by Rob Horner
“Where’s that?” Gina asked.
“In Westchester County, of course,” Scott answered with a smirk. Gina shot him one of those looks.
“It’s just outside of New York City,” Iz answered. “It’s not the biggest carnival, a little smaller than the Coliseum actually, but it will have the largest customer population.”
“Why’s that? Because it’s New York?” Chris asked.
“Partly that,” Iz answered. “But more because it’s a county fair at a racetrack.”
“NASCAR or Indy?” Michael said.
“Neither, and if you keep interrupting me, we’ll never get done,” Iz said, leveling a drill sergeant’s glare at the assembly. “It’s harness racing, where horses pull carts called sulkies and have to run in a specific gait. The jockeys ride the sulkies instead of the horse. There will also be a convention center, of sorts, full of advertisers selling everything from horse gear to sunglasses to super cleaners that can bleach the tail off a cat.”
“Those things never work,” Mrs. Jean opined.
It fit with my dream. A large building, a horse track, and the carnival.
Tanya.
“When?” I asked quietly.
“It opens Thursday next week.”
“Are we going in before they get up and running?” Bradley asked.
“Let me answer that,” Fish said. It was the first time I’d seen the Quin since the raid on the mall. His work with the police had kept him busy. I wondered if he’d had any luck figuring out how the other Quins upstairs were infiltrated. “We’ve got a few eyes and ears all along the coast, as you know, and even more now with our new partnership.” He paused for a moment, his reflective visor doing a slow scan of the room. “By our best estimates, the bulk of the carnival should have arrived early this afternoon. Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever given a thought to how an operation like this does business, but there are a lot of permits and safety inspections they have to go through before the first customer can get on a ride.”
“Makes sense,” Jeff said.
“A part of that involves private meetings with local law enforcement and inspectors’ offices—”
“The boys at the precinct mentioned something about that,” Brian interrupted. “Nothing weird when they showed up for the mall show, but a representative came by after they shut down, handing out those statues like they were an ugly parting gift. Sorry you had to work, here’s a little something you might have won if you’d come, kind of thing.”
“Yes, like that,” Fish said. “They hand out gifts, make sure the mayor gets a VIP ticket for his kids, that sort of thing.”
“Greasing the wheels,” Dave muttered.
“Exactly! That’s the phrase I was looking for,” Fish exclaimed. “Well, the wheel greasers came along today, and soon after, our guys lost contact with the Westchester County Police Department and the sheriff’s offices.”
There was an astonished silence among the audience. Mrs. Jean muttered a quiet, “Lord, protect them,” while someone else whispered, “Jeez, so soon?”
“It means we’ll have to go in hot,” Iz said. “We can’t count on being able to rent a few hotel rooms and waiting for the right time. We’ll try though.”
“Why can’t we go sooner?” I asked. “I mean, why wait? If they’re there now, let’s just go take them out.”
A chorus of agreement greeted this question, which was unexpected. As one of the newest and practically the youngest member of Mandatum, I half-expected a stern “Children should listen when adults are speaking,” or at least a “because I said so.”
“It’s a good question,” Fish replied instead. “With a simple answer. There were four separate carnival units in Hampton. Only two of them are currently in New York. The other two are handling smaller engagements this weekend.”
“So,” Iz finished, “we aren’t sure where the resonator is, or if it will even be in New York.”
“Only one of the two missing units will show up in New York. The other one is heading to a Pennsylvania engagement after this weekend,” Fish said. “So, the odds are good, with three out of four, that we’ll find it in New York.”
“But not yet,” Iz said. “If we pull the trigger early, and it isn’t there—”
He let the statement hang, but the remainder was obvious. If we attacked and the resonator wasn’t there, the other Dra’Gal would know about it, and the resonator would disappear.
“We never got close to the resonator during our last operation,” Fish said. “A normal, reasoning person may suspect we know it’s with the carnival, but the Dra’Gal don’t work like that. To them, our attack would seem like an assault on one of their strongholds, not a targeted strike at a specific goal. But once we push into their trailer park, all bets are off.”
“And there aren’t enough of us to mount an assault on three different locations simultaneously,” Iz concluded.
My dream clearly put the thing in New York with Tanya and Crystal.
We just needed to get there.
My day in the Distilling Room was an exercise in futility and exhaustion. That wasn’t out of the ordinary, according to Fish and Ricardo, the two most competent to operate the alien machinery. The concept was simple enough to explain, though that doesn’t mean it made much sense to a sixteen-year-old who barely understood the difference between acids and bases in chemistry.
The Phosphorescent Catalyst, as Fish called it, didn’t wake the mind to dormant abilities, like those television kooks liked to claim all humans possess. If that were the case, there couldn’t be someone like Joi, who made water out of nothing, or like Michael, who could create fire from thin air. Rather, it provided a force for change.
It was up to our bodies and minds to direct that force into a specific change.
I know that sounds very metaphysical and New Age-y, but it explained a lot. My power came to me when I tried to defend myself. Tanya’s manifested when she needed to reach something. Scott loved firecrackers and dreamed of growing up to become a demolitions expert. Those were just the ones I’d talked to.
