Renegade: The Empowered series prequel story

by Dale Ivan Smith

  “Can you and the assembly team come to the lab at once?”

  “Will do!”

  The Professor put the radio on the work bench, licked his lips.

  “Okay,” he muttered to himself. “This can work.”

  I glanced at Tanya. Her eyes were wide. The Professor was losing his shit at exactly the wrong time.

  “What can I do?” I asked the Professor. I tried hard to look calm.

  He wiped sweat from his face. “The array will go online soon. I’d like you both above ground, to keep an eye on what’s going on.” He looked at Tanya. “Go to your lookout in the upper level of the garage.”

  She nodded, started to leave.

  “Wait,” he said. He opened a locker at his feet, pulled out a pistol with a flared muzzle. There was no bore on it. I’d seen one on TV. A stunner.

  “Only use it if you need to in order to get back here.”

  He pulled out another.

  I shook my head. “No thanks.”

  “Very well. You’ll be on the ground floor, and she can look through your eyes as well as her own.” He handed us each a walkie-talkie.

  “But I don’t get the point. Why bother if the array is going to activate?”

  “I need to be kept up to date.”

  I shook my head. “But why?”

  His eyes narrowed. “Please just follow my instructions.” Driver-man, Bulldog and two other normals ran into the lab right then.

  “Go!” The Professor yelled at us. Tanya took off, but I hung back. This seemed all wrong. The Professor handed out components to Driver-man and the others, ignored me.

  “What about the nullifier field?” Bulldog asked.

  Nullifier field?

  The Professor gave a gold-colored cylinder to Bulldog. “Plug this into the Breeder reactor, and the main cloak cable into it,” he told her.

  “Null field?” I asked out loud.

  The Professor looked at me, his face urgent. “Mat, please go. I need you topside.”

  I swallowed and took off at a run. Something nagged at me. Nullifier. That was as illegal a tech as they came. Even teenaged-me knew about them, from those stupid TV shows. They took a nuclear reactor to power. I thought the Professor had wanted to hide this place, not neutralize powers. Thoughts raced through my head as I ran.

  Sissy. Toby. If this place was overrun, they might be hurt, imprisoned, or even killed. Everyone could be. If I could think of that, the Professor must have been able to.

  Which meant he had to have a backup escape plan.

  Luckily Sissy’s room was on the way to the elevator to topside. I had had a hunch that there might be other ways out of here. Please God, there must be another way out of here. Then it hit me. The emergency exit I’d been turned away from. I skidded to a stop outside Sissy’s room. I pounded on the door.

  Toby opened the door. The lights were off.

  “Where’s the emergency exit?” I asked him.

  “What’s going on?”

  “We brought the components. The Professor’s plugging them in. But he said something about a null field.”

  Toby looked at his hands, twisted them. Didn’t say anything.

  I grabbed him. “That must be because he has an escape plan, right?” I remember something dimly about null fields also killing, but I couldn’t remember where, if it were true, or some stupid TV-thing that wasn’t.

  “I told him not to,” Toby said, his voice weak. “He said it was a last resort.”

  “Okay, then maybe the cloak will work,” I said. It had to. But why bother with the null field if the Professor was sure it would? Didn’t make sense. Unless the cloak wasn’t working, and the Professor knew it, and was panicking.

  “He’s not sure the cloak will work, is he?” I asked Toby.

  “Nothing’s a hundred percent certain.”

  I took a deep breath. Probably this was as crazy as everything else down here, but better safe and looking like an idiot.

  “Get ready to leave. Where does that escape route go?”

  He blinked. “It comes out underneath the bridge overpass, couple of blocks away. We have a school bus parked there.”

  I sagged against the door frame. Thank you, God.

  Sissy came to stand beside Toby, patted his arm, her blind face toward me.

  “I knew you were special, Mattie,” she said.

  “Okay, I have to get up topside,” I told them. “Can you get all the normals near the escape route. Do you have a radio?”

  He did. He told me to use channel 5. The Professor was using 2, Tanya 3.

