

Dylan & Faedra

The Super-Not Chronicles

By C.L. Wells

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Copyright Christopher L. Wells (2017) - All rights reserved

This book is a work of fiction.

Any reference to real persons, places, or events is made in a fictional context and should not be construed to be factually accurate.

**Author's blog:** www.fictionwithamission.com

Other works by this author:

Domestic Bliss (A Short Story)

The Testament Stone: A Megyn Keith Paranormal Mystery

The Tucson Prophecy: Prequel to the Paranormal Gift Series

The Seer: Book #1 in the Paranormal Gift series

Utopian Day

For a current list of titles by this author, visit http://fictionwithamission.com/books-by-c-l-wells/

Author's email address: CLWells@fictionwithamission.com
Table of Contents

Ride to School

A Revealing Hike

True Confessions

The Meeting

Truth or Dare?

Miscalculations

A New Plan

Judgment Day

The Blow-up

A Dangerous Discovery

Secrets Revealed

Making Plans

The Secret Weapon

Operation Track the Mole

Charge!

Sample Chapter of The Testament Stone

Four Spiritual Truths

Thank You

Acknowledgements

About the Author
Chapter 1 – Ride to School

Journal entry #1

Date: Monday – Do I really have to go to school today? Again?

_Dear journal, or whatever, this is all new to me so I'll just go with it. Have you ever wanted to have superpowers? I mean, wanted to fly, or be super-strong, or see through walls – something like that? Well, in my world, ninety-nine percent of the population_ has _superpowers, while one percent of the population doesn't. Guess which group I'm in... You guessed it. I'm in the group that doesn't have superpowers. I'm what_ is affectionately referred _to as a super-not and, yeah, it stinks._

Way back before my parents were born, a huge comet passed by planet Earth. Scientists had been tracking it for years, and many people thought it was going to destroy our world. But it didn't. Instead, it streaked by about a thousand miles away. And while the comet didn't destroy our planet, it did change our lives forever.

_In the years following the comet's near miss, people began noticing strange behavior in some of the earth's younger population._ These days, it's not that big of a deal for a toddler to lift up a couch with one arm to retrieve a wayward pacifier, or for a two-year-old to fly up to the top of a tree and bring 'kitty' back down to earth, but back then, it was really something. _You get the picture. Practically everyone born after the comet came was some form of 'super'... except, of course, for my kind – the super-_ nots _._

_I wonder if_ going _to high school was this tough back in the days before most of the population had superpowers? I'm sure it was nothing like going to high school now, where 99% of the student body have superpowers, and you don't._ Like _I said, it stinks._

_Right now I'm waiting for the school bus, already counting the seconds until the dismissal bell rings. One of the people who makes this whole thing bearable is my best_ friend, Faedra _. She's a super-not too, and we've been friends since third grade. Here she comes now. Gotta go._

* * * * *

My mom had given me a new journal for my birthday and suggested I start writing as a way to help me deal with living life as a super-not. I wasn't quite sure what to write, but I'd decided to give it a shot. I closed the journal and slipped it into my backpack as I saw Faedra walking up to the bus stop.

"Hey, Dylan."

"Hey, Faedra."

"I'm so excited about the pep rally today! I can't wait to hear the Cool Tones play my song!"

Faedra may not have had superpowers, but she _was_ a talented song writer. She wrote an awesome fight song for our school, and the school's jazz band was going to play it at the pep rally at the end of the day.

"Yeah, that's gonna rock. I'm happy for you."

My face and my voice must not have matched the excitement I was trying to convey with my words. Faedra was frowning.

"What's the matter, Dylan?"

I turned to see that the bus was pulling up to our stop, and Bruno stuck his big fat head out of one of the bus windows and yelled, "Hey, Dylan the super-not! Get on this bus so you can do my homework!"

Faedra smiled at me sheepishly.

_"That's_ what's the matter," I said to Faedra as we got on the bus.

We picked a seat near the front of the bus. I was hoping that Bruno was just being his usual charming self and didn't, in fact, have any homework that he wanted me to do for him on the way to school. Before the bus driver closed the door and pulled away, however, Bruno had lumbered up the aisle and pushed the kid sitting behind us up against the window so that he could fit his six-foot-two, one hundred ninety-pound frame into the seat behind us. The kid pushed up against the window – some skinny ninth grader from the looks of it – looked terrified.

Bruno's meat hook of an arm reached over the seat from behind me and plopped his Pre-Algebra book down on my lap. I noticed there was a blank sheet of paper and a pencil shoved between the pages – how thoughtful of him.

"I need problems one through ten done by the time we get to school," he boomed.

"Has it ever occurred to you to _try_ to do your homework before forcing someone else to do it for you?" I replied, trying not to be too snarky and failing miserably.

"Hey, I'm going to play pro football. Probably won't even go to college anyway since the leagues can draft supers straight out of high school, so who needs to know how to do this stuff? I just need a passing grade so my old man doesn't ground me."

The thought of deliberately putting all of the wrong answers down for the homework I was about to do for him briefly crossed my mind, but it was quickly replaced with a vision of Bruno sticking my head in the toilet in the boy's bathroom in retribution. So, instead of resisting, I did what most people did when Bruno 'asked' them to do his homework – I started working the math problems for him. You have to wonder why his teachers hadn't caught on yet. I mean, how many different forms of handwriting could one kid have? Practically everyone on the bus had done homework for him at some point, and yet he'd never gotten called on it. The teachers were probably just as scared of him as the students were. He was, after all, super-strong, and most of the teachers were single-power brainiacs who wouldn't stand a chance against somebody like Bruno.

I made a mental note to jot down some notes on the hierarchy of superpowers in my journal for posterity's sake. Most supers were single-powered, meaning that they had only one enhanced power trait. Flying, super-strength, enhanced mental capacity, super-speed – et cetera. Some people were doubles, meaning they had _two_ superpowers. That happens about ten percent of the time. About one-tenth of one percent of people were triples, with _three_ superpowers. Bruno was the garden variety single-power super. Most of the teachers were single-power super-smart supers, or, as most people called them, brainiacs.

I finished Bruno's homework as the bus pulled into the school's unloading zone and handed it back to him.

"Thanks, super-not. You better get me an 'A' or it'll be toilet-scrubbin' time."

He lumbered past our seat and down the steps of the bus. The kid he'd smushed up against the window gave a big sigh of relief.

"He's such a bully," Faedra observed.

"Let's forget about it," I replied. "The good news is that's probably the worst thing that will happen to me all day."

Boy, was I wrong.
Chapter 2 - A Revealing Hike

First period was Chemistry. I was actually pretty good at Chemistry, but I wasn't nearly as good as Chandler. Besides Faedra, Chandler was my next best friend. He was a brainiac. You might be wondering why a brainiac like Chandler would want to be friends with a regular-old super-not like me. Well, let's just say he was a bit socially awkward. Okay, he was a _lot_ socially awkward.

I noticed him sitting by himself on the first day of school back in eighth grade, so I went and asked if I could sit with him. I mean, I assumed he was a super-not like me. Skinny, a foot shorter than anyone else in the room, and wearing coke-bottle glasses. We started talking, and it turned out he's a cool guy underneath all the super-smart geekiness. We'd been friends ever since. Needless to say, our Chemistry projects _rocked!_

Brainiacs had advanced classes for most of their subjects, but they were required to take at least one 'social normalization elective' per term to help them learn to socialize with non-brainiacs. That meant they had to take a normal course, like the rest of us. Otherwise, they'd tend to lose the ability to communicate with mere mortals about normal things like relationships, sports, and pretty much anything else that didn't involve nuclear physics or some form of higher math. Luckily for me, Chandler chose to take science as his social normalization elective.

One year, for the science project competition, we made a rocket using only items available at the local hardware store, plus a go-pro camera, that actually made it into sub-orbit. Yes, sir, first place in the state competition for that one. He'd already received a four-year scholarship to MIT that was waiting for him after he graduated.

"Hey, Chandler," I said as I sat down at our lab table. "What's our lab on today?"

"How to make wood alcohol through distillation," he replied. "I took the liberty of setting up the apparatus. Make sure to keep the temperature of the water at precisely 78.3 degrees Celsius. That's the optimum temperature for the distillation process."

I scanned the lab instruction sheet the teacher had placed on our desks and didn't see the temperature mentioned anywhere. "Did he write that temperature on the board somewhere? 'Cause I don't see it."

"No."

"Okay, wise-guy, did you look that up on your phone?"

He looked at me with a quizzical look on his face.

"The temperature... how do you know it should be 78.3 degrees Celsius?" I prod.

_"Science Journal_ , issue 57... I learned that in fourth grade."

"Really, super-geek?" Chandler was totally out of touch with how smart (and geeky) he actually was.

"Sorry."

"Don't be. Saves me five minutes trying to find that information on the internet. Hey, we still on for the afternoon hike?"

"Yeah, sure," he replied. "I wore my hiking shoes, so I don't even need to go home first." He stuck a skinny leg out from under the table to brandish one of his shoes, and wiggled it.

"Cool."

Hiking was a shared passion for Chandler and me. We both loved the stunning views from the tops of the mountains near where we lived, and it gave us both a chance to escape from the sometimes suffocating world we lived in. Me from being surrounded by supers that I could never compete with physically, and Chandler from being surrounded by frequently challenging and awkward social situations that he wanted to avoid like the plague. Out there, we could be just who we were with no one to judge. Faedra came along with us most of the time. I wasn't sure if she liked it as much as Chandler and I did, but she seemed to have a good time.

The bell rang, and the teacher called the class to order, took roll, and then gave us the intro to the day's lab. We were done fifteen minutes before anyone but Sam Tulver's team. Sam was another brainiac.

* * * * *

The school pep rally went off without a hitch. The Cool Tones' performance of Faedra's song was out of the ball park good. I watched her scream along with everyone else in the crowd when the song was over. She seemed so happy, so... beautiful... Suddenly it felt hotter in the gym. Not because of the hundreds of screaming high schoolers sitting all around me, either. Faedra was my best friend, and we'd been best friends forever, but what I'd just felt wasn't a best friend feeling.

I noticed how pretty her wavy blond hair looked as it fell down her back. Then I came back to my senses. _What_ the heck was _that_ about _? Must be some crazy teenage hormones._ I looked back at her, and she turned to look at me, her smile a mile wide, and suddenly I blushed. I smiled back, trying to cover up my embarrassment.

"That was great!" I said, shifting the conversation to anything but myself. "You did a really good job on that song, Fae."

"I am sooo pumped!" she replied, turning back to the band as the next song started.

I was just relieved that she wasn't looking in my direction any longer.

* * * * *

After school, Faedra and I met up at Chandler's truck. He was already there waiting for us. We all piled in the front, shoving our book bags onto the floorboard. Faedra sat in the middle, and I rolled down the passenger window so we didn't suffocate on the way out of town. The A/C had sprung a pin-hole leak two weeks before when we'd all gone muddin', and all of the refrigerant had leaked out. But it was a beautiful day, and the breeze felt good against my face as we tore off down the road.

An hour later, we'd parked in one of the little off-road parking lots at the trail head of one of our favorite hiking trails. We liked it because not many people hiked this trail at this time of day. It led up to a rock outcrop at the top of one of the mountains, and the view was breathtaking. It wasn't as high up as Cheaha Overlook, but it was still a great view.

Today, the hiking was perfect. We didn't see another single soul on the way up to the top, and we didn't speak for the first ten minutes on the trail. Finally, Chandler broke the silence.

"My parents are getting a divorce," he said matter-of-factly.

"What?!" I said as I stopped and turned around. He almost ran into me.

"Yeah, I mean... I'm pretty sure. The signs are all there, you know. They don't talk much to each other anymore. Everything they say is either to my sister or me – almost never directly to each other. Dad keeps working later and later. I've seen my mom... I've seen my mom crying sometimes on the back porch... Anyway, like I said. I think they're getting a divorce. Statistically, it's not unusual... but it still sucks."

I looked at Faedra and her face showed the same thing I was feeling. "Are you sure? Maybe they're just going through a hard time," she said as she put her hand on Chandler's shoulder. I felt something when I saw her hand touch him – jealousy maybe? _I'm such a jerk!_ I thought to myself. My second best friend's parents were probably getting a divorce, and I was jealous of him because Faedra was touching his shoulder. _Get a grip, Dylan!_

"I feel... I just feel that something bad is about to happen and I can't do anything about it. I'm not sure what to do."

"Dude, if there's anything I can do..." I offered.

"Well... I just wanted to tell you guys, that's all. If it's going to happen, then it happens."

Faedra gave Chandler a side-hug, and I felt my chest tightening up. I bit my tongue and didn't say anything. _Must not let feelings show!_ I told myself like I was Bruce Banner trying to keep the Hulk from showing up.

"Thanks, I appreciate it, you guys." After a few moments, he continued, "Let's just keep hiking; I don't want to talk about it anymore right now."

I could tell he was about to cry. Faedra was about to cry, too. I was about to explode. I turned around and started hiking up the mountain again, grateful the moment was over with.

* * * * *

At long last, we reached the overlook where a rock outcrop jutted out from the top of the mountain and gave us a great view of the surrounding mountains and the valley before us. The sun was starting to set, and the sky was turning that glorious mixture of pink, purple, blue, and yellow. The forest around and below us stretched for miles and miles, and the new bright green growth of spring was beginning to show on some of the hardwoods, interspersed with the evergreens. I took a deep breath and just stared. No one said anything for what seemed like an hour, even though it was probably just a few minutes.

"Well, we better head back down or it'll be dark before we reach the car," I finally said. Even though I'd brought my flashlight, I wanted to avoid the possibility of missing a marker in the fading light and spending the night lost in the woods.

As I turned to go, I heard the sound of loose gravel and Chandler's voice saying, "Whoa!" My head whipped back around, and I saw him in what seemed like slow motion as he began to fall off of the edge of the rock we'd just been standing on. I began to reach out to him, but even as I did, I knew I wouldn't reach him in time. It was fifty feet down to some more rocks – a fall that would surely kill him. But Faedra's hand was on his shoulder in a flash and she pulled him back onto safe ground, where he regained his footing.

Chandler was bent over, catching his breath, obviously aware of how close he'd just come to dying. Faedra's hand was on his back as she bent down to speak to him. "Are you okay?" she asked. I didn't feel that same feeling that I'd felt when she'd put her hand on his shoulder earlier. What I was feeling was something else entirely. Because, as I'd watched Faedra pull Chandler back onto the rock, I'd seen something that Chandler _didn't_ see. When she pulled him back to safety, Faedra had been standing on nothing but air.
Chapter 3 – True Confessions

I didn't talk much on the way back to the truck. I couldn't believe what I had just seen with my own two eyes. Faedra was a super. My mind raced with a thousand different questions. Why hadn't she told me? Had she always been a super and just been hiding it? _Why_ was she hiding it? Practically every super-not I knew (and there weren't that many) wanted to have a superpower like almost everyone else.

What bugged me more than all of the questions that I had was an underlying sense of betrayal. My best friend was hiding something from me. Not just some little something like, 'Hey, I forgot to tell you I borrowed a pen from your desk', but a _BIG_ something. This was huge.

By the time we strapped our seatbelts on for the ride home, Faedra knew something was up.

"You okay, Dylan?"

"Yeah, I'm fine," I lied.

Chandler cranked up the engine and mercifully turned on the radio, cranking it up really loud so we could hear it over the wind as we headed back home.

Faedra lived a few blocks away from me, and Chandler dropped her off first. As he pulled up to my house to drop me off, I reached forward and turned off the radio.

"Hey, don't touch my tunes, man," he said.

"Faedra's a super," I blurted out without any introduction. Chandler looked at me with a quizzical look on his face.

"What sort of a joke is that?"

"It's no joke," I replied. "When she saved you from falling off the top of the overlook... I saw her feet. She was standing on thin air."

He was silent for a few seconds before he responded.

"Well, do you think you could have made a mistake?"

"No," I said, shaking my head. "I _know_ what I saw. She was definitely levitating."

"Whoa."

"Yeah, 'whoa'. She's been lying to me... to both of us, for who knows how long."

"That's sooo not cool," he replied. "Are you going to confront her about it?"

"No... Who knows whether she would try and deny it? I mean, she may even be a double for all I know." I turned and looked at Chandler. I wanted to see how he would react to my next question. "Will you help me spy on her? I need to know the truth, and I obviously can't trust Faedra to tell me right now."

I could tell he was going to say yes. Chandler got this look when he was really stoked about doing something, and he had that look right now. He started nodding his head up and down before any words came out of his mouth. "Oh, yeah. I'm in, alright. And I know just how to do it."

* * * * *

After dinner that night, I got a text from Chandler that he had a plan. After texting back and forth for about an hour, we had all the details worked out. He had gotten some miniature drones for his birthday that had some awesome, high-performance cameras. The plan was to follow Faedra around whenever she went outside of her house and see if we could find any proof of her using her power (or powers, as the case might be).

Saturday turned out to be the perfect day for our little recon operation. Faedra sometimes worked with her dad on one of his old cars on Saturday mornings. When I called her to see what she was doing for the day, she said that she was free after lunch, but working on a car with her dad until then. I called Chandler to tell him the good news, and he came right over.

