Soulless

Chapter 3

I heard the sounds of conversation die down behind me as I grew further and further from them. The heat in the woods was oppressive, even under the shade of the trees. The air didn’t feel like it was moving, even when a brief gust of wind shifted more hot air in my direction, turning the sweat that was already trickling down my back into a tepid river that slid down the crease of my spine. I took a deep breath, sucking in the warm air, feeling it seem to stick in my nose and mouth, felt the perspiration drip from my forehead into my eyes, mixing with a little of the moisture already there.

Dammit. I got so caught up in the training exercise, in winning, in beating the others, that I let myself get carried away. For years I’d had no one but Mom to spar against, and now, only a few months out in the world, was testing myself against people that tracked and caught metas for a living. I felt a twinge of relief at the knowledge that Eve Kappler was going to be all right, and a little bit of pride knowing that I’d knocked her out of the sky.

Kappler was a severe woman by nature: she was thin, austere, too dry in personality and reserved in her manner to draw much attention. She had never really been nice to me (not that I’d smite her for that; there were a lot of people in the Directorate that had never shown me kindness; I’d be smiting for a long time to get to them all) but that didn’t mean I wanted to hurt her. It was practice. Mom had never intentionally hurt me during practice. Well, most of the time, anyway.

I ran my sleeve along my cheek, slopping off the salty mix of sweat and the first annoying hint of tears. I wanted to believe they were from all the perspiration that was in my eyes, but I suspected they might also have been from the pride stuck in my throat, that burning feeling that I couldn’t swallow away even though I wanted to. I had just gotten called out on my performance in the midst of my peers and fellow trainees. I hated that.

I took another breath, in and out, then another. I had stopped walking and was just standing, feeling the hot air gathered around me in a wall, like some sort of fortress of heat that had enshrouded my body. My long sleeves, gloves and pants didn’t help, and even though I wore tennis shoes, my socks were long. They were all soaked, some from sweat but most from wading into the creek to recover Eve. Every single article of my clothing was starting to stick to me, even as the water that had taken up residence within had matched my body temperature; only a little dash of coolness was running down and surprising me every once in a while. The rest just felt like sweat.

The first days of brutal summer had started only a couple weeks ago; before that it had been a beautiful, sunny-skied and cool-aired spring, all the way to the last of June. Since then, it was as though the weather had decided to get hostile. I had to say I preferred winter as a season to summer; it was colder, but even factoring in the number of times I’d landed in the snow while fighting, I didn’t get as wet as I did sweating during these training exercises, which were an everyday thing, in one form or another.

“Hey.” I had missed the footfalls behind me, caught up in my own thoughts. I turned without drying my eyes, hoping that the sweat would mask the other, marginally less stinging liquid. I doubted it would. Scott was there, along with Kat, who was leaning on him. They walked like I envisioned a couple would, her arm around his waist, her face looking more drawn than it had a few minutes ago. She rested against him, leaning her weight against his muscular chest. If we had been in a different place, and different people, she could have been a drunken sorority girl, leaning on her boyfriend for support.

And I could have been a…I dunno. Something else.

“You took down Eve pretty hard.” Scott stopped, repositioning himself as Kat pushed off him to stand on her own two wobbly feet.

My hands came up to cover my mouth as I wiped the sweat that was beading on my upper lip. “Yep.” I let them rest there, as though I could cover the lies that were bound to drip out when he asked the inevitable question.

“Why?” It was Kat who asked it, her hair looking stringy because of the humidity, but without a hint of the frizz that was afflicting mine. Thanks, humidity. It’d take a miracle and an hour with the flat iron later to get the kinks out.

I didn’t move my hands away from my mouth. “Why what?”

“Why’d you take her down so hard that I had to fix a skull fracture, a broken sternum and three ribs?” Kat let go of Scott and dropped to her rump, sitting with her legs in front of her. “I know we don’t do these kind exercises where we beat the hell out of each other for real very often, but we’ve done it enough to know you don’t lose control like that.” She laughed and tossed a blond lock over her shoulder. “I mean, when it comes to the training, you’re like the queen of control; it’s why you’re Parks’ favorite—”

“I just didn’t think.” I was sweating even harder now, my lip pressed up against my hand, more perspiration trailing down my forehead from my hairline. I felt my shirt sticking to me and all I wanted was a shower. “It got away from me, the rock. The adrenaline was pumping after we took down Parks—”

“After you took down Parks, you mean? When you left us behind?” The accusation came out of Scott, his arms folded but his manner cool.

“I drew her away from you,” I said. “I don’t know what else I could have done to help you. I wanted to win, and it was just…” I pulled my hands away from my mouth and licked my lip, tasted the salty residue of sweat.