  I raced to the elevator and the world above, running past the garden room. The plants were doing so well. If only they could continue to do well. If only we all could, here in our Hideaway. If only it could remain Hideaway.

  I’d give anything for this place to be cloaked, and for this sudden feeling that the cloak wasn’t going to work to end up being just another crazy thought in my head.

  Chapter 10

  I charged out the elevator and ran to the window. The sky was brightening. It would be dawn soon.

  I thumbed the radio on. “Tanya, do you see anything?”

  “Yeah, an idiot at a window.”

  “Funny.” I switched channels, radioed the Professor. “Is the cloak running? It’s almost sunrise.”

  “We’re working on it. Please keep me posted.” He was all business, with an edge to his voice. I guess I couldn’t blame him, but suddenly I didn’t feel like we were part of a family. Everything was coming apart.

  The minutes crawled by. The sky brightened. The sun was about to rise. The night had turned into shadow.

  There was a roar from the sky, and something big rocketed down. A weird-looking plane, jet engines pointed earthward, landed in front of the building, the thrust churning up old newspapers and scraps of cardboard.

  “Hero Council Strike jet!” Tanya called over the radio to me.

  “That’s it,” I yelled. “We have to leave.”

  A half-dozen people in blue jumpsuits came out of the weird-looking jet. They looked familiar. The first team. I’d seen them all on TV, but suddenly I couldn’t remember their names or their powers, just that we were in deep trouble. The last one was a huge, white-haired giant of a man. Him I remembered despite my fear. Titan. President of the Hero Council.

  A voice boomed from the cement walls like thunder. “Surrender immediately!”

  I clutched my ears, wincing. The command boomed again and again. I called the Professor, but there was no answer.

  The command stopped. The figures fanned out, heading toward the building. The cyclone fence had been flattened, either by the jets or by a power.

  “Tanya, get out!” I yelled over the radio.

  “No way.”

  She appeared in the window of the garage, aimed her stunner. I thought it might be too far, but one of the figures crumbled. Titan and the others hit the deck.

  “Okay, you’ve bought us time. Now get out of there!” I ran to the elevator, looked back.

  One of the sanctioned, a short, muscular bald guy, ran over to the shelter of the wing, raised his hand.

  There was a thunderclap that made my ears ring even inside the building. I actually saw the air outside ripple. The open window and Tanya both disintegrated , and the roof crumpled. She disappeared in a shower of red spray.

  And just like that, she was dead. Some kind of killer sound.

  I got in, turned the key, and rode the elevator down, my heart ashes in my mouth.

  My best friend, Tanya, killed trying to protect us.

  I called Toby. “Are you ready to run?”

  “Yes! But it will take us a while.”

  I wanted to see why the Professor hadn’t answered, but it was in the opposite direction.

  It didn’t matter now if the cloak worked or not. They knew exactly where we were.

  I kept calling the Professor as I ran through the corridors to where Toby, Sissy and the others were. Maybe the H
ero Council would let the normals off easy, but I didn’t know.

  What about Sissy? They would imprison her, since she was empowered. She was old. She’d die in prison.

  My radio clicked on as I neared the emergency exit. It was the Professor.

  “I’m sorry, Mat,” he said. “The cloak failed to work. We’re trying to get the nullifier on.”

  “They’re already here!” I shouted into the radio. I yanked open the metal door. Another corridor in front of me. People at the far end, heading up stairs. Toby was helping Sissy up the stairs.

  Shit. They were taking too long.

  Something boomed behind me, way back inside Hideaway. Like something heavy had been knocked over. I ran down the corridor to the stairs.

  “Professor!” He didn’t answer, but he had left the channel open. I could hear yelling.

  Someone screamed “the walls are flowing!” I reached the stairs.

  Another boom, behind me.

  I turned. The walls were oozing like concrete mud, a sticky, earthen avalanche.

  The Professor and the others were being buried alive. I ran up the stairs, and helped Sissy and Toy clear the last few steps

  I blinked in the sunlight.

