Empowered Academy 1985 Page 13

  Edgar left later that night, and as I lay in bed, everything that had happened today replaying over and over again in my head, I knew I’d have a lot to talk to Lizzy about the next day. At the moment, however, I was overcome by a perfect serenity knowing that my heart now belonged to somebody who was willing to share my burdens and take on the world with me.

  Chapter 17

  Ramsey

  I never thought I’d be sitting at the freaks’ table at the cafeteria, but here I was, and it was all because of Emily.

  Of course, Chad couldn’t wrap his head around the fact that I’d fall for a girl—especially Emily. He and I had been keeping track of our lays at the Academy, and now I was out of the competition because all of my attention was focused on Emily. I couldn’t even explain to Chad why she mesmerized me so much because even I didn’t understand it. All I knew was that I had to have her. From the first time I kissed her—which was partly out of frustration just to get her to stop yapping—I had been under her spell. As a result, I just couldn’t bear the thought of her sitting nearby without my protection. Not only did I not trust the losers she sat with, but I also knew the Academy was full of vindictive little shits and fights often broke out in the cafeteria, so I wanted to be close to Emily.

  I had known she was basically with Edgar before that, but I just assumed she’d drop him once she knew I liked her. In that regard, I had underestimated the newbie. I told Emily I’d accept him, but that didn’t mean I had to like him or get along with him. In truth, though, I was in no position to bargain with Emily. She could have told me to strip down to my boxers and bark like a dog and I’d probably do it.

  So there I was at the lunch table with Emily, her friend Lizzy, and all of Lizzy’s weirdo friends. Edgar sat on the other side of Emily, and I didn’t acknowledge him unless I absolutely had to. Were it not for the fact that he was Emily’s other boyfriend, I might have actually liked the kid. He had saved my ass that night at the Old Field Psychiatric Center and proved he was a reliable partner. Also, on some level, I knew that his willingness to tolerate me meant that Emily was important to him too, so maybe we had more in common than either of us cared to admit.

  Every now and then I’d look over at the table I used to sit at the head of, the jocks’ table. There was Chad, Troy, Flex, Lance, and all the other guys—the actual cool people of the Academy. I knew their respect for me had dropped since I switched tables, but I didn’t care because I also knew that a true alpha male didn’t concern himself with the opinions of others.

  Everybody at our table was talking about the break-in at the Academy last night. Apparently, a group of thieves broke into Epsilon, the basement complex underneath the Academy where the Empowered Bureau kept their research facilities, and stole a bunch of shit. The Academy was staying tight-lipped about what actually happened, so all we could do was speculate.

  “I heard they stole a vaccine that makes people unempowered,” Lizzy said. As usual, she had already concocted some kind of conspiracy theory about the event.

  “I heard they stole top-secret weapons,” said Brock, a lardo with X-ray vision who also sat at the table.

  “I bet they were trying to get that girl back,” Emily said, causing everybody to stop and look at her.

  “What girl?” asked Blink, one of Lizzy’s boyfriends.

  “The one we captured that night at Old Field,” Emily said. “Mr. Diaz had us keep her head bagged. And she seemed important to the rogue empowered too.”

  “And didn’t you say that girl was Russian, too?” said Lizzy, getting excited. “You guys know the Architect’s last name is ‘Ivanov,’ right? It’s all connected if you really look into it. Everything at the top is like, one big incestuous orgy or corrupt officials.”

  I was surprised that Emily didn’t say anything about that comment. She had always been eager to stand up for the government, but now she was just laughing with everybody else at Lizzy’s idea. I didn’t know if it was my influence or what, but she had definitely become more independent-minded recently.

  “At any rate,” Emily eventually said again, “I bet that’s what our mission this afternoon is about.”

  “No way,” gasped Lizzy. “They’ve really been sending you guys on lots of field missions lately.”

  “At least they gave us some warning this time,” Edgar said from the other side of Emily. “The last few times they either dragged us out of bed or took us out of class and shoved us in a van. Now we can at least finish lunch before going to the briefing.”

