The Empowered, page 92
I didn’t deserve him.
He stepped behind me, resting his hands on my shoulders. Goosebumps rose on my skin below his hands. This wasn’t the time or the place. I wished it were, that we were some place safe, and that none of this crap was coming down.
But a lot of this crap was my fault. I’m the one that took down RAMPART and freed Gaia. Now Gaia’s force had gone nuts. The Dark-Net had gone nuts, too. Titan had wanted to keep RAMPART running and Gaia under control. My mother hadn’t been conscious long enough for me to figure where she stood on that.
I had to do what I thought was best, even though I’d screwed things up.
Time to get on with it. I looked at the wall of twisted vines and roots boxing us in, at the murky air beyond the wall of plants.
I brushed my special sense against vines and roots. A weird melody rose in my mind.
Gaia’s power was her gift and her curse. That power flooded me like a tidal wave.
The vines and the roots trembled as my sense touched them.
Open, I commanded, and sent the tidal wave of power into the plants. The weird melody exploded into thunderous screaming. White-hot pain stabbed at my temples. I winced and staggered. Fell to my knees, banging them against the grassy earth.
I pushed myself up and poured more power into the plants. The pain stabbed deeper. My head burned.
Distant shouting. Someone held me. Alex? The world pulled away into a funnel, and only pain remained. Pain and the power rushing through me.
“Stop. Stop. Stop!” Voices commanded, pleaded, begged me.
All of me burned now. I clenched my teeth. My bones were on fire. I screamed, but the power’s roar blasting through me drowned it out.
“Bitch, stop!” Someone shouted, far away. Keisha.
“Please, Mat, stop.” Alex’s voice pleaded.
More shouting, but I couldn’t make out the words.
“It’s all right, Mathilda, you can let go. Let go.” That voice… my mother’s voice.
I gasped, pulling my special awareness back inside me.
The roaring surf-song of the living Dark-Net cut off. Silence filled me.
Whispering sounded outside me. I blinked. Opened my eyes.
I lay on the ground. This was getting to be a real nasty habit.
People knelt around me, staring. Alex, Keisha, Michelle, with others standing behind them, staring, too.
Something was wrong with the roof overhead. Very wrong. Roots and vines had vanished.
The ceiling shone black, like obsidian, crisscrossed with emerald green lines.
I sat up. The wall of green plants had become jade and obsidian pillars. That funny smell, like chalk dust. I sneezed.
People around me began coughing and sneezing.
Ena clutched at her throat, spasmed and collapsed. The big guy who’d glared at me fell over backwards.
The light flickered with violet edges to it.
“What’s happening?” Keisha asked. Her gaze darted around.
I swayed on my feet. I couldn’t pass out. Not again. This was beyond ridiculous. It was fucking stupid, is what it was.
Alex braced me with an arm.
Tendrils, black as the blackest night, began snaking down from the high obsidian ceiling. A high whistle echoed in my head, like nothing I’d heard from a plant before. More like the anti-life that had confronted Keisha and me at Emerald Biologics. Alien sounding, and angry.
The Dark-Net had revolted.
I raised my arms. Exhaustion hung on me like a lead blanket. Moving wiped me out. But, I had to do something. Two people were down. God only knew if they were alive or not. I had to act.
“Don’t, Mat,” Keisha warned. “Don’t make it worse.”
“We can’t just stand here and die,” I snapped. My chest hurt. I was having trouble breathing.
Another person fell, gasping for air.
Alex held me close. His chest heaved against me.
“Damn it,” Keisha gasped.
“I know what to do,” Michelle said, and strode over to the nearest pillar. Tendrils grabbed at her.
“No!” I groaned. “Mom, don’t.”
She ignored me. The tendrils looped around her wrists. She didn’t resist.
I lunged toward her.
“Mat!” Keisha coughed. “Mat. Stop.” She fell on her face. I wanted to go back to her, but I couldn’t be in two places at once. It was my mother or Keisha.
