The Empowered, page 80
I held up a hand. “I hear your words, but this is really over my head. Can we get my mom out?”
“Yes,” Alex said, “But, it means letting the system here run itself.”
“What is this place?” I asked him.
“It’s rather like the control room at a dam. It’s connected to the Dark-Net and the Necklace. The other network is overlaid on it and is affecting its operation. I don’t understand how. But there’s a control seat.”
“Where?”
He pointed at the amber pod behind me. My shoulders slumped. It fucking figured.
“I thought she was a prisoner?” Keisha pointed out.
“So, did I.” I swallowed hard. “But that was my vision and what I assumed.” Stupid, stupid, stupid. I rubbed my hands on my legs. “Okay, you said we can get her out. What happens if the system runs itself? I mean, she’s in there for a reason, right?” My skin went cold. Had she been here all those years? A slave? I had so many questions I wanted to ask her.”
“Is getting her out going to wreck the Dark-Net?” I asked them.
Alex shook his head. “I don’t know. There could be a risk.” He stroked his chin. “The thing is, we don’t know how this other, invisible, network interacts with this. Right now, I have no idea.”
“It’s always something,” I groused. My face was hot. Support would forever be calling the shots. “If we leave her here, then what?”
He wiped his forehead. “The one advantage we have is that this is all Support tech, and I know Support tech.”
“Do we have the time?” demanded Keisha.
“Not much,” he admitted.
“It can’t be that fucking easy,” Keisha said.
“It never is,” I retorted. “We need to find out what’s going on.”
I raised a hand. “We have to take the chance here.” I took a deep breath. “Somehow, you have to make it happen. Let’s get mom and get the hell out. Put this place on full autopilot. We can get back to the bolt-hole with her, crunch the data, and go from there.”
“Okay. Let’s make it happen.” He got to work, while the rest of us stood around, being useless. Time passed.
I wandered around the chamber, again, and again, began to hear the cables, only now they were like a forest of mighty redwoods groaning in the wind. Harris gave me a wide berth. Keisha leaned against the wall, idly watching a steel disk the size of a quarter spin in the air in front of her outstretched hand.
The cables groaned in my mind.
Alex looked up from the console. I don’t know how much time had passed, but Keisha sat on the floor now, head down.
“You can’t just decouple the cables,” Alex said. “We don’t know what that will do.”
“I don’t see any other way.”
“We need more time.” Alex pointed at the console.
“I can help get her out,” I said.
“How?” Alex asked.
“Those cables are alive. I can talk to them, get them to decouple.”
“Really?” Alex asked.
“It’s like Emerald Green.” I shuddered at the memory. “Alive, just like that tech.”
I knelt beside the cable.
I laid my hand on the cable, sending my special sense into it. It was like diving into a stream, a warm comforting stream filled with moss-covered rocks, and waving grass. The cable was indeed a living plant. I winced at the avalanche of energy flowing through it. Someone grabbed at my hand, but I wouldn’t budge. I pushed my awareness back up the cable until I reached the source. The stone wall so ancient the lichen over the years had left deep scars. I gasped. The stone itself was alive.
Someone shouted. A body slammed into me. I rolled on the ground but held on to the cable. Couldn’t stop now. The room faded. I closed my eyes.
My mind’s eye filled my awareness. Another shout.
The smell of ozone and hot metal. I needed to free Mom. Had to. For so long I thought she’d been dead. Now, only this stupid thing kept me from her.
I reached out and sent the living energy back to its source. First the one cable, then another.
A stunner zapped, three times. I pushed faster, until there was only one cable left, and I sucked its energy into me. The world snapped into sharpness around me. I could see deep beneath the rock, to ancient husks that had once been seeds. Life lay dormant inside them. I poured the power into them in an eye-blink, and grew them with the energy surging through me, not vines, but grass, and sent it up, impossibly tall, twenty yards long, until it found the rock. I opened my eyes. The two sanctioned Empowered were awake. They hunkered down behind a metal storage box. A metal shield rose up between them and Keisha and Alex. I couldn’t see Harris. Alex typed frantically at a computer console. The shield shuddered. Another sonic blast? My breath caught. I couldn’t hear anything all of a sudden.
