Fourth Birth: The Oakmont Saga, Book 1

“We need a team in Montana to start work on 32145. Prepare for 32023 as well. Looking at these scans, I think we’ll retain 32145 for now. That subject is the stronger and more interesting one. 32023 may be redundant. We’ll use the old techniques to see if we can elicit any psi-talent response from the subject. Those methods worked exceptionally well in the past. Depending on the response, we’ll expand to 32023 later,” a voice said.

“Yes, sir,” another voice replied.

“Sir, shall we send an advance team to prepare the facility?” yet another voice asked.

“Yes that would be prudent,” the first voice replied. “We will plan for detailed analysis of 32023 shortly after we begin with 32145. The initial work on 32145 will begin as soon as we arrive. Let us know when the facility is ready. We cannot begin until then. Remember, 32145 is our primary objective and must be kept functional. Although it would be nice to retain 32023 for a time, I would prefer fast results, so use whatever means are needed,” the first voice continued.

“Yes, sir,” the third voice answered.

I woke up, shaking and soaked in sweat. I got out of bed, grabbed my stuff and headed to the shower, shaking so bad I could barely hold my clothes. I spent most of my time sitting on the floor, trying to understand what the vision or dream meant. My mind didn’t make any sense of it by the time I needed to get going for the day, but I knew it was bad.

By that evening, I’d put the dream in the back of my mind. Aliyah and I trained, as we did every evening, with me also training during my long lunch break. No one had ever said anything to me about not going to Physics anymore, which was really weird. I wasn’t going to question it though, since I didn’t want to be there anyway.

It was late November, and Aliyah and I had both had a rougher day than usual. We were both frustrated and out of sorts. Kind of odd that we were both this way at the same time. We were beginning to have the same moods all the time. I wondered if it was because we linked our minds so much.

She had been making sarcastic comments to me all day, and I was at the breaking point. I had to admit, I’d been doing the same to her, but she was better at it than I was. One more snide comment, or mental jab would push me over the edge. I hoped we could make it through this without really hurting each other.

That evening during our practice, while I was trying to get her to figure out the fire ability, she threw her hands up. “I can’t do this!”

“You’re not even trying,” I said to her, knowing it sounded mean.

“I’m sorry I’m not perfect like you!” she yelled, sticking her tongue out, but not in a playful way.

Aside from her comment bringing back memories of James, I knew I wasn’t perfect and didn’t like people saying I was. “At least I try. You’re happy being mediocre because you’re scared of doing something good and being noticed,” I threw back at her.

“Me being scared of being noticed? Who is it that can’t admit that she’s pretty or smart or anything?” she asked. Her comment was actually funny to me since it was a compliment and she was supposed to be insulting me, and I couldn’t help but laugh a little.

That was apparently all it took for her as she threw her arm at me trying to shove me. I was too slow to block her, but I wished I hadn’t been.

Not quite sure what happened, there was a purple flash when her hand should have hit me and she was lying on her butt on the floor. Sitting on the floor, looking at me oddly, she was rubbing her hand.

“What did you do?” she asked, sounding curious rather than mad.

“I must have pushed you back before you hit me,” I replied, not knowing what else could have happened. The look on her face was doubtful, but she didn’t say anything.

She got up, still rubbing her hand. “Stand in the middle of the tunnel,” she commanded. I started to say no, in a not nice way, but she stopped me with a raised hand. “I want to try something. Trust me,” she said. Even though we were both irritated with each other, I trusted her completely, so I obeyed her command.

“Turn around so you can’t see me,” she instructed, as I placed myself where she had asked. Again, following her command, I turned around, although I was curious.

Standing there, I heard what sounded like a wood block fall on the floor and then another. A moment later, I heard something harder hit the floor. There were a lot of sounds of her rummaging around followed by more sounds of stuff falling to the floor. Some of it sounded like heavy chunks of metal, and all of it was close to me.

Finally, with my curiosity getting the better of me, I turned around and saw all kinds of junk on the floor just behind me. There was a collection of different size wood blocks, some bricks and several pieces of metal. She was still standing with a brick in her hand, looking like she was about to heave it at me.

“Are you going to build a cage around me to lock me up? I’d understand if you are,” I said. As I said that she got an odd quirk to her eyebrows and mouth. It was an odd look on her that I wasn’t familiar with.

