by Natalie Reid
“How does it feel?” Tom asked, taking a step towards her.
She grabbed onto a post of the bed and hopped awkwardly in a circle so she could turn around to face him. “Well, I can feel the part of me that isn’t supposed to be there. Kind of like there’s a line being drawn between my tissue and the stuff you guys put in.”
“Does it hurt?”
She shook her head. “No more than I expect getting your chest ripped open and then sewed back together would.”
“Well since that’s never happened to me, I don’t know how to gauge that,” he retorted.
She sat herself back down on the bed. “Let’s just call it pretty darn painful.”
The corner of his mouth twitched in thought, and he took his glasses away from his eyes. His long fingers scratched at a spot on his head and got lost in his messy brown hair. Jessie looked down at her lap when she saw this. The action reminded her of the fact that his fingers had once plunged into her chest and tugged at the tissue of her heart, trying to prod and squeeze and will the life back into her. Tom seemed so unassuming, but she knew that his fingers held power even greater than hers, clamped around the trigger of the gun on her fighter plane.
“What does it feel like when you breathe?” Tom asked suddenly. He had stopped scratching at his head, but his fingers were still buried in his hair. It made it look even messier than normal, but he was so deep in thought, he didn’t seem to care.
Jessie took a careful, deep breath, and answered, “The left side hurts more than the right, but it doesn’t feel as weird as the heart.”
He nodded, and she thought about asking him what his questions were all about since it seemed like he had something troubling his mind, but she decided against it.
A small beeping emitted from Doctor Tag’s pocket, and he quickly looked down at his tablet and gave a small exclamation. “Oh! I have to get going. It seems an experiment I’m working on is showing some very promising signs.” He was about to walk through the door when he called out, “You don’t mind finishing up in here, do you Tom?”
Tag didn’t wait for his response as he let the door close behind him and ran down the polished halls in juvenile delight.
Back in the room, Jessie watched in slight confusion as Tom stashed his glasses on the top of his head and went for the wheel-chair in the far right corner of the room.
“Are we going somewhere?” she asked.
“Uh.” He rubbed a hand through his hair again. “I have a personal lab up on the tenth floor. There’s some equipment I need up there to check on something about your lungs.”
“Something about my lungs?” she repeated. “You can at least try to explain what it is you’re thinking about. I’m not a doctor, but I’m not simple either.”
His hand went from his head to the back of his neck, and Jessie could tell he was feeling uncomfortable about something. “Look,” he said, coming to stand a few feet in front of her bed. “It’s just a theory I have. I don’t think Tag would agree with me. I just want to have a closer look inside and gather a little more information so I can know if I should press forward with it or not.”
Jessie hunched forward to rest her elbows on her legs and folded her hands loosely together. She nodded, saying quietly, “So what you’re saying is, you want to get a closer look at the science experiment.”
“Yeah, I guess so,” Tom admitted. He swung his glasses back to his eyes.
She glanced up at him and raised her eyebrows. “You weren’t supposed to admit to that.”
“Did you want me to lie?”
She let her shoulders drop in exhaustion. “Let’s just get it over with.”
Tom’s lab on the tenth floor was a lot neater than she expected it would be. With the way his hair always stuck out in odd angles, and how his clothes hung lopsidedly on his shoulders, she figured that his work station would be in much the same condition. But, though she could hardly identify a single object inside, everything looked to be cleaned and in its proper place. Like many other rooms in BLES headquarters, the walls were a harsh white, and the floor was polished to a fault. There was a wide shelf that acted as a table that ran around the perimeter of the room, save for the wall with the door. On the shelves were a whole assortment of machines and screens and medical devices that were no doubt specially designed for a single, unique purpose.
Near the center of the room was a large machine that surrounded a chair. Something resembling a telescope was hooked in front of it, and appeared as if it could swing around the chair on all angles. It was here that Tom parked her wheelchair in front of. He then ran to a shelf on the wall and began to type hurriedly into a computer. Jessie felt a little stupid just sitting there, waiting for him to tell her what to do. Her eyes scanned the contents of the shelves one more time, and they stopped for a moment at a picture.
It was a digital photo frame. The screen kept fading to black, but when it came back up, it always showed the same picture. It was of a small Potentian boy standing next to his Protector. She could see the Protector’s Band on the upper left arm of the woman. She was staring down at her Potentian, placing a loving hand on his head. The Potentian had one hand curled around the band that went around his neck, much like Jessie used to do as a Potentian, and the other hand was pointing out towards something past the camera’s vision. They were standing in a forest, obviously the one that resided just outside of Aero City boarders. Light streamed in through the trees, and the floor was blanketed in pine needles and fallen leaves.
“What are you pointing to in this picture?” Jessie asked.
Tom swung around and looked over to the small frame. “How do you know that’s me?”
“Your nose and your hair are exactly the same,” she pointed out.
His eyes cast down, as if embarrassed, and he turned back to the computer. When he was finished typing, he walked over to the machine and pushed several buttons.
“Can you get up and into the chair?” he asked, studying the dials on the machine with unwavering diligence.
