Aliomenti Saga 6: Stark Cataclysm Read online

  It wasn’t fair.

  I know it isn’t fair. He jumped as his mother’s words sounded in his mind. Life rarely is. The mere possibility that your child could be at risk is a horror too terrible to consider for a parent. If you can do anything to alleviate that risk, you’d never choose to do anything else, no matter how great the personal price. One day, you too may become a parent, and then you’ll understand better why your father and I made the decisions we made.

  Fil paced the floor, shaking his head. “I’d rather take my chances, Mom. I’m old enough to make that choice. Angel could level a city block without difficulty; no Hunter is going to be a threat to her.”

  They don’t work that way, Fil. The don’t come at you with figurative guns-a-blazing. They trap you and use your own conscience against you so that your greater power is of no use. The only way to win is to avoid engaging them. They’re relentless. You’ve seen the videos. Two centuries spent looking for Will, without fail, even with no hint of his continued existence. If they learn that the two of us live, that Will Stark has a second child, that my true identity is... what it is? I’ve little doubt they’d destroy the entire planet to enforce the penalties for breaking their Oaths. I don’t want to give them the chance to prove me right.

  He heard her transmitted words, but they failed to resonate.

  It was different for him. She’d had centuries of life lived with Will. Angel had a strange telepathic mutation that allowed her to sense his presence and existence when all other approaches failed. Adam and other long-term Alliance members had worked with Will for decades or centuries. Even Arthur Lowell, the Leader of the Aliomenti, had spent years with his father.

  But not him. In those few formative years, he’d been Shielded and prevented from communicating with the younger Will. He’d watched the man suffer at Fil’s affliction, blaming himself. It would have taken mere moments to allow a bond to form. But that was denied to both of them, because of a deep fear that such a communication would alert the Hunters.

  And while Fil could understand that logic, nothing could explain why his centuries-old father, one reputedly living in the shadows, couldn’t take a few moments to communicate briefly with his son. Offer some words of encouragement or advice; tell Fil he was proud of his son. Anything. It didn’t even need to be face-to-face; Will could send an email or a postcard, and Fil would be ecstatic beyond words.

  The decision to deny Fil even that brief bit of communication hurt deeply. And each time someone told him Will Stark was a hero, a knife twisted into Fil’s heart just a bit more, ripping open the scars of abandonment once more.

  He went along with it for two people: his mother and Angel. But he’d never make a decision because of the benefit it might bring, or the harm it might cause, to a man who actively avoided him to such a degree.

  I hope you find peace, Fil. It’s difficult for you to understand now, and I can’t deny that in your position I’d feel a sense of resentment, abandonment, even anger at your father and what his actions and memories have meant for you. I can promise you this, though: one day, you’ll come to realize that this is far more difficult for Will than it is for you. I can’t ask you to accept that, not now, or even take my message on faith, or to trust me. You can learn this only through your own experiences. Today, I can only ask that you keep an open mind that what I’ve said could be true.

  Ever the dutiful son, Fil nodded.

  Go, please. Discharge. The buildup… it doesn’t help your temperament. You’re acting like someone going through ambrosia withdrawal. With the strain visible on her face, she arched what remained of her left eyebrow.

  Fil couldn’t help it. He laughed.

  He walked to his mother, bent down, put his lips to her cool forehead, felt the leathery, loose, translucent skin, and kissed her. “Love you, Mom. Don’t ever doubt that.”

  And I love you, Fil. More than anything. Never doubt that, either. No matter what happens.

  Fil nodded, and then teleported to the discharge chamber.

  The chamber was a small room constructed hundreds of feet below their new home. The sparsely furnished room had one unique characteristic outside its location: it had been lined with dozens of layers of scutarium. They’d tested its capacity, deemed it fit to withstand even a Fil Trask-sized Energy onslaught, and stepped aside. Fil felt the room was similar to a stint in detention. All alone, no electronic devices to allow outside communication, nothing to do but read a book. He picked up a decades-old tome, sat in one of two chairs in the room, opened the book, and turned off his Shield.

