The Ables Read online

  I tried some deep breaths, pushing every thought out of my brain as best I could. I imagined the phone flying up from the bench into my hand and then imagined it again. Several beats passed as I strained and concentrated. I willed for that thing to move.

  But it didn’t. Nothing happened. My father had gone silent, probably not sure how to deal with my unexpected failure.

  And with that fleeting thought, I lost my focus and gave up. I started to apologize as I moved my hand back to my right knee in defeat. “I’m sorry, Dad—” but that was all I got out before I heard the sound of the phone falling back to the bench.

  Was that what I think it was? I froze, in complete shock. “Was that what I think it was?!” I inquired breathlessly.

  “You had it almost a third of the way there,” Dad confirmed, sounding like a beaming and proud father. “You didn’t know?! You had it moving at first and then you wavered, but you had it! You, my son, are going to make a fine telekinetic. You’ll be able to pull it all the way to your hand in no time.” He was gushing. You would have thought that all his poker buddies were standing around, such a spectacle he was making.

  I was still in shock. Did I really just move that thing? People with sight really do take for granted the everyday assurance that comes from being able to see the things around you. The eyes are more trustworthy than the ears and nose alone, usually. I felt like I always had an extra layer of doubt beyond what most kids did, just from not having any visual confirmation of, well, anything.

  I lifted my head up to my father in euphoria and spit out a brand new revelation, the only thought I could find rumbling around between my temples, “I have the Force!”

  “Yes, Phillip.” He burst out laughing again and leaned in to hug me, much too hard. “Yes, you do indeed.”

  Chapter 2: A New World

  I stood up in victory, arms in the air, and shouted. “I am a superhero!” I felt invigorated, unstoppable, free. I felt like I mattered.

  Dad corrected me, “Custodian, son.”

  “Same difference, right?”

  “I suppose,” he allowed.

  What followed was a series of questions the likes of which you normally only see from five-year-olds … the kind where every answer leads to yet another question. It was the lightning round, my questions flying at him from all directions.

  “How many people with super powers are there in the world?”

  “Thousands.”

  “How many are good guys?”

  “More than half, but not enough. Some are neither good nor bad and simply choose to ignore their powers and live as normal humans.”

  “How many live here?”

  “In Freepoint? Out of the nine thousand or so people living here, only about fifteen hundred, I believe, are custodians. Maybe two thousand. The rest are support.”

  “How many of them are bad?”

  “Here? None. This is a safe zone for our kind. This is not a town where villains want to live.”

  “What about Bobby Simpkins?”

  “Your friend from that camping trip?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He does not have super powers. His family is support. His dad works in our transport center, actually. He’s a good guy.”

  “What’s your real job?”

  “Well, I was a crime-fighter in New York, busting robbers and other bad guys like my dad used to do. But now that we’ve moved here, I’m a protector.”

  “What’s a protector?”

  “A protector is a guardian of the city and its citizens. It’s kind of like being a policeman of sorts.”

  “Wait a minute, I thought you said it was rare to have the same power as your parents,” I said, just then recalling that part of his “introduction to super powers” speech.

  “That’s right. It is. It’s so rare that a lot of people at work think it’s an omen.”

  “What kind of omen?” I asked hesitantly.

  “That the child is special. Some of our greatest heroes in history have been sons or daughters who inherited a power identical to one of their parents. It only happens a few times every generation.”

  “So you’re saying I’m special?”

  “It’s possible. In addition to inheriting your father’s ability, you also have some genetic markers that suggest something about you or your abilities is unique.”

  “Genetic markers?”

  “Your DNA looks like the DNA of every other telekinetic our scientists have ever seen, including mine … except in one or two small ways.”

  “Does it mean I’m flawed somehow?”

  “No, son. All it means is that you are the first person alive to have these unique DNA markers, and until we see you grow up and mature, we don’t really know what—if anything—they mean. Sometimes, when this kind of thing is observed, the individual ends up with slightly enhanced abilities, and sometimes their abilities are slightly limited. Most of the time, these new markers like the ones in your DNA don’t result in any noticeable change in abilities, personality, or development. You have to remember: while our gifted brothers and sisters have given us an edge in scientific and technological development over the rest of the non-empowered world, DNA is still a very new and exploding field for everyone, custodians and humans alike. There’s just a lot we don’t know for sure just yet.”

  “I thought people got their DNA from their parents.”

  “They do. But the DNA of custodians behaves in odd ways. Sometimes the combination from two custodian parents results in recessive genes becoming dominant that have been dormant for generations … or genes we’ve never seen before at all. Despite all our advances in learning and knowledge, we still don’t know much about how or why we exist … how we came about … how and why our DNA is different. … Our ‘race,’ so to speak, is still a mystery even to us.”

  All this talk of DNA and family reminded me of a question I’d somehow failed to ask. “What about Mom?”

  “What about Mom?” he asked playfully.

  “What’s her power?”

  “Why don’t you ask her yourself?”

  I whined a little bit. “Can’t you just tell me, Dad? I don’t to have to wait until we get home to find out.”

