The Riser Saga

by Becca C. Smith

  I felt something…

  Wow.

  I did it.

  I was completely aware.

  The only problem was.

  I couldn’t control my body.

  Not good.

  Maybe Elisha wouldn’t notice?

  Honestly, it seemed like Elisha was kind of ignoring me completely. I guess that, whatever she had planned next, I wasn’t exactly a part of it. I was just amazed I could actually stand.

  “Get in the hover and bring Chelsan,” Elisha barked to the guards behind me.

  Okay, maybe I was a part of the plan.

  The guards had to carry me.

  I wondered if I’d be able to reset myself once this drug was out of my system. I started to feel a surge of panic rise in my unresponsive body. Did I just paralyze myself? I was learning so many insanely crazy things I could do with my brain, it’s a wonder I hadn’t gone into a coma months ago!

  Elisha was talking to Eva now. “They’ll be here soon, so we have to leave. I can’t lose Chelsan.”

  Lose me? They? Did Elisha know my grandparents were coming for me?

  Oh! Toe wiggle. I wiggled my toe. Good first step.

  “I’m trusting you, Eva. Can you do this?” Elisha was the most serious I’d ever seen her.

  Do what?

  Eva nodded, determined. She looked like she was about to go into battle.

  The two men shoved me into the back of a rather nice hover-SUV. Eva slid-in to the seat in front of me while one of the live guards drove. Elisha and the soldiers stayed behind. That kind of scared me. Where were we going?

  Fingers. I could move my fingers. I was determined to get around this whole “drug” thing. There were conveniently no dead soldiers in the car for me to test my powers on. Elisha apparently didn’t completely trust the drugs either. I felt a modicum of relief that Elisha wasn’t in the car with us. For some reason Eva seemed a lot less scary, probably because I’d been going to school with her for the last three months, and every time I’d gone up against her… I had won.

  Of course I wasn’t drugged out of my mind those times, trapped in some sort of half-in half-out of body experience. I couldn’t even describe it properly. It was almost as if I was dead and controlling myself at the same time.

  Eva was silent while the hover-SUV drove on. I could tell she was nervous by the way she was fidgeting. That girl couldn’t sit still. She kept looking outside like she expected someone to show up at our window in mid-air.

  “Where are we going?” I asked. Admittedly it sounded pretty slurred, but I hadn’t figured out how to control my body properly yet. How long do drugs stay in your system anyway?!

  “Shut up!” Eva barked. She didn’t even turn around to look at me.

  But I saw her face reflected in the window.

  Eva was terrified.

  That made me terrified.

  What was going to happen? Maybe I should zoom outside my body and go and tell Roberta? I just couldn’t. I was afraid if I did… something horrible would happen to my body. And besides, they were on their way to Ryan. Sure, they’d be upset that I wasn’t there, but at least Ryan would be rescued. It was the least I could do after all the crap I’d brought into his life. Now that the I.Q. kids were out of his brain maybe he’d be back to normal. I really hoped so.

  In my drug-induced prison, I didn’t even want to think about the fact that Elisha had an entire army of dead soldiers. I’d deal with that later when I wasn’t in a hover-SUV on my way to who-knows-where to do who-knows-what.

  And I vowed to myself that, once we arrived, if I had a moment I’d jump out to Roberta and tell her where I was. The drug that stopped me from talking to her with my mind while I was in my body was really annoying. If there was any of it left in me by the time the grandparents found me maybe they could take a sample of my blood and re-create it. Then we’d have that weapon for ourselves. Elisha was one of the best head-communicators or telepathy-people out there: to stop her from using that particular power would be priceless.

  Then I thought about how Ryan asked if I could control him. If that was a part of the whole astral projection business, then maybe Max really was being mind-controlled by Elisha. I really hoped so.

  “Just park over there,” Eva instructed the driver.

  The hover-SUV landed and I tried to wobble my head towards the window to see where we were.

  The Glass Mall.

