The Next Chronicle (Book 1): Next (21 page)

Ray was disobeying orders.

The lab lay just on the other side of the door in front of him. He should have left with the last group of evacuees heading for the commuter tunnel, but something held him in place. Nunez had tried to convince him to do as he was told, but Ray would not be moved.

So he stood and waited.

An undefinable sense of tension kept him rooted in place. The feeling that moving one way or the other would result in disaster held his motor functions in a steel grip. It was more than simple fear or nerves. For all the feeling might be a construct of his mind trying to rationalize the insanity he could feel through the floor itself, to him it still felt real. With it came the same certainty every person felt when they made an instantaneous split-second decision. He simply
knew
standing still was right, just as he knew when he would need to move.

A younger version of Ray might have laughed off the idea. Before Fairmont and the years of sleep that came after, it would have been easy. People are not given to prescient awareness, there are no guiding hands telling us when to act. The world is chaos and the humans stumbling through it are buffeted from place to place by the die rolls of chance.

That was before. That Ray Elliot died in a silent blast of emerald light. The Ray he was now—Ray Cassidy, he supposed—needed far less convincing. He did not know the source of the understanding, but neither did he doubt it. Wherever it came from, Ray knew he would be needed, just as he knew the people within the lab were not out of danger.

Ray closed his eyes and cast out with his mind, following the energy of the
Surge through the locked door.

John Franklin was hearing voices.

At least, that was how he interpreted it. He knew better than to tell anyone. Wearing the ring was bad enough; he didn't want everyone to think he was crazy to boot. There were no words in the bombardment of sensations slamming into his head. Mostly it came in flashes of emotion, but not random. It was as if a song played, one he couldn't quite remember the words to.

At first it had been jumbled, disorienting. As the day wore on and the evacuation was planned, the tune grew more and more defined. There was no beat or tempo, yet the overwhelming understanding eventually became clear.

Danger. Something terrible was going to happen.

When the facility began to shake, John experienced a sort of seizure. He remembered it, a fact that kept him from outright panic. His body froze in place, his brain trying to squeeze out of his head. With brutal suddenness, John knew the moment was not far off. Disaster was about to happen. With an effort, he pushed forward with his family. He couldn't let anything distract him from keeping them safe. Mom and Dad stood by him when they could have done as so many other parents of Next did, and simply walked away. The law even allowed for it.

The further he moved down the seemingly endless tunnel, the harder each step became. Eventually he found himself stuck. Mom and dad pulled on his hands, but they might have been trying to move a mountain. He was only peripherally aware of them, his body monitoring its surroundings just enough to ensure its safety.

His mind was mostly elsewhere.

John could have turned and pointed through several floors of research labs and mechanical bays, right at the spot where the bad thing was going to happen. The urgency of the feeling grew, as it had been growing for hours, and John knew without a doubt that sometime very soon it would come to pass.

He focused on the bursts of emotions filtering in through his enhanced perception. Several of them were familiar. As he zeroed in on them, he knew their faces. The people who had come to his house, the two directors and the thin man with the black hair. Ray, they had called him.

“Hey,” came a voice, and with it a powerful sensation across his face.

John snapped back to reality. That had
hurt
!

“
What the hell?” John sputtered.

A short black man stood in front of him. Phillip Darby, a face and name every kid in Louisville knew. He was that cop, the Black Band who kept a huge neighborhood safe as easy as walking down the street. A lot of the younger generation looked up to him.

“You need to move, son,” Darby said in his faintly accented voice. “Your parents are worried.”

John shook his head. “I can't. Something is...” He paused, working up the nerve to say it out loud. “Look, this will sound nuts, but something really bad is going to happen back there. I can feel it.”

Mom and Dad stared at him like he'd sprouted tentacles from his face, which was in line with his expectations. Darby, on the other hand, grew intent.

“
You're sure?” Darby asked.

John blinked. “You believe me?”

“Yes,” Darby said. “We just got word that the Maggard boy was captured, but my own danger sense tells me something is wrong. Mine is not very strong.”

John wanted to ask what a danger sense was, in fact had a handful of questions ready, but there was no time. “I can feel the people back there,” he told Darby. “They don't know it's all going to go bad.”

Darby's eyes widened. “You can feel the danger coming,
and
you can feel the people up there? That's rare. I know of only one person with a danger sense that developed.”