Without warning, she chucked the brick at me with all of her strength. I knew I was going to get hurt from it, even if I managed to block it. I got my hand up just as it got to me, but there was a purple flash and the brick fell a couple feet away, like it bounced off of me. I didn’t feel anything, other than a tiny bit of pressure where it should have hit my hand.

I just stood there looking at her and then at the brick and then back at her. “Yeah, that’s kind of what I thought too. At first, I lightly tossed a small piece of wood, in case I was wrong. I got bigger and heavier pieces for every throw after that though, to make sure I wasn’t imagining it or was somehow wrong.”

The thought of another skill that I needed to hide overwhelmed me, along with the fact I’d need to learn to control it. I dropped to my knees right there. “So, now I have some kind of force field,” I exclaimed, not happy with this new development.

“Mel, what’s wrong?” she asked, running over to me.

“They’re going to do everything they can to never let me leave. I’ll be lucky if I don’t end up in a cage or something. ,” I told her. “They’re coming soon,” I whispered, after a moment longer.

She moved away slightly, and looked at me. Even though I was looking down, I could feel her gaze on me. “How do you know that and who’s coming?”

“I have visions sometimes and I’ve seen them saying it. I’m not sure who they are, but I know it’s real.”

“How long do we have?” she asked, not doubting me. I would have.

“I don’t know. They never said, but it’s as soon as they get this place ready for whatever it is they want to do to me, to us.”

“Well, you have another skill to practice so we can get out of here,” she stated, with a smile on her face. I wasn’t feeling her enthusiasm, but her optimism was very nice. Our earlier irritation, or whatever it was, had been completely forgotten.

We continued training, adding another skill to my practice sessions. Within a couple of weeks of discovering the force field, I’d started creating little balls of it in my hands and moving them around. My practicing this didn’t come without cost though. I left many of our sessions with a bad headache and Aliyah having to clean blood off of me.

What really surprised both of us was Aliyah’s ability with the force field compared to mine. I could manipulate small balls of it, and protect myself, but Aliyah could make a wall with it and make large areas of it in other places. Her skill with it was absolutely amazing. Of course, she also left many of our sessions with headaches, but she didn’t bleed like I did.

It was the third week after the discovery of the force field, mid-December. During my trips to the old lab, I’d been seeing people carrying large boxes through the corridors of the old section of the building. They were preparing and I knew it. How much longer did we have?

During the training session after seeing a particularly large crate being moved through, I recalled something I read in the journal about dodging probes, or connectors as they called them. It was something I had already thought about, but wasn’t even sure if it was possible. It might be very useful for both of us, should we come under attack from other telepaths, if we could even attack with it other than sending images.

Thinking on this all day, I went to our training still thinking about it. “Aliyah, do you know anything about dodging probes, or making them miss you?”

“Nope. Is it like what you did with me when you first got here?”

I had forgotten about that, but I’d bet it was similar. “Might be, but I didn’t know I was doing that. I want to do it deliberately and I want you to do it also.”

“You try first.” Even though she was more of a leader than I was, she always wanted me to try stuff first. Maybe that was her delegating. Let me, the grunt, figure it out first and then show her.

That wasn’t fair of me and I knew it. She thought I was better at this than her, which was wrong, but that’s why she wanted me to try stuff first.

I stood in the middle of the corridor, having completed my warmup exercises. I had no idea what I was doing, and really no plan to try and make it happen, other than a vague idea. “Send a probe at me,” I said. She did and it entered me without any problem.

We tried a bunch more times with no changes and I was frustrated. I decided to try one last time. “Alright, I’m going to try something different,” I told her, an idea coming to me that I thought might work.

I closed my eyes and focused my mind. My idea was to mentally sidestep the probe, kind of shifting to the side of it. I nodded that I was ready and I saw her probe coming in my mind, my eyes closed as we did this.

With a slight surge of energy, I made my mental shift. It was as if everything suddenly went sideways for me. There was some kind of odd lurch inside my gut and I couldn’t tell what was up anymore. I fell to the floor, landing really hard, my head bouncing on the concrete.

“Are you alright!?” she asked, coming to my side very quickly. I was unable to even speak. I had no muscle control and there was an incredible pain in my head, and not the one from hitting my head. It was like the attacks from before, which I didn’t have anymore, but this was a lot like them.

Aliyah looked like she was about to go get help, but I finally managed to start getting use of my body again. “I’ll be alright in a minute,” I finally managed to tell her, with some effort, my words coming very slowly.

