The Sovereign Era (Book 2): Pilgrimage (11 page)

He had to keep as much weight on his left leg as he could. His right leg was beginning to come to life with fiery pins and needles.

“Served its—?” Byron gaped at Mazmanian. “That’s, like, totally why you told me about my dad before we came out here.”

Mazmanian, still grinning, nodded.

“Jesus!” Byron looked at both of them. “Was my dad even here? Or was it all just part of the test?”

“Oh, your dad was here, all right.” Doc Mazmanian’s smile leveled off. “He made a big scene. They had to eject him from the Visitors Center under guard.”

Byron took a second to picture that. He decided he needed some flavoring. “Did they mess him up?”

Mazmanian raised an eyebrow; Byron knew the doc well enough to recognize that as a minor rebuke. “They only hurt his pride, Byron. Just his pride.”

Byron’s leg was on fire from the pins and needles, but he had to resist stomping his foot because of what the impact would do to the bruise. All the same, he smiled, just a little.

“That’ll work.”

Mazmanian furrowed his brow and shook his head. “Great attitude, Byron.”

Croy turned for the Institute grounds. “Time for your follow-up work.” He didn’t wait for them.

Mazmanian kept Byron’s limping pace but made no move to help him. Byron didn’t take it personally—it was all part of the exercise. They needed to see how fast his adaptive abilities would work; any outside assistance would mess up the, whatever they called it, the data.

Croy went directly to the research center; if Byron wasn’t bleeding or in shock, there was no reason to bother with the infirmary. Byron, eyes down, struggled with the stairs leading to the entrance. His leg really, really hurt.

“You can do it, soldier boy.”

That throaty female voice sure wasn’t Mazmanian.

Byron lifted his head and saw a girl about his age, sixteen or seventeen, leaning with deliberate cool against the rail on the far side of the wide steps.

She was skinny. Her holey, strategically bleached blue jeans hung off narrow hips. She had freckles all over her bare arms and, Byron noticed, across the belly beneath her gray half T-shirt. Her freckled face was topped by a shock of spiky red hair. If her wardrobe made her cold, she did a good job of hiding it.

Her smile was mostly mocking. She brushed lightly at her chin. “You got a little bit, right there.”

Byron automatically scraped at his chin, mortified that he might have puke caked on his face.

There was nothing.

She laughed. “Sorry, dude. Couldn’t resist.” She pushed off of the rail, briskly descended the stairs, and strutted toward the residence center while Byron watched.

“C’mon, Byron,” Mazmanian prompted. “Let’s get you wired up and cleaned up. You’ll be properly introduced before long, I’m sure.”

Byron scowled and painfully ascended the remaining stairs. “Can’t wait,” he growled.

From The Journal Of Nate Charters – Nine

Every Monday, I had to get my weekly independent study assignments from school, which meant getting a ride from my mother, who always took that day off or worked from home. I didn’t have much time for myself.

I’d been following the advice of Lina’s dad and hadn’t called her. She didn’t call me, either.

Tuesday, my mother left for her office and I had the house, and more importantly, the telephone, to myself. I went for the White Pages as soon as my mother’s car was out of sight.

There were four listings with the last name of Finn. Finn, Vincent; Finn, F.; Finn, Albert; Finn, Michael.

No one answered at the first number, even though I let it ring ten times. The second number clicked over to an answering machine on the third ring.

“Hey, there, hi! The Finns aren’t in! Get it? Ha, ha…well, you know what to do. At the beep, leave a message for Frank, Ricki, Bill, or Dawn!”

Beep.

No Eric.

I called the third number. On the fifth ring, a kid’s voice said, “What? I mean, Finn’s residence.”

I closed my eyes and crossed my fingers.

“Is Eric there?”

“Who wants to know?”

“A…a friend of his. From school.”

“Eric don’t go to school, dummy.”

I raised my fist and mouthed a silent, “yes!”

All excited, I found myself taking on the kid’s attitude. “Duh,” I said. “We used to go to school. Together.”

“What,” the kid giggled, “like a couple of fags?”

“Ha, ha. Good one. So is Eric there, or not?”

“He’s at work, of course.”

“Oh, yeah, right. Hey, where does he work again?”

“You don’t know?”

