No Good Deed (Destiny Saga #5) - Chapter 15

One of the frustrating realities of life, is that just because you’re resolved to do something, doesn’t mean you can jump right into action

“… and with all of his followers gone, he won’t have the power base to cause any more problems,” I said as I finished explaining the plan we’d come up with to Jawarski, Carter and Levi.

“Finally,” Carter huffed. “I was wondering how long you were going to let this sit out there. He’s unstable enough that, as long as he has the ability, there’s a chance he could cause trouble.”

“I don’t disagree that it’s a good idea to take care of him,” Levi added, his fingers stroking his chin. “I think you do need to consider the dangers going at him will cause.”

“He’s a danger every minute he’s breathing,” Carter said ominously.

“Yes, but right now he has his flock to protect. Sure, he’s volatile, but he has something to lose. You take that away from him, and there’ll be nothing holding him back.”

“I get that,” I said in response to Levi, “but I want him out of the picture. We’ve been dealing with his crap for a year, and I’m through with it. Will he be more dangerous after we break his world? Yes, if we let things stay as they are, he’ll still have the potential of going off the deep end. If he managed to hold on to some of his support when he does, he could be a problem.”

“You just want to hurt him,” Jawarski said.

“Yes, but that doesn’t make my reasoning wrong. Look, I’ve considered your argument, and I still say it’s time to deal with him. Either he’s a problem now, or he’s a problem later, and we all know he’s going to make trouble for us.”

“Is taking him on while we’ve got the Syndicate out there gunning for us a good idea?” Jarwarski asked. 

“Probably not. But he keeps hurting people I care about. The longer we leave him able to do that, the more damage he’ll do. I’m done. I know you guys are looking out for my best interests, and I appreciate it, but my minds made up.”

“No problem, Cas,” Levi said. “I just wanted to make sure you looked at all the angles.”

“That’s what you guys are for,” I said with a smile, slapping him on the shoulder. “So, I guess we need to get several of your people together to start dosing his followers. It probably needs to be done by any of the people you have that’ve gone through the change, or at least won’t ask questions.”

“All of our people have gone through the change,” Jawarski said. “We’re able to guarantee a loyal security staff and guarantee they’re in constant peak physical condition. We’d be idiots not to rely on that.”

“ALL of the? I’m not sure I like that idea.”

“Like I give a crap what you like,” Jawarski said with a sneer.

“Cas,” Levi said, casting a side glance at Jawarski, “we all knew you’d have a problem with it, but Beth’s right. Considering what we’re up against, we couldn’t leave room for anyone we don’t trust working security for you guys.”

“Do any of them …”

“Kid, drop it. Let us run our people,” Carter said.

“Fine,” I said, knowing there was no way I was going to talk Jawarski and Beth into anything. I wasn’t going to drop it, but this was something I’d have to work on with Levi, since he was the most reasonable of the three. “So, about going after the preacher. How soon can we get your people out there?”

“That’s the part of your plan that won’t work,” Jawarski said.

“Why not? Dosing them is the whole plan. Considering how casual you are about changing your employees, I’m surprised you have a problem with this.”

“I have no problem with it; or at least, not the idea of it. What I have a problem with is the proposed execution. You can’t go and change all of his people right away.”

“Why not?”

“Because, if all of his people come down sick all at the same time, and then bail on him, it’s going to raise a red flag,” Carter said. “It might not make him jump right to the conclusion that someone was chemically brainwashing his people, but he’s going to notice the coincidence.”

“It’s not brainwashing,” I said defensively.

“We know that,” Levi said diplomatically, shooting another glance, this time at Carter, “but his point still stands. We need to do this strategically. A mass exodus, or his whole flock getting sick - with the exception of your girlfriends parents - will make him twig to something. We need to be smarter about it.”

“Okay,” I said. That hadn’t occurred to me when I came up with the plan, but it made total sense. In my defense, I’d come up with the plan on the fly while being pissed at Tami’s parents. It’s one of the reasons I brought it to them in the first place. “So what do we do, then?”

“We do it a little at a time, and take them in sets,” Jawarski said. “We’ll look at it and work it up. My first thought is that we'll need to do it by family groups. If we do one parent, but not the other, at the same time, we’ll end up tearing those families apart like your girlfriend's.”

“That I don’t want to do. These people are his victims, too, in a way. I want to minimize any damage to them as much as possible.”

“We’ll do our best,” Levi said. “Just be prepared for this to take some time, ok?”

“Yeah, I get it.”

