Kinetics: In Search of Willow (44 page)

"You're sure it came from here?" one
of the men said.

"Yeah. Positive. That security light
has been going off for a whole day." A second man
replied.

"And no one noticed it until
now?"

"That was an oversight."

"Enough," a third man interjected.
"Find the intruder."

"Look, these boxes have been
opened."

"Carl's much neater than this. That's
proof enough for me that someone was here."

The four men began shoving aside boxes
and were poking their lights into every dark corner and shelf. My
heart pumped faster with every step that they got closer. They were
a couple feet away when I heard a shout from yet another
man.

"This way! There are alarms going off
in the next building!" The four men sprinted out of the
room.

I jumped out from the cramped shelf
space and peered out into the hallway. Three people in the hallway
were right in the way of my exit.

I cursed under my breath and looked
back in the room. The window was sealed shut. It was one of the few
windows in this building that weren't meant to open. I tapped the
glass. It wasn't all that thick.

The table in the middle of the room
was made out of thick steel. I doubted that I could actually pick
it up. The chairs were the same, but much smaller. I grabbed the
seat of the nearest chair and chucked it at the window.

The glass shattered into trillions of
sand to hand-sized shards. I didn't wait around to see if anyone
heard. I had no doubt that they did. I vaulted over the window sill
and sprinted into the darkness of the base grounds.

CHAPTER 31

"Anger, if not restrained,
is frequently more hurtful to us than the injury that provokes
it.
" ~ Seneca. Roman
philosopher.

The bleeding wasn't stopping. My vault
over the window sill of the Records room had dug toothpick-sized
glass shards into my hands. If I went to healer on the base then,
they would know it was me who was in the building just now. I ran
all the way back to the dormitory and sat in the shared bathroom
with my hands wrapped up in towels. Jack and Roy were still asleep
and it was abnormally quiet in the room. I wished that they would
start snoring to hide the noise made by my clumsy attempts to stop
the profuse bleeding.

I clenched and unclenched my fists. My
left hand was stiff and wouldn't move as well as the right hand. I
winced as I pulled the towels tight around my hands. A knock on the
bathroom door startled me out of my pain for a moment, and I
knocked a haphazard toothbrush off the edge of the sink.

"Hey, Genie, what's the hold up?"
Jack's tired voice flitted through the door. I frowned at the odd
nickname but said nothing about it.

"Not feeling too good," I
said.

"You need anything?" Jack's voice was
suddenly laced with concern.

I started to answer no when the towel
around my hand slipped a bit and blood splattered onto the floor.
That would be hard to explain. My heart took a running leap and I
began taking deep breaths.

"Eugene?"

The door handle shook as Jack tried to
open the door.

"Wait," I started to say, but Jack did
something to the door and it snapped open.

It was over. I was dead. Jack would
see me, sitting on the edge of the bathtub, with my blood pooling
on the floor. He would report me and all would be lost.

But Jack didn't run off to report me.
He just stood in the door staring at the blood. His eyes were wide
and stricken. He backed out and disappeared into the darkened room.
I heard murmurings--Jack talking to Roy.

Roy, groggy from sleep, stepped into
the threshold of the bathroom door, turned around and grabbed a
white box out of the cabinet just outside of the bathroom. He knelt
on the floor in the middle of my splattered blood, and with the
ease and deftness of a professional, took the slivers of glass out
of my palms, wrapped my hands in white gauze and didn't speak a
single word all the while.

"Move." It was the only thing that he
said. Once I was out of the way, he turned on the bathtub and
filled a bucket he got from under the sink with water. He spilled
the water on the floor and the water took the blood on the floor
with it down the drain in the middle of the bathroom
floor.

I backed up a few steps while he
turned off the tub and threw the shard of glass into the trashcan
beside the toilet. He pushed past me and moved next to Jack's
bed.

"You going to be okay?" Roy asked in a
low voice to Jack.

Jack nodded, voiceless, as he stared
into the dark room almost sightlessly. His gaze was far off, and I
suddenly felt bad, but I was unsure as to why. The blood had shaken
him up somehow.

Roy glared his token look at me and
then shoved his blanket over himself and went silent in a cocoon of
cotton.

I went to my own bed quietly.
Exhaustion was taking over now that my adrenaline rush was fading,
and the pain of the tightly wrapped gauze quieted to a dull
throb.

"We'll go see the Healer later," Jack
said, not averting his gaze in the slightest.

I almost protested. But
the realization hit that I was already caught. When everyone awoke
it would come out that a break in had occurred and I, being
inexplicably injured in the course of the evening, would be
implicated right away. I was doomed. But I nodded into the dark and
curled up under my own blankets, cradling my hands close to my
chest. The least I could do would be to be healed in preparation
for the hell that was sure to come. As much as I tried though,
sleep eluded me for a long time. Something niggled at the back of
my mind, but I couldn't grasp it. I fell asleep an hour later still
worried about something, just not knowing
what.

O
h, something has gone terribly wrong! Eugene, we may not make
it! I'm afraid the world as we know it is falling apart around
us.
She clutched my arms and looked deeply
into my eyes. I could only stare back.

