by Susan Bohnet
They reached the park. Kai was a few steps behind. He took a seat on one of the metal benches about eight feet from the stroller. Holly was so excited she was bouncing on the heels of her feet. “Can you push me on the swing?” Her voice was a loud squeal.
Just then, the baby squirmed in the stroller, crying out. Without a word, the woman slapped the girl’s face. Screaming at the child, her finger pointed threateningly, the woman proceeded to berate her. The little girl wiped her runny nose on her sleeve.
Kai jumped to his feet and felt the anger rise. This woman didn’t deserve these children. She didn’t deserve to live. Kai stepped toward the woman. She wouldn’t continue to abuse these children year after year of their lives! They would be so much better off without her.
The woman looked up, annoyed, as Kai moved in front of her. He could imagine the pain in the years ahead. He imagined the insults, the criticism, the slaps and shoves. The sensation was moving up his core, filling him, surging through his veins. He would pass out, but no one would blame him for the sudden death. And she deserved this.
“What?” asked the woman.
What indeed, thought Kai. What did your daughter do to deserve such treatment? The moment was approaching.
Suddenly Kai reached up and covered his eyes with the palms of his hands. The sound of the baby’s crying echoed in his ears.
“Are you okay?” asked the woman. She reached out and touched his arm.
Kai didn’t trust himself to look at her. He sat next to her on the bench. “Just feeling dizzy,” he mumbled. And it wasn’t a lie. He took several deep breaths while she picked up the crying infant. Then he turned toward her and reached into the young mother’s mind. He found the kindness and compassion that he’d chosen to ignore earlier. But she was already finding that on her own. An overwhelming feeling of regret for her actions was coursing through her whole being. She had not had a good example of parenthood in her life but she could be better. She would be better. And she’d made this determined choice without any Influencing from Kai.
He had a tissue in his pocket and helped Holly clean her face while the mother changed the baby. “He’s colicky and hardly sleeps,” she muttered. “Poor little fella…” she said rubbing the baby’s tummy. The woman had tears in her eyes, as Kai stood to go. “Thank you,” she said.
Surely, she hadn’t known he’d wanted to Influence her or what he’d narrowly stopped himself from doing, but her thanks was life changing. Not for her, for Kai.
He walked away, feeling the sun on his shoulders. What made him think he should shoulder the world, change and control people? They had their own agency; they had the power to make decisions, and without free will, what was life about?
Two boys a couple of years apart in age, obviously brothers, chased each other through the play structure. “Give me the stick,” yelled the older boy.
“Make me!” taunted his brother. They laughed and chased each other.
Kai snatched a leaf from a maple tree with low-hanging branches. His thumb felt the raised veins in the leaf and the miraculous power that is life. A feeling of awe flooded through him. Was it right to meddle with life and someone’s choices? Maybe if you were upfront about it. If you spoke to people, persuaded, and reasoned with them, you might be able to influence them in an honorable way. With discussions and teaching moments there could be enlightenment, but what about the sneaky way the Trebladores went about it? What was the morality of Influencing?
Kai sat in the shade. How could your life’s work not sit well with you all of a sudden? Not only the extreme measures of the rebels, but also the gentler interference of Influencers.
Chapter Forty-nine
Lincoln sauntered into the kitchen, pausing long enough to snatch a cookie from the plate that sat on the counter. Kai watched him from his seat at the table.
“So,” Kai said, spooning his cereal into his mouth, “Have you heard anything about Harrison? Does anyone know where they’ve taken him?” Kai felt Lincoln’s heavy gaze on him.
“No word yet. We have to be extra careful. We don’t know how much they know about us. We still can’t figure out how they know Harrison is a rebel. Or even if they do.”
Leo straightened from his position in front of the open door of the fridge. “Why would they do those things to him? I’ve never known the Trebladores to attack one another. It’s freaking weird, man. Who will they go for next?”
