XGeneration (Book 4): Pressure Drop

by Brad Magnarella

  “I’ve got a date, dude,” Creed protested. “Tickets to a Hailstones show.”

  “I can’t stay here, either,” Margaret complained, aligning with Creed for the first time Scott could recall. “My boyfriend and I were at the business school film festival when I got your call. I’m on the panel of judges!”

  “But you’re Champions first,” Kilmer told them impatiently. “That responsibility trumps all others.” He jabbed a thumb toward the monitor that, in its blackness, showed a faint image of the five of them around the table. “What’s it going to take to get that into your heads? Did you not just see Jesse? Do you not understand that he may have been attacked?”

  When no one answered, he threw open the door.

  “Dismissed.”

  Scott and Janis stood before the elevator to her garage. Margaret, either in anger at not being able to return to her film festival or indignity at having been chastised, had clopped wordlessly ahead and ascended solo. Now Scott listened to the mechanics of the elevator wind down.

  “Well, at least she’s all right,” he said.

  Janis stared at the closed door for another moment. “For someone so intelligent, she doesn’t always seem to grasp the bigger picture. She’s more vulnerable than she wants to believe. That could’ve been any one of us tonight.”

  “So you think what happened to Jesse was an attack?” Scott pictured the teeth of broken glass around the car window, Jesse’s limp and bloodied hand over the steering wheel.

  “The disturbance I felt when I tried to reach Jesse … You’ve told me that the electrical components you enter—circuit boards, central offices, etcetera—have a signature, a certain quality that you recognize them by. Well, this disturbance had a signature, too. A certain, I don’t know, chilliness. It was similar to the disturbance around Kilmer and Steel, with those chips they use.”

  “Are you suggesting they’re involved in this?”

  Janis crossed her arms as though to say, And how would that make sense? “No, but it suggests that a similar technology might’ve been behind tonight’s disturbance. As far as who’s behind it … I’m not picking up anything.”

  Scott found his thoughts snapping back to Mr. Shine. “Hey, what was that thing you wanted to try?” he asked. “In the theater?”

  Janis’s nose wrinkled in question before smoothing. She looked quickly around, then pressed the button beside the elevator door. When the metal panel slid open, she gestured for him to follow.

  “Your house?” he said uncertainly, stepping in beside her. He checked his watch. “I’m not so sure your dad’s going to be thrilled with me popping in this late.”

  “Not my house. Not exactly.”

  “All right, what are you up to?” Scott whispered.

  When the door opened beneath the wooden staircase in her garage, Janis brought a finger to her lips. Scott followed her from the elevator, around her mom’s station wagon, to the garage door. He watched as she released the door from the motor. Scott grasped the other door handle and helped raise it quietly. It was what they would do as kids when, on rainy days, Janis’s parents would let them play in the garage when what they really wanted was to play outside.

  Two rows of panels folded into the ceiling above. Scott braced the door for Janis to crawl underneath, then she did the same for him. Outside, they both lowered the door back to the ground. In the cooling night around them, crickets chirped softly.

  Brushing his hands against the sides of his pants, Scott cocked his head toward the woods. “Is that what you had in mind?”

  “It’s not leaving Oakwood, not technically.” Strands of hair fluttered past her face. “And we’re going to need some privacy.”

  “I like the way you think.”

  She punched his shoulder, then tugged for him to follow her through the side yard. At the leaning wooden posts that marked the entrance to the woods, Janis waved toward a surveillance camera and then spread both hands: Give us ten minutes. Scott waited for their watches to light up with a message denying the request, but their watches remained silent.

  As they stepped between the posts, Scott’s eyes adjusted to their old world. Fallen leaves crackled underfoot. The tea-like scent of sweet gum reminded Scott of the time he and Janis had walked home from Dress-up Night, a year earlier.

  “I was thinking about that night, too,” she said, taking his hand. “I don’t think it was any accident that we started out in costumes only to learn, by night’s end, who the other really was, what we could do.”

