Battlecry Read online

  He was right; my head throbbed, causing the persistent buzzing in my ears to ebb and flow in a way that was impossible to ignore. Sitting on the bench wasn’t so bad, but walking around was becoming increasingly difficult.

  I sat on the stone ledge of a fountain and patted the spot next to me. “You’re not wrong,” I admitted. “My head hurts pretty badly, so let’s just enjoy the beautiful day. No more talk about unpleasant things, okay?”

  His eyes tightened for a moment, but he said nothing more. I pointed to a family picnicking under a shady tree. “I’ve seen families do that before but I don’t understand the appeal. What’s so special about eating on the ground?”

  Benjamin studied them. “I suppose eating like that seems novel if you’re used to eating at a table. Did your family never picnic when you were a kid?”

  I flushed, aware that I’d revealed something about myself that I hadn’t intended. “No, we didn’t picnic.”

  Benjamin looked thoughtful. “No picnics, no ice cream. Gotta say, your childhood doesn’t sound like a lot of fun.”

  “Tell me about yours. Eleanor seems nice. Is she visiting for a while?”

  He laughed, though with a derisive edge. “A least a couple of weeks. She’s here because she dumped her idiot boyfriend, Dean, and decided to put some distance between them.” He rolled his eyes. “She’s got two graduate degrees and joined MENSA for fun. He had to repeat eleventh grade and works on a lube rack. Her dating him was an act of charity.” He bit off another chunk of ice cream. “You know what she told me? Get this: on one of their dates she asked him how he felt about euthanasia. He said he didn’t have any particular opinions on Chinese kids.” Benjamin shook his head. “Like I said, he’s an idiot.”

  Men-suh? Yooth-in-asia? I’d never heard the words, but I understood that Benjamin expected the average person to know what they meant, and that he valued intelligence. That right there would pose a problem for me, since I was dumber than a sack of rocks.

  I hurried the conversation along. “I think you mentioned having a brother?”

  “Yeah, an older brother, Beau. I don’t know what to tell you about him except that he addressed me as ‘buttface’ for two years straight when we were kids.”

  I almost choked on my ice cream. “My sister, Allison, cut off my hair when I was sleeping once,” I said when I’d recovered. “And I’m not even sure where to begin with my brothers and their rivalry. Gregory and Mason tried their best to kill each other over the years.”

  Privately I remained thankful that my brothers’ powers, respectively superhuman eyesight and the ability to talk to ants, were so useless in combat.

  While we talked, the sun came out from behind a cloud, causing Benjamin’s hair to shimmer brilliantly. I was struck by his handsome features, which were so different from what I grew up seeing at Chattahoochee camp. His face lacked the underfed, scarred combination with which I was so familiar, instead radiating robust health and wellness.

  I wondered if he thought I was attractive, but immediately disregarded the thought. Bruises and mismatched secondhand clothes attracted nobody.

  “Maybe I can meet your siblings someday,” Benjamin said, his tone hopeful. “Or you can come over to my house. My siblings can usually manage some courtesy if I bring a friend home. Well, just Eleanor. I’ll tell Beau to buzz off. And my parents are so thrilled that I pulled my nose out of my books long enough to meet a girl, they probably wouldn’t mind if you robbed us on the way out.”

  “I’d like that,” I said slowly. “Meeting your parents, I mean. Not robbing y’all. Maybe one day we can arrange something.”

  “How about this Friday? There’s a great magic show in town right now. I’ll take you out to dinner and a show, and then bring you home to meet my parents. Would that be okay?”

  I blinked. Courtship. He was trying to initiate courtship with me. I couldn’t deny it anymore. It was one thing to sit in a café for a few hours and drink coffee and eat pastries, but it was another thing altogether to court me. All the men in my life had made it perfectly clear that I would never be anybody’s first choice for courtship, what with my rebellious temperament.

