by Red Harvey
Like he warned her, she could go for hours. And she did. Afterward, she tried to catch herself, but she ended up on the ground, barely breathing. Moretz collapsed in a similar mess, but Kressick rushed to help her first, leaving his son while he loaded her onto the golf cart.
Limbs like ice and a head like fire—still, she heard the faint buzzing of tech. A prominent noise since Kressick insisted all three of them leave their electronics behind, so as not to interfere with the ritual. The buzzing grew louder when the golf cart passed by a row of bushes. Mostly from muscle memory and not from really wanting to, she sent a spark toward the offending shrubs. There were three yells followed by three thuds.
“What was that?”
Kressick hit the brakes. Moretz and Ada rose slowly from their seats.
“Stay. I can handle whatever forest animal dropped over there,” she said.
In her condition, handling anyone would present a challenge, but she kept up the pretense of investigating. He must have shared her mindset, because he dragged himself along.
Behind the bushes lay three bodies, twitching and writhing. She was reminded of the Sammie she had blasted so many weeks ago in Aurora and left twitching on the side of the road. Dance, monkey, dance.
Nerve endings tended to respond negatively to electronic charges forced on them. The body had a hard time handling so much power, and the three trespassers were in very defenseless positions.
Ada advanced slowly, but she almost ate dirt instead. Kressick took her arm and helped her get closer. They were wearing black clothes and official looking gear. Their faces were smudged with black paint—then she knew: the same girl from Ada’s first dinner with the Moretz family. She had parted with the clichéd warning, “We’ll be back!”
She kept her promises.
Ada crouched to speak with her.
“What are you doing?”
A response was not forthcoming, as the girl continued to writhe in pain. Ada put a hand on her forehead, absorbing the electric shock to ease her agony. She stilled briefly, then her head flailed from side-to-side, gaze falling on her comrades who were flipping like pancakes on a Sunday morning. Though she wasn’t in pain, she couldn’t move. Ada had made sure to keep her immobile.
The plan backfired, because the girl grew anxious. She tried to move and panicked when she discovered her limbs wouldn’t receive commands. Ada took the girl’s face in her hands, repeating the question.
Please don’t spit on me. She kept her spit to herself, and Ada thought she might keep her answers to herself too.
“Here to.” Words seemed hard. They emerged haltingly at first, then gained momentum. “I’m here... Here to document. Expose. Freaks.”
She glared at Ada, but most of her anger she directed at Moretz.
“Freaks?”
There had to be more to things than that. Inside her head, Ada found a deeper motive. Exposing Moretz was a priority, but not because of a hate for freaks. The group before her had all lost family members to the State, family members thought to be “different”. As added punishment, they were branded as N.A.’s for affiliating with specials and left to scrap in the N.A. neighborhoods. Rich people like Moretz, special as he was, managed to evade State capture by bestowing influence, bribes, or turning in other specials. They wanted him to suffer as an equal.
Their cause was admirable, but put a blight on Ada’s vendetta. The mission is what mattered. She silenced thoughts of Cybil and her mother, packing the guilt away to deal with later that night in the privacy of her bed.
Next to the girl lay a recording device, a new glass titanium model. Expensive tech. Now she had her evidence. Ada picked up the device, but not with her hands. A freak, yes, she was a freak, and she would show more of her power.
Levitating metal objects was an ability she had nearly mastered. For the last few weeks, she practiced on interfaces, lamps, and even chairs. A small recording device was a piece of cake to mentally lift.
With a small tweak, she crushed the small rectangle dangling before her. Inwardly, it bowed more and more until it became a fraction of its original size. When the phone tangled into a ball of glass and metal, she let go, and it fell with a clunk into the dirt. The girl’s face shrank from defiant to terrified.
“You won’t be exposing anything today.” Ada patted her on the shoulder as if they were buddies. “All you’re going to do is go home, wonder why your head hurts like hell, shrug it off, then take a shower. Maybe with one of these lugheads.”