  “Heard you guys have been kicking ass lately though,” said Wesley, Lizzy’s other boyfriend.

  I didn’t like that he was grouping us together, but it was true. The most perilous mission had been the one in Old Field, but the others had been cake.

  “This is the first time it’s just the three of us, though,” Emily said, looking to Edgar and then me.

  I had been feeling a little grumpy—what I called Smash Withdrawal Syndrome, when I had gone too long without smashing something—but when Emily flashed that look at me, I felt myself soften considerably. With just that one look, she reminded me why I was putting up with the freaks at this table; I was doing it for her and that addicting smile.

  “We’ll be fine,” I said calmly. “There’s nothing we can’t do when the two of us work together.”

  “When the three of us work together,” Emily said, tilting her head at me playfully.

  She was challenging me, but it was true. Edgar had bailed me out a tough spot at least once before, so maybe it wasn’t just me and Emily, but the three of us that kicked ass together.

  “Alright,” I said, smirking at Emily, impressed by her ability to rein me in. “The three of us.”

  Not wanting to hear what reaction my compliance would elicit from Emily’s best friend, I quickly got up and made my way to the buffet for seconds. I had some carb-loading to do in preparation for the big mission this afternoon.

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  A few short hours later, we—Emily, Edgar and me—found ourselves back in the black van. It was a vehicle we had become most familiar with recently as it ferried us around to field missions. In the past, these missions had been confined to different locations around Long Island; the furthest west we had gone before this was Queens. Today, however, we were going past Queens, through Manhattan, and into the depths of Upstate New York to the town of Little Falls, one of the smallest towns in the state.

  Since it was a four-hour ride from Montauk to Little Falls, we were being briefed in the van by Mr. Hill, a teacher with the ability to make people hallucinate who was accompanying us on the mission. Mr. Hill looked like a more badass MacGyver. He was short, only a few inches taller than Emily, but he carried himself confidently and you could tell he was highly competent just from the way he walked.

  “I’m sure you all heard about the breach in Epsilon last night,” Mr. Hill said flatly.

  Emily, Edgar and I looked at each other suspiciously. Those had just been rumors, and none of us were willing to reveal that we’d been stirring the pot with unfounded hearsay.

  “Cut the crap, guys,” Mr. Hill said, rolling his eyes. “I know all the students have been talking about it today. Well it’s true. And intelligence reported they were the same rebel group from Old Field.”

  “The one that got away?” Emily asked. She looked worried, but I didn’t know why.

  “Exactly,” Mr. Hill said, nodding. “That’s why we called the three of you for this mission. You were the only three that engaged with them, so you should know what to expect.”

  “Why did they break in to Epsilon?” Edgar asked.

  “We’re not sure what their entire plan was, but they stole some highly sensitive equipment that we need to get back. That is our number one priority.”

  “What equipment?” I asked.

  Mr. Hill eyed me seriously. “Even I don’t have high enough clearance for the Bureau to tell me what it is, but they said we’ll know it whe
n we see it. Something the Architect was working on. Real high-tech shit. It should stick out like a sore thumb.”

  “How are we supposed to get something back if we don’t even know what it is?” Emily asked, sounding frustrated.

  Mr. Hill sighed. “I’ll level with you guys; I’ve never known the Academy to be this secretive about something, so it’s gotta be important. Whatever the hell they stole, we need to get it back. If we can do it quietly without being detected, then all the better. If that’s not possible, then we’re authorized to engage with them as minimally as possible. What we need to avoid is a bloodbath, and that means not going all ‘Hulk smash’ on the first person you see,” Mr. Hill said, looking specifically at me. “We don’t know how many of them there will be. Could be a few, could be a dozen; but the bottom line is we need to rely on stealth.”

  Mr. Hill was warning me not to be too smash-happy, but I knew the Academy wouldn’t have sent me on this mission if they didn’t want me to bash stuff. I nodded to Mr. Hill, but inside I knew that if the opportunity presented itself, I would bash up the first rebel wastoid I saw.

