The Empowered, page 118
“What about the nullifier field?” Bulldog asked.
Nullifier field?
The Professor gave a gold-colored cylinder to Bulldog. “Plug this into the Breeder reactor, and the main cloak cable into it,” he told her.
“Null field?” I asked out loud.
The Professor looked at me, his face urgent. “Mat, please go. I need you topside.”
I swallowed and took off at a run. Something nagged at me. Nullifier. That was as illegal a tech as they came. Even teenaged-me knew about them, from those stupid TV shows. They took a nuclear reactor to power. I thought the Professor had wanted to hide this place, not neutralize powers. Thoughts raced through my head as I ran.
Sissy. Toby. If this place was overrun, they might be hurt, imprisoned, or even killed. Everyone could be. If I could think of that, the Professor must have been able to.
Which meant he had to have a backup escape plan.
Luckily Sissy’s room was on the way to the elevator to topside. I had had a hunch that there might be other ways out of here. Please God, there must be another way out of here. Then it hit me. The emergency exit I’d been turned away from. I skidded to a stop outside Sissy’s room. I pounded on the door.
Toby opened the door. The lights were off.
“Where’s the emergency exit?” I asked him.
“What’s going on?”
“We brought the components. The Professor’s plugging them in. But he said something about a null field.”
Toby looked at his hands, twisted them. Didn’t say anything.
I grabbed him. “That must be because he has an escape plan, right?” I remember something dimly about null fields also killing, but I couldn’t remember where, if it were true, or some stupid TV-thing that wasn’t.
“I told him not to,” Toby said, his voice weak. “He said it was a last resort.”
“Okay, then maybe the cloak will work,” I said. It had to. But why bother with the null field if the Professor was sure it would? Didn’t make sense. Unless the cloak wasn’t working, and the Professor knew it, and was panicking.
“He’s not sure the cloak will work, is he?” I asked Toby.
“Nothing’s a hundred percent certain.”
I took a deep breath. Probably this was as crazy as everything else down here, but better safe and looking like an idiot.
“Get ready to leave. Where does that escape route go?”
He blinked. “It comes out underneath the bridge overpass, couple of blocks away. We have a school bus parked there.”
I sagged against the door frame. Thank you, God.
Sissy came to stand beside Toby, patted his arm, her blind face toward me.
“I knew you were special, Mattie,” she said.
“Okay, I have to get up topside,” I told them. “Can you get all the normals near the escape route. Do you have a radio?”
He did. He told me to use channel 5. The Professor was using 2, Tanya 3.
I raced to the elevator and the world above, running past the garden room. The plants were doing so well. If only they could continue to do well. If only we all could, here in our Hideaway. If only it could remain Hideaway.
I’d give anything for this place to be cloaked, and for this sudden feeling that the cloak wasn’t going to work to end up being just another crazy thought in my head.
10
I charged out the elevator and ran to the window. The sky was brightening. It would be dawn soon.
I thumbed the radio on. “Tanya, do you see anything?”
“Yeah, an idiot at a window.”
“Funny.” I switched channels, radioed the Professor. “Is the cloak running? It’s almost sunrise.”
“We’re working on it. Please keep me posted.” He was all business, with an edge to his voice. I guess I couldn’t blame him, but suddenly I didn’t feel like we were part of a family. Everything was coming apart.
The minutes crawled by. The sky brightened. The sun was about to rise. The night had turned into shadow.
There was a roar from the sky, and something big rocketed down. A weird-looking plane, jet engines pointed earthward, landed in front of the building, the thrust churning up old newspapers and scraps of cardboard.
“Hero Council Strike jet!” Tanya called over the radio to me.
“That’s it,” I yelled. “We have to leave.”
A half-dozen people in blue jumpsuits came out of the weird-looking jet. They looked familiar. The first team. I’d seen them all on TV, but suddenly I couldn’t remember their names or their powers, just that we were in deep trouble. The last one was a huge, white-haired giant of a man. Him I remembered despite my fear. Titan. President of the Hero Council.
A voice boomed from the cement walls like thunder. “Surrender immediately!”
I clutched my ears, wincing. The command boomed again and again. I called the Professor, but there was no answer.
The command stopped. The figures fanned out, heading toward the building. The cyclone fence had been flattened, either by the jets or by a power.
“Tanya, get out!” I yelled over the radio.
“No way.”
She appeared in the window of the garage, aimed her stunner. I thought it might be too far, but one of the figures crumbled. Titan and the others hit the deck.
“Okay, you’ve bought us time. Now get out of there!” I ran to the elevator, looked back.
One of the sanctioned, a short, muscular bald guy, ran over to the shelter of the wing, raised his hand.
There was a thunderclap that made my ears ring even inside the building. I actually saw the air outside ripple. The open window and Tanya both disintegrated , and the roof crumpled. She disappeared in a shower of red spray.
And just like that, she was dead. Some kind of killer sound.
I got in, turned the key, and rode the elevator down, my heart ashes in my mouth.
My best friend, Tanya, killed trying to protect us.
I called Toby. “Are you ready to run?”
“Yes! But it will take us a while.”
