The water, hot enough to feel cold against his skin, sluiced over his body like a cleansing tsunami. Yet the one thing he wanted to wash away clung to him like a foul disease, a darkness that he couldn't reach to claw away.
He groaned under the weight of that darkness, both unwanted and unwelcome. If there was any other way …
"Don't you smell good enough yet, princess?" A hard voice just outside the shower asked.
"You've been in there for nearly an hour."
Marcus sighed and slowly pushed away from the shower's tiled wall. A thought then channeled pyrokinetic energies rippling over his lean, muscular body even as he turned the shower off.
Pushing the door of the shower open sent a gout of superheated steam into the communal bathroom.
"Nice," the young man standing a couple steps back, growled. "Why do you have to be such a fucking douche all the time, Marcus?"
Looking at him, for a moment Marcus only saw thermal patterns instead of a person. The hot core, the rivers of fire flowing out from them to the extremities, and the higher heat of the head. And over it all a glowing man shape where the billowing steam heated up their skin.
A blink and it was just Jay, the team veteran, standing there in his usual jeans, t-shirt and old army jacket, his protective stone skin absorbing back into his body.
"Jay. I thought you were in town trying to lure kids into your van," he said, reaching for a towel even though he was completely dry. A gesture not lost on the older man.
"Fuck you, Marcus,” Jay snarled. “When you finally get your shit together, the old man wants your encounter debrief in Ops. Try not to be late, fuck up."
With that, the broad-shouldered young man turned smartly on his heel and angrily marched out of the bathroom, once again subtly reminding Marcus that he was actually raised military. Instead of being brought in from the cold like an orphan. And, as it always did, it sent a surge of anger through him.
Unlike Jay, however, that anger was useful. It motivated him to move faster to get ready for the debrief. It cleared his mind and forced him to focus. And last, but most importantly it pushed back the darkness and the filth that had weighed down his soul. Just enough that he could square his shoulders with resolve and look at his reflection and not flinch.
'Thank you, Jay, you insufferable prick,' he silently said, finger combing his hair into place. Then it was into the labyrinth of corridors that stood between him and Ops.
The Red Butte Rapid Response Center, code named: The Briar Patch. This was RedSky’s tactical response outpost, isolated and insulated from civilization by hundreds of kilometers of Arizona desert. Here RedSky, a private government contractor, kept their hyper human response teams, set up to deal with threats neither the US military, nor other private contractors like Academi, G4S, Raytheon, and Northbridge had the capability of taking on.
Partially because of the advanced tech RedSky had gotten their hands on since their inception in the late Fifties from various sites where captured alien tech was being data stripped and reverse engineered for terrestrial use. And where the tech failed, they had the Team, code named: The Descendants.
In the middle of the Briar Patch was the Hub: built around the old man’s office, which sat at the center, the various operational rooms that radiated away from it were slices of pizza that pinwheeled around it. Although, to be precise, each ‘slice’ had its own shape and size according to what its ultimate purpose was.
Ops, by definition, was the largest slice of space as it held the war room and the bullpen for the various technicians and analysts that had overwatch on every operation running out of the Briar Patch across the planet. Today, Marcus noticed as he slipped through the entryway after putting in his biometrics, they were watching no less than three separate operations that were ongoing. One in Turkey, another in Brazil, and a third in the UK.
He was tempted to stay and watch, considering he had just finished a similar operation in Paris, until Jay shouted from the conference room’s open door.
“Hurry up, tourist,” the bigger man shouted. “You’re holding up the brief!”
“Unbunch your panties, Jay,” he growled as he jogged forward to step through the door. “The old man isn’t even …”
“Here?” a third voice rumbled.
Grimacing, Marcus let his eyes track to the head of the table even as he pasted what he hoped was an apologetic look on his face.
“Sorry, sir,” he said. “No disrespect intended.”
The square shouldered, hawkish looking man sitting at the head of the table frowned, making him look even more like Agent Smith from the Matrix movies. The dark suit that he always seemed to be wearing despite the desert heat, certainly helped that perception. Then he was pulling Marcus from his musing with a long finger pointing at a chair.
“Since you are last to join us, Agent Gray, you can be the first to give us your encounter report,” Mr. Smith intoned in that gravelly voice of his.
Slumping into the indicated chair, Marcus just about groaned in psychological pain. He hated going first. There was no chance to digest the other reports to see if he needed a little embellishment to make it sound like he did better than them. Because it felt like a competition with the other Descendants: who could impress Mr Smith more?