“That was weird,” she said, apparently sensing that I’d be alright. Sitting up finally, I looked at her.

“What was weird?” I asked, kind of moaning.

“You moved without moving.”

I was completely confused. “Huh?”

“You were standing here, I sent the probe and then you were standing there,” she said, pointing to a spot several inches away from the first spot. What she was describing simply wasn’t possible. That really was science fiction, as if the rest of what we could do wasn’t.

“Aliyah, that’s not possible,” I told her, trying to convince myself as much as her.

“Whatever. I know what I saw.”

“It doesn’t matter. I’m not doing that again.”

“You have to.”

“It hurt…,” I began, unable to stop the tears that formed in my eyes at the thought of doing it again. “Too much,” I finished after a moment, still in a lot of pain.

“You have to use everything you can to get out of here, no matter how much it hurts.” I knew she was right, but the thought of suffering that every time I practiced brought more tears. It was going to hurt, and it was going to hurt a lot.

So that began the latest addition to my weird and extraordinary skills. We continued practicing, each day getting a little stronger and a little better at what we could do. She was completely unable to light fires, but she was able to start creating the force field in amazingly powerful walls and arcs. The teleportation was a complete nightmare for me.

I’d learned quickly that I could only do it once per session and it had to be the last thing I did. It hurt way too much and took all of my energy. She tried it and I was afraid she was going to bleed to death from the blood that came out of her nose. She didn’t seem to have as much pain as I did, though. She also moved only a tiny bit, not even an inch. At first, I wasn’t even sure she’d actually done it.

Every day I practiced it, and every day I left the practice with a horrible headache and sometimes more than a little bleeding. A couple weeks after discovering the teleporting skill, I decided to push a little and tried to see just how far I could move. I’d been averaging about a foot lately, but I was really curious and I suppose a little too sure of myself, which was unusual for me.

Thinking about how I made the fire happen, I reached out to the pool of energy, and let it infuse me. Once I thought I had the energy I needed, hoping I did, I looked at a spot a long way away, and released the energy. The world turned upside down, worse than it had in the past. I made it to the spot, and collapsed immediately, unable to move. I laid there, pain totally consuming me from head to toe, a lot like the worst of my seizures I used to have, maybe worse. It radiated in incredibly strong pulses, seeming to be in sync with my heartbeat.

I wasn’t sure how long I laid on the floor like that, but finally I managed to start moving and picked myself up. It was a very slow process and it hurt too much to move with any speed. Reaching up, I touched under my nose and saw a lot of blood on my hand, probably more than I had ever bled before. With a lot of pain and fumbling, I got back to my room and cleaned the blood off. It had run down my neck and into my shirt. There was a lot of it this time, too, more than I originally thought, and I got scared. I had never even measured how far I’d gone.

A couple days later during our evening practice, Aliyah stopped in the middle of concentrating, and her eyes popped open, looking at a particular spot where there was a lot of machinery. “Someone’s here.”

We looked around, but couldn’t find anyone anywhere. After about 15 minutes of searching, we gave up and returned to our work, but she was nervous the entire time so we finally stopped early, deciding to go to the game room. We needed a little breather anyway, considering how hard we’d been working.

We both tried to teleport before we did, though. I managed a little more than a foot this time, almost without any pain. Aliyah had increased her range to about six inches. Neither of us would be able to use this to escape, but it was getting easier and better with practice. Maybe in five years, we’d be able to teleport to the other side of a room.

While we were doing all of this training, I returned to my normal classes, including martial arts. Although Mr. Braun didn’t single me out anymore, he looked really weird at me sometimes. He pushed me, but in a different way than he did the other kids, even complimenting my defensive postures and helping me improve them.

Unfortunately, I was getting harder and meaner as a result of his class, in spite of his reduced toughness with me. He was still teaching me to be cruel and bloodthirsty, and I really didn’t like it, even if he was doing it in a different way.

“Rebecca, I think I need to give you an update on Melanie,” Stone said, as he sat on her couch. She remained silent, waiting for him to continue.

“As you know, Melanie goes to the old Hammond lab during lunch. At least she was. She still does, but not every day and not the entire time when she does. She’s spending a great deal of time in the basement, in the afternoon and evening. The only thing that interferes with her training is ballet.”