“It’s not Wolfe, is it?” Scott stared me down. His T-shirt had been white when we started, but now it was gray in the places where he had sweated through, and bore the stains of dirt and grime from where he’d been pinned to the ground. “He’s not breaking out or whatever—”

“He’s not,” I said. “I haven’t heard from the rogues’ gallery in my head in months. I think Zollers and I have that under control.” That was mostly true. The medication Zollers had given me was working, but I had other help as well.

“I guess it was hard for us to tell by the way you acted back there,” Kat said, sarcasm oozing through her words, which were laced with a kind of bone-weariness. Her eyes flicked down, and they were lacking the brightness that was ever-present in them. “I didn’t mean that. Accidents happen, especially when they’re trying to train us for all the possibilities that could happen out there. It’s just not like you.”

“It happens.” Another voice joined our conversation. My head swiveled and I saw Glen Parks, shifting out of the shape of a wolf again. “You get reckless after playing this like it’s a game for too long.” He got taller as he walked, leaving behind all fours as his fur receded into the long beard and hair that I was accustomed to seeing. “Too much of this type of training’s not good. We need some real world experience for you three.” He halted behind me. I didn’t look away, even though my eyes were burning, this time from the sweat. “Especially for you, before your killer instinct gets away from you.”

I felt a burning again in the back of my throat. “I…do not…have a killer instinct.”

Scott coughed. “Um…haven’t you already killed three people?”

My tongue seemed to stick to the roof of my mouth and my jaw fell open. “I didn’t…I mean, Wolfe was unintentional and Gavrikov…he was gonna nuke Minneapolis.”

“And the other guy?” Scott stared back at me. “Henderschott? The one you tried to teach to fly?”

The angry red settled in my cheeks, burning me as I took a breath before answering. “That wasn’t me.”

Scott looked back the way we had come, back toward the creek, which I could still hear running in the distance. “Yeah, well that was all you. And Eve wasn’t an enemy.”

“This is a pointless discussion.” Parks’ voice was rough, like a flint striking a rock or a knife running over a sharpening stone. “Byerly, help Forrest back to her room. And let her rest, will you? You know how using her power takes it out of her.”

The burning in my cheeks got a little worse; I was pretty sure that Scott and Kat were sleeping together, but I didn’t really want to know for fact if it was true. Most of that was because there was someone I wished I could be sleeping with, but it wasn’t possible for me to touch him for more than three seconds without causing him excruciating pain followed by death. They walked away, Scott half-carrying Kat toward the dormitory building, which was quite a distance.

“What’s your problem, Sienna?” My head snapped back around to find Parks still looking at me, the rough, wrinkled skin around his eyes folded more than usual. They weren’t quite slitted, but they were a lot closer to closed than normal. It was the same look he got when we’d go to the firing range for weapons practice and he had to focus on a target at some distance. Parks was blunt to a fault, but he didn’t mean anything bad by it. He just said what he thought and let you sort it out.

“I’m just tired.” I couldn’t get a hand up to cover my mouth without Parks knowing I was lying. Hell, he probably knew anyway because his eyes grew more closed and he nodded. For the last six months he’d watched me as he trained all of us. We were a class of three, so it’s not like he had a ton of people to pay attention to. “We’ve been at a higher tempo of training lately, early mornings, late nights, all that. Like you said, it just wears on me. I’m ready to get to it.” I tried to hold my head higher, look him in the eyes, all that point-the-chin-in-defiance stuff. “I’ve had enough of the games. I want to get out in the field and go to work chasing down rogues.”

His gaze softened, the wrinkles spreading out. “Ariadne says you’re not ready.”

“That would matter to me if Ariadne was my training officer and worked with me every day.” I found I no longer needed to fake the defiance, the chin jutting. “I’m ready. Like it or not, me and the Junior League just took out two members of M-Squad. What do you think?”

He played it cool, too damned cool, not looking away but not registering a thing until he kicked his old, brown cowboy boot into the dusty ground. “We’ll find out soon enough if you’re ready. I must be getting old and senile to have taken down Kat first instead of you.”

“She’s easier to sneak up on.”

“Don’t get cocky.” His eyes found me again, his fingers stuck in the loops of his old jeans. “Fast way to get yourself killed, underestimating the people you’re fighting – or did you not learn from my example today?”

“I got it.” I cleared my throat. “I won’t underestimate anybody.”

“Bold statement to make. Hope you’re right about that. You need to trust your teammates though, watch their backs, because they’ll be the ones watching yours, not anyone else.” He got a sour look and turned away from me for a second. “Get on home, then. Looks like you got the rest of the day off; might want to take your liberty when you can get it. Not much time off around here, you know.”

