Amped: A Kid Sensation Companion Novel (12 page)

I said almost nothing on the drive back to the airstrip. (On his part, BT seemed to sense my mood and left me to my thoughts.) Likewise, other than serving me a much-needed meal, the flight crew on the plane essentially left me alone as we flew back to the city.

It was still early when we touched down at the airfield, but I decided to call it a day and went home. Between flights and lengthy car rides, meeting with Vir had been exhausting. Moreover, for an encounter that probably lasted less than a minute, my interaction with him had left me with far more questions than I’d ever thought possible.

Once I reached home, I immediately went to my room, intending to lie down and rest for a bit. I was asleep within minutes.

*****

I awoke to the sound of voices shouting. It was dark in my room, letting me know that I had been asleep for a while. I turned on the lamp next to my bed and looked at the alarm clock I kept on my nightstand: 11:33 p.m.

Reaching out, I felt Esper downstairs as well as someone else, and from all indications they were arguing. However, although their voices were elevated, I couldn’t make out the words. Worried, I crept out of bed and towards my bedroom door.

I cracked the door open slightly and peeked out. I could see a light on downstairs in the family room, which was where the shouting seemed to be coming from. Quietly, I slipped out of my room and walked towards the stairs, stopping before I came into view. I stole a glance around the corner, but couldn’t see anyone; Esper and our mystery guest were not in the line of sight of my current position. However, I could definitely make out what was being said.

“–ster here, it’s you,” our visitor was saying. From what I could tell, it was a man, but I couldn’t get a sense of how old he was. “What you did was heinous – keeping that child from her family.”

“Get out,” Esper hissed. “If I ever see you again, if you ever come near us, I’m going to fry your brain to a cinder.”

I heard the other person harrumph, and then there was the sound of the front door opening and closing. I immediately dashed down the stairs.

Esper glanced in my direction when I hit the bottom step and her expression stopped me in my tracks. She had bags under her eyes and her lower lip was trembling slightly. Her face was pale and devoid of color. All in all, she looked as though she’d had the life sucked out of her.

“What is it?” I asked. “Who was that man?”

“No one,” she said, waving off my question.

“Well, what did he want?”

“Nothing. Don’t worry about it.”

“Does it have anything to do with Vir?”

Esper went bug-eyed at the mention of my father’s name, and for a second her mouth worked with no sounds coming out. On my part, I realized that in my eagerness to get information I had probably overreached and given myself away.

“Vir?” she finally said. “What… Why would you… What makes you think this has anything to do with Vir?”

I stared at her for a moment. There was no getting out of it now. I let out a pent-up breath and said, “Because I went to see him today.”

“You did what??!!”

“I said–”

“No,” Esper said forcefully. “Show me.”

A soft glow came into her eyes and she was already reaching into my mind when I dropped my mental shields and showed her everything I’d been up to.

Telepathic communication is a lot faster than verbal conversation. That being the case, it only took a few minutes to bring Esper up to speed on my recent extracurricular activities. Frankly speaking, I expected her to flip her lid over some of the things I’d done: cutting class, breaking and entering, hanging out in notorious supervillain watering holes…

Instead, she merely flopped down onto the couch and put her head into her hands.

“This is my fault,” she finally said, looking at me with tears in her eyes. “I didn’t realize how important this was to you. I just thought that if we waited, I could protect you.”

“Protect me from what?” I asked, sitting down next to her.

For a moment, it looked as though she was going to revert to habit and tell me I wasn’t ready. Instead, she just swallowed and said, “Give me a sec.”

Her brow furrowed, and I knew she was getting ready to open herself up to me telepathically. However, as she opened up a link between our minds, I could sense her mental exhaustion; she was almost out of gas.

“It’s okay,” I said, laying a hand sympathetically on hers. “We can just talk.”

“Thanks,” she said gratefully. “But I don’t even know where to begin.”

“How about with my father, Vir, and why you told me he was dead?”

She looked at me in alarm. “I never told you he was dead!”

“Well, you guys always talked like he was: ‘That’s when we lost Vir…’”

She giggled slightly at my imitation of her voice. “I do
not
sound like that.”

“Yeah, that’s what everybody says, and everybody thinks they can sing, too.”

She laughed out loud at that. “Touché.”

“So,” I said. “Back to Vir.”

She sobered instantly, and then gave me a hard look before beginning. “Vir was a member of the Alpha League. He had a power set that, like yours, revolved around electricity. In fact, that’s where his name came from – the three basic components of electricity.”

“Voltage, current, and resistance,” I chimed in. “
V-I-R
.”

“Exactly,” Esper said, nodding.

