The Breakers Code

by Conner Kressley

  “Morgan, the girl is a Capricorn.”

  “She isn’t!” He said it so loudly that I wondered why it mattered so much. “I accessed the records at the hospital in Chicago where she was born. Her birthday is in March.”

  “Stop it. That girl drips Capricorn. Even a youngling could see that. You-“

  That’s enough!” I heard a loud clanging, like Echo had punched the wall or something. Instinctively, I jerked away from the door. ”I don’t like what you’re insinuating.”

  “Then maybe I should just say it.” I could hear the tears in Dahlia’s voice, even though, try as I might, I couldn’t actually picture someone like her crying. “It takes two Breakers to have a Breaker baby. Did you really think Ash just ran away and happened to find a husband who had those inherent traits; those exceedingly rare traits? You know better than that. That girl is a Capricorn. Ash was pregnant when she faked her death.”

  The breath caught in my throat, and not because of asthma.

  “You’re keeping Cresta here for the same reason you don’t want to have this conversation; because you know there’s a chance that she’s your daughter.”

  Chapter 11

  Why Nine Year Olds Don’t Get Tattoos

  Dahlia ran out of the tower after she dropped the bombshell. Echo went t after her. It was for the best because, if they hadn’t, I’m sure I would have burst out of that closet with my mouth open asking for an explanation.

  Echo could be my father. The thought rolled around in my head, wrecking whatever serenity had managed to survive the last few days. I spit the idea out as I exited the closet and the tower. This wasn’t something I was even going to entertain. Sure, my whole world had upended. I was a closet freak with superpowers I still hadn’t begun to broach, and my mother was a runaway from a secret cult. But I knew my father. I knew him in my bones, in my DNA. He was there when I was born, and I was there when he died. No one was going to take him from me.

  But was Dahlia right? If it took two people with Breaker DNA to give birth to a Breaker, then my dad must have had the DNA. But, if he had, why wasn’t he in the Hourglass with the other Breakers? Did my mom know my dad had special DNA? Is that why she settled down with him?

  I shook my head hard, trying to clear it. There were too many questions I couldn’t answer, too many moving parts to my life that I had no idea about. I stumbled back toward the main building. Echo and Dahlia were gone, which was fine with me. If I had seen them, I’d have probably started screaming or crying or something.

  I turned back to the tower, but it too had disappeared, taking the girl with the pale skin with it. She had brought me here. The thought slammed into my mind like a semi-truck. She wanted me to hear what Dahlia said about my mother, but why?

  And who was she anyway? Who was the girl in the tower?

  As I made my way back into the common area, blackened and still empty, I remembered what Dr. Static had said when I asked about her.

  A seer’s tower?

  Is that what that was? Was the girl watching me from the window a seer? Another piece of tonight solidified in my mind. It was what Echo said to Dahlia in the heat of their argument.

  You and I have done the greatest thing two people could ever do together. We gave birth to a Seer.

  The seer was their daughter. Is that why she was here, hidden away from everyone? But what kind of people kept their daughter in a tower?

  A sickening thought came to me. If she was their daughter, and there was a chance that Echo was my father, did that mean I had a sister?

  “Shouldn’t you be in bed?”

  I jumped. Turning, I saw Owen sitting cross-legged on the couch. My mind had been running so frantically that I hadn’t noticed him there, or the Wonder Knife infomercial playing on the television in front of him.

  It slices. It dices. It even cuts through stainless steel!

  His face was less puffy, but still bruised. His nose was swollen and there were gashes above his left eyebrow and on his left arm. Part of me wanted to run to him, to wrap my arms around him, and tell him everything that was going on; like we were back in Crestview and he was listening to me complain about the way everything closes at 9 o’clock, even on the weekends. But we weren’t back in Crestview, and Owen wasn’t the person I could talk about stuff with anymore. Maybe he never had been.

