Breaker

Chapter 3-1

Chapter 3

Kaeva

Kaeva hung onto the edge of the ATV with one hand and waved the other in the air. “s**t, again?” Mecken called in dismay, but he slammed on the brakes in time for Kaeva to lurch out of the vehicle. Kaeva staggered a few steps away before the dry heaves struck for the third time since they’d left the cabin. Stomach acid burned his throat and mouth, and he spat.

“You okay, man?” Mecken asked cautiously.

With a grunt, Kaeva stalked to the vehicle and climbed back in. He waved a finger in a “Let’s go” gesture, and Mecken hit the pedal without another word. Kaeva tried to settle in the seat and breathe.

The first hour on suppressors was the toughest. A moment after the first injection, the initial dizziness, nausea, and sickness hit. When that wave passed, the disembodied sensation took over. It wasn’t like being stoned or drugged. It was more like sleepwalking. The eyes were open, but the focus and the brain weren’t online. That got better, too, but as the symptoms of the suppressors subsided, it usually meant it was time for another one. A single syringe would last something between four and six hours, but with truly dangerous Estranged, nobody wanted to take any chances. That meant one syringe every three hours. So about the time Kaeva was feeling more like himself, it’d be time to get sick again.

“If it means anything, you’re like a pro on that junk,” Mecken said. “One time? I got to pick up a new intake off the shore and take her in for the initial examination and meeting stuff, right? I wasn’t by myself or nothin’. Collins was with me. He was all, ‘What’s your rank, Estranged?’ like he was military or some s**t. She tells him, ‘Four,’ and he stuck her with the suppressor. I didn’t have to, thank f**k. Anyway, she was puking the entire time. And by the time we got to the Med center, she was passed out cold. They said it was dehydration and shock after the swim.”

Kaeva felt a pang of sympathy for the poor woman. Getting to Exile was bad enough. The fact that one often arrived, got hit with suppressors, and dragged off for a full medical exam didn’t exactly make it welcoming. Though, sometimes the Estranged who showed up were so far gone, there wasn’t much to do but make them comfortable until they died. Better to die among one’s own kind than in some forsaken facility where they wouldn’t dole out so much as a sleeping pill to the likes of the Estranged.

“You had ‘em before, right? Suppressors?” Mecken asked. Kaeva nodded. “A lot?” Kaeva nodded again. He’d asked for them when he’d arrived on Exile. He’d waved the intake party away, explained he was a level five, the highest rank on the mainland’s scale, and later, after he’d been examined and his intake was through, he’d made the suggestion that everyone who showed up be given suppressors. Or, at the very least, the scout party should be armed with them.

“You never know what might wash up,” he’d said to the Council. “And everybody lies.”

Kaeva’s experience with suppressors went back further than Exile, though. They’d been a necessary evil at every whorehouse Kaeva had managed to find and afford. But those weren’t stories he wanted to share with a kid who wasn’t even thirteen.

“Man, that’s harsh,” Mecken said. “I ain’t never had ‘em.”

“You won’t need them,” Kaeva said. “You were born here, and you’re a Swift. That’s not dangerous.”

“It is if I get big and get in a fight,” Mecken said seriously. “Swifts can punch as fast as they can run, you know.”

Kaeva eyed the boy behind the wheel. He was ninety pounds soaking wet, long and lean and nut brown from the sunshine. He didn’t have to say anything. Mecken shrank away from the heat in Kaeva’s gaze.

“I wouldn’t punch anybody unless I had to. I’m just sayin’. It’s possible. I’m a skinny b***h now, but I could get big.”

Kaeva glared.

“I wouldn’t do nothin’ mean! Even if I do put on meat, I’d be a peaceful bad ass.” He grinned. “Like you.”

Kaeva snorted and choked down another surge of nausea. He didn’t feel very badass at the moment. But if he could f**k during hour two of suppressors, then he could meet with Oberon and Lake to find out what the island leaders wanted.

Not that Oberon or Lake would like being thought of as leaders. If they heard anybody calling them that, or Island Kings or princes or anything along those lines, they’d firmly explain that the Council was the official form of government. The positions on the Council were elected ones. If a person was elected, then he or she had to be on the council for at least two terms, which were six month stretches. After that, a person could defer the seat to somebody who wanted to deal with the island politics. Despite his protests of not being a leader, Oberon had never been off the Council, as far as Kaeva could tell. Lake came and went. He was always elected, but sometimes he opted out to focus on doing whatever it was the official Exile Seer did.

