Trance (3 page)

I’d waitressed in dives like this for years and been called a whore before. But whoring wasn’t my career of choice, and I would never cross that line. Normally I’d chalk up the solicitation to the alcohol soaking his breath, or simply blame bad manners.

Tonight I let my tangled emotions and unhappy stomach dictate action. I kicked Sasquatch in the groin. He howled and hit the floor. The ruckus caught the attention of half the bar, including Ted, who was squirreled away in his usual place in the DJ booth, and that put an end to my night at Whiskey Jack’s.

And my employment there.

The heartburn remained with me during the long walk home. I stumbled into my one-room apartment, clothes and hair rank with the odors of liquor and stale cigarette smoke. After a short debate over showering—too much energy required, not enough on reserve—I sprawled out on my saggy bed and tried to ignore the pain in my stomach
and throat. Antacids cost money and … well, I didn’t have any to spare.

Milk helped sometimes. Did I have milk in the fridge? I squeezed my eyes closed and tried to picture the contents of my wheezing icebox, an original installation in the aging apartment. Two cans of soda, half a loaf of bread, a few slices of faux cheddar, maybe a Styrofoam carton of last week’s filched leftovers. If I had milk in there, it was curdling into cottage cheese.

With nothing to save me, I curled onto my side and pondered the tip money in my back pocket. Five hours and only twenty extra bucks. My jackass of a boss docked me for kicking that guy in the crotch. As if firing me wasn’t humiliating enough.

I wished I’d controlled my temper.

This was the fourth time in three years that I’d been fired for not reining it in. Sooner or later, I’d run out of noncareer opportunities in Portland and then I’d really be screwed. And I had to go job hunting tomorrow if I didn’t want to end up on the street by the end of the week. Work and sleep—there had to be more to life than this. Oh yeah, there was. Pain.

Those invisible hands returned and twisted my intestines into knots. Scalding tears pricked the corners of my eyes. Drawing my knees up to my chest, I ground my teeth and waited for it to pass. No such luck. I tried to stand, preparing to run to the toilet and yak. Threadbare sheets had tangled around my ankles and legs. My left elbow scraped against the industrial carpet as I hit the floor.

Had to be my appendix. I was going to die after all.

The pain spread as I lay on my cold apartment floor—had I bounced another check on the heating bill? The water-stained plaster ceiling pressed down on me. No, it couldn’t be my appendix. That pain stayed in the abdomen and lower back. This pain was spreading all over, from my stomach to my chest to my throat. It radiated outward from my belly button, nothing like what I’d earlier mistaken for heartburn. Gooseflesh dotted my arms. My nipples hardened. Searing heat, like swallowing a gallon of boiling water, raced through my veins and arteries, heating my extremities and curling my toes. My mouth opened to scream—no sound came out. My eyes burned; I squeezed them shut.

Had I really worked so hard and survived so much only to die alone, on the floor of my crappy apartment?

The blazing heat ended as abruptly as it began. I curled into a ball and pressed numb hands against my chest. Chills tore up and down my spine. Something was happening to me, something bad. Fear warred with an odd sense of déjà vu. I longed to cry, but no tears came. My eyes still burned. I slit one open. The chilly apartment air cooled the hot cornea, and I opened the other for similar relief.

I tested the muscles in my abdomen. Nothing twinged. Legs and arms seemed equally okay for use. I rolled onto my right side. A lock of hair fell across my face and into my mouth. I spat it out. It tasted as bad as it smelled. A flash of misplaced color caught my eye. I grabbed a handful of hair and inspected the strands. Thin streaks of purple colored half of the light brown.

Crap.

Every six weeks, I splurged on a box of cheap hair dye to keep up the pretense of boring nut brown. The purple streaks had existed since I was a toddler, a random side effect of being born the daughter of two superheroes. But the heroes were gone, and while people still did funny things to their hair, I had wanted to forget the life I’d lost when my powers were ripped away. More than anything, I’d wanted to be normal.

The last box of dye wasn’t temporary, so why was the purple back? I rolled the colored hair between my lavender-hued fingertips.

What the huh?

All ten fingers had adopted a pale, violet hue, like the beginning of a bruise. Or like I’d played in permanent finger paints.