  The Energy poured from him, eager to escape the boundaries of the Shield. He let the excess bleed off first, letting the scutarium absorb and clear it from the room. He then began consciously pushing more and more Energy from his body. The older Will had done this a decade earlier, two days before the great fire destroyed the life Fil had known in his relative youth. Will had done it to summon the Hunters to Pleasanton at just the right moment. Fil went through the same process on a regular basis to avoid leveling his new hometown should an unexpected sneeze disrupt his Shield integrity.

  The book was enjoyable; he finished reading two chapters before marking his place. The raging fire exited his body, leaving behind the pleasant warmth that new Energy users found so addictive. It was a temporary reprieve; the Energy would naturally regenerate over time. For a few weeks, though, he’d live in greater comfort. He found his mood markedly improved, just as his mother predicted. The excess buildup of Energy soured his mood, and he needed to avoid anything that might set him off, shatter his Shield, and bring ruination to innocents.

  He took a few deep breaths, feeling the air work its way to his lungs, felt the refreshment as overtaxed cells began performing optimally once more after being relieved of the intense internal heat. He took a few moments to rebuild his Shield, using techniques his mother taught him years earlier to keep the construct in place when his focus moved to other matters. Like school. He glanced at the watch on his arm. He’d need to leave soon.

  Fil teleported directly to the kitchen, smiling. He felt cheerful for the first time in weeks.

  Angel and Adam were finishing breakfast dishes. Adam gestured at the microwave. “Plenty there for you if you need more. It just needs to be heated up.”

  Fil nodded. The discharge sessions always left him famished. He gratefully warmed the leftover food and sat down at the table, shoveling the food into his mouth.

  Angel sat down to join him. “Feel better?”

  He nodded, chewing feverishly. “You do realize you’re going to have to do this at some point as well, right?”

  She grimaced. “Don’t remind me.” Her eyes became distant, her facial expression confused. Fil felt his pulse quicken. The look wasn’t one he’d seen from her before, but he could feel her rising confusion. When she regained focus, she looked surprised… and frightened.

  Fil shot to his feet and leaned over the table in her direction. “What’s wrong?”

  Adam, who’d walked out of the kitchen, stepped back into the room, worry on his face at the sight of the emotion on Angel’s face.

  “Mom… I… she… I can’t… feel her.” She swallowed. “She’s gone.”

  Fil felt his soul leak from him, the news driving the air from him. He teleported directly into his mother’s room. Adam and Angel were there an instant later.

  He’d feared the worst; his mother’s lifeless eyes staring into space, seeing nothing, her face relaxed after she’d finally escaped the pain. He feared seeing her stillness, no rise and fall of her chest. No emanation of Energy.

  He’d feared Angel’s proclamation meant his mother was dead.

  But she wasn’t dead.

  She was gone.

  The covers were pulled back, as if she’d risen from the bed by conscious choice. Fil checked the floor to see if she’d fallen after the effort and lost consciousness. But he found no sign of her. Adam slipped into the bathroom to see if she’d entered that space, but re
turned shaking his head.

  Angel closed her eyes, her face a picture of concentration. She could read Energy patterns better than most, see the story and sense the emotions trapped in the flits of Energy floating in the room.

  She opened her eyes. “It was Dad. He took her. Some of the Energy… it has the thoughts, the ideas that they expressed. Something about an island, a place where they couldn’t be found, a place where he could help her restore her health.”

  Fil stared at Angel. “He just… took her?”

  Angel nodded. To his shock, she smiled, as if this was the greatest news she’d ever heard.

  “Didn’t bother to say goodbye, or let us say goodbye to her, did he?” He felt his pulse raging, the heat of Energy stirred to action roiling his body. He looked up and saw his face purpling in his mother’s mirror. The mirror shattered, the glass creating a symphony of sound as it rained down upon the floor. The light bulbs in the room shattered as well, eliminating the artificial light. He didn’t care.

