Since I had taken a nap during the first few hours of our trip, I was able to drive through the rest of the night, though I was ragged by the time Nicole woke up in the minutes before sunrise. We were a few miles outside of Vail, Colorado, and as I explained to her what Amber and I had discussed a few hours before, the sun began to peek out between the mountain ridges framing the sky to the east, tracing brilliant lines of golden light through the darkness dissipating around us.
“It’s so weird to see mom like this.” Nicole poked her head between the two front seats to look at Amber, who was now curled up with her back against the door and her mouth hanging open.
I laughed. “Seeing her like this is a good reminder to me that I definitely married up. It’s hard to think of anyone that’s more selfless.”
“You married Gravita.” Her tone was flat. “That might be the textbook definition of marrying up.”
“Gravita?” Amber’s voice came through muffled as she yawned and stretched. “Who told you about that?”
“What?” I cocked my head to the side.
“That’s the nickname my friends gave me in middle school.”
“Really?” Nicole couldn’t seem to help but laugh.
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing.” I frowned at Nicole. “That’s just the name you go by as an arbiter.”
“Makes sense.” She shrugged. “I figured out years ago that, if I ever decided to be an arbiter, that would be the name to use. It’s straightforward, and it fits.”
“If?” Nicole looked shocked. “Don’t you want to be an arbiter?”
“I’ve taken a power assessment before.” She scratched her scalp and squinted to see out of the windshield through the sunlight shining right in her eyes. “I mean, you have to for registration, right? Apparently, they ranked me as a Class AA, but I don’t know if I believe that.”
“Class AA?” Nicole frowned.
“Yeah. I think the threshold is regional destruction? Like, on the order of a few square miles? I don’t know how they figured that out. They just hooked me up to a machine and had me bend gravity. But obviously with that power class, I’ve been hounded by arbiter recruiters for most of my life. They’ve offered me some pretty crazy compensation for a pledge to join.”
“They misclassified you,” I said, my tone soft. Amber and Nicole stopped and watched me all the same. “You aren’t AA, you’re AAA.”
“What?” I looked over and saw that Amber’s mouth was hanging open. She snapped it shut at my gaze. “How?”
“What’s the range on your grav-sense right now?”
“Umm, I dunno.” She sounded flustered. “Maybe three miles?”
“That’s about where I was before I was hit with the serum. Eventually your range will go up to about five miles. Once you hit four, though, you’ll be able to break through spacetime. A black hole, even a microscopic one, would be able to produce enough energy to sterilize all life on the planet. You’ll be able to do that soon.”
“Wow.”
I gave her another glance and saw she was looking down at her hands and flexing her fingers pensively.
“You’re stronger than you realize, mom,” Nicole said. “I mean, some of the things you’ve done as an arbiter—”
“That we probably shouldn’t talk about?” I interrupted. “Nicole, come on. We still have to pretend like we’re trying not to change our timeline too much here.”
“Pot calling the kettle black, Mr. Mom?”
“Oh, snap!” Amber laughed, then twisted around to her and held her hand out. Nicole, who seemed taken aback by the gesture, gave her a high-five after blinking once or twice. “Yeah, screw that noise. I want to hear about the things I’m going to do.”
“Teenagers.” I rolled my eyes.
“Old man.” Amber stuck her tongue out at me, then turned her attention back to Nicole. “Come on, home slice. Give me the deets.”
“Before you give her the four-one-one?” My eyes flashed at Nicole through the rearview mirror, and I could tell she was trying hard not to laugh. “I’m going to need to switch out. Can you drive?”
After a quick pit stop, I found myself curled up in the back seat, trying to fall asleep while Nicole and Amber spoke conspiratorially in hushed tones from the front seat. Just as I was almost asleep, I noticed Amber glance my way before leaning toward Nicole, and I had the strong suspicion I could guess what the weight of their discussion would be.
Once I had rested for a few hours, I made sure to review with Amber all the techniques I knew of about using her powers, and I was pleasantly surprised to learn she had practiced using nearly all of them. In fact, flying had been one of the few things she hadn’t attempted yet, and I couldn’t really blame her for not having thought of it. Instead, I used our time to review with her what she could expect when facing the six rogues we knew for certain we would meet in Chicago. I only knew the powersets of two of them—Amanda the mind smith, and the wolf-bear morpher. Either of them would be a formidable opponent for me, and for the first time, I started to wonder if involving Amber in the fight had been a mistake. If I were to die now, it would be tragic, but if Amber were to die, it would mean Nicole, Sam, and Alan would never exist. That was a price I was unwilling to pay.
We made it into Chicago a few hours after sunset that evening. I offered to stop at a payphone to give Amber the chance to call her parents and let them know she was okay, but she didn’t seem eager to face them just yet. Oddly enough, she hadn’t gotten a page from them, either.
We used some of our money to grab some dinner and get a motel a mile from my old house. Luckily, I had grown up in a nice suburb of Chicago, so I wasn’t really worried about our modest accommodations. Besides, I was certain anyone bothering us and looking for trouble would end up dealing with much more than they could handle.
