The Kota

by Sunshine Somerville

  Now I had to focus on the other two Warriors. Although these Marked children weren’t of my bloodline, I’d come to care as much for them as I did for my own niece and nephew. While real time progressed, I watched these siblings as best I could, trying to guide events in a direction I knew they needed to go. But, because I’d so often paid more attention to the troubled Kandoya children, the safer Collins children had often gone unwatched for long periods of time. But, now that Loree and Zaak were in each other’s hands, I could turn my attention to the Collins pair. Using my unique gift for time travel, I could go back into past time and observe those occasions when I’d been absent from viewing. This would help me know them as well as I knew Loree and Zaak.

  From what I’d already seen of the Collins siblings, I knew they’d bring balance to the more eccentric Kandoyas. The Collins children had grown up not knowing they were anything special, and this alone made them more humble. Alex Collins was a small, anxious young woman who didn’t at all fit the part of a battle-ready soldier, but I believed she’d find her place in time. Ryu Collins already understood about love’s loyalty. The other Warriors weren’t as stable as Ryu. Also, I was relieved to have a pacifist in the group, however ironic that he was the prophesied Warrior Fighter.

  A few decades of watching the Warriors had gone like a flash compared to five centuries of waiting. And what I’d seen of these children surprised me. These four prophesied beings were rather like ordinary people, complete with personal issues and faults. They weren’t anything like the all-powerful, mystical Warriors I’d envisioned for so long. Perhaps I had, without knowing it, placed them on a pedestal just as Lee had done.

  In any case, they had to grow up a bit before meeting.

  For now, I thought, I’ll catch up on the Seer and Fighter’s history.

  And so, as I floated toward a particular portal hole, I prepared to look in on Alex and Ryu Collins.

  Past time

  The green grass around Alex Collins swayed as a breeze wafted up from the meadow. It was a bright, sunny day, and Alex lay on the warm ground in perfect comfort. If anyone had come upon her, they’d have seen a petite, blond, pretty, nineteen-year-old girl lying at the base of the lone tree on the hill. Her sundress ruffled in the breeze, and she bobbed her boots to the rhythm of the song in her head.

  Alex let out a deep breath, and the familiar sensation of burning and tingling strengthened her telepathy. Although her eyes were closed, she saw her surroundings in her mind. A raven hops through the branches overhead. Bursts of sunlight illuminate the greenery around the bird as the leaves blow.

  In the background of her thoughts, Alex heard voices whispering and muttering. She knew no one was nearby, so she focused her telepathy and tried to figure out what she was hearing. The mind-voices overlapped in her thoughts, and she squinted as she separated the eerie, whisper-like voices.

  “We’ll get him this time.”

  “He’s got nowhere to run.”

  “Stupid MOB.”

  One young man’s thoughts were clearer than the others. “Why can’t they just leave me alone?”

  Alex opened her blue eyes and sat up. The raven in the tree overhead shrieked in alarm and flew away. Alex rose to her feet and ran down the hill. She raced across the sunlit meadow, ignoring the tall grass that brushed against her boots and bare legs.

  Oh, no, she thought. I should’ve been paying more attention to my mind links! I heard at least Kent’s thoughts, and it sounded like other bullies are taunting Ryu too. They must already have him cornered! Why hasn’t Ryu called out to me for help? He has to stop thinking he can handle things on his own!

  When she broke out of the tall grasses, Alex hurried to the dusty street of the village where she, her younger brother, and their grandmother lived. The village was deep in the woodland part of the Northern Continent’s northern region, and there’d been no new construction for decades. As Alex stood in the street, she saw nothing unusual. People shopped at the market. Others sat in beat-up vehicles, tending to lists or calling out to friends. A gaggle of older ladies chatted on benches near the park.

  Alex took in the familiar scene and tried not to be obvious as she scanned with her telepathy. She tried to narrow in on the thoughts of the bullies with her brother. Facing the park, she sensed a stream of thoughts and knew Ryu was close.

  He’s in the park, she thought. Hurry!

  Alex ran across the dusty street and up a park trail.

