Chapter 2

I didn’t go to class. Instead, I called Ms. Jackson and she agreed to see me right away. In fact, she offered to drive over to get me! She must have been very concerned.

I don’t drive. I never learned and, even when I thought I might, I wimped out. The guy at the counter where you sign up looked a lot like one of the Chosen from the compound and I ran outside to be sick in the flowerbed. I was fifteen and mortified, so I never went back.

I have a bicycle I use, and it is pretty decent for getting around the campus and the few stores off campus that I visit. Ms. Jackson’s office is actually on the campus and she is employed by the university to counsel students. It was all part of the free education offered these days, and we, the students, seemed to be mostly appreciative.

Her office was in a low, two-story adobe building and her waiting room was a sea of cool air, calm, soothing colors and soft music. Most of the time, I didn’t even really mind waiting for a bit, if I arrived early or she was late with another student.

Today, I didn’t even have a chance to see if they had any new magazines. Ms. Jackson was waiting at her door and whisked me right in without even pausing at the receptionist.

Once I was seated, she sat and took a deep breath before starting.

“DJ, I hear you have had an exciting week so far,” she said calmly, leading but not suggesting like she always does, and I felt like laughing.

“Yes. I think that is fair to say. Should I tell you about it?”

“If you think it is best. I want you to tell me what you feel I need to know.”

Oh, the games we play. Still, I could see the sparkle in her eye and this was a familiar game, comforting in its sameness and predictability. It occurred to me that it was deliberately so, but even that was soothing.

We talked for almost two hours. The opportunity to lay everything out, to start at how I was feeling before Lisa even knocked, and then proceed through the events as the occurred, was priceless to me.

I could tell I shocked Ms. Jackson a few times, surprised her and even dismayed her, but she was a professional and really helped me to put things in perspective, even if she didn’t have, or was unwilling to suggest, solutions to my problems.

She did suggest one thing though, something I wasn’t very fond of.

“This has been a very good session, DJ. I can see that you know where you are and what you need to work on, but I also see you are avoiding something important. You need to go and deal with the league. Now that you have emerged, you must be registered or the school will not allow you to stay. It is a prerequisite and cannot be overlooked or overridden.”

“Why? Will I learn better if they know? Will I be a better student?” I asked, frustrated. I was very uncomfortable with the way that man invaded my privacy and didn’t want to deal with him.

“Safety, security, privacy, pick any one. Think about it, DJ. Mentalists, those with telepathy, empathy, mind reading, clairaudio and clairaudience, they require very specific, strict training and monitoring in the beginning. They could make puppets of students, or drive others mad. It is not just cheating on tests, it is the welfare of the other students that is paramount here.”

What she was saying made sense, but ... but I was whining. I was deflecting and deferring and avoiding and probably a dozen other poor behavioral stereotypes. This was something that had to be done.

“Fine,” I said with a sigh. It was not fine.

“Good. Now, I will see you on Monday afternoon, normal time, unless something else comes up. DJ, I am very proud of you. Overall, you handled that surprisingly well. One last thought, I might want to do a dual session with you and Lisa, once she is ready. Think about it, will you? Save your answer for later and just consider it.”

The Hero League headquarters was only about five miles away, but that was five miles of city traffic and no one, or no one sane, those bike messengers don’t count, will ride a bike in city traffic unless there is no other option.

I needed to get this taken care of. I wanted this all put behind me. I had lost a week of school, I was going to fail on my paper due this week and if I wanted to start fresh next week, this needed to be over.

Despite never having worked a day in my life, I wasn’t broke. The Hero League in Greensville; that meant Sword Sister, Piper, Bubbles and General Li, had confiscated all assets of the Deacon cult and spread it among the surviving children. The adults, to a man, had been executed and only those women who convinced the mentalists that they were too afraid to leave, got to walk away in the end.

The kids each got some credits in the new system, and those credits were in accounts only they could touch, and only when they were sixteen. It was not riches, and it would not hold them forever, but it would give then a chance, a head start.

