Psionic book two the tow.., p.1
PSIONIC Book Two: The Tower (Adrian Howell's PSIONIC Pentalogy), page 1
Adrian Howell’s PSIONIC
Book Two
The Tower
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: The Terms of Service
Chapter 2: Problems with P-46
Chapter 3: A Question of Identity
Chapter 4: Combat Training
Chapter 5: The Greatest Gathering
Chapter 6: Opening Doors
Chapter 7: The Secret War
Chapter 8: Past, Present and Personal
Chapter 9: The Closet Monster
Chapter 10: A Fairytale Mission
Chapter 11: The Puppeteer
Chapter 12: Ups and Downs
Chapter 13: The Closet Monster Revealed
Chapter 14: The Shattered Room
Chapter 15: A Guardian’s Choice
Chapter 16: Fire and Water
Chapter 17: A Force to be Reckoned With
End Materials
Introduction
“A lot of things are going to change in your life.”
That’s what my father told me just hours before he and my mother were killed.
And everything changed.
My name is Adrian Howell, and before we go any further, I should warn you that the book you have in your hands is not the first I have written, but continues from where I left off in the last one. Telling that story once was enough for me, so I will not offer a detailed summary. I will include some remedial explanation here and there, but even so, if you have not read the first book, you may be somewhat lost in this one.
However, I am not going to suggest that you go back and read the first book. In fact, I’m not even going to suggest you continue reading this book. While I stand by my belief that knowing something, even something horrible, is always better than not knowing, I would never suggest that knowledge is bliss.
Mine is not a story of heroism or noble sacrifice. It is not a fantasy story or a fairytale. It is about what really happened to real people. It is about how they were hurt and how they died. It is about the things I wish had never happened, and about things that, every time I wake up in the dead of night, trying not to scream, I desperately wish I could forget.
So unless you can stomach the harsher realities of life, you may want to go find a different book. Something about pretty magical unicorns, perhaps.
No? Then take a deep breath, and keep reading...
Chapter 1: The Terms of Service
The white concrete high-rise faced west, so June’s early morning sunlight didn’t shine down into the entrance ramp of the building’s basement parking lot. The inside of the basement was illuminated by neat rows of florescent tubes hanging from the ceiling. Through the windows of the psychedelically patterned bright yellow minibus I had arrived on, I could see that most of the parking spaces were empty.
Getting out of my seat and stretching my legs in the aisle, I looked down at the pale-skinned girl curled up on one of the cushioned seats. She was fast asleep with her long walnut-brown hair hiding most of her face, her arms wrapped firmly around a giant fluffy white unicorn doll. I didn’t know the unicorn’s name, but the girl was Alia Gifford. She was supposedly eight years old, could speak telepathically into my mind, and was one of the few reasons, aside from sheer dumb luck, that I was still alive.
“Ali, wake up,” I said, shaking her shoulders. “We’re here.”
Alia opened her eyes just a little and said groggily into my head, “Addy? Where’s Cindy?”
“She’s helping unload the bus. Come on, get up.”
We had been on the road for a day and a night. Alia and I had slept through much of the previous morning, but in the afternoon I had managed to fill Cindy in on how we had spent the last four months trapped underground at the Psionic Research Center.
Our minibus had made a brief stop at a mall to buy food and clothes that day, but Alia and I had to stay in the bus along with the other two escapees as the Guardians did our shopping. Our research-center-issue white shirts and pants were just a little too conspicuous to be seen outside in. Alia’s shirt had bloodstains down the front, and Cindy hadn’t brought anything for us to change into. I learned that she and Mark had lost everything the night Alia and I were captured by the Wolves.
Everything.
By the time I had told the Wolf interrogator Mark’s home address, Cindy and Mark were long gone, headed for the Guardians to beg for their help in rescuing us.
Although the agreement Cynthia Gifford had made with the Guardian leader, Mr. Travis Baker, was that she would rejoin the Guardians only if both Alia and I could be successfully rescued from the Psionic Research Center, Cindy had been living with the Guardians as a de facto member for nearly four months now.
“The Guardians are very different from how I remember them,” Cindy told me yesterday while we were waiting in the mall’s parking lot for Mr. Baker and his team to do our shopping.
Many years ago, when Cindy had been a Guardian herself, they were apparently much more militaristic in nature. Back then, the Guardians had a queen. She was a master controller named Diana Granados, and she could turn even her worst enemies into utterly faithful followers. Mind-slaves. Master controllers, being the only psionics who had long-term influence over their subjects’ loyalties, were always the center of large psionic factions like the Guardians.
This all happened before I was born, but Queen Diana Granados had become increasingly aggressive in her tactics, driving the Guardians into an escalating conflict with their biggest rival faction, the Angels. To stave off a full blown war, Cindy’s husband, Eric, had taken matters into his own hands and assassinated the queen. (Both Cindy and Eric had, at one time, been converted by Diana, but conversion can wear off over the years, and both had been trusted enough by the queen not to receive another dose of her psionic control.) Eric was hunted down and killed for his treachery. Cindy fled the Guardians and went into hiding.
