Thank you all so much for the view count! It passed 230! For any interested, I imagine Daniel's white blades to look like angel blades from Supernatural.
"So, you can create...crystals?" I ask Cassie after a chess move.
She makes her move and responds, "Yeah, but that's only one part of my power."
"What do you mean?" I ask, thinking about my next move.
She pulls up her left sleeve. Between her elbow and her shoulder, there's a tight black elastic band around her arm maybe three inches long. There are slight bumps around the middle. She pulls the elastic band off her arm and lays it flat on the table. In pocket style openings with a circle of elastic around each leaving a couple centimeters-wide opening, there are three or four curved flat discs of various color. I recognize the whitish-pink crystal.
"I create what I touch," She explains, pulling a shiny silver disc from it's elastic pocket. She holds it in her right palm and concentrates. A silver glow comes from her left palm and the silver light collects into a ball above her palm. It reminds me of when I make balls of electricity.
The glow fades and a perfectly smooth silver ball the size of my fist drops into her palm. She tosses it to me and I catch it. I'm not expecting what happens next. Sparks erupt from my skin and dance around the ball. I drop it in my lap.
"That's never happened before," Cassie says, craning her neck to look at the ball. I make a sudden realization. "This metal is from Lorien?"
She makes a surprised sound. "How'd you know?"
"My knives do the same," I say. I put the ball on the couch and crouch next to the pile of Mareese and I's stuff. Cassie turns in her seat to look. I pull my two foot-long white blades out of his laptop bag where they've been and hold them up. Blue sparks travel up to the tip.
"They're all from Lorien," Cassie says, looking back at the table where her elastic band lies. "This whole thing was in my chest."
"Woah," I say out loud. "This means the Elders knew what our legacies would be."
"Well, yeah," Cassie says. "Didn't your knives prove that?"
"I thought they were in my chest because I was a synergist."
"Synergist?" Cassie asks. The chess game lays forgotten on the table.
"My parents both had elecomun. That guaranteed that I would get it."
"Huh," Cassie says. "Do you know what everything in your chest does?"
I think back to the few times Mareese and I opened my chest, the short glances I got inside. "Only a couple items," I say. "My daggers. A red crystal." My inheritance is comprised of about a dozen items.
Cassie gets an excited look on her face. "My Cepan told me that the red crystal could be used to talk with the other garde. I have the macrocosm-the receiving half-in my chest at the penthouse!"
"That's awesome!" I respond. Does this mean we'll be able to talk to the other garde when we get to Chicago? "Wait-what do you mean, penthouse?"
She grins at me and leans back against the side of the RV, pulling her finger across her lips. Even as I get the message, I'm struck by how pretty she is with her smile. I grin back.
We play chess a couple more times on the journey. Once we're what Mareese and Sandor deem a far enough distance away from Pasadena, we park the RV at night and all sleep. It only takes two or three days to reach Chicago, but it seems like so much longer.
I looked at the GPS and looked up the end location-a skyscraper called the John Hancock center. When we arrive in Chicago at late evening and park in the underground garage of the John Hancock building, Mareese stops and I stop next to him as Sandor and Cassie approach the elevator. Sandor looks back. "Is there a problem?"
"This is your home?" Mareese asks incredulously.
"Uh, yeah," Sandor says. "What did you think? I put it in the GPS."
"I thought it was a general location in Chicago," Mareese says. "I thought you'd have a hole in the wall someplace normal around here. Not one of the tallest buildings in the United States."
"My garde and I were here for five years without any mogadorians catching our scent." Sandor responds. "It's safe. It's better than safe."
Sandor's words intrigue me, but I agree with Mareese. The John Hancock center is way too exposed, too known. We wouldn't be able to escape covertly if Mogadorians attacked.
Cassie beckons me forward. It tugs on my mind, but I resist, my eyes on Mareese. Grudgingly, Mareese walks towards the elevator. I heft my chest onto my shoulder with one arm and lug everything else of ours on my arm behind my back.
The elevator starts to rise and I raise my eyebrow as the number on the small screen goes from the 20s to the 30s to the 40s all the way up to 99. Mareese' mouth hangs slightly open and Sandor slaps him on the back as the doors open. "Welcome to the penthouse," Sandor says, opening his arms theatrically before walking elsewhere.
Mareese steps off the elevator and steps to the side, letting us off. He looks around the penthouse, the flabbergasted expression still on his face. All my attention, however, is on the view from the floor-to-ceiling windows.
I put down my things and approach the windows, looking out. The sun is setting on the horizon. Pink and orange reflect off Lake Michigan, and it seems like the whole of Chicago is spread out below us in the miniature grid of buildings and streets. I imagine my expression must look similar to Mareese' right now. It's how I feel.
Cassie stands next to me. If not for this view, I'd be distracted by her closeness. "It's beautiful, isn't it?"
I nod without looking away.