My cut had been about thirty thousand and I had spent very little. None when I was in foster care, and only a bit since I started college just after my seventeenth. I was nineteen now and had twenty-four thousand left, so I could afford a ride. I asked the receptionist, on my way out, to call a Movr for me. It was a sort of open-source, crowd-driven ride app and here, around the college, there were a lot of kids looking for spending money.

The ride down to the League building was quick, and quiet. I think my driver was hung over and wasn’t being very talkative. My favorite kind.

The building wasn’t all that big, four stories and had a sort of adobe feel, which probably meant some shaped stucco over concrete, but Las Cruces had standards new construction had to follow.

Inside, there was a big lobby, about half the first floor, by the looks of things, and there was a young lady at a sandstone reception desk that had to be twenty-five feet long.

“Welcome to the Hero League, Las Cruces. My name is Sarah, and how can I help you today?”

She looked like she was actually happy to see me. She didn’t actually know me, so her attitude was doubtful at best. Still, she was being nice so I tried to be nice too.

“Evidently, I recently encountered something traumatic and emerged. I was told I had to register but, to register, I have to be evaluated since I am not a simple Type Two. How do I do that?”

She blinked, staring at me for a moment. Then, with a quirked eyebrow, she admitted, “I have no idea. I have seen younger kids, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, and they get sent to Evaluations on two. I suppose that emergence is emergence, right? Evaluations are evaluations, so I am going to send you the same place. Does that sound okay to you?”

She was asking me? What if I said no? “Um, sure, I guess?”

“Great! If you walk straight ahead, there are a pair of elevators on the right side,” she clicked rapidly on a keyboard just below the counter and out of sight. “The elevator is arriving now, just step into the one with the open door. Someone will meet you upstairs and show you where to go.”

When the elevator doors opened on the second floor, Sarah was there to meet me and I stopped, staring for a moment. She smiled and shook a finger in the air.

“I know what you are thinking and no, I am not Sarah, I am Laura. See? I part on the left, she parts on the right,” she said brightly, pointing at the part in her hair. “If you would follow me, we have an evaluator on duty who is free and can see you right away.”

It’s days like that that make me hate days like this.

The room I was shown to appeared to be an exam room, like you would see at a doctor, but the kind of room where you are looked at to determine where you should really be. I guess that made sense, it was an evaluation and that was kind of like triage.

There was a man in the room already and he smiled, but didn’t offer his hand or rise from his chair. Older, a head full of snow-white hair and thick glasses perched low on his nose, he looked harmless and happy.

“Have a seat, please! On the bench or in a chair, makes me no nevermind. I am Larry Gelson and I will be your evaluator today. If I can see some identification, we can get started.”

I handed him my student ID.

“Do you have a Driver’s license or Registration card? Student IDs are not legal IDs, you understand, they are situational, only for use at school.”

Reluctantly, I dug out my ID. My Registration card, my official ID, was granted via the Hero League in Greenville. This is normally something a parent would do, but my parents were nutcases following a megalomaniac so I never got registered.

Larry looked over the official card with a cocked eyebrow, then he fed it into a pad in his hands. Evidently, the information that popped up surprised him and he spent several minutes reading before looking up at me.

“So, you recently emerged? How long ago?”

“Four days, I guess? Three and a half?”

“Uh huh, and what kind of power or ability manifested at that time?”

“I healed someone.”

His eyes widened a bit at that, followed by a look down at his pad. He tapped at the pad for a moment, then nodded again.

“This was at the University, young girl who was kidnapped?”

“Yes, but why is this important?”

“Oh, the actual circumstances are recorded as data, not linked to you at all. It is information and even now, years after The Fall, we are still struggling to understand how this all works, you see. We have made great strides, but there is so much we don’t know. Besides, Taiyin Izé has a bulletin out to watch for you.”

Great.

“I am going to take your hand now. My mind-reading works best with contact. I am going to scan your brain and try to identify both your particular abilities and your level. I will also scan for secondary, tertiary and so on, since some people have multiple powers or abilities. This will be absolutely painless, though since you have mental abilities of your own, you will certainly know I am there. Please, try to relax.”

