Nate moves from Angela, to Nick, to me in rotation. He observes and takes inventory of our wounds and heals us with Luke’s monitoring. One slip-up on Nate’s part can leave any of us in bad shape. Luke told us that Nate could be attempting to heal a blister on a finger and send a surge of energy too strong that could burn an entire arm off. Luke reassures him, and us, that he’s right here if he senses an imbalance or surge.
Then there’s Ezra and me. He plans to work on bringing my hidden abilities out. I’ve already had plenty of practice with Telepathy and blocking my mind from others. Nate’s recent break-in still has me wondering about my strength. The other three abilities are still weak. I tell Ezra that they really don’t appear to be abilities at all. Ezra reminds me that he knows better. “You don’t realize what you’ve stored up inside of you.”
For our training, Ezra leads us to the trailhead, which seems like an odd choice. “Going to perfect my running form or something?”
His thought registers loud and clear. “Smart ass.”
I understood why the others are in the designated areas that the mentors chose. Jake for the fire stuff. Angela for the space she needed. But which of my abilities qualifies the trails as my training area? I stand apprehensively thinking of all the possibilities at the mouth of the trail with Ezra gauging my reaction. “Ready?”
I shrug, “Yeah, I guess?”
I really have no clue what he has up his sleeve. As clear as day, Ezra suddenly disappears right before my eyes. His immediate absence is startling and I turn in circles expecting some kind of quick speed taking him to another spot nearby. I feel a warm presence near the back of my right shoulder, then a touch to my back. I turn instantly ready to fight. It feels too similar to what I’ve experienced back home on the trails, in my nightmares. Suddenly, Ezra reappears just as instantaneously as he disappeared. His arms are crossed and he’s grinning proudly.
My words come out shakily, “What the hell?”
“Just ‘jumping’.”
“’Jumping’?”
“Astral Projection. Quantum Jumping.”
Ezra says it like I should have some inkling of what he’s talking about.
He shakes his head and stares at me. “No? Nothing?”
I shake my head and confess. “Nope. Well, not in real life. Just in my dreams”
Ezra points at me, like I’m onto something. “Exactly. In lucid dreams, you ‘jump’ using your life force. It’s the same out here. You just have to use your life force to command it.”
“Uh. Okay? Still don’t get it.”
Ezra sighs with frustration. “Tell me about the most vivid dream you’ve had lately.”
Easy. “The dream where I’m running to Mom and Dad’s house and I’m confronted by a dark shadowy thing.”
Ezra interrupts, “The dark shadowy thing is a life force—an aura of a Sondian guardian trying to enter your mind with his or her well-tuned abilities. The dark aura you see is the form your mind has given this life force. It’s dark and evil, but a person.”
He stares at me for a minute, then says, “It’s what was after you that night I saw you at Margot’s Deli.”
I nod, not wanting to let words give it power over me again.
Ezra runs his hand through his ruffled hair. “I’m really glad we got out of Georgia when we did. I can only imagine what could’ve happened.”
He seems to drift off for a second, so I interrupt. “Well, let’s not, all right.”
“Fair enough. How’s it feel?”
“What?”
“‘Jumping’ in your dreams?”
“It feels like I’m using every single muscle in my body and when I wake, I’m wiped.”
“I bet,” he says casually
“No, you don’t understand. I mean seriously wiped. Like sleep paralysis wiped.”
“The drain isn’t sleep paralysis. It’s the depletion of your life force. We need to shorten your drain time—don’t want you getting caught with your defenses down out there when we go back up. When I used my life force for ‘jumping’ the first time, it took a solid hour or more for me to replenish. It’s about controlling the amount of energy you send out from your life force. We’ll work on that. The distance you ‘jump’ is gained with practice and the farther you ‘jump’, the more you expend. It’s all about technique and balancing your inner energy. At first, your ‘jumping’ will be weak. You’ll need to practice to get more accurate with where and how far you ‘jump’.”
“Your voice was in my last nightmare, walking me through it. You ‘jumped’ into my dream, didn’t you?”
Ezra suddenly lights up. “Yes, exactly! And, I got to you as quickly as I could when I sensed you were in the nightmare.”
Suddenly, I feel mediocre, like I didn’t do anything and he led the entire take down of a nightmare that had been haunting me for as long as I can remember.
Ezra puts his hands on both of my shoulders. “It was only guidance, Jes. You did all of the work. You had the strength to fight back. Keep that fire in you.”
Part of the morning, Ezra models and I follow. I have full control over Ushering. I use it tactfully to render the enemy submissive to my command by practicing on the chefs in the cafeteria. I’ve used my compulsion for home-style comfort food via Miss Char, Patrick and Fenton. Fenton is making homemade macaroni and cheese. Miss Char is baking peach and raspberry cobblers, as well as yummy snicker-doodle cookies. And Patrick is working on a beef stew and White Lightning Chicken Chili. Ezra and I are sitting at one of the tables as I smile with pride at my culinary compulsion.