She nodded at the twitching duo next to them.
“What? Why—?” She frowned.
The re-wiring had yet to take root in full.
“Shhh. When you wake up, you’ll feel better. And we won’t be seeing you ever again.” She tuned a final switch in the girl’s head, moving to the two other vigilantes once she was done.
There was a question in her head, and Ada needed to ask it before she forgot, before she—
Everything tilted. Kressick caught her before she fell. Re-wiring the three had taken more than she had, especially after completing a purge. As she leaned against him, she struggled to regain the words. The question. How—
“How did they see us?” Ada’s words came softly, barely audible.
His dome of energy was meant to conceal the purge, but clearly it hadn’t shielded them from the rebels. After dismantling the energy post-purge, the intruder’s presence had been easier to gauge. Her grandfather always had a plan, and she wanted to know if he let the shield down on purpose.
“They must’ve been within the radius of the shield before it went up. It’s the only way they could’ve seen anything,” he replied with a level gaze.
After weeks of living together, she could read his face. He hadn’t expected their uninvited guests. Had she anymore energy, she would have pinched the truth from his nerve endings.
Moretz left out any input. He leaned against a nearby tree, squinting through bloodshot eyes that were blue for the time being. Back in the golf cart, he finally said something, “Thank you.”
Ada realized he was addressing her. I didn’t do it for you.
“You’re welcome,” she said.
Ada’s world darkened and she saw he was affected too. The adrenaline which had kept them awake drained away. Purging consisted of more than she anticipated. Even Moretz had expended as much as she. Most interesting of all, the ritual had shown her how powerful she was. That was her last thought before everything went dark.
Twenty Three
Moretz was the first thing Ada thought about when she woke up two days after the purge ritual. She wolfed down three plates of eggs, waffles, and bacon. Mid-chew, she reminded herself: I have to stop getting comfortable and remember what I came to Atlanta to do.
There was also the matter of the rebels—they would be back. Running low on juice after the purge, she had manipulated them on a surface level. After a few weeks or months, they might shake off the spell and continue on as before.
Given the power, she wouldn’t have fully re-wired them anyway. They were doing good work in her opinion—who was she to deny them their idea of justice? As long as they didn’t interfere the same way again. If anyone was going to ruin Moretz, it would be her.
Except, she didn’t know if she could anymore. Three enemies had been laying, waiting to be hurt, and Moretz resisted the bait. Instead, he let her take care of things in her way. He had trusted her.
She tried to get back her old feelings of hate, but they were waning. They needed to be tested; they needed to be strengthened.
He would slip up sometimes soon, show his true face, then she would know what she had to do
~ * ~
Shana was nearly useless to Shylar now. She remembered little about Moretz and even less about why she hated him. The two guys who had gone with her, Jasper and Crud, were the same. Everyone else in their group was tripping balls, anxious to know why their leader and two of their colleagues were no longer on the same page when it came to destroyi
ng a central target.
“Who is Moretz?” They kept asking. “What happened to you?” Was everyone else’s question, but the trio lacked an answer.
Take care of us, and we’ll take care of you. The slogan on the building was a password of sorts, and a joke around the compound. Sometimes people in the group asked one another about taking care, and if they answered with the slogan, things were all right.
Shylar told Shana to take care, and he expected her usual response of, Take care of me, and I’ll take care of you, bub!, but she responded with a lift of her brow. Kressick had warned him about the re-wire and how extensive it could be, but Shylar hadn’t wanted to believe it.
He alerted Kressick to the changes.
I can’t use her anymore, not for a while anyway. I need to continue on my own.
~ * ~
“I definitely don’t regret that,” Phennell said.
Ada worked to catch her breath. He was so athletic and so large. Very large.
“You don’t feel weird about it, even a bit?” she asked.
