Bright Star (20 page)

“Is Matthew mad at me?” Thad asked. He already felt like he knew the answer. Matthew didn’t even like to be touched. He cried like a girl when he was hit. Matthew hated him.

“No,” his mother told him as she sat at his side and stroked his hair. It wasn’t until later that Thad understood the extent of what he had done to Matthew. It wasn’t that he didn’t remember the episode. No, it played in his mind over and over and over again. He couldn’t get it to stop. But somehow, his brain could not accept that he had done those things. He could not reconcile the violence with his desire to please people and his true faith in harmony. He had always been a mild-mannered, calm boy. He hated to hear people yell. He couldn’t imagine that he had done extreme violence to his friend. Even as he struggled with it, though, he remembered all the malicious feelings that had taken hold of him. Those were things he had truly felt, but the mechanism that reasoned through those feelings and kept them from overcoming him had been dismantled by the little winking rock he found on that trail.

Not long after he woke, a doctor came in and released him. The man was tall and blond with thin features. He didn’t talk much, but he watched Thaddeus in a way that made him uncomfortable. It wasn’t that the doctor seemed rude, cruel or dishonest. Thaddeus just had a feeling that Dr. Randall Sandoval was a man who had already accepted his own death. An odd thought for a child, but he felt it nonetheless.

His mother hesitated for a moment before grabbing him and squeezing too hard.

“Where does he have to go now?” she asked.

“You can take him home, Ms. Okwenuba.”

“Home?” she repeated in disbelief. She didn’t even move, she just watched the doctor in her wary émigrée fashion.

“Yes, home,” the doctor told her. “We’ll come by to pick him up tomorrow.”

“Pick him up?”

They tested him and tested him and tested him. For months, they had tested Thad and found nothing. No residual High Energy, not even the smallest trace of Talent. His eyes crossed and he got a headache every time they tried to force him to Shift. They had been very near to calling what had happened on that field trip a fluke. That is until they decided to sign his belongings back over to him. They’d been confiscated for testing right after the incident.

By the time the staff was able to sedate him again, the boy had nearly ripped out the heart of the nurse holding his bag. Again, he had to be subdued. Again, they put him through test after test after test. He failed all of them. He felt like a bee. They weren’t supposed to be able to fly, but they could. He had no High Energy of his own, but he could Shift. Dr. Sandoval himself came to check Thad every single day and was nice, however, most of the comfort he got during that unsure time was from his mother’s near ubiquitous presence. He knew she had to work, and he asked about it. Dr. Sandoval had been the one to assure him that they would find a way to take care of his mother even though Thaddeus was not a part of the Service family. That knowledge had frightened him. They wouldn’t take care of him forever if he couldn’t do any of the things they asked. For that reason, he demanded the rock again. He needed them to take care of his hardworking mother as promised.

Thaddeus had felt the presence of the thing when they brought it in locked in a box. He couldn’t reach for it with his mind as he had been instructed to do time and time again, but he knew it was there. It took a huge effort to rip his attention from the box and realize the scientists were leaving him in the locked room, again. But he did lift his gaze when he realized there was another kid about his age, maybe younger, in the room. He was shorter than Thad, but certainly more muscular and fit. He had blond hair and eyes that were light brown. He was fresh faced and he seemed friendly.

“What are you doing here?” Thaddeus asked him.

“I’m about to give you the rock in this box.”

Thad’s eyes widened as they focused on the child waiting quietly to the side. He heard his own panicked voice, “No!”

“Hey.” The other boy held up a hand. “It’s okay.”

“It’s not okay! You don’t know what it makes me do.”

“Sure, I do. They let me see footage.” The kid had the nerve to smile at him. “I’m telling you it’s okay. My name is Jackson, and I’m a part of the test.”

“What part?”

“I’m here to tire you out.” The boy grinned again. “Randall will probably want to record things like how long and how much it takes for your High Energy to diminish.” Then he took the rock out. With another grin, he said, “It’s okay. I’m Precocial.”

After the attendants and Dr. Sandoval left the room. Without a shadow of hesitation, Jackson gave Thad the rock.

When Thad was lying on the ground breathing so hard it made his chest hurt, he said, “I don’t know if my mother knows what I’ve done. I don’t know if she would understand this.”

“My mother would not be happy if she knew what I just did, either.” Jackson laughed out loud.

They did not become best friends, or maybe they did. It was strange. For sure, they had something in common. They were both the rules and the exceptions of the Parameters of Shift. They would also both be experiments for Randall Sandoval.

Over the years, Sandoval and his team would conceive and test theories about why Thad’s High Energy manifested itself through violence, but none of them would be conclusive. He would continue to cross paths with Jackson, but unlike Jackson, he was allowed to live a normal life outside of the Service. He changed schools and cities. No one knew him or what he had done. As long as he was without the rock he was normal. But every now and then, the Service would contact him and they would give it back, and the nightmare would start all over again.

Still, this time, even without it, Thaddeus knew something was coming. He didn’t know if it had anything to do with the rock or not. They’d asked him how he got it that last time, but he couldn’t honestly say. He’d been home at the time, packing for his vacation. He’d reached into a dresser drawer and there it was. When he touched it, it was like a static shock magnified to a point where he felt as if his ear canals were sparking. After Jackson had taken it from him this time, though, he found that he continued to have some of the residual High Energy. High Energy that warned him something was coming. Something that let him know it was Frankie Monnish.

