Metawars: The Complete Series: Trance, Changeling, Tempest, Chimera (4 page)

The last box of dye wasn’t temporary, so why was the purple back? I rolled the colored hair between my lavender-hued fingertips.

What the huh?

All ten fingers had adopted a pale, violet hue, like the beginning of a bruise. Or like I’d played in permanent finger paints.

I stood on shaky legs and padded barefoot to the bathroom. A colorful towel created the only privacy barrier between bed and bath. I pushed through it so hard two of the tacks popped out of the plaster wall and clattered to the floor. Ignoring the chilly tiles, I flipped the wall switch and flinched against the yellow light that bathed the room.

As my eyes adjusted, I leaned over the cracked porcelain sink, studying my reflection. Chills wiggled down my spine. Purple streaks as thin as fingers highlighted my hair in no discernable pattern, just like before I started dyeing it. Odd, yes, but not scary. Scary was reserved for my eyes. Formerly brown irises now shone an iridescent purple that moved like oceans of light. I’d seen eyes like that once, and not in my head. I remembered an age-lined face and white hair stained with blood, an old woman as she lay dying.

I gripped the sink’s edge. “No.”

I ran my fingers through hair no longer familiar, convincing myself that it was not an illusion. Purple hair was at least familiar. Purple fingertips? Not so much. I rubbed my thumb and index finger together, testing the texture of the skin. Lavender sparks shot off like a party sparkler. I yelped. My heart slammed against my ribs as a strange odor filled the room, like a scraped matchbook cover.

I had to get a grip—easier said than done. I rubbed again. More sparks. On a whim, I snapped my fingers. A marble-size ball of purple light appeared. It hovered above my palm like an extension of my hand, connected by a faint warmth I couldn’t explain.

“Whoa.”

I didn’t move. Neither did the light. After a moment of concentration, the marble grew into a walnut, and then into an apple-size orb. Holy crap. The oddest sensation of heat still connected the hovering sphere to my hand, pulled taut like a rubber band. I could control it, shrink it, expand it. Could I make it fly?

“This is bad,” I said, stumbling away from the sink. I tripped over a well-worn tub mat and fell, landing flat on my ass. The orb disappeared. Sharp pain skewered my lower back, and a few choice curses tumbled out of my mouth.

I sat up, breathing hard, and tried to drum up some explanation. Anything to account for this. My powers were gone, had been for fifteen years. Just like every other Meta. No one knew why our powers went away that day in Central Park. One instant we were huddled together, preparing to kill
or be killed, and the next we were all writhing in pain as some unknown force tore our abilities away from us. The world saw it as a blessing—no more superpowered freaks wreaking havoc. No more destruction. No more killing.

No one considered how it affected
us
.

Like most explosive and devastating conflicts, the spark that lit the five-year Meta War was decades in the making. For more than two hundred years, superpowered Metas had been a part of our collective history, but it wasn’t until the first half of the twentieth century that the minor Meta disagreements became full-blown conflicts. Conflicts that grew bolder and bloodier over the next century. During that time, the Ranger Corps was established, and Washington bureaucrats coined the term “Banes”—a catch-all for the Metas our Ranger ancestors were tasked to capture and neutralize.

Over time, career-criminal Metas embraced the distinction and their identity as Banes. Schoolchildren were taught that Banes were bad, but the Rangers would always save us. It was a nice fairy tale.

A decade or so before the outbreak of the War—right around the time my generation was born—Specter showed up. More powerful than any other Bane, his abilities were a fierce blend of telekinesis and telepathy—once in your mind, he could control your actions until unconsciousness or death forced him out. This power to possess from a distance and turn the possessed’s powers against them helped him command loyalty from the fractured groups of Banes scattered around the world without ever showing his face to the public.

For the first time in history, the Rangers were outmatched.
The Banes came at us sideways, using deadly force against anyone who stood in their way, children and trainees included. Everything came to a head in Trenton, New Jersey, after four innocents and one Ranger were killed during a string of jewelry heists. Five cold-blooded murders. Six city blocks burned to the ground. Five years of bitter, violent fighting followed.

