Authors: Adrian Howell
“Because…”
Alia said carefully.
“Because you and me… we were strangers once, a long time ago. And Cindy was a stranger too.”
I smiled, realizing that Alia had a very legitimate point. “Well, in my defense, Alia, if we succeed, it’ll help everyone, not just us.”
Letting out a little huff, Alia fell back onto her bed and stared up at the ceiling. I wondered if she had been listening to the earlier part of my conversation with Ed Regis as well, but I couldn’t exactly ask her.
I didn’t have to. Pulling her blanket up around her neck, Alia asked worriedly,
“Did you really have Terry and Ed promise to kill you?”
There was no way out of it. “There were conditions involved,” I explained quietly, “but yes, I did. I asked James too. Only Terry hasn’t agreed yet.”
My sister didn’t reply, and when the silence became unbearable, I added, “I just can’t afford to be caught by Randal.”
“Cindy was caught,”
Alia pointed out.
“We can still get her back because she’s alive.”
True, but that logic only worked if there was someone left outside of Randal’s empire to oppose him. I couldn’t take that chance with my own life, especially considering how Randal was planning to use me if he ever managed to get me alive. Even if I failed in my mission to kill the Angel queen, there was no way I could fail my other mission to rid the world of its last master-controller bloodline.
“It’s different with Cindy,” I said. “Besides, I meant everything else I said too. I don’t actually want to die.”
“I’m glad,”
Alia said evenly,
“because if you don’t call this off, Adrian, I’m going to talk to them too. I’m going to make them promise me that they won’t kill you no matter what happens. Then we’ll find out which of us they really listen to.”
This was exactly why I didn’t want my sister to know about my request. “Don’t fight me on this, Alia,” I said weakly. “Please.”
Alia turned her head toward me. Even in the darkness I could see the cold fury in her eyes as she whispered,
“You’re forgetting, Adrian, that I have a mission too. Someone has to keep you alive.”
“Suit yourself,” I said, turning onto my side, away from her.
Sleep still felt like a long way off.
Chapter 7: Power and Commitment
Alia spent much of the next morning in one of her silences, but I could tell that she wasn’t as angry at me as she was frustrated with the whole situation. Of course she was angry at me too, and the fact that she had called me Adrian last night showed just how much. But as always, I quietly sat with her until she was ready to talk to me again, and she gave me a weak smile before noon.
That didn’t mean I was off the hook, though.
“Last chance to do this yourself, Addy,” Alia warned me as the five of us sat down to eat lunch together.
I replied stubbornly, “You have your mission, Alia. I have mine.”
So Alia made her case to our team, arguing that I shouldn’t have made such an impossible request in the first place. Terry was the quickest to agree, of course. Ed Regis folded next, promising Alia that no situation, however dire, would make him waste a bullet on me.
Only James stood by my side. Despite Alia’s best efforts to stare him down, he firmly argued, “The success of this mission is more important than the lives of any one of us, Alia. Adrian knows this, as should we all. If he’s willing to sacrifice his life for the greater good, then I think we should respect that.”
That wasn’t really how I saw it – particularly the part about the “greater good” – but I was grateful for his support.
“You still have the majority,” I conceded to Alia over dessert. “Happy now?”
“Not really,” Alia replied in a forced calm. “But it’s a start.”
I had a feeling that James was in for a rough ride.
Later, when I got a moment alone with Ed Regis, I asked him if his new promise to Alia was really going to supersede his agreement with me.
“Let’s just say I promised you both,” replied Ed Regis, “and if and when the time comes, I’ll decide which promise to break.”
“I expected more professionalism from a Wolf,” I said reproachfully.
“Ex-Wolf,” Ed Regis reminded me. “Besides, I tried being professional last night and you didn’t like it.”
I scowled at him.
In the evening, I confronted Terry and James in the gym about Ed Regis’s unacceptable tactical suggestion regarding the Heart of Lumina. Just as I had suspected, they had both heard the ex-Wolf’s idea long ago.
“I told the major that you’d never agree to anything that could end up hurting Cindy,” said Terry, shaking her head.