  There was an old yellow school bus across a weed-choked lot.

  People were filing into the bus, a line that stretched back to the escape door from Hideaway.

  Things had gone to pieces in an instant.

  I ran out into the lot, waved people to keep moving. There was a blackberry thicket growing besides an abandoned building. We were maybe two blocks from the entrance to Hideaway.

  I squeezed tears away. Reached out into the blackberries, willed them to grow, spread, send vines everyway, until there was a wall of thorns eight feet high.

  Maybe, just maybe we’d make it. Sissy and Toby were at the door to the old school bus.

  I motioned go at them. Just go. Leave. They got inside, and the bus started up.

  Thunder boomed, and my blackberry wall blew apart, the vines screaming in my mind. A red-headed woman in a blue jumpsuit flew down and landed in front of me. She aimed a stunner at my chest.

  “That’s enough,” she said. Her face was as grim as steel.

  Behind me the bus’s engine coughed and died.

  “They haven’t done anything,” I said. “Please let them go.”

  She kept the gun pointed at me.

  “Please!” I shouted. But she ignored me.

  A black sedan pulled into the lot, and a group of Support personnel boiled out, brandishing stunners and carrying handcuffs.

  They slapped cuffs on me. They put cuffs on Toby, and the others, even Sissy.

  My heart felt like lead in my chest. Hideaway was gone. Tanya and the Professor were dead, Driver-man, Bulldog and Phil, too.

  The grim-faced sanctioned Empowered woman marched me into a black van, and I was surrounded by Support agents. She slammed the door shut, and we drove off.

  The next few days and weeks passed in a blur. They put me in a cell in some windowless jail. Told me the crimes I’d been charged with. I was numb at first. They wouldn’t let me see Ruth. Wouldn’t answer any of my questions.

  Anger began to simmer deep inside me, the first anger I’d felt since before Hideaway fell. They weren’t treating me like a person, they were treating me like a menace. All I had done was try to help build a place for outsiders and Renegades.

  They wouldn’t tell me what happened to Sissy. Toby and the surviving normals were charged with ordinary crimes.

  I didn’t get a jury trial. No, they stuck me in a room with a judge, a court reporter, and an sanctioned Empowered I didn’t recognize. The judge sentenced me to Special Corrections for life. I had a chance to be paroled at twenty-one.

  I was going to earn that chance, no matter what.

  THE END

  Afterword

  THANK YOU FOR READING RENEGADE! I hope you enjoyed this prequel novella. I wanted to show Mat’s “origin story:” why and how she became a criminal and how she was captured. As both a teenager and a newly Empowered young woman, Mat was looking for a place to belong. The problem is, the first place we find isn’t alway the right one for us. This world offers Empowered only two legal choices, if you want to keep your power and your freedom, you are considered an outlaw.

  The actual Empowered series will be four books long, the first, Empowered: Agent, will be released in late January 2017. I’ve included the first chapter as a preview, so read on if you’d like to see what happens to Mat next.

  Again, thanks for reading the novella!

  Empowered: Agent Chapter 1

  It was the three-month anniversary of my being paroled from Special Corrections. All I wanted was a job, to get out of this wet dress, and a break from the chorus of plant voices singing their happiness in my head now that it was finally raining again.

  Today’s interview went like all the rest for the last month. Badly. At least the weaselly interviewer didn’t try to steal a look at my chest. He was too scared of me, the paroled rogue Empowered. An interview without chest ogling to piss me off was nice for a change, but the rest of the interview sucked.

  Worse, the plants would not shut up.

  I stepped off the bus at the 151st street stop and into rain. My damn heel caught in a sidewalk crack. Just managed to save it. Couldn’t afford to break a heel. Not until they'd helped me find a job.

  The damn crabgrass growing up from the crack in the sidewalk brushed against my legs and hissed softly in my mind.

  Begging for my help. It needed more water.

  I could do it. I could urge the roots to grow and spread, pulling water and nitrogen from the soil. I could make the blades wider, to catch more of the drizzling rain. I could help it, give it just what it wanted.