“I know.” Believe me, I knew. It’d been six months since I had a day off. I walked back to the dormitory thinking about how different training to be an agent of the Directorate had been from what I thought it would be when I started. Looking back, I felt naive, like I was a kid when I began, wandering in because I had no idea what else I should do with myself. I had, after all, been cast out into the world after the ultimate sheltered life. Sort of.

It was only a couple weeks after first leaving my house (for the first time in over ten years) that I decided to enter the training program. I hadn’t even come close to living a normal teenage life when I decided to really leave normal behind and become what amounted to a paranormal cop. The Directorate paid me a lot of money to do this, all in hopes that someday I’d be a useful member of their policing force. And I was good, at least if we went by the training results. I put Scott to shame and made Kat look like a helpless little girl by comparison in every exercise they threw at us, from martial arts to weapons to chase and apprehension.

It was the “soft skills” that I lacked. Diplomacy, presenting a kind face and sympathetic ear to a metahuman who has just manifested their powers or to a human witness, freaked out by something they’ve seen that defies explanation. That was part of the job I was training for, being what they called a “Retriever” – trying to convince the newly powerful to come to the Directorate to get some purpose and direction in their abnormal lives. I sucked at that. Probably because it was foreign to me.

Maybe it was because I left home at a dead run with only the clothes on my back, being chased by two guys with guns and then, shortly thereafter, a crazed homicidal meta who nearly killed me. I guess after my own experience, it was hard for me to feel a ton of empathy for someone who gets a gentle knock on their door from someone without a gun who explains that they’re different, they’re special, and that there’s a place for them, then offers them a chance to join a training program to channel their powers. It’s a little different than my first real encounter with powers, which involved me being nearly choked to death in a grocery store parking lot after watching a maniac kill two innocent people.

I entered the dormitory building and felt the beautiful bliss of the air conditioner unit working overtime, sending a sweet chill across my body. The smell of the air was even different in the dormitory than it was outside, holding some kind of magical scent, like the processed and machined smell of the indoors, so much different than the overpowering, heated and wet atmosphere of the outside. By the time I got to my dorm room all the sweat on my body had congealed, evaporated or turned to a freezing layer of moisture.

I closed the door behind me and peeled off the layers of sticky clothes. I grabbed a bottle of water out of the mini fridge by the desk and drained it on the way to the bathroom. As I stepped under the shower head I reflected that this wasn’t so bad; the cool water washed down, rejuvenating me. I was in there for about thirty minutes, which was a short shower for me. When I stepped out I heard someone out in the room, and brushed open the door.

Zack was standing in front of the windows, looking out on the sun-beaten grounds. The sprinklers were going just outside, spraying the thirsty grass with water. I leaned against the bathroom door when I saw him, a smile spreading wide across my lips as I felt the wood of the frame through my bathrobe. “You’re watching sprinklers water the lawn instead of me in the shower?” My smile turned wicked as he spun to face me.

Zack was tall, at least six feet, which was a bit of a stretch for me. His hair was a darkish blond, and he usually wore a self-aware smile. He was impassive now, though, with a hint of hesitation. I didn’t like it when he wore that expression; it meant he had bad news. “I didn’t want to gawk.” I knew him pretty well by this point; he was my boyfriend, after all.

“You’ve got bad news?” I stepped out of the bathroom door, taking a couple steps closer to him, waiting for him to break it to me.

“I’d call it ‘disappointing’, not ‘bad’,” he said, crossing the distance between us and carefully placing his hands on my hips as he pulled me closer. He kissed me, but only for two seconds. After three, he’d stagger and get lightheaded. At five seconds, it’d start to burn. He broke away, but kept his hands where they were, avoiding any other flesh-to-flesh contact. The effect of my powers is cumulative, so if I kissed him again, it would start to drain him. “I have to cancel our date tonight.”

“Oh.” I tried not to show my disappointment, but it was definitely there. We had planned to go into Eden Prairie to eat at my favorite Greek restaurant, and after that see a movie. It was my favorite kind of date night.

“Kurt and I have to go to Michigan to track down a meta that’s causing a stir in Detroit.” He looked pained as he said it, his handsome face pinched with the regret of having to tell me. “Not sure when I’ll be back.”

“Hopefully soon?” He rested a hand on my shoulder and I wished I could pull him closer, kiss him again. And again. “Maybe tomorrow?”

He grimaced. “Maybe, but I doubt it. This one sounds complicated – a couple of assaults, a robbery. Might not be that quick.”

I rested my head on his shoulder for a second, smelling his cologne, then remembered my hair was wet and pulled away, my hand feeling the cloth of his black suit, where I’d left a damp spot. “I’m sorry.”

There was a twinkle in his eye as he laughed. “It’ll dry on the way to the airport, and if it doesn’t, I’ll probably be glad when Kurt and I have to haul our bags through the parking garage to the terminal. I don’t know if you noticed, but it’s kinda hot out there.”