“Agent Gray?” Mr. Smith, who’s real name was actually Jacob Barna, rumbled. “Today, Agent
Gray, today!”
“Yes, sir.” Leaning forward so he could access the in-table interface, he pulled up the mission log that he had submitted not even an hour ago, right after his flight back from Europe. And the screen set into the wall behind Barna came to life with a wash of light.
“Deployment 72A, January 14, 2023. Called in to respond to what appeared to be a terrorist attack by hyper human elements on the American Embassy in Paris, France. Intel bolus provided by local sector command, NSA, ground level intel provided by CIA Global Response units working with the embassy’s marine detachment,” he quickly read out as an image of several buildings on fire around the embassy appeared on the screen.
“Marines first identified on security cameras several individuals approaching the compound throughout the evening, noted their numbers, locations, and dispositions. But it wasn’t until they rushed the embassy at approximately two in the morning, and I quote: ‘spontaneously lighting on fire’ that the marines called it into DoD and the CIA’s European desk and received permission to go live with their weapons systems. They immediately engaged but were unable to bring any of the attackers down.”
Marcus paused there to let the security camera footage play, which showed the approach of the individuals that were using some sort of tech to hide their faces to remain unidentifiable. Then came the attack itself with the individuals indeed ‘lighting on fire’ and making a rush for the gates only to be driven back into the neighboring buildings.
“Paris city police and the French national police were both advised immediately of the attack but informed the embassy they didn’t have the resources to assist. That was when the call came in to the Patch, requesting assistance from us.”
“How long were you on route?” Barna asked, eyes narrowed as he examined the images.
“I happened to be in London on a cool down when the call came in,” Marcus indicated. “At the RedSky compound on Ponton Road, just down from our embassy there. Keller and Task were both on site, so they rolled in a package that took approximately twenty minutes to get on site in
Paris.”
“Twenty minutes,” Barna repeated. “And these hypers did that amount of damage to those buildings in that time?”
“No, that would be Marcus misfiring with his abilities,” Jay snorted, earning himself a look from Barna. Which just as quickly switched back to Marcus.
“While I acknowledge Agent Bamfield has a tendency to speak out of his ass on the odd occasion, I am seeing more damage here than a handful of hypers should be able to do to those mostly brick buildings. Were you misfiring, Agent Gray?”
Marcus felt a muscle in his jaw twitch. It was no secret that, as the youngest of the Descendants, and the last to come in out of the cold, he was still struggling to master his powerful primal abilities. But he certainly didn’t like admitting as much to the old man. Not that they’d take him out of rotation, because only his fire abilities seemed to be useful against hypers exhibiting similar strengths.
No, it was the possibility that they would pair him up with one of the others. Fiercely protective of his independence ever since RedSky found him in that mall he destroyed back in Illinois when he was nine, he would literally fight to stay that way. Even if it meant butting heads with Barna, who, while firm and heavy-handed, was the closest thing he had to a father figure in a life where his widowed mom basically raised him and his brother Jonathan by herself.
He just wished he could learn how to control his abilities faster. The other Descendents had been learning how to control theirs ever since they were kids. He spent his childhood past nine denying he even had them.
“There was something different about these hypers, sir,” he began. “I think they were
Soulless.”
Again Jay snorted.
“Bullshit,” he said disbelievingly. “You don’t know they were Soulless. We’ve never captured one so we could study it enough to know the difference.”
“That’s enough, Agent Bamfield,” Barna rumbled, instantly silencing Jay. Again he returned his attention to Marcus at that point.
“An interesting observation, Agent Gray. Any evidence to back it up?”
A flicker of pain went through him before he could stop it and he found himself looking at his hand.
“Ah, Marcus!” Barna said, switching to his first name. “You leached one, didn’t you.”
“I couldn’t help it, sir!” Marcus said, stuffing his hand back under the table. “I was trying to fend off three of them attacking me at once. My glove got torn off and I touched one of them while in emergency mode. And, despite getting the power boost, I felt nothing from inside him.
He was empty, like a construct.”
“That doesn’t necessarily make him Soulless, Marcus,” that from Valentina, the team’s water primal. Quiet and reserved, she usually didn’t say anything outside of her own report unless it was something significant.