I felt him right away, though his steps were much lighter than Taiyin Izé’s hobnailed boots. I could sense him moving around, looking, prying, even poking in an attempt to get a response. After a maddening half hour, which felt like several hours had passed, he was done.

“Very interesting! You are indeed a Bio, or a Biological Affinity, and healing is a primary trait with bios. You are also a mentalist, though of limited scope. Your mind-reading is very unusual in that it is only activated as part of the healing.

“The same is true of a third ability, of empathy. You can feel what your patient is feeling. Here is the kicker, there are more! Except for your bio, they are all weak and each one weaker than the previous. You have a total of five and the final two I can only guess at.”

“But what does that mean? Why do you have to guess? I don’t really understand how this works!” This was frustrating, like he is looking in a crystal ball or something.

“What we do, as evaluators, is to look into the minds of thousands of people. At first, with the tutor riding along and pointing things out and later, to gain more experience. These powers and abilities are not written somewhere, big letters saying MENTALIST in the brain matter. We have simply identified areas associated with powers and have learned to interpret, via the existing connections between those areas and others, what the other powers might me.” He explained. He reached into a drawer and pulled out a plastic flip book with several see-through diagrams of various layers in the brain.

“Here I saw your bio affinity, perfectly placed where expected. It is linked to here, and here, the mind-reading and empathy, but it is also linked here and here. Those areas are not clearly identified yet, with only one or two people having those connections, so we aren’t certain what they do.

“We think they have to do with the mind itself, but we will have to hope that you can show us, eventually. Healing, so the bios tell us, is convincing the body to return to its natural state. The cells know where they should be, who is next door and up or downstairs. When there is a cut, the bio convinces the body to send white blood cells, to pull the muscle and skin together and so on.

“With the mind, we can do that, but that does no good against mental illness or chemical imbalances in the brain. The brain simply thinks that is the way things have always been, so that is the way they should be! What we hope to find someday, is a way to influence change in the brain. That, is what we hope you might be able to do, with those undefined areas.” Larry sat back and crossed his hands on his chest, looking thoughtful.

“Okay, that all make a kind of sense, but you lost me somewhere. Why do you think I can do this? Why do these connections, as opposed to any other connections you don’t recognize, give you hope?”

“Two things. They are in the right area, that section is definitely involved in brain function, status and the what have you. Their location is indicative, being collocated with empathy and telepathy nodes. Last, and just as important, when Taiyin Izé scanned Lisa, that poor girl had no trauma he could find.

“She was as disgusted as any normal person by the thought of what was done to her, but the deep-seated trauma, the devastation she should have felt and the mental storm we would expect to see in any rape or torture victim, well, like you, for instance? All gone. She is as well-adjusted as anyone Taiyin Izé says he has ever met.”

Larry had set up an appointment for me, I was going to meet with Bio, a healer, on Saturday at lunchtime. The League was going to send a car for me, which was nice. While learning how to use this talent, this healing, was an exciting thing, something else was on my mind.

I spent the evening hours sitting in my apartment thinking about what I had been told. If this was true, if I could heal the mind, could I heal mine? Could I be normal? Could I help others, like me, other children of the Cult?

I tried searching for the areas inside my own mind, the ones that bore Larry’s footprints and still bore the impressions of the Indian man’s boots. I could feel the steps, but could not visualize what was there. I couldn’t trigger whatever it was, or activate it or whatever it was called. I needed to know. Could I heal myself?

I overslept, not that I had anywhere to go, and when I finally got showered and dressed, it was almost lunchtime and I was certain, though she hadn’t said so, that Lisa would be back.

Just in case, I grabbed two sodas from my fridge and stood by the door, peeking out through the peep hole. I almost put the sodas back a hundred times in the next ten minutes, convinced I was being an idiot and she had done what she said, she had already come until I was able to answer. It was over.

