The Empowered, page 78
“Convenient,” I said. “How are we going to get to the mound?” I asked and started pacing. “We can’t exactly fly there.”
Alex nodded. “We’re going to have to head to another node. Perhaps the Astoria one.”
“Isn’t that one of the ones Support monitors?”
Alex looked uncomfortable. “It is.”
Simon looked like a cat that had caught a mouse. “No need for that. We’ll use the node near here.”
We all stared at him like he was crazy.
“There’s a node here?” I asked, sounding like an idiot.
Simon’s eyes shone. “There is indeed.”
“That’s good to hear,” I said. “But then what? Is there a magic key we can turn?”
Simon glanced at Alex.
Alex shrugged. “Hard to say.”
“What about Support or the Hero Council?” I pressed.
“This intel has been double-coded and disassembled in the Black-Light system,” he reminded me. “The secrecy faction’s way of keeping it extra-safe.”
I ground my teeth. Stupid. I relaxed. He was right. This control center was hidden, which meant we had a real opportunity here.
“So, this is our chance to free the Dark-Net from its chains. Free it for real.” I rubbed my hands. It was about damn time a break came our way. We could truly do what the Professor and Tanya had wanted back in the Renegades, and what Loris had twisted at Sanctuary, a place where we could be free. But then there were the troubles wracking the world.
One thing at a time I reminded myself. What else could I do?
“Let’s get started,” I said. “This is our chance.” Time to tell Keisha and Harris.
Keisha thought the whole thing risky but was willing to go along. She saw which way the wind blew.
I thought I’d have to persuade Harris, but he surprised me.
“I’m in,” he said. Just like that. Confident, decisive.
Maybe I didn’t know him at all.
13
We spent a couple of days going over details, getting ready and resting.
Simon had given us each a little room to ourselves. Alex seemed to be constantly busy going over the intel with Simon. Harris kept to himself. Keisha and I went over the plans with the others, rested, worked out together in a makeshift little gym that had dumbbells, a pull-up bar and, a jump rope.
But we got on each other’s nerves after a day and a half. We were both too restless and wound up. I wandered through the little complex. I stopped outside the interrogation room. There was a steel couch-bed just like Simon had said there was, with straps, and various tools. Made my stomach sick. The Scourge had claimed to be fighting for humanity’s freedom, but they kept a room like this on standby.
Ella hadn’t sent another projection. I drove myself nuts worrying about her, Ava and Ruth, and the Imbued. I pestered Alex about Support activity. He was nice about it, but there wasn’t anything he could tell me without getting on the Internet, and that would risk exposing this place.
So, I was stuck being ignorant about my family and the others.
The night before we were scheduled to leave I was in my little room. I’d changed into an old Scourge black jumpsuit which I’d wear on the mission. It was made for a big man, so I really had to cinch up the belt. The Scourge and Support had both worn black jumpsuits on field ops—that would be confusing in a fight. But the Scourge ones didn’t have the fancy sealed pockets, and ultra-tech fabric the Support ones did. It was more like a really nice military-style jumpsuit, with a web belt.
I had just finished changing when there was rap on the metal door.
I opened it.
Simon stood there, breathing hard. He leaned on a cane. “You’ve changed already,” he said. “You aren’t leaving until tomorrow.
“No time like the present. I want to see if I need to make any adjustments.”
“You sew?” he asked.
“Badly. I also want to run around your storage room and make sure I can move okay in this.”
“Brilliant,” he said. He sounded distracted. His skin, the parts that weren’t covered in scars, looked yellow, and his eyes bloodshot. His face looked twenty years older than when I’d last seen him.
“You should be in the med bay, resting,” I said.
“I was resting. When I woke up, I felt worse. Would you believe I think I’ve aged a decade during that nap?”
He certainly looked like it.
He shambled over to my cot. “Do you mind if I sit there?”
The room just had enough space for the old cot. My feet were going to stick out from it and the blanket.
“Go ahead, but I can get you a chair?” I’d need to haul one in from another room, but he looked like he was about to fall over.
“There’s no room, but thanks for the gesture.”
He sat down, barely disturbing the cot. He had to weigh nothing. He was all skin and bones. His scrubs hung off his scarecrow body. He looked like he’d lost ten pounds in the past two days.
He coughed. He waved off my offer of a water bottle. “Drink too much of the stuff.” He motioned at the door. “Please close it.”
I closed the door, leaned against it. “Why did you come? I’d have been happy to come to you.”
“I wanted to speak with you privately,” he said.
I narrowed my eyes. “Why? Who don’t you trust. Alex?” My shoulders tightened.
He shook his head. “I’ll take your word on him.”
“Keisha? You know she’s reliable.”
He nodded. “Harris.”
“Harris? Come on, the guys a lamb.” Yeah, he’d had a few moments, like the one when I briefed him, where he suddenly grew a spine, but he made Gus seem like a First Team member of the Hero Council.
“I need to stretch out, that okay?” He wobbled on the cot.
“Sure. Make yourself comfortable,” I said. I helped him stretch out, trying not to show my worry.
