His mother wasn't smoking when his dreams finally ended, but she did look like she'd been through an ordeal. Any other public outing would find Susanna Washington with excellent makeup, carefully selected clothes (that matched) and hair that took at least an hour to do. Instead the hair was disheveled, the clothes were rumpled, and the makeup was creeping down her face as it mixed with the tears. And she was holding a pack of cigarettes in one hand.
At that moment, the doctor came through the door and pulled up Michael's chart. He decided to play possum for now, and shut his eyes.
“I have to apologize, Mrs. Washington, we must have been wrong about the aftereffects of Archibald Lansing's ability,” he told Michael's mother.
“And what's happening to him?”
“It's difficult to say,” he said. “We only found traces of Releshzna radiation on him, but the last time these were negative.”
“Someone mucked up the test,” she said, and knocked the cigarette pack so that one stuck out. Then she frowned and must have thought better of it, because she pushed it back in.
“I can assure you, Mrs. Washington—”
“Stuff your assurances, doctor. You know who my husband is. He pays you more than enough to find what is wrong with my son. So find it, whatever it is, and fix it.”
“Of course we're doing the best—”
“Don't you say you're doing the best you can,” she hissed. “I don't want your best, I want results. And another thing, I don't want any of those...Actives...near him again. He can do with medicine.” Actives, oh boy, the way she said it, it sounded like something you'd find on the bottom of your shoe. Something crawling around the underside of a rock.
“Of course, we're going to do everything we can,” the doctor said weakly. Michael could practically hear the man sag with relief, like a deflating balloon, as Susanna Washington allowed him to leave the room.
Michael was hooked up to all sorts of machines that were beeping out the functions of his internal organs. Apparently everything was okay, unless you counted his head. Everything from the neck down then was just fine.
And then a fresh wave of pain rolled over his head, and he moaned out loud.
“Oh honey.”
She came over to the bed and sat down.
“How's my boy feeling?”
“Not like a three year old,” Michael groaned. “I'm okay mom. I just want to go home.”
She just stared at him.
“How long do I have to stay?” he asked at last.
“Until they know what happened?”
“I had a migraine,” he said. “That's it.”
She continued to stare.
“Mo-om,” he complained. “I'm fine. The doctors are going to tell you the same thing.”
“And what about the Releshzna radiation they found?”
“I don't even know what that is.”
“It's the radiation given off by Actives when they use their powers. Something Archibald did to you must have left some sort of...stain. No, you stay put and the doctors are going to find out what's happened to you. I'm going to get cleaned up. Your father's supposed to fly home tonight.”
“Great.” Michael hadn't forgotten about the grounding, and he hadn't forgotten about his father's promise. Death threat really. Maybe, that doubtful voice inside him said, if you play this migraine thing up, they'll forget all about the grounding. He knew it wasn't likely to happen, but if one thing cut memory short it was getting sick.
He was grateful when she finally left to get the house ready for his father, because there was a lot to think about. He remembered the details of his dreams completely, which was odd. Normally he didn't dream, or woke up trying to catch them like streamers of smoke through his fingers.
He would have just put his dreams down as dreams, except for the cigarettes. She had never in Michael’s life put a cancer stick to her lips. As far as he knew anyway. The way secrets were getting revealed around here lately, he wouldn’t be surprised to learn that King Kong was his uncle and that his grandfather was actually a robot sent from the future, waiting to destroy them all.
So he dreamed things that were real. Okay, fine. In the long line of super powers, it was probably the worst one. And either it was really his, or it was just some fading echo of whatever Mr. L had done to him. Either way it sucked. He would really rather have hot lava spit or invisibility or something, but he wasn’t going to complain. Knowing more was better, despite what his parents and grandfather thought. Either it was going to make his head explode or it wasn’t, and it was either going to lead to some other amazing power, like cutting guns in half with his mind, or it would fade away. Either way, he had a situation that needed dealing with, and it couldn’t wait for him to try jumping off his house to see if he could fly also.
The main problem was that his mother was going to take him away. He thought he could be prepared for this, maybe. Just refusing to go and locking himself in his room might do, but there was the problem of food. And the bathroom. He'd have to come out, and he couldn't just climb out the window to eat at Charlotte's house.
