by Lan Chan
Before I had a chance to remind him to be careful, he disappeared out of sight. A wave of guilt struck me at the thought of Zeke getting hurt. The only way to ensure that didn’t happen was if I stopped feeling sorry for myself and got on with it.
As I neared the back entrance of the building, I pushed aside all other thoughts except the fact that inside this building was the person who had shot and killed my dad. The Academy would probably be at the scene of his death by now. Aunt Jenny probably knew too. She would be worried sick about me. If she were an esper, I could use one of the drones to get a message to her. As a Void, we were incompatible. But I would deal with her later. We would grieve later.
The building backed onto a dark alleyway with trash cans and sewage pipes spilling onto the pavement. I cast an electrokinetic web over the building and was surprised by the distinct lack of surveillance equipment. Things obviously happened here that they didn’t want recorded. Or maybe nobody cared what happened out here. All the better for me.
The back door was the industrial metal kind with a spy hole that could be pushed aside. There wasn’t anything electrical attached to it. If I tried to bend the metal, I could send myself into a coma from the energy expenditure. So I did the only thing I could really do—I knocked.
At first, it seemed as though no one was going to answer. Then I heard faint footsteps. Static filled my mind. I pushed my back against the door, out of the line of sight in case the first thing whoever was inside did was point their gun. When I heard the metal slot click, and no shot rang out, I reached in and slotted my fingers through the hole. The tips of my fingers wormed into a dry nostril. Yuck! I shuddered, but it was contact.
I wasn’t an Enforcer of any category, but my ability to control electromagnetic pulses enabled me to, when I was in physical contact, force someone to act against their will. The difference between me and an Enforcer was that they could make the person think it was their own idea. I had the person fighting me for control the whole way. It was a good thing I usually won.
Open the door, I commanded the woman whose nostril I was gripping. Her mind was weak underneath the anti-psi cuff. She did as I demanded. I had to let go for the door to open, but she was still hazy. I was inside and had shocked her before she could even raise her gun. I caught her as she fell, not an easy feat considering her rotund figure, and dragged her back outside. I lay her on the pavement and removed her cuff just in case.
It was dark and freezing inside this part of the building. Judging by the meat hooks hung on racks on the ceiling, this used to be either a meat freezer or a torture chamber. Maybe both. I stepped through into a short corridor and tried not to think about whether the dark blood smeared on the walls was animal or human. The corridor was lined with a few rooms. I looked inside the first and saw a cot and some male clothing strewn on the floor.
The next two were similar, but the fourth was just a cleaning closet. Not all that exciting. I was about to open the door at the end of the corridor when it swung out. Two men stepped through. At that moment, something enormous crashed in the far end of the building. Gunshots peppered the air as my heart lodged in my throat.
25
The men didn’t know whether to turn around or to deal with me. They hesitated for a split second. This gave me all the advantage I needed. I rushed at them, pushing them in on each other. They staggered, but where I had surprise on my side, they had bulk and strength. The grizzly one in the front caught my hand. I tried to shock him, but his rubber gloves negated the effect. He continued to twist until I had no choice but to move with him or have my arm broken. He locked my arm behind my back and pushed me face-first into the cold cement wall.
My head pounded both from the pain on impact and the building throb of the headache. I felt the brute’s forearm against the back of my neck. His rank breath seared my cheek
“Hello, lovely,” he said. I almost choked on the smell of tobacco and sour cheese. I tried to go over the moves my hand-to-hand combat instructor Khan taught me. This was the point at which I usually tapped out.
My instincts took over. My mind reached out to my attackers past the wall of static. I wasn’t intricate; I didn’t have the presence of mind to be. I was a battering ram and used everything I had to beat them into submission. The pain in my skull became stabbing, but my assailants crumbled to their knees and didn’t move.