With Diana Granados’s death, the effects of her psionic conversions soon wore away. The Guardians became disorganized, breaking up into many smaller (and consequently weaker) factions, each with their own leaders. The Angels, remaining far more unified under their own master controller, Queen Larissa Divine, were pressing their advantage.
“Nevertheless, we are better off now,” Mr. Baker had told me over dinner in the minibus last night. “Admittedly, it’s not easy leading without psionic control, but it is fairer. We may be losing ground to the Angels, but the Guardians who fight for us today do so by choice. And now that Cindy is with us, we may yet have a chance to even the balance some.”
The Guardians under Mr. Baker had risked a lot to rescue Alia and me. If the prize had not been so great, they may never have attempted it. But earning the loyalty of Cynthia Gifford, according to Mr. Baker, was a huge step forward in the rebuilding of the Guardian faction. Cindy was a psionic hider, which meant she could create a “hiding bubble” that concealed signs of power from other psionics. Hiding was not a particularly rare psionic ability, but Cindy was unique in that, while most hiders could only hide their own power or, at best, cover a single house, Cindy could hide several city blocks. Once inside her hiding bubble, psionics could not be located by potential aggressors.
“Now that you and Alia are safe and sound,” Mr. Baker had said to me, “Cindy will help us have such a gathering as never before seen in psionic history.”
Even in large psionic factions like the Angels and the Guardians, the members typically lived in small groups scattered across the country. Rarely did very many psionics live in a single location. This was mainly to better conceal the existence of psionics in an increasingly technologically complex world. But it was also to keep a net cast across the country that could quickly respond to a variety of threats, including emerging “wild-borns.”
A wild-born is a psionic who has no psionic relatives. Though only about as common as being hit by lightening, any normal person could gain psionic powers at any time. This was because while psionic powers did run in families, there were many unknown dormant psionic bloodlines that might suddenly become active through the right combination of parents. And whenever a wild-born was discovered, there was a mad rush between competing psionic factions to capture him and force him to join their ranks.
I had been a wild-born psionic, gaining my telekinetic power over the summer of last year. When I did, the Angels sent a mind controller who could cause uncontrollable rage, called a berserker, to capture and deliver me to their queen. The berserker died at the hands of a Guardian soldier named Ralph P. Henderson, but Ralph had also come to kidnap me. I fled, and for a time found sanctuary in Cindy’s home, hoping to stay clear of psionic factions and their conflict. As it turned out, it made little difference: my parents were still killed by the berserker while my sister, Cat, was enslaved by the Angels, and, upon my rescue from the Psionic Research Center just twenty-four hours ago, I ended up agreeing to join the Guardians.
Back when Queen Granados was still in charge, the Guardians had matched the Angels in strength. But now the various Guardian breakaway factions were being destroyed hamlet by hamlet. Mr. Baker’s plan was to create a Guardian city entirely covered by Cindy’s hiding bubble.
“Gathering our forces in one location would weaken us in the outer territories, but overall we would be better protected and, with any luck, we may yet find a way to carry on,” explain
I liked Mr. Baker. Up until then, my only direct experience with the Guardians was with Ralph. (I never really saw Cindy as a Guardian.) I liked Ralph as much as a good kick in the head. True enough, Ralph had saved me from the berserker, and later led the attack that rescued Alia and me from the Psionic Research Center. But he had also tried to kill me twice. He knowingly let my sister be taken by the Angels. He was a ruthless killer who had (for reasons I didn’t understand) once tried to goad me into murdering him. When he saved my life, he certainly didn’t do it out of the goodness of his pathetic excuse for a heart. I had assumed that all of the Guardians were like Ralph, and when, back in January, Cindy told me of her own experiences as a Guardian under Diana Granados’s rule, her story had solidified my image of the faction as a power-hungry gang of slave drivers.
But meeting Mr. Baker and others who risked their lives to rescue us, as well as hearing from Cindy how the Guardians had changed, softened my image of them enough that I found myself willing to join them. Ralph ignored Alia and me throughout the entire bus ride, which suited me just fine.
“This,” announced Mr. Baker as the minibus finally came to a full stop in the basement parking lot of the large concrete condominium, “is New Haven, the psionic stronghold we are about to create.”
The building was forty stories high, relatively new, and situated near the edge of a medium-size city from where we could see a distant mountain range in the eastern horizon.
“This is where we’re going to live?” I asked, looking around at the parking lot and wondering if there was some secret entrance to a hidden underground residential area. I knew that psionic gatherings were usually held underground, and when Mr. Baker used the word “stronghold,” I assumed that I was about to spend a lot more time out of the sun. For someone who had spent the entire spring locked up in an underground research facility, it wasn’t at all an encouraging thought.
“Well, not in the parking lot,” said Mr. Baker as I pulled Alia, still half-asleep, to her feet. “You two will live with Cindy in the penthouse.”
I nearly dropped Alia in surprise. “The penthouse?!”
“Of course,” said Mr. Baker. “Cindy is our beacon of hope. And it should be easier for her to cast her hiding bubble from the top of the building.”
