by Red Harvey
The door dissipated. “Hello,” she said, biting her lip in lieu of acknowledging how she’d ditched him.
“Hello. Please, come inside.”
She sat next to him on the couch. They got the formalities out of the way—asked how the other was doing. Ada hated the exchange because she had always complained to her mother about the nuisance of small talk.
When he offered to help with anything she needed, her tense attitude changed instantly. A ghost of a smile lit her face. Big smiles were rare with her, he remembered.
She explained what she was after. He suspected her needs and was hesitant to become involved. He hoped to gather intel or secure weapons—busy work. But killing the Congressman? Kressick had to tell her everything.
Gently, he informed her of important familial ties. “Killing Moretz will be near impossible and certainly impossible for me as he’s my son.”
A change lit the room, and the lights around him glowed a bit brighter. Still, Ada sat, appearing relatively calm, if not somewhat stunned at his revelation. He decided it was safe to continue speaking.
“I know you blame him for August’s death, but the truth is, he left you to keep you safe. Sammies pursued him, as they do with any special citizen, and he had to adopt a new persona.”
“Is that what he told you?” she mumbled, her gaze shifting until she stared into the corner of the room.
“It’s what happened, dear. When I had a family of my own, a widespread Purge occurred, and I was forced to abandon my loved ones or have us all captured. Your father hated me for a long time, but in his adulthood, I found him again, and he forgave me. Just as, in time, you’ll learn to forgive your father.”
Her snort of disbelief discounted Kressick’s theory, but he went on, undeterred.
“I’m sure you have questions about your abilities, and there are negative effects to consider. Abilities result from electronic stimuli, and the chance of a change in personality is a big possibility. After manifestation, each descendent in our family may undergo not only physical changes, but actions and thoughts change as well. Men submit to dramatic transformations, but women are also affected.”
After his speech, she said nothing, her eyes wide. He noticed the blue sparks and scooted back.
“You lied to me.” He waited for a more pronounced reaction and got one when Ada added, “You lied to my mother.”
Energy filled the room. The hairs on his arm stood up. He hoped his explanations might bring her some relief, but he knew he had failed. Her negative stress responses were part of her altered personality, a fact she seemed to miss.
“Now what? You want to have a nice family reunion, Grandpa?”
On the last word, a tug moved his pistol. His hands hadn’t moved, and neither had Ada’s, but an invisible force tried to remove the laser pistol from his jacket pocket all the same. The tricky minx was getting too powerful for her own good. He needed to react and soon. If he waited any longer, she might kill him.
He concentrated and connected with his granddaughter, finding the right neural pathways—blinking furiously red—and taming them. The change hurt, he could tell. She was powerful and therefore naturally immune to most preternatural influences. But he was older and stronger. His reversal of her reaction left Ada slumped on the couch, blue eyes twitching.
For a moment, he thought he had pushed her mind too far. Then her eyes cleared to their normal hazel color, and she blinked through her tears.
“I couldn’t let go. I didn’t mean to look down. Why did I look?”
He put a hand on her arm. What was she talking about? An errant memory could’ve fired as a result of the re-set.
“What’s wrong, my dear?”
Her eyes emptied. “I...” She cleared her throat. “I forgive you. I don’t know why, but I forgive you.”
“Yes, my dear girl, of course you do.” He helped her sit up. “I’m sorry, but the lies were necessary, for your sake and your mother’s.”
Tears fell freely, something he hadn’t seen from her often. “But, why?”
“Your father has more answers than I can give.” She swiped at her eyes. “I said I forgive you, not him.”
He smiled. So even after his interference, she had retained most of her personality after all. To enact a full personality reversal might result in a loss of her powers, and he had only reversed her proclivity to violence. She would have to fix the ugliness within on her own.
The rest of their conversation was a question and answer session about Kressick’s history.
Where was he born? London. Did he have other children besides Moretz? No. She smirked at that. Daughter in Cambridge, huh? He shook his head. Did he have powers? Yes.
“What can you do?”
“I can control the electronic impulses in other human beings,” said Kressick.
“Mind control?”
He nodded.
Ada tapped a finger on the side of her head. “You haven’t used your power on me, though, right?”
“No.”
Amnesia, of a sort, was a by-product of his power. People never remembered his invisible fingers wiggling around in their brain, and he threw switches as he pleased. Ada, though powerful, was no different.
“Did you use it on my mom?”
“Never.”
Which wasn’t a lie. Kressick loved Gemina, and she loved him. It had been a love built on lies, but at its core, real affection could be found. At least, those were his feelings. What he could never tell Ada was how he had faked his feelings for her mother their first year together.
During that time, he could hardly stand Gemina. Her hippie ways were dangerous and selfish, but she promoted them anyway. He was a practicing Prominent, even if he didn’t believe in all the ordinances. Everything had changed with Gemina’s health scare, and she had changed. He had seen her move from a proud woman to a fragile one, in need of care.
Though he hadn’t planned on it, he cared for her in every possible way, beginning with the purchase of the Clean and Clear. Gemina never used it and teased him for buying it for her. He had begged her to use it, and she teased him all the more. Somehow, she had become a part of him, and he let himself love her with all her annoyances.
