Reb speaks up again. “We really don’t think it’s anything to worry about. You’ve made it this long without any harmful effects from the muta—from the differences. You’ve even sown people with normal results, correct?”
I say, “Yes,” but with the inflection of a question.
“Here, see for yourself,” Doc interjects, motioning to the microscope.
I move into position and lean down to the eyepiece.
“This first one is Reb’s sample. See the two antenna-like growths on the left of the seed?”
“Yes, I see them.”
“Okay, that’s what it’s supposed to look like. This next sample is your blood,” he says, swapping out the slides. “Look to the right. Do you see the seed?”
“Yes. At least, I assume what I’m looking at is the seed. Mine looks like a squid.”
“Exactly. Now,” he says as he pulls the slide to the right, “take a gander at the seed over here.”
Unable to make any sense of the sight before me, I simply observe. The tentacles of two of my squid-like seed are interlocked and new antennae are growing out of the sides opposite their union. I wish I knew whether to celebrate or start praying. A part of me is excited about my uniqueness while the rest of me is horrified by it.
“They’re connected, merged like the beginnings of some kind of network,” I finally say.
“Let me see,” Mel says, tapping my shoulder then bending over the microscope.
“Ted,” says Reb, “we don’t know exactly what any of this means at this point, but my gut tells me it’s something astonishing; something that this alliance and this world needs, whether or not any of us knew it before this moment. You may not have the highest blood purity, but something about you, about your past, about who you are is quite possibly the greatest advancement our kind has ever seen and I, for one, can’t wait to see what you’re capable of.”
He turns to face Mel before delivering new orders. “I want to shift the focus of Ted’s training. I don’t think the uniqueness of his scintilla is going to make him any stronger as a physical fighter. What do you think about going eighty-twenty in favor of training Nephilim abilities?”
“I think that’s a good idea, Reb. He’s a natural fighter. He needs a little more technical training and then plenty of repetition, but he can already hold his own against most of us.”
“Good,” he says, turning toward me. “Take the rest of the day off and get plenty of sleep tonight.” Then back to Mel, he says with deep eye contact and fiery intensity, “I want you to make it your personal mission to unlock Ted’s potential. If I’m right about the seed in his veins, he may be capable of things well beyond the limitations of his blood purity. He may be capable of things well beyond what we even understand at this point. If he is, I want to unleash Verity on the wicked ones and set creation straight.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Learning Nephilim abilities is not as easy as I expected it to be. According to Mel, the key is learning to command the scintilla. That is the greatest oversimplification I’ve heard in my entire life. The unwrapped version of that statement is that I must somehow learn to influence the electrical output from my brain in order to communicate on the proper frequency or channel with the seed while still maintaining normal electrical communication throughout my body.
Apparently, like humanity, Nephilim don’t normally utilize much of our total brain capacity either. Our usage is between twenty and thirty-five percent, depending on blood purity. This is higher than the estimated ten percent workload of human beings, but still leaves some parts of the brain quite infrequently used. As I’ve been told by Mel and seen demonstrated by her and the others, there is a small part of the Nephilim brain, no bigger than a black bean, that serves as the command center of the scintilla but must be “activated” before it’s functional. The only way they have discovered to accomplish this is a regiment of meditation, pressure point therapy to divert blood flow, thought exercises designed to stimulate that segment of the brain, and sheer willpower. It’s as ridiculous as it sounds, and if it wasn’t for my firsthand experience with the alliance’s use of their Nephilim abilities, I might think I was being pranked.
Pair this seemingly impossible task with the pressure of Reb’s loudly professed and widely disseminated belief that I’m going to become some kind of super weapon, and I’m getting frustrated with myself and these expectations. It’s been three long days of training since the blood test and I’ve made almost no progress in my attempts to harness the power of the scintilla. Despite the others’ support and understanding, I can’t help but sense their growing impatience and furtive disappointment.