Lincoln glanced at Kai and then turned to face Leo. “We can’t make any unusual moves right now. We need to go about our business. If we have jobs at Headquarters we need to be there. Don’t draw attention to yourself.” He turned back to Kai. “But you need to lay low, Kai. They will be looking for you in earnest now, hoping you’ll lead them to us. You have to stay hidden. No more missions for a while, at least until we know what they did to Harrison and where they have him.”
“I doubt they’ve done anything harmful to him. Maybe locked him in a room or something, hoping he would talk,” said Kai. “And that’s a problem, too. We just don’t know if he will talk or has talked already.”
Lincoln glanced at them, his eyes moving from one to the other. “It’s a lot to ask to go in to work and act like nothing is wrong when Harrison’s been abducted like this. Are we all up to the task?”
“You don’t think they did anything bad to Harrison, do you?” Kai could hear the tremor in Leo’s voice.
“No, Leo. If I thought that for a second, we would all be storming that building.” Lincoln scowled. “We don’t just abandon our members to the enemy when the going gets rough, you know.”
“Is that what they are now?” asked Kai. “Our enemies?”
Lincoln shrugged, “What would you call them? They are not our friends. They oppose what we do and are searching for clues as to who is a rebel and who isn’t. Headquarters has become an uncomfortable place to hang out these days.
“You are the only one they think isn’t a rebel because you warned them about us. I’m sure Jessip would give anything for a chance to get some information out of you, though.”
“What does he say?” Kai asked.
“Nothing. He watches everyone with a worried look on his face. And I see him lurking around all the time like he’s hoping to overhear a conversation that will give us away.”
Kai looked at Leo. “Maybe I should pay them a visit. See what they think of that. They don’t, after all, know I’m a rebel. They just think I’m hiding so you guys don’t get me.”
Leo shrugged.
“You can’t do that!” yelled Lincoln, not nearly so blasé about the idea. “They know you know who we are. They won’t rest until they get that information out of you. You may never get out of that building again.” Lincoln’s eyes narrowed. “And that would mean that you would never lay eyes on Beth again … keep that in mind.”
Kai stared hard at Lincoln. Why would he make a reference to her now? She was far away in another country. Safe. Lincoln turned and strode out of the kitchen.
Kai looked at Leo. Leo returned his gaze, wide eyed, and shrugged again. Kai rose from his seat and followed Lincoln out of the room. Lincoln had settled onto a couch in the living room, he was alone, watching a show on TV.
Kai stepped in front of the TV, arms crossed over his chest. “What does any of this have to do with Beth?”
“I’m just saying,” Lincoln said. “I want you to be very careful, Kai. We all stand to lose a lot here … you most of all, if we don’t play our cards right.”
“What do you mean by that?”
Lincoln sat up suddenly. “I mean that we could lose our freedom and our backing. How do you think we pay for everything in this house? The Trebladore Society funds us. It is through them that we pay our bills. We do our job for them and they take care of us. If they figure out that we are the rebels, what do you think they will do first?”
Kai thought. “I
would guess they would restrict our income. Refuse to pay our bills or give us money for food until we turn ourselves in.”
“Right. And what would we do then, do you think?”
“Well, we could turn ourselves in, fess up. We would be reprimanded, that’s for sure, but what else do you think they would do to us?” For the first time Kai turned his mind to the details of their lives. He knew where the Society got its funds, how it managed to pay for all the expenses incurred by the men and women who were working on missions and couldn’t, therefore, always be there to work on the business end of their ventures. Treblake Enterprises had many ventures that were quite lucrative.
“Well, Kai,” said Lincoln, “I wonder, these days, just what they would do to us. They would have to stop us. They are completely against the measures we are taking. The original plan was to keep it quiet. To just slip away now and again to take care of any deserving souls we found out about. But overall we were supposed to keep it very much under the radar. Then you went to Jessip and told him about us. Until then, he didn’t even know we existed.”