Maybe he could tell Ada later. At present, complete honesty could wait.
They talked for another hour. After a while, she brought up a subject he’d been dreading more than any other.
“Wait, you’re my grandfather and you...and my mom...”
Finishing the sentence was unnecessary.
Very carefully, he considered a suitable answer. Failing to find one, he merely shrugged, hoping his features conveyed the appropriate amount of guilt. Throughout the years, using people had become second-nature. Boundaries of morality hardly hindered his actions, and Gemina was no different. Except, she was, because he had fallen in love with her.
Disgust colored Ada’s face, and he tried putting what he felt for her mother into words. The more he spoke, the more disgusted she looked.
“I guess I understand,” she choked out.
She stood up abruptly, citing the late hour. When she left, Kressick reviewed the files he had on nearby deviants and specials. None of them were as talented or as motivated as the gatecrasher Moretz had complained about. She might even accept food as payment.
He messaged Shylar:
No need to follow her. She’s coming back here with her things. Find the girl. Keep me up-to-date on your progress.
Seventeen
The girl was easy to find. Moretz’s guards put a tracker on her the night she crashed the dinner party. She was smart and ditched it after a few hours, but not before giving off general coordinates.
Shylar downloaded the location to his interface and did as he was told: he found the girl.
The coordinates took him through downtown Atlanta, past cobblestone buildings and small bistros. Then the buildings changed. With each block, full walls gave way to crumbling brick. There were holes where there should hav
e been more building. People lingered on the sidewalks, seeming not to care if they were inside or outside. A child in a shirt and pants much too big for him leaned against a rusty fence. He was cleaning a shotgun nearly longer than he was tall. The child waved as Shylar’s car went by, and he waved back.
Dark and deep conditions didn’t surprise him. He was right at home. Though what he saw was a bit darker and deeper than what he was used to. The pop-pop of gunshots a few blocks away put him on high alert.
Finally, he came to the end route of the coordinates. A tall building, one of the few with four walls instead of three quarter, loomed. Black paint was peeling off in long strips. At some point, the building must have been an animal hospital as a faded picture of a dog and cat decorated the front wall. There were lights on around the side worth investigating, considering reliable electricity was a rarity in such a neighborhood. Shylar passed the building and parked three blocks down.
“Nice car.”
An old woman with no teeth eyed his vehicle. Other cars littered the roadway, but they were frozen in place, stripped of all parts, forever left to rust in the sun.
“Touch it, and I break your arm,” he said with no malice.
The woman backed away and shuffled off. As he walked the few blocks back to the building, he noticed others watching him. Two youths on the opposite street and one young woman in front of him. They let him be. His skin color helped him blend in, though his clothes were all wrong. He took off his coat and held it out to the young girl. She wouldn’t take it.
“I don’t have any money.”
Her face was sallow and pinched.
He shoved the coat in to her hands, and she fell over. “Sorry.”
Helping her up would be futile, as she would be averse to touching him. Shylar’s clothes made him look like a Prominent, and in this neighborhood, Prominents were feared and avoided.
Without the leather coat, he hoped to be less conspicuous. His choice in clothes was moot, as he didn’t see another soul until he approached the front side. The dog and cat smiled down at him with faded eyes and faded teeth.
“Hi, guys.”
“Take care of us and we’ll take care of you,” was the slogan beneath the pair.
Around the corner, floodlights beckoned. He could hear a voice and another, then another. Shylar withdrew his weapon—a just-in-case. Communication with subjects was unnecessary, and he was programmed to avoid contact. If they saw him and felt like talking, his gun would respond.
He poked his head around the wall, careful to steer clear of the peeling black flakes which were apt to cling to his shirt. The first person he noticed was the girl from dinner. She was easy to spot, being the only white face in the crowd of six. They were arguing, if their loud voices and rough gestures meant anything.
Discreetly, he snapped a few photos of the group. They looked harmless, like a bunch of college protesters. For the neighborhood they occupied, they appeared well-fed. He wondered what they did for a job, if they had one.
He hit send and waited for Kressick’s answer. Infiltrate. Shylar spent the night in his car, not doing any sleeping, just watching and waiting. Citizens walked by his car, peering in through the rare unbroken windows. He held up his gun and they kept on-a walkin’.
A few hours before dawn, a black youth stepped out from the side of the building. He looked around, none too discreetly, then signaled to something in front of him. The something turned out to be a small electric vehicle, an older model in awful condition to match the building, but it was running. The youth knocked on the window of the passenger side, and the door opened.
“You’re jittery as fuck!”
Shylar heard the driver through his amplified listening device.
The youth jumped in, and the car finished backing out onto the street.
After a minute, Shylar followed. The car drove for miles, reaching the newer parts of the city. On the outskirts were factories and industrial buildings. They stopped at a small white concrete hub he recognized as a food processing plant.
