Magic and Shadows: A Collection of YA Fantasy and Paranormal Romances

by T. M. Franklin

  “They must have been rebels who never made it to us,” she murmured. “I wonder what happened to them.”

  I moved past her into the bedroom—the place had only one, and it doubled as an office apparently. A simple folding table sat beside the bed covered in papers, pens, and yet more layers of dust. But beside the papers was a net screen.

  “Pay dirt,” I whispered, pointing. “Look.”

  Jean fingered it apprehensively. “Of course you know that the minute I log on from this machine, the agents will be all over it,” she said. “They’ll know this one has been offline for however long, and someone unauthorized is assuming the identities of its former owners—”

  “That’s why we brought all the hunters,” I told her, squeezing her shoulder encouragingly. “Just do the best you can. Nobody really thinks you’ll be able to crack into the database Will found on the first try, in less than two hours.”

  “But if I can’t, we’ll have alerted the agents what we’re up to, and they’ll be on us like flies the next time we try to do this,” Jean muttered, opening the net screen and plugging it in. “And why there’d still be electricity to this house when it’s abandoned—oh!” she stopped, surprised when the ‘charging’ light showed up in the corner of the net screen.

  “Nick told me houses in the city are on a centralized grid for electricity, they don’t disconnect them one by one,” I told her. “And all the agents will know is that someone broke in and was doing something on the net, they won’t know who or for what purpose. Granted, we’ll probably have to find a target in a totally different part of the Republic the next time so they don’t start suspecting where we’re coming from in the forest, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.” I smiled at her reassuringly, watching her rusty fingers type in a few keystrokes, bringing up browsers with each one. “I’ll shut up now so you can work.”

  I positioned myself in the doorframe of the bedroom, where I could watch the window outside the bedroom and both the front and the back door. Periodically all four men walked around the perimeter of the house, and I recognized their silhouettes. They didn’t seem alarmed, so I assumed all was well. I glanced back at Jean, who bit her lip, the furrow between her eyebrows like a ravine.

  After what felt like a little more than an hour of silence and clicks of keys, she whispered, “I think… yes! I found it!” Despite her whisper, the note of elation in her tone was unmistakeable. “Kate told me Will said he had to hack into the government intranet, and she said it probably wasn’t guarded all that well because most citizens are too brainwashed to pose a threat anyway. Thank God, their passwords still follow the same pattern! Here it is!”

  “When did she tell you that?”

  “She came and talked to me last night.”

  Just then, Nick appeared at the window of the bedroom, urgently beckoning us away. He mouthed, ‘Agents!’

  “Close it and let’s go,” I commanded.

  “Wait! We have to get what we came for!” Jean rifled through the papers until she found a blank one, and a pen that didn’t work. She swore, tossed it away, and grabbed another one. Then she scribbled down two names, locations, and dates.

  Nick’s face appeared again, livid. ‘Get out!’ he mouthed.

  “We have to go now, Jean,” I told her, withdrawing my gun and removing the safety. I kept it pointed at the ground.

  Alec burst through the back door. “Get out! Now!”

  That was when the gunfire started. I didn’t know if it was our side or theirs, since I still wasn’t sure what these special guns the agents had sounded like. But I lunged toward Jean, and she dropped her pen and snatched the paper just as I forced her head down. “Crawl,” I told her, “out of range of the windows!”

  When we reached the outside, Alec had flattened himself against the back of the house and I peered around to the front beside him: sure enough, four agents wearing gray suits identical to the ones Agents Dunne and Jaffa had worn ducked behind their two shiny black sedans, aiming their weapons at the house and firing before ducking back down again to avoid bullets from Nick, Brian, or Kenny. I glanced back toward the forest and could just make out what must be Jacob and Pete, taking aim too.

  “They’re gonna tear this place apart!” cried Alec.

  But even though the agents fired several bullets per minute, aiming directly at the house, I saw no evidence that any of them actually made contact with it. No damage to the stucco, no dents or sounds indicating that the metal had been perforated, no shattered glass. But the hunters’ bullets left obvious holes in the black sedans, shattering windshields and windows and side mirrors. What did Alec mean?

  “Aaagh!”

  The yell ripped from Brian’s throat, and he went down, clutching his arm.

  “Take Jean and sprint to the forest!” Nick commanded me, “we’ll cover you! Go!”

  I shoved her in front of me, putting my body between her and the agents and staying as close behind her as I could without tripping her. The gunfire continued behind us, and I knew the agents had to see us escape.

  Shouldn’t there be bullets whizzing around us, I wondered? Near misses? What were they shooting with anyway? But so far as I could tell, there was no evidence that we were under attack at all, other than the agents behind us, the deafening noise of the gunshots, and the terror of my comrades.

  When we were within twenty yards of the forest edge, I glanced back, trying to understand. All four of the agents ran after us, training their guns on Jean and me, while the other four hunters ran after us, one by one. I heard the explosions of the guns. Jean hit the ground, but I stood there, watching them in wonder.

  Suddenly I understood.

