by R. T. Lowe
A startled shout and a wham exploded from somewhere behind him.
Felix’s heart jumped in his chest. He popped up from his seat and spun around, but so had the students in the rows behind him, and since the seats were arranged theater style with the semicircular platforms rising away from the lectern, Felix couldn’t make out what was transpiring in the back of the room.
“You’re a stupid fucking Rejectionist!” someone shouted.
“Get the hell away from me!” someone shouted back.
“Sit down!” Professor Malone bellowed from the front of the room. “Return to your seats! Now!” Malone stood completely still, a piece of bone white chalk in his dark fingers. Even before Felix knew he was in the Order, Malone had struck him as a man you didn’t want to mess with.
The students returned to their seats, whispering among themselves.
“The persons responsible for this untimely intermission will come to my office at noon,” Malone called out to the class. “If I don’t see you there, I’ll find out who you are and I’ll fail you from this class.” He turned his back and raised his hand as if to jot something on the chalkboard. Then he stopped and turned back, his expression grave. “And there will be no more talk of Rejectionists in this class. If you want to discuss politics, I suggest you do it on your own time.” With that, he resumed his lecture.
Felix twisted his head around, wondering who was involved in the scuffle. And more importantly, what in the world was a Rejectionist?
Chapter 6
HUNTING
A half-moon starkly exposed the extent of the decay gripping the dying neighborhood just west of campus before disappearing behind a bank of tar-colored clouds. Allison crossed 15th Street and jumped off the disintegrating sidewalk, limping along the potholed road, moving to the center to ensure she was an obvious and clearly visible target, easy prey for the people she was hunting. The houses, squat single-story hovels, sat silent and wary; most were boarded up with plywood, DO NOT ENTER notices hammered into the doors. Without streetlamps to light her way, Allison kept an eye on the ground, sidestepping broken bottles and jagged tears in the asphalt.
She moved unsteadily, wincing on occasion, favoring her left leg, struggling with the effort of walking. She put a hand to her stomach and yelled in pain, stopping at a garbage clotted gutter on the corner of 17th. She leaned forward, her face over the grates, hearing the rush of rainwater, picking up the scent of something putrescent in the depths. A damp breeze kicked up and the odor of sewage washed over her. She groaned loudly, painfully, bringing her face closer to the grates, holding her hands to her midsection and convulsing time after time as if emptying her stomach. She wiped her mouth with the sleeve of her jacket and cocked an ear, listening.
Dogs barked in the night and a door slammed shut somewhere in the distance. Then something else pierced the stillness, a subtle stirring in the darkness, moving toward her, using the tall weeds fronting the houses to muffle their footsteps. Allison turned her back to the sound and limped out into the road again, putting a hand against the bad leg, twisting her head from side to side as if searching for refuge from the biting cold in the darkest hours of a long January night. She felt a hand on her shoulder and a voice said, “Give me your—”
Allison, feeling a rush of anticipation and adrenaline, spun and swung her left arm, a blow as straight and true as an arrow at close range. Her fist connected with a face and she felt the nose soften and crunch as the force of it drove her assailant to the pavement in a clump. She stepped back and looked up from the unmoving heap on the ground, searching for movement among the shadows.
A low heavy moan rose up from the heap and Allison watched as it clambered awkwardly to its feet, rubbing a hand roughly across its mouth, spitting blood on its tattered shoes. “What the fuck?” the person said. It was a man’s voice, irate yet weak with an undercurrent of dreamy disorientation. Was he drunk? High?
“Get the hell outta here,” Allison told him, her heart sinking in a bog of dashed expectations. “I’m not interested in you.”
Staggering, the man cupped a hand over his face and bowed his head, staring down with bulging eyes as the blood from his shattered nose overflowed his palm. “You bitch!” he shrieked. Shafts of moonlight revealed scabs and sores on his face. His mouth was rotting, his remaining teeth blackened and broken.
“Go back to your hole!” Allison snarled, revolted.