  “So where the hell are they?” asked Edgar.

  At this, Mr. Hill took out a map from under the stack of papers he was holding and unfolded it. It was a close-up view of the town of Little Falls, a quaint little hamlet bisected by a thin river. Mr. Hill pointed to an area south of the river, away from where all of the houses and stores were.

  “Intelligence reports they’re here. Old junkyard, hasn’t been used by the city in years. We got satellite images of the coordinates, but they’re a few years old.”

  Mr. Hill took out another few sheets of paper from his stack and laid them on top of the map. They were blurry aerial photos of a junkyard filled with mostly busted up cars, and in the middle there was a rundown shack.

  “We think that’s where they’ll be,” Mr. Hill said, pointing to the shack. Then he began tracing a route from the river to the junkyard as he spoke: “We’re going to approach from the north. There’s a hill here we can stop on to scope out the situation—like I said, the satellite photos are out of date. From there, we’ll figure out our next move.”

  “Shouldn’t we wait until nightfall?” Edgar asked.

  “We will,” Mr. Hill replied. “We’ll arrive in Little Fall at around seven. You’ll have about five hours to get some food in you and sort out your nerves before we meet at the bridge at midnight.”

  I didn’t know if Emily or Edgar appreciated how rare it was for the Academy to give us five hours of unmonitored freedom since they hadn’t been at the Academy as long as I had, but I was seriously surprised. Having been at the Academy for over half a year, I almost didn’t know what I’d do with that time. When I first arrived at the Academy, I had had fantasies about sneaking off and going to the movies or surfing at the beach, but once I realized how impossible it was for us to leave the Academy perimeter (unless you could teleport like Matt), I pushed those thoughts out of my mind. But it looked like now my fantasy would become reality.

  As Mr. Hill handed out the documents for us to look over in detail, I felt my ears pop, which let me know we’d entered one of the underground tunnels connecting Long Island to Manhattan. Once we made our way up Manhattan, it would only be a few more hours before we arrived at Little Falls, where the little freedom we’d been given awaited us.

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  When I finally stepped out of the van a few hours later, the sun was just dipping below the horizon, painting the small town in a reddish hue. Away from the coast now, the air was a bit chillier here than it was on Long Island, and I breathed it into my lungs pleasurably as I stretched my legs. We had stopped in the parking lot of a strip mall that housed stores I hadn’t seen in months while I’d been trapped in the Academy: KB Toys, Tower Records, Pizza Hut, West Coast Video, and of course a McDonald’s.

  “Bridge is right across the road there,” Mr. Hill said, pointing across the parking lot. “Do whatever you want until midnight, but don’t get lost and don’t get into trouble.”

  After syncing our watches, Mr. Hill walked off, leaving Edgar, Emily, and me by ourselves outside the van.

  “Is this like when you bring your dog to the park one last time before you put him down?” Edgar asked. “This is going to be a suicide mission, isn’t it?”

  “It is weird,” I said, putting my hands in my pockets and looking around, “but what else would they have us do? Just wait in the van until twelve? They probably want us to stay limber and alert.”

  “Well—where to?” Emily asked, her eyes bright and cheery. “I’m starving, as usual.”

  “I would kill for some Dunkin’ Donuts,” said Edgar.

  “Dude,” I said, looking Edgar dead in the eyes as seriously as I could. “I freaking love donuts. I would drag my broken body over a landscape of barbed wire just to lick at the powder of a Berliner.”

  It was perhaps the first time I’d spoken to Edgar directly outside of a mission. I couldn’t help it; donuts were my Achilles’ heel.

  “Looks like you guys have something in common,” Emily beamed.

  I quickly snapped out of the donut-induced trance Edgar’s comment had put me in when Emily said that. I didn’t want to be like Edgar. I didn’t want to be grouped together with him either. That was one thing I hadn’t anticipated about our five hours of freedom: I wanted to be alone with Emily, but we couldn’t leave Edgar on his own. For one thing, Emily liked him, and for another, if we got into any kind of quarrel before the big mission, it would be disastrous to our performance. I sighed, resigned to the fact that we’d have to spend this time together as a trio.

