“You look tired,” I said, noticing her slightly sunken eyes. “Job getting you down?”
“I’ve had better months,” admitted Alia. “The Angels are pushing much harder now that we don’t have Cindy’s protection here anymore. The Meridian and the Avalon Union are causing lots of trouble too.”
“The Avalon can’t be a major concern,” I said, happy to be on a less personal topic. “They haven’t had a unified offensive force since the Angels pounded the hell out of them four years ago.”
“They’re recovering,” said Alia, who looked very conflicted about that news. “And they’re feeding the God-slayers with enemy intelligence.”
“You’re kidding!” I said, surprised. “That’s not very sporting of them.”
Alia agreed. “Slayers don’t care where the information comes from as long as it’s accurate. If the Avalon keep doing this, other factions might start doing it too.”
I raised my eyebrows. “And you?”
“Never ask a politician a question like that!” said Alia, laughing nervously.
“You are going to do it, aren’t you?” I pressed.
After a moment’s hesitation, Alia nodded. “We’re considering it.”
I gave her a wry smile and said, “Permission to speak freely, Ms. Gifford?”
“Always.”
“It was a mistake for you to accept this position,” I said carefully. “A member of the Council I’d understand, but not at its head. It’s not in your nature to fight, Alia. You care too much.”
“That’s why the Council can overrule my decisions,” Alia said sadly. “And they often do.”
“This war is going to get dirty again,” I said.
“Very dirty,” agreed Alia.
“Are you up to it?”
“I will do what I have to.”
I grinned widely. “Then why don’t you stop dragging your feet and tell me why you had Laila Land of all people kidnap me in the middle of my gardening. You didn’t bring me all the way out here to scold me for not keeping in touch.”
Alia chuckled. “Well, that was part of it. And I had a feeling Ms. Land would get a kick out of you, too.”
“You resent my peaceful lifestyle, don’t you?” I said jokingly.
“I envy it, Adrian, but I still had to get you here in person.”
“Then tell me why.”
Alia took a moment more to sigh, and then said slowly, “I had you brought to me because I know you don’t want to live in New Haven, and I need someone on the outside that I can trust.”
“No more missions, Alia,” I said flatly.
I was about to stand up, but Alia stopped me, saying, “This isn’t a mission, Adrian. It’s more important than that.” She shook her head a little and added quietly, “This one’s personal.”
“What’s going on?” I asked, suddenly curious.
“We found it,” Alia said with a frown. “We finally found it and shut it down.”
“Found what?”
“Site-B.”
Alia and I had escaped the Psionic Research Center Site-A, an underground prison where the Wolves sent captured psionics to be experimented on. Site-A had been completely destroyed when we escaped, but we had later learned about the existence of a Site-B from Ed Regis’s database.
Alia explained that her Lancer Knights had stumbled across the government-run research center and shut it down permanently a little over three weeks ago.
“Site-B wasn’t just a research facility,” said Alia. “They weren’t just studying psionics there.”
I looked at her questioningly.
“It was a…” Alia’s telepathic voice trailed off. She gulped once, and continued, “It was a genetics lab, Adrian. They were making people there.”
“A soldier program?” I asked.
Alia nodded. “Composite psionics. They were using the data collected from Site-A and B combined.”
“What did you do there? I mean, what did the Lancers do?”
“They destroyed it,” said Alia, looking downcast. “They destroyed the whole building, and the research data, and the experiments. Everything.”
I shook my head. “You’re hiding something.”
Alia stood up from the table. “Come with me.”
She led me to our old bedroom. It had been refurnished and redecorated as a guestroom.
It was occupied too.
The guest, currently fast asleep and hovering two feet above his bed, was a very small, dark-haired boy.
“The youngest experiment,” explained Alia, her eyes blinking furiously as she watched the boy hover. “He’s only two years old. The Lancers couldn’t kill him, so they brought him back to New Haven and I took him in.”
“You’re just like Cindy, Alia,” I said, chuckling. “Looking for lost kids to save.”
“He’s not lost, Adrian,” Alia whispered into my head. “He’s home.”
I stared at her in astonishment.
Alia nodded. “He’s ours.”
Technically, this sleep-hovering child wasn’t just ours. He was a genetic mix of Alia, me and several others who had been locked up in the PRC. Furthermore, the doctors at Site-B had done something to him that not only made his powers come early, but allowed him to gain many more powers than was common for psionics. At two years old, the child was already a flight-capable telekinetic, a spark and a telepath. Alia explained that he would probably also acquire healing, hiding, delving, puppeteering and perhaps even teleporting as he grew up.
As I watched, the boy’s body rose a few more inches until he reached the full length of the tether that Alia had attached to his clothes to keep him from drifting away. I telekinetically guided the boy back down onto his bed. His eyes opened slightly when he touched down on the mattress, but then he went back to sleep.
“He’s our child, Adrian,” Alia said again. “He didn’t have a name, so I call him Richard. But there are already some people here that suspect what he is.”
