by Corey Tate
There was about a minute’s pause while Scott attempted to process all this information.
“Nope. I’m out.” Scott shook his head. “Even if this were for real, I still wouldn’t do it. I have my little brother to think about. And school. And my mom. And I’m not into stranger danger. You look like you should be driving a magical ice cream truck at Comic-Con. Plus, I don’t want to go to a different planet anyway. I’ll leave that crap to the astronauts.”
“You’re lying to yourself, and I see right through you. And like it or not, you’re coming with us so that Terminus can’t use you to finish what he started. This is bigger than you, boy.”
Scott shrugged his shoulders. “I’ll think about it. Sounds pretty dangerous, so I’ll have to talk to my mom about it once I wake up and realize that this isn’t real. Maybe get a permission slip.”
Artam snorted. “Then think about this, boy. In two days the Gateway will open and allow people from Earth to travel to Armadron. You’re going to make that journey one way or another—willingly with our operative, or unwillingly with Terminus. When it reverses in roughly a week, things will get really interesting. I say this because people from Armadron will travel to Earth unchecked. Those people will be able to keep their abilities, and Terminus will have the means to—”
Artam’s eyes flashed a brilliant white for a second. Suddenly he said, “I must leave you. He’s tracking me somehow.”
“Who? Who is tracking you?”
Suddenly, Artam’s expression shifted to a slightly more cheerful one.
“Also, in thirty Earth seconds your mother will call you down for dinner. Do not worry, and enjoy the hamburgers. I’m sorry that you’re out of ketchup. We’ll get you to Armadron. Leave it to her.”
“You didn’t answer my question!” Scott yelled at him. “And leave it to her? To who?!”
Artam’s body evaporated with a hiss like water hitting a hot surface, and Scott awoke from the dream.
He was on the floor by his bed, lying on his back. He opened his eyes and laughed to himself for several seconds.
Ha! That was a load of bull—
“Boys, dinner time!” Christine called up the stairwell. “I made burgers!”
Scott’s face instantly turned the color of computer paper.
“We’re out of ketchup,” she added, “so you’ll have to use barbecue sauce!”
“Coming!” Jared yelled as he raced out of his room and down the stairs.
“Coming,” Scott mumbled distantly to himself.
He turned on his side and slowly stood up, groaning. He opened his bedroom door, went downstairs, and ate dinner with his family. He thought of Armadron, Irri, Conjurers, and Mediators the whole time.
Accelerating
After dinner, Scott returned to his room, closing the door softly behind him as he sidestepped a pile of dirty clothes. He glanced over at the clock on his nightstand. It was 8:47 p.m. Without hesitation, he flopped down on the bed again, crashing the back of his head into the pillows and sinking blissfully into them. He was too tired to practice with the water. Plus, he wasn’t sure if he should do that anymore.
For the next hour or so he responded to text messages from Charlie and some other friends and played some games on his phone. After a while, though, he tossed his phone next to him, laid back, and folded his hands over his stomach, thinking about the day.
A place called Armadron. Mediators. Accelerating. Conjurers, and everything else. And what else was that guy talking about? Molecular displacement something? And how did a dream-guy know about dinner?!
He sat up and put his head in his hands, finally starting to see some of the pieces coming together. He was connecting the dots, slowly but surely.
His heart was beating faster and faster, and he couldn’t get himself to relax. He was too wound up. The vision problems. The seizures. The perfectly convenient trip that he was already going on to Bermuda. Together they raised a big question.
What if the dream wasn’t just a dream?
He wiped his palms on his legs and blew out a big breath, fighting the thin film of sweat that was starting to accumulate all over his body.
“I got one of your pairs of pants in my laundry!” Jared shouted at Scott from the other side of the closed bedroom door. “You want me to leave them here?”
“Gah!” Scott jumped.
His heart rate skyrocketed, and he could feel every pore on his body physically moving like ants crawling all over him.
“Thanks,” he struggled to speak, “I’ll just see you tomorrow, Jared.”
“Okay, whatever. I’m dropping them in front of your door, then,” Jared called. “Night!”
His chest was now tightening up, and Scott quickly changed his mind about sending Jared away.
“Jared, wait! Hel—”
He tried to take another breath, but his lungs couldn’t hold in any air. It was too late anyway. Jared had already shut his own bedroom door across the hall.
Craaaack!
Every bone in his body twisted and jerked out of place, and Scott thought that he could hear multiple splinters and cracks reverberating throughout his entire body.
The pains and aches that had been coming from the inside of his stomach the past few days immediately intensified.
Ziiiip!
He could hear and feel his stomach rip on the inside of his body like a zipper.
He would have been screaming in pain from all this had he been able to hold a breath in. Rivers of tears flowed down his face and absorbed into the comforter, making it damp. He fell off the bed and was abruptly forced into unconsciousness for what had to be the millionth time that day.
* * *
He bolted upright from his spot on the floor, drenched in sweat. He rubbed his bloodshot eyes and stared at the clock. It was now 1:55 in the morning.
