T ag moved swiftly through the small park. He had only gone about one hundred yards when he noticed that all the ground around him was covered in a psychic shadow. Someone must have taken manual control of the cameras and was looking in a different direction. It was at that point that Tag stopped, got down on his knees, and threw up. While he was being attacked he didn’t have the chance to think about what was happening. He just reacted to the moves his attackers were making, and his body responded automatically. Now he thought about what he had done.
“I’ve never thrown a knife,” he thought, “and I’ve just thrown two that killed two men. I didn’t even aim them and on the second throw I couldn’t see him when I threw it. How could this happen?” He thought for a moment and then looked up at the sky, full of floaters. “It must be part of my gift. I just never thought that it would take control of my body like that,” he decided.
He felt another round of gagging and threw up again. After a minute he got up and started jogging toward his house. He still had three miles to go, and all he saw in front of him were the psychic shadows where he knew he would not be seen. As he ran he played back in his mind the confrontation that had just taken place. He knew that he didn’t think about what to do;, he had just reacted to his attackers instinctively. The hours he had spent going through the self-defense moves at home must have saved him, but that practice could not account for what he had just done. He realized that he could feel what the attackers were going to do before they moved, which allowed him to avoid their attack and take advantage of them.
Tag had never been in a real fight or any physical confrontation. Perhaps his self-defense instructors were right about some people having an affinity for these skills. But even those that had an affinity still had to train for years to be able to do what he had just done, and he had not trained for years. It dawned on him that most of the training must be to teach how to avoid the attack of one’s opponent while delivering them appropriate strikes. He realized that the skill was something he possessed naturally because of his gift. Seeing what his opponents were going to do in very slow motion allowed him to do exactly what he did at five-years-old playing tag. They moved one way, he went the other. He remembered seeing, in his mind’s eye, the thin, dark psychic shadow that went from him to the first gunman. He threw the knife at that shadow and it never dropped an inch or wavered in its flight. It went straight in the gunman’s eye just as he crouched to fire, as if that shadow knew where the eye was going to be. He did the same thing with the second knife throw. He saw the shadow under him as he rolled and threw the second knife at it. He didn’t even see the gunman behind him. It had all happened so fast, and Tag felt no joy or sense of victory from killing his attackers. Even knowing he had no choice and that if he had not fought back he would be the one lying back there dead did not remove the sorrow and pain he felt inside. All the way home he second-guessed himself.
“Maybe if I had just run as soon as I sensed them approaching; or maybe if I had just wounded them…” he thought. But he knew deep down that if he had run they would have just shot him, and by the time he sensed there were five they were already surrounding him. He also knew that if he had only wounded the gunman, they would have continued shooting. Still, he couldn’t help himself from feeling pain, because it was not in his nature to deliberately hurt anyone. He vowed that in the future the last thing he would do, unless he had absolutely no other choice, would be to use the skills he discovered tonight.
The moon was up and he visualized the man in the moon crying over the wasted lives. The night sounds surrounded him, and he heard the chirps and buzzing of the insects along with the sound of the floaters overhead. Life continued and he was going to have to do the same.
Then a thought penetrated his self-pity. The cameras had seen him. He stopped running and began walking. He replayed the attack in his mind. The cameras had recorded him sitting against the wall surrounded by the five men. He thought hard and knew he had kept his head down while the camera was on him. He was also certain that during the attack the cameras were turned away. However, he knew that when the cameras swung back they would see the results of the fight with him still sitting against the wall, confronted by the big man. “I’ll bet that causes the security investigators some confusion,” he thought. “Could they possibly connect this fight with what happened at school tonight?” He had been careful to make sure that he would not be seen, and he had been successful until the confrontation. “I wonder if the cameras could tell how old I am.” Then another thought struck him. “The security people are going to wonder how the person sitting against the wall got there. That’s a question that the investigators are going to have a hard time answering. No one is on the cameras, then boom, someone appears.” He was sure that the five men could be tracked back from the scene of the attack, but that made his appearance all the more suspicious. That might shift all the attention away from the attackers and on to him. Someone that could handle five armed criminals single-handedly and appear from out of nowhere was a lot more of a concern for security than the one remaining unsuccessful criminal. “All I wanted to do was steal a test booklet, and look what happened. I guess nothing is ever simple,” he thought. He walked through the cool night, moving in the shadows without conscious thought. “Will they be able to connect the fight to the theft of the test booklet?” he wondered. He could still smell grass in the park and it smelled good. The moon had finally risen high over the horizon and the night took on a beauty that Tag saw and savored. The moon shining through the trees cast intricate shadows on the ground, and the grass blades reflected some of it back into the trees. Tag could see small flying insects move through the moonlight like fairies. The close brush with death had sharpened his senses and made every color, every sound, and every smell intense. “This is the flavor of living,” Tag thought. “I don’t see how they can connect the two, and worrying about it won’t change the outcome.” So Tag put it out of his mind and savored the night while he continued to move toward his home.
He finally arrived; it was barely daylight, so he sat down next to his house between the climate control and waste removal bins and then waited for his parents to leave for work. Thirty minutes later he saw the lift on the roof raise the floater and then watched it fly away with his parents. He made sure he wouldn’t be seen and entered the front door. He was exhausted from being up all night, but he knew he had to go to school to make sure that the public transportation records would show him leaving his house. He took a quick shower, put on clean clothes, put the clothes he wore last night into the auto laundry, and left to board the floater that would take him to school.
He was sitting in his seat almost asleep when Leila and Tara sat down on the seat next to his. “I must be really tired not to have sensed them board the floater,” he thought. But they were not thinking about him, so his psychic sense wasn’t triggered. They didn’t notice him because they were having a deep discussion.
“Leila, you have to ask to take the test again,” Tara said.
“And what reason would I give?” Leila responded. “If I tell them about my mother’s plans to leave and how I had been up all night, then I won’t be given a good job anyway because of my parents’ inability to maintain a long-term relationship.”
“You have to try!”
“Don’t you understand? If I bring that up then they’ll investigate my parents and discover that she’s only staying until I get married. Then not only will I not get a good job, but I’ll also lose the chance to marry and have a family.”
“You’re right,” Tara said, almost crying. “I haven’t thought it through. That’s exactly what would happen.”
“Well, at least after today I’ll know where I stand and try to put this behind me,” Leila said.
Tag sat in his seat and knew that what was going to happen today was only the beginning. He knew Leila was about to face the full attention of security investigators because of the theft of her test booklet. He also knew that she knew absolutely nothing about it, and the investigators would make that determination quickly. She would not be able to offer a clue as to how it went missing. He suspected she would have to endure questions about all her friends and anyone else that she had spoken to after the test. Her reactions to their questions would be genuine and honest and the security truth fields would show that. He was hoping that this would lead to her being made to take the test again. Since she had never spoken with him and had not seen him when he gazed at her, then it should be impossible for the investigators to connect them, he determined.
Tag’s wildest dream didn’t touch what he saw when the floater stopped at school. There was a heavy security floater unloading boxes, and ten security speed floaters parked around the entrance. That was a lot, but what really concerned him was the company of armed naval marines in full battle armor surrounding the school. He felt a sinking feeling in his stomach, fearing that the enforcement division had been able to tie the theft and the fight together.
“Here goes nothing,” he thought.