XGeneration, Books 1-3: You Don't Know Me, The Watchers, and Silent Generation

by Brad Magnarella

  “It’s not always a choice.”

  “No? What do you call it, then?”

  Janis’s gaze fell to the glove lying across her shoe. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Because you’re not explaining it to me. Make me understand, Janis.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Can’t or won’t?”

  She swallowed. “All right, do you see that glove?” She nodded toward the one remaining on the dashboard.

  Blake’s head turned. “Yeah?”

  Janis’s heart hammered beneath her sweater. If she showed him, there was no going back. It was a threshold she couldn’t uncross. She concentrated again. The smell of the sea crept back into her nose; the electrical pulses tingled over her skin, connecting her with apparently empty space, connecting her to the glove. She felt the fabric of the glove’s first finger begin to stiffen as a low vibration hummed between her ears.

  Just a little more concentration…

  But then she understood the impossibility of it. The sensations faded, and the glove’s finger went slack.

  Blake wasn’t Scott.

  “It’s for the right hand,” Janis said lamely, picking up the glove. “The other one’s down here.” She stooped and retrieved the glove from the floor, her thoughts racing to come up with something sensible. She held the gloves together. “They’re perfect complements, see? Right hand, left hand.”

  Blake’s brow wrinkled. “I’m not following you.”

  “To make you understand what’s happening with me, I would have to know that we were complements. That this…” She gestured between them. “That this was it. You’re wonderful, Blake, more than wonderful, but we’ve really only been together for, what… three, three and a half months?”

  “Is there someone else?”

  “Someone…? Of course not!” Blood rushed to her face.

  Blake held his brow and took a deep breath. “Amy Pavoni came up to me the other day at my locker and told me to be careful. She said, and I quote, ‘What you don’t know about your girlfriend could fill a book.’ Normally, I wouldn’t take stock in what Amy had to say — and I didn’t at the time — but it sounds like you’re confirming what she told me.”

  Janis bristled. “I think your first instinct about Amy was the right one.”

  “Well, what could she know that I don’t?” Janis was picking up an edge in his voice.

  “I don’t know, Blake. Considering that I made her sprain her ankle at Dress-up Night, jeopardizing her precious modeling career, I’m guessing she would say and do anything to get back at me.” Anger seeped into her voice. “And that apparently includes planting doubts inside my boyfriend’s head.”

  “She said something else.”

  Janis’s heart leapt into her throat, but she forced her eyes to roll. “What?”

  “She said you spend half of English class every day staring at Scott Spruel.”

  “And you believe her?”

  “Should I?”

  “What do you think?” Scott’s distant window felt like a spotlight.

  Blake sat back in his seat and sighed. “I know. I just…” He ran both hands through his feathered hair. “I thought you and I were solid. Especially after getting through last month.” He blinked three times quickly. It was the closest Janis had ever seen him come to tears.

  “It’s just a break,” she said, more gently now.

  “Until the flakes settle?”

  “Until the flakes settle.”

  When he smiled, his dimples looked sad. “Can you promise me they will?” he asked.

  Janis thought of her parents, waiting inside but not talking to one another.

  “I… I have to go.” She pushed her gloves into the pocket of her jacket. “I’m sorry.” She touched his hand, which lay on his thigh. She considered kissing him, but it still felt dishonest.

  “Oh.” She twisted the ring from her finger. “You should hold onto this.”

  He held up a palm. “I meant that as a gift, not a loaner.”

  “I know, but…” She continued to hold the ring out. “It would make it easier.”

  After a moment, he nodded — more to himself than to her — and slipped the ring into the front pocket of his shirt. Only when Janis was at the front door and the taillights of Blake’s car had climbed the hill of her short street and disappeared did she begin to wonder what she had done.