He got up and turned off the large overhead light that he had left on, or at least he tried to. He flipped the switch down, but oddly the light stayed on.
More than a little freaked out, Scott flicked the switch up and down, over and over again. It didn’t matter if the light was on or off. His vision remained perfect. With the switch in the on position, he could see an additional halo of light around the bulb that wasn’t there with the switch in the off position, but that was about it. He could see everything in the room just as clearly either way.
He turned the light off because he didn’t want Jared seeing light beneath his door and knowing that he was still awake.
Now Scott looked around the room and noticed that every item (including himself) was pulsating with slow, white waves, like the ones he had been seeing lately, only much clearer than before. It reminded him of a documentary he had once seen about dolphins. The waves looked like sonar blips on the monitor of a ship.
“Wow,” he said out loud.
Instantly it looked like a nuclear bomb of sound had gone off in his room. The waves crashed into each other and accelerated, all moving either toward Scott or away from him. He could feel individual pores all over his body moving as well, responding to the waves like they were speaking to one another.
Scott stumbled backward away from the pulses and fell onto the floor, involuntarily closing his eyes.
He quickly realized that he could feel everything in the room without actually touching anything.
He had been hesitating to do this, but he crawled across the floor and peered into full length mirror on his closet door.
His eyes weren’t his natural blue. However, they weren’t the deep purple color he’d been anticipating either. They were somewhere in between, changing from a dark blue to an extremely light purple every couple seconds. Something was also different about his joints, but he couldn’t figure out exactly what by looking at his body.
He rolled his wrist in a circle and immediately saw a difference. His wrist could now rotate much more in any direction. He could easily touch his thumb to his forearm now as well, which he was pretty sure should have been impossibl
e unless he was a master gymnast or something.
Next were the fingers. He tried to move them around in circles, but he had the same mobility as before. Nothing had changed, except he still felt a tingling kind of pressure in each of them.
Maybe . . .
He pulled his right pointer finger.
His finger popped and quickly unfolded like an accordion to grow an extra few inches in length. The finger unfolded out of its sockets, which felt only slightly discomforting. He did the same process with most of his other fingers. As each of his fingers unfolded, his hand grew slightly bigger as well. He looked down at his feet and had another thought.
Responding to his thoughts faster than he could have imagined, Scott saw his toes and his feet grow the same way that his hands and fingers had—except that he didn’t need to do anything to them this time. The rest of the fingers that he hadn’t yet pulled out became elongated by themselves too.
It probably would have been painful if he had been wearing socks and shoes.
His feet “unfolded” their bones until Scott guessed that he was could wear a size 16 or 17 shoe instead of the size 10.5 that he usually wore.
He looked at his body in the mirror and could now very clearly see the white pulses of light coming off everything, sharper than ever before.
Sheeeeeeeeek!
Scott heard an earsplitting white noise reverberate inside the walls of his skull. The noise progressed and broke off into separate noises. They came in pulses, coming and going in the same way that the sonar waves were coming and going. They didn’t stop, and they kept getting louder, like when someone accidentally clicks on the AM radio when they disconnect their phone from Bluetooth in the car.
He fell to the floor on his side, silently moaning, realizing at the same time that he still hadn’t taken a single breath.
Wincing with each white noise, Scott looked at his body to see if he had any gills or any other weird mutation that could allow him to breathe, because his lungs and mouth were choosing not to listen to him at the moment.
His neck quickly bulged outward in all directions and his chest expanded. The pain that accompanied this particular transformation was excruciating.
In another moment or two, though, his neck and chest returned to normal.
“Wow.” Scott breathed for the first time in a while.
The splitting headache stopped, and so did the white noise. He stood up and looked at himself in the mirror again, sizing himself up and moving back and forth, testing whatever his body had turned itself into.
His feet were now angled so that when he stood up, he was immediately balanced on the balls of his feet. He was about five inches taller because of this, making him roughly six foot three, and he was willing to bet that he could now run a lot faster as well. He could somehow feel it.
“Scott?” Someone called timidly from outside the door. “Are you okay?”
It was Jared. Scott could see the sound waves from Jared’s voice flowing toward him from under the door. He had less than two seconds before his little brother barged through the door and saw him.
Now would be a good time to change back, Scott thought, silently willing himself.
Jared reached for the doorknob and turned it quietly. Cracking open the door, he peered into the darkness, looking around Scott’s room.
Scott stayed absolutely still. With his new vision, he could see everything clear as day.
Jared looked around the room for a minute, but he obviously couldn’t see anything. He eventually just sighed and closed the door. Scott heard him walk back down the hall and return to his own bedroom. Once Scott heard the door shut, he slumped onto his bed, releasing all the tension he had been holding in.
After a minute, he realized that the white waves had gone away. He couldn’t see them anymore.
He looked in the mirror.
He was looking at his old self again. Even his eyes were now their normal blue.
He grinned. He had no more stomach pains, and he felt a lot better now. It was like his body had just been stuck in a cocoon, and he had now evolved. He felt better, he didn’t feel weak anymore, and somehow he knew with absolute certainty that he was not going to have another seizure. He was beyond that now. Whatever had been holding him back didn’t apply anymore.