My thoughts were a jumble as I moved further into the belly of the warehouse. I prayed that wherever he was, Zeke was safe. The corridor led to an open plan loft area that looked to be the storage house of every stolen television and radio in the city. One entire wall was lined with screens. It took me a second to piece together that the screens were following certain individuals. Some of them wore the St. Matthew’s uniform. Others were City High. Some wore uniforms of the prestigious schools in the Kew Gardens districts. All were probably high-level espers totally unaware that they were being watched.
My eyes tracked movement overhead. I saw then what had caused the commotion. There should have been two walls of screens, but one had been completely knocked down. Zeke was balancing like a monkey on the beams that had previously held the screens in place. He had a smile on his face despite the sheen of sweat beading down his neck and sideburns.
Six men had their guns raised at him. My guess was that they’d tried to shoot him and had failed. The effort was taking its toll, though. If I didn’t do something quickly, Zeke would be Swiss cheese.
But what to do? I didn’t have the strength to break through another half dozen anti-psi cuffs and disarm these men. My only real choice was to create a diversion so Zeke could escape. And I knew exactly how.
I focused the energy I had left on the screens that were monitoring those of my kind. With a wave of my hand, I cut the electricity to them. The axing was violent and abrupt so that instead of just switching off, a few of the televisions popped and shot sparks as the screens went dark.
“What now?” the man closest to Zeke snapped. He turned in my direction. I recognised him instantly. I would know his pockmarked face for the rest of my life. He was the man who shot Dad. All the guns realigned and were now pointed straight at me. Out of the corner of my eyes, I saw Zeke scramble down the beams. He moved behind a couple of amps stacked together.
Get the hell out! he sent to me. Alarm reverberated through our mental link. Someday I’d question how quickly I’d become accustomed to hearing his voice inside my head. I was already able to pick up his slight intonations. Today, I had something else to do. My feet refused to let me retreat. My vision tunnelled until all I could see was the man who killed Dad. Never mind the other men who could shoot me at any time.
They wore savage grins. The only thing keeping them from pulling the trigger was their confusion over why I’d willingly walked into a room full of armed men. I gave them props for being careful enough to take stock of the situation.
That’s when I felt the snotty itch in my head again. One of them, the woman in the back, was an esper. She was young. Probably in her mid to late twenties. She wasn’t dressed like the others in combat uniform. Her blue jeans and ankle boots were clean of dirt, and she wore a dozen necklaces with skull and cross pendants. Not the kind of person who got her hands dirty.
Her mind was another thing altogether. She gestured at the others and made a fist held up vertically that obviously meant hold your fire.
Her consciousness skirted my mind, appraising the shield that had come up immediately. When she brushed up against the block, it was as though someone had come up behind me and struck my head with a hammer. I screamed and toppled over, clutching at my scalp.
The pain radiated down my neck and over my skin as though the hammer was made of lava. It dripped slowly all over me. Pins and needles pricked me from all sides. When I tried to move, it almost felt like I was weighted to the ground. Like gravity had reached its tendrils through the earth and wrapped me in a cocoon.
Zeke reached out to me telepathically, but I begged him to leav
e. I couldn’t handle another person in my head. The woman touched me again, and someone started to throw knives at my brain. I whimpered and curled into the foetal position. Tiny bolts of electricity darted across my vision. I spasmed, trying to steer clear of getting electrocuted.
The woman’s smile widened as though she had me figured out. I may have been an esper, but my reaction to her touch made her sure that I wasn’t nearly as strong as she was. Maybe she was right.
Hello, little electro, she thought. Though my shield was still up, I heard her clearly and painfully. Why didn’t we pick you up on the test scores? Her palm hovered over a keyboard. In the reflection of her irises, the screen scrolled through test scores.
I’d never met another EK with power so close to mine before. The truth of what Dad and Jenny were trying to tell me slammed into me like a sledgehammer. These were the kinds of jobs I’d end up doing if I let my life be controlled by my abilities.
