Page 52 of Broken Ties
The girl has no Gift… or so she’s claiming. Tell me what it is and I’ll consider the Bonding.
A ripple works through my mind as my bond eases away from me once more, one parting retort as though scolding me.You cannot lie to me. We are of the same mind, child.
Instead of being insulted at the dismissal, a thrill of victory has a grin spreading across my face briefly. I’ve pissed it off, nomean feat, and with any luck, that’ll shut it up for the rest of the week.
Downing the glass again, I focus on the papers again and try not to let my mind be distracted. A difficult task at the best of times, but it’s now been made impossible.
I loathe the girl all over again.
More insistent than anything else plaguing my mind today, her paper is impossible to get out of it. There’s nothing particularly brilliant or pioneering about her opinions, no new insight on the riots or the founding Gifted families that make up the council that has sparked my curiosity, and yet it’s tugged at the back of my mind the entire time I mark the other papers.
I thought reading hers first would get it out of the way, rather than having it looming over my head for the rest of the evening. I’d marked it the moment I’d read her name on it, but there was no way I could set it aside without reading it first.
Even as I slowly work my way through the rest of the assignments from her classmates, certain lines of thought she focused on stay stuck in my mind. Her point of view is far too perceptive for an uneducated runaway, and the research areas she chose to lean into are beyond the majority of her peers. Worse still, there were at least a dozen specific phrases within her work that echo in my head regardless of my efforts to push them aside until finally, I fish thefuckingpaper back out from the completed stack to reread it.
Grabbing my own notebook, a colossal mess of research and the scraps of information I routinely collect throughout the day, I get to work sifting through the paper more thoroughly. Setting aside who wrote the words is difficult at first, but once I do, I begin to jot down anything that stands out to me without stopping to question why or second-guessing them. Deeper scrutiny can be saved for when I have all the offensive points in one place.
Indoctrination tactics.
Cherry-picking Gifted types.
DNA markers.
Concentration of Gift types according to geographic locations.
Patterns of birth rates rising and falling over decades of conflict.
There’s nothing in this that should be flagging with me, yet the list grows.
Measures put in place to stop the escalation of violence. The Gifted watchlist, once spoken of as though a myth was proved to be an indexation of the Gifts and birth lines that the Resistance was keeping to predict when Gifted of unprecedented power were likely to be born, thanks to the established patterns that were discovered through this work. For some reason still outside of our grasp, there are hot spots within the community that seem to give greater chances of Top Tier Gifts, no matter the family lineage.
Magnifiers.
Like a shot of heroin, adrenaline races through my bloodstream so fast that I almost black out.
With frantically shaking fingers, I flip back through my notebook to the scans of the intel and my notes until I find it. Within the cipher, there was talk of an ‘amplification’ of power. AMP was used several times within the texts as well.
Gryph’s Gift wasamplifiedand turned back on himself. It wasn’t Neuro, just as he thought, but it’s clearly not a passive Gift either. When directed at him, the greatest threat to the Resistance in his TacTeam was taken out in a split-secondbecauseof the strength of his Gift, not in spite of it.
This is the Resistance’s Infinite Weapon.
EIGHTEEN
NORTH
On an ordinary Thursday evening, within a hundred-mile radius of Draven, two hundred Gifted go missing in the span of an hour.
The single largest abduction event since the riots back in the seventies, it’s almost impossible to keep it from getting out. If the community finds out the sheer scale of what we’re dealing with right now, there will be mass panic and a new wave of rioting, only this time, it’ll be within our own ranks.
We’re not prepared to deal with this despite my best efforts and those of all the other Gifted who actually give a damn about anything but themselves. I’m the only council member who goes into the office and works through the night in response, the only Gifted with a seat who scowls at the map of known sorting camps and plans out scouting missions to attempt to find those missing. I’m the only council member left feeling gutted as dawn breaks with no news.
The rest will be here later in the day for a meeting, but the idea of sitting across the table from them all fills me with rage, enough that I should probably cancel it or pull out. It wouldn’t just be convenient, it’s necessary considering we should all be here actually doing something, like working with the TacTeamsto respond or checking in with the builders at the Sanctuary to get people to safety, or something else worthwhile.
The only worse fate than that meeting, of course, is being called down to Draven because my Bond is facing disciplinary actions for misconduct. I don’t even have to ask; I know with every fiber of my being that Nox is behind this and now I’ll be carefully walking the line between my brother’s trauma and the damage my Bond’s secrets are inflicting on us all.
Without sleep or anything to eat, or even a moment of quiet from the second we were alerted to the abductions, it’s almost impossible to argue with my bond and fight against its demands, so there couldn’t be a worse time for me to be in her presence. It takes me ten minutes just to calm myself down enough to collect my laptop and some paperwork to read on the drive over before I leave.
The moment I unlock my office door and take a step out into the hallway, a dozen people rush at me at once, as though they’ve been waiting at my door for hours. Each has arms full of papers and tablets full of data, and they all start talking at once, their frantic tones getting higher and higher as they fight for my attention.