Chandler parked his truck at my house, and we walked the rest of the way to Faedra's, so we wouldn't arouse any suspicion. There's a little park right across the street from her house, and we found a bench just far enough away so that we wouldn't be seen from her house if she happened to come out the front door. Then we went to work.

Chandler popped open the plastic briefcase he'd brought with him and took out a small drone. "Hold out your hand," he said to me. I held out my hand, and he placed the drone in my palm. It was light as a feather, and not much bigger than, well, a drone that could fit in the palm of your hand.

I watched as he took out a hand-held controller with a couple of knobs on it, a joy stick, and a video monitor that was about four inches by five inches. When he flipped on a switch, the video screen showed a picture of an area of the park right in front of us, where the drone was facing.

"Cool," I said.

"Now, let's see what Faedra's doing with her dad," he said with a smile on his face. As he worked the controls, the little drone gently rose out of my palm and then zoomed across the street in the direction of Faedra's house. A few minutes later, Chandler had succeeded in landing the little spy machine on the top of a privacy fence post with a good view of the garage out behind her house. We could see the front end of one of her dad's muscle cars sticking out of the garage.

"Can this thing zoom in or something? That's a long way off."

"Oh, yeah, this baby's got..."

He proceeded to rattle off some geek-speak about how powerful the camera was and what it could do. I caught something about a powerful zoom, advanced audio capabilities, and excellent stability in flight. I finally put my hand up to flag him down.

"Okay, First Officer Spock, I get it – it's a powerful camera that can zoom in. So let's see it work," I said, motioning to the video screen. He plugged in some earbuds to the controller and handed me one of the buds, then proceeded to zoom in on the garage. We waited about ten minutes before we first heard, then saw, Faedra and her dad walking out of the house and towards the car.

"So, what's on the agenda for today, Dad?" Faedra asked as they walked.

"Well, I thought we'd change the oil in the Mustang and then take her for a spin to the ice cream shop."

"Cool," she replied.

I could see Faedra smiling on the video screen. She was apparently relieved they weren't doing some heavy-duty work on the car. I knew from previous conversations that she liked spending time with her dad but that she didn't really like working on cars. She said that her dad never spoke about it, but that she had always suspected that he had wanted one of his kids to share his passion for cars – something neither her nor her little sister had so far shown much interest in.

I felt a little guilty, spying on her private time with her dad like this, but then I reminded myself why I was doing it in the first place, and my anger at her having deceived me about her powers quickly pushed any guilty feelings out of my mind.

"I'll jack the car up if you'll get the creeper and put it in front of the car," her dad said.

Faedra went inside the garage and came back with a long board-like thing with padding on top and wheels on the bottom. I thought we had one in our garage at home, but Mom never used it.

"Ahh... darn it. The hydraulic jack isn't working, and I'm out of hydraulic fluid. I've been meaning to go by the auto parts store to pick some up. If you'll help me out, I'll slide the stationary jacks under the car."

"Sure," Faedra replied.

I wasn't entirely sure what happened next. As soon as Faedra replied to her dad, Chandler manipulated the controls and the camera started to zoom in for a closer shot. Faedra leaned down towards the car hood, and then her dad looked in the direction of the drone. It was almost as if he was looking right at it. Then, his arm moved like he was throwing something in the direction of the drone, and suddenly, the screen went black.

"What happened?" I asked Chandler.

"I don't know." He fidgeted with the controls. "The drone's not responding."

He popped the battery pack out of the controller and replaced it with a spare from the case. Nothing. Then he powered up another drone, and the video screen came to life.

"Hmm. The other drone must be malfunctioning, or maybe the battery went dead. Let's see."

I watched in silence as Chandler maneuvered the second drone out of the park, across the street, and towards where the first drone had been. It was no longer on the top of the post where he had landed it. He backed the drone up a bit and zoomed the camera out to look at a bigger area.

"Wait, I think that's it," I said, pointing on the video screen to a small black object on the ground just outside of the privacy fence.

Chandler zoomed the camera in on the black object. It was the drone... or a better description would be that it was what was left of the drone. It looked like it had been shot with a bullet. One of the propeller blades was gone entirely, and all that was left of the camera was a mangled hunk of plastic with a few wires sticking out of it.

"Whoa, what in the world happened to it?" I wondered aloud.

"Very interesting," Chandler replied. He repositioned the camera and took a peek over the fence. Faedra and her dad were nowhere to be seen. Then he zoomed the drone straight up to get an aerial shot of their entire property. Off to the left, Faedra's dad could be seen walking around the front of the house. He was about to turn the corner along the side of the house where the drone had crashed.

"Get out of there before he sees the drone!" I said excitedly.

Chandler didn't respond, but his brow furrowed as he quickly manipulated the flight controls. He flew the drone over the privacy fence and landed it just inside of their yard so that it wouldn't be seen by Faedra's dad. He had landed it with the camera pointing towards the fence, and we could see through the slits between the planks as Faedra's dad walked by, then stopped and bent down right where the crashed drone was.

I held my breath for what seemed like a minute. Chandler was probably doing the same thing. Neither of us spoke the whole time. Finally, Faedra's dad stood up and walked away.

Chandler waited about thirty seconds before he powered up the drone's propellers and flew it back to where we were seated in the park. Once he landed it on the ground in front of us, he let out a sigh.

"Whew... that was close," he said.

"Yeah. What in the world just happened?" I asked. Chandler said nothing, and just shook his head from side to side while staring at the drone. Finally, he stopped shaking his head from side to side and started moving it up and down. "I'm gonna figure out what happened, but I can't do it here. I have to download the video footage to my computer back home."

The alarm on my cell phone went off.

"Yeah, and I'm due to show up at Faedra's on my bike in fifteen minutes. We better get going."

* * * * *

Chandler dropped me off at my house, and I made it back to Faedra's on time. We went riding on one of our favorite trails near her neighborhood. The trail ran through an old plantation that the county government had leased for ninety-nine years and turned into a recreational park. Half of the trail along the back side of the plantation was covered by a canopy of trees which shielded us from the sun. It was still early Spring, and it was nice to have a cool breeze blowing down from the direction of the mountains.

My anger at Faedra for having been deceptive had been cooled somewhat by the fact that I was now hiding something of my own from her, so we actually had a good time. I said something that made her laugh at one point, and when I looked over at her, her hair was blowing in the wind and... well, I felt something. It was weird. We'd been friends for so long and I'd never been attracted to her like that before. Now that I knew she was a super, I should've just put those thoughts out of my mind.

We pulled off the trail and stopped for a drink of water. Right before we did, I felt my phone vibrate in my pocket. It was a text message from Chandler.

You've got 2 c this! Great pix from video. WOW! Come by aftR mtg.
Chapter 4 – The Meeting

On Saturday night, I went to what wass affectionately referred to around my house as 'the meeting'. Saying, 'The support group for teenage super-nots attending Ashlin High School', was just too much of a mouthful. According to the flyer they gave to all in-coming Ashlin High super-nots, the group was founded about ten years ago to help super-nots deal with the, "...somewhat unique realities of being a member of the supernaturally-challenged minority in a high school setting".

Out of the approximately 1,500 students at Ashlin High, there were exactly fourteen super-nots, and they'd all attended this group until about six months before. That was when Faedra stopped attending the group. Whenever I talked to her about it, she said she just didn't feel comfortable sharing in the group anymore. That was hard to believe because she normally did fine in group settings. Now I thought it had something to do with her superpowers. Did she start manifesting her powers then, and that's what motivated her to stop coming? Just thinking about it made me mad... and sad. I missed seeing her at the meetings.

Mr. Franklin led the group. He was a local minister at the Anglican Church. At first, I thought he was geeky, but was actually pretty cool. We usually started out the meetings with some sort of group game, and then Mr. Franklin or his assistant, Ms. Hernandez, would share about something related to being a super-not or dealing with stress, or something like that. Afterwards, we would break up into two smaller groups for sharing time.

Sharing time was pretty cool. You would share what was going on with you, good or bad, and then move on to the next person in the circle until everyone had had a turn. Nobody told you how to fix your problem or told you that you made the wrong decision or anything like that; they just listened. Mr. Franklin sometimes asked some questions, but that was it. It felt good sometimes just to tell somebody else what was going on in your life – just to be heard and maybe even understood. I hadn't wanted to come to the group at first, but my mom had made me. Now... now I actually looked forward to it.

The game of the night was dodge beach-ball. All thirteen of us showed up, so Mr. Franklin joined in to make the sides even. I made it to the final four before Joey Zappa zinged the ball at me. I pivoted to the wrong side right before he threw, and I was tagged out.

Five minutes later, the game was over, and we all gathered around in a big circle. Mr. Franklin shared a news article about how to handle cyber-bullying in the virtual reality social networking site called "Jammin!" I was surprised that the article talked about some privacy settings that even I hadn't known existed on the site. Mr. Franklin was alright in my book – this stuff was very relevant to my life! Imagine that.

When we broke up into the smaller groups, I was in the one led by Mr. Franklin. I was seated three chairs to his left, which meant I was going to be the third person to share. My head was spinning with everything that had been going on since I found out Faedra was a super. It was pretty much all I had been able to think about. Should I 'out' her to the group or not? I was conflicted about what to do. As I was trying to decide what to share, Mr. Franklin gave the introduction.

"Okay, guys and gals, time for open sharing. You know the rules. Keep your sharing focused on yourself. We all respect what anyone shares. No cross-talk or interrupting anyone. Shaniqua, you're first," he said as he turned to his left.

Shaniqua was normally very bubbly and vibrant. That night, not so much. She hung her head a little and stared at the floor. I could barely hear her when she said, "Hi, my name is Shaniqua."

"Hello, Shaniqua," we all said in unison.

I could tell she was blushing, and I could also see she was about to cry before she even started talking.

"It's okay," Mr. Franklin said, placing a hand on her shoulder. "You don't have to share if you don't want to."

"No," she finally managed to say, "I need to say this."

We all waited, wondering what she was about to reveal. You could have heard a pin drop in the circle right then. She started to say something and then inhaled sharply, like she was about to start sobbing. It took a visible effort for her to regain her composure, but she did it.

"You all know I've been dating a boy named Tommy – a super. He's a brainiac. Last weekend, he... he said he couldn't see me anymore."

Tears started streaming down her cheeks as she spoke.

"He said his parents want him to start dating someone more like them..."

Mr. Franklin waited a moment, but when she didn't continue, he asked her, "...do you mean another super?"

"Yeah..."

Mr. Franklin waited. He was good about that, like he had a sixth sense and knew when someone wasn't finished sharing yet. It didn't take long before Shaniqua continued.

"It's not fair!" she exclaimed, fists clenched, double-stamping her feet on the floor. "What is so wrong with me? Why can't they accept _me_? Why does everyone seem so fixated on superpowers? I mean, am I somehow a sub-human just because I can't perform integral calculus in my sleep?!"

Another pause. Still not done yet. We waited... When she continued, she was quieter.

"I just thought he loved me... And to be rejected over some stupid missing genetic code is so... is so... _wrong_... Thanks for letting me share."

"Thanks for sharing, Shaniqua," we all responded.

Tom Stanton was sitting between us. He waited a few seconds, then introduced himself.

"Hi, my name is Tom."

"Hi, Tom," we replied.

"This week's been pretty good. I placed at a track meet for non-enhanced runners today."

A small round of cross-talk began with several people congratulating him on his accomplishment before he continued.

"Thanks, everyone. So... that's all I've got."

"Thanks for sharing, Tom."

Then it was my turn. I hadn't really figured out what I was going to say yet, so I just opened my mouth and started talking.

"Hi, I'm Dylan."

"Hi, Dylan."

"I found out a few days ago that a friend of mine has been lying to me. I'm pretty mad at them right now. We've known each other for a long time, and now I don't know if I can trust them anymore. Thanks for listening."

"Thanks for sharing, Dylan."

Everyone in the circle shared something except for the very last kid. He just smiled and shook his head from side to side when Mr. Franklin asked him if he wanted to say anything. Then Mr. Franklin led us in our closing.

"Okay, everyone, we have a great way of closing our meeting. Let's all say it together: God, grant me the grace to accept with serenity the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."

* * * * *

I drove over to Chandler's house in my mom's car once the meeting was dismissed. We went down to the basement to what I called his 'tech-cave'. It was where he kept all of his electronic gear. The new drones, a tower computer that he'd modified so that it was supercooled and probably had enough processing power to control the space shuttle, some kind of virtual-reality tool-kit he'd been working on since he was a sophomore, and a bunch of other cool stuff.

He led me over to a trio of computer monitors in the corner and pulled up a second chair for me.

"I downloaded the video we captured before the first drone was destroyed. Thankfully, it was backed up on the handset. The onboard storage is totally junked. I think you'll be very interested in what I found. First, let's look at it in full-speed."

He played the clip, and I saw Faedra and her dad, and then her dad looked up, and his arm moved, and then nothing.

"Yeah, just like before. I didn't see anything new," I replied.

"Not yet. Now, let me slow it down to one tenth of that speed."

He clicked on something, then punched a few keys, and the video began playing again – much slower this time. I could see Faedra's dad pick something up right before his arm moved in a throwing motion in the direction of the drone. Then, as the video moved forward, I began to see something appear in the middle of the video. It was small at first, but as it came closer it looked somewhat shiny and silver. Next, the screen went black.

"What _was_ that?" I asked.

Without speaking, Chandler moved his mouse over some controls on-screen, and the video feed began moving backward, one frame at a time. I could see the thing slowly taking shape, until Chandler finally stopped backing up the feed. A perfect up-close shot of a screw appeared in the center of the frame.

"So..." I began, "Faedra's dad threw a screw from the garage to the edge of the fence... say, maybe a hundred feet? And he hit a drone bulls-eye that is small enough to fit in the palm of my hand."

"Yeah, pretty much."

"Something tells me Faedra's superpowers didn't come from strangers," I said. Her dad was obviously an accurate. That's what we called supers who had eyesight like a hawk and could pretty much hit anything they aimed at. They were great at golf, basketball, and anything else that required good hand-eye coordination. Apparently, they were pretty good at throwing screws, too.

"I thought Faedra said her dad was a super-not?" Chandler asked.

"Yeah, she did. Obviously, there's more to her family history that she's hiding besides her own powers."

"But that's not the best part," Chandler said as he moved a dial on-screen and re-positioned the video to a different spot. "Wait 'til you see _this_."

The video was at the point right before Faedra's dad looked at the drone. Faedra's back was toward the screen. She was standing in front of the car, facing toward the hood.

"Look at the tire," Chandler directed.

I watched as the tire suddenly began to rise two, maybe three inches off of the ground.

"No way!" I exclaimed.

"Yes, way."

"Play it again."

Chandler played it again, and I watched in amazement as Faedra bent down slightly towards the hood of the car, her hands hidden from view in front of her, then began to straighten up, and the car tire in view lifted off of the ground.

"She's a double," I pronounced.

"Yep. Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound _and_ lift a car off of the ground without a car jack."

"Whoa... this just keeps getting more weird by the minute."
Chapter 5 – Truth or Dare?

After leaving Chandler's house, I did a lot of thinking about what I had learned so far. Maybe, just maybe, I had been blowing things out of proportion. Maybe there was a good reason Faedra was keeping all of this secret from me. But if there was a good reason, I sure couldn't think of it.

We had already planned to go hiking over the weekend – just the two of us. I decided that would be a good opportunity to try and get her to talk about her powers. Maybe if it was just the two of us with nobody else around, she would come clean and tell me the truth.

I borrowed Mom's car and picked up Faedra on Sunday afternoon after she and her family got back from church. We drove out to a favorite hiking trail of mine – one that skirted the top of a mountain, then shot almost straight down and finally ended at a lake that almost no one ever went to. After hiking down to the lake, we ate the lunch we had brought and just listened to the forest sounds. No cars, no dogs barking... nothing but the sound of the wind blowing through the trees and the occasional fish that would disturb the top of the water as it snagged a bug for a lunch of its own. It was peaceful.

"You never really told me why you stopped coming to the meeting about six months ago," I began. "I know you said that you didn't feel comfortable sharing with everyone and all, but I wonder if there's something else – some other reason."

I tried to be nonchalant and not stare at her too intensely as I waited for her to respond. Her lips puckered and she drew back one corner of her mouth the way she did whenever she didn't want to answer a question.

"I don't want to talk about it," she said. She looked away from where I was sitting, obviously not wanting to look me in the eye. I guessed she figured it was easier to avoid telling me the truth that way.

"You sure there's _nothing_ you want to tell me?"

She looked down at her shoes and started scratching in the dirt with the tip of her sneaker. I thought she was just going to tell me 'no' and move on. After I heard what came out of her mouth next, I wished she had.

"Dylan," she began, still looking down at her shoe as she continued scratching in the dirt, "do you think I'm pretty?"

I felt a hot feeling creeping into my face. I knew my cheeks were probably turning red. Faedra turned and looked at me with her nose all scrunched up, her eyebrows raised – kind of like she was waiting to hear something she didn't want to hear. And me, Dylan, the guy who always had something to say and never lost his cool in front of a crowd... I suddenly found myself tongue-tied.

"I, ahhh, of course, ahhh, yeah, I mean... sure, you're pretty," I fumbled. When I'd said the word 'sure', my voice had shot up about two octaves. It had sounded like a bird chirping. Now it was my turn to stare at my shoes. I felt like I wanted to dissolve into the ground.

