Empowered, p.13
Empowered, page 13
“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.
“I’m just one person.”
“As is everyone.”
I took a sharp breath, sobbed. “Damn you.”
She smiled gently at me. “We never intended you to be in distress, but you must see clearly. Think clearly. Feel clearly.”
“Why me? I’m not anybody special.”
Her smile became tender. “But you are. You have strength of character, courage, determination, and love for others. But you are afraid—afraid of losing them, so you keep yourself from trying to help everyone.”
I felt about an inch tall right then. Me, six feet two and looming over Sprig, but it was like she was a Sequoia towering over me. I covered my eyes.
“What are you, the Dark-Net’s conscience?” I choked out the words.
“A guardian.”
I already knew that. But the tests—the hoody guys had run me through the ringer back in Astoria the first time. Later, after Sanctuary, the questions were simple easy, until the Guardians stopped showing up altogether. “Why do you want to go where you want to go?” That sort of question. Nothing like this.
Not questions that ripped into my soul.
Think clearly. Feel clearly. I wiped my eyes, straightened up. “I’ll do what it takes to try and make things right.”
“No matter what the cost to yourself?” Sprig asked.
“There’s always a price, isn’t there?” I put my hands on my hips. “Yes, no matter what the cost to me.”
She smiled, but it still felt like winter inside me.
“Do you still wish to go to where you said you wanted to?” she asked.
I nodded slowly. “Yes.”
She pirouetted like a ballerina and pointed at the bridge of living wood that suddenly rose up out of the green mist. On the far side was an ancient rock wall, with stone arch rock framing a wooden door.
“There lies your destination.” Sprig beamed at me.
I shook myself. This was like a crazy vivid dream. “Thank you.” I shook myself again. I wasn’t waking up. I was already awake, but it sure as hell felt like some kind of bizarre dream. “Where do you come from?” I asked.
“What you call the Fairy Road. I’m a guide, as I said before.”
“But who created you or have you always been there?”
“I am intertwined with the ‘’Fairy Road,’ which you also call the Dark-Net. I’ve existed as long as it has.”
I licked my lips. “How long has it existed?”
She tapped her nose, then giggled. “That would be telling.” She smiled. “Take care, Mathilda Brandt.” She vanished.
“Where the hell did that came from?” Keisha blurted from behind me. She pointed at the bridge. Alex and Harris blinked and stared past me.
“You didn’t see any of this?” I asked them.
“It just popped up,” Keisha said. She swiveled her head around. “Where the hell did the weird chick in the green dress go?”
“She froze you, in time, I guess,” I said. I turned to Alex. “She said that door leads to our destination.”
He looked a little dazed but recovered fast. “Did she test you?” His voice was low.
I nodded. “I passed, I guess.” I shrugged. I strode across the root-like wood-bridge spanning the chasm to the door on the other side. The handle was hard as rock but looked like the ancient root I had planted in the Dark-Net. It was warm to my touch.
I pulled the door open and stepped through it, the others right behind me.
I stepped into a circular chamber of stone. The floor was dirt. Moss covered the rocks, moss that glowed with a blue-green light. The moss whispered welcome in my mind. My skin prickled from the power flowing through the room.
It reminded me of the tunnels at the old mine in Oregon.
The ceiling was low, made of huge blocks of stone.
Sharp intakes of breath behind me made me whirl around. Keisha, Alex and Harris stood behind me, staring around at the chamber. Their faces were pinched, especially Alex’s.
I touched his arm. “You okay?”
He closed his eyes, took a deep breath. “So much power here. I feel like I’m drowning in it.”
It had to be harder on him then the rest of us, with his power to channel power.
“Try and put up that wall in your mind, like I taught you.”
He nodded, eyes still closed. His face relaxed. “Better.” He looked at me. “Thanks.”
“Sure thing,” I said.
Keisha shuddered then relaxed.
“You okay?”
“It’s like being drunk on champagne. The good stuff, not the crap we used to scrounge. But yeah, I can handle it.” She stretched. “Feels like I could conjure the Eifel Tower without breaking a sweat.”
Opposite us was another door, this one metal, fitted into the stone. My heart raced. My mom was beyond that door if my vision hadn’t lied. This was the place. It had to be.
Alex laid a hand on my shoulder, gently squeezed. “Let’s take it slow,” he said.
I nodded.
He pulled out his ultra-tech data pad and his magic wand and began a sweep of the chamber.
Keisha stood beside me. “So close,” she said. “We’ll get in there, Mat. I promise.”
“Thanks.” I slipped an arm around her, giving her a side hug.
She hugged me back, then pulled away and mocked punched me on the shoulder. “You’re getting soft,” she said.
I faked a frown. “Never with you, bitch,” I retorted.
She grinned. “That’s more like it.”
