The Empowered, page 94
Lenore, I hadn’t thought of my old cell mate and friend in so long. She must still be in San Diego Special Corrections. She’d been a lifer.
I shook my head. “Sorry.”
“You keep saying that,” Alex said, his voice quiet. Worry filled his eyes. “You don’t normally apologize three times in a month.”
“Like I said, it’s this place. It’s doing weird things to me, messing with my head.”
Keisha cocked her head. “Your lover just made a crack about how you never apologize, and you didn’t react.”
“Well, it’s Alex, not you, so I make exceptions.”
It was a lame attempt at making a joke, and Keisha didn’t react.
“Let’s get something to eat,” I said. “I wish I could tell you more about what’s going on with me, but you know all I know.”
They both stared at me. Okay, so I hadn’t shared my vision or whatever it was with them—that was too crazy to share. They’d think I’d lost it.
But I’d told them things nearly as crazy as that. I’d had other bizarreness, hell, my entire life was bizarre these days. Except for them. My sister. Maybe Michelle.
I imagined her inside her cabin, head inside that VR helmet or whatever it was plugged into a system, doing God knows what. She hadn’t told them.
Maybe she’d tell me, or Ella.
But she’d been dead, until I learned that she wasn’t. For most of my life, and nearly all of Ella and Ava’s, she’d been dead. There was even a cemetery marker for her and my dad. He’d stayed dead.
I sat there with my insta-meal, Salisbury steak, mashed potatoes, and green peas, and didn’t taste the food as I ate it, just staring off into space. Keisha and Alex ate their meals, not bugging me with any more questions.
When I woke up later in our hut, Alex asleep beside me, it all came back to me. I’d been a whacked-out asshole last night, letting that vision and the lingering pull of the enormous power that had flowed through me keep me from thinking. Or acting like a half-way decent human being.
I pushed myself up onto one elbow. Alex slept on his side, facing away from me, face pillowed in one arm. His hair was ruffled.
I reached out with a hand to smooth it. Stopped. What time it was it?
None of us had gotten much of a chance to sleep recently.
Two years. I pushed the thought away. I couldn’t keep lingering on that. I had to deal with things the way they were.
Someone stood beside the bed.
I pushed myself up. “What the hell?” I growled.
Alex jerked and sat up, hands balled into fists.
It was Ella. Well, an Ella. She wore a skin-tight cat suit and a mask.
A projection.
My eyes widened. “Ella? What is it?”
“Intruders.” Her voice sounded distant. Monitoring another projection elsewhere.
I got out of bed, pulled on my clothes. Alex did the same. My face burned, but my sister wasn’t paying attention.
“Where?”
“At the node. I’ve been on watch.”
Shit. I’d been sleeping off my stupid fugue, leaving my baby sister to keep watch.
“My turn, Mat, don’t freak,” she said, still sounding distant, but not distant enough not to notice that I was acting all guilty.
I pulled on my boots and hit the door release, Alex right behind me.
The dawn sky peeked through the trees. People clustered in the clearing.
“Spread out, everyone,” I barked, rubbing my eyes. Sometimes you had to be an asshole to save people’s lives.
People moved apart.
I looked at Ella’s masked projection. “Well?”
“A dozen Empowered, closing on us.”
I closed my eyes, reached out with my power, into the underbrush, finding sword ferns, brambles, shoots, and urged the entire tangle of green to grow.
A buzz-saw noise erupted from the direction of the node. Plants screamed in my head. I tasted blood.
I’d bitten my lip.
I pushed more power into the plants. Pain shot through me. Something sliced through them like paper. A whoosh exploded above us.
Keisha ran up beside me and began gesturing. Steam flashed, and giant metal stars flew upwards, spinning.
Alex put his hands on my shoulders, and power flowed into me. I extended my special sense into the soil and found poison oak, poured power into it, changing the vines and urging them to expand and reach out, like snakes erupting from the earth.