(Someone without an electrical background would probably think his name should have been
V-
C
-R
. However, the symbol for “current,” the letter I, comes from
intensité de courant
, a French phrase which means “current intensity.”)

“So what was he like?” I asked.

Esper looked nostalgic for a moment. “He was incredible. He had an absolutely formidable power set, and he could do amazing things…feats that no other electrophorus individual – except perhaps you, one day – could ever hope to accomplish. Plus, he was absolutely brilliant. There was almost no problem he couldn’t solve. He was our version of Mouse back then.”

I nodded in understanding. In addition to being the current leader of the Alpha League, Mouse was generally considered to be the smartest man on the planet. (My boyfriend Jim certainly thought so.) Therefore, putting Vir anywhere near the same category as Mouse, intellectually, was saying quite a lot.

“On top of all that, he was idealistic. He was an optimist who believed that people, when inspired, could achieve almost anything.”

“Doesn’t sound like the kind of guy who’d end up in prison stripes. So what happened?”

“The same thing that happens to a lot of good men: a bad woman.”

“Her name was Beguile,” Esper said. “And, as her name implied, she had an extraordinary talent for enticing men.”

“Was she a Siren?” I asked. Sirens were a well-known class of female supers capable of manipulating the opposite sex.

Esper shook her head. “No, but she had a similar ability. I think Sirens can manipulate men’s emotions. Beguile’s power involved pheromones and seemed to operate on a bio-chemical level. That said, the end result was pretty much the same: Vir fell head-over-heels for her.”

I looked away for a moment. “So she’s the one, then. My mother.”

“Yes.”

Suddenly nervous, I took a deep breath and asked my next question. “So what happened to her?”

Esper hesitated for a moment, as if unsure of how to start. “Beguile was part of Novercalis, whom you already know about. She was given the assignment of making Vir fall in love with her, and she succeeded magnificently.”

“What was the purpose of that?”

“What – making him fall in love with her?”

“Yeah.”

“Because then he’d do anything for her.”

I shook my head. “I don’t understand.”

“It’s a run-of-the-mill scam. Kidnap the beloved girlfriend, demand that the distraught boyfriend pay a ransom or do something else to get her back.”

“So where do I come into the picture?”

“You were an unanticipated outcome – the unexpected consequence of Beguile doing her job just a little too well. She was not too happy when she found out.”

“And my father? What was his reaction?”

“Are you kidding? He was over the moon! He knew even before Beguile – he could sense you in the womb. He loved you from the moment you came into being. He called you his little amp.”

I laughed. In electrical terms, an amp is a unit of measurement that indicates how much electricity is being used. It’s also what Vir had called me before we parted ways.

“I’m sorry,” I said sincerely. “Please go on.”

“As I was saying, Beguile didn’t want a child, but the Novercalis leadership figured that two hostages were better than one.”

“Two?”

“Yes. Your pregnant mother
and
her unborn child.”

“So Novercalis kidnapped my mother?”

“You’re overthinking this. Your mother was part of Novercalis – she was in on the whole thing. There was no kidnapping. She just left the city.”

“When was this?”

“Some time during her last trimester, close to her due date. She was with your father up until that point, and Novercalis figured that was enough time for Vir to have gotten seriously attached to her and the baby. When she ‘disappeared,’ they sent him pictures – proof of life – and threatened to do all kinds of harm to the two of you if he didn’t do what they wanted.”

“Which was what?”

“Your father had constructed a device that he called an induction engine. Novercalis wanted control of it.”

“What did it do?”

“Lots of things. Most of the technological aspects of it were beyond me. However, I do know that one of its primary features was wireless transmission of energy.”

“It could send energy wirelessly?”

“Yes. More importantly, it could also siphon energy out of something.”

I reflected on that for a moment. “I can see why criminals might want something like that. If, for instance, the cops were chasing you, you could suck the energy right out of their car battery.”

Esper made a derisive sound and shook her head. “It’s a good thing you’re going to be a cape. You’d have made a terrible supervillain. Your thinking is way too small.”

“Oh?”

“With a device – a
weapon
– like that, you don’t just shut down a few police cars in hot pursuit. You threaten to cause blackouts in major cities. You threaten to bring down Air Force One with the president on board. You threaten to overload nuclear power plants and cause a meltdown.”

I blinked in surprise as Esper’s words gave me greater insight into just what it was that Vir had constructed.

“So Vir’s induction engine was basically a gun that they could point at the world’s head?”

“More or less. But they didn’t stop with just his invention. They compromised him in other ways.”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you recall me mentioning that around the time we found you, the Alpha League had just had a couple of missions go sideways? Vir was the reason they all went bad. He passed along critical information to Novercalis.”

“Didn’t it strike anyone as odd that all of a sudden there were a string of mission failures?”

