The Next Chronicle (Book 1): Next (20 page)

She took a deep breath. “That's full disclosure, people. You now know exactly how dangerous this will be, and what steps you can take to minimize that danger. If you want to back out, now is the time.”

No one spoke up.

“Okay,” Kit said. “We're going in two teams. Team one will be me, Ray, Darby, and Jenkins,” Kit said, naming a short sandy-haired man with a set of powers nearly identical to Darby. “The four of us will move onto the surface, inside the office itself. The other eight of you will switch your headsets to channel five. You will wait one level below the surface. An agent named Ben Carlton will direct you over the radio. You will do as he instructs unless I personally tell you otherwise. You're our way out if things get bad. Should you lose communication with Carlton and me, you will take any injured you find and head for the rear exit. Understood?”

There was a round of nods. Kit would have preferred to give them a well-rounded and detailed plan, but the situation didn't allow for it. Thomas Maggard still floated above the facility. According to their engineering department, the drain on their electrical system was increasing. There were no scenarios painting that fact as a positive development.

Instead of trying to manage every detail, Kit did what she had never been able to with Helix; she delegated to others and trusted them to make the right call. The volunteers were a contingency, in any event, a quick way out should the next ten minutes go south.

“
Ray, Darby, Jenkins, let's move,” she said.

The four of them made their way upward, emerging at the rear of the main office. The sky outside was growing dim, though a bright wash of sunset pinks and oranges played across the narrow strips of land visible through the windows.

“Ray, give me a location check,” Kit said. She braced against his back, wrapping an arm around his chest as he slumped into unconsciousness. For a moment she wondered why Ray had to leave his body to remote view while Ben didn't. For that matter, why were there so many repeated abilities, but such wide differences in how they worked and how effective they were? She would ask Nunez about that later. If there was a later.

Ray perked back up. “No change,” he said. “Same spot. But he's much brighter now. And he definitely knows we're up here.”

No more than Kit expected. Even before Thomas began leeching from the power supply, he had clearly been able to see Next through solid objects, within certain limits. Now that he was juiced up, those limits were probably expanding. The layers of hardened concrete and steel below were one thing, but she doubted the traditional construction of the main office provided much of a barrier.

“
Remember, these things only have an effective range of fifty feet. Maybe less. If he comes close, don't hesitate,” Kit said in a low voice, holding up her pulse gun. “They'll knock out your own powers if you're hit, so be careful not to get caught in the crossfire.”

She led the group toward the middle of the office. The lights were out to conserve what little power Thomas wasn't soaking up, but Nunez had given her a detailed report on the location of every pulse weapon in place. A safe corridor ran from the emergency exit through the center aisle between the desks. There was also a safe zone running around the edge of the stairs, which would allow the team to move toward the back door if needed.

“Ben, what's the word?” Kit said into her headset.

“
The rest of your unit is in place,” came the reply. There was a sharp intake of breath from Ben.

“
What is it?” Kit asked.

“
I'm not sure, it's blurry,” Ben said. “I caught some movement in the field to the north of the office.”

“
Ray,” Kit said at once. “North, on the ground. Take a look.”

This time it was Darby who held Ray upright. The trip took longer, perhaps thirty seconds, and when Ray came to it wasn't the gentle return to consciousness she expected. He woke with a gasp, pawing for his weapon.

“There's someone out there,” Ray panted. “Human with a gun. They're going to shoot the kid.”

Before Kit could begin to formulate a response, the distant crack of a gunshot split the air. A host of possible outcomes skittered through her brain, from dread mixed with guilty relief if the boy were stopped so easily, to outright terror it would only cause him to lash out.

Nothing happened.

“
Ben?” Kit asked. “Someone shot at Thomas. What are you seeing?”

“
Look out the window,” Ben said.

Kit's head snapped to the side. A dozen yards away, a body hovered in the air. It was an adult, limbs stretched out in a painful splay. Another form drifted down to face it. From this distance Kit couldn't make out the details, but there was no doubt she was seeing Thomas Maggard confront his shooter.

Whoever took the shot had no idea what they were facing. Thomas would have seen them coming long before, and one reason Archer and Kit had avoided using traditional firearms was their lack of utility against telekinesis. With any sort of warning, someone with a tenth of Thomas's power could deflect or outright stop bullets as easily as breathing.

In the distance, Thomas flicked a hand. The body flew like a rocket, crashing against the window in an explosion of blood and glass before tumbling brokenly through the desks. The pitched whine of several pulse traps filled the room, the smell of ozone wafting after.

