Bern pushed a key on his keyboard. A grainy video filled the monitor. I remembered watching it once, a long time ago, while still in high school. I had gotten bored with it back then, because nothing really happened in the first two minutes, and hadn’t finished.
A young man with longish dark hair and pale eyes, his face smudged by static, standing in the middle of an empty four-lane road, silhouetted against an overcast sky, padded with gray clouds.
“. . . Carla will float you,” a measured female voice said. “No worries. We know you’re up to it.”
“This was taken somewhere in Mexico,” Bern said. “Most people agree it was probably Chetumal. You can catch a glimpse of an ocean in one of the frames.”
I raked my brain, trying to find something about Chetumal. A port city on the tip of Yucatán, one of the hubs of Mexico’s robust international trade. Thriving economy. It suffered in the war.
“This was his trial run. He wasn’t even commissioned yet. This video was the only one that got out onto the Internet. They cracked down hard after that.”
The man shrugged. He was pale and painfully young, younger than Bern. It might have been the lousy quality of the video, but he looked scared. The camera zoomed in on his face. His blue eyes were so sad, almost mournful and filled with power.
“How old is he?”
“It’s his senior year of college. He’s nineteen. He graduated from high school early and did his bachelor’s in three years. He was brilliant.”
“He also had the best tutors money could buy.” House Rogan was wealthy. I wasn’t sure what exactly they did, but Mad Rogan was a fourth-generation Prime.
“It’s time,” the woman’s voice said. “Remember, this entire sector has been evacuated. This is just property damage. No doubts, Connor. You are doing the right thing.”
Sure he was. Someone must’ve talked to him at college, someone from the military with many bars on his or her shoulder, and he must’ve listened, because they flew him out to Chetumal to see what he could do.
Rogan started down the road, a lone figure in a grey hoodie, walking along the yellow line toward the high-rises. A hundred feet. Two hundred. Rogan kept moving. He was almost to the buildings.
“What is he, half a mile out?” a male voice asked offscreen.
“He’s giving us safe space,” the original woman speaker said.
“How much safe space does he need?”
“As much as he wants.”
Rogan kept moving.
“Is he still in range?” the woman asked.
“I can levitate him from here, ma’am,” a second woman with a higher voice said, “but if he walks any farther, we’ll have to close the distance.”
Levitating a person without causing serious internal injury was a very specific branch of telekinetics. Levitators were highly prized, and once it became apparent that a child had this particular brand of magic, that’s all they did. A regular telekinetic could lift or throw a person, but he or she would likely be dead even before landing.
Rogan stopped. He was two buildings into the block. On his left, a huge rectangular complex of dark stone rose eight floors high. On his right, a white tower spiraled toward the stormy sky.
“Finally,” the male voice said.
Rogan regarded the towers of glass and stone. He stood motionless, as if overwhelmed by the sheer size of the buildings.
Moments dragged by, towing a convoy of minutes.
“Oh come on,” the male voice said.
Rogan leaned back. The wind stirred his long, dark hair.
“Let it rip,” the first woman murmured.
The video blurred for a moment. I held my breath.
Nothing.
“And?” the male voice asked. “You told me he was some sort—”
The white tower on the right slid to the side like a cut tree.
This couldn’t have been happening. Nobody could cut through a building.
Cracks streamed up the tower. On the left, thin puffs of grey dust shot out of the office complex windows. The building held together for one long, torturous second. The front of it sagged and plunged down, tons of bricks and stucco plunging, like the waters of Niagara Falls. Thunder pealed as thousands of tons of rock, steel, and concrete crashed onto the street.
Oh my God. My insides went cold. The sheer power. A human being couldn’t contain that much power.
Offscreen, people screamed. Their cries had no words, only the raw, primal sounds of intense human terror.
The tower collapsed. Dense smoke, churning with grey and black dust, billowed like a tsunami from both buildings, clashing in the middle of the street right over Mad Rogan. Six feet on both sides of him the blast waves broke, rolling back as if bouncing from an invisible wall. Debris crashed into the barrier and ricocheted into the street. He stood enveloped in a funnel of clear, calm air.
Wind swirled Rogan’s dark hair. He turned his hands palms up.
The recording blurred. To the left and right, the buildings adjacent to the rubble, a red tower and a brown apartment high-rise, fractured and fell. The sound was deafening.
“Stop him!” the man screamed.
“He can’t be stopped,” the original woman howled over the roar of the falling buildings. “He can’t hear us or see us! We have to wait it out!”
Mad Rogan’s feet left the ground. He rose two feet above the pavement.
“It’s not me,” the levitator screamed. “It’s not me, I can’t reach him!”
The recording blurred.
The camera trembled. The heavy truck parked on the left slid toward it.
“Jesus Chri—” a man yelled.
The recording stopped midword.
Bern and I stared at the dark screen. I sat, shell-shocked, not sure what to do next. I’ve studied many Primes. I’ve never seen one who could do that. This was inhuman.
“I think we should reconsider getting involved,” Bern said.
“It’s too late,” I told him. My voice sounded dull. “I took the job.”
We looked at the screen some more.
“We can’t tell Mom,” I said.
“Oh no, no, we really can’t.” Bern clicked the video off and went to erase the browser history.
“Leon?” I guessed.
“Mhm. He likes to snoop, and he’ll blow our cover.”
The video disappeared, but my dread didn’t.
“What kind of magic was that?”
“The consensus is, he’s an inorganic telekinetic.”
“Telekinetics move things. They don’t cut buildings in half.”
“He does,” Bern said.
“What’s Mad Rogan doing now?” I asked.
“He left the military four years and eight months ago. Nobody has seen him since. By all indications, he became a shut-in. The chatter on the House groupie forums says he was horribly disfigured in the war.”
“Yes, and he’s waiting for just the right woman to come and love him as he is.”
Bern gave me a small smile. Primes, like any celebrities, had their admirers, especially the young, handsome, male, unmarried Primes. They spawned a whole subculture on Instagram, Tumblr, and Vine. They even had their own social network—Herald. Most of the content consisted of photos of Primes, fanart and fanfiction, often with a romantic bend, and wild speculation about who was going to marry whom and what sorts of powers their kids could possibly have. Usually powers carried over from generation to generation, but when two different magic bloodlines mixed, there was always a chance for some mayhem.
“Does he love his cousin?” I asked.
“The Lanceys disowned Kelly Waller when she turned twenty-two.”
Wow. Being thrown out of the family was the worst kind of punishment. Having financial support severed was hard enough, but being disowned also cut you off from all family contacts and connections. It made you an outcast. You couldn’t go to your family’s friends or to your family’s enemies, because neither would trust you. Members of the Houses almost never suffered being disowned, even when they were complete screwups. Case in point, Adam Pierce probably murdered a man and injured a woman and two children, and his House was falling over itself trying to bring him back into the fold. Members of a House were simply too valuable. The Lanceys weren’t the main branch of House Rogan, but still.