She's silent, but I can tell she's preparing to talk in her head. I wait. "My Cepan would take pictures of the sunset, wherever we went. Every day. She had a picture book of them all."
She falls silent, and I glance at her for a second. I see her eye welling up, but she blinks and it's gone. She looks down at Chicago.
It's at that moment that I realize I probably really need a shower. Sandor gives me a towel, and I spend almost an hour stretched out in there, letting the steaming water rain in streams down my face and my chest. It's so refreshing after days in the same clothes. At one point, my eyes fall close, and I start awake after seemingly a blink but what was probably five minutes. I know I have to get out now before I fall asleep for good, so I pull myself up slowly and turn off the shower.
Sandor points me to a room with an actual bed to sleep in, and after eating some frozen pizza he heats up, I collapse in bed, my suitcase and chest on the floor in the same room, and immediately fall into sleep after pulling the blankets over me.
When I wake up, I pull on clean clothes and brush my teeth in the bathroom at the end of the hall before walking out into the living room/kitchen area. Now looking around the penthouse, it's clear to me that Sandor's extravagant tastes extend beyond the RV.
After a quick breakfast, Sandor invites me into a place he calls the Lecture Hall. Cassie and Mareese stand near the door, watching me. Sandor sits behind a control panel and presses a couple buttons. "Feel free to destroy them," He calls to me, grinning. I'm not sure what he is talking about until panels open on the wall and half a dozen basketball-sized and shaped robots fly out, hovering in the air. They zip towards me quickly.
I dive and roll under them, but I've underestimated the technology. They turn around, barely losing momentum, and come at me again. I immediately realize I'm not going to be able to run away. I don't see any sharp protrusions on the robots, so I should be able to bat it away, but I realize too late that they wouldn't be dive-bombing me if they didn't have a way of harming me. I'm already swinging at it.
The robot extends a sparking stick out of its midsection as my fist swings towards it and it sends voltage up my arm as my fist connects. Sandor laughs unabashedly, thinking it affected me, and I grin.
I grab the robot with both hands. It keeps sparking me, but all it does is give me more power. I throw it at the floor and it smashes apart. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Sandor with his mouth open, staring at me. I swing around and reach both hands upward towards the robots hovering above me. They're powered by electric batteries, and I pull all of the electricity out of them. They drop and make hollow clunking noises when they hit the floor. I pull the electricity into my body.
Cassie steps in, holding a hand out to Sandor. He raises his up slowly and wheels away from the control panel. "My turn," She says, metal growing from her hand. It becomes a smooth staff around five feet long. She chuckles at the look on my face and walks towards me, spinning the staff with ease. I don't move quick enough and she wacks my knee, sending me to the floor.
I fall forward and she grabs my shoulder, tossing me onto my back. She straddles my chest, keeping me from getting up. I squirm my legs, but it's obvious she's stronger than me. And I thought I was so strong. She playfully pinches my cheek and wiggles it.
I phase and she falls through me, smacking her shoulder on the metal floor. It takes me a couple seconds to get up and she's already whizzing the metal staff at me. I grab it, wincing at the pain in my palms. It conducts my electricity, just like I thought it would. It's the metal from Lorien.
She yelps and lets go. I get a better grip and swing the staff at her. She rolls backwards and stands up. I toss the staff away, running at her. She falls onto her back as I approach and plants her foot on my stomach as I come closer. She grabs my shoulders and yanks them down and past her head, at the same time moving my lower body up and over. She rolls with it and lands on my body. The end result is me on my back again and her straddling my stomach. She laughs, tossing her hair back. "You're not very good at this, are you?" She asks.
"I don't want to hurt you," I retort, although with the experience of her fighting I have now, I'm now sure I could defeat her even if I wanted to.
"Don't worry, you won't," She responds, standing up.
We open her chest the first day after training and she gets a drawstring of glass marbles from it. She tosses the marbles in the air and they spin around before coming together into a large globe of Earth. There are two glowing blue dots on it. One in Chicago and one in South America. "Are those dots us?" I ask, walking around it.
She doesn't look away from it. "I'd guess so, but there are only two there. That doesn't make sense. There are two of us in Chicago, so why is there only one dot?"
Neither of us knows, and neither do Mareese or Sandor.
We train against each other every day. She shows me the book she was reading. She explained it, but I think it's one of those books you have to read to understand because anything else wouldn't give it justice. I honestly don't remember exactly what she said about it. Some hobbits and a wizard, Gandalf, trying to find some jewelry or something. I'm not much for reading.
When I get bored, I do multiplication with many digit numbers or long divisions with big numbers on paper. The order and repetition of it calms me. I tried to show Cassie, but she didn't really get it. It makes sense, she was never taught this stuff. All combat training for her.
I hold the red crystal in my fist and speak, and it comes back through the globe of earth from her chest. No other voices come through, though. We're trying it everyday. The dots are different every time we look at the globe, the only constant being the Chicago dot.