There have been a couple of short-lived, hopeful moments: one where I created enough of an electrical disturbance to make my own arm hair stand on end, and one where I altered the blood flow to my brain enough to briefly lose consciousness. Strange for either of those to bring hope, but learning to intentionally influence my own body’s processes using nothing but my body is just the type of paradox that could drive a man crazy. Any alterations, even those with counterproductive results, still show progress and prove that my mind is capable of such feats.
Each day has included at least six hours of intense, focused sessions during which I try to access parts of my body that I didn’t know existed until a few days ago. I’ve continued to see mirages here and there, but whenever I approach they flee or dissipate before I reach them. My nights are continually afflicted by the rogue Nephilim’s plague. If I don’t awake in the darkness to find him standing in the corner of my room, I toss and turn with ghoulish nightmares of serpents, insects, and putrid deterioration. But in spite of this nightly onslaught, I persevere to unlock the potential within my veins.
Throughout the last few days, I have forged ironclad bonds with Vic and Mel as they train me. I’ve even found a spring of playfulness buried under the many years of repression and sobriety. It’s these moments of lightheartedness that have helped me survive the burdensome, hopeful anticipation that afflicts me and the rest of the alliance. When Reb speaks they listen, and what they’ve heard is that I am a legend in the making. It’s a role I relish, but also one that I have yet to earn in any way.
Mel’s patience is supernatural. With days of failure under our belts, she continues to invest in my training as if each minute is the first we’ve shared. She brings fresh hope every morning that it will be the day of my breakthrough, and if it weren’t for her peaceful strength, I’m not sure I could sustain this pace. Simultaneously my harshest critic and my most sincere advocate, she has read me like a book from the beginning, providing rest when I reach my breaking point and pushing me back to my breaking point when I’m sandbagging.
It isn’t until late afternoon of the fourth day that everyone’s hard work receives a well-deserved pat on the back. Mel and I are performing an exercise aimed at focusing my brain’s electrical energy on the scintilla command center. At this stage I’ve felt only momentarily the sensation of a deeply embedded brain spasm, the tension and pressure of a foreign object within the brain tissue near the back of my skull that accompanies the command center’s activation. I have yet to be able to sustain it, much less control its output.
We enter a time of meditative silence, but I can’t quiet my mind. A kaleidoscope of the last couple of weeks spins before my mind’s eye: the revelations of truth that rocked my foundation, the ass whoopings I’ve received, the intrusions of that dead-eyed Nephilim, the sight of my mutant scintilla, the slimy bits of Dave’s brain and bone, Jan’s betrayal, and the incendiary agony of being tased. I refuse to dwell on those memories, and I will not be defined by them. If Reb is right, my future will outshine all of this darkness. I am Theodonis Verity. I am a divine being of truth and I will remain loyal to my nature even if it means my death!
Somewhere beneath the wrinkled recesses of my brain’s surface and near the back of my skull, a twinge and a spasm seizes and holds like a tightly balled muscle. My eyes snap open. Arou
nd the gymnasium, the others are still hard at work, oblivious to the change in my body and for good reason. Nothing has changed externally. The lights aren’t flickering, no little yellow lightning bolts are stretching from my fingertips, and I’m not being bombarded with signals from the others, but I know that this is the breakthrough I’ve been working toward.
I lift my arms to investigate the prickling ripples that continually flow over my skin, massaging me from the neck down. With my sleeves already pulled up to my elbows, I can see every last hair standing rigidly with the passing of each wave. Mel must have heard my movement because I watch her eyes sneak open in the blurry background of my arm hair. Looking through the hair, Mel and I make eye contact, brimming with joy and excitement.
Without alerting the others she leans in next to my ear and says quietly, “Let’s try something before we get everyone’s hopes up.”
I nod in agreement and whisper, “Okay. What did you have in mind?”