Not well-fed after all. Two youths came out of the car, and the driver wasn’t the girl as Shylar assumed but a different girl, a darker girl. She had a sweet face, at odds with the huge gun in her grip. Immediately, she shot a hole through the dissipating door of the hub. The hole shrunk, collapsed, and re-formed the particle barrier. Before the barrier re- formed completely, she leapt through the hole.
Jittery paced outside, his eyes moving around in crazy directions, hands over his ears to drown out the fierce ring of alarms going off. Sammies would respond in three minutes or less, and the pair had to know that. By their actions, Shylar thought maybe they didn’t.
He got out of the car and jogged a safe distance to Jittery’s eye line. Hands up, he approached. Jittery raised his gun, ready to shoot Shylar to high heaven. He brought out his far superior weapon and shot.
The Sammie behind Jittery dropped to the ground. With the blare of the alarm in the background, Shylar checked the dead woman at his feet. No use, she’s gone to that place. The woman’s body reminded him of his mother who overdosed on hallugin when he was ten, then she was the one gone to that place.
There was no time for Jittery to thank or question Shylar’s presence. The girl came blasting out of the building the same way she’d gone in. Though they hadn’t spoken, he liked her ferocity. She reminded him of Ada.
“Who the fuck’s this?” she screamed to be heard over the alarms.
Jittery shrugged. “I dunno, but he helped me.” He kicked at the dead Sammie.
She narrowed her eyes
“Come the fuck on, then.”
She dashed to the car, not slowing for either of them.
Back at the rebel headquarters—Shylar had no other name for it—she tried explaining to her superior how they picked up a stray on a simple food retrieval mission. Using suggestive techniques hardwired by Kressick, he managed to assuage their doubts. The group’s leader, Shana, was the young woman who gate-crashed Moretz’s mansion. She informed him she had trouble feeding the group, and she didn’t want to feed another asshole with a gun.
He smiled and held up his laser pistol. Shana gave him a nod of appreciation.
“Nice, but I can’t use you. I don’t know what you were doing at that hub, but providence isn’t what brought you here.”
“No, not providence.”
He placed his interface on their dirty tabletop, allowing a stream of holographic images, all of them of Moretz in various locales.
Shana nodded and put her hand out. He shook it happily.
“Maybe I can use you,” she said.
Eighteen
Ada was different. Not noticeably, but he felt it, like dirt under his fingernails. Ada complained about a headache for two days. Kressick took care of her by giving her a guest room, bringing her food in bed, and respecting her need to be left alone.
She hadn’t thought she would return to Kressick’s townhome, she told him. A voice inside of her told her to come back; he was family after all. Every time Ada heard the voice, she tried to choke it down. There was an internal struggle, and though she didn’t know it, the struggle was the source of her headaches. Only when she quieted her own voice did the headaches abate. She had told him none of the details; he scanned her brain and skimmed her thoughts.
He could have lessened the pain, but he preferred not to alter her any more than he already had. Occasionally, he held his wristlet to her head, performing an MRI scan. When she allowed it, he also had her leave a drop of blood on his fancy machine, to test for pathogens. All of her tests came back clear
Moretz and Shylar messaged Kressick daily. He stonewalled both of them as he waited for his connection with Ada to deepen. He also wanted to wait for the next move to come from her.
After the second day in bed, Ada started leaving the house for lunch. Upon return, she was always whistling. When Kressick asked her where she was going, she shrugged. She couldn’t know Shylar was following her agai
n. From his reports, Kressick knew where and with whom she was meeting.
Ada reached out to Phennell. Either she wanted to get to know her brother, or she was working an angle. Or both. They met at a coffee shop to talk about their lives. Of course, she made up most of hers. Phennell listened with complete interest, according to Shylar. Even from his typed reports, Kressick sensed Shylar’s minute jealousy, indicating a certain chemistry between Phennell and his granddaughter.
Kressick wondered how Ada felt about that. Disgusted? Conflicted? He brought it up during dinner one night. They sat across from each other on the electronic partial table which came out from the dining room wall when needed. The chairs were regular polycarbonate composites, nothing like the particle chair Ada had seen in the Congressman’s office. Kressick was well off, but not that well off.
The large windows leading out to living room held a view of the night sky, complete with passing commercial delivery o-planes. Their small search lights were distracting, and before he spoke, he used his interface to change the view on the dissipating surface. Instead of a live view, he chose to display a night sight of the ocean. The water so was clear, the stars above reflected on the surface—a scattering of diamonds on a velvet blanket. In real life, the air above any ocean was clogged with tech traffic, either o-planes or other flying tech. There were no more scenes of the ocean devoid of human interference. The current one was at least thirty years old, but he didn’t care. The scene was beautiful, and it would set the tone for a calm conversation.
“You never told me how you felt about meeting your sister,” he began.
“Darcy?”
Acting as though the whir of o-planes distracted her, Ada sipped the modulated wine.
“Yes, Darcy. Unless you have another sister.”
She didn’t smile. “I don’t know. Do I?”
“You and Darcy are Moretz’s only children.”
“What about Phennell?” She put down the glass.
“Phennell is Chancelin’s son from her first marriage.” Kressick let the bomb smolder.