Outliers

Chapter 9: Little Did We Know

"You know how we're warning people?" Ariana asked a couple weeks later.

We had successfully managed to warn a few people, and scary as it still was, it might have been helping me a little. I'd had a couple days where I actually felt like doing things, where I didn't want to just stare at the wall for hours. I was trying my best not to let the guilt about surviving eat away at me. It was hard.

"Yeah," I said. We were sitting at our little plastic table, eating meal bars for dinner...again. I still missed meat. There was no way the three of us could afford it, but I couldn't help longing for my dad's roasted turkey—a ridiculous thing to complain about when my family could never eat anything again.  How could I be missing anything except for them?

"What's up?" Xavier asked Ariana.

"Well, I was thinking." She bit her lip and shifted in her chair. "What if we made a group with the Outliers we find? Y'know, talk about what happened, our powers..."

"That's a good idea," Xavier said, sitting straighter in his chair. He had that fire in his eyes. "If we get enough and train them, we could go after the Takers. They'll want them gone as much as we do."

"We can't," I said, shaking my head. My breathing sped up a little. "What we do is already risky enough. Now we're gonna have big, suspicious group meetings full of other Outliers? We'd just be rounding ourselves up so the Takers could catch us all at once."

A group meeting regularly also meant extra attachments that I didn't want. I worried enough about Ariana and Xavier, and I'd already lost my family. I didn't need to be getting attached to new people who could be taken at any time.

"Yeah, it's risky," Xavier said, still all pumped up, "but this is our chance! We can make them pay for what they did to us."

"What are we gonna do?" I asked, raising my eyebrows at him. "Charge in with a few other kids hoping to take down an entire government? We can't get revenge if we're dead."

Xavier's "shoot first" attitude was going to get him hurt.

"Renee's right about that," Ariana said. "We can't try to attack anybody. But I still think we should form a support group or something. It wouldn't be too suspicious. Like, people do have friends they see."

"If we did make a group," I said, "we still couldn't meet regularly or too often. And it couldn't be a support group because nothing has happened to them yet. If we made a group, it should just be to enlist more people to warn others." It was important to warn as many as possible, and if we made a group this way, Ariana and Xavier would get what they wanted, with much less risk.

"I guess that could work," Xavier nodded, even if he seemed a little reluctant not to go after the Takers.

"So you'll do it?"Ariana asked me, excited.

"If," I said, putting my hands out in front of me. "If we do it the way I said. Irregular, no group therapy."

"Fine," she said, rolling her eyes.

And the warning group was born.

                                 ~

"Found one a few blocks down," I said as I walked through the door, almost a year later. The electronic lock gave a soft beep as I shut the door, and as I always did, I looked back to make sure it was red.

My friends were already home, chatting and filling up on some meal bars. I pulled out my earpods and set them on the kitchen counter. Unfortunately, they weren't connected to anything. It just looked less suspicious if I had music when I went for my "run" every night. That way, I didn't appear as if I were walking around the neighbourhood aimlessly when I was really listening for the thoughts of other Outliers.