She pops up from the mat and hurries to the side of the gym opposite the bleachers where a table stands bearing a selection of random objects. From the various options (a silver flip phone, a battery-powered radio, a table lamp, another multimeter, a tube TV with rabbit ears on top, and more) she selects the badly outdated table lamp. Returning to her position off the corner of my crossed legs, she sets the lamp on the ground about one foot in front of me. Leaning so close to me I nearly expect a peck, her cheek rests softly against mine, intensifying the electric atmosphere as she whispers, “This old table lamp. See if you can turn it on, light it up. Be careful not to burn out the bulb though. Control it.”
“I don’t know how to do that. I don’t know how to make it do anything. I can tell I’m connected to the control center though. I can feel the scintilla’s movement through my entire body.”
“Getting connected is the hard part, Ted,” she says. I can feel the warmth of her breath against my ear as she tries to hush her excitement. “All you need to do now is think the command in the same way that you would tell any part of your body what to do. Look at the fixture and visualize the scintilla energy field reaching out and engulfing the light. The field allows us to induce a voltage into some simple electronics and disrupt the operation of others.”
“Okay, here goes nothing,” I say with hesitant expectancy.
“Just focus. You can do this.”
I look at the light fixture with its lifeless bulb and imagine it firing up to a glowing yellow. Nothing. Willing it even harder, I again imagine the bulb’s filament warming to a white-hot glow. Again nothing. Without success, I adjust my approach, thinking instead about the invisible electromagnetic field as some snaking vaporous extension of my body that wraps around the bulb like a fist, bringing it to life. It remains lifeless.
“It’s not working,” I whisper to Mel.
“I wish I could tell you exactly what to think or visualize, but everyone is different. Everyone’s scintilla is unique, yours more than most. You have to find what works for you. Try it again but do what comes naturally. Only you know how your brain processes information. Do it your way.”
I look ahead and examine the old light fixture, taking note of every detail: the glossy porcelain housing with its avocado finish and wavy form resembling that of a curvy female’s figure, the standard incandescent bulb with its loosely coiled filament, the translucent, discolored power cable with its braided copper conductor terminating at the fixture’s base, and the small two-pronged plug resting on the gym mat. Armed with fresh mental snapshots of the lamp, I close my eyes and imagine the cool, twisted copper. I picture the electrons flowing through its lattice, across the terminals of the fixture, through the socket, into the bulb, and along the filament. I dwell on this thought, investing my will, my emotional energy, my desire. The muddy drubbing of my racing heart floods my eardrums, nearly drowning out Mel’s quiet gasp.
Through my sealed eyelids, I detect the glow of the burning bulb. Slowly, to preserve my focus, I retract the thin flaps of protective skin shielding my eyes from the lamp’s direct beams. Actually, the light is rather weak, but, sure enough, it’s glowing a faint red orange that reminds me of a lipstick shade that my adoptive mother used to wear—a versatile color, dramatic enough for a winter gala, but light and refreshing enough for a summer date. I stare more deeply than I should into the bulb’s dim ambiance and strain my mind to increase its output.
At first there’s no change, but slowly, methodically, I find my stride, moving the electrons at an even higher rate and with greater force. The filament burns hotly, slinging heat against our awestruck faces.
“Careful, you don’t want the bulb to burst, Ted,” Mel warns.
I turn the lamp off and back on with ease, then again, and once more, each attempt bringing its own unique hue of orange and fading off at its own leisure. Rather than bring the bulb to life with a swelling wave of electrons, I decide to hit it with a surge of juice like the flip of a switch. My eyes again closed, my mind focused, I wipe my thoughts away and with them the electric current. Behind a mental dam I build a cache of voltaic thought, again envisioning not just the result, but the path to it. When the dam bows under the mounting pressure, I let loose, unleashing a reservoir of energy into the lamp which radiates gloriously through my eyelids. But it’s not just the lamp. The entire gym is lit up like an operating room! A DJ’s garbled banter squawks from the portable radio’s two-inch speaker. Scrolling, checkerboard static paints the TV screen’s pixels white, gray, and black. Every bulb burns brilliantly, casting shadowy spokes around each upright body. A clamor builds as the others take notice and close in around me.
