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Part 35
It doesn’t take Ava long to notice me, maybe a minute. Not nearly enough time for me to get over the surprise of seeing her here. Hell, I don’t even have time to close my mouth again.
When her gaze meets my shocked stare she hesitates, then she gives me a small smile, looking a bit like she’s been caught with her hand in the cookie jar.
Um, hello? Where’s the surprise? Where’s the shock at seeing me here? What the fuck is going on?
Alec must have noticed that something’s wrong because he comes over to me again, casually brushes his hand down my arm. “You okay?”
I just nod, not capable of uttering even a word as simple as ‘yes’. He follows my gaze, realizes who I’m staring at. “That’s Ava,” he informs me. Well duh, I know that. Question is, how does he know about her?
“She’s Telecoercion,” he goes on. “You know, mental abilities. She can change people’s memories, make them do things, make them see things. And she has the ability of Telekinesis, as you probably noticed,” he added, waving at the door. Now I gap at Alec instead of Ava.
Yeah, I noticed the door flying open and crashing closed with a wave of her hand. Hard to miss. But I already knew that she could do those things. What I want to know is why Alec knows about it, and why he obviously thinks that she’s Manticore.
As if on cue, Ava comes over to us. “Hey Alec, you don’t mind if I steal Liz away from you for a minute, do you?”
It’s Alec’s turn to gap at me. “You two know each other?”
Ava nods. “Yeah, we met when I was on a mission down in Roswell.” Interesting way of putting it. She gives me a look that obviously means that I should play along. Not a hard thing to do since there’s not much playing involved on my part either way.
“I think I have a lot of explaining to do,” she adds with a guilty smile.
“You can say that again,” I mutter under my breath, finally finding my voice again.
Ava starts pulling me towards the back room but I stop her. “Cece...” I begin, and her face falls. Obviously she knows about what happened. They joys of live TV coverage. Guess you don’t have to be a genius to figure out how that one ended, with Cece being shot in the chest and all. We go into the girls’ bathroom instead since it’s the only other room with a door.
“You lost your accent,” I say. Yeah, I know. Pretty silly to dwell on that fact with everything else that’s going on and the two billion other questions I have.
She shrugs. “Would have been kind of suspicious, a Manticore soldier with a New York accent.”
Well, that makes sense. At least one thing that does.
“Okay, so you’re probably asking yourself what I’m doing here,” she begins.
“Geez, you think?”
Ignoring my sarcasm, she pulls herself up onto the counter, letting her feet dangle, apparently completely at ease with the situation. I take the time to study her. Her hair looks completely different, and the number of piercings in her face has been reduced and some changed places, but her outfit is pretty much the same. Leather pants, heavy boots, tight top. Basically, the kind of outfit that screams “I dare you to come near me”. Wonder if that’s on purpose.
“When I first came to Seattle, I didn’t plan to stay very long,” she begins. “But I got myself a job, then an apartment...if you can call it that. My former boss actually helped me find it.”
“Joint?” I ask.
She looks surprised for a second, then she smiles. “You’re good. If White had half as much talent as you do when it comes to tracking people down, we’d all be toast.” I think of all the times I was running around the city like a chicken with its head cut off, not having as much as even a hint of a plan and I suppress a smile.
“Anyway,” Ava goes on, “I got my job, got my apartment and I kind of, I don’t know…settled down I guess. Before that, I was constantly on the move, always looking over my shoulder, always ready to run if I thought that Lonnie and Rath were getting too close. If they were even following me. But then I just realized that, you know, that’s not the kind of life I wanted to live. At least not anymore. So I decided to take the risk and just stay somewhere. And since I was already here in Seattle...”
“Okay, so that explains why you’re in the city. I still don’t know how you got mixed up with the transgenics. Which is kind of the point of this conversation, in case you haven’t noticed.” Ava doesn’t comment on my rudeness and seems neither fazed nor surprised by it. A fact that throws up even more questions, but they can wait till later.
She shrugs. “That was pretty much a coincidence, at least how it started and, well, kind of on purpose later on. I used to hang out at this bar-”
“Crash,” I supply impatiently, and Ava smirks again, nods. Yeah, yeah, I’m Nancy Drew. On with the story.