“As you said, it could’ve just been a construct. Some of the more powerful hypers we’ve faced, possess the ability to make echoes of themselves.”
“Normally I would agree with you, Valentina,” Doug, the fourth and final member of their team and their air primal, said with a slight accent to his English. Found and raised in Africa, he had spent most of his life there before a RedSky team responding to reports of strange weather phenomenon near his village, found him.
“But constructs must have their master nearby, and we saw nothing like that on the video. Nor did Marcus see a hyper acting to direct the others while he fought. No, I think the very fact that our fire brother was unable to feel a soul inside of the hyper he leached, pretty much confirms it as a Soulless.”
“If we’re dealing with Soulless, we have to ask the question: who in the world of global terrorism has the power and the resources to obtain Soulless and use them as weapons?” Barna grimly asked. He turned in his chair to stare at the screen, frozen in the middle of Marcus’s defense of the embassy.
“Even better,” he mused out loud. “Who has the power to make them in such numbers they can supply them to terrorists as the next new superweapon against law and order??”
There was a long moment of silence as they all considered Barna's mostly rhetorical questions.
Then:
"Did Keller or Task lose any assets in the defense?" Barna asked.
Marcus shook his head as he continued to state at the table top. Not looking at the fire primal when he nodded, Barna frowned and turned his head to speak over his shoulder.
"Did Keller or Task lose any assets, Gray?" he tightly repeated, startling Marcus into speaking. "Sorry, sir. No, sir. Tactical did not lose any assets in the encounter."
Barna slowly nodded as he stared at the video for a long moment. Then he was abruptly turning back to face the four of them.
"Very well. Thank you, Agent Gray. Bamfield, you're next."
Marcus put his brain back into park at that point. He had too many Jay debriefs to be interested in the slightest for longer than a nanosecond. They were all the same: powerful earth primal sweeps in, instantly assesses the situation then single handedly takes out whatever he's taking on before spending a good hour patting himself on the back. It was all bullshit as far as he was concerned.
Not that Doug Leboo, their air elemental, was any better. Possessing a genius level intellect, Doug always dissected everything down to the driest possible detail. It was never a fight against an enemy. It was a chess match against an overmatched opponent with Doug doing his best to show just how much smarter he was than his enemy throughout.
Valentina Alvarez was much better, but only because her reports were short and directly to the point. Painfully shy, and likely traumatized as a child by the Mexican cartels wiping out her entire village just north of the west coast town of Troncones in the state of Guerrero in a bloody clash over territory when she was only nine. She had wandered the ruins for nearly a week on her own before a RedSky tactical team rescued her.
It was in their custody that she began exhibiting her Primal abilities as a water elemental. Seeing opportunity, RedSky transferred her to the Briar Patch and made her a member of the Descendants. She had been here ever since, keeping quiet and to herself.
Then the brief was mercifully over.
"Okay, Gray, I'm passing your video to the analysts for a data strip and scrub. Hopefully they'll see something you didn't notice that will tell us who was behind the Paris attack, and why they attacked.” Barna paused to scan over the entire four unit team.
“I must say I’m alarmed by your reports, agents. We know for a fact other countries are engaged in various super soldier and hyper human genesis projects. Because RedSky and the Descendants have been dealing with the results for the last decade. But it’s always been a tactical exercise, each country probing its enemies for weaknesses and gathering intel as they did, preparing for the eventuality that someday war will be fought with hyper human assets instead of battle mechs, AI, and normal humans.”
He turned to point at the screen with its fiery images and reckless violence.
“This is not tactical. This is terror. More and more we’re looking at terrorist organizations getting their hands on hyper human biotech and immediately leveraging it against high profile targets.”
Barna folded his arms.
“I’ll be submitting a brief to Rose about this spike in terrorist activity using hyper human assets. And I’ll advise our overwatch teams to increase their vigilance with regards to such activity. So expect a higher volume of deployments until we can locate some sources for this biotech and take them out. In the meantime, you’re all on cooldown.” He looked directly at Marcus.
“Especially you, Gray. You’ve done a back to back. You have twenty four hours minimum cooldown. On base. No wandering into town.” His eyes narrowed when Marcus tensed up in a visible show of resistance. “Am I clear, Agent?”
Marcus sighed, knowing his body had given away his reluctance to be on base for any longer than he absolutely had to. And being told he had to do it. He wasn’t much on taking orders.
“Crystal, sir,” he replied reluctantly.