  Scott nodded, no longer surprised she could pick up his stray thoughts. “That was the beginning of this, wasn’t it?”

  “Becoming Champions?”

  “Well, that,” he said, “but also the beginning of us.”

  Her hand might have tensed in his, but in the next moment they released each other, having arrived at their destination. The fallen tree and its arcing branches shone pale, like the bones of a giant creature. Scott boosted Janis up, then used the roots to clamber after her. They walked single file to the tree’s middle. Water left over from the summer rains glistened below them, reflecting a half moon.

  Janis sat cross-legged, and Scott mirrored her.

  “The first time we did this,” she said, “we were shown how we were being kept from the end of the Meadows—if not by mean old Mrs. Thornton, then by Samson the Rotweiller. The second time, we were shown the location of the emergency bunker, near our old fort … the place where Mr. Leonard was hiding.” As though anticipating Scott’s guilt, Janis squeezed his hands, thumbs massaging between his knuckles. “The point is, those trips to the past revealed information to us.”

  Scott thought about how, without that information, they wouldn’t have been able to force Director Kilmer’s hand, wouldn’t have trained that summer, wouldn’t have been sent to Missouri to halt the nuclear missile launch.

  “And you think there’s information on Mr. Shine in our pasts?” he asked.

  “It’s possible. Like a lot of the adults in our neighborhood, he always seemed to be around, but in the background. Someone you saw but didn’t pay much attention to, you know?”

  Scott nodded, knowing exactly what she meant.

  “But now that we’re looking for clues…”

  “Does it work like that?” Scott asked. “I mean, in the past these experiences happened sort of spontaneously.”

  “Mrs. Fern did some regression exercises with me during summer training,” Janis replied. “I’m going to try to self regress but without a specific event in mind. More like an open-ended request: show us something significant about Mr. Shine. Now, look at my eyes.”

  “That part’s not hard.”

  Janis’s lips quirked into a smile before straightening. She cleared her throat. Almost immediately, her face became possessed of an intensity and a beauty that called up Scott’s desperate middle school-era longings. He blinked her steady as her eyes began to transform. Soft green striations illuminated her irises until they didn’t glow exactly, but grew.

  Scott’s body pulsed with energy—her energy, he realized.

  Bit by bit, the present dissolved away.

  The piece of paper in Scott’s hand was worn from having been unfolded and refolded many times. Dirt lined its sweat-damp creases. He recognized the illustrations on it, as well as his scratchy eight-year-old handwriting. It was a map he’d labored over one Saturday morning, superimposing a fantasy realm onto his own backyard.

  I’m back, his present self thought. Whatever Janis did worked.

  But as with the previous two experiences, his present self didn’t seem to possess any agency. He could only observe what was happening. Even though he wanted to look around for Janis and Mr. Shine, his nose remained inches from the map, snuffling with spring allergies.

  “How much more’s left?” Janis asked impatiently.

  He could hear her chopping the toe of a shoe into the mulch behind him. She hadn’t been nearly as excited as he was about the game, he remembered,
but judging by the marks on the map, they’d almost completed their quest for the magical orb that would grant them any wish. Scott already knew what he wanted: one of those personal computers he’d read about. The thought of having that kind of processing power in his own bedroom amazed him.

  But they still had some work to do.

  “Well, we just defeated the Medusa creature,” he announced, “and now we need to venture to the Talking Tree of Power for the final clue. The map says it’s that way.” He aimed the sword-length stick he was clutching toward a knotted oak that grew on the edge of his backyard.

  Janis ran toward the tree, black cleats kicking up bits of lawn. She’d come to his house following her Saturday morning soccer game and was still wearing her white shorts, knee-high orange socks, and YMCA shirt. Her ponytail whipped across her shoulders.

  “Fine,” she said, arriving at the tree. “I’m here.”

  “Unh-uh.” Scott pushed up his glasses. “It’s a two-day journey around the mountains, and we’re going to need to stop in town to replenish our supplies first, maybe even barter for a draft horse.”