I grew grass up around the two blue-suited guardians, made the grass blades ooze with a knock-out agent, until the two Empowered toppled onto the ground.
“Alex,” I shouted, but I couldn’t hear my words. I pulled myself up.
The male sanctioned must have blown out our hearing. Never thought I’d end up deaf. Being deaf could be the death of me. I giggled silently, swaying from the energy pulsing through me. Felt like I’d knocked back three bottles of wine, really good wine. I reached out with my power and urged more plants to grow up, this time around me. Healing medicine. Plants could be healing medicine. An image flashed through me. Plants, growing, cells multiplying, over and over. I saw that action. Saw how the plants repaired themselves.
Healing medicine. It lay within the plant. A green-gold spark. I sculpted that spark until the grass became a flower, pedals dripping with healing fluid.
Keisha stared at me, waved her arms, said something, but I couldn’t hear any of it. Flowers bobbed on their stalks around me. I plucked a flower, put it to my mouth, chewed and swallowed.
Power pulsed through me from the one living cable still filled with vibrating energy. Energy from the very Earth itself.
Loris had told me that was where the energy had come from. I’d thought she had lied, but then I saw it. But I had still doubted, even as the evidence piled up.
I saw it again, saw the energy flowing all around, like a tide. Something held much of it back, and only droplets of it sprayed through the tiny gaps in the invisible barrier.
The invisible, secret network Alex had mentioned. This must be it.
The air hummed with power, and the whir of a ventilation system. A chair creaked.
I could hear again.
“Mat!” Keisha said.
I smiled “I can hear.” I looked around. Still no sign of Harris.
She shook her head, pointed at her ears.
I rolled to me feet, striding toward her. I plucked a flower on the way and pressed it into her hands.
She shook her head. “What do you want?”
I mimed chewing it.
She reluctantly took the flower from my hand, sniffed it. Her eyes widened and she put it on her tongue, tasted it. She closed her eyes, shivered.
Alex had his head down, typing away like mad on the computer.
I plucked another flower and went to his side, squeezed his shoulder. He kept typing away.
“Alex,” I said softly, squeezing his shoulder again. I tugged at his sleeve until he finally stopped with the damn typing and looked up at me.
“Here,” I whispered, putting the flower to his lips. He looked at me, eyebrows raised. I did the miming thing again, and he ate it.
“I can hear,” Keisha said across the room, and did a little dance.
“You sound like a horse,” I said, grinning. “Where the hell is Harris?”
“Harris!” My words boomed in the room and out into the corridor, echoing.
“Don’t know,” Keisha said. “If he’s been deafened like us, he can’t hear you.”
Of course. I was an idiot. But I could do this without Harris.
“I’m getting Mom out,” I said, my tone daring Keisha to try and stop me.
She shook her head. “Hey, girl, I’m with you.”
I let my breath out. I didn’t want to fight her. That would have been the height of stupid.
“I’ll help, too,” Alex said, standing up from the console and hugging me. “Mat, you healed us. How?”
“Plant power. A little green can go a long way.”
He smiled at that. “Where’s Harris?” he asked, looking around.
“I was going to ask you the same thing. I already trying yelling. No answer.”
“Let’s get your mother out, first, then we can look for him.”
“Did you get what you could out of the computers?” I asked, walking back over to the amber pod-thing.
“What I could. There’s a ton of info in there. It’s not encoded like the Black-Light system. Different, older system. I soaked up as much as I could and dumped it all into my data pad. The thing’s memory has to be full now.”
I nodded, got back to my own work. “One cable left,” I said. I shifted, my legs, bracing myself on the rocky ground and raised my arms. I closed my eyes again. The power—I’d already pulled so much in to me. I directed the stream in the wall and sealed off the cable.
Keisha gasped.
I snapped open my eyes.