Horror dawned on Kit's face. Nunez's people made the weapons motion sensitive, and every unit on that side of the building must have gone off.

“
Retreat!” she shouted.

The word was barely out of her mouth when a hand snatched her by the collar and off her feet. Kit found herself being hauled through the air and down the emergency exit without bothering with things like steps. It was Darby who carried her, Jenkins following behind. Kit's boots nearly slapped him in the face.

Darby stopped, allowing Kit to get her feet under her. Someone had slapped the button for the entrance, and as the heavy steel door slid closed she saw a huge section of wall explode inward. The narrowing gap filled with dust, tiny pieces of smashed brick ticking down the stairs.

With six inches to go, the door stopped moving. A deep grinding noise filled the hallway as the machinery struggled to push the foot-thick slab of metal. Through the gap, Thomas Maggard appeared, one hand outstretched. Stopping a piece of machinery wasn't as easy as knocking down a wall, from the look of it. His hand shook slightly, concentration etched on his angry child's face.

“Move,” Kit whispered harshly. Ray, Darby, and Jenkins rushed down the hallway behind her. She ignored their urgent pleas to fall back with them. Instead she waited in her place ten feet from the door, watching the young boy struggle to follow.

Thomas didn't seem to notice her. All his effort was focused on trying to open the door. For a few seconds the scene was unchanged. Then a screech accompanied the door opening another inch.

The boy whooped loudly, redoubling his efforts. His face became a mask of effort, veins bulging in his forehead. As far as Kit could tell, nothing but the effort of going forward registered to him.

She tossed the pulse grenade and hauled ass.

A glance over her shoulder as she ran caught the scene in perfect detail.

Psychotic break or not, Thomas was still only a child. Eight year old boys—no matter the video games—had no life experience to prepare them for the reality of certain choices. Especially those involving grenades lobbed near their faces.

Thomas caught the pulse grenade mid-air, which she expected. The hope was to shock him into letting go of the door at the very least. The reality was better. Thomas managed to hold the door open as he snagged the weapon before it could sail through, but before he could do more than realize he had the thing, it went off with the familiar keening hum.

The boy recoiled as the electromagnetic pulse scrambled his powers, falling back from the open door. A blood-curdling shriek washed over her as the tortured mechanism finally pushed the door closed, the heavy metal slamming into its frame with a thundering clang.

“Next position,” Kit huffed as she ran past the team. “No idea how long it'll take him to get through.”

Kit slapped switches as they ran down the long corridor. There were five of them, all added hastily by crews setting up pulse traps. Each switch was on a five-second delay, arming the weapons after she passed by. Unfortunate for her team, these weren't aimed in any way. They would buzz to life and fill the hallway with power-draining fields in both directions, making it nearly impossible for the team to risk going after Thomas. At best the tactic would buy them time to avoid being turned into greasy smears on the concrete walls.

Twenty minutes and several status updates later, Kit thought they were doing fairly well.

Thomas was in the hallway, that much they knew. The boy had begun beating on the outer door just as Kit and her team stepped from the emergency exit into the facility proper. Exactly what he was beating on it with was a matter of opinion, though Kit leaned toward a large section of the wall he had ripped from the office.

The even heavier door on this side of the hallway was also closed, but the thing vibrated on its hinges in regular beats. All five traps went off, the first three slowly, the last two as one. Apparently Thomas had wised up and sent a blistering shower of debris ahead of him to set them off remotely. For the last ten minutes he had been pushing at the door. Kit and her team waited, hidden in the dark among overturned tables and desks.

Archer fed her a steady stream of updates, and the news was encouraging. The evacuation was going well, and Nunez had come up with a possible way to stop Thomas without hurting him. It would be dangerous and costly if he kept inflicting the kind of damage the facility had already suffered, but it was their best shot.

Getting the kid to follow them was the easy part. Surviving the attempt, now that was...tricky.

The door bucked again, the heavy metal bending in its frame.

“Get ready,” Kit said.

The next blow did it. The entire door ripped free of the wall, spiderweb cracks appearing in the concrete like frozen bolts of lightning. Tons of steel flew through the air, directly into Phillip Darby. The small man staggered as he caught the door, dropping his pulse gun in the process.

Thomas Maggard stood framed in the doorway. Right on cue, Ray clicked on his flashlight and blinded the kid with the bright LED. Kit fired her pulse gun as the boy recoiled, already rising to her feet.

“
Move!” she shouted.