She laughed and then said, "You don't have to be embarrassed; I think it's cute."

I didn't ask what she was referring to as 'cute', whether it was my Rudolph-the-red-nosed-reindeer face, my suddenly cracking high-pitched voice, or the fact that I couldn't form a complete sentence. I decided it didn't matter. On top of that, I was having a hard time remembering what we had been talking about before she'd asked me that question.

A beeping sound suddenly started coming from Faedra's backpack. She fished out her phone and then frowned as she read a text message. When she looked back up at me, all of the previous light-heartedness was gone from her expression.

"I have to get home, right now."

"Okay, no problem, we can start hiking back," I replied.

"Dylan, I need you to do something for me, and please don't ask me why. I need you to give me a ten-minute head start before you start hiking back. My dad's gonna give me a ride at the trail head, so I won't be riding home with you."

I nodded my head up and down. She was probably expecting me to protest or something but knowing what I knew, it made total sense. If she needed to get home fast, she didn't need me slowing her down. As soon as I was out of sight, she could fly off and probably be home before I got back to the car.

"Yeah, okay," I responded.

She looked relieved, and then turned and started jogging along the trail back to the car.

"Be safe!" I yelled after her when she was almost out of sight. A few minutes later, I saw a dark speck in the distance, soaring through the sky.

* * * * *

I had a lot to think about on the hike back to the car. First, Faedra hadn't given me any more information about why she'd stopped coming to the support group meetings. Second, she hadn't taken the opportunity to come clean when I'd given her the chance by asking if there was _anything_ she wanted to tell me, so she obviously had no intention of telling me the truth about her superpowers. And third, what was up with her asking me if I thought she was pretty? Was she starting to have the same feelings for me that I was beginning to have for her? The thought made me smile for a second – until I remembered that she was flat-out lying to me about something _very_ important.

I thought about how to handle the situation all the way home. I could confront her with the video, proving that I already knew she was a super, but then where would that leave us? What else might she be lying to me about? How could I get her to voluntarily tell me the truth without letting her know what I already knew? I didn't want to lose our friendship, but she had violated my trust. How could I trust her again unless she showed me that she valued our relationship more than her secret?

The solution came to me at a stop light while I was waiting for the light to turn green. It was so simple that I was surprised I hadn't thought of it sooner. A big smile came across my face, and I drove home a happy man – well, teenager – but you get the point.

I was going to pick a fight with Bruno.
Chapter 6 – Miscalculations

When I got home, I called Chandler to tell him about my plan. He was less enthusiastic about it than I was.

"You want to what?!" he exclaimed.

"I want to pick a fight with Bruno to force Faedra to use her powers in order to rescue me," I repeated.

"And exactly how is _that_ supposed to work?"

"It's simple," I replied. "We find a good time and place to stage it – some time when we are changing classes, preferably when fewer teachers will be around. Faedra and I will 'happen' to come by just then. I'll insult Bruno. He'll get all worked up and threaten to beat the living crud out of me, and then Faedra will step up to the plate and save me – thus exposing her superpowers to the world."

"What if she doesn't 'step up to the plate' as you so eloquently put it? You do realize Bruno could kill you with one punch, don't you? And how do you know she's strong enough to stop him anyway?"

"Oh, she's strong enough, alright. I looked up the weight of the Mustang they were working on; it weighs over 3,500 pounds."

"Congratulations, you can look up the weight of a car on the internet. But how does that prove she's stronger than Bruno?"

"You remember that week last year when you were out because you had those burns from that science experiment, something about fire-retardant hand sanitizer?"

"Yeah, I neglected to properly account for the change in the oxygenation of the air at our particular geographic location. I fixed that the following week."

"Well, that was the week Bruno went to the state weight lifting competition for supers. He maxed out at 1,500 pounds on the bench press."

"Wow, so she really is stronger than him... cool. But how do you know he won't punch you before she can save you?"

"That will never happen."

"And why not?"

"Because you're going to be there with the gel gun."

The gel gun was one of Chandler's 'off the books' science projects. He had been developing it as a non-lethal weapon that could be used to stop people with super-strength during riots or crimes. I had been his guinea pig for phase one. The gel was super expansive, could be shot from a modified paintball gun, and acted like a fast-drying gel that essentially wrapped the target in a super-strong rubbery film. No matter how strong you were, you couldn't break through it because it would stretch instead of tear. It was genius.

I could sense a smile creeping across Chandler's face. He had been wanting to test it out on a real super-strong subject, but so far we hadn't been able to recruit a super to help us out. He had been reduced to stopping riding lawn mowers and me on a bicycle – not the ideal test he had wanted. This would be the perfect chance to try it out.

"Okay," he said. "I'm in."

* * * * *

The bus that took Bruno home from school was the last one to load up after school dismissed. I knew this because I had to take that same bus home on the days when Chandler couldn't give me and Faedra a ride. That would give us about ten minutes after the final bell rang to execute our plan – more than enough time to stage the fight with Bruno.

On Monday morning, when we were getting off of the bus at school, I handed Bruno a note.

"What's this?" he asked as he stared at the note I had shoved in front of him.

"Just read it," I said, trying to sound a bit tough. He opened the note, and then looked up at me and smiled.

"Okay super-not, I'll be there." He crumpled up the note and tossed it back to me.

Faedra frowned as she looked at me with a quizzical look on her face, and then she bent down to pick up the crumpled note. Her eyes got big, and her jaw dropped as she read it to herself.

"You, 'hereby refuse to do any more of' Bruno's homework, and you challenge him to, 'settle this once and for all, like men' in the gym immediately after school today?"

"Yeah," I replied, trying not to look too cocky.

"You _do_ realize he could kill you with, like, one punch, don't you?" she asked.

"Why does everybody keep bringing that up?"

"Because it's _true_?"

"Yeah, look, that doesn't necessarily mean we're going to fight. I mean, there _are_ other ways to settle a disagreement, you know."

"Not with _Bruno_."

"Well, just in case, will you come along so you can call the principal or something if he does decide to pummel me mercilessly?" I smiled sheepishly, hoping to look like I really needed her help. Apparently, it worked.

"I can't believe you are doing this. I mean..." She let out a frustrated sigh. "Of course I'll come so I can call for help if things get messy. I just can't believe you are doing this. What are you thinking?"

"Hey, just because I'm a super-not doesn't mean I don't have any pride, you know?" That last statement came out a bit harsher than I'd intended. In fact, I felt my face getting hot when I said it. I was sick and tired of being treated like some helpless weakling by the likes of Bruno and the other supers, and now Faedra – a super trying to pass as a super-not – was doing the same thing.

"Okay, you don't have to get mad at me. I just don't want to see you get hurt, that's all."

That was exactly what I was counting on.

* * * * *

After the last bell, Faedra and I went to the gym, as planned. Chandler met us outside the entrance.

"Are you in on this, too?" Faedra asked when she saw him.

"Are you kidding? I wouldn't miss this for the world."

"Boys," Faedra said with finality, shaking her head. I opened the door for her and let her enter the gym first. Then I turned to Chandler, and he opened his backpack slightly to reveal the gel gun.

Our plan was simple. I would trash-talk Bruno, and maybe push him if I couldn't rile him enough with the trash-talk. Faedra would step in to protect me once Bruno got mad, and that would be the end of it. Chandler would only break out the gel gun if something went really wrong and I was getting hurt.

Bruno was already waiting at the far end of the gym. He was seated on the bottom bleacher. As I came closer, he stood up and walked over to me, a big smirk on his face.

"So what's this about you not wanting to do homework for me anymore, super-not?"

He towered over me by a good five inches, and his breath stank like rotting meat. I wished silently for a breath mint to mask the smell.

"Look, it's like this. If you're too dumb to do your own work, then you'll just have to fail your math class, because I'm not going to do it anymore, get it?" I poked a finger in his chest to emphasize my point. His chest was rock-solid muscle. I was beginning to feel nervous.

He looked down at my finger like it was a fairy that had just appeared out of thin air. "I can't believe you just did that, super-not," he chuckled.

"Oh yeah?" I replied. "Just what are you gonna do about it?" I started to prepare myself to get punched, but then I remembered I'd never been punched, and I didn't know _how_ you were supposed to prepare for it. So instead I just stood there, scowling up at Bruno's big ugly face.

"Oh, _this_ is what I'm gonna do about it."

I glanced down as Bruno brought a roll of duct tape out from behind his back while grabbing me by the arm in a death grip with the other. He started walking towards the corner of the gym where the volleyball nets were stored.

"Hey, let me go!" I protested.

"Bruno, you can't hurt him!" Faedra helpfully reminded him. "He's a super-not; you hit him once and you'll be suspended for the rest of the year. You know the rules about super-strongs getting in fights."

_Why doesn't she just use her superpowers and make this guy let me go?_ I thought. I knew Bruno was strong, but I'd seen Faedra lift a car off of the ground without a struggle. I knew she was stronger than Bruno. What was she waiting for?

"Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm not gonna hurt the little twerp. I'm gonna do something better than that."

He pushed me up against a metal pole set in cement with a tire around the bottom – the kind used to support the volley ball nets. "Don't move," he said, letting my arm go to extend about a foot of the tape. This wasn't looking good.

"I'm calling the principal," Faedra declared, whipping out her cell phone and beginning to type furiously.

I decided it was time to leave. I stepped down off of the tire and tried to walk past him, but by this time he had extended the tape another foot. He pushed me back up against the poles and began wrapping the tape around me before I could get away. Thirty seconds later, he had a good start on turning me into a duct-taped mummy.

Chandler was tilting his head and raising his eyebrows while he looked at me and raised his backpack slightly. I shook my head from side to side. We couldn't blow our cover and still expect Faedra to act. Although, it did look like the plan was turning into a total failure. At least I still had all of my teeth.

Bruno took something out of his back pocket and taped it to my chest, and then stood back to admire his work. Taking out his own cell phone, he pointed it at me for several seconds before turning away and walking towards the exit. I could hear him say as he was leaving, "This is gonna be good."
Chapter 7 – A New Plan

Once Bruno had left the scene of the crime, Faedra and Chandler busied themselves with un-taping me from the volley ball pole. When I was finally free of the tape, I pulled the paper off that Bruno had attached to my shirt. It read, 'My name is Dylan, and I suck." Not very creative, but at least he'd spelled my name right. I had a sneaky suspicion that I would be seeing the video he had taken very soon.

Thankfully, we made it out of the gym before the principal arrived. Chandler and I practically ran to his truck, with Faedra trailing us.

"Hey," she called after us, "why are you running off? The principal will be here soon. You need to tell him about what Bruno did."

Chandler and I looked at each other. "Faedra, I basically challenged Bruno to a fight. If I tell the principal about what happened, we'll _both_ be suspended. And then Bruno will really have a good reason to pound my face into next week." I was hoping she would leave it at that.

"Well, what do you think is going to happen once the principal calls me back? I called the front office on my cell phone and told them Bruno was taping you up!"

"That _does_ put a wrinkle in my plan to escape suspension." Inside, I was secretly fuming that Faedra hadn't just used her powers to stop Bruno, but I tried not to let it show. I guessed that stopping your best friend from being duct-taped to a pole wasn't exactly enough justification for revealing your superpowers to the world. Why _was_ she hiding her powers anyway? I had to find out.

"Just get in the truck so we can get out of here, we can talk about this on the way home," Chandler prodded.

Chandler and I piled into the truck, but Faedra wasn't moving.

"Come on, Faedra, we need to move," I said.

"Okay, I guess so," she responded, finally climbing into the cab.

"You didn't leave your name when you called the office, did you?" Chandler asked as he started up the truck and began driving.

"Well... I don't exactly remember," Faedra replied.

"I don't think you did. I don't recall hearing you mention your name," he continued. "Since they won't find anyone in the gym, they may drop the whole thing."

"Why did you challenge him anyway, Dylan?" Faedra asked. She looked mad.

"What's the big deal? I'm okay. He didn't exactly try to punch me or anything."

"Well, he _could_ have, and _then_ what would you have done?"

I stole a look at Chandler, but he was keeping his eyes on the road. His cheeks were turning red like they did whenever he was in a situation where he felt uncomfortable. Come to think of it, I was feeling a bit uncomfortable myself. I wasn't used to Faedra being mad at me like this. What was up with _that_?

"I... guess I would have run away," I finally responded.

"Well, stop provoking him," she said, and then she turned back around and looked out the front windshield before adding, "I don't want you to get hurt."

After that, none of us said anything else the rest of the way home.

* * * * *

The next morning, it became abundantly clear that the wrath of Bruno had been released upon me. No less than five people texted me the link to the video of myself being taped to a pole with that stupid sign stuck to my chest before I even got to school. Just what I needed – more public humiliation, as if being a super-not wasn't bad enough.

There were giggles and snorts and awkward stares as I made my way to my first class. That, unfortunately, wasn't all I was going to endure as a result of my failed attempt to expose Faedra's superpowers. Right after the teacher finished taking attendance, he called me up to his desk and handed me a hall pass.

"You're expected in the principal's office in five minutes, Mr. Jones."

My heart sank. If Faedra's phone call hadn't outed us, then the victorious video post by Bruno had. I imagined a hundred ways the situation could get worse on the way to the office. By the time I arrived and sat down in the row of chairs just outside the principal's office, Bruno was already there. He scowled at me as I took the seat farthest away from him and awaited my fate.

We waited in the hallway a good ten minutes before Coach Delaware came lumbering down the hallway towards the office. Bruno's face blanched when he saw the coach coming. There were probably three or four people in the entire school who could strike fear into Bruno Walkowski's heart, and Coach Delaware was one of them. The coach was about six feet and one-hundred inches tall, with shoulders as wide as the hallway, and biceps the size of my entire body. He was the strongest super any of us knew. He'd been in the World's Strongest Super competition about ten years before, and made it to the semi-finals – a fact memorialized by a laminated news article posted on the door to his office in the gym.

When he was within twenty feet of us, it was obvious that he was _not_ happy. He lumbered up to the seat where Bruno was now trying to disappear and looked down at him with a frown on his face.

"What's this I hear about you duct-taping some super-not to a volley ball post in the gym?"

Without waiting for an answer, he turned his massive neck in my direction.

"Was that you?"

"Yes, sir," I squeaked. He turned back to Bruno.

"I've been called away from my planning period to deal with this, and I'm _not_ happy about it. I'm going to ask you once and once only. Did you do it?"

"Uhh... yes, sir, I did," Bruno finally managed to say.

"Hmmh!" Coach Delaware snorted. "Wait here."

With that, he turned around and marched into the principal's office. After about five minutes, he came back out.

"Okay, boys," he said, smiling at us. "Principal Needlemeier has agreed to let me deal with this situation." He turned and looked at me, the smile fading away from his face. "Mr. Jones, did you do anything to provoke this incident?"

My mind raced as I tried to think of how I was going to answer him. I couldn't tell the coach about doing homework for Bruno or Bruno would be in more trouble with the school, and I'd be in more trouble than I already was with Bruno. I decided to lie.

"I told him I was tired of him calling me a super-not, and asked him to come to the gym after school to settle it."

Bruno looked in my direction. I couldn't tell if he was surprised, relieved, or both, but he didn't say anything.

"Mr. Jones, let me give you a piece of advice. You don't pick a fight with a super-strong when you aren't. It's just not a good idea. Got it?"

"Yes, sir," I said.

He stuck out a piece of paper in my direction.

"Here's your get-out-of-jail-free card. Now, go back to class."

I took the piece of paper from his hand and gratefully began walking back down the hallway towards my class. I inwardly cringed when I heard him talking to Bruno as I retreated.

"And you, Mr. Walkowski. You should have had the presence of mind to ignore Mr. Jones' invitation. Since you did not, you are going to have the opportunity to run extra laps after practice every day this week."

Suddenly my plan to expose Faedra's superpowers seemed short-sighted and dangerous. I wondered if I had crossed that boundary between doing something to provoke Bruno into a one-time confrontation and entering the land of 'he may never forgive me as long as I live'. At this rate, I might need to hire a bodyguard to watch my back until I graduated... from college.
Chapter 8 – Judgment Day

After my visit to the office, the next few classes went by without incident. I couldn't shake the feeling that I had set in motion events that I could no longer control. Chandler and I talked about it under our breath in Chemistry class as we pretended to work on a lab assignment. Well, Chandler did the lab assignment while we talked, and I mostly focused on the problem at hand – namely, staying alive and avoiding Bruno for the foreseeable future.

"So you got busted and _still_ didn't get disciplined for it? Sweet."

"No, you don't get it. The fact that I got off scot-free is probably going to make Bruno even madder. He has to run extra laps after practice every day for a week. This is _not_ good."

"Okay, so what's the plan?"

"The plan? I have no plan unless you call possibly skipping school every day for the next week a plan. I can't possibly engineer having Faedra follow me around between classes like she's shepherding some helpless dweeb who's afraid of his own shadow. This was supposed to be a surgical strike, but it's looking more like a protracted land war."

"You could always talk to Faedra about it, you know. That _might,_ in fact, work. I mean, you two _are_ best friends. Remember?"

"I'm not so sure anymore. I mean, if she can hide this from me, maybe we aren't such good friends after all."

