Episode 52: Spoon River and Siphoned Power
- Crystal Crawford
- May 1
- 6 min read
Updated: May 2
“Yes, the dreams were from Emery,” I answered Chloe. “At least, some of them were. They were hidden messages, like her notebook, only magical. It just took me a long time to decipher them.”
“Her notebook had hidden messages?” She stared at me, processing, then nodded.
“Okay, then. My best friend and her sister both have magic. Got it.” She looked at my parents. “Does that mean…?”
My dad shook his head. “It skipped a generation. But it’s in our bloodline.”
Chloe nodded, looking overwhelmed. “Cool. Right. Okay, this is normal. Right. Good.”
I wasn’t sure how to ask the next question, but I needed to know. “So, our friendship… I mean… You weren’t just my friend the past two years because your father asked you to spy on me?”
Her eyes widened. “Of course not! Why would you think that?”
“It’s just, the woman who was pretending to be you said you befriended me because he told you to.”
Chloe’s face darkened. “She’s a liar.” She looked up at me. “We’ve been best friends for two years, Aubrey…and we’ve known each other since middle school. I didn’t even know my father until a few weeks ago. That’s the truth.” She glanced around the dungeon room. “I had no idea he was doing any of this until after he took me.”
I studied her face. “I believe you.” I did.
Relief flooded over her, but was quickly replaced by horrified concern. “You really think he’s the one who took Emery?”
I nodded.
“Why?” she asked with wide eyes.
I gestured to the orb. “I think it has something to do with that thing. Emery’s gift of visions, it was kind of like seeing the future. We think he was taking supernaturals with those kinds of gifts either as a way of predicting what his potential opposition was planning, or maybe to keep us from being able to get those supernaturals to help us figure out what he was up to.”
“That’s our best theory,” Trenchcoat Man chimed in. “Thanks to your chatty but evil clone, we have some idea of your father’s overall goal, but there’s still a lot we don’t understand about what he was trying to do and why he took the people he took. Is there anything you might have seen or heard about whatever’s going on here that could help us fill in the pieces? Anything about this dungeon, or how the wards down here work?”
She shook her head. “I’m sorry. All I know about this place is what I heard about that thing”—she pointed at the orb—”and then my father and his assistant left. One of his henchmen stayed with me, but then the guy got a call, grabbed my arm and jabbed me with something, and I passed out again.” She shoved up her sleeve, revealing a bruised puncture mark on her upper arm. “I don’t know much about what’s going on, but that machine turned on right before the guy got the call and jabbed me.”
I looked back at my parents and the others. “Maybe that’s what he meant by ‘it’s too late to stop.’ Maybe he’d already activated the orb.” I swallowed. Did that mean the orb really was unstoppable? I was not a fan of the idea of getting blown up when this thing completed whatever it was designed to do.
Trenchcoat Man nodded in thought, then turned back to Chloe. “Were the elementals already unconscious when you got here? Did you talk to any of them?”
“I’m sorry,” Chloe said, shaking her head. “They were already asleep. The creepy IV things were already attached to all of them, too, it just wasn’t pulsing and glowing yet. I don’t think it was doing anything to them then, except maybe keeping them sedated. I’m not sure.”
Collin stared past me, at the orb. “But what is it doing now?” He looked at the unconscious people in the cells. “I mean, obviously it’s draining their power for him to use, but… how? And how is it going to deliver that power to anyone if it’s made to self-destruct? Unless it’s sending the power across some kind of supernatural Wi-Fi network or something, they’ll have to come back to gather it when it’s ready, right?”
“A supernatural Wi-Fi network might not be the right way to describe it, but he could transfer energy from a distance if he has the right equipment set up,” Trenchcoat Man said. “He would just need something on the shore nearby to ‘catch’ the energy when this one discharges it… kind of like lightning and a lightning rod.”
“Oh,” Collin said. “There goes our chance of escape by overpowering them upon their return.”