I wanted to see why the Professor hadn’t answered, but it was in the opposite direction.
It didn’t matter now if the cloak worked or not. They knew exactly where we were.
I kept calling the Professor as I ran through the corridors to where Toby, Sissy and the others were. Maybe the Hero Council would let the normals off easy, but I didn’t know.
What about Sissy? They would imprison her, since she was empowered. She was old. She’d die in prison.
My radio clicked on as I neared the emergency exit. It was the Professor.
“I’m sorry, Mat,” he said. “The cloak failed to work. We’re trying to get the nullifier on.”
“They’re already here!” I shouted into the radio. I yanked open the metal door. Another corridor in front of me. People at the far end, heading up stairs. Toby was helping Sissy up the stairs.
Shit. They were taking too long.
Something boomed behind me, way back inside Hideaway. Like something heavy had been knocked over. I ran down the corridor to the stairs.
“Professor!” He didn’t answer, but he had left the channel open. I could hear yelling.
Someone screamed “the walls are flowing!” I reached the stairs.
Another boom, behind me.
I turned. The walls were oozing like concrete mud, a sticky, earthen avalanche.
The Professor and the others were being buried alive. I ran up the stairs, and helped Sissy and Toy clear the last few steps
I blinked in the sunlight.
There was an old yellow school bus across a weed-choked lot.
People were filing into the bus, a line that stretched back to the escape door from Hideaway.
Things had gone to pieces in an instant.
I ran out into the lot, waved people to keep moving. There was a blackberry thicket growing besides an abandoned building. We were maybe two blocks from the entrance to Hideaway.
I squeezed tears away. Reached out into the blackberries, willed them to grow, spread, send vines every way, until there was a wall of thorns eight feet high.
Maybe, just maybe we’d make it. Sissy and Toby were at the door to the old school bus.
I motioned go at them. Just go. Leave. They got inside, and the bus started up.
Thunder boomed, and my blackberry wall blew apart, the vines screaming in my mind. A red-headed woman in a blue jumpsuit flew down and landed in front of me. She aimed a stunner at my chest.
“That’s enough,” she said. Her face was as grim as steel.
Behind me the bus’s engine coughed and died.
“They haven’t done anything,” I said. “Please let them go.”
She kept the gun pointed at me.
“Please!” I shouted. But she ignored me.
A black sedan pulled into the lot, and a group of Support personnel boiled out, brandishing stunners and carrying handcuffs.
They slapped cuffs on me. They put cuffs on Toby, and the others, even Sissy.
My heart felt like lead in my chest. Hideaway was gone. Tanya and the Professor were dead, Driver-man, Bulldog and Phil, too.
The grim-faced sanctioned Empowered woman marched me into a black van, and I was surrounded by Support agents. She slammed the door shut, and we drove off.
The next few days and weeks passed in a blur. They put me in a cell in some windowless jail. Told me the crimes I’d been charged with. I was numb at first. They wouldn’t let me see Ruth. Wouldn’t answer any of my questions.
Anger began to simmer deep inside me, the first anger I’d felt since before Hideaway fell. They weren’t treating me like a person, they were treating me like a menace. All I had done was try to help build a place for outsiders and Renegades.
They wouldn’t tell me what happened to Sissy. Toby and the surviving normals were charged with ordinary crimes.
I didn’t get a jury trial. No, they stuck me in a room with a judge, a court reporter, and a sanctioned Empowered I didn’t recognize. The judge sentenced me to Special Corrections for life. I had a chance to be paroled at twenty-one.
I was going to earn that chance, no matter what.
THE END
Epilogue-Nullified
The rust brown prison walls loomed over the Yard, the force projectors atop them gnawing at the San Diego sky like black teeth. I sweated in the little tomato patch the Warden had granted me, struggling to save my six tomato plants while ignoring their faint screams in my mind.
The Yard in the women’s section of Special Corrections was deserted, except for Lenore and me. Lenore pumped iron beneath the south wall, ignoring the 100-degree temperatures that had driven everyone else inside, wearing her red knit cap despite the heat.
I wasn’t given enough water. The warden allowed me a single watering can’s worth each day. They gave me an ancient tin thing with a bent spout and faded green paint. It barely held a pint’s worth of water. I glared at the gold-colored null cuffs locked on my wrists. Once upon a time, I could have waved my hand and willed the plants to draw water from the air and from the ground. I was an Empowered. My power let me hear plants, make them grow, even kill them. But the null cuffs on my wrist blocked that power, kept it from me. I wanted to punch the bastard who invented nullification tech. It must have been someone on the Heroes Council.
Just beyond the force dome, the huge white sphere of the desalination plant shimmered and billowed. Lenore called it Xanadu, after an old poem she knew. Looking at the distortion for very long gave me a headache. It mocked me. All that salt water transformed into fresh H20, and the prison only gave me a tiny can’s worth for my tomatoes.
I worked my spade into the hard soil to help the water reach the roots. I wasn’t going to let them win. No way. I was growing plants. If I couldn’t use my power, fine, I’d do it the old-fashioned way.
Something clinked against the blade. My gloved fingers brushed against a smooth glass surface. A brown vial, like an iodine bottle, lay in the soil, sealed with a screw-top cap. Inside was a rolled piece of paper.
