The Awakening (13 page)

“Look, I didn’t have a choice! I have to get to Solomon Cord!”

“So the ends justify the means, yeah?”

Colin said nothing. He knew that what he had done was wrong, but he also knew that Razor was right.

Colin had enjoyed it, and that scared him.

25

D
ANNY
C
OOPER STOOD IN THE EXAMINATION
room, stripped to the waist, as Rachel stuck dozens of small white plastic dots to his chest.

Rachel said, “Your muscles seem underdeveloped for a boy of your age. Do you exercise much?”

Danny ignored her. He had refused to speak since the conversation with his father.

“How’s your metabolism?” she asked. “Are you eating regularly?”

Not since I got here,
Danny thought to himself.

Rachel didn’t seem bothered that Danny was ignoring her. She checked some of the plastic dots, ticking them off on a list attached to her clipboard.

“OK, Danny. That machine over there scans these markers and logs their position. When you move, we can track the stress on your muscles. Unfortunately, the scanner can’t track enough markers for us to do your whole body in one go, so we’ll have to do your legs later. We should be able to match up the data easily enough.”

When Rachel turned to key information into her computer, Danny switched some of the markers around.

The woman didn’t seem to notice. “This is very similar to the system that movie people use when they want to do motion capture. You know what that is? They track an actor’s movements and afterward the computer can reproduce those movements exactly. OK…Now to start with, I just want you to walk around.”

Danny didn’t move.

Rachel sighed and took the electric shock device out of her pocket. “You want me to use this again?”

Go ahead,
Danny thought.
I hope it interferes with your instruments. I should be able to get out of here anyway. OK, so my powers aren’t exactly reliable, but I’m still the only one here who
has
any sort of powers. If I can move as fast as I did when that bus was coming for Susie, they’ll never be able to stop me.

But getting past the heavy door, and the two soldiers standing guard on either side of it, was going to be a problem. The door hadn’t been opened since shortly after his father had left.

Danny still couldn’t believe what Joseph had told him.
He had a vision of me fourteen years ago, and because of that he ruined my whole life.

Rachel was asking him something, but Danny wasn’t paying attention.

Then, he suddenly sensed that she was pushing the shocker toward the small of his back.

Danny spun around and knocked the device out of her hand.

Rachel stared at him. “How did…? My God!” She turned to one of the technicians. “Did you get that? Tell me you got that!”

“I got it! Correlating the data now!”

The technician’s screen cleared to show a series of dots. Rachel said to Danny, “Have a look at this!”

Curiosity got the better of Danny, and he followed her to the computer station.

The technician clicked on a button marked “Replay,” and Danny saw the dots blur for a second.

“Link the markers so we can see it more clearly,” Rachel said to him. “By the way, Danny, it makes no difference that you moved some of the markers. Nice try, though.”

On screen, the series of dots turned into a network of lines, roughly forming the shape of a man’s chest and arms. “That’s you standing still,” Rachel explained. “See how it swells and ebbs? That’s your chest as you breathe.”

As Danny watched, the figure on the screen was suddenly facing the other way, one of its arms outstretched.

Rachel asked, “What’s the time resolution?”

The technician switched to a different screen and flipped through page after page of numbers. “We’re getting one thousand and twenty-four readings a second. That’s optimal.”

“All right. Show me the sequence again, but this time, I want to see it played back in real time, not speeded up.”

“Rachel, that
was
real time. He really spun around that fast.”

“Good Lord…Replay at one-tenth speed.”

Even slowed down, the figure on screen spun around faster than the eye could track.

“Skip to just before the turn, then run it one frame a second,” Rachel said.

The technician tapped at the keyboard for a few seconds. “OK…”

On screen, the figure seemed to be completely still, then its muscles tensed and it turned around, lashing its hand out at the same time. The process took ten frames.

“Amazing! In real time, that’s less than a hundredth of a second,” Rachel said. “We need to do that again, see how his feet move. Danny, strip down to your shorts.”

For the first time in hours, Danny spoke. “No.”

“We’ve
never
had the chance to examine a superhuman before, Danny. This equipment wasn’t even invented ten years ago. We want to see everything that you can do.”

Again, Danny said, “No.”

“We have to know how fast you are.”

Danny held up his right hand and opened it. “Fast enough to pick this up without you even noticing I’d moved.” In his hand, he held Rachel’s shocking device.

He pressed it against her neck and pushed the button.

Rachel yelped and stumbled back.

“Hurts, doesn’t it?”

One of the soldiers at the door pulled out his gun and aimed at Danny…who was no longer there.

The soldier barely had time to say, “Where—?” before he too was shocked in the neck. Before the man could even react, Danny had shocked his companion, taken their keys and unlocked the door.

On the other side of the one-way glass, Victor Cross glanced at the device on his wrist. It looked like an ordinary wristwatch.

It wasn’t.

Danny ran through the dark mine shafts, easily dodging the many guards and workers, who seemed to be almost frozen in place.

He had no idea which way he was going, but he wasn’t bothered about that: he was moving so fast that he was sure he’d find the exit before anyone could catch him. The only problem was that the faster he moved, the darker the tunnels became.

In a small cavern, he stopped to watch two workers who were attempting to fix a leaking water pipe.

The men moved in a plodding slow motion, as did the spray of water. Danny saw one drop of water arc toward him so slowly that he was easily able to step aside and watch as it smoothly and silently splashed against the ground, raising a small cloud of dust.

It’s like I’ve altered my perception of time,
Danny said to himself.
This isn’t just me running faster; I’m
living
faster.

As an experiment, he picked up a fist-sized rock and let it drop from shoulder height. To his perception, the rock took over twenty seconds to hit the ground.

