by R. T. Lowe
“That’s why I love you,” Felix said, sitting up and taking the bagel and coffee from her as she took a seat on the other end.
Lucas and Harper, carrying coffees of their own, mumbled, “Hey,” and sat down stiffly in the chairs, Harper across from Felix, smiling nervously.
“You’re not hurt?” Harper asked, uncomfortably, eyes roaming over Felix.
“Hurt?” Felix said, confused.
“Your wounds,” Allison reminded him. She leaned back and put her feet on the marble-topped table in the center of the seating arrangement. “I told you guys not to worry.” Her eyes flitted over to Felix and her face broke out in a big smile. “How did I not notice your questionable attire last night?”
“Well those goddamn Numbered Ones trashed what I had on,” Felix said with a mouthful of bagel, glancing down at his elbow patched flannel shirt and paint spotted cargo pants ripped at the knee and lined with pockets along the sides for brushes and tools. He laughed and added, “You think it’s easy finding clothes when you’re my height?”
“Finding?” Allison raised her eyebrows at him.
“I might have stolen them from a clothes drop-off on Fourteenth,” Felix admitted.
“You’re stealing clothes from the poor?” Allison frowned disapprovingly and shook her head. “Look at what you’ve become.”
“I’ll take them back if it’ll make you feel better.” Felix smiled at her over his coffee.
“It would definitely help me sleep at night,” Allison joked. “Speaking of which, how’d you sleep?”
“Okay.” Felix looked away from Allison and tore into his bagel. He hadn’t really. He’d been up since four, worrying about how this might go, thinking about the various ways they could react, and fearing where it might lead. For all his abilities, he was as blind to the future as everyone else.
Harper and Lucas sat silently on the edges of their chairs, holding their coffees, not drinking, still wearing their coats.
“Where’s Caitlin?” Felix asked, chewing on his bagel, his gaze moving to the doorway. Her reaction was the one that concerned him the most, and even though he understood the difficulty of assimilating everything that had happened yesterday, he wasn’t eager to see that fearful, revolted look in her eye again.
“Gone,” Allison answered, frowning. “Took her luggage and her Louis. Didn’t even text. I can’t believe I didn’t wake up. Must’ve been exhausted. I thought she might do something like that.”
Harper looked down at her phone. “I’ve been texting her, but nothing yet. She might still be on the plane if she’s headed home.”
Felix groaned inwardly. Caitlin all alone in California without his protection was bad enough, but she’d fled still thinking he was a monster and hadn’t given him an opportunity to explain himself. He wondered if she would ignore Allison’s warning and confide in her parents. He knew they were close. Would she come back to campus? It would be easy for her to stay home with the school giving everyone the option to take their classes online.
“Don’t worry about Little C,” Lucas said. “She’s tough. She’ll be all right. Just give her a little time” Then he grinned wide. “Well let’s hear it. I have Sociology at nine and you know how crucial the second class of the semester is.”
Lucas’s smile, as usual, was infectious, and Felix smiled back, more relaxed now, his anxiety feeling less like a pool of acid churning in his gut. He thought for a moment, draining most of his dark roast, then shrugged helplessly at Allison. “Where do I even start?”
“No idea.” She drank her coffee and rested it on her lap, motioning for him to say something.
“Well,” Felix began, his mind going in ten different directions all at once, “here’s what you need to know. The world is even more fucked up than you thought. There are all kinds of things trying to kill me. Us, I mean”—he looked at Allison, correcting himself—“and now we’ve dragged you into this madness. You already know about the Numbered Ones, and the Protectors. They were there too, right? I’ll explain that in a sec. Then there’s Drestianites. They’re like me, I mean us”—Allison, the newly proclaimed Sourceror, grinned at the inclusion—“well, sort of. They’re Sourcerors, but they’re not on our side. I mean, they’re on Lofton’s side, and we’re on the other side. And the Order, the Order’s on the other side too—our side, I mean.” He gave Allison a confused look. “Are we in the Order?”