Except it wasn’t. Lisa came down the walk at eleven thirty and I quickly unlocked all three deadbolts and removed the metal bar. When she stepped onto the bottom stair, I opened the door and stood there, staring at her.

She was wearing another sun dress, this one a pale, mint green, with white and yellow flowers. She wore these thin-strapped sandals on her feet, and her long, black hair was swept back into a single, loose tail at the base of her neck.

She wasn’t wearing makeup, as far as I could tell, her flawless skin was already porcelain smooth. She did wear just a hint of something light and flowery though, a scent that hinted at spring.

Her smile was wide and warm and inviting and oh, so bright. I just stood there and stared, not sure what to do or say, until she stepped forward again, a hand out.

“Is one of those for me?

One, both, and anything else I had, I thought, but out loud I stumbled and stuttered. “Yeah, um, sure, whichever. They are both unopened, see?” I showed her the tops of the cans and then blushed, feeling foolish. She wouldn’t suspect me of something like that, right? I mean, I wouldn’t heal her just to drug her, would I? Oh heaven, what if she thought that?

“That’s fine, I trust you. I see you took the same freshman intro course as everyone else, eh? Never take an open drink, never leave your drink unattended and so on? Those were scary, and I found out exactly why those classes exist, didn’t I? Man...” she looked down for a moment, then shook her head.

I bet she didn’t know. Did they tell her? Maybe they didn’t. She had the right to know, didn’t she?

“Lisa, um, can we, I mean, I really need to talk to you. It’s important, I think.”

She looked up at me from the bottom step and cocked her head for a moment. “Sure, DJ. Want to sit here? Or we can walk, there is a little park just around the corner.”

I glanced around, seeing the next apartment’s door that shared the same steps. I had never actually met the guy who lived there, though I had heard him and his girlfriend through the wall on many occasions.

“Let me get my keys and lock up.”

We walked down the sidewalk and around the corner, turning left into a small community park. There was a playground with teeter-totters, swings and dome-shaped jungle gym.

Lisa led me to the swings and sat in one, pushing off just a bit to get her moving, her smooth, well-muscled legs kicking lazily. She waved at the other swing and I looked at it suspiciously. It looked sturdy enough, with strong chains holding up the rubber seat, but it was designed for children, wasn’t it? I was no athlete, but I still weighed twice what Lisa did!

“You look like you have never been on a swing before.” She remarked, smiling at me. I didn’t have the nerve to tell her how right she was. Maybe someday, if she stuck around.

I sat gingerly, testing the strength and was glad to feel it was very solid. Holding on tightly with one hand, and with three fingers of the hand that still held my unopened soda, I pushed a little with my toes.

This was ... nice! It felt good to swing back and forth, with just a hit of danger, but not real danger, more like ... a suspenseful movie, safe danger. I shook my head at the incongruity of that feeling and saw Lisa smiling at me.

I sighed, hoping this didn’t ruin her good mood.

“Lisa, when I healed you, evidently I did more than that.”

“I don’t understand, DJ. What ‘more‘?” I caught my breath as she released both chains to do that air quote thing, and only exhaled when she had a solid grip again. She wasn’t going fast, but the ground looked hard beneath her.

“I got examined. By the League, I mean, so I could register. He told me I am a Type Four, he was certain, but he was only allowed to classify up to Type Three, and someone else would come in to see if I was a real Type Four.” I was babbling, that wasn’t important.

“Sorry, babbling. Look, I can heal, but I have a little telepathy and empathy, and they think I can heal the brain too.” There, that was better.

“Okay, that sounds good. It’s good, right?”

“Um, sorry, well, I ... Bio’s don’t change things. They heal by convincing the body to go back to the way it was. A cut is separated and damaged cells, but the body can heal cells and remembers how it was before the cut, so they convince the body to go back in time, fix what is wrong. They can’t make a man grow a second thumb, or a third leg.

