“Be careful,” her father started.
Matt put his hand up.
“We still have a great deal to discuss,” Matt said. “When I return, I want to know what really happened last night and why no one decided to tell me until this morning. Had one of you called me, I could easily have subdued my father without killing him.”
And like that, he shot off into the sky.
Neither Becca nor her father moved for a while after that. There was something pumping through each of their veins, and it definitely wasn’t the NaU that made them feel as such.
“We should head back,” Robbie said, “Your mother is worried sick about us.”
****
“We have to go,” her father said.
The three of them were sitting around the dinner table. It was late in the day, and though Carol and Robbie had done their best to try and clean the house, there was a greasy feeling in the air around them. The house would never feel like it had before. Most things in Becca’s life she assumed would carry feelings of change.
“Where?” her mother said.
When Becca and her father had returned home earlier that day, Carol’s face had been bleak white. Evidently, Matt hadn’t taken the news of his father’s death all that well, and while Becca and her father had seen the later end of that rage, Carol was all alone when she saw the first.
“Toronto,” her father said.
All through the day, her father had been making this call and that, trying to talk to everyone he knew about the NaU. All of it was theoretical, though, since her father might have been stupid enough to infect a bunch of people with NaU, but he wasn’t stupid enough to let other people know about it, especially not old Uncle Sam. He had sent over Becca’s test results, along with blood from himself and everyone else from the NaU program.
Of all the labs he talked to, the one up in Toronto looked the most promising.
The researcher up there was an old friend of Robbie’s, back from his zoology days at the University of Glenn Lake. The two of them had been good friends, but also research partners on the first theoretical designs of the NaU. Robbie had, of course, modified it to fit his own needs. Regards, the doctor up north thought he might be able to come up with some sort of cure, but it was a major maybe on that front. Still, though, something was better than nothing.
“What about . . ..” Her mother did not even have the strength to say the name of her son.
Robbie did it for her.
“It is why we have to go,” he said.
“Why?” Carol said, though her face showed the mention of someone who knew a terrible truth and would much rather die than have to hear it come out of another person’s mouth.
“You know why,” Robbie said, looking grimmer, then resentful.
“Then remind me,” Carol said.
Becca remembered the way that Matt had looked at her, the way she had felt his touch on her and her father, the way he had spoken.
“Matt isn’t in a good place right now,” her father said.
“As if any of us are,” Carol said.
“Exactly,” he said, “but Matt is in a worse state. He might not be decomposing alive like Nigel and Kent, but there’s something off with him. For all we know, the same amount of desperation and craziness that was present in Nigel last night might also be spreading through the son.
“Nigel and Matt are completely different,” Carol said.
“Not on a biological scale,” Robbie said. “Look at their NaUs. Of course, they aren’t the same color, or even close. All of us involved have different colored NaUs. However, look at the NaUs. Nigel’s NaU was to create objects out of the air, usually sharp. His NaU rather left his body and made a change. That is the same kind of powers that Matt has, but on a different scale. He might not be able to make swords like his father, but he can still command his NaU to affect the environment around him. The only difference is that you can’t see it with your eyes, which makes it look like telekinesis.
“So if that same kind of NaU is present in them, then the symptoms might be close to the same.”
“You’re afraid,” Becca said, providing all of the courage in the room to say what was on everyone else’s mind that wasn’t being discussed, “that he might try to kill us.”
“He’s my son,” her mother said, “Matt wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
“Neither would our daughter,” he said, “but when time and circumstance come together, people do desperate things to protect the people they care about.”
“He cares about us,” her mother said.
“I’m sure he does,” Walter said. “But if Jolie is pregnant, and Matt thinks that killing Becca will somehow allow his girlfriend and child to live, he might go along with it.”
“You are making a lot of assumptions about a boy who has been nothing but nice to everyone around him for the last eighteen years of his life,” Carol said.
Her father and mother continued, but to her, it felt as though they weren’t right in front of her, that they were, in fact, quite far away. The events of the last twenty-four hours seemed like a dream, a fast-moving one where every attempt that Becca made to reorient herself only ended with her falling deeper and deeper into a hole of mystery and madness. Yesterday, she had woken up as a normal middle school-aged girl who liked to read and had a family of people with superpowers. Now, as she sat there at that table, she was a murderer, a person with not only one, but two powers, who was listening to her dying parents talk to each other about abandoning their son because he might want to kill both of them, or just Becca.
“This is your fault,” Becca said.
Her parents stopped talking at that, as though someone had whipped each of them.
“Becca, I—” her
