Destinata (Valguard) (14 page)

Zane turned to go back to his own room comforted by knowing that Charlie had only had a bad dream and no one had come to attack her in the middle of the night but was stopped by a whisper just before pulling the door closed.

“
Don’t leave.”

“Never.”

No more nightmares plagued Charlie’s dreams after that, she slept peacefully and when she woke in the morning was refreshed and happy to see that the rain although only showering was still there. She reached up to touch Zane’s cheek, he looked so peaceful in sleep that she hated the thought of disturbing him but she wanted to get up and get moving. Laying idle wasn’t doing the growing concern in her mind any good, she needed to be doing something. He stirred slightly at first looking disoriented and then smiled down at Charlie who was still cupping his face in her small hand.

“Hi.”

“Good morning. Are you ready for training?”

“Already?”

“Sure why not?”

“Well, I thought we could just spend the day talking.”

“Talking? About what? Have you forgotten what’s waiting for us when the rain clears? This isn’t a time to be having a good old chat.”

“Why not?
It’s the best time. If things go the way you think they are going, we aren’t going to get a chance to talk much again are we? So why not now? You know everything there is to know Charlie, our plan is set in place and you are going to be brilliant. There’s nothing more I can teach you and you’d be better of resting and reserving energy rather than spending it and going out exhausted.”

She had to admit that he had a point there, wasting energy wasn’t something she could really afford to do at this point so she agreed to talk to Zane although she still didn’t know what he wanted to talk about her, he already admitted to knowing everything about her life so what more was there to talk about?

“So what do you want to talk about then?”

“Well, how about breakfast.”

“Breakfast? Of all the topics in the world you want to talk about food? You’re such a guy.”

“
I meant what do you want for breakfast? You can have anything, you decide and I will gather.”

While Zane was downstairs preparing Charlie’s bacon and pancakes, she decided she was in desperate need of a shower. The warm water felt like heaven running over her aching body and she almost forgot about the
Valguard’s and her father and the war but when she shut off the faucets the eerie absence of water running reminded her that it wouldn’t be long now before the skies turned off their own faucets and the memories came crashing back to her at full force. Today wasn’t about the war though, today was about talking apparently.

They ate in silence, Charlie blushing a lot more than usual while Zane stared at her, seemingly fascinated by the way she ate.
Once finished, she quickly downed the rest of her coffee and tried to shift the focus off herself.

“
So, what do you want to talk about?”

“You.”

“Me? But you know everything about me.”

“Not everything, only the things that Kara told me and they were limited. She gave me just enough so that you would believe what I was telling you and that was about it.”

“Ok fine, ask away. But be prepared to be talking about yourself as well when I get my turn to ask questions.”

“Oh you get to ask questions? I thought this was my day to ask questions.”

The playful banter put Charlie in a better mood, she could feel herself relaxing at the light air of the conversation and knew this was a good idea.

“Well, this may be the only day I get to ask questions so how about you ask five and I will ask five.”

“Ok sounds fair, I’ll start. When did you lose your first tooth?”

What the hell? Why would he want to know that?

Raising her eyebrows and the corners of her mouth Charlie thought about the question for a moment before remembering.

“I was five
, I remember I bit into an apple and when I took my mouth away it was sitting right there in the middle of the flesh of the apple and I freaked out. My mom deposited $2 in a glass jar that night and thought I believed the tooth fairy had brought it. I had seen her do it but I couldn’t bring myself to tell her I knew the truth.”

Hoping that satisfied him, she motioned for him to move onto the next question.

“What’s your favorite season and why?”

“Does that count as two questions?”

“Nope.”

“Fine, I’ll play along. My favorite season is spring because everything is perfect at that time of the year, the days are clear, the nights are cool, everything is in bloom and the birds fly more in spring.”

Nodding his head in accent he moved onto the next question with a slight hesitation.

“
Do you believe there is only one right person to love?”

His questions just got a lot harder and Charlie chose her words carefully before answering.

“I don’t think there is only one
right
person to love. I think you can love more than one person and have it be right for that time of your life but I think that there is only one soul mate for every person, the one that completes you. That you fit with perfectly because they are the missing half of yourself.”

No pauses this time before launching straight into the next question. Charlie could see now that he had only asked the trivial questions at the start to ease her into the tougher questions that were coming now and she had to hand it to him, it had worked.

“How many
right
for the moment loves have you had?”

“One – Ford.
And that didn’t exactly turn out too well did it.”

She saw Zane’s face tilt lower towards the bed as if to hide whatever emotion was playing across his face and she wondered whether she had said the wrong thing but she never got the chance to address it because he was straight into his last question.