Professor Chan looked at us from the front of the room and then started walking over toward our lab table.

"Red alert, start talking lab stuff," I warned.

"So, the temperature measures 36 degrees Celsius," Chandler said, raising his voice slightly as Professor Chan approached.

"Got it," I replied, dutifully writing down the measurement in my notebook and hoping to God that Professor Chan didn't ask me what exactly we were measuring.

"Everything going okay over here, boys?" the professor asked.

"Yes, sir," I replied, "we're making good progress."

"Goooood," he replied, letting the word draw out like he normally did right before he was about to ask a question. If he asked me, we were sunk. Just then, mercifully, the bell rang.

"Okay, class, remember we have a quiz tomorrow over chapter nine," the professor warned as we all packed up our books and started filing out into the hall.

In today's class rotation, Chemistry was the last class of the day, so it was utter chaos in the halls as everyone was jockeying for position to get out of the building. Chandler and I took our normal route out the back door closest to our classroom and headed for the back parking lot, where Chandler's truck was parked.

We took up our conversation where we had left off right before Professor Chan had interrupted us. We were walking slower than the other students, who all pulled ahead of us in the mad rush to get home, leaving us trailing behind. Suddenly, I felt something grab the back of my shirt, and my heart leaped into my throat as my feet came off of the ground. I knew even before he started speaking that it was Bruno. I had an equally compelling thought that I was about to experience some serious bodily harm.

Bruno started walking off the main sidewalk, heading between two trailers that were used as overflow classrooms while holding me off the ground with one hand and Chandler off the ground with his other hand.

"Well, super-not, I guess you know why you're here. I'm going to be doing extra laps the rest of the week because of you. I noticed you didn't seem to get into any trouble at all, so I thought I'd give you a little something to think about while I'm running laps."

There was a nice-sized tree behind the trailers. Bruno walked over to it while he was talking and lifted Chandler up to a broken branch, hooking the backpack he was wearing on it so that Chandler was suspended about two feet off of the ground. I had a suspicion we weren't the first visitors Bruno had brought to this location. With Chandler taken care of, Bruno turned his full attention back to me. I glanced over at Chandler, who was feverishly typing on his cell phone. I just hoped whoever he was texting would get there while I was still conscious.

Bruno tossed me towards the trailer. When my feet hit the ground, I stumbled and fell into the building, hitting my shoulder hard against the metal siding. _That's going to leave a bruise_ , I thought to myself.

Bruno squared off, facing me as I recovered my balance.

"Now, Bruno, think about this. You hit me too hard and I could end up in the hospital. Who's the first person you think they're gonna suspect? Your dad wouldn't be too happy about that, would he?"

"Oh, you don't have to worry about that. I'm not going to hit you too hard. Just hard enough."

I didn't know if he saw me glance over at Chandler or not, but he looked at him just then and saw him texting away. This just kept getting better.

"Hey, geek-boy, put that down!" He grabbed me by the shirt and dragged me along as he walked over and yanked the cell phone out of Chandler's hand. Staring down at the screen for several seconds, he scrolled through the messages. Then he laughed.

"You have a chance to save your friend, and you're texting Faedra for help? A super-not girl? You really aren't as smart as they say you are." With that, he tucked the phone into his pocket and turned back to me.

"Time for payback super-not," he said as he drew back his fist to hit me. I closed my eyes and winced to prepare for the impact. This whole thing had been a very, very bad idea. I wished I had just talked to Fae instead. Now I might not be _able_ to talk to her for quite a while.

"I don't think you should do that," a voice said.

It was Faedra! I opened my eyes to see my five-foot-six-inch best friend holding Bruno's arm with one hand so that he couldn't hit me. Talk about David and Goliath. The look on Bruno's face was priceless.

"What the..?!" Bruno said, staring at his arm and then back at Faedra. He made a motion like he was trying again to punch me. I could see his face turning red and the veins bulging out on his neck with the strain, but his arm didn't move. Faedra's smile never wavered. She didn't even look like she was making much of an effort.

Bruno released me and grabbed Faedra's arm with his other hand in an attempt to pry himself free from her grasp, but without success. I scrambled a safe distance away and watched in awe as Faedra released Bruno's arm and grabbed two big fist-fulls of his shirt. As he desperately tried to break free, she lifted him off of the ground, levitating above the earth several feet. She had stopped smiling.

"Look at me, Bruno," she commanded. Bruno stopped struggling and stared at her face. I could tell he was terrified. This was too good.

"If you try and hurt my friends again, I'm going to do something worse to you than tape you to a volley ball pole and put the video online. Do you understand?"

"Uhhh... yeah," Bruno responded nervously. Even though I had known Faedra could fly and was super-strong, I was still standing there with my mouth open as I watched what was happening.

"And another thing," she continued, pulling Bruno a couple of inches closer to her face. "If you tell anyone I'm a super, I will be your worst nightmare."

Bruno's head started shaking up and down even before the words started coming out of his mouth. "Okay... sure, whatever you say..."

The smile I was used to seeing came back onto Faedra's face as she slowly came back down to earth, letting go of Bruno's shirt when his feet touched the ground.

"Good. I'm glad we understand each other," she said cheerily as she came back down to mother earth.

Bruno just stood there looking down at her, not moving.

"Better head off to practice. You don't want to keep Coach Delaware waiting, do you?"

When Faedra mentioned Coach Delaware, it was as if Bruno came out of a trance. He turned in the direction of the football field and began running, not looking back once as he rounded the corner and went out of sight. She turned and looked at me. I must've been rubbing my shoulder because she asked how I was doing.

"I'm okay. Thanks," I replied. I was having to work up being angry at her for her deception, but at the moment I was just glad to have avoided a trip to the hospital courtesy of Bruno. She looked around, I suppose to see if anyone else was nearby, and then levitated up to the branch where Chandler was still hanging by the straps of his backpack. She gently unhooked him and lowered him to the ground.

"That was sooo cool," Chandler said once he was back on the ground.

Faedra's countenance changed, and she looked worried. "Look, you guys, you can't tell _anyone_ about what you just saw, okay? Nobody can know I'm a super."

"Yeah, sure, no problem," Chandler replied. I shot him a dirty look. "What?" he asked defensively.

"What's the matter, Dylan?" Faedra asked.

"What's the matter? You – my best friend since third grade – are a _super_." I'd dragged the word 'super' out like it was a curse word, and then I remembered Chandler was a super, so I added, "no offense, Chandler."

"Yeah... no... I get it," he replied.

"What's so bad about that?" she asked.

"What's so bad about that? I'm a member of the most despised and reviled people-group on the planet that practically everyone looks down on because we don't have superpowers like everyone else, and you were one of the few people I thought understood me. You were someone I thought I could count on. Now I find out that you're a _super_. So not only do you _not_ understand what it's like to be a super-not, but you've been _lying_ to me for who knows how long!"

From the contorted look on her face, I thought she was about to cry. Her arms were crossed, and her face was turning red. I could tell I was practically shouting by the end, but right then, I didn't care.

"You don't have to worry about your little secret. I won't tell anyone," I spat. I turned to Chandler and said, "I'm not riding with you today, I'm walking home... alone." And with that, I grabbed my backpack off of the ground and started walking off.

"Dylan, wait!" Faedra called after me. "Let me explain!"

I just kept walking.
Chapter 9 – The Blow-up

It took about thirty seconds before Chandler's truck pulled up alongside me as I walked down the road. Faedra was leaning out of the open window.

"Dylan, come on. Please get in the truck."

"Not now. I need time to think," I responded.

"We _need_ to talk."

"We _needed_ to talk months ago, maybe years ago, or whenever it was that you started lying to me," I said. "Suddenly, you want to 'talk'. Well, news flash – I'm not in the mood right now."

A car pulled up behind Chandler and started blowing its horn. I heard Chandler say something to Faedra, but couldn't quite make out what it was. A few seconds later, his truck drove off down the road.

Funny thing about being angry. When you're angry, the mind often promises what the body can't deliver. Thirty minutes later I was still walking. Only, by then I was beginning to get tired. I was hot, sweaty, and thirsty on top of everything else. My resolve to refuse to take that ride had begun to seem like a mistake. I was tempted to pull out my cell phone, call Chandler, and beg for a ride.

Just then I saw a car approaching from the direction I was heading. As it came closer, I began to make out the outline of the vehicle. In another hundred yards, I could tell it was Chandler's truck. A smile crept across my face. My frown temporarily returned as I thought that Faedra might be in the truck with him, but a few seconds later I could tell that she wasn't, and my smile came back.

Chandler pulled into a driveway directly in my path and yelled out the passenger window, "How about that ride now?"

"I thought you'd never get here!" I yelled, jogging the remaining distance and jumping into the cab of the truck.

We were happily cruising along in silence the way only two teenage guys could do, when Chandler broke the 'guys looking cool and not talking' atmosphere.

"She cried practically the whole way home."

"Yeah? Well, serves her right. She should feel bad about lying to me... to _us_."

More silence. I thought about turning on the radio but didn't.

"I get that you're upset, Dylan. Nobody likes being lied to... but we did what we set out to do, right? We got her to show her powers, and now everything is out in the open."

I didn't say anything. I just sat there looking out the window.

"Chandler, do you believe there's a God?" I finally asked.

"Whoa, where did _that_ come from?" he asked.

"I've been thinking about it a lot lately, whether or not there's a God. I mean, are we just accidents and there's no purpose to our existence beyond propagating the species and having a good time while we're here? Or is there some _reason_ behind it all? Is there some reason I got passed over when God handed out the superpowers or is it all just some big cosmic lottery, and I'm one of the losers?"

Chandler took the next turn in the road before he answered. I honestly didn't know what he was going to say.

"When I was three or four, I don't remember for sure, I got a big box of books from my grandmother for my birthday," he began. "It was filled with a bunch of really cool old books. That was the best gift. I read through all of them in a week, and then I read them again. It was great. One of the books was a book called _Case for a Creator for Kids_ by a guy named Lee Strobel.

"At one point in the book, he starts talking about the statistical probability of life developing on planet Earth. He mentioned how, if the force of gravity varied even the slightest bit, that life on our planet couldn't exist. Then he mentioned something called the cosmological constant..."

"The cosmo-whatical-what?"

"The cosmological constant. It's the energy density of empty space."

"You're losing me here, Einstein. I just want to know if you believe there's a God or not, not learn how to build an atom bomb."

"Well, the point is that if the cosmological constant varied even slightly, if the energy density of empty space was one tiny bit more or less dense, then either the stars would never have formed or the universe would have collapsed in upon itself."

"So how did that help you decide if there's a God or not?"

"Well, the probability of either gravity or the cosmological constant occurring randomly is astronomical. But scientists have calculated that the probability of both of them occurring randomly at the same time in such a way that life could occur on planet Earth as it has is about one chance in a hundred million trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion. I checked the math, and they're right."

"You did that when you were three?"

"Well... I might have been four. I told you I don't remember exactly how old I was. It's not as hard as you think once you learn calculus and a bit of advanced probability and statistics."

"You're losing me, genius," I prodded.

"The point is, I don't believe that life on Earth could have happened by chance. I believe there had to be some super-intelligent design behind it. For all practical purposes, you could call that super-intelligence God."

At that point, I was very confused.

"So... you _do_ believe in God?"

He laughed. "Yes, I believe there is a God. Do you?"

I frowned. "My mom says she believes in God, but she never goes to any kind of church or talks much about it. I guess she wants me to figure out that part of life for myself. I mean, I look around at everything that exists on this Earth and I see some pretty complex stuff. It's hard to believe it all happened by chance. I guess I haven't made up my mind about it yet. But if there _is_ a God, I sure wish He, or She, or It would give me a clue why I got stuck in no-superpower-loserville."

"Don't say that. You're not a loser, Dylan. You're my best friend. That's a pretty coveted position."

Then it was my turn to laugh. "Yeah, I guess you're right. I wonder if Faedra is going to replace my position in _her_ friend list with another super?"

"What are you going to do about the Faedra situation now?" he asked.

"Honestly... I don't know," I admitted. "I think I need to pull out the big guns for this one."

"Okay, sounds good... What does that mean, exactly?"

"I'm going to talk to Mr. Franklin."

* * * * *

My mom gave me pretty good advice most of the time. We talked about a lot of stuff, but sometimes a guy just needs to get some advice from an older, more experienced guy. Since my dad had died before I was born and my mom had never re-married, I didn't have another guy at the house to talk to, so in times like these, I went to talk to Mr. Franklin.

I had Chandler drop me off at the Anglican Church instead of at my house. I texted my mom to let her know where I was so she wouldn't worry about me, and then I went inside to search for Mr. Franklin. I didn't think Tuesday afternoon would exactly be a hotbed of activity at the church, so I thought my chances of finding Mr. Franklin and getting to talk with him were pretty good.

I opened up one of the large wooden doors at the front of the church and walked into the familiar foyer. At the far end, next to the doors that led into the main sanctuary, there were two six foot long tables placed end to end. There was a printed banner taped across the two tables that read, 'Seniors for Service Training'. An elderly man and woman sat behind the tables, and they smiled at me as I walked up to them. The woman had a cheery voice and was the first to speak to me.

"Well, hello there, young man. How are you today?"

"I'm good. Thanks."

"Can we help you with something?" the man asked in an equally pleasant but not quite so cheery voice.

"I'm looking for Mr. Franklin."

"In that case," the man replied, "you had better look in the gym. When I saw him earlier, he said something about replacing the basketball nets."

"Do you know where the gym is?" the woman asked.

"Yes ma'am, I do. Thanks."

I jogged off down the hall to the left and out the door at the end. It didn't take me long to reach the gym annex out behind the main church building. When I went inside, I saw Mr. Franklin standing near the top of an eight-foot ladder diligently re-threading a new net onto the basketball goal. A threadbare, tattered net lay on the floor below the goal. The gym was fairly old, but you could tell it was kept in good condition. The surface of the court had been made out of wood, and the afternoon sun reflected off of the polished floors as it shone through the windows above the bleachers. Aside from us, there was no one else in the gym. He turned his head and looked my way briefly when I opened the door.

"Well, hello Dylan. What brings you here on a Tuesday afternoon?"

"Remember that friend that I mentioned in group on Saturday?"

"The one who lied to you?"

"Yeah, that's the one. She... my friend... well, I need some advice."

He finished looping the final piece of the net into the goal and then climbed down from the ladder. "Let's have a seat, and you can tell me all about it," he said as he motioned over to the bleachers.

"What seems to be the trouble?" he asked after we were seated.

I let out a long sigh, not quite sure where to begin or what I should say considering the delicate nature of the offense. "Well, I decided to trick my friend into basically telling me the truth about what they had lied to me about before."

"And how did that work out?"

"Well... it didn't work out like I planned. Honestly, I'm not sure what exactly I expected. After I tricked my friend into revealing the truth, I was just as mad as before. So I'm not sure if my plan accomplished much."

He didn't respond right away. He just sat there for a few seconds. It was nice to have someone to talk to who was really listening. I just hoped he had some decent advice, because I was stumped.

"What did you want to see happen?" he asked at last. Now it was my turn to pause as I racked my brain, trying to answer what should have been a simple question.

"I don't know. I guess one thing was to get the lie out in the open. Beyond that... I don't have a clue."

He nodded his head up and down. "When somebody lies to you, they have violated your trust," he began. "If you want to restore the relationship, then you need to talk to this person about the fact that they lied to you. Now, it sounds like you also lied to them when you tricked them, correct?"

"Yeah..." I replied sheepishly.

"Well, then, I recommend that you tell them about your deception as well. You see, if you want to save the friendship and restore trust, you have to start with the truth... the whole truth. It's the only way you can forgive each other and begin to rebuild the relationship."

It made sense. But just because it made sense didn't mean I wanted to do it.

"Thanks, Mr. Franklin."

"Anytime, Dylan," he said as he clapped me on the shoulder and stood up. "Let me know how it goes."

"Okay," I replied.

It took me about ten minutes to walk home. The whole time I was thinking about how it might go if I took his advice. I had no clue.

When I got home, my mom had one of my favorite meals ready to eat – Chinese take-out. My favorite was General Tso's chicken. The spicier, the better.

"Thanks, Mom!"

"Well, I figured we could use a change of pace, shake things up a bit."

"Cool."

"Let's eat, and we can tell each other about our day."

I smiled and thought about how I couldn't tell her about the most important part of my day without betraying the promise I had made to Faedra. As she started talking about some things that had happened at her work, I thought to myself that relationships were complicated sometimes... way too complicated.

"...and after that, I called the supplier and ordered the parts for the _second_ time. I'm just glad that they had the right parts after all," she concluded.

"That's great, Mom." I hated to admit I hadn't been listening to what she'd just been saying. I loved my mom, but sometimes hearing about her work day was just plain boring.

"Soooo, tell me about your day at school."

"Well, not much happened. I had a quiz in math class, and we have a new reading assignment we have to write a review on by the end of the week. That's about it."

"Did you find Mr. Franklin at the church?"

"Yeah, I did," I said, secretly hoping she wouldn't ask me what I talked to him about. Mom usually gave me space to work through my issues without being too pushy. I was thankful for that. But then, she uttered the words every teenager dreads like the plague.

"I got a call from the school today..."