“Perhaps,” Trenchcoat Man said, “but that doesn’t mean this orb isn’t still our solution.”
We all looked at him.
“How?” Jillian asked.
“I’m wondering how none of us detected such a potent activation of power before now,” Trenchcoat Man said, studying the orb from an arms length away. “I thought maybe it was the magical shielding on this bunker, but… I can’t detect any magic from the orb, even now. It should be putting off a massive amount of magical energy, given its supposed purpose, but if I weren’t looking right at it, I wouldn’t believe it was here.” He reached out to touch it, but seemed to think better of it and dropped his arm.
“Are you saying this is another illusion?” I asked.
“No,” Trenchcoat Man said. “Not exactly.” He looked up at the rest of us. “Are any of your cell phones working down here?”
I pulled mine out of my backpack and tried it. “No.” It was on, but it had zero signal.
When I looked up, the others were also shaking their heads.
“That explains why they didn’t bother confiscating them,” Meredith said.
But Trenchcoat Man’s face had taken on a thoughtful expression. “If the elementals are feeding this orb, then perhaps, to shut it down, we just have to disconnect them.”
“That seems too easy,” Collin said.
“Indeed. And yet…” Trenchcoat Man walked a large, slow circle around the orb, stepping carefully over the tubes that ran out from it.
We all watched him in silence as he completed his circuit, then he looked up at us.
“Let’s try it,” he said.
“Wait,” my dad said. “How do we know it’s safe to disconnect them?”
“For us, or for them?” Trenchcoat Man asked.
“Either or both,” my dad answered.
Trenchcoat Man stared at the orb again, then shrugged. “I can’t speak for you, of course, but I don’t want to explode, and I doubt these supernaturals prefer to remain connected to this thing when it explodes, either. We have to at least try.”
My dad looked at him for a moment, then nodded. “You have a point.”
Trenchcoat Man glanced around the group. “Should we try to disconnect them one at a time, or all at once? There’s plenty of us to pull all five tubes in unison.”
“I think one at a time,” Collin said, “so if it does harm them in some way, we can stop.”
“But what if unplugging one of them makes some kind of surge to the rest of them, or sets off the explosion?” Meredith asked.
“What if unplugging all of them sets off the explosion?” Lockley interjected in a panicked tone.
“Maybe we’re going about this the wrong way,” Trenchcoat Man said. “We’re assuming we have to be the ones to unplug them. What if we just wake them up and let them choose whether to unplug themselves? It’s possible they know more about this orb than we do.”
“But how?” I asked. “We don’t have anymore of whatever that vial had in it.”
“We don’t need it,” he said. “We have five elementals, and from what I know about them, they represent all four elemental magic types. The powers of these five seem to be dampened here—or maybe they’re just weak from the siphoning—but you’re looking at one fire elemental, one earth, one wind, and two water elementals. I’m not sure why Vorcos doubled up on water, except that they’ve taken many others before this, so perhaps there were some magic types he hadn’t gathered as much of, yet.”
Lockley looked at him. “Why does it matter what elemental types they are?”
“Remember the Spoon River quote about the elements mixing?” Trenchcoat Man asked. “There’s a reason that set off a mental flag for me.” He turned to me. “I told you, then, that I thought he was trying to start a war. I don’t think I’m wrong. If his righthand woman was truthful, and Vorcos is collecting their magic to open the gates to other worlds, that will create a war. Whether that’s his actual plan or not hardly matters. Either in this world from panic or because he brings something terrible over, or between our world and theirs due to upsetting the entities on the other side, the end can only be destruction. But… There’s also another thing that happens when you mix all the elements together.”
We stared at him.
“What?” I asked.
His eyes locked on mine. “Chaos.” He clapped his hands together, then looked down at them with pleasure. “Oh, so rarely do I get to do that just for effect.”
“And chaos is a good thing because…?” Collin asked.
Trenchcoat Man looked up at us, but ignored the question. “Let’s get to work! Anyone have something sharp? We’re going to need four drops of blood.”
***
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