Meta (Book 3): Rise of The Circle (33 page)

“Midnight says the metabands need to be touching each other,” I relay to the group.

"All right everyone, you heard him. Line up, metabands together with the person to your left and right. We don't have much time," Winston says.

"Wait, what happens to you then?" I hear a heavily distorted voice ask. It belongs to Sarah, or more accurately, to her mechanical suit.

"It doesn't matter. If I don't try this, we're all dead anyway."

"But what if it does work?"

I take a second and glance up into the sky, expecting to see a fiery streak coming through the atmosphere, but it's not there, not yet at least. I turn to Sarah and mentally pull my cowl back into the rest of my suit, revealing my identity.

"What?" the distorted voice asks.

"Protect Derrick for me, okay? He's the only reason I'm still here. He never abandoned me, but now I have to abandon him. Tell him I'm sorry."

Sarah hits a few buttons on her right forearm and the visor to her suit retracts.

"Connor? How are you using Omni's metabands? I don't understand," she says.

Even with all of this, I have to laugh at the question and how she'll feel when she realizes.

"You'll have time to figure it out. I hope."

"Connor, I've got incoming. If you're going to do something, you'd better do it soon."

I pull the cowl back over my head. There's not much need to keep my identity concealed at this point, but it'd feel wrong to go out without the full suit intact. That's how this started, and it's how it'll end.

I lower my forearms to my sides, placing them in front of Winston to my left and Ellie to my right.

"I'm sorry," Iris says through tears.

"Don't ever be sorry. The world can't ask for a better protector."

Winston and Ellie tap their metabands against mine and it begins. What looks like liquid electricity flows from the assembled group, collecting in a pool at my end of the enclosed circle. There's no pain involved, a concern of mine before this started, but their costumes and uniforms retreat back into their respective metabands. Their bands lack the energy even to keep those relatively uncomplicated abilities intact.

At first I don't feel different, but as their power leaves them, I begin to feel it enter me. Everything becomes brighter, clearer. My mind feels like it's running on pure energy, and I can suddenly see everything I have to do laid out in front of me.

I look down at my metabands. They’re no longer a silver metallic color. Now they look as though they’re made from light itself. My uniform pulses and flows with the same energy, making it appear as though it's alive.

"Go get him, Connor," Iris says to me.

I smile before directing my attention to the sky and take off.

Bay View City shrinks below me as I reach higher and higher, bursting through a lone cloud hanging in the cool autumn sky. I've flown many times by now, but this feels like something else entirely. I'm traveling so quickly it's almost dizzying. The streak that is Charlie waits silently above me. No doubt he’s traveling toward me almost as fast as I'm traveling toward him, but he's still far enough away that he remains a blip in the night sky.

The air around me begins to thin and become dark. I'm reaching the edge of Earth's atmosphere. It's higher than I've ever flown before. There's a sudden panic that I won't be able to breathe before I realize that I don't feel the need to. I've become so powerful that even something as critical to life as oxygen isn't necessary for me anymore.

It's now that I start really thinking about what I'm doing, and that that was probably the last time I've stepped foot on earth. There wasn't much of a choice, though, and while the thought of death terrifies me, the thought of what will happen if I don't stop this terrifies me more.

That's what I have to focus on. That's what will get me through this.

The thin atmosphere disappears completely, and I realize that there's no more wind on my face. As if to punctuate the realization that I'm in space, a satellite whizzes past my face only a few feet away. I turn to look at it, but it's already hundreds of miles away by the time I catch a glimpse of it turning around the edge of the Earth.

I turn my attention back toward the moon. Silhouetted against the bright full moon, I pick up sight of him again. Charlie is closer now. Within seconds, he'll be right on top of me.

I take a hard look at him, gauging his angle and direction so I can make my last adjustments. I'll have to hit him with everything I've got. There's no slowing down or second-guessing.

I reach down deep and pull the last reserves of energy I have to push myself as fast as my bands will take me. There's a brief moment when I see Charlie's eyes right as he catches sight of me. There's an instant of confusion followed by an even shorter instant of recognition.

Then we collide.

And then there's nothing.

W
hen I wake up
, I'm not sure if I've been out for seconds or weeks. Time itself feels different. The collision, the school, finding my metabands, my parents dying, they all simultaneously feel like they happened impossibly long ago and also like they happened just yesterday.

I'm afraid to open my eyes and find out where I am. If I'm not dead, then I'm likely floating somewhere in space, my metabands barely supplying enough reserve energy to keep me alive, but probably not enough to get me back home.

That worry is short-lived, though. When I finally work up the nerve to open my eyes, all I see is vast, empty white space.

I guess I'm dead after all.

"Hello?" a voice asks.

It sounds scared. I don't know much about religion or ideas about what the afterlife's supposed to be like, but I know enough that hearing the fear in someone else's voice doesn't bode well for me being in the good place instead of the bad place.

I search around for the source of the voice, but find nothing but more empty space.

"Up here," the voice finally says.

I tilt my head and finally see him floating above me: a man, maybe in his thirties. He's wearing a suit that looks almost like the types worn by me and other metahumans, but it's different, plainer, without symbols or colors, just all one white, seamless suit.