The sight stopped my breath. A message in a bottle, planted right where I would find it.
I should turn it in. The rules said no written or recorded messages, especially not for an inmate still in blackout, and I was in blackout for another month. But someone had left me a message, and I sure as hell wasn’t turning that in.. I slipped the vial inside my coveralls and went back to working my little tomato garden.
I couldn’t read it in my cell, the cameras would see me open the bottle. Same for the cell block, or the cafeteria, or the showers. It had to be in the yard. Even then, cameras watched.
I headed to the tool shack with the empty water can and spade. As I approached the permacrete deck surrounding the tool shack, I made myself stumble and fall.
Glass crunched inside my coveralls. I got up, made a show of brushing myself off over the permacrete, then another show of trying to brush my shoes, grinding the glass shards into powder, while the C.O. inside the shack laughed at me through the open window.
I handed my tools, gloves and ball cap to her.
“Getting clumsy,” she said. “You don’t want to be falling on that spade, it could go badly for you.”
She could laugh all she wanted. I had the message.
Lenore was doing jumping jacks as I passed. The null cuffs on her wrists flashed in the sunlight. Her black skin glistened with sweat.
“Come on, Mat, you could use the exercise,” Lenore called out to me.
“Maybe later. I’m busy now.” I stopped just inside the door to the central building and palmed the paper, read the neatly printed words in the shadows there.
“I thought you should know. Your grandmother is very ill and may die,” the note read. “She’s been diagnosed with serious illness. We can help you get in touch with her.” I rolled the paper back into a little tube, slipped it in a pocket.
Grandmother Ruth, dying? Was that true, or just B.S., left by someone trying to rattle me. Who was “we?” My heart raced, and I tucked the paper inside a pocket.
Blackout meant I received no news, not just general news, but no personal news of any sort, no letters, no postcards, no packages either. Other prisoners were banned from using their news privileges for another inmate, blackout or no blackout. It sucked.
The rest of the day my stomach was twisted in knots. I kept telling myself that note was B.S., but worry I barely ate dinner. Had something really happened with Grandma Ruth? She was the only family I had left. I had to find out how ill she was.
The only way I could find out was the prison grapevine. I’d pieced together hints about the grapevine, been taunted about it by bullies—especially that bitch Tricksie—but I’d never tried to use it. Breaking the rules meant infraction points, and I had accumulated a pile already, mostly from fighting with the likes of Tricksie and her cronies. Leonore said I had a thick head, but I was tired of being set up by Tricksie and friends.
I just had to be smart about how I got to the grapevine was all.
Ming Li would know. I’d ask her. We got along okay.
I went looking for her the next morning at breakfast, but she wasn’t in the cafeteria. Nor was she in the yard, or in the factory.
I learned from old Barb that Ming Li had punched a C.O. and was in the control unit— solitary confinement below ground—for God only knew how long. Perhaps always. My one contact for black market info gone. I stood in the hot sun and ground my teeth. Tricksie, maybe I could get it out of her. I could take her. I was taller, had a better reach. Maybe it would be worth spending time in the control unit.
I went looking for her but couldn’t find her. Figures. Just when you wanted to find the pain-in-the-ass you usually didn’t want to find, she wasn’t around.
The rest of the afternoon I was jumpy, riled up about Ruth. It was stupid. I didn’t even know if any of this was real, or why someone would tell me. I tried harder to tell myself that someone was messing with me
There was one other inmate I could ask.
I found Lenore preparing to do chest presses in the yard. Of course she wore her red knitted cap. I’d never seen her bareheaded.
“Good, y’all can spot for me, and I’ll return the favor,” Lenore said when she saw me. I frowned. Leonore’s workouts were brutal.
“Don’t scowl at me,” she said, sounding like my grandma for an instant. “You need the workout. Scowling don’t change that.”
She finished her next set. “Your turn.”
She loaded up my bar and spotted as I worked. My muscles screamed after the first three reps.
I finished my set. Lenore had to grab the bar so I didn’t drop it on myself.
I sat up. “I need to ask you something.”
“Y’all can wait until we’re finished.” There was no arguing with that tone.
After weight lifting, she had us run laps around the yard until my lungs were fit to burst. I would have gotten angry but I was already blown from the workout.
“Okay, what did you want?” she asked once we’d finished our run. I swear she wasn’t breathing that hard after all those laps.
“I need . . .” I gasped for more air, couldn’t seem to fill my lungs fast enough. “I need to know about my grandmother.” It wasn’t hard making my voice a whisper, my words came out as a hoarse croak.
Her eyes narrowed. “What’s this about?”
I told her about the note, in a low whisper.
Lenore gave me a sharp look, leaned in close. “Can’t do that. We’d both wind up with a load of infractions.”
“I have to know now. I can’t wait.”
She shook her head. “You’re a fool, Mat. You gonna throw away news privileges?”
“I don’t have those privileges for another three months.”
“It’s only three more months.”
But I had to know now. I couldn’t wait.
Lenore patted my arm. “You just gotta hang tight, girl.” Her words were matter-of-fact, firm.
