Kinetics: In Search of Willow (45 page)

Roy gave me one last glare before
placing his hands in the imprints and pressed the silver ball. It
shifted under his hands and a yellowish glow spread out from the
ball and enveloped us until yellow light was all that I saw. I then
felt Deconstitution take hold. It was a little different from what
I remembered when I was first teleported to the Laramie Mountains.
It was less like I was being torn apart atom by atom and more like
I was being inflated with air. The bloated feeling dissipated
slowly, and then abruptly the yellow light was gone like a light
switch turned off, and I was now looking at a whole different set
of mountains. These were covered in snow and I now realized why
Jack had given me a coat in the middle of summer.

"Where are we?" I yelled over the wind
that was screaming through the columns of an identical, if not
larger, teleporter.

"Argentina!" I heard Jack yell back.
It took a moment to process that information, and then I was pulled
by my jacket sleeve by Jack toward a dark opening in the side of
the cliff face nearest to the teleporter. "Come on! We need to get
inside!"

Roy was leading the way this time and
greeted someone so bundled up that it was hard to tell the sex of
the person. I couldn't clearly hear what they were saying to each
other as the bundled person led us into the square opening, but I
was having trouble hearing anything over the bellowing
winds.

Once we were inside, the new person
smacked a red button on the wall, and the opening was shut by a
huge metal door. The person shook off the snow that had collected
all over the thick coat and then untied the hood and cotton
facemask.

The dark-haired woman who came out of
the hood gave all three of us appraising looks and then jerked her
chin in the direction of the dark depths of the tunnel before
us.

"Follow
me, 
niños.
"

The tunnel was sporadically lit with
thin panels at the tops and bottoms of the stone and metal stretch.
Doorways opened to the left and right of the tunnel leading to
other hallways or rooms.

The woman and Roy struck up a
conversation in Spanish, but I couldn't understand what was said at
all. My choice in high school for foreign language had been
Japanese. What could I say? It was supposed to be an easy A. Jack
didn't look like he understood what was being said either, but at
the moment I couldn't think of anything to strike up for
conversation.

The need for conversation ended when
we reached the end of the tunnel and came out into a wide open dome
full of computers, large screens and other high-tech
equipment.

The most startling thing however was
Willow's face on the largest of the screens.

Her mouth was moving but I heard
nothing but the scattered conversations of the people in the dome.
Willow's eyes kept looking down like she was reading something
while she was talking. Her forehead was creased with deep thought
lines. The lines smoothed out every time she finished a sentence
and started another one.

The screen cut away to black and
showed only the Isiroan symbol. The conversation in the room seemed
to increase after the screen cut out.

"Ooh, nifty," Jack said to
Roy.

Roy nodded as if he was responsible
for the hundreds of computer screens and consoles.

We were led into a corridor off to the
side, away from all the consoles by the woman, and taken to a large
room. It was not as large as the dome, but large by normal
standards. The ceiling was pockmarked with square florescent bulbs
and thick streams of wiring strung back and forth. The room itself
was full of boxes and crates with labeling in Spanish. The woman
led us to a small conclave of the room and pointed out three boxes.
They were different from the other boxes and crates. The sides of
them were painted in blue in contrast to the pale brown of
cardboard and wood. The writing on the side was painted over by the
blue, so even if I could read Spanish, I wouldn't have been able to
see the writing.

The woman and Roy continued to
converse in Spanish for a few minutes more while Jack cracked open
the boxes with a pocket knife. I sidled up between Jack and Roy and
examined the contents of the boxes over their shoulders.

A fragile-looking glass-encased diode
the size of a baseball was at the center of a large silver disc.
The surface of the disc had deep grooves giving it the appearance
of a vinyl record. I hadn't a clue what it was. I was the only one,
however. Jack looked at the thing like it was made of diamonds. He
muttered "good design" under his breath over and over. Roy was
still talking to the woman but now they were looking at a clipboard
with a list of items on it. I backed off a bit and tried to use my
limited Spanish language abilities to read the other boxes. I had
no luck, of course.

This place was actually bigger than I
had first thought. The mass of boxes and crates made it look
cramped, but the walls created by them hid the depth of the room. I
turned one of the corners made by a stack of crates and saw
something that I recognized.

Willow's bike.

My heart leapt up into my
throat and I stopped in place. I would recognize the silver and
blue frame anywhere. Now it wasn't all that hard to think that
someone else would have had the same kind of bike somewhere, but
few would have the wrestling stickers and the
initials 
W. A.
P. 
etched into the handlebars. Willow
Andrea Patterson.

Willow cherished that bike. It was the
first thing she ever bought with the money she earned at her summer
job. She wouldn't even let anyone ride it without signing away
their first born in the event of damage. And now here it was in a
glorified cave in Argentina leaning against a wall of
cardboard.

She couldn't be far off.

My heart left my throat and stampeded
into my chest. Excitement coursed through my veins on the backs of
a thousand wild horses. My first impulse to start running through
the halls screaming her name was shut down the moment Jack rested
his hand on my shoulder.