“I think the Order thinks we’re in the Order,” Allison said. “But I don’t think we’re, um, on the same page. What do you think?”
“I’m not sure I wanna have anything to do with those guys,” Felix said, realizing he was only confusing matters for his friends.
“Agreed,” Allison replied. “They kinda suck.”
Felix flicked a glance at the wall where twenty-nine ornately framed portraits of President Woodrow observed them. He wondered if the former president of Portland College had ever witnessed anything as strange as this. “I think that’s it,” he finished tentatively.
A hush settled over the room. It was quiet, perfectly quiet, not a sound from the lower floors. Not only was President Woodrow’s secret study exceedingly hard to find (besides being hidden in the darkened recesses of a corridor concealed within a bookshelf on a floor reputedly haunted by the ghosts of a Native American work crew killed during construction of the floor, the elevator stopped one level short, and the only way to access the fourth floor was an unlit cordoned off stairwell in the farthest reaches of the huge building beyond endless rows of bookcases stuffed with volumes that had most likely never been read), he’d made sure to soundproof it against the disruptive ruckus of students doing what students normally do in college libraries: study, talk, and ogle one another.
“You forgot the testers,” Allison said to him, breaking the silence.
“Right. Um, yeah, so there are these guys who go around testing kids to see if they’re Sourcerors. Like the Faceman. If you fail the test, they kill you, or at least, that’s what the Faceman was doing.”
“He stopped doing that,” Allison said, smiling coyly, “after Felix put a brick through his head.”
“You did kill him!” Lucas exclaimed, nearly dropping his coffee. “I was…right?”
Felix gave him a sheepish grin. “Sorry. I couldn’t tell you the truth. I was really, really impressed at how you figured everything out though. It was pretty amazing.”
“Thanks,” Lucas said proudly. “I appreciate the compliment. Definitely makes up for you making me feel like I was losing my mind. Just for the record, I knew something was up with you. I told them about it too. First you thought Allison was dead, then you thought I was dead, and it’s just not normal behavior to go around thinking everyone’s dead. And your goddamn nose.” He sighed. “I knew it was broken.”
Harper chewed on her lip. “It just seemed a little far-fetched. Sorry Lucas. You can’t really blame us.”
“I don’t.” Lucas smiled at Felix. “I blame him.”
“Am I the only one who’s confused?” Harper said, looking at Lucas.
Lucas grinned his big mischievous grin. “Dude,” he said to Felix, “most of that didn’t even sound like English.”
Harper nodded in agreement. “The only thing I think I understand is there are those Numbered One monsters and they’re the most awful things in the world.” Her eyes shifted back and forth between Felix and Allison, squinting. “Are you guys aliens?”
Allison laughed.
“No!” Felix shouted. “We’re Sourcerors. We’re human. We just know how to…um…we can use this thing called the Source to do, well, I guess you could say…” Frustrated with his poor attempt at an explanation, Felix raised his nearly empty cup above his head and released it, letting it fall, but before it struck the table it stopped, hovering a few inches above his half-eaten bagel. He twitched a finger and the cup darted this way and that, looping around the lamps and through the legs of the curio tables, gliding across the room, rising and descending rapidly before settling back into his
hand when he thought he’d made his point.
“Showoff,” Allison said to him, crossing her arms.
“Can you do that?” Lucas said to her, eyes wide, still staring at the cup in Felix’s hand.
Allison shook her head. “Felix is a little different than the rest of us.”
Harper was watching Felix attentively and something in her expression had changed. It wasn’t just her smile—the barest trace of which hovered on her lips—but a look in her eye he hadn’t seen since that day in his dorm room before his tragic hypnosis session with Bill had forced him to end their ‘moment’ prematurely (a moment he’d spent the semester fantasizing about from the first day of school when they’d shared beers after freshman orientation and her beauty had left him literally speechless, his tongue as dry and useless as an old piece of carpet). “What’s the Source?” she asked him.