  “No, Phillip. I mean, why don’t you lift your head up and ask her yourself.”

  In that exact moment, I heard a strange noise—brief, but unmistakable. It was kind of like the sound a person makes when they’re punched in the stomach, that “ooph” of air rushing out, only much faster. Or like the tiniest little explosion. I didn’t think much of it until …

  “Hello, dear.” My mother’s voice was unmistakable.

  I jerked my head up. “Mom?” I’d lost track of the number of times my mind had been blown in the last hour or so.

  “I guess you’re having to process a lot of new information today, aren’t you?”

  I just nodded, still not sure how my mother got from the house to the cornfield or how long she’d been standing there.

  “Well, why don’t you ask me the question you wanted to ask me so I can get back to the house and make sure your brother isn’t breaking everything?”

  “Um …” I said, stalling, “Dad won’t tell me what your super power is.”

  “That didn’t sound like a question to me,” she scolded, reverting to mother-mode long enough to give me a grammar lesson in the middle of my big superhero coming-of-age talk.

  I rephrased, as all good sons do when they get an impromptu English lesson. “I was wondering: would you tell me what your super power is, please?”

  “That’s much better,” she said, a slight touch of humor in her tone. I heard her walk toward me. “Why don’t you give your mother her first hug from her superhero son?”

  I can’t tell you how much my mother was completely ruining this moment for me by acting like my mother. I just moved my phone with my brain, Mom, do we really have to do hugs and kisses right now?

  I knew better than to actually say that, mind you. So I open
ed up my arms, shoulders saggy, and waited for this embarrassment to end. Thank God we were on a deserted farm.

  She reached her arms around me and hugged me—she didn’t have to bend down very far anymore; I’d grown a whole inch just since we moved here. I wrapped my arms around her and hugged her back, secretly kind of enjoying it.

  She whispered in my ear without letting go of me. “My power is teleportation, Phillip, which means that I can go from one place to another in less than an instant.”

  I walked right into her little trap. “Like where?”

  Ooph!

  I heard that noise again and could instantly tell that we were no longer in the cornfield. “Like here in your own bedroom,” I heard her whisper before she let me loose from her embrace. My nose told me that this was definitely my bedroom, as she had claimed. I could hear Patrick’s cartoons blaring in the living room. Before I could acclimate to the new surroundings and begin to comprehend what was going on, she grabbed my left hand and I heard that tiny explosion sound again.

  Ooph!

  And then I heard an unmistakable noise … the ocean.

  Ever since I was a little kid, I’d loved the ocean. I would stand in the sand, right at the water’s edge, and stare out into the sea for hours at a time. I couldn’t see anything, obviously. But I could feel the ocean. And hear it. Smell it. And it seemed … enormous. Eternal. It may sound strange, but something about the infinite nature of the ocean just filled me with peace. With apologies to my loved ones, I never wanted to see anything in my life as badly as I wanted to see the ocean.

  That day the waves were choppy. Mom and I were right up on top them. A fine mist blew in our faces as the water clapped against the beach. “You know where we are, right?” she yelled over the roar of the surf. Like she even needed to ask.

  “Yes!” I exclaimed. She knew how the ocean made me feel. That was why she’d brought be here. Only this time, I was as mesmerized by her abilities as I was the ocean’s might.

  We were now at least a full day’s drive from Freepoint, I knew that much. Maybe two. We had just traveled over seven or eight states in the span of a half-second. I decided then and there that teleporting was the coolest thing I’d ever heard of. Though I would never tell her, my mom earned some massive cool points that day.

  Ooph!

  The change in humidity was the first thing I noticed about this new location. Then the birds. Then the children playing. Then the sound of many car horns being honked. Central Park! My single favorite place in New York City had always been Central Park. Mom used to bring us several times a week to have picnics or go for a walk. She had always been very concerned about ensuring we got our fair share of exercise and fresh air in a metropolitan area as large as New York.

  “How is this possible,” I asked in awe. “How can we go from here to there so quickly?”

  “That’s my gift, Phillip. Teleporting is like opening a door straight to another place on the planet. It’s like skipping all the time and space in between. We’re the reason heroes can live in Freepoint or one of our other two cities and still fight crime all over the globe.”

  “So … you’re kind of like a superhero taxi?”

  She laughed. Mother’s genuine laughter could not have been more different from Dad’s; it was much more melodic but every bit as pleasant, to my ears. “I guess you could say that. I work at the transport center downtown. There are about thirty of us teleporters on staff there. And yes, we use our abilities to quickly get heroes to and from the various destinations their missions require. Without teleportation, Freepoint couldn’t exist, and we’d all be scattered across the globe.”

  “How does it work? Do you have to be touching the person?” An avid science fiction fan, I was a bit of a stickler for details, particularly with regard to how things worked.

  “That’s right,” she smiled. “But it doesn’t have to be a person.”

  “You can teleport other things?!”

  “Sure. Anything I can put my hand on. Or foot even.”