"Hey, buddy, it's time to
go."

I hesitated. I could easily run past
him. But then my cover would be blown. I had no idea if Willow was
actually here or not. She'd been kidnapped and the bike must have
been stored here.

"Right," I said instead and followed
after Jack, Roy and the woman. I didn't dare look back at the
bike.

The woman held her hand out
delicately, physically holding nothing, but telekinetically leading
two large crates after us. I stayed as far away from the crates as
I could and still be walking with the other three.

We made quick progress through the
base, back through the dome room with the screens and consoles
where only a few people still milled about and finally back out
into the cold. The woman left the floating box in the center of the
teleportation device and we traveled back through the Argentinean
transporter to the base in Wyoming.

CHAPTER 32

"We live in a pretty bleak
time. I feel that in the air. Everything is uncertain. Everything
feels like it's on the precipice of some major transformation,
whether we like it or not." 

~ Sean Lennon

“
The disc goes here." Jack
pointed to an empty case on the base of the teleporter. Roy and I
both put our backs to the box, pushing it—carefully—across the
spiral portion close to the edge of the teleporter where Jack was
standing. Jack reached inside and pulled out a thick cable. The
cable had a four pronged connector on the end, glinting gold in the
noon-day light. Jack opened the box and clicked the connector into
the diode. The diode's lights blinked and some mechanism on the
disc started spinning around and around. Jack smiled as if this was
the best thing that could happen.

"Great!" Jack exclaimed and tugged the
connector out of the diode, promptly stopping the light and the
spinning. "We'll just leave this here for the technicians to
install."

Jack closed up the box and patted it
like a father would a favorite child, pushing it into a snug
position between one of the support pillars and the base of the
teleporter.

"We're going to have dinner with my
folks tonight. You're welcome to join us," Jack hollered over his
shoulder as we walked down the side of the hill off the paved
path.

I looked at my hands where faint white
lines of new skin marked where the glass had cut through my hands.
I wasn't quite ready to go back to the video room. No doubt they
would have the place under heavy surveillance and I would be caught
the second that I stepped a toe into the building.

"Sure," I shrugged and followed behind
Jack and Roy all the way to the dormitory.

Jack left the dormitory not long after
we returned, saying he had to work an hour or so at the security
office. Roy didn't seen any more pleased to be left in the room
alone with me with than I was. I chose to make the first move and
buried my nose in one of the books Jack had given me.

Roy on the other hand opened up his
laptop and typed away on it like crazy. His fingers hitting the
keyboard frantically distracted me in the dead afternoon quiet of
the room. I opened one of the books Jack had left me and tried to
ignore him.

I stopped examining the book the
second I heard the typing of Roy's laptop cease. He was staring
into space, his eyes wandering about the room, unfocused. He eyes
traveled into contact with mine and I looked away.

"Where are you from, originally?"
Roy's voice seared a startling hole in the dead silence.

I considered a fib, but thought better
of it at the last second. "Ohio."

He nodded knowingly. "You accent
doesn't sound local."

I hadn't thought about my accent since
I had been with Harry at her aunt and uncle's place. I had long
dropped the act of a Japanese transplant. I thought for a moment
and tried to place Roy's accent. He sometimes sounded like a
stereotypical California surfer dude, but sometimes he sounded like
any normal Midwesterner. Right now his accent was the neutral
Midwestern.

"You?" I prompted, somewhat amazed we
were actually having a conversation.

"Nowhere." Roy snarled and slammed his
laptop closed.

Well, there went the
conversation.

I opened the book again and looked at
it without reading. "Well, okay, then."

Roy stormed out of the room and
slammed the door behind him.

I had yet to gain any inkling of
understanding of Roy. His emotional outbursts were random and
inconsistent. He set off an internal alarm bell in the back of my
mind and I knew, even without the use of instinct, that he was a
loose cannon.

I returned to reading about the
various methods to Kinetic power conservation and expansion. It was
a dry, boring text, but I could see the value in it. I had no
intention of actually putting into practice any of the suggested
exercises at the moment. Maybe in the future I would, as unlikely
as it seemed.

Roy reentered the room about a half an
hour later. He was talking on a cell phone in what sounded like
German. That was surprising. Not only was he able to converse in
Spanish with the lady in Argentina but he also was now speaking
with someone in German. How many languages did he know?

He wrapped up his conversation quickly
and then stared me down with a hard look. "Are you still coming to
dinner with the Ashwaters?"

I nodded.

"Then let's go," he said, barging out
the door without as much as a by-your-leave.

I dropped the book on the bed and
scrambled after him as he gained ground with his sprinter's legs
and fast pace. He passed the elevator and made a beeline for the
stairs taking two or three of the steps with each bound of his
feet.

I was a flight of stairs behind him
the whole way down and then I was trailing a good forty feet behind
him when we finally reached ground level. He didn't slow down or
let me catch up at any point as we traversed the length of the base
grounds toward the little residential area, the same area where
Marcus Grey had his apartment.