Power (Book 1)

Chapter 41

"Can you stop trying to attack me for one second and answer my questions?" I asked him. I was running out of patience.

"Sure," he said. "What do you want to know? But don't ask about how to break the tube. I don't know. Even if I did, I'd still want to see how you do it. It would be a great show."

"I wouldn't dream of it," I said with a roll of my eyes. Sage stopped struggling and perked up, intent on listening to our conversation. I let her go slowly, in case she tried to pull something. Once I had fully released her, she walked over to Dad to stand by his left shoulder.

Was he trying to make a point? That there was a spot for me as his right-hand man? Why would I ever accept that position?

"Who do you work for?" The thought that there was someone higher up than the Master- my Dad- was terrifying.

"The government." He twisted around in his chair, bumping the desk from side to side. He looked like a kid in that thing.

"You couldn't be," I said. "The government wouldn't allow you to kill people."

"They would if the people being killed weren't from their country. Keep in mind that the whole reason we're here is to keep me in check. Well, not me, exactly, more like all the originals."

"What?" I said. "No one's ever told me that."

"Really? I thought I told Jake to tell you that..." He leaned forward in his seat. "Oh, well. I need to explain that to you.

"Of course, as you know, the Meta Revolution happened over fifty years ago."

"I know," I said. "Then it stopped when Blackout and Warp came and destroyed a whole state fighting each other."

"Yes. Nice to know that you're learning something in that pointless history class of yours," he added. "Anyway, do you know why they were fighting?"

"It doesn't say. No one knows," I said.

"It was because they were married," he said with a grim smile. "They were husband and wife, torn apart by the forces of the government from the other dimension; they sent this whole town here from there. All the people, as well. They sent us here, with collars, so they could control us. But only them- Blackout and Warp. We were their first social experiment with crossing dimensions."

"So...you're saying..."

"Your mother and I were Blackout and Warp." He looked at me, gauging my reaction.

"That can't be. That would make you over 70 years old," I said. "But you don't look a day over 40."

"That's because we age slower than the average human," he explained. "I'm 94, and your mother would turn 95 in a few months."

Assuming he was telling the truth, that would account for why he didn't want me using my powers. But that didn't excuse him from everything else. And plus, ew. My parents were old enough to be my great grandparents.

I felt sick. To hide that secret from me, about who he and Mom were, as well as the one about my sister, was beginning to make me question the authenticity of our family.

"Eventually, the collar became so unbearable that I became insane," he continued, "Taking millions of lives on the spot, for no reason other than to make them feel my pain, the pain of being chained up and controlled like a wild animal. Lives I can never take back. But I'm better now. Your mother stopped me just in time. She figured out a way to break the collars."

"You call trying to kill your son sane?" I asked incredulously. "We must have some very different interpretations of that word."

"That's what you don't understand," he said. "I'm doing this to protect you. Once the collars were off, the government threatened to send over some of their agents to kill us if we didn't cooperate. We had to do what they said. And eventually, one of their orders was to kill you and Sage."