The Point

by John Dixon

  She would do it or die trying.

  The funeral had gutted her. Her parents had been hollowed-out shells of themselves, her mother drugged and sobbing and inconsolable, her father pale and empty-eyed and lost. Dan’s fiancée, Daisy, had been sad and sweet. Though Daisy was only in her twenties, her hair was shot through with gray. She’d held Scarlett’s hand throughout the nightmarish ceremony, which took place in a dusty conference room at the back of the nondescript building within the industrial-looking complex where government agents were keeping her parents safe.

  Dan’s coffin was closed, of course. The fire had burned so hotly that the Jeep wasn’t even recognizable. Atop the glossy casket sat a framed picture of Dan in uniform and a vase of plastic flowers dominated by yellows, oranges, and reds.

  Scarlett, her parents, and Daisy were the only attendees. A Marine chaplain spoke briefly about Dan and sacrifice, but she didn’t really listen. She stared at her brother’s coffin, thinking, All my fault, all my fault…

  Two Marines entered and played taps, executed the flag-folding ritual, and handed the flag to her mother with whispered condolences. Even Scarlett broke down then, barely aware of Daisy rubbing her back and crying softly beside her.

  Then the chaplain said something, and it was over.

  Just like that. Time to leave.

  Good-bye, Dan. Good-bye, brother. No chance to apologize, no chance to bury the hatchet, no chance for Scarlett to make something of herself, no chance to make Dan proud.

  Nothing, nothing, nothing.

  Scarlett asked for a moment alone with Dan’s coffin. Her parents drifted away like ghosts. Daisy followed, brushing her fingertips softly over the glossy wood as she passed.

  Scarlett blew her nose, wiped her eyes, and straightened her uniform before approaching her brother for the last time. From down the hall, she could hear murmured conversation and faint music. Up close, she noticed that someone had left the sticker on the vase of flowers.

  AUTUMN BOUQUET, the sticker read, IMITATION. $8.97.

  She stared into the framed face. The eyes of her dead brother stared back at her. They were soldier’s eyes, hard and fearless.

  “Dan,” she said, and wrestled against her quavering voice. She had planned to apologize but realized that she couldn’t. If she tried, she’d completely melt down. “I’m going to get them.” Her eyes burned, but she fought back the tears. “I promise.”

  Now, suffering again in Room 17, she glared at Rhoads. “Turn…up…the…flow.”

  He hesitated briefly, then increased the current. Fresh pain infused Scarlett’s agony.

  Since returning to The Point a week earlier, she had driven forward like a machine. Like a yellow Jeep, she thought, with rusted floorboards, blasting classic rock.

  Every second of every day, she focused on making the strike force, which included Lucy, Dunne, and Hopkins, who still sneered but treated Scarlett fairly.

  Fine by me. I don’t want to be buddies. Just do your job and stay out of my way.

  Dalia was a strike force member, too, though she rarely trained alongside them and never joined them for meals. The strike force ate together wherever they were training and shunned the mess hall above ground. They saved a lot of time, not having to change uniforms, form up, or travel to the mess hall, and they maximized that extra time, dispensing with mess hall etiquette to talk tactics through the meals. Scarlett sensed that there was more to their isolation than that, something bordering on pride. The team was coalescing as an elite strike force. The order she’d known since coming to The Point had flipped. Her teammates were no longer freakish cave dwellers, living beneath the real cadets. They were preparing to employ incredible skills against enemies who could destroy the surface dwellers literally in the blink of an eye.

  The strike force focused on door-buster tactics. Scarlett pushed hard, started taking all her meds, and followed every order. Rhoads was pleased, yet the question hung in the air between them: Would Scarlett prove herself in time?

  Scarlett worked hard at yoga and meditation with Dalia. Things between them were much friendlier, and meditation and yoga actually were helping. They did nothing to dull the pain but had enhanced Scarlett’s awareness of the energy flowing through her.

