Chapter 14

Juliet watched Shawn stare at her as if she were some sort of monster and then felt the very strange sensation of being constricted by telekeneisis. The men in white robes all around her were frightening to say the least, but nothing disturbed her more than Shawn as he walked away without so much as glancing back at her.

"What did you do to him?!" she cried, glaring at the man she presumed to be the commander. He was the one barking orders, but he didn't say a word to her directly. When he finally looked in her direction, though, she instantly regretted it. Her vision went dark and suddenly she was asleep, barely conscious of anything...

She began to slowly wake up and she squinted her tired eyes as they looked around their new surroundings. She was sitting on a hard mattress in a room barely bigger than the bed itself. There was a door with a small bar window, and that was it. The stone walls made the room feel cold and lonely and as Juliet stretched her sore muscles, she called out,

"Is anybody there?"

There was no telling how long she was asleep, or where she was now, but if she had to take a guess, she'd say that she was inside the massive castle they had seen from the garden.

"O'Hara?"

That was Lassiter!

"Carlton!" Juliet replied, and she slowly got to her feet and pressed her face to the bars in her small window. Outside her room there was a hallway with much larger windows, each spilling warm sunlight onto the floor. She could kind of make out another door to her right and figured that there must be another cell next door. "Where's Henry?"

"I'm here," he called from her left. Another cell most likely. "What happened?"

"We were completely humiliated, that's what happened," Lassiter replied in defeat. "They didn't even use guns..."

Juliet pressed her hands against the wooden door and felt how solid the material was. By all accounts, now would generally be a good time to wake up from this dream, but she couldn't. What a strange feeling it was to be stuck in such an uncontrollable circumstance. She had to pinch herself just to make sure this wasn't some figment of her own imagination.

"Well, now what do we do?" She asked, moving back to her bed.

"They've taken all our weapons, and they have the power to erase memories, so I think the answer to that is pretty clear," said Henry in a defeated sort of way. Juliet knew exactly how he felt. Carlton probably did, too.

"Juliet? Lassiter? Mr. Spencer?"

"Guster?" Henry said, confused.

"Gus?!" Juliet cried, recognising the voice coming from outside. Suddenly a face appeared in her window and she jumped to her feet. "Gus! What on Earth are you doing here?"

"It's a long story," he replied.

"Well give us the condensed version," said Lassiter, a bit annoyed.

"Well, Everseers have erased Shawn's memories, given him super powers, and manipulated him into thinking that he's one of them so that he can go on a quest to 'save humanity' or something. And I'm here to mop the floors," Gus said and he waited for someone to reply, but no one did for a while.

It took a few more explanations, but several minutes later, everyone was on the same page.

"So what do we do?" Juliet asked.

"At the moment there's nothing we can do," Gus replied. "The Everseers, King Rutherford, and by extension, the Watchers, are all too powerful for us to fight."

"This is utterly ridiculous," Lassiter was saying to himself as he paced in his cell. "I mean, what kind of 80's, drug induced cartoon did we just stumble into?"

"Oh, believe me, we are all way overdressed for an 80's cartoon," said Henry. "My question is why do they want Shawn so badly?"

"Shawn's apparently the most powerful Everseer they've had in a long time," Gus explained. "I overheard some of the Custodians say that he might even be more powerful than King Rutherford. They'd do just about anything to keep him here."

"As if his ego needed any more inflating..." Henry muttered.

"But there's absolutely nothing we can do?" Juliet pressed. Surely there had to be something, some way out they'd overlooked, some loophole they could exploit?

"Not unless you can convince someone to let us leave. Even if I could get to the keys to open the cell doors, an Everseer or Watcher would find us before we made it to the ground floor," Gus sighed. Suddenly, a door opened somewhere off in the distance. "And technically speaking I shouldn't be here right now. I'll come back if there's any news, but the only thing I've heard for now is that you've all been summoned to a trial."

"Thanks Gus," Juliet said as he disappeared down the hallway. Well at least now they knew what was going on. Still, a secret organisation of mind-readers? This was just ridiculous.