“But if Janis is able to plant that alternate future…,” Scott said.
“Yes, that would alter her read. The Witch will believe their victory inevitable. I’m not sure about the immediate future, though. In a confrontation like what we’re discussing, actions will change from moment to moment. Her vision may remain clear on a shorter time horizon, which means one of our goals would be finding her early and taking her out.”
Janis felt the collective attention in the room round toward her. Taking out the leader would be her job.
“As the longest-standing members, the Witch, Titan, and Shadow constitute the core of the group. The remaining three are recent additions, as far as I can tell. First up is a member called Techie.”
Janis groaned. “Scott and I have had the pleasure. The Walkman the Scale gave Jesse? He used that to lure us to a transmission station a few days ago and then ambush Scott with some sort of energy blast.”
“Blew me clear into the cosmos,” Scott added.
“That’s his skill,” Reginald said, nodding. “Computers, electronics, mechanical contraptions.”
As Reginald spoke, Janis felt a wave of anxiety and claustrophobia issue off him. She picked up a sensation of being cuffed and bolted to the contraption she and Scott had found the old man imprisoned in. It felt worse than awful, but Reginald gave no outward signs.
“I’ve only met him once,” he continued. “It was after Titan and Shadow ambushed me. I was pretty well drugged, but I remember him talking while he worked. Going on and on about a battle suit he was building, and how he’d be taking a more active combat role soon. The others didn’t seem to think much of him, but we can’t rule him out as a combatant.”
“Good,” Scott muttered. “I was hoping for a rematch.”
“The remaining two I’ve not encountered. What I can glean of them comes from their names and brief mentions by the Witch. One goes by Shockwave, who, by my best estimate, is able to propagate disturbances through air and matter—to destructive effect. The other is named Minion. I don’t have more information there, unfortunately, but if the name is to be taken literally, it could suggest the person is capable of spawning other beings.”
Janis shuddered at the thought of miniature demons screaming toward her.
“How did the Champions Program miss the new ones?” Margaret asked.
“Our methodology isn’t perfect,” Kilmer said. “Some were bound to fall through.”
“I’m still not crazy about the odds,” Scott muttered.
Director Kilmer brought his folded hands to his lips, as though deciding whether or not to disclose something. “I’m going to make a couple of calls,” he said at last. “There are … other teams besides the Champions.”
Janis and Scott looked at one another, then back at Kilmer.
“Wait,” Scott said. “Repeat that, please.”
“As I said, our methodology for locating Specials isn’t perfect, but it’s a far cry from what we did the last time. Then, it was a matter of following up on rumors.” He tilted his head toward Reginald. “A boy who could mold his facial features. A fire starter. A mind-reading girl. With this generation, our research arm was able to anticipate in which individuals special abilities were most likely to manifest. We located six Specials the last time. This time, we found nineteen of you.”
“Nine-nineteen?” Scott stuttered, sounding like the popular song without meaning to. “Where are the others?”
“My idea was to split you up, compartmentalize you. If one group was discovered, there would still be the remaining two. The others were separated into Alpha and Beta units and placed in model neighborhoods. The exact same setup as this one, just in other parts of the country.”
Janis caught herself marveling at the idea of other Oakwoods, other Specials.
“We can use them, then, right?” Scott asked.
The skin around Kilmer’s eyes crimped in what appeared despair. “I underestimated the Scale and its reach. The other teams were targeted, too. Of the thirteen Specials on those teams, only four remain—and they’ve gone into hiding. It’s also worth noting that they had yet to attain the same level of training and experience as your team. Remember, you found us out before we were prepared. We had to move up the timetable with your group.”
For a moment, Janis was back in a hospital bed, a healing presence moving through her, restoring her to life. A light blazed on in her head. “When I was in intensive care in Germany, one of them came to help me, didn’t they?”
“That’s right, Janis,” Kilmer said. “I broke protocol to get her over there, but I don’t regret it for a second. Her name was Naomi. As an older member, she had already begun her training.”
His use of past tense, as well as the slight wobble in his voice, chilled her. “She’s no longer with us, is she?”
“I’m afraid not.”
Tears stood in Janis’s eyes as she thought of all those young lives ended and the agony their families must be going through. She snuck a peak at Tyler, who was sitting with one elbow on the armrest, his face without expression. She didn’t need to use her powers to know he had drawn in on himself—a skill he’d no doubt mastered at a young age. The blows just kept on coming.
“I’ll try to talk to the other Program directors,” Kilmer said. “See if they have any members they’d be willing to send. I’ll tell you right now, though—it’s a hell of a long shot.”
Janis blinked and cleared her throat. “With or without them, I’m game.”
Tyler raised the fingers of his propped-up arm. “Count me in.”
“Me, too,” Scott said, squeezing Janis’s hand.
All eyes shifted to Margaret, who had wrapped a length of hair around her finger. She released the strand and sighed. “Look, it’s past midnight. Do I at least get a few hours to sleep on it?”
Janis turned to Kilmer. “How much time do we have to prepare?”