“It’s tough to explain,” Felix replied slowly, Harper’s expression distracting him a little. “It’s at the center of everything, but it’s not like you can see it or anything like that. Everything depends on it—the whole universe. Without it, everything will just die, but it’s not like this thing that doesn’t change. It does, and now it’s really bad and if it doesn’t get fixed, we’re all dead.”
Harper and Lucas stared back at him vacantly, brows creased.
“Just tell them what the Journal says about it,” Allison suggested.
Felix didn’t need to think about where to begin. Every word in the Journal was as front and center in his mind as his birthday. He went right to the description of the Source and began to recite it. “‘I will start from the beginning. The Ancients discovered it. Some say the Egyptians were the first, others the Mesopotamians, and still others say it was the peoples who dwelled in the jungles west of the Great River. The knowledge of its discovery has been lost to time, but it was the Druids who adopted it as their god and worshipped it, unlocking its secrets. It was they who named it the Source, the wellspring from which all life flows, the energy that if darkened will extinguish the sun and all life with it. The Druids ritualized the training of those rare individuals born with the gift to draw energy from it to manipulate what most consider the natural order of things. They called them Sourcerors and they were honored above all others. It was the mightiest among them, a man named Myrddin, whose prophecy forever changed the world. Myrddin’s prophecy, known as The Warning, is a vision of the future that has been passed down through the ages. It tells us that we have a symbiotic relationship with the Source. It is not just an unalterable wellspring of energy—the Source is like a mirror that absorbs and reflects the state of humankind, constantly changing as we change. In the beginning, the Source was perfect and we were not the base creatures we are today, practically immortal, living without disease or hardship. But with each act of human cruelty, each act of human evil, we damaged ourselves, and in turn, we damaged the Source. It is a cycle that is vicious like no other. As the Source diminishes and darkens, so does human nature, heralding a final tipping point—the Suffering Times. On that day of judgment, if the Source is not healed, it will die, and none shall be left to witness its passing.’”
“Does that help?” Allison asked, watching them closely.
Lucas and Harper both nodded, tentatively, and Felix could see he’d only muddied the waters.
Allison jumped in. “Not everyone who can use the Source is good. There are two sides. There’s this guy called the Drestian who can fix the Source, but he’ll take over the world, and if you don’t follow him he’ll kill you. He’s been recruiting Sourcerors to help him and they call themselves Drestianites. We know the Drestian is Lofton Ashfield. He’s the one who’s been using testers to find Sourcerors.”
“Lofton…Lofton Ashfield!” Harper sputtered out, shocked. “Lofton Ashfield’s responsible for killing all those kids?”
“He’s responsible for everything,” Felix said. “The Numbered Ones are his. It wasn’t some secret government experiment.”
“How long have you known about all…this?” Lucas said, looking puzzled. “How did you find out?”
Felix finished his coffee, wishing he had another or at least done a better job of pacing himself. “There’s a groundskeeper here who knew my mom. He showed me a Journal last semester—my aunt’s. The whole thing about the Source I was saying, that’s where it came from—the Journal. I sort of memorized it, but don’t ask me how ‘cause I have no idea. I didn’t know anything until I read it though. This is all new for us too.”
“A groundskeeper?” Lucas asked.
Felix laughed at the look on his face. “He’s not really a groundskeeper. His name’s Bill. He’s been sort of watching over me since I was little. My mom—my real mom—had to give me up because, well, she just did, and Bill promised her he’d look after me.”
“Hasn’t stopped him from lying about everything,” Allison said bitterly.
“Not everything,” Felix said. Her anger at Bill seemed to balloon every time his name was mentioned. Allison had every right to be pissed, but sometimes he wished she would get over it or at least cut Bill a little slack.
“No,” Allison agreed, grinding her teeth. “Just the important stuff.”
“You said,” Harper began, looking at Allison, “Felix is different than everyone else. What’s that mean?”
