Wild-born (20 page)

Four months... Had it really been so long?

“Cindy, where are we going?”

“To a friend’s place,” said Cindy. “His name is Mark Parnell, and he helped me with Alia for the first year or so after I brought her home. He’s not psionic, but he knows about us. He used to babysit when I was away. Alia might even remember him.”

“I thought you didn’t have any friends you could trust.”

“Not in the neighborhood,” said Cindy. “We’re still another night’s drive away.”

I leaned forward in my seat. “Are you going to drive all night?”

“Just a few more hours. We’ll find a place to hide well before dawn.”

“You said we were hidden.”

“Psionically, yes,” said Cindy. “But that doesn’t keep us from being found by the police. Do you want to sit up front?”

I crawled between the seats and sat down beside Cindy, trying to keep her from seeing how carefully I was handling the seatbelt buckle so as not to touch any of the metal. I’m sure she noticed anyway, but she politely chose not to comment. I still had made no progress in the balance department, but at least Cindy had once praised me for not getting any worse.

We were driving down a cross-country freeway. We passed farms and clusters of houses here and there, but the landscape seemed unchanging for a long time. There were very few other cars on the road.

“I’m hungry,” I said.

Cindy smiled. “So you are feeling better.”

“Yeah, maybe a little.”

There were no 24-hour stores in this part of nowhere, but I found some leftovers in the drive-thru bag. The food was cold and dry, but after eating, I did feel somewhat better. Cindy spoke very little while she drove, and I was grateful for the silence as I stared out into the darkness around us.

Eventually, Cindy pulled off of the freeway and onto a narrow gravel road, which we followed for about ten minutes until we came to a small river. I couldn’t actually see it, but I could hear the babbling of the water nearby. Cindy cut the engine and the headlamps, and we sat silently for a minute. I guessed Cindy was extending our protection, though probably not very far considering that we were sitting in a metal box.

A moment later, Cindy asked, “Do you want to go fly? No one will see you here, and I can stretch our hiding bubble farther.”

I shook my head. “I’m not in the mood.”

“Look at the stars,” Cindy said in a hushed voice.

I looked up through the windshield. Having grown up in a medium-size town far away from heavy industrial pollution, I could usually see a pretty decent night sky even from home, but this was something different. I could clearly make out the Milky Way spanning the sky above us, and looking up at the spectacular infinity made me feel like I would either be sucked up into it, or perhaps crushed by it. We sat listening to the gurgling water, and for a while just watched the planet slowly turn.

Still gazing upwards, Cindy whispered, “Billions upon billions of stars and planets. Probably even some with life on them. Maybe other planets like Earth, with civilizations of their own. Looking at the stars helps me keep my life in perspective. Kind of makes our problems here feel small and insignificant... No offense, Adrian.”

“I like the stars too,” I said quietly.

Cindy took a deep breath and turned to me. “So, Adrian.”

“So, uh... what?” I asked.

“So ask me.”

“Okay, I will. So what’s your story, Cindy?”

Finally, I got to hear it.

Cynthia Gifford turned psionic in her early twenties, soon after she had finished nursing school. Her first power was finding, which meant that unlike most wild-born psionics who wait to be discovered by one of the factions, she was the one who went out and found a group of psionics that included...

“...Ralph,” said Cindy.

I stared at her. “Ralph?!”

“Keep your voice down, Adrian. You’ll wake Alia. Ralph and I lived in the same town. Actually, we still do.”

“Ralph was living in the same town as us?” I asked in disbelief. Cindy had never mentioned anything of the sort in the months that I had lived in her house.

“Did you think it was mere coincidence that Ralph was the one hunting those Slayers?” asked Cindy, raising an eyebrow. “Ralph lived across town from my parents’ house, where I was living at the time. I found him, and he introduced me to the Guardians.”

Introduced
would not have been the word I would have chosen. Ralph power-charmed Cindy into coming with him to Guardian headquarters, and the then-leader of the Guardians, a master controller named Diana Granados, converted her into a loyal follower.

“Large psionic factions have always been built around one or more masters, like a bee hive,” explained Cindy. “Diana was our queen.”

“That’s disgusting,” I said with a shudder.

