Kinetics: In Search of Willow (17 page)

"You made it out safe?" I asked,
coming to stand next to him.

"Yeah, uh, after a bit of a hold up. I
thought you were dead for sure." His eyes watched the passing
traffic as he came to stand next to me.

"Fortunately no. What's been going
on?" I grinned. I was immensely relieved to see him. He hadn't been
captured by the Alliance people, which means that all the
information that he had gotten off the computers was still
intact.

"I take it you haven't been watching
the news then." He said.

"Been a bit preoccupied." I replied.
What in the world was going on in the news?

"Hmm, c'mon inside. My dad's still out
at work." Harry hiked his backpack up onto his shoulder and strode
inside. I shook my head in amazement. From my short interaction
with Harry I was quickly realizing that Harry was never one to get
phased by anything and this should be no surprise. I'm sure he was
take it pretty calmly if I told him I was the Buddha and was here
to claim my place as king of KFC.

"I think it would be better for you to
just watch it and see." Harry said, grabbing the remote on the way
to the living room couch.

I sat down to the early evening news
where my face was tattooed in the tiny boxes at the shoulder of the
newscasters. At first it didn't compute that I was seeing my face
on the screen, but after seeing my face on the security cameras at
the Alliance HQ, I thought that I would take it better.

"Yoshida is still wanted for
questioning in connection with a large military-grade stockpile of
weaponry found at Briggs High School earlier this week. Police say
that the suspect is still at large but they are following up on
leads."

"I never took you for a terrorist."
Harry said, not even looking up from his fingernails.

"I'm... not?" I stared at the pictures
of my alleged crime. "This is bullshit. I'm no
terrorist."

"They seem pretty convinced." Harry
raised an eyebrow at me and jerked his chin toward the
TV.

"Yeah, well, what do they
know?"

"That's what I said." Harry shook his
head and muted the TV. "I would peg you for roadside axe murders,
not some overly complicated Columbine-esque affair."

"Uh, not helping." I
frowned.

"What happened after you got caught?"
Harry asked, grinning.

"That's kind of why I'm here." I took
in a deep breath.

"By the way, the school said Willow
was sent on an impromptu vacation with family in Ireland or
something. They really need to work on their cover stories. 'Cause
really, who leaves this close to the end of the term? And the fact
that the both of you stop coming to school the same day, I mean,
really. The connection is screaming. There's a rumor that you two
eloped." He had a quirky half smile on his face.

"No kidding?" I squeaked, and then
coughed.

Harry chuckled. "Yeah, the guys at
school are crying foul. You know how much they like
her."

"I wish it was that simple." I
whispered and shook my head.

"Anyway, by the time I realized you
weren't behind me I was too far away to be of any help."

"It's okay. It worked out. I was put
into this weird looking cell…" I explained what happened after we
were caught, and about the strange interaction with the old man,
intentionally avoiding the topic of my "powers." Harry's expression
was one of curiosity the whole time I explained the cell, the
little ball that he took out and then put back into my chest, and
the teleportation to the desert and shack.

"This guy's name was… Ashwater?" Harry
finally asked. Harry had pulled a notebook from somewhere and was
taking notes with a fascinated expression on his face.

"Yeah, he was a little strange, talked
strange, too." I chuckled a little.

"So… is this thing, this metal ball
still in your chest? Can you feel it?" Harry leaned forward and
looked at my chest as if the ball would magically appear if he
stared at it long enough.

"I dunno. I thought I did right when
it teleported me, but the feeling is gone." I patted my chest where
I thought the thing would be.

Harry scratched his chin. "Hmm. I
wonder if that's exactly what he put in you. A teleporter or
something."

I shrugged. "I really don't know. Nick
suggested I get an x-ray to see if it's still there. Oh yeah, what
were you able to pull off their computers?"

"Mostly the information on Marcus
Grey. I still have it on my flash drive. They have an interesting
Intelligence report on it. It shows the route he took from here to
some place in Wyoming."

"Laramie?"

"Yeah." Harry's eyebrows raised in
surprise. He pulled his laptop out from his backpack and showed me
a few of the files he had managed to get. One was a profile of
Marcus Grey. I took it from him and read over the
details.

"I'm going to introduce you to my
friend Nick. He's a Kinetic, too. Knows scads of stuff about
them."

"I almost think we should follow the
same route. It seems strange to me, that people who have the
ability to teleport long distances would choose to take a recently
kidnapped girl on a road trip."

I scratched my head. "That does seem
strange. I'll have to ask Nick about it."

Harry's phone began ringing. "Hold on
a second, it’s my Dad." He got up off the seat and disappeared into
the kitchen. I could hear the low tones of him speaking to someone.
I switched files and looked at the map that showed Grey's route.
There were pictures notated on the document too. Harry had been
only able to get a couple of them but from the two he was able to
get, I was able to see a couple pictures of Willow just after her
kidnapping. Their backs were facing the camera, and Willow was
standing between a man who I assumed was Grey and a woman who was
pointing at something off camera.