There were exceptions to the mandatory two-term rule, of course. Kaeva was one of them. He’d not served on the Council after he’d pointed out to Oberon that he’d need to be on suppressors constantly or risk blowing circuits and generators and who knew what else. Yes, he had more control now than he’d ever had. Sure, usually the only danger was upon physical contact, and that was typically avoidable, but Kaeva was still a level five. Nothing could fix that.

Oberon was a level five, himself, but his Estrangement didn’t seem affected by emotion, like Kaeva’s. But Oberon had excused Kaeva from Council duty. He was a reasonable guy, Oberon, if a serious one. Lake was the one with the sense of humor. The two of them made one hell of a team. The legend surrounding them and how they had acquired Exile was one of the first lessons anybody got upon arriving on the island.

Oberon Favara was an orphan raised in the foster care system, and he’d been peculiar since birth. Oberon never spoke about his childhood, but Lake did, and Lake’s favorite story to tell was that when Oberon was a baby, everyone wanted to hold him. The sense of euphoria and happiness from simply holding Oberon kept him safe. Nobody wanted to hurt him after they touched him.

One of the workers at the adoption agency to which Oberon’s case was assigned recognized what Oberon might be, and got in touch with a man who wasn’t interested in adopting kids. The worker got the man to come in, anyway, and after holding Oberon once and looking into his crystal green eyes, the man agreed to take Oberon into care. The man, named Shaker, was a healer of sorts; an energy worker, a modern-day Shaman, and Shaker raised Oberon and trained him as an apprentice.

When he was grown, Oberon trained as a nurse and a healer who practiced the laying-on of hands. Oberon eased suffering and reduced sickness with his touch, but it didn’t come without a price. Oberon was easily tired after working on someone back in those days.

Tons of people came to Oberon’s practice for healing, and one man who came to see him was in trouble not only with illness but with the law. Oberon made the decision to help the man, who was to be tried for theft and manslaughter, and Oberon helped the man find an attorney. That attorney’s name was Lake Perricone.

Lake got the charges dropped against Oberon’s charity case, and soon after they met, Lake and Oberon began seeing one another. Lake confided to Oberon that sometimes he had dreams that came true. Or he saw things that became reality. Or had hunches that weren’t hunches at all, but predictions. Oberon shared his own gifts with Lake, and soon the men were united in the idea that they’d been given these powers to help people.

Lake’s family had money and loved their only son, so it was no problem getting funding to open a shelter designed to assist people who’d lost their way. Lake and Oberon offered medical services free of charge, counseling, and legal advice.

Meanwhile, famine raged in food production areas across the globe. As scientists and farmers scrambled, a new strain of Ebola emerged in Africa and in the Middle East. Flus broke out in Europe and the Americas. Starvation and diseases killed tens of thousands.

And then, one spring day, a man walked into Heathrow Airport and released a lab-created, airborne strain of smallpox. At the same time in LAX, someone unleashed a manmade, airborne flu virus. Both culprits committed suicide, and the next day, the Era of Plagues began.

As the plague spread, the shelter was flooded with the sick. Oberon was immune to illness himself, but he couldn’t keep everyone else healthy and cure patients, so they had to turn the dying away in droves.

It was years before the Cure was created, and rumors ran rampant. Oberon often spoke about how, in the months before its release, the metaphysical community comprised of healers, Shaman, and men and women of faith and psychic ability, discussed if this would be how magic would be restored in society. The Cure altered humanity at the cellular level and introduced the blueprints for new cell structures into the bloodstream. The magic community was hopeful, even fanatical.

Oberon was worried. He didn’t believe the Cure was the way to magic. He thought the Cure was the way to pain and grief. Lake had been the hopeful one, urging his ailing and aging parents to be some of the first in their hometown to get the Cure. Oberon got it too, even before Lake. He knew he’d be dealing with its effects one way or the other, and he was confident his natural abilities would keep him from dying, if it came to that.

The Cure didn’t kill Oberon. It made him sick, like it did anyone who was destined to become Estranged. Lake’s parents were in the same shape; sick as dogs. Lake had gone to be with them, leaving Oberon at the shelter in care of a medical aid. While Lake was gone, the power in the shelter went out. Rolling blackouts were common in the cities.

