Alcatraz (24 page)

1

S
o, there I was, slumped in my chair, waiting in a drab airport terminal, munching absently on a bag of stale potato chips.

Not the beginning you expected, is it?
You likely thought that I would start this book with something exciting.
A scene involving evil Librarians, perhaps – something with altars, Alivened, or at least some machine guns.

I’m sorry to disappoint you.
It won’t be the first time I do that.
However, it’s for your own good.
You see, I have decided to reform.
My last book was terribly unfair – I started it with an intense, threatening scene of action.
Then I cut away from it and left the reader hanging, wondering, and frustrated.

I promise to no longer be deceptive like that in my writing.
I won’t use cliff-hangers or other tricks to keep you reading.
I will be calm, respectful, and completely straightforward.

Oh, by the way.
Did I mention that while waiting in that airport I was probably in the most danger I’d ever been in my entire life?

I ate another stale potato chip.

If you’d passed by me sitting there, you would have thought that I looked like an average American boy.
I was thirteen years old, and I had dark brown hair.
I wore loose jeans, a green jacket, and white sneakers.
I’d started to grow a bit taller during the last few months, but I was well within the average for my age.

In fact, the only abnormal thing about me were the blue glasses I was wearing.
Not truly sunglasses, they looked like an old man’s reading glasses, only with a baby-blue tint.

(I still consider this aspect of my life to be terribly unfair.
For some reason, the more powerful a pair of Oculator Lenses is, the less cool they tend to look.
I’m developing a theory about it – the Law of Disproportional Lameness.)

I munched on another chip.
Come on
.
.
., I thought.
Where are you?

My grandfather, as usual, was late.
Now, he couldn’t
completely
be blamed for it.
Leavenworth Smedry, after all, is a Smedry.
(The last name’s a dead giveaway.) Like all Smedries, he has a magic Talent.
His is the ability to magically arrive late to appointments.

While most people would have considered this to be a large inconvenience, it’s the Smedry way to use our Talents for our benefit.
Grandpa Smedry, for instance, tends to arrive late to things like bullet wounds and disasters.
His Talent had saved his life on numerous occasions.

Unfortunately, he also tends to be late the rest of the time too.
I think he uses his Talent as an excuse even when it isn’t to blame; I’ve tried to challenge him on this several times, but always failed.
He’d just arrive late to the scolding, and so the sound would never reach him.
(Besides, in Grandpa Smedry’s opinion, a scolding
is
a disaster.)

I hunched down a little bit more in the chair, trying to look inconspicuous.
The problem was, anyone who knew what to look for could see I was wearing Oculatory Lenses.
In this case, my baby-blue spectacles were Courier’s Lenses, a common type of Lens that lets two Oculators communicate over a short distance.
My grandfather and I had put them to good use during the last few months, running and hiding from Librarian agents.

Few people in the Hushlands understand the power of Oculatory Lenses.
Most of those who walked through the airport were completely unaware of things like Oculators, silimatic technology, and the sect of evil Librarians who secretly ruled the world.

Yes.
You read that right.
Evil Librarians control the world.
They keep everyone in ignorance, teaching them falsehoods in place of history, geography, and politics.
It’s kind of a joke to them.
Why else do you think the Librarians named themselves what they did?

Librarians.
LIE-brarians.

Sounds obvious now, doesn’t it?
If you wish to smack yourself in the forehead and curse loudly, you may proceed to do so.
I can wait.

I ate another chip.
Grandpa Smedry was supposed to have contacted me via the Courier’s Lenses more than two hours before.
It was getting late, even for him.
I looked about, trying to determine if there were any Librarian agents in the airport crowd.

I couldn’t spot any, but that didn’t mean anything.
I knew enough to realize that you can’t always tell a Librarian by looking at one.
While some dress the part – horn-rimmed glasses for the women, bow ties and vests for the men – others looked completely normal, blending in with the regular Hushlanders.
Dangerous, but unseen.
(Kind of like those troublemakers who read fantasy novels.)

I had a tough decision to make.
I could continue wearing the Courier’s Lenses, which would mark me as an Oculator to Librarian agents.
Or, I could take them off, and thereby miss Grandpa Smedry’s message when he got close enough to contact me.

If
he got close enough to contact me.

A group of people walked over to where I was sitting, draping their luggage across several rows of chairs and chatting about the fog delays.
I tensed, wondering if they were Librarian agents.
Three months on the run had left me feeling anxious.

But that running was over.
I would soon escape the Hushlands and finally get to visit my homeland.
Nalhalla, one of the Free Kingdoms.
A place that Hushlanders didn’t even know existed, though it was a large continent that sat in the Pacific Ocean between North America and Asia.

I’d never seen it before, but I’d heard stories, and I’d seen some Free Kingdom technology.
Cars that could drive themselves, hourglasses that could keep time no matter which direction you turned them.
I longed to get to Nalhalla – though, even more desperately, I wanted to get out of Librarian-controlled lands.

