Chapter Twenty-four
Park backed away, dragging a sleeve across her bloody face. “You don’t understand. I’m trying to save humanity from itself! I’m doing good work!”
“By enslaving people?” Annie asked as Kevin held Andrew back. “By stealing children?”
“Sometimes peace requires sacrifice.”
“Do you even know the meaning of the word?” I asked. “You’re not the one sacrificing anything—you just force your ways on everyone else. You’re a bully who killed my mother. You attack families and use them as weapons to get whatever you want.”
Park’s hand shot to her neck, yanking at a thin chain with a locket.
“Family?” she said. “You want to talk about family?” She showed Annie a photo of a woman and a girl.
“My sister Jessica and my niece Samantha, you remember them? You got Samantha killed! And my sister took her own life in prison! I lost them both because of you people and your stupid powers.”
“They did that to themselves,” Annie said as all color drained from her face.
“You got them killed!” Park spat on the floor.
Samantha. Samantha? Jessica . . . Smith? “Was that . . . were they the ones who kidnapped you and Jenny? To get stronger with your powers or whatever?” I asked.
“Same ones.” Annie nodded, her eyes never leaving Park’s. “Ava, you realize they were power-hungry, right? What is it with you and your family? Haven’t you lost enough?”
“Losing them opened my eyes. I saw how destructive unchecked power could be,” Park said. “Someone had to impose order. The world needs structure. Rules. Everything I did, I did to protect others from losing their children to freaks they can’t control.”
“YOU used children against their own parents, you psychopath!” Annie yelled.
Park stared at the locket, pressing hard into her sister’s picture. For a second, I thought she was just being sentimental. Then it caved with a faint pop. “Well, I still have one last—”
“No.” Annie snatched the pendant, crushing it to dust. “No more tricks,” she said, lifting Park by her pristine white collar. “No more threats. No more hurting any family.”
But Park’s lips curved into a smile, even as she dangled in Annie’s grip. “You really think you bested me? Even Rash didn’t know everything.” Her eyes darted to one of the screens where a countdown had appeared. Fifteen minutes. “Goodbye, my dear Luminaries.”
The screens erupted again as Rash’s fingers flew across multiple keyboards, his eyes blazing brighter. “She’s activated something in the satellite network . . . a kill switch for all registered Luminary signatures!”
Annie dropped her and stared at the countdown. “But Ryan killed all the chips.”
“I don’t need chips anymore! You’re all easy to sense with your stupid blood type. You have special frequency markers, and all my satellites have now been set to track them. This was a one and done switch.” Park laughed. “Once triggered, there’s no going back!”
Gabby reached out and grabbed Park’s hand. “Shut up and sit down. Do not move.” Park dropped to the floor right where she’d been standing and stared into space. Gabby’s fist clenched. “Dammit. I should’ve done that from the beginning. I just . . . I didn’t know she’d have so many fail-safes.”
“None of us knew,” Kevin said, then stared at the countdown. “Rash, how long until you stop it?”
Rash’s fingers scrambled across several keyboards, his eyes flipping like slot machines perfectly in tandem.
Very different from the red-orange fire that spun in his eyes when he’d controlled my powers before.
The way his abilities presented themselves was fascinating, but now was not the time to ask how that worked.
“I might not be able to stop it.” After a minute, he grabbed a keyboard and threw it at the wall. “Less than thirteen minutes until total system activation.”
“What can we do to help?” Jay asked, patting Rash’s back.
“Nothing . . . I— Damn.” He turned to look at us, then at Jay. “I can’t get in. I don’t even know how the switch works on the power signature to stop it.”
“Dad!” Gabby said, running up to the monitors. “He said . . . he said to combine powers.” She turned to me. “You were supposed to use Annie’s boost to expand and kill the chips. But you used him.” She pointed at Rash.
“Yeah?”
“We can do the same thing,” Gabby said. “Annie can boost me to send out the blocker through the satellite network. If there’s no Luminary signature to track, there’s nothing to target—and no one to kill.”
“It would strip everyone’s . . .” I couldn’t finish the thought.
“Yeah,” she said. “Everyone will lose their powers. Rash just has to upload me instead and route my blocker the same way he did your short-circuit thingy.”
“Okay, I hear you,” Rash said. “That’s what we need. But I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
He shook his head. “I only control her.”
“Me?” I frowned. “You’re looking at me. Why can you control me?”
“Never mind that right now. Gabby, what are you saying?” Jay asked.
“I thought he could get Annie and me to send out the block.” She gulped. “The cure . . . to all Luminary signatures. Assuming you can control it so it goes to only Luminaries?”