I groused as they went off to plan their move. I knew I shouldn’t be unhappy. This is why I'd brought it to them in the first place. When it came to something like this, experience was the most important thing. My error had been clear to all three of them, probably as soon as I finished explaining it. Once they pointed out the problem with my plan, it was pretty obvious. That didn’t make me any happier about it, though. Once your mind is made up, it's only natural to want to get moving. 

So, I had to wait.

Thankfully, there always seemed to be a distraction around the corner. The latest distraction came two days later, when Alex and Mom told me and the girls they wanted to talk with us. That alone was enough to perk my interest. Things that involved both Mom and Alex rarely involved the girls, and stuff that involved the girls and me rarely involved Alex. Unless it was an update on some study she was running on our particular subset of the change. But as far as I was aware of, she wasn’t.

“Cas, how has school been?” Mom asked when we all sat down.

“Fine, I guess. Honestly, we’ve had so much to deal with, I haven’t been paying as much attention as I probably should.”

“How about the rest of you?” Mom asked.

They all said variations of what I’d said. It hadn’t occurred to me that I was dropping so much on them, but they’d been as involved in other projects as I had been, and had let attention on school slip, too.

“When you say you’ve not payed attention, did you notice how that affected your grades?”

“Not really. Actually, since the report cards at the end of last semester, I’m not sure I’ve seen any of my grades. I hadn’t actually thought about it until just now.”

“Because you’ve been so caught up in other things?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s because we asked your teachers to hold your grades back at the beginning of this semester.”

“Why?” Zoe asked.

“We wanted to look into some things. I’d noticed how little attention you kids were putting on school, and Alex thought this would be a good time to test something she’d been working on.”

“Which is?” I prompted.

“From observing all of you - following your grades, which Angela was providing to me, and additional tests I’d been running on new samples from you - I was pretty sure you were all continuing to evolve.”

“I thought you said you knew the girls were still evolving, since they weren’t at the point to … uhh..” I paused, realizing where the sentence was going, and turning red.

“Reproduce with you?” Tami offered helpfully, which caused my face to turn more red.

“Yeah. You said you thought they would continue to change, until we were biologically compatible again.”

“I said I thought they were, and I still do. But it’s more than that. They’re not the only ones still evolving. You are, too.”

“Really? But, I thought I was the next evolutionary step already.”

“We haven’t been sure, but I think you’re still progressing towards that. We know that you went from seemingly normal biology, to what you are now, at some point after the onset of puberty. I have your medical records Margaret got from the state when they adopted you, and you’d had several tests over the years that would have identified what we see now from you. So we know when you were a child, your biology at least appeared normal. It didn’t start mutating to the point where it was noticeable, until some point after you were adopted. Again, probably at puberty.”

“We knew that already.”

“We also knew that the changes you went through didn’t all happen at once. While you were well into the change by the time I was able to start investigating your biology, it seems pretty clear it was a progressive change.”

“Okay, but why do you think I’m continuing to change?”

“It’s just supposition, at the moment. We have nothing to compare your genetics to, and a lot of it isn’t something that would show up in blood tests. It’s hard to gauge things like intelligence in any kind of quantitative way that takes into account your biology.”

“Because we couldn’t do it medically, we decided to start using other things. Keep in mind, this is not definitive. It's really pretty subjective, but we’ve been using your grades and tracking the time you all spend studying and preparing for school. Would it surprise any of you to learn that you’ve all scored a perfect score on every assignment and test you’ve taken since we started tracking your grades this semester?”

“Not really,” Vicki said. “We pretty much did that last semester too.”

“Yes, but you actually spent time studying last semester. Except to complete homework, we haven’t seen any of you study. Are we wrong?”

I thought back to over the last several months. I’d always seemed to have things that needed to be done, so I hadn’t actually paid much attention before she asked.

“No, I hadn’t thought about it, but you’re right. I haven’t studied once this semester.”

The girls all said the same thing, after they'd thought about it.

“We’ve also been working with your advisers. We’ve had them gradually increase the difficulty of your work. We’re to the point now where they’ve been consulting professors at U of H to build lesson plans. For all intents and purposes, you five are doing sophomore level college courses now, you're not studying, and you're acing everything that goes in front of you.”

“Really? But, I hadn’t noticed it getting any more difficult …”

“Like you said, you’ve been really distracted, plus we’ve tried to do it gradually. We've been increasing the speed of study as you mastered previous lessons, cutting out any time spend on incremental lessons or review. We hadn’t planned on moving this fast, but as you shrugged off every increase in difficulty, your teachers took it as a challenge to throw more and more at you. Honestly, I’m a little worried we may have taken it too far. They’ve started asking questions we’d rather not answer.”