“Why Ford?”

She wasn’t so sure she wanted to answer the question now but she had agreed to play the game and she wasn’t one to bow out when things got tough, so she answered as honestly as she could.

“I’m not sure really. I’ve known him since I was about five. Right around the time my first tooth fell out actually but it wasn’t until I turned thirteen that I started looking at him in any other way other than a protective big brother. I started to notice his appearance first, the sudden onset of muscle, the squaring of his jaw, growing into himself you know? And then we started hanging out more at school and then at home and soon we were as inseparable as me and El’. I loved everything about him, the way he talked, the way he would ruffle his hair when he got upset or worried, the way he protected Ava and El’ above anything else. He always put himself last and his sisters first. He’s older than I am and when you’re a teenager growing up in Tole, there aren’t many choices in boyfriends but I didn’t need any, I only had eyes for Ford, of course I would never admit it because of the fact that he was older and the girls his age were so much better looking than me and funnier and more experienced. I honestly thought he just thought of me as another little sister to protect until El’ told me the day he came back that he’d always loved me. And that’s it.”

She shrugged her shoulders and turned away from Zane’s intent gaze thinking up her first question to ask him before he could retaliate to her last answer.
Taking her cue from him, she decided to ease him into the harder questions with easier ones first.

“
My turn. First question is did you go to a regular school?”

“Yes, I was raised in a foster home so I went to a regular school and did the regular boy things but I could never show my eyes or use my hazing powers. My ‘parents’ made me wear contacts
while we were in public. I hated them because I could see the reflection from the glow on the inside of them.”

She had always wondered whether contacts would cancel out the glow, now she knew that they did maybe she could invest in a pair if she made it through the war alive.

“If you could choose anywhere to be in the world where would it be?”

“Right here, in this room.
With you forever.”

Charlie hadn’t expected this answer and before she could begin to turn red once again she hurried on and reused one of his own questions.

“Do
you
think that there is only one right person to love?”

“No, like you I think that there are right moments to love different people and one soul mate for each of us.”

She wondered briefly why Zane had wanted her to answer that question when his own answer was the same as hers but ignored it and moved on, wanting to know more about the mysterious man upon whose chest she still leaned against.

“Have you ever had your heart broken?”

“Once.”

“By who?”

“Pass.”

“What? You
never said anything about passes.”

“You never asked, so I pass.”

“Ok, well then I have just one more question. Do you believe in love at first sight?”

“No. I think that you can be attracted to someone at first sight, even be in lust at first sight but not love. I think it takes a certain amount of intimacy
to connect to someone before you can love them. Sure I think you can love someone instantly but not be
in
love with them.”

Charlie didn’t respond, instead she put her head back down on his chest which had risen slightly waiting for his answer and let her breathing fall in step with his, the steady rise and fall of his chest calming her. That sense of calm vanished the moment she
notice that everything was quiet… A little
too
quiet.

“The rain’s stopped.”

There was no sense of urgency or worry in her tone, it was only riddled with sadness. The time had come to fight.

It was time to put the hours and hours they had spent planning - with the help of Charlie’s foresight – into place. They had known for weeks now that the Valguard would come at them from the Town Hall. There were currently 642 Valguard residing in Tole, not including Charlie or Zane. The odds weren’t great but if their plans went accordingly they would have numbers on their side as well. It was still daylight when they started to set their plans in motion and Charlie felt nothing but grateful that the Valguard didn’t like the thought of fighting during daylight hours. They thought it would give them the upper hand if they could fight in darkness but Charlie had other ideas.

She decided not to let the others know that the time was now. They would find out in a few short hours anyway and
her and Zane could get around a lot quieter and quicker without another three people following them unnecessarily.

The ‘stinky old thing’ that Ford had retrieved from Kara’s basement the day she had died had in fact been a cloth bag – the kind that was sold in Tole’s gift shops. Printed on the outside of the bag was a map of the whole town, no one else would have been the wiser about the hidden meaning behind the map, except that in her final letter to Zane she had told him to check the inside lining of the bag. They had spent hours taking turns to carefully unstitch the lining of the musty smelling tote so as not to rip an essential part of what they were looking for and when they finally had every piece of cotton unpicked they found that the underneath the lining of the bag was another map. Almost identical to the one on the outside and at first they couldn’t distinguish why they had needed to go through the effort of unpicking all those stitches. It wasn’t until that afternoon when Charlie was standing in the pantry looking for something to eat that something clicked about the differences on the maps.

