Chapter 80
It was two in the morning, and Bailey stood in front of the freezer looking for an ice pack for her bruised ego. She surveyed the packed cubicle, and when no ice pack was to be found, she grabbed a frozen steak from the top shelf and pressed it to her quickly bruising eye. She was proud that she had held her own in her very first bar brawl, but embarrassment threatened that pride. The brutally eventful night had capped off an exhausting month of tactical strategy and battle. She was so ready to be asleep in her bed but couldn’t shut off her mind. For Bailey, the scuffle was only the second most interesting thing that happened to her that evening; Bobby had dropped a megaton bomb of life-altering family revelations on her at Arkade, and before her brain would allow her to drift off, she needed to interrogate him fully. And privately.
She slapped the t-bone against her eye, walked toward the boy's side of the dormitory, and knocked on the door of the room shared by Joel and Bobby. She heard some muttering and shuffling coming from the boys’ bedroom. And then, the couple of cameras that had been following her around the dorm dropped out of the air.
Before she had a chance to consider the oddity, a bleary-eyed Joel finally answered the door. Instead of greeting her, he yanked her arm and pulled her over the threshold, shutting the door quickly, yet quietly, behind her.
“Sorry. We disabled the cameras around our room but still needed to minimize the chance that a distant camera outside our radius could pick up your entry.” In reality, they were lucky. Post War Games and the bar brawl, The Show’s team was nearly as tired as the contestants, and monitoring the multitude of camera drones required a ton of focus and effort. It was a level of focus that no one was willing to apply after such a long month. So, no one noticed Bailey entering the two boys’ bedroom.
“Disabled?” Bailey was confused, “Just how much have you two been hiding from me?” Bobby was one thing, but she had always considered Joel her closest friend and ally. She had trusted him completely since day one of the competition. The idea of him withholding anything this huge started to rile her up, and paranoia began to take hold. “Come to think of it, since The Healer challenge, you two have been connected at the hip, thick as thieves, stuck together like… like… like..”
“Glue?” Bobby attempted to finish her sentence.
“What?”
“Glue. Stuck like glue.”
“That’s not what I was gonna say!” Bailey insisted. “You think you are so damn clever.” She loomed over Bobby, who was sitting up in his bed. Her face pinched in anger, her hands, one still holding a steak, finding their way to her hips. She stood there and stared at him in silent frustration.
After an uncomfortable amount of time, Bobby started to speak, “Wha–”
“-- Velcro! I was going to say Velcro!”
“Uh huh,” Bobby agreed sarcastically, rolling his eyes.
“Seriously!” Bailey’s ire spilled over, forcing down her exhaustion and the pain that throbbed in her cheekbone. “What gives?!”
Joel decided to step in. He rose from his bed, walked over to her, rested his hand on her shoulder, and soothingly said, “Maybe you should grab a seat. It’s sort of a long story. But, I promise, we’re going to tell you everything. By the end, I hope you will see why we have been so secretive.” The empathy that he emanated calmed Bailey. Even though he had been withholding things from her, she still knew that deep down, Joel was a good guy.
“Okay,” she tentatively assented and mosied over to sit at the foot of Joel’s bed. She turned to Bobby and asked, “Ok, bro, so what’s going on?”
Bobby and Joel shot each other a look that begged the question: “Where do we start?” Joel nodded, prompting Bobby to begin.
Before he began, however, he got out of bed, put on a robe, and sat at his desk, parking himself backward on his chair, chin resting on the high back. “So, the most important thing you need to realize is that we know very little in the grand scheme of things. A lot of what we are going to throw at you is conjecture based on the piecemeal information that we have come across, or that Ariella has let us in on.”
“Ariella?”
“Oh, yeah. That’s a good place to start. You know that redhead from the Gods and Goddesses Party?”
“What redhead?” Bailey didn’t remember much from the party, aside from her very first confessional. She had waited a long time to introduce herself to the world, so between that and the basketball game, everything else was a bit of a blur.
“Okay, so that’s a no,” Bobby continued. “Well, Ariella is associated with the Council. She’s like their one-woman ethics committee. Except that with a lot of The Council on sabbatical, her influence has been neutralized. Her official title is The Sentry, but she doesn’t have an actual seat or a vote.” Bobby sighed and looked over at Joel. “Actually, buddy, I think this is more your part of the story to tell.”