  Keep calm, she thought. Just stay calm and try to handle this as quickly as possible. Don’t let on that you heard their argument from the meadow – drawing attention to my telepathy certainly wouldn’t help! They’d freak out about us being MOB, and then they’d run to their parents. Again.

  A downside to living in the remote village was that the citizens here held to centuries-old notions about the world. While MOB were celebrated in the Dominion and at least tolerated in the bigger cities, not so in this backwoods village. Here, the villagers still bore prejudices against MOB.

  I remember high school, thought Alex. My classmates’ parents always claimed I was invading their kids’ minds to steal test answers. Ryu has it worse – they accuse him of beating up their brats. They’re too stupid to see he’s only defending himself! It’s been harder as he’s gotten bigger. My telepathy is easy enough to deny, but his strength…

  Alex jogged along a pebbled path and looked back at the main street. A Dominion patrol vehicle rolled by. Alex wasn’t a coward, but she was always on the lookout for trouble. And a patrol vehicle was always a good reason to be on alert. The local villagers weren’t the only threat to Alex and Ryu’s well-being. Not by a long shot.

  Great, she thought. I better fix this quick before Ryu gets in another fight. If he’s arrested… No, don’t think about that.

  A voice ahead was Kent’s. “MOB,” he was yelling at her brother. “Go home!”

  “If you’re a MOB, you’re a snob!” another teen rhymed. (This was neither an original taunt nor a very good one.)

  “Don’t come to this park again,” yelled a third, “or we’ll tell the drones you’re a rebellious, dangerous freak!”

  The boys laughed.

  They came into view as Alex rounded a hedge. She recognized these three as Ryu’s classmates from the local high school. Her brother stood beside a small pond, facing the other boys. Ryu was much more muscular than his peers. He was also a good head and shoulders taller, standing over two meters tall. Ryu was a much sweeter person than his stature suggested, but he didn’t look pleased with the other teens at the moment. His brown eyes glared at his classmates. Mud was stuck in his blond hair, on his white T-shirt, and on his baggy pants.

  They threw mud at him, thought Alex. Probably from a safe distance. Good grief.

  Ryu’s voice was deep for his age. “Why don’t you go home, Kent? I was here minding my own business.”

  Alex jogged to her brother’s side. She tried to sound unknowing. “Hey, what’s going on?”

  A boy with a ripped sleeve glared at her. “Get out of here, Alex. We know what you are too. Take Ryu home with you. We don’t want either of you freaks in our park.”

  Alex looked up at her brother, whose jaw was clenched. “Come on, Ryu. Let’s go home. We’ll have missed dinner, and Grandma will worry.” She glanced at the boys, then stood on her toes to whisper in his ear. “You know they want to start a fight. They’re just looking for an excuse to report you. We need to go home.”

  Ryu huffed. Then he rolled his eyes, turned his back to the boys, and walked to the path. Alex followed but looked back uncertainly at the younger teens, who seemed satisfied. Alex then hurried after her brother. She caught up with him on the main trail, and they walked side by side into the village.

  “Stay close,” Ryu whispered. “I saw a few drones enter the park a while ago, and Kent might actually rat us out this time.”

  Alex felt a lump of fear in her throat.

  Life in the village had always been difficult,
but the last few years had been especially rough. This was thanks to Malice, the Elite who governed their region. Malice himself wasn’t a MOB, and he seemed to share his subjects’ general distaste for those with ‘impure’ genes. He regularly sent patrols throughout the region in search of MOB. While Cruelthor instructed his Elite to recruit MOB into the Youth program, Malice preferred to imprison or even factor them. In the village, a few MOB had already been reported and never heard from again.

  Everyone here knows we’re unusually gifted, thought Alex. Most respect Grandma and the memory of our parents and so kindly don’t report us. But things are getting worse. Soon, I’m sure someone will tell the patrols.

  They made it through the village without seeing drones. Once they reached the road leading out of town, they breathed sighs of relief. Ryu relaxed his muscular frame, and he scuffed his feet along the pavement. Alex slowed their pace and enjoyed the nature around them.