  And go back to prison. For life, this time.

  Convicted rogue Empowered weren’t allowed to use their “gift.”

  Period.

  When I spotted the cardboard sign with the familiar looking sketch of a seeing eye pyramid fastened to the bus stop sign, I was already in a crappy mood.

  I yanked it off the metal post. The pyramid was sketched in deft little strokes, and the eye radiated squiggly lines of electric power. If I squinted, I could just make out the faint curve of a smiling mouth in the pyramid below the eye.

  I knew who drew that.

  Gus Silco. My old “team mate” in the Renegades, and a weasel if there ever was one. The cardboard was damp, not soaked through, so it couldn’t have been there very long. Which meant he might still be hanging around here. This was his crazy way of leaving me a message, letting me know he was here. What I wanted to know was why he was here. He was the last person I ever wanted to see again. Looked like I had no choice though, if only to get him the hell away from me, once and for all.

  I tore the sign in half and tossed it in the street. Started looking for Gus.

  Douglas fir trees ran in a line behind a slat-board fence. The firs murmured sleepily in my mind like softly humming giants. They liked the drizzle, and for an instant their pleasure made me happy. Only an instant, and then my resentment bubbled up. What had my power ever done for me except land me in prison?

  My parole might forbid me from using my power, but it couldn’t stop me from hearing plants in my mind. It wasn’t like I had a choice. I had to fight to keep the plant chorus from drowning everything else out, and I couldn’t completely stop hearing them.

  Just like I couldn’t stop detecting others like me. My skin tingled. Another Empowered was close.

  Gus. It had to be him, since I couldn’t see anyone else.

  Damn him. Jerk would get me thrown back in prison.

  “Gus, I know you’re here. Appear already.” There wasn’t much for him to blend into here. Across the street, a line of abandoned cars slowly rusted in front of a fenced junkyard. The only plants there were a few dead Queen Ann’s Lace from last summer. I pulled my power’s awareness back before it could feel the dead plants and
shuddered. The dead plants couldn’t tell me what I needed to know.

  But he had to be over there.

  “Gus, come out!”

  He didn’t.

  There was an old Ford pickup with a tarped bed directly across the street from me. “Okay, so listen. I don’t want to see you!” I shouted. “Ever again!” He was probably standing there smirking at me, his body blending in with the junker truck. Perfect camouflage for a scumbag. What the hell did the weasel want with me, anyway?

  I turned and headed for the Shadow Wood Apartments, wiping the damn rain off my face and keeping my eyes fixed on the apartment complex sign. Didn’t work. I heard footsteps on the pavement coming up behind me. I kept walking. No way was I talking to that traitor.

  The apartment manager had gotten the tags on the sign painted over again, but hadn’t bothered to clean up the bottles and crap all over the ground.

  God, I had to get Grandmother Ruth and my sisters out of this dump.

  But I had to have a job first. I could still hear Gus behind me, so I walked faster. Along with using my power, talking to a known criminal, normal or Empowered, busted my parole. I’d go back to prison for life. My family would be hosed.

  The moss under my feet moaned softly. It would be so easy to reach out with my power, caress it, and cover the trashy ground with a thick carpet of the stuff.

  No more. Never again. I pushed the urge away and kept walking, almost running now. Mister Get Me Thrown Back in Prison was right behind me.

  Then I heard swearing and the clink of bottles.

  I whipped back around. Gus sprawled on the dirt next to the sign, face down on slimy wet newspapers. His jacket hood had fallen back, and I could see long dark hair beneath a knitted black cap. A lone beer bottle rolled across the sidewalk and clattered over the edge into the street, while two more bottles spun slowly near his feet. Tripped by the party from last night. If I wasn’t so ready to punch him, I’d be laughing.

  The fall must have broken his concentration, and without that, he couldn’t “blend in,” and hide.

  He still wore that grungy old Army field jacket of his. It was ancient, made just after the Three Days War. There were blank patches where the radiation detectors used to be.