  “A what?”

  “Get back here so we can take inventory.”

  “This is stupid.” She began to shinny up the tree. “Let’s play something else.”

  “You don’t want your wish?” he asked in honest surprise.

  She paused, eyes squinting over freckle-splashed cheeks. She shinnied back down. “Do we really have to go around the mountains, though? Can’t we just, I don’t know, get a magic carpet ride or something?”

  “There aren’t any magic carpets in this world,” he replied testily. “You’re thinking of One Thousand and One Arabian Nights.”

  Janis began to march toward the street.

  “All right, wait, wait,” Scott cried. “Let’s see … okay, we meet a dwarf who shows us a secret mine that cuts through the mountains.” Scott was totally ripping off Lord of the Rings, but Janis didn’t have to know that. “Now it’ll only take us a half day.”

  Janis folded her arms across her thin chest.

  “Fine, a few minutes,” he said. “The dwarf, um, casts a spell.”

  Scott made spell-conjuring noises—“de-da-dee, de-da-dee”—and spun past Janis toward the tree, motioning for her to do the same. She sighed and performed a few lazy turns.

  “Oh, Wise Tree of Power,” Scott said, holding his glasses to his face while he bowed. “We’ve—”

  “I thought it was the Talking Tree of Power,” Janis interrupted, not bowing.

  Scott consulted his map, saw that she was right, and pressed on. “We’ve come a long way to ask you to show us the location of the magical orb that will grant us each a wish.”

  Making his voice deep, Scott spoke for the tree: “The orb is a powerful relic of the gods, fallen from Mount Olympus many eons ago. I saw it fall. I know where it landed. I can show you. But how do I know you’re worthy?”

  “We can chop you into firewood, you know,” Janis muttered.

  Scott shushed her as he unfolded his map and held it out. “We have faced many perils, as you can see, oh great Tree. Our journey began on the ship Argo…”

  At school, Scott’s enrichment class had just completed a unit on Greek mythology, and Scott had combined elements of several of the stories in constructing his own quest. The Talking Tree of Power was his idea, though—one he was rather proud of, even if Janis wasn’t.

  “…and we’ve just now defeated Medusa,” he finished.

  He spoke for the tree again. “Impressive. Very impressive. Answer me this riddle and I will show you the location of the orb.”

  “Are you listening?” he whispered to Janis, who was back to driving her toe into the ground. For the first time, Scott became aware of the blatting drone of a lawn mower, coming from the front yard.

  Mr. Shine! he thought from the present.

  “I’m listening,” Janis said, “the tree’s going to tell us a joke.”

  “Not a joke.” Scott’s arms dropped in exasperation. “A riddle. We’re going to have to solve it.”

  “Whatever.”

  Scott cleared his throat and made his voice deep. “The riddle is this: What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs—”

  “I’ve already heard that one,” Janis said. “It’s a person.”

  Disappointment pulled on Scott’s stomach. He’d wanted to be the one to solve it. He tried to think of a way to change the rest of the riddle so that Janis’s answer would be wrong, but he couldn’t.

  “Explain your answer,” he intoned in his tree voice.

  “A person crawls when they’re a baby,” Janis recited, “walks normally when they’re grown, and then uses a cane when they turn old.”

  “Actually,” Scott said to the tree, “they use a staff when they turn old.”

  “Ah, yes,” he intoned. “I did not know what a cane was and so could not accept your answer. But with staff, you have answered correctly.” A punch landed against Scott’s arm.

  “So where’s the orb?” Janis asked.

  “Over there,” Scott said for the tree.

  “Over where?” Janis squinted around.

  Scott shielded the sun from his gaze as he craned his neck back. Then he turned his head, pretending to follow a pointing branch toward some bushes that grew behind the garage.

  “C’mon!” he called, making sure he had a head start on Janis.

  She breezed past him, stuttering to a stop in front of the low bushes. She squatted low and blew a strand of hair from her face. “Is that it?” she asked, sounding thoroughly disappointed.