She stood up and carefully avoided hitting her head on the large metal machine. When she sat in the chair, it began to slowly tilt her back. She tried to relax her breathing as the cold, metal, circular end was pressed to her chest. She had been given pants and a T-shirt to wear during her recovery, but now she felt as if her shirt was hardly even there. Everything about the last couple of days felt so intrusive, and she found herself wishing for the thick material of her flight suit.
Tom said nothing as he studied the hyper-accurate X-Ray of her chest. Jessie began to grow a little apprehensive, almost worried that he would find some hidden black mass stuffed behind a lung or tangled in between two ribs, and she would be declared a Bandit then and there and rushed off to a dark room to be shot.
“Everything okay?” she asked after a while.
“You don’t get dizzy, do you?” he questioned. “Or, see things that aren’t there?”
“Well, I get dizzy if I move too fast but… I don’t think I’m seeing things that aren’t there. Why… why do you ask?”
“Just routine,” he muttered.
Tom’s head came up from the machine, and he moved the metal device away from her chest. He pushed a button, and the chair brought her head back up to a normal sitting position. However, the movement of blood away from her head had happened so fast that she found herself getting dizzy. She placed a palm to her forehead, and tilted her head down in pain.
“What happened?” Tom said, sliding past the machine to stand in front of her chair. His voice actually sounded worried.
“Just that dizziness you were talking about,” she answered in a strained voice.
He put his hands on either side of her neck, saying, “No, tilt your head back up. You’re just knocking the blood back and forth in your head.”
She slowly lifted her head back up, a little more than surprised that Tom had allowed himself to get this close to her. She looked up into his face and tried to hold his gaze, but he l
et go of her skin as if it was on fire and backed away. He didn’t get too far as his back hit the machine behind him. She looked away so she wouldn’t embarrass him anymore. She remembered what he had said about feeling weird around her, like she was the dead come back to life. Luckily his tablet beeped, and he took it out, grateful to focus on something else.
“Oh. I have to go,” he announced. “Stay right here, I’ll be back in a minute.”
She scrunched her brow in confusion, wondering where he thought she could get off to. When he had gone, she made the arduous journey from the machine’s chair to her wheel chair, and began to drive herself over to the shelf with the photo frame. She had been to the forest in the picture several times on military training camps. In fact, it was above the forest that she had first learned how to fly. It seemed such a stark contrast to the metal of Aero City just a few miles away. She was about to pick up the picture when she realized that Tom would probably hate her even more for doing so. So she backed away from it and wheeled herself to the center of the room. She was still sitting there when the door opened a few minutes later.
Jessie looked up, expecting to see Tom coming through the door, but was surprised when a pair of strikingly blue eyes met hers. For some unexplainable reason, her breath caught as she stared into the silent emotion that seemed to be coming from these eyes. And then information came to her in slow streams, as if it was being dripped into her like an IV. This was a boy. No, a Potentian. He had a band around his neck. He looked to be ten or eleven—just a year or two before evolution. His hair was jet black and falling just above his eyes, and his skin was incredibly pale. But the most astounding thing was that his Protector was nowhere to be seen. Behind this Potentian, Tom followed closely, wheeling in a small machine that held the same insignia that all Protector’s Bands were inscribed with.
Jessie’s eyes had not left this boy’s since he came in, and he surprised her by holding her gaze. Not only holding it, but he seemed to be trying to speak to her with his eyes. Whatever it was they were trying to communicate felt so tragic. It was this feeling that held Jessie captive and made her unable to turn away.
“Ehh,” Tom exclaimed suddenly, feeling around in his pockets. “Forgot one thing. I’ll just be a moment.”
With that, he was out the door, leaving Jessie alone with this Potentian. Briefly her eyes moved to the machine beside him. She always knew that there were those Protectors that didn’t want to deal with their Potentians. It was why the city passed the Independence Clause, stating that someone could only be declared human if they could live freely and independently without aid from any other person. Though it was rare up on the air-base, she also knew about the three stages of termination, from pre-birth, post-birth, all the way to sentient termination. But she had no idea that a Potentian as fully grown as this boy could be given up by their Protector.
So many questions ran through Jessie’s head. She wanted to ask if he was alright; what it was that he was doing here. She wondered if he knew that he was going to die now that his Protector was no longer giving him the life support he needed. But she couldn’t bear to ask him any question that would cause him distress, so she settled on a simple one.
“What’s your name?”
“Ben,” he replied, still holding her gaze. His voice sounded so small, yet it wasn’t at all young. Even his eyes, which were bright and clear, were edged with a line of red that reveal the sadness behind them.
She gave him a smile that she hoped didn’t expose how shaken up she felt over his presence. She had never seen a Potentian without its Protector before, and it felt as if something natural and essential was being violated.
“I’m Jessie.”
Ben’s mouth twitched, trying to mimic her smile, but found that he could not quite form the shape to pull it off.
“You’re the pilot that crashed,” he stated simply.
Before Jessie could reply, the door opened and Tom stepped through, accompanied by another man in a blue BLES certified coat.
