Rod punched Danny in the face, and a split second later Lorraine slapped Rod on the shoulder and he collapsed to the ground.
Danny flew back from the punch and crashed into Kess, knocking her down. She scrambled to her feet and turned to help Danny, but he was already getting up on his own, blinking woozily.
(How did that work? She had seen how hard the Reds could hit. One of them had hit Danny in the head—he should be unconscious or maybe dead. The Blues must be tougher than regular people, even if they weren’t as tough as Reds. That was nice.)
Kess felt the push, the strange instinct that had made her run after Lorraine when the rocks were flying at the house. She spun around and tossed out her hands without thinking. They hit the Red right behind her, and electricity flowed as he jerked back and collapsed.
She hadn’t known he was there.
But another Blue had seen him.
The push was telepathy.
That was awesome.
Kess could only dwell on this discovery for a moment before the push was pushing again. This time, she ducked, and the punch from a blonde Red girl flew over her head.
Most of the Blues were running low on charge after dumping power into the transformer. That should have meant they couldn’t last long in this fight, but that didn’t seem to be the case. They dodged every hit the Reds threw at them. It was the push, which once you gave into it wasn’t much of a push at all. It was reflex. It was easy. Every Blue was watching every other Blue’s back, and so they always moved out of the way just in time. And while the Reds seemed to flail about, each independent of the others, the Blues moved together.
Kess grabbed Connor the red-headed Red boy and released all her remaining charge into him. It wasn’t much, so he spasmed without falling. But that was enough that when Danny shoved him in the chest he went down. And then Danny’s eyes went wide, looking at someone behind Kess, and the push told her to move but she wasn’t quite fast enough and whoever was behind her picked her up and threw her. She landed bruising-hard on her knees.
She scrambled around to the see the van door open and light spilling out. The other Blues were climbing inside. Danny ran to Kess and yanked her to her feet, and the two of them ran and leaped into the van. It started to move with the door still open. It charged backward down the driveway, in reverse gear and lurching on its flat tire. Inside, the Blues bounced and jostled and Kess managed to slam the door shut.
When the van had pulled far enough away from the house and the Reds, Paul turned it, driving over the grass, and launched onto the street.
“Is anybody hurt?” asked Danny.
“We all hurt,” said Lorraine.
“Is anybody hurt seriously?”
“Stephanie elbowed me in the stomach,” said Breanna. “Stephanie wears glitter nail polish. Stephanie has a Hello Kitty backpack.”
“And did you rupture something?” asked Kess. “Do we need to go to the hospital?”
“Boo,” said someone. “No hospitals.”
“No. It just hurts. It’s gonna bruise.”
“They’ll be hurting too,” said Marlie. “I shocked myself plugging in a lamp once. It felt terrible.”
“I need to stop and put on the spare tire,” said Paul from the front seat. “Are they following us?”
“Not that I can see,” said Bradley. “The road’s dark. No headlights.”
“Tonight was stupid,” said Danny.
“Danny,” said Lorraine in a low voice, though the rest of the van could hear. “This was going to happen eventually.”
“Next time will be better,” said Greg. “We’ll be all charged up.”
#
The Reds agreed, after some discussion, that they would have absolutely smashed the Blues, if they hadn’t been holding back.
The Blues had dropped their flashlights on the lawn during the fight and left them behind when they roared off in the van. This was good, because the house was pitch black. Stephanie sat on the living room couch with one flashlight in her hands, Rod had the other flashlight and sat across from her, and the rest of the Reds squeezed together around them.
Connor was mostly in the dark. Priya, beside him, was mostly in the light.
“Oh, we were holding back?” asked Priya. “Because we sort of started the fight.”
“We?” asked Connor. “You stayed in the house.”
But she didn’t hear him, because everyone else had exploded into noise. We didn’t start it, they all said pretty much at once. They came to our house. They knocked out our power. What am I going to tell Mom and Dad? (That was Stephanie.)
Rod pointed his flashlight directly in Priya’s face, making her squint and shrink away. “Ya-Ya thinks we’re bloodthirsty,” he said. “She should give us some credit. We taught those guys a lesson about trespassing and left them lightly bruised. We could have killed and crippled them if we wanted to.”
Connor wasn’t actually sure about that. He was still sore from when Priya’s sister with the big yellow hair had shocked him. And Danny had shoved him off his feet, which made him furious and ashamed whenever he thought about it because Danny was weak now, compared to Connor, he shouldn’t be able to do that.