“Conversion isn’t total mind control, Adrian. You can still think and feel and choose your own life. It just makes you loyal to your group and your master. Some people join by choice, others are converted, and many of the converted ones choose to stay even after the effects have worn off, simply because that’s the life they have grown used to.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No, I didn’t,” she said, and continued her story.

Cindy had married a fellow Guardian. His name was Eric Laude, and he wasn’t a psionic at all. Eric was a yoga master who accidentally learned about the Guardians, was converted, and later chose to stay of his own free will. Cindy and Eric, along with the other Guardians, battled the Angels during a time when the two factions were, for the most part, evenly matched. Eric helped Cindy learn to perfectly balance her power through breathing exercises and meditation. Later, when Cindy gained her hiding ability, she became invaluable to the Guardians’ protection.

“I don’t mean to brag,” said Cindy, “but as far as hiders go, I’m probably the best in the world.”

“How’s that?” I asked.

“Remember how I told you that gatherings are usually held underground in the city? That’s because many hiders can only hide themselves. Even really good hiders can’t hide much more than a small building.”

“But your bubble can hide several blocks.”

“That’s right,” said Cindy, frowning slightly. “Eventually, I was put in charge of protecting Diana.”

“The queen bee?”

Cindy nodded. “By then, my conversion had worn off, but they didn’t have to do it to me again. The Guardians were my family.”

Cindy stayed with the Guardians, but it tortured her to see more and more of her fellow faction members die. And Queen Diana Granados started becoming increasingly aggressive in her tactics.

“We started taking more slaves,” said Cindy, looking out the window. “More powerful conversions. It even led to the creation of a small army of non-psionic people. The feud was heating up. Some of our battles were even reported on the news, though very few people knew what was really happening. There were houses catching fire, group suicides, things like that. Normal people explained it away as the result of drug use and religious cults.”

That’s when Eric killed Diana. The yoga master, who shared Cindy’s resentment toward the heavy-handed tactics of the Guardian queen, decided to end it with a knife to her heart. Eric was hunted down and killed, and Cindy fled the Guardians. She returned to her hometown, the one place she felt the Guardians wouldn’t think of looking for her, precisely because it was the most obvious of hiding places. Her plan worked.

“And you never met the Guardians again?” I asked.

“They searched for me for a while, but they had other problems now,” said Cindy. “You see, master controllers are among the rarest of psionics, and the queen didn’t have a successor.”

Without their only master controller, the Guardians quickly became disorganized. Lacking central leadership, Guardian settlements and outposts were singled out and destroyed by the Angels one by one. Some of the most powerful Guardian psionics, such as Ralph, worked hard to keep their people united, but the new leaders ended up arguing more than cooperating, and the Guardians gradually lost their strength as a unified group.

“The Guardians today are actually several, semi-independent factions that share the same name,” said Cindy, not without a touch of sorrow in her voice.

I asked, “And Ralph is the leader of one of them?”

“Well, Ralph stepped down after a mission he was leading failed horribly, but he’s still high up in his group’s chain of command.”

“And how do you know that if you left the Guardians before they fell apart?”

“You don’t miss much, do you?” said Cindy, and it took a moment before I realized that she was complimenting me.

Cindy asked, “Do you remember what Ralph said to me about Alia?”

“Something about him helping you with her?” I said, trying to remember Ralph’s exact words.

Cindy nodded. “After I found Alia and brought her home, I wanted to find her parents. Ralph was the one who helped me locate them.”

“You mean the crazies?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“But you’re a better finder than Ralph, and even you can’t find normal people.”

“Ralph is ex-military,” said Cindy. “Special Forces. He’s very well connected. Many friends.”

“I’ll bet!” I said sarcastically, wondering how many of Ralph’s “friends” were actually his victims.

“Oh, no, Adrian, you don’t understand,” said Cindy. “Ralph didn’t gain his powers until he had been with the Wolves for several years.”

“Wolves?” I repeated, vaguely remembering that Ralph had mentioned Wolves in our very first conversation.

“They’re government people,” explained Cindy. “Soldiers. They hunt psionics, sometimes to kill, sometimes to capture and study.”

“Study?”