I touched the screen and felt my heart
ache.

"Hey, sorry about that." Harry came
back in and I dropped my hand. "That was my dad asking what I
wanted for dinner."

"Ah, cool." I sighed. I didn't know
when I would get to have dinner with my family again. Mom and Dad
were only a dozen blocks away but I wouldn't be seeing the inside
of my house for some time.

"It's a good thing it's just me and
Dad." Harry said, smiling. "It means we know when someone is going
to be here."

"I guess." I said, looking around at
the living room once again.

"What's the plan now?" Harry sat back
down and glanced at the picture on the screen I had been looking
at. "Are you sure you want to go cross country?"

"Well, I don't really know what else
to do. If I go back to the Alliance, then they're going to wipe my
memories or force me into training that's not going to let me go
after her anyway." I handed the laptop back to Harry. "I know it's
insane, but I really don't have any other options. I don't want
Willow to become a mindless host to whatever that thing is. I'm
going after her, end of story."

Harry nodded, uncharacteristically
quiet, while he considered. I sat back and stared at the silent
pictures moving across the muted TV.

"I'll help you the whole way," he said
finally.

"Yes." I sighed with
relief.

"Give me tomorrow to finish up the
rest of my school work and I'll be ready to go." Harry stood up and
closed the laptop with a firm click.

"Aren't finals in a week?" I stood up
too and stared at him incredulously.

"I would think you would want more
time..." Harry raised his eyebrows.

"I do, but how-"

"I'm going to ask my
teachers to give me all the required work and I will finish it up
within in a few hours." Harry smiled. "My only reasoning to be in
school is so that my dad won't make me get a job, and at this point
the teachers are okay with letting me do whatever because I always
turn everything in on time, or 
early
 when I want to do
something else."

"Serious?" I stared at him in
surprise. I knew he was smart but not that smart.

Harry grinned. "That's
right."

I wrote down Nick's address for him
and waved goodbye. "I'll see you tomorrow."

As I headed back to Nick's house on a
bike borrowed from Harry, I felt a small weight lift from my
shoulders. I wasn't in on this alone. But I could still feel the
suffocating weight of the task ahead of us.

Tomorrow after Harry was
done with school he would come to Nick's house and we would begin
our mission plan. 
Soon, Willow. Soon,
we are going to find you.

CHAPTER 14

"Distance? What's
that?" 
~ Gareth Cypress. A teleporter
noted for his travels of the world. 1909.

"To be perfectly honest, I'm as
stumped as you are." Nick was reading over the stuff we had grabbed
off the Alliance computers. "In all my years as an Intel Operative,
I've never seen a kidnapper take his quarry on a joyride across the
States. It just defies logic and most of all safety. I don't see
why we couldn't have jumped on this and gone after her. He's pretty
much taunting us."

"That's what I thought, too." Harry
interjected.

"I knew Lancaster was lying." I pushed
my chair up closer to Nick's desk. "She told me it was
impossible."

"It could be they are attempting a new
form of brainwashing." Nick scratched his chin.

"Brainwashing?" Harry asked,
incredulously.

"Yeah, they have this way of getting
perfectly sane individuals to turn to their cause and believe it."
Nick replied shaking his head.

"What is that anyway?" I asked. "Their
cause?"

"I've heard a couple different
stories, depends on who you talk to, but the general consensus is
that they are trying to raise an army to take over Earth and any
other habitable planet they can find."

"Why would they do that?" I shook my
head.

"Why does any dictator or pathological
villain do what they do? Power." Nick shuffled some papers in front
of him and frowned.

"Hmm, are you sure there aren't some
other reasons?" Harry didn't seem convinced.

"Look, I only know what I've been told
and what we can see from external reports." Nick looked over at
Harry. "We know for a fact that the majority of the bases and
facilities the Isiroans possess are dedicated to military training
and tech development." I saw Nick grind his teeth, his bad habit
when he was frustrated.

"Sorry man," Harry laughed, and patted
Nick's shoulder. "I like to play the devil's advocate."

"It's alright." Nick shook his hands
dismissively and looked back.

I shook my head at them. Over the past
few hours Nick and Harry had been at odds. I guess that's what you
get with two really smart people in the room. I felt out of place
as I tried to keep up with them and listen to as much as they were
saying. They were covering the reports and info we had gathered
from the Alliance HQ, and added in some of the higher security
stuff that Nick could access.

What we--and I say 'we' lightly--were
finding was a picture of Marcus Grey. Marcus Grey wasn't even his
real name. He had been born in a small town in China around 1933
and had been adopted by Catholic missionaries in 1945 who changed
his name.

He had once been a bold military
leader in the Second Great Kinetic War, the equivalent of one of
the Non-Kinetic World Wars. There were about a dozen registered
Kinetic groups around the world. Grey and an unnamed brother had
run one of them before the war. And then somewhere in the middle of
it, they had incorporated themselves into the Isiroans and then the
war ended with an unsteady truce that was probably all but violated
with Willow's kidnapping.