“It’s…been a while. Hey, why aren’t you in school?”

“The car place,” the kid said. “What’s it called…oh yeah.” The kid made like he thought he sounded like a radio announcer. “Sunrise Import Shop!” His voice went back to its high, piping normal. “I’m home sick!”

Sunrise Import Shop.

I hung up on the kid, grabbed the Yellow Pages, flipped to the right page, and there it was. Even had a quarter-page ad.

I wanted to go right then, but it was all the way across town. I’d need to fuel up before I got on my bike.

As I put second breakfast together, I started playing fantasies of my meeting with Lina’s would-be rapist through my head. None of them ended well for Eric Finn. Some of them involved tears, and not mine.

It wasn’t a short bike ride to Sunrise Import Shop. The place was in an industrial park on the far side of El Toro, which meant going all the way down by the freeway.

At least the weather was decent. A little chilly, but that gave me an excuse to wear my hooded sweatshirt. I could be incognito until the right moment.

I wasn’t sure when that right moment would be, or how it would unfold, but I had ideas that there would be some public humiliation.

It was around one in the afternoon when I coasted into the parking lot. Sunrise Import Shop was what looked like one of those places that customizes cars, puts spoilers and headers and superchargers or whatever on them. It sat kind of in the middle of a row with a wrought iron fence place, a transmission place, and so on.

From the parking lot, the shop might as well have been an office. I pedaled around to the back, where I saw the rear of the building was, in contrast, almost entirely open to the elements: a nearly unbroken row of roll-up garage doors.

In Sunrise Import Shop, five guys were tinkering around four import-looking cars—like Nissans, Datsuns, Toyotas and what-not—in various stages of disassembly or whatever.

I rode back and forth along the alley behind the building, my hood tight around my head. A cold feeling swept through me. I felt like I’d just figured out the dream where I’m at school with no pants on wasn’t a dream.

I stopped a dozen yards down from the three garage doors that made up the back of Sunrise Import Shop and balanced my bike on one straight leg.

It occurred to me that I had no idea what Eric Finn looked like.

I was fucked.

Fucked.

A guy in coveralls walked out of Sunrise and into the alley. He wiped his hands on a dull red rag and put his hand above his eyes, shading them from the sun behind me.

“Hey, kid,” he called.

Great.

I stood there on my bike.

“Yeah?”

“C’mere, kid.”

I realized there was a one in five chance that this was Eric Finn himself.

Yeah. Game time.

I pedaled casually toward him. It didn’t take long for my excellent eyes to pick out “Len” stitched on his breast. Okay. Not Eric Finn.

I stopped so that Len had to turn his back on the shop interior to face me. Meanwhile, I had a pretty good view of the people inside.

“Yeah?” I tried not to sound too much like your typical sullen teenager. I hoped my hood provided enough camouflage; I didn’t want to be recognized right off the bat.

Len smiled; he thought I was suspicious, that I was like most kids, and assumed I was in some kind of trouble, or at least about to be wrongly accused of something. “Nothin’—I just saw you going by a few times. Did you wanna check out the shop?”

Over Len’s shoulder, I
was
checking out the shop. Most of the guys inside hadn’t looked up from the cars.

One did. He appeared when he dropped the hood on the car he was working on.

He had jet-black hair that looked like it would make a pretty tall pompadour if he took the time. His eyes were brown. He had high cheekbones on a face that looked narrower that it probably was thanks to the pointy black Vandyke on his chin.

He pretty much looked like a music-video handsome version of a carnival devil.

“Oh, no,” I told Len. “I’m just, y’know, riding my bike.”

Len laughed. “Sure. Sure.” He wiped his hands on the rag again. “Well, look, if you feel like taking a break to check things out, that’s cool. We’re all cool; it’s no big deal.”

Lazy pompadour male-model guy was watching us with intelligent, curious eyes. He moved around the car and started walking toward us.

“It’s cool... no, I’m…I’m good.”

The stitching on rockabilly Satan spelled ERIC in embroidered cursive.

I started sweating. My gut felt empty and rebellious.

I stood on my pedals and started pumping until I was out of the parking lot and all the way down at the intersection.

I screamed at the passing cars.

“Fuck!”

