1. Discovery
WHEN YOU HAD A LOT OF TIME TO KILL, YOU WERE FLOODED WITH OPTIONS.
I was one of the lucky few who had a lot of time. I guess that’s the benefit of arriving wherever you wanted to go almost instantly.
Dawn was just breaking over the horizon, blinding the sky and earth with a flame of red. It stretched across the open line of land and sky uninterrupted; a stroke of fiery colour that lit over the pyramids. It made the already red earth ablaze with light.
Egypt was one of my favourite places to go to see the dawn. It was a primitive place; a timely look into what it was like over hundreds of years ago. There were no large skyscrapers or office buildings to blemish the scenic awakening of the day. I watched this from my usual place – standing alone on top of the head of the ancient Sphinx.
Huh. Alone. That was the key word. Sometimes, in rare moments – like this moment for instance – I wished that I didn’t have to enjoy this by myself. It would be nice to share it with someone. How miserably pathetic I was sounding.
Of course, there were people I could enjoy this with. Four, actually. My family, my three brothers and my sister. Not biological, but family in the sense. They wouldn’t protest to a quick trip to Egypt – but what they would protest to, I knew, would be the reason for it. What would be the point coming all the way to Egypt just to see the sun rise?
In truth, my only sister Alice wouldn’t mind. She was kind that way. She probably wouldn’t relate to my enjoyment of the ordinary sunrise, but she would come and she would enjoy it, in a way, with me. Out of my three brothers, only Jensen and Riley would come. But it would be a quiet affair. Riley wouldn’t say much – that was his nature, though, to stand watchfully but silently in the background. Jensen would...tolerate it. He was the closest to me out of my brothers, but only because we were alike in many ways. I could say a lot of things to him that I would never say to Riley, and especially Jared. Jensen is the most understanding. But he wouldn’t understand the point of watching the sunrise. He was a man of action – subtle action, but ultimately effective in the end all the same. The only reason he would go and watch a sunrise out of free will was if Alice would be there. The two were inseparable ever since they’d met two years ago, and they shared a comprehensive bond. They were not flagrant about their relationship like most other people – but it was Alice and Jensen who knew each other’s every mood as well as their own.
Sometimes I envied that.
Jared would be the last person I would ask to come here with me. He was my brother, and I cared as equally towards him as I did the others, but there was a large distance of differences between us. Understanding each other at times was almost impossible. While Jensen was the subtle man of action, methodical in his achievements, Jared was brash and clear cut about his. There was nothing he didn’t think in his mind that he would not say aloud or put into action.
So he would never understand why I would come at dawn to watch a sunrise. He didn’t really take time to enjoy the understated moments in life. Like his nature, he enjoyed things brash and simple. Time was for action, not contemplating, he’d say.
I sighed. I turned my attention back to the sunrise and tried to enjoy the still moment as much as I could. Really, sometimes I sounded utterly pathetic, even to myself. I was glad it was only very rare times that I would feel the need for company. But that was a human craving. All people felt this need now and then.
That was plausible enough for me.
When the light finally reached me on my high position above the ground, I blinked against the harsh bright light. It was warming up already in Egypt, the country that was famous for its searing climates. My Titanium watch beeped four times at that moment. I looked down to see the time. Surprising how it passed without you realising.
I guess before when I said I had a lot of time to kill, I was wrong. Even people like me have curfews.
I walked over to the edge of the Sphinx and stepped casually over the distant drop below.
The drop was well over forty metres, larger than a modest skyscraper, and, though the ground below was soft, red sand, the impact would be fatal. But I felt no fear as I began to fall. The world around me began to blur. A second later I was in the forested area beside my wooded, three-storey home, surrounded by tall Sitka spruces. It was raining and I became instantly drenched. The dry, thirst-wrenching smells and atmosphere of Egypt were gone, now replaced with moisture, the smells of wet earth and moss.
One moment I had been in dry Egypt, now I was in wet, chilly Alaska.
Esme was in the kitchen when I came in through the back door.
“How was Egypt?” my mother asked me, not looking up from stirring breakfast at the oven. Her soft, caramel coloured hair was pulled into a classic bun behind her head. Of course she was used to my abrupt comings and goings.
“Good.” I told her, smiling. “I brought you a memento.”
I pulled out of my damp coat a small piece of the Sphinx I’d scraped off, handing her the dry rock. She turned and I placed the red piece in her hand. She looked at it appreciatively with her large, chocolate brown eyes.
“Thanks, Parker. I can put that with the collection.”
My parents had a large shelf of souvenirs of everywhere I went. It had grown largely over the many years we’d added to it.
“Where’s Dad?” I asked absently. I returned my watch to Alaskan time from one of the many clocks that adorned the walls; it was nearly seven in the morning.
She shrugged her slight shoulders. “He’s in the study working on a report.” My father was a doctor at the local county hospital to the good people of Little Port Walter. “I wouldn’t disturb him. He got called out last night.”
I nodded. I pulled my coat off and hung it on the rack by the kitchen door.
