by Dawn Jansen
Empowered Academy: 1984
Book One in the Empowered Academy Trilogy
By Dawn Jansen
Copyright © 2019 by Dawn Jansen
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without written permission of the copyright owner except for the use of quotations in a book review. For more information, please contact: [email protected]
Chapter 1
Mazzy
The two men sitting across the metal table from me—I guess they’re feds—don’t say a word as they take a strange contraption, all wires and knobs, out of a briefcase and start setting it up on the table.
They aren’t anything like the rowdy local cops who whisked me back to the station; these two are calm and quiet, with an air of confidence that makes them way more ominous than the other officers, who seem to get a kick out of scaring innocent nineteen-year-olds like me. They’re both clean-shaven and seem to be in their thirties or forties. The one on the left would be pretty hot were it not for the fact that he’s probably about to start rattling off a list of charges to me. The woman that came in with them—tall, trench coat, bodacious pink hair—is standing off to the corner, her hands in her pockets. She’s wearing these big shades that I’m pretty jealous of, since this interrogation room is lit like an... interrogation room.
“You guys aren’t local, are you?” I ask, noticing that my voice is a little hoarse. Evidently, whatever I did to the officer that pulled me over took a lot out of me.
Neither of them bothers responding to me. One keeps fiddling with knobs on their device while the other starts pulling papers out of another briefcase.
“Um, when can I get my motorcycle back?”
I know it’s probably useless asking this, but it’s all I’ve been thinking about since I got to the police station. After having been stuck in foster homes all my life, my Interceptor is the only thing that makes me feel free.
“Mazzy Martins,” says the fed on the left coldly. He has a deep voice and a neutral accent; I can tell he’s not from New York.
“How do you know my name?”
“We know a lot about you, Mazzy,” he replies, acknowledging me for the first time and dropping a thick manila folder on the table.
“No way,” I say, looking in shock at the folder packed with papers and post-its. “But I’ve only been arrested, like, twice, and that was all juvie.”
It’s true—I try staying out of trouble, but it always seems to find me nonetheless. Besides, it’s the 80s; if you don’t have attitude, you won’t make it down the block without somebody trying to mess with you, so I’ve gotten into a few scraps during my teenage years that have added some padding to my record.
“Wait, are you guys CPS? I’ve been out of the system for years,” I explain, thinking they might have dug up my records from the foster system.
“That’s not what we’re here to talk about, Ms. Martins,” he says, opening the folder and thumbing through some of the pages inside. “We’re here to talk about what you did this evening.”
I can still hear the sickening crunch of the officer’s bones breaking as the handcuffs twisted and bent, crushing his hands. I hadn’t moved a muscle, but I somehow knew this was my doing.
“Okay, I have no clue what happened. His handcuffs just—”
“It’s not the first time this has happened, is it?” asks the one who has been quiet up until now, cutting me off mid-sentence. “Well, not so severely, I’m sure, but certainly you’ve noticed there’s something different about you. You’re not like other people.”
I was going to keep protesting that I didn’t lay a hand on the officer who pulled me over, but something about the tone of his voice makes me pause. It’s like he knows... Like he knows what I’ve been experiencing these past few years, how sometimes when my emotions become too intense, things around me react.
It first happened when I was 14, when my abusive foster dad (one in a long line of assholes who had taken me in only for the benefits of being a parent in the foster care system) was getting ready to launch into another one of his tirades and I just snapped. I couldn’t take it anymore. I screamed and all the windows in the kitchen shattered, and I felt that same energy in my core that I had felt tonight. Or another time when my first boyfriend was being a jerk and, as I was struggling to shove him off of me in the backseat of his car, the seatbelt seemed to come alive and pinned him to the car door.
But in the last year or so these reactions have been happening more and more, and whereas before I had been able to brush them off as just coincidence or freak occurrences, the frequency and intensity of these happenings have become too much to just explain away, especially after tonight.
I actually tried recreating these events recently. I got some stupid book on telepathy from the library and tried bending a spoon, but I just ended up feeling like an idiot holding a defiantly unbent spoon. It seems like these things only happen when I’m under extreme emotional pressure.
“Do you know what’s happening to me?” I ask, feeling an odd sense of relief that I can finally talk to somebody about this, even if they are FBI or whatever.
“First, I want to ask you about your past, Ms. Martins,” one of the agents says.
“Isn’t that what that’s for?” I say, nodding toward the huge folder. “Looks like you’ve got enough material to write my biography.”
“And yet we don’t have anything on you before 1973,” the agent says.
“Wait, don’t you know this?” I ask. “I had amnesia. Like, certified. They even brought me to a hypnotist and all that, but I’ve never been able to remember. Everything from before I was eight years old is just blank.”
The two of them share a brief look where they seem to be exchanging some kind of non-verbal message before turning back to me. The woman in the corner shifts her weight to her other leg.
“It is sometimes the case that using your powers can bring back long-repressed memories,” the agent with the folder says.
“No, I just see this white light and I feel this pressure building inside me and—wait, did you say ‘powers’?”