“Of course. The general presumption was that we had a mole in our ranks.”

“And with everyone on the lookout for a mole, Vir was still passing along information to Novercalis? That was pretty bold of him. I would’ve been afraid of a psychic like you picking up on a stray thought and figuring out I was playing for the other team.”

“That was unlikely to happen,” she said. “Because I was with Novercalis.”

In shock, I glanced at Esper’s wrist, which was unblemished – no emblem.

“It’s subcutaneous,” she said, in response to my unasked question. “Beneath the skin. It only shows up under certain types of light.”

“You were part of Novercalis?” I asked, unable to hide my shock and surprise. “When did they recruit you?”

She gave me a very frank stare. “They didn’t. I was always part of Novercalis.”

I was completely befuddled now. “I don’t understand. I thought you were part of the Alpha League.”

She shook her head. “No. Because I displayed mental powers at a very young age, I was sent to
infiltrate
the Alpha League. Then, once they got their claws into Vir, I was ordered to be the go-between with respect to him and our organization. The way it was supposed to work was that Vir would find out mission-critical information and I would read his mind to get it before passing it on telepathically to Novercalis. That way there was no paper trail, no hand-offs, no clandestine meetings.”

“Hmmm,” I muttered, thinking. “You said that’s how it was
supposed
to work.”

“Yes. In truth, though, I hated everything about Novercalis – their goals, their evil ambitions, their callous disregard for human life. I shared that with Vir, and together we worked to undermine them at every opportunity.”

I thought about that for a moment. “Are you saying you were a double agent?”

“Sort of. We were walking a very fine line. We had to give Novercalis enough information to keep them convinced that Vir was cooperating, and at the same time try to keep them misinformed to the extent that they couldn’t do any real harm. Bearing in mind the threat to you and your mother, we erred on the side of caution – providing more accurate than inaccurate info – which resulted in several missions going off the rails.”

“But if you were with Novercalis, why didn’t you just tell Vir that the entire kidnapping scheme was fake?”

She looked at me as though I were a six-year-old child without the ability to comprehend something. “You don’t understand. That man who was here earlier? He’s called the Kraken. He’s the head of Novercalis. He’s evil incarnate. He would have had no qualms about killing you and Beguile.”

“Even though she was on his side?”

Esper seemed to withdraw into herself for a moment, as if reflecting on something horrible. “Years ago, the Kraken had a young son who failed to laugh at a joke his father told one day. The Kraken stated the punchline again and told his son to smile; the boy refused, saying he got the joke but didn’t think it was that funny. The Kraken ordered him to grin, saying ‘You can either put a temporary smile on that face right now, or I’ll give you a permanent one.’ When the boy still refused, the Kraken calmly slit his own son’s throat, practically ear to ear.”

My brain stumbled for a second, trying to mesh what I was hearing with other facts at my disposal. A moment later, the clouds in my mind parted.

“Smiley,” I said softly, remembering one of the guys who had attacked me.

“Yes,” Esper said. “That became his nickname. The point of the story, however, is that the Kraken prides himself on never making idle threats. It’s an integral part of his reputation and one of the things that makes him so terrifying.”

“So you believe he would have killed Beguile, even though she was one of his cohorts?”

“Beguile certainly believed it – and she’s his daughter.”

“What?!” I shouted, unable to contain my surprise. “She’s his kid?”

“Yeah,” Esper said in a flat tone.

It took me a moment to absorb this, with Esper waiting patiently for me to find my next question. “So what happened to her?” I asked.

Esper closed her eyes for a second, wincing slightly as she did so – as if she wasn’t sure exactly how to respond.

“They had assembled Vir’s induction engine in a small town outside the city,” she finally said. “A place where strange comings and goings were less likely to be noticed.”

“Aberdeen,” I volunteered. “The place where I was found.”

“Yes. You were about three weeks old at that point. The Kraken had told Vir that your mother had died in childbirth, and that if the induction engine wasn’t operational within seven days, he was going to chop you up into fish food.”

I was silent for a moment, then asked, “Was it true? Was she dead?”

“Of course not,” Esper said disdainfully. “But they didn’t need her any more to keep Vir in line. They had
you
. Plus, she was happy to no longer have the Kraken’s threats hanging over her head.”

“I take it my father got the device up and running.”

Esper gave a slight chuckle. “It was already functional, for the most part. Vir had simply been stalling, trying to come up with some kind of rescue plan, but the new threat on your life meant he had no more options.”

“So he handed over a working doomsday device in exchange for me.”

“That was the plan.”

“Did he know about my mother? That she wasn’t dead?”