Joel closed his eyes for a beat and then looked at Bailey, making the kind of direct eye contact that he usually avoided. “We are about to tell you some things that you’re going to have a hard time believing. But first, we all need to agree that none of this will leave these walls. The only time we reference any of this is in this room with the Drone Buster activated.”
Bobby started to clarify, “That’s the camera disab-”
“I figured.” Bailey was on the edge of her seat. It seemed like this was about to get good. She had a slight apprehension about the danger that might come along with the information, but she was curious by nature, so she urged Joel on, “I promise.”
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“You will understand why that promise is so important in just a sec.” Joel took a deep breath. “See, I was there the night Eclipse died.” He let the statement breathe, but Bailey seemed not to understand what he was saying.
“You were where?” she asked.
“I was there. I didn’t see anything; it was dark, and I wasn’t close enough. First, I heard a Bang! Like a gunshot or something. Then, there was a sustained bright light that lit up the whole area, and then the trees and rocks and grass in the woods started to glow. I heard a deep groaning yell and some voices, so I just started running in the opposite direction from the sounds. I was stumbling over rocks and branches, and then, a minute or so later, I heard someone chasing me. They tackled me to the ground. It was Ariella. I think she thought I had killed Eclipse at first, but then I started to glow. Which had never happened before. Cuz, see, I wasn’t exactly born with powers like all of you. I kinda got mine that night. We think Eclipse transferred his abilities to me when he died.”
“Wait, What!?” She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Not only was this all batshit crazy, but she couldn’t tell how it related to her being somehow linked to Bobby.
Bobby decided to wade in again, “Yeah. Crazy right? I didn’t believe it at first, either. That’s why secrecy is imperative. Only a handful of people know this information. I was against telling you, but Joel insisted that you know.”
Bailey looked at Joel. He was smiling weakly, filled with guilt over having to withhold this big part of himself and lie to everyone about who and what he really was. Bailey leaned over and gave her friend a hug. “This must be really scary. I’m so sorry.” She felt the tension leave his body. Bailey remembered what it was like having to come to grips with how dangerous her own powers could be. She couldn’t imagine being thrown into this competition just weeks after learning she was a meta.
“He’s fine,” Bobby answered for his roommate, who seemed to be choked up at the moment. “He’s got me, remember. Oh, and Athena. But we will get to that piece in a bit.”
“Athena?” Bailey found herself reacting tonight with confused one or two word questions. She hoped they would tie all this together soon. She couldn’t take many more shocking revelations.
“Don’t jump ahead,” Joel chastised Bobby. “We’ll get there. Anyway, so I am really a Moon Aspect, not a Sleep Precept, which is why I was so confused on registration day.”
“Oh, man! This makes so much sense now! I thought you were just super overwhelmed or a little dim. But, you probably had just learned all the power categories that very month.”
“That very week, actually,” he confirmed. “So yeah, I had to lie so that the rest of The Council didn’t find out my little secret. I guess Ariella had someone on the inside validating my false identity on the registration forms.”
“Your name is really Joel, right?”
Joel laughed. “Yeah, and I did grow up in Eden. Anyhow, so, Ariella has been training me, and I went to meet her one night, and this guy,” he nodded at Bobby, “followed me to the rendezvous.”
“I can take it from here,” Bobby winked and then dramatically began regaling Bailey with his side of the story. “I had woken up alone and was worried for my dear friend, Joel. So, I masterfully tracked him to his secret tryst, thinking he was either up to something sexy or something no good. Little did I know, it was both. Just kidding. Ariella just wanted to give him the Cam Killer. Thats the littl-”
“I know what it is!” Bailey insisted.
“Right! So, Ariella gave us the lowdown on the secret origin of The Council, which we will catch you up on later, and then she cut the whole impromptu meeting short in order to have another secret rendezvous with some huge black dude in a hat.”
“We don’t actually know that she met with that guy. We just bumped into him on our way out,” Joel clarified.
“We know.” Bobby nodded knowingly. “And… we also know that The Show and The Justice manipulated The Culling, somehow, to only allow bloodlines of themselves and their allies into the greater competition.”
Realizing her reactions had been slowing down the story, Bailey just sat there, waiting for him to continue.
After her pause, Bobby asked her, “Aren’t you going to ask how we know this?”