The tendrils pulled Michelle toward the pillar, and she stepped forward as they did, until she was flat against it, arms stretched out.
She was saying something, something in a language I didn’t recognize. Sounded sort of like Greek. Stupid thing to have flitted through my head right then.
The high, whistling song blaring in my head shifted down in tone, until it was a gentle baritone, a deep melody once more, the bones of the world’s own song.
The air blurred, began glowing green. We had to shield our eyes against the sudden brightness, and even behind my eyelids, that sharp green pierced me.
It faded, leaving me blinking away tears.
When the tears cleared, the world had become a meadow, edged with root-like trees. A butterfly flitted past. A little stream gurgled somewhere out in the meadow.
All of us stood - those who had been unconscious were awake and up, again. Keisha caught my gaze. Her face was wide with shock. Alex’s, too.
I bet I looked the same way.
We all did.
Except for my mother, who stood beside an ancient oak. The tree branches soared above her, leaves budding as I watched.
The air smelled sweet and alive, a warm, welcome smell.
“How?” I asked her.
She shrugged. The gray had gone from her skin, replaced by rose-tinted warmth. Her head tilted up to look at me. She was back to looking just a few years older than me, like she had when we pulled her from the pod, what seemed like a century ago.
“It just came to me,” she said. “I can’t put it into words, but it was like being back inside the pod, part of RAMPART, feeling Gaia’s energy and directing it.
The light in her eyes danced as she spoke.
“I feel like I could do anything.”
I shivered.
Ena came over to stand beside me. She smiled at my mother, eyes shining. “I thought I was dying, but you saved me. You saved all of us.”
“What happened to the Dark-Net?” I asked.
My mother sighed. “You did, Mathilda.”
I flinched, just like she’d slapped me. “What do you mean, I did?”
She reached out to grasp my arm. “It’s not your fault. Your power was out of control.”
I had no answer for that.
“We’ll talk,” she said, “after we arrive at our new refuge, Haven.”
“Haven?” Ena asked.
“It’s waiting for us,” she said, and smiled.
3
I strode into a dense rainforest. Sword ferns covered in dew swayed, spattering water droplets on a riot of enormous mushrooms growing out of a gigantic fallen fir tree. The Dark-Net node loomed behind me, in the form of an enormous Sitka spruce.
I craned my neck to look up. Clouds hung low over the forest. I shivered in the chill air.
Alex appeared, followed by Keisha. She’d insisted on being the last of the rear guard. The three of us were the guard for my mother, who stepped out of the sequoia. One moment she wasn’t there, the next, she was, just like the rest of us.
That was the Dark-Net for you. At least she’d controlled it. I’d completely failed.
I rubbed my arms together, trying to warm up. Damn, but this place was cold. The rest of our little band of Empowered and Imbued clustered nearby. Ella saw us appear and left the group to join us.
“Where are we?” I asked our mother.
She put her hands on her hips and looked around. Smiled. “In the center of the Olympic Rainforest, close to Haven.” She closed her eyes and began humming.
Keisha and I looked at each other.
“What is Haven?” Keisha whispered.
I shrugged, trying to not act worried. “No clue,” I said.
“Funny, because it sounds like a place you’d gravitate toward.”
I cocked an eyebrow. “And I didn’t know you knew a word like gravitate.”
“I know lots of words you don’t.”
Ella rolled her eyes at our exchange.
“More of us should banter like that.” Our mother smiled at us. “It’s a pleasant way to cut the tension we’re all feeling.”
Ella threw her head back and laughed, the first laugh I’d heard from her in a very long time.
Even Alex chuckled. I felt a brief spike of jealousy.
For a woman who’d spent twenty-plus years inside a pod, she had a knack of saying the right thing to help people relax.
She motioned for the group to come closer until all seventy of us huddled around her. My brain started at long last to lose that cottony feeling, and I blinked. Seventy-plus people? Back at the South Pole there’d been maybe twenty-five of us. Where had the rest come from?