“Good. You’re all dismissed.” And he turned back to the image, eyes narrowed as he studied it.
Marcus couldn’t help grinding his teeth in frustration as he strode down the hallway leading out of the Hub back towards the common areas and the barracks. The last thing he wanted was to be cooped up in here with a bunch of jarhead ex-tier 1 operators with a sociopathic need to kill something. And his fellow Descendants.
Now, if he could find some corner of the base where none of them, especially Jay, could find him, then he wouldn’t have to deal with their less likable characteristics. Jay’s smug physical superiority and narcissism, Doug beating him over the head with his intellectual superiority, and Valentina’s … awkward silence. He didn’t know how the latina primal did it, but every time they were in a room together and she just sat there, withdrawn and staring off into space in silence, his insides just twisted around in discomfort the whole time.
“Hey, Marcus!” Jay’s voice shouted at him from the far end of the corridor behind him.
Damnit, too late.
“The old man says he wants you to do at least two sessions with the shaman during your cooldown. Orders.”
Marcus squashed the impulse to flip the older primal off. In truth, it wasn’t a bad idea. The Navajo wise woman, who was actually a medicine woman, not a shaman, had certain insights into controlling their primal powers that had proven effective. In fact, she was the only reason he had any control of his fiery abilities at all.
Stifling the urge to glare over his shoulder at a now no doubt empty hallway, Marcus instead changed his destination and took a side corridor that would eventually lead him to the small sanctuary Chenoa Tso kept for training the Descendants on improving the health of their spirit cores. Because for the power primals, their spirit cores were the batteries and control mechanisms for their incredible abilities. A strong core, just like it did in physical fitness, led to strong abilities.
“It’s been far too long since your shadow has darkened my doorway, Marcus,” Chenoa, a handsome and dignified middle-aged First Nations woman, her long hair pulled into a complex bun and barely touched with a hint of silver, didn’t look up from her laptop as her fingers danced across the keyboard when he finally stepped into the sanctuary,
“I thought I said ‘see you next week’.”
“You did, Madam Chenoa,” Marcus said somewhat sheepishly.
“Boy, that was almost two months ago!” She finally looked up from her computer to level a firm look at him with her dark brown eyes, her brow lifted. “Did Barna have to order you here?” Upon seeing the grimace that abruptly appeared on the young primal’s face, she snorted.
“I should tell you to go and meditate in a dark, wet cave for a day for the disrespect you’ve shown not only me, but the spirits themselves,” she said crossly before a slight hint of a smile at the edge of her mouth betrayed the fact that she was only pretending. She then made a gesture with her left hand even as she closed her laptop with her right.
“Hmm, interesting.” She took a quick look around the medium-sized room, filled to almost overflowing with charms, dried bundles of herbs and plants hanging from lines running across the ceiling, and various wooden and stone statues. Spotting what she was looking for, Chenoa quickly plucked a number of dried sprigs from two of the herb and plant bundles before quickly knotting them into two separate bundles with lengths of cord.
Pressing the first into a ceramic brazier with a handful of glowing charcoal inside, Chenoa held it just long enough for the bundle to begin to smolder. She then turned to a frowning Marcus and waved him closer.
Once the bemused primal was within range, Chenoa passed the smoldering bundle over him, once, twice, three, and four times, using an eagle feather to make sure the smoke completely covered him. As she did, she murmured under her breath in a voice too low for Marcus to make out. And once she was done, she pressed the smoldering edge of the bundle into a second ceramic bowl, this one filled with dry dirt.
Before Marcus could ask her what she was doing, Chenoa had lit the second bundle in the brazier and again passed it over him four separate times. And again she used the eagle feather to make sure the smoke had reached every part of him.
Now with two different, but equally pleasant smells woven over him to the point he could smell nothing else, Marcus peered through the slowly dissipating smoke at the Navajo woman as she snuffed out the second bundle.
“Okay, just what the hell was that?” he demanded to know.
“You were a mess of conflicting energies, boy,” Chenoa said, carefully wrapping the two blackened bundles of herbs into separate linen clothes to properly deal with them later. “I smudged you with sage to dispel the negative energies, then with sweetgrass to pull positive energies to you.”
“And why would I need all that?”
Chenoa reached out to poke him in the chest.
“Because your spirit core is unbalanced,” she bluntly announced. “You’re feeling a darkness permeating your mind and you don’t know why.”