She started to ask what she was doing down there, but she knew that was why he was there, so she waited. “The first few times she started doing this, I became worried. I was hearing the rumors the kids started spreading about her and I worried there might be some truth to them. Of course, we already had an idea of what she was doing,” he said, pausing for a moment.

“Anyway, I had decided to try and verify what she was doing down there before our last meeting. But just when I decided to watch her lunch forays, she changed things on me. That’s when Aliyah began going with her in the evening. She started splitting her afternoon session between the lab and the basement, like I already mentioned. Being that Aliyah only joins her in the evening, I decided to see what she was doing during lunch, but wanted to make sure her schedule was set before I did. Spying on a telepath is risky, spying on two is absolutely foolhardy,” he said, pausing for a breath.

“The first week or so, there was nothing obvious. She did what appeared to be warm up exercises for telepathy. I’ve seen the kids do those, so I’m familiar with them. She’s very meticulous with them, and I think she’s even improved on them. As time went on, I noticed something that seemed odd. She always brought out a metal waste basket and stared into it. The first few times, I didn’t notice anything odd about it, other than staring into a wastebasket in itself is a little odd, but after a couple of weeks she started lighting fires in it. Okay, so she was cold and wanted to get warm, but something didn’t seem right, so I continued to watch. The fires were getting larger and hotter the longer this went on. I never once saw her use a lighter or any matches,” he said, making her look at him, her eyes narrowed.

“Are you trying to imply that she’s starting fires with her mind?”

“I’m not implying it. I saw it, but that’s not the most interesting thing I’ve witnessed. In late November, she started making these little purple spheres. She played with them in her hand like she was juggling them. They were only visible to me when they touched something, and they’d have this odd purple glow before they became invisible again. She would make them and throw stuff at them. Everything that hit them bounced off, flashing purple for a moment.”

She was stunned speechless by what he was telling her. She wasn’t sure she could even believe him, except for the fact that he was such a stoic and practical person.

“Now for the final revelation,” he started.

“You mean there’s something bigger than that?”

“Maybe,” he said, obviously not sure.

“Toward the beginning of December, I was watching Melanie during her afternoon training session, and I no longer have any doubt that’s what she’s doing. She stood in the middle of the corridor and closed her eyes, concentrating. Suddenly, she was in another spot. As soon as she appeared in the new spot, she collapsed,” he said, and she thought it was really interesting the way he looked when he was remembering like that.

“Rebecca, I have to admit, I almost came out of my hide to check on her, because she laid on the floor way too long. Just as I was about to come out, she started moving. She moved very slowly and looked to be in a great deal of pain, like when she had all of those attacks. I could even see the pain in her eyes and I was probably about fifteen feet away. There was a lot of blood coming out of her eyes and nose. I imagine her ears too, but I couldn’t see them. It was so much that it soaked the top of her shirt.”

“Stone, you’ve described skills that are too incredible to believe.”

“I know, which is why I watched her for a long time before I came to tell you. During all of this, I decided to try and watch both of them at least once. That was nearly a disaster. Aliyah can sense people near her. She doesn’t seem very good at it, but she can do it. She can teleport and create the force field as well, although she doesn’t appear to be as good as Melanie. They’ve been practicing shields too,” he informed her.

“Dear God,” she said.

After a long pause, looking at some distant place on the floor, she looked back at him. “They’re training to escape, just like you said. There’s no other explanation.”

“I have to agree with you. With the abilities those two girls have demonstrated, I’m not sure we can stop them, unless we do it now. And even now, I’m not sure we’ll succeed, if they decide to fight, at least not if they get much stronger.”

“The skill that concerns me the most is Melanie’s fire ability. Although it doesn’t seem that strong yet, I can see it strengthening, and I believe she’s holding back. I think she’s scared of it,” he said, a look of grave concern on his face.

“Why does it concern you so much?”

“It can be a weapon,” he stated, rather somberly.

“If she can manipulate the force fields, that could be a weapon as well,” she told him.

“I hadn’t thought about that, but you’re right and she can clearly manipulate them,” he agreed. “Here’s something to consider, though. If she gets the teleportation honed, we won’t be able to contain her and she’s teaching Aliyah how to do it.”

“Yeah, they’re becoming quite the pair,” she said, almost groaning.

“There’s one bright spot. Melanie is definitely looking better. She has a long road to really heal, but there’s very noticeable improvement,” he told her, actually smiling.

“At least, there’s that.” However, she didn’t want to let her go, even though she was beginning to believe that might actually be what was needed.