“They want to know what makes us tick,” said Cindy.

“And Ralph was one of them?” I asked.

“Ironic, isn’t it? When Ralph discovered he was psionic himself, he escaped and joined the Guardians. He’s one of the few people who knows any details about what the Wolves do.”

“Back to Alia, please,” I said, not caring to hear what a great asset Ralph was to the Guardians.

“After I brought Alia home, I called Ralph on the phone,” said Cindy. “I told him I had found an abused child who was a telepath. I knew he’d help me because he would see it as an opportunity to capture me, and maybe even get Alia in the deal, though he probably didn’t care too much about her. You see, I didn’t tell him that she was a healer.”

“Sounds like a dangerous game you were playing,” I said.

“It was. But I had to know what Alia had been put through, so I could help her recover. I wanted to know how she ended up in the forest. I wanted to know what they did to her.”

“You wanted revenge,” I said, sensing the bitterness in her tone.

Cindy was silent for a moment, and I wondered if I had gone too far, accusing her like that, but then she answered in an almost inaudible whisper, “Yes. Yes, I did.” Her voice was shaking, and through the corner of my eye, I saw her put her hand to her face.

I didn’t turn my head, but instead concentrated on the stars outside as I said, “You killed them.”

“Yes, Adrian. I killed them. It is my deepest regret in life.”

“Why?!” I cried, looking at her in disbelief. How could she feel this way, knowing what they had done to Alia?

“Because it’s wrong!” Cindy said so forcefully that I almost jumped. She probably would have shouted it if it hadn’t been for Alia sleeping in the back.

Cindy looked at me with eyes that were, at the same time, both fierce and hurt. “I’m a nurse, Adrian. My life is dedicated to saving lives. To easing pain. I spent ten years with the Guardians as their finder and hider. I didn’t fight, but I helped those who did. I helped them kill each other and I watched them die. I never wanted any of that, for anyone!”

Alia stirred in her sleep, and I heard her murmuring something in my mind.

Cindy turned around in her seat and looked at Alia sadly. “Alia doesn’t know her real parents.”

“She doesn’t remember what happened to her?”

“Oh, she remembers that, alright,” Cindy said grimly, sitting back in her seat, “but they weren’t her parents. It turned out that Alia was kidnapped by them when she was an infant.”

“You ever tell her that?” I asked, actually a bit relieved that Alia wasn’t blood-related to her psycho-parents.

“We don’t talk about that,” Cindy said quietly. “Someday, when she’s old enough to understand, I’ll tell her. You see, I don’t know who her real parents are. Her kidnappers claimed they were saving her from what they called ‘her demonic keepers,’ which leads me to believe that Alia’s real parents were both psionic, though I don’t know which faction.”

“And Ralph never caught you?” I asked, wanting to hear the rest of her story.

“He hoped to get me during my meeting with Alia’s parents, or kidnappers, or whatever you want to call them, but I cornered them away from their house. Ralph never met Alia until just now. He always thought she was only a telepath.”

“But now he knows.”

Cindy nodded slowly. “Yes, Adrian, now he knows. I’m still glad you didn’t kill him.”

“Ralph tried to goad me into it,” I said. “He sounded like he wanted me to kill him.”

“Ralph’s a sore loser,” said Cindy. “And he’s been through a lot in life. I don’t think he cares much about people’s lives anymore, his own or others’.”

I looked down at my knees, thinking about all that Cindy had told me. About her life as a Guardian, and about Ralph and Alia. Alia, who never knew her real parents, and...

“Wait a minute, Cindy. You once said that Alia’s birthday is March 24th,” I said, remembering hearing that in a conversation we had a few days after my own birthday. “How do you know her birthday if she had been kidnapped as a baby?”

“Oh, well, as to that, it’s the day I found her,” Cindy said with a slight smile. “I’m pretty sure about her age, though.”

“Ah...”

“I know she’s small and still acts like a baby sometimes. We just have to give her time, Adrian.”

“We?” I asked.

“Yes, we! Come on, Adrian, you can’t pretend we’re not family now, after all we’ve been through together.”

“You’re just saying that to keep me from going after Cat by myself,” I said, frowning, though inwardly I was very touched.