Forgotten (Reject High: A Young Adult Science Fiction Series Book 3) (2 page)

Still, I wondered why she suddenly got so clumsy. She'd taken my blood for a long time and never dropped a single thing.

I pressed the red call button on the television remote to get a nurse into the room.

“Yes? May I help you?”

Taylor pulled an unusually-shaped silver pistol from behind her and pointed it in my face.

“I've got it,” she shouted back to the PA system.

After the call disconnected Taylor yanked the remote cord from the wall, splintering the paneling. I couldn't see a prism or feel its energy which was strange. She obviously had one on her. Where was it?

“Lead shielding.” She tossed the remote behind her, more serious than I had ever seen her. “It focuses the radiation inward. We all got it after Orizaba.”

I never said what I was thinking out loud. I must be on a different ADHD medication. Otherwise, she couldn't have read my mind, even with a scarlet emerald.

“You were in King's compound,” I said to

her. Orizaba was the city in Mexico where I stole heliodor from six people. Deprived of it, they'd rapidly aged until their bodies had given out and they'd died. It was one of a couple of close calls Rhapsody and I'd encountered. Another came in North Hospital when we were trying to save her dad’s life.

I knew her boyfriend. It's why Taylor had dropped the tray.

She released the gun's safety. “Ryan Cain. The sex is lousy, but at least he tries.”

My hands and armpits got sweaty. I stated the obvious. “Someone will hear the shots.”

“High-grade tranquilizers are quiet," she shrugged. "You'll live.”

Right. If she or anyone else really meant to kill me, they'd have done it by now. There had to be a good reason they hadn't.

It was about my blood.

I forced myself to glance at the scene on the floor. Broken glass and crimson crystal shards.
What is happening to me? Who is she working for? King should be dead.

Taylor fired, emptying her full load of tranquilizers in my direction. I wanted to close my eyes but something inside me wouldn't let my lids shut. The ammo ricocheted off of my chest and face and flew to opposite points of the room. Most of the tranquilizer darts ended up in the wooden paneling. One fragment crashed into the television, sending blue sparks and pops of smoke into the air. The last one bounced straight back and hit Taylor in the side.

She slumped to the floor. The gun fell from her hand with a solid crack.

My powers surged, on and off for just a few seconds. I had my powers back. How?

I eased my feet to the floor, kicked Taylor's gun away, and tried to think of a way out of the hospital. If I left the room to find Rhapsody, would anyone believe I hadn't shot Taylor with a tranquilizer? How would I explain my crystallized blood?

My window faced a rain-soaked brick wall, and at this angle I couldn't see how far the frop to the ground would be. Anything more than a story would break my legs or worse. I could really have used Rhapsody with her powers about now.

Since my skin deflected tranquilizers without my wearing a prism maybe I could absorb the impact.

What if I couldn't?

I swung one of my crutches like a baseball bat to bash against the window glass. It was reinforced and my powers were out again. Without them I’d never break it. I kept hacking at it, wishing, hoping they’d turn back on. On the seventh attempt, a lot of cursing, and right before I tried putting my fist through it, the arm handle broke through it. I knocked out most of the shards. For now, the storm had slowed down.

Taking a deep breath, I used my good leg for leverage and stepped up. That's when the
click
of automatic weapons stopped me in my tracks.

“Jason!”

My heartbeat skipped. That voice – it sounded way too familiar. Exactly like my mom's.

The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. Today was September 9. In five days she would have been dead four years. I turned my head enough to see behind me. She was standing in front of five men in black suits – my mother, Anna Champion, or her identical twin. She wore a blue flowered dress, with her hair pinned down and straightened – exactly like my nightstand picture of her.

I wanted to reach out, feel her soft touch.

She beckoned me. “Come here. Please?”

I could smell her flowery perfume and the scent of gun oil. My breathing staggered. I was actually thinking of giving myself up to the people she was with just to find out what or who brought her back to life. I glanced down at the floor where Taylor had been lying.

Her body was gone. This wasn't real at all.

My mom reached out her hand. “Come with me. It'll be all right. They won't hurt you.”

Taylor’s impersonation of my dead mother really pissed me off. Somehow she made me see men in black suits, when they were probably soldiers. More of those guys swarmed around. I hoped Rhapsody made it out of the hospital in time.

My options were limited to one thing.

I lifted my right leg onto the window sill. The fluttering in my belly transformed into anger. The illusion broke enough for me to detect the shape of a gun. I looked back in their direction. Placing my hands on the sides of the wet metal frame, I readied to move quickly. I knew they had bullets and not tranquilizers. After more than two months on the shelf, I really did not want to be shot again.

If they wanted my blood, they could try scraping it off of wherever I landed.

