Meta (Book 3): Rise of The Circle (5 page)

"Hello? Connor?" Jim asks while waving a hand in front of my eyes, noticing that I appear to have completely zoned out.

"Jim," I say.

"Yeah?"

"Move."

He's confused at first, but before he even has time to fully process what I've just said, let alone understand why I've said it, the depressed areas of grass begin appearing more quickly.

It's an Invisible. I don't know who it is, or how long he’s been standing there, but I know that there's one sure-fire way to find out, and that's catching him.

Jim still isn't sure what is going on when I push him out of the way and start running after a ghost. The invisible footsteps in the grass are becoming faster and heading for the paved road in front of me. Once its feet hit that pavement, trying to find them is going to be next to impossible. This is my one chance, so I take it and dive into the air, aiming for the footsteps and hoping for the best.

To my amazement, it works! Even when you know there's someone there, it's still a very bizarre feeling to feel yourself collide with what looks like open space. I'm not sure what part of their body I've hit exactly, but it's solid, not just an arm or a foot; these are legs or a torso. I wrap my arms around whatever it is and hang on as hard as I can.

The ground is coming up in front of me fast, but inches before I hit it face first, my fall stops, cushioned by muscle and bone. Someone else's muscle and bone, that is, which feels a lot better hitting the ground than when it's yours. I'm frantically grasping at whatever I can get a hold of on this person. After I've got a good grip on what feels like nylon fabric, I look up and see a trickle of blood on the sidewalk in front of us. Part of this person made it to the pavement after all.

"There's no use hiding anymore. I've got you, and I'm not letting go, so you might as well turn that off," I say to the invisible body I'm holding on to as it continues trying to squirm out from under my grip.

It's now that I remember that I don't have my metabands. Lunging at this person was pure instinct and not the good kind. Confidence is great; cockiness is not. The only reason I'm not completely freaking out is the thought that if they were powered or invulnerable, then I wouldn't still be on top of them. I was lucky, and I need to remember that.

"He said power down!" Jim screams from behind me. Before I have a chance to turn around and look at him, I see a sneaker coming toward my face. I wince and close my eyes, but it doesn't hit me. Instead, it makes a heavy thud as it hits what I presume to be the face of the invisible meta I've currently got pinned. "Power down!" Jim screams again as he winds up for another kick.

"Stop it!" I yell back, trying to use my right hand to block Jim's blow before it can reach the Invisible. Jim's foot hits my forearm hard and hurts so badly that I think he's broken it for a second. In the confusion and pain of what's happening, I momentarily lose my grip on the meta. A second later, I can feel invisible hands on me, pushing me off far enough to get his feet out from underneath me and use them to kick me off completely.

Jim lunges forward when he realizes what's happening. He makes contact with the metahuman, but his hands slip. His arms are flailing wildly, desperately trying to find something to hold on to in the thin air, but there's nothing there anymore, only the sound of footsteps running away down the road into the night.

Jim begins running too, following the sound of the footsteps, but after a few feet he must realize it'd be next to impossible to find the Invisible now, and he stops.

I'm laid out on my back in the street at this point, holding my right arm close to my chest. It's not broken, thankfully, but it still hurts like hell. I tuck it in close and use my free hand to prop myself up into a sitting position on the ground. Jim's walking back toward me, sporting a minor injury of his own in the form of ripped jeans and a bloody knee from where he landed in the street.

"What the hell was that?" Jim yells at me.

"I'm not sure. Must have been a metahuman."

"I know it was a damn metahuman! I mean what the hell was that with you letting him go?"

"I tried to hang on to him but he was just too strong and got loose."

"Why did you try to stop me?"

"Because you were going to kill him, Jim. He wasn't invulnerable or else I wouldn't have been able to tackle him. You were going to kick him right in the face."

Jim turns around and walks back into the street, looking off in the distance to see if there's any clue of where the meta might have gone. There's none, and Jim looks angry.

"Whoever that was, they were spying on us and they were breaking the law. ‘No metas’ means ‘no metas’, especially metas using their powers to try to spy on two citizens minding their own business."

"But that doesn't mean you can just take it on yourself to kill one of them."