Kai could not detect any note of anger or recrimination in Lincoln’s voice. They had all been so careful to treat him as one of them, to make no mention of the little episode outside the Trebladore Headquarters. If they were caught, Kai could not envision anything truly horrid happening to any of them. The Trebladores were non-violent. That was how they were raised. What could happen?
Kai looked around the room, his eyes roving restlessly. He felt a crushing sense of guilt. These were his friends and he had started to turn them in. But then, Jessip and the Elites were not all they seemed either. And they had taken Harrison. Taken him with violence. What had happened to him? Despite the fact that most of the Trebladore rebels spent at least some time in Headquarters working, no one could find out anything. None of the Elites were talking. Everything seemed very secret.
“I think the fact that no one in Headquarters knows anything about Harrison … there hasn’t been a rumor, even a whisper of what went on that night … speaks of something totally different going down over there,” said Lincoln. “The Elites have their secrets, they always have. Secrets that most of us don’t have any inkling about. And that is worrying at best. But the fact that there has not been one word about Harrison makes me think there is a deeper cause. The Elites are up to something they don’t want anyone to know about.”
Kai sat in one of the chairs, feeling his knees suddenly going weak. What would Jessip and the Elites do if they caught the rebels? Would they lock them up in some kind of prison and not allow them to live normal lives until their ultimate deaths? What else could they do with a group of dissidents … without causing harm?
Leo entered the room, his shoulders hunched and his features contorted. “What do you think they did to him?” he hissed. Both Lincoln and Kai jolted back in surprise. “I bet they killed him! I bet those stupid old men did something horrible to Harrison and they did it in secret so nobody would find out! There isn’t a word about him because they didn’t take him back to the Headquarters. They took him somewhere else, somewhere they could dispose of him and no one would be the wiser.”
Lincoln stood. “Leo, calm down, you don’t know what you are saying.”
“Oh, don’t I? I know they came and took Harrison. Two Trebladore Elites held him down while Jessip injected something into his neck! Kai saw it happen.” Kai could see that real fear was overcoming Leo’s normally placid personality. He felt the fear radiate from the other man and he watched in surprise as Leo stumbled toward Lincoln, his finger pointed at Lincoln’s chest.
Overcome with worry, Kai reached out toward Leo with his mind, wanting to calm the other man’s nerves. Trebladores couldn’t Influence each other but he felt the fear, sensed the anxiety that was racing through Leo’s veins, found the deep desire for peace and respect and safety. Kai tapped into that desire for peace, holding the thought in his mind as he watched Leo, visually imagining the other man surrounded by a pale pink light, a soft glow of love and kindness.
Lincoln stood frozen, watching Leo as he first started toward him in anger and then suddenly stopped, dropping all attempts at an attack and instead sagged within himself and then turned, silently, and stumbled out of the room.
“Things are going south, Lincoln,” said Kai. “I think we need to spend some time thinking about what our options are. We have Trebladore Elites who are abducting other Trebladores and we have Trebladore rebels acting extremely strange, even for us.”
Lincoln nodded once and then stepped past Kai to disappear down the hall. Kai just stood, rooted to the spot for several moments his thoughts whirling.
Chapter Fifty
Was it a fluke? Was it nothing more than a wild, random coincidence? Or did he really have the power to influence Trebladores? The air seemed thick and full of menacing forces. It wasn’t possible. He shook off the eerie feeling. It was laughable really — he was trying to Influence a Trebladore and the guy changed his mind on his own at the exact moment, making it seem Kai had really had some effect. That should be hilarious … but Kai didn’t laugh.
He grabbed his phone and dialed Beth’s number. It went straight to her voicemail. At the beep, he bit his trembling lip and swallowed before speaking. “Hey, it’s me. Missing you. Hope you’re having a good day. Love ya.” He pushed the button to disconnect. He called again just to hear her recorded voice tell him to leave a message. He hung up and set his phone on the night table in what had become his room at Lincoln’s. One with a window, this time.
