Empowered Academy 1985

by Dawn Jansen

  “They... They showed us classified documents they’d been hacking from the Academy. I didn’t want to believe it at first—I thought it was all hoaxes they’d fabricated—but there was so much evidence proving it all. How the Bureau spread the empowered serum to Russia. How they’d experimented on human subjects. The Architect’s new robot force...”

  A deep frown had appeared on my dad’s face. He was leaning forward in his big leather chair, listening intently.

  “I have it all here,” I said, opening up my belt pouch and taking some of the papers out. “You have to see this stuff, dad. You’re not going to believe some of the awful stuff they uncovered.”

  My dad’s eyes went wide for a split second when I pulled the papers out, but then his face quickly went back to normal.

  “Emily... I want you to hand those documents over to me. All of them,” he said coldly. There was not a trace of emotion or excitement in his voice, but I could tell there was panic lurking beneath this robotic facade—he had revealed it when I first took the documents out.

  “Why?” I asked, scrunching my face up in confusion. This was undoubtedly the first time in my life that I had ever questioned one of my dad’s orders, but I couldn’t help it; there was something off about how he had reacted—something sinister.

  “Because those are lies, Emily,” my dad said. His face was turning red with distress; his facade was cracking. “We need to analyze them and figure out how they managed to fabricate—”

  “But they’re not lies,” I said loudly, cutting him off. “I’ve seen them all myself... It’s all irrefutable!”

  That’s when I noticed my dad’s hand. It was under his table pressing into something repeatedly.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, horror spreading across my face. “Is that an alarm?”

  Before either of us could say another word, the door behind me burst open and Academy guards rushed in with guns drawn. Normally I would have been paralyzed with shock, but all of the field missions recently had trained me to become decisive and adaptable. A thought flashed through my mind: I still had Edgar’s power in me; I could phase out of the nearest wall, but what if they fired on me? What if they missed and hit my dad, who was directly in front of me? Why was I still worried about my dad, when he was the one who had called security on me?

  There was too much to consider at once, and my window of opportunity had already closed. The guards swarmed in and slapped cuffs around my wrists.

  “You knew about everything?” I shouted at my dad as I struggled futilely against the guards—I was massively outnumbered.

  My dad refused to look at me. “I tried to protect you,” he said. “This is for your own good, Emily... Take her to Epsilon.”

  The guards began yanking me toward the door, but I resisted. “Epsilon?” I cried. “You’re locking me up? How could you do this?”

  I was confounded. I felt like everything I ever knew about the world had been wrong. How could my father have been such a monster all along?

  One of the guards punched me right in the gut, knocking the wind out of me hard. I was already exhausted from the mission last night and I wasn’t expecting the blow, so my legs buckled as the shocking pain radiated through my torso. The guards took this opportunity to begin dragging me out the door. Despite the pain, I kept my eyes trained on my dad the whole time they dragged me away, but he still wouldn’t look at me—he just sat there grimacing at his desk, and I wondered if there was any remorse in him at all.

  Chapter 21

  Emily

  I’d never traveled far into Epsilon before because my dad’s office was close to the main part of the Academy and I never went past that point during the times I had meetings with him. Today, however, as the guards dragged me out of my dad’s office and deeper into the bowels of Epsilon, I got to see its many rooms and hallways. Truth be told, it looked just like any other lab one could imagine—shiny testing equipment, white-coated technicians with clipboards in their hands mulling about, the slight odor of disinfectant in the air—but knowing what I knew about what went on down here, it was all tainted with a sinister hue in my eyes.

  Once we got to a huge, high-tech door with an advanced locking mechanism that took about an entire minute to open, I knew I was in deep shit. Just as they pulled me through this door, I caught sight of a sign next to the threshold that read “UNSTABLES.”

  So it’s true. They keep “undesirable” empowered down here, and this is where they’re putting me now too.

  It was a long, barren room with a grated-metal catwalk overhead, and along the left side of the room were huge metallic doors similar to the one we had just passed through—prison cells.

  After operating a series of complicated locks—no doubt mechanisms created by the evil Architect, the greatest inventor that ever walked the earth—the guards undid my cuffs and shoved me into the cell.

  “You’ll pay for this!” I shouted as they shut the door, trapping me inside.

  It sounded like a line from a movie, but I was deadly serious when I said it. They were all complicit in everything that was going on at the Academy, and I would do everything I could to see they were all brought to justice—the guards, the Architect, and even... my father.

  As soon as I entered the cell, however, I felt something horribly familiar: a disempowerment field. My powers were already weak because I was so fatigued from the physical and emotional roller coaster I’d been through during the past twelve hours, but now there was no possibility of me using them to break out of here. I was cut off from my power, just like I had been when Hugo used the disempowering device on us. I reached out to my core in a way that had become so familiar to me now, but it was silent—there was no reply.

  This made me feel helpless, as though I’d lost my ability to talk or even think properly. My power had become such an important part of who I was that to have it so suddenly torn away from me was almost traumatizing.

  We don’t know if the effects are permanent after a certain point.

