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“I hear you moving in there! Say something if it’s you.”
Kopano rubbed his eyes and worked some moisture into his mouth.
“Ran . . . ?” he asked, uncertain; her voice was coming through muffled. “Ran? Is that you?”
“Yes! Can you move?”
Kopano decided he couldn’t answer right away. He sat up on a firm cot and swung his legs over the edge. His bare feet touched cold concrete. He looked down at himself—a dull gray jumpsuit with no identifying marks, no zippers, no buttons, all Velcro. He was in a small room with nothing but his cot, a sink and toilet, and one empty shelf. The door—through which Ran’s voice was coming—was thick metal.
It all dawned on Kopano fast. He felt sick to his stomach.
“Holy shit, Ran. Are we in prison?”
She didn’t answer. “Can you move?” she asked instead, her voice taut.
Kopano got up unsteadily. He cringed at a sharp pain in his temple. He reached up and touched a bandage there, heavy gauze and medical tape, a sharp throb beneath. Had he hit his head?
“I . . . I can move,” he said.
“Then stand back from the door.”
The door began to glow. Kopano recognized the dark crimson of Ran’s explosive energy. He yanked up the mattress and used it as a shield, wedging himself in the far corner between the sink and the slab of concrete that held up the bed.
The explosion came seconds later, a burst of kinetic energy and tearing metal that made Kopano’s head ring all the more. The door to his cell rocketed backwards and smashed through his toilet, water and chunks of plaster spilling across the floor.
Ran padded into the room. She wore the same prisoner outfit as Kopano and had a similar bandage on her right temple. She had her sleeves rolled up and the knuckles of her right hand dripped blood. Kopano got the sense that she’d been in a fight.
The situation might have been dangerous and disorienting, but that didn’t stop Kopano from striding forward and sweeping Ran up in a hug. The brief terror of finding himself in prison was greatly diminished by her presence.
“I’m so happy to see you,” he said.
Ran gently brushed free of him. “No time for that. There are guards.” She squeezed his arm quickly. “I am happy to see you, too.”
“What the hell is this place?”
“I don’t know,” Ran said. “But I do not intend to stay and find out.”
Kopano followed Ran out into the hall. Dimly lit and dingy, its old concrete walls sweated with moisture. There were other cells like the one that Kopano had come out of, their doors left ajar to show that they were empty. Kopano looked to the right. He could tell that was the direction Ran came from because of the smoking husk of another cell door, this one blown outward, a security camera that dangled broken from the wall, and the bodies of three guards in body armor and helmets.
“Are they dead?” Kopano asked quietly.
“Unconscious,” Ran answered.
He frowned at the path of destruction. “Our first reaction to waking up in a place like this is to start hitting people and blowing things up,” he said. “Maybe we do belong here.”
“That was my first reaction, not yours,” Ran said coolly. “You do not have to come with me. But, we do not know if our captors are friends or enemies. Kidnapping and imprisoning us without any process would suggest to me they are the latter. But you do what you will, Kopano.”
“Okay, okay,” Kopano said, holding up his hands. “I’m with you. Just . . . let’s not hurt anyone too bad, at least until we know what’s going on.”
“I won’t hurt anyone who doesn’t try to hurt me,” Ran said. She picked up a chunk of shattered porcelain and charged it with her Legacy.
They crept down the hall in the opposite direction of Ran’s former cell. They went around two corners, encountering nothing else but more security cameras. Ran promptly ripped them out of the walls with her telekinesis.
“Where is everyone?” Kopano asked.
“They will come,” Ran replied. “Those others had weapons like you faced during the Wargames. Shock collars and chaff grenades to disrupt telekinesis. Be ready.”
They turned another corner and there was finally a break from the monotony of empty cells. Ahead, two thick double doors appeared to lead to a different section of the prison.
Between the Garde and the doors were a half dozen guards. They all wore heavy black body armor and helmets with face shields, a dim glow emanating from within suggesting they were using HUDs—heads-up displays that would assist with aiming, plus grant them night vision and heat vision. Two of them were armed with plastic riot shields, two with the crossbow-shaped Inhibitors that Kopano remembered from the Wargames, and two with long metallic sticks that resembled cattle prods. They were organized in a tight group and had clearly trained for exactly this kind of combat.
But they didn’t stand a chance.