Oberon, sick and miserable, tried to light a candle. The flame jumped from the wick to his palm, spread over his body and in seconds, he was completely cured. The fire went out when he willed it to do so, and he could call it forth too. He’d become what would be known as a Firebrand: a healer who used intense heat to speed the reconstruction of cells to cure the sick and wounded. Immediately, Oberon called Lake, but Oberon’s skills had manifested too late.

Both Lake’s parents had died from the effects of the Cure. They would be far from the only ones.

Most people who took the Cure had no side effects at all. Roughly two percent of the population, however, got sick. Many of the Cure sick died. From what Kaeva knew of it, the sickness was a response to the new cell structures introduced into the body by the Cure. The Cure changed the cell structure, made it impervious to viruses, and it also gave the body blueprints to make other so-called “manufacturing” structures that pumped out disease-fighting cells. It mucked with DNA and the chemical makeup of a person’s body, and for the Cure sick, it proved fatal. It created an internal war zone, a fight between the old body and the new one. Eventually, the Cure couldn’t outmaneuver the shutdown of organs and the failure to thrive, and the Cure sick person died.

Death was not always the outcome, though. If the stricken survived the sickness, they came out on the other side with what came to be known as Estrangement, because the people who were affected and discovered were cut off from society.

Mother Nature, with a little help from the science lab, had found a way to reintroduce what passed for magic into the population. The problem was, the powers of the Estranged weren’t fully developed. Some people could use their powers without devastating side effects, but their powers didn’t amount to much. There were the rare Estranged who had talents that were helpful, like Growers who could sprout plants or make crops grow faster or like the Healers who could mend a dozen or so sick people before they had to pass out and rest.

Publicly, the media and the government held the useful Estranged up as examples to prove there was nothing to fear in the Cure. Even the worst side effects were benefiting society.

They weren’t lying completely, which was the b***h of it all. Some Estranged did serve the greater good, particularly those with Healing Estrangements. Binders, in particular, were useful as they could seal flesh and tissue together without creating scar tissue. The Growers, too, helped out, supplementing the invention of Biodomes and kickstarting projects that turned the tide on famine.

The problem was, of course, that while on camera the Estranged would say their efforts were voluntary, the fear in their eyes spoke otherwise. Everyone knew the propaganda of Estranged Working with the Government to Save the World was horseshit. People were kidnapped. Drafted. Processed. And those were only the ones who had so-called “useful” Estrangements. There were plenty of people who didn’t fit that category.

Two percent of the population didn’t sound like much, but in a devastated population it was enough that just about everybody knew someone afflicted. Two percent was, after all, only the official estimate. Unofficial estimates put the Estranged at something like eight to ten percent.

So stories got around. A kid who suddenly understood a bit too much about wildlife vanished. People who won the lottery were under such suspicion that states began to shut the games down entirely. Then there were bigger stories, newsworthy ones of Estranged whose powers genuinely scared the s**t out of anyone paying attention. Like the guy who could suck the energy out of anyone he touched. He’d been shot to death in New York Metro area by the military. There’d also been that woman who could read minds without becoming exhausted and with perfect accuracy. After a documentary had gone live about her life and what she was trying to do with her gifts, she’d vanished. Rumor was, she’d been relocated to the basement of some official facility and forced into examination and government service.

With all the global disasters, the world had united behind finding a way to survive: all races, all colors, even most religions. When the Cure had offered up the Estranged, though, suddenly everybody had a new group of people to hate.

Oberon and Lake had already made names for themselves as men who’d help those people on the fringes of society. Now they had dozens of people from the sick, weak and dying to the newly powerful and terrified showing up on their doorstep with nowhere else to go and a government recruiting van on their heels.

Desperately trying to cope with an angry, grieving lover while keeping his own power out of government sight, Oberon got in touch with a man he knew from the healing circles as Miracle Jones. Miracle was a rich, paranoid nut who owned an island and kept it heavily fortified. Miracle agreed to rent his island to people Oberon and Lake were trying to help in exchange for Oberon moving there too and keeping Miracle forever young. Oberon agreed, and he and Lake began transporting Estranged who were well enough to travel to the island.

They thought they were being careful. They thought wrong.