  That’s what Jasmine had said when she warned us not to accidentally turn on the disempowerers. Well now I was trapped in a room that was saturated with a disempowering field, and I had no idea how long I’d be here. I huddled up in the corner—cold, exhausted, betrayed, scared—and looked around the room. It was a windowless box made of concrete and metal with a glaring fluorescent light overhead. There was a single mattress placed on a platform built into the wall, and the only other notable feature was the highly advanced door that took up the entirety of one of the four walls.

  I was still in the combat gear I had worn for the field mission, except my utility belt was missing. They had taken my belt pouch, inside of which was all the damning evidence about the Empowered Bureau. I felt so stupid. I had failed Edgar and Ramsey. Failed Hugo and the other empowered fighting to bring the Academy down. Failed Lizzy, whose conspiracy theories I’d always laughed at but that had turned out to be true.

  Tears welled up in my eyes as I thought about Hugo. We had broken into his camp and killed one of his friends—he was fully within his rights to kill us, but he didn’t. He trusted us—trusted me—to do the right thing. Would he ever know what happened? That I’d been betrayed by my own father? I wondered what he would think when I didn’t show up at Old Field and he left for San Francisco without me. Would he miss me? It had only been that one unexpected kiss between us, but I missed having his power inside me, that feeling of optimism and possibility it exuded.

  I clutched at my mom’s pendant that I wore around my neck, hoping to find strength from it. This made me think: my mom died when I was two, and everybody always said it was from cancer, but what if...?

  If my dad was heartless enough to lock his own daughter up in a clandestine prison, who’s to say he didn’t have it in him to do something equally as terrible to his wife? There was evidence of tests run on human subjects after all. Perhaps my mom had been another one of his pawns.

  Grabbing on to the necklace, I wept f
or my mom. Tears ran down my cheeks feebly as everything came bearing down on me at once—the exhaustion, the disempowerment, the regret—until, in an act of mercy, the fatigue proved too much to resist and I nodded off to sleep in that cold, hard corner.

  ━━━━━ ▣ ━━━━━

  I was jolted awake hours later by the thunderous noise of the cell door being slid open.

  What happened? Was it Hugo breaking me out? Guards come to execute me?

  Panicked thoughts flashed through my mind as I scrambled to my feet to see what it was just as two figures were thrust into the cell violently, the door slamming behind them.

  It was Edgar and Ramsey, and they looked like they’d just done twelve rounds with George Foreman. They were still wearing their dark-gray combat uniforms, but they were nearly in tatters now. Ramsey had a big black eye and a bloody lip. Edgar had several cuts across his face and was clutching his ribs. They both tumbled into the cell and landed on their knees, the disempowerment field shocking them immediately. Edgar’s disguise disappeared instantly, revealing his burn scars, as he no longer had the power to hide them.

  My body ached as I rushed over to them. They looked woozy, like they were still recovering from their wounds. I placed my hand on Ramsey’s shoulder, hoping to comfort him, but he winced in pain when I touched him, so I jumped back, not wanting to cause any more harm than I already had.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, fresh tears running down my face again. “This is all my fault. We should have just told Lizzy and a few of the others and got out safely and—”

  “Shh,” Edgar said, pressing his index finger to my lips, quieting me. “You didn’t know.”

  “There’s no way you could have known,” Ramsey added. He sat up against the wall and managed a smile at me, his bloody lip glinting in the harshness of the overhead light.

  This whole time I was imagining that they’d blame me for ruining everything, so to see that my men still stood by me—even at a time like this—brought tears of happiness and gratitude to my eyes. What had I done to deserve such faithful lovers? I didn’t feel worthy of their support.

  We were all sitting or kneeling on the hard ground, so I got up and helped both of them onto the almost equally uncomfortable mattress.

  “How bad are you hurt?” I asked them, looking over each of their injuries to see how serious they were.

  “I’ve seen better days,” Ramsey said. “What’s up with my powers though? It feels the same as when Hugo used that thing on us.”

  “The whole cell is flooded with some kind of force field,” I said. “My power has been shut down for hours already.”

  Edgar and Ramsey looked at each other seriously—they both knew how grave the implication was.

  “What do you think they’re gonna do to us?” Edgar asked.

  My thoughts immediately turned to the worst-case scenarios—execution, torture, having experiments done on us—but I stayed quiet, not wanting to bring our down morale too much.

  “If I had to guess,” said Ramsey, “they’ll weaken us in here for a few hours until they get some psychics to go fishing in our minds and find out everything we know about Hugo and the other rebels.”

  That meant Hugo and his team would be in danger too. I couldn’t allow that to happen. Suddenly, I had an idea.

  “That might be our chance to break out,” I said.

  “What do you mean?” asked Edgar.

  “No psychics can use their powers in here either, right?” I explained. “They’ll have to take us out of the cell so the psychics can work on us. When they’re transferring us out, maybe we can escape before they restrain us again.”

  Ramsey nodded. “It’s a long shot, but... it might be our only one.”

  “Maybe we can find our own way out first,” Edgar said. Straining, he got up and started looking around the room. “There has to be something,” he said, tapping the walls, studying the locks on the door.

  “Did you see the sign on the way in here?” I said. “This is where they keep the Unstables. I don’t think there’s any way out...”