  He felt Adam move closer. “Fil, she was on death’s door, and we’d—”

  “Two minutes!” Fil snapped, whirling on Adam, who took a step back. “It would have taken all of two minutes to let us know he was here, that he was taking her away to help her, to let us say our goodbyes. But did he do that? No. He waited until we were all out of the room, waited until I was in the discharge bunker, and just took her away.”

  “Look, Fil, I understand that this seems inappropriate, but—”

  “Couldn’t stand to see me, could you?” Fil shouted at the ceiling, shaking as the emotion poured from him. “Didn’t want to face that embarrassment of a son, did you? No concern about how this sneaking about would affect anyone, did you?”

  He slumped down to the floor, pulling his knees up to his chin, wrapping his arms around his legs, rocking back and forth, fighting back the tears that strained to leak from his eyes. Seventeen year old boys—men—didn’t cry. Or did they? He wasn’t sure, decided he didn’t care, and let the tears and grief and anger pour forth in sobs the wracked his body.

  Angel took a tentative step toward him, then another, before she knelt down next to him. She tried to wrap her arms around him. “Dad’s going to help her, Fil. You know that, don’t you?”

  “He could have done that here, Angel.” He let himself roll to the floor, to his side, and curled in a fetal position. He thought she hugged him, but didn’t feel a thing. “We’re shielded. We have the discharge bunker. He could have worked here, kept her here so that we could provide our Energy, our insights, and our support. But he didn’t do that, did he?” He felt the salty tears enter his mouth and nearly gagged, coughed once. “He swept in like a knight on his white horse to rescue the damsel in distress, but didn’t care about who the horse might step on in the process. He just had to be the hero.”

  He curled his neck to face up, looking into Adam’s wide-eyed face, and turned to look at Angel, who looked frightened. “He’s no hero. He’s selfish. And right now, I’d leave him to his fate with the Hunters. Leave him to fend for himself, all alone. Just like he just did to us.”

  He fell completely still, felt the total silence in the room envelop him, before he whispered the words that had been forcing themselves to the surface.

  “I hate you, Will Stark.”

  II

  Sand

  2040 A.D.

  The ticking of the antique clock Adam built by hand two centuries earlier was the only sound he heard, the metronome-like sound echoing loudly in his head. He sat at the kitchen table, arms resting upon the wooden surface, fingers absentmindedly tracing the grooves gouged out by the previous owners. His chin rested on his hands, the bones of his wrists digging into his chin. The mild pain seemed appropriate.

  Angel’s fury weighed on him. She’d shouted as only ten-year-old girls can, making his burden one inclusive of guilt for his words. He didn’t hate their father; she made him say the words until she believed he meant it, until he was fairly sure he did. “Hate is eternal, anger is temporary,” she said, leaving him wondering if his parents had injected a century’s worth of wisdom in her young mind. “You can be angry at Dad, but you aren’t allowed to hate him.”

  Unable to counter her logic and unwilling to add to her horror at his statement, he’d agreed.

  He was angry, but as he sat there in his melancholy, hearing little but the monotony of the ticking clock, he thought he understood his father’s motivation. Will wouldn’t hide from them his existence; they all knew he’d been alive to summon the Hunters to Pleasanton, and Angel knew he’d been present at her birth. They knew he was alive. Direct communication wouldn’t tell them anything they didn’t already know, or enable them to inadvertently reveal his existence to the Hunters.

  There was one thing about Will none of them knew.

  “Mom said that Dad figured out how to retune his Energy so it seems different to everyone who can hear or see or smell or taste it.” He glanced at his sister. “It doesn’t seem to affect you as much, for some reason. Meeting him in person means we’d be able to associate him with that new signal, and we’d effectively know his disguise.” He shrugged. “I guess to Dad’s paranoid mind, that means we could unknowingly betray his identity.”