“Ted, how are you doing that?!” Mel cries ecstatically, but I’m locked in and offer no reply.
In a sporadic staccato pattern, I pulsate the power to the entire array of overhead fixtures and nearby electronics, eventually learning to exclude the TV, radio, and flip phone from the grouping. The lights flash and dim repeatedly until I start varying the timing, staggering the flashing amongst the numerous rows of lighting. Mel’s expression of amazement is pasted on every face in the room.
I’m feeling it now, so I decide to push the limit. I raise my arms like a conductor, extended outward and upward to dial up the drama and give physical manifestation to my state of mind. The frequency of the flashing and the intensity of the bulbs’ output increases suddenly. The collective breath of the alliance escapes their lungs, everyone standing in stunned suffocation while they behold the demonstration of my newfound power.
Their eyes squint narrowly at the intensifying flares of light I create until eventually, and to my embarrassment, several bulbs burst with the surprising pop of an exploding balloon. A cascade of glass peppers everyone in the room and taps against the floor like crystal rain. Mel is speechless, and no one else seems to mind my costly mistake that serves to finally satisfy their expectations for my potential. Reb, Doc, Pam, Vic, and the others look at me with wide-eyed admiration and Drake, who has been spectating from the bleachers, initiates a slow-clapping round of applause that is straight out of an eighties flick.
“Well done, Sunny,” he hoots.
I can’t help beaming at the applause and cheers, but at the same time it seems unnecessary. Like a parent who gushes over their mediocre child simply doing what was expected of them, the entire alliance is coddling me for taking my first baby steps.
Congratulations for overcoming your total ineptitude, Ted. We’re so proud of you for not being a waste of time.
“Ted,” Mel’s voice interrupts the ones inside my head, “how did you do that?”
“What do you mean? I just did what you told me to do.”
She steps on my next thought, saying, “No, Ted. I told you to turn on the lamp. Several of us can do that. Nobody can do what you just did.” She lets out a breathy laugh of disbelief. “Those lights are at least twenty feet away. Lighting up one would’ve been unprecedented, but what you did is unfathomable!”
There’s a tinge of insignific
ance in her otherwise exuberant tone. It’s the smallness she might experience in the presence of her father, or perhaps at the sight of a powerful predator, or while watching a cyclone sweep across the plains—fear born from respect. Reb carefully hobbles around the minefield of glass between us. With a big, toothy, slightly self-satisfied grin, he lowers himself delicately onto the mat, completing an intimate triangle powwow.
“She’s right. That was exceptional, Ted. I knew you were special, but that was beyond my wildest hopes, and you’re just getting started. Who knows what your top end looks like.”
I beam again, this time bashfully. “Thanks, Reb. I’m sorry about the lights. I didn’t mean to; I was just experimenting.”
“Don’t apologize, they’re just lights. You have carte blanche to experiment and explore your abilities. I don’t care how many lights we have to replace!” He puts a firm hand on my shoulder. “How do you feel?”
“I’ve never felt better.”
“Do you want to continue training or call it a day? It’s nearly quitting time and it’s been a long wee—”
“Oh, I’m not done yet,” I blurt, cutting off Reb mid-sentence. “Sorry, but I’m just getting the hang of this and I don’t want to quit now.”
“I’ll stay and keep working with him,” Mel volunteers—more palpitations.
“All right, then. Anyone else want to stick around to help clean up this glass?” Reb asks the others, their response a unanimous yes with the exception of Pam who is slated to babysit for one of the families. My confidence building, it emboldens me to know that they’re likely only volunteering to clean so they can see what I do next, though I’m not accustomed to an audience. Mel takes my hand and leads me to a back-to-back set of chairs underneath the basketball hoop’s netless orange rim. We shake the jagged debris from the seats and turn the chairs to face each other.
Verity Rising (Gods of Deceit Book 1) Page 25