I take advantage of the moment. I’ve wanted to ask Ezra this question for a while. It’s just not something you can blurt out in between training sessions though. I kind of want to know more about the man who seems to know every detail about my life. Ezra is snacking on homemade potato chips while he tells me about the afternoon training he’s planned. I’m having a protein shake and banana, training food apparently. I tread cautiously. “So how old were you when you became a guardian?”
Ezra pauses mid-crunch, then wipes his hand on the leg of his shorts. “I was about your age—maybe a couple of years younger. I’d just graduated high school and was set to attend MIT in the fall.”
I’m waiting for more, but nothing comes as he returns to his bag of chips.
“Well, where’d you grow up?”
He takes to drinking his Pepsi through a straw; complete torture watching him drink the dark, carbonated bubbly. As soon as he releases the straw, he responds. “I was raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts.”
Ezra continues to eat his deep-fried snack as I pull at the stringy part of the banana peel.
I try to keep the conversation alive. “Well, that’s convenient being that you grew up and were attending college in the same city. I’ve never been to Massachusetts. What was your family like as a child?”
With that question, he takes a longer drink before answering. “Mom and Dad were good Christian people. They raised me that way too, but never kept the sciences away from me. Mom was very spiritual, metaphysics—God’s tools for us to survive our world.”
A long crease suddenly forms in the middle of Ezra’s forehead as he continues. “But I was a defiant little shit. I was a bullheaded, rebellious, impulsive and arrogant. It took a slap in the face by the hand of God to make me realize it.”
He takes another long drink of his Pepsi. “My parents were guardians. It was kept from me much like it’s been with you. My mother was a professor at MIT in the geophysics department, my father a professor in the biology department. They were always traveling, but one of them was always there when I got home from school.”
Ezra seems to daydream for a moment.
“Did they meet at MIT?”
“They met while attending as students.”
“When did they become guardians?�
�
“When they entered university is what Sebastian told me.”
Ezra looks down and I know I’ve touched a nerve, but he continues to take to my surprise. “Mom and Dad were murdered when I was in seventh grade.”
I lower my eyes to my banana skin and soften my voice. “I’m sorry, Ezra.”
He nods at me, and then focuses on a spot on the table in between us. “As I walked out of school that day, there he was. Standing across the street dressed in a suit and tie with a trench coat to ward off the cold. Sebastian always wore a trench coat, even when it was eighty degrees in the shade.”
Ezra scoffs. “He had salt-and-pepper hair and wore these round sunglasses, kind of like the ones John Lennon wore. That was the first day I met the man that would be an instrument in catapulting my life into this chaos.”
I feel vulnerable hearing Ezra open up about how he feels all of a sudden, but I don’t want him to stop. I need to hear this. Ezra continues, “He informed me of my parents passing, that I was a target and needed to go with him quickly. I wasn’t about to go with someone I didn’t know, let alone someone who just told me my parents had died. I took off running as hard as I could, but didn’t get far. Sebastian could ‘jump’ with his life force and he blocked my every attempt at escape. It didn’t take many ‘jumps’ to subdue me. I was only thirteen. I was more frightened than I’d ever been in my life.”
Ezra uses his arms to mimic what he’d done as a child subdued. “I fought and clawed and tried to scream. He grabbed my face and forced me to look at him. His words burned into my mind, like he wanted them to be placed there. He said that I was already building walls.”
On the edge of my seat, I ask, “What did that mean?”
Ezra says, “It meant that he couldn’t Usher me; make me bend to his will. I could block him from reading me and making me do things. All I remembered after that was a cloth going over my face, the smell of chloroform and everything fading away. When I woke, I was lying on a couch alone left to hope that this mysterious man reporting my parent’s death was just a nightmare. I wasn’t on my couch or in my house though.
***
“Hello, Ezra. I’m Sebastian Onoch.”
“Where am I,” I whimper.
“You’re in a safe place. The facility.”
He pauses looking around the room then breathes in deeply. “It’s not a nightmare Ezra. Your parents are gone—murdered.”
I growl through my broken and battered voice, “No, you’re a liar! A sick old man kidnapping children!”
He shakes his head. “No. I’m not. I wouldn’t lie about such a thing. God, I wish much of what’s happened was a simple nightmare, but it isn’t.”
I sob remembering all the terrible things I’d done to hurt my mother and father the weeks, months before. My getting in trouble at school, talking back to them, making them feel like terrible parents. I plea with God to just give them back and I’ll make it all right. I rise from the sofa and bang on the walls as I sob, then drop to the floor once all of my energy is spent. The man, Sebastian, let’s me go through the motions of my grief until I’ve exhausted myself.
After I settle enough for the sobs to become mere sniffles and hiccups, I feel his hand rest on my shoulder. I want to shrug it off but I’ve no energy left. Instead, I look up with him only to see tears running down his cheeks. His voice shakes as he says, “I’m so very sorry. My sons went through this same pain when they lost their mother, Dobria. She died a terrible and violent death. Watching you go through this, I see now that I didn’t do enough for my own sons as they broke inside. They needed me and I let them down.”
I shake my head and try to speak through my soft sobs. “I don’t have a family. Where am I going to go? I’m alone.”
Sebastian’s pain seems to soften, turn to compassion for my tragedy. “Yes, you do, Ezra. You have us.”
