfriend was simultaneously mortifying and extremely convenient.
“Emma knows. And Emma told her parents she was dead,” I reminded him.
Finn shrugged. “Emma’s sort of warped.”
“Talking about me again, Finn? What are you, obsessed?” Emma popped out from behind her locker, snapping a piece of bubblegum. “It’s hard not to be. I get it.” She motioned to her face and her ensemble, laughing. Her bleached pixie-cut was immobile with gel, and she wore a Rolling Stones T-shirt and a plaid miniskirt that looked suspiciously like it had been wrangled from a real-live cheerleader. Rounding out her look were her non-military-grade combat boots, which she wore strictly as a fashion statement.
“More like, not obsessed,” Finn teased.
“Speaking of obsessed with me, where’s the new boy?” Emma peeked around. “I’m wondering if we’ve finally recruited my soulmate.”
“You haven’t met Micah yet? Weren’t you in class?” I asked.
“No, I was in a meeting, remember?”
Finn’s head whipped around. “Meeting with who?”
“Riley didn’t tell you? Nora. She’s here, dropping off Micah, and she wants to have one-on-ones with all of us.”
Finn let out a low whistle, impressed. “Whoa, I didn’t know she was here.”
Emma looked pleased. “I was the first one to have a meeting.”
“Wait, who’s Nora?” Emma had told me about the meeting, but because I was a newbie, I hadn’t realized its significance.
“She’s Cranston’s superior,” Finn said. “She’s who he reports to directly.”
“Oh. Huh.”
He nodded at Emma. “What did she ask you?”
Emma finished reapplying her lip-gloss before she spoke. “She wanted to know how the…indoctrination…went.” Her gaze traveled over to me.
Finn put his arm protectively around me. “You mean, with Riley?”
Emma nodded.
My heart thudded. Being noticed, under the best of circumstances, made me nervous. Now that I was part of The Division, any scrutiny made me uneasy. “She wanted to know about me? What? About Levels and my powers and…stuff?”
Emma and Finn’s eyes met briefly, but then Emma smiled at me. “A little. I think her questions centered more around how you handled the information you were given about your origin and your family. She wanted to know how you seemed after some of the tests—the ones where you saw your family.”
Over the course of the summer, we’d performed various tests to explore my newfound telekinesis. In two of the tests that involved hallucinogens, I’d encountered my father and my sister, Katie, both of whom were dead. “What did you tell her?”
“Just that you were upset by seeing them, but you handled it well.” Emma shrugged. “I think she wanted to make sure that you weren’t too impacted by the tests. I told her what I thought—that it was cruel. But I made sure to talk you up, so that you looked good.”
“Thanks. But why are they asking questions like that about me?”
Finn squeezed me. “They might be reviewing their policies. It’s probably something procedural. Nothing to get upset about.”
“Could this have something to do with the new boy?” I asked. “Are they trying to figure out how to indoctrinate him?”
“Micah’s not new,” Finn reminded me. “He’s new to our group, but he’s been around. He won’t need to be fully indoctrinated again. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have transferred him to us.”
What Finn didn’t say, most likely because he wanted me to keep calm, was that they wouldn’t transfer a total newbie to us right before we went to war.
He leaned down and put his mouth to my ear, making me shiver. “Easy, Hanover.”
I tried to glare at him, but he was so close that I just wanted to flutter my eyelashes instead. Stupid hormones.
“I don’t know why Nora’s asking about this,” Emma said. “But I think news that your monitor blew a couple of times traveled up the chain of command. I think she’s just making sure we’re proceeding the right way so that not only are you okay, but that future recruits are dealt with properly. That’s what I think, anyway.”
“That makes sense,” Finn said, “although I thought you said Riley was our last member.”
“I didn’t see Micah coming. That’s for sure.” Emma huffed.
“But that’s part of his power, I think. He’s a cloaker.”
I whipped my head toward Finn. “What the heck’s a cloaker?”
“It’s someone who can mask their special abilities and remain undetected, even by a very skilled precog.” He smiled at Emma. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. I can’t get into his head, either.”
“I’ll have to find out Micah’s secret,” I mumbled.
Finn leaned conspiratorially toward Emma. “Riley asked him if he was upset because he’s black.”
Emma guffawed. “We just rescued him from the Others, and she’s worried about—”
“Riley.” Cranston suddenly towered over us, and Emma stopped talking immediately. Our superior looked tense, his face pale with visible dark circles blooming like bruises beneath his eyes. “I need you to come with me.”
“Y-Yes, sir.” I shot Finn a worried look.
“It’ll be fine,” Emma whispered to him as I followed Cranston down the hall.
I hoped she was right as I ducked into Cranston’s office, which he’d taken over from the former administration. The only remaining decoration was a dusty globe, abandoned on a metal bookcase in the corner.
As always, Cranston sat impossibly straight in his chair. His silver crew cut glinted under the fluorescent lights. “I heard you had a letter from your mother.”
“But you already knew about it,” I blurted out before I could stop myself, “because you censored part of it.”
“I didn’t censor it. It went through Central Command, and they redacted it before forwarding it here.”
“Oh.” We had a Central Command? “Sorry, sir. I didn’t know that.”
“I’m happy to clear that up for you, soldier. Now, there are several reasons I wanted to meet with you this morning. First of all, I need to let you know you can’t
respond to the letter.”
“Am I ever going to be able to talk to my mother again?”
“No.” He said it without a trace of emotion.
I swallowed hard. “Will you make sure she’s safe?”
Cranston’s gaze, all ice blue and steely, met mine. “As long as she isn’t a nuisance and you don’t draw any unwanted attention to her, she should be fine.”
I decided to keep my dissatisfaction with his non-answer to myself. It was safer that way. Cranston got prickly when you questioned policy. “What else did you want to see me about?”
“I report directly to my commanding officer, Nora. She’s here on base, and she’s interviewing everyone on the team. You’re next. She’ll want to interview you, then we’re going to give her a demonstration of your abilities.”
I licked my lips, which had suddenly gone dry. “Will there be hallucinogens?”
“No,” Cranston said tersely. “Just you in the gym with some objects like the good old days.”
“Will Finn be kissing Rachel again, sir?” During one of my first tests, they’d trotted Finn and gorgeous Rachel out together, and he’d proceeded to jam his tongue down her throat. I’d been so upset I’d shattered every light in the gymnasium, unlocking my telekinetic power.
Cranston smiled. “Not if you perform, soldier.”
“Gee, thanks, sir.”
The smile slid off Cranston’s face as he stood up. “Nora’s ready for you in the assistant principal’s office.”
“Thanks,” I said, even though I didn’t mean it.
I stopped when I got to the door. “Sir? What’s she like?”
“She’s a little scary. Nothing you can’t handle.”
I sighed as I headed down the hall, preparing for whatever “a little scary” meant to someone like Cranston.
Here is the link to Book 2 on Amazon, which publishes September 15, 2017:
INTUITION (THE DIVISION #2)