The man's gray eyes look terrified. His lower lip is trembling like he's on the verge of bursting into tears.

"Where am I?" the man asks me. "What is this place?"

Well there goes any hope that he was going to be the one to answer that question for me.

"I'm not sure."

"How did you get here?" he asks.

"I'm a metahuman. I was in a ... I'm not sure what you would call it. A collision? When I woke up, I was here."

"A meta ... human? What's a metahuman?" the man asks me.

He says the words as though he's never heard them before in his life. Whoever this person is, he’s been here a long time if he’s never heard of a metahuman before.

That's when I notice he's wearing metabands around both wrists, which only adds to my confusion.

"I told you how I got here. Why don't you tell me how you got here?"

"I asked you a question," he says, raising his voice with a quick kind of anger that makes me flinch.

"If you tell me how you got here, that would help us both figure out where we are, which I think is probably the most important thing to figure out right now."

The man pauses for a moment, considering what he should, and maybe shouldn't, say to me.

"I was on a vessel. We were inbound back to the Earth relay station when ... there was an accident," he says.

"What kind of accident?"

"The bad kind."

"How long have you been here?"

"I'm not sure. A long time. Nothing changes. Everything stays the same. Every hour of every day. I don't know why I'm even saying 'day.' There are no days here or nights. There's nothing but this. You have to do something. You have to get me out of here. I'm slipping. I'm starting to lose it. I don't know why I'm telling you all of this. I'm not even sure if you're real."

My stomach drops as I start to realize.

"What's your name?" I ask hesitantly.

"John. John Jones. I think. I can barely even remember anymore."

It's him, Jones, the man who killed my parents and thousands of others, one of the most vile and horrific killers who has ever lived, and he's impossibly standing right here, right in front of me, and ... he's normal.

Maybe he’s not normal. He's definitely got a few screws loose still, but he's not the maniac the world watched kill for sport. He's something different. For starters, he can talk. The Jones I knew, before he died, never spoke a word, which only added to the mystery surrounding him.

I begin to open my mouth to ask another question, when my metabands start chirping like crazy. It’s a sound I've never heard them make before, something in between a notification sound and an alarm.

"What ... what is that?" Jones asks. "You have them too. You have the same as me." He holds up his wrists to demonstrate that he's wearing metabands as well, as if it wasn't one of the first things I noticed. "What does that sound mean? What are they doing?"

"I'm not sure," I tell him honestly. "They've never done this before."

The chirping becomes more rapid and louder. Jones and I catch each other's glares as we both recognize that the sound is a warning. It's increasing in frequency the same way a bomb would.

Without another word, Jones turns and runs in the opposite direction, far into the never-ending white void. There's nowhere for me to run, not with my metabands still attached. In a panic, I touch the bands together in an effort to deactivate them, hoping that maybe that would stop whatever is about to happen.

It doesn't work. The bands offer no response whatsoever. The beeping continues growing in intensity until it’s no longer a beep. It’s now one long solid blaring tone.

Then everything white turns black.

"
W
elcome back
to the land of the living," The Physician says as I open my eyes.

I'm laid out in a hospital bed somewhere deep in the bowels of the facility. I think I've been here for a few days, but it's hard to keep track since I keep fading in and out of consciousness.

"We were all hoping today would be the day you were able to keep those eyelids open for more than a few seconds," he says.

"What happened?" I ask.

"Well, where to begin? For starters, it took about seven hours of searching the entire globe before they found you floating in the middle of the Indian Ocean. A nearby freighter had reported seeing you leaving a flaming trail through the sky as you plummeted back to Earth. Ellie came and found you apparently being nibbled on by a couple of frustrated sharks. Your metabands were in pretty bad shape, but they had enough juice left to keep you alive and prevent the sharks from turning you into lunch. How are we feeling today, Mr. Connolly?" The Physician asks.

"I've felt better."

"Of that, I have no doubt. Your recovery is coming along nicely, though, I must say."

"What can I say? I'm a trooper."

"It can all be directly attributed to the metabands around your wrists, but sure, the positive attitude helps too."

"So when can I get out of here then?"

"You're still going to be laid up for a few days, I'm afraid, but I do have some good news for you. Michelle looked over your charts this morning and deemed you well enough to receive visitors. In fact, I believe your first visitor is already waiting for you."

Derrick walks into the makeshift hospital room, and I can't believe how happy I am to see him. I immediately try to get out of the bed to give him a hug but find that I'm pretty well secured thanks to all the tubes and wires attached to me.

"Whoa, easy there. These things look expensive," Derrick says.

He leans over to give me a hug.

"I'm so glad you're okay," I say.

"That makes two of us. I guess I really owe you one now, huh?"

"Damn right you do. Don't worry, though. I'm easy to please. The sports package will be fine. I don't want you to have to go out of your way when you shop for my new car."

"Glad to see falling from outer space didn't do anything to your sense of humor."

"How is everyone else?"

"Everyone else is good. In fact, there's actually a few other people who wanted to come say hi to you now that you're awake."

