Kinetics: In Search of Willow (42 page)

I spun around and kicked at the
teleporter who showed up behind me and chopped him in the neck with
a blunt ice club. I was not going to have this water forever. The
more I fought the more I was going to run out. I had to blast
through another two fighters before I made it to the tank room and
by then I was almost out of water.

The tank had one person floating
inside. If I could crack open the tank, it would throw the one guy
in there out on the floor. I didn't want to hurt the guy inside.
There was no telling who he was, but more than likely he was
another victim of these creep's experiments.

I slammed the door to the tank room
behind and froze the lock, this time to keep me in, and didn't wait
around to hear the scuffles on the other side as they tried to
break their way in. It was only a matter of time before they got
the door open.

I quickly scaled the metal stairs
going up one side of the tank and stood on the top where there were
a few large buttons that opened and closed the gate that covered
the whole tank. I pressed the green one and the gate rumbled and
began to retract. As soon as the water was exposed I pulled a small
wave of it out and threw it at the door freezing a cap on the door.
It wasn't much, but it was enough to keep them from getting in any
easier. The guy inside the tank began to wake at the movement and
struggled. I started pulling more and more water out of the tank,
creating a vortex on the floor at the base of the tank. The guy
inside saw me, and when we made eye contact he calmed down. I kept
the vortex spinning and pushed one more button that pulled the
guy's harness out of the water. As soon as his head was above the
waterline, he ripped the breather out of his mouth and
coughed.

"Oliver!" he shouted as soon as he
stopped coughing.

I did a double take and it was only
then that I realized who he was. "Logan?"

It was Laura's brother, the brother
who had supposedly been killed back at Hooverville. But here he was
alive and well… as well as could be, trapped in a water
tank.

"What are you doing here?" he asked. I
grabbed his hand and pulled him the rest of the way out of the
tank.

"Captured, just like you
apparently," I said, and looked at the door. Something was going on
outside, and I was disturbed by the fact that they had yet to come
in. They had to have had a wide variety of Kinetics here. At least
one of them should have been able to chop through that door by
now.

Logan peered over the side of the tank
and saw the vortex. "Water user?"

"Yeah, but we need to get out of here.
Are you good to run?"

Logan shook his arms and legs free of
the protective bodysuit he was in and nodded. "My legs are a little
wobbly but that's okay."

I quickly explained my plan and Logan
worked out how he could help with his Florakinesis. I threw more
water on the floor and the vortex grew bigger. Logan carefully ran
down the stairs and pressed his hands to the floor, trying to find
a root system.

And just as if it were planned, the
door blasted inwards, hitting the vortex and ricocheting into the
tank. It cracked it, spilling water out onto the floor. I stood on
the part of the tank that wasn't collapsing and worked the vortex
into a water spout over 18 feet tall. The top was pointed sharp
like a cone. Logan shouted in triumph just as a handful of Alliance
Kinetics poured into the room and started blasting us with all
manner of powers. I punched upwards, and the vortex of water
blasted upwards boring a hole in the ceiling.

Over the roar of the water drilling
through the ceiling, Logan's vines and roots blasted through the
floor, spinning tangles around the other Kinetics' legs and arms. I
pressed further and further, feeding the water drill with the water
from the tank until it punched through the ceiling into the room
above.

"Logan, now!" I shouted. I pressed the
reservoir of water up into the room and Logan quickly constructed a
root ladder up to the next floor. I jumped from the edge of the
tank to the roots and scrambled up it to the next floor. Logan
wasn't far behind. I started boring the next hole while Logan ran
for the windows and pried them open.

The water drill punched through again,
spilling sunlight through the room. There were no more floors but
just the sky. Instead of going out the hole in the ceiling Logan
and I jumped through the window out on the lower part of the room
and spun around into another room. The room was a little storage
area and Logan and I settled in behind a wall of boxes. Let them
think that we had escaped out the roof, while we were really still
under their noses.

We sat in silence for almost thirty
minutes before we couldn’t hear any more shouts or loud voices from
inside the building. At one point I felt brave enough to look out
the window and see that they were scouring the surrounding
desert.

“
Are we safe, Oliver?”
Logan asked.

“
For now,” I replied.
“Also, my name is actually Harry.”

Logan’s eyebrows creased.
“Harry?”

We had plenty of time while we waiting
for an escape window so I proceeded to explain the deception and my
part in it.

“
Can you tell me what
happened to my sister?” Logan finally asked.

“
I don’t know. Yoshida,
that’s Eugene’s brother, seems to have gotten her under his thumb.”
The last I had seen of her had been when I had been captured and
she had tried to save me and Eugene until Eugene had been taken in
by Jacob Yoshida's lies.

He nodded and buried his face in his
hands. I left him alone after that. I felt he needed time to grieve
and to think.

Once night fell, we felt safe enough
to escape the facility. Logan and I slipped out under the cover of
darkness, and it was only then that I found out where we really
were: a large warehouse district in the deserted Colorado
wilderness. There was almost nothing for miles around. We walked
for close to fourteen hours before we found a tiny gas station with
a phone.

