The Tower
Authors: Adrian Howell
Adrian Howell’s PSIONIC
Book Two
The Tower
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: The Terms of Service
Chapter 3: A Question of Identity
Chapter 5: The Greatest Gathering
Chapter 8: Past, Present and Personal
Chapter 10: A Fairytale Mission
Chapter 13: The Closet Monster Revealed
Chapter 14: The Shattered Room
Chapter 15: A Guardian’s Choice
Chapter 17: A Force to be Reckoned With
Introduction
“A lot of things are going to change in your life.”
That’s what my father told me just hours before he and my mother were killed.
And everything changed.
My name is Adrian Howell, and before we go any further, I should warn you that the book you have in your hands is not the first I have written, but continues from where I left off in the last one. Telling that story once was enough for me, so I will not offer a detailed summary. I will include some remedial explanation here and there, but even so, if you have not read the first book, you may be somewhat lost in this one.
However, I am not going to suggest that you go back and read the first book. In fact, I’m not even going to suggest you continue reading this book. While I stand by my belief that knowing something, even something horrible, is always better than not knowing, I would never suggest that knowledge is bliss.
Mine is not a story of heroism or noble sacrifice. It is not a fantasy story or a fairytale. It is about what really happened to real people. It is about how they were hurt and how they died. It is about the things I wish had never happened, and about things that, every time I wake up in the dead of night, trying not to scream, I desperately wish I could forget.
So unless you can stomach the harsher realities of life, you may want to go find a different book. Something about pretty magical unicorns, perhaps.
Chapter 1: The Terms of Service
The white concrete high-rise faced west, so June’s early morning sunlight didn’t shine down into the entrance ramp of the building’s basement parking lot. The inside of the basement was illuminated by neat rows of florescent tubes hanging from the ceiling. Through the windows of the psychedelically patterned bright yellow minibus I had arrived on, I could see that most of the parking spaces were empty.
Getting out of my seat and stretching my legs in the aisle, I looked down at the pale-skinned girl curled up on one of the cushioned seats. She was fast asleep with her long walnut-brown hair hiding most of her face, her arms wrapped firmly around a giant fluffy white unicorn doll. I didn’t know the unicorn’s name, but the girl was Alia Gifford. She was supposedly eight years old, could speak telepathically into my mind, and was one of the few reasons, aside from sheer dumb luck, that I was still alive.
“Ali, wake up,” I said, shaking her shoulders. “We’re here.”
Alia opened her eyes just a little and said groggily into my head,
“Addy? Where’s Cindy?”
“She’s helping unload the bus. Come on, get up.”
We had been on the road for a day and a night. Alia and I had slept through much of the previous morning, but in the afternoon I had managed to fill Cindy in on how we had spent the last four months trapped underground at the Psionic Research Center.
Our minibus had made a brief stop at a mall to buy food and clothes that day, but Alia and I had to stay in the bus along with the other two escapees as the Guardians did our shopping. Our research-center-issue white shirts and pants were just a little too conspicuous to be seen outside in. Alia’s shirt had bloodstains down the front, and Cindy hadn’t brought anything for us to change into. I learned that she and Mark had lost everything the night Alia and I were captured by the Wolves.
Everything.
By the time I had told the Wolf interrogator Mark’s home address, Cindy and Mark were long gone, headed for the Guardians to beg for their help in rescuing us.
Although the agreement Cynthia Gifford had made with the Guardian leader, Mr. Travis Baker, was that she would rejoin the Guardians only if both Alia and I could be successfully rescued from the Psionic Research Center, Cindy had been living with the Guardians as a de facto member for nearly four months now.
“The Guardians are very different from how I remember them,” Cindy told me yesterday while we were waiting in the mall’s parking lot for Mr. Baker and his team to do our shopping.
Many years ago, when Cindy had been a Guardian herself, they were apparently much more militaristic in nature. Back then, the Guardians had a queen. She was a master controller named Diana Granados, and she could turn even her worst enemies into utterly faithful followers. Mind-slaves. Master controllers, being the only psionics who had long-term influence over their subjects’ loyalties, were always the center of large psionic factions like the Guardians.
This all happened before I was born, but Queen Diana Granados had become increasingly aggressive in her tactics, driving the Guardians into an escalating conflict with their biggest rival faction, the Angels. To stave off a full blown war, Cindy’s husband, Eric, had taken matters into his own hands and assassinated the queen. (Both Cindy and Eric had, at one time, been converted by Diana, but conversion can wear off over the years, and both had been trusted enough by the queen not to receive another dose of her psionic control.) Eric was hunted down and killed for his treachery. Cindy fled the Guardians and went into hiding.