  Benjamin must have mistaken my shock for displeasure, because he backpedaled rapidly. “Or, we can hang out at the park or Café Stella. Or not, if you don’t want to. I-I’ve just really enjoyed our time together and I’d like to get to know you more. But if you don’t want to hang out, we don’t have to. I can leave right now. ” Spots of pink appeared in his cheeks, which I found endlessly endearing.

  “I didn’t say no,” I reminded him when I’d recovered my ability to speak. “I was just surprised. Nobody’s ever seriously courted me before.”

  He cocked his head to the side. “I’m starting to think your family is pretty old-fashioned. I’ve never heard anyone refer to dating as ‘courting’ before.”

  “We’re…we’re different.”

  Benjamin got up to throw away our trash, leaving me alone for a few seconds. Several yards away, under the shade of a tall oak tree, half a dozen elderly couples had arranged themselves in front of a young woman in exercise clothing. She leaned down and plugged her mp3 player into a small radio, then scrolled on the screen until she found the song she was looking for. Sweet, peppy music filled the air, and then a man’s crooning voice began to sing. I wasn’t sure, but I thought the song might’ve been an old one.

  The couples began to dance, their feet shuffling in a slow, practiced rhythm. I watched them, charmed.

  “The retirees’ class would listen to Frank Sinatra,” Benjamin said when he returned, smiling and shaking his head.

  “Is it a dance class? I love dancing.”

  It was true; dancing was a longtime pastime of mine, though I had few chances to dance in Saint Catherine. Back home my friends and I would join hands around campfires—dutifully lit by Marco—and sing songs about heroism, our feet moving in time with the beat. I even knew a few couples dances.

  “You do? I wish I could say the same. I can’t dance to save my life. I was abandoned by my date at senior prom for an hour because I embarrassed her on the dance floor.”

  “People who say that are usually thinking about it too much.” I stood up and held out my hands. “Let me show you.” Headache be damned.

  He paused, then let me pull him off the bench. “I’m telling you, you’re wasting your time.” He was smiling, though, so I put my hand in his and nudged his other hand down to my waist, eliciting a luscious tingling all over my body.

  I gazed into his eyes. “Don’t think about your feet. Just feel the music and let it move you.”

  “Did you get that from a headphones commercial?”

  “What? No. I don’t watch television.”

  “You’re a bigger nerd than I am.”

  We were moving in time with the music, swaying back and forth a little. I pulled him closer, our faces inches apart.

  “And you’re a better dancer than you think,” I said quietly. “Your prom date was stupid. I wish I’d been there to dance with you.”

  On top of the thrill from Benjamin’s hand on my body was the thrill of actually knowing what a prom was; Ember received two invitations to proms the month previous, so we’d looked up the word in Patrick’s dictionary. I imagined Benjamin in a sharp black suit, whirling around a room with a dark-haired girl in a glittery blue dress, having the time of his life.

  “I wish you’d been there, too. I would’ve been dancing with the prettiest girl in the room.”

  I stopped dancing. I was pretty to him?

  The sun came out from behind another cloud, causing my headache to announce itself with a pain so breathtaking I broke away from Benjamin and stumbled back to the ledge, all thoughts of proms and fun forgotten.

  “It’s my head,” I gasped.

  Benjamin kneeled down beside me and raised his hand to my head, but pulled it away with a pained expression. “Did you get hurt at work again? Was it your boss?”

  At that mo
ment, my phone beeped the alert that my hour was up. “I didn’t get hurt at work, but I have to go now.” I was unable to keep sadness from my voice.

  “You’re the hardest person to hang out with, I swear.” He ran a hand through his hair.

  “It’s not you, I promise. But I really do have to go.” I stood up and immediately sat again, the head wound’s negative effect on my balance increasing. “Head rush,” I explained, then stood up again more slowly. “Say ‘bye’ to Eleanor for me!”

  I wandered away, the pain stabbing me above my ear and the world teetering around me. Before I reached the road, I looked back. Benjamin sat on the ledge around the fountain, staring at his phone.

  My phone beeped and I glanced at the screen. Wanna find out if you like picnicking? I’m going to set one up tomorrow and I’d love it if you came.