Kopano’s first move was to try yanking their shields away with his telekinesis. All the guards were tethered to their weapons, though, thick cords connecting their armaments directly to their body armor. Kopano’s grab for their shields knocked the guards off-balance a bit, but it didn’t disarm them or break their formation.
Ran took a different approach. She tossed her charged chunk of toilet at the guards. They were prepared for that, the shield bearers knocked the explosive down and pinned it to the floor. When it exploded, the force sent them flying hard into the hallway walls, but they had managed to spare the rest of the group.
One of the back-row guards tossed a grenade at their feet. It released a puff of glittering chaff and then emitted a pulsing burst of blinding light, all this creating a highly disorienting strobe effect. That was their best method for disrupting telekinesis.
The guards fired their Inhibitors. Auto-locking collars attached to tensile cords that discharged crippling amounts of electricity, the projectiles programmed to seek the heat of the carotid artery. Kopano had been struck by one of these collars before. Not an experience he was looking to repeat.
With the chaff and the strobe, it all happened too fast for him and Ran to deploy their telekinesis. Still, Kopano was ready. He grabbed Ran’s arm and turned them both intangible. The collars sailed right through their ghostly necks, Kopano guided Ran to the side of the cords, then turned them solid again.
Before the guards could reel their collars back in, Ran screamed and charged.
She leaped into the air and hit one of them in the neck with a jump-kick, pinning him against the wall by grabbing hold of his partner and staying suspended between them. Her foot on the throat of one guard, she held the other by his Inhibitor and began charging his weapon, the crimson glow cutting through the strobe effect.
The guards with cattle prods came forward and Ran was out of limbs to fight them off with. Kopano moved to intercept. He phased through Ran and her two guards, then hardened his molecules in time to punch the nearest guard in the helmet, shattering the mask over his face and putting him down. The second one jabbed at Kopano’s abdomen with his cattle prod. He turned transparent again, let the guard stumble through him, then turned solid to grab him by the back of the head and slammed him face-first into the nearest wall.
Two down. But now the guards with the shields were starting to get back up.
As they did, the guard with the charged Inhibitor panicked and released his weapon, hitting a button inside his glove that disconnected it from his tether. Ran rolled to the floor, releasing the guard who she’d been pinning with her foot to let him gasp for breath, and slung the charged Inhibitor at the guards with shields.
This time, they were too slow. They took the brunt of the explosion and were flung back down the hall, their shields hanging limp from their armor tethers.
Four down.
The guard n
earest Ran snatched up one of the cattle prods and charged her before she could regain her feet. Kopano intercepted him, his diamond-hard elbow crunching through the guard’s mask in a single blow.
Seeing his colleagues decimated, the last guard tried to retreat. With her telekinesis, Ran looped one of the shield cords around his ankles so that he fell on his face. As he struggled to get back up, Kopano bounded over and put him down with a precise blow to the back of the head.
Ran stomped down on the grenade, cutting off the annoying strobe effect. Then, she looked at Kopano and wiped sweat off her forehead. He grinned.
“Practice makes perfect,” he said.
“Come on,” she replied. “Let’s keep going.”
They moved quickly towards the end of the hall. The double doors were sealed by a set of bars and a heavy-duty hydraulic contraption, but that couldn’t stop Kopano. He led the way, reaching behind him to grab Ran’s hand, going transparent while they were still in motion and passing right through the doors.
Kopano expected more hallways and more guards. Instead, their narrow confines opened into a large room with a vaulted ceiling. A bank of monitors dominated one wall, some of them tuned to static, thanks to all the cameras Ran had broken on the way in. There weren’t any guards, just one solitary woman seated at a conference table. Although she had a weathered look about her—auburn hair streaked with gray, scars on the side of her face—Kopano thought the woman to be in her forties. She raised an eyebrow at them and he felt almost embarrassed for bursting in on her.
“Let me start by saying that I don’t condone the way Greger brought you two in,” the woman spoke calmly, like they’d already been having a conversation. “I figured there would be some resentment on your part. That’s why I arranged for a little exercise out in the hall.” She waved back the way they had come. “Get that aggression out. Thank you for not hurting any of the guards too badly.”
“I know you,” Ran said quietly. “You were at Patience Creek.”
Patience Creek. Kopano had heard the place mentioned in hushed whispers. It was the secret military base from where the Garde and humanity waged their resistance against the Mogadorian invaders. A massacre happened there when the Mogs infiltrated the place. Ran, Nigel, and Caleb had survived—others weren’t so lucky.
