The Tower (24 page)

“It does?” I asked in surprise.

Cindy answered, “Yup. The Knights could find that car from the other side of the world. So you see, Adrian, I’m the one with the beeper collar.”

I laughed, and then asked, “Where is Ralph these days?”

“He’s out on a mission as usual,” said Terry. “He took his motorcycle. With any luck, he won’t come back.”

“Terry!” exclaimed Cindy, but Terry just shrugged.

Cindy drove from there. Terry sat with her up front, leaving Alia and me cramped in the back seat. We kept the top up. Ralph’s convertible wasn’t designed for lots of luggage, and what we couldn’t fit into the trunk was piled upon us. We had decided to give Alia a break from her mouth-speaking training just for the camping trip, but her voice in my head kept fading in and out like a badly tuned radio. Eventually, we discovered that a metal buckle on a backpack at her feet was rubbing up against her thigh.

“And that’s why you need to learn to mouth-speak,” Cindy called from the front as I helped Alia slip a towel between her leg and the offending bag.

“It’s the car that’s too small,”
grumbled Alia, and I nodded in agreement. I never thought I’d be riding Ralph’s junky old convertible again.

As the sun finally began to rise, Cindy called up Mr. Baker on Terry’s cell phone. She explained to him what we had done, but of course refused to tell him exactly where we were headed. Though I couldn’t make out what Mr. Baker was saying, he certainly sounded very upset and angry. But I had to agree with Cindy here: It wasn’t fun being under constant surveillance. Sometimes we all just needed to be free.

Leaving the city limits, we drove for nearly four hours before arriving at the spot Terry had chosen for us. It was a deserted, broken-down farmhouse surrounded by fields overgrown with weeds and tangled thickets. The gravel road it was on led to a dead end, so there was little chance anyone would come down this way.

“Give me a moment to extend my bubble,” said Cindy, cutting the engine.

Cindy had placed a hiding bubble around the car before we left her big one over New Haven. Out here, however, the moment we got out of the car, we could be sensed by psionic finders from a great distance away, especially in a wide open and metal-free place like this. We sat quietly as Cindy worked her power, and after a few minutes, she said, “Okay, we’re set. I had almost forgotten how easy this is to do out in the countryside.”

Terry and I pitched the tent in a clearing by the road while Alia helped Cindy set up the barbecue. It was a perfect late-summer day, with a warm sun and a cool breeze to balance it off.

After lunch, I asked Cindy if I could go fly a little.

“Of course, but don’t go above the lowest clouds,” said Cindy. “The bubble doesn’t go much higher than that.”

I kicked off the ground hard, shooting up into the air as fast as I could go. My heart leapt with delight as I felt the wind on my face. It was my first outdoor flight this year, and I had almost forgotten how much fun this was. I could hear Terry and Alia calling my name, so I cut my ascent and swooped down toward them. Kick-stopping several yards from the ground, I snapped them a quick salute. Then I flew upwards again, doing a few somersaults in midair before spinning around once and floating back down. Human levitation was one of the hardest things to do for a telekinetic. Many couldn’t do it at all. I could hover for just over five minutes at a time if I wasn’t moving swiftly, but aerobatics like what I was doing now took far more energy, and soon I had to land and catch my breath.

“You’re a better dancer when your feet aren’t touching the ground, Adrian,” said Terry, coming up to me.

“I’ll try to take that as a compliment,” I said, laughing with her.

“My turn, Addy,”
said Alia, tugging on my arm.

That wasn’t surprising, but a second later, Terry also said, “My turn.”

“Sure, Terry?” I asked. “I thought you didn’t like being picked up.”

“Well, not when I’m trying to hit someone,” said Terry. “But that looked like fun.”

With frequent breaks to steady my breathing, I gave each of them nearly half an hour of flight time. My sister didn’t want to go very high, but Terry was laughing and screaming like a little kid as I flew her around and over the farmhouse.

Terry and I wanted to take a look in the farmhouse, but Cindy said it was too dangerous. She was probably right. The house looked on the verge of collapse, but that didn’t stop Terry from ignoring Cindy’s warning and taking a few steps inside to look around. Later, we played tag and volleyball in the field.

When it got too dark to play, we roasted marshmallows over a blazing campfire and tried to teach Alia a few camp songs to sing out loud. To make things fair, Terry suggested that we all sing with marshmallows crammed into our mouths. Alia loved it, and I don’t remember ever laughing so hard. It was a miracle that nobody choked.

Terry wanted to sleep outside the tent, under the stars, but the rest of us weren’t feeling as adventurous. Who knew what creepy crawly critters lurked in the bushes and tall weeds around us?

“Suit yourselves,” Terry said lightly, pulling her sleeping bag out of the tent and unrolling it next to what little remained of our campfire.

I smirked. “Enjoy the snakes, Terry.”

Leaving the fire in Terry’s care, the rest of us retired into the tent for the night.

As Cindy zipped the tent flap shut, Alia telepathically said something to her, and she replied, “Don’t worry, sweetie. The inside of this tent is a designated nightmare-free zone. You’re going to be just fine.”

Alia shook her head and looked at Cindy anxiously.

When we started out on this trip, I too had been a little worried over how my sister was going to sleep without dreamweaving treatment. There was no way to tell if Alia had been cured of her nightmare-induced bedwetting or if it was just temporarily on hold thanks to Mr. Koontz. I wished we had at least brought along Alia’s unicorn.

Catching Cindy’s hopeful eye, I said hastily, “I’m absolutely not sharing my sleeping bag with her, Cindy.”