"Really?" I asked, my voice squeaking at the end of the word, so I said it again, trying to recover. "Really?"

She reached her hand across the table and put it on top of mine.

"Dylan, I know about the video and what Bruno did to you. I know about the name-calling..." She let out a sigh. "I know it's not easy not being a super, and I just want you to know that I understand. Do you want to talk about it? Are you okay?"

Most of the time, when your parents tell you they understand, you don't believe them. It's just hard to imagine your parents as teenagers who faced similar circumstances. But in this case, I believed her. She _was_ a super-not, after all. I had heard enough stories about her childhood to know she had endured her own share of persecution and ridicule over it. Faedra and Mom had always been the people I counted on the most to understand what it was really like. Now that I knew that Faedra was a super...

"Mom, Faedra's a super," I blurted out, immediately wishing I hadn't.

"What?" My mom's jaw dropped open and she stared at me. I had already let the cat out of the bag, so I went for it.

"She can fly, and she's super-strong. I found out when she saved Chandler from falling off of a cliff when we went hiking last Friday."

My mom slowly closed her mouth. I could tell she was processing the information as she nodded up and down slowly for several seconds.

"Wow..."

"No one saw it but me, and I didn't say anything to Faedra. I was upset that she's been lying to me, so I challenged Bruno to a fight in the gym, hoping to out Faedra as a super. I thought she would use her powers to stop Bruno, but it didn't work out like I planned – thus the video and the office visit." I stopped there and didn't say any more. I wasn't planning on telling my mom about the near-death scrape with Bruno behind the trailer at school if I could help it. She had enough to worry about as it was and I didn't want a lecture about risking my life in a fight with a super.

"So the whole thing was just to get Faedra to admit she's a super?"

"Yeah, I know it sounds stupid now, but at the time it made sense to me. I wanted to expose her for lying to me... to _everybody_."

"Dylan... why don't you just _talk_ to her?"

"Yeah. That's what everyone keeps telling me to do. I'm starting to see that's probably the best way to handle it, but..."

"But, what?"

"But I'm still mad at her right now."

"Okay. Well, no one says it has to happen this instant. Give it a few more days. Clear your head. Then tell her you need to talk to her. She's a sweet girl, and you guys have been friends forever. I'm sure there's a reasonable explanation for why she didn't tell you. Maybe her parents told her not to come out as a super for some reason."

"Maybe. I guess you're right. I can't screw things up worse than they already are just by talking to her."

I didn't usually go to my mom for relationship advice. She was a great mom and all, but she wasn't Dr. Phil or anything. Still, what she was saying sounded an awful lot like what Mr. Franklin had suggested.

"Thanks for listening, Mom."

"Sure, honey. Anytime."

After we were done eating, I helped clean off the table and took out the trash. I had just put the lid down on the trash bin when my phone buzzed in my pocket. I took it out and saw it was a text from Faedra. I clicked on the message icon, and my blood froze.

hlp me home bsmnt hury
Chapter 10 – A Dangerous Discovery

I told my mom I was going over to Faedra's. Next, I texted Chandler and asked him to meet me there before jumping on my bike and pedaling as fast as a super-not possibly could toward her house.

The whole way there, I was worried sick something might be seriously wrong – like the house was on fire or something. Then I remembered she was a super, and a fire would be so easy for her to handle, so that couldn't possibly be it. Dang it! What was wrong!? Suddenly, the fact that Faedra had been hiding her superpowers from me wasn't all that important. All I wanted right then was to get to her house and make sure she was safe.

When I arrived, everything looked totally normal to me at first. The house wasn't on fire, and no ambulance with its lights flashing was in the front driveway or anything like that. Then I noticed that I couldn't see any lights on inside the house. It _was_ summer time, and there was still some daylight left, but even so... by this time of day, you could usually see lights turned on in most people's houses.

I laid my bike over on the ground and sheepishly walked up to the front door and rang the doorbell. I half expected Faedra's dad to open the door a few seconds later, but no one answered. I tried to peer through one of the glass panels that flanked either side of the door, but with no lights on inside, it was next to impossible to make anything out.

After several seconds, I decided to try the front door. I depressed the latch and pulled on the handle. To my surprise, it came open, so I went inside.

I hadn't thought to bring a flashlight, but I didn't want to start turning on lights all over the place. I wasn't sure what was going on yet, and Faedra had said that she needed my help. What if a burglar was hiding around the corner or something? If that was the case, though, Faedra could easily overpower a burglar with her superpowers, right? It didn't make any sense. Why would Faedra need _my_ help? Something was definitely wrong here.

I crossed the foyer and placed my hand on the door-knob of the basement door. I took a deep breath, slowly turning the knob and then gently pulling the door open, hoping the hinges wouldn't squeak. I never remembered the door squeaking before during the hundreds of times Faedra, Chandler, and I had gone down to her basement to play video games in the game room, but we'd never been concerned with being quiet before. When you're trying to be totally silent, it's amazing how every floorboard seems to creak, and every door hinge squawks to announce your presence.

Thankfully, the door opened silently. I looked down the stairs and saw that the landing at the bottom was barely illuminated by the light coming in from one of the basement windows. It was now or never. I reached my hand over to the light switch and turned it on. I listened for any sign that someone might be downstairs, but heard nothing.

"Faedra?" I whispered, waiting for a reply. Then, I heard something. It was faint, not nearly as loud as my whisper, but I thought someone had called my name. I slowly descended the steps and peered around the corner. There was Faedra, tied up to a chair.

I instinctively ran up to her and began untying the ropes. As I did so, I accidentally knocked the cell phone that had been resting on her leg onto the floor.

"What happened?" I asked as I continued to untie the ropes.

"Too weak... take me up... stairs," she whispered.

For the first time, I noticed that she looked sick. Her skin was pale, and she looked like my mom had the last time she'd had the flu, right before she threw up. I finished untying the ropes and held out my hand to help her up. I immediately thought the gesture was stupid since Faedra was super-strong, but she seemed to struggle to lift her arm up and place her hand in mind. I realized she was too weak to stand on her own, so I bent down, draped one of her arms around my neck for support, put my arm around her waist, and hoisted her out of the chair.

"Hello? Anybody home?"

It was Chandler, calling from the front door.

"We're down here, in the basement. Faedra's sick," I called out.

"No..." Faedra muttered as we made our way to the stairs.

I could hear Chandler hurrying across the foyer and beginning to pad down the stairs; then I heard a bump and a groan. As Faedra and I made it to the landing and turned to head up the stairs, I saw Chandler seated on the third step down, leaning against the wall and looking just as sick as Faedra.

"What's wrong with you?" I asked. Chandler just stared back at me and moaned helplessly, but he didn't move.

Faedra and I slowly made our way up the steps. As we got closer to where Chandler was sitting, it seemed that Faedra's strength was returning. I wasn't having to practically carry her anymore and she was moving more under her own power. I couldn't walk past Chandler while supporting Faedra, too, so I sat her down two steps below where Chandler was.

"I'm going to set you down for a minute while I get Chandler upstairs, and then I'll be right back for you, okay?"

"Okay," she replied.

I helped Chandler stand to his feet and practically carried him up to the main floor, where I sat him down in a chair in the front den, and then I went back and helped Faedra. By the time Faedra and I reached the foyer, she was walking under her own power again.

"Thank you," she said, her voice sounding much stronger. She began walking through the rooms on the ground floor, calling out for her mom and dad. "Mom! Dad! Is anybody here?!"

Taking my cue from her, I helped search some of the rooms, too. By the time we came back to the foyer after having searched the rest of the house, she seemed to be walking fine. Chandler was still sitting down in the chair where I had placed him.

"What's going on?" Chandler asked.

Faedra didn't reply, practically running out the back door – I assumed to check the garage and back yard for her parents. I followed her out just in time to see her duck into the garage. She came out a few seconds later, tears streaming down her face.

"They're gone," she said. "I can't believe they're gone."

"What happened, Faedra?" I asked.

"Yeah, and why do I feel like I have lead shoes on my feet and I can't think straight?" Chandler added.

I turned around to see him leaning against the back door frame for support, not looking quite as sick as he had earlier, but still pretty pale. Faedra was wiping the tears off of her face with the back of her hand.

"I'll tell you everything soon, I promise," she said, "but first I need your help to get something out of the basement. Chandler, you need to come out of the house. The farther away you are from the basement, the better you'll feel."

"I'm all for that," Chandler responded, leaving the support of the door jamb and lumbering unsteadily across the yard towards the garage. With each step, he seemed to become more steady. By the time he was beside Faedra and me at the garage, he seemed fine.

"Okay, so I'm confused," I began. "Why is it that you and Chandler got sick and I didn't?"

"It's a long story. For now, just know that there's a meteor fragment in the basement that makes supers weak, and I need your help to get something from down there that will help us find my mom and dad."

"What happened to your mom and dad?" Chandler asked.

"They were kidnapped, and we need to move now to help find them."

Chandler and I exchanged a quick glance.

"Well, since I'm the only one who doesn't get sick in the basement, tell me what you need and I'll go get it," I replied.

"You know that book shelf in the corner, the one to the left once you come off of the steps?"

"Yeah?"

"That little, stuffed elephant sitting on top of a barrel is what I need."

"Got it," I said, already turning back towards the house.

"Thanks, Dylan," Faedra called from behind me.

"I'm guessing this isn't _just_ a stuffed elephant," Chandler said.

"It has a USB drive inside that I need to get to one of Dad's friends, and fast."

I found the elephant downstairs and came back out a minute later, holding it in my hand. "Here you go," I said as I handed it to Faedra.

Faedra opened the bottom of the little barrel that the elephant had been sitting on, and pulled out a USB drive not much bigger than a dime.

"What's on the thumb drive?" Chandler asked.

"I'm not 100% sure. My dad just told me that if he or Mom were ever kidnapped, that I should take this to his friend and it would help them find them."

"You mean your dad was _expecting_ to get kidnapped?" I asked.

"Like I said, it's a long story. Right now we need to get this to Mr. Franklin ASAP."

"Mr. Franklin?" Chandler and I both asked in unison.

"Yeah... Mr. Franklin's not _just_ an Anglican priest, you guys..."
Chapter 11 – Secrets Revealed

We jumped into Chandler's truck, and Faedra punched in Mr. Franklin's address on her phone's GPS app. It took me all of ten seconds to notice the cool air coming out of the air vents and that the windows were up.

"You fixed the air conditioning?"

"Yeah. I put some dye in and found the leak, and then I plugged it and recharged the system with a new refrigerant I've been developing. It keeps the air five degrees cooler and uses half the energy of the old coolant," Chandler replied.

I shook my head and marveled yet again at how smart Chandler was. Even among the other brainiacs I knew, he stood out.

"That's great. At least now we don't have to shout to be heard above the wind." Turning to Faedra, I continued, "So, it's spill-the-beans time. Why on earth would anyone want to kidnap your parents?"

She let out a heavy sigh and looked down at the floor. "I guess there's no point in continuing to hide the truth." She looked at Chandler and then at me as she continued, "You guys have to promise me you won't tell anyone what I'm about to tell you. I'm serious. If anyone finds out what I'm about to tell you, my parents could lose their jobs, or we might have to move or something. Promise."

"Yeah, sure, I won't tell," I said. I decided not to point out that their having to move or losing their jobs was probably the least of her parents' worries right now.

"My lips are sealed," Chandler agreed.

"My dad and mom are government agents."

"Whoa, cool," Chandler blurted out.

"Since when?" I asked. "I've seen your mom's work papers at home for that lab she works at a thousand times, and I've seen your dad in his park service uniform when we go hiking in the national forest. Those aren't exactly spy organizations."

"No. Those are their cover jobs. They really work for the Department of Homeland Security. Dylan, you remember when I had to leave you on that hike the other day?"

"Yeah," I said.

"Well, my dad called me home for an emergency meeting. That's when he told me about the thumb drive and what to do if they turned up missing. When I came home from school this afternoon, the house was a mess, just like you saw, and my parents were tied up and laying on the floor of the den. There were these people in strange-looking suits, like hazmat suits or something, standing around. I started to fight them but then felt really weak. They tied me up to that chair in the basement. I heard them talking with each other about what to do with me. They finally decided it would be best to leave me behind because they didn't want some kid to slow them down. They warned me, that if I went to the cops, they would kill my mom and dad. Then they left. Mr. Franklin is the person my dad told me to take this to."

"Here we are," Chandler announced as he pulled up to the curb and shut off the engine.

Mr. Franklin lived in a middle-class neighborhood on the edge of town. It was a small brick house with a slate walkway leading up to the front door from the curb. It was no mansion, but even in the quickly fading twilight, it was obvious he spent a lot of time working on the yard, just from the manicured shrubs and neatly-groomed flower beds. This was the first time I had ever been to his house, and it struck me as odd that a priest would live in a house like this. I didn't know why. I guessed I'd always imagined him cloistered away in some monastery somewhere. Strange, the way we fill in the blanks like that without really thinking about it.

Faedra rang the doorbell, and we waited. It wasn't long before the front door opened and Mr. Franklin's smiling face greeted us from behind the screen door.

"Well, hello. What brings you three out here to my neck of the woods?"

Faedra held the thumb drive up to where he could see it, but kept it close to her chest.

"My dad and mom are gone, and they told me to give this to you," she said.

Mr. Franklin's brow furrowed and the smile faded from his face. He opened the screen door and practically whispered, "Come in, quickly."

I noticed as we went inside that he was looking past us towards the street, first left and then right, before shutting the door and locking it. When he turned around to face us, his voice was urgent and solemn.

"Did you notice anyone following you on the way over here?"

"I don't think so," Chandler replied.

"Into the study," he said as he motioned us to another room. Once we were all inside, he shut the door. When he turned around, he held out his hand to Faedra and she gave him the thumb drive. "Have a seat," he said as he stepped around behind a mahogany desk and sat down. He plugged the thumb drive into a USB hub on the top of the desk and began typing away on the keyboard as he looked at a computer screen that we couldn't see. No one said anything for about ten minutes. Finally, he stopped and leaned back in his chair, inhaling and exhaling a deeply.

"So, can you find my parents?" Faedra asked at last.

"One moment," he replied. He got up and walked to the opposite corner of the room, to where a plaster bust of Martin Luther sat on top of a wooden pedestal. He grabbed the head of the bust and flipped it backwards to reveal a single red button, which he pushed. Once he'd done this, he turned back around to the three of us.

"Now we can talk."

He looked down at the floor for a moment and appeared to be considering what he was about to say, and then suddenly he looked back up at Faedra.

"Faedra, how much have you told these two boys?"

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"How much do they know about you and your parents?"

"I told them that they work for the Department of Homeland Security and that they've been kidnapped."

Faedra went on to tell him about how she'd been tied up and left at her house, how she'd texted me for help, and what had happened since then until we arrived at his house. Mr. Franklin nodded his head up and down and looked at Chandler and me, apparently trying to decide if he could trust us.

"Okay. Here's the deal," he said, still looking at Chandler and me directly. "You boys already know enough to be in some serious danger. You are going to need to stay with me until I'm convinced it's safe enough to let you go home. Whatever we talk about in this room stays just between the four of us, understood?"

Chandler and I both nodded.

"Is that a yes?" he asked.

"Yes," we both replied, speaking out of sync with one another so that it sounded like an echo.

"Good. Because if you break your promise, and all of our lives could be put in jeopardy. This isn't a game."

After pausing for effect, he continued.

"I wasn't always a priest. Years ago, I worked with Faedra's dad and mom for another government agency. I was involved in the operation where Faedra's mom got injured and hurt her spine. That's when I got this." As he spoke, he pointed to a scar that began on the left side of his forehead, the remainder of it covered by his hair.

Faedra's eyes got big and she opened her mouth as if she was about to ask a question, but then she closed it again. Mr. Franklin continued.

"The operation was a tragic failure, and it changed all of us in different ways. After that, I decided it was time for me to get out and do something different with my life. I became a priest, and Faedra's parents joined a different agency. Life moved on.

"A few months ago, Faedra's dad, Tom, came to me and told me that he and Colleen had discovered a mole in the DHS. Someone had compromised a major operation, and they found proof that it was done from inside the department. He told me that, if they ever disappeared, I should get this USB drive from their house. He said it would contain the latest information they had on who they thought the mole was and what their plans were.

"Apparently, several months ago, a small meteor crashed in the forest near here. Once it was discovered that the meteor had special properties that affected supers, the DHS took over and began working with the army to secure the area and conduct extensive experiments and analysis on the meteor. Tom and Colleen were a part of that team. They discovered the mole had been sending reports to an outside organization. They almost had enough information to go to the top when they discovered the code names of several other moles in the department. That was the last entry in the information on the USB drive. Ergo, we can't go to any other government authorities for help right now – at least not until we know who all of the moles are. If we go to them, the other moles may learn of it, and Faedra's parents will likely be killed to cover their tracks."

He walked over to the desk, turned around, and sat down on the top of it with his arms crossed, looking down at the floor.

"So how can we find my parents before something bad happens to them?"

"We can use the information on the drive to follow the mole and possibly discover where your parents are being held," Mr. Franklin replied. "The mole apparently smuggles out some materials from the meteor site once a week and meets with his superiors. Your mom and dad hadn't yet been able to follow him on one of these rendezvous without the risk of being discovered, and that's as far as they got before they were kidnapped themselves. Obviously, the mole, or whomever he or she is working for, discovered what they were up to and thought they were getting too close for comfort."