Despite my acute sleep deprivation, both from the road trip and my captivity the night before, it took me hours to fall asleep that night. I just couldn’t stop wondering what we were going to see the next day, and I couldn’t stop the ache that was hollowing out my insides.
My parents had been taken from me more than half a lifetime before. Now, I had the chance to see them again for one more day, and for much longer than that if I could somehow manage to pull it off. The realization didn’t lend itself to sleep.
“Come on!” I shouted, my fists raised. “You have to move faster than that.”
Amber grit her teeth and ducked forward, swinging her gloved fists toward me in a flurry of blows that I blocked almost effortlessly. With her focus on offense, she had left herself so exposed that I had to jab her a few times in the side to remind her to keep her guard up. Swiveling to the side, I parried Nicole’s punches as well, though since she had kept herself more guarded than Amber had, she was able to dodge the blows I aimed at her.
“Okay.” Amber massaged her side as she stepped away. “Not sure you beating us to a pulp is really helpful. What do we need to change?”
“You are too focused on landing the punch.” I flexed my powers slightly and tipped her backwards with what amounted to a slight nudge. The force was still enough to send her toppling backwards. She caught herself through a gravity field, but she still looked indignant. “You have to be aware of your environment. Especially given your powerset, you should be able to control the entire field, but you’re so focused on connecting that you aren’t even guarding the area around your body. That’s the first rule of martial fighting.
“You’re guarding yourself more.” I nodded at Nicole. “But that’s because you’re afraid of getting hit. Which, now that I think of it, actually might not be a bad instinct to rely on since we have no idea what powersets we’re going up against with four of these rogues. Feel free to hit the blonde woman as much as you want. Being a mind smith, I doubt she’s going to be a physical threat.”
An hour later when we left the gym, I was feeling better about our odds. For having no formal fight training, Amber seemed to show good
instincts in our sparring matches, and since she had lived with her powers for the past decade, she incorporated her powers into her fighting seamlessly. More than once, she had managed to catch me off guard with a push or a pull of gravity. Nicole seemed to have a good sense to herself as well, though without having any powers, I was uneasy about including her in our training. It was only at her insistence in the first place that I brought her to the gym that morning.
“So, are we going to go in there?” Nicole’s voice broke through my thoughts as I leaned on the steering wheel, my eyes glued to the two-story house on the other side of the street. I had killed the car a minute before, but finding everything there—the street, the cars, the houses, really all of it—exactly the way I had remembered it from so many years before gave me pause. A part of me that I didn’t want to listen to was begging me to take as much time as I could to experience this one more time.
“I guess so.” I shook myself out of my thoughts, then glanced over at Amber and Nicole, who were both watching me, before I climbed out of the car.
“You think you’re in there right now?” Amber’s eyes were also trained on the house as she closed her door and came around the hood of the car to stand next to me.
“I wish I could say.” I grimaced.
“Come on.” Nicole put her arm around me.
The three of us crossed the street, then walked up the short path between the driveway and front door. With an encouraging nod from Nicole, I reached up and rang the doorbell.
An angry barking sounded from the other side of the door a second after the doorbell quieted.
“Chewie?” I asked, causing both Amber and Nicole to stare.
“As in... Chewbacca?” Amber laughed.
I shrugged, then gave a sheepish smile. “He looked like him.”
A second later, the barking quieted as the front door creaked open and I found myself looking at my mother.
“Can I help you?” Her eyes flickered between the three of us.
For a moment that seemed to stretch for an eternity, I just stared at her, unable to think of anything other than the impossible reality that my mother was alive again, and that she was so close I could touch her. I took in every feature of her face, even as I realized with a start that I had taken far too long to answer her question. I opened my mouth to speak, but found my throat was sealed off. She frowned at my motion, studying me in apparent confusion.
“We think your family might be in danger.” Nicole nudged me in the side with her elbow. “Can we come in and talk?”
“Excuse me?” She turned to Nicole.
“We think there may be rogues that are targeting you,” Amber said. “We’d just like to talk to you for a minute, if we can.”
She gave us another frown, but something in our demeanor must have clued her into our sincerity because, after another pause, she moved aside and held the door open for us to pass into the house.
A flood of nostalgia stole over me as I forced my legs to move and crossed stiffly over the threshold into my childhood home. All at once, I was overcome by the familiar smell of baking bread coming from the kitchen. I looked around in a fog of déjà vu as I followed Nicole through the entryway and into the living room, even as my stomach dropped out at the intimate comfort of everything around me. As I came into the room, my eyes were drawn to the man pushing himself out of the recliner in the corner. He looked exactly the way I remembered. It was all I could do to keep the tremble out of my hand as he shook our hands politely and we introduced ourselves, though he looked perplexed as my mom came into the room after us and explained what we had told her at the front door.
“Well, I appreciate your concern for us, but I’m sure we’ll be alright.” My dad pursed his lips as he settled back into his recliner and the three of us sat down on the couch. He looked uneasy as my mom excused herself from the room to make a call.
Something seemed to click into place as he watched us with what I recognized as both confusion and annoyance. I looked around the room, the haze of my thoughts swept away in an instant.
