Age of Power 1: Legacy (45 page)

He laughed at me and then said, “Wow, you are so naïve! Yasmine
made living time bombs! That’s 
her
 legacy! The dark Empowered.
Yasmine turned Empowered into the worst that people could be. Just
so
she could swoop in and play the hero. Now, thanks to
Sinclair’s killing shot, they’ll probably kill at the first insult someone
throws at them! And not even they will know they’re going to do it until it’s
too late.”

All I could do was
stare
at Brand. I
heard his heartbeat. He was telling the absolute truth. And it fit too
perfectly. Yasmine wanted villains so she could play the hero. But I had to
worry about that some other time. Brand was my problem now.

I said, “And that’s what you really want—a world on
fire? You want death to come to everything that you ever cared for, like
your dad,
Karla?
And is this how you want to honor
Kyle’s memory? All of it will be gone forever, burned away.”

He blinked and, for a moment, something in him seemed normal. I
couldn’t let the chance pass by. “Brand, don’t do this. There’s a way out.
There has to be. Please, don’t give in to it, don’t let Yasmine win!”

Then with his eyes burning with insanity, Brand said, “No.
Riverlite burns, man. I’m burning this town down to dead ash!”

I sighed, “Not if you don’t have anything to stand on…thanks for
giving me the chance to rest, by the way.”

I shattered the trestle.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The world fell, and I fell with it. Then,
everything flared white in my eyes. There was a flash of pain. When it cleared,
I was outside the school.
I was surrounded by everyone, my
parents, Brand’s parents, Brand
. Everyone was here, looking up at the
sky. I did the same, and I was startled to see Yama coming down. “No…”

Brand reached out to me, showing a sad smile.
“Dude, it’s okay. It’ll be fast.
You’ve been daydreaming, but
come on, man.
We’re all here, at the end.”

I took a step away from him. “No…this isn’t
how it went down.”

Mom touched my arm, worry on her face. “Honey,
it’s alright. We’re all here.”

No, I shook my head. I moved from mom. This
was wrong. Yama
was stopped
! Then I bumped into
someone. “Alex!”

He stood there, looking at me with a confused
look. He took a drag off a cigar and gestured towards the asteroid. “Vaughn,
it’ll be fast. The firestorm will kill us faster than we’ll feel it. Just
relax, man.”

“Vaughn, we saw you were daydreaming…it seemed
like you were in another world.” Dad said, coming up to me. I looked at him, at
the others. I saw Jennings looking at me with a slight sneer…he had his arms
around the two girls. Next to him, Chief Sinclair was holding onto Dana…

“Wait.” I said, turning to Alex. “Why aren’t
you stopping Yama, Alex?”

Blowing out a cloud of smoke, Alex looked at
me.
“Man, Vaughn, what were you daydreaming?
Come on,
man, suck it up already! Everyone
’s dealt
with what’s
coming. You have to as well.”

No, no, no…this is just not right! I couldn’t
have imagined all that!
Not a chance in hell!
No! I
ran to Alex, and pushed him away from the crowd. I lowered my voice as I said,
“Damn it Alex! I know! I know you’re Noumenonii! Come on! You can stop the
asteroid! You did it before!”

Alex shook his head. “New…men… on
ee
…
What the hell?
Vaughn, snap out of it, dude!
The world is
coming to an end
! Get past it! There’s nothing we can do.”

A distant clap of thunder came from the west.
We looked up as Yama crashed into the high atmosphere, growing larger and
larger in our sight. “No! This is wrong! Alex…” I turned to him, “You have the
power to stop it! Come on! Do it!”

Alex met my eyes. *I’m sorry for what I have
to do, Vaughn. You have to stop them, I can’t. You have to make them realize
that we all have to live together. The crystal will—*

I felt a hand on my shoulder, interrupting
Alex. I turned to yell for
whoever
it was to leave us
alone.
Yama’s burning light shined now, in the west, getting
ever closer.
I opened my mouth to yell, and Brand’s charred, burned
body rushed from the river’s edge, shoving aside the ice. Reaching for me with
a skeletal, blackened claw, he screamed, “Vaughn, wake up!”

My eyes flew open with a gasp. Hands kept me from trying to leap
out of the bed. The scenes of the river and the Day fell away to the walls of a
hospital room. Dr. Kirksten and Nurse Wells were doing their best to keep me
still.

“Where?”
 I managed
to croak out.