A few seconds passed before I realized that my mouth was hanging open.
Mr. Baker laughed and said, “My place is one floor below. And while you were sleeping, I had a chat with Malcolm and Janice, who have both agreed to join us, so they will live here too. And within a few days, we will be joined by a large number of breakaway Guardian groups. We are about to reform our alliance under one flag.”
“How many are coming?” I asked.
“More than this building can house, I assure you,” replied Mr. Baker. “But not to worry, we own the ones around us too.”
“You own this whole building?”
“We own several whole buildings,” said Mr. Baker, grinning. “Welcome to Psionic Land.”
I smiled too. For the first time in months, life was looking up.
I helped Alia carry her big unicorn to the elevator. Alia didn’t know it, but this unicorn wasn’t the same one she had back at Cindy’s old house. Knowing Alia’s love for the horned beasts, Cindy had bought an identical one for her just before our rescue. I didn’t have any baggage of my own – just the clothes on my back and Cat’s amethyst on a leather cord around my neck.
As the elevator came to a stop on the fortieth floor and the doors opened, we found Cindy waiting right outside.
“Finally awake, huh, sleepyhead?” Cindy said to Alia as we stepped out of the elevator car.
Looking around, I found myself in a small rectangular space with two other exits. One led to a stairway opposite the elevator, and the other was the front door to the penthouse.
Cindy unlocked the penthouse door for us and said, “You two go on inside. I want to have a quick chat with Mr. Baker.”
Cindy got into the elevator, but as the elevator doors began to slide shut, Alia jumped back in with her. Alone, I opened the door to our new home and stepped inside.
“Wow,” I whispered softly to myself as I looked around the spacious and lavishly furnished living room. There were three couches around a low oval coffee table, a few potted plants and a monstrous wall-mounted TV. After dropping Alia’s unicorn off on the living-room floor, I walked through the penthouse, opening doors and closets, exploring every nook and cranny.
The couch-infested living room was just the tip of the iceberg. There were three large bedrooms, and one of them appeared to have been furnished with Alia in mind. There was a child-size bed, lacy pink curtains, and an assortment of girls’ toys and stuffed animal dolls. Nearly a third of the dolls were unicorns (though none as big or fluffy as Alia’s main one) and there was even a giant unicorn poster on the wall above the bed. I smiled to myself. This was unquestionably Alia’s room. I wondered who had taken the time to prepare all of this before we had even been rescued.
The kitchen was ultra-modern, complete with a high-tech electric stove and fully automated dishwasher. The dining room was similar to the one at Cindy’s old house, with a heavy oak table and somewhat antiquated chairs.
And then I stepped into a room that made me blink twice before I believed my eyes. There was a pool table in the middle, and a row of cue sticks rested on a rack against one wall. I didn’t touch them, knowing nothing about playing pool, but there was also a dartboard hanging on another wall. Picking up the darts, I telekinetically threw a few bull’s-eyes. The darts were a bit hard to levitate since they had metal tips, but still well within my power.
Further exploration brought me to a mini-library, which was a room nearly as large as the living room, but lined with tall shelves containing everything from mystery novels to reference books on mechanical engineering.
There was another door at the far end of the library, and stepping through it, I found myself standing in a terrace greenhouse. Protected from the windy outdoors by giant glass panels, most of the flowers here were in full bloom. There was a white marble table set in the center of the garden, and though I wasn’t one to really appreciate the beauty of flowers, I decided that this wouldn’t be a bad place to sit and relax from time to time.
I stepped closer to the glass. The morning light shone brightly through the large windowpanes, and through them I could see much of the city below. A wide, slow-moving river flowed through the edge of the city and curved around the area Mr. Baker had dubbed New Haven, and I could see boats and barges of all sizes chugging along it. Looking toward the horizon, I gazed at the long and jagged mountain range, the peaks of which would probably be snowcapped during the winter.
Going back through the library, I took a peek in the bathroom and found something that Alia, who couldn’t swim but nevertheless loved water, would go nuts over. It was a humongous Jacuzzi bathtub, almost large enough for Alia to practice dog paddling in.
Returning to the living room, I plopped myself down onto one of the couches and looked up at the fancy wooden ceiling fan.
Yes, I thought to myself contentedly, things are definitely looking up.
The front door opened, and Cindy and Alia stepped into the living room. I stood up from the couch.
Cindy was holding a brown paper bag, but before I could even wonder what was in it, Alia jumped into my arms as Cindy asked me, “Finished exploring your new home?”
“This place is amazing!” I said, giving Alia a quick hug before setting her back down onto the floor. “I didn’t know you played pool, Cindy.”
“I don’t,” Cindy replied with a smile. “That room and the library were left that way by the previous owner. Maybe someday we can learn together.”
“That’d be great,” I said. Then I pointed to the wall-mounted television, asking, “What’s with the TV? You didn’t have one at your old house. You said things like that interfered with your hiding bubble.”
Cindy laughed. “That was left there too. You know I don’t watch television. But it’s built into the wall, and to be honest, one TV hardly makes a difference in a concrete building surrounded by other concrete buildings.”