“The houses are marked!”

The loud exclamation had come as a shock to the rest of the house who came running to her side to find out what she was talking about.

“What are you on about Char?”

“The houses on the inside of the maps are marked. On the outside they are just houses but on the inside they’re marked.”

Ford ran to grab the
stuffy tote from the back of the dining room chair and returned to the kitchen to spread it out over the counter.

“See there. There’s a small mark probably where the kitchen is. And what’s the bet that
those small dotted lines symbolize tunnels, just like the one that runs from this house to Kara’s.”

Their attentio
n immediately turned to the house on Oak Street that they knew to be the one they were standing in and traced the faint dotted line from their own kitchen to the basement below the kitchen in Kara’s cottage. She had left them a map of every house that had connecting tunnels which would assure easy travel around town and the best part was that the the Valguard had no idea of the tunnels existence.

The
Valguard don’t know.

Those four
words were the last words Kara had ever written and until they had figure out the map, they hadn’t been able to figure out what she had meant. Kara had interpreting her visions down to a fine art, Charlie only wished she could be so sure of her own.

The warmth of the shower beating down upon her head was comforting but it felt all wrong after fourteen days of showering with Ford; just the thought of him sent a pain through her stomach that gnawed away at her until she shut the shower off, dressed and met Zane in the kitchen. Having showered before her he was dressed and ready by the time Charlie found him leaning against the counter looking… What? Bored? Worried? Indifferent? She couldn’t decide on which emotion was playing across Zane’s face at that moment but it was gone as soon as he looked her way, his face breaking into a small smile and erasing all traces of any other feelings.

“You ready?”

“Not really. But I don’t think I’m ever going to be ready to willingly kill another being. Let’s go.”

Their equipment had been packed for over a week now and as they made their way through the concealed pantry door into the hidden shelter behind, Zane grabbed the bag and did a quick inventory making sure that everything they needed was in there. They didn’t want to be entering a war empty handed after all.

Handing a flashlight to Charlie he also pulled a second from the bag for himself, lightly pushed against the almost bare wall to their left and started on down the tunnel, making sure the door was sealed well. If the
Valguard decided to raid their house there was no way they would ever find the shelter let alone the network of tunnels they were moving along quietly now. Having traveled the tunnel several times since finding the map inside the tote bag they knew exactly where they needed to stop, open the next door by pushing firmly on the wall of the tunnel, and move onto the adjoining tunnel that would take them next door to where Ford, El’ and Matt would hopefully be preoccupied. Not bothering to turn any lights on in the shelter identical to the one back in Zane’s house, they made their way relatively silently into the basement of her old place. This basement was nothing like Zane’s pristine, training basement. It was just full of old junk and dark corners that had always freaked Charlie out. She decided to sit in the middle and lightest part of the basement, hoping that no one would choose that moment to come downstairs, while Zane started on the first part of their plan.

It took longer than expected for Zane to finish playing inside the
electricity box on the far right of the basement and just as she was about to ask what was taking so long she heard a door creak. She moved faster than she thought possible, ducking under the stairs and pulling on her sunglasses, thankful that she had remembered them and waited. Had Zane heard the door? Did one of her friends know that they were down here? These questions were answered when she saw Ford move down the steps one by one, looking in every direction and finally settling his eyes to the right of the large room. He knew they were there, or suspected they were anyway.

Charlie felt the faint tingling that was constant when Zane was near start to ebb and she knew that he had heard Ford move onto the stairs and had started to retreat into the shadows. Making his way faster down the steps now Ford ne
ver once took his eyes off the electricity box, looking to confirm his suspicions, but once there it was plain to see that he had found nothing; he turned, dropped his head in disappointment and stalked back out of the basement.

Not feeling safe enough to stay concealed under the stairs, Charlie made her way back into the tunnel through the shelter and waited for Zane to join her. Neither of them dared to speak until they were a good distance down the tunnel and a safe distance from her old house.

“Do you think he knew we were there?”

“Of course he did. He knew the plan and he went straight to the electricity box.
There was no doubt that he knew we had been but he probably thought we were long gone.”

Charlie didn’t reply, instead retreating into her own thoughts. She knew for certain that Ford would be watching and waiting now and there would be nothing she could do to stop him from joining in once the fighting started and nothing more she could do than try her hardest to protect him.

Charlie stuck to sitting under the stairs while Zane fiddled in the electricity boxes after that, thinking it safer to sit in the dark than in the light. There was no need for the worry that encompassed her upon entering every house that encircled the Town Hall, they hadn’t run into any other people since leaving the Oak Street house and yet still the sense of concern followed her in a relentless stream of fast paced heart
beats and sweaty palms until they made their way back into their own basement. Charlie stayed with Zane just like she had with the other houses and waited until he had finished before they both walked back into their own eerily silent house.