“I’ll kill you, you fucking bitch!” Reaching into the pocket of his ragged jacket, he came away with a handful of chrome, a barrel pointing at Allison.
Before the man could react, Allison darted to the side and clasped his wrist, holding it firm as she slammed a fist into his straightened arm, snapping the bones in his forearm. The gun fell. The man screeched in pain. Without urgency, Allison picked up the weapon, stepped over to the gutter, and slipped it between the grates, hearing a faint ka-plop a moment later.
“My… my gun!” the man howled. “You bitch! That’s my gun!” He rushed her, his unbroken arm swinging wildly in the air.
Allison slammed her fist into his head, knocking him to the pavement as if his legs had been cut off at the knees. She didn’t hit him very hard, just enough to disable him for a while. She wasn’t in no-man’s-land to kill meth addicts, and notwithstanding his pitiful attempt to shoot her, she felt sorry for him.
The sound of the man’s painful wails receded into the night as she cut through the back yard of a ranch with a collapsed roof, hopping over a cyclone fence and continuing at a jog, picking up her pace as she headed for campus. She stopped suddenly and listened, waiting, hoping someone was following her. Nothing. Shrugging off her disappointment, she started back up. She had thought no-man’s-land would be prime hunting grounds, the most likely place to find the people responsible for killing her parents. Instead she’d only discovered a drug addicted squatter hoping to take advantage of one of his own kind.
She wouldn’t tell Felix what she’d done tonight. He wouldn’t understand. The hatred she felt for the Protectors consumed her in a way she hadn’t thought possible, and the only way to calm the fury in her heart was to take their lives, just as they had taken Allison’s life—the life she was meant to live. Her years of loneliness and isolation, of feeling unwanted and unloved, the decade surviving the cold and harsh world of foster homes and the heartless, uncaring people who ran them—all of that was the fault of the Protectors who murdered her parents. She imagined what her life would have been like living with her mom and dad someplace safe and far away from the madness of Sourcerors and the assassins sworn to kill them. She fantasized about a cottage near a lake, a home with light, music and warmth and the smiling faces of her parents, a place where she was cared for and loved endlessly, without reservation or limits. That should have been her life. Not this life of pain and the hopelessness of an unrecoverable past, a life where she was forced to conceal her murderous rage for fear of losing the person she loved the most. And for that, the Protectors would pay. Oh, how they would pay.
Chapter 7
CHANGING COURSE
Bill placed his mug next to an empty bottle of scotch and returned to the living room, slumping into the same chair he’d slept in for the past two nights. He glanced out at the street, watching the raindrops patter down from the branches of the spreading oaks that lined the road. The computer monitor on the desk beside him went dark and he tapped it, resurrecting the image of a woman in her sixties wearing a dark blazer over a light-colored blouse, her smile warm and confident, a smile that seemed to say you can trust me. The woman was Channel 8’s lead news anchor, Connie Redgrave, and below the photo was her biography. Bill had read it twenty times. Connie’s accomplishments were impressive, a local legend whose imprint was rapidly expanding across the country. But could he trust her?
Looking back, accepting the entirety of the Journal as the truth was a journey he’d resisted from the start. Reading it was an experience like no other, but as a rational man, an empiricist, he’d wa
nted to believe there was another explanation, something less insane than two competing groups of magically endowed individuals battling to restore the Source, the big battery that charged the universe. It seemed too fantastical, the stuff of mythology and children’s storybooks. But the existence of the Journal—a magical Journal—was in and of itself proof of the veracity of its winding tale, proof that couldn’t be refuted. Then there was Felix’s mother, beautiful and captivating despite the sadness and guilt that left her so weak she could barely sit up on her bed in the hellhole mental institution where they’d met. Her words had held his heart in an enchanting and inescapable grip, like an insect trapped in amber, and she refused to let herself die until Bill had promised to watch over her son and protect him.