If he couldn't stop her, then he needed to stop the other thing. Whatever was going on, it was clear Mr. Jackson was at the heart of it. He was the same guy Charlotte had talked to as a counselor, and he was a mind-reader guy. Michael didn't know anything about psychics, but he had read a few books about this sort of thing, and if they could take thoughts from your head, maybe they could put some back in. If he could do that, he could probably put in signals that would help Activate Trent and Charlotte and the others. Like a hypnotic thing. Like when you wanted a cigarette and popped a stick of gum instead, just because the hypnotist told you to.
He had other facts that didn't make sense. His mother had mentioned the Omega Syndicate. Definitely a bad guy name if there ever was one. So maybe Mr. Jackson was working for them. Maybe he was the leader. Anyway it was clear that if you wanted to stop something in this super town, you'd have to be secretive about it. If you just came rolling up in your evil engine of destruction with attached satellite death ray thingy, fifty or sixty super-powered people were going to punch your lights out.
Okay, so the Omega Syndicate was trying to blow the volcano. The town. If Mr. Jackson was right, and a few underage Actives were really a big problem, the whole town could go up. Well, his mother and Grandpa were really worried about it. Was Mr. Jackson right? Was it as easy as tipping the town off balance a little?
Michael wasn't about to find out. He may not be popular at school, and everybody might be afraid of him, but there were plenty of people on his paper route who were nice people. They didn't deserve to get caught up in a volcano blast. Mrs. Sulzsko and the twins didn't deserve that either. His mother didn't deserve it, no matter how many times she grounded or yelled at him.
He had to do something. The trouble was he didn't know what to do. His parents and his Grandpa were keeping secrets from him. They didn't want him to know about the Omega Syndicate. They wouldn't be happy if he told them about it. It might earn him another grounding. Talking to Charlotte was clearly always the best option, but she was stuck underground in some sort of prison cell. Call it a treatment facility, but it was nothing more than a jail cell dressed up and pretending to be a classroom.
He decided, after a bit of thought, that Lily was the answer.
The doctors, terrified and puzzled, informed his mother that there was nothing wrong with him. She told them that all the money in the world couldn't surgically remove their heads from their butts, and left the hospital with Michael in one hand and a pack of cigarettes in the other.
“Mom?” he asked.
“Hm?”
“What's with the cigarettes?”
“Oh, nothing. Stress. I used to smoke, you know. A long time ago.” He didn't know, and he didn't approve. It meant something was very wrong, like a plague of locusts on the horizon, millions of them ready to swarm all over everything and chew the world to pieces.
“Did you get a sub f
or the paper route?” he asked.
“I did,” she said.
“Call them back. Cancel. I need to go out.”
She stared at him. “Honey it's January. You're not feeling well and there are two inches of snow on the ground. I don't need you sliding on your bike and falling in someone's front yard and freezing to death.” They finally arrived home.
He looked at her. “Wait a second.”
“You know what I mean,” she said.
“You mean that if I fell off my bike—”
“You know what I mean. I'm worried about you!”
“—nobody in this town would come and help me out?”
“Michael—”
“They're just going to let me freeze to death right in front of their house or their neighbor's house?”
“Michael Edward!” she snapped.
“I might as well not walk to school, or take my bike to school either. The roads are treacherous. In fact I could just stay in the house and learn everything by computer.”
“We don't know who we can trust here. We haven't lived here forever.”
“My whole life isn't that long.”
“The face people show you in public isn't the same one they wear at home,” she blurted out. “People keep secrets here, Michael. It's a small town, they always do.”
“Like you and Grandpa?”
He'd gone too far. The realization struck him like a slap, his mother didn't even have to. The look they shared was electric, full of warning bells and the frightened urge to run away from her. So he did, back to the garage to grab his bike.
By the time he got back to the porch she was inside, probably calling one of her Tupperware party friends to talk about what a horrible son she had. He threw the papers into his neon, reflective newspaper sack and got the bike moving.
All throughout the ride he couldn't stop thinking about what he'd say to Lily. He'd sort of grown apart from her when he started to make friends with Charlotte, but she still said hi to him and still smiled at him. He felt guilty for not talking to her, but only a bit. She was just another customer. Who was pretty. And nice. And got him interested in lots of awesome books.
