It was a tough call, but I had gone with my gut before, and oftentimes that had turned out to be a selfish choice, only causing more trouble for our group going forward.
With another step forward, I turned from Angel to Arianna, a grimace on my face.
“Good,” Angel said. “You’re listening for once.”
“Keep your goddamn mouth shut,” Stella told him. “Or we’ll have one prisoner and one dead body to deal with.”
I glanced over my shoulder at Stella to see just how pissed she was. Her face was red, a crazy amount of energy radiating off her.
She was definitely not playing around.
With a deep breath in, I approached Arianna, my head shaking as red energy swirled around my fingertips.
“Please, don’t,” she said, looking up at me with pleading eyes.
I closed my eyes for a moment and drained enough to make her pass out, the woman’s skin turning purple, her head falling forward.
“More,” Angel told me.
“I’m good,” I said, looking at him defiantly. “Now get the fuck out of here. And next time we see you…”
“What?”
“It won’t be pretty,” I told him with a huff.
I stepped aside, allowing Angel to grab Arianna’s cage. He lifted the cage with one hand and carried it over to the motorcycle’s sidecar, where he looped the seatbelt through a corner and buckled it.
From there, he got on the motorcycle and started it up, the key already in the ignition.
The regret hit me the hardest when I saw his motorcycle speeding away, Arianna caged at the side.
I didn’t know when this would come back to haunt us, but I knew it would happen sooner or later.
“You did the right thing,” Stella said as she stepped up to my right.
“I hope so.”
“You really did.”
She forcibly lifted my arm up and brought it around her shoulder, leaning her head into the nook of my arm. It was the closest to an embrace I’d ever had with Stella (aside from the one kiss we shared), and I went from being filled with remorse to being filled with surprise.
“Don’t get used to it,” she said as she patted my stomach.
“Used to what?”
“You know what,” she finally said.
“How are we going to explain this to the others?”
“We’re not going to tell them about the hug.”
“No, I mean how are we going to explain what happened here to the Mongolians.”
“Oh, that. You will use your power, and to demonstrate your goodwill, you will heal the poor man over there.”
The Mongolian guy that Angel had nearly choke-slammed was on his knees now, coughing, blood dripping from his chin to the ground.
He started to move away as I approached him, fear spreading across his face.
I showed him both palms, indicating that I wasn’t going to do anything, that I was going to help. Eventually, he relaxed some, allowing me to crouch before him. I started up my healing power, the young man breathing heavily as I did so.
“Bayarlalaa,” he said.
“Thank you?”
“Yes,” he said in broken English. “Thank you.”
The door of the yurt burst open and Mary ran out, Ingrid chasing after her.
“What happened?” Mary asked, her hands coming to her mouth.
The young man began speaking to her in rapid-fire Mongolian, even as I tried to explain what had gone down. Mary simply nodded, ignoring me and listening to him. Once he was finished she turned to me.
“Your friend caged someone, right?”
“Um, that’s right,” I said, looking to Stella. “And he’s not our friend. Screw that guy.”
The mother of the yurt was also outside now, her baby in her arms. The young man greeted her, and began explaining the story again as Mary continued her line of questioning.
“And then he stole Dorj’s motorcycle,” Mary said. “Right?”
“That’s right. We couldn’t stop him.”
“Why couldn’t you stop him?”
“Because… I don’t think you’re going to believe what I tell you next.”
“I might. You just healed Dorj, and that’s something that doesn’t happen very often.”
“Very often?”
“My uncle is a shaman,” Mary said with a shrug. “Strange things happen around shamans. In fact, that’s where we’re going when we go back to the city.”
“Okay, let’s circle back to the shaman thing in a minute, but to maybe tell you more than I should: we are superpowered. There, I’m being honest with you. And the guy that took…”
“Dorj.”
“Yeah, the guy that took Dorj’s motorcycle has a superpower as well. He’s incredibly strong, and he can heal himself too.”
“So that’s how he lifted Dorj so easily,” Mary said. Even though she was younger than Michelle, she seemed more mature in the way that she was putting all this together, more articulate.
“That’s right.”
“What is her power?” she asked, nodding to Stella.
“You don’t want to know,” said Stella.
“She can manipulate vectors,” I told Mary, ignoring Stella’s ominous tone. “Just think of it as, well, sort of controlling parts of reality. Like making an invisible shield. That sort of thing.”
“Okay. And Ingrid’s?”
“She turns into a monster if she pinches herself.”
Mary looked at me skeptically for a moment.
“I’m serious,” I told the girl. “You don’t want to see what she can do, trust me.”
“It’s true,” said Ingrid. “I may not look very strong, but when I turn into Tulip…”
“Your monster has a name?”
Ingrid nodded. “He does.”
“And you?” Mary asked me. “What can you do?”
“Well, I have a unique power that allows me to absorb other people’s powers.”
“Like a bloody leech?”
“A leech? And isn’t the word ‘bloody’ technically a curse word in the UK?”
Mary grinned.