"Alright. So how do we track this mole down?" Faedra asked.

_"We_ don't," he replied. "It's too dangerous for you kids to be involved. I'll track him down and follow him to the next rendezvous; then I'll contact you and let you know what I find out."

"Are you forgetting that I'm a super, too?" Faedra asked.

"No, I'm not. But that doesn't make you invincible. These people kidnapped your parents. Just because they left you alive this time doesn't mean that they won't kill you if they think you're going to be a thorn in their side. Right now, it's safer that you just lay low, continue going to school, and let me work on this."

Faedra looked down at the floor, obviously disappointed, but she didn't say anything else.

"Dylan, Chandler – you boys go home and don't tell anyone what we've discussed here. Faedra, I'd like to take you to a friend's house so you won't be home alone. It's too dangerous for you to be in your family's house alone right now. These people could decide they made a mistake by not taking you, too, and come back for you."

"She can stay in the spare bedroom at my house. My mom won't mind," I said.

"Are you sure?" Mr. Franklin asked.

"Yeah, she stayed with us for a couple of days last year when her parents went off to some conference."

"I'd like that," Faedra chimed in. "After all that's happened, I'd really like to be with someone I know I can trust."

I felt that flushed feeling creep into my face again, and I was pretty sure my face was turning red, but if it was, no one seemed to notice. I smiled at Faedra, and she smiled back at me.

"Okay Dylan, that's probably a good idea. No use dragging anyone into this that we don't have to. But if your mom says no, call me, and I'll come over and pick Faedra up and find another place for her to stay.

"One more thing. We don't talk about any of this over cell phones, email, internet social networks – no electronic communications. They'll likely be monitoring anything and anyone related to Faedra for any signs that she has gone to the cops or that we're on to them. They may even have left her behind for that very purpose. We only talk about this in person, here at this house if at all possible, and when we do, I'll have the surveillance neutralizer system turned on just to be safe." He nodded over to the bust of Martin Luther. "That was the red button I pressed earlier, in case you were wondering. It jams a variety of common surveillance signals from picking up anything that we say in this room. Agreed?"

Everyone nodded.

"Okay, I'll contact you via text to arrange a meeting as soon as I know more. I'll text you the question, 'Will you be coming to Sunday service?' If you get that, come back here at 7:00 p.m. the same night you get the text. The mole's next rendezvous is Thursday, so that gives me all day tomorrow to track him down and get prepared to follow him to that meeting. I'll have more information after that."

"Is there anything we can do?" Faedra asked.

He unplugged the USB drive and handed it back to her.

"For starters, you can hide this somewhere and don't tell me where. If I'm captured, this will be your only leverage to get your parents back."

"Is that it?" Chandler asked.

"Of course not. We can pray," Mr. Franklin said.

He held out his hands towards us. I wasn't much of the praying type, but I had gone to church enough to know he expected us to join hands. Faedra took hold of one of his hands and I took the other. Chandler, who didn't attend church as far as I knew, reluctantly joined in our circle, seeming somewhat confused by what we were doing.

"To quote one of our country's founding fathers, and one of my ancestors, Benjamin Franklin," he continued, "I have lived, Sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth—that God governs in the affairs of men. I wouldn't dare undertake this mission without first asking God to help us."

After saying this, he prayed a short prayer. And as he prayed, I began to feel a peace come over me. I couldn't explain it. Nothing in our circumstances had changed, but I felt better. It was weird. When he was done, I opened my eyes and noticed tears coming down Faedra's cheeks. Mr. Franklin pulled her to his side in a fatherly kind of hug and said, "Don't worry about your parents, Faedra. They're made of stern stuff. And I believe, with God's help, that we'll get them back."

"Thank you," she said.

After that, he walked over to the bust of Martin Luther, depressed the red button, and put the head back into its original place.

"Thank you for coming to see me. You did the right thing. I'll be in touch soon," he said as he ushered us out the front door.

As we got back into Chandler's truck and pulled away from the curb, Chandler asked, "Sooo... is that it?"

The question hung in the air for almost a full minute. Chandler glanced over at Faedra, but mostly kept his eyes on the road. I tried to watch her without making it look like I was staring straight at her – which, of course, I was. She was looking down at the floorboard. Finally, she looked up.

"No. That's _not_ it. Mr. Franklin is going to follow the mole to the rendezvous... and _I'm_ going to follow Mr. Franklin."
Chapter 12 – Making Plans

"But don't you think it would be better to let him follow the mole by himself? I mean, apparently Mr. Franklin was formerly a trained government agent. If we tip off the other guy that he's being followed, we could lose our chance to find your mom and dad," Chandler said.

"My mom and dad are trained agents, too, and _they_ got caught by these guys. I'm not going to risk it. Look, with my superpowers and your high-tech gadgets, we can follow Mr. Franklin to the meeting without anyone knowing we're there."

"Yeah, I'm with Faedra on this one," I agreed. "These bad guys managed to defeat Faedra and two trained DHS agents without so much as disturbing the neighbors, then take Fae's parents with them when they left. Mr. Franklin is going to need all of the help we can give him."

Chandler's head started bobbing up and down as he stared out of the front windshield, and I knew he was already thinking of how to use his tech to follow Mr. Franklin.

"Okay," he said at last, "let's do it."

* * * * *

We drove to my house first and squared everything away with my mom about Faedra spending a few nights in the guest bedroom. We told Mom that Faedra's parents had had to take an unexpected last-minute trip out of town and that they'd left Faedra behind so she could go to school – which was partially true. I felt bad about being deceptive with my mom, but I knew if I told her the whole truth, she would freak.

Once we had the okay from Mom, we headed back to Faedra's house so she could pick up some of her things. While we were driving, we formed a plan.

"I think I've got an idea that might help us keep from getting detected while we follow Mr. Franklin," Chandler said.

"Let's have it, Mr. Gizmo," I replied.

"We could put a tracking device on his car that would allow us to follow him from a distance without being seen."

"That's a great idea," said Faedra. "Do you have one we can use?"

"Well, no. But there's free software on the internet that can turn any cell phone into a tracking device. I can set up one of our cell phones with the software, and then all we have to do is put it in Mr. Franklin's car. Once we do that, we can track him from another phone."

"Maybe we shouldn't use our phones for this," I suggested. "These guys may already be tracking our phone numbers, like Mr. Franklin said."

"Good point. But that would mean we would need to buy some new phones and set up accounts. That's a pricey option," Chandler added.

Faedra reached into her purse and extracted an envelope. She opened it up to reveal a thick stack of cash.

"Not a problem. Dad also gave me this to use in emergencies."

"Sweet," Chandler said.

"Okay, that's one problem solved, but if Chandler and I ditch school on Thursday, our parents will get notified via text that we're not at school. That could be a problem."

"I could go alone," Faedra suggested.

"Are you forgetting that these guys just captured your family, tied you up, and left you for dead? No way am I letting you go by yourself," I said.

Faedra looked over at me, smiling. "That's sweet, Dylan. You _did_ save me once already, after all."

My face was heating up again, and I knew I was probably turning red as a beet. "We may be getting ahead of ourselves here. We should probably just look at the USB drive to see if it tells us when the next meeting is supposed to be. If it's after school, we're good."

"Why didn't I think of that?" Chandler asked.

"Hey, you're not the only person in the car with a brain, you know," I replied.

* * * * *

Before we went back to my house, we stopped at a store and picked up a couple of pay-as-you-go cell phones, which Chandler took with him after he dropped us off. Once we were home, Faedra and I looked at the contents of the USB drive on my laptop. We waded through several files that were mostly full of technical data, one file that contained the code names of the other moles, and finally we found the file where Faedra's parents had documented their surveillance of the mole they had been tracking. His name was Jared Spitznik.

"It looks like this Jared guy usually leaves for the meeting with his co-conspirators at around 8:00 p.m. each Thursday night," I observed.

"Co-conspirators? You sound all James Bond," Faedra said. She laughed, and I thought my heart was going to jump out of my chest. When this was all over with, we were going to have to deal with whatever this was that was going on between us. But the thought that it might only be a one-way feeling crossed my mind and immediately put a bit of a damper on my emotions.

"Well, whatever we want to call them – 'bad guys', 'co-conspirators', or whatever."

"Co-conspirators is fine; I'm just messing with you."

"Okay, well, since the meeting with the 'co-conspirators'," I said, making air-quotations with my fingers, "will be after we are out of school, then we're all set. We just have to make sure we get the tracking device into Mr. Franklin's car before then."

Just then, Mom poked her head around the corner. I froze, hoping she hadn't just heard our conversation, but she acted like everything was normal.

"You guys hungry? I didn't know if you'd already eaten, so I made some pizza for you just in case."

"Thanks, Mom. I'm starving."

"You're welcome. Faedra, I put a towel and washcloth on the bed in the spare bedroom for you."

"Thanks, Mrs. Jones. I really appreciate you letting me stay for a few days while my parents are out of town."

"No problem. Glad to help. Oh, Dylan, please put anything you two don't eat in the fridge and clean the counters before you go to bed. I'm going to go ahead and hit the hay."

"Yeah, sure, Mom. Thanks."

"Goodnight, Mrs. Jones."

"Goodnight."

After Mom left, Faedra and I made our way to the kitchen and began to devour the pizza. It was mushrooms, ground beef, and green peppers – my favorite. I offered Faedra a bottled water – she didn't drink soda – and I took a 7 Up for myself.

After Faedra had eaten her first slice, she looked a little sad. With her parents missing and all, I guessed I should have expected it.

"You okay?" I asked.

"Well, I'm worried sick about my parents, but I believe Mr. Franklin – that they're probably okay. Otherwise, why would those people have left me behind, unharmed, like they did? But that's not all I was thinking about."

"What _else_ are you thinking about?"

"Well... I told you and Chandler that I'd come clean about my powers and all."

"Hey, listen, don't worry about that. Let's focus on getting your parents back right now. There'll be plenty of time to talk about your superpowers later."

"That's just it. All I can think about is my parents. I need something else to focus on right now or I'll go crazy. Telling you about my powers is what I need to do right now."

"Okay," I said, sitting back in my chair and grabbing another slice of pizza. "Go for it."

"For starters, my mom and dad are both supers."

Faedra's face scrunched up like she was preparing to get hit or something. Before her parents had disappeared and we'd found out they were in danger, I would probably have flipped at what she'd just said, but considering the circumstances, it suddenly didn't feel right getting upset about it.

"Whoa... what powers? Wait, let me guess. Your mom's a brainiac, and your dad has super-vision and can throw things fast and hit small targets – so he must be an accurate."

"How did you know those things?" she asked as her eyes got big in surprise.

Now it was my turn to cringe. "Weeeelll... I guess I have a confession of my own. I saw you levitating the day you saved Chandler from falling off the cliff, and Chandler and I spied on you with miniature drones when you were working on your dad's car one day. Your dad trashed one of Chandler's drones with a screw from a hundred feet away."

"You sneak," she said as she picked up a piece of pizza crust and threw it at me. She was smiling, so I took that as a good sign. "I'd be mad at you, but I guess I'm the one who should apologize for keeping things from you for so long. How'd you know about my mom?"

"That one's easy. I mean, she's a scientist, right? What else would her superpower be?"

"Good point. Well, anyway, the reason we kept our powers secret is for their cover for DHS. Everyone was supposed to think that none of us were supers."

"So you've always had superpowers?"

"Me? No, actually, I didn't manifest superpowers until about six months ago."

"But I thought almost all supers manifested by the time they were out of kindergarten."

"Well, that's mostly true, except supers with multiple powers take longer to manifest."

"So, since you're a double, it took longer for them to manifest? But sixteen years is a long time even for a double, isn't it?"

"Well... I'm actually a triple..."

"What? You're kidding me."

"Nope."

"So you can fly, are super-strong, and what else?"

"I have super-sensitive hearing, too."

"That could come in handy."

"Well, sometimes. Sometimes it can be a bit of a curse. Imagine you could hear everything everybody whispers about you, no matter how rude or insensitive – things they would never say to your face."

"I guess I never thought about a superpower being a negative before, but I can see your point."

"Anyway," she continued, "after my powers began to manifest, it felt weird coming to the support group and lying. I just couldn't do it. It's been bad enough not telling my closest friends about it without lying straight to their faces."

What she said made sense to me. I still didn't like the fact that she had lied to me... but I understood she was in a tough spot. I decided right then that I would forgive her. It wasn't my place to judge her. I just wanted to help her get her parents back.

After we had talked for a while, Faedra helped me clean up the mess we had made at the table with the pizza before we went to bed. I was beat. It had been a long day. She already knew where the spare bedroom was, so I told her goodnight and started heading down the hall to my room. Then she called my name.

"Dylan?"

I turned around. "Yeah?"

"I don't know what I would have done without you today. You came to rescue me from that meteor and everything... I'm just glad to have a friend like you. Thanks."

Before I could respond, she stepped forward and gave me a big hug, then turned around and walked quickly to her room. I stood in the hallway for a few seconds, just staring at the bedroom door she had just shut. I felt that familiar flame spreading across my cheeks, the intoxicating smell of whatever shampoo she used casting some strange spell over me and making me unable to move or speak. I wanted to rewind and replay the last fifteen seconds again in slow motion. After a few seconds, I turned around and went to my bedroom.

We were definitely going to have to talk about this at some point.
Chapter 13 – The Secret Weapon

The next morning, Chandler picked us up at 5:00 a.m. like we had planned. He had the two cell phones configured so that one could be tracked by the other on the GPS app. Thank God for free software from the internet. We drove by Mr. Franklin's house and parked about a block away. While Chandler and Faedra served as lookouts, I snuck up to Mr. Franklin's car and attached the cell phone underneath the rear bumper with some of Chandler's gel – that thing was never coming off. By 5:45 a.m., we were all back in our beds so that no one would get suspicious. We went to school just like we were expected to, and waited.

A couple of times throughout the day, Chandler checked to see if the tracking software was doing its job. From what he could tell, Mr. Franklin had driven across town and parked his car for several hours. Hopefully, that meant he had found Jared Spitznik.

The school day dragged on forever. By the time we got out for the day and re-grouped at Chandler's truck, it was a big relief to be able to finally discuss our plans without whispering.

"So, has his car moved since the last time you checked?" Faedra asked.

"It appears he's back at home," Chandler replied.

"Okay, so now all we have to do is wait until tomorrow," I said.

"About that," Chandler continued, "I've been considering our plan, and we haven't addressed what we're going to do once we find Jared and his co-conspirators. They'll likely outnumber us. We can't call on the traditional authorities because of the other moles, and they also have more of the meteor that can essentially disable two of us."

I secretly wished Chandler would quit saying 'co-conspirators' – especially considering Faedra's comment the night before. It was beginning to make this whole thing sound like a plot to kill Caesar or something. I was personally leaning toward using 'bad guys' or something like that. But, considering the circumstances, I let it slide.

"Yeah... good point," Faedra replied.

"Well... we have some of the meteor, too," I said. "Couldn't we leverage that somehow to even the odds?"

A saw a glint in Chandler's eyes that told me I had just hit gold. I waited to see what great idea was about to spring out of his suped-up brain.

"Yeah... I might be able to come up with something, but we're going to need to go back into Faedra's house and retrieve the meteor fragment."

"Okay, no problem. Since it doesn't affect me, I can walk right in and get it. But then how are you going to get near it to work your magic?"

"My parents must have worked with dangerous stuff like that meteor all of the time – especially my mom. I know she had some sort of protective suit she wore sometimes when she was doing experiments. There's a room in the back of the garage they never let me go in. Maybe they have something in there that we can use," Faedra said.

"Great," I replied. "Let's get going."

* * * * *

We drove over to Faedra's house and parked in the front drive. Her mood had seemed to take a turn for the worse, and she sat in the truck looking depressed after I got out.

"You okay?" I asked, knowing she wasn't but not knowing what else I could say.

"It's just... it's just so creepy without them here, not knowing where they are right now. I just want all of this to be over."

"Agreed. And the sooner we get what we need here, the sooner we can get them back," Chandler said.

His statement seemed to wake Faedra from her trance-like state. She shook her head from side to side like she was trying to wake herself up, and then replied, "Right, let's go."

Whatever hesitancy shed shown when we first arrived was gone now. She marched towards the garage with renewed purpose, and then opened the door and went inside. Chandler and I hurried to keep up. At the back of the garage was another door with a formidable-looking lock on it.

"This is it," Faedra said.

"Well, since we don't have the key, we should probably get a crowbar and try and pry it off..."

As he was speaking, Faedra took hold of the lock and began to pull. I could hear the sound of the wood giving way as the screws that held the latch in place began to come loose reluctantly.

"...or Faedra could just rip the lock off," Chandler continued.

"You might want to look away in case any splinters come our way," I interjected, turning away just in time to hear a loud popping sound and feeling some of the wood pieces from the door pepper my shoulder.

"Great," Chandler said.

Faedra reached forward and pulled open the now lock-less door, reaching around the inside of the jamb and apparently feeling for a light switch. A lone fluorescent light flickered on and revealed the inside of the storage room.