“How did you …?” Marcus grimaced a second time. “Nevermind that. Say you’re right and I have been feeling a kind of … darkness inside. What can I, or you, for that matter, do about it?”
Chenoa leaned back into her overstuffed, leather chair and folded her arms over her breasts, eyes narrowed as they studied him for a long moment.
“What kind of primal are you, Marcus?” she asked instead of answering, brow lifting again.
“Uh, fire.”
“Right. Fire. Powerful, chaotic, and possessing the power to both create and destroy, often at the same time.” She leaned forward slightly. “And it’s used in forges to help purge impurities from metal and to harden steel. So, why not use it to purge the darkness from your soul?”
When Marcus stared back at her with only confusion written on his face, she frowned. Then she pointed at a plain metal chair that, up until now, had remained unnoticed.
“Sit,” Chenoa tightly directed.
After Marcus complied, she got out of her own chair and took a step toward him.
“Close your eyes, boy,” she commanded with such authority, he didn’t think of resisting. He just did it.
“Do you see the heat in my body?” Chenoa then asked. Marcus was about to shake his head because his eyes were closed which normally prevented him from using his thermal sight when, in the act of lifting his head to do just that, he noticed something right through his closed lids. Faint at first, it quickly came into sharp focus when he bent his whole attention to it. And Marcus nearly gasped out loud in shock at what he saw.
It was Chenoa’s heat stream, as he had learned to call it, the flow of heat through her body in echo to how her blood moved through her body. It turned her into a ghostly scarecrow of thick trunks and thin branches, all flowing out of the bright core that was her heart.
“No, don’t open your eyes,” she said, somehow sensing what he was about to do. “You are seeing with your thermal sense without the optics getting in the way. This is your spirit sight. Psychics call it the Second Sight, but we all know psychics are full of shit. You’ll call it by its medicine name: Spirit Sight. Say it.”
“Spirit Sight,” Marcus said in a low voice.
“Spirit Sight,” Chenoa repeated. “All of you have it. You see chaotic and living fire, Jay sees the grim, dusty nuances in the earth, Doug the flow and weave of invisible air currents, and Valentina the shift and shiver of water’s living motion. Each living thing has a sliver of each in their living spirit, something that each of you can see. Something that will let you track that sliver over vast distances, see into their very essence. And discover their weaknesses.”
“Holy shit!” Marcus breathed weakly as he struggled to wrap his brain around what his spirit teacher was telling him.
“Indeed. And if you hadn’t skipped the last two months of my training, you wouldn’t be having so much trouble comprehending how powerful that sight truly is!” Chenoa said, reaching out to lightly slap him in the head.
So overwhelmed was he by the hypnotic flow of heat through Chenoa’s body that he was now seeing with his Spirit Sight, Marcus barely even flinched at the slap.
“Now. Look at yourself.”
Obediently Marcus dropped his eyes to his own body. And nearly swore out loud at how much different his heat stream was compared to Chenoa’s.
“That’s your spirit core,” Chenoa pointed out, observing his physical twitch of surprise and correctly surmising its cause.
“It’s like looking into a blast furnace!” he breathed in stunned amazement. “So much power and chaos, licking flames surging out of the middle. So much … fire!”
To his eyes, there was no spindly scarecrow of arteries and veins carrying heat to and from the body core. Just a seething, surging cylinder of chaotic light and flame dominating the center of his body that felt like it would scorch the world if it were let loose.
But Marcus had it contained, if barely. Contained inside his very body.
“From your spirit core comes all of your power and abilities, Marcus,” Chenoa pointed out. “It ignited when you were young and afraid, angry and betrayed, the core drawing on your essence to light itself on fire. That fire grows ever more bright, more powerful, more devouring with each passing day. And it’s up to you to control it. Channel its energy, like the flow of magma from an erupting volcano. Instead of allowing it to scorch the fields and burn the forests, direct it into the sea to build more land for life to grow on. Create, don’t destroy.”
“But our enemies,” he began, the brightness of his spirit core starting to hurt his closed eyes.
“They won’t let us use our powers to create. Only to fight and kill.”
Chenoa sighed. Unfortunately Marcus spoke the truth. RedSky brought the Descendants to the Briar Patch to teach them how to be weapons. Not terraformers and reclaimers.
She never got the chance to rebut his observation. Even as she lifted her eyes back to him, she watched as he twitched hard once more.