***
Ezra wipes his hands on a napkin after eating another chip. “I didn’t know who “us” was until Sebastian told me about the fellowship and my parent’s involvement. He said he sought them out while they attended MIT with invitations to go on a scientific expedition during their junior year. Intrigued and eager for adventure nothing held them back from accepting such an offer. Unknown to them, it’d be a quantum leap from Earth to Dobria. They were part of the first colonists, planning to stay there, research, develop and study the environment. They studied the space-time differential between Dobria and Earth and helped construct the subterranean living quarters for the colony. They stayed for about two Dobrian years, which is equivalent to eight Earth years. The planet had its own unique properties for life to flourish, life forms unlike Earth’s—unique organisms with duplicate organs and multifunctional appendages for defense and protection.”
“Why did they leave?”
“My mother became pregnant with me. They spoke with Sebastian about their concerns. They were all unsure of how a pregnancy would withstand the altered properties of Dobria as I developed in utero. The gestation could even vary when space-time differential was factored in. They were also concerned about the adaptations the fetus might experience with being in the Dobrian environment. Mom and Dad had firsthand experience with minor physical and metaphysical adaptations they were encountering while in Dobria. Too many variables were left unanswered and they all agreed it’d be best for Mom and Dad to return to Earth for my sake. They went back to Massachusetts as inactive guardians, part of the Cambridge sleeper cell.”
I can’t help but briefly scan Ezra as I ask, “Did everything go normally with your development?”
“Some of the metaphysical properties carried over through my mother due to her adapting to Dobria, such as the telepathy.”
An enormous explosion startles us from our conversation. Ezra looks back at the door, then at me. “What the hell was that?”
I look beyond him out the entry door window slots and see the smoke. “Shit!”
He and I both jump to action and rush to the doors, when Jake and Nick stumble in. Nick has a look of shock on his soot-covered face and Jake is coughing from smoke inhalation. As Ezra and I give them space, the rest of the team files in behind them.
Jake smirks and puts his hand on Nick’s shoulder. “That’s what you get, show off.”
Nick’s hunched over coughing. “I was in complete control. I just wanted to give you deadbeats a little surprise.”
Ang walks passed and pats him on the shoulder. “Yeah, okay hot stuff.”
Nick perks up with her comment. “Hot stuff? Well Ang, I didn’t know you felt that way about me.”
She turns on him ready to shut him up, but he struts passed her, his nose turned up in the air. “Let’s eat ladies and gents. It smells amazing in here!”
I take responsibility for the amazing smell. “Thank you. I thought some southern comfort food was due.”
Ang turns to me. “Yes! Thanks, girly. Ushering?”
I nod, “Yep.”
The chefs have set up a buffet at the main assembly for us to feast.
“Lunch is served,” Fenton announces. All of us rush the line ready to indulge in the delicious spread of southern-style goodness.
The afternoon is physically draining with ‘jumping’ while in combat. Ezra doesn’t speak any further about his life or parents’ lives and I don’t push the topic. He opened up quite a bit and I don’t want him to clam up on me because of my curiosity.
Ezra is all business and for good and obvious reasons. We’re one week out from leaving the facility, the safety net.
Ezra doesn’t hold back with his jabs. I notice him wince when he strikes me in my midsection and I crumble to the ground. I scramble up quickly, not wanting him to wince on my account. I didn’t want his pity. We dance around each other for a moment as I ask breathlessly, “Aren’t you going to give me any clues on how to ‘jump’, or are you going to continue b
eating the crap out of me? Seems a little unfair. Just sayin’.”
I jab and miss, but follow with a leg sweep that takes him down to the floor.
Ezra disappears from the ground and reappears standing behind me. Ezra is breathing evenly, not fazed the slightest physically. “I told you. It’s just like ‘jumping’ in your dreams. Use your pent up energy.”
He points to my forehead. “I know it’s in there waiting for you to use it.”
He puts his hands on his hips. “Remember this morning. Fuel the fire.”
He slaps me across the face. It isn’t hard enough to hurt, but it definitely bruises my ego and pisses me off royally. I feel the vibration and hear the humming instantly as I stare him down. Suddenly, everything Ezra begins to shake, and then blur. I imagine myself behind him, the shortest ‘jump’ I can think of. The weightlessness comes quickly and in one small blink of my eyes, I’m staring at the back of Ezra’s head. “What the—”
“See, I knew you could find it. Just needed some motivation.”
He slowly turns to face me, a huge smile on his face.
“I feel dizzy, like I did that night at the bookstore.”
Ezra nods in agreement. “Your body was trying to defend itself without you realizing what was going on. Let’s go again.”
For the next two hours, we battle throughout the facility—sparring in the trails, the recreation room and gym. The feeling of vertigo just before each ‘jump’ is sending my stomach upside down and by 4 p.m. I’m heaving by the pool.
“You okay?” Ezra’s out of breath and bent over with his hands on his knees.
I smile a little at the thought of my making Professor Kahn exhausted. I give him a weak thumbs up. “Yeah. Yeah. I’m just feeling a little light-headed.”
Copula Chronicles: The Complete Collection: Origin, Descend, Ascend, Legacy Page 12