A bright flash blinded me, but my awareness was with the poison oak as it became a twisted forest of vines beneath the soaring spruce. The trees shuddered.
Yells exploded from within the sudden toxic bramble.
Gotcha. My lips curled into a fierce grin. Yeah, fuck with us and pay the price.
Another whoosh overhead, and more cursing from Keisha.
The air scalded my skin, and I jerked away, losing my connection to the poison oak. I blinked, trying to clear my vision.
I reached into the nearest tree: a huge hemlock looming above me. My breath was ragged already, so soon, even with Alex pouring more power from Gaia into me. My connection to the gigantic tree slipped away from me. I stretched my power out, deeper into the tree, trying to reconnect. There. I had it.
I grounded myself in that ancient wood.
“I’m not letting go,” I whispered. It was like grabbing on to a boulder, or Alex. Sturdy. Constant.
I pushed down to the tree’s roots, reshaped them, and felt the roots swell and burst from the ground.
A big dude, Empowered, swollen with muscles, tried to charge between the roots and I snared him, tightening the surrounding roots until they were like chains, and he screamed.
“Mat.”
I kept squeezing, and he kept screaming.
“Mat!” It was Alex. “Please stop, Mat. Please. Stop.”
“She’s killing Evan,” a woman screamed.
If Evan was the muscle-bound moron, then it served him right. Asshole. Alex’s voice tugged at me, but I wasn’t stopping.
“Mathilda, you can stop.” My mother’s voice was right beside my ear, but she wasn’t there. “These aren’t enemies,” she whispered in my ear.
“Could have fooled me,” I said.
“They are allies.”
I gasped and released the roots, returning them to their original form. If I couldn’t trust her, then we were hosed. Where was she, still plugged into that machine?
“How can you be so sure?” I asked the air.
Underbrush thrashed and swayed. A line of figures appeared. My skin tingled, like it did when Empowered, ones new to me, came close. It felt like a thousand tiny needles poked me.
The sky brightened. A dozen people in gray uniforms, splotched with black. Camouflage.
Empowered soldiers?
A big dark-skinned man led them. The air surrounding him rippled.
“You sure are a pain in the ass, you know that?”
“Fuck you,” I retorted. “Don’t just barge into someone else’s camp.”
He crossed his arms, eyes narrowing. “Who the hell says this is your camp?”
A rail-thin guy with long red hair appeared next to him, camouflage hanging loose on him. “Hey Roy, is this the bitch that nearly killed Evan?” he asked the big guy.
“No shit, dumbass,” the big guy replied.
“Only I can talk to her like that,” Keisha said, coming up beside me.
The big guy’s lip curled. “Now you, babe, are a special thing.”
Murder filled Keisha’s face. “Babe? You think I’d touch you with a ten-foot pole, asshole?”
Most people, that would have either scared them, or pissed them off. But Mister Big just grinned. “I think I’m in love.”
Keisha scowled at him. Her fingers curled. Steam flashed. “If a little abuse makes you fall in love with me, wait until I finish carving a fresh hole in you.” A machete popped into existence between them, twirling faster and faster.
“Sure, bring it on, lovely,” he said, his voice a rumble.
“That’s enough.” Mother’s voice was like iron. She stood beside me. She wore some high-tech gauntlets, and a clear visor, like a safety helmet. Only the visor glowed. She must get information on it. I didn’t see any wires, so it had to be Wi-Fi.
The big guy, Roy, became serious. “Sorry, ma’am,” he said.
I glanced at Keisha. “At least he listens to someone,” I muttered.
“Yeah.” The freshly made machete still spun slowly in the air in front of her. She looked like she wanted to let that blade go spinning right through him. She gazed at him. After a long moment, she waved her hand. The weapon slowed its spin until she could reach out and snatch it from the air. “Not worth it.” She held the machete loose in her hand. “I could carve you a new one, but that lady says don’t, so I won’t.”
Roy chuckled, which would only piss off Keisha that much more.
“You’re playing with fire, dude,” I told him.
His eyes sparkled. “Don’t I know it.”
