XGeneration (Book 6): Greatest Good Read online

  She leaned in and kissed him.

  “You wanted to talk?” Scott asked. Uncertainty emanated from his words. When Janis sat back, the same uncertainty showed on his face, one made ruddy by the cold. She’d called him at six o’clock that morning, insistent they meet, but vague as to why.

  “I had a premonition.” She cleared her throat. “Last night. One of my strongest yet.”

  “A bad one?”

  “A bad one.”

  Scott squeezed her shoulder with a gloved hand and pulled her into the warmth of his jacket.

  “A Champion is going to die,” she said.

  Scott stiffened. “A Champion? One of us? How?”

  He had nearly asked who, but Janis felt him recoil from the question, fearful of the answer.

  “I didn’t see an image,” Janis said, fighting to keep her voice from shaking. “But the premonition couldn’t have been clearer. When I link to the other Champions during campaigns, I tap into the part of all of your minds that handles speech.” She touched the left side of his head, above his ear. “But because I’m connected to a living process, I can also feel your life forces.”

  “And in your premonition, you felt a life force go out?”

  She nodded, not caring to describe the suddenness, the violence, of the experience. Like a vital organ being torn from her body. Thrashing upright in bed, hands pressed to her chest, she had checked that she could still link to everyone. With the exception of Jesse, with whom she had been unable to connect since he disappeared, all were alive, all were well. She took the extra step of slipping into Margaret’s bedroom to ensure her sister was breathing.

  Moments later, she had called Scott.

  “I couldn’t tell whose life force it was,” Janis said after a moment. “I don’t think it was yours or mine, though.”

  Scott remained frowning down at her. He was no more convinced by her assurance than she was. The fact was, she didn’t know.

  “Any information of who might be behind the … you know … killing?”

  “No,” she answered, “but I think we have to assume the Scale.”

  “Timeframe?”

  “I’ll go with soon.” There had been an urgency to the premonition.

  Janis felt the colors of Scott’s mind shift from a raw, red worry to the blue-gray of rational problem-solving. She found comfort in the new colors.

  “These premonitions of yours pick up on a probable future, right?” he said. “Meaning that if we take corrective action, we stand a good chance of altering that future, sparing our teammates or one of…” His eyes darted from Janis’s and he pushed up his glasses. “Somehow, we need to get to the Scale first.”

  “Our one link to the Scale is Mr. Shine,” Janis said.

  “Was Mr. Shine,” Scott reminded her.

  “Right, was.”

  Following their return from Saudi Arabia, Mr. Shine had vanished. He no longer pushed a janitorial cart at school, no longer scraped a rake over the lawns of Oakwood. He had resigned from both occupations, Scott’s mother showing Scott the mailed letter in which he cited health reasons and thanked her for the years of “steddy work.” When Janis took an astral trip to his home, she had found it cleaned out, his station wagon gone.

  “Maybe we should talk to Kilmer about what you’re feeling,” Scott said.

  “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”

  “Why not?”

  “Something tells me we’re going to need to keep our hands as free as possible. We go running to Kilmer with a premonition that confirms his worst fears, and he could decide to take our quarantine a step further. Hide us away in a bunker somewhere. I’m exaggerating, but he’s that worried.”

  “Yeah, I noticed he’s taken up smoking, too,” Scott said. “Well, we should at least tell him about Mr. Shine. How he infiltrated the neighborhood, how I saw him at Al Karak last month.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea, either.”

  “No?” Scott tilted his head. “But in the hospital, you said—”

  “There’s that dual nature I sensed about him. One part on our side in some way, looking out for us, the other part aligned with the Scale. Kilmer’s not going to care about the first part.”

  Scott nodded. “And if they eliminate Mr. Shine, they’ll sever our only potential link to the Scale.”

  “Leaving us blind and vulnerable.”

  At the word vulnerable, Janis thought of her sister. Despite Margaret’s mission-saving move in Germany, she was the lone member of the team without offensive abilities. Maybe it was for that reason she found her worried thoughts returning to her sister repeatedly.

  She prayed that was the only reason.

  “Our confinement to the neighborhood does hamper things,” Scott said. “How clear is your impression of Mr. Shine?”

  “Not very. I can try, but I don’t think I’ll have much luck locating him that way.”

  Scott frowned in fresh concentration. “I can talk to Wayne, have him check out a few things. If Mr. Shine hasn’t shifted, if he’s remained Mr. Shine, he might have left a paper trail. In the meantime, I’ll see if I can pick up anything on the phone networks. He probably communicates with the Scale through an encrypted system, but for ordinary phone calls…”

  “Kilmer can’t know what you’re doing.”

  Scott lowered his voice. “I installed a hidden switch in the phone system to circumvent their monitoring system. You know, in the event a situation like this ever came up.”

  “Good, because if he learns we’re using our powers on the outside, he really will stick us in a bunker.”

  “He won’t find out.”

  Janis reflected on their plan and smiled weakly. “It’s a start, right?”

  Scott brushed a lock of hair from her cheek and touched his forehead to hers. We’re not losing anyone, he spoke inside her. We’ll find him.