“You’re in the hospital, Vaughn. You’ve been out for a few
days,” Kirksten said. My confusion slowly cleared away, and I took in the
doctor and the nurse, and then the room. Double bed, closet, small half
bathroom, and windows next to the beds…yep, I was in the hospital.

I moaned, “Whoa…was it all just a dream?”

I reached up and hesitated when I felt bandages on my head. I
said, “What? Did I fall?”

Nurse Wells nodded. “We found you at the edge of the river. What
do you remember, Vaughn?”

I opened my mouth, and then closed it. The trestle shattered, I
fell…but that strange dream…so real.
So…very real.
But
the trestle shattered. Brand and I fell. He hit the ice below, and then he…the
tons of trestle crashed atop of him…damn.

With a pang of grief, I said, “I remember. Brand…he’s dead. I
stopped him.”

Kirksten squeezed my shoulder. I sighed and began to sit up. I
stopped as pain spiked down my arm and back. My shoulder hurt with every move I
made. Thankfully, that wasn’t much. Bandages 
were
tightly wrapped
around my shoulder. In fact, I had enough bandages on me
to star in a mummy movie. The nurse, after a quick nod from Kirksten, helped me
sit up, putting pillows behind my back for support.

Once settled, I asked, “So what’s the damage?”

Kirksten winced. That wasn’t good. He said, “Well, for the most
part, you seem all right. We had to give you heavy amounts of magnesium and
lithium salts. You were burning up. You seem to be recovering, however. But the
shoulder isn’t healing as well as I would like.”

I muttered, “Resilient, not invulnerable…joy. Um…what’s been
going on while I’ve been out? How…how bad did things get?”

I caught the cautionary look between the two. I said, “Look, by
now it’s probably well known that I did things that I shouldn’t have been able
to. So tell me, please?”

Dr. Kirksten smiled and nodded. With a nod to Nurse Wells, he
waited until she had finished jotting down information on my medical board and
left.

As she walked out, Kirksten called to her. “Keep them occupied…”

Nurse Wells nodded. She said, “Naturally. We seem to have become
experts at doing just that…”

When the door closed, the first thing I asked was, “My mom and
dad—please tell me they weren’t in the house?”

Kirksten patted my forearm. He said, “They’re fine. They’ve just
been busy. You ah…set off things. I’ve decided to tell you something of what’s
going on before you’re hit by the wave of questions coming your way.”

I sighed. “Wait, don’t tell me. The FBI, the media, and, oh
yeah, the religious nuts all want a piece of me, right?”

Kirksten snorted. “Actually, the religious zealots have backed
off since what happened to Ryan Tech and the town. There seems to be a bit of
emotional shock going on in the various religious communities...a pity, really.”

Thinking of how I
’d been treated
by the
religious zealots, I said, “Uh, yeah. It’s a pity that I’ll have no more
screaming fanatics ready to burn me at the stake. Darn…”

Kirksten looked at me oddly, the shine of his balding head flashing
slightly as he grunted. “You really didn’t know?”

I uttered a bemused chuckle, and then said, “Uh, busy saving the
planet…sorry. What don’t I know?”

Kirksten said, “Understandable, I suppose, but despite the
media’s attempt to push the Avatar as the new messiah, there have been
international calls for unity to deal wisely with the issue. Worldwide
conferences to study Alex and his actions are still going on. And while he is
still the Avatar, people were talking about him as a single messiah…not one
among many. Even the Catholic Church has reigned in the good Cardinal Benito
Bersculini. It seems he was acting beyond his capacity when he endorsed Joe
Andrews and his efforts to push forward the sanctity of Alex Shaw.”

Huh. Things had happened while I was out.

“I think you’d better tell me what’s going on,” I said.

And he did. I could tell he was skipping things, but the gist
was that I’d been outed. Son’x was all the rage. So were the Empowered.
Controlled as he was by Yasmine, Delmar had done his job to perfection. Like it
or not, I was a star again. And this time, there was no going back to my
bedroom and hiding until things calmed down.
Not when I was
hitting fifty million views on YouTube per week.

Then Kirksten said, “One of the questions they’ll be asking
about is the Orishai.”

The name startled me. “You’ve heard of the Orishai?”

His nod toward the television was his answer. He went on. “They
announced themselves after the news showed Yasmine’s attack at Ryan Tech. After
some demonstrations about the veracity of their claims, people know all about
the Empowered.”

I groaned. “What else?”