“I’ve brought someone to take you back to your room,” he explained.
She glanced over at them, and then back to Ben. She had hated the fact that she always needed someone to escort her around the building because so many of the doors required cylinder keys, but now she hated that fact even more.
She gave Ben a small nod as the man came behind her and began to wheel her away. She didn’t know why, but she felt as if she and Ben had just carried on a conversation that had lasted for hours instead of a few seconds.
As she was being led down the hall, she called up to the man behind her. “How many Potentians do you have here?”
“Several hundred at the moment,” the man replied matter-of-factly. “We have a section of the building cordoned off just for them. It’s the branch right across from this one. The Desolar Complex. It was named after the scientist that founded our Potentian research.”
Jessie let her tired shoulders sag, and she rested her back against the chair. She suddenly felt incredibly tired and defeated and very much like she had on the day she evolved, when all she wanted more than anything was just to see her mother again.
* * *
Task Force helicopters circled around Apartment Complex B16. It was situated on the outskirts of the east side of Aero City, and was considered by all to be the most likely place for a person to lose heart and give into the Bandit. Task Force agents surrounded the outside of apartment number 213, causing those on the second floor to poke their heads outside of their doors before hurriedly stuffing them back in again. They could hear all sorts of noises and struggling taking place inside of apartment number 213. It may have surprised about half the people on the floor that there was only one Task Force agent inside, yet the other half, the half that didn’t bother to poke their heads out to see what was happening in the first place, wouldn’t be surprised at all. They were the ones that had lived on the east side for a long time and knew enough to keep quiet about what went on in these instances.
Inside the apartment there was a loud crash. Those looking up from outside the building could see as pieces of glass fell from the window, and a figure lay limp in its frame. Not long after, the door to the apartment opened up, and Ritter stormed out.
He gave a wave of his hand to the officers waiting outside the door, saying, “Clean it up!” before marching down the hall and out the building.
When Ritter reached the door to his apartment, he rested his forehead against the wood in exhaustion, blindly procuring his ID card and swiping it across the scanner to unlock his door. When he stepped inside, the first thing his eyes were met with was the sight of the grand piano in the living room. On the top, lined up in perfect precision, were several vials of blue flowers. He was about to walk over to the piano, when his foot stepped on something.
Looking down, he saw that there was a sheet of purple paper lying on the floor. There were no words written on it, but the message it sent was clear to him all the same. Cursing under his breath, he bent down and fiercely crumpled the paper in his hands. Then, throwing it across the room, he turned around and marched right back out his door.
When he reached the outside of his apartment complex, he hopped onto his hover bike and zoomed straight onto the street, disregarding any and all traffic. He drove several miles in this fashion, and hardly slowed down when he reached his destination. A weaker man would have been thrown from his bike at the sudden and abrupt stop, but Ritter hardly noticed the jerk in his arms. He seamlessly slid off his bike and marched over to a structure that stood across a courtyard.
This structure was hardly more than a small shack. It was only several feet wide in both directions, and the door took up nearly the whole space when its frame swung inside to allow entrance.
Ritter kicked in the door without stopping and stepped into the shadows of the small building. The light coming in through the door was enough that he could see the phone that hung on the wall. It was larger than any regular phone, shaped differently
too, and had a wire running from its base to the wall, where it disappeared from there.
He picked up the phone, shoved it to his ear and mouth, and growled out into the receiver, “What is it?”
“Always a pleasure to hear from you too, Ritter,” a male voice replied calmly.
“What do you want, Jason?” he asked, spitting the last word out in disgust. “I’m busy.”
“I know you are,” the man named Jason responded in good humor. Then his voice grew serious as he said, “There was a Task Force raid on an east-ender today. One of ours was killed. You better make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
“That’s got nothing to do with me.”
Jason chuckled on the other line. “Don’t play games with me. I know it was you.” He paused. “You’re gambling with her life, you know.”
Ritter tightened a hand around the telephone.
“One of these days you’re going to cross the line, and then you’ll never get her back,” Jason warned. “I’m just telling you for your own good.”
“Well then let me tell you something,” Ritter said in a low voice. “One of these days I’m going to find you. I will break every rule of human decency to get to you if I have to. And when I finally do, you won’t find a man, but some twisted creation that only wants to bring you pain. That’s what you’ve got on your hands.” He took in a seething breath before finishing, “For your own good, Jason, I’d give her back to me before I get to you.”
There was silence on the line. Static crackled in his ears. Then the amused voice of the Resistance leader came back on, as calm and unaffected as ever. “I’d watch that temper of yours, Ritter. Or I might just have to take it out on her.”
With that, the line went dead, and Ritter slammed the phone back on the wall and stormed out of the room.
Chapter 6
The Potentian
The screen on Denneck’s tablet had run the same video over and over again. The camera on Trid’s fighter plane had picked up each movement of the Bandit that had shot a bullet through Jessie’s heart. He had paused it and zoomed up on the numbers painted onto the Bandit fighter, a ship that used to fight for their side not long ago.