  “Like a car?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “A house?”

  “Yeah, that too.”

  “An aircraft carrier?”

  She laughed again. “I suppose so, yes. If I had to.”

  I just shook my head in awe.

  “I’ve never had to teleport anything as big as an aircraft carrier, to be honest with you, but, yes: I do believe I could if I needed to.” And with that, she grabbed my arm.

  Ooph!

  We were back in the cornfield.

  “Dad, you’re not going to believe where I’ve been,” I bragged before realizing how dumb that must have sounded.

  He humored me anyway. “I can’t wait to hear all about it.”

  “Well, I’m sure Patrick has done something worthy of punishment by now. I’d better go inspect the damage,” Mom said. And just like that … Ooph!, she was gone. I could tell already that Mom’s power was never going to get old.

  Oh yeah, Patrick. “Dad, what’s Patrick’s power?”

  He stood up from the table and walked the four steps to where I was standing. “This is where it’s going to get very important for you to be able to keep a secret, because Patrick doesn’t know about his powers any more than you knew about yours this morning. But your brother has super speed.”

  “Like the Flash?”

  “Yes. Just like that, actually. He can run, jump, move … anything physical with his body, he can do it as much as a thousand times faster than you or me.”

  Cool, I thought. I liked my brother for the most part. I know most people hate their kid brother for a large chunk of their childhood, but Patrick was pretty okay most of the time.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Is that why he’s such a spaz all the time?”

  “Don’t call your brother a spaz, Phillip. It’s not a nice word.” He paused. “But yes, his hyperactivity is directly related to his powers from what the doctors have told your mother and me. They won’t really manifest for a while yet, we’re told, but the seeds are there, already beginning to grow. And they come out that way because his body and his mind just aren’t ready for them to come out any other way yet.”

  It actually made me like him even more to know that he was mostly not in control of his agitated behavior. I had assumed he was just a spaz.

  “But you have to keep all of this from him, you understand? No practicing your powers when he’s around, no talking about it, nothing. When the time’s right, when he’s ready, he’ll have the same kind of talk you and I had here today. But until then, no matter what, you keep this to yourself, you hear?”

  “Yeah, Dad. I will.” I nodded. “So … everyone in town is … ‘in on it?’” I asked, not sure if I was using the right phrase. “You know … the whole superheroes-are-real thing?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Except for Patrick.” I said, assuming.

  “Except for Patrick and all the rest of the kids who haven’t been told about their powers yet. Pretty much every kid gets his powers around the age of eleven or twelve, and for the most part, the heroes in town—even the teenagers—are pretty good about keeping the secret. It’s kind of like Santa Claus out in the real world, I guess … how everyone knows not to spoil that for little kids. Does that make sense?”

  It did. “Yeah.”

  “Only it’s a lot more serious. Custodians view the act of informing children of their abilities as a sacred rite between the parent and the child—one they don’t enjoy being robbed of. Besides, it’s considered kind of uncool to go around using your powers in town anyway. We try pretty hard to keep the city looking and running like a normal city. We’re in a remote location, but we do get some random visitors. Plus, it’s good practice for when you’re out in the real world as a grown-up hero, where keeping your powers a secret could be the difference between life and death.”

  The prospect of being an adult hero, out in the world fighting crime, was every bit as enticing as the wor
d “death” was sobering.

  “Now I think we’d better get headed home now. You’ve got a lot to process.”

  “But, Dad,” I protested, “I have so many other questions! Can’t we just stay here a little while longer?” I knew it wouldn’t work. In all the times I’d ever tried the “but, please … can’t we just” approach to whining, it had never once worked.

  “There’ll be time for questions, Phillip,” he reassured me as we started the long walk back to the car. “You have the rest your life to explore this new world. We’ll be able to practice your powers together, and we can have a million conversations about being a custodian. We just can’t do it all in one day.”

  I knew he was right, logically. But a twelve-year-old doesn’t always prioritize logic at the top of the list. So I was bummed. But it only took a few steps for my brain to remind me that I was, at the very least, a person with super powers. I had come out to the cornfield a young boy, but I was leaving it a superhero. Not every kid who dreams about such an event actually gets to have it come true. By the time we got to the driveway, my spirits were up again.

  “Before we go home,” my father said, “I’m going to give you something.” He unlocked the doors with his remote, and we both climbed in.

  “What?” I inquired eagerly.

  He started the truck. “Your first superhero accessory.” He reached into center console compartment and pulled his fist out with something in it. Then he swung his arm over toward me and said, “Go ahead. Take it.”

  I felt around his palm for a second and found a small circular object. I picked it up. It was heavy for its size and made of metal. Not much bigger than a silver dollar.

  “There’s a button on one side, son. But don’t press it.” It’s a good thing he said the second part, as I was definitely about to press it. Thankfully, my father knows me well.

  “How come?” I asked, curious to know why he would give me something I couldn’t use.

  “It’s a radio call beacon. All active superheroes in the field have one. It’s for emergencies. If you ever get into trouble, you push that button.”