  I don’t know what I’d do without you. Janis had intended that to mean that she did not know what she would do without his help, but as the thought formed, it had taken on far greater weight.

  Behind his glasses, Scott’s eyes wobbled.

  Nor I you, he replied with a kiss.

  5

  Later that day

  “It’s a yes or a no,” Star said. “Are you coming this Saturday or aren’t you?”

  Oh, man, Creed thought. This noise again.

  He scuffed his pointed boots along the sandy gutter. He didn’t need to look over to know she was hitting him with a deadly stare. He’d seen that stare a lot lately. Star was active in the no-more-nukes movement and her public speeches were gaining attention. She wanted to know why he wasn’t going to any of them. Thanks to the flipping rules, he couldn’t tell her the truth. In his peripheral vision, her eye whites shone from pits of black makeup.

  “I already told you,” Creed mumbled, “I’m grounded.”

  “That’s the lamest excuse yet.”

  Creed shrugged and kept walking.

  She seized his elbow so that his momentum swung him around and he was forced to face her. Her pressed-together lips formed a severe black line. Creed guessed he wouldn’t be making out with those lips today.

  “Seriously? Grounded?” She said the second word as though it was a flake of cigarette ash that could be brushed off a jacket sleeve.

  Heat filled Creed’s face.

  “For what?” she demanded.

  “You came over to take a walk, right? Can’t we just, you know, walk?”

  “For what?” she repeated, fingers digging into the bones at his elbow.

  “For talking back to my mom. You happy now?”

  When she didn’t release him, Creed pried her fingers off, reclaimed his arm, and moved a step away. All at superhuman speed. With Star’s next blink, Creed could see the realization dawning on her face that she was no longer holding him. Confusion lines mapped her pale brow.

  He was never supposed to use his powers in front of so-called outsiders—another one of Kilmer’s ru
les—but he was damned if was going to let himself be manhandled by his girlfriend. He’d been manhandled enough in his life.

  He trudged on.

  Star came up beside him. “I’m sorry for grabbing you, but you’re not grounded.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’ve met your mom. She’s hardly capable of dishing out punishment, much less enforcing it. What’s really going on? You ditching me for your friends again?”

  “No,” he said, thinking about how his lone friend, Jesse, had been snatched by the bad guys the month before. He burned for the day he’d get to slice and dice those sons-of-bitches while Jesse pounded them to a pulp.

  Assuming Jesse was still alive.

  When he felt Star’s stare on him again, he forced out a breath. “Can’t we just drop it already?”

  He stepped from the street and into the shade of a giant oak tree whose branches sprawled over a corner of the Grove’s large field. Star fished something from the front pocket of her green-checked flannel shirt. As she sat next to him against the trunk, she cracked open the lid on a throat lozenge tin. It was filled with rolled joints.

  “Interested?” she asked.

  He hesitated before shaking his head.

  Star lit one, puffing out a cloud of smoke. When the skunky smell hit him, Creed was tempted to ask her to pass it, but drugs and alcohol were also against the rules. If it wasn’t for the fat paychecks this outfit’s paying me… He pushed his hands to the bottoms of his vest pockets.

  “Are you afraid of me?” Star asked.

  Creed laughed, but something inside him felt off. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Star pulled one leg in and propped her arm on her knee. She squinted through the curling smoke toward the playground. “The work I’m doing,” she said. “The speeches and protests.”

  “What about it?”

  “It’s what got my sister killed.”

  Creed watched her, remembering the night she had told him that story, shown him the shirt her sister had been wearing. He understood now what Star was asking him. And yeah, the thought of the same thing happening to her rattled him. Especially since the Program had his hands so damned tied that he would be powerless to do anything to protect her.

  But he couldn’t tell her those things, either.

  “I’m sure you know what you’re doing,” he said offhandedly.

  “Yeah, it’s called standing for something. You should try it sometime.”

  “I stand for plenty.”

  Star laughed derisively and sipped from the joint. “A good game of pool, maybe.”

  “Shit.”

  “Exactly.”

  “You don’t know anything.”

  Star held out the joint for him. He looked at it, then pinched it from her fingers. The smoke he held inside him broke up his anger a little. He relaxed against the tree as he exhaled.

  “What I do know,” Star said, “is that you’re not as much of a bastard as you want people to think.”

  He handed the joint back.

  “You care more than you let on,” she continued, “but you see it as a weakness. Your eyes give you away. It’s why you’re always wearing these stupid things.” She pulled away his John Lennon shades.

  Creed almost grabbed them back before realizing that would only prove her point. He squinted around her pointed stare, his own eyes feeling exposed and naked. Fresh anger burned inside him.

  “You done with your analysis?” he asked, and then he did grab for the glasses. Too late, Creed realized what he’d done. Star looked from her empty hand to his face, where his glasses had rematerialized. To redirect her attention, Creed said, “All right, so maybe you’re not so far off.”

  Star’s eyes narrowed in suspicion.

  “Yeah, I worry about you,” Creed pressed on, before she could question his speed. “I think about those kinds of things.”