  I stopped, frozen where I stood. Careful not to meet his eyes, I said, “It’s really none of your business.”

  Watch the Wonder Knife cut through a steel pipe with ease!

  He stood, slowly like he was in a lot of pain, but didn’t come any closer. “I guess I deserve that.” He ran a hand through his hair and let it rest at the nape of his neck, where his dark hair curled up in ringlets. Given the position of his arm, I could see a huge bruise that had been hidden before. I tried not to bristle, but I mustn’t have done a good job, because he answered my expression. “I’m okay. Really I am.”

  “I didn’t ask.” I regretted the sharpness in my tone as soon as the words came out, but the wince that settled between his eyes told me it was too late to take it back.

  “I know,” he answered in a small voice. “Look, there are things we need to talk about, things I want to explain.”

  It’s so sharp it even cuts through brillo pads with ease!

  “There really isn’t,” I held my hands out in front of me, telling him to stop. “I saw it all. I watched that weird movie disc that Echo pulled out of your head. I know what happened.”

  The news seemed to stun him. He lowered back down onto the couch and stared at me for a second with his hands wrapped around his shoulders like I had just seen him naked or something.

  “Okay,” he finally said, shaking his head. “So you know now. You know that I didn’t know what was going to happen. You know that I would have never ever intentionally done something that would have hurt you.”

  “Hurt me?” Now the sharpness in my voice was intentional. “You lied to me for two years. You sold yourself as someone you’re not. You passed yourself off as my friend. You made me feel things that-“

  I turned my back to him, suddenly feeling like I was naked too. “Look,” I said, closing my hand into a ball. “I know you pulled me out of that fire, I know you tried to save my mother, and I appreciate that. But I don’t know you. I never really did. And, whether you meant to or not, everything that happened was your fault. If not for the things you did, my mom would still be alive.”

  “Don’t you think I know that? This is killing me. If I could take it back, if I could trade places with her and bring her back to you, I swear to God, I swear on fate, that I would. You have to believe me.”

  His voice grew closer now. He was off the couch, walking toward me. He touched my arm lightly, letting his fingers rest at my elbow. “Please look at me, Cress.”

  There had been so many times that his touch, that those fingers had lit me up; so many times that I had lain awake at night, thinking about him accidentally grazing my shoulder or brushing the hair out of my eyes with his thumb. Those nights, in my bed, I thought that touch could fix everything. But now, now I didn’t know what to think.

  “No,” I said through clenched teeth, tears flowing hot down my raw tired cheeks. “I don’t have to believe you. I don’t have to do anything for you, because I don’t know you!” I turned to him, though I don’t think the growing rage in my eyes was what he expected when he asked me to look at him. “You’re not Owen. You’re not even real. You’re some weird half person cult baby who thinks it’s okay to screw with people’s lives. I’m sick of being lied to and I’m sick of lairs. Whoever you are, I’m not interested. Whatever you think there is between us, there isn’t. “

  He reared away from me, like my words were bullets or the Wonder Knife and he were that poor brillo pad, but I didn’t stop. I couldn’t; not now.

  “I don’t know what my life is going to look like Owen, and don’t even know what I am anymore.”

  It slices!

  “But I
do know one thing. Whatever I do, whoever I become; you won’t be a part of it.”

  It dices!

  “And don’t call me Cress,” I said, turning away from him. “Only my friends get to call me Cress.”

  It breaks your heart.

  When I got back to my room, I found another note sitting on my bed. Opening it, I found it was in a code similar to the last one. Once again, the letters reached out to me, begging me to read them.

  Destroy the clover, mourn the flicker, mind the ring .

  The Girl in the Tower.

  Sighing,I crumpled it up, and threw it away.

  The next week went by as a sort of dance between the strange and mundane. I started taking classes at Weathersby. Some, like Advanced Algebra, were almost page for page the sort of thing I left back at DeSoto. Others, Dr. Static’s Implementation of Prophecy for example, were things that no one back in Crestview could have ever dreamt up.