The way the Blues had moved… It had been actually scary when Connor first saw it. They seemed to react to things before they even happened, twitching away from Connor faster than he could think. They moved together as well, in eerie coordination. It was as if the Reds were a bunch of bears who happened to hang out, and the Blues were a pack of wolves.
Eventually it was decided that everyone would just go home, since there wouldn’t be electricity again that night. Connor walked Priya out to her car, lighting their way with his phone.
“I was angry too, you know,” she said. “When we realized they were messing with us. I felt violated, too. It wasn’t easy to stay inside. But I realized it was just a prank and I didn’t overreact. It’s not like we don’t have a choice.”
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
She drove away, and he watched her red taillights until they were gone. And then he got into his own car. When he got home, his sister Lily was at the kitchen table working on one of her puzzles.
He flicked her orange ponytail. “Shouldn’t you be in bed?”
“Mom said I could stay up until I finished the sky.” She picked out a blue puzzle piece with a corner of cloud. “How was the movie?”
“Okay.”
“Did it have violence?”
“Yeah, lots.” For the first time, Connor wondered whether Lily would become a Red when she was older. It didn’t seem to affect anyone younger than about fifteen, but she’d get there eventually.
What if she turned into a Blue, and they were split up like Priya and her sister? Was there a way to make sure she got the Red virus (or whatever it was) instead? The thought made him uncomfortable—he hadn’t really considered how the whole Red/Blue superpowers thing was going to affect his life a year from now, five years from now, ten. He bet Priya had thought about that.
“Can I help?” he asked.
“If you help with the sky it’ll get finished sooner and then I’ll have to go to bed.”
“I’ll do this corner down here with the waterfall.”
“Okay.”
Connor did a puzzle with his sister and tried not to think about his aching muscles or the future.
###
TEXT MESSAGE CONVERSATION BETWEEN ELIAS KAPLAN AND KSENYA CARPENTER.
Elias: We should go to Johnston.
Ksenya: Johnston? The Holifeld Company town?
Elias: It’s only a two- hour drive. We can do it tomorrow.
Ksenya: The length of the drive isn’t the problem. The problem is there’s people who know we were looking into Holifeld and they jabbed you with a mysterious needle and wiped the memories of a dozen people.
Elias: Yeah, and we still don’t know what’s going on. We can’t just give up on the investigation.
Ksenya: Can’t we?
Elias: Look, Kess, I think something is changing in me. Not my body. It’s all in my head. I can’t even tell if it’s real or if I’m imagining it because I expect it.
Ksenya: What do you mean? Why didn’t you tell me earlier?
Elias: We have to find out, okay?
Elias: We have to find out what the powers are and where they come from.
Elias: It’s important.
Elias: It’s only a two-hour drive.
###
The drive to Johnston took two hours and forty minutes.
Kess, in the passenger seat, plugged in her phone and played music from the car’s speakers. She started to sing along automatically, without thinking about how embarrassing it would be, but Elias joined her. He seemed to have problems with rhythm and timing, though, the words he sang cutting off short or holding too long. The lumpy, unmusical effect messed up Kess’s singing too. He gave up after a couple of songs, scowling.
They reached a “Welcome to Johnston” sign and Kess checked the map on her phone. “Holifeld Company isn’t marked. I think it must be this place at the edge of town. There’s buildings from the satellite image but no map marker.”
“We shouldn’t go straight there,” said Elias. “First we go into town and ask questions.”
“Ask who questions?”
“The humble townsfolk.”
“Won’t that be suspicious?”
He shrugged. “We’re here to do suspicious things, Kess. We have to start somewhere.”
“Okay, so which somewhere do we start? It’s a pretty small town—there’s not many businesses on the map.”
“What’s there to eat? I’m hungry.”
“You want to double-task and question a waiter or something?”
“That would work. People in the town might know exactly what Holifeld makes, or might know someone who works there, or might know where Vance Holifeld lives.”
“What would you do if you knew where Vance Holifeld’s house is?”
“Go there.” He glanced over at Kess. “I told you, we have to figure this out soon.”
“Why? Why soon?”
He didn’t answer her. That made her low-grade angry, so she set the computer-voice on her phone to give him directions to a restaurant and turned away from him to stare out the window.