  There’s no such thing as internal damage bullets. They’re shooting blanks.

  * * *

  “You’re insane,” Nick told me shortly when I tried to explain this to the hunters. “They just happened to be lousy shots, that’s all.”

  “Not that lousy,” muttered Brian, whose face had gone white. He gritted his teeth and trudged on anyway, but he looked like he was teetering on the edge of shock.

  Admittedly I hadn’t worked out how a blank could have injured Brian—although his shoulder looked just fine.

  “But there was no other damage!” I insisted. “Didn’t you notice? No bullet holes, no shattered windows, no bullets whizzing by your ears—”

  “You are insane,” echoed Alec. “There was all kinds of damage!”

  “Yes, but from our bullets, not theirs!”

  Nick started to look annoyed. “Jackson, there were perforations all over the siding of the house. They blew out one of the windows.”

  I stared at him for a second, not comprehending. Then I asked slowly, “When you guys looked at that house, when we first got there… what did you see?”

  “What do you mean?” Nick snapped at me.

  “I mean, what did it look like to you?”

  “It was a wealthy suburban home, probably owned by a government official who defected or was terminated,” Nick replied, exasperated.

  I let that sink in for a minute. Then at last, I murmured, more to myself than to him, “You’re still brainwashed…”

  “Then how did I get shot?” Brian growled, but he was too weak to put much venom behind the words. “I suppose this is all in my head too?”

  “Maybe,” I agreed. “If the body thinks it’s been hit, the mind can make it real, can’t it?” Grandfather had certainly taught me that a healthy body cannot withstand a mind convinced it is ill; granted, this case seemed a much more extreme version of the same idea, but with a little help from the control centers, why not?

  “I don’t want to hear any more of this, Jackson,” Nick snapped. “Nobody here is brainwashed anymore. Jean, what did you get?” He turned to her abruptly, and she jumped.

  “This,” she said, holding up a crumpled piece of paper.

  “What is that?”

  “The names and current residences of two of the next victi
ms on the government’s hit list,” she said.

  The hunters erupted into cheers, and all of them except Brian clustered around Jean, overwhelming her with hugs, pats on the back, and exclamations of ‘well done!’ She looked startled and jumpy, but pleased. “There were a lot more of them, but I ran out of time to write down any more. I know how to hack back in now, though! They really didn’t make it hard at all!” she declared over the jubilant voices of the hunters. I smiled at her too, but I couldn’t manage more than that. I was too distracted by what I’d just learned.

  In the excitement around Jean, Jacob slipped out from the group and approached me.

  “Those agents fired straight at you,” he whispered. “You weren’t even running. You should have been hit like eight times.”

  I nodded at him, relieved that at least someone saw what I saw. “Exactly.”

  Jacob sighed and bit his lip. “Even if I believed you, and I’m not saying I do… how come you see that and we don’t?” He cocked his head to the side. “Is it that whole ‘seeing with your inner eye’ crap?”

  I smiled at him. “I figure it must be.”

  “Well then. Consider me your apprentice, boss.”

  20

  Kate

  It was nightfall when the hunters and Jean returned. Most of them looked triumphant— except for Brian, whose face was white and his arm in a makeshift sling made from his t-shirt. Jackson seemed lost in thought.

  Some of the fierce grins faded from the hunters’ faces when the Crone stepped forward to greet them, flanked by her two bodyguards.

  “The hunters are returning late today,” she observed, her beady little eyes taking in the party shrewdly. “No game, and yet bizarrely triumphant this evening. And what’s this? Have you encountered animals who have learned to shoot back?” She gestured at Brian. I saw Jean try to step behind Jackson to avoid the Crone’s notice, but rather than hiding her, the action drew the Crone’s attention instead. “Jean, are you an apprentice hunter now, as well? I imagine hunting is especially difficult without a weapon.”

  “Madam,” murmured Nick, “Allow me to explain.”

  “Yes, that would be good,” the Crone replied coolly.

  Nick started to tell her about the mission, and the Crone cut him off. Members of the Council joined the fight, and pretty soon the conversation degenerated to shouting.

  “You had no right—”

  “How dare you, without permission—!”

  “We can’t just let them die though! We got two names—!”

  “…could have been killed! Who gave you the idea in the first place—?”

  The rest of the cave dwellers inched closer to listen as the shouting escalated, abandoning their meals to charring in order to satisfy their curiosity. In the midst of the confrontation, Jean managed to sneak away meekly, and Jackson headed for me.

  “Can I talk to you?” he whispered to me, gesturing to the woods beyond where the tribes congregated. “Alone?”

  I followed him. We walked beyond the scope of the firelight and then some, into the depths of the woods where the only illumination came from the moon through the branches of the trees. He led me to the edge of a stream I’d just found earlier that day, and he sat down on a rock. I sat beside him.

  “So what happened?” I asked.