He shook his head and said, “It’s only been a week, but I want
you to know what is coming. There’s going to be some stress on
you. And…I…”

I looked at him. “What?”

Kirksten’s look of pain was wrenching. He opened his mouth, but
couldn’t say anything. Then taking a deep breath, he managed, “Vaughn, I was a
fool to believe Kular. She seemed so kind, but underneath, there was all that
madness! I should never have let her near you.”

“You didn’t,” I said simply. At his look of confusion, I
continued. “Yasmine was a full-on telepath, and she probably pushed things to
get you out of the way. Hell, if you want an idea of how cruel she could get,
just look for the cameraman who recorded us, and I think a nurse that worked on
the same floor Kular did was mind controlled by Yasmine as well.”

“Thomas Delmar? Ah, he’s in ICU. His brain suffered some extreme
damage. He’s unresponsive to any stimuli. And a nurse did die on the day of the
hospital attack. And she did die from a cerebral hemorrhage. Did Yasmine…?”

I nodded and said, “Yes. Delmar probably won’t recover either.
Yasmine just literally overwhelmed him. I know you won’t like hearing this, but
we’re very lucky she’s dead. Sorry, but I’m not gonna regret that.”

Kirksten looked disappointed at what I had said. I couldn’t
blame him. I would’ve said more, but my hearing was picking up voices in the
distance. People were starting to get impatient with Nurse Wells’s stall
tactics. I sighed, and patted the doctor on the shoulder.

I said, “Why don’t you let them in? I’ll deal with the
questions.”

Giving me a sympathetic smile, Kirksten got up. He said, “All
right. And…thank you, Vaughn. It’s my responsibility to keep you healthy. And I
failed in Brand’s case. Was…what he did with the town—the madness, the
arson—was that Yasmine’s influence?”

I nodded as Kirksten went to leave. It would be what I would
tell the world, too. Brand was likely dead. I couldn’t save his life.
But damned if I wasn’t going to try to save what little of the good
that people remembered about him.
Whatever he’d become, thanks to
Yasmine, Brand would have made a fantastic hero. Kyle Houseman had taught him
too much about life for him to have been otherwise. Kyle’s actions—especially
at the end—were what made me decide the things I did, so I never doubted that
Brand would have been a good man too. Now I just had to live with the guilt of
killing him.

With the opening of the door, the parade began. The most
important people to come in were my parents. We hugged while I explained the
things that had happened to me. To my surprise, Dana had already clued them in
to what had occurred. Mom was a bit mad at me for not telling her. But with all
that had happened
,
she was just happy that I had
survived. Dad—well, Dad said I was his son no matter what. That made me feel a
whole lot better for reasons I couldn’t begin to explain. It had been my
deepest fear—I’d been scared that he and Mom would find out and push me away.
They didn’t. And for a small while, we had our moment as a family. And then the
world demanded it’s time with me.

I thought I was ready for it, but the next few days became a
mental blur as I became the subject of a major interrogation about Ryan Tech,
Yasmine, and the Empowered. Although the FBI did most of the questioning, I
also had visits from the NSA, the CIA, and people from organizations with
letter combinations that I’d never heard of.

However, thanks to the way they questioned me, I’d learned a few
things in return. For instance, BJ was a lucky son of a bitch. Although the
camera caught him on the scene, not once did it record his face. He was under
investigation, though. People saw him fighting the mercenaries. They didn’t see
what happened after Delmar dropped the camera.

But Delmar had captured many other scenes, including the fight
on the highway. And what he recorded had made it onto the news. The slaughter
of so many people by superhuman powers will do that. Oh, and I did,
too. I was famous now. So was Nightsword. But he wasn’t talking from his
prison cell in some undisclosed place.

The agents didn’t really talk much about him. Instead, they
directed their questions toward just why Ryan Tech’s various video recorders
were all blank. I didn’t have answers. They didn’t like that.

Now, I could have told them some guy from a mysterious group
called the Noumenonii had sabotaged the whole complex. But I didn’t. Bad enough
that we had two super groups fighting each other; bringing up a third group
might have sent Homeland Security into an apoplectic meltdown.

Still, none of the agents was quite willing to believe that I’d
been fighting all by my lonesome. They also didn’t believe me when I told them
I didn’t know the ‘good Samaritan’ who helped me out. Delmar never got BJ's
face on camera. And by the time the authorities got there, he was gone. Well,
maybe that was best. I wouldn't want to spoil his anonymity.