This also explained how and why our abilities continued to evolve. Once the power was set, shaped and directed by need, it could only grow in a direction the owner perceived as plausible. For Gina, that meant she should be able to shape her walls anyway she wanted, just as Scott could make his bombs any size he wanted or set timers on them. He could probably make them explode just by thinking about it, without the need for an arbitrary timer, but he hadn’t decided he should be able to do it yet, so it hadn’t happened.
Once you got beyond the questioning of how they turned us into mutants straight out of a comic book, the explanation made sense. It wasn’t so much a suspension of disbelief as an acceptance that…huh…aliens…well, there ya go.
The Catalyst, in addition to endowing us with the power to develop a power, as it were, also made those changes transferable, in a way. Rather like how a laboratory can take a sample of blood, the distiller could take a sample of our power. Also, like giving blood, our bodies regenerated the power, so it was a no-loss process.
“Could it take so much that we lose our powers?” I asked.
“In theory,” Fish answered, “it could deplete you to the point that you’d be unable to use them, but for a very short time. It’s the same as exhausting yourself. After a modicum of rest, the power is there, waiting to be used again.”
Unlike giving blood, there was no “One Size Fits All” container for our powers. And, the un-instilled power couldn’t be stored and used later.
So, it worked like this: the guinea pig—me—sat down on the right side of the big white machine. I placed my right hand on the flat surface there. The operator—Fish—had a small warehouse of various items waiting on a set of rolling shelves by the left side. These were anything that could conceivably be used to house a power. The most common items were ammunition for various weapons. BBs, paint balls, all the way up to rounds for a Thompson Submachine Gun, grenades o
f various makes, shapes, and sizes, and landmines. On the odder side, there were lightbulbs and even oil lamps, like one of us Chosen were going to create a genie.
Anyway, we sat there and tried to put ourselves in a state like what the hypnotists describe as Acceptance. Rather than lulling ourselves to the border of sleep and suggestion, we were supposed to summon our power into our hands, letting it build, but without a specific use in mind. This came easier for me than for a lot of my friends because I’d been doing it for several days now, just letting my power build and watching my hands glow. Once the power was there, the distiller sucked a little of the light into its…um…machinery, then it chewed on it for a while, like a desktop computer trying to connect to a message board through a 14.4k telephone modem. Fish watched the dials and gauges as it worked, though he wasn’t very clear when it came to explaining what he was looking for.
“The quadrature functioning of the phosphorescent effect on the null-energy derived from your gamma waves inform a complex structure of potential energy within a defined matrix. By adjusting the transcription aperture, we can focus the waves through an adaptive lens and into the prepared receptacle, but matching the wave to the chemical properties of the receptacle’s composition, as well as its inherent ability to restrict your specific gamma waves from diffusing through migration is the real problem. We solve it by determining the diffusion speed, or rate of loss of gamma absorption through a multi-tiered mathematical equation and move through a list of known chemical properties to determine whether a harder, softer, thicker, or thinner material is more conducive to retention.”
Let me rephrase my statement: Fish knew exactly what he wanted to see but his explanations left a lot to be desired.
“You’ve forgotten the folding principle of loss again,” Ricardo chided the Quin.
“Oh right.” And off he went into a discussion about the probability that having the right shape was just as important as the right material composition, which meant finding a material that minimized loss came first. Then they would try different shapes to see if the loss rate changed at all.
Suffice it to say the first day was four hours of making my hands glow between breakfast and lunch, then five more hours until we called it a day at dinnertime. Though I hadn’t done anything all day except lean on my elbow like I was in an arm-wrestling stalemate with Casper the Friendly Ghost, I was exhausted.
Unfortunately, Wednesday was no better. By the time I crawled into bed, the only thing we’d accomplished was figuring out that nothing with any metal content whatsoever was going to work. I don’t really remember what dreams floated through my head that night, though I’m sure they involved being tormented by Tupperware and peppered with paper.
Thursday began as a repeat of the previous two days and might have been even worse. Fish decided we were going to work through lunch and dinner, so our meals were brought to us by Austin from the cafeteria. While eating, we determined that paper wasn’t a good substance, and plastic was almost as bad. On a whim, Fish wiped his plate off into the trash, then set the faux-China piece on the left-hand side.
It wasn’t a perfect match, but it was much closer than anything else we’d tried. It also meant that nothing else on his shelf of goodies was going to work.
“I always said teenagers were difficult,” the Hispanic doctor said, earning a laugh from Fish.
We found the answer on Friday. Ceramic balls about the size of a tennis ball. Don’t ask me why size mattered, but it did. The first time it worked alarmed Fish and Ricardo, which would have been good to know before waking up with them standing over me.
“Okay, Johnny. I know you’re tired. But the last one came very close—”
The last one was a ceramic ball the size of a ping-pong ball.
“—so, we’re just going to try something a little bigger and see which way the readings go.”
