Spell Robbers (6 page)

BEN’S
mind burned hot, but gave him nothing. He looked at Peter. He looked at Dr. Hughes. What could he do? He had never actuated without any equipment. He didn’t think he could do it now, but he closed his eyes to try for another lightning bolt.

“None of that, hero boy!”

Something knocked the side of his head. Hard. Ben felt a sharp pain, and the actuation broke apart in his mind with a shower of sparks.

“How should we do it?” one of the Dread Cloaks asked.

Their leader paused. “I have an idea. Take them over there.” He pointed at a spot on the ground several feet away.

The Dread Cloaks holding them shoved Ben and Peter across the floor to the spot, then let go of them and backed away.

Ben looked at the doorway. It wasn’t too far. His head throbbed, and he closed his eyes. He couldn’t think straight. He considered running, but couldn’t bring himself to leave Peter and Dr. Hughes.

“You say this device doesn’t work, Doctor.” The Dread Cloak leader aimed the augmenter gun at Ben. “So you must be perfectly comfortable with me doing this.”

“Please, don’t.” She held out both hands. “I said it was unreliable.”

Ben looked straight through the metal ring at the end of the gun.

“Well, let’s just see what it does,” the leader said. “Unreliably.”

Ben thought of his mom, not too far away, on the other side of campus. She wouldn’t know what had happened to him.

“They’re here!” A Dread Cloak ran into the lab. “The League has come!”

“Bring her!” The leader pointed at Dr. Hughes. “And make a door!” He looked back at Ben, still aiming the gun.

Ben felt a … disturbance. The beginning of an actuation coming through the ring. He knew something bad was about to happen to him. But in that moment, a troop of uniformed people charged into the lab through the broken doorway.

“Drop the weapon, Poole!” one of them shouted.

The Dread Cloak leader held up his hands. “You think you’ve caught me?”

An explosion at the far end of the lab threw Ben to the floor. The impact struck the core of his chest and blew out his hearing. It was dark now, the room filling with smoke. He rolled onto his back. Wires hung from the gaping ceiling, and the walls bloomed fire. People rushed around him. He saw Peter lying on the ground beside him.

Then he didn’t see anything at all.

When Ben woke up, he was lying on a cot in a white room. White walls, white ceiling tiles, white linoleum floor. Was he in a hospital? Peter lay on a cot next to him. He was sleeping, but he didn’t look hurt. Ben sat up, and felt a pain stab his temple. He reached his hand up to it, and found a bandage. It must be a hospital. But when he went to the door, he found it locked.

He knocked. “Hello? Is anyone there?”

“Ben?” Peter had woken up. “Where are we?”

“I don’t know,” Ben said. “You okay?”

“Yes, I think so.” Peter rubbed his hair. “My head hurts.”

“Mine, too.” But it was more than that. He felt disoriented, like he was floating, and not in a good way. More like he was getting pulled out to sea.

Something clicked in the door, and Ben stepped back as it opened. Two people walked in, a man and a woman, both wearing suits. Their faces looked familiar, and then Ben remembered seeing them back in Dr. Hughes’s lab. They were part of the second group that came in after the Dread Cloaks. Who were they? Cops? Military?

“Ben, Peter.” The man was tall and lanky, and carried a manila file in his hand. “I’m Agent Spear. This is Agent Taggart.” He spoke with a slight southern accent.

The woman nodded. She had red hair and lots of freckles. “We’re relieved you weren’t seriously injured.”

Agents?
What did that mean? FBI?

“Where are we?” Ben asked. “Where is Dr. Hughes?”

“Have a seat.” Agent Spear pointed at the cot with the file he held. “Let’s talk.”

Ben and Peter both hesitated, but sat down side by side on Peter’s cot. Agent Spear sat down on the low cot across from them, his knees almost bumping his chin, while Agent Taggart stood back by the door, arms folded. Spear opened the file and began to read over whatever was in there, licking his thumb and turning pages. A few moments later, he looked up and smiled.

“Right. You boys have stepped in it now, haven’t you?”

“Stepped in what?” Peter asked.

“The battlefield. The Quantum War.”

“War?” Ben asked.

“Well, I don’t mean a war between nations,” Agent Spear said. “It’s a street war. A gang war.”

“Who are you?” Ben asked. “And where’s Dr. Hughes?”

“We belong to an agency,” Spear said. “You could think of it like other intelligence agencies you might be more familiar with, but we don’t answer to any government. We’re the Quantum League. Agent Taggart and I are Quantum Agents.”

Peter cocked his head. “What
is
the Quantum League? What do you do?”

“Our agency has tasked itself with —”

“Where is Dr. Hughes?” Ben raised his voice. “This is the third time we’ve asked.” It seemed like there was something this Agent Spear didn’t want to tell them.

Peter leaned back a bit on the cot, silenced.

Agent Spear sighed. “Okay. You demand the truth, and I’ll give it to you straight. We don’t know where Dr. Hughes is. The Dread Cloaks abducted her when they made their escape. She could be in any one of their hideouts.”

“Can you rescue her?” Ben asked.

Agent Taggart spoke up from the door. “A direct frontal assault against the Dread Cloaks would not be in our strategic interests.”

“What she means,” Agent Spear said, “is that we don’t have the firepower to take on the whole gang.”

“Whole gang?” Peter asked. “How many are there?”

“Current estimates,” Agent Taggart said, “put their membership between three and five hundred.”