“No,” she smirked in response. “I’m saving my questions for after you are done. It’s the polite thing to do.”
The expression on Bobby’s face betrayed just how annoyed he was that she had stopped playing along, “Uh-huh. Well, the reason we know this, is that we overheard The Show and The Justice talking about it as we were getting home to the Spire that night.”
Bailey appreciated their letting her in on all of this, but her initial question still lingered. “I appreciate you finally telling me all this, really. But, I still don’t get how this all ties into our being related.”
“Think about it,” Bobby prodded. “Joel had Ariella pull strings to get him through the screening that kept this competition ‘all in the family,” and it seems you and I are related, probably twins. But we are orphans. We didn’t have someone pulling strings to get us through the screening process. So..”
“So we have to be related to someone on the Council!” It finally dawned on Bailey why this was all so important.
“Or someone in the inner circle,” Bobby added. “I had an inkling that you and I were connected when I heard your backstory and how similar our powers are. But even before it was confirmed, or basically confirmed, with our birthcards, I had started doing some digging. And when I got back from War Games, I had this!”
Bobby reached behind him and ripped out a manilla envelope that had been taped to the bottom of his desk. Scribbled in big sharpie letters across the front was: “Operation Spork.” When he saw the confused look on their faces, Bobby answered the unasked question, “When I was a kid, I wanted to find out who my parents were. My buddy, Jerod, the guy you met at the Tycoon Party, my guitarist… Well, when we were given the ‘birds and bees’ speech at school, we both thought they said ‘spork’ instead of ‘Stork.’ When he started helping me look for my parents, we decided to call it Operation Spork. It’s dumb, I know.”
Bailey had never seen Bobby so vulnerable. “No, I get it.”
“Anyway,” he continued, “At the Tycoon party, I saw that a few of the council members were having drinks, so I swiped the glasses they were drinking from and ran them against my DNA.”
“So… What does it say?” Bailey felt a nervousness well up inside. She didn’t know how to feel about this. In the past few hours, she had found a long-lost brother, and now she might learn the identity of one of her parents: something she had wondered about her whole life. “Wait.” She didn’t know if she wanted to know this. Bobby had grown up as a drifter. But she had a family. She had parents. Still, that wouldn’t change just from knowing who her birth parents are. “No. Go ahead.” The information would still be there tomorrow. Maybe she needed time to process. “No. Wait.”
The stops and starts were clearly wearing on Bobby. “Look. I’m gonna open this. This envelope holds the answers to questions that I’ve wondered about forever. And, based on the people I have tested, I’m sorta hoping that there won’t be a match. I mean, it's only three out of… who knows how many. There are 12 potentials on the council, and then each has their own inner circle. The odds of a match are basically nil.”
She was convinced. “Okay. Do it.” Bailey closed her eyes. She didn’t know why. She wasn’t even the one reading the results. But, it seemed like the thing she should do for a reveal this big.
Bobby ripped the flap off of the envelope and read for a few minutes. Bailey got tired of keeping her eyes shut, and when she opened them, she saw that he had a quizzical expression. “What?”
“This doesn’t make any sense,” he handed the papers over to Bailey. It says one of them is a match, but that the samples got mixed up, so they don’t know which one. It also says that the matching sample was taken from a female, and I didn’t take a glass from a woman.”
“Who’s glasses did you take?” Joel sympathetically inquired.
“Well, Ricky Diamond, Flint, and Solomon.”
“It’s probably not Solomon.” Joel assertively tried to help narrow it down. “He’s black.”
“And not a woman,” Bobby yelled. “Which none of them are. Goddamn it, did I pick up the wrong glass? Was there someone in one of their camps there who is our mom, and I picked up her glass by mistake?”
“The odds of that would be astronomical,” Bailey offhandedly suggested as she browsed the results.
“Nearly impossible!” Bobby was getting more worked up.
It was Joel who finally brought an end to the fraught night. “Look. It’s been a long night, and War Games was exhausting. None of us have slept in our own bed for an entire month. Let’s sleep on it, and maybe when our brains are recharged, we will be able to make sense of everything.”
“Good idea,” Bailey agreed. “Let’s all get some rest.” She got up and gave Bobby a hug on her way out, leaving him with a parting message. “No matter what, I’m happy you found me. Thank you… bro.” And this time, the moniker was actually said with affection.