I stood on shaky legs and padded barefoot to the bathroom. A colorful towel created the only privacy barrier between bed and bath. I pushed through it so hard two of the tacks popped out of the plaster wall and clattered to the floor. Ignoring the chilly tiles, I flipped the wall switch and flinched against the yellow light that bathed the room.

As my eyes adjusted, I leaned over the cracked porcelain sink, studying my reflection. Chills wiggled down my spine. Purple streaks as thin as fingers highlighted my hair in no discernable pattern, just like before I started dyeing it. Odd, yes, but not scary. Scary was reserved for my eyes. Formerly brown irises now shone an iridescent purple that moved like oceans of light. I’d seen eyes like that once, and not in my head. I remembered an age-lined face and white hair stained with blood, an old woman as she lay dying.

I gripped the sink’s edge. “No.”

I ran my fingers through hair no longer familiar, convincing myself that it was not an illusion. Purple hair was at least familiar. Purple fingertips? Not so much. I rubbed my thumb and index finger together, testing the texture of the skin. Lavender sparks shot off like a party sparkler. I yelped. My heart slammed against my ribs as a strange odor filled the room, like a scraped matchbook cover.

I had to get a grip—easier said than done. I rubbed again. More sparks. On a whim, I snapped my fingers. A marble-size ball of purple light appeared. It hovered above my palm like an extension of my hand, connected by a faint warmth I couldn’t explain.

“Whoa.”

I didn’t move. Neither did the light. After a moment of concentration, the marble grew into a walnut, and then into an apple-size orb. Holy crap. The oddest sensation of heat still connected the hovering sphere to my hand, pulled taut like a rubber band. I could control it, shrink it, expand it. Could I make it fly?

“This is bad,” I said, stumbling away from the sink. I tripped over a well-worn tub mat and fell, landing flat on my ass. The orb disappeared. Sharp pain skewered my lower back, and a few choice curses tumbled out of my mouth.

I sat up, breathing hard, and tried to drum up some explanation. Anything to account for this. My powers were gone, had been for fifteen years. Just like every other Meta. No one knew why our powers went away that day in Central Park. One instant we were huddled together, preparing to kill
or be killed, and the next we were all writhing in pain as some unknown force tore our abilities away from us. The world saw it as a blessing—no more superpowered freaks wreaking havoc. No more destruction. No more killing.

No one considered how it affected
us
.

Like most explosive and devastating conflicts, the spark that lit the five-year Meta War was decades in the making. For more than two hundred years, superpowered Metas had been a part of our collective history, but it wasn’t until the first half of the twentieth century that the minor Meta disagreements became full-blown conflicts. Conflicts that grew bolder and bloodier over the next century. During that time, the Ranger Corps was established, and Washington bureaucrats coined the term “Banes”—a catch-all for the Metas our Ranger ancestors were tasked to capture and neutralize.

Over time, career-criminal Metas embraced the distinction and their identity as Banes. Schoolchildren were taught that Banes were bad, but the Rangers would always save us. It was a nice fairy tale.

A decade or so before the outbreak of the War—right around the time my generation was born—Specter showed up. More powerful than any other Bane, his abilities were a fierce blend of telekinesis and telepathy—once in your mind, he could control your actions until unconsciousness or death forced him out. This power to possess from a distance and turn the possessed’s powers against them helped him command loyalty from the fractured groups of Banes scattered around the world without ever showing his face to the public.

For the first time in history, the Rangers were outmatched.
The Banes came at us sideways, using deadly force against anyone who stood in their way, children and trainees included. Everything came to a head in Trenton, New Jersey, after four innocents and one Ranger were killed during a string of jewelry heists. Five cold-blooded murders. Six city blocks burned to the ground. Five years of bitter, violent fighting followed.

Chicago was left a smoldering husk. The Great Salt Lake became too alkaline to live near, and most of Salt Lake City remains unoccupied. Los Angeles and New York City bore the brunt of the attacks. L.A. still has half a million stubborn inhabitants, but the majority of New York’s five boroughs are abandoned. The War trickled overseas a few times—Paris, Moscow, some tiny village in the Philippines. London took the worst of it, and kids over there still sing some little ditty called “London Bridge Is Burning Down.”

