The Powerless Series: Complete 5-Book Set

by Jason Letts

  “Even if you die fighting for it?” Will asked, looking Mira in the eye.

  “Yes, for you and the others and my family and your families, I’m willing to fight and die. Because a life without them is no different than death.”

  Will looked like he wanted to say something in protest, but he just couldn’t find the words. Mira put her hand on his shoulder.

  “Your parents are counting on you. Just because something seems like the smart thing to do doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do. We’ll go to Darmen, and we’ll fight alongside the last of those who want to salvage those things that mean most. We might lose, but I would much rather lose than forsake those I care about.”

  Will nodded haltingly, and Mira guided him back through the small clearing to the forest path. They strolled together in the cool shade of the trees, praying for a little more wisdom, a little more clarity.

  When they rejoined the others, none of the scorn greeted Will that saw him off. Everyone was too torn up to hold a grudge and too thankful to hold on to what they had even when so much had been ripped away. Almost as soon as they got back, Chucky loped down the hill toward them. He had a sooty towel in his hands covered in little wood slivers. Carefully gripping it like a sack, he handed it over to Mira.

  While everyone watched, she removed the towel to reveal a snow globe of thick glass. Inside the dome, a little puff of mist danced and twirled in all of the most beautiful shapes. Her hands wrapped around it, and she closed her eyes to focus on the feeling of it. Even though the glass was cool, it made her feel warm.

  “This means they’re out there, somewhere. And they’re still alive. I only hope they hold on long enough for us to come find them.”

  Chapter 16: The Pilgrimage of Lost Souls

  After a few hours of resting, Mira finished constructing her rockets. The shells had been packed with black powder and pyrotechnic stars, the fuses were arranged, and the small lifts to angle them off the ground were ready. A handful of these little white tubes sat innocently on the ground, looking like they could be nothing more dangerous than birdhouses.

  “I hope these things do the trick,” Vern said.

  “They’ll do something, but we have to get in position to use them,” Mira replied.

  The others had gotten their belongings together and looked ready to depart. Even Goober had scampered over from his playhouse in the demolished town, greedily eyeing the bag containing the food. Only Mert Bogger had no place else to go.

  “You could come with us,” Mira suggested, but the old man chuckled.

  “I think I’ve tempted fate enough with those knuckleheads. You lot can go on ahead. I’ll be right here waiting for you to bring everybody back. I’ll have a hotel ready with a competitive rate.”

  “OK then,” they said, waving him goodbye.

  Mira led the group up the road that would take them past her home on the way to Darmen. The rockets peeked out of the bag on her back, in her hand she carried the snow globe, and on her hip she wore the tiny bottle of her mother’s tears. These mementoes helped keep her parents in her thoughts, which seemed all she had to go on.

  The others grouped around her in solidarity. They carried the small packs they had brought with them when they originally left for the warfront. They only had a few small knives between them. Carrying food enough for the two-day walk, they wouldn’t need to scrounge through the forest on the way, which left them free to worry about a host of other problems instead.

  There could be no telling what they would find when they reached Darmen. Would they get there before the Sunfighter army and have to warn the city of the coming attack? It seemed just as likely they would come upon a flattened city just like the one they left. Or they could come right in the throes of battle and have to quickly work their way in. Only time would tell.

  Something else puzzled them more than any of the possibilities for what might happen. Knowing their families were alive and yet taken against their will made them all wonder the same thing. Why were they taken prisoner?

  “It doesn’t make any sense to me. The Sunfighters sure didn’t want any prisoners back on the battlefield. They’d be more willing to kill one of their own than take a prisoner,” Chucky mused.

  “You’re right about that. Are they really going to go through the trouble of feeding them and everything? That doesn’t seem like them at all,” Roselyn agreed.

  “What could they possibly want so many people for?” Mira wondered.

  None of them could conjure the slightest idea, but that didn’t stop them from thinking about it. Turning the corner, they saw Mert Bogger’s flattened house. The old man had built a rudimentary shack from the wreckage that sat on his front lawn. It seemed a shameful residence for someone who had lived such a long life.