“But it does tell us that, you’re capacity for learning has increased. You were doing well last year, but not this well,” Alex said. “We looked at your grades, and while you were all scoring well, it wasn’t perfect scores on everything.”

“So what does this mean?” I asked.

“We’ve discussed it,” Mom said after a sidelong glance to Alex, “and we think the best thing we can do is get you placed out of your next two years. It’s not unheard of, but placing out of two years isn’t normal either. The fact that five of you will be doing it at once is going to raise some attention, but since it’s something that does happen, we think it’s better than the alternative.”

“Which is?”

“You stay in school, and perhaps evolve further over the next two years. Through regular contact with educators, they'll notice how really gifted you are. We don’t know when, or even if, your evolution is going to stop, and we don’t know where it’s going. The longer you’re in contact with people trained to evaluate and notice how students perform, the more risk we have. We think getting all of you graduated early, is our best bet. It also solves a different issue we have.”

“Which is?”

“What to do with you guys next year, since you’d no longer be in the same school district. We’d discussed home schooling, but, I’m not sure Alex or I, even having gone through the change, will be able to keep up with you five. We’re seeing more divergence between people going through the full change and those of us who’ve gone through the lesser version of the change. I’m not sure if any of us are qualified to teach you to the level you could achieve.”

“So then, what do we do next year?” Zoe asked.

“That would be up to you. While our plan has always been to send you to a good college, things have clearly changed. We aren’t sure traditional education is the way to go. One, it introduces the same danger you’re running into from teachers, now. Two, like I said, you five have advanced to a degree we aren’t equipped to cope with. I think, maybe, you just keep doing what you’re doing. It’s not like we have to worry about you being able to support yourselves when you ‘grow up.’ You’ve clearly found what you want to do.”

“Huh,” was all I could say as I processed it.

We were all young enough that ‘the future’ still seemed to be more schooling, with our post school lives an amorphous, undefined thing. Being confronted with the idea of jumping ahead, straight to the end game, was hard to really contemplate.

She wasn’t wrong, of course. We’d already started on what we wanted to do, long term. Next Step was the real goal. It was a way to solve issues; and, hopefully, find a way to spread our evolution through to the rest of the planet. Even the company was just a way to facilitate that. Since we were figuring this out as we went, it was hard to see what we’d be getting from future education and training. On top of that, they were right. It hadn’t occurred to me how noticeable we’d be to people who worked with kids every day. Of course, once it was pointed out, it was hard not to see.

“But do we want to all graduate two years early? If the idea was not to draw attention to us, I’d think that wouldn’t be the way to do it. We aren’t in a large school district. The idea of having five students all graduate two years early has to draw some attention. Wouldn’t it be better to just, pretend to be more normal at school.”

“We thought about that,” Mom said, “but there are two big problems with that. One, it would be obvious to anyone who knows you guys, especially if they’ve already been working with you, that you were holding back. That would create even more questions as they asked why. Two, we don’t want to hold you guys back. You’ve already started on some amazing stuff. The last thing we want to do is delay that, just to keep you hidden. Especially since we don’t think we'll be all that successful at hiding you.”

“So, how do we do this?”

“We’ve already been talking to your principle. There will be some testing; but, like I said, this isn’t an unknown. Other kids have tested out early. Two years isn’t even the earliest it’s happened. There have been kids starting college as early as eleven or twelve, so you guys wouldn’t be shattering any records. The only thing that will draw attention, is that there are so many of you at one time. We’ll work with your principal to try and keep that attention as minimal as possible, but …”

She trailed off, letting the thought sit.

“Ok, well, you guys figure it out,” Zoe said. “I’m actually a little excited to think that, in just a few months, we could be done with school. It will give us time to really focus on what’s important.”

“Speaking of that,” Vicki said. “We do have something. We talked to the contractor and it looks like we’re way ahead of schedule. It looks like we’ll be able to open the new center as early as this weekend. We thought some of the inspection processes would take longer, but I guess some people have gotten wind of what we are doing, and there’s hope that our center will take some of the load off of the surrounding social services and clinics, so they agreed to speed things up.”

“Just because the building’s ready doesn’t mean we’ll be ready to actually open, does it?”

“No, but we’ve already started staging some of the stuff, since we didn’t know when we’d be ready. Jonathan and Ted let us store it at one of the warehouses in your new facility. We have most of the stuff we need for the shelter part, and everything we need for the classrooms and clinic. All of that can be ready as soon as Saturday. The food distribution will take longer, since we couldn’t actually start bringing in food until we were set up to store and distribute it, especially the perishables. But if we’re ready for at least the clinic and start planning out job training and getting people signed up, we want to do that.”

“What about marketing?”