“We both did,” put in James.
“How do you really feel about it, though?” I asked, remembering James’s assertion over lunch that no one person’s life was more important than the success of the mission.
“I’m not all that for it, either,” James replied carefully. “But I do think we should keep an open mind to every option.”
“This one isn’t an option,” I said firmly, and we didn’t discuss it any further.
Two days later, we learned that the Resistance would indeed allow us into their base of operations within Lumina, but that we would have to wait another three full weeks before transport could be arranged. We wouldn’t be leaving Wood-claw until a week into November.
And so the uncomfortable waiting game in Wood-claw continued. Fortunately, we weren’t just sitting around. James and I increased our volunteer hours in the security office, allowing other security members more time to their families and thus boosting our standing in the community. Terry and Alia continued teaching their classes. Alia, with the help of Susan, Scott and Rachael, increased her bi-weekly kiddie-combat classes to run every day, and her eager students always showed up. Ed Regis was also to be seen more frequently in the gym, assisting Terry with the adult classes which, after Mrs. Harding’s announcement, had doubled in enrollment.
“I can’t thank you enough, Teresa dear,” said Mrs. Harding when she visited the gym to observe Terry’s lesson once. “The Angels are going to be in for a big surprise if they attack us now.”
After Mrs. Harding’s initial announcement about the formation of King Divine’s Guardian Angels, not even she called them by their new name, so no one else did either. We were all used to calling them the Angels and we had little reason to humor their egos. It was a small defiance, but an important one.
Even in her combat classes, Terry kept her newfound talent as a windmaster so completely out of sight that few people realized she had become psionic at all. After her initial discovery, Terry had been carefully avoiding prying eyes, practicing alone in her room or in the gym during the early mornings. Just occasionally, she let me and Alia watch as she concentrated on moving the air from one side of the room to the other and back again.
The thing about psionic power is that whether you learn to control it or not, it can grow quickly once it gets started. Within a week of my birthday, Terry had pretty much become a full-blown windmaster. She still couldn’t control the air very well, but she could create short gusts of wind strong enough to knock down anyone who wasn’t bracing for it.
There were two major downsides to becoming psionic: the need for hiding protection out in the open and the ever-present risk of metal draining. Draining was Terry’s main concern.
“I don’t want to be a windmaster at all if it’s going to weaken my real fighting ability,” said Terry.
I grinned. “Yeah, well, once you’re psionic, you’re stuck with it like everyone else so you’d better get used to it.”
Despite her concern, Terry didn’t develop dire drain-weakness the way that I had. While she claimed that being drained made her tired, it didn’t show in her movements as far as I could see. Nevertheless, Terry borrowed my draining ring and used it during her combat training to overcome her new Achilles’ heel as completely as possible.
“This air shield is going to come in really handy for crowd control,” Terry said happily when she first succeeded in creating a short-lived mini-tornado around her body.
“Just remember what you once said to me about newborn psionics,” I warned her.
“I know that, Half-head,” Terry replied lightly. “Real power isn’t psionics anyway. Real power is just willpower.”
In the short term, Terry’s psionic training was geared more toward self-control than active use in combat, but I was sure that she would find use for it soon enough. We weren’t going to stay in the safety of Wood-claw much longer.
Meanwhile, Alia once again proved that her power was the greatest of all of us when she was called upon to help save the life of a young Wood-claw resident. The child, a four-year-old boy named Samuel, had been born with a congenital heart defect, and his open heart surgery had originally been scheduled for January of the next year. However, jumping on the opportunity to have a psionic healer present at the operation, the boy’s family begged Alia’s assistance.
“Wood-claw has never had a permanent healer,” Samuel’s mother said to Alia. “We know it was wrong to let you be taken by the Angels back in Walnut Lane, and we are truly sorry we didn’t help.”
“That was a long time ago,” said Alia, “and your son is innocent.”
