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I stared at my grandfather’s door for a long minute before twisting the knob and stepping inside. A computer screen lit Pops’ face in a harsh blue glow and cast shadows across the thin wrinkles around his eyes. The daunting light leaked onto the metallic wall beside him and spilled across the torn family photo, leaving the rest of the room in shadow.
I swallowed hard. He used to turn people into beasts.
Pops motioned to the light switch, his eyes fixated on the computer. “Please, turn on the lights.”
I flipped the switch. Bright light flooded the room.
“The Camaraderie is planning something,” Pops murmured, his thumb on his lip as he scrolled down the screen.
I took my seat nervously. “They’re probably trying to get their pendant back.”
“Not just that.” He folded his hands in his lap and swiveled his chair to face me. “The Cuban Resistance said they’re pulling specific beasts from the transformation facilities. Not the usual fighters. Beasts with shapeshifting and radiation and laser eyes. We’re not sure why.”
Of course he would notice that. He’d been one of the doctors who transformed them.
I lowered my eyes to the symbol on the front of his desk. “You think they’re planning something outside of their usual attacks?”
“Possibly.”
“Do you think Lady Winters has something to do with it? I had a run-in with her at the beastie plant.”
He glanced at me, concerned. “Inese told me you faced her again.”
“Yeah, she—” I looked up from the symbol on the desk and the lights wavered. My legs felt numb and heavy. My skin burned—I stared at Pops from inside a tube. I screamed for him to let me out, but my tongue stuck in my mouth, thick and swollen. A tickling fire rushed through my arms and legs, and I collapsed to the ground, shaking and burning—
“Jenna!”
My grandfather’s rough hands shook my good shoulder and his blurry fingers snapped centimeters from my nose. My knuckles had gone white from gripping the chair’s cold metal frame.
“Jenna,” Pops repeated, softly. He knelt beside me and lifted my chin so he could look me in my eyes. “What happened?”
“I don’t know.” I took a deep breath, grateful as Pops returned to my side with a cup of water. He waited until I could hold the cup steady, and after several gulps, I lowered the cup to my lap.
He asked me again what was wrong.
“I think Gwen called it a memory seed,” I said. My blood pounded in my ears. “When I was at the beastie plant—”
Rows and rows of green tanks, each inhabited by the helpless—
“Brainmaster attacked my mind.”
Pops lifted his head in recognition, but didn’t interrupt.
“In my mind, she turned me into a beastie. She asked me what I thought of you. She—” Fear flooded through me. Saying this aloud was so much worse than keeping it in.
“I’m sorry.” Pops wrapped his arms around me. His suit was stiff, his cologne strong, but it’d been so long since anyone hugged me, anyone I remotely considered part of my family, that I relaxed. Warmth spread through me and I let my body still.
Whatever he had done before, that was in the past. He was my grandfather. “Thank you,” I whispered.
He nodded and withdrew from the embrace. “Talk to Gwen about removing those memories as soon as she’s recovered enough.” He stood, his knees popping. “Can I get you anything else?”
I nodded. “I want to sabotage the beast plants. I want to find information on the beasts so I can stop them from being made. I want to fix everyone who’s been hurt.”
Pops tucked his cane neatly under the drawer handles and sat, his face twisted as if he understood but didn’t agree.
“I want to try a covert mission,” I continued. “But I think—I think it would help if we knew how the Oriental Alliance fights. If they can stop these beasts, then we can use that to our advantage.”
Pops’ eyes held a telling sadness. “Jenna, the Camaraderie has us vastly overpowered. But if you want to see how the OA works, I’ll have Inese make the arrangements. The more you know about this world, the better suited you’ll be to take what life gives you. I know Gwen will remove the damage Lady Winters has done, but you might also speak with Jim. He’s missed talking with you these past couple days.”
“I’ll do that.”
“Good. Do you need me to escort you anywhere?”
I shook my head and tested my ability to stand. My knees felt weak, like they could buckle at any moment, but I steadied myself against the wall. “No, but thank you.”
A smile tugged on Pops’ lips. “Anytime.”
Jim held a magazine in one hand, the cover of which had a thick yellow border and a woman wearing white makeup and red lipstick. Her black hair contrasted sharply with the rest of her face, and I’d never seen a leader’s costume so unusual. Stacks and stacks of these magazines were piled in the corner of Jim’s room, some older than he’d been alive.
Jim sat the magazine on his desk and eyed me through his reading glasses. “Are you all right?”
I sunk into the plush chair and explained what happened between me and Lady Winters. The memories. The accusations. The transformation I’d seen. I tucked my legs against my chest. “Half those prisoners were from the Community, and their only crime was having powers.” I scowled. “Too bad the car doesn’t have enough firepower to blow up the beastie plant. Then there would be no place to send them.”
He chuckled sadly. “I know how you feel, but if we used the car to make a direct attack, then the car would be a target, and it is vital to our sabotage operations. We have lost too many of those who serve our goals to accomplish anything bigger.”
I rested my chin on my knees. “Is that why everyone’s so eager to take on Val?”
“She seems like a nice young lady. Very enthusiastic.”
I scowled. “She’s too chipper. She just seems...” I fiddled with Lady Winters’ charm. I didn’t trust Val. I couldn’t trust her. “She was one of the prisoners, yet she doesn’t fault beastie creation. How can we trust her?”
