Chris didn’t know what to say.
“Hey, what’s your favorite animal?” Emily asked.
Chris was glad for the change in subject. “Dolphins,” she replied, surprising herself. It used to be tigers. She wasn’t sure exactly when that had changed, but it had.
Emily closed her eyes before tapping on her forearm with her fingers in an odd pattern. When the girl opened her mouth, her vocal cords shaped sounds that weren’t human. The cell echoed with a series of jubilant clicking and squealing sounds that matched a dolphin’s call, a perfect impression.
Chris’s mood took an unexpected turn when she remembered a vacation in Florida back when she and her sister had been around Emily’s age. They’d swum with the dolphins, laughing at their tricks.
When Emily was done, she opened her eyes and just stood there with an expectant smile, spreading her arms wide. “You can hug me. I know you wanna.”
And it was true. That’s exactly what Chris felt like doing, but she didn’t hug her. She couldn’t.
After an awkward moment, Emily took the initiative and crossed the distance to where Chris was sitting on the cot. Someone beyond the open door yelled a word of warning, but Emily never flinched. She just wrapped her skinny arms around Chris’s shoulders.
“You don’t have to worry about me,” Chris whispered. “I’m okay. Really.” She wasn’t lying.
“Better watch yourself, Kid,” a male voice barked. The door swung open with a metallic squeal, revealing two uniformed men. “It’s time to go.”
Emily gave Chris another squeeze, ignoring the guards’ warnings. “I have something for you,” she whispered to Chris, making a mysterious face. She reached beneath her striped polo t-shirt and removed a piece of white paper, folded over and over until it was just a small square. She quickly pushed it into the pocket of Chris’s hoodie. “Look at it later, okay?”
“Kid! Enough!”
Emily stepped away from her and then turned to head for the door.
“Kid?” Chris called before she had time to stop herself.
When Emily turned to look at her, Chris picked up the yellow flower shirt from where it lay on the cot and tossed it to the girl. “You can keep this,” she said.
Emily caught the bundle with a wide grin. “Thanks!”
The guards were making a ruckus again, so Emily continued her retreat.
“Geez, take a chill pill,” she told the guards as she left the cell. The words sounded hilarious, coming from such a small person. “She’s not dangerous, okay? Trust me, I should know.”
The door slammed shut, and Chris could hear its internal locking mechanisms clicking back into place. She walked over to the small table to sit down on one of the hard chairs. The hug had been nice; she honestly couldn’t recall the last time anyone had hugged her. She hadn’t even realized how much she’d needed one until that little girl broke through her defenses.
She pulled the folded piece of paper from her hoodie pocket and considered it for a moment. Emily had asked her not to look at it until later. But why? Chris traced the edge of the small white square with her fingertip, then set it on the table. If Emily didn’t want her to look at it yet, she wouldn’t. Besides, she enjoyed the idea of having something to look forward to, even something as minor as a letter written by a little girl. If she unfolded the paper now, she’d break the magic.
With that decision out of the way, she moved back to her cot to wait for Athena. Chris didn’t know if the heroine was coming in a few minutes, hours, or even in a few days, but it didn’t matter. It wasn’t like she had anything else to do.
***
Chris must have dozed off, because she awoke to the sound of a voice calling to her over the intercom. It put her entire body in a state of alert. She sat up with one jerking movement, peering at the door through narrow eyes.
“Christina?”
Stop calling me that. The flicker of irritation which had been sitting in the back of her mind for hours flared, reminding her of how frustrating her situation was.
“Christina, may I come in?” Athena asked.
“I can’t exactly stop you, can I?” Chris said, keeping her eyes on the door rather than the intercom.
The locking mechanisms shifted and the door swung open, allowing for a draft of cool, fresh air to flow into the cell.
Chris was surprised to see the real Athena in the doorway, not just a gadget sent in her place. Instead of the suit of power armor she was usually depicted in, Athena’s petite body was wrapped in a mundane pair of jeans and a simple peasant blouse. She looked small and vulnerable without her armor. Her dark curly hair was piled in a big bun atop her head, adding a few inches to her height. Athena looked to be in her mid-twenties, with olive-hued skin and jet-black eyes to match her Greek origin. She was pretty, but not strikingly attractive. She had a weary, drained look about her as she walked across the cell to one of the chairs.
“I apologize for the delay,” the heroine said. “Things have been hectic at headquarters.” Her practiced way of speaking sounded amplified in person.
“Yeah, I get it. Distraction in South Africa,” Chris answered, wishing the woman would get to the point already. There had to be an explanation for all of this, and she wanted to hear it.
Athena’s mouth tightened. “That, among other things. There were some reports of fugitives who fled from the White Center mall location on the night of your altercation. Overseer Vega demanded that you be put on hold until the situation could be cleared up.”
“And by on hold, you mean solitary confinement,” Chris supplied icily.
“We had no other choice, Christina.”
“You could have asked, you know? Knocking me out without warning was a bit of a dick move.”
Athena didn’t disagree. She drew out the chair she was standing beside and sat down. “Samael was of the opinion that you might run if the evidence turned out not to be in your favor, and you are not exactly a slow runner.”