It was tempting to take a risk and go for Thomas. Her aim was true; the pulse blast knocked out his powers. The evidence—her being alive—was strong. But what would she do? Knock him out? Any blow hard enough to do that might permanently damage him, and the adrenaline coursing through her combined with the variable nature of her strength made precise control of force questionable. She would do it if there were no other choice, but for now the best option was sticking to the plan.

The team was moving even before her order, falling back through the next door in the long path down to the main lab. Kit's job was to draw out the chase for as long as possible in order to give Nunez time to set up. That, and every time Thomas had to break down a barrier, he was using up stores of energy. The more, the better. Kit's main concern was buying enough time to evacuate as many civilians as possible.

Again and again they pulled the same trick. The boy wasn't stupid, trying to reach out and snatch Kit's team telekinetically every time he breached a door, but he never quite managed. The engineers were turning off the lights in every room before Thomas could break through, giving Kit time to prepare. Ben watched remotely, feeding information to Archer and to the team managing the details of Kit's retreat, which also included locking and sealing every door they weren't using.

Making sure Thomas saw which door they went through was tough, but they managed. Between blinding him with sudden light—which was less effective as he figured out the tactic—and the handful of other tricks, they managed to get the boy halfway to the lab before the first wound was taken.

Jenkins was picked up and slammed into a wall before Kit could fire her pulse gun. She managed it a split-second later, causing Jenkins to fall. Another Black Band caught him and fled through the door, followed by the team. This time they kept moving, putting two rooms with sealed doors between them and the mad child.

To ensure Thomas used the correct door, Kit pulled her knife and made a small cut in the meat of her forearm, rubbed her hand in it, and left a bloody print on the door control before leaping through.

“
We've got a few minutes,” she said. “How bad is it?”

“
Knocked out,” Darby said, checking Jenkins over. “No blood. Must have hit his head when his powers shorted.”

Kit nodded, then pointed to the man carrying Jenkins. “You go on ahead. Get him to the evac point and have a doctor look at him, if you can find one. Everyone else, get set up. He'll break through eventually.”

It was a tired group that finally backed into the lab an hour later. Behind them lay a trail of destruction beyond any expectation. Whatever break Thomas Maggard's mind had undergone, it was deep and wide. Every time Kit and her team frustrated his efforts, the boy reacted with more terrible fury. A part of her thought he would eventually tire and give in, the weight of his efforts finally draining him of the urge to lash out.

She was wrong.

Through the doors, she heard him destroy room after room. Near the end they began lobbing pulse grenades and relying solely on old-fashioned human mobility, letting the waves of energy sap their own powers in order to ensure the same for the boy. Kit worried he would begin to tear the structure of the facility itself apart.

Once, when she was younger, Kit had seen a man display the sort of guided, unreasoned, and white-hot fury Thomas was unleashing. The man had been drunk beyond rational thought, angry at another man for reasons no one could fathom. Despite the damage to his own body, the drunk fought through a crowd of people trying to help him, only to break fingers as he beat his victim senseless.

Not for the first time, Kit mourned for Thomas Maggard. Chances were, the conditions for this already existed. Maybe the doctors were right and it was an extension of explosive personality disorder. Maybe he was an undiagnosed schizophrenic. Whatever the underlying cause, the boy must have been a barrel of explosives waiting for a spark.

“
You made it,” Archer said as the door to the lab clanged shut. Kit leaned hard against it, resting her head on the cool metal.

“
Barely,” she said. “He's tearing this place apart. We left him three rooms back, but at the rate he's going he'll be here in a few minutes.”

“
We're ready for him,” Archer said.

The room was ringed with thrown-together electrical equipment. The familiar shapes of pulse generators dotted the landscape, wires strewn about in a massive net. There were even a few attached to the walls.

On the far side of the room stood a man Kit hadn't seen before. Archer had mentioned his name when telling her the plan, but she hadn't bothered to remember. Who he was didn't matter at all when compared to
what
he was.

He was tall, on the bad side of husky. His hair was buzzed short and held more gray than black. He hadn't shaved in days at least, and from the state of his clothing showers weren't a priority. Even these things were unimportant. Two facts above all others stood foremost in Kit's mind. The first were the chains, shackles linking feet to hands to high-tech collar. The silvery band around his throat was a smaller cousin of the pulse weapons, an EMP generator just strong enough to dampen his powers.

The man was a Charmer.

Kit strode forward, meeting the prisoner's stare. She smiled at him. Not from any genuine pleasure but to show him she wasn't scared.

“I'm staying with you,” Archer said. “But we'll need to send everyone else away. Once we shut off the collar, it won't be safe to have the others around.”

“
You should be going too,” Kit said. “You're as vulnerable as any of them.”