She couldn’t believe she was the one saying such things. The relationship with him had started at her insistence, and intensified at her stark insistence. They had been meeting regularly for weeks, but the last few times felt off. This time she dressed without speaking. Phennell didn’t seem to mind. He also didn’t mind when she left without saying goodbye or promising to return.
The time she was spending with Kressick, and—damnit, don’t admit it, even internally—and with —don’t do it—with Moretz—geez, why don’t ya just marry the asshole if you love him so much? was influencing her more and more. During subsequent purge rituals, they taught her about her origins, little by little, adding to the story day by day so she could absorb it all. In time, they promised Darcy would join in on the sessions when she began manifesting.
Ada enjoyed learning about her powers and new ways in which to use them. Inside one of the thick, ancient tomes, she found alterations of the lightning lore, like the woman from the 1880’s who used the power of nerve manipulation to read minds. Or woman from the 1920’s who could concentrate energy beams from her finger, similar to the power and strength of a laser pistol.
“Can I do any of those things?” Ada pointed out the laser- cutter to Kressick.
He fingered the page, tracing the black and white lines of the woman’s face. “She was my mother, so it’s quite possible you might learn her specialty.” He closed the book gently. “However, some of the other specialties skip a generation here or there, so I doubt you’ll be reading minds.”
“Not like you,” Ada said, half-kidding. He laughed. “Like me?” He laughed all the harder, and she chuckled along.
He hadn’t denied or confirmed anything, and she let the issue drop.
The idea of Darcy joining the purge sessions stuck with Ada. Moretz still made her skin crawl, but she slowly got used to him. Kressick knew how to get her laughing, as no one else did. If she let herself forget about the baggage, which was nearly impossible, it seemed as if they were becoming a family, and what she had going with Phennell was far from that. In comparison, she went to Mars every time they screwed—and not in a good way—then came back down to Earth when they were done.
When she got home from her latest meeting with Phennell, Kressick was waiting for her. He puttered around the living room, and he wasn’t one to putter.
“Just say what you want to say.” She went into the kitchen, poking around the cabinets in a futile attempt; they were all empty.
The kitchen was retrofitted with a food modulator, and Ada probably looked silly going through the empty cabinets, but old habits died hard. She half expected roaches to skitter out. She was a bit disappointed when none did.
“I could say I’ve nothing to ask, but that would be a lie.” He grinned.
She did some puttering of her own in the kitchen. Let him ask what he wanted, but she wasn’t going to go along with it by prompting him anymore. Her mother loved being prompted along in conversations. Perhaps he missed Gemina and wished to be reminded of her, but Ada found the prompting annoying.
“I was going to ask...” Kressick raised his voice to be heard over the rustling going on in the kitchen. “I was going to ask why you bother with him.”
Phennell. He had to mean Phennell. Again, she waited for him to elaborate.
“Phennell has some fine qualities, but I certainly wouldn’t want him dating any one of my daughters, even less so when they’re related by marriage.”
She thought Kressick expected a shameful bow of the head or shrug of the shoulders, but she gave him a retort instead: “Oh, but it’s okay for you to have sex with my mother, ol’ Grampy?”
He winced. “Touché.” After an awkward second came and went, he had more to say about his step-grandson, none of it good. “Though he’s not related to Brontes by blood, he’s inherited a lot of his bad qualities, along with his mother’s calculating ones. Makes for a bad mix, but he always has a bird on his arm. And then another. You don’t seem like the type to perch. So I ask again, why do you bother with him?”
Ada came out of the kitchen. Her answer was not going to be yelled across the condo. For a moment, she considered not responding. She was a grown woman, and if she wanted to screw around, who was he to question her? He was her grandfather, but he had been absent from the job for years.
Mornings spent with him and Gemina around the breakfast table tumbled across her thoughts. He always made her laugh over shared cups of coffee, even when she woke cranky, which was all the time the last eight months. Whenever the cartridge on the food processer had been low, he had noticed and replaced it. And those things weren’t cheap. He hadn’t been entirely absent, just misrepresented. At least he had been there, unlike his son. Kressick was worthy of an answer.