When the sun is high in the sky, warming me and the ground even with the cold spray of Lake Michigan, I walk around. The skyscrapers are overwhelming, and I spend most of my time gawking up at them. Mareese never took me to a big city before. I buy some food from vendors. It's the first time I've had a hot dog with more than ketchup and mustard. It's an overload of flavor and makes me want to throw up. The first time I had it, Cassie was with me, and we spent the next 10 minutes on a bench, me bent over retching, her laughing her ass off and patting me on the back.
Most times, Cassie comes with me on my adventures in Chicago. We went to the Willis Tower skydeck and took a picture together on the glass rooms. I held her hand while we were on it-which she practically broke with how much she squeezed it. She didn't let go of my hand after we left the glass room. It made me blush, and she laughed. We also took a picture on the wall with the mural of Chicago's cityline. We acted like we were smashing buildings in the mural.
Mareese makes us stop going out after the first two weeks, telling us the mogs will be looking for us everywhere. It makes me feel guilty and stupid for not thinking. He's right. We take to watching TV shows and playing video games to pass the time when we're not training, eating, or trying to communicate with the other garde. Sandor makes an occasional appearance, but I think he spends most of his time looking for leads on his garde. He told me that his garde was Number Nine. Lucky him, except for the whole getting kidnapped and all.
Almost three weeks have passed since we first came to the penthouse when something finally happens. We hear someone through the macrocosm.
It was a regular day. I had gotten up, eaten, spent an hour or two sparring with Cassie, and then we were messing with the macrocosm. When I hold the crystal and speak, it comes through the globe of earth on a delay, so I messed around-made funny noises, that kind of thing. I had lowered the crystal from my mouth after my usual minutes of that, grinned at Cassie, and then the voice came through.
"Adalina, despierta! Despierta, por favor! Adelina!"
I look over at Cassie, mouth open. She has hers open too. After a second I say into the red crystal, "Hello?"
Sam zips us down a tiny dirt road. The globe continues to whir in my face. The tiny pulsing light continues to try to tell us something. Sam pulls off the road and kills the engine and lights. He turns around in his seat to face the globe. "So, I'm thinking it's you guys," he says. "Other numbers. And those numbers are in Spain and Chicago."
"We have no way of knowing that," Six says.
"Seriously, think about it." Sam responds. "If the Elders were going to give you all this stuff in your chest, then they'd give you something to communicate with each other. Right? Maybe that dot in Spain is a number that needs our help."
"Or maybe one of the others is being tortured and they're being forced to make contact and it's a trap," Six says.
I'm about to agree when the edges of Earth grow fuzzy and then the globe vibrates with a female voice that says, "Adalina, despierta! Despierta, por favor! Adelina!"
Just a second after the voice ends, the globe vibrates with a confused male voice. "Hello?"
The globe suddenly shrinks, re-forms into the seven orbs and returns to normal.
"Woah, woah, woah! What just happened?" I ask.
"I'd say the signal has been cut," says Sam.
"Who were those people? And who's Adelina?" Six asks.
The globe suddenly shrinks back into the marbles and fall to the floor. Cassie catches them and tosses them back into the air, but they don't form Earth again, just the solar system of Lorien.
Sandor runs into the room while we're still blinking, trying to figure out what happened. "I think I know where Nine is," he says.
Cassie tosses the marbles in the bag and back into her chest. "You don't sound very excited," she says.
"The bad news is, he's a prisoner in a mogadorian base." Sandor sits on the couch and rubs his hand over his face, tugging slightly on his beard.
"Where is the base?" Mareese asks.
"Inside a mountain in West Virginia," Sandor sighs. "But an attack would be suicide. The schematics I have of the base show that the cells are way deep down."
"How did you get schematics?" Mareese asks.
"I hacked into their systems," Sandor responds. "I have a computer dedicated solely to scrambling my location all over the globe. We're safe here, but they'll probably find the hack and kick me out within a couple hours. I wasn't going to risk sending any information back to my computer here, so…" He holds up several printed photos of the monitor taken by a cell phone. On it are schematics of the base.
"But you said an attack would be suicide," Cassie says. "What good do the schematics do us, then?"
I speak up, an idea forming in my mind. "Do you know where the cells are located specifically, from straight down aboveground?"
I can see Sandor realizing what I'm thinking of. "Yes, but you'd have to phase down in a straight line. You could end up going down to the Earth's core if you miss."
I turn to Cassie. "You can fly, right? So I phase us both aboveground, we fall down, if we go past the depth the cells are supposed to be, you can fly us back up?"
"I don't know if that would even work while you were phasing, though," She cautions, glancing at Sandor and Mareese.
"Let's test it right now." I touch her wrist and phase us. She hovers a foot or two off the ground, not losing contact with me. I let go and she shivers. "That's a weird feeling. Seems like it works, though."
"Well, alright," Sandor says, a slightly crazy grin spreading across his face. "Looks like we're going to West Virginia."