John waved away the words. “Whatever, man. Just tell me what to do, I can't even force myself to move forward.”

Darby glanced from John to his parents. “I need you both to go,” he said. “I am best suited to help your son, and if you stay you may die.”

His parents tried to protest, but Darby put up his own hands to forestall them. “I promise you, I will do everything in my power to protect him. But you must go now.”

John could tell by the set of his mother's shoulders that she had no such intention.

“
Mom, please,” John said. “I'll be okay. I can't get hurt anymore. You have to go.”

There was a plaintive tone in his voice, a relic of the boy he had been only a few years before. But rather than the selfish cry of a child who wants his way, the breaking John heard in his own words begged for them to leave. It said many things to them, that fearful creak. It spoke of his worry. His sorrow that he was what he was. His need for them to be safe, equal in weight to his need to help. Though his words were simple, they said much. Mom, riled up only a second before into her 'mama bear' defensive posture, deflated. Her eyes shone in the dim light.

To his surprise, they hugged John fiercely, told him they loved him, and turned down the tunnel toward safety. Others might have wondered why any parents would leave their only child, but John understood. They were so far beyond their depth that facts were the only thing keeping them from a breakdown. They accepted that John had to stay back, that he would be safe given his invulnerability. They knew they had no such protection. They assumed John would remain where he was and join them as soon as possible.

They were wrong.

“Pay attention to me, John,” Darby said. “If your ability is as strong as I think it is, you should be able to affect the people whose emotions you are feeling. Find one you sense an attachment to and concentrate on it. It should give them some sort of warning.”

That part was easy. One of those bundles of fear and anxiety stood out, burning bright in his mind. It was Ray. John realized after a moment that he must have been reaching out to Ray already. With the improved connection came a flood of terror, a renewed sense of urgency.

Without conscious thought, John turned and ran back into the facility, a shouting Phillip Darby following behind.

The tension in the room no longer grew, but neither did it fully dissipate. Kit slowly relaxed her fingers and unwrapped her arm from Thomas. The boy was still, offering no resistance.

Eyes distant, even dreamy, the prisoner stood facing his new captive. His arms were rod-straight, fingers twitching. Thomas stepped forward, then sat mechanically on a piece of rubble.

“
Get the damn collar on him,” Archer shouted from across the room.

Startled from her observation of the suddenly compliant boy, Kit jumped. She ran to the heavy chest left by Nunez and threw open the lid. Inside, circles of metal gleamed. Kit took two. Better safe than sorry.

In no time at all she closed both collars around the boy's neck, ratcheting them down to their smallest setting. Their fobs came off as the locks closed, detaching with a twist and turning the devices on. Kit made sure they were on their highest setting.

“
We're good,” Kit said, waving to Archer.

“
You want me to let him go now?” the prisoner asked.

Kit shook her head. “No. You hang onto him until we have him secured in the special cell we're having set up.” The man nodded, though there was effort in the expression.

“He's a little rowdy,” the prisoner explained. “Harder to keep hold of him than I thought.”

“
Are you going to be able to manage it?” Archer asked as he walked up.

“
Yeah,” the prisoner said, teeth clenched. “Just don't take hours. Usually I just take over, plant commands, and run people on autopilot. This kid is something else.”

Kit stared at the motionless boy, his empty eyes fixed on nothing. “I can't imagine what he's going through.”

The prisoner cleared his throat. “You don't have to. I can show you, if you want.”

“
Absolutely not!” Archer said, stepping forward.

Kit put up a hand to stop him. “I don't plan on letting him take me over. Calm down.”

“I'm a broad-range telepath,” the prisoner said. “I can control, sure, but I can broadcast and receive, too. It's like putting out a radio signal.”

Archer's face drew into the beginnings of a furious reply, but again Kit cut him off. “Don't we need to get in touch with our people, get Thomas in a cell? Maybe you should go do that.”

The big man shook his head. “Don't do anything stupid,” he said, then walked off to call their soldiers back.

“
What's your name, again?” Kit asked the prisoner.

“
Quesada. Erik Quesada,” he replied.

“
Okay, Quesada,” Kit said. “Here's the deal. I want to see what the kid sees. I want to know what happened. You're going to let me see what happened to Thomas? Fine. But I'm resistant to mental control. I'll feel it if you try. I don't trust you. You use your power to manipulate people, just for the sake of having things your way. You try anything, I'm going to break your arms. Do you believe me?”