  She could feel her body handling different energies with different systems. She’d always sensed this, but now she could feel the separate pathways as definitely as she could feel her various muscle groups. Electricity burned along her nervous system, lighting her up like a Christmas tree. Kinetic energy bounced around inside her like shock waves before radiating into the muscles. Sound waves also bounced around, though not so painfully, and built within her bones, which vibrated like tuning forks if she waited too long to release. Sound waves were by far the easiest to hold, though this didn’t impress Rhoads, who reasoned that it was highly unlikely that a High Roller would attack with a sonic boom.

  Because she had to miss academic classes, instructors provided her with detailed notes, but she barely studied. By the end of every day, she was completely destroyed. She gave up chess with Lucy, stopped taking nighttime walks, and blew off Seamus, all to get more sleep, which she needed in order to break through.

  Her sleep was carpeted wall to wall in dreams so shockingly vivid that her nights became a second life, separate from her waking existence yet no less real. She dreamed only of Dan.

  Her brother, alive and well, would walk with her along a stretch of deserted beach that she almost recognized but couldn’t quite place.

  You have to avenge me, Dan would say. Now, tell me about these magical powers again.

  And they would walk on, strolling the empty beach, Scarlett telling Dan all about her abilities, training, challenges, and goals.

  Sometimes Dan would ask questions, his breath redolent of smoke and kerosene and a ghastly scorched smell that made her scars tickle. Other times he would stare into the distance, his eyes narrowing the way they did when he puzzled over an engine block. Mostly, however, he just listened and then told Scarlett again, Avenge me.

  And in that dreaming world, Scarlett nightly renewed her blood promise.

  “ALL RIGHT,” LUCY SAID, GATHERING things from her desk, “I’m hitting the library. I know you’ll miss me terribly, but carry on bravely, soldier.”

  Scarlett laughed. It wouldn’t occur to her until later that Lucy had set her up.

  Scarlett sat at her desk, staring through notes and thinking about what Lopez had told them after door-busting drills. Tomorrow Colonel Rhoads will brief you on the High Rollers, Lopez had said, his voice growling like tires on gravel. Tune in and take notes. There’ll be a test—whether or not you survive when you finally meet the bastards face-to-face.

  Her stomach did a slow roll. She wished she could bust down Jagger’s door right now and blast him between the eyes with 10 million volts, but this intermediate step, learning about her brother’s killers, seeing their pictures, hearing their names, made her feel—

  “Hey.”

  She turned.

  Seamus stood in the doorway, looking uncharacteristically wary. “May I come in?”

  Her heart gave a little hitch, and she smiled reflexively but then came to her senses and straightened the smile. “Sure.”

  Seamus took a few steps inside and leaned against the bunks, hands shoved into the pockets of his PT shorts. He eyed her cagily. “So, where are we?”

  “I guess we’re on hold.”

  “On hold?” he said. “You don’t talk to me. You don’t smile back when I pass you in the halls. You look away, Scarlett.”

  “I have a lot on my mind.”

  He took a step toward her. “Look, I’m no good at this, okay? I don’t know how to say this type of stuff, all right? But we have something.”

  She felt like a chew rope caught between pit bulls, anger and affection.

  W
hatever. I don’t have time for this now. “Yeah,” she said, “we had something.”

  “Had, huh?” Color came into his cheeks, and he laughed bitterly. “But not anymore?”

  She stood, feeling her face grow hot. Her body ached from training, ached like she’d run a marathon, boxed a heavyweight champ, and thrown herself down a dozen flights of stairs for good measure. She had to study. If she couldn’t study, she needed to sleep so that she could be at her best the next day. “Why didn’t you join the strike force?”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “Bull,” she said. “You’re the most powerful TK at The Point. Rhoads would kill to have you on the team.”

  “Screw Rhoads,” he said. “I’m not joining his team.”

  She spread her arms. “The High Rollers killed my brother.”

  “And Rhoads killed my whole family.”

  “What? You said that your dad—”

  “Rhoads turned my dad into a murderer.”

  She took a step toward him. “You never—” An invisible hand stopped her.

  “Rhoads got our dads gassed in Iraq,” he said. “He was in charge. He made the call, despite warnings. That gas—and the so-called treatment that saved them—changed our dads. You said your dad got mean. Well, my dad went psycho.”