  “It’s a good thing he’s around or we’d know even less than we do now,” Will said, and his surprising optimism caught the attention of his friends and garnered their immediate agreement.

  “We would’ve had no choice but to assume that everyone was dead and gone,” Vern noted. “And this trek would’ve been that much harder because of it. I’ll take a rescue mission over a revenge attack any day of the week.”

  “We’ll have to rescue much more than just our families,” Mira added. “After Darmen, there’s nothing left to defend. Assuming they raze the other nearby towns, only the ones way out west would be left, but they wouldn’t stand a chance. There wouldn’t be anyone left to stand up to them.”

  “Darmen is everything,” Aoi sighed.

  They came to Mira’s house, which had been leveled like the rest. The freshly painted exterior was strewn about the area. The roof had been ripped apart and the walls capsized. Furniture stuck out through the rubble. Mira could see things from her room baking in the sun.

  Drifting off the road, Mira took a moment to absorb the destruction. Thinking back to the first time she left town for Darmen to the last time she came home, a feeling of responsibility for what she saw bloomed within her. She choked up, and the others parted from the road to comfort her. Mira brushed a hair from her eyes and held the snow globe tight to her stomach.

  “Do you know what I said to them the last time I saw them? The surest way to see something destroyed is to call it home. And wouldn’t you know, it happened. Gosh, why did I say that to them? I could have said something sweet like ‘home is wherever your family goes’, and the meaning of this wouldn’t have felt so hard, but instead I didn’t and now they have to suffer more because of it.”

  “I’m sure they don’t hold it against you,” Roselyn consoled.

  “Maybe they don’t,” Mira went on. “And I can’t hold it against myself because that’s what made me so hard in the first place. Instead I’ve got to be better at just being myself. I’m not perfect, and I make mistakes, but my work will always be for the betterment of those I care about. I’ll always try my hardest to do what’s right, which for right now means freeing my family, all of them.”

  Mira nodded, signaling her readiness to move on. Taking a deep breath, she led them from the yard and northeast along the road. Walking just behind Mira, Mary’s eyes grew large as the rockets rolled around in front of her. Something made her scratch her chin and squint.

  “Speaking of just being yourself, can you imagine if everyone was like Mira?” Mary said.

  Everyone, even Mira, had to laugh at the ridiculousness of her idea.

  “Nobody would have any gifts and people would be building stuff all the time instead? How am I supposed to create a gadget when I can barely tie my shoes?” Roselyn chuckled.

  “You mean I wouldn’t be able to just sit in a chair and have snacks float to me at the twist of the wrist?” Vern said, flabbergasted. “That’s not a world I want to live in!”

  “I wouldn’t mind giving it a try,” Will smiled. “At least then nobody would be able to fiddle around with the Earth and make it stop revolving.”

  “It might sound interesting now,” Mira said, “but I bet i
t wouldn’t be too terribly different. People are people, after all.”

  “I’d say it sounds a lot different to me,” Aoi said. “I’d much rather get to Darmen and not have to worry about the Warlord exploding me or brainwashing me into a lunatic.”

  As soon as she spoke, its relevance hit them and everyone stopped dead.

  “What if he took everyone prisoner so he could corrupt them!” Mary said, her hand over her mouth.

  “What if we get there and we have to fight against our own families? What if they’re trying to kill us?” Chucky asked.

  “I don’t even want to think about that!” Roselyn shuddered.

  “What…‌what would we even do?” Vern asked Mira.

  Mira still had the globe in her hand, and she now looked down at its twirling formations with horror. What would she do if she had to fight against her own parents? She noticed the others struggling with the same question, and brooding, troubled unease took shape on their faces as they realized their families might be lost after all.

  “If they are being controlled, it is that one vicious man who is doing it. Since the beginning, he’s been the cause of all of this, and it’s only through him we can set it right. I won’t fight my family, but I won’t let them stop me from helping them either,” she declared.