This time, Taylor's voice broke through my mother's mouth. “Don't do it!”

I turned my back to them and leapt out of the window.

CHAPTER TWO

the great escape

Doing a cannonball off of a high dive into a swimming pool is awesome. From the fourteenth floor onto the street? Not so much.

The first time my powers activated I broke the sound barrier. I remembered bits and pieces of what had happened that day in May. This time was the same way, screaming with everything I had. Hearing the wind whip past my ears and the rattle of gunfire trailing after me. Wondering, as I sensed the ground closing in fast, if I'd feel the pain of all my bones simultaneously snapping.

Surrounded by mounds of crumbled concrete and moldy-smelling mud, I realized I'd created a giant sinkhole on the side of a busy city street. Groaning, I crawled to my knees just in time to see an out of control white hybrid sedan swerve and roll into the crater I'd created.

On instinct, I put my hands out and caught the car by its roof. I stopped it from moving. But the sudden force knocked the front passengers unconscious with their heads smashed against the windshield and bloodied.

However, the boy in the backseat was awake, mouth wide open, and staring at me.

Crap.

Too late to turn my face away and avoid being seen, I tossed the vehicle right side up back onto street level. That's when I noticed a mixed crowd of midday commuters staring down at me. They thought I was dangerous, an alien or a mutant. I could tell by the finger pointing, the gapes, and the stares. I'd done the unexplainable in plain sight.

Eventually one of us was going to get caught doing something superhuman.  All the others – Rhapsody, Sasha, Selby, even Esteban and Ryan could use their power to get away or avoid being seen.

Not me. I'm Captain Obvious. Obviously I wasn't escaping this time.

Flying away right now would make things worse. What if my powers, which shouldn't even be available without a prism, conked out in mid-air? I’d be human road kill. In the last few months I'd gotten injured enough for two lifetimes. I'd bet there are career marines with medical records shorter than mine.

Heart beating double time, I waited for someone to say something. Anything.

After a moment of silence, I moved my lips to speak. What was I going to say? I stopped trying to talk. My first thought was, “Hi,” but the crowd started talking for me.

“Where do you think it came from?” asked a brunette woman in a business suit.

Oh great, now they
definitely
think I'm an alien. I'm not even a boy to them.

“Busted sewer line, I bet,” said a pudgy bald man with a laminated ID badge hanging around his neck. Hands on hips, he sniffed. “Don't you smell that?”

“Happens all the time,” said a Spanish woman with a harsh accent.

The first man rambled on and on about the city's rotten infrastructure. “Sewer lines don’t last forever. People need to do their jobs and update these things.”

“Not likely,” said another. “The solar storm killed the power grid. That'll come first.”

He was right about the electricity being spotty. Many busy traffic intersections still relied on policemen to direct the flow of cars. The fact that I had cable television in the hospital was a miracle and kept me informed about the chaos.

At his second mention of a sewer problem the crowd dispersed. One time the septic system backed up in the apartment we had before moving into Aunt Dee's. Everything smelled like exploding toilets.
No one wants to be around that if they don't have to be.

Digging my hands into the hard reddish-brown earth, I climbed my way back to the surface. The cars had resumed their movement, but the hybrid was still there. Besides them, everybody had left except for the two people I hadn't seen in the crowd earlier, Courtney and Rhapsody. Courtney’s blouse was unbuttoned low enough that I could see she wore an armored jumpsuit underneath. It looked different, though, purplish and shinier than the ones we’d worn before.

Rhapsody showed me the green emerald in her palm. “I made you disappear.” She nodded to Courtney. “She did the mind thing on the crowd.”

Scarlet emeralds allowed their wearer to control minds, even freeze time. Erasing memories was risky for us. Sasha tried and brain-damaged Stu Spivey, the police officer who was hunting us. I heard he died shortly afterward.
You won’t catch me mourning him.

Courtney patted me on the shoulder. The corners of her mouth had faint lines which hadn’t been there before. Unlike a few months ago, this time I was sure she had aged since the last time I saw her.

“I did have a plan to get you out, you know, using the elevator, the stairs…” she joked.

I didn’t appreciate the sarcasm. A wild wave of heat ignited from my t-shirt collar and spread to my face. “How long did you want me to wait for you, until I hit the ground? It’s not like you had two months to spring this magnificent plan into action.”

Rhapsody circled her hands around in the air, like I was supposed to say something else. The lack of verbal communication bothered me.

“What?” I blurted out.

“What do you mean ‘what’? Shattered window half a mile up!” I noticed her body shivering and the mascara trails on her cheeks. She grabbed a fistful of her own hair. “You smashed into the road, Jason! How did you survive that without a prism?”