He definitely did not think about his mother, and how she was going to steal him away from his life here. And how she was keeping things from him. Focus, he told himself. Focus on what's important. You need to have a plan, and you need to have help.
He'd gone over the start of his conversation with her a few dozen times by the time he actually got to the library and stomped on the welcome mat to clear the snow off his boots. She was there, still with a halo of gold blonde hair tied in a very cute ponytail, still with the business clothes, suit coat and matching skirt.
“Hey Michael,” she said. “You okay? Looking a little peaky right now.”
“I had a migraine at school today,” he said. “Had to go to the hospital.”
“Ooh, sucky. You okay then? Clean bill of health for Mr. Michael Washington?”
“Yeah,” he started to stare at his shoes, and realized he was being a dork. “Hey listen, can I, are you busy right now? Because I need to talk to somebody about something.”
The smile dropped immediately. He hoped he hadn't just made a huge mistake.
“What's up?”
“I...not here. You have those study rooms right? The ones nobody uses?”
“Yeah,” she said. “The soundproof ones. Funny you think nobody ever uses them.”
She led him over toward the empty study rooms. There were two, just little boxes with a window, blinds on the window, a table, two chairs, a reading lamp, and a lame poster about how cool reading was. Nobody read books with that look on their faces.
“Okay... what's up?” she asked.
“Can you, um, shut the door?”
She did. Michael gathered up his courage and his breath at the same time. He wanted to tell the whole story as quickly as possible. He didn't want to leave anything out, but he knew he was going to forget things.
He tried to tell her the whole thing in one breath, from Trent up to the dreams he'd had in the Marcus Patterson gym, and how he somehow knew they weren't dreams (mostly because of the cigarettes...he wouldn't have believed about the cigarettes, and that would have made the whole things just a dream). But it was real in real life, so they all had to be true.
In the end he told her about the suspicions he had about Mr. Jackson and the thing he'd overheard, the Omega Syndicate. Only when he finished did he see how stupid it all sounded.
He waited for Lily to laugh at him, to give him a slap on the back or an affectionate punch in the shoulder and tell him 'good one' and that April Fools' day wasn't for another two months and change.
If she had, he might have laughed and tried to forget the whole thing, to put it down to his own failing mind, and ask his mom to let him see one of his Grandpa's psychologist teams. But in the end she didn't do any of that.
Instead, she looked at him with a face more serious than he'd seen before, arms folded across her chest, and nodded.
“You're ready then,” she said.
In the break room, she pressed a combination of buttons on the coffee maker, and the wall with the coat rack slid aside. Revealed was a staircase leading down into darkness, and at the end was something he couldn’t quite make out, only that it was lit by halogen bulbs somewhere far beneath the library.
Apparently the architect behind the public library had been a paranoid nutcase, because he (or she, let’s be fair) didn't just design it with an underground bunker to keep out fallout from nuclear blasts. The architect didn't just include the heating system that was tied into thermal vents from deep within the earth's crust. It wasn't just built with water and air purification systems, so that a dedicated army of moles could survive down there indefinitely. There was also light absorbing fungus under glass, which glowed in the dark, so they could conserve power, and a curious bank of stationary bikes along one wall.
Lily led him around, watching his face carefully.
The whole thing looked like a secret headquarters, which he guessed it was. He wondered briefly if the Omega Syndicate had just stolen him without a fight at all. Then he considered that this was Lily, the same Lily who told him about soppy romance novels he’d never read, the ones with oily bodybuilders on every cover.
“Michael, you probably got an echo of Mr. Jackson’s power,” Lily explained.
“Huh?”
“You said that Mr. L used his ability on you, and he’s together with Mr. Jackson quite a lot. There was probably some residual mind control or telepathy when he gave you the other powers.”
“You think so?”
“Yep.”
Michael spotted something out of the corner of his eye.
“What is that?” he asked. He was afraid that Mrs. Susanna Washington had been right about Mrs. Sulzsko and she visited the library's underground marijuana farm.
“Hydroponics,” Lily said. “You can actually grow plants down here with just UV lights and water, did you know that? We have soil, but you don't really need it.”