“The mind is different. There are things that go bad in there, like a chemical imbalance or misfiring neurons. People get manic or depressive, they hear voices or think they are Miracle Girl. Things like that, and the healing, well, it thinks that imbalance is okay, and convinces the body to go back to the imbalanced state. It is incapable of modifying something, so it doesn’t fix what is wrong, it restores what was, what the body sees as natural.”

“Okay, that makes sense. It is sad, and too bad you can’t fix that stuff, or even other stuff, but it makes sense. What does this have to do with me?”

Okay, she wasn’t ... I wasn’t explaining it right.

“Rarely, a bio can fix something, like a disease, but no one fixes the brain. Except, maybe, just maybe, me. I might be able to, I have, I don’t know how to say it, special links or something in my brain. They told me I healed you. In your head, I mean. The trauma of ... all of that bad stuff. Most people, if that happened, would be traumatized, it would be with them for a long time. Depressions, fear, paranoia, a lot of pain, but...”

“But they think you healed that in me when you healed my wounds!” She said, excitedly. She stopped kicking her feet for a moment, staring straight ahead, her head cocked that littlest bit I found so adorable.

Then, with a move so quick it scared the hell out of me, she was out of the swing and in my lap, facing me with her legs through the chains backwards! She was kissing me! My lips, my cheeks, my eyes, my nose ... she was kissing me!

“DJ you are the absolute best, the most amazing man I have ever met and I am going to have your children. No, don’t say anything, you don’t have any choice. Not today, and not tomorrow, but someday, you and I are going to get married and have babies and you will be the best dad ever.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I have been worried. No nightmares, no jumping at shadows, no unexplained tears. Yes, I am sad and yes, I am a bit more afraid of strangers and no, I will not be going to frat parties ever again alone, but I expected to be destroyed by this. My friends, my parents, the college rape counselor, even Denise Jackson are all expecting me to fall apart. But I am not wounded, I am hurt emotionally, but I am not ... I am not traumatized.”

“So that is good, right? Better for you.” I said, nodding my head.

“It’s ... it’s everything. Something like this, it destroys lives, DJ. That kind of trauma breaks people, turns them into someone else. I have been worried that I was not broken., I thought I was too broken to know that I was ruined or something.”

“If I could just do it to myself...” I said thoughtfully, still searching for that unidentified something inside me.

“What was that, DJ?”

“Oh, it was, um, it was nothing, Lisa.”

“You should test it.”

“Test it? How?”

“There are people who are in institutions. People who cracked when they emerged, or at the horrors they faced since The Fall. There are sick people whose brains are just out of whack, right? They should let you try to heal them. If you can’t heal their brains, and only their bodies, it can’t hurt them, but if it does work, it’s a miracle.”

“Wait, no, no way. No doctor would let some kid experiment on their patients. It’s probably even illegal!” I told her, shaking my head. The thought of some drug company doing human trials directly on sick people made me feel ill.

“Oh, yeah, I didn’t think about that. Maybe you could get volunteers or something?”

“I have a meeting with a healer tomorrow, to learn about, I don’t know, exactly, but how healing works. Maybe that person will have some ideas. I wish you could come with me.” I said, the last part mostly under my breath, but she was so close, she heard every word.

“Why can’t I? Did they tell you not to bring anyone?”

“Well, no, but...”

“But what? So, I go with you and worse comes to worst, I sit in the waiting room or something. I want to go.”

She wanted to go. I was good with that. In fact, I was feeling much better about Lisa, now that she knew the whole story.

It’s funny, we sat and talked for at least an hour and I never even minded that she stayed in my lap.

I got a call the Saturday morning, about nine. It was a lady from the League asking if eleven was too early to send a car for me, and we, Lisa and me, were dropped off out front of the League Building at about twenty after.

Waiting was a big woman. Not, like, big like fat, though she was carrying a few extra pounds for sure, but big in this woman was tall! In fact, she was the tallest women I ever met.

Henrietta Pease had been a local fixture in Las Cruces since well before The Fall. She used to run a mission for the homeless downtown but, after The Fall and after she emerged, she converted it to a clinic and began healing folks and not just feeding them.

