“We never had a chance to fire. Lone Star landed in the middle of the group like a bomb, energy shooting off in every direction, scorching the ground and trees,” Barrage said, picking up the story. “When the debris and dust cleared, the result of his attack was immediately evident. Lone Star stood in the center of a crater where Cloak had been a moment before. The four of us—your High Council—were all that survived.”
“I was tapped into their minds,” Shade said. “The final, anguished thoughts of all our fallen screamed in my head. What should have been our greatest triumph ended in the darkest day of Cloak’s history.”
Alex thought he could see tears forming in his mother’s eyes, but he couldn’t be sure. “We’re going to avenge them,” he said. “All of them. And we’ll honor their memory when Justice Tower is in flames.”
“We forget that you’re young,” Shade said, smiling softly first at Alex, then at the rest of the Betas. “You weren’t there. How should we expect you to understand how much this attack means?”
“Of course we understand,” Julie said. “We all lost something that day, even if we weren’t old enough to remember it.”
“We’ve been waiting for this all our lives,” Titan said.
“It’s all any of us want,” Mallory agreed.
“It’s our destiny,” Alex said.
The council again looked at one another, nodding, as if they’d been waiting to hear such sentiments for a long time.
“Stay here,” Shade said, rising from her seat. “I’ll be right back.”
She walked out into the hallway, leaving the others to their dinner. Titan made small talk by boasting how much weight he’d added to his training regimen that week, and suggested that he use himself as a human wrecking ball during the attack. Alex was just beginning to say that he would happily use his powers to throw Titan through the walls when Shade returned, carrying four black boxes wrapped in gray ribbon.
“We were going to wait until the attack to give these to you,” she said, passing the boxes out to the Betas. “But consider them rewards for completing your first mission.”
The Betas opened the boxes and tore into the tissue paper. Alex’s heart began to race as he realized what sat on the table in front of him. It was a lead-colored trench coat with a hood, lightweight and reinforced with thin bulletproof plates. On each shoulder were two silver bands.
Julie screamed and had her coat halfway on before any of the others even realized what they had been given.
“You’re the future leaders of the Cloak Society,” Phantom said. “You ought to look like it.”
For a moment, everyone in the room beamed with joy.
“You should count yourselves lucky,” Volt added. “When I was your age, we were still running around in heavy wool cloaks.”
Shade stood and walked around the table to Alex. She pressed the lapels of the coat down, smoothed the shoulders out, and took a step back to get a better look at her son.
“My Alexander,” Shade said, smiling. “How handsome you look in that.”
She turned him around so that he could make himself out in the gleaming silver skull on the wall beside him. In its polished teeth, with his mother behind him, Alex cast an ominous reflection. His lips spread broadly across his face, but the metal distorted his smile.
8
Power Training
Saturday.
Running. Breakfast. Tutoring. Lunch. Studying. Power training.
Alex rode the elevator to the surface in a black T-shirt and running shorts. He was looking forward to this power training session, and to showing his mother that he deserved the two silver bands on his new Cloak coat.
“Mother?” he called out as he stepped from the projection booth, expecting to see her waiting for him. “Hello?”
Since Shade’s abilities gave her insight into the mind-set and limitations of her pupils, she handled power training, sometimes with assistance from Volt. Several times a week, the Betas met with her for one-on-one instruction. Lessons varied, but the objectives were always the same: refinement, increased power, and control. Walking into a session with Shade, the Betas never had any idea as to what exactly they’d be doing. Mallory might be spending an hour attempting to freeze a single ice cube from across a room or creating smoldering infernos in an empty field. Julie’s training often focused on hand-to-hand combat and agility, as well as attempting to spread her gemlike form to the rest of her body. This type of blind training had a purpose, according to Shade. After all, how could they ever truly know what to expect when walking into a potentially dangerous situation?
Alex walked around the abandoned drive-in parking lot, but his mother was nowhere to be found. Instead a square piece of paper was taped to one of the old speaker posts that dotted the lot. He recognized his mother’s handwriting.
Alex,
Be right back. Start your warm-ups.
The breeze picked up, and the paper blew off the post, drifting away from Alex. He focused his mind on the page, stopping it in midair. His ears drew back slightly and the paper began to stir, folding in on itself. The movements were slow but precise, each edge crisp and evenly lined up. After a final tuck, a winged bird was floating in front of him.
He smiled to himself. Alex liked origami, the symmetry of it, the thought that a piece of paper could be turned into something else with just a few creases and bends. When his mother first started training him, he was always tearing half-formed frogs or getting lost in the design. His mother had put emphasis on precision over power, stressing that mastering the former would lead to a better control of the latter. If nothing else, the accuracy of Alex’s powers was improving. He had that to be proud of.
Alex willed the bird to flap its wings. It flew gracefully up into the air, until a popping sound came from somewhere in the trees lining the lot to Alex’s right. A half second later, his paper bird was falling to the ground in pieces. Alex turned toward the direction the sound had come from but saw nothing in the dense screen of branches and trunks. Realizing that he was under attack, he ran toward the projection booth for cover.