They drove to Johnston’s Main Street, which was charming in the same way as a vintage bottle cap collection, and stopped at a burger joint. Inside they slid into a booth. Kess tapped the corner of her laminated menu against the table as she looked around the restaurant.
Kess had always thought she’d been born without an intuition. But now, she was pretty sure, she was having one of those “bad feelings” people talked about.
“Elias,” she said in a low voice. “Look around. But be subtle.”
He did so. “Uh, what am I looking for?”
“You don’t see it?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, but probably not.”
“Everyone in this restaurant is eating a salad.”
“So?”
“So this restaurant is called ‘Big Betty Bubble’s Burgers and Fries.’”
“Salads are on the menu, though.”
She raised an eyebrow at him. “This is not the type of place where everyone orders a salad. It’s not the type of place where even one person orders a salad.”
“I don’t get where you’re going with this.”
“Don’t you think it’s sort of… sinister?”
Elias laughed. “Salads aren’t sinister.”
“They are in some circumstances.”
“Which circumstances?”
“These circumstances.” She leaned over the table so that she could speak even more softly. “Look, it’s not just the salads. I only noticed them because I was feeling… weird. I have this feeling something bad is going to happen.”
“You didn’t want to come here when I first suggested it,” said Elias, also leaning in. “So now you have this ‘feeling’ which justifies what you thought before, and that makes you overreact to salad. It’s not rational to make decisions based on it.”
Fear is only useful in so far as it tells you what to do.
“Paranoia is only useful in so far as they’re really out to get you,” she said.
“I didn’t say you were paranoid.”
“Please, Elias.” She reached out and grabbed his hands. “When the waiter comes, don’t ask them anything about Holifeld. Don’t make them suspicious. Just trust me, please.”
He stared down at her hands on his with an odd look on his face, as if he were confused by something he nonetheless knew was important. “I already told you you’re not making sense.”
“And I already asked you to trust me.”
Elias looked at her for a long time. The way he did it didn’t seem romantic, at least not in a straightforward way. Normally, Kess hated people looking into her eyes. But this moment with Elias didn’t make her uncomfortable. If anything, it made her sad, and she wasn’t sure why.
When the waiter came by, Elias ordered a burger and didn’t say anything else. Kess ordered sweet potato fries. They ate for a while without talking, which made Kess realize—
“Elias, nobody’s laughing.”
“Is this like the salads?”
“Yes, but more so. Nobody’s laughing, nobody sounds excited, nobody’s talking loud. Nobody’s talking much at all.”
“They could just be hungry.”
Kess rolled her eyes. “If they were all that hungry they wouldn’t be eating lettuce.”
Elias sighed. “Is it okay if we check out the company itself or would you rather we head back home?”
“Don’t pretend you’d turn around and leave without finding anything out just because I want to.”
He blinked. “No. I guess I wouldn’t.”
They finished eating. Two or three times Kess attempted to start up a conversation about the sort of things they would have talked about if superpowers and mysteries weren’t an issue. The words came out stilted from both of them. She could tell Elias was thinking hard about something.
“When the waiter brings us our check,” he said at last, “can I ask him something? I promise it won’t be about Holifeld.”
“What do you want to ask him?”
“I just need to test a theory.”
“By asking him what?”
Elias looked up from the table. “He’s coming.”
“Oh alright.”
The waiter arrived at the table with their checks. He was a boy their age, gawky and freckled.
“Hey,” said Elias. “My sister thinks you’re cute.”
Kess felt her eyes pop wide open. The waiter didn’t say anything.
“So what do you think of her?” continued Elias, nodding at Kess. Her cheeks burned with embarrassment.
The waiter, oddly enough, did not look embarrassed at all. His face was totally neutral. He seemed to puzzle over the question for a long moment before answering. “She seems nice.”
“What do you think of the way she looks?”
“She looks nice.”
“What do you like about the way she looks?”
That was too much for Kess. “Elias.”
“She looks nice,” repeated the waiter. And then after a pause, “She has a nice face.”
“Thank you,” said Elias. “That’s all we were wondering. Put it all on my card.”
Kess held her tongue until they were out of the restaurant. Then she grabbed Elias’s arm. “What was that about?” she asked, not sure whether she was more embarrassed, outraged, or confused, and trying to keep all those emotions out of her voice.
“You were right,” said Elias. “He’s a Gray. They all are.”