"He could have powered down like we told him to and I would have stopped. He chose not to listen."

I can't believe what I'm hearing and struggle to make my way onto my feet.

"So you would have kicked that guy to death, just because you felt like it was your right to?"

"I would have done what needed to be done to get him to comply with the law. The Alphas pushed their message out everywhere. There's no excuse. He knew that he shouldn't be using his metabands in this city anymore, but he didn't care. Are we just supposed to have the rules apply to some people, but then allow others to skate by just because we don't want to deal with the consequences? That's the kind of thinking that ..." he trails off.

"That's the kind of thinking that what?" I ask him.

He looks down at the ground before raising his head and looking me dead in the eye.

"That's the kind of thinking that led to your parents getting killed," Jim says.

The words feel like a punch to the gut, and I struggle to rein in a sudden flood of emotions. Part of me is full of rage and wants to tackle him right there into the street. Another part of me is fighting back tears, but I'm not sure if it's thinking about them, or thinking about Jim being so far gone that he could ever say something like that to someone who's supposed to be his best friend. I wait a few seconds in silence to let the feelings pass and get myself back under control.

"I'll see you, Jim. Take care of yourself," I say before turning and walking back to the car.

I hope for Jim to say something as I'm walking away, to apologize. If he does, I don't hear it before the door closes behind me.

"
I
s this everything
?" Derrick asks as he walks from the front door of our building to his car. I'm standing with the trunk open, playing some version of Tetris with a bunch of bags and boxes that don't seem to want to fit right no matter how I rearrange them. You'd think I would have gotten better at moving by now.

"Yeah, I think that's the last one," I say to him.

"Don't worry about it," Derrick says as he balances on one foot while bringing up the other knee to help regain his grip on the box. "Your poor feeble old brother's got it."

"Good, you could use the exercise," I shoot back as I snatch the box from him and cram it into the trunk with the others.

"Go easy. I still have a few payments left on this beauty."

"If your car's going to get damaged by a few cardboard boxes, then I don't think it's worth what you paid for it," I say as I slam down the trunk door, then slam it a couple more times before the latch catches and it stays firmly closed. Derrick winces each time I press down.

"Where's Michelle?" I ask.

"She left for Skyville about an hour ago."

"Oh, I thought she was just going to get coffee or something."

"No, she said she wanted to get a head start on the drive. She still has a few things that needed taking care of apparently."

"It's not that long of a drive."

"Hey, I'm just the messenger."

"So, do you have any idea what all this is going to be like?"

"Aw, are you scared for your first day of school?" Derrick asks.

"You should know better than anyone that at this point I've had too many first days of school to get nervous anymore."

"Yeah, but you've never had a first day of school with other metas."

After our parents died, Derrick and I moved around for a bit. The first move was out of necessity. Empire City, where we'd lived and grown up, was practically condemned. So many buildings had been destroyed that there wouldn't have been any safe place left to live, even if we'd wanted to stay.

At first Derrick didn't know where to go. He'd just finished college and didn't even have a job yet, but now he was faced with two dead parents and the prospect of raising a little brother on his own. There was insurance money and government assistance, but both were slow to arrive. Initially we stayed at a shelter set up on the other side of the river at a decommissioned baseball stadium. I don't remember much about it, except that there were more people there than I'd ever seen before in my life. It was crowded and noisy, people crying and screaming all day and night because of the people they had lost or just from their own injuries.

Rumors started sweeping the stadium that Jones was on his way back to finish the job, or that other metas were on their way to the city to pick through what was left, even though there were plenty of conflicting reports saying that metabands all over the world had stopped working. People were scared, and scared people can be dangerous. Derrick was desperate to get us out of there as soon as he could.

Our dad didn't have any extended family left, or at least any that we knew about or could find. Our mom did, though, and the first place we moved to was Chicago, where she had a cousin named Maria we had never met before who offered to take us in. That place seemed fine enough at first. Maria was nice and accommodating. I didn't know it at the time, but Derrick later told me that Maria started asking more and more about the insurance money from our parents' policy. Eventually she started telling Derrick that she wouldn't be able to afford certain things unless he was able to sign over part of the inheritance to her. The final straw came when Derrick grilled her about our mother and found out that she had never even met her. From there it was pretty easy to figure out that the woman wasn't a real relative, just an opportunistic con artist. We were gone the next morning.