“I don’t know why I bother.” He’s not even a great lay. But she couldn’t say that. He was probably yucked out enough over their love affair. “I’m lonely.” I really am, she admitted with surprise. “And he’s just...there.”
Kressick sat next her on the couch. “Just there, eh? Doesn’t bother you that he probably doesn’t care about you and might be prepared to move on at a minute’s notice?”
She shrugged. “He and I are in the same boat then.” She thought for a minute. “Should I care? Phennell doesn’t care, you know that, but have you had this same talk with him?”
“It’s you I’m worried about.”
“You’re worried for the wrong reasons. I’m a woman, but that doesn’t make me different. If I want to use him, use him I will. I already knew he was using me, and it made the arrangement all the better. Me feeling neutral about the whole thing means nothing. Get your Prominent head out of your Prominent ass. I seem to remember you explaining how you used people in the past, my mother included.”
The last bit was relayed playfully, but she got the feeling she might’ve hurt his feelings.
Ada got up. “Thanks for worrying about me, but I know what I’m doing, Gramps.” She gave him a pat on the knee before heading to her room.
“I just don’t want you to forget your own worth, my dear.”
She laughed. “Why is it men always worry about a woman’s worth in chivalrous situations that amount to very little in the end?”
He rolled his eyes. “What a Tramp thing to say.”
“Thought you’d like that. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight, Ada.”
He still sounded worried.
~ * ~
In Ada’s off-time, which she had in abundance, she tracked down the youngsters she re-wired. Using memory retrieval techniques and hacking algorithms taught to her by Kressick, she found them by combing State satellites, o-planes, and interface networks. Eventually, a personal wristlet transmitted the three faces she remembered. The downloaded coordinates placed the wristlets in a N.A. neighborhood downtown.
Before approaching, she observed for days, following the group, learning their habits. None of the surveillanc
e told her what she wanted to know. Once again, she hacked the interface network, establishing a connection with the young girl’s wristlet.
“Is that me ringing?” Fumbling, then, “Who the hell are you?” A young, dark face glared at Ada via holograph.
“A friend, of sorts.” She cringed internally. She sounded so cryptic, like Kressick. “We met at Moretz’s estate, twice now. My name is Ada. Don’t you remember me?”
Confusion and annoyance colored the girl’s features. “I don’t remember you, no.”
The holograph disappeared, and the line of communication closed.
The abrupt action didn’t discourage Ada. She was used to rudeness, even though she usually dished it out. The girl’s memory erasure was her fault and had days or weeks until it reversed.
A face to face meeting it is. The next afternoon, she left a food modulator on the rebel’s doorstep. She waited. A young boy opened the door, looked around, shrugged, and brought the modulator inside.
Minutes later, Ada rang the young girl’s wristlet. The line connected, and girl immediately protested, threatening to disconnect the line. Despite her attempts otherwise, the line stayed open.
“Piece of shit.” She tapped the screen, gritting her teeth. “Won’t work. I’m overriding your commands,” Ada said. “Hacker piece of shit,” she amended. “I’ll have to get a new interface, thanks jerkwad.”
“Or you could say thanks for the modulator and know that more are on the way,” she drawled.
The girl started to speak, then stopped. She glanced off- screen, chewed her lip, and nodded. “What do you want?”
“Friendship.” Ada donned a winning smile. “And intel.”
“Three more modulators, unlocked,” she stressed the last word, “and we have a deal.”
“Sounds like a deal. I’ll contact you soon.”
As Ada procured the other three modulators, she reflected on the needs of the rebels. Instead of asking for money or power, their leader requested unlimited food sources. She flashed back to her life in Colorado, endlessly searching empty kitchen cabinets and realized how much she liked this new group, even without knowing much about them.