With Diana Granados’s death, the effects of her psionic conversions soon wore away. The Guardians became disorganized, breaking up into many smaller (and consequently weaker) factions, each with their own leaders. The Angels, remaining far more unified under their own master controller, Queen Larissa Divine, were pressing their advantage.
“Nevertheless, we are better off now,” Mr. Baker had told me over dinner in the minibus last night. “Admittedly, it’s not easy leading without psionic control, but it is fairer. We may be losing ground to the Angels, but the Guardians who fight for us today do so by choice. And now that Cindy is with us, we may yet have a chance to even the balance some.”
The Guardians under Mr. Baker had risked a lot to rescue Alia and me. If the prize had not been so great, they may never have attempted it. But earning the loyalty of Cynthia Gifford, according to Mr. Baker, was a huge step forward in the rebuilding of the Guardian faction. Cindy was a psionic hider, which meant she could create a “hiding bubble” that concealed signs of power from other psionics. Hiding was not a particularly rare psionic ability, but Cindy was unique in that, while most hiders could only hide their own power or, at best, cover a single house, Cindy could hide several city blocks. Once inside her hiding bubble, psionics could not be located by potential aggressors.
“Now that you and Alia are safe and sound,” Mr. Baker had said to me, “Cindy will help us have such a gathering as never before seen in psionic history.”
Even in large psionic factions like the Angels and the Guardians, the members typically lived in small groups scattered across the country. Rarely did very many psionics live in a single location. This was mainly to better conceal the existence of psionics in an increasingly technologically complex world. But it was also to keep a net cast across the country that could quickly respond to a variety of threats, including emerging “wild-borns.”
A wild-born is a psionic who has no psionic relatives. Though only about as common as being hit by lightening, any normal person could gain psionic powers at any time. This was because while psionic powers did run in families, there were many unknown dormant psionic bloodlines that might suddenly become active through the right combination of parents. And whenever a wild-born was discovered, there was a mad rush between competing psionic factions to capture him and force him to join their ranks.
I had been a wild-born psionic, gaining my telekinetic power over the summer of last year. When I did, the Angels sent a mind controller who could cause uncontrollable rage, called a berserker, to capture and deliver me to their queen. The berserker died at the hands of a Guardian soldier named Ralph P. Henderson, but Ralph had also come to kidnap me. I fled, and for a time found sanctuary in Cindy’s home, hoping to stay clear of psionic factions and their conflict. As it turned out, it made little difference: my parents were still killed by the berserker while my sister, Cat, was enslaved by the Angels, and, upon my rescue from the Psionic Research Center just twenty-four hours ago, I ended up agreeing to join the Guardians.
Back when Queen Granados was still in charge, the Guardians had matched the Angels in strength. But now the various Guardian breakaway factions were being destroyed hamlet by hamlet. Mr. Baker’s plan was to create a Guardian city entirely covered by Cindy’s hiding bubble.
“Gathering our forces in one location would weaken us in the outer territories, but overall we would be better protected and, with any luck, we may yet find a way to carry on,” explained Mr. Baker.
I liked Mr. Baker. Up until then, my only direct experience with the Guardians was with Ralph. (I never really saw Cindy as a Guardian.) I liked Ralph as much as a good kick in the head. True enough, Ralph had saved me from the berserker, and later led the attack that rescued Alia and me from the Psionic Research Center. But he had also tried to kill me twice. He knowingly let my sister be taken by the Angels. He was a ruthless killer who had (for reasons I didn’t understand) once tried to goad me into murdering him. When he saved my life, he certainly didn’t do it out of the goodness of his pathetic excuse for a heart. I had assumed that all of the Guardians were like Ralph, and when, back in January, Cindy told me of her own experiences as a Guardian under Diana Granados’s rule, her story had solidified my image of the faction as a power-hungry gang of slave drivers.
But meeting Mr. Baker and others who risked their lives to rescue us, as well as hearing from Cindy how the Guardians had changed, softened my image of them enough that I found myself willing to join them. Ralph ignored Alia and me throughout the entire bus ride, which suited me just fine.
“This,” announced Mr. Baker as the minibus finally came to a full stop in the basement parking lot of the large concrete condominium, “is New Haven, the psionic stronghold we are about to create.”
The building was forty stories high, relatively new, and situated near the edge of a medium-size city from where we could see a distant mountain range in the eastern horizon.