  Dr. Static taught us about seers; how they were like the top of the Breaker food chain; how, because they’re so evolved, they’re by far the rarest type of Breaker to be born, and that, without seers, the other Breakers wouldn’t be able to do their jobs and the world would sink into utter chaos.

  It was a cheery class.

  There had only been two times since the beginning of recorded history that the world had gone without seers, Dr. Static told us. Those times became known as The Dark Ages and World War 2. So, you know, I guess he made his point.

  Hearing about seers got me thinking about the one seer I had ever…well, seen. It was no good though. Thinking about the girl in the tower only got me thinking about Echo and the connection that the two of us might share.

  To that end, I did my best to dodge him. I couldn’t bear to look at him at the moment, to think about what might or might not be true, to wonder about why our eyes were the same color. If I didn’t ask him the question, then he couldn’t answer it. And if he couldn’t answer it, I could go on pretending the entire idea was ridiculous.

  The closest I came to broaching the subject was when I worked up the nerve to ask Dr. Static if it was possible that a Breaker might go out into the world, find some random to shack up with, and get a Breaker kid out of the deal.

  Though he seemed a little taken aback by my use of ‘shack up’, he conceded that it was “theoretically possible, I suppose, though the odds are infinitesimal.”

  I stopped listening after possible. With possible, I could manage. With possible, I could hang on to the shredded tether of normalcy that was left to me. I could deal with possible, even if it was just theoretical.

  That did mean that I had to steer clear of Echo though. One wrong word and he’d probably know something was up. Then his weird Breaker powers would pull the truth out of me like a shiatsu with a rubber hot dog. That was pretty easy though. What with the insane amount of classes I was going to (I swear, there were like ten a day), I was busy enough that running into him was never a real problem. Besides, he wasn’t the only one I was trying to stay away from.

  Since my blowup with Owen, I had done my best to try to put him out of my mind. I would just focus on my classes, focus on this crazy secret world that had just opened up at my feet, and then I wouldn’t have to think about him. I wouldn’t have to think about the deep blue pools of his eyes or the way his lips always curled when he said my name. I wouldn’t have to think about the way his arms bulged under his shirt sleeves, or the nape of his neck, or the small of his back….

  No. I wasn’t thinking about any of that.

  To his credit, he made it easy on me. Whenever we had to share the same space, he was always careful to keep his distance. When we were at lunch, he’d always sit by himself off to the side. Platters would be served to him, which he would barely touch, and I only caught him looking at me twice.

  I, on the other hand, was routinely surrounded by friendly faces. It was like we had slipped into some kind of bizzaro DeSoto land where I was the popular one and Owen was the outcast. I couldn’t go three seconds without someone introducing themselves or offering to show me around. They were even cool about Casper, who was taking to this whole thing so much better than me.

  Turned out there was a certain cache to being a human inside the Breaker world. Crazily enough, most of them had never met someone who wasn’t a Breaker before. Casper was an oddity, a rooster in the henhouse. They had countless questions for him; about the way humans thought, the things they liked to do, about what a Kardashian was. Casper was the most popular guy around, and he ate it up, especially from the girls.

  The only person who was in higher demand than my ginger haired best friend was me. My story, or the pieces of my story that weren’t still shrouded in mystery, became the only thing anybody talked about. I was the Breaker from the other side of the tracks; the prodigal daughter whose secret life literally exploded when the truth came out. Everybody seemed to have a theory about why my mom kept me hidden all these years.

  Teera, a large girl who introduced herself by taking half of my chicken kabob, thought Mom had grown tired of her life as a Breaker and, when her mission went south and she saw a way out, took it. She didn’t say it, but there was something in Teera’s voice that made me think she would do the same thing if given the chance.