They don’t respond to me. Instead, the agent with the device turns and looks to the woman. She gives him a little nod, her pink hair bobbing slightly as she does, and he begins powering on the device on the table. After a few clicks, the machine starts up with a light hum, and it’s only then I realize I’ve actually seen this device before. Every time I ended up switching foster parents (which was about every year or so growing up), the state would have me go through a range of medical checkups, and this device was part of those checkups. They’d strap these electrodes to my head, have me look at a few random images, and that was it. I’ve always thought it was just part of a normal checkup, but I haven’t done any of these tests since I left my last foster family three years ago.
Sure enough, the agent managing the device pulls out three electrodes and gets up to attach them to my head. My hands are still cuffed to the interrogation table, so I can’t resist even if I wanted to.
The agent with the folder seems to be able to read the expression on my face.
“I know it’s been a while since your last test,” he says. “This will help tell us a lot about your condition.”
“My condition? Which one is it, a power or a disease?” I ask with a sneer. These guys aren’t like many of the asshole authority figures I’ve had to deal with over the years, but I still don’t like being handcuffed to the table like this while they’re free to do whatever they want to me.
“It could be both, Ms. Martins. That all depends on how you choose to use your gift.”
“But I can’t use it. At least not on purpose.”
“Yet
,” he says plainly, and then removes a stack of photos from the folder. “I want you to say the first word that comes to mind when you see each photo.”
“Yeah, yeah, I remember how this—”
I’m cut off mid-sentence by the first picture I see, which is a gory crime scene photo of an auto wreck. I can make out blood and splayed limbs among the metallic prison that the mangled car has become.
“What the hell?” I yell. “These aren’t the kinds of pictures they used to show me!”
“What word comes to mind, Ms. Martins,” the agent says apathetically.
“Fuck,” I say in exasperation.
“Fuck?” he asks, raising an eyebrow.
“No, no, just...” I take a deep breath and clear my head, looking again at the gory photo. “Obliterated.” Right after I say the word, I hear the machine hum a little more loudly than normal, like it’s recording my answer.
The next photo shows a little girl crying by the side of a dirt road. The area around her seems to be a war zone. There are blasted buildings and crowds of people moving by, but nobody is paying any attention to the girl.
“Despair.”
The machine whirs again.
━━━━━ ▣ ━━━━━
After going through about ten photos, each more depressing or violent than the last, the other agent finally removes the electrodes from my head.
“That was a trip,” I say with a sigh. “Why all the grody pictures this time?”
“The more striking photos provoke a greater response. Now that your powers are beginning to manifest, we can dispense with the pretense.”
“A greater response in what?”
“Your pineal gland,” the other agent says, removing a sheet of paper from the device.
He gets up and walks over to the woman in the corner, showing her the printout. She hasn’t said anything or made any expressions this whole time, but when she sees the paper she smirks. It’s a smirk that sends shivers up my spine. I see her whisper a short command to the agent, but I can’t hear what she said.
“My pineal gland?” I ask once the other agent has brought the sheet back. “In my brain, right?” I remember reading about the pineal gland in bio, but I can’t remember what it does.
“Correct, in the epithalamus,” one of the agents says, pulling a piece of paper out of the folder and laying it on the table. “This is the activity level of a normal human’s pineal gland.”
I look at the picture, but can’t make much sense of it. It looks like a seismograph readout, with a thin line running steadily along a graph and a bunch of numbers at the bottom. There are little oscillations here and there, but it’s mostly pretty level.
“And this,” he continues, placing the printout from the device next to this paper, “is yours.”
Compared to the micro-tremors of the first graph, my readout looks like an area that got hit by a record-breaking mega-earthquake. The lines shoot up and down violently along the graph’s axis, sometimes even going outside the range of the chart.
I’m totally speechless. I was already feeling a little woozy from what had happened with the police officer, but now I’m feeling dizzy for an entirely different reason. Have I had this “condition” my entire life? Does it have anything to do with my amnesia? Why have these occurrences started happening more now?
“These are the most extreme readings we’ve seen in an untrained empowered yet, Ms. Martins. That makes you one of the most dangerous individuals in the United States.”
I’m still recovering from the shock of my first realization when he drops that nice bombshell on me.
“But I’m not dangerous,” I plead. “I don’t even know how to use my... powers.”
“That’s exactly it. If you have an outburst in public, or if the Soviets—”
“Ahem.” Trench coat lady clears her throat loudly, cutting the agent off. I think I see a brief look of terror on his face, like he knows he just screwed up or something.
“At any rate,” he continues, straightening his neck tie, “your readings have only been getting stronger since your first test a decade ago. We can’t have somebody like you walking around unchecked.”
I knew that’s where this was heading.
So that’s my life, I guess. Eight years of amnesia and another eight years bouncing around foster care. At least I got three years of freedom that were pretty sweet. I got free ice cream working at Häagen-Dazs, and this past year I’ve had my motorcycle.
“Can I at least ride my bike one last time before you kill me?”
Chapter 2
Mazzy
The good news is they didn’t kill me.
