“I was thinking about something else.”
“You were doing your nails,” Torstyn said.
Kylee glared at him. “You have a problem with that?”
Torstyn speared his pasta. “Apparently you do. You can’t paint your nails and think at the same time?”
“Chill,” Quentin said.
“I don’t understand what’s so special about this girl,” Tara said.
“She’s a savant,” Quentin said.
“What’s that?”
“It means she’s smart. Like genius smart.”
Tara’s brow fell. “And why does this concern us?”
Quentin glanced around, then said in a softer tone, “I’m not supposed to tell you this, but if you can keep it to yourself, I will.”
“I can,” Tara said. “Kylee?”
She looked up from her cell phone. “What?”
“She won’t understand what you say anyway,” Torstyn said.
“You’re such a jerk,” Kylee said.
Torstyn smiled. “Only to you.”
“All right,” Quentin said. “The Elgen scientists think this girl can show them how to make the MEI mass-produce Glows.”
Tara frowned. “So what you’re saying is that with her help, they’re going to make a lot more of us.”
Quentin nodded. “Exactly.”
“And why is this a good thing? If there’s a million of us, suddenly we’re not special anymore.”
“Yeah,” Kylee said. “What if some of them have powers better than ours?”
“We’re the pioneers,” Quentin said. “We’ll be their leaders. It’s like when the Wright brothers invented the airplane. Within five years there were dozens of plane manufacturers, but the Wrights dominated aviation because they got there first. We’re the firstborn. We’ll be the leaders of the next generation.”
“How do you know so much?” Tara asked.
“I’m smart,” Quentin said.
Tara nodded in agreement.
“We won’t be their leaders,” Kylee said. “Dr. Hatch will.”
“With us,” Quentin said.
“So what if something happens to Dr. Hatch?” Kylee said.
“If something happens to him, we take over the Elgen,” Quentin said.
“You mean you take over the Elgen,” Kylee said.
“Do you really think one person can handle all of it?” Quentin said. “We’ll split up the world. Torstyn will take Asia, Tara gets North and South America, Bryan takes Europe, and Kylee, you get Africa, Australia, and Antarctica.”
“What do you take?” Tara asked.
“I’ll oversee all of it.”
Just then Bryan walked up to the table with a tray of orange chicken and fried rice with chunks of tofu. “How did you guys find a table in here?”
“They gave it to us,” Torstyn said.
“Why does Bryan get Europe?” Kylee asked. “That’s where the best shopping is. And why would I want Antarctica? It’s just ice.”
“Then give it to Bryan.”
“Give what to me?” Bryan asked, sitting down.
“Antarctica,” Quentin said. “When we take over the world you get Europe and Antarctica.”
“I’ll take Antarctica,” he said. “They’ve got penguins. And ice fishing. I can cut through the ice without a saw.”
“Good for you,” Kylee said. “I still want Europe.”
Tara asked Quentin, “Have you ever been to Taiwan?”
“Dr. Hatch took me there once when I was nine. I don’t remember much about it, except there was something going on in the street outside the hotel. Dr. Hatch told me it was a Chinese opera, but it sounded more like an execution.”
“Who are we guarding the girl from?” Tara asked.
“Vey and your sister,” he said. “And the rest of the traitors.”
“The next time I see Vey,” Torstyn said, “I’m going to melt his brain into a little puddle that drains out his ears.”
“That would make a very little puddle,” Bryan said. “That guy’s an idiot.”
“If he’s such an idiot, how does he keep outsmarting us?” Tara said.
“You suddenly a fan of his?” Torstyn asked.
“She’s right,” Quentin said. “The first rule of success is to never underestimate your enemy. Vey’s no idiot.” He shook his head, adding, “I hate that twitching little dork.”
“Speaking of dorks,” Kylee said, “want to see something funny? Watch that fat guy over there.”
Everyone turned to see a smiling, overweight man on the other side of the courtyard walking toward a table in the middle of the most crowded section of the food court. He was dressed in a light beige suit and tie.