  Why were we at a mall? And the Glass Mall at that? This wasn’t some secret or hidden location.

  Eva exited the vehicle while the driver came around and pulled me out of the hover-SUV, supporting me to stand. We had landed on a large hill just outside the mall, so we had a full aerial view of the monstrous building.

  Hover-packages were zooming in and out of the stained glass structure droning in the normal buzz of commerce. The Glass Mall itself was always beautiful to behold. Its five domes of intricately designed stained glass sat atop a giant canyon. A work of architectural art. It should have been a museum, not a shopping center.

  “Can you make her stand on her own?” Eva asked the guard.

  “Eva…” I sputtered out. What was she going to do?

  Eva and the guard ignored me like I was their toy mannequin. Somehow they propped me up so I could stand without support. Better for me. It allowed me to experiment with puppeteering myself. I already had full use of my hands and feet, which they didn’t know, now I just needed control over my arms and legs. No biggie. Ugh!

  Eva and the guard positioned themselves next to the SUV, but within arms length of me. That’s when I saw something that made my heart stop.

  A small device in Eva’s hand. A device that would…

  POP!

  Yup.

  Dimension displacement.

  The same kind of device Turner used to disguise our vehicles when we snuck into Havenville months ago.

  Somehow Elisha had stolen the technology. Now she was using it to hide her own armada. Although now that I thought about it, it was probably one of the I.Q. kids that invented it in the first place. Turner said once that pretty much all of our modern day innovations came from the I.Q. farms. Of course Elisha had access! She probably invented it herself!

  The hover-SUV, Eva and the guard disappeared from sight.

  Oh boy.

  This was the moment I’d been dreading.

  I was going to be set up for something.

  That whole She can make things float thing Eva had been telling to the press was going to bite me in the butt and there was nothing I could do about it.

  Eva and the guard had disappeared from sight, but they were still nearby.

  “Watch her. I need all my concentration.” I could hear Eva’s voice order the guard.

  Concentration?

  She was going to use her powers.

  And I wouldn’t be able to stop her.

  I tried not to lose it as I focused on all my limbs. I needed to control myself. I needed not to be drugged!

  Too late.

  I felt it before I saw it.

  A mass of swirling black holes looming behind me, headed straight toward the Glass Mall.

  What the…?

  I managed to tilt my neck up to see the most terrifying sight imaginable.

  A gigantic shard of metal floated above me casting a shadow over everything in the nearby vicinity. The thing was huge, well over seven football fields long, and it was jagged all around its edges. Sharp metal edges that could do some serious damage. But what was most frightening was the fact that this enormous slab of metal floated in the air because it was being held up by trillions of dead flies.

  Before I could even contemplate what Eva planned to do with this razor-blade-of-terror she made it slam into one of the Glass Mall’s five domes. The structure was built to withstand hurricanes, so the first attack didn’t break the glass. But I could tell the building wouldn’t hold up for long.

  I could hear screams from the people below, and see them running from the m
all as fast as their terrified legs would carry them. But there still had to be thousands of people inside. If I didn’t so something quick…

  They would die.

  That’s when I heard the guard’s voice next to me, placing an “emergency” phone call to the authorities, and knew my fate was sealed.

  “Hello?! Hello?!” he cried into the phone, pretending he was scared witless. “I’m at the Glass Mall! We’re being attacked! We’re all going to die!” For a “frightened” person, he had a lot of details to convey, like this kicker: “I see that Chelsan Derée girl from the news on the North side hill! She’s doing this! She’s trying to kill us all! Stop her! Stop her!” He hung up, making his phone call sound like it was cut off in mid-sentence: all the more dramatic to whoever was on the receiving end.

  But at the moment I didn’t have time to care about the fact that they were framing me for this attack. People were going to die unless I could get control of the flies and move the metal to safety. Problem was: I couldn’t just drop the flies’ connection to their swirling black holes because then the sharp metal shard would fall directly on the mall and on the people below.