I woke to Jack and Roy talking in low
voices on the other side of the room. Roy was nearly yelling his
whispers. His tone was so harsh that it grated my nerves. I shifted
under the blanket. The voices cut out and it was quiet. I pushed
myself up and saw Jack and Roy sitting at the table near the door.
Papers were spread out on the table, but Roy very quickly gathered
them up and stuffed them in a backpack under his bed.

"Ready to go to the
Healer?"

I nodded and threw on a change of
clothes that I hoped was clean and followed the other two
out.

The base was again bustling with
activity in the form of training the new recruits. Fortunately, we
went in the opposite direction of the fire wielders. Roy led the
way through the grounds to a two story building. Inside looked
exactly like a doctor's office in any normal city. The waiting room
was empty and the receptionist was chewing on the end of her pen
while reading some novel with a scantily clad couple on the
cover.

Roy spoke to the receptionist and
pointed to me. She blinked at me for a few seconds and then picked
up her phone and chatted with someone on the other end. We three
sat down and five minutes later the Healer came out and beckoned me
into a smaller room.

"You boys are always getting into
trouble." The Healer's gaze was reproving, but she did not hesitate
while stripping off the now bloody fabric and examined my hand with
the eye of a hawk. She turned my hand back and forth, asked me to
flex my fingers a couple times and then she began to rub tiny
circles at the heel of my right hand. She worked her way up the
palm and I felt a chilly surge in icy pinpricks flowing down my arm
into my hand. I watched as the broken skin squirmed in a revolting
way and began closing in on the wound. My hand then heated up and
the newly formed skin reshaped a bit to the miniscule patterns on
my palm and then stilled.

The Healer took up my other hand and
the process was repeated.

"There you go. Your name is Eugene, is
it not?"

I nodded, and then paused. How did she
know that?

My worries from earlier
suddenly bloomed again. 
Jack knew my
real name
.

The Healer frowned. "You must have
lost a lot of blood. You look very pale." She touched my forehead
with her fingertips and her frown deepened.

"I'm just tired." I moved away from
her touch.

She paused at that but nodded and
didn't argue. "If you start feeling weak, sit down. I want you to
go home and rest now. You need to let your body regenerate that
lost blood. Eat something, too."

The Healer shuffled me out and I
entered the reception area alone. Adrenaline started to course
through my veins and I knew that my end was here. Our next
destination was the jail or whatever they used to lock up people
around here.

"My dad needs to get some stuff from
one of our other bases. We need an extra hand to carry things. Want
to come?" Jack asked, leading the way out of the
Healer's.

That wasn't what I was expecting to
hear. So in my shock, I just nodded my head.

"Great! We'll just stop by the room
real quick and then head on out."

Roy said nothing the whole way back.
The moment we got back to the dorm, Jack rooted through the closet
and pulled out three heavy winter coats.

"Here's a coat."

"Isn't it too hot for these?" I
murmured, still in shock that I wasn't locked behind a set of bars
by now.

"Trust me, you'll need it." Jack
nodded knowingly.

I frowned at the coat and took it
despite my misgivings but didn't put it on.

Jack and Roy put their coats on right
away. Confused I followed them out.

Jack spearheaded the way through the
base and then up the hill toward the monstrosity of a teleporter. I
wasn't that far behind him and Roy was only a few steps behind me.
I felt a little uncomfortable having Roy walking behind me. I could
almost feel the pupil-sized holes being gouged out of the back of
my skull. Jack acted like he didn't know who I was, but Roy treated
me like he knew exactly who I was.

I looked back once at the base which
was becoming evenly viewable as we got up higher. The teleporter
was nearly in the very center of the base, and, other than the
building powering the large fence, it was the highest single-story
man-made structure on the base. The dormitory was the tallest of
the buildings, even overshadowing us in the falling sun, despite
our vantage point.

I nearly bumped into Jack when he
stopped on the threshold between two of the columns of the
teleporter. The columns were not made of stone as I had previously
thought but of a rough looking metal. I couldn't identify it off
hand.

That's when I noticed the veins.
Small, spidering veins were etched into the metal flooring and
columns in intricate designs that all started—or ended—at the very
center where they all spiraled around a waist high pillar in the
very center. All that the little pillar had on it was a silver ball
on which were two imprints, a pair of hands.

Jack went to one of the columns and
opened up a barely visible panel and began flipping switches,
typing something into a little keyboard. He read the equally small
display and closed the panel with a grin.

"Ready when you are," he gestured
toward the hand pillar.

Roy shoved past me and took up a
position in front of the little pillar. "My turn." He gave Jack one
of the first grins I think I'd actually seen him
display.

Jack huffed and crossed his arms. "You
and your stupid bet."

Roy's playful grin turned smug. "Told
ya I was the awesomest."

Jack rolled his eyes and waved me
over. I hadn't followed any of what the two guys had just bantered
about. I mentally shrugged and stepped into place beside Jack,
choosing to ignore it.