  Edison, a bookish boy with golden spiked hair, said that a lot of people thought Mom must have had an affair and, knowing that genetic testing after my birth would prove it, decided to bolt instead of staying and facing the shame. Of course, he wasn’t one of the people who thought that.

  Jackson thought I was an alien. “A really pretty one, but an alien all the same.”

  None of them, it seemed, thought that my dad was actually my dad. That was too out there even for them.

  The one part of my story that didn’t spark any debate was Owen. Everyone, every single person I talked to, painted him as an idiot. He wasn’t malicious. He wasn’t trying to destroy me or my family. They didn’t give him enough credit for that. He was just the Breaker that got tricked, the boy who should have known better, the guy who let his ambition get the better of him and, in doing so, shamed his family. Maybe that’s why everybody kept their distance from him; they didn’t want the embarrassment to rub off on them.

  I wanted to feel for him, even if I couldn’t bring myself to actually tell him so. But I still wasn’t sure how I felt about him, about everything. And besides, I had more than enough to keep me busy.

  Once the ‘asthma medicine’ had worked its way out of my system, I started noticing weird things. First off, the symptoms of my asthma, the shortness of breath, the closing throat, all vanished. Then a veil seemed to lift from my mind. It was like I was waking up from a long sleep or something. Pieces of my brain I didn’t know I had clicked on, and the results were pretty huge.

  On Monday, I learned French…the entire language. On Tuesday, I took, and completed, Beginner’s Geometry, Biology, and Physics. On Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, they crammed as much world history into my mind as possible. I started seeing cyclical patters in time. History really did repeat itself. I started seeing patterns in everything else too. German came easy because I already knew French. Putting what I learned to use, I cracked Russian in half an hour. I was a machine, and what was more, I enjoyed it.

  It was like, since my mind had gone so long denying everything it could do, it was thirsty for the knowledge. I soaked it up like a sponge and licked the bowl when I was done. It was gratifying, like scratching a decade old itch that I had never noticed before. These connections, Dr. Static said, were only the first steps in what I would eventually become. Once my mind managed to push past the confines of what it had been trained to do my entire life, I’d start to feel the real effects of being a Breaker. Maybe I’d be able to move things with my mind, like Ezra. Maybe I’d be a human lie detector, like Echo. Or maybe I’d be a superhumanly frigid bitch, like Dahlia.

  Though it took most Breakers years to fine-tune their strengths and coax out their abilities, they wer
e much younger when they started. Dr. Static told me that my own progress would be a little trickier to gauge. I was older, which meant my mind was more set in its ways. But it also meant that I presumably had a maturity that many of Breakers didn’t when they were just learning the basics at four or five. Which was a good thing, if being told you’re probably more mature than a five-year-old was even a compliment.

  The point was I had things to keep my mind busy; busy enough that I didn’t have to think about Owen, Echo, the girl in the tower, or that fact that nine days after she left, Merrin still hadn’t returned. She had said it would take her two hours; that, in that time, she’d pull apart every secret hiding in Crestview. Maybe she was just bragging though. Maybe she wasn’t being literal and this sort of thing took time. Or maybe what she found in Crestview was so big that she had to stay awhile. Maybe whoever was after me was so unexpected, so impressive and intimidating, that it was taking this long just to feel them out.

  It had been two weeks since Casper and I had driven up to Weathersby’s gates, and I still hadn’t really found a footing. I began to think that maybe the kids at DeSoto High hadn’t been the problem. Maybe it wasn’t that they were small town. Maybe I was just closed minded. It certainly felt that way to me, because no matter how many perfectly cool looking Breakers walked up to me and offered friendship, I just wasn’t interested. Even Jackson; a cool little kid by anyone’s standards, wasn’t someone I’d consider a friend.

  So, I suppose it shouldn’t come as a surprise that, as I walked down the hall of the common area, waving at the rock-climbing, arrow-shooting, and holographic puzzle-solving Breakers that I passed, the only thing I really wanted to do was veg out with Casper in front of the TV.