  “Jean did it. She cracked into the database, but it took her almost the full two hours. I think the agents picked up the net screen signal, because four of them showed up right when she cracked it. She wrote down two of the names, but then we had to get out. The agents fired at us and we fired back at them. But Kate, their bullets left no damage—aside from Brian’s arm. No damage at all! Only ours did. We didn’t hit any of the agents that I saw, but we left bullet holes and shattered windows in their cars!”

  I stared at him, not comprehending. “What are you saying? They’re really bad shots?”

  “No. I’m saying they were firing blanks! They didn’t think they were, and neither did the hunters—everyone believed their bullets were real, they just said they were the ‘internal damage’ kind. But they weren’t. That’s just how they explained the fact that there’s no blood. The only reason Brian got hurt was because he believed the bullets were real. But I’m telling you, there was nothing in those guns!”

  I shook my head. “That doesn’t make any sense to me. Why would they be firing blanks?”

  “Well, if the entire Republic is predicated on a lie anyway, what need would there be for real bullets, right? Nick said the bullets we use came from an old army barracks, so before the rise of the Republic. We’re using real ones, but they aren’t. Even the other hunters—as soon as they got back on the grid, they started seeing what wasn’t there again. The house we went to was a dump, but Nick told me it looked like a wealthy suburban home to him. Even those of us who know the truth—signals still work on them somewhat, once they’re in range. They must!”

  I let out a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding, and turned away from him.

  The day I found out about Will, the day I ran… as I packed, I’d looked around my beautiful kitchen. And then—flash.

  It was the first time I’d seen past the veneer in decades. And it looked toxic, like a health hazard.

  Then it was over. My state-of-the-art kitchen returned, looking like something out of a decorating magazine.

  I started to tremble. Obviously it was possible for a person to know the truth, and yet still see the lie. I proved that.

  “Then what hope is there for any of us?” I whispered.

  “We have to train the people to see through it,” Jackson said, his tone decisive. “Knowing the truth isn’t enough when you’re constantly bombarded with what’s false—you have to actively fight against it and always be on your guard. If I can teach people how to see things the way I do…”

  “But why doesn’t it work on you?” I interrupted.

  “Because I have trained! That’s what I’ve been doing my whole life, I just didn’t know why until this moment!” He stood up, pacing as he spoke. “What Grandfather taught me to do is control my mind. He taught me to see through the distorted biases and warped worldviews that plague most people, so I can access what’s really there. He taught me how much power we all have, if we could only learn to do exactly that. I never had problems discerning what’s real and what isn’t; my problem has always been, what do I do with it once I know?” He paused, stooping down to scoop up a handful of pebbles which he began plunking into the stream with a little splash at regular intervals. “The things I can do always seemed so pointless in Frjósöm. But here, in this environment, the ability to discern truth is—everything. It’s the difference between life and death!” He dropped the last pebble into the stream, dusted off his palm, and crouched down beside me again, his eyes dancing. “This is the place I was made for, Kate. I’ve finally found it. The reason I trained with Grandfather all this time, the reason I can do what I can do… it’s to help set people free!”

  “What is it that you think you can do that other people can’t?” I asked cautiously. “You just mean because the control center signals don’t influence you like they do other people?”

  “Well, that,” Jackson conceded, “but… more than that.” He hesitated a moment, sat down next to me again, and seemed to wrestle with himself a bit before he continued speaking.

  “Grandfather had quite a few disciples, not just me. He taught us that our minds are immensely powerful… limited only by what we think is possible. He encouraged us to find a unique expression that fit our own personalities, so all of us ended up specializing in different things. For example, one guy focused mostly on multiplying enormous numbers together in his head. We used to check him with a calculator and he was always right. But he spent hours and hours just practicing that skill.

  “Another one got really into visualization. He imagined this house he wanted to build in the capitol for his family—I mean, down to the last nail, he had the whole thing planned out. And then
he constructed it, totally from the blueprint in his mind.

  “Another one had total recall. He could recite entire conversations verbatim, all the way back to when he was two years old. Stuff he’d completely forgotten. But he knew the memories were still in there, and he could access them if he tried hard enough.”

  “Oh-kay…” I murmured. “So they were geniuses. What’s this got to do with anything?”

  He didn’t seem to hear me. “Grandfather focused mostly on control of his own body functions, the ones they call autonomic, that we’re not supposed to be able to control. He used to go hiking for days by himself in the wintertime, with no gear or anything. When he was younger everyone was sure he’d freeze to death, but he never did. He said he always felt warm, no matter what temperature it was outside. He also learned how to suspend his vital functions to the point where he looked and seemed dead.”

  I shook my head, more and more confused. “You mean that's what he told you he could do. You never saw it for yourself.”

  “He taught me to do the same thing, actually.”

  “To do—what?”

  Jackson took a deep breath. “When I arrived here and the agents picked me up, and I told you I fought them off… well, one of them injected me with something and I lost consciousness. When I woke up, they’d strapped me down. I realized then that my only chance of escape was to fake my own death. I slowed my heart rate and breathing down enough that the agents thought I was dead. They tossed me outside, and as soon as they weren’t looking anymore, I ran off.” He turned to look at me, and scrutinized my face.