Chapter 5: Hide and Seek

~ Andy

Andy didn't understand it.

The rule was absolutely no presents. It had always been the rule. Birthday parties were for celebrating and for parties, but they weren't for getting presents. Birthday presents came from Mom and Dad, and always after the party was over and the guests were gone. No exceptions, that was the rule.

This was what made the brightly wrapped package sitting on the table alongside the birthday cake such a mystery to Andy. He continued to eye the package for the entire party, waiting for the joke to be revealed. Or maybe it wasn't a joke. Dad could be unpredictable, and Mom was an unfathomable mystery.

There were no candles to blow out on the cake. That tradition had ended when he was three and discovered how to use the gift to snuff them out. 'That was the year they stopped trying to hide the Christmas presents too' Andy thought to himself. Now all he did was reach out and suppress the holo-field that was generating the glittery, flashing '10 — TEN- 10' that hovered above the cake top.

With cake and ice cream out of the way, Dad got everyone's attention.

"Before we sing Happy Birthday, we're going to let Andy open his present." Dave said. "Everyone here knows that birthday presents aren't something Andy and Serenity are used to seeing at their birthday parties, so bear with us please. Andy, go ahead and unwrap your present."

Andy reached out with his thoughts and felt the thin wrapping, he measured the uniqueness of it in his mind and with a quick thought, jumped it to the other end of the table, leaving the contents sitting in front of him.

"Show off!" He heard his sister say with a giggle.

The unwrapped object was... a solid 4 inch square block of granite???

"A present?" He asked.

"A test." Hid Dad answered.

"What kind of test?" He asked.

"The kind where you have to figure out what kind of test it is." Dad answered. "You have five days."

"What do I get if I figure it out?" I asked.

"When you understand the nature of the test, you will understand the nature of the reward." Dad answered. Serenity snickered.

"You'll be ten in two years Ren, don't get cocky!" I told her.

"I already know the answer copper top, so there!" She taunted.

"No you don't, and I've asked you not to call me that." I said.

"Copper top?" Great Grandpa A.J. Asked.

"As in Duracel, as in battery, as in Double A, as in A.A. McKesson." Dad told him. "Ren has discovered a new way to annoy her big brother."

I stared at the cube for another moment. Ren probably didn't know what the test was. Probably. I jumped it to the dresser in my room.

"I'll look at it tonight. Let's play football!" I said.

We played football four on four, and the teams were pretty even. I was only eight months older than Trevor, and none of us were way bigger or stronger than the others. That was probably not going to stay true for very many more years. Ian and Kieran were both two years younger than me and they were both already as big as I was.

Trevor and I were captains, and we took turns picking until we had our teams. We ran out the front door of the house where Uncle Con 'announced' the starting line ups.

"Starting for the McKesson Marauders; Andrew Alan McKesson, Jeni Jean Anderson, Maia Patrice Poole and Grace Marie Parkin!" Con yelled, and we ran out on the grass.

"Starting for the Parkin Prowlers; Trevor Paul Parkin, Kieran Oscar Alvarez, Serenity Elizabeth McKesson and Ian Dale Parkin!" Con yelled out their names and they ran out too.

"Pick a number between 1 and 1 billion." Con said to Trev and I.

"4,137,269" Trev called.

"500,525,215.3175!" I hollered back. I heard Jeni giggle behind me.

"The number was 4! the Parkin Prowlers win the toss." Con declared.

We just laughed. Con always picked 4, and none of us really cared who won the toss.

As we lined up to kick off, I heard Grandpa Carson lean over to Grandma Carson and whisper "Does Hyannis Port ring a bell?"

I'd have to look that up later. Now it was time for football.

We played with Legion rules. We were allowed to use our gifts on ourselves only, but not on the ball, and not on the other players. If we were carrying the ball we could do Light-jumps sideways or backwards, but not towards the goal, and the ball carrier couldn't do more than one per play.

We started on defense, which was fine with me, because I had a new trick I wanted to try. We had a standard trick called the 'residual afterimage linebacker', where we jumped back and forth between two places while we waited for the snap. We cycled through the spots so fast that your eye couldn't really tell which image was live and which one was residual. Kinda like the trick of making circles in the air with Halloween glow sticks at night.

My new trick was to add a third spot to the cycle of jumps, but I popped a Light shield between me and the line as I hit first and third spot. It kept the image from building in those spots because the Light was disguising it. It looked like I was just crouched in one spot, and when the ball was snapped I zoomed in from nowhere and sacked Trevor.

"Good one!" Trev called as I helped him up.

It only worked one more time for a good play before Ren figured it out, but any game where you could introduce a new trick was a good one. We played until the adults began to think we should be getting tired, and then we stopped, collapsing onto the lawn laughing and pretending to catch our breath.

I did get a birthday present before dinner, and as usual Dad was sneaky about it.

"If you want to see your birthday present Andy, we're going to have to take a little ride."

"Okay!" I said. I stopped trying to peek in people's minds to find out what I was getting when I was four. That was the year I didn't get any presents. Dad still liked to be sneaky though.

