Kinetics: In Search of Willow (47 page)

"We found him on the southwestern
corner of the base. Further investigation found these as well." The
Teleporter handed Ashwater my bundle of papers. Ashwater glanced
over the items and then locked gazes with me, staring
hard.

"Not too smart, using a beacon
signature that we've already cracked." Ashwater didn't move an inch
and continued to stare at me. He never blinked.

I stared back and resolved to say
nothing.

"I supposed you are the one who's
responsible for the break in at the Archive Center." He narrowed
his eyes and threw the papers onto the table.

"I was right to be doubtful of you. My
son believed you to be safe and therefore convinced me to look over
your suspicious origins for the time being. I don't know what
you've said to him…" Ashwater glanced at one of the men behind him
and jerked his chin upward. The man nodded and he and the
Teleporter whisked away.

"What were you trying to
accomplish? What possessed you, or your handlers to send in a
child? You're fifteen!" Ashwater slammed his fists down on the
table knocking some of the papers to the floor.

I gritted my teeth and crossed my arms
over my chest, resolving again to say nothing.

"Gabriel," Ashwater
growled.

The other man in the room stepped
forward and stared at me hard. I could feel a buzz in my head
getting louder and louder. I spun away and clutched my head in my
hands but the buzzing only got louder. I felt something else then
like a cool trickle of water slipping through the increasingly
painful buzz, chilling whatever it touched. Dazed by the battle
waging in my brain, I fell to my knees. Heat rippled through my
veins taking over the chilly trickle of before. Now my blood was on
fire. The tips of my fingers began to glow red hot and I knew what
was coming next. Flame burst from my fingers, enveloping
me.

I pushed back away from the fire which
was clinging to the concrete and singeing the gray wall. The fire
was still coming out of my fingers in bursts and waves burning
everything it touched. Panicked, I rolled away.

The buzzing in my head got louder and
louder, drowning out the scream of the blaze around me. I heard
myself yelling, "No, no, no, no!" over and over again. Ashwater was
also yelling, but I didn't hear any of what he was saying. The fire
was building around me higher and higher. I couldn't see anything
but the red and orange flames. I curled in on myself and waited for
the fire to consume me.

The buzzing ceased. The heat around me
chilled.

I opened my eyes.

The concrete was charred. The table
was burnt to a crisp.

I was alone.

***

Hours passed.

The camera that sat in the corner was
melted into an amorphous blob. The only sound, other than the
shuffling of my feet or the low wheeze of my breath, was the
constant flow of air coming in from the air vent.

I pushed myself into the unburned
corner of the room and stared into the wall trying to ignore the
maddening silence. The first hour after my fire had burst, I
screamed and yelled at the walls until I realized they probably
couldn't hear my anymore. If the camera was any sign, they couldn't
see me either.

The second hour I tried to make my
fire on my own and failed. The third and fourth hours I went back
to trying to find some kind of hidden door. Other than the burnt
portions of the walls I found few anomalies in the
concrete.

The fifth hour was under way. I had
spent most of it curled in the corner feeling my sapped energy
finally taking its toll.

I must have dozed off without
realizing it because when I woke I didn't immediately realize where
I was. When the knowledge hit me I moaned and hit the wall. My
knuckles burned with the impact and I found every muscle in my body
beginning to burn with unimaginable pain.

It was like the time I had blacked out
in the Alliance hallway because of Joseph Carmichael. I was going
through hyperthermia again. I could feel it all twisting through my
body like a disease. I crawled to the center of the room and pushed
the charred pieces of table around until I found the remains of the
beacon that Jacob had given me. It was cracked in half with its
little mechanical circuit board hanging out pitifully.

I tried to push the little board back
in and push the halves together but the beacon didn't take to the
action of pushing it's broken parts back together and shattered
even more in my fingers. I dropped the thing and covered my face
with my hands, getting soot on my face. I didn't care. I screamed
and grabbed the nearest charred bit of table and threw it at the
wall where it exploded into a burst of blackened wood.

I curled up into the fetal position
and held my head in my hands.

I fell into a fitful sleep.

I woke up to my arms being pulled up.
I struggled for the first second before I realized what was
happening. I saw the Teleporter for a split moment and then I felt
Deconstitution and Reconstitution faster than ever
before.

My new surroundings were just as
depressing as the previous. Instead of four walls of concrete there
were three. But the fourth wasn't much better. It was a wall of
thick metal bars.

The man Teleported to the other side
of the bars and took up a position against the far wall. He watched
me with a keen eye.

The hallway which enclosed my new cell
went down a long ways to the left but turned a corner to the right.
My cell was one of many in the hall. I didn't see anyone else in
any of the other cells. I pushed myself to my feet and looked at my
surroundings.

There was a toilet open and for all to
see, a sink, a table and a thin mattress. The former three were all
made out of concrete. The mattress was enclosed in a concrete bed
frame which was more of a box than anything.