“The one with the tray?” Tara asked.
“The one who looks like he ate a tray,” Torstyn said.
“He looks like he ate a stack of trays,” Tara said. “What about him?”
Kylee grinned. “Just watch.”
The man set his tray on the table, then pulled out a chair to sit. As he began sitting, Kylee reached out. “Wait for it, wait for it, now!” She magnetized, pulling the chair out from under the man. He fell back onto the ground, hitting his head on the chair and pulling the tray on top of himself.
The teens laughed. The man slowly sat up with Coke and spaghetti dripping from his face and chest. He was rubbing his head and looking around to see who had pulled out his chair.
“You did him a favor,” Torstyn said. “You helped him start his diet.”
“I can do one better than that,” Tara said. “I’ve learned a new trick.” She held up her hand, her palm facing the man, who was now standing back up, his face bright red with embarrassment.
Suddenly several women standing next to the man screamed. One fainted. Almost everyone around him ran except a few who held chairs up, as if warding him off. Then people began pelting him with trays and food. The confused man ran from the courtyard. The teens laughed again.
“That was awesome,” Bryan said. “What did you do?”
“I made everyone around him think he’s the thing they fear most.”
“That’s epic cool,” Bryan said. “You’re going to give him an inferiority complex.”
“He’s a human,” Quentin said stoically. “He is inferior.”
“I know, right?” Tara said.
Quentin looked at her. “So how did you do that?”
“It’s a trick I’ve been working on with Dr. Hatch and the trainers. They say that fear is located in the amygdala region of the brain, but triggered by the hippocampus, so they taught me how to focus on it and trigger it. I can also make people think they’re looking at anything or anyone.”
“What do you mean?”
“Watch.” Suddenly Tara turned into Dr. Hatch.
“Whoa,” Torstyn said, sliding back.
“That’s incredible,” Quentin said. “How did you change?”
Tara turned back to herself. “I didn’t. I just rerouted the part of your brains that recognizes images and made you see something else. I can prove it. You all saw Dr. Hatch, right?”
“Yes,” Quentin said.
“What was he wearing?” She looked around at each of them. “What did you see?”
“A gray suit,” Quentin said. “Red tie.”
“No, it was a dark blue Armani,” Kylee said. “I would know, I love Armani.”
“He wasn’t wearing a suit,” Torstyn said. “And I don’t think the tie was red. I think it was gold.”
“I don’t remember,” Bryan said. “It could have been blue. Or black.”
“So who was right?” Quentin asked.
“You were all right,” Tara said. “Because the image came from your own minds. You saw what you expected to see.”
“Fascinating,” Quentin said. “So what did those people around the fat guy see?”
“That’s the weird part. I don’t know. It could have been a bear, a werewolf, a snake, a giant spider; it could have been their bo
ss. Whatever they fear most. But I could have made him someone they like too. Like a famous movie star or singer.”
“So you could make them think I’m the president of the United States?” Quentin asked.
Tara nodded. “I could make people think you look like anyone.”
“That’s very cool,” Quentin said. “We’ll have to play around with that.”
Just then a large, muscular kid with bright red hair walked past their table. He smiled at Tara. “Hey, baby.”
Tara rolled her eyes. “Did you really just call me baby, loser?”
He stopped next to her. “You have a problem with that?”
“Uh, yes, moron,” she said.
“You think you’re something special?”
“Please go away,” she said.
He glared at her, then said, “Woof.”
Tara’s eyes flashed with anger. “What did you say?”
“I said ‘woof,’ dog face.” He turned and began to walk away.
Tara turned red.
“I got this,” Torstyn said. He shouted after the kid, “Hey, ginger, did anyone else survive the accident?”
The guy turned back. “Huh?”
“Dude, is that really your head or did your neck just throw up?”
The guy flushed. “What did you say?”
“You’re ugly and deaf? I’ll use small words so you can read my lips. Beg my friend’s forgiveness; then I might let you run away.”