  SLAM!

  Eva made the metal hit the glass wall once more. This time it cracked. One more hit and the dome would buckle and collapse.

  I heard sirens from all directions.

  The authorities were coming for me.

  I had to do this quick.

  SLAM!

  SMASH!

  The stained glass shattered into a million pieces.

  The screams below sounded like a roar. There were thousands of seriously freaked out people down there and they were all going to die if I didn’t do something about it.

  SMASH!

  Eva made the giant shard of metal slice down into the mall. I couldn’t see what was happening, but a moment later I could see the newly swirling holes of dead bodies scattered on the ground.

  NO!

  Something inside of me cracked.

  I felt it.

  It was like the moment I had to make Roberta stop torturing my mother’s dead body.

  I was blind with rage, frustration and terror.

  And I screamed.

  I could feel my back arching as my insides boiled.

  I connected to every single dead fly.

  Trillions of them all mine.

  “NO!!!” I heard Eva shriek in outrage.

  I hurled the deadly metal slab out of the mall, making the flies soar it safely away from the Glass Mall, into the oak forest behind me.

  The loud sound of trees snapping into pieces as the metal shredded through the forest was almost deafening, before it finally crashed to the ground.

  I could feel Eva trying to regain control of the flies.

  My momentum was gone.

  The drugs were still in effect.

  I was too weak to separate my mind from my drugged-out body.

  Eva was winning.

  With my last bit of mental strength I kept hold of the flies and did the only thing I could.

  I released them from their swirling black holes. Now no one could control them.

  The sound of Eva screaming gave me small pleasure as I felt my body start to fail. I was losing consciousness fast. I heard her voice harshly whisper, “Grab her! Quick! We have the holo-footage already!”

  The guard’s voice sounded rattled, “The authorities are too close. They’ll see me.”

  “We can’t let Turner have her! Elisha will kill me if we don’t bring her back!”

  I could sense more than see the hover vehicles landing all around me, lights flashing, coming to arrest me.

  I saw the guard’s arm materialize next to me, starting to grab.

  I wasn’t going back to Elisha.

  I took the last reserves of my energy and forced my body to move toward the policemen running to arrest me.

  “Grab her!” Eva’s voice was a shriek of dread desperation.

  I jumped away from the guard’s outstretched arm, blackness already starting to envelope me.

  The last thing I saw was a police officer grabbing my arms as I collapsed to the ground.

  “Why isn’t she waking up? The drugs were flushed out of her system hours ago. Shouldn’t she be up by now? Where’s the doctor?” Nancy’s voice filled my heart like a beam of sunshine.

  I opened my eyes: everything was completely blurred. “Nancy?” I croaked, surprised to find that my voice was hoarse.

  “Oh thank goodness!” The blob that was Nancy ran to my side and grasped my hand tightly. “Are you okay?”

  “I can’t see anything. Where am I?” I asked. “All I see is white blobbish stuff all around me.” Since some of those blobs were moving, I assumed they were people.

  “You’re in Turner’s private hospital. It’s inside the Population Center. This place is freaking huge. Did you even know they had a hospital in here?” Nancy was rambling. That meant she was nervous.

  It also meant she was hiding something from me. I knew that tone.

  I sat up and my head immediately spun dizzily. “Where’s Ryan?”

  “Lie down, he’s fine.” Nancy practically pushed me back into the bed. “He’s right next to you. You really can’t see?” I could tell Nancy was waving her hand in front of my face.

  I whacked it away. “I’m not blind, everything is just blurry.”

  “Give her some space, child,” Roberta’s voice scolded Nancy.

  Nancy sat back.

  “Can we have some drops over here?” Roberta barked to someone in another room.

  A large blob hurried over to my bed. PLOP PLOP went the drops in my eyes. It was instantly soothing and within seconds my vision came back to me. And what I saw was… impressive.