Quesada nodded silently.

“Good. Now, show me.”

He did.

If the stream of information hitting her had a dreamy quality to it, there were two reasons why. The first was that Kit wasn't dropped wholly into Thomas's raging thoughts. His memories were overlaid on the actual world around her. She could see Archer over at the wall, using the hard line phone to call for support personnel. The second was that Thomas's perceptions were different. Not because they were memories. It was something else.

A strange doubling appeared, two slightly different viewpoints in the shattered lab. The first was her own. The second, she worked out, was what Thomas was seeing at that moment. Kit gasped at the realization, her mind trying to wrap itself around the images.

Thomas was calmly staring ahead, but the room he saw was not the one Kit's own eyes perceived. It was much darker, everything tinged with green. The boy's range of vision was mostly focused on the cracks in the otherwise blank wall ahead, though she saw herself and Quesada out of the corner of his eye.

The writhing green energy in their bodies
hurt
him. Even the minimal view he was getting of Kit and Quesada was like looking at the sun. She felt the pain as if it were her own, felt the anger boiling in him, and saw the world shift again. Streaks of terror shot through the boy's mind, the bright green shapes taking on a subtle but deadly edge. It wasn't so much what the boy actually saw, but how his emotions reacted to it.

The entire world was a nightmare. She was only getting a fraction of it, but her heart began to pound, her stomach twisting in knots.

This was how he had been seeing the world since his powers appeared? Kit shuddered at the thought. It was no wonder the boy attacked the Next. It was like living in a carnival fun house, a world distorted and sickeningly twisted at every turn.

Thomas lived every moment in that strange space between waking and dreaming, where everything seems unreal yet impossibly dark and terrifying all at once.

The scene shifted.

Gouts of blood filled the air. Thomas didn't understand what was happening. His hands were curled into fists, still rebounding from the table, and his family was—

Terrible pain shook his body even as the broken things that used to be his parents and siblings fell from their chairs. Like the end of a whip finally cracking as its length straightened behind him, the sensation of his power overtaking him caught up to the act itself. His body burned, every cell engulfed in terrible fire. His mind lashed out with pure animal instinct, desperate to escape the falling bodies and mind-shattering agony.

The door exploded inward as he grabbed it with his mind and pulled, and without conscious effort Thomas erupted into the air like a cork from a bottle. His tiny form rocketed skyward too fast for the eye to see.

The memories shifted again, jarring Kit, reminding her she was herself. The memories and thoughts were so powerful, she had nearly forgotten...

His flight was an empty space, a mass of confusion, terror, and pain too strong for rational thought. As he approached the ground, however, a dim recognition bloomed in his fractured psyche. A playground close to a factory, a place he had spent time with other children. Some sort of gathering, he remembered.

The memory brought more pain. The image of his dying family, the searing of his body, all at once. Thomas allowed himself to fall further under, letting instinct and madness run the show.

A cascade of moments flashed by. In a warehouse, sensing the approach of one of
them
, the bright ones who set his eyes on fire. In an empty house, digging through cabinets for food, gorging himself and jamming his pockets full. On a road, mind wrapped around cars full of the hateful bright ones, then throwing one of them like a biting insect.

Another shift, and Thomas was thinking about the wall in front of him. That wasn't all. The buried part of him, the core of the child chained by his damaged mind, understood that the man standing near held him in check. The other Thomas, the mad part pushing him forward, was beginning to glean this fact. The child that was, slowly crumbling beneath the pressure, passed on this understanding.

“Oh, fuck me,” Quesada said.

The telepathic connection between them snapped, gone in an instant.

“What is it?” Kit asked. By the shell-shocked look on the prisoner's face, it couldn't be good.

Beads of sweat formed on Quesada's face. “He's still fighting, but now it's like...” his voice faded for a moment. “It's like I'm wearing the collar. I can feel my powers getting weak. I don't understand.”

The blood drained from Kit's face. “I do. Archer!”

Whipping around at the note of panic in her voice, the big man dropped the phone. “What?”

“The kid is too strong for the collars!”

Whatever reply he might have had was interrupted by a massive belch of blowing dust centered around the locked exit door. A disc ten feet wide appeared. From the center of the maelstrom, Ray emerged.

“Get out,” he said. “I'll handle the kid.”