I frowned. “You mean he’s a master?”
“He’s a boy, so he won’t become a master,” said Alia. “But he carries the blood of Havel. Your blood.”
We stepped back out into the hallway. Alia quietly closed the door on the sleeping child.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked, though I already suspected.
Turning to me, Alia said, “I want you to raise him outside of New Haven. If my people find out that Richard has master controller in him, they might kill him, or worse.”
“I don’t mind hiding him for a few weeks, Alia,” I said uncomfortably, “but I don’t know about raising him.”
“Why not?”
“Well…” I said, cringing, “I’m sure you do remember that I was never a very good parent…”
“I remember,” said Alia, suppressing a smile. “But I wasn’t exactly the easiest kid to take care of either.”
I laughed. Alia started laughing too, and for a while we just stood there and laughed without reservation. It felt good to laugh with her like this again. It had been many years since I had a good laugh.
When we finally stopped, Alia looked into my eyes and said pleadingly, “Just watch over him, Adrian. Watch over him as you once watched over me.”
“Are you sure, though?” I asked seriously. “I mean, what makes you think I won’t kill that boy myself?”
In reply, Alia slowly reached down into the front of her shirt and drew out her other pendant. She looked at the amethyst thoughtfully for a moment before taking it off and carefully placing it around my neck. Then, with her right palm, Alia pressed the pendant to my heart as she whispered, “I just know, Addy.”
I agreed to take the child home. He had my sister’s eyes.
I can’t tell you how my story ends because I simply don’t know. Not even the Historian can tell the future. We all live our life stories without knowing where they will lead us, or when or how they will end. I suppose that is the only true fairness in life, as maddeningly unfair as it is.
But for the time being, allow me to suggest, in lieu of a more dramatic and less common ending, and in the spirit of blind optimism, as well as the possibility that it may even be true, that at least some of us really did live happily ever after.
Afterword
The total number of words comprising the five books of my Psionic Pentalogy are roughly equal to that of Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings combined, just a chapter or two shy of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. If you are reading this afterword, I can only assume that you have read the entire series from Wild-born to Guardian Angel. I thank you from the bottom of my heart for sticking with this story and its characters through thick and thin. I hope you have enjoyed reading it as much as I have enjoyed writing it.
This is the first time I am writing in my own voice, that is, the voice of the author Adrian Howell (pen name) as opposed to the narrator Adrian Howell. I figure that if you’ve come this far, you just might be interested in knowing a few additional details about the characters, some background information about this story, and how it all came about. From here on in, everything I write will assume that you have already read all five books, so if you haven’t, stop reading this afterword now.
Where to begin…
Wild-born is actually the first full-length novel I ever wrote in English. The Tower was the second, and so forth. I had written a number of short stories in my youth, as well as a full-length high fantasy novel in Japanese that will never see the light of day, but the Psionic Pentalogy was my first major series project in any language.
I can no longer remember exactly when I started writing Wild-born, but I think it was sometime in mid-2008. After nearly a decade of teaching full time at an EFL school in Tokyo, I had decided to open my very own private English school – right in my own house. With no business training, absolutely no experience in anything aside from teaching, I quit my stable job and took the plunge into self-employment. I converted my first floor into a classroom and lobby area, put up a sign, paid for a little advertisement, and waited for the phone to ring.
It was a leap of faith which ultimately (and very fortunately) resulted in success: by the second year, I had enough students to keep me fed and clothed, doing a job I love, with the added bonus of being my own boss and having my own bath and shower in my workplace.
But that first year was no picnic. With only two classes a week, and required to stay at home manning the telephone all day long, waiting for it to ring, wondering if it would… The mixture of boredom and anxiety was driving me insane.
So I started writing to keep my mind off of things.
I wrote the first two chapters of Wild-born thinking that it would be a standalone novella, but by the end of the third chapter, I knew what kind of monstrous project I was dealing with. Still, I figured that I’d write just one book and see how I felt at the end of it. There was no pressure to complete the project, so I took my time, occasionally stopping for a week or more between writing. Months later, when I finished the last chapter of Wild-born, I do recall it was that very evening that I wrote the first chapter of The Tower. I was hooked. It would become a pentalogy after all.
But that didn’t mean I had mapped out the entire storyline over the next four books. Far from it. I knew very basically where I wanted to end up with these characters, but I took the journey with them, much like a reader would, not knowing what was going to happen until it actually did. Truth be told, I wasn’t even sure until halfway through The Quest that Cat really was the master controller that Adrian would have to kill. I had been toying with the idea, of course, but it was still possible to make Randal Divine the final objective. At least, that’s what I thought until I got to the Historian. I realized then that if Randal really was the master and Adrian’s journey was that of killing this king and saving his first sister, then the whole story really would be a simple black and white fairytale. I couldn’t live with that.
But I’m getting way ahead of myself here. Back to The Tower.