“The confrontation would need to happen before the twenty-second, obviously, but there’s also the question of how long I can keep the president at bay. He still thinks Steel is in charge. If he were to find out what’s really happening, all bets would be off.”
“Fine,” Margaret said in barely repressed exasperation. “I’m in.”
Janis caught her eye and nodded. I’m glad, she said.
Margaret’s tensed expression let out a little.
“I don’t think I need to remind you how dangerous the Scale is,” Kilmer announced. “How deadly. Once Janis plants the false future in the Witch’s vision, there will be no turning back. They’ll come, and they’ll come in force. We’re going to do everything in our power to tilt the confrontation in our favor, but there are no guarantees. Does everyone understand?”
Janis and the others voiced that they did.
“All right,” Reginald said, clapping his thick hands once before rubbing them together. He fixed his preternaturally blue eyes on Janis. “When can you be ready with that hack?”
Janis studied his gaze. She saw hope and the scars of heartbreak.
“As soon as it’s needed,” she replied.
38
Tuesday, December 31
10:30 a.m.
Janis hovered a foot above the center of her bedroom floor with her legs crossed, eyes closed.
At first all she could feel was the furniture she’d pushed to the walls of her room and a house without her parents—they, along with the other parents, had been relocated to a safe location. But gradually, Janis began picking up familiar riffles of energy. Images accompanied them. Her early years in the same bedroom. A time of trading cards, grass-flecked soccer shoes, scraped knees. A time when Janis still believed herself normal. Nostalgia rose inside her like a tide.
No time for that, she scolded.
She waded beyond the currents of her bedroom and swam out to where time barely existed. A black sea. That was where she had felt the Witch in the past.
With her clairvoyant vision, the Witch could peer into the
waters and interpret their currents and patterns much more clearly than Janis could. To Janis, the plane was inscrutable—calm and chaotic at once. But by tapping into the Witch’s vision, Janis would be able see what she saw and alter it. And that’s where the Champions hoped to turn the Scale’s advantage into their own.
Janis stopped breathing. Speak of the devil.
A pair of red eyes loomed above the waters like blood-red suns. A foulness emanated from them, the smell of disemboweled fish. Janis ignored the odor and aligned her awareness with the Witch’s.
A mind-bending sensation of inversion followed. In the next moment, Janis was peering through a red haze. A smoky or mist-covered battle field opened below her. The ground was torn up, as though a cyclone had blown through. A confusion of figures moved in and out of view. It appeared to be a battle without resolution. Janis sensed the Witch straining to make sense of it.
At one end of the field stood a giant oak tree. Janis recognized the tree. It was in the Grove, where their confrontation with the Scale was to take place. But how could the Witch be seeing it? Janis had yet to plant the images that would draw the Scale to the Grove in the first place.
Unless…
The strange logic came to Janis. The Witch was seeing a future that included Janis having already planted the images—a future that had leaped the others in the hierarchy of probabilities the moment Janis contacted Reginald. Its confusion was no doubt owed to the fact that what was being perceived wasn’t a real future, but a superimposition of images.
Need to act before Witchy Woman comes to the same realization.
Janis took a moment to calm herself. She then called forth the images. With Reginald’s help, she had spent the last two days constructing them and then converting them into what she thought of as energetic files, easy to retrieve.
The files represented two alternatives. Janis began with the first, opening and decompressing it, linking it to the Witch’s vision. Images rolled out in a sequence. They showed every move by the Scale being thwarted by a reconstituted Champions Program. The money transfer would fail; the Soviet Union would fall; the U.S. would declare victory; the Cold War would end. Janis had made the associated images as clear and evocative as possible so as to leave no doubt that the future the Witch was perceiving was a highly probable one.
From a distance, Janis thought she felt the Witch recoil, then lean in.
Now to throw her the apparent lifeline, Janis thought.
She unpackaged the alternate future. The first images showed the Champions members up in the Grove, gathered around a smoking barbecue grill. A date flashed, Sunday, January 5th. In the next images, the Scale appeared, catching the Champions off guard. A battle ensued.
One by one, the Champions fell until only Scale members were left standing. In the aftermath, the money transfer was executed. The U.S.S.R. pushed back into Eastern Europe; the U.S. dug in along the former front; and the Cold War resumed for the foreseeable future.
Janis expected to feel relief coming from the Witch; instead, she picked up a tenseness wrought from suspicion. The dual futures played out again, like movie reels. First one, then the other, the Witch poring over them. As the Witch’s suspicions grew, so did the stench of foul fish.
Janis prayed.
Surely she had left the Witch with no choice, she thought in growing anxiety. If she wanted the optimal outcome, she would have to send her team to the Grove, right? The Witch’s gaze slashed here and there now, as though searching for futures beyond the two Janis had planted.
With their next blink, the eyes vanished.
Janis tumbled into the inscrutable black sea of energy, tossing and turning until she washed up in the shallows of her bedroom. She opened her startled eyes and landed with a thud from her hover.
“Ouch!” She leaned to one side to massage her tailbone.
Reginald, who had been waiting in Margaret’s room, opened the door and peeked in.
“How’d it go?” he asked.