Chicago was left a smoldering husk. The Great Salt Lake became too alkaline to live near, and most of Salt Lake City remains unoccupied. Los Angeles and New York City bore the brunt of the attacks. L.A. still has half a million stubborn inhabitants, but the majority of New York’s five boroughs are abandoned. The War trickled overseas a few times—Paris, Moscow, some tiny village in the Philippines. London took the worst of it, and kids over there still sing some little ditty called “London Bridge Is Burning Down.”

Mostly it stayed here in the States, drawing all known Metas to its center like a crow to a cornfield. Battles devastated small towns and large cities with alarming frequency. The War finally ended on the evacuated island of Manhattan and left the surviving Metas as powerless as any other Joe (and Jane) Citizen.

As powerless as I’d lived for the last fifteen years. Powerless to remain in Los Angeles where I’d grown up, raised to be a hero. Powerless to stop the taunts of other children who saw my purple hair and hated what I no longer was. Powerless to affect the course of my own life.

Bitter fear coated the back of my tongue. Not fear of my strange appearance. No, that particular fear lived in a tiny
block of ice, deep inside my gut. This was an old fear of imminent death. Fear of how painful it would be to die at the hands of an angry Bane. Fear of my own cowardice.

“No, no, no.”

That part of my life was over. I tried to shut off the unbidden, unfocused slide show. Colorful faces from long ago, wearing strange uniforms of all shapes and sizes. Raging battles. Destroyed towns and leveled city blocks. Hundreds of innocents dead or dying.

No. No!

I hauled ass to my feet and pushed through the towel, managing to rip it the rest of the way down, and stalked to the opposite side of the apartment. As far from the mirror as I could get. I needed a drink. Badly. With no liquor on hand, I settled on bottled water from the refrigerator. I gave the outdated milk quart a suspicious glare.

Cool air from the interior of the fridge caressed my face. I shivered. It had been cold and raining, the devastated skyline black with smoke. Air thick with the stench of death. My father had led the final Ranger assault—a mixed unit of active and retired Rangers. Eighteen inexperienced children tried to fight. Six died. I thought I would die, too.

The overwhelming terror of that day still held my heart in its icy vise—terror I’d revisited in violent nightmares for years. Huddling with the other Ranger children, listening as the Banes blazed a path across Central Park. I remembered a handsome boy with silver eyes trying so hard to be brave for us as we prepared to make our final stand. They prepared—I’d cowered, too afraid to fight.

The last of the Banes had found our hiding place. And then the pain had started, radiating from within and spreading outward, burning through my body like fire and destroying the thing inside that made me special. Made me a Meta. All at once, for no real reason, Rangers and Banes alike were left without power—confused and exhausted and unable to remember why we were there in the first place.

The bottle of water slid from my boneless fingers. It hit the floor, bounced, and rolled toward the front door. I slammed the fridge shut and backpedaled, not stopping until my hip slammed against the counter. Distant bass from somewhere else in the building thrummed through the floor.

Had whatever mysterious force that stole our powers reversed itself? Confusion and incredulity momentarily blurred my vision and set my head spinning. Standing alone in my cold apartment, I desperately wanted to be wrong. I wanted to return to my dull, purposeless existence. I didn’t want my powers back, didn’t want the fear and uncertainty and responsibility of the Ranger legacy.

We didn’t know why our powers left and had no chance to ask. We were just children—separated, split up, and shipped out to different corners of the country. Schools enrolled me under my first foster family’s name, Kimble. A name I’d kept, only Teresa Kimble wasn’t really me.

My father’s surname was West. I was Teresa West—someone who’d ceased to exist fifteen years ago.

I balled my trembling hands into fists and waited for my brain to catch up and tell me I was wrong. It was an illusion, all of it—Metas didn’t exist anymore. Two years of working
three jobs, eating crap food and barely sleeping had finally culminated in an hysterical breakdown. Or I really had burst my appendix at work, and I was in the ICU, slowly dying from complications. I just had to play along with the delusion until death claimed me.

No problem.

Unless this really was happening, in which case I needed to accept it and move on, before I collapsed into a puddle of hysteria.

Move on to what, though? Tomorrow’s House of Chicken shift? Forget it. My eyes were lavender, and I couldn’t afford contacts. My fingers looked filthy. The boss would take one look and fire me on the spot. Two firings in twenty-four hours would completely suck.

