Sophomore Freak (Reject High: A Young Adult Science Fiction Series Book 2) (17 page)

“Spit it out, dude,” Selby said.

Ryan licked his bottom lip. “With heliodor, some of your powers will work very well. Others won’t work at all.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

more powers, more problems

Ryan did his best to explain the situation with the gold crystals, but we kept interrupting him with a slew of questions.

Selby stopped cursing long enough to ask the most important one. “What does that mean, ‘our powers won’t work’?”

Ryan drew a deep breath and exhaled. “As long as what you try to do won’t hurt anyone, they’ll work like normal. Otherwise, they won’t.”

“Jason and Selby can jump or run across the planet,” Sasha said, gritting her teeth, “but if they punch someone, their powers fail? That makes no sense.”

“Don’t blame me. Blame God or whoever designed these things that made us mutants.” Ryan threw up his hands. “I’m only repeating what I heard.”

“Wait,”
Rhapsody said. “Are you sure they don’t do anything else?”

“Well, yeah. You age a whole lot slower, and you’re sterile.”

Selby scratched his temple. “Umm. . .what does ‘sterile’ mean?”

“It means, while you’re wearing it on your body, you can’t have kids,” I said.

He grinned a mile wide. “Oh, this couldn’t get
any
better.”

Selby was in heat, and I’d do almost anything for a hot meal and a bed, at this point. “We have to get off the grid,” I said. “Can you meet us in Walsh, Ryan?”

Ryan leaned back against the alleyway wall. “Why
Walsh?
You have a horse and buggy hookup? What’s out there?”

I gave him the coordinates to the Collective’s underground fortress and repeated them until he memorized them. 

“Secret fortress, right?” he asked. “See you there.”

Ryan left us in the alley and disappeared in the crowd. I walked with Sasha to the back of the alley. With the sun still in the sky, I’d need to be invisible, although it would be dark when we landed. Rhapsody had to go with me.

“I don’t like this one bit, Jason,” she said, wringing her hands together. “I wish my power was different, or something. Selby creeps me out. He’s extra grabby.”

“Yeah,” I crossed my arms. “He’s too fast for me to hit.”

“I’m sure you hate being with Rhapsody all the time.”

I looked away. “We don’t get a choice, do we?”

Sasha cradled my face. “When things slow down, we need to talk.”

After a quick kiss, I rejoined Rhapsody, who was wearing her mask. “Ready?”

It wasn’t fair – she was hiding from me. “Yeah.”

I bent down to cradle her legs in my arms – the way I normally held her, but she hesitated. “What’s the problem?” I asked her.

“Can you hold me differently from now on?”

Are we going to do this now
? “Yeah, if you want me to drop you. It worked fine the way we were doing it.”

She flapped her arms at her sides. “Jason, it’s just. . .”

“We don’t have time,” I said. “And I need you.”

My answer broke her defenses. I pulled down my mask and we leaped away.

We landed at the cornfield first. The shine of the full moon gave us a little light to work with. Rhapsody and I stood there, starving, exhausted. I had no idea how they washed these bodysuits, but mine had sand and dirt on the outside and two days of sweat on the inside. I was afraid to unzip it past my neck and suffocate on my own stench.

The entryway didn’t open. Maybe they were waiting for us to call them. That would suck. Our phones were somewhere on the eastern coast of Mexico. Hopefully they’d see us on their monitor and get to us before King could pin down our exact location.

Hands on my knees, I bent over and unmasked. Sweat dripped from my forehead and temples down to my neck. Rhapsody turned her back to me, took off her mask, unzipped her suit and breathed a loud sigh of relief. At that distance, with no breeze, she couldn’t smell me. I eased my arms from my bodysuit and breathed. The night air cooled my sweltering skin. The extra necklace I’d taken dropped onto the dirt. I patted the ground, found it, and secured it inside my bodysuit’s chest pocket. 

“Jason,” Rhapsody softly said. She turned around to face me and brushed her hands through her moist hair. “I. . .what I told you before. . .I. . .”

We heard a faint
pop
coming in from the far south. Selby and Sasha. Blazing a trail of corn stalks en route, they slowed down about a football field away. By the time they reached us, Selby was running at a normal speed. He carried Sasha pretty much the way I did Rhapsody – except my hand didn’t stray to her butt the way his did to Sasha’s.  

Sasha jumped out of his arms and patted herself like she was covered in roaches. She looked at me and held her hands out, as if she expected me to do something. When I didn’t, she sucked her teeth and flipped her hands.

“What’s the deal,
Captain?
We’re here. Why aren’t the old folks opening up?”