I felt like my body was being held inside my skin and every point where they met was barbed wire and Teflon. I wanted to explode. I wanted to break something. I wanted blood.

I wanted to cry. Suddenly, I was so frustrated.

The light had changed. Cars were stopped in the lanes next to me. People were looking.

“Fuck you!”

I had to get away. I hauled ass until I got to Bridge Park, off Los Gatos Parkway. I got off my bike, let it fall, and dropped myself onto the damp grass.

I would not cry.

I sat there, the smell of the grass and mulch and exhaust from the cars on the street tickling my sinuses and itching at the back of my throat, and tried to take stock. I tried to figure out why I’d gone rabbit.

The only reason it took as long as it did was because I didn’t like the answer.

I’m stronger than anyone my age and most anyone older, for that matter. I’m faster, too. I can jump almost fifteen feet, and almost seven feet straight up, standing. I can see in the motherfucking dark, hear things you can’t hear, and smell people before they come into the goddamn room.

I’ve fought honest-to-fuck monsters, human and otherwise. I’m not a coward. I’m not.

That stuff doesn’t matter all that much when you can’t pass for a normal in a crowd. When you spent pretty much the first decade of school being picked on, singled out, ostracized, you name it.

To see Lina’s fucking wanna-be rapist is all handsome and sharp, like he stepped out of a Stray Cats video or the set of fucking
Grease
or something…and to know that this is the guy that Lina never even bothered to turn in…and to know that…

I stopped myself. I squelched the tirade in my own head. I had succeeded in shaming myself.

You can’t unthink a thought, though.

“Fuck.”

I got back on my bike and headed home, knowing that baby rock-star Carson Meunetti and Eric male-model motherfucking Finn had known Lina in all the ways I had, and some ways I never had—the way things were going, maybe never would, now.

It made me feel like I was ten years old again, wondering how I was going to explain that my homework was in my backpack, and my backpack was hanging from the top of the elementary-school playground backstop, where Byron Teslowski and his wingmen had thrown it.

Where I had let them throw it, even though I could stop them if I only had the guts. If I wasn’t paralyzed from the desire to just be normal.

I didn’t feel strong, or special, or brave.

No. I felt small. Different. Stupid.

Byron Teslowski – Two

Getting shot made Byron hungry, even though it also usually made him barf. He’d have to work on that.

Doc Mazmanian would tell him adapting and healing after being shot gave him the appetite. Made sense. Byron remembered when he and Nate got in their fight that one time. Terry and everybody had been freaked out by all the blood, but all Byron could think about was tearing into the spaghetti leftovers he knew were in the fridge at home.

He guessed that he would have been starving after the fight at Kirby Lake if he hadn’t been unconscious.

He kinda missed his mother’s spaghetti.

The residence building’s ground floor was dominated by the commons area, which had a cafeteria. It made Byron think of what a food court would look like in a mall designed for billionaires.

It was the middle of the afternoon, after lunch and well before dinner, but the cafeteria counter was always open. Byron cut under the metal line dividers, grabbed a tray and a place setting, and smiled at Sal, who waited behind the counter.

“What’s up, Sal?”

The cafeteria worker looked past Byron, indicating the line dividers with his glance. “How’s the leg, Byron?”

Everybody knew when Byron was having a test; Mister Croy didn’t want anyone to be alarmed when they heard the gunshot.

“A little stiff, but it’s cool.”

Sal shook his head. He smiled under his mustache. “You get shot in the leg and two hours later you’re limber like a piece of rubber! Me, I couldn’t bend my knees like that if my life depended on it.”

Byron liked chatting with Sal. It almost made him feel like they were anywhere in the world, and that more than one of them was a totally normal…human. “Aw, I bet you could.”

“Let’s not find out. So…pasta today, kiddo?”

“Yes, sir.”

Sal piled a plate high with angel-hair pasta, poured on the marinara, and snowed Parmesan cheese all over that. Byron thanked him and sat down at one of the smaller tables.

He had just rolled a mouthful around his fork and shoved it in his face when the girl from the stairs sat down across from him.

“Hey, soldier boy.”

Her eyes were greenish-gray and large on her small, angular face. She smirked at him.

Byron wiped his mouth and tried to chew faster.