Ah, there you are. She frowned and took a few steps towards me. She placed her hands on her colleagues’ arms, forcibly lowering their guns.
Her boots made clacking noises as they slipped over the concrete. Each echo caused me to shudder with a new round of electrical impulses. What was happening to me? The woman crouched down beside my head. One of the amps flew through the air at her. She turned and straightened with lightning speed. She threw her arms up just as the amp was about to hit her. The woman and Zeke became locked in a battle of wills.
EK vs. TK.
I lay uselessly on the floor, writhing in agony as the sparks played fry-up with my brain. Where was this electricity coming from? Why was I the only one who noticed it? Zeke was a powerful telekinetic, but the object he’d chosen to throw at the woman was wired with electricity. A cable still clung to the amp. The woman edged it across until it hung in the air directly above my head.
“Make a move, boy, and I’ll drop it on her,” she said. I tried to reach out and grab hold of the woman’s ankle in a last-ditch attempt to pull her off balance. When my hand came up, blue and yellow veins of electricity shot from my fingers. The tiny filaments danced across my palms as though they were electricity caterpillars, and I was the tree they were clinging to. I tried to fling the electricity away and locate its source, but it was still only me on the cold floor.
Somebody groaned. Two of the men dragged a struggling Zeke out from behind the remaining amps. He was soaked in sweat, but his eyes were wild. They became white-rimmed when he spotted me. I recognised the same awed expression he had given me after I had moved all those cars at the checkpoint. Finally, he registered the thing that had me locked in position. My body was generating its own electricity, and it felt like it was tearing my brain apart!
“What do you want us to do with this one?” the man who had killed Dad said. His question was directed to the woman. She cast aside the amp as though it was made of paper. The resultant crash set my teeth on edge.
“Don’t suppose you’re looking to be a part of something bigger than yourself?” the woman asked Zeke. “We could use someone young and strong like you.”
“Go to hell!” Zeke spat. Pockmark punched him hard across the jaw. I crawled along the floor towards them. I had no idea what I was going to do, but I wanted to be there for Zeke the way he was for me.
All of a sudden, the woman’s voice was in my head again. This time it was too much.
How about you, little electro? She cooed in my head. Can you think of a way to convince your friend to join us? In her mind, I read that I wasn’t going to be offered a position. They recognised that I was compromised somehow. An EK who couldn’t control her powers and was prone to what appeared to be seizures was bad news by any measure.
Like he said, I thought, go to hell!
She smiled again brilliantly. It didn’t reach her eyes. Instead they narrowed. She exerted the tiniest pressure on my shield. I writhed in agony. Electricity crackled and popped until it felt as though my hair was standing on end.
“Do it,” she said to Pockmark. The man raised his gun. At the same time, the woman placed her hands on my neck. I caught a glimpse of what looked like a triangle tattoo with a lightning bolt through it on her wrist. She was attempting to shock me.
As soon as her hands touched me, it was as though I was an electrical crucible that couldn’t reach maximum capacity. Her body completed a circuit, and I was the outlet. Just as Dad’s killer was about to put a bullet in Zeke, I reached a hand towards him. A webbed beam of pure electricity shot from me and engulfed him. The sound of the electricity tearing through the air was incredible. It thundered through the warehouse. He didn’t have time to scream or register what was happening before he was dead.
The other men tried to run, but I was quick and beyond reason. I shot beam after beam of electricity at them. The electricity had a mind of its own, and it was impossible to escape.
The woman’s face sunk in both amazement and sudden panic. Her arms trembled, but she couldn’t break the connection between us. She struggled vainly to pull her hands away from my face, but each time she did, a field of electricity brought her right back. I took hold of her wrists. With renewed strength, I stood up. Every nerve in my body was humming as though they had been created anew. We were almost the same height standing up.
It was my turn to smile. I placed my finger on her forehead and spoke a single word in her mind.
Boom!