The first face I see come through the door isn't one I expected to see down here, but it's extremely welcome, nevertheless.

"Sarah!"

"You know, you made me feel like a real dummy for not having figured all of this out sooner."

She leans over and gives me a hug, careful not to get tangled in any of the tubes. The next face that I see walk through the door is absolutely one that I never expected to see here or anywhere else. Jim.

"Jim? But how?" I ask.

He doesn't say anything and just leans in to hug me. Unlike Sarah and Derrick, Jim doesn't seem to care about the tubes and cables presumably helping to keep me alive and just goes for it. When he finally pulls back, there are tears in his eyes.

"I don't understand ..." I say.

"I don't completely understand either, but I have your friend Ellie to thank. She was able to get me to a hospital quickly enough to save my life. Another thirty seconds and I would have been gone for good."

"Jim, I'm so sorry about all of this. I should have told you everything sooner. I should have never gotten you involved in any of this."

"Well, it's a little too late for that, unfortunately."

"What do you mean?"

"Jim's transferring here to the academy," Sarah informs me.

"Technically, I already have, actually. Today was my first day of classes," Jim says.

"And guess what else?" Sarah asks, but she doesn't wait for me to guess. "You're going to have some more company down here soon."

"They're admitting me and Sarah into a new program here. I know we don't have the fancy fashion accessories that you do," Jim says, referring to my metabands, "but considering everything that went down in Bay View City, they want us on board."

"Speak for yourself. I've at least got one metaband," Sarah says.

"Considering these two already know so much about the goings on here now, and because of their work in the field, Michelle thought it would be a good idea to admit them into the program. The world's going to need more people looking out for it than just those who have a pair of metabands," Derrick explains.

"Well now I wish I hadn't gone through all the trouble of making new friends."

"I'm sure they're probably pretty close to being sick of you by now anyway," Sarah jokes.

"Speaking of which, where is everybody else?" I ask.

"I'd love to tell you, but that's classified," Jim says, barely able to contain the smirk on his face.

"They gave this guy security clearance and now that's all he says about everything. It got old like three days ago," Sarah says.

"It might be old to you, but Connor's been knocked out for a week. I'm sure he thinks it's funny."

"Yup. Hilarious."

"To answer your question without being a smartass, most everyone else is on a mission right now," Sarah says.

"Already?"

"Hey, just because you decided to sleep doesn't mean the rest of the world stops turning. There's still a lotta bad people out there that need straightening out," Sarah says. "Speaking of which, we should probably check on them. We're kinda their support team for this outing, and they should be reaching their target soon. We just had to stop by once we heard you were waking up."

"I should probably get out of here too. They say you still need your rest," Derrick says.

I give each of them one last hug before they leave. On his way out the door, Jim flicks the light switch, and the room darkens. I lie in bed, staring at the ceiling, thinking about how lucky I am to have survived. That's when I see movement in the dark, just out of the corner of my eye.

"I was wondering if you were going to stop by to visit," I say into the darkness.

Out of the shadows, in the far corner of the room, Midnight steps toward my hospital bed.

"You're getting better at that," he says.

"Either that or you're getting worse at hiding."

"Unlikely."

"Why the sneaking around in the first place? You're practically faculty here now."

"I needed to speak with you about what happened, and there's no need to bring anyone else into it. I need to know where you went."

"You saw where I went. You had a better seat than anybody."

"You disappeared from my radar for over nine hours."

I think about what I'm going to say for a few seconds before opening my mouth. I don't have my head fully wrapped around what I experienced yet, and I didn't think I'd have to be explaining it so soon.

"I'm not sure where I went. It was bright. Endless."

"Were you alone?"

"No, there was someone else there."

"Jones."

"How did you know?"

"Where you went is a place that was thought to be only hypothetical, even in my time."

"What is it? Another dimension? Another universe?"

"Not quite, but you're not too far off. The science to explain what that place is doesn't exist in this time yet. The only relevant thing you need to know is that it’s where your powers derive from. It's even where your metabands go temporarily when you think you've made them disappear. We call it the Fervor.

"The Jones you met will spend the equivalent of thousands of years alone in that place. It's what will make him into the monster you came to know in this time."

"But he wasn't that yet when I saw him."

"It doesn't matter. It's what he will become."

"But if I was able to leave that place, why couldn't he?"

"I don't know. The energy he was subjected to was much, much higher than what you were."

"If I could get in there and leave, maybe there's a way to get him out of there before he turns into the Jones we know in our time."

"Connor, I'm not even sure how you were able to enter the Fervor in the first place, let alone leave it. Don't count on ever being able to do it again, even if we knew the way."

"So what now then?"

"Now you rest. You just did something no one else in history has ever accomplished, and that includes future history."

"This is starting to get confusing."

"And that's why you need your rest. We're not done. Most of the escapees from Silver Island are still out there. There's a power vacuum right now in Bay View City after the Alphas were defeated, and there are still more metahumans emerging out of the shadows everyday, some good, but a lot of them not.

“Rest up. We're not done yet."