Another pop, this time shooting dirt into the air just a few feet away from him. Something small and black bounced away from the point of impact. Alex pulled the black object to him with his thoughts. It was hot in his hands, a perfect sphere the size of a golf ball, firm but squishy, like an eraser.
“Mother . . . ,” he muttered. He should have expected something like this. Leaving the safety of cover, he walked into the open, raising his arms into the sky. “You’re shooting at me? Seriously?”
Alex’s wits were about him now. The training session had begun the moment he’d stepped off the elevator. Clever. His eyes scanned the trees for sight of his mother, but the cover was too good. Of course she wouldn’t let him off that easily.
Pop. Another noise in front of him, slightly to the right. The ball whizzed by Alex’s ear, close enough for him to feel its wake.
Pop. The next bullet was headed straight for his chest, but with a wave of his hand it was deflected off course. Two more shots immediately followed, but now that he knew where they were coming from, Alex stopped them easily. He flung them back toward the trees with a blue push.
More pops. Now another shooter had joined in the fray, firing just off to Alex’s left. A ball grazed his left shoulder, stinging him. He was ready for the next shot, though, and as the two shooters pumped round after round toward Alex, he got into the rhythm of it and was sending the bullets back almost immediately after they were fired. Hear the pop. See the ball. Focus. Push it back.
As quickly as they’d begun, the shots stopped, and Alex stood panting in the center of the parking lot. Movement in the trees. Alex’s parents emerged and walked toward him, carrying oversized black guns that were part rifle, part leaf blower. They were both dressed in dark T-shirts and pants with more pockets than anyone could possibly need.
“Nicely done, son,” Volt said, once he was close enough that Alex could hear
his voice.
“Remember to breathe,” Shade added. “It doesn’t matter how many bullets you deflect if you’re just going to pass out.”
“I feel good,” Alex said, standing tall, anxious to show no weakness.
“Wonderful,” Shade said, smiling. “That was just your warm-up. Come with me.”
Shade led Alex to the back of the snack bar, where an old, padlocked wooden box sat on the ground. It was at least four feet long and stood several feet tall. Its hinges were rusty, and most of its white paint had weathered off long ago.
“Inside this box is a generator that weighs just over five hundred pounds,” Shade said, walking around the perimeter of the container. “I want you to lift the box and its contents off the ground.”
“That’s impossible,” Alex said. He looked to his father, his eyes urging the man to protest along with him. “There is no way I can pick that up.”
“Just try, son,” Volt said. “That’s all we’re asking you to do.”
“I’m telling you, I can’t do it,” Alex said. “Let me start with something smaller. I can work my way up.”
“We’ve been doing smaller things,” Shade said. “Tables. Chairs. Just a few days ago you tossed a girl several yards with only the slightest effort.”
“Fine,” Alex said. The last thing he wanted was to talk about Kirbie again. He narrowed his eyes and focused, placing his hands in front of him, palms wide.
“Hands down, Alex,” his mother said. “Flexing your arms is just wasting energy.”
Alex pressed his lips together and set his jaw. Breathing in a few deep gulps of air, he lowered his arms and focused his mind on the box in front of him. Everything around it faded away as the box glowed blue. Alex lifted, straining his brain until it felt like fire would shoot from his head. The lock on the front of the box jiggled.
“Harder,” Shade said from Alex’s left.
This was just like the vault, he thought. His palms went clammy down at his sides. Do it, he pleaded silently. Rise. Rise off the ground. Just a little. Please.
The dirt around the box shifted. The breeze seemed to change.
“That’s it,” Shade cooed in a reassuring manner.
Eyes bulging, muscles tense, Alex pushed at the box.
And then, nothing. Alex exhaled loudly and shook his head as if he were coming out of a trance. When his eyes met his mother’s, she was frowning.
“I see we’ll have to do this another way,” Shade said calmly.
She led him back to the drive-in parking lot. As they walked, Volt took a small electronic device out of his pocket and began tapping on it.
“Stand there,” Shade said, pointing to a clear area in the center of the lot. “Tell me: How did you go about stopping those bullets earlier?”
“What do you mean?” Alex asked.
“Walk us through it,” she said.
“Well . . .” Alex paused. He was never very good at describing how it was he saw the world. “I could see the bullets coming toward me, so I focused on each one . . . and they would start to shine. Blue, like everything else. And when that happened, it’s like I could feel the bullet. I just stopped it and pushed it back toward you. Once I got the hang of it, it was easy.”
“You performed very well—even if you were caught off guard at first,” his mother said, a small smile forming on her lips.
“We’re ready,” Volt said, looking up from his electronic device.
“Wonderful. Look around you, Alex,” his mother said, motioning widely with one arm. “What do you see on the roof over there?”
A weapon similar to the ones Shade and Volt were carrying appeared over the snack bar, rising from behind the lip of the roof. It twisted, shifting its aim until it pointed directly at Alex. Another appeared, perched on the edge of the movie screen. Alex saw it calibrating out of the corner of his eye.
“Uh . . . ,” he murmured.
“There are five guns currently trained on you,” Shade stated casually. “On my signal, they will go off at the same time, and will fire with increasing strength until I tell them to quit.”