“Where’s Jake?” I looked back at my dad. It was the first thing I had said since seeing my parents, so I wasn’t surprised at the odd look he gave me. “Is he at Rick’s, or Will’s, or some other friend’s house right now?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Where is he?” I got up and paced around the room. “He isn’t here, is he?”
“He’s not at Rick’s,” my mom announced as she came back into the room. “I just gave his mother a call, and they said Jake wasn’t there.”
“So, he’s on his way home then?” My dad still sounded annoyed, I’m sure because he still didn’t believe anything of what we had told them.
She glanced at me, then held her hands up helplessly. “She said he hasn’t been there today.”
“But Jake left here hours ago.” He frowned and looked at me too. “Did you girls have anything to do with this?”
“This isn’t some sort of prank.” I fixed him with a serious enough look that I hoped he would believe me. “Your entire family is in a lot of danger right now. Jake—”
I snapped my gaze to the telephone on the counter as it began to ring. It took all the discipline I had to not reach for it and instead let my mom pick up the receiver.
“Jake?” Her eyes furrowed as she met my dad’s gaze. “Honey, where are you?”
I let go of the breath I didn’t know I had been holding as her eyes flickered to me.
“What’s going on?” Her voice was tense. “Jake, just tell me—”
She closed her eyes at whatever she heard over the line, then pulled the receiver away from her ear and looked between Amber, Nicole, and me. “He wants to talk with... Amber?”
I glanced over at Nicole and Amber, who were still seated on the couch. They both looked back at me with mirrored expressions of anxiety. With a shaking hand, I took the receiver from my mother.
“Amber?” I heard my teenage voice ask as I put the phone up to my ear.
“Jake?” I met my mom’s gaze, my heartbeat racing.
“Not quite.” He laughed, his voice hollow and flat. “I think you know who’s really pulling the strings here.”
“Amanda?” I fought to keep my hand holding the phone to my ear from trembling from a mixture of fear and anger.
“And you think you’re not that smart. Well, Amber, let’s make sure this is simple for you. You have half an hour to get here, or I die.” I heard a pistol being cocked in the background before he continued. “Please don’t be late.”
I twisted over to the counter and jotted down the address he gave me onto the legal pad next to the phone.
“Jake?” I called after repeating back the address. “Hold on. We’re going to get you out of there.”
“Good luck.”
I missed the base of the phone as I put the receiver back down, my hand shaking too much from a mixture of fear and rage.
“They have him,” I whispered.
26
WE COULD HAVE FLOWN to the address, but it was a Sunday afternoon, and traffic was light enough that we could get there in Amber’s car well within our time limit. Apart from that, I wanted to conserve as much of my energy as possible, especially after the morning’s training. It had been stupid of me to insist we train, but I thought we would have another few hours. This wasn’t what I had remembered happening. My memory that the confrontation would happen at my old house around midnight that night, though, gave me an odd sense of hope. If things were already different from what I remembered, did that mean we had already altered the timeline, somehow?
“So.” I stared in the rearview mirror at Nicole. “You’re going to wait out here while we go in, right? You can’t go in there. Not with four rogues with unknown powersets.”
“Dad, that’s not fair.” She crossed her arms across her chest and stared out at the abandoned industrial park we were in. “I have just as much a right as anyone to help save... well, you.”
; “But it’s not the same for you.” I fixed her with a stern gaze. “Promise you’ll stay in the car.”
“I... promise.”
Amber and I climbed out of the car and headed toward the warehouse in the distance.
“You know she’s not going to listen, right?” Amber studied the building carefully as we approached.
“Yeah.” I grimaced, my eyes also on the warehouse. “I only hope we can take out most of these morons before she joins us and gets herself killed.
“Remember: primes only ever have one chief power. You’ll never see a morpher that can duplicate themselves, or a mind smith that can manipulate energy. Even powersets like ours only stem from control of one thing: spacetime. Once we identify what the other four powersets are, we use any means necessary to end them. We don’t have the option of being diplomatic here.”
“Can’t we just take them out right away?”
“Sure, kid, if you get the chance.”
I nodded to the front of the warehouse, where the wide corrugated steel door to the building had been rolled up. Two men I recognized stood on either side of the entryway with their arms crossed. I studied the man nearest to us as we crossed over the threshold into the cavernous warehouse and noted that half of his body seemed to be composed of steel. I glanced over at Amber, who had her eyes trained on the man’s arm, which gleamed in the sunlight.
Turning my attention to the inside of the warehouse, which became more visible as we stepped out of the bright sunlight, I saw what I had already sensed a few minutes before. Four people stood in a line in the center of the open space, watching Amber and I as we walked closer. As we approached, Jake tilted his head to the side.
“There are two...?” He looked between the two of us in evident confusion. “Oh. One of you is from this time, aren’t you?”
I saw Amanda’s eyes flicker between the two of us as he spoke, a frustrated look flashing across her face before she could mask it. Was it possible... could she not read our minds while she controlled Jake? It was a dangerous assumption to make, but one that opened a few tantalizing possibilities to us. I had to know.
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