  Appearing shy and more than a little bit scared, Mary spit out a question that gave them all a new reason for concern.

  “What if he does it to us? What if we have to fight against each other?” she asked.

  “Mira, how did you break through it?” Will asked.

  At a loss for how to answer all of these dreadful questions, Mira tried to explain how it worked even though she couldn’t be entirely sure.

  “The problem is that you become so desperate to deny your insecurities that you’ll do whatever he says to show you the way out. It makes you selfish and greedy, cold to everything. It took me so long in my dream to realize there were more important things than myself. You just have to find something outside yourself that you care about more than your very own life.”

  “Selfish and greedy?” Goober spoke up. “That’s only what we are.”

  “That’s not true! I’ve known plenty who were caring and altruistic, Corey among them,” Roselyn countered.

  “You can’t know what’s in their heart. You can only speak for yourself. What have you done in the service of others?” the boy asked Roselyn with a horrid smirk.

  “Me?” she pondered, perturbed.

  “I’ll tell you what I would give my life for,” Chucky said. “Any of you. I know I wasn’t cool back in the academy, and I’m probably still not cool now, but I’ve seen you fight for me and fight for what you believe in. That’s worth a lot more than my life, but that’s all I have to give.”

  “You’ll get your chance soon enough,” Goober griped, salivating at all this talk of mortality.

  “Wait,” Roselyn interrupted. “My father said all the time he would put his life before mine. So if the answer is loving someone else more than yourself, how could he be influenced?”

  Mira thought for a moment, but she couldn’t figure it out. Just as she was about to tell them she didn’t have a clue, Vern spoke up.

  “Maybe you have to know it’s the answer,” he said. “Maybe that’s what his words hide from you. He wraps you up in everything you’re afraid of, and at that point you’re just trying to save your sense of self instead of looking out for anyone else.”

  “That sounds like what happened to me,” Mira added, a cold shiver shooting up her spine. “If it weren’t for my dream, I never would’ve been able to see how cold I had become. I would’ve gone right on fighting against those awful things he showed me. I can only hope my parents are better at resisting him.”

  Many miles away, in the dust of another destroyed town, the Sunfighter army and their captives waited for the order from their leader to move out. They’d defeated this town just as easily as they did Corey Outpost, and now both those in uniforms and civilian clothes ransacked the rubble for scraps.

  Kevin and Jeana Ipswich, looking dirty, demoralized, and chilled, watched two of their townsfolk fight over a loaf of bread they’d pulled from the wreckage. Split in half, it’d be enough for them both, yet they scuffled and yanked to get it all. The two men were oblivious to the scene they were creating, and it seemed obvious there would be consequences.

  Suddenly, Pyrenee appeared out of nowhere beside them. In one stroke, she loped off both their heads, smiling as the bodies and the bread dropped to the ground. She howled to the crowd something about saving their fighting for the enemy, but none of her words made it through to Jeana and Kevin for the sight of her face.

  “She looks so strangely familiar,” Kevin gasped, squinting and craning his neck to glimpse what was under that red helmet. Her almond eyes and rosy cheeks struck him.

  “It can’t be,” Jeana shuddered, her mouth dropping open.

  They may have never known it was their daughter if she wasn’t so similar to Mira. Seeing her for the first time in sixteen years mesmerized them, and they gawked openly. Pyrenee turned her head, catching them staring, and the two parents jerked their heads away, pretending to search the rubble. They were afraid, knowing the one in the red armor to be a ruthless tyrant but confused because of her appearance. Out of the corner of his eye, Kevin saw her take her first step toward them.

  “What do we do? Does she even know it’s us?” Jeana rambled.

  “Hey!” Pyrenee said, forcefully and yet not loudly enough to drawn any attention. “What’cha looking at?”

  “Nothing. I knew those men,” Kevin cowered, unable to take his eyes from her though he kept his head down.

  “Don’t lie to me! I knows who you is.”

