Daughter of Zeus ✔

5

The window on the charge pole lit up with a green circle. Like an eye, and a mean one at that. Twenty minutes had flown by, as it was apt to do under life-threatening conditions.

Ada was pale and shaking as she slid into the driver's seat. Immediately, she fiddled with the car's interface to arrange a trajectory, ensuring the auto-pilot feature was on. She couldn't manually drive the car; she could barely touch the correct options on the screen with her trembling hands. Before she exited the screen, their end destination flashed in bold letters: Atlanta.

She pressed "commence trip", placing the car into auto-drive mode. The car passed by the store, and she shook her head at the downed and bloodied clerk.

On the highway, she and Kressick exchanged words every few miles. The quiet was nice, actually. Ada positioned her hands on the steering wheel, more for peace of mind than for necessity. She tightened her grip until her knuckles bloomed white.

Fifty miles from the station, the silence grated on her. She figured if she bottled up what just happened, she might lose it. An electric god of a woman losing her mind was a recipe for a blackened and crispy outcome.

"I thought kidnappings and the like only happened to rich people," she said, hating the small-talk tone to her voice.

"They weren't planning on kidnapping us."

Her hands thrummed on the steering wheel. "I know."

Another five miles rolled on beneath them. Outside the window, moonlight spilled over picturesque pastures. How wonderful it would be, living in the middle of nowhere, without having to answer to Staties.

Ada blew out her breath in one long stream and tried sparking another conversation.

"Aren't you wondering what that was?"

"I know what that was." The infernal "that", and he already knew what she meant.

She didn't even know what "that" was exactly. "Please, explain."

His blue eyes darkened. "People aren't as unaware as you assume. I've watched you zap an interface, your car, the roaches in your kitchen."

She dropped her head. Ordinarily, a driver doing that would cause the other passengers alarm, but the car had control. She could sleep if she wanted. Sleep was sounding more and more like the plan, anything to get away from the current conversation she'd started, and then started again.

"You're crazy." She hoped she looked convincing.

"And you're more powerful than even your mother probably knew."

Along with Cybil's confession, his was the second confirmation that her mother knew of her powers. At home, confident and cocky, Ada had done little to hide her abilities, zapping everything she could, using her powers quite irresponsibly. Through all of it, she suspected her mother confiding in Kressick, but was glad to know her mother kept some secrets.

"She never told you though?"

"No, I put it together on my own," he said.

They went on for miles in silence before Ada noted, "The guy back there...I've only ever controlled machines, not people."

She had pressed that guy's buttons, telling him where to walk and what to do. Overriding his free will and inserting hers was easy. The power scared her with the implications, but she pushed the fear aside. Her newest problem was Kressick and his knowledge of her. Her encounter with Cybil had been a warning: trust no one. She would have to ditch him when the time was right.

He said, "That's all people are, complex machines. We conduct electricity like anything else."

Ada listened, but only to the relevant parts of his words. People...the equivalent of machines. Why hadn't she thought of it before? She made the clerk do what she wanted him to, as if he had become her puppet. She wanted him dead, to shoot himself, but at the last second, she changed her mind. Point-blank murder wasn't in her nature—yet.

With her new ability, maybe she wouldn't have to do any actual killing. Countless times she had re-wired or re-booted a piece of tech, all with the flip of a switch in her head. Could she flip the switch on another human being? Re-wire them completely? Could her father do the same thing? Most likely, the man had mastered mind control. She would have to remember that when she met the bastard. Mind control.

Re-writing a person's entire personality and basic functions to fit her parameters amounted to an unethical dangerous scenario. She couldn't wait to be pissed off enough to try it on the next asshole.