“And the bikes?”
She handed him a flashlight. It was one of those ones you pump up several times.
“I don't get it.”
“The bikes are bigger versions of this.” She explained how you could cycle up the generator every day with four people working three to four hours each, or sixteen people working an hour each. Good for the body, good for the community.
“And our generator will work for two days between recharging, if we conserve power a bit.”
“This is so...wow,” he said.
Another of the librarians was down there, but he was an old guy with finger-in-the-electric-socket hair around the back of his head, while the top was billiard ball shiny. He was staring down his nose through a pair of half-moon glasses at some clipboards tacked to one of the walls.
“Right,” Lily said. “Here's Zeus.”
“Zeus,” Michael said.
/> “Keeper of the thunderbolt,” she said. “Hi Mr. Z.”
Mr. Zeus (that couldn't be his real name) grunted. Michael hadn’t noticed before, but there were a bunch of clear glass sticks hanging on the wall just behind this Zeus guy. Each stick had a clipboard next to it. He took a long look at one of the clear glass sticks on the wall next to the clipboard and grunted again. Then he took it off the wall and turned it.
“What's going on?” Lily asked, much more brightly than usual. Bright enough that Michael could tell she was worried.
“Trouble,” Mr. Z said.
When he turned, Michael saw that he had a wireless headset in his ear. Mr. Z grunted again, then looked at Lily. With a flip of the head towards Michael and an arch of the eyebrows, he asked a question without asking at all.
“Michael Washington. He's real concerned about his mom and dad, and his grandfather. So I thought I'd...I thought...” She trailed off. “Let's head back upstairs Michael.”
The glass stick said UNSTABLE on it in big blocky yellow letters. And the name on the clipboard was—
“Hey, no!” he shouted. “Why's my mom's name down here on this wall?”
It hadn't seemed as interesting before, but now he could make out names on the other clipboards. Terrence Jackson was one, and Mary-Ann Lansing was another. He guessed that was Archibald Lansing's wife. There were well over thirty spanning the wall, each with a glass stick hanging next to it. Terrence Jackson's stick unbelievably read STABLE in lying green letters.
“Michael, let's go,” Lily said. Now she sounded a little scared.
“I'm not going anywhere.”
Mr. Z grunted and went to another clipboard, then wrote a note on the attached paper.
“Listen, I just wanted to show you the hydroponic farm and the generators, you know, and, and, maybe give you a spin on the generator bikes. I wasn't thinking—”
Mr. Z said, “Yep,” and penciled in another note on another board.
“You tell me what you're doing with my mom's name there, and I'll go. Simple as that.”
Lily looked over at Mr. Z, who ignored her, and back to Michael. “Listen, I'm going to get in trouble as it is. Please Michael.”
“You've been really nice to me before,” he said. “So I'm not going to ask you about all these other names. You just tell me about this one, and no problem okay? What's the glass stick for, and what is her name doing down here?” He wouldn't have believed that it was a Bingo roster or a Tupperware party schedule for a second, and he was glad when Lily gave in.
“It's her key,” she said. “The glass stick. Your mom's one of the keys...we, uh, we follow her progress—”
“You follow her?”
“That came out wrong. We just watch to make sure nothing goes wrong.”
“So you're watching her, and following her.”
Lily squirmed and tried to look at anything but him. She opened her mouth to speak, but Mr. Z exploded.
“NO!” he screamed. Not at he or Lily...whoever was on the phone. “NO, YOU DO NOTHING, DO YOU HEAR ME? ABSOLUTELY, UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCE ARE YOU TO APPROACH HER OR INTERACT WITH HER IN ANY WAY! I SWEAR TO ALL THINGS HOLY THAT YOU WILL DISAPPEAR OFF THE FACE OF THE EARTH IF YOU LIFT A FINGER. DO YOU UNDERSTAND THE DIRECT ORDER I HAVE JUST GIVEN YOU, AGENT? Of course you do.” Pause. “No, I do not CARE if she is weeping herself blind up there! If she gets a bottle of sleeping pills and swallows every single one of them, YOU ARE TO DO NOTHING BUT REPORT TO ME!” He swore in a rainbow of words Michael had never knew could go together like that. Finally he ripped the headset from his ear and yelled into it.