“Anyway, I was there a lot when the whole thing with Mia went down...did Alec tell you that story yet?” I nod. “Well, then you know that Mia was Manticore, psy-ops to be exact. She had abilities similar to my own. You know, she could make people forget things, make them do what she wanted them to do and so on. She was doing her mojo at Crash and I picked up on it, probably because we have very similar abilities. I can kind of… I don’t know, feel it when someone else uses theirs. So basically, I went into Mia’s head, retrieved her memories, faked a bar code and pretended to be one of them.”
“Why?”
She shrugged, suddenly looking a bit embarrassed. “Don’t know. I guess for once in my life, I wanted to be part of something real. Of something important. The transgenics, they’re the closest thing I’ve ever had to a family. Ever since I saw you guys down in Roswell, I wanted that. You know, a group of people I could trust. Somewhere to belong. Just...a family I guess.” I suppress a snort. Some family we are. Half the group left the planet, one member killed, the rest estranged. Yeah, really tight-knit.
“I mean, the transgenics don’t necessarily all like each other,” she goes on, “but they stick together. And if Lonnie and Rath really hunt me down, what better protection could I have than a fleet of elite solders? Besides, I can do some real good here. Help them a lot. I can fix things with a wave of my hand that would take them hours. I can mind-warp people into just giving me their money while they have to take risks and steal it...or in Alec’s case, con it.”
I smile a bit at Ava’s statement. But then my smile fades. What Ava is doing...it sounds awfully like compensating guilt to me. Not that that surprises me. If she feels half as bad about Zan as I do about Alex, she has lots and lots of guilty to compensate for.
Then I remember something from earlier and I cross my arms over my chest. “So, how long have you known that I’m in Seattle?” She must have known that I’m in the city before today. She didn’t look nearly as surprised as she should have when she saw me here. It was almost like she was expecting me.
Ava has the grace to look sheepish and just a bit guilty. “Two or three weeks,” she admits. “I saw you in TC once. You were talking to Calvin and-”
“And since we were on such bad terms when you left Roswell, you of course decided that saying ‘hi’ would hardly be the appropriate thing to do in that situation,” I finish for her, my tone harsher than I intended it to be.
She sighs a bit, slides off the counter again. “It’s not that. I was just scared that you weren’t alone. Some of your friends weren’t exactly very nice to me when I was in Roswell. I wasn’t really in the mood to see them again, not when I was finally moving on and getting away from my past.”
“Yeah, well, they were kind of worried about your friends trying to kill their brother,” I say rather snipishly.
Ava stiffens. “Lonnie and Rath were never my friends,” she tells me quietly.
I sigh, take a deep breath to calm down again. “I know. I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just frustrating, knowing that I’d practically already found you, just...without finding you.”
She gives me a small smile that seems like an offer of truce to me. “It’s okay. And I’m sorry, you know, for hiding from you. I just wanted to make sure that you were here alone before I approached you. And you looked quite happy chatting with Calvin, so I just assumed that your being in Seattle wasn’t about some huge alien crisis.”
“It isn’t. It’s about my utter lack of control over my powers. In Roswell, I was blowing stuff up left and right.”
Ava winces, looking slightly guilty. “I’m sorry. I had no idea.” Then she frowns. “That’s…kinda unusual. I mean, it’s normal to not have control over your powers at first, and that of course includes using them accidentally sometimes, but not all the time and definitely not with a lot of force behind them. Normally you really have to concentrate to do that, especially when you’re just getting the hang of them. Of course, our abilities are strongly linked to our emotions, so...” She trails off, seeing the look on my face. “Guess that explains it, huh?”
“Yeah,” I whisper. “It sure does.” I just stare at the wall for a few moments, then I shake myself out of it. “Can you help me with them?” I ask, slightly changing the subject. I don’t want to talk about what happened in Roswell, at least not now. “I’ve gotten better, but I’m still far away from really controlling them. I need help...desperately so.”
“Sure, love to,” she tells me. “How about we start right now?”
I stare at her. “Now? Don’t you think there are more pressing issues at hand?” Like, a little hostage situations for example?
“Sure there are, but this way we can hit two birds with one stone.”
“I’m listening,” I say warily. Somehow I have the feeling that I’m not going to like her plan.
“Can you mind-warp?” she asks me.