Mrs. Harding allowed Alia, blindfolded, to accompany the child and his parents to the city hospital. Neither the heart surgeons nor hospital personnel were connected to Wood-claw, so it wasn’t easy smuggling an eleven-year-old girl into Samuel’s operating room. With the help of other psionics, namely peacemakers and mind-writers, the Wood-claw Knights tightly controlled the scene, thus allowing Alia to assist the non-faction doctors successfully complete Samuel’s operation in record time.
Alia, along with Samuel and his parents, returned to Wood-claw all smiles that very night. If Alia hadn’t been there, Samuel’s recovery might have taken weeks, not hours, to say nothing of the added risks of relying on human medicine. Under the circumstances, the joy that the family felt was only natural, but I was particularly happy for Alia. My sister rarely got the chance to help people outside of the psionic war, and I could see that she was delighted to finally do something other than take care of bloody noses, broken bones and gunshot wounds.
During our stay, we had all done our best to repay the Wood-claw residents for their hospitality, but Alia’s assistance at the hospital was the icing on the cake. With under a week left till our scheduled departure, Mrs. Harding announced that henceforth, Wood-claw would fully fund our mission against the Angels for however long it took to bring down King Randal Divine.
“Within reasonable bounds, of course,” added Mrs. Harding. “We are a small community.”
A new motorhome suddenly didn’t seem entirely out of the question, but we wouldn’t need one in Lumina. In fact, it was hard to know what we would need. This made planning our next step pretty much impossible. All we knew was that the next step, whatever it was, was coming. November was already upon us.
After a full month’s vacation, the looming prospect of leaving the sanctuary of Wood-claw and returning to the open world – and the Angel city beyond – was probably what caused it. I woke early one morning with my nose and forehead lightly pressed against the floor as if I had fallen out of my bed, or so it seemed until gravity regained its hold on me and the floor turned out to be the ceiling. It had been so long since this had last happened that I was completely unprepared for it. Alia woke with a start as I made a loud and painful crash-landing.
I gingerly sat up on the cold wooden floor and massaged my throbbing back.
Alia turned on her bedside light, asking,
“Addy? Are you okay? What happened?”
“Nothing, Ali,” I groaned. “I’m fine.”
Alia laughed as she realized why I was on the floor.
“I thought only kids did that.”
“I know,” I said, cringing. I felt as embarrassed as I would be if I had wet my bed. Seventeen years old and I was sleep-hovering! “Please don’t tell anyone,” I begged.
“No promises,”
said Alia as she knelt beside me and lifted my shirt to check for bruises.
“Anyway, it serves you right for trying to act so tough.”
Alia was still upset with me over my position on capture, and she hadn’t managed to sway James’s opinion either.
“It’s not about acting tough,” I said patiently as Alia ran her healing hands over my back. “Anything can happen, and I–”
“I know!”
Alia cut across me angrily.
“No happily ever after! I remember and I’m okay with that! But if I had asked James and everyone else to kill me, they wouldn’t have agreed. And if they did, you would have stopped them. You think you’re being noble, Adrian, but you’re just being horrible!”
“I hate it when you call me Adrian,” I said miserably, looking away. “You make me feel so small.”
After a moment, Alia said in a quieter tone,
“I know this mission is important, Addy, but I can’t lose you again. I just can’t.”
I closed my eyes and sighed. “Then you had better keep trying to convince James to change his mind.”
“I will,”
said Alia, finishing up the work on my back.
“And you’re right, by the way. Anything can happen. Even good things. You’ll see. It’ll be alright in the end.”
There was never much to be gained by arguing with my sister. If she was proven right, it would be great for me too. If she was wrong, she’d find out soon enough.
As to the possibility of “anything happening,” something actually did happen later that very day.
It was a little after 1pm, and I was in the kitchen washing the dishes when the telephone rang. Actually, it didn’t ring so much as beep loudly.
“Isn’t that the alarm?” called Ed Regis from the living room where he and Alia were playing cards.
All the telephones in the Wood-claw apartments were wired to the building’s security office so that this alternate ring of repeating electronic beeps would alert residents to an emergency situation. We had been told about this system upon our arrival, but this was the first time for us to actually hear the alarm go off.