“I’m not sucking out their blood or anything. But whatever. You asked, so I’m explaining. As for how I healed your neighbor, I have the ability to heal, which I absorbed from someone else. I have a few other powers, and I can switch them out.” I shook my head. “I’m sorry, I know this almost sounds like a bunch of nonsense…”
“No,” Mary said with a shrug. “And I’m fine with it. I won’t tell anyone unless you want me to.”
“Thank you,” I said, knowing full well that Grace would do a mind sweep on the girl once she met her. “Now, I don’t want to cause any more trouble for this family. Please, let’s go to…”
“UB, Ulaanbaatar.”
“Yes, let’s go there. Then we can meet with our friends who’re in Japan.”
Mary’s eyes went wide. “You’re going to Japan? I’ve always wanted to go there.”
“We are, and trust me, you don’t want to get into what we are about to get into.”
Chapter Four: Asian Spaghetti and a Long Trip to the Capital
And that was that.
It wasn’t twenty minutes later that Ingrid, Stella and I were sitting in the back of the lorry, as Mary called it, our young translator and the man named Dorj up front, the vehicle aimed at Ulaanbaatar.
It was going to be a bumpy ride, since there was no road per se. We simply sped toward the east, barreling over the countryside, occasionally stopping so the driver could talk to local herders.
It was an exhilarating experience.
The blue sky above us seemed eternal in that moment, the Mongolian steppe as grand as it was foreboding, small pockets of civilization signaled by a cluster of white yurts, then nothing again for miles upon miles, long spells of barren grasslands.
We came across a group of wild horses, the driver skidding to a halt and kicking up dust, and Mary poking her head out the window.
/> “Do you see them?” she called back to us. “Horses!”
“It’s amazing,” I said, the horses galloping off to our right.
“Can you ride a horse?” she asked Ingrid.
“No.”
“Neither can I,” I said, noticing the disappointment in Ingrid’s voice. “And I’m sure Stella can’t either.”
The vector manipulator shrugged. “Why would I need to ride a horse when I can fly?”
“Touché…”
“It’s okay,” said Mary, “I can’t ride a horse either. He can,” she said, pointing to Dorj, “and you wouldn’t want to ride one of those horses anyway. They’re wild.”
“I can see that,” I said as one of them reared onto its hind legs.
Once our horse-gazing had ended, we continued on our way toward the capital city. There were a few points where I had to close my eyes to take in gulps of oxygen in an effort to steady my stomach. The jarring ride was shaking me up like a can of soda, and I was glad when the vehicle slowed for a moment to circle around a pile of rocks covered in blue flags.
“What do you think that is?” Ingrid asked.
“No idea,” I said, biting my lip again as Dorj slammed his foot down on the gas.
We were hauling ass now, occasionally hitting bumps that sent us up to a foot off our seats. It was brutal, and I was relieved as hell when we came to an actual road, even if it was filled with deep potholes.
There were a couple other vehicles now, and they sort of stayed in a straight line as they barreled toward the capital city.
Of course, wanting to get there faster than the others, Dorj began passing these vehicles, a smile on his face as he did so.
“Do you think this guy even has a driver’s license?” I asked Stella.
“Don’t worry, I will protect the vehicle if we crash into something.”
“Good to know,” I said, wincing at the pain in my gut.
“Come on, I thought you were a tough guy,” Ingrid said.
“Me?”
Stella slugged me in the arm.
“Hey!”
“Just kidding. He’s tough,” she told Ingrid. “He almost fought Angel back there; you missed it.”
Ingrid pondered this for a moment, her hair whipping in her face until she swept it behind her ears. “I feel like I’ve seen you fight him before, but I don’t know, my memory gets a little hazy when I’m Tulip.”
“I don’t like what happened back there,” I said as our driver honked at another vehicle, trying to get the other man to speed up.
The three of us waved at a child who stood on the side of the highway selling watermelons. He was with his parents, or at least I assumed they were his parents. I suddenly felt hungry for watermelon; all I’d had for breakfast was salty milk tea and fried hunks of dough.
“What other choice did we have?” Stella asked me. “We couldn’t bring Arianna to the city in a cage, unless we were able to force her to remain invisible, and even then, that could prove difficult.”
“I know, I’ve already thought about that. But I just don’t think it was the right thing to do. Something’s telling me that, and maybe I shouldn’t listen to that voice, but I normally do.”
“Don’t listen to the voices in your head,” Ingrid finally said with a chuckle. “Don’t listen, Gideon…”
“What voice am I supposed to listen to?”
“How do you even know the voice in your head is yours?” Stella asked.
“Who else would it be?” I asked, immediately thinking of Grace.
That was who the voice would be, or who the voice usually was. And while it was nice to hang out with Ingrid and Stella, and get to know both of them better, I was excited as hell to see the three original CBGs again, most notably Grace.
I felt empty when I wasn’t around her, like she filled a portion of my skull or something, augmenting my thoughts. I still had my suspicions that she controlled everything, that there was nothing that I said, did or thought that wasn’t somehow touched by her.
In that case, maybe it was Stockholm Syndrome.
And from Grace my thoughts drifted to Dorian, even as Ingrid continued to talk to Stella about something Mary had told her about this region of Mongolia and the herder lifestyle.
I needed a damn Internet connection.