The bad news is they only agreed not to kill me if I join this freakoid academy where I’ll learn to use my powers.
The even worse news is that my Interceptor is locked up and I don’t get my keys until I pass the Test, which sounds way more ominous than the tests I was used to in school.
After they took my reading, the lady with the pink hair, who I soon found out is the dean of the Empowered Academy, took over and gave me the lowdown: I have to stay on campus every day of the week until I graduate, which can take however many months until they decide I’m ready for the Test. I’m going to have to attend classes on not only how to control my powers, but also how to work together with other EMPs. Oh yeah, I’m also now officially an EMP—Empowered Military Personnel, a government organization that’s even more secret than Area 51—which sounds kind of righteous but is totally not what I asked for. My whole life I’ve been getting burned by the system, and now I’ve unwillingly become part of it.
The Empowered Academy is this old estate that’s in the middle of the Hither Hills state park in Montauk, all the way on the eastern tip of Long Island along the coast of the Atlantic Ocean. Once they got me out of the police station last night, we took a black car through the old roads and pathways of Montauk until we got to this military checkpoint. I grew up out here and have been all around the state parks of Long Island, and I never even knew this place existed. Of course, everybody’s heard the stories about Camp Hero, where they supposedly do tests on aliens and run time travel experiments, but none of us have ever taken that seriously. After seeing this complex in the Hither Hills, though, I’m not so sure anymore.
It’s after midnight by the time we get to the Academy, a huge Victorian mansion in the middle of the estate grounds. The mansion is quiet and dark, and I can barely make out anything as I’m whisked upstairs to my dorm room.
“You’ll start classes tomorrow,” the dean tells me, standing at the threshold of my room. She’s still wearing her sunglasses despite how dark it is in here. She hands me an index card. “This is your curriculum, for now. We’ll monitor your progress and make changes based on your needs. You’ll be taking classes with the others, but every student here moves at their own pace.”
The only trace of emotion I can make out from the tone of her voice is possibly slight annoyance, which, if that’s the case, sorry lady, but it was either this or get “disposed of”—I’d rather not be here either. Aside from that, the only thing notable about the way she speaks is that she’s unfailingly articulate; her pronunciation is as perfect as a robot’s and she speaks with great precision.
“Alright. Got it, Ms...”
“You may call me the Architect.”
This lady keeps getting weirder by the minute.
“The Academy is not a forgiving place, Ms. Martins,” she adds in her somewhat robotic tone. “You may think it was either this or execution, but the fact is students die here, too. It’s built in to the system, in fact. Those that perish are unfit for graduation.”
I don’t know if she’s just trying to psyche me out or what, but she’s already starting to get on my nerves.
“I’ll do my best to stay out of trouble,” I say through my teeth.
She pauses for a moment and I feel like she’s studying my reaction before continuing. “Good. And before you get any stupid ideas, you
should know that escape is thoroughly impossible. You may explore the Academy grounds freely, but you may not leave the restricted area. Now get some rest, Ms. Martins. You don’t want to be late for your first class.”
She leaves without waiting for me to respond. If the teachers are as lame as the dean at this place, I know it’s gonna be a long however-many-months it takes until I get out of here.
I take a look at the index card she gave me. I have about two classes each day, and my first class tomorrow morning is something called Basic Power Theory. Sounds pretty self-explanatory, but my brow furrows as I go through the rest of the card: Psychic Defense 101, Firearms, Fundamentals of Espionage, Hostage Strategy, Assassination Theory. That last one really drives home just what I’ve gotten myself roped into. EMP is a government organization, a military one at that. I’m not sure if all of the other students have powers similar to mine, but of course the government would want to utilize people like me—“empowered” people, I guess we’re called—to gain whatever advantage it can.
I throw the card on my bed and take a look around the room. Tonight’s been a real shit show, but at least my room is nice enough. It’s more than twice the size of the tiny apartment I’ve been renting on my own, and it matches the decoration of the rest of the mansion with an expensive-looking red carpet with gold trim, a huge bed with wooden posts, ornate curtains, and even a marble fireplace. I open one of the drawers of the large, antique armoire and inside there seem to be nothing but matching sets of preppy school clothes composed of a checkered skirt, knee-high socks, a white dress shirt and knit sweater with “EA” embroidered on the chest—all my size. I go through all the drawers, each one containing variations on this same outfit, I guess depending on the weather, but then I let out an audible gasp when I open the very bottom drawer. It’s filled with lingerie: lace chokers, corsets, garter belts, and all kinds of fancy bras and underwear.
“What the hell?” I wonder. At first I think it must be a mistake, but I pull out a bra and it’s 34C, which is exactly my size, and all the other items seem to fit me as well. I glance around the room for a bit, looking for some kind of clue on why there might be sexy lingerie in here, but everything else about the room looks normal. Well, the dean is a lady called the “Architect” who looks like an evil Nina Hagen, so maybe this isn’t the weirdest thing about this place. Besides, it’s too late to try and figure this out now. I pull a silk nightgown out of the bottom drawer and make my way to the en-suite shower.