  Called out, Kevin and Jeana had no choice but to face her plainly. Having their daughter right in front of them, radiant and terrifying, brought stifled smiles to their faces. No matter how terrible she had become, their faces flushed with joy.

  “You can’t be Pyrenee,” Kevin pleaded. “You’re Clara, and we sent your sister Mira to find you. You’re our little girl.”

  The girl in front of them started to chortle, and that’s when Kevin began to sense a presence behind him.

  “I’m somebody’s little girl, but it sure ain’t y’all’s,” she smirked, glancing behind them.

  Kevin, who was reasonably tall, turned around to discover a monstrosity of a man towering over him. His singed hair and grisly features were disturbing, and Kevin immediately recognized him as the man who had kidnapped Clara from him so long ago. Even though he knew what would happen, Kevin created a cloud to detain him, but the Warlord sent a jolt of electricity that shocked him to the ground. Jeana gritted her teeth and prepared to lunge as well, but Clara and the tip of her sword stopped her. Jeana grasped for her daughter, but her fingers slipped right through.

  “You’ll pay for what you did to our family! Do you hear me? Not a moment will go by when I’m not hunting you down!” Jeana raved at the Warlord, flailing her arms in hysterics.

  Feeling shocked, though not seriously hurt, Kevin wondered why they hadn’t been killed. Catching his breath, he stared at his daughter, who oozed malice and contempt. He shook his head, disgusted at the one who had perverted his flesh and blood.

  “You monster, what have you done to her? No girl should ever end up like this.”

  The Warlord, formerly passive and plain-faced, struck a strange glare, one Kevin found both unsettling and strangely invasive. He cracked his lips open to form a crooked smile.

  “What have I done? Why don’t I ask you that? This girl seems just the same as her twin you raised. So it can’t be my fault.”

  “What?” Jeana yelped, calming down and taking deep breaths. Slowly, Kevin hobbled to his feet and took his wife’s side.

  An image of Mira during the Equinox Festival came to Kevin then. She was scornful, full of murderous rage, and no different than the lost daughter he saw before him. The villain’s impli
cation was all too clear.

  “No, that wasn’t our fault. It was Widget who changed Mira! We raised her to be a good girl!” Kevin barked, and Jeana nodded her head emphatically. Neither the Warlord nor Clara were convinced in the least.

  “You brought her up in a cage since she was born, taught her what she knows, and made her what she is! She is what she is cuz of you!”

  “No!” Jeana frothed, babbling. “We tried to be good parents. All we ever wanted was to be good parents! We didn’t do that to Mira!”

  Her heartfelt pleas seemed to have some effect on Pyrenee, who didn’t take her eyes off her mother. The Warlord’s face also softened into something almost akin to sympathy. A strange shine in his eyes remained, one that somehow put Kevin’s mind at ease despite the dire nervousness he felt at bearing responsibility for Mira’s murderous behavior.

  “It is not your fault,” the Warlord relented. “That wretch does not come from you. The white-haired man made her in a lab, then she spurned you for your love. Your true child is right here. I made her what she is, not you, and so you can be free of your guilt.”

  Desperate to escape his accusations, Kevin and Jeana anxiously agreed. While the Warlord moved on to work his unnatural coercion on more of his new followers, the Ipswiches discovered feelings of resentment and bitterness for Mira they had never known. The world would’ve collapsed if it meant they’d laid the seeds for Mira’s warping, but instead she had abused their love when she had no right to it in the first place. Shunning Mira in their minds, they clutched each other and went to embrace their real daughter, a merciless, vicious girl whose atrocities could never be their fault. Clara lowered her sword and let them come. For just an instant, she appeared disappointed when they couldn’t touch her.

  Mira and her friends followed a thinning trail along the forest’s edge beside the mountain chain running north. Each new thought presented a new way something ghastly and horrific would be waiting for them when they reached the capitol city. But for all their thinking, solutions to their problems seemed as scarce as stars in the sunny sky.