“I … see something in the flames!” Marcus declared in a far away voice. “It’s a place. And there’s a boy there. A boy hiding.”
“No, Marcus!” Chenoa cried with sudden alarm, reaching out to take both his arms with her hands to shake him. “Do not focus on the boy!”
But it was too late. Even as he felt her grab his arms, the world spun away and …
Marcus pulled away the wet cloth over his eyes at the sound of his name. Only to grunt in pain as a stab of light penetrated his lids to make the pain filling his head throb in time to his heartbeat.
“C’mon, Marcus,” his mom called from the living area of their small Schaumberg, IL home. Even though she was a pediatrician, and made decent money, Doctor Jane Gray had decided to live simply and stay within her means. Not to mention, she was a single mom, her husband, a pilot, having died five years before she found Marcus and his brother lost and shivering in the mountains a year ago.
“I need you to put your big boy pants on and come out here and help me get your brother into the car.”
“Mom. I can’t. My head hurts,” he whined just loud enough for her to hear. “I don’t want to go to the mall.”
He could hear his mom sigh in that long suffering way she had.
“We’ve put it off for three weeks already, kid. You need clothes for school and Jonathan has already grown out of the stuff I bought him a month ago.”
School. It was enough to make him grimace as his head throbbed with extra pain from the stress the thought brought. Not that he was stupid; quite the opposite, actually. But he was awkward, so awkward, without that sense of social interactions and limitations kids his age usually possessed..
Whatever had happened in the mountains that stranded him and his brother there, naked and shivering, had also taken away all of his memory. Including how to behave and act around others. Not knowing that, his adoptive mother had put him into public school. Where, in less than a single day, he found himself ostracized, marginalized and labeled by not just the other kids. But by his teachers as well.
He came home that day crying, ashamed that they had put him into the special needs class. Which led to testing, and visits with child psychologists, each saying his intelligence was not only not stunted, it was genius level. In an irony that wasn’t lost on either him or his adoptive mother, he found himself wishing those tests never ended. Because when they did, he would be going back to school.
Alas, after months of testing and homeschooling, he was placed back into actual school, this time a private school recommended by a number of the psychologists that tested him. And while it was better to be amongst children with IQs that matched his own, his awkwardness beyond the usual that genius kids exhibited still made it difficult to make friends.
Marcus had breathed a sigh of relief when the summer break finally came. But then spent the most of the last month stressing out about going back to school. Stress his mother thought contributed to the ever increasing frequency of his migraine headaches. Stress that was exponentially growing each day closer to the first day of school.
“Let me see you,” his mom said in a low voice as the cloth was pulled back off his face and he found himself looking at her.
A classically beautiful African American woman, Jane Ellis Gray was the daughter of an Army colonel and a university English professor, raised on base with a new set of friends every new assignment her mother got, with summers spent on her Grandparents’ farm in southern Indiana. So she understood how hard it was to make friends, having been forced to do so more times than she cared to remember.
It also made Jane a very compassionate person, assisted in no small part by her mother’s upbringing in the deep South, where love of family, good manners, loyalty, and community were central. Compassion that saw her choose Pediatric Medicine out of the College of Medicine at the University of Illinois, Chicago campus, graduating with honors. And saw a grieving widow, only days from losing her commercial pilot husband in a plane crash, traveling in the mountains of Colorado, pull to the side of the road when she saw a naked little white boy standing in the rain, holding a white baby as a forest fire burned in the distance.
She had taken those two boys in without a second thought, unable to speak and unable to remember what had happened to put them there, officially adopting them a few weeks later to give them their forever home, loving them like the children she and her husband intended on having, but never did. So it was with love that she now looked Marcus over with a critical eye, her hair pulled back into a ponytail which was what she did when she needed to get something important done.
“Headache again?” she asked, her words touched with the faintest of Southern locution.
Marcus mutely moved his head just enough to confirm it.
“Mm. Well, I can’t just leave you here and take your brother, Marcus,” she said with a thoughtful expression. “And your grandparents are currently in Germany, so you can’t hang out with them. Okay, kid, how about I make you a deal. You come with me, take a couple Tylenol and we’ll have lunch at the Olive Garden, then a slice of cheesecake at the Cheesecake Factory.
You love the Cheesecake Factory. What do you say?”