Alex returned. “Clear. The only tech in here is the door. Dura-steel, with a standard coded lock.”
We crossed the chamber. Our footsteps echoing softly. There was a code panel beside the door, with an actual keypad below a green glowing display, like something out of a museum.
“This looks ancient,” I said.
Alex leaned forward, taking it in. “It certainly wasn’t installed yesterday.”
“Can you crack it?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Oh, ye of little faith.” He made a show of cracking his knuckles, twiddled his fingers, and reached to tap out a code.
I grabbed his wrist. “Is that a good idea?”
“Gotcha,” he said, and grinned.
I took a breath. “Funny, Sanchez, real funny.”
He grew serious, and ran his wand over the panel, while staring at his data pad. “Looks like a triple input access lock. Meaning I need to put in three sets of codes.
“We’re fucked,” Keisha said. She’d joined us. Harris hung back, still taking in the room.
Alex tapped on his data pad, smiled. “Got it!”
“Is it really that easy?” I asked. It couldn’t be that easy.
“Simon and I were able to extract examples of access codes from the Black-Light. He then ran them through a ‘cracker” program.” Alex tapped out the first sequence. Number sequence flashed green. He tapped out a second sequence. Again, green. And then a third sequence.
A whirring sound broke the silence and the door slowly slid back, revealing a dura-steel corridor glowing red from recessed lights in the ceiling and walls.
Alex waved his wand at the corridor. “No active security defenses.”
“Nothing?” Keisha asked, her voice incredulous.
“Not that I can find.”
“Great, that makes me feel loads better,” she groused.
“There’s always risk,” he said.
“Fuck it,” I said, and walked into the corridor. My boots thumped on the metal flooring. Just like being back in the Support dungeon. Except lichen covered the walls, here, glowing red, to match the overhead lighting. I brushed a finger against a lichen clump. The lichen hummed with power, but otherwise was silent. I got no sense of emotion from it, but it was lichen, not a tree. Still, strange it grew inside an enclosed dura-steel corridor.
Pain poked at my temples and spread until my jaw ached. Shitty time to get a headache.
“You have a headache?” Harris asked behind me.
“Yes,” I heard Alex say.
“Me, too,” from Keisha.
“Yeah, I do, too,” I told Harris.
“Come on.” I fast-walked to the far door. There was another keypad. Figured. My head pounded harder, like an army of jackhammers drilled at my skull.
Alex staggered to join me. Keisha stumbled forward. Harris stumbled behind us, panting hard.
I had to grab Alex to keep him from falling. “Come on, Sanchez, you’ve got this.”
I kissed him. He stood up, kissed me back.
“Great time to get all lovey,” Keisha grumbled.
“I can kiss you next,” I said.
“No thanks.” She managed to stick out her tongue.
The access panel on this door looked newer, more like the kind of thing I’d seen at Support. There, agents swiped their wrist comms on it.
Alex did his magic wand act. Frowned. “I’m having a hard time thinking. I’m not able to crack the code.” He took a deep breath, tried again. “Nothing.”
“We’re screwed,” Keisha said.
“Not yet,” Alex said. He reached into his bag. I froze. He held a Support wrist comm.
“What the hell?” I demanded. “They can track us with those.”
“I’m sorry, Mat, but this one has been powered off since I left Support. Just a little insurance.”
Harris had stepped back, afraid.
“I’ll only use it for a moment,” Alex told him.
Keisha stepped beside me as Alex thumbed the wrist comm, and its screen came to life.
“Sucks when someone you care about keeps secrets from you, doesn’t it?” She whispered.
I glared at her. She didn’t budge.
“Fine, I get it,” I said.
Alex strapped on the wrist comm, ran it over the input panel.
Snick! The door slid open.
It worked.
I looked through the open door. My breath caught. The chamber from my visions. Power cables snaked down moss-covered walls. Machinery hummed nearby. In the center of the room was a figure, inside what looked like a huge amber pod, which glowed gold, lighting up the room.
I stepped inside, ignoring Keisha’s hissed “wait!”
I’d waited for too fucking long.
My skin tingled like a bitch. Empowered! I whirled around.
There were two amber cocoon-like things, man-sized, hanging from the wall off to my right, just past the door, glowing golden as well. My skin tingled, three different layers of pricking, meaning there were three Empowered, not two. Shit.
But where were the Empowered?
The two cocoons opened, revealing a man and woman, both in Hero Council blue jumpsuits.
Harris made a strangled sound and ran back the way we’d come.
I reached out into the walls and floors. The floor was dura-steel, but the walls were naked rock, covered with moss. No time to try and summon vines.
The man was a black guy with long hair, worn in a ponytail. He blinked and focused on me.
“Intruder,” he said.