Mostly it stayed here in the States, drawing all known Metas to its center like a crow to a cornfield. Battles devastated small towns and large cities with alarming frequency. The War finally ended on the evacuated island of Manhattan and left the surviving Metas as powerless as any other Joe (and Jane) Citizen.

As powerless as I’d lived for the last fifteen years. Powerless to remain in Los Angeles where I’d grown up, raised to be a hero. Powerless to stop the taunts of other children who saw my purple hair and hated what I no longer was. Powerless to affect the course of my own life.

Bitter fear coated the back of my tongue. Not fear of my strange appearance. No, that particular fear lived in a tiny
block of ice, deep inside my gut. This was an old fear of imminent death. Fear of how painful it would be to die at the hands of an angry Bane. Fear of my own cowardice.

“No, no, no.”

That part of my life was over. I tried to shut off the unbidden, unfocused slide show. Colorful faces from long ago, wearing strange uniforms of all shapes and sizes. Raging battles. Destroyed towns and leveled city blocks. Hundreds of innocents dead or dying.

No. No!

I hauled ass to my feet and pushed through the towel, managing to rip it the rest of the way down, and stalked to the opposite side of the apartment. As far from the mirror as I could get. I needed a drink. Badly. With no liquor on hand, I settled on bottled water from the refrigerator. I gave the outdated milk quart a suspicious glare.

Cool air from the interior of the fridge caressed my face. I shivered. It had been cold and raining, the devastated skyline black with smoke. Air thick with the stench of death. My father had led the final Ranger assault—a mixed unit of active and retired Rangers. Eighteen inexperienced children tried to fight. Six died. I thought I would die, too.

The overwhelming terror of that day still held my heart in its icy vise—terror I’d revisited in violent nightmares for years. Huddling with the other Ranger children, listening as the Banes blazed a path across Central Park. I remembered a handsome boy with silver eyes trying so hard to be brave for us as we prepared to make our final stand. They prepared—I’d cowered, too afraid to fight.

The last of the Banes had found our hiding place. And then the pain had started, radiating from within and spreading outward, burning through my body like fire and destroying the thing inside that made me special. Made me a Meta. All at once, for no real reason, Rangers and Banes alike were left without power—confused and exhausted and unable to remember why we were there in the first place.

The bottle of water slid from my boneless fingers. It hit the floor, bounced, and rolled toward the front door. I slammed the fridge shut and backpedaled, not stopping until my hip slammed against the counter. Distant bass from somewhere else in the building thrummed through the floor.

Had whatever mysterious force that stole our powers reversed itself? Confusion and incredulity momentarily blurred my vision and set my head spinning. Standing alone in my cold apartment, I desperately wanted to be wrong. I wanted to return to my dull, purposeless existence. I didn’t want my powers back, didn’t want the fear and uncertainty and responsibility of the Ranger legacy.

We didn’t know why our powers left and had no chance to ask. We were just children—separated, split up, and shipped out to different corners of the country. Schools enrolled me under my first foster family’s name, Kimble. A name I’d kept, only Teresa Kimble wasn’t really me.

My father’s surname was West. I was Teresa West—someone who’d ceased to exist fifteen years ago.

I balled my trembling hands into fists and waited for my brain to catch up and tell me I was wrong. It was an illusion, all of it—Metas didn’t exist anymore. Two years of working
three jobs, eating crap food and barely sleeping had finally culminated in an hysterical breakdown. Or I really had burst my appendix at work, and I was in the ICU, slowly dying from complications. I just had to play along with the delusion until death claimed me.

No problem.

Unless this really was happening, in which case I needed to accept it and move on, before I collapsed into a puddle of hysteria.

Move on to what, though? Tomorrow’s House of Chicken shift? Forget it. My eyes were lavender, and I couldn’t afford contacts. My fingers looked filthy. The boss would take one look and fire me on the spot. Two firings in twenty-four hours would completely suck.

I gazed at my hands. This was my future now, as it always should have been, and as right as it felt it was also very wrong. I swallowed, stomach quaking, mouth dry. Nothing about my life as a Ranger trainee reconciled with the appearance of my hands and eyes.