But for Bill, there were always doubts, a reasoning voice in the back of his mind telling him he was a fool for devoting his life to a child whose mother had been committed to a psychiatric hospital. The voice was always there over the years, an irritant, the bite left from a mosquito after it has filled its belly with blood, and it had accompanied him in his last year of college, then graduate school and finally AshCorp once he’d secured a position as a consultant to gain knowledge of Lofton’s activities.
Bill had purchased a home not far from Felix’s adoptive parents, and from there he witnessed his childhood. There were indications, even early on, that Felix was different, though nothing concrete: The bulb over his toddler bed burned out every night until his parents moved the bed to the other side of the room; an elementary school teacher suspected he was somehow responsible for breaking her ruler though Felix was nowhere near it; a neighborhood bully claimed an eight-year-old Felix had ruptured his appendix without touching him. Those were merely the faintest whispers of the abilities lurking within the child, tantalizing hints of the magical world described in the Journal. So Bill had learned to be patient. He waited. The years passed. Felix grew up and went off to college. And again, Bill followed him, bribing an administrator to gain access to the school, and to Felix.
Then came the day Bill had tested Felix in the old library. Everything Bill had done, everything he had sacrificed, had all come down to a single act. Could Felix move a book with his mind? Bill’s nerves and anxiety had almost gotten the better of him that night, though he’d remained outwardly calm, sticking to his plan of inciting Felix, making him so angry he would tap into the Source and demonstrate abilities that defy logic and natural law—and silence the reasoning voice in his mind. Standing in the failing light of the old library, he recalled how the air had changed, becoming charged with an energy that raised the hairs on his arms. Then the books moved, a stack of forgotten tomes, the ones on top inching along until there was nothing to support them but air that smelled of damp leather and time, and they toppled over and slapped against the table. Felix had succeeded in moving the books with his mind. Felix had used the Source. In that instant, Bill knew that the Journal was true. He had been vindicated. His life had not been wasted. After nearly twenty years of self-doubt, he believed. He truly believed.
What had taken two decades to accomplish had all unraveled in a single night. Lofton had let Felix live. Five simple words had turned his world on its axis, sending him, once more, struggling to make sense of the world and his reality. Bill had gotten drunk that first night after Felix and Allison had left, a half bottle of scotch to numb the terrible realization that he had wasted his life. Lofton, he knew, would never let Felix live. If The Warning was true, the Chosen One would stop at nothing to destroy the Belus, the only person with the power to kill him. Yet Lofton had attempted to recruit Felix—to convince him to join his cause. Allison and Felix, to their credit, had correctly understood the implications. The Warning was a lie. Everything had seemed hopeless to Bill as he slumbered restlessly in his chair, wrestling with the notion that the veracity of the prophecy was irrelevant. Lofton was well on his way to fulfilling it, so perhaps it wasn’t the truthfulness that mattered, but the result, and a world controlled by Lofton couldn’t be permitted. Finally, the alcohol dragged him down to a dreamless sleep.
Then this morning, after his second mug of Earl Grey, a thought began to work its way into his mind. If the Source didn’t exist, what exactly was a Sourceror? What was Lofton? Or Felix for that matter? If they didn’t derive their powers from the big battery in the sky, where did they come from? Were Sourcerors akin to wizards? Demigods? Were they simply the result of human evolution, a uniquely adapted sub-species that had evolved with special abilities? As he pondered this question, he began to wonder what would happen if the existence of these Sourcerors became known. How would the world react?
The public would fear them, he decided. It was a tenet of human nature: that which cannot be understood should be feared. And there was good reason to fear Sourcerors. They weren’t like ordinary people. They had powers. Incredible—and dangerous—powers. So what if he somehow publicized the existence of Sourcerors and made it known that Lofton was one of them? Then the people would be confronted with the alarming truth that Sourcerors had stolen their government from them. The country, he believed, would galvanize itself against a common threat, the first step in taking it back. Before that could happen, however, he had to inform the public of the existence of magical beings without sounding like a crackpot. The question was how. How?
The Journal.
