As far as I know, that person died in the village. Ellery gave me this blessing, this curse, and then she left me. Damn her.
I sense movement to my right. When I spring up and turn, preparing myself, I see that it’s Finn. We haven’t talked much in the past couple of days. He’s been busy guiding the retreat, and I’ve been busy trying to be a leader.
“Hey,” he says. “You okay?”
I lean up against a tree and look down at my hands, as if the answer is contained there. I ask a question that he won’t have an answer for. “What’s happening to me?”
“That was crazy, Caroline. You were flying.” He’s excited about it. Of course he is. It’s not happening to him. “What else can you do?”
“I don’t know.”
“I mean, I saw you do those other things, like how fast you moved and the way you threw James like he was a feather pillow, but that down there, do you even know what that was?”
There is no explanation that’ll make sense, at least none that won’t make me sound like a raving madwoman. “I’ve been dreaming this same thing each night. I’m in my parents’ hut, only I’m not there, right? I can see and hear everyone like I’m right there. They can’t see me though. I see myself as a baby in a crib—this is insane. Forget it.” Why bother? He won’t understand. It’s a dream. Or was it?
“Tell me,” he says.
I’m trying not to cry. I can feel the lump welling up in my throat. I don’t have anyone to talk to about this, and I don’t want the only person I consider a friend to think I’m crazy. But, I need someone, anyone, to tell me something. “The dream goes on and on—they’re talking about whether or not it’s right, whatever it is they plan to do, and then Ellery—she’s the mystic from our village—she pricks her finger and I drink the blood.”
“The invisible you?”
“No, the one in the crib. It has to be me. I can feel my stomach getting full, you know? That’s it, really. It felt so real, like I was a part of something that actually happened, like I was seeing the past instead of feeling like I was in a dream.”
“So what’re you saying?”
“I—I think that maybe she turned me into a Kinder.” There’s no stopping the tears. I rub my cheeks with the back of my hand, pushing them away.
Finn stares at me so long that it makes me uncomfortable.
“Stop looking at me like that. I already feel like a freak.”
“Sorry. It’s just that I’ve never met one before.”
“A Kinder? How could you? They’re all gone. Ellery was the last.”
Finn shakes his head. “That’s not true.”
I roll my eyes and turn away. “How do you know?”
“Well, I guess what I should’ve said was, I’ve never met another one before.”
“Finn, I don’t need this right now—”
He shushes me and points down at his feet. “Watch.”
I do, and then I stumble backward and away from him as his heels come off the ground, then the balls of his feet. He’s on the tips of his toes, and he lifts up, rising a foot into the air before he slowly descends.
“Are you…” I begin. I can’t find the words.
He nods. He doesn’t need to say anything. I pounce and practically smother him in a hug.
20
James takes point and has Teresa join him. He says it’s to keep him company, to get to know her, but I’m sure that he wants to watch her every move. We give Marla and another one of the Republicons the responsibility of watching the sides while Finn and I bring up the rear. Sure, I’m now the revered leader, but I can’t stand all those curious eyes boring holes into my flesh.
They look at me as if they can spot something special, or something wrong, and it’s frustrating because I know there isn’t. My body is the same body I had a few days ago. I look no different now than when I sat on that hillside near the lake and heard the beat of the war rhythm for the first time.
Plus, I have so many questions for Finn. I want to discuss our secret with him, away from curious ears.
First, he says, “Why do you think I was so far south when we first met?”
“You told me you were spying. You said you were following orders.”
“Partly, yeah.” He shakes his head. “In my heart, though, I was trying to run away. Trying to convince myself, anyway.”
“You were?”
“All these weird things kept happening to me, and I thought that if I tried to explain it to anyone, they’d throw me in an asylum—especially the military leaders. They don’t like the unordinary.”
“Then why did you keep going back north? Back to them, I mean.”
“Some misguided sense of duty, maybe. I honestly don’t know. But it finally took me a while to realize that my only option was to disappear. In between all that, every time I went out, it gave me another reason to come see you again.” He grins sheepishly and looks away.
I suspected that might be the motive. “Couldn’t you—I don’t know, couldn’t you defect like you did this time?”
“Defect to the PRV? Please. Your people would’ve tied a rope around my neck and dragged me through the streets—once from the DAV, always from the DAV. But when I found out about the invasion, I had to come warn you, no matter what the consequences were.”
“Wait, you were worried they would kill you? Why would it matter if you’re a Kinder? Aren’t we supposed to be, I don’t know, invincible or something?”
“Not exactly, but no, that’s not the reason why. I wasn’t sure at first. I’d had a similar dream, except I was in a hospital, and I watched this nurse sneak into my mother’s room. She wore a pink uniform, I remember that, and when she walked past me in the dream, I smelled cinnamon. I watched her inject something blue into the baby version of me, just like in your dream, because I could feel it in my own arm. And, as crazy as it sounds, on the morning of my fifteenth birthday, about a week before I came to warn you, I woke up knowing.”