“Intruder,” the woman echoed. She looked Persian, with a shaved head, and a face that would make men fall all over themselves.
Hero council types but hanging out in cocoons in this out-of-the-way place. Sanctioned Empowered in a can.
The stupid thoughts ran through my head as I began working frantically to grow and modify the moss, change it into something useful.
The man raised his arms. “Do not move,” he said.
Keisha gestured and spinning blades flashed into existence around her. “Screw that.”
The bald-headed woman slipped out of her cocoon and began a dance with her arms. They flashed faster and faster. “You want to relax,” she told Keisha.
The blades clattered on the dura steel flooring and Keisha’s shoulders slumped.
The black guy raised his arms and thunder boomed around Alex and me. I fell to my knees. A howling cyclone of sound built up around us. Alex lay on the floor, clutching his ears.
Harris scurried past me, back into the room, and waved his hands. A wound opened in the side of the sanctioned Empowered, and he screamed.
He shoved the air with his hand, and thunder erupted around Harris. Harris’s mouth twisted in pain and he fell.
I shook myself, got up on my knees, and urged the moss to spew the gases I’d had it ferment.
The black guy coughed and clutched his throat. He tumbled to the floor.
The bald beauty looked at me, twiddled her fingers at blinding speed. “You don’t want to hurt anyone.”
My shoulders relaxed and I let go of the moss. Hurting people was wrong, and so unnecessary here. Part of me cried out, there’s no mind control, but I just felt relaxed and didn’t want to hurt anyone. Ever.
Keisha stood with her head down.
I closed my eyes, struggled to fight, to break free of whatever the woman had done to me.
“You don’t want to hurt anyone. You want to surrender. This place is not for you. You belong in a safe room.”
The words crawled over me, and where they crawled I relaxed. The idea of fighting this was stupid. Why would I want to?
The sound of someone being hit hard in the face cracked across the room.
Suddenly I was angry and on my feet.
Alex stood over the prone body of the woman. Her eyes were closed.
“I decided it was time to put my boxing to use,” he said, rubbing his hands.
“Man, you have a nasty left hook,” Keisha said. “One blow and she’s down.”
“We need to extract the information about the facility immediately,” Alex said.
“No kidding,” I said. My heart raced. I just wanted to open that amber pod suspended in the center of the room, and free my mother.
Alex nodded and went to a computer console near the power coupling and got to work.
“I can help,” Harris said, and followed Alex over to the console.
“That guy is full of surprises,” Keisha muttered to me.
“Yeah.” I couldn’t think about that, right now. What I cared about was freeing my mother.
No one was going to stop me.
15
I went to the amber pod glowing in the center of the room. It hung from the ceiling on tendrils of golden light. Ropes made of light. It hurt my eyes to stare too long. A pair of green, vine-like cables anchored the cable to four different points on the wall. The cables pulsed with movement from inside, like blood moved through them.
There was a shadowy figure inside the pod. It appeared tall and slender.
I swallowed.
Mom was tall, but not as tall as me. Her silhouette warped like a sail in the wind. Tables attached to the pod, but something was off about them. I knelt down, ran my finger over the nearest one.
A roaring broke in my head, like a million blades of grass singing at the sunrise. I swayed. The roaring grew, now like the rushing water of a mighty river.
I yanked my hand back. Damn.
“You okay, Mat?” Keisha’s anxious face peered down at me.
“There’s a motherlode of power running through that thing.” I rubbed my hand.
I sent my sense into the nearest cable. It was like that time in Colombia, at the Ellis Biologics factory. The cable lived. It pulsed because living fluid moved through it.
“How do we get your mom out of there?” Keisha asked. It sounded like her voice came from far away.
“I don’t know yet, but we sure as hell are getting her out of there.”
I got back to my feet. Time to make some crazy-ass decisions.
“Alex, how does it look?” I asked.
He and Harris bent over the console.
“Complicated,” he said. “I don’t know where to begin.” He glanced back at me. He looked worried. “This could take some time.”
“We don’t have time.” I crossed my arms. “I want to get mom out now.”
Harris turned, his face anxious. “We will, Mathilda, I promise.”
“But we need to move,” I pointed out. “Support is likely high-tailing it here right now.”
“We’ll move,” Alex promised.
“I’ve seen tech like this,” I growled. “Goddam Ellis Biologics and their Emerald Green sites.”
“I agree,” Alex said. “Everything about this facility screams hidden, even from Support. It’s on the Black-Light system, but there’s no connection to the main Support network, nor the Hero Council.”
“So?” Support loved its secrets.
“So, every Support installation is mandated to have connections to Support and the Hero Council’s computer networks. Period. End of story. This breaks all those mandates, and that’s a huge deal.”
I couldn’t argue with his earnest look. “Okay, I’ll take your word for it. But I want to free my mom. Now.”