I ran a hand through my hair, trying to untangle it. “I noticed. The most comfortable part of my training exercise was when I ended up having to drag Eve out of the creek.”

His brow lowered as he frowned. “Out of the creek? What happened?”

I felt my teeth click together and my jaw tighten. “I…um…kinda knocked her out of the air with a rock.”

“That must have been a helluva a rock.”

“It was a helluva throw, actually. The rock was just average.”

“It’s always a helluva throw if you’re doing it, Miss Meta.” He found his way back to a smile. “Why did you have to pull her out of the creek, though?”

I flinched at the memory of Eve, broken, lying on the rocky shore of the stream. “I kind of…broke her sternum…and ribs…and maybe fractured her skull a little.”

His right eyebrow crept up until it was an inch higher than the other. “A little? I’ve had a fractured skull before. It’s not a minor injury.”

“It was an accident. Things just got a little out of hand.” I took a deep breath.

He chewed his lip, opened his mouth and started to say something, then stopped. He blinked, then started again. “It wasn’t Wolfe?”

“Ugh.” I turned away from him, exhaling sharply. “Why does everyone keep asking me that? It’s not Wolfe, okay? He’s buried, safe and sound, way in the back. It was just me, slipping the leash a little, sick of training and thinking I was actually fighting someone. It’s kinda been a while since I felt a real threat and peril, you know.”

“Yeah, I know.” I felt his hand on my shoulder and it took everything I had not to put mine on top of his. Passing out on my floor wasn’t something that would make him very happy. “Not much longer and you’ll be done with training and into the real world.” I turned to look at him over my shoulder. “Then you’ll long for the good ol’ days of training.”

I hung my head. “I doubt it. I just wish things were easier sometimes.”

His eyes watched me. “With training?”

“Like…with everything. With training, with us…everything.”

“With us?” His hand dropped to his side and he cocked his head. “What’s wrong with us?”

“Let’s see…I’d like to be able to touch my boyfriend for more than two seconds without stealing his very soul.” I spat the words out like they were some kind of foul venom. He took a step back and I closed my eyes and took a breath. “I’m sorry. That’s my issue, not yours.”

He stared at me, almost a blank look, and I caught the subtle calm of his gaze. “No, it’s an issue for both of us.”

“Yeah, but it’s my fault.” The full meaning of his last sentence made its way through my warring emotions and I felt a sharp drop in my stomach. “What do you mean by that?”

He perked up, his mouth forming an oblong “o” as he recoiled slightly. “I…nothing.”

“It meant something.” I could feel the tension in my face. “It’s because we can’t—”

“No, I told you, that doesn’t matter—”

“It matters to you like it matters to every guy—”

“—there’s more to us than just—”

“ It matters! ” My shout ended his protest and he took another step back, as though he were afraid of me unleashing Wolfe on him. “It matters. I know it matters to you. I may have to wear heavy clothing but it doesn’t mean I can’t feel anything through them—”

“I was out of line.” He held up his hands. “We knew getting into this that it was going to be different, because you’re different. That’s not bad, it’s just…” His eyes went to the side as he searched for the word. “…really inconvenient at the end of the night.”

“Yeah. Well.” I looked at the floor. “You’re not the only one it’s inconvenient for.”

“I just meant that—”

“You think I don’t want to?” I was back on his eyes again and he grimaced, balled up a fist and looked away. “You think I don’t think about it all the time? You’re not the only one that feels the effects after a date. We can’t even sleep in the same bed without worrying that I’ll roll over and press my cheek against you in the middle of the night, making you another ghost in my head.”

“I didn’t come here to fight.” He was focused on me, his eyes earnest, face oddly blank. “I came to say goodbye. I have a plane to catch in an hour and a half.”

“Well, you better get moving, because the airport’s at least a half-hour away at this time of day.” I pulled my arms tighter against me and narrowed my eyes at him.

He started toward the door and I watched him go. He stopped and started to say something, his fingers and knuckles white as they held the edge. He made it through a half-spin and halted, and I heard him breathe deep as his head dipped down. Whatever he had on his mind didn’t come out, though, and after a minute he turned back and walked out the door, closing it much gentler than I would have expected.

My hand went to my forehead and covered my eyes from the light. I hoped he’d be all right on his trip, but I didn’t have the guts to call him and tell him that. I heard my smartphone beep – the one the Directorate had given me – and felt a thrill as I ran to where I’d left it on the desk next to the computer. I turned it on and swiped the screen to find I had a text message waiting. It appeared and I sighed – it wasn’t him. My eyes played across the words and my hand went back to my forehead, blotting out the light, as if that could make the world, all my troubles, and that damned text message go away.

I’m back in town. Come over so we can talk. - Charlie