21.0 - Remember by Robert J. Crane

Author:Robert J. Crane [Crane, Robert J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Unread
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

25.

Reed

New York

The alarm wailed in the distance as we charged over the field toward the supposedly abandoned factory. I could have taken the lead and flown over on the winds, but I needed to be at least a little careful about how crazily I threw those around, given that Greg Vansen was out here somewhere, miniaturized and flying. Me creating a tornado for him to be sucked up into wouldn’t be doing any of us—or at least not him—any favors.

“How’d they detect us?” Augustus asked. He was talking in a normal volume, but the sound of the alarm would have drowned it out with any non-metas.

“The electrical activity coming off Greg’s plane, or a motion sensor,” Jamal said. “Finely tuned, with enough resolution, it could probably pick him up moving at high speed.”

“They’d have to know they were looking for small things, too, right?” Angel asked.

“If they know metas well enough—and us,” I said, running through the field, “they’d know to look for just that.”

There was a fence ahead, and it was a tall one, ten plus feet of chain link. Designed to keep out the riffraff, and with signs posted every few yards warning against trespassing.

I jumped it, easily. Augustus followed, and then Angel, who seemed like she might stumble but caught herself, perfectly. Those reflexes—so enviable.

“Um, some of us are not quite so strong and fleet of feet or whatever as you lot,” Eilish said, standing back outside the fence.

“Yeah, I have deep insecurities from that time I almost failed gym class,” Jamal said.

“You should have dressed out, fool,” Augustus said. “That’s literally all you had to do. Put on your gym clothes, show up, try.”

“I didn’t want to undress in that locker room,” Jamal said. “It was humiliating. And this was before I had powers, and before ‘bullying’ was a watchword, back when it was just an assumed part of your school experience.”

“Pipe down,” I said, and thrust both of them up over the fence with a gust apiece.

“Whoa!” Jamal said, coming down in a rush. I kept the tornados as confined as I could, hoping Greg hadn’t decided to steer within a foot of either of their bodies at the exact moment I was bringing them over.

“We got incoming,” Augustus said. “Fifty yards that way.” He pointed to the rising hill that separated us from the factory ahead. “They’re about to crest.”

“You want to handle this?” I asked.

“I s’pose I could,” Augustus said, cracking his knuckles. He squinted into the darkness, concentrating, hand extended.

Guards were shouting over the wailing siren. The first came up over the hill, silhouetted against the shining light from the factory—

And promptly disappeared.

Augustus started to whistle, a slow tune that put me in the mind of Ella Fitzgerald. But one of her peppier tunes, maybe. I hardly knew them all.

After a minute, he brushed a sleeve against his forehead, wiping away beads of sweat. It was not warm. “Okay, that’s about it for me for now.”

“How many did you get?” Jamal asked.

“Close to a hundred,” Augustus said.

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