  I typed back a reply. Sure! Text me where and when. We’ll see about Friday.

  Then I deleted the texts on my way home.

  12

  “Tell me why we’re doing this again?” Marco’s brow furrowed.

  I put a thumb drive into the port on my laptop and pulled up the correct file. Marco sat next to me on the couch in his bedroom with his own laptop, in the process of downloading files from a different thumb drive.

  “I got a tip today that other Supers are in the city and I want to cross reference their names with known Supers,” I explained. “These files are the latest information we have on all the families in the country.”

  I wished the files were on paper. One of the hardest adjustments to living in the city was using technology in our daily life. Though the camps had allies that used things like telephones and computers—the same allies that kept tabs on Supers and made files such as these—most of us lived a wire-free life. It had taken several weeks for me to shake the fear that I’d press the wrong button and cause my laptop to burst into flames. Months ago, Patrick had caught me poking around the metal box of switches in the laundry room. He'd dragged me away by my hair, screaming that I'd kill us all by messing with electricity, and since then I'd been hesitant to deal with electronics.

  I liked my phone, though.

  Marco tutted. “This folder’s a bunch of photos. Am I looking for someone specific?”

  I frowned. Marco couldn’t help me if he didn’t know what Benjamin looked like. “What’s in the other folders?”

  “Um, there are documents in this one. I don’t know what they’re about.” His eyebrows knit together. “Why did you even ask me to help you? I don’t know what or who we’re looking for.”

  “I want this done as fast as possible,” I answered without looking up from my screen. “And we’ll take a look at the photos when we’re done. In the meantime, just go through the documents and look for references to anybody with healing powers, or anyone named Benjamin, Eleanor, or Beau.”

  “What’s the surname?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I’d forgotten to ask Benjamin, like an idiot. Marco didn’t know it, but the whole point of this research was to cross-reference Benjamin’s family with non-superhero families, especially the forbidden ones. The blacklisted family names were drilled into me so I’d be able to identify threats when they were introduced: Rowe, Peery, Snider, Hensey, Trent, and Edge. However, they were all psychopaths and murderers, so I wasn’t worried that Benjamin was one of them.

  Still, due diligence and all.

  I went back to my thumb drive. File after file of dense records were in the folders, each one detailing the lives of people long dead. Occasionally I’d see a family name I recognized, such as Johnson, St. James, or Harris and I’d swallow sudden homesickness.

  After twenty minutes of fruitless searching, I found a subfolder I hadn’t gone through. I clicked it open. A brief glance at the files’ contents made me tap my cousin’s shoulder. “Marco, look at this.”

  The folder contained hundreds of dossiers. Each family had their own subfolder, some containing dozens of names. Some dossiers had names, gender, birthdates, power, and a picture. Others simply had their gender and approximate age. For fun I did a search for my own name and found my file. My surly face glared at me from the computer screen and I couldn’t help but crack up, though I abruptly stopped when my head throbbed again.

  “What day of the month is it?” I asked, wincing.

  “Um, the fifth, I think. Why?”

  “Did our medical supply box come yet? It usually arrives in the first week of the month, right?”

  Marco thought for a second. “Uh, yeah, it did. I put the box in the sick bay but I haven’t opened it.”

  “Get me some hydrocodone, please.” I gingerly touched the side of my head. The pain was becoming nauseating.

  “Don’t you think that’s overdoing it a little? Hydrocodone is strong stuff. I don’t think you’re supposed to take it when you have a concussion. The elders were only able to get us drugs without prescriptions because they told Bell Enterprises we wouldn’t abuse them.”

  “Just give it to me. I know what I’m doing.”

  I moved my head side to side to see if the buzzing would go away. It didn’t. I knew narcotics weren’t recommended for head injuries, but I was in too much pain to care.

  Marco left and quickly returned with the little pill bottle and water. After swallowing four pills, I returned to perusing the files.