  On one side of the road lay the woodland, on the other the meadow where Alex had waited for Ryu to get out of school. She did this every weekday after her shift at the food stopover, and they always walked home together after his last class.

  Few strangers would guess we’re related, thought Alex. I certainly never had anything like his growth spurt…

  “Ryu, you have to be more careful,” she scolded in her big-sister tone. “If I hadn’t heard your thoughts in time and come running, you would’ve gotten in another fight. That school won’t tolerate you pulverizing your classmates, even if it is self-defense. To them, you’re just a MOB. So am I, for that matter, since no one trusts telepathy any more than mutate-genes. We have to keep our heads down, Ryu. Stay out of trouble. You can’t let those boys corner you. They’ll report us to the drones, and then everything is over.”

  Ryu picked up a stone in the road and threw it into the woods. “I’m sorry, sis. Kent and those guys started it at school earlier. It wasn’t my fault. I was walking through the park to meet you when they ambushed me and started hitting me with mud. There was nothing I could do!”

  “I know it wasn’t your fault, Ryu. We just have to be really careful. You’re the only MOB anyone’s ever heard of who had his mutate-genes kick in before puberty. We both developed early. I’ve never heard of a telepath who could read minds so young either. You never should’ve told people about that tingle we feel when we use our abilities. Even other MOB don’t feel it, and that’s just one more thing that makes us different. These people don’t get us, so they’re afraid of us. Most of the time when people look at me, I hear them thinking, ‘There’s something strange about those Collins kids.’ Ever since the Dominion started patrolling regularly…”

  Ryu looked at her with a pleading smile. “Since it’s getting so bad, you could take me with you when you move south. I know you and Grandma want me to finish school, but Kent and those jerks start something every day. An education isn’t worth getting killed.”

  He might be right about that, she thought with a frown.

  “I could go with you,” he went on. “I hear there are hundreds of MOB in the bigger cities, but no one notices because of the crowds. We could blend in. My strength and your telepathy are easy enough to hide. It’s not like my mutate-genes have given me cat eyes or a tail like MOB I’ve seen on the newscasts. It’s not like you have a third eye, either. We’d be safe in El Miret or Chi.” Ryu lifted an eyebrow at her. “That’s why Grandma suggested you move, you know. She’s more worried about you than me. Even if I’m younger, you’re the one who can’t defend yourself.”

  Alex thought back on the conversation she’d had with their grandmother. The old woman had said, “Your parents came here to be safe, but Malice is stirring everyone up. Drake and Roux were taken from us in that accident; I can’t let anything happen to you too. I swore to protect you children, but I’m afraid it’s not safe here anymore.” Alex had assured her that she’d protected them as much as she could, but their grandmother hadn’t looked reassured.

  She was worried, thought Alex. But I also sensed something… She wanted me to leave and search for something. I didn’t dare snoop in her mind too much, but I’m sure I heard her thinking about wanting more for our lives.

  Alex sighed.

  I’ve only been south to El Miret a few times, she thought, but Ryu’s right about blending in better there. And Grandma does want me to move and be safe. She wants Ryu to go too. But…

  Ryu apparently was thinking along the same lines, and he sighed. “I know what you’re going to say. One of us has to stay with Grandma. You want to get out of here, and you should. I can take care of myself, so I should be the one to stay.”

  Alex frowned. She didn’t like feeling as if she was running away to protect herself… Especially when it meant leaving Ryu, who was too confident about his ability to avoid danger.

  I hope he doesn’t do anything stupid once I’m gone, she thought. Really, I have to leave for Ryu’s sake. The two of us combined seem like more of a threat, but the drones are less likely to take notice of a lone MOB.

  Alex sighed as she looked ahead up the road.

  I want to leave, she thought. What is there for me here? Am I going to work in the food stopover for the rest of my life? I don’t hate it here, aside from the danger. This is the only home I’ve ever known. But this isn’t… It isn’t enough. I talk all the time with my telepathic friends who’ve seen more of the world, and I am curious. Ryu isn’t satisfied here either – that’s a big part of why he wants to go with me.