She flew across the room like a paper doll in the wind and landed amongst her surveillance equipment. Zeke and I shared a glance, and then my brain exploded. I slipped into darkness. Even though the electricity was still sizzling over my skin, Zeke reached out to grab me as I fell. The last thing I saw before my eyes closed was a tendril of green reaching from my mind into his.
26
I came to with the sound of emergency service sirens blaring around me. I recognised that I was lying in the backseat of the all-terrain vehicle. Zeke’s sweat-soaked head was twisting left and right as he zigzagged through the tight suburban streets, trying to get away from what probably looked like a major crime scene.
“Zeke,” I croaked. His head snapped back immediately. His hands left the wheel to cup the sides of his head.
“Thank God! I thought you were a goner.”
I tried to sit up, but my brain pounded so hard I thought I was going to throw up on the leather upholstery.
“Where are we going?” I asked as I lay back down.
“I’m taking you to St. Francis Hospital.”
This caused a bolt of alarm to go right through me, compounding the pain in my brain. “No! I can’t go there!”
“What are you talking about?” His hands still hadn’t landed back on the steering wheel. Instead, he twisted around so he could see me. It took a lot of mental energy to drive using his mind, and it made me wonder why I was passing out when he seemed to be able to keep going. “You need medical attention!”
I knew he was right. But for fifteen years, my mum insisted that hospital visits were just another way for the government to track your movements. It made me skittish. Plus, there was no way to explain what had happened to me, and like gunshot wounds, two espers showing up in emergency often begged many questions.
“I can’t control what’s going on with my powers,” I told Zeke. “I’m going to be a danger to the other patients if my electrokinesis goes haywire and deadens the machines.”
“What do you suggest we do then?”
There was only one option, and he wasn’t going to like it. “My godfather’s husband is a doctor,” I said. “His name is Julian.”
Relief flooded through our mental link, which I was surprised was still there even after I passed out. It glowed a pretty forest green in my mind. Odd.
“Okay, where do I find this Julian?” He turned back to the wheel and prepared to take off wherever I pointed him.
“At the Rendezvous Hotel in City Square.”
Zeke slammed his foot on the brake. The car ground to a halt. “Are you serious?
That’s Street King territory!”
“I know,” I said. The darkness was edging in on me again. “Ask for Gabriel when you get there.”
There was fear in Zeke’s eyes as I blacked out again.
The next time I woke, I was lying on Gabe and Julian’s bed inside the Rendezvous Hotel. There was a distinct smell of cigars and cedar in the air. Someone lifted my left eyelid and shined a light on my face. This caused me to blink several times. The motion aggravated the slight headache that still plagued me.
“You’re blinding me, Jules,” I said.
“That’s the least of your problems,” Gabe’s gravelly voice said from the foot of the bed. When the dots in front of my eyes cleared, I took in the scene with a measure of sheepishness. Julian sat in an armchair beside my head. His stethoscope hung from his shoulders like a cold metal snake. In contrast, the touch of his hands on my neck and forehead was warm and gentle. I caught his brown eyes and silently pleaded with him for backup. He pushed a glass of orange juice with a straw in front of my face.
“Drink,” he said. I did so, knowing if my mouth was occupied, Gabe wouldn’t be able to question me about what had happened. It didn’t take long enough for me to down the glass, and all too soon, Julian was getting up.
“You’re going to be okay, sweetheart,” he said. “Nothing’s broken. From what I can tell, you haven’t suffered any internal injuries. You’ve overexerted yourself, and it short-circuited your senses. Get some rest and you’ll be okay in no time.” Julian cast Gabe a warning glance. “Be nice. I’ll step out to get her some food. I better not hear shouting when I return.”
I wanted to reach out and grab Julian’s shirt to keep him beside me as a shield. But I was too weak. The door closed behind him. Once the echo of his footsteps melted, I scrunched my eyes up, waiting for the shouting to begin. Gabe’s heavy steps moved closer. When I opened my eyes, he was in the chair beside me.