“No idea.” I pointed my thumb at Courtney. It would be one of about ten million things she knew and didn’t tell us. “Bet every Raider shirt I own she has a clue.” Courtney took both of us by the arms. “I’ll explain what I've got once we’re in the car.”

She does know something!
We shook ourselves free. For all the history between her and us, Courtney must be crazy if she thought we'd go anywhere with her.

“Let’s hear it,” I demanded.

She repeated herself. “The family you saved called the cops. Hear the sirens?”

I actually did. Two or three cars worth of wailing. But I didn’t care.

She pointed ahead. “The Cougar is a half block this way. Let me buy you a burger and answer your questions. It was probably just residual radiation from the explosion.”

I gritted my teeth. My stomach rumbled at the mention of food, but her explanation wasn’t good enough.  “Right here, right now, or never. You owe me your life, Eris, remember?” She'd once threatened to shoot me in the knee if I called her by her given first name. I didn’t see a gun though.

“You fell fourteen stories,” she said, wiping sweat from under her straightened bangs. “Erasing someone’s mind isn’t like cleaning a chalkboard! It takes an incredible degree of control, patience and concentration. You’re welcome to try it before they arrest you.”

I thought we would be better off hitchhiking invisible or if I flew us away. Courtney had a scarlet emerald, and with my Adderall wearing off, she could easily anticipate our moves or freeze our bodies to stop us. I wiggled my fingers – the electric-like pulsing was still there. My powers were active. The glint in her brown eyes signaled to me that she knew it, too.

Courtney unbuttoned her blouse almost to the bottom and unzipped her suit. She reached into the left breast pocket and produced a necklace like the one she’d shown me in the hospital. Except this one had all six stones in it – green emerald, scarlet emerald, goshenite, heliodor, a morganite, and not one but two ice blue aquamarines.

“You’re right. I owe you everything.”

I snatched it from her.

“Jason, are you insane?” Rhapsody smacked my arm as I held it. “It’s too easy. Tracking device, something, I don’t know – and there’s
morganite
on it. Get rid of it! We don’t even know what the aquamarine does.”

I could do what Rhapsody said, never wear it, and go back to feeling crappy 24/7. Or, I could assume the risk that whatever good having my abilities did was better than the bad they could create.

I latched it around my neck before anyone could change my mind. I’d already been exposed to pink crystal and whatever my deepest desire was, but I hadn’t done anything stupid so far. Except almost jump to my death. The feeling from the crystals was great! My eyesight felt improved. I saw colors and shapes more sharply than ever before.

Rhapsody cursed in Spanish and shouted at Courtney, who yelled back, shook her head at her and sucked her teeth. We never faced the passing cars, but I’m sure someone filmed the Goth, the blonde hot girl and the black dude arguing on the side of the road.

“They don’t care about us.” Tears in her eyes, Rhapsody pleaded with me to see her side. “Everything they do manipulates our lives and benefits them. It’s what they do.”

My blood ran hot with anger at the situation. The Collective had us at a disadvantage until I learned its secrets. “What does the aquamarine do?” I asked, trying to sound civil.

A tense moment of silence passed between us. The sirens were closing in. A car door slammed shut in the distance. We were almost out of time.

One thought popped into my head that wasn’t mine.
Had I read her mind?
Courtney looked me straight in my eyes. I could feel the truth slipping away from the front of my brain.

Rhapsody drew close to me and wrapped her arms tightly around my waist. I secured an arm around her and we flew away.

We landed in Sasha’s backyard. Still invisible, we checked to make sure the coast was clear. Though some of our enemies had the same power, we could tell if we looked hard enough for signs – parted bushes, large indents on grass, or objects moving at weird angles. Nothing appeared to be out of place. The lush, clipped green grass pointed upwards and the bushes were perfectly square. From the looks of it, the inside of the Anderson house was dark.

Rhapsody and I reappeared. She crossed her arms and held onto her shoulders. “If you made a list of the places I thought you were taking us, this was the last place I would’ve picked.”

“That’s why I picked it,” I said, sure of myself. “Sasha stashed clothes for me here.”

She hesitated. “You’ve got stuff at my place, too. Just as dangerous there.”

I smiled. “They know that. They’ll go there first. Will you ghost me in?”

She paused. “You want me to help you break into your ex-girlfriend’s house? Let’s take a moment and think about this. How would you feel if I asked you to smash my ex’s door in?”

A bubble of jealousy rose into my chest. It was a pretty messed up request, I had to admit. “It’s not comfortable for anyone, but I’ve been mooning people for the past hour.”

Rhapsody snickered. “I’m not cool about this at all, but all right. Make it quick.”