The kid’s fist clenched. “I’m going to rip your head off.”
Torstyn smiled and calmly leaned back in his chair, his arms behind his head. “Show me.”
The redhead took one step toward Torstyn, then froze. His mouth fell open and he grabbed his head, which was turning bright red. Then the blood vessels in his eyes began bursting. “Ah, ah, ah.”
“Aren’t you going to ‘rip my head off,’ tough guy?” Torstyn mocked.
“Ahhhh.”
“What are you saying? Do you want me to stop?”
“Ahhhhhhh.”
“I can’t understand you, carrottop,” Torstyn said. “I don’t speak moron.”
“That’s enough,” Tara said.
“Not for me.”
The guy fell to his knees.
“You want to worship me now, huh? You better start praying.”
“Stop it,” Quentin said. “You’re drawing too much attention.”
Torstyn looked at him. “C’mon.”
“I said now,” Quentin said.
Torstyn pushed one more time, then lowered his hand. “Whatever.”
The kid fell to his side, convulsing.
“What did you do to him?” Bryan asked.
“Dude was a hothead, so I added a little more heat.”
“You heated his brain?”
“It was a little hard to find, but yes.” Torstyn smiled darkly. “Not all of it. Just parts.”
Kylee grimaced as the kid vomited. “Gross.”
“Is it permanent?” Bryan asked.
“Maybe. He might have had an aneurysm. Dr. Hatch used to have me practice on GPs, but I melted too many of them, so then I started practicing on monkeys.” He grinned. “One day I fried about a hundred of them in the Lima zoo. Scientists are still scratching their heads over that one.”
“That was you?” Quentin said. “I read about it online. They’re calling it the Capuchin Virus.”
“That was me, bro. The virus.”
Bryan laughed. “That’s epic, man. That reminds me of that time at the X Games when Zeus shocked that . . .” He froze, realizing his slip. Everyone looked at him.
“Did you just say the Z word?” Quentin said.
Bryan swallowed. “Sorry, man. It was an accident.”
“You think?” Kylee said.
“You’re lucky Dr. Hatch wasn’t around,” Tara said. “You’d be on lockdown for a week.”
“Like I was in Peru,” Kylee said. “He needs to be punished.”
Bryan looked afraid. “Please don’t tell him. Please.”
Quentin looked at the others. “I’ll let you off this time. But don’t do it again.”
“Oh, come on,” Kylee said. “No one let me off.”
“That’s because you were dumb enough to say it in front of Dr. Hatch,” Torstyn said.
“Thanks, man,” Bryan said. “Stupid mistake.”
Quentin squinted. “You owe me a big favor. Don’t forget.”
“You got it. Thanks.”
Just then an Asian woman knelt down next to the kid on the ground. “I’m a doctor,” she said. She looked at Torstyn. “Did you see what happened?”
“Dude dropped to the ground like a fish,” Quentin said.
“Will one of you call 911?”
“We’re eating,” Torstyn said, turning away.
The woman stared at him in disbelief. “He may be dying.”
“Everyone goes sometime,” Torstyn said.
The woman just gaped. Someone at a nearby table said, “I’ll call.”
As a large crowd started to gather, Quentin said, “We better get out of here. We’ve only got two more hours before we need to get back.”
As they stood Kylee asked, “Will you bring us back some chocolate from Switzerland?”
“Of course,” Tara said.
“Better get a lot,” Quentin said. “There won’t be any decent chocolate in Taiwan.”
“I’ll buy twenty pounds of it,” Tara said.
The five of them walked away. As they left the food court Quentin raised his hand and shut the place down.
Port of Lima, Peru
Schema and the surviving Elgen board members were about a mile up the Peruvian coast from the Ampere when the Watt exploded. They briefly slowed their raft and watched as a column of thick, black smoke billowed up into the twilight sky.
“It’s the Ampere,” Three said.