He wouldn’t be at work tomorrow, the reason why… Well, he would leave that to the principle of determinism. He opened his refrigerator to think of more lofty questions: those that he felt he could actually impact. Beer or wine? Beer always seemed to win when he was alone. He grabbed two, actually, then made his way to the sliding door of his fifth floor balcony. He put his beers on the table then stretched out the plastic and aluminum chaise that provided the only seating. He opened a beer.

Then he saw her. Unsure and unsteady, he said her name. “Frankie—”

“My name is Point,” she interrupted gently, but stepped forward anyway. “I have something for you.” She held out her hand, and in the palm were the platinum cuff links he’d admired just days before. Her thick black hair, which she normally kept pulled back in a tight pony tail, caressed her shoulders as it blew in the subtle wind.

For a moment, he’d thought about not taking them. Just a quick doubt. A pinprick. He’d learned long ago to listen to his instincts, the intuition his mother had bragged about when he was small. But he found something stronger than his intuition this time. He found that he had to have those cuff links. So he took them and put them into his pocket.

“Frankie, I—”

“Point,” she corrected him again.

“OK,” he whispered, finding himself willing to agree with anything she said or wanted. “Point. Are you okay?”

“Better,” she answered with a warm grin. Her teeth were white and straight. Her lips luscious. His body started to stir. Yep, this was his woman, all right.

“Where have you been?” he asked.

“Here in town,” she answered, sitting down on the rickety chaise and pulling her arms around her body. “Not very far away at all.”

“Cold?” he asked. Point nodded. Thaddeus reached inside the door to pull a throw off his sofa. He handed it to her. She wrapped the material around her shoulders and gazed up at him. She looked tousled, her pretty brown eyes languid. Thad wasn’t quite sure how to react. It seemed so unreal, a fantasy.

“What is it?” he questioned.

“Nothing.” She chuckled. Her dark brown eyes seemed to sparkle at him, then. “Funny, if you’d asked me that last week, we’d have probably had much more to talk about. But nothing’s wrong.”

“I don’t understand.” Thaddeus slowly shook his head. He wasn’t completely sure he needed to understand. He already knew it felt as if he’d been given new life when he saw her. He hadn’t known until that moment how much he needed her. He’d suspected, but never really known.

“You will,” she responded, then stood, throwing off the blanket. She stepped close to him and into a ready embrace. Thad was startled, but held her anyway. He would never have missed the opportunity to do so. She spoke to him, “I have something wonderful to tell you.”

“That you love me?” he asked, trying to laugh, but grimacing instead. He had meant for it to be a joke, but his throat closed over the words. He wanted her to love him. God knew he’d loved her from the moment he’d met her. It had been too much to expect that she reciprocate.

“I do love you.” She nodded. She said it so easy. As if weren’t cataclysmic. “More than I could ever show you.” Before he could adjust to that revelation, she spoke again. “But there is something else.”

And even as she told him there was something else, Monk could see the woman standing in the shadow of his balcony watching them, her blue eyes startling as they shined in the dark. She tilted her chin up and down as if in approval. Then, Point’s slender, feminine fingers pressed something tightly into his palm, something he knew very well.

*

The back door slammed open. Jackson jumped to his feet and swung around. His jaw dropped when he saw the man entering his home.

“Oh my god! What the hell are you doing here, Thad?” Jackson demanded. The taller, slim man passed through the back door and the kitchen with two duffle bags. He nodded at Jackson in a nonchalant greeting. Jackson noticed his friend was being followed closely by Bright Star and Point.

“Thaddeus,” Jackson called. The other man kept walking. “Thaddeus!”

Thaddeus slowed. He stopped. Then he turned. He didn’t say anything but he acknowledged Jackson with his eyes as Jackson approached.

Bright Star stepped in front of him. “Monk,” she corrected. “His name is Monk, now.”

“What?” Jackson breathed. “No, his name is Thaddeus Okwenuba.”

“Monk,” Bright Star repeated sternly. She drew out the word as though Jackson needed time to process it.

“But why is he here? Bright Star, how do you know him?” She didn’t answer. He turned back to Monk and demanded, “Why are you here?”

“I’m here because Point brought me here,” he answered. As if he realized how cryptic that sounded, he added, “At the end of the day, I’m here because I have to be.”

“Don’t get me wrong, I love you like a brother, man,” Jackson said, “but you can’t stay here. Does Sandoval know you’re out?”

Monk shrugged his shoulders, a nonchalance that bugged Jackson.

“Doesn’t matter about Randall, Jackson. Monk has to stay here,” Bright Star explained.

“But he’s dangerous.”

“Jackson.” Bright Star laughed. “Honey, we’re all dangerous. You know that.”

“Yes, but we haven’t all nearly killed someone,” Jackson argued.

Bright Star didn’t answer, but her silence was enough to remind Jackson that may not have been true.

“Rush?” Bright Star asked the older brother, who had only observed.

“He can stay,” Rush told them. He lounged in the doorway.