I rolled my eyes at Selby’s comment. “Don’t know,
Leslie.
Maybe I should knock.”

Arching my back, I raised my fists above my head and pounded the earth. In addition to creating two fist-sized holes in the earth, the strike sent a tremor through the immediate area. Soon we heard the
whirr
and
whizz
of the compound’s entryway.

I looked at Rhapsody, who faked surprise by gasping. Sasha reluctantly smiled. I held out my arm in a “welcome” gesture. The girls walked inside, followed by Selby. “Showoff,” he said to me. I grinned as I brought up the rear.

We filed into the elevator. I stepped forward to close the elevator’s gate and Selby pressed the “B” button. “You stink,
Freak,”
he said, holding his nose.

“Unzip,” I shot back. “You won’t smell springtime fresh, either.”

Sasha, lip trembling, reached for my left hand. I held it and she laid her head on my shoulder. On the other side of me, Rhapsody cleared her throat and fixed her eyes on the see-through top of the elevator until we stopped in the basement.

When we entered the control room, Hughes was waiting for us with Courtney, who had returned and sat on her desk in a leather chair. At the sight of us, she lowered her head. She wore a bodysuit like ours and looked every bit as tired as we felt. Easing off of her desk, she walked tenderly in the direction of the bunks.

We’d screwed up. Majorly.

Hughes pointed his fingers toward Rhapsody and Sasha. “Go,” he said with a heavy sigh. The girls trailed Courtney to the living quarters.

Hughes walked over to us. He wore black cargo pants, a matching knit shirt, army boots, and a utility jacket. Was he preparing to fight someone? “What in the world happened?” he asked us.

“We went after the white source,” Selby said, “and. . .”

Hughes slowly shook his head. “No, no, no. See. I wasn’t asking you because I didn’t know the answer, Michael. I just wanted to hear your sorry explanation.”

Selby set his shoulders square and approached Hughes, who was several inches taller than he was. “Who do you think you’re talking to like that?”

“You,” Hughes said, pointing his chin down. “You played a hand. You blew it. Man up and take responsibility for the mess you made. No one has time to coddle you.”

His answer seemed to shut Selby down. I forced my lips to stop curling into a smile. Hughes must have seen it, or sensed it. “What are you so happy about,
Captain?”

“Nothing,” I said. 

“You lost the goshenite. Did you even
think
about the scarlet emerald?”

The answer was obvious.

Hughes stiffened his posture. “Courtney went into the field and retrieved it.”

“So, it all worked out?” I asked with genuine curiosity.

“You’re missing the point, Jason.”

“What
is
the point,
Brad?”
Selby shouted.

He crossed his arms over his chest. “You
have
to stop him. Otherwise, your home and anyone you ever even thought about will die, early and miserably. You want to know about King? That’s what he does. He kills for whatever reason he sees fit.”

The thought of my loved ones dying – even Ray and Julia – made me think. How long would it take for me to rebuild my life if
everyone
died? Susan had helped me piece myself back together after my mom passed. She wouldn’t help me if we failed. She’d be at the bottom of the ocean with her husband, my family, and the rest of North America.

The texture of my new necklace was rough against my skin, so I pulled it out on top of my shirt. “That’s better,” I said.

Hughes’ eyes widened. “Where did you get
that?
Do all of you have one?”

“I stole six of them,” I responded. “King’s got, like, twenty kids working for him. They all wear them. . .wore them.”

“And you know what they do?”

Selby waved his hands. “Yeah, yeah, longer life, passive powers, no kids.”

The fact we had done at least one thing right cracked through Hughes’ tough guy act. “There’s a corridor branching off of the bathroom,” he said, smiling. “Hang your suits in there. Leftovers in the kitchen. Camuto was on the stove tonight.”

“You should probably set an extra place,” I said. “We invited a. . .
friend.”

Just like that Hughes switched back to his rotten normal self. “You ‘invited a friend’? As in gave the coordinates to this place to someone I didn’t vet first?”

“Relax,” Selby said, holding his hand out. “It’s
Ryan Cain.
He’s not that smart.”

True, I hated him for obvious reasons, but I thought it through now. Had Ryan’s girlfriend played him, or
had they played us?
Were they and King in it together? Was he going to tell King where we were and launch an attack on us for the provenance crystals? Ryan might not be that smart, but King was. After all, he’d been living for a long time.

Hughes cursed and pounded a fist on his desk. “You were in Orizaba, right? Fourteen kids, plus King. . .”

While he was thinking out loud, we stopped him. “No,” I said, “
twenty
kids.”

“When you stole the gold ice from them, did they shrivel up like Boris Karloff?”