A tall man in an amber-goo-smeared blue hero council jumpsuit sprawled on the floor. His arms spread wide, the gooey remains of the amber pod beneath him.
My skin began tingling like a thousand needles pricked it. The man was Empowered.
But, he wasn’t my mother.
He looked familiar but I couldn’t recall from where.
“Doctor Prometheus,” Alex gasped. “It’s him.”
Doctor Prometheus died more than forty years ago.
And here he was, back from the dead instead of my mother.
16
“James Goldin is supposed to be dead.” Alex stood beside me, looking down on the unconscious man. Goldin had been Dr. Prometheus’s real name.
“Yeah,” I said. My vision had lied to me. My mother—but I had felt her.
“Shit, I’m sorry, Mat.” Keisha touched my arm. “What a fucked thing.”
I knelt down. Goldin looked about forty-five years old, blond hair cut short. One of the first Empowered. The man who founded the freaking Hero Council.
“Died in 1973 during the Wildfire incident,” Alex said. “I’ve seen his statue in the Hall of the Hero at the Citadel in Colorado Springs and the Hall of the Brave at the Arch in Paris.”
“Guess dying isn’t what it used to be.” Keisha folded her arms. “Wait. You smell that?” She asked, wrinkling her nose, and looking around.
A musky, stinking-fur smell filled the air. I gagged and surged to my feet, Alex doing likewise.
A snarl erupted across the room.
“What the hell is that?” Keisha shouted and pointed behind me.
I whipped around. A thing built like a mastiff with a whip-like tail glared at us, its eyes glowing red. Glowing. Blood red. The whip-like tail came to a sharp point. It had huge fangs sticking down from its mouth, like an old movie vampire. The thing opened its jaws, and hissed, like a spitting cat.
It charged us, snarling.
Alex drew his stunner, fired. The thing didn’t slow down. It bounded across the thirty feet between us, Alex zapping it all the way.
“Hey!” Harris’s voice boomed from the corridor. The thing skidded to a stop, whirled toward him. Harris made a slicing move with his hands, and the thing’s flesh ripped open. Dark blood spattered from a fresh wound in its side down. It howled in pain and charged him. Harris chopped the air again. Blood erupted from the thing but it didn’t stop.
Keisha gestured and showered razor blades at it. The blades streaked across the room, slicing its hide, but it crashed into Harris. Foaming jaws ripped at his shoulder. Harris shouted and tried to escape, but the thing was too big and muscular.
I charged, yanking up handfuls of flowers as I sprinted. I sent power into the flowers, and changed them again, into looping vines that pulled moisture from the air.
“Hey!” I yelled at the thing from ten feet away
It turned, standing on top of Harris, its tail whipping back and forth. It lunged at me as I flung the vines at it. I gestured, and the vines lengthened, looping around the thing’s body, becoming like steel cables.
A huge sword chopped down on the thing’s neck, cutting its head off.
Keisha bent over, hands on her knees, panting. “Shit,” she whispered, and wiped sweat from her face.
I took a step toward Harris, and my muscles cramped something fierce, forcing me to the ground. Someone pressed a flower into my mouth. I managed to pry open my teeth and chew it. A moment later, the spasms were gone and I sat up.
The thing’s body began to smoke. I pushed myself up just as it flashed into flame.
An alarm shrieked. Covers suddenly rolled over the computer consoles, like hoods. Water sprayed from the ceiling. The flames roared up, and then there was only a pile of muddy ash where the thing had been.
I staggered over to Harris. Alex was already there, examining him. There was a huge, gaping wound in Harris’s right shoulder. Muscle and bone poked through. Blood spread over his jumpsuit.
Fuck. That wound would be a bitch to heal from.
Harris opened his eyes, gasped. The wound closed up, like a stop motion film run backwards. A sharp cinnamon tang filled the air.
“Damn,” I said, widening my eyes. “That was impressive!” I said, leaning forward. The wound closed up, and the blood vanished.
Harris coughed, and Alex took his water flask and gave Harris a drink.