I gazed at my hands. This was my future now, as it always should have been, and as right as it felt it was also very wrong. I swallowed, stomach quaking, mouth dry. Nothing about my life as a Ranger trainee reconciled with the appearance of my hands and eyes.

I could accept that I was once again a Meta (maybe). I could accept that my brain was more than a little trauma-warped (definitely). I could even accept that everything I remembered about my life before the age of ten wasn’t all childish cowardice and failure (with more therapy). I just couldn’t accept the extra purple or the floating orbs.

Of all the things I had ignored or forgotten, I knew this for certain: they weren’t my original powers. My Trance ability had been a kind of telepathy—the power to plant suggestions and influence the minds of others. While not exactly
the same, these new powers were oddly similar to Granny Dell’s.

Had all the powers been released from the ether and played musical chairs with their former owners? Like me, were the other eleven kids-now-adults waking up with someone else’s powers? What about the sixty-odd Banes imprisoned on Manhattan Island?

Dozens of tiny tremors shot up my spine.

The high walls and harbor patrols of the world’s largest man-made prison would not keep the Banes contained once they began to manifest their powers.
If
they began to manifest. At that moment, I had no proof anyone besides myself had powered up. I also had no proof that this wasn’t some sort of psychotic break. The result of too many sleepless nights, unsanitized bathwater, and bad nutrition.

My ICU/appendicitis theory was still on the table.

I squinted at my reflection in the dented surface of a toaster. Those eerie eyes winked and shimmered. If I had some warped version of Granny Dell’s power, who had mine? I had to find the others (if they were still alive) and make sure I wasn’t the only one turning strange colors.

Something squealed, sharp and muffled. A smoke detector in a nearby apartment, maybe. It ceased, and something new niggled at my memory. An item I’d kept ever since the War. Something I hadn’t allowed any of my foster parents to take away. The squeal repeated itself, lasting only a few seconds. Definitely not a fire alarm.

Half a minute passed.
Scree!

I stumbled across the small apartment to a warped closet
door. It screeched on its rusty hinges, and I yanked on the string of a bare bulb, drenching the small space in sickly light.
Scree!
Behind a pile of winter boots, old sneakers, and an antique wooden baseball bat, I found a dusty cardboard box. Inside the box, swaddled in an old T-shirt that had belonged to my dad, was a six-inch-square, carved jewelry box. I held it to my nose and inhaled. It still smelled like roses, even after all this time.

Scree!
I almost dropped the jewelry box. The sound, so familiar now, came from inside. I lifted the lid and put it aside. Picked out the small assortment of pins and baubles I’d collected as a teenager. I pulled at the bottom of the box, and the faded satin gave way.

An old Corps Vox communicator was nestled on top of the cotton batting, shiny black and unmarred by age or war. My hand jerked. I struggled to breathe as I picked up the Vox, smaller than the palm of my hand, smooth and warm. My thumb brushed across the silver
R
and overlapping
C
engraved on the plating, and beneath it, the name
Hinder
.

Hinder. Dad’s alias in the Corps.

I closed my eyes and held the Vox close. I could see his face, rugged and tired. Wide brow, thick hair, and an ever-present grin, always trying to keep us in good spirits. He told terrible jokes, and we laughed at their sheer awfulness. We read the comic strips every Sunday morning. He made pancakes shaped like the letter T. His laugh sounded like music, reverberating in my chest long after he stopped.

Grief squeezed my heart; an ache settled deep in my gut; tears stung my eyes. How could it hurt so badly to remember a man who died more than half a lifetime ago? Mom
died when I was five. She was only a shadow in my mind, unformed and barely visible. But Dad … I’d tried so hard to box him up and push him away, so that the grief of losing him didn’t kill me.

It hadn’t worked too well.

I flipped open the Vox and studied the colorful buttons. Open channel. Private channel. Alert. Vibrate. It fit in my hand perfectly, fingertips lined up with small grip indents along the sides. I pressed the red “alert” button, praying it still worked and that someone received the signal.

“Identify,” a computerized voice squawked out of the Vox.