Cindy gave me a withering smile. “You don’t have to be so heartless, Adrian. At the very least, you can let her sleep next to you.”

The tent was pretty roomy, especially without Terry, but Cindy laid our three sleeping bags in a tight row.

Patting Alia’s head, Cindy said to her, “You know, sweetie, the real trick to not having nightmares is to already be inside a good dream when you fall asleep. Just keep thinking of all the fun you had today.”

Absolute nonsense as far as I was concerned. Nightmares were nightmares no matter what you did, but I wasn’t about to say that out loud.

Snugly sandwiched between Cindy and me, my sister still looked a little apprehensive about closing her eyes, but nevertheless much calmer than a moment ago. We hadn’t brought any of Alia’s books, so Cindy made up a bedtime story on the spot, whispering to us about a lonely goat that lived on top of a mountain. I don’t remember the story well, but I clearly remember the calm I felt hearing Cindy’s quiet voice. By the time Cindy turned out the lamp, my sister looked highly unlikely to have a bad night. My own dreams were pretty peaceful too, and everything would have been perfect had we not been rudely awakened at two o’clock in the morning by none other than...

“Mr. Baker?” I asked groggily, stepping out of our tent and squinting into the headlights of the two sedans the Guardian Knights had arrived in.

Terry was already out of her sleeping bag, standing in the bright light and gazing warily at the Guardians’ cars.

Mr. Baker’s haloed silhouette said anxiously, “Adrian! Terry! Is Cindy okay?”

“I’m here,” said Cindy, pulling herself out of the tent too.

Mr. Baker rushed up to her. “Oh, thank goodness!”

“How did you find us?” asked Cindy.

“No time for that now,” Mr. Baker said hurriedly. “Please, all of you in the car. Leave Ralph’s car and your tent and everything. We have to get you out of here.”

Mr. Baker got behind the wheel of one the sedans. Cindy sat up front with him while Terry and I got in the back with Alia sandwiched between us. The Guardian Knights that had come in this car, as well as all but the driver of the second car, were left at our campsite as we drove away.

Alia was yawning, but I could tell that Terry was as awake as I was. Something was definitely very, very wrong.

“What’s going on, Travis?” Cindy demanded crossly.

“You tell me, Cindy!” Mr. Baker replied irately. “You are being protected for a reason. You can’t just disappear like this!”

Cindy snapped back, “We were sleeping nice and sound until you lot barged in!”

“Then perhaps it would surprise you to know that we got an anonymous call that gave us not only your exact location, but also informed us that a team of Seraphim were hunting you, and would probably have arrived before sunrise.”

Nobody spoke. Cindy was probably looking at Mr. Baker in exactly the same way that Terry and I were staring at each other. Who had known where we were going? Had someone spotted us in the city and followed us? Someone had told the Angels where we were, and someone else had warned the Guardians for us. Turning away from Terry, I looked out the window and into the darkness. So this was what it was like to be in the middle of a secret psionic war.

We were back in New Haven by first light. None of us had gotten any sleep in the car. As we made our way up to the NH-1 penthouse, I wondered if the Angels had already attacked our camp, and if so, what had happened.

“Guess I blew it,” said Cindy over breakfast. “Perhaps things are even more dangerous here than I thought.”

“It was still a fun day yesterday,” I said, forcing a smile and stifling a yawn at the same time. “I just hope no one gets killed in the ambush.”

“Me too,” Cindy said quietly.

“I hope they all get killed,” Terry muttered savagely, and when I looked at her, she added, “The Angels, I mean.”

We spent the rest of the day in the penthouse. After a short morning nap, I played nine-ball with Terry, once again losing almost as spectacularly as I usually did in the dojo. When Cindy returned from an afternoon meeting, we got to hear the rest of the story.

“Two dead, both Angels,” announced Cindy. “The rest got away. One of our Knights is badly burned, but she’ll live. We were hoping to catch some of the Seraphim alive to discover how they found us, but it looks like they were half-expecting an ambush.”

“It could have been worse,” I said quietly. “It could have been you.”

It soon became worse, though mainly for me.

The following day was Terry’s last before she returned to school. I would have thought that she would want to spend her last day of summer vacation out with her friends, giving me a day off, but Terry was in no mood for play.

“No jog?” I asked as she led me straight down to the subbasement.

Terry shook her head. “In light of recent events, I think we’ll start you on your weapons training today. It’s time we stepped things up anyway.”

Terry led me through several doors before we arrived at a shooting range. My first impression was that it looked a bit like a bowling alley. There were ten lanes, but at the end of each, instead of bowling pins, there were paper targets hanging from ceiling-mounted rails that extended down the length of the room.
A large black silhouette of a man with white circles over his chest was printed on each target.

I flinched a little when I heard the slightly muffled sound of a gunshot. The firing point of each lane was separated by soundproofed walls to stand between, so I couldn’t see who was doing the shooting, but apparently there was someone in the farthest lane firing at a target that was nearly the full length downrange.

“I thought we agreed no guns,” I said, refusing to take the pistol Terry was holding out to me.

Terry rolled her eyes. “No, Adrian,
you
agreed no guns. But I’m the instructor, and I say you learn.”

I still didn’t touch it. “I don’t want to kill anyone.”

“If you practice really hard, you may even learn how to shoot someone without killing him.”

“Ah,” I said, putting my right index finger up, “but if I don’t use the darn things at all, I won’t run the risk of killing someone in the first place.”

Terry scowled impatiently. “Just humor me and learn, okay?”