My routine was the same every morning. There were very rare times that I deviated from disrupting it. Once I returned from my trip, I showered and changed clothes. Then I turned the computer on in my sound-elevated room, hearing the monitors sing to life. As I waited for it to load, I inserted the green contacts to my eyes – hiding the unique true colouring of my pupils. It was something we all did, me and my sister and brothers, to stay inconspicuous, unnoticed. There would be talk if a large group of seemingly dissimilar people all had the same, and strange, eye colouring.
The computer was quick to load. My father Alain and I had spent one summer tweaking the system; now the computer was faster and more efficient than others on the market.
My routine, of course, had a reason. Not only had we made the computer more efficient, but we had set up a unique software that was vital to what I did. In every school in America, I was able to access the personal files of each student. I was able to see if any new student had enrolled, learn if anything new had happened in their permanent record, and the like. This was important. It was so I could find any others like me and my “family”. We would be there on hand when the change occurred – I knew from personal experience that going through it alone was terrifying and confusing without an explanation.
I had found Riley and Jared this way. Jared was the first, and he had already obtained his full powers of teleportation before I’d found him. He was sixteen when he had, a year from the time that he would naturally obtain them. He had nearly drowned in a river and his powers had been triggered early for survival. At first, he hadn’t been happy when I eventually reached him and talked him about what he was. He didn’t want to join me in finding others like us and helping them through the process. But he eventually decided to stay on. He became my biggest support.
Six months later, we found Riley. He hadn’t come up on any school records – his school in Tennessee hadn’t transferred to using them on computers yet. When they did, I quickly found his file photo. He was instantly spotted by his eyes. He was just about to turn seventeen.
Strangely, Jensen and Alice found us during this time. They had found each other first, by pure chance, before somehow hearing about me in the following months. When they came Alice had already thought herself part of the family. Her first question was, “So, where do we begin?”
I hadn’t ever heard of Alice or Jensen before then. That was one of the problems – drawbacks, actually – by only having their photo and limited file information from their schools. Alice and Jensen had always worn contacts – not out of subtlety, like me and Jared and Riley were doing – but out of personal reasons. Alice, for optical choice, and Jensen, to fit in. There could be hundreds of people I’ve missed in my search because they could be wearing contacts.
There were sixteen alerts now on my computer. I had never the time to scour each file photo day after day, and was resorted to only learning about any new enrolments in school.
I searched through each of the new alerts without much hope. Two students, a brother and sister, had started in Pacific Coast High School. I had never heard of them before, so I searched carefully for any signs of strange behaviour, or if, hidden somewhere, they were like me and the others. I came up with nothing. Twelve I didn’t even look at. I remembered their names from when they were at their old schools, and I knew there were only ordinary people.
The second last was a boy enrolling in a school in Michigan. He was eighteen – past the age of naturally obtaining the powers; he must have been held back a year. I studied his file carefully anyway; but again, I found nothing. For many months it could go on like this, rarely sparking any interest in someone who could be like us.
So it was with little interest that I opened the last file.
It was a girl, sixteen years old – her birthday was coming up in few months – enrolling in Spenser High School in Phoenix, Arizona. Tanner, Kristen. Her middle name was Emilie, but it was hardly important on the list. And as I read apathetically through the first couple of lines, I realised this hadn’t been her first school. She’d been to four others – each in a twenty-four month period.
For a long moment I felt shocked, and then irritated. How could I have missed her name – for of course the name Kristen Tanner was entirely new to me – when the system would have alerted me instantly when she changed schools? How could I miss it four times?
I wondered briefly if there was something wrong with the computer, but it seemed the same as it always did. Maybe this Kristen Tanner was on a witness protection plan; that would explain the regular moving around and the entirely new name to me. Still, I felt irritated by missing this fact.
I scrolled down to see girl’s picture; to see who had irritated me by eluding the system. I might recognise her photo from somewhere, at any rate.
But the photo I saw was one I had never before seen in my life. I stared in surprise.
The photo was of a pretty slender girl. Pretty; but not typically. She had a light skin, golden pale in fact; only just bronzed, nothing like the dark tanned people that were so common these days. Her hair was a dark, warm mahogany colour. It fell below her shoulders in soft, natural waves, framing a slender heart-shaped face. She had quite striking features – briefly my mind wondered why she didn’t wear her hair up to play this up; she was definitely one of those people who shouldn’t wear makeup, already pretty without it.
But while I saw all this and the pleasing way her smile puckered up a little at the corners, her dark eyebrows yet frowning – possibly embarrassed at having the picture taken – at the same time, my eyes couldn’t look away from hers.
I stared with familiar emotion at the unique eye colouring before me. They were royal blue, liquid with colouring. A small rim of brown edged this blue, like some foreign shore in around the sea. I had seen these eyes many times in life. I had these eyes.
I didn’t have to think what to do as I reached in my pocket and fished out my cell. I pressed a speed-dial button and heard the ringing tone of a call being connected. It didn’t last long.
Jensen answered on the second ring. “Parker?”
I stared again at the picture of the pretty girl before me; no, Kristen Tanner. I would have to get used to calling her by name.
“Jen, what would you say to a little trip to Phoenix?”
I think this can work, only if you balance it with some other core part of the person, like the body or the soul, for humorous effect. Like 'briefly my mind wondered X, while my body wanted to know Y'