The remark put Chris on the defensive. “What evidence?”
“Witness testimony, mainly. Fortunately, the witnesses were cooperative, and their stories matched for the most part. You encountered a villain named Gentleman?”
Chris bought some time by arranging herself into a sitting position on her cot, her back against the wall. “Yeah. He pulled some kind of appearance shifting stunt, and so did that monster robot of his. He changed his speech, too. It was all over the top. Like he got a kick out of it.”
Athena nodded with a pensive look on her face. “Gentleman is a negotiator, the front man associated with a villain group known to us as the Conglomerate. The group was founded by Data, whom we suspect to be the creator of those machines you have seen. Gentleman had vanished and was considered dead, but your encounter suggests otherwise.”
“Machines?” Chris repeated, sitting up straighter. “You mean, there’s more than one of them?”
“We found three others, but there are likely more out there. They all detonated upon discovery, and left little in the way of data to be examined.”
“Bummer,” Chris muttered, her victory diminishing in light of the new information.
“Can you tell me what else you observed about Gentleman?”
“Um, it looked like he was planning to hire a gang. I don’t know why, though.”
“Yes. Those civilians for hire were most likely intended to support an offensive strike at some point in time. We do not know when they intended to unleash the robots, and there isn’t any evidence which shows who–or what–their target was.”
Chris was dumbstruck. As far as she knew, villains only existed in fiction which predated the Pulse. The Covenant was quick and efficient in dealing with dangerous Evolved that cropped up.
Athena was tracing the table’s edge with a fingertip. “Christina, did Gentleman try to recruit you?”
“Yeah. And I told him to go fuck himself.” A thought dawned on her. “Wait a minute. Is that why you’ve kept me locked up? Because
you think I might become a villain?”
It would make sense. It was easy to imagine how Chris’s powers might help a villain team survive a Covenant assault.
Athena shook her head, but something was gnawing at her, and she wasn’t very good at hiding it.
The heroine held up an index finger and made a circling motion in the air. A tiny metallic object detached itself from the brooch on her blouse to hover in the center of the room. When the device had positioned itself, Athena pulled her chair close to Chris’s cot.
“We cannot be overheard now,” Athena told her, meeting Chris’s eyes with her own. “I want to be honest with you, Christina. It is my own personal decision to tell you this because I think you need to understand the situation we are facing. Once you do, you will need to make a very important decision.”
Chris just nodded, unsure of how to feel about this sudden shift in the direction of their conversation. But honesty was something she could appreciate for now.
“Right now we are faced with a two-fold risk,” Athena began, drawing in a deep breath. “For the two reasons I am about to mention, the UNEOA has recently decided that rogue Evolved are no longer tolerable. The potential risk they pose is too great.”
Chris’s mind raced. Does she mean that all new transitions with rogue status are going to get locked up? She was incredulous.
“First of all,” Athena began, barely giving Chris a chance to catch her breath, “Are you aware of the Evolved disappearances in America and Europe? There have been nine confirmed cases so far, all within the past two months.”
Chris was still numb. “I heard about a couple of them in the news, I think.”
“We refer to these disappearances as going ‘off the grid,’ meaning my teammate Queenie is no longer able to locate them. There are some theories regarding the reasons for these disappearances in Europe, but those same theories do not seem to apply to the American continent. They may have been kidnapped, or they could be dead,” Athena informed her. “Regardless, we need to make sure that no one else disappears.”
“You mean there could be a serial killer and not even the Covenant knows for sure?” Chris asked, taking the thought one step further.
“Obviously, we need to get to the bottom of this, Even if they are alive and have found a way to block Queenie’s powers, we cannot have Evolved just roaming around dodging Covenant intelligence.”
Chris nodded. She felt like she was back in Mr. Kim’s chemistry lab, wanting to know all the things that were not in the curriculum, but were more immediately useful.
“Second of all, the issue of the power surges is becoming much more concerning,” Athena continued.
Chris knew about power surges. From what she gathered, they were inexplicable random bursts of energy that supercharged Evolved powers. They increased the strength and range of existing powers or, what was more uncommon, granted them new abilities. Power surges had only begun to happen recently. Newscasters and pundits had discussed the potential of detrimental post-surge side effects, but she hadn’t known that they were considered such an immediate problem.
“Did you figure out what’s causing them yet?” she asked, hoping to learn something new.
“We still lack any definitive evidence, but we do know that they are happening more frequently now. And they are posing more and more risk.” Athena looked up to check that the little device was still hovering. Satisfied, she went on. “Shadowslasher’s range increased to half a mile. He became overconfident, declared himself a god and saw fit to ‘punish’ those who opposed him. Since he was a rogue, and could not be contained, the Covenant had to cull him.”
Was he the only one they killed? Chris wondered. She hadn’t heard anything on the news, but, then again, the UNEOA would have all sorts of reasons to keep the incident under wraps. That was the kind of news that inspired mass panic.
“We had no choice,” Athena went on, watching Chris’s face. “His power had developed to the point where he could slice a two-story house in half from half a mile away.”
“What happened in South Africa?”
