Page 48 of Anarchy Chained: Alpha Thomas

“Security,” I say. “In case anyone thinks they can follow us.”

We’re only going about a hundred miles an hour, but it’s fast and the iris begins to close before we even get there.

Sadie stands up, her hands braced on the dashboard. “It’s gonna close before we get there! It’s gonna cut us in half!”

“You have no trust.”

But she doesn’t hear me because we fly through the gate and her head whips around to look out the back window to watch the iris close with a bang.

Before she even looks back we pass through another one. Bang!

Then another.

Bang!

Then the final gate on this end.

Bang!

“Holy fucking shit!” she says, holding her hand over her heart. She looks at me and says, “You’re fucking insane! Those things barely missed us! Was that… was that a blade in the center of the gate?”

I grin and soak up the impressive display of my genius. “We made it, didn’t we?”

She shakes her head and sits back down in her chair. “That’s dangerous. How does it know we’re through? We were like milliseconds from being sliced like salami!”

“Relax,” I say, easing back in my chair and putting my feet up on the dash. “It’s all math, Sadie. The physical laws of nature never let you down. Life is predictable and boring if you know the right equations.”

“Right.” She snorts, blowing up the hair that’s fallen over her face. “Because all that weird mental shit follows the laws of nature.”

“Well, what you do is just tricks.”

She huffs more air. “Whatever. I’m pretty talented.”

“I’m sure you are, but it’s a trick. Like a magician. What I do is command a force of nature.”

“What kind of force?”

“You know… like… wind, right?”

“Wind?” Everything I say seems to make her scoff. “How the hell do you get wind from that freak show of a display back at the asylum?”

“Well, wind is caused by the sun heating the earth. The air moving around it too. So it creates this force, right? You can’t see it, but it’s there. And it’s all based on natural properties because the earth has different topography so it heats unevenly. Which creates wind, or moving currents of air. When I use that mentalist power I’m creating uneven heating of things around me, which creates a force. Like wind, only… on an extreme scale. So there’s heat and air and then pressure, which makes the blast.”

“Freak,” she says again. “No one’s supposed to be able to do that with their mind.”

“Yeah, but it makes a whole lot more sense to have my power controlled by my mind than it does to have it controlled by two non-sentient forms of energy, don’t you think?”

“Whatever you say.”

“But you… you really have some kind of link, right?”

She stares out the front window for a few seconds. Mulling it over.

“To people’s minds. That shit makes no sense at all, thus it’s a trick.”

She rolls her eyes. “A better trick than yours. I can make people hallucinate.”

“But how long does it last?”