Archer waved a hand at the minefield around them. “This is a two man job, Kit. Those are manually activated. You'll need to keep this guy in check, so someone will have to hit the switches.”

Kit shook her head. “And you can't think of another person you trust to do it?”

“
No, I just don't want to risk any more of my people,” Archer retorted hotly.

Embarrassed, Kit didn't reply. Instead she motioned for the skeleton crew to leave. “Get to the evac point,” she told them. “If we're not there in an hour, assume we're dead and call Robinson.”

Nunez blanched at the directness of her words. “Try not to make that call necessary, Kitra,” he said, handing over the remote to the Charmer's collar. “I would dislike having to train new employers very much.”

“
I'll keep it in mind, Doc. Now, please leave. I hear Thomas knocking.”

The sound was the least of it. Tremors shook the floor, the equipment a rattling orchestra of metal on stone. Fine dust drifted down from the ceiling as the miniature earthquake grew in strength. It wouldn't be long now.

Kit turned to the prisoner. “You know your job?” she asked him.

The filthy man nodded. “Get in the kid's head, keep him under control.”

“Which will help you when your parole hearing comes up,” Archer said.

Personal bias might have played a part in it, but Kit didn't trust the man. The memory of another Charmer digging his fingers into her brain was all too sharp, crystal clarity like razors. “Why didn't we just try this from the start?” Kit asked.

“We don't keep mind-control telepaths on the payroll,” Archer reminded. “They're not allowed to work for the department.”

“
Right, because they tend to be untrustworthy power addicts,” Kit said, locking eyes with the prisoner. “I'm not a fan. Keep that in mind if you get any ideas.”

Though his lips thinned into a tight line, the prisoner was smart enough to keep quiet. He nodded, then pointed at the collar.

Right. Not a lot of time.

“
Go on,” Kit said to Archer. “Get in position. I've got this.”

She held up the control, finger over the switch. “I'm going to turn this off. Are you ready?”

“Yeah,” the prisoner said. “All I need is to see him, and he's mine.”

There was a note of pleasure in the words that made her skin crawl. Trying not to think very hard about it, Kit pushed the button. An LED on the collar flashed blue, then red.

The shaking stopped. Across the room metal began to groan. The door deformed as if a thousand hands were pushing a sheet of rubber. After thirty seconds of abuse, it fell forward with a resounding clang.

For the length of a breath, nothing happened. Beyond the door was darkness, a hollow filled with shadows.

A storm of debris exploded from the room beyond. Pieces of steel and concrete, chunks of broken furniture, office supplies, and every imaginable item spewed forth at hurricane speeds without the barest whisper of wind.

Kit threw an arm over her face to ward off the rain of grit pelting her from above. Through narrowed eyes she saw the first thirty feet of traps spin and crash into each other, propelled by the psychic push Thomas used to clear the space. The warning bells blared in her head. Thomas had destroyed the traps closest to him.

Archer hit the switch on every pulse weapon in the massive room. The original plan was to set off the row closest to the door when Thomas came through, then have the Charmer capture his mind.

A human would not have felt the buzz of the EMP as it passed through them, but Kit did. Her limbs grew heavy, senses dull, and the ever-present and often-cursed sensation of the
Surge vanished. For half a minute, maybe longer, she was close to human.

It was good that her own particular set of abilities were not solely reliant on the
Surge. Her body had changed over time, and though the lack of outside energy weakened her, she was still much stronger and faster than even the most capable athlete. For a brief sliver of time, Kit was a combat-trained human being at the peak of human norm. Thomas Maggard was, on the other hand, only a child.

There was a look of confusion on his face as she raced toward him. Pity welled up in her, crashing against the hard edge of determination. When he realized what was happening, confusion melted into impotent rage. The boy raised a hand as if to swat her away, but of course nothing happened.

Kit grabbed him, snaking an arm around his chest and lacing her fingers back through the straps of her armor. He fought with the wild abandon of a caged animal, thrashing with all his might against the arm shackling him to her body. The seconds ticked away as she ran awkwardly back to the Charmer.

“
My powers are still out,” the man said over Thomas's feral screams.

“
Not a problem,” Kit said. With her free hand she pulled her pulse gun and aimed it toward both of them. With the trigger pull came another invisible scythe cutting away at her rebounding connection to the Surge, and a renewed wave of incoherent protests from the boy. She repeated the process twice more, each shot fifteen seconds apart.

“
Ah,” the prisoner said. “Okay, give me a few seconds.” His eyes lost focus. A few heartbeats later, Thomas fell still.

“
Got him.”