  “I’m sorry about your family,” she said. Everything felt weird. Sad and horrible and not quite real. Part of her wished she could hop on a Yamaha and peel out of there. She couldn’t, though. Wouldn’t. This time she was all in. “You can’t blame Rhoads. He couldn’t have known what—”

  “What if it wasn’t a mistake? What if Rhoads knew all about the chemical weapons, knew what was going to happen, and marched our dads straight in there?”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Is it? After the gas attack, Rhoads shipped his troops to Germany, where doctors had genetic treatments ready to go even though they’d supposedly never heard of this chemical agent before. Doesn’t that strike you as strange? And then Rhoads just happens to find out when kids like you and me start showing off our crazy party tricks? Open your eyes, Scarlett. We’ve been on a watch list our whole lives. And who happens to be in charge of our training? Rhoads, that’s who, the guy who ruined our dads and messed up our DNA. That doesn’t strike you as weird?”

  She pinched the bridge of her nose. Her skull, which had been filled with booming, flashing fireworks since Room 17, accelerated toward a grand finale.

  “Why isn’t Rhoads messed up from the gas?” Seamus said, taking a step closer. “Because he took some kind of antidote, that’s why.”

  “Enough.” She had a mission—avenge Dan—and wouldn’t let Seamus fog her path. “The past is the past.”

  He shook his head. “You don’t believe that.”

  “All I care about is killing the people who killed my brother.”

  “Then you’re playing right into Rhoads’s plans,” he said, and stepped even closer. “You’ll be his weapon then, and that’s exactly what he wants from us. That’s the point of The Point: building a posthuman arsenal. We wipe out the High Rollers, Rhoads becomes a hero. The program gets whatever he wants. They’ll probably start gassing regular troops. Set them to breeding, build a whole army of superhumans.”

  “Stop,” she said, or meant to say. It came out as a shout.

  Seamus stood his ground. “You want vengeance. I get it. When Dad killed Mom and my little brothers and our cocker spaniel, I would’ve done anything to punish him. Anything.”

  “You understand, then. So help me.”

  He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Scarlett. I won’t let Rhoads turn me into his weapon.”

  Seamus’s eyes glistened with tears that he was too tough to shed. Scarlett realized that they had moved unconsciously closer as they’d argued, as if their very bodies yearned to touch. It would be such a simple thing to lift her hand, caress his face, and end the fight—and end her insane attempt to make the strike force, which so far had been like smashing her face into a brick wall day after day. One touch…

  His glistening eyes sang to her heart like Sirens along a rocky shore.

  But what about Mom’s tears? What about Daisy’s? What about her own?

  She crossed her arms. “Go, then, if you won’t help. Get out and leave me alone.”

  “Fine,” he said, and stalked away. He stopped at the door and rounded on her. “But you can’t just turn it off, Scarlett. If you let Rhoads turn you into a weapon, you won’t be able to change that. Not ever.”

  And he was gone.

  * * *

  —

  SCARLETT RECOGNIZED THE beach now.

  It was the stretch of deserted sand that she and Dan had discovered as kids, when they stayed at the north end of Corolla in South Carolina’s Outer Banks.

  Now, in the dream, they were no longer children. They were both in uniform, Dan in his dress blues, looking like he had marched off a recruiting poster for the Marine Corps, and Scarlett in her PT uniform, the one she wore during energy training.

  “You have to break through,” Dan said.

  “I’m trying,” she said. “I only have a few days. Rhoads says that if I don’t—”

  “You’ll do it.”

  “I’m trying,” she repeated, and explained how hard she’d pushed herself that morning, holding on for longer than ever before.

  Dan chuckled. “Beating your head against the wall, huh? You always were tough. But you can’t just gut this out, kiddo. I’ve been thinking about the mechanics.”

  She grinned, partly because it was such a Dan thing, analyzing supernatural power in mechanical terms, and partly in anticipation, because her brother was one of those rare people who could fix anything. “Rhoads says I need to find my capacitor.”