I nod reluctantly. By far not my favorite power, in case you haven’t noticed. “But I’ve only done it once...and that was accidentally.”
She shrugs that off like it doesn’t matter. “Well, the plan’s pretty simple. Basically, all we have to do is mind-warp the crowd out there, get into the bus and drive off into the sunset.”
I gap at Ava. “Are you crazy? There are dozens of people out there!”
“Hundreds,” she corrects me very matter-of-factly.
“Oh, well that makes it all better,” I reply, heavy on the sarcasm. “We could never mind-warp so many people!”
“Sure we can. Besides, it would just be for a few minutes.”
“But how? Tess couldn’t hold a mind-warp up for longer than a minute or two, and she never used her abilities on more than four or five people at once.”
Ava snorts in disdain. “Please. Her abilities are practically non-existent compared to mine.”
I raise my eyebrows at her as a sign that she may have to elaborate on that one a bit more before I begin to comprehend what she’s actually saying.
Ava sighs, pulling herself back up onto the counter. Looks like this may take some time to explain. “Back on Antar, when they cloned us, they mixed a bit too much human DNA into the first batch. As it turned out, too much human DNA hampers our powers. They’re there, but in a weaker form. So they made us, the second batch. Only problem was, Max already had the seal. It couldn’t be transferred to Zan anymore, at least not without the risk of destroying it. In the end, they decided to send both sets down. If something would have happened to Max, the seal would have automatically gone to Zan, so they at least had some kind of insurance.”
“Wait a minute. I’m confused. I thought that your powers are actually human, only a couple of centuries away, evolution-wise.”
“They are human,” Ava explained, “or at least they come from a part of the human brain that is identical to Antarian brains. But human brains still lack something that makes it possible to access those abilities in the first place, Antarians have that something. So basically, the more human DNA you mix into the batch, the harder it is to access them, which makes the abilities weaker.”
“So when Max healed me, he triggered something in my brain that made it possible for me to access these abilities?”
“Exactly. I have a theory why your powers are so strong, but that will have to wait. For now, we should concentrate on getting out of here.”
I nod, swallow hard. The idea of helping to mind-warp the crowed out there makes me feel kind of woozy. The lives of a lot of people will depend on my ability to not only conjure up a mind-warp, but to hold it for several minutes as well. True, Ava will be the main mind-warp source, but I have no idea how to do this. I don’t know how I did it the one time it happened and it’s not like I ever tried to do it again.
Ava hops off the counter and starts walking towards the door. What is she doing? Is she crazy? “Wait!” I yell. “I need to practice first. I suck.”
She turns around, looking a bit surprised, like that thought had never occurred to her. Shrugging, she say, “Fine. Mind-warp me.”
“Um, a little help here? I don’t know how.”
“It’s easy. You just concentrate on me and the thing or person or whatever you want me to see. If it works, you’ll see it as well, even though mind-warps are always see-through for the people who conjure them up. That way, you can see both reality and what the person you’re mind-warping is seeing.”
Well, that sounds easy enough.
I concentrate on Ava, concentrate on what I want her to see and a second later it’s there. Wow. This is easy. It’s faint, and it flickers a bit, but it’s there, exactly the way I wanted it to be.
She raises an eyebrow at me. “What the hell is that supposed to be?”
“It’s Eeyore. From Winnie the pooh?” She gives me a blank look. “You really need to polish up your on pop culture knowledge,” I tell Ava. “Eeyore rocks.”
“Why is he purple?”
“He was drawn that way. Look, it’s just a cartoon character. It doesn’t matter. How good was it?”
“It flickered a bit, but basically it was solid. Two-dimensional, but solid.”
“Yeah, well, most cartoon characters are two-dimensional,” I tell her defensively.
She smirks. “In any case, it’s good enough for what we have planned. Let me conjure up the mind-warp, you just supply energy to hold it up. Oh, and I’ll start off with making all the reporters turn off their cameras, but I can do that alone. Getting people to do what you want is a bit trickier than just making them see something that isn’t there. Don’t want them to have our escape on video, now do we?”
Good thinking.
“So, let’s do this,” she says, once again heading for the door. I follow her lead reluctantly, feeling anything but confident in my ability to be any kind of help at all. Somehow I have the unmistakable feeling that this can only end badly.
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