Despite the pain, Marcus felt a thrill. He did love the Cheesecake Factory! A lot! So, after a slight hesitation:
“Okay,” he said and a smile blossomed on his mom’s face.
“Deal!” she said with a nod. “Now, please come and help me get Jonathan into his car seat! It’s always easier when you help him buckle up!”
It was late summer, 2012. Barack Obama was the President, the Summer Olympics in London, England had been over for about a week, America was still reeling from the shooting at the movie theater in Colorado, and ‘Marvel’s The Avengers’ was ruling the movie box office. And they were going to Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg, IL, the fifteenth largest mall in the United
States.
The drive there through Schaumburg wasn’t very interesting. Which was good, since it hurt his eyes to look out of the Jeep Cherokee’s windows from his spot in the back. But he couldn’t help but feel a surge of anxiety when the mall appeared around the final corner, a vast, sprawling complex of over two million square feet of retail and entertainment space. And suddenly he wasn’t sure bottomless salad and cheesecake were enough to pay for his presence in this place.
That anxiety only worsened after they found a spot in the parkade, paid for parking, and began walking in. And not just because there were a handful of strange men in dark clothing standing by the entrance that watched them with an unusual amount of interest as they walked by them, the men glancing at small devices in their hands that were definitely not cellphones.
“Easy now, Marcus,” his mom said, sensing his growing anxiety from where she pushed Jonathan in his stroller. Autistic, the baby was unusually silent as they moved forward, not making the usual bubbling, babbling, and cooing that went along with a baby under a year old. Yet Jonathan’s eyes were bright as they took in everything around them with quick sweeps back and forth of his electric blue orbs.
“I’m right beside you. You have nothing to worry about, in here.”
“But what if kids from school are here, Mom?” he said, looking up at her. “They’ll start making fun of me.”
“There’s over two million square feet of space to shop in,” Jane quickly retorted. “The chances of meeting one of your twenty three school mates are almost astronomical!” Upon seeing the doubtful look on Marcus’s face, Jane sighed.
“Okay, I’ll tell you what. I can see at a greater height than you. I’ll be able to see the kids and their parents way before you do. And I’ll just steer us into a store where they won’t see you. How does that sound?”
“Okay,” Marcus grudgingly replied.
“Okay. Now.” Jane squared her shoulders resolutely. “Let’s get some shopping done!”
They had been shopping fairly steady for nearly an hour when, just outside of JCPenny’s, his mom came to an abrupt halt. Holding on to the stroller while helping her push their shopping cart, Marcus was pulled to a stop as well. Looking up with a frown, his eyes widened with surprise and fear when he found a second group of men in dark clothing, with strange devices in their hands, confronting his mom.
“Dr. Jane Gray?” one of them, a square-jawed man with the look of a soldier, asked. “My name is Lawrence Rose, an investigator with RedSky.”
“I’ve heard of you,” Jane carefully replied. “My mother, Colonel Lynn Gray with the Army, said you’re a private military contractor, like Blackwater.”
“Academi, yes,” Rose corrected her as he put away his ID. “There are similarities. We deal with matters of unusual circumstances for the Department of Defense that are beyond their own personnel’s ability to address.”
“I see. Well, I’m not in the military, Mr. Rose. Perhaps you need to speak with my mother.” And she began to maneuver around the small group of men.
“No, Ma’am,” he replied, holding out a hand to stop her from leaving before looking down at
Marcus. “We need to speak to you. Can you tell me what you were doing in the mountains of
Colorado just south of Aurora about ten months ago?”
Jane followed his look down to a visibly anxious Marcus before looking back into Rose’s craggy features.
“Pardon me for saying, Mr. Rose, but I believe that’s none of your damn business,” she tautly replied.
Rose smiled thinly as he lifted his eyes to return her glare with a steady gaze of his own.
“Actually, Doctor, by the order of the American government and the Department of Defense, an event in the area where you found your children was declared a matter of national security. Since RedSky has been contracted by those bodies to protect national security, it makes my question, and your impending answer, precisely my business!”
The man paused there as if to assess Jane’s state of mind. Then:
“I can show you the paperwork that confirms all that, if you like. And you can certainly take a moment to call your lawyer, Mr. Seidler at Marder and Seidler in Schaumburg, if you are so inclined. However, I feel I must advise you that I have the power to deny you access to that lawyer and take you immediately into custody to protect the national interest of the United States if you fail to cooperate with RedSky’s investigation.”