I placed my hands on the small table on the right side of the machine and summoned my power. I’d become quite good at this by now, and my hands began to glow immediately. The machine did its thing, whirring and puttering. There were lights visible on the side nearest me, three bands of red that rode the side of the machine up to its ten-foot height. As the bands lit, moving from top to bottom, that was my notice that it was about to take a sample. I was supposed to maintain the glow until Ricardo or Fish told me to stop. Occasionally the machine would come back for another sniff, or whatever it did, like it didn’t get enough the first time.
This time, the machine sniffed, the lights went from low to high, and it presumably started trying to push the light into the container. The lights came back down almost instantly, and I felt a drain, like it had gone from a sniffer to a vacuum cleaner, sucking my strength out through my hands.
It happened fast. The lights came back down and something pulled and drained.
I might have heard a “Shut it down, Fish!” but that could have been my imagination.
Then Ricardo was shaking me as Fish leaned over me. Let me tell you there isn’t much scarier than having a Quin, face hidden in an alien motorcycle helmet, leaning over you as you wake up.
“What happened?” I asked.
“It worked,” Fish said. “You made a…I don’t know…a ceramic grenade.”
“What’s it for?” Ricardo asked.
Fish shrugged and said, “Can you tell, Johnny?”
It was a lightweight ball made of hard, shiny ceramic. It felt cold and somehow fragile. The size hadn’t changed, still about two and a half inches in diameter. I started to say I don’t know, but then, amazingly, knowledge flew into me. The cold outer shell remained cold and hard, but there was a warmth inside calling to me, flooding me with an understanding that this was not a weapon made from the force projecting part of my abilities. This was made to heal.
“It’s always like that,” Fish said, watching me. “There doesn’t seem to be any way for us to know what something will do until we use it, but the creator always knows.”
“It will cure them,” I said softly, wonderingly.
Fish clapped his hands together gleefully.
“I see you getting excited, Fish,” Ricardo said, “but there’ll be no more tonight. Doctor’s orders.”
The next morning was a Saturday and just five days before my life would turn inside out…again!
When I arrived in the Distilling Room, Danielle and Gina, Angelica and James, Michael and Scott, plus a half-dozen others were gathered around the machine.
“We figured you could use a boost,” Chris said, flashing a smile.
“Two at a time,” Angelica offered. “And if one of them is me, maybe you won’t get so wiped out.”
“Mmm, baby,” Chris said, “I could do with a little wipin’ out by you.”
I took my place at the right side of the machine as Fish opened a box of a dozen ceramic balls, all of which looked identical to our one success from the day before. Honestly, did he have Brian conjuring the things? Or was Tiffany transmuting other stuff into it? Would that even work?
“What if it doesn’t work again?” I asked.
“It will,” Ricardo said. “Once we get one, the machine remembers everything about the appropriate substrate. All Fish needs to do is put your name in and put something on the table over here. The machine will scan it and alert us if it’s not going to work.”
“So, a real tennis ball would…what? Set off an alarm?”
“Nothing so dramatic,” Fish said. “But it wouldn’t try to draw from you either. We’ve established what you can instill into. The distiller has that saved to your profile. It’s all we can use from here on out.”
“Don’t worry, you got this,” Angelica said.
“What’s to worry about?” I joked. “The only thing bad that happened to me yesterday was Fish trying to give me mouth to mouth.”
“You wish, human,” the Quin quipped back.
“Okay, from the top please,” Ricardo said.
Not without some trepidation, I put my hand on th
e right-side table and summoned my power. Angelica and Chris moved up behind me, each of them putting a hand on one of my shoulders. Though most of my concentration was on my hands, I was still aware of the warmth coming from theirs, a gentle strength that pushed away my lingering fatigue. The machine sniffed, then started pulling. There wasn’t any hesitation like the night before. The thing knew what it needed and how much.
“Jeez,” Chris said.
It made me into a conduit, pulling their power through me, with me shaping it somehow, turning it into…what…a purging force to fill one of those fragile globes?
After only a few seconds the lights began to dim.
“Wow,” Angie said. “That was intense. I think I need to sit down.”
“How do you feel, Johnny?” Ricardo asked.
“Not bad,” I said, and it was the truth. Whatever that thing did to me last night, it went better with others to share the strain. “I can tell it took a little of my strength, but not as much as it did them.”
“I’m fine too,” Chris said. “Not that anybody asked.”
“Good,” Fish replied. “Then you can go again.”
“Um…only if you want to pick a dead brother off the floor.”
So, Angie and Chris swapped out with Gina and James, followed by Michael and Danielle. At one point, Fish put out a call to the compound for any other unengaged Chosen to come help.
“Has this ever happened before?” I asked.
“Nope,” Scott said. “Usually we’re good for instilling a few dozen…whatever’s before we need to call it a day.”
“Ben could—” Danielle started. Then she hitched a breath and tried again. “Ben could make a hundred rounds at a time. I could only do one sound grenade every hour or so.
By the time we got to the twelfth Purge Grenade—Bradley’s name for it—we’d drained every available Chosen and I could barely keep my head up. As the rest began filing out of the room, heading for dinner, I made one request.