The Spaces Between Coordinates

Chapter Seven

The longer Tamanda stared at Patrick to see if he would crack, the more the inkling of doubt festered. More than half the time, she wasn't wrong when it came to her brother taking or hiding her stuff. Even their parents Joseph and Katrina Owusu knew. Their kids caused so much trouble growing up but Patrick was usually the instigator.

Their gifts made everything ten times as bad. Patrick had superhuman speed which he never failed to use to escape from his twin and their parents. Tamanda's gift wasn't so obvious as her brother's. She was able to attract and store static electricity in her body which she could only dispel when she reached a certain limit. So together they would play lots of pranks on their peers, parents and each other.

Their parents were also gifted so they came up with lots of creative ways to stop their children's antics. With an aptitude for electronics, Katrina was a real tech nerd and she spent most of her time making nifty gadgets for the house. For Tamanda she made items that could absorb the electricity she attracted. Joseph had superhuman traits of speed, strength and hearing so together with Katrina, they made regimes for Patrick to constantly run around the house.

Patrick's speed limit was yet to be determined so every weekend their parents had training sessions just to see how fast he could go. Katrina and Joseph were athlete trainers for their professions so naturally they raised their kids under the same conditions as their trainees. While Tamanda wasn't superhuman, she had high aptitude for nearly every sport and she was quite fast as well.

They were both fairly good students as well but their pranks and antics always got them expelled. So the RSG was their fourth high school in the year 2156. 'I did sneak into school last night to use the pool...I might have left them in my locker.', Tamanda thought. Patrick and Tamanda had a school ritual they did every time they got transferred. They would both sneak into their school and basically snoop out every possible hiding place and figure out the entire building layout.

Using the information they would find, they would create a blueprint of their own so that they could plan any pranks and have routes to use in order to not get caught. Naturally they couldn't always go together because someone would have to play decoy and keep their parents from discovering one of them was missing. Yesterday Tamanda snuck out to make a layout of the building near the football stadium but instead wandered off to the stadium.

She was on the track field when she noticed a lever hidden in the grass by a goal post. When she pulled that lever, a slight rumbling came from the ground and the whole football ground split in half like a Venus fly trap to reveal a large pool rising up until it was level with the ground. She stood dumfounded for a good minute but she regained her composure and looked down at the lever again. There were other buttons next to it but she didn't want to waste anymore time so she left them alone.

One of Tamanda's favourite hobbies was swimming and the crystal clear deep blue surface was like dangling a carrot in front of a donkey. Instead of making her map she spent the rest of the time swimming and when she got home, she simply went straight to bed without telling her brother what she did.

Clenching her fist, she turned away to her locker and spun in the combination. To Patrick, the sound was like an executioner sharpening his axe and a bead of sweat rolled down his back. 'This is bad. I need to move silently and quickly.', he thought desperately. He was not afraid of his sister per say. It was more like afraid of what she would do to him. They got into a lot of fights as kids and once Tamanda pulled out another kid's tooth just for taking her lunch. His heart raced and he gulped as he shuffled away at a snail's pace.

The lock clicked and the door came away open with a creaking metal sound. The locker was divided into three shelved sections of which Tamanda's books were placed on the top shelf. Her stationery and notepads in the middle and in the last one a container for her contacts. The container was open and a cracking sound was heard as Balthazar sat occupied with chewing the right eye contact.