“But it would be impossible for me to stop all of those,” Alex said, his voice soft.
“The way you stopped the others, yes,” she said. “There’s no way you could stop each bullet individually.”
“You’re going to shoot me.”
“Only if you don’t think of another way to stop them. They’re only rubber bullets shot at a controlled velocity,” Volt said. “They’re not lethal.”
“Yeah, but they hurt!” Alex said. “I don’t want to do this!”
“You don’t have a choice,” Shade snapped, her calm demeanor breaking. “It’s your duty to hone your skills for the good of us all, and if this is how it must be done, then so be it.”
“But Mother—”
“I am not your mother right now,” she replied. “I am the person in charge of making sure you use your powers to the best of your ability. If you can’t do that, then you are a liability, and Cloak has no use for you.”
“Alex,” Volt said. “The only way Cloak succeeds is if we are all performing at our highest capabilities. You know this. One day you will thank us for today. Trust me. It’s for your own good.”
“Your telekinesis—this blue energy—is all around you,” Shade said. “It’s in the air. It is the air. You tend to associate it with objects. The bullets, for instance. Or the paper. But the energy comes from you and it’s yours to manipulate. So create a shield. A force-field bubble to protect you. It’s the only way you’ll make it out of this exercise without getting hurt.”
“Fine,” Alex said. Paper birds and unmoved boxes weren’t going to impress them. “Let’s do this.”
His mother and father smiled and backed away.
“I’ll give you four counts, and then we fire,” Shade said. “Make me proud.”
Alex looked up at her, exhaled a long breath, and nodded.
“Four.”
Alex closed his eyes. He reached out with his mind, imagining the energy rising, folding and collecting itself like a blue origami shell. He pushed at it with his thoughts, forming a protective layer.
“Three.”
Alex could sense that the force field was too thin. He gritted his teeth and poured more energy into the bubble.
“Two.”
The telekinetic power was pouring out of him now. The walls were strengthening. Alex opened his eyes and saw the brilliant blue light of the bubble, glimmering as if it were real.
“One.”
The popping was instantaneous, coming from all sides. Alex braced for impact, clenching every muscle in his body.
But the impact never came. Instead the bullets bounced off his makeshift shield. The guns continued firing—Alex could feel thuds growing more violent with every round—but his force field held. There was a satisfied expression on his mother’s face, a look of pride that he so rarely saw in her eyes.
“Yes!” she yelled at him. “Good! Keep going!”
It was an awful test. Alex wanted nothing more than to impress his parents and to be back on the strike team, but this was bordering on torture. He knew it was for the glory of Cloak, but he was sure that kids weren’t supposed to be shot at by their parents. The guns continued to fire, and with each round Alex grew more upset. His anger pushed out of him and into the bubble, feeding it. The force field began to expand, and the earth flattened around Alex in a perfect circle, growing steadily outward.
“Alex, that’s enough,” Shade said, but the circle grew, encroaching on them steadily. “Volt is stopping the guns. There will be no more bullets. I promise.”
But Alex wasn’t listening. He was so focused on the force field that he didn’t even notice the shots had stopped coming.
“Alexander!” Shade yelled again, but still, he didn’t respond. She tried to reach out with her mind, but her thoughts bounced off the invisible energy, and the resulting backlash made her head ring.
The sit
uation had suddenly become dangerous. She nodded to Volt, who threw his arm forward, sending an arching spray of purple electricity toward his son. When it hit the edge of the invisible dome, it bounced off, hitting one of the rusted speaker boxes, which then erupted in a shower of sparks.
“ALEXANDER!” Shade shouted.
As the bubble pressed up against the speaker boxes, the posts holding them up snapped like they were made of Styrofoam. Shade focused and gritted her teeth, ignoring the throbbing in her head as she tried to force her thoughts through her son’s defenses. Her silver eyes were radiant in the sun as she finally broke into Alex’s mind.
STOP! she screamed in his head with all her power. NOW!
His mother’s mental intrusion startled him, and what little control Alex had over the bubble was wiped away. It expanded wildly, and for the first time Shade and Volt could see it—the crackling blue energy their son always spoke of, brilliant and untamed. The bubble passed over Shade and Volt as it grew, sending them sprawling backward. A cloud of reddish dirt rose from the wake of the force. Finally the shield dissipated, until it was nothing more than a countercurrent against the breeze.
“Are you all right?” Volt asked his wife as he sat up. She nodded, coughing, and waved toward their son, who was on his knees. Volt was on his feet in a flash.
“I did it, right?” Alex asked as his father crouched beside him.
“Yes, you did,” Volt said as he took Alex’s face in one hand, turning it from side to side in inspection. “But it looks like you have a bit of a nosebleed.”
“Here,” Shade said, standing. She patted at her legs. “I have a bandage in one of these pockets.”
She finally came across a short length of gauze and balled it up. She knelt beside Alex and pressed the cloth to his nose, letting her free hand rub his back.
“I’d say that’s enough for the day,” Volt said. “You did a great job, son.”
“Aren’t you going to show him?” Shade asked. “That was the point of all this.”
“The boy has been through a lot, dear,” Volt said. Shade’s face grew sour, staring back at him.