  * * *

  The tapping on her bedroom door didn’t surprise Janis. It was still early, only quarter after nine, but she was already in bed, her highlighted copy of Lord of the Flies facedown across her stomach. At the family party, she’d managed to eat a small wedge of cake (double chocolate with maraschino cherries, her birthday dessert of choice since she turned five) and to unwrap her presents, but she’d said little. Her father asked where Blake was, to which she replied, “Home.” No one had asked again. Janis figured it was only a matter of time before one of them came to check on her.

  “Come in,” she called.

  The door opened, and her mother appeared. “Hey, hon.”

  “Hey.” Janis scooted over to make room for her on the bedside.

  “Do you want to talk about whatever’s eating at you?”

  Janis shook her head.

  Her mother sat and nodded toward the dresser. “That’s the brand you like, right?”

  Janis followed her gaze to the new honey-colored softball glove leaning against her trophies. “Yeah, thanks. Course, I won’t be able to break it in until the doctor gives me the green light.”

  “That should happen soon.”

  “If you call two months ‘soon.’ Half the season will be over by then.”

  Her mother smiled and stroked her hair. “We’re all just glad you’re on the mend. So what’s going on with you and Blake?”

  “What’s going on with you and Dad?”

  Her mother’s fingers paused. “What do you mean?”

  “Ever since… you know… what happened, you just don’t seem the same.”

  “Well, we were worried about you, Janis. We’re still a little worried. We want to know you’re all right.” But even as she said this, the lines around her eyes appeared to waver. She gave Janis’s hair a final stroke, then clasped her hands together in her lap. “Your father and I are fine.”

  Fine? Give me a break. “Well, what were you arguing about that night in Denver?”

  “What night?”

  “When I was coming back from the bathroom?”

  “Oh.” Her mother fell silent for a moment. “What did you hear?”

  “Your raised voices. You sounded upset. Dad sounded mad.”

  Her mother looked toward the ceiling as though she was about to pray. “What you have to understand, Janis, is that when you’re a parent, your children are everything. And when something happens to one of them, like what happened to you, our instinct is to blame ourselves.”

  Janis sighed and reached for her mother’s hand. “It wasn’t your fault.” Her skin felt like crepe paper. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  When her mother tried to smile, her face appeared on the verge of collapsing. She inhaled, pulling herself together. “You’re our baby. We just want to make sure nothing like that ever happens again. That’s what your father and I were discussing in Denver. We’re fine. We’re all going to be fine.”

  “Do you promise?”

  “I promise.”

  And now Janis knew how Blake must have felt earlier that evening, because when she sat up to receive her mother’s hug, she found herself wishing she could believe her.

  * * *

  Janis awoke in the backyard, the whoosh-whoosh-whoosh of the out-of-body state filling her senses. It was her first experience since before she’d been stabbed — the first one she could remember, anyway. Janis rotated, her feet skirting the grass. She was in the same spot where she used to awaken, beside the island of oak trees and azalea bushes, just out of reach of the English ivy. Only, where the yard used to ap
pear dark, its edges suffused with supernatural light, luminous strands now glimmered in the space around her.

  All right, this is new…

  Janis drifted upward, parallel to the trunk of an oak tree. The broad tree was composed of the same strands that spanned the yard, but these wound around each other in a kind of columnar matrix. Threads linked the tree to other trees. And Janis could feel her own connection to the trees, just as she’d felt her connection to her wool glove earlier that evening, in Blake’s car.

  This is how I’m able to influence remote objects. Only they’re not remote. The living connections are all around us.

  She thought about her conversation with Mrs. Fern last semester, when her English teacher had described another world, one that supported the physical world, manifested it. “Not a realm of people and objects,” she had told her, “but of the passions and energies that constitute them.” She’d also said the world was beyond the perceptions of most. “It is what makes Janus so special.”

  Yeah, so special that she’s being stalked, apparently.

  Janis turned from the tree until her gaze came to rest on the tall shrubbery bordering the back of the lawn. She rotated, taking in the entire property line.

  Or caged….