“Yes. It was a bitter pill to swallow when he found out that she was in on the whole thing – that she never really loved him. But by the time of your birth, he’d made his peace with it. At that point, you were all that mattered.”

“So what happened?”

“As you probably know from your own personal experience, there’s a world of difference between
having
power and actually knowing how to use it. In this instance, Vir intentionally designed the induction engine so as to not be user-friendly. That being the case, Novercalis really didn’t know what they were doing with it. As a result of their ineptitude, there was some kind of malfunction and it blew up, destroying half the town and killing a bunch of people – including your mother, as far as I know.”

I felt something almost like physical pain at Esper’s words, and a moment later I found myself struggling to hold back tears. It felt odd to suddenly be feeling powerful emotions in regards to a mother who, from all indications, had never wanted me and had done little more than use me from the moment I came into existence.

“I know you’re feeling sad and disappointed,” Esper said, plainly reading my mood, “but before you get overwhelmed by excessive sympathy for Beguile, I need to make one thing perfectly clear. Even though the Kraken was threatening her life, she was his daughter through and through.”

I winced, struggling to put her words into perspective. “What does
that
mean?”

“It means that she was just like him: ruthlessly ambitious, unfeeling, uncaring and – with respect to her own unborn child – unnurturing. I know it’s hard to hear, but that woman had a black heart, if she had one at all.”

She was right – it was incredibly difficult to hear those things, even though the comments about Beguile’s maternal instincts seemed to match what I’d learned from Mrs. Gutierrez. Still, that had been a far cry from the hardcore terms Esper was using to describe the woman who gave birth to me.

“You talk like you knew her,” I finally said.

“I did. After all, we were both part of Novercalis. Moreover, she was my sister.”

She made the statement so casually that it took me a second to recognize what she’d said, and then I’d had to replay it in my head to make sure I’d heard it correctly.

“Your…your…your sister?” I stammered. “Then that…that means that the Kraken…” I trailed off, unable to finish.

“Yes. He’s my father.”

She spat the last few words out, uttering them in disgust, like they were smeared with something incredibly distasteful. At the same time, she glanced at me with a pleading expression on her face.

Her words, in addition to catching me off guard, caused me to reflect back on my short meeting with Vir.

“My aunt,” I said softly. “Vir mentioned that I had an aunt.”

Esper smiled. “Guilty as charged.”

“Then why didn’t you ever say anything!” I screamed in sudden fury, incensed at the way she had kept this information from me my whole life and then casually blurted it out as if it didn’t mean anything. “You’ve let me go all this time, thinking I was an orphan – that I had no family – and the entire time you’ve been right here in my face!”

Not to be outdone, Esper yelled right back. “You think I wanted to keep you in the dark?! You think I enjoyed evading your questions and keeping the wool pulled over your eyes! I did those things to protect you!”

“Ha! My mother was dead and my father was in prison! What were you protecting me from?!”

“The Kraken, you ungrateful brat! He was still out there and was more than willing to make good on his promise to slice and dice you! And even if he didn’t follow through on that, he could use you to control your father!”

“Oh, yeah,” I said sarcastically. “I’m sure there’s a ton of upside to controlling a guy who’s behind bars, and in a nullifier, to boot.”

Esper just stared at me for a moment, and I could see the wheels turning in her brain as she contemplated how to respond. After a pause that seemed uncomfortably long, she said, “There’s no cell that can hold him.”

“Excuse me?” I said, thinking that I had surely misheard her.

“Your father,” she said. “There’s no prison that he can’t escape from.”

I scoffed. “Maybe with his powers, but they’re keeping him in a nullifier cell.”

She shook her head. “You really have no clue of what Vir’s capable of – of what you yourself have the potential to do.” I simply stared at her, not sure of what she was trying to convey; when I didn’t speak, she went on. “He can circumvent the effects of a nullifier.”

Still staring at her, I slowly shook my head. “No. That’s not possible.”

Esper went on speaking as if she hadn’t heard anything I’d said. “I don’t know if it’s technological or something incident to his power set, but I know that there’s a flaw in the nullifier design – at least in the older models, like the one in his prison – that he’s able to exploit.”

Unbidden, I had a sudden recollection of the odd communication I’d had with Vir. It was clearly some kind of ability related to our powers – and he had used it with the nullifier on.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s assume Vir can break out any time he likes. Does Novercalis know that?”

“Probably not, but it wouldn’t have mattered,” Esper stated. “The Kraken would have given your father some kind of ultimatum – like, ‘Escape from prison in a week and start rebuilding the induction engine or I’m throwing acid in your daughter’s face.’”

“So you took me and hid me,” I concluded.

“Yes, but it’s more complicated than that. I knew that Novercalis would never stop looking for you for as long as you were alive, so I killed you.”