He laid down and looked up at me, his eyes half-closed. “Nice effort, Mat, but I can see you’re worried about me.”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t be. I should be dead. I’m not. Yet.” He coughed. “Anyway, Harris. As I said, I knew him back in the Scourge.” His gaze turned hard. “He wasn’t a mouse there. He knew what he wanted. Yeah, he was a healer, but he used that as leverage every chance he could get. You had to get him stuff or give him favors. Not just favors, but special time with him.”
My stomach twisted at that.
Simon coughed again. “Didn’t matter if you were male or female. He was a right bastard. Nefarious or someone high up in the Scourge must have gotten word, finally, because I heard he stopped with the blackmail.” He paused, remembering.
I frowned. “This doesn’t sound like the Harris I know.”
Simon scratched his face. “No, it doesn’t. That’s the odd part. There’s something else though.” He coughed again. My heart sank. Blood flecked his lips.
I looked around for a rag, a paper towel, anything. Ended up ripping a sleeve from my worn tee shirt and dabbing at his mouth. “We should get you to the med bay.”
“It appears I have less time than I’d bargained for,” he said quietly.
He’d gotten worse fast. I started to pull him up.
“No point.” His voice was croak and his eyes got a faraway look in them. He coughed again. More blood. I wiped his mouth.
“The thing is, I discovered information in a separate file included in the mountain of data from the Black-Light network. Jango Harris died last year when the Hero Council took out the Scourge base in the Alleghenies, a month after our mission to Emerald Green.”
My muscles tightened. “Killed? But he’s here with us. He doesn’t look dead to me.” I shook my head. “I don’t get it. Perhaps your information is wrong. What did Alex say?”
He coughed, weaker this time. “I didn’t have a chance to tell him. Harris was there.” He said something under his breath.
I leaned down, trying to catch his words. He repeated them.
“The world needs you, Mathilda. Do what you can for it. Whatever you do, keep Harris in your sights.”
His mouth went slack and his eyes stared through me to nowhere.
I lowered my head. My tears spattered his corpse. I wiped my eyes with my sleeve. Never let them see you cry. Well, no one saw me now, so I could cry all I wanted.
“Simon’s dead.” I blurted out the words. I’d found Alex in the main room of the bolt-hole, where all the computers were, discussing the mission to Ireland with Keisha and Harris. They all stopped and stared at me. “Just now.” I gulped air. Damn it.
Alex got up and rushed over to hug me. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “It’s never easy to lose someone.”
Harris looked sad as usual. “I’m sorry, Mat.”
Keisha ran a finger along the top of a computer monitor. “Sucks. That man was dying for a long time.”
I wiped my face with the back of my sleeve. “He wanted us to do this. So, let’s do it.”
The Dark-Net node waited for us. The Scourge must have used it, but the Guardians would’ve challenged them; the Scourge would have had to pass their test.
We needed them. That was the challenge. The Dark-Net had become so unpredictable, like a fairy road from a story, that we could want to go to Ireland, but not necessarily make it.
We ate our dinner, went over the prep, again. The Dark-Net would put us very close to the Mound, another underground location. I’d thought that Astoria with its old wharf was typical, but it seemed many nodes were underground.
I went to the storage lockers to pack. Alex and the others gave me some space.
I was always underground. My life had been underground ever since I had become an Empowered. Always skulking about in the shadows. Hideaway had literally been underground. I’d been in the underground of Special Corrections, prison. I’d had to infiltrate the Scourge, which operated in the shadows. We’d gone underground, again for real, to destroy Emerald Green. Loris and her Sanctuary were underground. Now, we were going underground again. Always underground. Always in the shadows.
All I wanted was to live my life, take care of my family.
My chest felt heavy. Ruth. She was sick. Dying from Thalik’s disease. Ava with her, worried, and unable to help. I’d abandoned them for this idiot quest to fix the Dark-Net and save my mother, who’d been dead, as far as we knew, until that damn vision in Sanctuary.
I thought again about my sister, Ella. What had happened to her?
14
The next morning, we had an insta-meal breakfast of scrambled eggs, ham, fruit and a biscuit. We ate in silence. Got ready in silence.
We covered Simon’s body and put it in a freezer. Turned out there was a whole bank of freezers. Several were empty. He probably would’ve hated the idea of his body in one of those. I wished we could bury him, but there was no way.
The Dark-Net was a huge question mark.
Finally, late morning, we headed out the secret passage to the node. The node that had to be the reason why the Scourge had taken this forgotten fallout shelter. We trudged down a dirt tunnel to a metal door.
Keisha grabbed the handle and tried opening the door. It wouldn’t budge.
“Damn this thing,” she gritted. She tried again.
“That’s not going to work,” I told her.
She whirled around. “Fine, you try!” She glared at me
I placed my hand on the door, closed my eyes. Sent my power into it.
“Enter,” a woman’s voice said in my mind.
I jerked my hand back, looked around frantically. “Goddamn,” I said.
“What was it?” Alex asked.
My eyes widened. “I think the Dark-Net just spoke to me.”
“What did it say?” Keisha’s eyes were as wide as mine.