  In their six months together, Creed had never conceded to having any real feelings for her, the constant back and forth of prodding and denial forming the basis of their relationship. But now that Creed had changed up the pattern, Star didn’t seem to know how to respond.

  “Who else?” she said.

  “Who else what?”

  “Who else do you care about?”

  With Star’s attention back on him and off his superhuman ability, Creed felt his resistance returning like a brick wall. He scowled and picked at the dry grass between his boots.

  “My mom,” he muttered. “She’s had a rough go, you know.”

  “No, I don’t know. You never talk about her.”

  He hadn’t, and he wasn’t about to start now. Because talking about her would mean having to bring up his old man. How he used to throw her against the walls of the house. How he’d rain punches down on him and Tyler when they tried to protect her. How the bastard had run out on all of them.

  “And my brother,” he added.

  In fact, it was his brother Creed dwelt on most these days. Ever since Kilmer had warned the team about that Scale group, Creed had been worried they might target the embryo next. As far as powers went, his brother’s were right up there with Jesse’s and Janis’s. And maybe that was the way the bad guys were going about their business: targeting the strongest members of the team, leaving the ones like him and Margaret till the end. He wasn’t a weakling, Creed thought about himself, he just couldn’t set off the fireworks like the others. Even Scott had more going on than he did, but he’d drink piss before admitting that out loud.

  Star’s black-painted nails combed down the back of his hair. “See, that wasn’t so bad.”

  She passed what remained of the joint as though sensing the angry knot in Creed’s stomach. Worrying did that to him. Creed inhaled and held the smoke until the knot loosened.

  “I’ll go this weekend,” he said, knowing his speed would foil the neighborhood’s detection system. He ground the end of the twisted butt against his boot heel. “I want to hear your speech.”

  “Thought you were grounded.”

  Irritation prickled through him. “Do you want me to go or don’t you?”

  Star’s black lips torqued into a smile.

  “That’s my man.”

  6

  The Barn

  Monday, December 16

  8:02 a.m.

  Tyler’s head filled with the familiar susurration of static as he shaped atmospheric energy into a pair of electromagnetic spheres. A large, metal-plated box stood in the center of the training room.

  “Now move to the right,” Chad, his trainer, called. “And … release!”

  Tyler slung the crackling spheres at the box, one right after the other.

  “And again!” Chad called. “They don’t have to be very strong.”

  Still moving, Tyler repeated his attack, two more electromagnetic spheres shooting from his outstretched arms and breaking up against the box that housed a computer. He hit it a dozen more times. When he completed his circuit, he stooped forward to catch his breath. Chad approached him while peering down at a tablet-shaped device with wires running back to the box.

  “You see,” Chad said, tilting the display toward him. “Even if your opponent is capable of grounding your electricity, you can still create disruptions. These gaps are where the computer’s circuits blinked out. There are sixteen of them, one for every time you nailed it.”

  “Yeah, cool,” Tyler said, raising his visor.

  Following the Champions’ last campaign, Agent Steel had downloaded the visual data from their helmets. Upon identifying deficiencies—and she always found them—she had instructed their trainers to correct them. Tyler’s main deficiencies, according to Steel and Chad, was that he’d attempted to flank the Artificial without a plan and taken a giant fist to the head.

  Chad must have observed something in Tyler’s posture. “If I’m telling you something you already know,” he said, his cocked hip propping a fist, “why couldn’t you act on it when it counted?”


  Cause you don’t know a thing about being in the middle of a battle, Tyler thought. And you don’t know a damn thing about seeing the girl you care about fighting for her life.

  “I had to do something,” Tyler said.

  “Well, doing something doesn’t mean doing anything.”

  Tyler shrugged and walked over to Chad’s computer desk. He plopped down in a rolling chair. Chad took a seat on a neighboring stool and leaned forward, frown lines creasing his shiny brow.

  “When you used to wear that face into my record store,” Chad said, “I knew something was off in your world.”

  “What face?”

  Chad sighed forlornly and made his expression sag.

  “C’mon, I don’t look that bad.” Tyler dragged a hand through his damp hair as he dropped his gaze. “I’m just tired.”

  “You don’t start leveling with me, and I’m not going to be able to help you. The next time it might not be a fist that nails you but a couple of exploding rounds.” He raised his rust-colored eyebrows.

  Tyler looked at his trainer sidelong, considering how completely different they were. Where Chad was colorful and expressive, Tyler felt sullen, closed tight as a fist. But even going back to the record store days, Chad seemed to have a knack for getting him to open up. Call it chemistry.

  “It’s Janis,” Tyler said.

  “And…” With a hand, Chad made a circular spill-the-rest gesture.

  “And I don’t want to see anything happen to her. When she got into trouble in that bank vault, I don’t know, a part of my mind sort of shut off. All my training went out the window. I had to draw that blaster fire away from her any way I could, even if it meant putting myself in danger.”

  “Janis isn’t helpless, you know.”

  Tyler nodded faintly, but he was remembering their mission in Saudi Arabia. Watching her getting swallowed by a cloud of toxin. Finding her rigid and still. Touching the cold skin over her sternal bone…