“What’s your deal?” Keisha demanded.
“Other than getting on your good side? I’m with Ultimate.”
I froze. “Ultimate? Those Empowered supremacists?”
“That’s unfair,” Roy said.
“You think Empowered should run things, right?” I shot back.
He shrugged. “Seems obvious to me.”
“Just how many are coming?” I demanded.
“A lot.”
I lowered my arms, but kept them ready. “A lot is not specific enough for me.”
“Probably a few thousand.”
He laughed at my surprise. “And there’s a hell of a bigger wave beyond that group.”
“Is Zarathustra on his way?” My mother asked him.
Zarathustra?
Roy rubbed the back of his head. Sweat glistened on his shaved scalp. “Now, that would be telling.”
My mother plucked at the air with her fingers. “Not to someone who knows him.” I felt invisible energy ripple from her fingertips to him.
The amusement left his face. “Artemis?” he asked my mother.
“That’s right.”
I cocked my head at her. A sunbeam speared through a gap in the cathedral of cedars and down into the clearing, like something out of a movie. My mother’s skin glowed in the dawn light. The ragged line of rogue Empowered, in their blotched gray outfits, stared in shock at my mother. Several of them knelt.
Artemis, who was Artemis to them? Once again, the universe reminded me I didn’t know Michelle Brandt, she’d just been photos in Grandma Ruth’s album growing up. I’d wondered about her, listened to Ruth’s stories, but they were the distant past. My entire family outside of Ruth and my sisters was distant, blurry.
My mother stood there, like some goddess glowing in the sun.
“If we’re standing down, how about we stretch?” I asked.
Roy ignored me.
“I’m serious,” I pressed. “Yoga is good for you. Lighten up.”
Keisha snickered.
Roy gave me a grim look. I cocked an eyebrow at him, then grinned. His jaw tightened. Too easy, pal, too easy.
“Come on, I’m just asking,” I said, twisting the knife a little.
Roy turned to my mother, jerked his head at me. “Does the mouth get to keep spouting off, or do you want me to shut it for her?”
Touchy.
“She’s my daughter,” Michelle said.
Roy blinked, like she’d smacked him between the eyes with a two by four. “Apologies, Artemis. Now I see the resemblance.”
He’d gone from menacing to respectful groveling in a heartbeat.
“Well, I am taller,” I said.
“She’s nothing like Artemis,” one of the other rogues muttered. Heads nodded.
“She’s Artemis’s daughter, that’s all we need to know,” Roy said. “Can it!”
The grumbling faded away.
I stretched my arms, and Keisha did the same.
Roy watched us suspiciously.
“You ever see someone use a power by stretching?” I sneered. The goon just got under my skin, I couldn’t help it. Okay, maybe I didn’t want to help it.
My mother smiled. There was something in her smile though, not indulgence, not amusement, I couldn’t find the words for it at first. Approval. That was it, and that made me shudder.
Like I said, I didn’t know her.
We all ate granola and insta-oatmeal with some dried fruit, and washed it down with terrible coffee made from old instant. Just add water and get instant yuck. Still, I need the caffeine.
There we were, eighty-odd people in the clearing. The Imbued we’d rescued so long ago from Sanctuary, minus some who’d died or gone off on their own. And then there were a dozen of these Ultimate goons. Waiting.
My mother stood in the clearing, not eating, still looking like a glowing goddess, waiting. Looking back on it now, I don’t know why I didn’t jump up and demand the truth, but I didn’t even know which questions I should ask. My head still buzzed and ached from yesterday’s power surge, and I still couldn’t get my mind wrapped around the whole two years gone in a day thing.
We needed information.
Mother watched us, a slight smile on her face.
A bell pealed, making me and Keisha jump. My muscles tensed. The sound had come from the direction of the node.
Roy and his clowns looked smug.
One guess: Zarathustra had just arrived.
My ears perked up. Rustling in the underbrush. More people in camo appeared, followed by others in civilian outfits, looking dirty and tired.