The number shocked Ben, and at first he wasn’t sure he had heard it right. Between three and five
hundred
? And how many of those were Actuators? Would they hurt Dr. Hughes? Was she alive? Each question hit Ben’s head like a hammer strike. He felt disoriented, his world all ground up. Just weeks ago he’d learned about actuation, and then the lab was attacked by a gang, and now this skinny guy was calling himself an agent and talking about a war.

Ben still felt adrift, and the waves were starting to break over his head. “I’d like to call my mom now.”

“That’s been taken care of,” Agent Spear said. “You needn’t worry.”

“What does that mean?” Ben asked. “Let me call my mom.”

Agent Spear closed the folder. He looked over his shoulder at Agent Taggart, who checked something on a small device she pulled from her pocket. She gave him a nod back.

Agent Spear stood. “Let me show you boys something.”

“What?” Peter asked.

Ben stayed seated. “I don’t want to see anything. I’m not going anywhere. I want a phone.”

Agent Spear looked around. “You see one in here, son?”

Peter tugged on his sleeve. “Come on, Ben.”

Ben looked hard at Agent Spear. The man met his gaze with the kind of smile fathers gave their boys in commercials. “Things will make sense again real soon. I promise.” He walked to the door and grasped the handle. “Coming?”

Ben looked at Peter. His friend bounced a little as he nodded. Ben got to his feet. The two of them crossed the room, and as they approached the door, Agent Spear opened it.

They entered into a hallway that felt a little like the Castle back at the university. Old. White walls, smoky wood trim.

“Right this way, gentlemen,” Agent Taggart said.

She led the way, while Agent Spear came behind them. They followed the hallway, turned a couple of corners, and stopped before another door.

“This is the training room.” Agent Taggart pressed a button, and a loud buzzer sounded before she opened the door.

They entered into a huge vaulted room. Areas of the floor had been sectioned off by partial walls of different materials. The nearest one was made of cinder block, and it bore blackened scorch marks and craters across its surface.

The people inside, some of them as young as Ben and Peter, had stopped whatever they’d been doing and stared as Agent Taggart led them through the room. Some wore protective armor, like they were on a bomb squad. Others wore heavy padding that made them look puffy and stiff. The rest of the people either wore plain workout clothes, or suits like Agent Spear and Agent Taggart. Ben made eye contact with a girl who looked a few years older than him. She had long black hair, shiny and smooth as electrical tape, with a single lock dyed bright blue.

When they reached the far side of the room, Agent Taggart spun around.

“What kind of training are they doing?” Peter asked.

“Watch,” Agent Taggart said. “It should look familiar to you.” She cupped her hand to her mouth. “Clear!”

The room resumed motion. People took up positions. Ben felt something change in the air. Then fireballs flew. Ice. Lightning. Blasts of wind. The girl with the black-blue hair smirked at Ben before launching a baseball-sized rock from a pile into the air like a bullet. Ben glanced at Peter, whose wide eyes and open mouth looked how Ben felt.
Actuation
. This was an actuation training room.

Except, Ben didn’t see any augmenting equipment. He looked around, along the walls, up into the heavy timber rafters that stretched across the ceiling. Nothing. It seemed that every person in that room was actuating on his or her own.

Agent Taggart waited a moment longer, and then motioned for Ben and Peter to follow her through another door. Ben didn’t want to leave. Peter didn’t move, either. He just stared. But Agent Spear shepherded them forward, and they soon stood in a quiet hallway.

“Quantum Agents,” Peter whispered. “Now it makes sense. But —”

“Let’s finish this in the library.” Agent Spear took the lead again, and they followed him down a few more turns into a room that was smaller than the one they’d just been in, but larger than the room where they’d started. Empty wooden shelves lined the walls — was it still a library if it didn’t have any books? — and a couple of conference tables rested in the middle of the room, surrounded by high-backed wooden chairs. They each took a seat.

“What is this place?” Ben asked.

“It used to be a church,” Agent Spear said. “They were going to tear it down, but the League moved in before they could.”

“So this is your headquarters?” Peter asked.

“One of them,” Agent Taggart said. “The League is a global agency. We monitor quantum activity around the world and make sure groups like the Dread Cloaks don’t get too powerful or cause too much trouble. We stop them when we can.”

Ben thought back to what the leader of the Dread Cloaks had done to the computer in Dr. Hughes’s lab. “Can they all … well, Dr. Hughes called it actuation?”

Agent Taggart nodded. “That is the scientific term we use as well. Although, you may occasionally hear an older agent still calling it magic. But that’s usually as a joke. As for the Dread Cloaks, yes. Most of them can actuate, to varying degrees.”

“Does the government know about them?” Ben asked. “Or, you guys?”

“No,” Agent Spear said.

“How is that possible?” Peter asked.

“That’s the funny thing about actuation,” Agent Spear said. “Ennays have a hard time seeing it.”

“Ennays?” Ben asked.

“Non-Actuators,” Agent Taggart said. “N-A’s. Most people who cannot actuate don’t really perceive it. It is a part of reality they are blind to, just like you’re blind to infrared light. They see the aftermath of actuation, but they attribute it to other things. Freak storms. Freak accidents. Spontaneous combustion. That kind of thing.”

“Another term for Ennays you might hear is Imps,” Agent Spear said. “Short for
impotent
. Powerless. But that’s an insult, so don’t go picking it up.”

But Ben thought back to how Dr. Hughes had trained them. “If Dr. Hughes is an Ennay, how does
she
see it?”

“Her equipment allows her to perceive it,” Agent Taggart said. “Like you wearing infrared goggles.”

“Which brings us back to the attack,” Agent Spear said. “Poole is in charge of the Dread Cloaks, and for him to personally head up an operation means there was something very important in that lab. And with Dr. Hughes.”