  “While you’re gone,” said Ryu, “maybe I can find a way to use my gifts to help people. There must be a way to show the villagers I’m not a threat. I mean, we live in one of the most oppressed regions in the Dominion, and I want to use my strength to help people. I can’t just hide all the time.”

  Alex shook her head. “We shouldn’t draw attention to ourselves.”

  Ryu made a face as they reached their small house’s front yard. “I heard one of Grandma’s lady friends talking yesterday. She thinks you control her thoughts whenever you’re in her shop.”

  Alex rolled her eyes.

  “Do you, sis?”

  “You know I don’t. I can only use my telepathy to hear thoughts. One thing those telepathy books agree on is that it’s impossible to control a mind and go unnoticed – a mind always knows when thoughts aren’t its own. Making people think certain thoughts is tricky and dangerous for both parties. I don’t have enough strength. My telepathy is a one-way thing – intake, not output. I might have abnormal skill with it, but I still have limitations.”

  Ryu understood this much. “So that’s why I never notice when you enter my thoughts? Since they’re only my thoughts and not yours, I don’t notice? It’s like that with other people too, even ones without mind links?”

  “Yeah. The mind links I make with people only replace the need for eye contact. They don’t really strengthen anything. And even the mind links are hard to use when there’s distance involved. My link with your mind is a lot stronger than most, for some reason, but it’s hard to hear even your thoughts when we’re not together.” She frowned and stepped around a garden utensil left in the grass. “I’m not nearly as powerful as people fear.”

  They walked across the front yard, and Alex looked around their simple home. Normally, she was so used to the serene beauty that she didn’t bother noticing it. Everything was a wash of green. Their grandmother’s property was much wilder than anywhere in the main part of the village. Trees hemmed in the homestead, except for the driveway where it met the road. Because of the cover, it was already getting dark.

  The significance of the protective isolation wasn’t lost on Alex. She’d always suspected her family had moved here to avoid the ugliness of the outside world. She had many happy childhood memories of playing with her father in the back yard while her mother held baby Ryu and laughed. When their parents died in an accident, their grandmother strove to fight the tragedy with love and joy, and Alex and Ryu had grown up happy here. Yet, e
ven this place’s safety was crumbling as the villagers’ fears advanced.

  I wonder, thought Alex. Did our parents know our abilities would be so strange? Is that why they chose to raise us here – to hide us? Well, no, how could they’ve known? They probably just wanted to avoid the Dominion’s atrocities. This was their safe haven… Too bad nothing lasts.

  They climbed the short stairs that led to the house’s porch, and Ryu pulled Alex’s blond hair to hold her back from entering the house.

  She laughed at him. “What?”

  Ryu spoke with more passion than she normally heard from him. “Sis, we both believe there’s a reason we have these incredible gifts. I don’t need telepathy to know you feel the same way I do.”

  She sighed.

  “I want to know what I’m capable of. I get that you’re afraid we’ll be caught and sent off to the Dominion, but you want to know about our gifts too. I’ve seen the stacks of books on mutate-genes in your room, and you talk to other telepaths to learn about your gifts. We might not understand, but we can’t live in hiding our whole lives. It doesn’t seem right to squander our gifts. I want to use my strength to help people, even if it means getting into trouble. I know you try to help people with your telepathy, but you hold yourself back because you’re afraid that you don’t have control if you don’t understand. I just… I just think we should be doing more than hiding.”

  Alex squirmed. She never liked feeling convicted by her younger sibling. But she was older, and a little bit wiser. She’d looked out for him ever since their parents died, and the stress of this had perhaps distracted her from the truth of what he was saying.

  “Ryu, of course we both want to use our gifts to help people. But you’re still so young. I’m still so young. There’s a lot we don’t know about the world. There’s a lot we don’t know about our own abilities. I really think we need to understand our abilities before we use them willy-nilly. We have to play it safe, considering the Dominion would snatch us if they knew. You use your strength in public all the time, and you need to tone it down.”