Authors: Adrian Howell
“What’s that?” I asked.
“This morning, Alia heard you saying how she isn’t your sister, and it really hurt her.”
“Well, she’s not my sister, Cindy,” I said matter-of-factly.
Cindy shook her head. “That’s not the point, Adrian.”
“Well, let’s make it the point then!” I shot back. “Because maybe it has slipped your mind, Cindy, but I already have a sister, and she could be dead for all we know.”
“I’m sorry about what happened to Catherine.”
“Well, I’m sorry too,” I said crossly, “but sorry isn’t going anywhere, is it?”
“You have to be patient.”
“You think I don’t know that?!” I said, painfully aware that my voice was quivering. “I was shot for my impatience, Cindy! I lost four months for it. I know that’s my own damn fault, but I’ve learned patience!”
“I see,” Cindy said quietly.
I looked away, calming myself a little before saying, “I’m sorry Alia is hurt, Cindy. But she’s not my sister, and I can’t be her brother.” Hearing Cindy sigh, I turned toward her again and said, “Listen, I’ll do a lot of things for Alia. I’ll play with her. I’ll read to her. I’ll share my room with her. I’ll be her bodyguard if she ever needs one again. But that’s the best I can give right now. I’m sorry.”
“Okay,” Cindy said heavily. “I understand.”
Alia was still awake when I got back to our room, lying silently in her bed with the lights off. The nightlight was just bright enough for me to make out her eyes peering over the edge of her blanket. She had pulled her unicorn up into her bed again, but her eyes were on me, gazing up at my face in a wounded way.
“I’m sorry, Alia,” I said quietly.
Alia just shook her head. I wished I could say something more, but I didn’t know what. “I’m sorry,” I whispered again, but a moment later Alia quietly turned her back to me. I stood there, feeling more confused than ever. Who, exactly, was Alia?
During the night, I woke up three times with a series of nightmares. Alia didn’t murmur in her sleep as much as she usually did.
The first Guardian arrivals started moving in the very next day. They came in groups of five to fifteen vehicles. Looking down from the living-room window, I watched their motorcades pulling into the entrance to the underground parking lot. From up here, I couldn’t see much else, but Cindy told me that the families were greeting Mr. Baker, finalizing their re-initiation to the “true Guardian faction,” and then being sorted into their new homes, which were in this building or in similar ones around us.
“We’re pretty sure there are spies among them, so it takes time to get them settled,” explained Cindy.
“You mean the Angels already know where we are?” I asked in surprise. “What’s the point of you hiding this place, then?”
“Oh, well, putting a hiding bubble over New Haven was never about keeping its location a secret,” said Cindy. “You can’t gather this many psionics in one place without giving yourself away. My hiding bubble simply makes it impossible for anyone to sense where everyone else is. You haven’t been able to sense any psionics since yesterday, have you?”
“No,” I answered. I hadn’t been able to sense a single destroyer anywhere since Cindy had set her hiding bubble over the city. Cindy had once told me that even a proper psionic finder like herself couldn’t sense powers inside a hiding bubble unless they were only several yards away.
“Well, the destroyers are still around,” said Cindy, “just like every other psionic in New Haven. And we know where they are, but the Angels won’t. The idea is to make sure our enemies can’t find out how many and what kind of psionics are living here. Not without spies.”
I asked, “But if the Angels outnumber us, why don’t they just gather all their forces and destroy us?”
“Two reasons,” replied Cindy. “First off, an all-out war would make our existence known to everyone on the planet. Nobody wants that. And second, the Angels don’t want to kill us. They want to convert us. As long as the Guardians continue living in small groups, the Angels could gather a slightly larger force and defeat them without attracting too much attention and without too many casualties, which means they could take more prisoners for conversion. Back when the Guardians had a master controller, we did the same to the Angels. Did you know that Mr. Baker was originally an Angel?”
“No,” I said, surprised.
“Some of us have been swapped back and forth many times. The problem is, if you’re reconverted too soon after one conversion, it could severely damage your mind. Even drive you insane.”
“But the Guardians don’t convert people anymore,” I said.
“Because we can’t,” Cindy said simply. “I know Mr. Baker said that the Guardians are better off without a master, and I believe we are too, but not everyone agrees. If the Guardians were to acquire a master controller again, she could easily become the rallying point for a new Guardian order.”
“She?” I asked.
“For some reason, master controllers are always female.”
“Oh,” I said, feeling stupid. There were still so many things about psionics that I didn’t know.
“So how do the Guardians catch spies?” I asked.
“With a delver,” answered Cindy, and I remembered that a delver was someone who could read your thoughts.
“You mean Mr. Baker is using a delver to look inside everyone’s brains?”
“That’s right.”
“But he didn’t bother doing it to me,” I said, wondering why Mr. Baker had drained me as a “test of character” when he could have simply used a delver to read my mind.
“Because he couldn’t, Adrian,” said Cindy.
“You mean because I can block it?”
“I doubt you could, but if you did, they would know that you had something to hide.”
“Then why?”
“You’re too young,” explained Cindy. “Delving always runs a very slight risk of damaging your mind, but it’s much more dangerous for someone younger than twenty or older than sixty.”
I asked, “What about other mind powers, like berserking and peacemaking, or masters, and...”
“Many forms of mind control come with certain risks, Adrian. Dreamweaving and peacemaking are pretty much harmless, no matter how old you are. But the berserker who attacked you last year...” Cindy looked anxiously at me for a moment before continuing, “Well, he might not have known that you weren’t an adult. But even against adults, berserking is dangerous. He could have seriously harmed you.”