I scanned the crowd. There were over a hundred and more filing into the clearing. Two hundred, then three hundred, four hundred.
Roy hadn’t lied about the numbers.
The Change wrought this, a familiar voice sang softly in my head. We must address it.
I sat down on a fallen log, banging my tailbone and not caring.
Keisha and Alex both looked at me in alarm.
“What the hell are you talking about?” I whispered.
The chains are gone, but the shackles remain, the voice said. I knew that voice. I’d heard it before. Met the source.
Sprig.
I raised my head, peered around. The air smelled like rainforest, but not Sprig. She smelled—hell, I couldn’t really describe it, sort of like if a jungle went into overdrive, crashed into a field of flowers in springtime, mixed in with the wake-you-up smell of this rainforest.
But there her voice was, running around in my head, singing.
You must find the Heart and break the shackles.
“I don’t understand,” I muttered under my breath. No answer. Are you there? I asked silently. Still no answer. Maybe I just imagined the entire thing. She hadn’t shown in the Dark-Net, why now?
Alex and Keisha knelt on either side of me and were saying something. The others stared at me.
Shit. Terrible timing had always been my specialty.
“Sorry, just spacing out.”
“Really, Mat?” Keisha hissed, just loud enough for me to hear. By now there was a vast crowd of Empowered. My skin began tingling even harder.
Sprig was gone from my head. If she’d ever really been there.
The crowd of people parted, forming an aisle. A tall man in Ultimate gray-black camo strode confidently into the clearing, smiling at my mother.
Zarathustra. It had to be. A scar ran down one side of his face, but somehow made him look more ruggedly handsome. He was a couple of inches taller than me, so six four or six five. His hair was the color of summer wheat. I guessed he was thirty-five, maybe forty. But it was hard to tell with Empowered, we didn’t show our age as much as normals.
“Artemis,” he said, striding toward my mother. His arms stayed at his sides. “We meet in the flesh at last.”
She looked up at him and nodded, like a queen acknowledging a king. “Zarathustra.”
“They must know each other,” Keisha whispered to me.
“Yeah.” How did they know each other?
Mother had remained in that pod, jacked into RAMPART for twenty years. Twenty years. Had she and Zarathustra been in contact back then? If so, why? She worked for a secret arm of the Hero Council and Support, a covert initiative started by James Goldin, which kept Gaia and humanity in balance by restricting the flow of the Gaia force, the energy that empowered a handful of humans.
He towered over her, smiling. She motioned to me to join them. I got off the log and approached them, trying to keep my muscles from tensing up. Zarathustra had the same look to me that Nefarious had: supremely fucking sure of himself.
He nodded at me, gaze like a blast furnace. “Once upon a time, they called you Vine,” he said.
“A long time ago.” I coughed. I felt like was sixteen again, and meeting the Professor for the first time, the Empowered who led the Renegades.
“You’ve accomplished so much, for one so young,” he said.
I opened my mouth to say something sarcastic, but what came out was, “it’s been hard.”
My eyes widened, but as they widened, a fresh feeling washed over me.
Confidence.
All round me people smiled, faces shining with the same confidence.
He reached out and took my hand in his.
It wasn’t an electric jolt like when Alex touched me, more like bathing in the confidence he projected.
“You connect with Gaia herself,” he said. He bowed. He still held my hand. He straightened up, faced the crowd, and raised my arm.
“Mathilda Brandt, she freed the world.”
Roy took a step backwards. The others stared at me, awe in their eyes.
God help me, I didn’t argue with Zarathustra. I should have. Should have said that was a load of shit. Should have told them not to look at me like that.
But I didn’t.
Instead, I just stood there like a patsy and sucked up their awe and astonishment, and the confidence that poured into me from Zarathustra, and didn’t blush when my mother smiled her approving smile at me.
Keisha and Alex, they looked at me the same way.
Alex, he knew me better than that, now. And Keisha, she didn’t let any bullshit phoniness slip past her.