We all stepped in to see what we could find. The room was as wide as the garage, about twenty feet in all I guessed, and about five feet deep. There were shelves all along the back side of the room on the right-hand side that were filled with all sorts of things in boxes and hanging from hooks. There was what looked like a small lab of some sort on the left-hand side containing equipment I didn't recognize, but which apparently impressed Chandler.

"Cool! Your mom has a Blanders and Hous granulated spectrometer! Sweet!"

He walked up to the Blanders-and-whatever thingy and touched it like he had just discovered a T-Rex skeleton or something.

"Chandler, focus," I said. "We're here to get supplies that will help us rescue Faedra's parents, not plan our next science project."

"Yeah... right," he said, sounding like a kid who had just been scolded for stealing a cookie before dinner.

"I think I found something over here," Faedra said.

I looked over to the other side of the storage room and saw Faedra holding up what looked like a silver jumpsuit that she had pulled out of one of the boxes on a shelf.

"That might work," Chandler said, crossing the room and picking up a second suit from the same box. "See if there's a label or something to indicate what the suit is for."

"Looks like this is it." I turned the box a bit so I could read the label. "Special-issue lead-lined hazmat suit with goggles. Respirator not included. Only for protection from low-level radiation, non-particulate sources (see manual for exact specifications)."

Faedra reached back into the box and produced something that looked like the old aviator goggles I'd seen in the history books from World War I fighter pilot pictures. "I guess that would be these," she said.

"Well, this could be what we're looking for," I offered.

"Yep. Only one way to find out," Chandler said as he began putting on one of the suits. "I'm going to go inside to attempt to retrieve the piece of meteorite in your basement. If I don't pass out, then we've found what we're looking for."

The suit had booties and gloves attached, as well as a hoodie that covered almost his entire head, leaving a small circle of his face revealed so that only his mouth, eyes, and nose were still exposed. He put the goggles on over the outside of the suit and looked up at Faedra and me.

"How do I look?" he asked.

Faedra and I both burst out laughing. Even though he had picked the smaller of the two suits, he still looked like a little kid dressed up in his dad's work clothes. The suit's excess material bunched up at the ends of his arms and legs.

"What?"

"You look cute," Faedra replied.

It was good to hear her laugh. I loved that laugh.

"You'll need something to put it in, won't you?" I asked.

"Oh, right. Look for some sort of container. It should be very heavy for its size if it's lead-lined," Chandler instructed.

After a few minutes of poking around, we managed to find a lunch-box sized container that felt like it weighed fifty pounds even though it was empty.

"That's probably what we need. Easy enough to test it once I put the meteorite inside of it," Chandler said.

"I'm going with you, just in case you get weak like the last time," I said.

"Good idea," Faedra added.

* * * * *

The expedition back into Faedra's house didn't take long. Chandler didn't experience any of the weakness he'd displayed before when he went into the basement. Even though I felt fine, I let him pick the meteor fragment up using the gloves, not wanting to touch it with my bare hands just in case there might be some other contaminant on it. It was the size of a tennis ball and fit inside of the container we'd brought with us nicely. The hardest part was lugging the container back up the stairs and outside.

By the time we were back outside, Faedra had put on the other suit and was waiting for us. She started walking slowly towards the container and didn't appear to be experiencing any problems. She reached down and picked it up by the handle, and held it out in front of her – something she would never have been able to do before. It was something _I_ couldn't have done even _without_ being affected by the meteor! I wondered briefly how her new super-strength had changed the way she thought of me. In the old days, before superpowers, most guys were stronger than girls. I didn't know how I felt about the new situation, but I would need to sort through those feelings later. Right now, we had to prepare for a rescue operation.

"Now that we have this, what do we do next?" I asked. I saw the sparkle in Chandler's eyes as he turned his gaze towards the garage.

"Now I get to use Mrs. Sutherland's lab to analyze this bad boy and come up with a way to weaponize it!"

"Just don't break anything," Faedra instructed. "That stuff belongs to the government, and it's probably _really_ expensive?"

"Yeah, sure, your mom's lab is in good hands," Chandler responded while rubbing his hands together with a big smile on his face.

"What are we going to do while Chandler works on analyzing the meteor?" Faedra asked.

"We better get back home in time for supper, or Mom's going to start calling and asking where we are."

"Yeah, good point."

Faedra and I had learned from reading her parents' notes on Jared the Mole that tomorrow's meeting wouldn't occur until he left work, which was around 6 p.m. Before leaving Chandler, we all agreed to meet after school as usual, but then to go and follow Mr. Franklin to the meeting. So that my mom wouldn't get suspicious, we were going to tell her that Chandler and I were working on a science project.

Our plan sounded so smooth when we discussed it. We thought we had everything figured out.

Boy, were we about to be surprised...
Chapter 14 – Operation Track The Mole

Jared the Mole had waited until around 8 p.m. before he left work for the meeting, and it had almost been dark by that time. Now, Chandler was driving his truck deeper and deeper into the forest on some dirt roads I had never been on before. We hadn't seen a house or a street light for miles, and it was getting darker by the second. I monitored the GPS while Chandler drove, telling him when to make a turn or not. We stayed about a half mile behind Mr. Franklin's car to make sure we wouldn't be spotted. Faedra was flying ahead, keeping track of Jared the Mole from above.

The plan was simple; we would follow Mr. Franklin and Jared the Mole to the meet-up, then track the bad guys back to wherever they were hiding out, which we hoped was where they were keeping Faedra's mom and dad. We also planned to use one of Chandler's drones to record the meeting and hear everything that went on. Faedra had a drone with her, and when the mole stopped to meet with the other baddies, she was going to turn it on and Chandler was going to fly it right up to where the mole and his buddies were so he could capture audio and video. We had worked out a code to use when texting each other during Operation Track the Mole so that even if they were monitoring our texts, they wouldn't know what we were up to.

"Lks like M stopd," came a text from Faedra. 'M' was our code for Jared the Mole. "No 1 ls is ther."

"The mole stopped," I told Chandler, updating him on Faedra's messages. "No one else is around."

Chandler stopped the truck. "Do you think we should send the drone now?" he asked.

"Why not? If it's a false alarm, Faedra can pick it up again."

"Okay. Do it."

"Snd the drn," I typed in the chat window.

I turned on the hand-held controller and watched as the video feed came up. The first thing I saw was Faedra's face. Even through the night vision lens that made her face look greenish-white, she still looked awesome. We had to have that talk about 'us' soon, or I was going to explode.

I quickly pushed those thoughts out of my mind so I could focus on Operation Track the Mole.

"Okay. Time to switch," I said to Chandler. He put the car in park and we switched positions so that I could drive, if needed, while he navigated the drone. He has some mad drone flying skills.

He maneuvered the controls and the drone began moving. As I watched the video screen on the controller, the scene changed from showing Faedra's face and pivoted in the direction of the mole's car so that we could see the headlights. The drone glided down into the forest and continued approaching the road at a perpendicular angle

"Where's Mr. Franklin's car? I don't see his lights," I said.

"I don't know, check the GPS. He has to be somewhere in between where we are and the mole's car."

I glanced at the GPS and confirmed what Chandler had said, then quickly looked back to the video screen to watch as the drone sped towards the mole's car. Chandler stopped the drone right before it reached the road and lowered it down into the forest, using the trees and brush as cover so it wouldn't be discovered. It wasn't long before it was close enough to pick up an image of the mole. He was sitting in his car talking on his cell phone.

"Can't you turn the microphone up so we can hear what he's saying?" I asked.

"Sorry, this drone isn't equipped with the Captain Crunch junior spy super-sonic eavesdropping microphone. I left that at home."

"You're being facetious, aren't you?" I had picked up that fancy word in English composition class the week before and had been aching to use it ever since. 'Facetious' basically meant 'funny'.

"There's no fooling you, is there?"

"Ha, ha, Einstein. Just make sure you don't lose the target."

"Wht do u c?" came a text from Faedra.

"Nthg yet," I replied.

Within seconds after I had finished typing I saw a second pair of headlights begin coming up behind the mole.

"That has to be Mr. Franklin. What is he doing? He's going to blow his cover!" I lamented.

Chandler pivoted the drone so we had a better view of the approaching car.

"Wait a sec. Looks like more than one vehicle. Something's not right," Chandler said.

"See if you can pick up Mr. Franklin," I urged.

The drone slowly moved away from the mole's car and toward the next car. I could immediately tell it was Mr. Franklin's.

The approaching car's lights flashed once they were close to the mole's car, and then the mole's car started moving.

"What's going on?" I asked.

Then, as Mr. Franklin's car drove by the drone, I saw the driver. He appeared to be wearing a silver jumpsuit with a hoodie very similar to the one we had used at Faedra's house to retrieve the meteor.

"Why is Mr. Franklin wearing a silver hazmat suit?" Chandler asked.

As the cars continued to move, we saw another vehicle drive past. This one was a Humvee. Its driver also appeared to be wearing a similar hazmat suit. I began typing furiously on my phone.

"Get drn and follow cars," I texted Faedra, telling Chandler at the same time, "I'm telling Faedra to get the drone. I think they've captured Mr. Franklin."

I turned on the ignition and put the truck in gear, pulling back onto the road and putting the phone in the mounting cradle on the dash so I could track Mr. Franklin's car.

"The mole must have figured out he was being tailed and called ahead so they could have someone waiting on a side road to intercept Mr. Franklin," Chandler observed.

"Yeah. It's a good thing we followed him," I replied.

Chandler glanced down at the drone controller. "Okay, Faedra's got the drone."

We drove mostly in silence as the trio of cars wound their way through several more miles of twisty, mountainous road before they finally stopped. The GPS screen didn't even show a real road where we were at. It looked like we were on a one-lane logging road at this point, so I simply stopped the truck and put it in park. Chandler took my phone off of the dash and began typing away.

I leaned over so I could see what he was typing. He was telling Faedra to get as close as she could and then turn on the drone. A couple of minutes passed as we stared at the drone controller, willing the video feed to come alive.

It seemed like thirty minutes had passed when the video feed finally came back on. We saw three parked cars appear on the screen. Several people were walking around, all of them dressed in the silver alien suits. One of them opened up the driver's side passenger door on Mr. Franklin's car and reached inside. Another one came up to help him. Moments later, they pulled out Mr. Franklin's limp body and started carrying him towards the front of the car.

"That can't be good," I said.

We watched in silence as they marched towards what appeared to be a cave in the side of the mountain near where they had parked. They disappeared inside of the cave one by one. The lights on the cars had all gone dark, and as the flashlights they were carrying dimmed with each step they took, we were soon left staring at almost total blackness. Vague green-tinted outlines highlighted the cars, trees, and rocks where the people had been moments before.

"I'm going in," Chandler said as he began navigating the drone towards the cave. As the drone got closer, it began picking up on the light from the flashlights shining somewhere ahead.

"Don't get so close that they see you," I warned.

"Got it," he replied.

I texted Faedra that she should come back to the truck and watch the drone feed. A minute or so later, I almost jumped out of my skin when she opened the passenger side door. Chandler jerked up and almost dropped the controller.

"Geez! What the fudge-sticks!" he exclaimed. "Next time, let me know you're coming or something."

"Sorry. Dylan told me to come back to the truck," she replied.

"It's okay. Come on in so we can all watch," I said.

Faedra got in and sat next to Chandler as we all huddled close and watched the video feed from the drone. The lights up ahead of it were getting brighter, and Chandler slowed the drone down to a crawl. He adjusted some controls, and we began hearing what sounded like voices getting steadily louder. The drone went around the next corner, and then we were staring directly into a large room where several people dressed in the silver hazmat suits were gathered. Chandler quickly moved the drone to one side of the passageway where there was a stack of metal drums, positioning it so that the camera could just see through a crack between two of them.

"Good thinking," I said. "For a second there, I thought they were going to see it."

"Yeah, well, they still might. We'll just have to wait and see," he said.

As the drone hovered behind the barrels, we could hear what they were saying.

"Put him in the cage with Sutherland, and then go back out and watch the entrance to the cave. The last thing we need is anyone finding out we're in here when we're so close to being done with this place."

"Sure thing," came the response. On the screen, we could see a woman taking Mr. Franklin's body from the other two silver-suits. She'd picked him up like he was made of feathers and walked out of the room and deeper into the cave.

"So there's at least one other super-strong in there," Chandler said.

I thought I heard Faedra sigh, but my focus was quickly drawn back to the conversation we were hearing from inside the cave.

"How close is she?" one of the silver-suits asked. From the size and shape of the speaker, it looked like it was Jared the Mole.

"Pretty close. She's got some kind of spray developed, but it's not a mist fine enough to be used in aerosol form yet," came the reply from another silver-suit.

"Let me talk to her," the mole replied.

On the screen, we could see Jared the Mole leave the room in the same direction as the woman who had taken Mr. Franklin. The remaining two men sat down at a table, and one of them picked up a deck of playing cards and started shuffling them.

"I'll be glad when we're out of here. I don't like being in a cave like this," the other one said.

"Yeah, I'll just be glad when we get paid for the job."

"You said it."

"Can't you follow the mole?" Faedra asked. "I'm sure he's going to talk to my mom. We need to know where she is."

"I'm pretty sure these two would notice if I flew a drone right through the middle of the room," Chandler replied. "Besides, if I go too much farther into the room, I'll lose the signal from the drone. As it is, we're near the operational limits right now."

"Hey, what's on that computer screen over in the corner, to the right?" I asked.

Chandler re-adjusted the drone to get a better view. When he zoomed in, we could see the screen showing four separate video feeds.

"Good eye, First Officer Spock," Chandler replied. "Looks like some sort of security monitor. Let me see if I can zoom in a bit."

As he fidgeted with the controls, the lens on the drone zoomed in on the monitor, and the image became clearer. We saw Faedra's mom in one feed. She was working with what appeared to be some lab equipment. In another, a man was sitting in some sort of cage. I couldn't see his face, but Faedra's response cleared that up real quick.

"Dad and Mom! They're both here!" Faedra exclaimed. I heard her inhale sharply and she put her hand over her mouth – she looked like she was about to cry. I reached over to put my hand on her shoulder.

"Don't worry, Faedra, we'll get them back," I said.

The third feed on the monitor showed the entrance to the cave, and the last one showed a door with a keypad lock on it that appeared to have been installed in the cave wall.

Just then the cage door opened and Mr. Franklin's body was put inside with Faedra's dad. I hoped he wasn't seriously hurt. I was just about to say something when Jared the Mole walked back into the room where the video monitors were.

What he said next changed everything.
Chapter 15 – Charge!

"I've confirmed that she's _very_ close to completing the aerosol compound. In fact, I've decided to move to phase two tomorrow morning, which will require that we move to Test Site Bravo. Make the necessary preparations to bring all of the prisoners with us; we may still need them," Jared instructed.

"Will do," responded one of the henchmen.

"We'll leave at 6 a.m. Make sure you're ready," Jared said, and then he walked out of the room and back down one of the tunnels.

"What do we do now?" asked Chandler.

"If we go in there now, they're pretty well defended. If we wait until they're loading up tomorrow morning, though, then we can take them out when they are the most vulnerable," I said. I turned and looked at Chandler. "Were you able to weaponize the meteor?"

He smiled. "Yeah, I was able to make a colloidal solution with it. I found a dart gun in the Sutherland's shed and was able to load ten darts with the solution. I've got it behind the seat."

"And the gel gun?" I asked.

"Fully loaded with enough gel for about fifteen shots, also behind the seat," he responded.

"What do you think, Faedra? It's your parents, so it's your call. Do we try and rescue them tomorrow when they're loading up, or do you have another idea?"

"What if they don't bring them all out at once? I mean, my mom's in a hover-chair and all. They could have my dad and Mr. Franklin loaded up while my mom is still inside. If we tried to rescue them then, they could just threaten to hurt my mom unless we give up."

"Good point," Chandler said.

"There's another option. We could go in now. If we use Chandler's darts to take out the guards, we could work our way back through the cave until we get closer to your mom and dad and Mr. Franklin. They aren't expecting us, so we'd have the element of surprise," I suggested.

"Yeah, but we could easily run into some problems with that. We already know that they're keeping Mrs. Sutherland in a different room from Mr. Sutherland and Mr. Franklin," Chandler said. "So we don't know that we could get to them all in time to prevent a standoff where they have one of them, and we have the other two, or something like that. And we don't know how many goons are in there either."

"What if we wait until they're all loaded up?" Faedra asked. "Then we'll know exactly where they all are. They may even all be together if we're lucky. At the very least, we'll know more about what we're dealing with."

"I think she's right," Chandler replied. "Waiting until they're all loaded up and ready to move is our best bet. With the only road out being one lane, they'll be driving single file – more vulnerable to an attack."

"That makes sense," I responded. "I think I've got a plan..."

* * * * *

The next morning, Jared and his goons started loading their vehicles at 5:30 a.m. We had positioned one of Chandler's drones so we could see the whole process without being seen ourselves. Both Faedra and Chandler had suited up in the silver hazmat suits just in case they were exposed to some of the meteor during our rescue attempt. We watched the video screen as the goons loaded Mr. Franklin and Mr. Sutherland into the back of Mr. Franklin's car. They were both looking groggy and had to be practically carried out of the cave to the car. All of the goons were wearing silver suits, so they must have been using meteor fragments out in the open to keep Faedra's dad and Mr. Franklin out of it.