“Haven’s a rest and recovery camp for people working on the RAMPART project,” Mother said.
Keisha leaned in close and whispered in my ear. “There’s always another fucking secret installation of some sort, isn’t there?”
I shrugged. “Mushrooms,” I replied.
If Mother had heard me, she ignored it. “They built it back in the 2000s, one of many such emergency shelter and recovery camps.”
“Bolt-holes, you mean,” I said.
“No, rest and recovery. RAMPART was a secret facility.”
“Which means the Hero Council also doesn’t know about these,” Alex said.
“That’s right.” She nodded at him.
“How long have we been inside the Dark-Net?” I asked.
“I’m not sure,” she replied. She looked up at the sky. “We can get an update at Haven.”
I frowned. “Where did the others come from?”
“I could connect with them,” she said.
“Most are from the Outback camp,” Alex said, his voice low.
“I thought your power is connected to Gaia?”
A burly guy covered in barbed wire tattoos scowled at me. “You sure ask a lot of questions.”
I lifted my chin, looked him straight in the eyes. “Only way to find things out.”
“Whatever.” He turned away, said something to the woman beside him.
Keisha balled her fists, took a step toward him. I stopped her.
“Not worth it.”
“Haven, it’s really called that?” Ella asked.
“It is,” our mother replied.
Haven. Great. Another secret facility, just like Keisha had groused.
Haven turned out to be mossy green, oval-shaped huts, at least fifty, clustered beneath towering spruce. A stream cut through the middle of the camp.
“Perfect,” Mother said, leading us into the clearing. “As good as I imagined.” She knelt beside the stream and dipped her fingers into the fast-moving water.
“It is beautiful,” Keisha said, coming up beside me.
Alex went over to a hut, checked out the door. He ran his wrist beside it, and the door opened. Surprised, I jerked backwards, but he went inside. A moment later, a light came on inside, soft and gold.
I strode to the hut, looked inside.
A pair of bunks, a table, sink, and a bookshelf filled with old paperbacks.
Alex was kneeling beside a bed, looking at the floor.
“How is it you have the magic key?” I asked him, hands on my hips. “Been here before?”
He looked up at me, straight-faced, then grinned. “No, and no. But I had a hunch that they would set the security system to accept any allowed DNA in the blacknet database.”
“Allowed DNA? You mean the super-secret side of Support keeps a list of all agent DNA?”
He nodded. “You got it in one.”
“Figures,” I said. “But this—what, DNA taster or whatever it is—why don’t ‘regular’ Support facilities use it?”
“They were converting them when I left.”
“What is it with Support and the Hero Council? Everything is in boxes. Factions. Secrets.”
Alex shrugged. “Compartmentalized, that’s the word you’re looking for.”
I stuck my tongue out at him, and he laughed.
“Okay, why do you think everything’s compartmentalized?” he asked.
“Everyone has their own agenda, I guess.”
He nodded. “Got it in one, Brandt.”
Something fluttered inside me. That was the first time he’d ever called me by just my last name. That was something Keisha did: familiar; friendly, at least, after she’d gotten over wanting to kill me.
With Alex, it made me feel warm.
“You two lovebirds settled in yet?” Keisha asked from the door.
I jumped at the sound of her voice, turned and smacked her in the arm.
She made a big show of clutching her arm.
I mock-glared at her. “You’re embarrassing me,” I hissed, loud enough for Alex to hear.
He laughed.
“Handy hideout,” Keisha said, looking around. “Aside from the fifty huts, there are three buildings big enough to hold a hundred people, a hidden power plant, plus a workshop with tons of cool toys.”
I raised an eyebrow. “How do you know this already?”
“I’m real fast.”
My eyebrow went higher.