“Throughout the Coalition’s history, we have worked with many people we did not immediately trust. During the early days of the Coalition, before we officially started calling ourselves that, one of our founding members was a black market hacker.” He paused. “I hated his guts.”
I blinked. Jim hated someone? That didn’t seem like him at all.
“However,” he continued, “this hacker was crucial to our success. Without him, the Coalition would never have secured this airship and made it out of the U.S. alive. I eventually came to terms with him, but it took time and a considerable amount of patience.” He smiled and interlaced his fingers over his magazine. “Give Val a chance. There will always be people you don’t like, but get to know her. You may find that she is as nervous as you were when you first joined. She has been exiled from her home, unable to return without being targeted by the Camaraderie. Similar to you.”
I sighed. “I guess. I’d love to go home with Lance and Tim, and have Mom chide me for bleaching my hair too long and for Dad to go on a walk with me and talk about daily life. I guess Val might feel the same.”
Jim nestled his reading glasses onto the crook of his nose and smiled.
The smell of warm beef called me from the kitchen. Out of everyone here, Crush was the only one we all agreed could prepare food well. His concoctions outperformed Jack’s frozen burritos, and the time Inese tried making scrambled eggs, she’d almost set off sprinklers I didn’t know we had.
Since then, we’d been lucky to find scrambled eggs left warming in the skillet every morning, though Crush adamantly claimed he wasn’t the one who cooked them. My guess was that he didn’t want anyone taking dinner duty and leaving scorched pans in the sink for him to clean later.
But his cooking aside, I longed for Mom’s shredded beef and cabbage dish she made before I left home. I still hadn’t heard anything about my parents. I didn’t know if they had the same jobs, or if the Community relocated them. Families were sometimes relocated if a relative was taken away, but I now doubted that was a good thing.
“This airship is so big!” Val’s voice carried down the hall, interrupting my nostalgia. “Tim, I can’t believe how lucky you are. You must be really smart to learn so quickly.”
“Well... my power helps out a lot with that—”
I eased my way into the kitchen and took the long way to the stove. Crush had left the pan simmering, presumably with Tim keeping an eye on it. He was the only other person here with an ounce of cooking sense, though he usually didn’t exercise it. The warm, spiced beef smelled delicious, and I was happy to find there were potatoes and green beans in it, too. I just didn’t plan on checking the expiration dates of the empty cans littering the sink.
“What about you, Lance? What’s your superpower? I know you’ve got a thing for swords. I’ll bet you can get really good with them if you keep up your practice.”
Lance beamed at Val’s words, and I froze in the middle of heaping a nice ladle of stew into my bowl. Val traced her finger along his shirtsleeve, smiling eagerly into his eyes.
He coughed, then smiled back. “I can make portals.”
Don’t do it, I told myself. Flinging the ladle at Val would waste perfectly good stew.
Val grinned. “You saw my fangs,” she said, turning to Tim. She made a little growling sound. He yipped and jumped away, delighted.
I dug through the drawers for a spoon. For some reason, finding a fork around here was getting a lot harder. Crush suggested they were somewhere under the piles of Jack’s DVDs, but Jack blamed a so-called “Ghost Cook” and suggested that Crush had misplaced the garbage shoot for the dishwasher.
Either way, I wanted forks. It was difficult to eat waffles with a spoon.
Val raised her hand toward the ceiling and leaned into Lance. “I can also make electricity do what I want.”
The lights flickered.
Great. She was using all our power reserves.
“That’s awesome!” Lance said. “My other power is speed, but I’d go with electricity if I had the option. Imagine—electricity with a metal sword?”
Val giggled and hopped up on the table. “That would be cool.”
“Yeah.”
I didn’t see what was so great about being an electric elemental—
I fumbled and dropped my spoon. All three of the them turned to stare as it clattered to the floor. My cheeks burned.
Val scooted to face me. “Your major power is plants, right?”
I nodded coldly and took my seat, then tried the stew. The once-delicious green beans tasted lumpy and hard to chew. The potatoes were too stiff; the beef... scarce.
Stupid Val.
She swung her legs and tossed her head from side to side. “I once heard of a guy with plant powers, but he was creepy; totally antisocial. He had plans to take over the world, or so the stories said. They called him Ivy Man.”
“Ivy Man? What kind of name is that?”
Both of the guys moved closer, intrigued. “What’d he do?” Lance asked.
“He encased his victims in vines and messed with their minds to make them turn on each other.” Val glanced at me. “Kind of like you, except without the telepathy.”
My skin prickled from the warm metal of the charm, and I clenched my teeth. If I wasn’t going to use the charm before, I definitely wasn’t going to use it now.
And did Val just imply that I was antisocial?
“Your other power is speed, right?” She grinned.
I glowered at her. “Yes.”
“Right. Being able to run from beasties is always a good thing.”
I sat down my spoon, deciding against a second helping. “Yeah, plenty useful,” I murmured, then took the bowl to the sink. I wasn’t going to deal with another Sam.
Instead, I headed downstairs and stopped by Gwen’s room to see if she’d recovered enough to try again with the memories, but she didn’t answer her door.
I didn’t want to disturb her, so I headed back to my room.
I’d try again tomorrow.