From there we spent a lot of time moving from town to town, city to city. Derrick had no idea how to raise a kid, and the world had changed. Everywhere we went people looked at us with the same pity. Derrick may not have known much about raising me, but he knew that he didn't want me to grow up feeling pity from other people. He said that a lot of people had lost their loved ones in The Battle, and that countless others lost people they cared about everyday to things like car accidents, cancer, diseases. Derrick told me that these peoples' grief was no different than ours and that we shouldn't allow ourselves to get lost in letting the world feel bad for us.

Bay View City was the first place we moved to that really felt like home. Even more than Empire City, especially since I was really too young to even remember what that was like before such horrible memories were associated with it.

We hadn't been in Bay View City that long, but it was long for us. It was the first place where we both started to put down any kind of roots. It was the first place where both of us started caring about other people, rather than just relying on each other.

The drive to Skyville takes a lot longer than we expect, but that's because neither of us thought about how many other people would have the same idea. There's only one bridge over the bay that separates the two cities from each other, and it's clogged with probably more cars than it's ever seen before. It takes hours of moving inch by inch before we even get close to the on-ramp. Derrick gets a text from Michelle fairly early in our trip to let him know that she's made it there already, apparently having beat most of the traffic we wound up stuck in.

It's late afternoon by the time we finally reach the Skyville limits. I desperately need to go to the bathroom, but Derrick tells me it's my own fault for getting such a huge coffee before we left and makes me hold it until we get to the campus.

When we finally pull up to the gates, the school isn't anything like how I'd imagined it. I hadn't really thought about what a school that had tons of money pumped into it over a decade ago would look like when that money dried up before completion. It's obvious that whoever initially started building this place thought it would look very, very modern, but ten years down the line, it looks ridiculous, just like most things made to look futuristic do once time has passed.

The buildings all look very monolithic, with lots of metal and glass, but also with strange splashes of bright colors throughout, like someone got a good deal on highlighter fluid and decided to use it as paint. Garish greens, blue, yellows and pinks accent what would otherwise be impressive-looking large concrete buildings. All over campus there are workers scurrying around, mowing lawns and power washing years of grime off of buildings. They're hampered by the huge crush of students and families trying to get settled in before the first official day of classes on Monday.

"So, what do you think?" Derrick asks me as he tries to find a parking spot somewhere, anywhere, on campus.

"Looks kinda dated," I reply.

"Well yeah, that happens when no one uses a place for as long as this place has been sitting in mothballs."

"Do you know where we're going?"

"Yeah. Sure. Kinda. I mean, I have a general idea."

This is not the kind of answer you want when you have to use a bathroom as badly as I do right now.

"I guess it doesn't really matter what I think of all of this," I say, gesturing out the window at some of the buildings we pass. "I'm going to be spending most of my time a mile down from here anyway."

"That's not necessarily true. There'll be a lot of precautions in place to make sure that there isn't any suspicion raised about you or the other metas here, so you'll still be taking a full course load. Who knows, maybe you'll even graduate high school if you aren't careful."

Derrick sees a car pulling out of a spot ahead of him and springs into action, quickly pulling into it a split second before another car with the same intentions rounds the corner.

"Ha ha! Sorry sucker!" Derrick says, not realizing his window is open. The driver of the other car, a middle-aged woman dropping her son off, scowls at him. "Oh, sorry. Just kidding," he says with a nervous laugh.

I roll my eyes and unbuckle my seatbelt before opening the passenger side door. This is exactly what I'm talking about when I say people overestimate how cool my brother is. I step out of the car and stretch my legs, which feels great after being cramped in there for so long, but I'm also instantly reminded of just how badly I have to pee.

"I'm gonna go find a bathroom," I shout to Derrick as I cross the street and head toward the nearest building. Derrick isn't even out of the car yet, and I can hear him yelling for me to wait, but too bad because there is absolutely no way I can hold this any longer. I feel like I've got a time bomb ticking in my pants.