The first person I was
going to call was my father to tell him about the facility and then
I was going to call my friends at Laramie and find out if Eugene
made it.

The phone rang and my dad
answered, “hello?”

"They're experimenting on people,
Dad."

***

Internal Memo

To: J. Yoshida

From: T. Blair

Facility HEB3 has been
compromised. Subject AK-773 escaped from holding cell and released
Subject FK-642. Included with this memo is security footage of the
incident. Subject EK-Prime apparently assisted AK-773 with the
escape. He is now in lock down with extra protections.

Subjects AK-773 and FK-642
have disappeared from the facility. A cursory search of the
surroundings has come up with nothing on their
whereabouts.

We have released a missing
person’s report to the local police and surrounding counties.
However it is the conclusion of the facility management that they
will have been picked up by Isiroans by now.

We are relocating the
remaining subjects to HEB2 and HEB4.

Subject EK-Prime may no
longer be an asset. Please advise.

CHAPTER 30

“
Discovery is a beautiful thing. Knowledge is the silver
lining on all things.”
~ Nhu Trang.
Kinetic Poet and Author.

EUGENE YOSHIDA

I opened the door to the Records room
and peered out. I paused to wait for any sound or shift in air that
would indicate that someone else was in the building with
me.

Nothing.

I slipped out the door and nearly
jogged down the hall toward the window where I had entered the
building. A door slammed somewhere in the building and I stopped in
my tracks. My heart was running a triathlon in my chest. Footsteps
echoed in the otherwise quiet hallway and I looked around
frantically for a place to hide. The only dark enough space was
under a small row of benches flanked by a couple of fake potted
plants. I hit the ground and rolled under the bench, pushing myself
against the cold wall. The footsteps tapped closer and I saw dress
shoes and the hem of a coat stroll past only a minute
later.

I held myself rigid against the wall
for a few dreadfully long minutes. A door somewhere far off closed
and the building became dead again. I glanced around the corner of
the wall into the long reaching hallway and checked to make sure
the coast was clear.

I counted to three and then stepped
into the hall. The eerie quiet followed me through the rest of the
building until I reached the room where I had initially entered it.
I slid into the room and closed the door behind me as quietly as
humanly possible. I felt my adrenaline start rising as my escape
from here got closer and closer.

Cool air greeted me on the other side
of the open window. I breathed a sigh of relief when my feet were
firmly planted on the other side of the building and I was well on
my way back to the dormitory.

I saw a couple people wandering the
grounds, but they were too far off for me to see the details of
their faces. I hoped it would be the same for me. I walked away
from the tall dormitory structure at first and wandered to the far
edge of the base not far from where the supply entrance was where I
had first entered.

The air was oddly cooler on the far
edge of the base. I breathed into my hands, but the heat lingered
only a few seconds in the chilly air. I quickened my pace and made
an uneven turn in the path toward the dormitory.

"Hey!"

I jumped slightly at the voice, but
stopped myself from panicking. It was only Jack. He trotted up
beside me and grinned. "What are you doing out this
late?"

I shrugged. "Walking."

Jack seemed to consider that phrase a
moment before nodding his head and fell into step with me. "Are you
worried?"

Worried?
 I glanced at him out
of the corner of my eye. I could still clearly remember the feeling
of him trying to invade my mind with his powers. What could he
know? What 
did
 he know?

Better to play it safe. Steer the
conversation in the direction that I want it to go. "About the
training, yeah."

His chin lifted slightly and I saw an
odd glint in his eye, as if something had been confirmed for him
other than what I had answered. His words, however, revealed
nothing of what might have been confirmed in his mind. "It'll be
okay. It's always hard at first. But we have some of the best
wielders in the world at our fingertips. In no time you'll be out
there with the rest of us."

Fighting a war with a
people that have taken so much from everyone, including me? Not
likely. 
I breathed in the cold night
air and buried my fingers in my armpits. "Yeah, I can't
wait."

"But first we have to train you. Dad
says that he'll talk to the Educational Minister later and find out
where we should start with you. Until then he said I could
introduce you to some of the theoretical concepts behind our
powers. Also gonna take you to see our best
Pyrokinetic."

I gulped. I already knew where this
was going. "Marcus Grey?"

"Yeah. The guy from Convocation." Jack
patted me on the back. "I'll drop some books off with you tomorrow,
and when I get back from my internship, we can go see Mr.
Grey."

I nodded and followed Jack. The rest
of the trip back to the dormitory was quiet. Jack seemed to feel
uncomfortable with silence and would occasionally start humming or
singing lyrics that I didn't recognize.

Fortunately we reached the hall
quickly, and I settled in to bed with the covers enveloping my
entire body so that I wouldn't have to hear the low conversation
between Jack and Roy. Sleep claimed me faster than I could ever
remember.