  Dan shook his head. “That’s your problem: trying to hold the energy. The force builds up, reaches critical mass, and explodes. Stop trying to be a battery, Scarlett. Be a power plant.”

  “A power plant…”

  He showed her the shining grin that meant his brain was firing on all cylinders. “Power plants aren’t just big batteries that we drain and replace. They get energy from windmills, hydraulic turbines, nuclear reactors, coal furnaces, but they don’t pump wind or water or heat out to the world. They convert energy into electricity and pump that out to us.”

  “All right,” she said, following him but still uncertain where exactly he was headed.

  “You want to hold that energy longer, convert it. Keep it moving.”

  “How?”

  “You said that each type of force feels different inside you, right? And you have different channels for each variety. Don’t just let the force build in your chest. Reroute it to another channel—or multiple channels. Use more of your body. Change the energy’s form, keep it moving and buy time. Then, when you’re ready to release, convert it. Rhoads hits you with ten thousand decibels, fry his equipment with a lightning bolt. You won’t just make the team. You’ll make captain.”

  KYLE STEEDE, SCARLETT WROTE. STRONGEST posthuman ever. Merciless.

  Around her, the dozen strike force cadets, including Lucy, Dunne, and Hopkins, scribbled their own notes. Dalia sat with crossed arms, listening to Rhoads but writing nothing.

  When Scarlett woke that morning, she had been excited to test Dan’s theory. Maybe it was crazy to follow dream advice, but she was out of options. Yes, she’d improved through toughness, but Rhoads was demanding more, and Scarlett already had pushed herself to the max, so conversion it was. As she pulled on her PT uniform, however, Lucy corrected her. Morning training had been canceled to clear the schedule for the High Rollers briefing.

  “Next slide, please,” Rhoads said, and the image of the burly posthuman with crazy eyes disappeared, replaced by a pale little girl wearing a sparkling silver dress, a pink feather boa, and a toy tiara that twi
nkled atop her white-blond hair. She looked vaguely familiar…and completely ridiculous.

  “This is Penny,” Rhoads said, “the second most dangerous person in the world.”

  Laughter rippled across the classroom. The girl was scrawny, eleven or twelve years old. Probably eleven. With her glittering eyes and grin full of braces, she looked like someone had just given her a pony.

  Rhoads didn’t laugh. “That red-and-white sign behind her is the Fox Theatre in Atlanta. Can anyone tell me what happened in Atlanta last spring?”

  He didn’t wait for an answer. The Atlanta tragedy had shocked the world.

  “Note the time,” Rhoads said, and Scarlett jotted “1:38” next to “Penny.” “Seven minutes after this photo was taken, Penny killed 117 people. She incinerated them with her mind.”

  Scarlett struggled to square the little girl’s beaming smile with the carnage in Atlanta.

  Then a chill went through her.

  She’s the one. She killed Dan. Burned him to death.

  “We don’t know who she is exactly,” Rhoads said, “only that they call her Penny and that she is the only pyrokinetic free in the world. We suspect that she was also responsible for Times Square.”

  “You see this little bitch,” Lopez said, “kill her on sight.”

  People shifted, obviously uncomfortable with the command to kill a small child.

  Picturing her brother’s coffin, Scarlett called out, “Yes, Sergeant,” and wrote “Kill her on sight” next to Penny’s name.

  “Next slide,” Rhoads said. “Behold Antonio Jagger, the most dangerous person alive.”

  Dark-haired and thirtyish, Jagger wore Wayfarer sunglasses and a winning smile. He had sideburns, full lips, and a large nose and managed the rare magic trick of being really attractive without actually being handsome. He didn’t look particularly dangerous. He looked like a guy who could tell a good joke.

  “I trained Jagger at Bragg, before The Point even existed,” Rhoads said. “He was one of the original High Rollers. In fact, he suggested the unit name. When we recruited him, Jagger was a gambler. He drifted casino to casino, hitting it big at blackjack. Based on his winning streak, we assumed that he had a perfect mathematical mind, an eidetic memory, or a remote viewing ability.”