It was just on
dusk when they arrived back, they still had time before they needed to move and decided on having dinner and fuelling up before settling in for the wait that was too short. Although they didn’t need to eat as often or as much as humans did to sustain them, they still needed food to gain energy and tonight was no night to be skimping on the energy. They would need as much as possible in the coming days so they sat down to a full meal in silence before Charlie finally spoke.

“Zane.
I’m sorry.”

“What for?
If anyone should be sorry it’s me.”

“For dragging you into this.
For imposing on your life. For hurting you.”

“Well first of all you didn’t drag me into anything, if you remember it was me that told you about who you were and set the whole thing in motion. And you definitely aren’t imposi
ng. I’ve loved having the company.”

“But I have hurt you.”

He didn’t need to respond it hadn’t been a question and Charlie knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she had hurt him more than she had even hurt Ford.

“I think it’s time Charlie.”

She wanted nothing more than to tell him that she loved him and to make him feel better before heading out to fight but she couldn’t form the words that would surely only hurt him more. Whether it was because she didn’t want him hurting any more if she were to pass away or because of Ford, or because she didn’t really know how she felt yet, she wasn’t sure. The reason didn’t matter now, any excuse would do and she took hold of that thought and waited beside the front door for him to join her with the bag of weapons. Whatever she was in love, she wasn’t a coward in war, she would meet the Valguard head on.

They made their way silently through the deserted night street of Tole knowing that they would meet with the Valguard in Town Square, which lay directly opposite the Town Hall and wasn’t actually a square but more of an oval shape, littered here and there with trees for shade and bench seats, which during the day could be found occupied with numerous residents relaxing. The atmosphere at night was completely different, it was abandoned, quiet and dark and made all the more creepy by knowing that very shortly the Valguard would be filling up the square intent on killing Charlie all because she was the destinata, because she would be the one to stand up to them for the rights of the humans, to take the town back, to bring them to their knees.

El’ had asked her a few days prior to this moment why they even cared, why
would they care that one girl knew their secret, it was no cause for war surely. Charlie had answered as best as she could at the time but now wished she could go back and answer differently. At the time she had said ‘because if one person knows, they will spread it to the rest and once we are told to our faces what they are and what they can do, they start to lose control of us. Their hazing isn’t as effective and they fear that once word gets out, we will take them out and they will lose what they have here. You have to remember that when they first settled in Tole they had no intention of keeping us around but they soon realized that with their hazing abilities they could keep us within their control and keep us doing whatever they wanted. They want and need for nothing because they have more than 1500 ‘zombies’ to do it for them. Imagine if they lost that. What would they do? Where would they go?’ Now she wished she had answered with ‘because they can.’ She knew that this day would have come no matter what had happened that day in the woods. Even if Zane had kept his mouth shut about her being the destinata and never uttered a word to her about the Valguard, Charlie had always noticed the subtle differences in her towns members and even more so after her eighteenth birthday. She would have pieced it together eventually, the only difference being that she wouldn’t have been prepared for the fight. After her mother’s death she had realized that it didn’t matter what she said to the Valguard and the humans. The Valguard would never relinquish power and would kill anyone who defied them and the humans would never give up their right to freedom. So now instead of trying to create peace, she would bring knowledge to the humans and sent the Valguard’s running.

It turned out that Zane was pretty good with computers as well and while Matt had shown him what he needed to do, he remembered every step with precision and had executed their plan perfectly because instead of waiting in absolute darkness for the Valguard to arrive, the town was lit up like a Christmas tree. While Charlie had been waiting under the steps of the Tole residents basements, Zane had been reconfiguring their electric systems so that at approximately 8pm every single light in those houses would turn on and would not be able to be switched off. They had covered every house that surrounded Town Hall and then using the internet to hack into the Town’s main power grid also turned the lights on in every government build including the flood lights and street lights that surrounded the area. Of course they were now just one big target but the Valguard were coming anyway so why not give themselves the advantage of light. They knew that almost every person in town would fill the square soon enough because within fifteen minutes the towns evacuation alarm would go off, sending them all to Town Square where they would finally meet the beings who had been controlling them for nearly two decades.

The first Valguard appeared in the square about ten minutes after the lights switched on all around Tole. He was quickly followed by another twenty Valguard at least, five human police officers and right alongside them, Mikal.