I needed to know how far Ulaanbaatar was from Nagasaki, or Tokyo for that matter. I really had no idea where the other CBGs were, but we had set up a joint email account, and there were ways for us to get in touch with each other now. The only thing I was curious about was why Dorian hadn’t already used her empathetic teleportation power to come to us.
Then again, maybe we were too far out of range.
Dorj slowed to a stop about thirty minutes later. There were a couple of yurts along the side of the road, a sign in Cyrillic out front. He got out of the vehicle and stretched his arms over his head, yawning.
“We’re going to eat now,” Mary told us.
“How far are we from UB?” I asked as I hopped out of the back of the truck. It was weird to be on solid ground, my center of gravity a little iffy.
“Hopefully, we will reach there by night.”
“I thought you came from the city,” I told her.
“I did, I came from the city of Khovd, from my grandparents’ home, but we’re going to Ulaanbaatar and that’s pretty far away. Luckily, they have this new highway that will take us there. It used to be a very long trip.”
“Why didn’t we just go to Khovd?”
“There aren’t many foreigners there, and the airplanes only come three times a week.”
I looked to Stella, who was stretching a bit, a pained expression on her face as she twisted to the side.
“But you think we will be there by tonight, right? To UB?”
“Probably,” Mary said with a shrug. “We need to get petrol too, but we should be able to do that soon. Anyway, it’s time for lunch; let’s have some tsuivan.” Mary gestured toward the roadside yurt.
“What’s tsuivan?” Ingrid asked as we stepped up to the entrance.
“It’s like…” Mary thought for a moment. “It is sort of like Asian spaghetti. Trust me, it’s delicious!”
The tsuivan was good, and Mary was right, it was sort of an Asian spaghetti without tomato sauce. It definitely wasn’t like ramen, or any other Asian noodle dish I had eaten before, a bit saltier, and no broth either.
It did the trick in the end, keeping us satiated on the bumpy ride to the capital city.
The temperature dropped considerably as we grew closer to UB, as the day started to shift into night, and it didn’t help that we were sitting in the bed of a truck that alternated between thirty and eighty miles-per-hour depending on if Dorj got a clear stretch of highway.
Oddly enough, the vehicle’s rumbling had put me to sleep at some point, only to be woken up by the sound of the horn and someone yelling, the noises gone just as quickly as they appeared.
Eventually, I was able to see through the windows of the vehicle that there was a city on the horizon.
More traffic too.
Even though I could now see Ulaanbaatar, and could smell it too, it felt like the last stretch was the longest as we pulled into a line of vehicles, more and more cars trying to cut into the space in front of us, people honking their horns all around us. It was maddening watching it all; seeing how unorganized it was and how antsy some of the drivers were had me feeling manic.
Lots of headlights were flashing on us too, and I wondered in that moment what some of them must have thought to see three, clearly not Mongolian, people on the back of a lorry.
We came to a police checkpoint and a man wearing a Soviet-esque military uniform that included a cool beret waved us through, not at all paying attention to the three foreigners in back. There were dozens upon dozens of vehicles behind us, all cantankerous, and the checkpoint guy seemed like he just wanted to go home.
I couldn’t blame him.
Not only that, I fel
t his pain; I couldn’t help but think about my bedroom in Colorado, away from all this madness, the noise, the smoke, the dust, the bedlam that I would come to recognize came hand-in-hand with many an Asian city.
We had gone from rolling hills and sparkling streams to a slum of sorts, yurts behind cracked wooden fences, the occasional shack, people loitering on the side of the road, stacked tires, two kids pushing a cart that contained two large jugs, roadside food stands, drunken men moving around, women walking in high heels even though they were on cracked sidewalks and dirt roads, their purses clutched tightly to their chests.
I turned to Ingrid and saw the expression on her face, one of both shock and wonder. Stella’s was different, hers was one of sheer curiosity.
I’d never seen anything like this before.
Sure, I’d seen some of the rundown areas of New Haven, the neighborhoods around Yale University (I never understood why a university so rich couldn’t give two shits about the space that surrounded it), and most of the homes in Fair Haven with their chain-link fences and ‘beware of dog’ signs.
But nothing like this.
“Is this really the capital?” I asked Stella, who seemed fascinated by the sights and sounds. It looked nothing like what I had seen from the road, skyscrapers and blinking lights atop large buildings.
It was only after we continued for another twenty minutes that I realized that Ulaanbaatar was similar to Rio in the fact that the center of the city was modernized, with tall buildings and public works, while the outer rims were where the poorest people lived.
We reached a wide boulevard with more Soviet Bloc apartments. There were lots of Korean restaurants too, karaokes, everything from English to Cyrillic plastered across some of the buildings, a few surprise American restaurants as well such as McStarbucks and Wendy’s Hut.
I even saw a billboard for Krunkin’ Kronuts.
America runs on Krunkin!
We came to a traffic circle, Mongolian drivers making up their own traffic rules as they zipped around each other fighting for the exit points.
Dorj swerved around a public bus that was hooked up to an electric line above it, the bus driver shaking his fist and yelling something out the window, an unlit cigarette perched on his bottom lip.
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