“Are you threatening me, sir?” Jane grated while being inwardly dismayed that this stranger knew so much about her and her life. Regardless, she wasn’t about to be intimidated by this Rose character, no matter who he claimed to be. Her mother and father had raised her with a spine in her back, and a brain in her head. No-one pushed around Jane Ellis Gray. No-one!
Again Rose smiled thinly.
“No, Doctor. Just giving you your options,” he said.
With every word, Marcus could feel his heart pump harder as adrenaline rushed quicksilver through his body. With every exchange his anxiety grew and his fear raged. Until, with Rose’s second smile, which looked like Death’s leer before it swung the scythe to claim his life, his heart jumped into his throat and his vision blurred. Then he was twisting away from the stroller and his mother to run. Run as far as his nine-year old legs could carry him.
“Marcus!” Jane screamed, lunging in an attempt to grab his arm before he got out of range. Only to fail.
“Noooo!”
And then everything exploded into furious flames.
- You need to wake up, Marcus, - a voice belonging to a young boy quietly urged. - Wake up.
You’re on fire! -
With a gasp, Marcus stood from the metal chair Chenoa had him in. Except it wasn’t a gasp; it was the crackle and snarl of living flame that came out of his mouth.
Chenoa was backing away from him, hands held protectively in front of her face, when his eyes finally found her.
“Madam Chenoa!” he called out and reached for her. Only to see his arm was on fire. No, not on fire. It was fire! Pure, living flame in the shape of his arm, appearing to surge and lick just like the fire that wreathed his spirit core had.
“I would say well done, Marcus,” Chenoa said through the thermal distortion of the air all around him. “If I wasn’t so afraid of you lighting all my shit on fire.”
“This …” He looked down at his hands, both now made out of fire. As was his entire body, clothing and all.
“This was supposed to happen??”
“It’s your fire form,” Chenoa replied, sounding rather pleased despite the fact he was now a fiery elemental standing in the center of her study. “Your fellow Descendants all have them, matching their individual abilities, of course. As the youngest, your powers have been the slowest to develop, almost as if something was holding you back. Or draining your power core, somehow. Preventing it from hitting full charge.”
Draining his power core? What did that even mean?? In the meantime, maybe it was a good idea to not be fire!
“Madam Chenoa, how do I stop?” he said as the flames that made up his skin, filled his ears with their fluttering rush and throb. But wait, didn’t fire crackle and hiss??
“Stop what, Marcus?” Chenoa said, furiously scribbling notes into her tablet.
“Being made out of flame.”
The Navajo medicine woman looked up with a frown.
“Stop? Like turn off the ability?” she asked, brow lifting,
“Yeah.” His expression tightened with alarm. Was it his imagination or were the flames making up his body getting … bigger??
“You will it to stop. Just like you willed it to start,” Chenoa answered as if it was the easiest thing in the world to do.
Marcus grimaced. But he didn’t will it to start. It just did, after he came out of that vision, memory, whatever the hell it was.
At least, he tried to grimace. It was hard to tell what his face was doing, it being made out of pure flame and all. Then he tried to frown as he felt a sudden drop in energy levels. And, without warning, his body of pure flame flickered. Then he was himself and he dropped to the ground with an exhausted groan.
Chenoa immediately looked up from her notes.
"Was that deliberate, Marcus?" she asked with a frown while checking her watch. "Or did you just run out of juice?"
"I'm supposed to be on a 24 hour mandatory cooldown, Madam Chenoa" the fire primal groaned, now down on all fours. "I pulled two back to back missions. So yeah, I’ve got nothing left in the tank!"
Looking at him for a long moment, Chenoa slowly nodded.
"I can see that," she noted, making a couple more notations on her tablet before setting it aside. "We're going to work on increasing your energy pool. You were in your elemental form for less than five minutes. No fight will be over that quickly. We can't have you flickering out in the middle of a battle."
"No kidding." Marcus slowly pushed himself onto his haunches. "What do you want me to do now?"
"A full meal with lots of protein. Then straight to bed," Chenoa firmly directed. "Then back here first thing to try again." The medicine woman folded her arms over her breasts.
"We need you in your flame form every day now, going forward. It's the only way to build up your energy pool and your stamina." She frowned. "And we need to figure out what's draining your core."
Chenoa made a dismissive gesture.
"But we'll worry about that later. Go. Food then bed. And I'll see you tomorrow!"
****