  Not having found anything that could help our cause, Edgar plopped down on the mattress again. It had been a while since I’d seen him with his burn scars revealed (he identified more with his unburnt self that he usually presented as), but looking at him now, even under the unflattering light of the cell, I found something peculiarly sexy about the scars. They were like patterns traced upon the surface of his skin, multicolored and layered, that told the history of his past, that proved the strength he was capable of. I stared longingly at his profile. The three of us fell silent.

  “So you’re dad’s kind of a prick, huh?” Ramsey suddenly said after a while. “On the plus side, that means no father-in-law to impress.”

  He was joking, but my heart was stirred that his mind would even go in the direction of marriage. I laughed, my features relaxing for the first time in hours.

  “What made you think you were gonna get that far anyway, mister?” I said in a playfully challenging tone, leaning against Ramsey’s broad shoulder. If we had to be trapped in this cell together, we might as well flirt with each other, I thought.

  Ramsey flashed a cocky smirk, his boyish good looks evident even through his injuries. “I got a hunch you’re pretty into me.”

  And then, without warning, as Ramsey was so often fond of, he reached in for a kiss. It was only a little more than a peck, but I gasped in astonishment when he pulled away.

  I gasped not just because it was the first time either of them had done something so affectionate in front of the other, but because when his lips touched mine, I felt something I hadn’t felt in hours. It was only a whisper, a fleeting sparkle, but it was still there—my power.

  Chapter 22

  Emily

  Ramsey’s eyes were about as wide as mine were.

  “Did you feel that too?” I whispered, my voice quivering with hope.

  Ramsey nodded.

  “Feel what?” Edgar asked. He was sitting on the other side of me on the mattress.

  “My power,” I said. “It’s still there. It’s so weak, but I felt it when Ramsey kissed me.”

  This time, I was the impetuous one—without warning, I leaned in and kissed Ramsey on the lips, harder and longer, and with a bit of tongue this time. It felt faint and distant, but there was no denying my power was still there inside me. It was like somebody had draped a great blanket over it, but I could still hear it murmuring and shifting, wanting to connect with me so it could unleash itself. Each time Ramsey and I kissed, it felt like that blanket became a little bit lighter.

  I pulled away from Ramsey’s lips, the taste of blood from his cut lip lingering on my taste buds. “Maybe our love... Maybe our love is stronger than any mad contraption the Architect could ever build...”

  I had been staring deeply into Ramsey’s eyes, connecting with him on a primal level, but then I turned to Edgar as well. I didn’t want him to feel left out. Regardless of whether or not this would work as a way to get our powers back, I didn’t want him to feel separated from my love—it belonged to both of them, Ramsey and Edgar.

  With my body still facing Ramsey on one side, I craned my neck toward Edgar and kissed him as well. I licked at his soft lips and felt a shiver run down my spine when he slid his tongue into my mouth.

  Edgar had looked worn out from the moment he had been thrown into this cell, but after that kiss, there was a sparkle in his eyes.

  Suddenly, I felt Ramsey’s hand at my waist, pulling me back to the center of the mattress. Given the circumstances, I found it hard to believe that I could feel so aroused, but it was so exciting kissing Ramsey and Edgar in front of each other. It felt a little wrong, a little naughty, but when I stripped away the societal beliefs I was focusing the lens of my judgment through, it felt right.

  After kissing the two of them back to back, I realized in that moment just how different Edgar and Ramsey were from each other. Ramsey was impulsive, and this was
reflected in the way he kissed me; desperate, impassioned, greedy, as though I were the last woman on earth. Edgar, meanwhile, was reserved, but once you pierced his shell, there was depth and great power, and this I felt in his kiss too.

  “I don’t care if this works to bring back our powers or not,” I said, leaning back against the wall as the two of them slowly inched toward me like stalking lions, “this might be our last day on earth and...”

  I was scared to say what I wanted to say next. In my heart, I pined for it, but the thought of those words escaping my mouth frightened me for some reason. Looking back and forth to Ramsey and Edgar, however, I finally found the strength to say it: “I want to make love... to the two of you.”

  I never would have imagined bringing this up under normal circumstances—not that I didn’t want to, but it seemed a little extreme for where we were at in our relationship. These weren’t normal circumstances, though, and thus I was able to lead with my heart and throw caution to the wind.

  Edgar and Ramsey replied with their actions, not telling me how much they wanted me, but showing me. With the three of us sitting on the mattress, I closed my eyes and relaxed back against the wall as they began caressing every inch of my body. I was offering myself to them, exposing my body to their eager, groping hands, and it felt so good. My body responded instantly, fresh wetness announcing itself in my pants.

  Ramsey was to my right kissing at my sensitive neck and earlobes. Edgar was on the left, tilting my chin toward him so he could explore my mouth with his agile, probing tongue. And all the while, they continued to feel my legs, my stomach, my ribs, my breasts, their hands roving over my clothes, that thin material being the only thing that separated our naked bodies from joining. Each time I moaned—which was frequent—it was like shoveling coal into the belly of a great steam engine, my power glowing and growing with each breath, feeding on the energy that blossomed from our love.