That was the answer. Placing the Journal in the right hands would introduce the world of Sourcerors to the population. It would also ruin Lofton. The note from Eve to Elissa, the note that he hadn’t shown Felix, painted Lofton as the murderer of his parents and the entire staff of Ashfield Castle. The solution seemed perfect. Except for just one thing. It would destroy Felix, the child he was sworn to protect. With the Journal in the public arena, they would learn the identity of Elissa’s son and they would go looking for him. Then what? Would they kill him? Would it be us versus them? People against Sourcerors? By attempting to end the reign of the New Government, would he be starting a war? That was a risk he couldn’t ignore, but the alternative was Lofton ruling the country (and the world), and that wasn’t acceptable. He would have to break his promise to Felix’s mother, and as terrible as that was, perhaps she would understand if she knew the prophecy was a lie—perhaps she would forgive him.
So who should he trust? Who should be the first to know the truth? The answer was looking at him from his monitor. Connie Redgrave’s reputation for truth seeking and integrity were surpassed by few, and no one was better positioned to disseminate the Journal to the country. The public trusted Connie, and with the Journal in her hands, Lofton would become a pariah, and the people could reclaim their government. And Felix, perhaps, could stay on the sidelines as he wished—at least until the people came for him. Bill imagined Felix on the run with Allison and was nearly overcome with grief and guilt for what he was about to do—and pity for those who pursued them. Regardless of where Felix’s powers derived, only a fool would stand in his way.
Bill typed out his email to Connie after his third mug of tea. All that remained was to send it. The email was carefully crafted to demonstrate he possessed something of tremendous value that would be of unparalleled interest to the Old Government—something the New Government would do anything to suppress. To provide evidence that he wasn’t delusional, Bill included a link to a webpage containing his professional accomplishments and several articles he’d authored over the years.
Bill held his finger over the send icon, thinking about Felix and the promise he’d made to Elissa. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, feeling a deep ache in his heart. Then he held his breath and tapped the screen.
Chapter 8
THE PODCASTER
It took some work for Caitlin to convince everyone to attend her Political Science professor’s podcast on a Saturday morning. Lucas had protested even more than Felix (who wanted to sleep in, eat a late breakfast and laze around the dorm), arguing that a classroom should be avoided on the weekend like a roomful of poisonous snakes, the
n something on his phone absorbed his attention and he muttered distractedly that he would do “whatever everyone else was doing.”
Despite the winter chill in the air, Felix was warm and he wished he didn’t have to wear his jacket, even though he’d removed the lining from it months ago. Lucas hadn’t said much since they’d left the dorm. He blew hot air on his fingers and busied himself on his phone as they walked toward The Yard, the paths predictably quiet.
“I hope you trip and fall on your face,” Caitlin told Lucas, scowling at his phone.
“That’s harsh.” Lucas was using both thumbs now.
“So is antisocial behavior.” Allison made a move as if to swat it from his hands and Lucas flinched, holding it tight and close to his face. “In case you’re interested,” she said, “Professor Hamlen is on the front page of this morning’s L.A. Times and the Washington Post. He did his first podcast on Monday and now everyone’s calling him ‘the voice of the Opposition.’”
“What’s he opposing?” Lucas asked vaguely, his eyes still on his phone.
“The ERA,” Harper answered. “The New Government.” She turned to Caitlin. “Hamlen’s supposedly brilliant. You like him, don’t you?”
Caitlin nodded. “He’s seriously the best teacher on campus as far as I’m concerned. I listened to his podcasts and he’s really thought provoking.”
“You didn’t say this involved thinking,” Lucas muttered, giving Felix a sideways grin.
“You’re such a dimwit,” Caitlin told him. “If I didn’t think Hamlen was amazing I wouldn’t be forcing you guys to go to this. You just have to hear him though. He’s not the only one saying the ERA isn’t perfect, but the way he’s doing it has gone viral. If you Google him, you’ll see just how influential he’s becoming. They’re saying his podcasts are the most downloaded content on—” She stopped and glowered at Lucas who was still texting. “Are you even listening?”