  Because inside the bushes, where Janis used to feel an impenetrable force — a charge rebuffing another like charge — she could now see a field. It wavered as it rose, lines crisscrossing like latitudes and longitudes on a globe. Above the house, amid the high branches of oak trees, the lines converged to a point. However, the globe-cage wasn’t impenetrable.

  Janis flew to the place along the back line of bushes where she had left her yard twice before. The air crackled around her. She didn’t have to probe with her hands now; she could see the disruption in the field, a hole where luminous filaments strained and fluttered like an underwater swimmer’s hair. Janis didn’t slow but let herself be pulled through.

  Whoosh.

  She peered up and down the culvert. Above her, the Leonards’ old house stood large and dark, its back deck empty. She looked at her own house and saw the field she’d just passed through, appearing fainter from the outside than the inside, shimmering in the night air. And though she was free of the dome, she had no idea where to go or what to do. Her modus operandi for the last month had been to remain distant from those closest to her, if not physically, then emotionally.

  Blake had been right about that.

  But what about what he’d said about Scott? Okay, maybe she did peek over at him from time to time in English, but so what? She was responsible for him. She was the reason he’d bled in the Leonards’ shed. She was the reason he’d fallen under Agent Steel’s suspicion.

  And the recurring dream of his body landing in front of her…

  When the Leonards’ shed door creaked open above her, Janis almost screamed. She pressed herself to the bottom of the culvert before remembering she was in her out-of-body state. Incorporeal. A slender figure emerged and peered around, a man. He was dressed in black. From inside his hoodie, a pair of glasses flashed in the low light like ghosts.

  Mr. Leonard?

  He stepped into the yard and closed the shed door behind him. Janis remembered his parting words: Lay low until I contact you. But Mr. Leonard was dead. And something felt different about this person’s energy. It was cleaner and lighter, more familiar.

  Hunkered over, the man moved toward her. Something shifted against his back, a bag. When he reached the fence, he peeked around, then climbed over. He lowered himself down the wall of the culvert, using the tips of his rubber soles for traction. He crouched a few feet from her, and Janis watched their threads seeking one another’s. When the threads touched, Janis shivered warmly, and her incorporeal form pulsed with fresh light.

  “Scott?” she whispered.

  The man turned and looked straight at her — no, straight through her, his eyes large and startled — before slinking up the culvert. It was Scott, but what in the world was he doing out here?

  Janis followed him. Hadn’t she told him not to go back into the Leonards’ basement? Hadn’t she made him promise? But he hadn’t promised. She remembered that now. He had stood on the fallen tree in the twilight, hands in his pocket. “So this is it?” he’d asked her, his voice small and beaten.

  She watched him crawl into the tunnel beneath Twenty-first Avenue.

  Oh, Scott. What have I gotten you into?

  She drifted to the street and down toward his house, the night air alive with dancing threads. She waited above the storm drain until Scott emerged. Their threads touched once more as he gained his feet, then they broke apart like a lingering handhold. Scott stole over the yard and disappeared inside the bushes at the front of his house. Janis followed until something pushed against her, a charge rebuffing a like charge.

  And now she could see the faint, wavering lines rising dome-like over his yard and house as well.

  Janis circled the dome, searching for any holes like the one that perforated the field in her backyard, but the integrity of this one was sound. She arrived back where she had started, near the storm drain. Hovering, she rested her hand against the push of the field and watched the small glow in Scott’s window until, eventually, the experience faded into dreaming.

  14

  Spruel household

  Sunday, February 3, 1985

  1:42 a.m.

  Scott shoved his hoodie back and slumped to the floor, his head propped against the windowsill. Behind his closed lids, terror and exhilaration put on a Fourth of July Spectacular. But he was safe. He was safe. There had been the one moment, upon descending into the culvert from the Leonards’ lawn, when he’d felt someone standing behind him. Scott even thought he heard his name. Convinced it was the person who had tried the shed doors the night before, Scott had spun, a cry halfway up his throat.