  Scott squatted beside her. “I think so.” He tried to inflect his own voice with awe.

  “It’s a flat basketball.”

  “Hmm, it must have made itself ordinary, so it wouldn’t be discovered. That’s how it’s lay hidden here all these eons. But we know the truth about it because the Tree of Power just told us.”

  “Fine, let’s just grab it and get our—”

  A shovel blade descended in front of Janis’s reaching hand, narrowly missing her fingers. It cut through decomposing leaves and into the earth, creating a barrier in front of the basketball.

  When Scott turned, Mr. Shine was standing over them, both hands gripping the top of the shovel handle. Beneath the shade of the man’s flat-top straw hat, Scott made out a grim face.

  “Git back,” Mr. Shine told them.

  All right, Scott thought from the present, I sort of remember this.

  Scott and Janis obeyed, shuffling on hands and knees until they were several feet behind him. Scott climbed to his feet uncertainly, his gaze lingering on the map, which he’d dropped in front of the bushes. Being his best map yet, he hoped his yardman wouldn’t trample on it. In his peripheral vision, he saw Janis massaging the fingers of the hand he’d nearly struck.

  “Ol’ Scratch at it again,” Mr. Shine muttered.

  He left the shovel standing and stooped forward, suspenders stretching over the back of his T-shirt. He grasped something in each gloved hand and stood. Leaves and pine needles fell from what looked like two thick lengths of rope.

  Beside Scott, Janis drew in her breath.

  “That’s right,” Mr. Shine said. “Gotta watch out for him. Blend right in with the leaves, and that’s just how he likes it.”

  Scott saw now how the rope in Mr. Shine’s right fist tapered to a knotted tail. In his other hand, he held the snake at its neck. Poking out beyond Mr. Shine’s thumb was a large, diamond-shaped head. His shovel had cleaved the rattle snake neatly in half.

  As Scott’s gaze flicked between the two parts of the snake, his present self sensed that something was off. He couldn’t tell what exactly. If only his eight-year-old eyes would stop moving around so damn much.

  “What are you gonna do with it?” Janis asked.

  “Aim to take it home,” Mr. Shine replied. “The meat you can fry and eat, if it don’t spoil first.”

  “Isn’t
it poisonous?” Scott asked.

  “Poison’s all up here in the mouth. But even that you can use, if’n you know what you’re doing.”

  Scott and Janis stood silently as he moved the snake to one hand and pulled the shovel from the ground. He swung the shovel over his shoulder and strode off, humming. When he’d disappeared around the side of the house, Scott raced Janis back to the bushes, their eyes scouring the leaf fall for more snakes, the map and magical orb forgotten.

  The whooping cry of a hoot owl brought Scott back. His crossed legs tingled with sleep as he spread them, straddling the fallen tree. He gave Janis’s shoulders a gentle shake.

  “Hey,” he whispered.

  Her head came up. Blinking, she inhaled deeply through her nose.

  “The snake?” he asked.

  She nodded and stretched her arms out to the sides. “Did you notice anything?” she asked. When her hands came back in, she drew her jacket closed and hunched her shoulders to the cool air.

  Scott rubbed her arms. “Well, there was a moment when he was holding the snake up.” He strained to see what he’d at first mistaken for ropes dangling from the man’s hands. “Something didn’t seem quite right. I can’t say what, though.”

  “I can.”

  “Really? Share, share!”

  One half of Janis’s mouth crept up. “First you have to answer my riddle.”

  “Oh, sure, use that against me.”

  “Did you notice anything about his eyes?”

  Scott thought back again. “They were … lighter?”

  “They were blue.”

  “Blue?” But even as he asked, he began to see it, too. The color had been concealed a little by the shade of his straw hat—and by the fact Scott had been much more interested in the cleaved snaked—but with each pass past the man’s face, there they were: blue eyes.

  “You were right, though,” she said. “They only stayed that way for a moment. When he was talking about snake meat and handling the poison, his eyes were brown again. Dark brown.”