by K. T. Hanna
“You’re new, Dare.” Sam knelt in front of me, tucking a strand of hair behind my ear. I didn’t move. She continued, her tone sad.
“You haven’t even finished your tutorials and we’ve thrown you in the deep end. Eels—that’s electrical affinities by the way if you didn’t figure that out—aren’t necessarily rare. But their ability is fraught with dangers. Often, they come with another affinity immediately attached, and therefore the eel ability is lesser, and less, shall we say, combustible.” She grinned at me. “But a solo eel? We don’t have many of them, and they’re spread thin. So you’ll be sent on a lot more tasks the more you evolve with your skill.”
“Soon?” I was worried about the State meet. So freaking panicked. It was the one remnant of my life I’d managed to keep intact, keep away from this damned system.
“We know you have State on Sunday. Sorry this has kept you so long. We have the visual recording from your system. There was literally nothing you could have done, Dare. Don’t beat yourself up about it.” She rose to her feet and stretched. “If all goes well, I’ll see you next Friday. Good luck on Sunday. And remember to cherish your extra time here.”
I watched her go as a soft and cool breeze ruffled my hair. The blood was going to have to go if I wanted to get home. And I’d need to throw on a wash as soon as I was there. Orion was still in the swing next to me, and I could feel him waiting for the right time to speak.
“Ry, I’m so confused. This whole thing is huge. It’s only been four weeks, and my life has changed so much. I’m not sure how to deal with it.” There, I’d sort of apologized. Even with electricity snapping at my heels, telling me not to.
“It’s okay. I remember going through this, but I didn’t have missions like today’s so early on. Took me about six months to get to where you are. Getting struck by lightning rarely yields usable bodies, so electrocution is the only way they can tap into the eel ability. Careful they don’t use you up too much.” He got off his swing and came and offered me his hand. “We’ll get through all this. I’m not sure why we’re in this together, but there has to be a reason.”
I grinned and stood up, deliberately putting my weight on the offered hand. I still felt uneasy at his words. But if I wallowed, I’d end up in a probability spiral, and what good would that do anyone. “Yep. We’ll get through it, all right.”
“But not with blood on your face.” Orion reached up and scratched one of the drops away before I could react.
“Oh my dog, Ry! That’s almost worse than Mom spitting on her finger and rubbing dirt off my face.” I jumped back, staring at him in mock horror. If I could channel away my actual horror, everything would be okay. It had to be.
He laughed, and for just a moment it felt like everything was right with the world. “Scratch it off yourself, then. C’mon. You have to get sleep before training tomorrow.”
We headed toward home. I shoved my hands in my pockets after picking off what I thought was all the blood stains. Maybe I should take a leaf out of Orion’s book. Or Sam’s. Neither of them seemed inclined to question what they were doing given the awesome chance at a second life.
But me? I was built out of curiosity, and too many things nagged at the back of my mind. Not to mention the fact that my ability seemed to have come with its own opinion about everything.
State championships passed in a whirlwind of joy, and time, and I lost track of everything. Right down to the fact that I died.
I placed first in the marathon, and never once thought about helping to give myself a boost. Though, had I not trained as hard as I did, maybe I would have given into the temptation. Gold in the five thousand meters was one of my favorites. It was as close as I got to a sprint. And the ten thousand meters was just a fun little jog.
Okay, so I was downplaying the hard work and energy levels it took. But with my wins and going to regionals soon, I thought I’d earned the right to be flippant.
That and spring break was right around the corner. Regionals could wait.
Tuesday started off well. I jumped out of bed at around 5:30 in the morning before I realized I didn’t actually have to be at practice at all that day. We had the next few days off as rest days before we had to start training for the next meet. This spring break was perfectly timed.
I sighed, unable to doze off again with all the thoughts tumbling through my head. Friday night came rushing back to me, plaguing my brain with visuals I’d rather not see. I’d managed to avoid thinking about it too much while I prepped for and competed over the weekend. Focusing on one thing at a time always did me the world of good. But now...
Now I had time to think. And I didn’t like it one bit.
Reliving the moment made me queasy. It seemed like a bad dream, but I knew it had been real.
Hale reaching for my hand with his firm grip. Suddenly slack with those clouding eyes. The blood on my face like sticky rain. My stomach heaved for a moment at the memory, and I groaned and rolled over on my side.
How had they known we were there?
This has, as of yet, been undetermined.
Stay out of my thoughts.
I am always here.
That’s my point.
Please explain.
I need my me time, my own thoughts. I’ll go insane if you’re always jumping in when I least expect it.
I don’t understand what you want me to do.
Disengage from my thoughts! What was so difficult to understand here?
I’m sorry, but I cannot. If I were to do that, you would die.
If the system wasn’t attached, was it like pulling a plug on a bathtub? A cold tingle shot through my body. Maybe there was a way I could take care of it on my end. Don’t worry about it then.