Kit gaped at him. “Are you insane?”

“No time,” Ray said. “I was watching. Thomas is draining your telepath dry. He's draining the batteries in those collars, I'd bet. He's too weak to do it all at once, but every second makes him stronger and them weaker. So you need to run. Now.”

She would have. In that slice of time, Kit understood the truth she had been skirting since the moment she learned the boy was the killer they hunted. Here, now, there was nothing more to do. Thomas was a power, almost a force of nature, and you can't fight a thunderstorm. Every idea had been tried or thrown away as worthless. They were at the end of the line.

Given the time, Kit would have wrestled with the decision and ultimately done as Ray suggested. Thomas, however, gave none of them even a second more to think.

Both collars exploded outward with ringing snaps, the metal pinging from every surface. Quesada didn't have time to flinch as, half a second later, his entire body collapsed in on itself. The man's scream had just begun by the time his lungs, face, and the rest of him was compacted into a perfect sphere of blood and bone less than a foot across. Like a grisly cartoon, it hung in the air until it remembered such a thing as gravity, then splattered to the floor.

Thomas screamed, and the whole world shook.

Kit flew backward, slamming against a far wall. Several ribs broke, white blossoms filling her vision as she slid to the floor. With gritted teeth she struggled to her feet, bracing herself for the next attack and biting back the constellation of pain assaulting her nerves.

What she saw was enough to convince her she was forgotten. Unimportant.

Thomas was arcing back through the air to evade Ray, whose hands were out in a vaguely threatening gesture. Kit thought he looked like a monk with his open palms and semi-relaxed stance. The truth was more frightening by far; the ground surrounding Ray was suddenly and perfectly empty. Every piece of equipment, rubble, and furniture had ceased to exist. Not even dust remained.

It was beyond anything he had ever done, save perhaps at the epicenter of Fairmont.

Thomas landed thirty feet back. Ray stood facing him, waves of power now visibly radiating from his body.

Kit spotted movement in the distance. Archer, who had apparently been ignored completely. She wanted to cry out, to tell him to stay down, but doing so would have drawn attention.

Thomas flicked his hands, sending ripples through the concrete walls. Support beams jutted out trailing nets of reinforcing bars and buried wires. Many lodged in place as they bent and twisted, a forest of steel spikes resistant to Thomas's power. Others—many others—broke off and flew free, centering on Ray like a storm of arrows.

Every one of them vanished as they approached. The effect made it seem as though they slid behind an invisible barrier. They left no trace.

Ray exploded with light, flinging out a hand. Thomas, three dozen yards away, flew up and toward Kit to avoid being disintegrated along with the vacated section of floor.

Dust began to sift down onto her. She looked up to see the broken walls tremble, vast pieces rattling in place. One section actually began to fall but was stopped by an unseen hand, then pushed back into place and held there.

He's holding the entire room together.
The thought held almost physical weight for her, adding another layer of danger to an already deadly situation.

On the far side of the room, Archer stood and leveled his pulse gun. For the briefest instant, Kit thought it might work, but Thomas saw the movement.

It happened with the speed of thought, faster than Kit's senses could process the information. Between moments, Archer went from standing defiantly to impaled upon one of the many lengths of steel jutting from the wall.

The world did not stop. There was no moment of dire realization. Archer did not reach a hand out to her in a dramatic final gesture. Instead, in the brief second their eyes met, Kit got the distinct impression, even over the distance between them, that Archer was annoyed. Something about his features sent her brain the perverse urge to laugh. The horror of the situation contrasted with the mildly irritated look...

Then he slumped.

Pieces of stone and steel rose all around, shooting at Ray in a merciless stream. Kit saw him curl in, catching glimpses of his face between flying chunks of debris. Concentration etched Ray's visage, lines tightening his eyes and mouth. In a sickening moment of understanding, she knew he was struggling to hold in the power. Every projectile he absorbed added to the huge reserve straining to escape Ray's body just as it had at Fairmont, only a few dozen yards above where they stood.

Thomas's back was to her, slightly turned. The little of his profile she could see contorted in anger, eyes blazing over gritted teeth. She knew it was possible to help the boy. There was every chance, given the proper treatment and time, that Thomas could heal. The thought sent a deep pang of sadness through her. Kit had been in his mind, however briefly. The young artist was still in there, no matter how deeply he was buried.