She had been a nurse for twenty years before she became a Bio healer, and it only took another four years of college, plus residency, to get the letters after her name. One of the first things she told me was that it had been a waste of time because she was still not a doctor and had no plans to be one.

The knowledge of the human body had helped her, and made her a better healer, she insisted, but the rest? And the letters? Worthless to her. She was never going to use most of it, she insisted, but still spent half the day telling me what to study.

Henrietta ran a weekly clinic at the League headquarters building and that is what we did for the day. She took us to lunch in the cafeteria and then it was time to see patients.

“Okay, DJ, I got a double whammy and got telepathy as well as my Bio powers, so I am going to show you around as we work. I will have you stand beside me, your hand on my shoulder, and I will show you what I am doing and why, okay?”

“You, sweetheart, I can see why he wanted you along,” she said in a teasing voice to Lisa and laughed when the girl blushed. “But unfortunately, you can’t help and, in some cases, you might not be able to even be in here. However, if you were to agree to work for me for the day, I could pay you and call you my nursing assistant. You would have to fetch and carry for us though...”

“That would be wonderful, thanks! I wanted to see what DJ will be doing and if there is some way I can help him be better, or do better, I am willing,” Lisa said happily. Henrietta got her some scrubs and had her change, and then showed her where sterile cloths, saline and the small exam trays were, already packaged and sterile wrapped.

The first patient was a mother and child. The girl had fallen from the slide at her school and broken her arm, but the swelling had prevented them from putting a cast on it. The hospitals in the area had been told that they could send non-serious cases, that would be better served by a bio, to the clinic today and they had done so with a vengeance. Normally, only the most serious cases would receive immediate help from the bios, since it was so easy to overwhelm them with work in a city this size!

“Little Roxie here broke her arm, didn’t you sweetheart? Well, today is your lucky day! You get two healers instead of some stuffy old doctor, isn’t that the coolest? Yes, that’s right, we are going to fix it without a cast,” Henrietta told the young girl. She introduced us to Roxie and to her mother as well, explaining that we were students.

She turned to me to explain. “We have to have consent or, in the case of a child or someone who is unconscious, we have to have parental consent or it has to be a life and death emergency. Just because we have these powers doesn’t mean we can do what we want. Mrs. Hernandez has already given consent and now, so has Roxie, so I want you to follow what I do.”

She waited until my hand was on her shoulder and she connected with me, pulling me into this gray, featureless place where I seemed to float. Ahead of me, a perfect representation of Henrietta, down to the clothes she was wearing, except for shoes, was floating in front of me.

“Take your shoes off before you come in my house,” the floating Henrietta said with a laugh, then gestured for me to follow her.

In a blink, the gray was gone and we were standing next to a large, rough-textured pipe that disappeared into the distance in both directions. I could see where something had impacted the pipe and the structure was cracked, a rough, slightly splintered and jagged line that cut diagonally across the face.

It hit me then, exactly what I was seeing. If this was accurately scaled, we would have been just a few hundred microns tall, barely larger than a red blood cell. This was the break and it was in the outer of the two bones in the girl’s forearm. I could even see the inner one, slightly larger, on the far side.

“This is amazing!” I thought to Henrietta, who smiled and nodded.

“This is why, even after all of the suffering and the changes and what have you, that I still believe that God has a hand in this. This miraculous power he gave us has a purpose in the grand scheme of things. I don’t know what it is, but I know how to use it. Now, hush and watch what I do, ‘cause school is in session.”

Henrietta began running her hand along the fissure in the bone and, in its wake, solid, unblemished and unbroken bone was left. Deeper, I could actually see her urging the marrow that had seeped into the crack to retract, to reform inside, where it belonged. I could see her showing the bone how to regrow, to connect again and how it should reshape itself so it was whole again.

There were other threads too, like free white blood cells she tasked to clean up any debris from the break, and fluids that had filled the area, swelling the tissues, to recede and be reabsorbed by the body. The entire thing only took about an hour and it was the most incredible thing I had ever watched.