  I was definitely in the richest looking hospital I’d ever seen. Not that I’d been in a lot of hospitals, but after my ordeal with the serial killer Brady, I’d stayed the night at L.A. Hospital. It was nice, but this was insanely lavish. My bed and pillows were made of the softest foam and from the ultra-smooth feel had to be covered with about a million-thread-count sheets. No wonder I hadn’t woken up right away! The room was decorated with high-end holo-paintings and the pale yellow walls were framed with intricately ornate white crown molding.

  That’s when I noticed my bed was placed in the middle of the room with two other identical beds on either side.

  Ryan was on the bed to my right, asleep.

  I started to sit up again to go to his side, but Nancy pushed me back down again. “He’s fine. He’s sleeping.”

  She had that tone again.

  “You’re hiding something from me,” I called her out.

  “I’m not,” Nancy answered, looking away worriedly.

  “Nancy.” I grabbed her hand so she’d have to make eye contact with me.

  Roberta stepped forward, her black swirling hole a constant reminder that the body she inhabited was as dead as a doornail. “Ryan hasn’t woke up yet, but he will. We’ve done scans and there’s nothing physically wrong with him.”

  “It’s Max you should be worried about,” Jill’s voice came from my left.

  I hadn’t even noticed she was there. I turned to her.

  That’s when I lost my breath.

  Max was on the bed to my left, or what was left of Max. He was on life support and looked like he’d been beaten to a pulp. I felt my eyes well up at the sight of him. I couldn’t stay in my bed. I ignored Nancy’s protests and wobbled over to Max’s side. Despite my dizziness I couldn’t just lie down while Max was barely alive. Jill was on the other side of the bed, holding his hand. Her eyes were puffy and red from crying. I’d never seen Jill so wrecked before, and it wasn’t until that moment that I realized there was a lot more to Max and Jill than I had ever guessed.

  “Is he going…?” I couldn’t finish the sentence. I didn’t need to: I already saw the beginnings of a black hole forming in his chest.

  Turner came up from behind me, “We’re doing everything we can to
save him. Unfortunately, whatever Fortski did to age him so fast is causing complications,” he said it with a genuine concern that made me pause. I had only seen glimpses of Turner’s humanity in the short time that I knew him. This was one of those moments.

  I could hardly speak for the lump in my throat, “What did she do to him?” I choked out.

  Turner kept his eyes on Max as he answered, “We found him dead in one of the rooms where you were being held, but we were able to revive him. As far as Elisha knows she killed him. We can use that to our advantage if he recovers.”

  Business as usual.

  I gave Jill a look that I hoped told her I was going to do everything I could to help Max. She barely nodded as she focused all her attention on his still form. Max was so mutilated, it was hard to look at him. Elisha had beat him to death. To death. And remembering how she’d done almost the same thing to her ninety-eight year old twin sister, I really wasn’t that shocked. Elisha enjoyed hurting people. It’s what made her tick. Maybe knowing that would help me later on.

  I turned to Gramps. “We have a lot to talk about.”

  “Agreed.” He eyed me up and down, “Do you need to rest some more?”

  He so didn’t care if I did or not, but I could tell Roberta had made him ask.

  “I’m fine. Can we go back to Nancy’s to talk?” I wanted to be someplace where I felt at home, not locked up in a dungeon, even as nice a dungeon as this hospital room was.

  Turner looked at me like I was crazy. “You can’t go anywhere. The world thinks you’re a mass murderer. I pulled every string I had to get you out of police custody.”

  It all came back to me in a flood of heightened memories: the giant flying piece of metal, the Glass Mall shattering, people dying, me being blamed.

  My knees suddenly failed me and I nearly toppled over. Gramps awkwardly caught me with his hand. “Maybe you should rest.”

  Nancy gently pulled me from Turner’s grasp and led me back to bed, where I sat on its edge. She sat down next to me, protectively. “Jason is handling the spin and Bill and his parents are helping. You know his mom, she’s using her influence to vouch for you.”