Kai paced the room. Picked up the phone, checked for a text, and set it down when he saw there was nothing new. Beth would stabilize him, if only he could talk to her. He saw his faint reflection in the windowpane, the fleck in his eye visible. Would she be able to help him? Maybe he’d feel more agitated talking to her without being able to talk about any of the important things weighing on him. Sometimes she helped to take him away from Trebladore issues. Day-to-day human concerns could be a refreshing change. Other times, avoiding the Trebladore issues was ignoring the elephant in the room and he would get so frustrated it was impossible to talk about anything at all.
There was only one way he could really be sure that he didn’t have the power to Influence Trebladores. He would have to try to do it again. He slipped his phone in the front pocket of his jeans and headed out to the common areas of the house. He had checked out of the hotel that morning.
Scott was lying on the couch now, watching TV. He was a rebel who liked to keep a low profile, but was highly educated and kept a close-cropped goatee for the sole purpose, it seemed, of stroking it and looking smart. Kai sat in the chair next to him. “What’s on?” he asked.
“A great documentary. The civil war. Humans really are barbarians.”
“Let’s see what else is on.”
“I’m in the middle of this, dude. Just watch, I think you’ll find it fascinating.”
Kai concentrated, searching for the dominant threads of thought and emotion. There–kindness, compassion, a sense of wanting to belong. Scott was a solid Trebladore who worked hard for the values he had been raised to believe in. But he was also a rebel. That meant there was some small trace of doubt or fear or maybe even anger in him that made him willing to step outside the confines of the rules of the Trebladore Society.
“There was this one battle…” Scott began. The commercial ended and he trailed off so as not to miss the next part of the program.
Kai had a thought. Scott was totally into this show. Could Kai Influence him to do something else? Kai reached out with his mind and concentrated on the thoughts he wanted to convey. This civil war show was giving Scott one view of history. It’s the victors who usually write the history. The real story might be somewhere between what the two sides would say. If he went to original sources instead, it might give him a clearer picture of the truth. There is very little in this program Scott co
uld take for fact.
Scott stood.
“Where are you going?”
“To the library.” He tossed Kai the remote. “Watch what you want.”
“What? Why?”
“I want to check out some other sources. Try to get to the truth of the civil war, what the people who lived it did and thought.”
Kai rose and walked with Scott to the door. Cautiously he said, “What makes you want to do this?”
“I don’t want to take one person’s point of view. I’m going to trust my own intellect to draw conclusions when I know all the facts I can possibly find. Do you want to come with me?”
“There’s more pressing issues,” Lincoln said, coming out of the kitchen and joining them in the foyer. “If you want to do research, why don’t you help them downstairs?”
“I won’t be gone long,” said Scott. “But I want to know more about this chapter in history. It may turn out to be useful in understanding human nature.”
“Yeah, right,” said Lincoln, rolling his eyes. “You talk a good game.”
Scott laughed. “Besides, it’s another place we haven’t looked for Harrison.”
“You think he’s at the public library?” said Kai.
“Not really, but until I check it out we won’t know for sure.”
“See you later,” Lincoln said, with a smirk that disappeared as soon as Scott was out the door.
“We’re really grasping at straws now,” said Lincoln, as he and Kai walked back to the living room. Lincoln sat on the couch and suddenly slammed his fist on the coffee table. “I don’t understand it … any of it. Why would they take Harrison? And why would they do it like that?”
Lincoln seemed to forget that Kai was there. He was basically talking to himself. Lincoln was an Elite and even he didn’t know what was happening at Headquarters. In his position, Lincoln would normally be aware of infractions by the younger, less experienced Influencers and the action that would be taken to teach them. He would also monitor the efforts of those whose missions were in the human world working alongside their human co-workers. Was he also aware of the kind of actions Jessip had taken to separate Kai and Beth? It seemed he was being groomed to take over the Master position someday. Lincoln should know something about Harrison … something.