  But he’d been alone.

  He illuminated his wristwatch. The timer showed that he’d climbed outside only eighteen minutes before. Not bad, considering that he had to pick several lingering threads of duct tape away from the underside of the shelf-desk, his fingers trembling madly in the flashlight’s beam.

  But the reward had been worth the risk. The voice-activated recorder was back in his possession. And judging by the spool on the cassette, it had grabbed at least twenty minutes of conversation.

  Scott stood and lowered his blinds, twisting them shut. He tiptoed to the door — prying his feet from his shoes as he went — locked it, then tiptoed in sweat-damp socks to his desk, where he clicked on the swing-arm lamp. He used to sit at the same desk for hours, if not days, lost inside his latest computer hack. The computer was no longer there, but as Scott set the tape recorder down and pressed REWIND, the same excitement pumped through him.

  Scott retrieved a pair of headphones from his dresser and pulled them over his ears. He returned in time to catch the rewind button before it popped up with a clack. “All right,” he whispered, easing his finger from the button. “Let’s find out who’s chatting on our little party line.”

  He plugged the headphones into the recorder’s jack and pressed PLAY.

  The first seconds of clear tape whispered through the headphones. Then came a sound, a man’s clipped voice. Scott pressed the headphone cups to his ears and bowed his head in concentration. Another voice answered.

  What the…?

  None of it was sensible, as though all the consonants and vowels had been swapped. Are they even speaking English? A third voice entered the conversation, this one belonging to a woman. More nonsense. Then Scott had it.

  Aw, crap.

  He pulled the headphones from his head by the cord. It was English, all right. Scrambled English. The network was more sophisticated than he realized. To those using the phones, their conversation was as clear as a bell. But to prying ears, like Scott’s, it sounded like perfect gobbledygook. Scott eyed the turning sprockets. So, a network off the grid and scrambled.

  And Scott had learned somethi
ng else important that night: he was wrong. Whatever Mr. Leonard’s role, he had not been acting solo. That alone was worth the price of admission.

  He placed the headphones back over his ears to try to discern something amid the nonsense — anything — but it was futile. He might as well have been listening to Mork from Ork.

  Shazbot!

  He considered his next move, then groaned. He turned everything off, hid the tape recorder in his closet, swapped his burglar outfit for a T-shirt and sweat pants, and flopped into bed.

  It seemed he had a lunch date on Monday.

  * * *

  Wayne spewed bits of burger as he spoke. “The malfunctioning robots are called ‘runaways.’ So this one goes berserk and hacks up the family it’s supposed to be serving. A special division on the police force is called in — that’s the runaway squad I was telling you about. They’re trained to hunt down the runaways. Only this robot has a special chip to attack humans.”

  “Just take out the chip,” Chun interrupted. “Problem solved.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Wayne’s cheeks began to turn pink. “For that one robot, maybe, but what if the chips are being mass-produced by a mad genius?”

  Craig leaned over to Scott, his blond hair a cumulous cloud around his flat, gentle face. “Wayne saw that Tom Selleck movie this weekend, Runaway. Now he wants to start his own runaway squad.”

  “Then you throw the lunatic in jail,” Chun said. “Shut down the operation.”

  “Oh right, just throw him in jail.” Wayne threw his arms out, his laughter sharp and incredulous. “And what’s your plan when Gene Simmons starts shooting smart bullets at you, genius? Or when one of his assassin robots jabs an acid-filled syringe into your neck?”

  Chun fingered the purple mole above his nostril. “I just don’t see why you need a special law enforcement division.”

  “Oh, you will,” Wayne promised. “You will.”

  By Wayne’s slanting eyes, Scott guessed he was imagining all sorts of scenarios in which Chun would one day be accosted by killer robots and require his expert help. Scott cleared his throat; probably not the best opening, but he needed some real-world help.