He picked up the rock again and threw it as hard as he could against the far wall; the rock seemed to move at what was, to him, a fairly normal speed, but when it hit the wall it shattered, silently, as though it had been a ball of dried mud.

At this speed, he realized, he couldn’t hear anything. The sound waves were too slow for his ears to register.

But the two workers
did
hear it. Danny watched, fascinated, as the men reacted to the sound; slowly, methodically, they turned toward where the rock had hit.

Amazing!
Danny thought.
I could do
anything!

He walked over to the nearest man, and stepped right in front of him.
Can he even
see
me?
Danny wondered.

From the way the man’s expression changed, the way his eyes widened before settling on him, it was clear that he could be seen if he stayed still long enough.

So I’m not invisible. Pity.

He left the cavern and returned to the maze of tunnels, running at what felt like a gentle pace, but still much faster than anyone could react.

He found himself back on the corridor that led to the examination room and saw that Façade was running—with glacial slowness—toward the room.

Danny zipped past him, turned left and found himself at the end of a very long, wide corridor that sloped upward. There were dusty tire tracks on the ground.

This has to be the way out
.

He raced up the corridor. It ended in a large cavern in which dozens of men, most of them armed, were unloading equipment from huge army trucks. At the far side of the cavern were two huge reinforced metal doors.

The doors were closed and clearly locked; three steel bars, each at least twenty centimeters thick, had been slid in place across them.

There’s got to be
another
way out.

He turned back and began to explore the mine.

Everywhere he went, he saw soldiers carrying equipment, standing on guard, escorting other people. All of them were standing still or frozen in midstride.

The light is definitely getting darker the faster I go…Strange.

Façade burst into the examination room, where he saw the two guards helping Rachel to her feet.

“What the hell happened here?”

“He just disappeared,” Rachel said. “His power…My God, I’ve never seen anything like it!”

“How long will it last?”

Rachel shrugged. “It’s impossible to say.”

“He could be a thousand miles away by now,” Façade said.

She shook her head. “No, the entrance is sealed. There’s no way out without a pass code.”

“Won’t the power-damper work wherever he is?” Façade asked.

“I don’t think we should take that chance; we can’t be certain that our machine will work as well as Ragnarök’s did. I say we seal off the unused tunnels and reduce the number of places for him to hide.”

A voice behind them said, “I say we let him go.”

Rachel and Façade turned to see Victor Cross and Joseph standing in the doorway. “Let him go,” Victor repeated. “If we keep him trapped here, he might damage something.”

“We need him, Victor,” Rachel said. “We didn’t get enough data to properly calibrate the power-damper!”

“We
don’t
need him,” Victor said. “We have the girl. She’s a superhuman, so she’s viable. Plus she’s a lot more stable than Danny is. Rachel, tell the guards to open the main door.”

Rachel unclipped her communicator from her belt, hit the activation button and began to speak into it.

The communicator disappeared.

Rachel stared at her empty hand. “What—?” She turned to Victor. “Did you see that?”

Victor was staring over Rachel’s shoulder.

She turned to see Danny Cooper standing in the doorway. In one hand, he had Rachel’s communicator. In the other, he was holding one of the guards’ guns.

26

T
HERE IS NO WAY OUT OF THIS
, R
ENATA
said to herself.

She was being kept in a large, empty room, somewhere on one of the mine’s upper levels.

The guard at the door had his gun trained on her at all times.

Renata was sitting on an uncomfortable metal chair, the only thing in the room. They’d tried to handcuff her three times, and each time she’d snapped through the cuffs.

“Can I get something to eat?” she asked.

“No.”

“Please?”

“I said no.”

From far below, Renata could hear a siren. “What’s that?”

Without taking his eyes off her, the guard spoke into his walkie-talkie. “This is Escher on level one. What’s going on?”

A voice crackled in reply: “Maintain your position, Escher. We’ve had a security breach. We’re handling it.”

“Roger.”

“Look, you can’t just let me
starve
to death!” Renata tried again.

“That’s not up to me.”

“Then at least tell me what’s going on here.”

“No. Now shut up.”

“You don’t know, do you?” She risked a smile. “You have no idea who I am and what I can do!”

“I know you can turn yourself into some weird hard substance and that you’re very strong. I also know that your strength isn’t any good to you right now, because I could shoot you down before you got anywhere near me.”

“But—”

He interrupted her. “And I know that when you’re invulnerable you can’t move. So whichever way you look at it, you’re trapped here. You might as well get used to the idea.”

The guard’s walkie-talkie crackled again. “Escher? This is Davison. What’s your status?”

“No change, sir.”

“Good. We have a problem here. Seems the kid has got Cross and the others hostage. You sit tight until you’re called, got that?”

“Sir.”

Renata said, “Looks like you’re stuck here too. So who’s the boy?”

“I don’t know. And you don’t need to know.”

“Are they, like,
paying
you for this? I mean, I know that this isn’t a military operation, despite what it looks like. So they’re paying you, right? I hope it’s worth it. I hope that you can sleep at night, knowing that you’re working for the bad guys.”

“What makes you think that we’re the bad guys? All we’ve done is taken a few civilians in for questioning. That’s acceptable, when you consider that the security of the world is at stake.”

“And is it?”

“From what I’m told, yes.”

“You believe them? Then you’re a fool. The good guys don’t take innocent people hostage. The good guys don’t have some sort of doomsday machine in the basement.”

The guard laughed. “That’s not a doomsday machine, kid. That’s salvation.”

She smiled. “Oh, sure.”

At least he’s talkative. If I can get him to relax, to lower his gun a little, then I might have a chance.

She’d calculated that she would need about a second. Any less than that and the guard would have enough time to pull the trigger.

Renata was willing to wait, even if it took hours.

After ten years, what difference would another couple of hours make?