“Knowing what?”
“That I was special, I guess. I looked exactly the same, but I felt different. Clean, maybe. Pure. And I could do all this amazing stuff.”
“Like what?”
“Superhuman things. Ridiculous speed. Jumping crazy distances. I can’t exactly fly, but I can float, like you saw. Um, what else? There are things that I can feel and know they’re true. It’s not like reading minds—more like sensing truth. I learned to speak French in thirty minutes, so that was fun.”
“Is that a language?”
“Yeah. Dead language from a dead country.”
“How do you control your—whatever you call them? Abilities?”
“It’s more like I believe I can do something, and it happens, but, it only works for things I’m actually capable of doing.”
“Did anyone else know? Did you tell your parents?”
“Not a soul. My mother didn’t wake up in the dream, and the nurse slipped out.”
“Why you?” I ask.
“Why you?”
“Fair enough. Right before my grandfather died, he told me, ‘She gave you strength for a reason,’ and he never got a chance to explain what he meant. Who gave me what? I didn’t understand what he was talking about until after the dreams began. Did anything like that ever happen to you?”
“About a year ago, I was buying apples in a market, and this woman comes up to me. I swear it was the nurse from my dreams, but she looked older. Gray hair, wrinkles around her eyes. The only thing that made it certain was that she smelled like cinnamon.”
“Weird.”
“Yeah. She said, ‘You’ll need to fight one day. Use what I gave you.’”
“Really?”
“Exact words. She squeezed past me, disappeared into the crowd, and then I never saw her again.”
“Finn, this is… I don’t even know what to say or what to ask. How crazy is it that you found me so far away?”
“Maybe I was drawn to you. If we’re the same, then maybe we have som
e connection.”
“Yeah, maybe.” I stop along the trail and pick up an ancient stuffed animal that someone has dropped. A teddy bear with one missing eye and disgusting, dirty fur.
It reminds me of home. It triggers a memory. “Oh my God, do you remember back in the village? You were talking to me in your mind. I could hear your thoughts. Can we communicate that way?” It’s strange to think that he might be able to hear what’s in my head, which makes hiding the fact that I’m staring at his blue eyes and thinking about how beautiful they are almost impossible to control.
He shakes his head. “I can’t. And if you can, stay out of my head, okay?” He laughs and playfully squeezes my neck. “I wondered how you knew exactly what I was saying when we first met James.”
“If I can do it, why can’t you? We’re the same, right?”
“How much do you know about Kinders?”
“Only the stories we’ve heard. The Elders used to tell us these ridiculous things around the campfires at night, and we always thought they were trying to scare us. We never saw Ellery do any of the things they mentioned. She was an old blind woman with milky eyes, not this superhuman person that could run like a deer and jump like a squirrel.”
“There’s more than that. They taught us in school what happened. A lot of it might not be true though, because my dad says people mold history to fit their beliefs.”
And this is what Finn tells me: back before the world ended, when the government of the United States still pretended to have some level of control over their people, they took secret precautions in case of a real revolution. Things were bad. There was barely any clean water to drink. Pollution had ruined nearly all the freshwater lakes and rivers. When snow melted on the mountains, and ran down into the valleys, it was acidic and undrinkable. The same thing happened with the rain. They had ways of filtering it for drinking and cooking, but it took days to get it safe enough.
Crops were useless, and meat supplies had been ruined from drinking the tainted water. The remaining population, of what used to be fifty states, was on the brink of collapse. Some place called Hawaii had fought for, and won, its independence. So did some faraway land called Alaska.
The remaining states wanted change. They needed help, and the government was either unwilling to assist, or maybe they were simply incapable.
Something had to bend to stubborn wills. People were assembling. They were overtaking small towns and complete sections of cities. They overthrew local governments as if it would make a difference, as if having someone new sitting behind a desk would cause the water supply to be drinkable.
At first, the resistance was minimal, and nothing that the privileged politicians of Washington, DC couldn’t control. They sent in army reserves to quell the uprisings, but where they saw small victories and a reestablishment of peace, it only served to ignite the fires of rebellion even more.
The people tried again in larger numbers, and again they were beaten back into submission. It happened numerous times over decades, and nothing ever improved. They survived on scraps, and water dripping through a filter. For years, they were quiet and accepting.
Then a man named Daniel Allen lost his wife and son to some contaminated food that had been provided by the government. Furious that the supplies that were supposed to be safe had become poisonous, he took to the streets and marched from town to town, gathering up followers. It was a quiet, subtle movement of people that demanded for things to change, but they did it with words and wisdom, not bombs and bullets.
Daniel Allen was furious, but he was also against violence. He fought with his mind. People understood him. They believed in him. They left their homes and followed him wherever he went. Their numbers grew into the thousands, then thousands more.