“YOU ARE INCHES AWAY FROM BEING TAKEN OFF ASSIGNMENT, AGENT! The regents are going to hear about this.” Then Michael watched as he smashed the headset against the floor and stomped on it not one, not two, but three times.
Lily cleared her throat, and Mr. Z looked up.
“Sorry,” he mumbled. He went to a place in the wall Michael would have sworn was a wall, opened it, and retrieved a new headset. Then he cut the plastic case off and fitted it into his ear. There was no trace of the fury he'd just shown. This Mr. Z looked tired and a little sad as he crossed to a dark doorway, flipped on a light, and motioned inside.
“Come,” he said.
It looked like an interrogation room from one of those cop shows: one table, three chairs, bars on the table you could be handcuffed to, gray paint on the walls, and a big mirror over one wall. That was it. The whole room was designed to make you feel like you weren't a part of the real world anymore, that you were already in prison. It was about as personal as Mr. Z.
Zues staring at him across the table made him want to go to the bathroom. Maybe to throw up, maybe not.
“There are more than forty individuals in this town who we think of as Keys,” Mr. Z explained. “This is where we keep track of them.”
“A Key,” Lily said, “is someone we think could tip over the whole town.”
“I think you've said quite enough,” Mr. Z snapped. Then he sighed. “Think of a shield, Michael. You put it on your arm, and what does it do? It protects you. Only this town doesn't have a shield. It has a hundred shields. And they're not just shields. They're more like tame lions. When the lion likes you or fears the whip, it will attack anybody that tries to harm you. But it's pretty easy to let your guard down and have that lion bite your arm off. Times a hundred. So we have a hundred crouching lions, ready to be a shield against any danger to our little town here, but we also have to watch that the shield doesn't eat us.”
All Michael could manage to say was, “Uh.”
“So you can see why I would rather you not be here. But since you are, I’m afraid I have to make a call. If you’ll excuse me.”
Lily fidgeted. Mr. Zeus answered dialed, said a few curt words, and listened. He said nothing, but got the clipboards off the wall and wrote on them. Once he went to another part of the room, opened up the wall, and retrieved a file. He took it to a table, had a quick read through, and replaced it.
“I’m so sorry Michael.”
“Don’t say that,” he told her. “What’s he doing?”
“Collecting,” she said. “Zeus is the collector. He gets all the reports. If nothing happens, you know, it’s all paperwork, they can just stick the reports to the clipboard, but right now he’s having a really hard time. All our Keys have been having a lot of trouble. They don’t like what’s been going on at the schools.”
“Like my mom. She’s threatening to take me away.”
Lily nodded gloomily. “Others are threatening to leave the town forever, and we think we have a mole from the Syndicate somewhere. Trouble is we don’t know where.”
“The Omega Syndicate?”
“Yeah,” Lily sighed.
“Why’re you telling me all this now?”
“Oh, uh... it’s too late now anyway, right? You know what you know.”
“So what’s the Omega Syndicate anyway?”
“A group of Actives and people like us somewhere out there. They’ve been tearing parts of the world up. They mostly believe that the world’s coming to an end because of the Actives. The Active ones just like to be in control, they want to be kings, gods. We have to stop that wherever we find them.”
“Who did Zeus go and call?”
“Oh?” she was off somewhere else, not really with him. “Terrence Jackson.”
“You didn’t listen to me at all!” he shouted. “He’s the one, he’s in the Syndicate. He’s probably their leader!”
“Michael calm down,” she said, but there were tears at the corners of her eyes. She spoke to him like she’d just been to a funeral for her grandfather. “There’s no way Terrence Jackson is the leader of the Omega Syndicate. All the Actives that come here undergo a thorough screening process. And don’t worry. We’ve got him under surveillance all the time. If he is who you say he is, we’ll catch him doing something.”
“Yeah,” he laughed, “That’s what you think.”
Just
then he heard footsteps on the stairs just outside, and when he turned Jackson was there.
“You can’t go stealing my lines, Mr. Washington. It wouldn’t be proper telling the telepath what he thinks.”
Chapter 13 - Brain Stew