“It said enter,” I whispered. I turned the handle and opened the door.
The figure of a woman waited for us inside the Dark-Net, perched on a giant root. Red-headed, wearing a princess dress. She was barefoot, and under five feet tall. Her eyes were the eyes of the last guardian, the hoody woman. But her flowing hair was green, the green of growing leaves, and her princess dress the dark green of moss. Her skin was nut brown.
“Hello, Restorer,” she said to me. Her voice rang in the still air. She flipped down from the root like an Olympic gymnast. The edges of her dress fluttered as she reached the ground.
“You’re a guardian?” I asked, feeling like a clumsy giant next to her. The others stood behind me, Alex closest. When she smiled, her whole face dimpled. She was like a short, human-sized version of one of those little sprite dolls the twins played with when they were younger.
“You can think of me that way. I am a part of it that is able to become human in form, in order to interact with you. You may call me Sprig.”
“Sprig?”
She smiled. “You restored us by bringing the ancient root.”
“Restored you?”
“What you call both the Dark-Net and the Fairy Road.”
If we had, then we’d already succeeded. Then we just had to free mom from her ancient underground Irish prison. My spirits rose.
Just as quickly, she dashed them.
“Alas, your restoration is only temporary. The forces pressing down on what you call the Dark-Net have not dissipated, they have only been forestalled for a short while longer. We are still in jeopardy.”
“So, we’ve bought a little time.”
She nodded.
Before I could ask anything else, Harris pushed his way past Alex. “You are real?” He asked.
“What kind of question is that?” I said, stepping toward him.
Sprig laughed, sounding like a gentle rain on a rooftop. “Yes, this body is real.”
Harris raised a hand defensively. “Sorry, Mathilda. Things just seem so weird here.”
Simon’s comments about Harris acting differently when he knew him ran through my mind just then. But the Harris I knew was quick to cringe. I wondered if Simon’s memory had been affected by the radiation?
I turned back to Sprig. “We need to go to Ireland, to a place beneath an ancient mound.” I gave her the details we’d uncovered.
She listened, head cocked.
“Very well, but there is one thing I must do first.”
“Do you have a test for us?” I asked Sprig.
Her gaze was like facing a Spring sunrise. “I have a question for you.”
My legs wanted to turn around and get me the hell out of there, but I managed to keep them still. “Okay. I’ll do my best.”
She giggled. I shivered at the sound. It was like a sudden Portland rain pummeling the ground. I was starting to think she really was one of the twins’ old sprite dolls, brought to life and all grown up. She scared the hell out of me. Trapped on the Fairy Road with a psycho spirit thing. Hard to believe she was like the hoody guardians. I hope she didn’t ask me something too obscure or complicated. I sucked at riddles.
She watched me in silence. It was starting to look like we were going to be here all year.
I fidgeted. “I’ll answer your question. Whatever it is.”
She smiled. “Who are you?”
My hair stood on end. Who was I? What kind of question was that.
Keisha swore under her breath. I shot her a look, mouthing, have a little faith.
“Prove it,” she whispered.
Alex squeezed my arm. Harris looked thoughtful, like he was working out some heavy math in his head.
“Mathilda Brandt,” I said.
“That is your name, the designation others have given you. Who are you?”
My shoulders tightened. Why did I have to answer that stupid question? “You just said I restored the Dark-Net. Temporarily, at any rate. Why do I need to prove myself?”
“You must acknowledge your identity. It is necessary.”
Cryptic crazy as far as I was concerned.
I crossed my arms. “No guardian showed up the last few times we used the Dark-Net. Why?”
“You haven’t required a guardian,” Sprig said.
“Why now, then?” I demanded. Keisha shot me a warning look, but I ignored her.
“Because it is necessary.” More cryptic crap.
Her smile faded. “Who are you?” she asked.
“An Empowered, like it or not.”
Her pixie face tightened. “Who are you?” She asked again.
I swear she was worse than Support. Her glower made me want to shrink down and cover my face. I flinched.
“A woman who just wants to save her family, her friends, and stay alive.”
She smiled, and suddenly I could stand there and not want to crawl into a hole.
“Do you want to save the world?”
I laughed like a manic. The question was so crazy. Save the freaking world?
“Not my department.”
“But what if it meant you could save your family and your friends?”
I swallowed. Alex and the others had kept silent through all this. Suddenly I noticed they were keeping silent because they weren’t moving. They were statues, stock still.
“What have you done to them?” I demanded.
“This conversation is only for you.”
Conversation—that was a laugh, more like a full-on interrogation.
“Why?” I asked.
Sprig ignored my question. “But what if it meant you could save your family and friends?” She asked again.
“Yes, then I would save the world, if I could. But I can’t.”
“Why not?”
She wouldn’t quit with the questions. “Every time someone tries to save the world, it ends badly. I’m just a woman with a power she didn’t ask for, and I just want to protect the people I care about.”
“What about those you don’t? Do they deserve to perish? What about the world’s other creatures? What about all the green life you can hear, grow, shape? What about all the innocents? Do they die?”
I rubbed my eyes. I couldn’t see for all the damn tears swimming there.