In 2009, as I continued to write The Tower, I was busy looking for a publisher to represent Wild-born. Back then, eBooks were still in their infancy, and I knew nothing about self-publishing. I was still of the mindset that a book could only get published if it was accepted by a traditional publisher. I sent my Wild-born manuscript to a long list of literary agents across the United States, and some of them were even kind enough to reply that they weren’t interested. (It wasn’t helping my situation that I was sending my requests from Japan, but that probably wasn’t the only reason.)
But by the time I was getting these polite rejections, I too was having second thoughts about releasing Wild-born so soon. I was halfway through writing The Tower, and I had hit a problem with the storyline. In the original version of Wild-born, psionic finders could in fact find non-psionic people as long as they were relatively close. But that didn’t work for a part of my planned plot in The Tower, specifically the puppeteer’s inability to lock onto Terry. So I went back and changed the rules of the world, rewriting a section of Wild-born to fit what I wanted to do in The Tower. In short, I cheated, and I couldn’t have done that if Wild-born had already been published. Thus I concluded that I would stop trying to get published until all five books were completed.
For several reasons, this was probably the best decision I ever made in writing my books.
For starters, it gave me free reign over my world, allowing me to change or edit anything I wanted in my previous books whenever it suited the larger story arc. As I said earlier, I really wasn’t sure until the end of The Quest whether Adrian and Cat were of master-controller blood. But if you go back to the second chapter of Wild-born, you will notice Ralph Henderson calling Adrian “Havel” by accident. That part was edited in as I wrote the last chapters of The Quest, a full three years after I originally finished writing Wild-born.
Second, pre-completing the series meant that readers wouldn’t have to wait a year for the next book. For me, the single most frustrating thing about reading a series in progress is having to wait for the release of the next installment. I didn’t want my readers to have to wait around not knowing when (or if) the next book would ever be completed. It would be better, I decided, to have all five books ready before releasing any of them, thus allowing readers to set their own paces. And I really don’t like writing to a deadline: That feels too much like work. I write because I enjoy writing, so I only write when I want to. The muse comes and goes.
Lastly, because I delayed all publishing issues for several years, by the time I got around to it, the eBook industry had taken off, allowing me to avoid the hassles of working with traditional publishing houses altogether.
I am very particular about my storytelling, and entirely unapologetic. I suspected when I wrote The Tower that some readers would find the first half of that book slow-paced. There are slow sections in the other books too, and a traditional publisher’s editor would no doubt have required me to tighten up the plots because modern audiences want more frequent action. But for my part, I see the Psionic Pentalogy as one large story first and five separate novels second. The pace picks up in the last two books (as would be expected of any story as it approaches its climax), and if certain sections of the first three novels did not have the mass-appeal speed and action that traditional publishers would require, I nevertheless felt these slower chapters entirely necessary for the larger story arc. Would readers agree, or at least be forgiving of my eccentricities? Do I really know my readers better than a traditional publisher’s experienced editor? Perhaps not, but in the interest of preserving my own storytelling style, I was willing to take that chance. When it finally came time to publish my series, I knew that indie was the only way
for me to go.
Thus I self-published all five books of my Psionic Pentalogy in approximate two-week intervals starting in December 2012. At the time, I designed my own book covers, using what very little experience I had with graphics programs. The results were crude and unappealing to say the least, but professionally made custom covers cost lots of money, and going into this business as an amateur, I had decided that my books would have to pay their own way. That is, I would only spend money on promotional materials such as advertisements and proper covers if the books sold enough to pay for them. A bit of a catch-22, I know, but it made sense to me because writing is my pastime, not my career. I wasn’t about to invest lots of money in a new and untested endeavor.
Predictably, the books sold very, very slowly. I used whatever free online resources I could get my hands on in order to promote my series, and once the books sold a little, I experimented with a few cheap paid ads. Some of them worked, but none worked very well.
In early 2013, I decided to enter Wild-born in The Kindle Book Review’s Best Indie Book Awards Contest. The entry fee was minimal, and it looked like a fun thing to try. But what with Wild-born being my first-ever novel, I wasn’t expecting to even make the semi-finals in a book contest, so imagine my surprise and delight when, several months later, Wild-born was announced as a category finalist. No, it didn’t win, but being in the top five was honor enough for me. And by this time, the books had sold just enough to get my embarrassingly horrible self-made covers redone by a professional, so I did.
It was a slow but very enjoyable process. My cover designer, who goes by the name Pintado, is an amazing, award-winning artist himself. The resulting new covers weren’t close to what I wanted. They were spot on. Pintado took the basic ideas from my self-made covers and turned them into exactly what I would have created myself in the first place if I had the skills to do so. A true magician if there ever was one.
The new-cover editions came out in December of 2013, marking the end of my first year as a self-published writer, and what I hoped would be the beginning of a better second year in which I could get my books out in front of a larger audience. After all, what are books without readers? The new covers certainly attracted more people who hopefully enjoyed the words too, but even so, this series still remains very much unknown to the world.
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