You will be fine after you Accelerate for the first time, but no one has ever done that on Earth.
Scott mulled over those words. The words that Artam had said.
He had just Accelerated. He had changed, which meant that he didn’t need to go to Armadron anymore. He didn’t need the cure for cancer, because Scott could just feel that he didn’t have it anymore. His cells had purged it.
Okay, so all this stuff is real. Still, whatever Artam needs from me, I’m not giving it to him, Scott thought. Or any of them. It’s honestly not my problem. I’m not about to just go to a whole different planet so that I can fight some bad guy and his experiments and probably get killed. I don’t even know any martial arts, and I’ve never even held a gun before! Plus, Artam’s probably just like . . . him. Terminus. Artam’s not telling me everything anyway, and he’s not answering my questions, and I’m not trusting someone like that. They can figure this out on their own.
Scott laid back on his pillow and shut his eyes, ready for sleep to take him.
Except that he wasn’t ready. He kept tossing and turning and repositioning his pillow, thinking about something else that Artam had said:
You’re lying to yourself, and I see right through you. This is bigger than you, boy.
Bermuda Delta
Sunday morning arrived quickly.
“Wake up, Scott!”
He shot up in his bed, ready and alert. He looked in the direction of his open door and saw his mom dressed in jeans and some kind of orange-and-red short-sleeved shirt. She also had a flimsy hat on that had palm trees and sandy beaches decorated all over it.
“I’m up,” Scott replied as he rubbed his eyes.
“I made breakfast. Eggs, ham, and bacon. It’s downstairs whenever you want to eat it. You might want to do it quickly, though, because we leave in thirty,” Christine said with a smile on her face.
She left his room and walked down the stairs. Scott could hear her giggling with excitement all the way down. That’s when he realized that he hadn’t heard her laugh in a while, and it all finally fell into place.
WE’RE GOING ON THE CRUISE TODAY!
He was so excited that when he jumped up from his bed, the water from his goldfish tank in the far corner of the room hyper-evaporated, coating that part of the room in mist.
Luckily, his goldfish had died a couple weeks before.
He felt his body immediately start to Accelerate. His arms got longer, his breath caught in his throat, and the white sonar waves began to—
“Scott! You better not be going back to bed!”
“I’m getting ready, Mom!” he yelled down the stairs.
His body returned to normal, and the waves dissipated as his bones settled back to their regular size.
He checked his phone for messages and found a couple social media notifications that he quickly dismissed. He also had a message from Charlie about the trip.
Once he texted Charlie back, he remembered that he hadn’t quite finished packing his suitcase, so he got to it.
In about fifteen minutes, he had taken a shower under his brand new showerhead and was fully dressed in tan shorts and a blue V-neck T-shirt. His suitcase was ready to go, and so was he.
I wonder what Molly’s doing today, Scott thought, silently cursing himself, for perhaps the hundredth time, for never getting her number.
He ran down the steps to the kitchen, after seeing Jared jumping up and down in his own room as he went. He noticed his mother wasn’t in the kitchen either, so she was probably getting ready too.
He poured himself a glass of orange juice before sitting at the table and starting to scarf down his now-cold breakfast. Halfway through his breakfast, he d
ropped his fork and clutched his stomach in agony.
You’ve got to be effing kidding me, he thought.
The stomach pain was back, sharper than yesterday.
Scott closed his eyes and waited for the pain to recede, rocking back and forth.
Actually . . . He began to form an idea.
Scott opened his eyes and concentrated. He focused on the sounds around him, and soon something began to happen.
His eyes shifted, and he could see the white lines everywhere. He could hear his mother somewhere in the house now talking to a coworker on the phone, and he could hear Jared upstairs as well. He slowed his breathing and didn’t Accelerate all the way, this time only allowing his eyes to change and his hearing to improve.
He held that for a couple seconds, remaining perfectly still.
Scott breathed out slowly and relaxed, trying to revert to normal.
The lines disappeared from his vision, and so did his stomach pain and his headache.
“Yes!” Scott cheered out loud, grinning wickedly.
“You okay?”
It was Jared. He was standing behind Scott in the kitchen entryway.
“Yeah.” Scott turned in his chair and flashed Jared a smile. “I’m actually great.”
“Hmm,” Jared responded, disbelief all over his face. “Looked like you were gonna go throw up.”
“I’m good, Jared. Thanks, really. I’m good, though.”
He rose up from his chair quickly, and Jared flinched obnoxiously in response, trying to make it look like Scott was being aggressive.
Scott just rolled his eyes and put his dishes in the dishwasher. He paused as he stood over the dishwasher, thinking about Artam and the dream.
I don’t know whether to tell Mom or not, he thought. I don’t want to die . . . and I don’t think that I’m going to anymore. I’m getting better. Still, I don’t want to go to Area 51 or something like that. Plus, Artam did say that it’d go away if I could Accelerate. He just didn’t think that I could do it here. But . . . can brain cancer really go away? Just like that? I mean, it’s cancer!