"On horseback!" Dad called out as he jumped out of the room. I jumped right behind him to the stables at Kieran's house. Dad was already sitting in the saddle of Copper, his horse. He must've jumped straight into the saddle. He was holding the reins of another horse that already had my saddle on it.

I looked at Ranger's stall, the horse I usually rode, then back at the horse, then at Dad. He held out the reins to me.

"Happy birthday son!"

Whoopee!! My own horse! I danced a little happy dance in my head, but managed to only grin at Dad.

"Awesome Dad! Thank you, thank you!"

I took the reins and touched the horses mind with my thoughts. We tried each other on for size, and I think we were both pretty happy right off the bat.

"His name is Slider." I said to Dad. I checked the saddle and blanket for fit and made sure things were cinched up tight. Uncle Dwight always said "Treat a saddled horse like a parachute and always double check everything before you strap it on."

We only had an hour of daylight to ride in before dinner. But we road down to the Cataloochee, and followed it for a little while. Slider was happy to let Dad and Copper lead, but I could tell that he had bundles of energy he wanted to let go of, so I promised him a big ride in the morning. We picked up the pace a little on the way back and both horses were happy when we got back to the stable.

WE got the tack put away and Copper and Slider cleaned and groomed. I got a nice nuzzle from Slider, and I patted his neck before we took off for home.

Dinner that night was just family. Dad and Mom, Grandma and Grandpa McKesson, Grandma and Grandpa Parkin, Great-Grandpa A.J., Great-Grandma and Grandpa Carson, Uncle Ambrose, Aunt Ia and Uncle Aaron, Uncle Pete and Aunt Sarah, and Con and Eru. And Ian and Grace of course.

Grandma McKesson made me Grilled Lime Chicken with black bean sauce. my favorite! Trevor thinks I'm weird, but Grandma is an awesome cook so its hard to pick a favorite around her. Last year it was Mom's curried lamb and rice. Next year it'll be Great Grandma Parkin's turn. I plan on having a new favorite every year until they stop throwing me birthday parties. Maybe by then they'll figure out that I'm rotating the cooks when I change favorites.

That night, after bedtime rolled around, I sat in my room staring at the granite cube as I held it in midair in front of me, slowly spinning it around and around. The first thing I did was zoom in on it with a little augmented vision. I found it right away, as I'm sure Dad expected. Micro-etched into every side of the cube were the words. "This isn't the answer."

I had only looked to satisfy my curiosity. Depending on the mood he's in, Dad's sense of humor can be very strange. Since I had used one of Ren's old sandbox game tricks, I decided to try the other, and I began trying to coax the cube's Light signature to reveal what was connected to it. That was the first big road sign that told me I was on the right track.

This piece of rock didn't have the usual connections. If you can coax the information out, even a grain of sand at the mouth of a river can lead you back to the exact spot on the mountainside it washed down from. This one didn't have any connections leading anywhere, except one to Dad, and I expected that one. The only connection I could find seemed to just vanish into... nowhere!

That oddness with the Light signature was the key, I knew it, but I wasn't sure why. I went to sleep with the image of the cube still spinning in my brain.

We took Slider out for a ride the next morning after breakfast. We weren't a working ranch or farm, like a lot of the homesteads we visited were, so we weren't up before sunup doing chores, but we ate breakfast every morning at eight. Mom or Dad usually cooked, unless they were gone on a trip somewhere, then it would be Shelaana. I cooked once in a while, pancakes or French toast usually. Serenity made waffles once in a while, but not much else. I knew how she worked though. She would wait until she'd absorbed the whole 'being a chef' thing and then she'd offer to cook some day and we'd all get treated to a gourmet meal.

Trevor and his Mom and Dad came over to go riding with us. Ian and Grace were going to go to a concert in Austin, Texas with Serenity, Mom and Aunt Felicia. Cyrus was going, along with an Obsidian Industries security team. Mom and Dad weren't allowed to go anywhere on Earth without a security team anymore. Trevor says its because Dad is the richest man in the world. Dad didn't say where he had to be, he was already gone by the time I got up.

We followed the Cataloochee east again, but we crossed the river early in the ride and rode through a seemingly endless stand of tall thin alder trees that seemed to fill the flats on the south side of the river. Dwight said they grew thicker on this side cause the light was better and the alders preferred the sandier soil.

"These alders go for the easy life, first to get the sun and right next to the water, but they pay a price for it." Pete said. "You almost never see one of these trees get much bigger than you see them right now, and a hard winter with some heavy rain raising the river out of its banks will wipe a good chunk of em out."

As we rode, the light from the rising sun in front of us strobed through the trees, and at the same time the reflected light from the Cataloochee did the same from our left. Since we only saw light from the moving surface of the river as the angles caught the sun just right, the timing of the two flickering strobe effects were different. It was hard to watch them both at the same time because of it. Their phases didn't match up, except very briefly once in a while, and then it seemed for just a split second like the light was coming from everywhere at once.

That's what triggered it for me. Suddenly I knew what I"d been missing last night, looking at that granite cube!

I reached out to my room and jumped the cube to me, holding it in the air in front of me, letting it spin slowly. Slider sensed my attention shift from the trail in front of us, and he stopped. Trevor looked back at me and took it in.