Very well.
It fell silent, like it did sometimes. I never knew when it was actively listening or not. There had to be a way to circumvent that. To have my own thoughts. Nya had hinted as much. It made me wonder if it was listening now. But it never gave any indication of what it was paying attention to until it interrupted my train of thought or else scared me half to death.
Instead of getting up to run like I’d been contemplating, I pulled up my tutorials, and accessed my most recently achieved tutorial. With all the stress over the last couple of days, I’d simply not thought of pulling up the information.
There was nothing that I hadn’t already figured out, for the most part anyway. Acting as a circuit, circumventing electrical blockages, acting as a live conduit.
Okay, that last one sounded kind of scary. Yet the sensation that ran through my body at the thought of it was filled with glee. Maybe it was something worth trying, worth setting up for. I wondered how much electricity I could conduct. It wasn’t something I was willing to experiment with right now, but give me a little more control…
Last topic was preparing the mind. Sounded like the best option to give me some clues. There was no way there’d be a guide on how to block off your thoughts, but I was fairly certain I could extrapolate if given enough information.
The information at my...eyeballs, was complex. It explained patterned brainwaves, and what I needed to exert in order to access the different portions of my mind. Most of the information seemed to be theoretical. No eels had been able to test it from what I could see. Perhaps no eels had chosen to test it and report the results. Directing thoughts was more complicated than SC made it out to be.
Laying down, I held my hand up in front of my face and focused on making electricity jump from one fingertip to the next. A rush of adrenaline triggered, and for a few moments, it was easy to control. But once that energy flagged, the sparks dwindled.
So adrenaline directly affected my electrical output. I already knew this. With all my physical training, it gave me an idea on how to manage my resources for the most part. But on how to pace myself? Well that was different than simply tempering
my energy output.
I wanted to approach the doctor sometime soon and see if I convince her that I required some other tools to take complete advantage of my ability. Though what they might be I didn’t know.
I concentrated on the different portions of the brain as described in my tutorial. Thought and memory were areas I could easily light up. To signal speaking to the system. This was where I’d been sending my thoughts that directly contacted the system when I got exasperated.
Studying the information at hand, I noticed, not what it said, but what it didn’t say. If there was a way to direct my thoughts solely into one area of my thought center, shouldn’t there also be a way to do the opposite. To create a place just for my thoughts, for no one else but myself?
I still needed to be able to communicate with the system, which meant not cordoning off all of my thought space. Sweat began to bead on my brow as I carefully began to map the differing areas. It was slow going, an involved process. Understanding a part of my brain that was the size of a thimble.
After however long it took, I rested for a moment. I needed a barrier, and yet a clear space at the same time. Carefully, I created a railing around half of my thought allocation in my brain, or at least I attempted to. I wasn’t going to know until I tried it.
Taking a deep breath, I deliberately thought into the sealed space.
Are you there?
Why wouldn’t I be?
I tried not to let my disappointment sound in my voice. Because sometimes you just disappear.
Oh. It was quiet for a few moments. Sorry, I’ll try and do better. Sometimes I have things to attend to, though. Things that don’t allow multitasking.
Makes sense. I tried to sound conversational, but that was a fantastic bit of information. It couldn’t always multitask?
Quiet again, I tried to reinforce the barrier and made sure that I let it touch down in a way that sealed of the portion I’d sectioned off, giving me more of a sphere of space. Considering the amount of intricate work involved, it was becoming difficult to keep my eyes open. I was tired, both emotionally and physically. It made me so glad that I’d been practicing focus and control with my little rubber ball friend. Still though, sleep was sounding mighty nice right about then.
Checking on the joins of my little mental electric fences, I decided to give it one more try. Otherwise it was going to have to wait until I woke up from the nap that was tugging at my eyelids.
Hey, you still there?
No response.
No, I mean it, can you hear me?
Still nothing. Trying not to get too excited, I directed my thoughts outside of the barrier and into the unsealed thought area.
You still there?
I’m always here. I thought we just talked about this.
Well. I was checking. You were gone and I was waiting for you to continue talking.
Like I said, sometimes I might be directing energy elsewhere, but I am generally always here.
Okay. Just checking. Sometimes I wonder.
Now you know.
That I do.
I smiled, directing my thoughts back to myself. I did know, and now I could really begin to think for myself.
I must have fallen asleep after my triumphant little experiment. It was difficult to contain my joy at having figured out a solution. Even though it wasn’t much different from allowing a harddrive to be separated into partitions with different operating systems. One of my programing professors always maintained that as long as you could partition your work, you’d always be one step ahead of failure.
Hopefully he was right.
I stood up, and the room swayed with me. It took me a moment to figure out why. We’d celebrated some the night before, even though to do so left a vile taste in my mouth, just like the blood spatter on my face. While I was laying down, my head was okay, but now... well, now it felt like someone had hit me with Thor’s hammer.