“You’re not the only one who’s learned how to use her power to detect things. The huts are metal-composite stuff. There’s something like plastic layered in, but I can sense the contours of the plastic and get a map in my head of the layout of the camp and what sizes and configurations the buildings are.”
I crossed my arms, looking down at her. “I’m still amazed that you know the word contour.”
“Keep it up, maybe you’ll say something funny at some point.” Her face tightened. I’d pushed the quip at the wrong time.
“Okay, it is handy that you can do that.”
“Thanks,” she replied.
“Mat!” Ella called my name outside. “Alex!”
The three of us hustled back outside. The doors to the other huts were open. People stood in small groups near each, talking among themselves.
“Mom wants to talk with you,” she said.
I turned to Alex beside me. “I thought you said the doors were DNA-locked.”
“That’s what I thought?” he said, face puzzled.
I didn’t like that it puzzled him.
Ella led us to a hut that sat apart from the cluster, nearly hidden in brambles. It was in a rectangle-shape, not like the ovals of the others, but its sides still sloped.
The door opened as we got close, sliding into the wall. Thick and metal. The walls looked like reinforced concrete. We stepped inside.
Electronic equipment filled the inside. There was a wall display, turned off. Computers, and other kinds of gizmos I didn’t recognize. The place was dim, lit mostly by computer lights and illuminated indicators.
I looked around for Mother. My heart started thumping fast. Toward the back there was a big green pod, reminding me of the ones at the South Pole base.
My eyes adjusted to the dark, and I saw that it was actually a chair shaped like a pod. Mother sat in it, head enclosed in a plastic helmet with a forest of cabling spilling from it.
The door slid shut behind us, closing with a very solid-sounding thunk.
“Mathilda, we need to talk.” My mother’s voice came over an intercom, quiet and confident.
“I have unpleasant news,” her voice said.
I stared at my mother, laying in that pod-like chair. Crash couch? The term weirdly popped into my head just then.
“Never pleasant news,” I muttered under my breath, but Alex must have heard me. He eased an arm around my shoulder, gave me a one-armed side hug.
I sighed.
“You’d better sit down,” my mother continued. “All of you.”
Alex, Keisha, Ella, and I each took a chair.
“What is it?” I asked.
“It’s been twenty-two months, one week, three days since you deactivated RAMPART.”
Ella gasped. “No! Almost two years? How is that even possible?”
“Time dilation effect.”
I frowned. “What kind of answer is that?”
“I don’t pretend to understand exactly how the Dark-Net operates, Mathilda, do you?” Her voice was soft.
“No, I don’t.”
“Well, then why do you think I would?” She asked, her voice still soft.
Maybe because she’d been plugged into RAMPART for twenty years. Maybe because her power connected her to Gaia. But I didn’t press it.
“Fair enough,” I replied, after a moment.
“As far as I can tell, the Dark-Net held us in a kind of time-dilated semi-stasis for most of that time. Why, I can only guess. My best guess is because of the enormous power surge from Gaia.”
“The shunt,” I said. That didn’t seem right to me. This was the third time I’d ran face first into a long holdover time inside the Dark-Net. But I kept my mouth shut.
Nearly two years had passed outside, but only a long day inside. The Dark-Net really was the fairy road. It was like one of those strange “fairy realms” in the old stories Ruth read to my sisters and me when we were kids.
My sisters—Ella and Ava. The twins were born four years after me. But, along with the two years that had passed while we’d been stuck in the Dark-Net, there were twenty months combined from two previous times the Dark-Net had delayed me.
Ava would only be months younger than me now.
If she still lived. I pushed that thought back down into my subconscious. She had to be alive. She just had to be.
Keisha closed her eyes and snorted. “Figures.”
Alex didn’t seem that surprised.
I leaned against him. “You expected this?” I whispered.
He nodded. “It happened to us twice before, remember?”
“Yeah, but it didn’t happen when we went from Sanctuary in Persia to the Amazon. And it didn’t happen on our missions to the Crimea or Ireland. Why this time?”