  Angel nodded, her platinum blond pigtails bouncing as she did so. “I could tell it made him sad to leave without saying anything, but even Mom agreed it was for the best. It’s no easier to say a long goodbye than a short one, I guess.”

  Adam inclined his head in her direction. “Deep wisdom points for the ten-year-old in the pigtails.”

  School that day was a blur. Fil forced himself to focus on the schoolwork and the lessons, though he’d learned the material before he was Angel’s age. He sat alone at lunch, well away from his usual entourage, who seemed disinclined to encourage him to join them. The walk home with his sister was a silent trek, each absorbed in thought. Fil felt the waning warmth of the late summer sun and the onrush of the cool breeze as he entered the house. Adam called out his standard reminder to complete homework; Fil didn’t bother arguing.

  The meal that evening reminded him of meals they’d shared when his mother was with them, even those in recent years where she joined them only sprit from her permanent spot in her bed upstairs. Forks scraped at empty spots on plates, filling the kitchen with a kind of clinking shriek that represented the melancholy of those at the table.

  “Do we have to go to school tomorrow?” Fil asked.

  Adam, now their guardian in the eyes of the state, considered the question, and then nodded. “We’ll arrange a trip out of town to give us the freedom to explore, to try to find them. I want to know what’s happened to them as much as you do, Fil.” He folded his hands. “The story we’ve shared gives us the leeway needed for extended absences.”

  Fil sighed, but nodded. Adam had called the school that morning, explaining that the Trask children wouldn’t be in as their mother had become violently ill, the result of a rare genetic disorder requiring special treatment in a far off medical facility, and that they’d said their goodbyes as their mother was whisked away to undergo lifesaving treatment. There was just enough truth sprinkled in the story to prevent them from mistakes if questions arose.

  He wondered where they were, what mysterious location his father had identified, and what treatments he might attempt that others hadn’t considered. His father was imaginative, he admitted to himself, and with both unlimited time and relatively unlimited Energy, his odds of success were greater than most.

  He glanced from Adam to Angel and back again. “If—when—Dad succeeds, and Mom is healthy… what happens then?”

  Adam frowned. “I’m not sure I follow.”

  Angel understood. “Those video memories, the notes from the future… they all say nobody’s seen Mom for a long time.” Her eyes moistened as she spoke. “Dad knows that.”

  Fil let his head drop to the table and rest on his arms. “Of course he does. It’s probably why he took her. And it’s
why he’ll keep her in hiding.”

  Adam offered a grim smile. “If you think your father will keep Hope in hiding, you don’t know her very well. If she hides, it will only be after a reluctant acceptance that it’s what’s best for the two of you.” He paused. “I suspect your father will teach her the Energy signal alteration technique he’s perfected. When he does… I suspect she’ll wrangle her way into your lives as a positive influence. You never know the true identity of a kind stranger you might meet in the future.”

  Fil raised his head. It was an interesting thought. Any person he met in the future could be one of his parents. Would he recognize them? If they wanted to stay hidden, he suspected they’d hide themselves well, even if hidden in plain sight. Would he truly fail to recognize them?

  Could he remain angry at them for disappearing if they were hidden in plain sight?

  “I’m going to bed,” he announced. The chair squeaked against the floor as he pushed back from the table. He could feel two sets of eyes on him—maybe there were more than two sets?—and resisted the temptation to eavesdrop on the private conversation he sensed between Adam and Angel as he walked out.

  He paused at the top of the steps, glancing at the door to his mother’s room. Perhaps she was playing a joke on them. Maybe he’d open the door and find her back, perhaps like she’d been that morning, perhaps cured and back to the levels of radiant health she’d enjoyed for centuries.

  The room remained a silent tomb. He moved in, glancing around, wondering if they should leave everything alone, clean up, or empty everything in recognition of the fact that Phoebe Trask would never again set foot in this house. Probably leave things be; they’d told people she was getting treatment for a rare illness, which implied she might be back one day.

  He wondered if he should hold out ho—

  The vial grazed his peripheral vision by mere inches.