“So I was saying there are two sides to all this—actually three, we can’t forget the Protectors—well, the Sourcerors who don’t want the Drestian to rule the world formed their own group, the Order of Belus. They called it that because the Belus is the only one, according to that old prophecy, who can stop the Drestian. We actually met the Order last night for the first time and it was, well…bizarre. They really seem like a complete shit show and neither one of us trusted them. We just had a weird feeling about the whole meeting so we basically told them nothing. So what I’m about to tell you…” Allison stopped herself short, her gaze shifting to Felix to make sure he was on board.
Harper and Lucas probably didn’t need to know everything, Felix thought, but they’d told them this much, and he either had faith in them or he didn’t. He trusted them. He trusted them completely and wholeheartedly. They were his friends and the thought of sharing a secret of such magnitude—the search for the Belus had split society into three factions that had waged a shadow war for millennia—made him feel like he was finally reciprocating that friendship. Instead of all the lies and half-truths of the past, he was finally coming clean. He was being a real friend. “Go ahead,” he said to Allison.
Allison’s eyes glittered and she gave Felix a smile. “The whole point of the Order is to find the Belus,” she explained, “and they’ve been searching for a few thousand years. Well, he’s right here.” She turned her thumb sideways at Felix and raised her eyebrows. “Felix is the Belus.”
“No fucking way,” Lucas whispered, his voice thick with awe.
“Yes fucking way,” Allison whispered back, smiling at him.
“You’re the Belus?” Harper asked, staring at Felix. Then she turned to Allison and said, “He’s the Belus?”
They both said “yes” at the same time.
“Wow,” Harper said softly and set her coffee down on an end table. “I guess.” She looked confused. “I mean, I guess I should be saying ‘wow’, right? I’m just not clear on whether I’m understanding the importance of all this. I guess, I mean, I guess I mean I think I sort of understand what you’re saying.” Her cheeks went red. “Maybe I should’ve just stopped with ‘wow.’”
“It just means he’s a major badass,” Lucas said to her. “I’m glad you’re my roomie, dude.”
Felix tried to smile. Lucas meant it, of course. He probably thought it was pretty cool to have a roommate who could liquefy a Numbered One’s face with a thought. But Lucas hadn’t had time to consider all the implications of being his friend. Once Lucas reflected on his situation and realized his life was at risk, Felix wondered if he would still think it was so awesome to be roomies.
“Cool,” Harper whispered. “But he’s not the only badass.” Her blue eyes settled on Allison. “That guy at the quarry—the Protector—why’d he try to kill you? How do they fit into all this?”
“That’s what they do,” Allison answered bitterly. “They kill people when they’re asleep or not expecting it or too young to do anything about it. They’re a real brave bunch.” She fell silent, her eyes locked on the floor.
“They’re assassins,” Felix said, realizing Allison’s hatred of the Protectors made it impossible for her to have a conversation about them. Learning they had killed her parents had clearly hit her hard, and despite Professor Malone’s warning, he wondered if she had revenge on her mind. “They”—he frowned and pulled at his lower lip, trying to articulate their philosophy—“let me back up. When I use my powers, I’m tapping into the Source. That’s how it works for me and Allison and for all Sourcerors, regardless of whose side you’re on. The Protectors believe each time a Sourceror taps into the Source, that Sourceror is stealing the Source’s energy, siphoning the life from it. They believe the Source is dying because Sourcerors are killing it. So the only way to save the Source is to kill those who are responsible. Their goal is to return the Source to its original state of perfection, and the only way to do that is to cure it of its disease. And the disease, in their eyes, is the—”
“Sourcerors,” Lucas finished. “That’s deep. Is it…is it true?”
“Is what true?” Felix asked, not understanding the question.
“Their philosophy.” Lucas looked serious. “When you use your powers, do you think you’re killing the Source?”
“Of course not,” Felix said quickly. “If we were, I think we’d, um, feel it, or know, right?” He turned to Allison for confirmation, but she was still staring at the floor, lost in thought, running her hand absently up and down her damaged arm. “The Source doesn’t work that way. It’s like a mirror. Remember what I said before? It reflects the state of humankind. People are killing it because of all the awful shit they’re doing to each other. That’s why it’s dying.”