“You a super-healer now?” Keisha asked, looking down at him, puzzled.
Harris blinked. “I don’t know. I guess it must be this place. I don’t know what else it could have been.”
“Well, whatever you did, thanks,” I said to Harris. He could cause wounds, too. Lucky for us.
I looked at the pile of muddy ash that had been the dead hell-beast. “I want to know what that thing is, and how it just popped into existence here.”
Alex nodded. “Perhaps we can run a search in the data we grabbed, along with the intel from the Kerch station.” He turned back toward the computers. “Never mind. They’re powered down. We don’t have the time.
I pushed myself up. “Yeah, no time for sure. We have to haul ass. As usual.” We were always getting the hell out of Dodge.
Alex managed a grin. “You have got that right. “Can you walk okay?” he asked Harris.
Harris nodded. Alex helped him up.
“What about Doctor Prometheus?” Keisha pointed at James Goldin, still lying unconscious in sticky amber goo.
I didn’t hesitate. “We take him.”
“Take the no-longer-dead founder of the Hero Council with us?” Keisha shook her head slowly. “You’re crazier than even I thought, Mat,” she said.
“I don’t want to leave him here. And he may be able to help us.” I didn’t know what to think about my freaking visions. Maybe I had been wrong. But it felt like my mother.
Alex helped me lift Goldin and we carried him between us, his arms over our shoulders, while Harris and Keisha followed down the metal corridor.
We reached the node. Sprig appeared, nodded at us, and motioned for us to enter.
“We need to return to where we last started from,” I said, trying to get her to understand. Her gaze stayed on me. I shifted uncomfortably. “The node in Tacoma.” Stupid. Did she have any kind of clue about human cities and our name for them?
She nodded but remained silent. It creeped the hell out of me. She turned and we followed. We walked down a tunnel that glowed with green light from calf-high grass growing up from the earth. The walls were covered with ivy that also glowed softly green.
We reached the far end. A curtain of mist hung there. Sprig stopped, waggled her fingers at us and then the mist. Time to go, the gesture said. But why wasn’t she speaking?
I held up my hand. “Please, wait.” I turned to Alex. “Put him down for a moment, please.” We lowered him to the ground. Keisha looked nervous, stealing glances at Sprig and then back to me. Harris stared at the glowing grass, twisting his hands.
Sprig arched an eyebrow and watched me silently.
I swallowed. “Are we doing the right thing?” I nodded at Goldin’s unconscious body. “Freeing him? If he was keeping the Necklace and the Dark-Net stabilized, did we do more harm than good?” I glanced at Alex to let him speak up. But, he was motionless. Frozen. So were the others.
Sprig smiled suddenly. “Things cannot remain as they’ve been,” she said. “This man thought he was doing the right thing, but now the world faces disaster.”
“But my vision showed my mother in the amber pod, not Prometheus.”
Sprig cocked her head, grew serious. “The vision did not lie. You need to find her. Do what is necessary.”
“But how will I know what is necessary?” I asked.
Sprig stepped close to me. Her green hair was so curly. She reached up and touched the center of my chest, over my heart.
“I get the message. Thanks,” I said. She smiled.
Alex blinked and the other two also looked around.
“Great, we were frozen again while you two had a secret chat?” Keisha said.
Sprig laughed silently.
“I’ll tell you later,” I said to Keisha.
“You’d better,” she shot back. I smiled. “Come handsome,” I said to Alex. Let’s pick him up.”
We lifted Goldin and carried him between us into the mist.
Alex and I stepped into the dirt tunnel that lead back to the Scourge hidey-hole, carrying Goldin, Keisha right behind us, and Harris in the rear.
That was when Ella popped into existence, right in front of me. I jumped. “Shit!”
It was one of her projections, in that gray cat suit she liked, with the classic mask.
“I’ve found you,” the projection groaned, and fell to her knees.
“Ella!” I helped her up. Relief flooded me. I wobbled.
“I’ve been looking for you for so long,” she said, hugging me.