By the time the shelter got raided for “dangerous unregistered persons,” Lake and Oberon had managed to get almost one hundred people to Miracle. There were still dozens of people in the shelter, and they, along with Oberon and Lake, were taken into custody “for their own safety.”

While in custody, Lake was forced to take the Cure. He became Cure sick and the guards watched, passively, waiting to see what would happen on the other side, if Lake survived.

Oberon was similarly unlucky. The arresting officers had seen Oberon’s skills at work when they’d raided the shelter that had spontaneously and specifically caught on fire. They suspected he was one of the rarest of the rare—an Estranged who could use his Estrangement without tiring. They did everything in their power to get Oberon to show them what he could do. Oberon still carried some of the scars, refusing to burn them away. “A constant reminder,” he’d say if one asked and he felt like answering. “Of why I fight.”

Eventually, Oberon and Lake were released into a type of protective custody that was similar to house arrest. It didn’t last long. The guards thought they were protected from Oberon’s power. They weren’t. Oberon didn’t talk about what he’d done to get them out, but the question was never if he’d killed his captors but instead how many had Oberon gone through to get himself and Lake out of harm’s way.

They had fled south and had been the first two Estranged to make the swim to Miracle’s island. By the time they had arrived, though, Miracle was already dying. He’d taken the Cure hoping it’d enhance his abilities. Instead, it killed him. Oberon did what he could, but the Cure’s sickness was too strong.

Miracle had left the island and everything he had to Oberon in his will, and together with Lake, they had founded Exile. The Estranged already on the island helped guard and protect it and so far, the Barrier and the precautions had been enough to keep it off the radar. There’d been a few brushes with people who had gotten through the Barrier’s boundaries, boats that had lost their way, but they had a Trickster Estranged. She could confuse even the most determined of souls, and she wasn’t the only ace up Exile’s sleeve.

Still, everyone knew eventually the peace would end. Oddly, that kept most people, including Kaeva, grounded instead of terrified. He tried to enjoy every moment of freedom he could. He knew he’d need to remember them when times got bad.

Mecken drove the ATV through a field, past the remnants of an outpost building left over from Miracle’s time on the island, and finally across a path mostly overgrown by beach grass. They bounced down a dune and onto the sand. The waves lazily kissed the shore with a quiet, soothing sound. The ocean breeze was cold against Kaeva’s bare face, but it dialed down the nausea.

“Figured it’d be easier,” Mecken said. “Smoother ride down here.”

“You just wanted to drive on the beach.”

Mecken grinned. “f**k yes I did!”

The kid whooped and dipped the vehicle to the water, kicking up surf. Mecken laughed and shook his hair like a dog shook its fur after a bath. Kaeva’s face crept into an almost-smile. If he hadn’t been summoned by the kings and wasn’t on suppressors and if it’d been a part of his nature, he might have considered trying to have fun.

“There they are,” Mecken shouted, pointing, though he didn’t need to bother. In Miracle’s day, the docks had been active with a private ferry service that took Miracle to and from other islands. He never ran a ferry directly to the mainland, using other islands as stop-overs, instead. There were no bridges or roads connecting Exile with the outside world. The only other way on or off the island was private plane. Exile had its own landing strip and plane, though nobody had flown the thing in years. When the plagues started, Miracle had cut off the ferry’s services except for Oberon and Lake’s access.

The old ferry was covered in tarps and floating at the docks. When people made journeys to the mainland, they took small craft to another island, hid it, and then took a ferry to the mainland. There were several Estranged who could encourage people not to see or remember the Exile residents. One of those Estranged was always chosen for the trip.

“I think I see ‘em,” Mecken said, leaning over the wheel and squinting.

Kaeva did. His vision had been like a hawk since the Cure. Two distant figures stood on the docks watching the ATV draw closer. The sun shone on Oberon’s red hair, setting it ablaze, and the wind fluttered Lake’s dark coat. True to their word, nobody else seemed to be around. Kaeva steadied himself. The only thing left to do was find out what they wanted and get home as fast as he could, preferably before he had to take another hit of suppressors. He respected the kings enough to meet with them. He liked Mecken enough not to get the kid in trouble. But Kaeva wanted no part of island politics or City life. He was a solitary creature, fit only for patrols and to pass his days in silence. He couldn’t help people except by staying away from them. He just wanted to be left the hell alone.