“Monsoon happened. His power surge created a lake the size of a town near Johannesburg. Hundreds of people have drowned. Many more are missing.”
“So that’s why Radiant and the others are over there,” Chris murmured, getting off the cot to take the chair opposite Athena at the table. Things were starting to make a little more sense now.
Athena nodded. “I am telling you all of this because we need you. As you can probably imagine, the UNEOA is concerned with these new developments. The power landscape is shifting, and we are not sure if the Covenant can stay ahead of it much longer. Just last night the small Assembly agreed to evacuate the Oracle. She was moved to a secure location which is being kept strictly confidential.”
The Oracle. Chris remembered that name because it had been all over the news for some time. The Oracle was a comatose, paraplegic Visionary. The most powerful clairvoyant in the world, in fact. Most of her prophecies had come true, though no one truly understood her predictions about the end of the world. They involved ‘the One’ and ‘the Other,’ who the UNEOA believed to be the Healer and the Antithesis. The former, everyone assumed, was Shanti. The latter had never been identified.
“Why did you move her?” Chris asked, wondering what had sparked the sudden concern for the Visionary’s life.
“To prevent a worldwide panic. If people learn of her visions of widespread devastation, who knows what lengths they will go to in order to save themselves and their families? But that is top secret information that is not to leave this room.”
Chris sat in silence as she processed Athena’s revelations. So the world is going to hell in a handbasket, and Athena thinks that I can help? Even if this was true, Chris couldn’t imagine how her force fields prevented power surges and mass panic. Maybe Athena had an idea. But if she did, she was keeping it to herself.
But if I’m not with them, they might think I’m part of the problem.
Chris’s eyes shifted to the abandoned piece of folded-up paper on the table beside her elbow. Before she made any decisions which would have a huge impact on her life, she wanted to know what the little Empath had to say.
Athena watched curiously as Chris unfolded the paper. But it wasn’t a letter. It was a drawing. Something about the pencil illustration looked eerily familiar, but she couldn’t place it. The clumsy composition clearly indicated a child artist, but the scene was identifiable enough. A giant lizard—equipped with horns, wings, and tentacles—held a broken skyscraper within its monstrous grasp as two small figures with capes opposed it. The shorter figure, labeled ‘Super Kid,’ stood closest to the giant lizard and was surrounded by a bubble which deflected the monster’s fiery breath. The larger figure extended its arms to protect the shorter companion.
Super Chris.
Chris lowered the drawing to her lap, her eyes seeking Athena’s. “You’re not giving me a choice, are you?”
The heroine didn’t flinch. “If it were up to me, I would have no problem trusting you. But you were a subject of debate even before Monsoon’s surge. And now the situation is concerning enough that all rogues, even cooperative ones, will be treated much more harshly. If you do not agree to join us, then I cannot offer you anything in terms of protection.”
Chris sighed at the irony of it all. She was a Guardian, and now she was the one who needed protection. She couldn’t help but to feel that Athena was pointing a proverbial gun at her. Sure, Chris wanted to reach the point where she could eventually face her parents without feeling like a monster. Just not like this.
“But I wanted to work on my terms,” she said quietly. To her horror, she felt tears prickling at the back of her eyeballs. She wished she had a cigarette to hide behind.
Athena leaned across the table and forced Chris to look her in the eyes. “When we spoke in the park, you asked me whether I believed you could make amends. Well, this is your chance. We are not talking about catc
hing criminals here, Christina. This is dangerous work, and I cannot guarantee any of us will make it out alive. But we are about to face a worldwide crisis, and we need all the help we can get. The next surge might very well make your hometown uninhabitable, or end tens of thousands of lives, or worse.”
Chris felt her resolve begin to crumble. Another glance down at Kid’s drawing confirmed her decision. Something about the thick pencil lines struck a chord in her. It only made sense that an Empath like Kid would know exactly how to get under her skin. Maybe she should have been irritated by that, but she could forgive a cute little girl easier than she’d ever forgive Athena or Samael.
“Fine. Introduce me to the Wardens,” Chris agreed. “But that doesn’t mean I’ll be a puppet on a string.”
“Fine. Anything else?” Athena asked, relief audible in her voice.
“I really need a cigarette.”
Athena shook her head. “Have you not heard? Smoking can kill you.”
2.1 Dancer
Zürich, Switzerland
Saturday, the 2nd of June, 2012
4:35 p.m.
Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea, Sarina thought as she looked out the car window and saw the throng of people clustered around the Maag Event Hall. There must have been thousands of people there, and they’d all come to see her.
Her heart took a sweeping dive to the bottom of her stomach so she sank down in her rear passenger seat. She wasn’t used to performing on stage, let alone for a crowd larger than even the average birthday party guest list.
Holy cow, look at them all.
The street was so congested that it was barely passable. From the driver’s seat, Danny touched the horn which cleared a path for them momentarily. As the car made its way past the front of the hall, Sarina saw a few hundred people already lined up near the Maag’s main entrance, waiting to be admitted. Another hundred or so were lined up to try their luck at the ticket window even though the marquee sign announced that the show was sold out.
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