“And that’s how they tried to recruit me into the Angels?” I asked incredulously.
Cindy nodded.
I shook my head in disbelief. I didn’t need any more reasons to hate the Angels. The list was long enough already.
I eventually got tired of gazing down at the motorcades disappearing into the basement, so I went exploring the building with Alia, whose mood, at least outwardly, had recovered during the previous night. As we walked through the condominium, Alia didn’t mention her tattoo or anything else about the day before. Thanks to her constant, cheerful chattering in my head, I even managed, for brief periods of time, to forget my question for Mr. Baker.
The so-called Guardian city of New Haven was actually just a loose cluster of condominium towers, each designated with a number. Our building was New Haven One, or NH-1 for short. This was the first building that the Guardians had purchased for the New Haven Project, and it housed most of the breakaway faction leaders, including Mr. Baker, as well as various other VIPs.
As we walked through NH-1, I discovered that pretty much every floor was identical, with neat rows of doors along the halls. It was utterly boring, but I sometimes caught glimpses of Guardian families moving boxes and furniture into their new homes. Some of the families had children close to my age, but they were busy helping their parents so I didn’t approach them. I knew from Cindy that most psionics didn’t gain their powers until after they were adults, and I wondered if perhaps Alia and I were the only psionic children here.
Even inside the completely Guardian-owned building, no one was using their powers openly. I occasionally sensed a destroyer power or two as I passed people in the halls, but for the most part, everyone seemed perfectly normal.
And, in fact, there probably were a lot of non-psionic adults here too, since only the thickest of psionic bloodlines had all-psionic families. I suspected there were many families in New Haven where only one or two members were psionic. Thinking of that made me wonder how it might have felt being a normal person in a family where others could fly and read minds and do all sorts of things. It was probably pretty crummy.
The motorcades kept coming. Mr. Baker hadn’t been exaggerating when he said that this was to be the greatest gathering of psionics ever. By the next day, New Haven One was fully occupied, as were two other towers next to us. And more kept coming.
It was a sunny Sunday, and I wanted to take a stroll around the neighborhood and see the rest of the Guardian city. However, even though no one had told me that I couldn’t leave NH-1, I still felt a little apprehensive about going outside without Cindy. Cindy was kept busy powering her hiding bubble and attending meetings with Mr. Baker and others, so I stayed quietly in the penthouse with Alia. Still used to my shut-in lifestyle at the PRC, I honestly didn’t mind it all that much. We played board games and hide-and-seek, and generally just lounged about.
Mr. Baker joined us for dinner that evening. Alia and I had helped Cindy prepare the roast chicken. As we sat eating, our conversation drifted from the current population explosion in New Haven to how the other psionic factions were going to react to this unprecedented tactical move by the Guardians. Mr. Baker believed that the Angels would, for the time being, settle for sending spies. Most of the other factions were too small to worry about, none of them having master controllers in charge.
“Of the lesser factions, the Meridian and the AU are probably the only ones strong enough to hassle us here, but they have their own troubles with the Angels at the moment,” Mr. Baker said with a chuckle.
I didn’t bother asking about these lesser factions since they seemed irrelevant. I wanted to know more about the Guardians. As I spoke with Mr. Baker, I learned that the New Haven Project had been in the works long before Cindy and Mark had shown up on Mr. Baker’s doorstep begging for help.
I listened intently as Mr. Baker explained, “We had been planning this defensive stronghold for over three years now, slowly buying up the neighborhood so that when we were ready, we could all gather in a few short days. Without Cindy, however, New Haven would have been much more vulnerable to sneak attacks by the Angels. They would be able to sense where our defenses are weak and exploit it, kidnapping our members for conversion into the Angels. Cindy alone can double the security of New Haven by making it much harder for the Angels to gather intelligence on us. We were extremely lucky that she came to us when she did.”
Cindy laughed. “Well, I don’t know about doubling the security, but I’m glad I could help.”
I said to Mr. Baker, “But you said on the bus that gathering everyone in New Haven would weaken the Guardians in the outer territories.”
“And it will,” said Mr. Baker. “But as long as we’re on the defensive, there’s little point in stretching our forces too thinly. We won’t be able to bring in wild-borns as effectively, so we’ll probably lose many of them to the Angels. But, at the same time, we’ll be saving more of our current members from harm, so hopefully it’ll even out.”
“What about the Wolves and Slayers?” I asked, “They’re not going to just sit around and watch this, are they?”
Slayers, short for “God-slayers,” were a loose association of religious fanatics who were committed to the total eradication of psionics worldwide. I had learned this firsthand last January when a group of them attacked us with hunting rifles. But at least we got away from them. Not long thereafter, owing greatly to my own impatience and stupidity, Alia and I were caught by the Wolves, a paramilitary unit that hunted down psionics for medical research. I wasn’t sure which group I hated more.
“The Slayers might try something reckless, but we’ll be ready,” Mr. Baker answered confidently. “As for the Wolves, I doubt they will attack us here. We control this part of the city now. We have ties with the local government, media and police. The Wolves are a top-secret branch of the military, which means they are a relatively small force. They might try to pick off anyone who strays too far from New Haven, but even if they had the firepower, they wouldn’t risk exposing us with a full-scale assault. You see, the government doesn’t want the public to know about us any more than we do. If psionics were forced into the open, there could be a contest over species superiority.”