  He hummed while he worked, and I couldn’t help smiling, because he was still the same kid at heart that I’d known since childhood. My cousin had been my brother Gregory’s best friend and a frequent tagalong when my brother and I did our daily chores growing up. His presence was one of the few comforts I had at base camp.

  I wish I’d insisted that we do our research in my room, though. I didn’t care for Marco’s decorations, which were posters of past superheroes, all of whom were long dead. Mighty men and women in various candid action shots were displayed around us, tall and proud as they defended the American people from evildoers. It was as if they could see me, knowing my true purpose and judging me for it.

  I slid down a little lower on the couch.

  Searches for “Benjamin”, “Beau”, and “Eleanor” came up empty. I searched for “healing powers”, “human resources”, and even “blond.” The last search gave me hits for a known superhuman named Fortuna who worked out of Las Vegas, but there was no information on her except that she was a probability manipulator—whatever that meant—who frequented casinos and cleaned them out. I showed her dossier to Marco and we both agreed that whatever her power was, it was cooler than our own.

  Finally, I opened the six folders containing the most current information on the forbidden six families. If Benjamin was one of them, his information would be in one of those folders.

  One by one I looked at the mugshots, police sketches, photographs, and grainy security pictures of the people who’d turned their backs on righteousness and embraced villainy. I was surprised by how few of them there were. I would’ve thought that after a century they would’ve had more members, but if our reconnaissance teams said this was all there was to know about the forbidden families, then this was all there was to know. Elder St. James had once told me that of all the groups of Supers, the forbidden six families were the most surveilled, the most spied upon. There were probably cameras in their bathrooms.

  Benjamin wasn’t among them, nor were his siblings.

  I closed my laptop and pulled out the thumb drive, idly turning it over in my hand.

  So…he wasn’t a supervillain. But what was he? It wasn’t impossible for him to be unknown to us. With so much focus on the supervillain families, other people were bound to fall through the cracks.

  Deduction time. I knew enough about our kind and his family to guess which superhuman groups he wasn’t from.

  He definitely wasn’t from mine, the superheroes. Everything about Benjamin spoke of ample food and medical care. He apparently enjoyed eating outside on the ground, as if he hadn’t grown up in a furniture-less shack like
everyone on my team had.

  The Westerners, Gregory’s murderers, were insular and antisocial. I was comfortable supposing that Benjamin wasn’t one of them.

  I’d established he wasn’t from the forbidden six families.

  That left the one mysterious group that I knew almost nothing about: the people who’d purposely slipped into obscurity, intending to hide their powers from the public.

  I closed my eyes and drifted back to when I was in Café Stella with Benjamin. I saw the excitement in his eyes when I described my team and our powers. He so eagerly wanted to know more about us…he could only be from a family of people who didn’t have regular contact with other Supers. I’d guessed so earlier, but now I was certain.

  The thought threw me for a loop, but I liked the idea of a superhuman family that didn’t cast themselves into the heat of battle all the time. It sounded so weird, but an inviting kind of weird.

  Children could run around and play instead of beating each other up.

  Mothers and fathers could get jobs and raise their children in a house with a roof and bedrooms.

  There would be enough food to truly satisfy, not just stave off starvation.

  My mother wouldn’t have had to bury three babies because of a lack of medical care.

  Suddenly I didn’t want to ponder this alternate life anymore. I turned to Marco, who was smiling at his screen. “What are you looking at?”

  He turned the laptop around and showed me a black-and-white photo of stern-looking people in seriously old-fashioned fighting clothes. The women wore skirts and one of the men wore suspenders. Two of the men had facial hair, which was forbidden to all men from the camps, even the elders.

  One of the women stood in the center, just a little more prominent than the others. She looked a little bit like me, with thick, dark hair and bushy eyebrows that dominated her face. A glint of strength in her eyes, visible even decades later, dared me to challenge her.

  “Who are they?” I asked.

  “Some of our ancestors. Our camp was founded a few years after this was taken. The lady in the middle is Christina St. James, our grandma’s grandma. You know, the first superhero in American history.”