Janis pushed herself to her feet and limped once. “I managed to plant the futures, and the Witch definitely absorbed them. I’m just not sure how convinced she is. What does that do to our planning?”
“Not a thing. Unless you’d prefer hamburgers on that grill to hotdogs.”
“So, you think it took?” she asked uncertainly.
“As well as it’s going to.” Reginald turned her desk chair around and sat down. “The Witch has survived as long as she has by being suspicious. It’s her nature. That’s why I wanted you to do this a few days ahead of time. It’ll give us longer to prepare, but it also gives her a few days to think things over. To decide whether the risk of putting her entire team in play is worth the reward—or if there’s another way.”
“How will we know?”
“We’ll either see them up there Sunday, or we won’t.”
“But you think we will,” she stated.
Surprise flashed across his face, and for a moment it was as though he was seeing someone else. “I don’t know why, but I forgot you could do that.” He cleared his throat. “Yes, I think they’ll come.”
Janis lowered herself to the edge of her bed. “I can feel other things about you, Reginald. If I hadn’t reached you through the rapport, you were preparing to eliminate a Champion.”
“Preparing to,” he said. “Yes.”
She studied his eyes. “Which one?”
“Christmas morning, when I had the five of you in my sights? I went Champion to Champion looking for you, and I’ll tell you something, Janis. Had it come to it, had you not reached me the night before, I couldn’t have fired on any of you. I just couldn’t have done it.”
His gaze remained steady on hers, and Janis saw the truth beyond.
“I feel something else,” she said.
Reginald’s brow furrowed.
“You’re out of medicine. You gave the Program a blood sample, hoping they’ll be able to extract enough to engineer a version for the rest of us, but it won’t be ready in time for you.”
The fissure between Reginald’s eyebrows deepened as they pushed further together. He looked like he was going to say something, but then he relaxed his expression and nodded.
“How much time do you have?” she asked.
“About a week.”
“You sacrificed a lot to find us, to help us, and I…” Janis swallowed around the knot of emotion in her throat. “I just don’t want that to get lost in all of the preparations. I appreciate what you’ve done. We all do. And there’s a person who would have been especially proud of you, I’m sure.”
His smile was tender. “Thank you, Janis.”
“So,” she said, standing, “you think we’ll be ready?”
Reginald’s gaze moved past her face, a resolve taking hold in his eyes. He nodded slowly as he stood, as though to himself or someone unseen. Then he clapped a large hand around her shoulder.
“Damn right the Champs will be ready.”
39
“We are the chosen, duty bound to maintain order and balance and to defeat any and all who would oppose our purpose. We are the Scale.”
As the group incantation fell off, the Witch dabbed the fluid that had seeped from the corners of her eyes. Concealed beyond the outer reaches of candlelight, she looked down at the towel. Dark spots of blood stared up at her. When she swallowed she could taste it, coppery in the back of her throat. Desperate to strengthen the web, she had fed more power into the incantation than she should have. She’d had no rest for the past days. Not since her vision.
She raised her eyes to the team arranged before her. “Never has the imperative of who the Scale are, of what we do, been more stark,” she said. “We stand at a cross road. Along one axis lies fire and ash. Charred bone. World damnation. Utter ruin. Along the other axis, salvation.”
The Witch had been glad for the recent clarity. But it was the suddenness that bothered her, the futures seeming to manifest out of nowhere. What new action had set them in motion?<
br />
“These things I have foreseen,” she finished, wincing as a pair of hooks scraped the backs of her eye sockets.
“I thought the money transfer was all set.”
The Witch squinted through the blood film until a figure came into focus. She stood in the back of the room, bandages bulking out around the left strap of a black tank top. The Witch’s men had told her about the shooting and Reginald’s escape. Indeed, the Witch suspected his escape had, in one way or another, led to the sudden visions.
“Shadow,” the Witch said thinly. “How nice of you to join us.”
“Is the transfer on or isn’t it?”
Titan heaved his upper body around to look from the Witch to Shadow. The others did the same. Techie, whose job it would be to execute the transfer in two weeks’ time, picked at his dry lips.
The Witch felt the web wobble.
“That will depend on you,” she answered, fresh blood welling into her vision. She paused before going on. She had game planned alternatives, but the futures that held the most clarity, the most certainty, were the ones that had visited her two mornings before. “The hero team known as the Champions is crippled but not crushed,” she went on. “That might have gone differently had a couple of you done as your were told. But no matter—the past is not what concerns us now. Two days hence, the remaining Champions will gather. The Scale will be there. We will execute our strike quickly, precisely, and exactly as I instruct you. Following the strike, the Champions will be no more. Then and only then will the transfer proceed as planned. The axis to salvation will be realized. Balance restored.”
Shadow laughed.
“Is something funny?” the Witch asked.
“You’re damn right something’s funny.” She laughed again—a humorless sound meant to cut rather than cheer. “You’ve fallen for their ploy. You’re seeing exactly what they want you to see.”
Hot bands of anger winched the Witch’s brow. “Who is they, and to what are you referring?”
“The girl, Janis. The one you wanted killed. She planted those images.”
XGeneration (Book 6): Greatest Good Page 22