Kinetics: In Search of Willow (48 page)

She passed on by and disappeared down
the hall. Her voice faded and I was alone again.

I didn't return to my meditations in
the odd world of Kinetic psyches but instead began pacing. There
had to be some way out of this place. Eventually they'd have to
turn off the bars. They couldn't keep me locked down
forever.

More time passed and my stomach, which
had been rumbling protestations to the abuse I'd been putting my
body through, started to growl in hunger. I hadn't eaten anything
since dinner at the Ashwater's before they had captured me. How
many hours had it really been?

I waited longer, unable to feed
myself. I finally tested the water in the tap and found it to taste
okay. I drank my fill of water, and finally fell into a dreamless
sleep.

***

When I woke, I was confused. I looked
at my watch again, but it still said 10:43. I tried to stand, but
my legs turned to jelly under me and I fell to the concrete floor
in a heap. I laid still and breathed in and out, trying to regain
my bearings. The cell wobbled around me and I clung to the floor
for dear life.

My water filled stomach flipped
uncomfortably and nausea set in. I groaned and pulled myself back
up onto the mattress. Maybe drinking a ton of water wasn't such a
good idea. Good thing there was a toilet in here. Otherwise, I'd
really be in trouble.

I had just gotten done relieving
myself when I heard the elderly lady from earlier singing again as
she came down the hall. I zipped up and stumbled to the middle of
the cell just as she turned the corner and came to stand in front
of the bars.

"
Comida." 
She pushed a tray
through a thin, but wide gap in the bars near the floor. Then she
left.

I kneeled down next to the tray and
examined what had been brought. A bowl of thick beef stew and a
bread roll. There were no utensils. I sighed in frustration, but
pulled the tray up and sat on the mattress and sipped from the edge
of the bowl. I used the bread roll to scour the rest of the stew
from the bottom of the bowl. I didn't know how wise it was to trust
the food from the Isiroans, but I was hungry enough to not
care.

I was so involved in eating that I
didn't notice that I had gained a visitor.

"Eugene."

I turned around so fast that my neck
creaked in protest.

"Harry?"

I stood up in the middle
of the room and eyed my former friend. "What are you…?" I stopped.
He was one of them! I was at the bars before I realized what I was
doing and grabbed his shirt collar through the bars. I got a nasty
shock from the bars and was thrown to the ground.

"This is your fault!" I
shouted through my pain.

He stepped out of out of my reach and
frowned back at me. "Nice to see you, too."

I slammed my fists on the ground and
then turned away from him. "What are you doing here?" I couldn't
stop the weariness from peppering my tone.

"I escaped your brother and I've come
to join my friends here."

"Your friends?"

He smiled grimly. "You've been living
with them."

Jack and Roy.

Harry was the third member of Jack's
group of friends. I had heard enough third party stuff about him
but it had never really clicked that it was Harry. I hadn't seen it
at all and the knowledge slapped me in the face.

This explained why Jack
was so perceptive about me and probably why Roy was so hostile.
Harry must have been sharing information. This explained why he
never seemed surprised by anything about me. He knew things he
shouldn't have known.

I wanted to run but the walls around
me mocked the very idea. I was trapped, always trapped.

"I was almost surprised
when they told me you were here," he smiled. "I really didn't
expect you to get this far."

"I'm not stupid." I
frowned at him, turning around to add a glare.

"I never said you were."
Harry stepped a few more feet back and leaned into the wall. He
crossed his arms over his chest and watched me with his eyes
half-lidded.

"Why are you here?" I asked in a low
voice.

"I wanted to see how you
were. I’m sorry about what happened, Eugene. I promise that my
intentions were never to harm you or Willow. I wasn't sure what was
going to happen when I returned, but it seems that you've outed
yourself to the whole place. Saves me the trouble, I suppose." He
grinned, but his eyes were sad.

I turned away again and stared at the
wall opposite the bars, opposite Harry. "You won't win; evil like
this can't go on." I said to the wall.

"This is not some childish
battle between good and evil, Eugene. I thought you of all people
would realize that." His voice was angry.

"Realize what? Realize
that enslavement of Kinetics is not a bad thing? That taking over
our planet is just another way of saying 'oh, hey, let's be
friends'? Bull. "

"One of these days, Eugene, you're
going to realize that the world is not so black and white." I heard
him move away from the wall and walk away. I slipped to my knees
onto the floor and buried my head in my hands. It took all my will
to not try and rip my hair from the roots.

CHAPTER 35

"We may be brothers and
sisters in the eyes of God, but we are not brothers and sisters in
the eyes of Man. Brotherhood requires too much of him, for it
requires him to trust.
" ~ Reginald Cook.
Kinetic who attempted to take control of the Alliance.
1983.