I stumbled to the bathroom and splashed my face in the sink. The cold water shocked my eyes open fully, and I noticed black eyeliner had given me a somewhat racoonish appearance. Odd. I didn’t recall putting eyeliner on. With a shrug, I viciously attacked my teeth with the toothbrush, went to the bathroom, washed my hands, and moved out of the tiny room.
Going to the bathroom in the mornings—or late mornings, as it appeared to be—was quite an ordeal. I shuffled into the living room, wishing I’d put on more than just my shorts and tank top that I wore to bed at night as soon as I realized we had company.
Orion and Sam sat in the living room, their heads bent close together. My chest clenched like a fist, and I gasped in breath, alerting them to my very jealous presence. They started and turned toward me, but both smiled when they realized who it was. At least that’s what I’d like to think.
“Jacob went home for spring break, so this is our headquarters until Sunday night.” Sam winked at me.
“Headquarters? For what?” I didn’t like where this was going. Hiding my thoughts in my little vault was a good thing. I only hoped that as I took it in and processed it, the system couldn’t see how I reacted to what the others said. It was the little things I’d failed to think about.
Orion laughed. “Don’t tease Dare like that. It’s nothing. We were just discussing what we think went wrong the other night. We all performed according to the plan the program laid out for us. It gave us the pertinent research for it, but something went wrong.”
“Or something was omitted,” I murmured before I could catch myself.
Sam laughed this time. “Why on earth would the program omit something? If we didn’t have the information, it was human nature that interfered. Guards that acted differently than previously observed or something. You’re not thinking straight.”
But I was. Or at least, straighter than those two. But I’d never seen Orion behave like this. Loss of life should affect them more. “How can you laugh? We lost a colleague. Right in front of us. Or well, it was in front of me. I was holding his hand when he got shot. I saw his eyes begin to cloud over, and I wore his blood all the way home. Someone we knew died.”
The word echoed ominously in the room. Sam and Orion squirmed in their seats. For them, since they’d been in the system for longer, maybe this was just another day. Just another risk of the job. I didn’t want to be that sort of person. That someone’s life should mean so little, should elicit such a lackluster response from the people who’d known me? This was cold and calculating, and how did we know what the purpose of the mission was? What if that file meant nothing at all? What if the purpose of that mission had been Hale’s demise?
There were so many possibilities just beyond my reach of comprehension that it made my head hurt. How did we know that what the voice told us inside our heads was the truth?
Except I couldn’t say any of that out loud. Not yet anyway. I needed to keep it safe in my thought vault until I could figure out a way to protect the thoughts of my friends too.
“I don’t know. But it was awfully coincidental. We didn’t set any alarms off. We went through the steps flawlessly, yet the patrols were suddenly changed? We didn’t knock anything over or make any other loud noises. So tell me how this happened?” I was desperate to see some humanity in their eyes. Some regret at least.
Orion bowed his head, and Sam spoke. “It was a freak accident. I’ve seen heaps of them. They don’t always end in death. I’ve got my fair share of scars. It’s just a hazard of the job.”
She wasn’t going to come around to my way of thinking. I had no idea how to convince her, or them, or anyone. But I would figure it out. Hazard of the job. What even was the job? A vague description of saving humans from themselves? Sure. That worked. For idiots.
But I smiled for the camera, for the recording the system in her head was no doubt making. “True. Just got to get used to it, I guess.”
Except I wasn
’t going to do that, and my little thought vault was going to help me make sure no one found out until it was too late.
As the week rolled onward and Friday swung around once again, I realized one particularly potent piece of information. Orion was brainwashed. He’d died, been told he lived at the system’s will, and chose to leave it at that. It had to be that. This cold and distant person who didn’t bat an eyelid at death couldn’t be my Orion.
I couldn’t help being disappointed. He was usually so much more analytical than that, so much smarter. Why he wouldn’t question the motives of the program didn’t make sense to me. Everything had to have a reason, an agenda. It was only logical to want to know what that was.
You’re being awfully quiet these days.
I shrugged and realized I couldn’t be sure SC had seen that. Apparently my thought barrier worked well. It might help to strengthen it, just in case.
Sorry, got so much on my mind that it’s overwhelmed and not going through things well.
Your thoughts have been humming, just nothing that prompts answers from me.
You don’t have any answers I need right now.
It paused for a moment. I feel superfluous.
I laughed. Well, you’re not. I’m just dealing with a lot of shit right now.
It seemed satisfied with that answer, at least for now. I was going to have to be more careful and see if I couldn’t figure out a way to have thoughts running in the portion of my mind it could hear. That way it wouldn’t think I was avoiding it, or suddenly never thinking. The latter might raise more alarms than my constant questions. Multi thought strands. Sure, I could figure out how to do that. Easy, peasy.