“Yeah, she has it coded via all satellites. I can do that.” Rash turned to me. “But we need you. I can only go so far without you.”
“Here.” Jay grabbed Annie. “I will boost one of them, you boost the other.”
“Then no more powers?” Annie asked.
“We have to do it,” Nick said. “Or we all die.”
“Yeah, so can we stop wasting time?” Kevin asked, staring at the countdown.
Annie’s eyes suddenly widened. She turned to Jay, her face pale. “No, wait. You have to go now, don’t you? We have to send you back to the future now.”
“Mom . . .” Jay’s voice cracked slightly. “It’s gonna be okay.”
“Mom?” Nick stared at them. “Wait. Are you . . . Jack? I knew you looked familiar!”
“Yes, Dad.”
“You told your mom, but not me?” Nick’s voice cracked as well. “I don’t understand. Are we not on good terms?”
“Are you kidding? Of course we are!” Jay said, pulling him into a hug. “But you’re the one who told me to keep my distance so you wouldn’t read my mind. You said it was better if nobody knew anything until the last second.”
Nick nodded as Jay let go of him. “Yeah, that . . . was the right thing to do.”
“Exactly. I was just following your rules, Dad. I promise we’re good.”
I could barely believe what I was hearing, but everything clicked into place. The way Jay had always been around Annie and Jack—umm, himself? His investment in our success.
Nick held baby Jack closer, staring at the man his son would become. “You came back to help us.”
“We both did,” Jay said, looking at Rash. “We knew this was the day everything had to change.”
“But the time of arrival was off!” Rash looked at Jay. “Nine years’ time jump? What the hell happened?”
“I don’t know, man! I was surprised we didn’t arrive when we were supposed to. I thought we were too late, but even today’s events got pushed back.”
“Must be because of the changes we made before the jump?”
“Probably.” Jay shrugged. “I mean, we lost a few years of planning, but most things remained the same. And then I thought I’d lost you. You could’ve told me you were here and okay, you know? I wasn’t even sure you’d made the jump back in time until we rescued Andrew.”
“You know I made it. We’ve always known I’ve made it, but these guys left out a lot of details on all we had to do because of the different variables they were concerned about.” He pointed at us.
“Us?” I asked. “We left out details? So we sent you back?”
“Of course you did, Aunty Ryan.” Jay smiled. “How else would we have known what to do?”
“Why didn’t we send you to a time before any of this? Like to stop Ava way earlier?”
They looked at each other, and Rash sighed.
“Well, because certain people have to be there in the future. And if we change too much too early, they’ll never exist. Then, if we came too late, we could never come back to change things.
We wouldn’t have the knowledge and details as they are today. It’s complicated.”
“Right, and that’s all we can say about that.” Jay pointed at Rash. “But you! I still think you should’ve reached out so I knew you were fine.”
Rash shook his head. “I was constantly under watch. Couldn’t risk any contact.”
“And tech?” Jay asked. “You can control tech?”
“I was surprised, too. And I kinda wanted to see your face when you found out,” Rash said, then turned to us. “In our time, this day went very differently.”
“Yeah, Rash is right! When the satellite system activated, it sent a signal to overload any active blood markers, and all Luminaries died. Those who survived—just your small group—did the same thing as today, but on a smaller scale. Everyone in this room lost their powers.”
“What about our kids?” Gabby asked. “Did they—Oh, my God! What happened to them?”
“They were fine,” Jay said. “They had your dampeners on so their markers were inactive. It’s how we were able to come back. Their powers survived. But trust me, you don’t want to know anything else. We had to fix it.”
Rash adjusted his glasses. “But we can do it now. Save everyone. We’ll do the same thing with the chips, Ryan. Together, we can reach every single Luminary.”
“No. You . . . but we need to go back first.” Jay stared at his friend. “With no powers, we’ll be stuck here.”
“I’ll be stuck here. You go back.”
“No, I can’t leave you.”
“Yes, you can. We came to fix it, and that’s what we’re doing.” He winked at Jay. “You know you’ll see me again, anyway.”
“But—”
“No, brother. It’s okay.” Rash placed a hand on his shoulder. “We still have our own failsafe, remember?”
“Jay . . . ‘J’ as in the letter?” Kevin asked. “And your last name is from . . .?”
“From Jack Daniels, bro!”
“Bro!” Kevin gave him a fist bump, and they laughed it off. “You’ve definitely earned these.”
“Damn straight. Okay, Aunt Gabby,” Jay said. “Let me boost you up.” He held her hands and transferred Annie’s kinetic energy to her, the sky-blue seeping until Gabby’s eyes were swirling the same shade. “Now, save our families.”
She hugged him. “Sure thing.”