Faedra's mom came out of the cave using her hover-chair, and she was also wearing one of the silver hazmat suits. They loaded her up in the back of the Humvee and put her hover-chair in the cargo bay. At least now we knew where she was. Lastly, Jared the Mole himself came out. He was carrying a large silver cylinder with him when he got into his car. I assumed the container was probably holding the aerosol gas Mrs. Sutherland had been developing. I just hoped they weren't prepared to use it on us when we broke up their little party.

By 5:50 a.m., they started up their engines and began driving down the road away from the cave single-file. Now we knew how many enemy agents we were dealing with. Fortunately, we had already seen everyone the night before. Besides Jared the Mole, there were the two henchmen from the first room in the cave and the super-strong woman.

We were all in place as they rounded the first corner. Jared the Mole's car was first. He was the only one in the car. He was followed by Mr. Franklin's car, which was being driven by the super-strong woman. Bringing up the rear was the Humvee with Mrs. Sutherland and the last two goons.

Jared the Mole stopped his car about ten feet from the huge tree that Faedra had placed across the road the night before. He got out and walked up to it, then turned around and pointed towards the super-strong woman, waving at her to come forward. She got out of the car and walked up to the tree. She was about to pick it up and move it when I shot Chandler's gel gun at her from my hiding spot behind some bushes.

The gel gun worked like a charm. The super-strong woman went down as she was enveloped in a purple coating of gel. I raised the gun to fire at the mole next, but he had ducked behind the car. I heard some commotion from the direction where the Humvee had stopped and glanced back just in time to see the driver, who had gotten out of the Humvee, drop like a sack of potatoes right beside the driver's side door.

"The mole is on your side, Chandler. Do you see him?" I called out.

I heard some more commotion, and then came his reply, "Don't see him, but we got the other two in the Humvee."

I came out of the woods so that the fallen tree was between me and the mole's car, just in case he had a gun or something. The tree was about four feet in diameter, so it gave me some good cover. When I got to the point where I could see the other side of the car, the mole was nowhere to be seen.

"I don't see him anywhere!" I called out.

"Hold on," Faedra said. I saw her fly up into the sky about fifty feet and look around. "I can't see him either," she reported.

I cautiously worked my way over the tree and back to where Chandler was proudly standing over one of the incapacitated henchman.

"Dart gun worked like a charm," he said as he smiled from ear to ear.

"You did great," Mrs. Sutherland replied from the back of the Humvee. "Is everyone else alright?"

I turned to see Faedra reaching into the back seat of Mr. Franklin's car and pulling her dad out, then carrying him back towards our location. The closer he got to where we were, the better he began to look. By the time he reached us, he was looking normal.

"Thank God you kids are safe," he said as he gave Faedra a big hug. "Colleen!" he exclaimed, opening the back door of the Humvee and giving his wife a big hug next. "I'm so glad you're alright!"

He quickly turned back around to address the three of us.

"Are you kids alright?"

"I think so," Chandler replied.

"Is everyone neutralized? Any more agents we need to deal with out there?" Mr. Sutherland asked.

"I think Jared the Mole got away," Faedra replied.

"Jared the Mole," Mr. Sutherland said, smiling slightly at the name we had given to Jared Spitznik.

"Yeah, and he just disappeared with the canister," I replied.

"Ahh. That's not good," Faedra's mom said.

"What was in the canister, Colleen?" Mr. Sutherland asked.

"Only enough meteoric gas to debilitate a platoon of supers."

"That's not good. Well, then, we need to get John to the hospital A.S.A.P. and alert the director of Homeland Security about the gas," Mr. Sutherland said.

"John? You mean Mr. Franklin?" I asked.

"Yes, that's right. They apparently hit him on the head pretty hard when they captured him. He's been in and out of consciousness since they brought him in," Mr. Sutherland replied.

* * * * *

On the way to the hospital, I called my mom to let her know I was fine and to tell her what had happened. She wasn't too thrilled that I had ditched school in favor of a highly dangerous rescue operation, but she was happy I was alive and well and that Faedra's parents were safe. By the time we arrived at the hospital, she was waiting for us in the E.R.

We waited for an hour before a doctor finally came out to give us an update on Mr. Franklin.

"I'm afraid Mr. Franklin has a very nasty concussion. He's in and out of consciousness. We're monitoring his brain activity and have him in the ICU for the time being. You can come back and see him if you like, two at a time, but I can't guarantee he'll come back around anytime soon."

From the look on my mom's face, you would have thought _I_ was the one in the ICU. I was concerned about Mr. Franklin too, but Mom looked like she was about to start crying.

Mr. Sutherland put his hand on Mom's shoulder. "You should go and see him, Sandra. Take Dylan with you."

My mom and Mr. Sutherland were looking at each other in that way people sometimes do when they have a shared secret but don't want to say it out loud. My mom nodded before turning to me. "Come on, son. Let's go see him."

"Yeah, sure. It's gonna be alright, Mom," I replied.

The doctor walked us down the hall to the elevator and gave us instructions on how to get to the ICU before he headed back to the E.R. Mom didn't say much as the elevator took us up. I'd never seen her like this before. I just held her hand and waited.

One of the nurses let us into the ICU and escorted us to Mr. Franklin's room. The ICU ward itself was somewhat circular. In the middle of the circle was the nurse's station, where there were several nurses and computer monitors displaying what I assumed were patients' vital statistics. Around the outside of the circle was a semi-circle of glass walls and glass doors, on the other side of which were the patients. The succession of glass was only broken by the double-doors we had just walked through as we came in.

When we entered Mr. Franklin's room, he looked peaceful. He had a bandage on his forehead, patches with wires coming out of them placed on his temples, and an I.V. tube in his arm. The nurse told us we could stay for ten minutes, and then she left us alone in his room. I was surprised when Mom walked up to Mr. Franklin and took his hand in hers.

"John, it's me, Sandy. Can you hear me?"

I stared at my mom, somewhat confused. I'd never heard anyone call her 'Sandy' before in my life. While Mom was looking at Mr. Franklin, I could see his eyes begin to move behind his eyelids. A monitor in the corner of the room that I assumed was monitoring his brain activity began showing colored lines spiking up and down.

"Mom, look," I said, pointing at the monitor.

"Mmmhh..." came a sound from Mr. Franklin.

"John, can you hear me?" Mom asked.

Mr. Franklin's eyelids raised to half-mast, and he stared directly at my mom. "Hey... San... it's good to see you..." The sentence came out like he was half-awake, but he had definitely just called my mom 'San' – another variation of her name I had never heard her called before.

"John? You know who I am?" Mom asked, her voice getting all choked up as she spoke. This was truly weird.

"Of course I know who you are, sweetheart. You're my favorite person in the whole wo..."

He stopped speaking mid-sentence as his body arched in the bed. Buzzers started going off and two nurses rushed into our room.

"John?" my mom called out, still holding his hand as his body convulsed.

"You'll have to leave now, ma'am," a male nurse said as he ushered my mom and me out of the room.

An orderly led us out of the room and escorted us to the ICU waiting room. "You can wait here," he said. "Someone will come out and give you an update once things calm down in there." Without waiting for a reply, the orderly turned around and went back into the ICU, leaving my mom and me alone in the small waiting room.

My mom took a tissue out of the tissue box on the table next to our chairs and wiped the tears away from her eyes. "Dylan, I've got something to tell you." She took one of my hands in hers before continuing. "Mr. Franklin isn't who you think he is. A long time ago... well, there's really no other way to tell you this, and I know you'll probably be upset with me and all, but now that John remembers who I am... This is so hard to say... A long time ago, Mr. Franklin and I were married, and..."

I was so shocked I had nothing to say. I just sat there with my mouth open and waited for the next words that would come out of my mom's mouth.

"...and then he had an accident. He was injured on a job we were working on, and... and he forgot who I was..." She choked back a sob before she continued. "And after that, everything changed. That's why I never re-married – because I'm still in love with him." At that point, she looked directly into my eyes, and I had a sense that whatever she was about to say next was very important. "And that's why, instead of telling you the truth, I told you that your father had died..."

"What?! Are you telling me that Mr. Franklin is my _father_?" I was raising my voice, but I didn't care. I let go of Mom's hand and stood up, backing away a few steps and turning around in total shock. I turned back around and faced her before I continued. "That... that..." I couldn't finish my sentence.

"You were born a few months after the accident. At first, I thought he would recover and remember who I was, and that we had a baby on the way, but he didn't. Then you were born and began getting older, and by the time you were getting old enough to be told who your father was, I just couldn't bring myself to tell you. By that time, John was out of the hospital and looked normal enough, but he still didn't remember us. I tried to talk to him, to convince him of the truth, but he just didn't remember... Finally, he moved away and went to seminary and started a new life here, so I moved here and took a job and started over – using my maiden name, hoping against hope that one day he might remember and everything would be made right... I'm so sorry, Dylan. I did what I thought was best, but I realize I should have told you a long time ago."

"Well... yeah, you should have, Mom," I scolded.

I ran my hand through my hair and stared out into the hallway. At that moment, I could have sworn that I saw a blur of something move past the doorway. Before we could continue our conversation, the same orderly who had escorted us into the waiting room burst back through the doorway.

"Did you see him go by?"

"Who?" my mom asked.

"Mr. Franklin?" the orderly replied.

"No, we haven't seen anyone come by!" Mom said.

"Wait," I replied. "I thought I saw a blur go by the doorway, but that couldn't have been him, right?"

"He's a speedy?" the orderly asked.

"Yes," Mom replied.

"Then that was him; he's probably long-gone by now. You should both come back into the ICU and see something."

Mom and I followed the orderly back into the ICU, to Mr. Franklin's... my dad's room. A small note had been placed on the pillow, folded tent-style so that it sat on the pillow like a place-card at a fancy dinner. On the front, it simply said 'Sandy'.

Mom picked up the note and opened it. I looked over her shoulder so that I could read what it said.

Sandy,

I'm so very glad to see you again. I look forward to picking up where we left off so many years ago, but there's something I must do first. You and everyone we love are in danger, and I'm the only one who can help stop it before it's too late. Remember Project Pegasus.

Love,

John

Mom looked up at me once she had finished reading the note, a look of concern on her face. "Dylan, we have to go downstairs right away. If Project Pegasus is still underway..." Without completing her sentence, she grabbed my hand and began walking out of the ICU.

* * * * *

That day it was as if my life was split into two parts – the old part of my life was over, and a new part was just beginning. Rescuing Faedra's parents, finding out my dad was still alive – none of that prepared me for what was about to happen next...

TO BE CONTINUED...

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Sample Chapter of _The Testament Stone_ by C.L. Wells (https://fictionwithamission.com/testament/)

Prologue

Sunday, July 3rd

The cool evening breeze felt refreshing as Alana Roberts stepped into a small clearing in the forest and closed her eyes. She had learned over the years that it was much easier to tap into the eco-net when she wasn't distracted with what she saw in the physical realm. As she stretched her hands out to her sides, palms up, and began to concentrate, the green pendant around her neck began to glow. Soon the breeze, which had been very mild when she had entered the woods, began to increase in intensity, swirling around her. The ubiquitous leaves that had been resting on the forest floor moments before began to circle her gently in the air. The branches on the surrounding trees started swaying rhythmically. She turned her face towards the sky as the wind lifted her slowly off of the ground until she was levitating almost a foot above the earth.

She was now in full communication mode, listening and watching in her mind's eye to see what the forest would show her. A month ago, she had seen a man trapped under an ATV that had rolled back on him when he'd been ascending a steep bank. He had managed to get out from under it, but the initial fall had broken his leg, and he wasn't able to push the ATV upright and get back home. Alana had been able to determine exactly where he was and had called the police so that rescue workers could find him.

Over the years, she had helped dozens of people. There had been lost children, hikers trapped by a snow storm, injured campers, and even lost animals whose owners were distraught when their beloved companions had gone missing. She had helped all of them with her unique gift.

Her gift allowed her to sense danger anywhere within the contiguous forest surrounding her or in the immediate vicinity of the forest for miles around. The plants themselves served as kind of ecological network and provided her with images and impressions that could be interpreted by her own senses. Her communion with the forest indicated no hint of trouble tonight, however. She smiled to herself, satisfied that everything was calm in the surrounding forest. Slowly coming back out of her trance-like state, she was lowered back to the ground. The light emanating from the pendant began to recede until it once more appeared to be simply a beautiful piece of jewelry hanging around her neck.

Being the bearer of the Testament Stone wasn't always easy. There were times when she found it hard to balance her responsibilities in her 'normal' life with those of being a guardian with paranormal abilities. But she had learned to take life one day at a time over the years, taking both the successes and the occasional failures in stride. She was, after all, only a human steward of the Testament Stone – one of many in a long line of stewards stretching back hundreds of years.

**** End of Sample Chapter ***

Four Spiritual Truths

Truth #1

God cares about you and He has a wonderful purpose for your life.

God loves you so much that He sent His only Son, named Jesus, to earth to establish a relationship with you. If you will believe that Jesus is the Son of God you can have eternal life. Jesus said that He came to earth so that we might have a life that is full of purpose and happiness. (John 3:16; John 10:10)

God has told us not to do certain things like lying, stealing, cheating, hating other people, doing things that hurt others, and being selfish. When we do these things, we are disobeying God and this is called sin. When we sin we are doing things that will ultimately destroy our true purpose and happiness in life if we do not change.

Truth #2

Every person has sinned. This sin keeps us from having a good relationship with God and prevents us from experiencing God's love and purpose for our lives. (Romans 3:23; and Romans 6:23)

God will allow no sin to exist in His presence. When we sin, we are making a choice to live separated from God. If we choose to live a life full of sin, when our physical bodies die, our spirits will the separated from God for eternity in a place called hell. Those who go there will be tormented forever.

But God has a better way! Because God loves you, He made a way for you to be forgiven for all of your sins so that you could live with Him forever in paradise. He sent His only Son, Jesus, to die a physical death here on earth in order to pay the penalty for your sins. Three days later Jesus physical body came back to life.

Truth #3

Jesus Christ, God's Son, is the only One Who can forgive you of your sins. He is the only One Who can help you experience God's love and purpose in your life. (John 14:6)

Jesus suffered so that you don't have to. He paid the debt that you owed so that you don't have to. All that you have to do to receive forgiveness for your sins and begin a relationship with God that is full of purpose, peace, and meaning is to ask. It's that simple. Just ask.

Truth #4

If you will ask Jesus to forgive you for your sins and to come into your life and be your God, then you will begin to experience God's love and purpose for your life and be spared from eternal separation from God.

By asking Jesus to be your God, you are making a commitment to obey His teachings which are written down in the holy book called the Bible. God is everywhere, so if you speak to Him wherever you are, out loud or by thinking thoughts to God in your head, He will hear you. If you make this commitment, then you will live with God forever in paradise once your physical body dies and will have a wonderful relationship with Him while you are still here on earth.

To make this commitment you need to talk with God. The following is an example of what you might say to Him:

"Jesus, I confess that I have sinned and I realize that this sin keeps me from experiencing Your love and purpose in my life. I ask You to forgive me for my sins and come into my life and be my God so that I can begin experiencing Your love, peace, and purpose for my life."

God wants to be a continual part of your life starting right now! You don't have to wait until you die to experience God's love and purpose for your life. He wants to communicate with you every day. I've already explained how you can communicate with Jesus - you simply talk to Him as if He were right next to you. But how does God talk to you?

God speaks to us in many ways. One of these ways is through the Bible. In this book God communicates to us about how we should live our lives in order to continually experience His love, freedom, and purpose.

If you have just made a commitment to Jesus as your God you should begin reading this book and meditate on the truths that it teaches every day. A good place to start reading is in the section called "John". This section tells about Jesus' life here on earth and clearly tells us why He came, what He did, and how we can experience His love and purpose in our lives every day.

When you accept Jesus as your God and ask Him to forgive you of your sins, you can be sure that He has forgiven you and accepted you as His child regardless of how you feel emotionally. Don't rely on your feelings to confirm your decision, instead rely on the commitment that you have made to follow God no matter how you may feel in a given moment. Feelings change, commitment doesn't.

Talking with God daily, reading the Bible daily, and getting together frequently with other people who believe in Jesus will help you continue to experience God's love and power to help you live your new life. Following God is not always easy, but the rewards of experiencing His love, power, and purpose in our lives is well worth it. Remember, when you need help, just ask Him and He will help you.

I hope you will choose to follow Him as I have.

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Thank You

If you enjoyed this book, I would appreciate a short review on the site where you purchased it. If you know of others who would enjoy reading this book, please pass the word along. Your participation is greatly appreciated. Thank you!
Acknowledgements

Thanks to Jennifer Collins, my editor, whose work and comments helped to make this a better book. To be fair to her, any mistakes you may find are likely at the points I decided not to take her editing suggestions. Thanks to the members of the South Carolina Writer's Group and the LILA writers group for their helpful comments, suggestions, and input on the story.
About the Author

C.L. Wells lives with his family in Charleston County, South Carolina. His hobbies include writing YA, Paranormal, Mystery, and Crime/Adventure fiction, kayaking, paddle boarding, hiking, and bicycling.

For up to date information on the latest releases and upcoming books, visit www.fictionwithamission.com.

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