Grandpa Smedry hadn’t explained exactly
how
he planned to get me out, or even why we were meeting at the airport.
It seemed unlikely that there would be any flights to the Free Kingdoms.
However, no matter what the method, I knew our escape probably wouldn’t be easy.

Fortunately, I had a few things on my side.
First, I was an Oculator, and I had access to some fairly powerful Lenses.
Second, I had my grandfather, who was an expert at avoiding Librarian agents.
Third, I knew that the Librarians liked to keep a low profile, even while they secretly ruled most of the world.
I probably didn’t have to worry about police or airport security – the Librarians wouldn’t want to involve them, for that would risk revealing the conspiracy to people who were too low ranked.

I also had my Talent.
But .
.
.
well, I wasn’t really sure whether that was an advantage or not.
It—

I froze.
A man was standing in the waiting area of the gate next to mine.
He was wearing a suit and sunglasses.
And he was staring right at me.
As soon as I noticed him, he turned away, looking too nonchalant.

Sunglasses probably meant Warrior’s Lenses – one of the only kinds of Lenses that a non-Oculator could use.
I stiffened; the man seemed to be muttering to himself.

Or talking into a radio receiver.

Shattering Glass!
I thought, standing up and throwing on my backpack.
I wove through the crowd, leaving the gate behind, and raised my hand to my eyes, intending to pull off the Courier’s Lenses.

But .
.
.
what if Grandpa Smedry tried to contact me?
There was no way he’d be able to find me in the crowded airport.
I needed to keep those Lenses on.

I feel I need to break the action here to warn you that I frequently break the action to mention trivial things.
It’s one of my bad habits that, along with wearing mismatched socks, tends to make people rather annoyed at me.
It’s not my fault, though, honestly.
I blame society.
(For the socks, I mean.
The breaking-the-action thing is
totally
my own fault.)

I hastened my pace, keeping my head down and my Lenses on.
I hadn’t gone far before I noticed a group of men in black suits and pink bow ties standing on a moving airport walkway a short distance ahead.
They had several uniformed security guards with them.

I froze.
So much for not having to worry about the police
.
.
.
I tried to hold in my panic, turning – as covertly as I could – and hurrying in the other direction.

I should have realized that the rules would start changing.
The Librarians had spent three months chasing Grandpa Smedry and me.
They might hate the idea of involving local law enforcement, but they hated the idea of losing us even more.

A second group of Librarian agents were coming from the other direction.
A good dozen warriors in Lenses, likely armed with glass swords and other advanced weapons.
There was only one thing to do.

I stepped into the bathroom.

Numerous people were in there, doing their business.
I rushed to the back wall.
I let my backpack fall to the ground, then placed both hands against the wall’s tiles.

A couple of men in the bathroom gave me odd looks, but I’d gotten used to those.
People had given me odd looks for most of my life – what else would you expect for a kid who routinely broke things that weren’t really all that breakable?
(Once, when I was seven, my Talent decided to break pieces of concrete as I stepped on them.
I left a line of broken sidewalk squares behind me, like the footprints of some immense killer robot – one wearing size six sneakers.)

I closed my eyes, concentrating.
Before, I’d let my Talent rule my life.
I hadn’t known that I could control it – I hadn’t even been convinced that it was real.

Grandpa Smedry’s arrival three months earlier had changed all of that.
While dragging me off to infiltrate a Library and recover the Sands of Rashid, he’d helped me learn that I could
use
my Talent, rather than just be used by it.

I focused, and twin bursts of energy pulsed from my chest and down my arms.
The tiles in front of me fell free, shattering as they hit the ground like a line of icicles knocked off of a railing.
I continued to focus.
People behind me cried out.
The Librarians would be upon me any moment.

The entire wall broke, falling away from me.
A water line began to spray into the air.
I didn’t pause to look behind at the shouting men, but instead reached back and grabbed my backpack.

The strap broke loose.
I cursed quietly, grabbing the other one.
It broke free too.

The Talent.
Blessing and curse.
I didn’t let it rule me anymore – but I wasn’t really in control either.
It was as if the Talent had joint custody over my life; I got it on every other weekend and some holidays.

I left the backpack.
I had my Lenses in the pockets of my jacket, and they were the only things of real value I owned.
I leaped through the hole, scrambling over the rubble and into the bowels of the airport.
(Hmm.
Out of the bathroom and into the bowels – kind of opposite of the normal way.)

I was in some kind of service tunnel, poorly lit and even more poorly cleaned.
I dashed down the tunnel for several minutes.
I think I must have left the terminal behind, traveling through some access passageway to another building.

At the end, there were a few stairs leading to a large door.
I heard shouting behind me and risked a glance.
A group of men were barreling down the passage toward me.

I spun and tugged on the doorknob.
The door was locked, but doors have always been one of my specialties.
The knob came off; I tossed it over my shoulder in an offhanded motion.
Then I kicked the door open, bursting out into a large hangar.

Massive airplanes towered over me, their windshields dark.
I hesitated, looking up at the enormous vehicles, feeling dwarfed as if by large beasts.