"Welcome to your new home." Ashwater
was now standing outside of the bars. His arms were crossed over
his chest and he stared at me hard. "Eugene Yoshida. Son of the
Chief Minister of Security in the Anyan's Alliance. Brother to the
most brutal member of the Military High Command. Clever, really.
Who would have expected the son of such a high ranking member of
the Anyan Corps to be here? You won't be going anywhere for quite a
while. This place is equipped to handle your Fire powers so don't
even think of trying to escape. It will be pointless." He snarled
out his last sentence.

I didn't even think of what I was
doing, but I slammed my body into the bars and tried to grab
Ashwater. "You mother..." I felt a searing electrical shock blast
through my body from the bars. I stumbled back and fell to the
ground.

Ashwater sniffed, unaffected and
turned away. He and the Teleporter walked down the hall and turned
the corner to the right.

"You can't keep me here!" I yelled
through bars of the cell. No one responded. The near-silent
whispers of the footsteps faded down the hallway and I was left
strikingly alone. The dead silence of the hall rang in my ears more
loudly than if someone was yelling at me.

I sank to the floor with my palms
pressing against the cold face of the door. I let my hands soak up
the coldness before I rested my over-heated forehead between my
fingers and breathed in and out to calm myself.

A sore on my arm throbbed with angry
beats and my fingers shook from the adrenaline coursing through my
veins.

I closed my eyes and tried to find
that little place in my mind where I knew my powers sat. I pushed
and pulled at my mind trying to find it. The knowledge, the skill
that I should have had, was somewhere in there.

My fists clenched, and my nails dug
into my palms, but the pain did little to coax the latent powers
from their hidden place in my mind and body.

I slammed my fists into the floor.
"No!"

CHAPTER 34

"For every action there is
an equal and opposite reaction." 
~ Newton's Third Law of Motion

More time passed with little to do,
and even less to see. The walls continued to be blank and the bars
were still electrified. Every so often I would pour water over my
hands and flick droplets at the bars, relishing in the noisy hiss
created by the contact. Eventually I hoped to find the bars turned
off, but so far it seemed that they were going to keep the bars
electrified. Was I really that dangerous, or were they just that
cruel?

I didn't have a good grasp of the time
passing by. My watch had been killed by the contact with the
electrical bars earlier. It was stuck on 10:43. I habitually
checked it even though I knew it was broken. I knew I probably
perceived time as passing slower than it really was because I had
nothing to do but think, but so much time had passed. I slept for a
little bit, but it didn't do anything to relieve the tiredness that
was weighing on my brain and body.

Ashwater had said that they had
already cracked the beacon signal. I had waited too long to contact
Jacob. I had failed not only him but Willow. Soon, she would be
infested with Isiro's soul. All that I had worked for was over now.
All that I had loved would be lost.

I couldn't see where I would go from
here. These Isiroans might kill me, or they might leave me to rot
in this mind numbing cell for the rest of my life. How long would I
live in a place like this without going completely
batty?

I curled up into a loose fetal
position on the lumpy mattress and stared at the sink across the
cell from me. The faucet dripped a steady tune into the bowl and
beckoned me to close my eyes and sleep again. I conceded and closed
my eyes but I did not sleep. Instead I felt in my mind for my
telepathic powers. I could feel the dormant telepathic link, stiff
and unused for too long.

I opened the link and reached out for
Willow's mind. It was nowhere to be found. Oddly enough, I could
sense the minds of others. This strange new sensation of sensing
the little mental signatures was new. Willow hadn’t said anything
to me about this before. Was it possible to search for a mind like
searching for something in Google?

I danced around the mind of the others
I could feel, not quite touching their minds but flirting with the
energy that their telepathic links gave off. I don't know why I had
never noticed this before. The more time I spent reaching out, the
more I began to actually visualize what I was feeling out
there.

The mental world that I "saw" was
purple. White lines drifted unhinged and touched with others only
briefly, creating bursts of light that faded like food coloring in
water. Unintelligible whispers tuned in and out, echoing eerily.
Telepathic signatures stood out like miniature suns. The white
lines came out of them like solar flares. In my limited exposure to
Kinetic powers I had never heard of anything like this before. To
actually "see" the psychic world that connected all Kinetics was
beyond anything I had ever even conceived. It must be an effect of
the EOS, right? It wasn't natural to be cut off from the powers, so
to do so must have just made me aware of what was already out
there. At least that’s what I could come up with anyway.

I played with the images in my mind
for an undeterminable amount of time until I heard something. I
pushed myself up into a seating position on the bed and the
imagined world of telepathic links flitted away.

Someone was singing far off down the
hall, an unrecognizable tune echoing off the pasty white walls. I
stood close to the bars and looked out at the hallway. I saw no
one, but the singing was getting closer. It was a woman from what I
could tell.

Finally I saw her. An elderly woman
walked down the hallway, running her hands across the walls as she
walked. Behind her the walls glowed with an unnatural light. The
walls behind her were cleaner than the walls in front of her. The
pitch of her voice rose higher and she passed by my cell. Her words
were in Spanish. Whatever her power was doing to the walls it set
off the electrical element to the bars. I felt the tingle of
electricity and backed up a few steps.