The next time the old lady came by
with food. I didn't eat. I ignored the tray. The smell of the food
made my stomach roil, and I felt that if I ate anything I would
just hurl it up. I curled up in a tight ball and for the first time
in my life truly wished I could use my powers. I strained my mind
and my body while curled up in that ball, but no flame manifested.
I didn't understand how it was that my powers came to life only
when my mind was under attack.

I meditated on the psychic world
trying to seek out a mind that I could try and attack to hopefully
receive an attack back from, but my search was fruitless. It seemed
the more I tried to grasp onto my newfound vision of the Kinetic
psyche, the more it faded and blackened. I was losing even
that.

My sense of time was gone completely.
Hours, days, I couldn't tell the difference even if I wanted to.
Time was now a meaningless dimension. I slipped in and out of
sleep, drifting to the point where, at times, I couldn't tell the
difference between reality and dream. I saw things and people, the
world shuddered and shifted with sounds, and my body seemed to take
on the consistency of Jell-O. I thought then that I could see
through my hands as they turned into pure fire, but I never felt a
burn.

Thoughts of Willow twisted
sinuously through my weird visions, and I dreamed that she was
standing outside my cell speaking comforting words. But I knew
that, of all things, was a dream. Willow was lost to me. Willow was
becoming one of 
them.
 She was never going to be
the same. She was never going to know. Never going to
see.

I mourned her loss. She was as good as
dead now. Would she survive the process of taking on
Isiro?

Eugene

Where was the line between the
two?

Eugene… wake up

Where would her fiery personality go?
Surely an old mind like Isiro's wouldn't leave anything
behind.

EUGENE

I shot up out of my dazed dream state
and gasped as if I had been underwater. Sweat poured down my face
and my shirt was soaked.

I blinked, clearing the blur that made
my vision wobble.

"Jacob," I breathed.

My brother stood triumphantly outside
the bars of my cell, grinning like a man who had just conquered the
world.

"Jacob, you came!" I stumbled off the
bed and staggered toward the bars. I had the foresight, even
through my fevered brain, not to touch the bars again.

"I have to thank you, Eugene. This
couldn't have happened better." He nodded in approval.

"What do you mean?" I
grinned.

"This place is the perfect spot to
bring in our troops. I wasn't sure if they were going to bring you
here, or worse, to an open cell."

I felt my grin falter.
"What?"

"It seems that you've either royally
pissed them off, or you actually worry them. I think I'm quite
proud of you, little brother." He laughed. "I'm sorry that I had to
give you a bad beacon. We were presented with an opportunity
through you to get us an access into this place. No one in his
right mind would dare send any of our operatives into this place.
It's too heavily guarded, too much of a risk to send in valuable
troops. You have done a great service to the Alliance by doing this
Eugene, even if you didn't realize it."

"I don't understand." I
whispered.

Jacob smiled indulgently. "You've been
the unwitting martyr to the Alliance cause, my brother. I gave you
a bad beacon on purpose. The code for that has been broken by the
Legion for a good five years now. They could tell it was one of
ours the moment you set it off. All it took was a day or so and I
knew they would have you in a cell of some kind while they tried to
figure out what to do with you. We've used you as a focal point for
teleportation."

"We…?" It was then that I noticed the
others in the hallway next to my brother. They wore the uniforms of
the Alliance.

I felt my blood run cold.
Jacob hadn't cared a whit about Willow. What was I thinking? Why
would anyone believe that a fifteen-year-old boy could do anything
to a well-established organization like the Isiroan
Legion?

My brother had used me. I was his
Trojan horse. The Laramie base was his Troy.

"Why? When…" It was the
only thing that I could think of to say at this point.

"Unfortunately, Eugene,
this is war. Sacrifices must be made." Jacob waved to one of his
men and he nodded curtly before teleporting away.

All of a sudden more and more troops
were being teleported in. They filled the hallway and spread out
like a wave in either direction.

Wait. Something Jacob had said
earlier.

"How many days? How many days has it
been since the beacon?"

Jacob paused in the middle of
direction some of his troops, "About 46 hours. Not long.
"

Two days. Willow couldn't have bonded
yet. There was still time.

Jacob began to leave… without
me.

"You can't leave me here! I've got to
at least try to save Willow!"

"Don't worry. You should be quite safe
down here. You'll be out of the way of any major fighting. I'll be
sure to come get you when we've taken the base. As for Willow,
she's a lost cause, Eugene. By now the bonding has already begun.
It began well over a week ago, about the time you got
here."

"That's impossible. The
transfer…"

"Is the last step in the
bonding 
process
. At this point I would say that she's only a shell of her
former self. She's a vessel, and that's all."

"No." I moaned. "You said…"

"I lied."

Jacob smirked and jerked his head at
the last of his troops. They filtered away as Jacob lingered only a
few moments more.

"I'm truly sorry, Eugene. But we've
all had to make sacrifices in this war. It will be over
soon."

And then he was gone.

CHAPTER 36