The government left them alone. They let Allen’s followers have their say because their weapons were words, and words were not worth the government’s limited resources. The government had wasted so much over the years, attempting to stamp out the smallest of rebellions, and Daniel Allen, at that point, had not cost them anything. Besides, the public perception of the government was already bad—Daniel Allen’s words couldn’t make it much worse.
His group became known as the Peaceful Change Movement. People came from as far away as Oregon to be a part of it. One of the members donated thousands of acres of land in the middle of Kansas where the pollution had done the least damage. The PCM built homes there. They tried to start new lives. They declared themselves independent from a failing government that would do nothing to save its people.
Two years passed, and some of the members were beginning to get restless.
The promise of change did not make up for the lack of change.
On a crisp November afternoon, Daniel Allen was murdered by a man named Carter Rash, who felt that the peaceful approach wasn’t doing enough. Like Daniel, he was excellent in front of a crowd, able to whip them into a frenzy with his words of revolution.
He had twenty-five thousand people collected together and angry, ready to fight back with weapons they’d salvaged and brought from home. They were prepared, they were ready, and they were going to march a thousand miles from Kansas to northern Virginia. They were going to gather more followers. They were going to take control. They were going to make things right again.
That’s when the government unleashed the inappropriately named response called The Kindness Project: genetically altered humans who were originally designed for battle against foreign nations. One thousand men and women who had either volunteered or had been forced to participate. These instruments of war had lain in wait for years, ready to be called into action. They never expected it would happen against their own people. The republic of New China or Canada, possibly, but never against their own.
Kinders, as they came to be known, had been given a serum that enhanced their skills depending on each recipient’s natural abilities. If a man was physically gifted, he could jump, fly, and run with unbelievable speed and power. If a woman had been a brilliant scientist or thinker, her mind could see thousands of different outcomes, veritably predicting the future. Some developed superhuman strength. Some could read a sentence in a book from miles away.
While these Kinders had been trained to defend our home soil against foreign invasions using weapons along with their exceptional abilities, they were sent weaponless against the Peaceful Change Movement. Do not kill was their only order. Capture, turn away, convince. Whatever was necessary.
It didn’t take long for the government to realize they had made a drastic error in judgment. They never counted on the Kinders siding with Carter Rash.
Battles were fought. Millions of people died.
Against the odds, the government won. They maintained control.
Maybe it was because they had bigger guns.
Or it could’ve been because a Kinder named Ellery Speck was a traitor to the Peaceful Change Movement, which was no longer peaceful at all.
Outside of Manassas, Virginia, Carter Rash, his PCM followers, and one thousand Kinders were amassing for a final attack on Washington, DC. Some states had built and sent their own armies to help. Some had erected massive fences around their borders, fences that stretched for thousands of miles. They didn’t want to fight. They just wanted to be left alone because they believed they could do better by themselves.
The government was crippled. They would fall soon, and Rash had his sights set on becoming the President of the United Republic. All but one of the Kinders believed in Rash. All but one saw him as a hallowed leader instead of the violent wretch that he was. All but one had been brainwashed by his vitriol.
Ellery Speck was that one.
Historical records are inaccurate, but it’s believed that Ellery Speck was in contact with a member of the national government, who provided her with a deadly anti-serum that would only affect the Kinders. She sneaked into the massive tents that served as mess halls and poisoned the water supplies. And then she disappeared.
In one afternoon, nine hundred and ninety-nine Kinders fell to the ground and never got up again. Without their superior abilities, without their superhuman skills and near invincibility, Rash had no chance to take the capital.
But he tried anyway.
He failed. His armies were obliterated.
The Peaceful Change Movement was no more, and things were never the same. The government kept control of what little they had, which wasn’t much, and we became a divided nation.
Finn finishes his story and waits for my reaction.
It’s so much to take in, so unlike anything I’ve ever heard about our history, yet the only question I can come up with, the only one that’s at the forefront of my mind is, “Ellery was a traitor?”
21
It’s such a strange feeling when someone tells you a fact that changes everything you’ve believed your whole life. Imagine walking outside, looking up at the sky, and having someone prove to you that the sky isn’t blue.
That’s what it feels like when Finn explains the history of the Kinders to me and tells me what he knows of Ellery’s story.
“But,” I say, “you don’t have any actual proof of this, do you?”
“All the history books say it’s true. Then there are the old men sitting around telling us what their grandfathers told them, all the way back to the Old War. Who knows how much has been distorted with the stories being passed from person to person for a couple hundred years.”
“What do they say happened?”
Finn shakes his head and readjusts the pack’s straps on his shoulders. “Not much, really, except that maybe she was in love with the president at the time.”
“No. Really?”
“I know it sounds crazy, but they say she did it for love. One woman’s love brought down a revolution and crippled an entire nation.”
“Do you think it would’ve been any better if Carter Rash had won his war?”
“It was a bigger world back then. I don’t know if he could’ve made enough of a difference, you know? If there was a new person sitting in the White Home, no matter who he was, he wouldn’t be able to control the weather.”
The Last Legend Page 14