  “Well, I’m sure there’s a Dunkin’ Donuts around here somewhere,” Emily said, and the three of us walked off.

  ━━━━━ ▣ ━━━━━

  There wasn’t a Dunkin’ Donuts, but by eight o’clock we had found a 24-hour mom and pop donut shop a few streets away. We were sitting down at a quiet table by the window, watching locals walk by outside as we enjoyed homemade donuts and freshly roasted coffee. I started with six donuts for myself—a mix of glazed, Boston cream, jelly, and others—because it was on the Academy’s tab after all. And besides, I would burn up all the calories I consumed during the mission later tonight anyway.

  “You might be the only person I’ve met who can eat more than Emily,” Edgar said, looking down at the box of donuts I’d prepared—he had only taken two for himself.

  Normally I’d be pissed that he was talking to me, but I was overwhelmed by the beatific joy of eating donuts, so I tolerated his quips for now.

  “It feels weird being out in the real world again,” Emily said, licking a glob of strawberry jelly off her glistening lips. It was a natural move, but infinitely sexy the way she did it, and it stirred something dangerous inside me. Before I returned to my donut, I realized that Edgar was looking at her in a similar way—I couldn’t exactly hold that against him, though, as I ogled Emily any chance I could get.

  “It doesn’t feel like much has changed for me,” I said after taking the final bite of my Bavarian cream. “This is just like the small town I grew up in.”

  “Where did you grow up?” Emily asked, scrunching up her brow. “I can’t believe I’ve never asked you that.”

  “It’s not important,” I said. “I don’t like talking about my past.”

  “East coast?” Emily asked. She wasn’t giving up.

  “Midwest,” I finally said, moving on to the bear claw waiting in my box of donuts. “Frankfurt, Michigan. We moved away when I was ten, though. Chemical plant my dad worked in blew up on take-your-son-to-work day. I watched my old man succumb to the flames as he tried saving his coworkers. He brought four of them out of the fires before he collapsed. I’ve hated fire ever since.”

  I hadn’t planned on telling them this, but she did ask. Maybe it was something about the donuts that made me more talkative than normal.

  “Anyway, that’s all in the past,”
I said. “My mom and I lived in Wisconsin after that, and shortly after we moved I discovered my powers, yada yada.”

  When I noticed neither Emily nor Edgar were talking, I looked up. Emily had her hand on Edgar’s, and he seemed to be spacing out at his donut. They both looked really serious.

  “What?” I asked, feeling that I’d just missed something important.

  “Edgar...” Emily said softly, looking deeply into Edgar’s eyes. “Show him.”

  Show me what?

  Edgar looked at Emily thoughtfully, and then at me. My brow was knit in confusion at first, but then my face contorted into an even more perplexed expression as I watched Edgar change. His skin seemed to shimmer and ripple for a moment before revealing scars that ran across the left side of his face and traveled down below the neckline of his shirt. Burn scars.

  “I lost my dad... my whole family... to fire too,” Edgar said gravely.

  I studied the damage the fire had done to him. I had seen what it did to my dad, literally melted his skin. I imagined how painful it must have been. And Edgar survived that.

  As I took new measure of the man sitting across the table from me, I found myself saying something Emily had been trying to convince me of all along: “Maybe we’re not so different after all.”

  Chapter 18

  Emily

  We were waiting on the slope overlooking the derelict junkyard with Mr. Hill, who was presently studying the landscape with night-vision binoculars as the rest of us waited to hear his appraisal of the situation.

  Tonight had been amazing. For the past few weeks, I’d been struggling to handle the animosity between Edgar and Ramsey, and tonight at the donut shop they’d finally made real progress. They weren’t exactly buddy-buddy now, but they certainly respected and understood each other more, especially Ramsey. It was a step in the right direction that filled me with hope, and as we crouched on the hill now, I felt that the three of us were more empowered than ever.