Schema turned back. “Andiamo, we must keep going. Once they recover from the attack, the whole Elgen guard and the Peruvian military will be looking to find who did that.”
Ten minutes later there was a second explosion. “What was that?” Eight asked. “They got a second boat?”
“Hopefully they’ll take out the entire fleet,” Nine said.
“Maybe the first explosion wasn’t the Ampere,” Eight said.
“If it wasn’t, Hatch may have gotten out,” Schema said. He pointed toward the beach. “There. Cut back on power and head to shore.”
“Yes, sir,” Four said.
Schema carefully surveyed the beach but saw nothing but sand and a wall of foliage separating the beach from the city. They had to be careful. There were hundreds of Elgen guards around Lima, and six well-dressed foreigners coming ashore in a raft would not go unnoticed. The raft struck sand and the board members quickly climbed out.
“Send the raft back out,” Schema said to Four. “If they find it they might figure out we survived.” Schema hoped that anyone who knew they had escaped was killed in the explosion of the Ampere, but he couldn’t be sure, and a wrong assumption could cost them their lives.
The other board members turned the raft around; then Four started the engine again and sent it, unmanned, back out to sea. The group took cover in a small grove of palm trees while Schema walked to the road alone. After sunrise he flagged down a passing cattle truck.
Schema spoke even better Spanish than he did English, and he bargained with the driver for a ride into downtown Lima, offering the man the only valuable he still carried—his twenty-thousand-dollar Rolex watch.
Schema, who was accustomed to elegant yachts and luxury cars, now sat on the alfalfa- and manure-covered floor of the cattle truck for the twenty-minute ride. But the discomfort and humiliation were not the source of his greatest pain. His love, Two, had died after Hatch had hung her upside down in the Ampere’s brig, taking Schema’s place in death.
The truck reached downtown Lima a half hour later and Schema ordered the driver to stop a half block from the Hilton Hotel. ?
??Wait here,” Schema said to the driver and the other board members. “I’ll be back.”
He brushed himself off, then walked into the hotel and up to the concierge desk. A Peruvian man wearing thick-rimmed glasses and a black suit looked up. “May I help you?”
“Yes,” Schema said. “What is your name, please?”
“I am Victor Perez.”
“Mr. Perez, my name is Giacomo Schema. I am the CEO of the Elgen Corporation. I have no identification, but if you need confirmation you can verify my identity on the Internet. My associates and I have been the victims of a crime. We were kidnapped on our way into town. The thieves stole everything and I need your assistance. If I could have access to a telephone, I can wire money to your hotel and book a room. I would like your presidential suite or an equivalent.”
Even though Schema’s suit was disheveled, Perez recognized it as a twenty-thousand-dollar Ermenegildo Zegna.
“You are of what citizenship?” Perez asked.
“Italian.”
“Shall I alert the Italian consulate?”
“Yes, of course,” Schema said, not meaning it. “But if you please, I will do so later. I am tired and hungry and still a bit traumatized. If you can assist me, I guarantee that you will be properly rewarded.” Schema took a pen from the desk and wrote his name and “Elgen Inc.” Then, at the bottom of the page, he scrawled,
$1,000 for your kind assistance
Schema looked into the man’s eyes. “Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Being who I am, there are obvious reasons this is best handled discreetly. If you need verification, check the website.”
The man googled “Elgen Inc.,” and then clicked on the website’s Chairman/Board tab. He looked at Schema, then back at the screen. “Yes, this appears to be you. Just one moment, sir. I must speak with the hotel manager, Señor Castillo.”
He spoke into his phone and a moment later a tall Peruvian man walked up to the desk.
“Good morning, sir,” he said to Schema. “I am Señor Castillo, the manager of this hotel.”
Perez spoke to Castillo in Spanish, not knowing that Schema could understand him perfectly.
“This gentleman claims that he was robbed and is now without money or identification. He says his name is Giacomo Schema and he is the CEO of an international company called Elgen. I looked at the website and there is a picture of him.”