“Yeah, it will be light, ” Zoe said. “We can put out a press release tomorrow, and start spreading the word, but turnout won’t be huge. That’s probably a good thing. It will keep the initial run of people low, and only ramp up as people hear about us. That’ll let us work out the bugs, before we start getting really slammed.”

“Which you will be,” Mom said. “I think you guys need to be prepared for the volume of people who will be looking for help. A lot of the charities in Houston are already strained to the max. There are a lot of people looking for help.”

“We know. We’ve talked to some of those organizations already. For a while, we’ll have to turn people away, at least until we can expand further, but that is, apparently, just the way it is in the charitable services world.”

“So this weekend huh?” I said.

“We were thinking, Saturday,” Zoe said almost hesitatingly.

While I actually agreed with mom that this was a little premature, I couldn’t fault them for wanting to get started right away. They put a lot of time and energy into getting the center open, so it was only natural. Zoe was probably right, this would keep the volume of demand down, letting them ease into this thing.

I had to eat that thought two days later, when we pulled up in front of the new center. A large banner was draped across the front of the building, declaring it to be open for business.

A line of people stretched from the front door, down one side of the long building, around the corner and out of site.

“Where did all these people come from?” I asked as I stepped out of the car.

“I don’t know,” Zoe said, looking more astonished than I felt. “Olivia said she’d talked to a few people to get the word out, but she made it seem like it wouldn’t do anything. Speaking of …”

Zoe cut off as she looked in the direction of a Hispanic woman walking quickly towards us. She was a small, thin woman with dark haired pulled into a no-nonsense bun, and was wearing jeans and a dark red blouse. A good combination that was comfortable enough to do physical work and still look professional.

“This is amazing,” Zoe said to her as she reached us. “From what you said on the phone, I thought the turnout would be much smaller.”

“I know! It’s crazy! I didn’t think we’d have time to get the word out, but I was able to get hold of a friend at social services. We’d already discussed some of what we wanted to do here, and she had a long list of people who’d … fallen through the cracks in the state system.”

“Are we ready for this kind of turnout?” Vicki asked.

“Partially. I’ve already spoken to most of the people in line, and told them delays were going to be long today. Like I said on the phone, we aren’t set up at all for food distribution. I hate to turn a few people away who were looking for that, but I called the food bank and got them a place in line over there.”

“How about the rest?”

“We’ll start taking signups for the continuing educations classes. We won’t actually start them for a few weeks, so we have time to get that taken care of. We were able to get one of the job councilors to come in today. She said she'd also mostly be taking names and info, since she hasn’t had time to start reaching out to companies, yet. The other three weren’t scheduled to have them start for a few weeks, and they all have to finish up their current jobs, so for the next few weeks Niki, that’s the councilor who was able to start early, is going to be a little slammed. The one shinning spot is the clinic. Your doctor friend called me right after you did, and said she’d heard we were opening early. She assured me we’d have a full staff here today … which we do. She also made sure the mental health specialist was here.”

“It seems you’ve got a much better handle on this than you made it sound,” I offered.

She turned to look at me with a mixed expression of pride and confusion.

“Yeah, I guess I do have a handle on it,” she said, “but we aren’t as ready as I’d hoped. I had some big plans for this.”

“Sorry to jump right into that. Cas, this is Olivia Presciado. We snagged her away from the Star of Hope, where she was the number two person over there. Olivia, this is Caspian Grey.”

“The infamous Caspian,” she said reaching out a hand. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

“Good, I hope,” I said, throwing a side glance at Zoe.

“Well, interesting at least. Still, I understand we really have you to thank for all this. I’ve been working in charities for almost ten years, and I haven’t heard of anything with such a broad mission before; or, at least, not one with the funding to pull it off.”

“I just want us to help people,” I said with a blush.

“That’s a good place to start. Well, I gotta run,” Olivia said looking at her watch. “Still have a lot to do, and we gotta start getting people inside. It was good meeting you, Caspian. Zoe, Vicki, I’ll be around.”

“She sure has a lot of energy,” I said.

“You haven’t seen anything yet. She’s really very impressive.”

“Well, I guess we should go see what she’s accomplished.”

“Actually,” Zoe said, laying a hand on my forearm. “Before we go inside, there’s something you should probably know.”

Some of the things Olivia said raised red flags, and Zoe’s wanting to give me a warning about something before we went inside, more or less confirmed those suspicions.

“Yeah,” I said, my face darkening. “This has to do with the medical setup, I’m guessing.”

“Alex did talk some of her techs into volunteering in the clinic, offering to count one day a week of volunteer work here as a work week in their lab. But that’s not what I wanted to mention.”

“Okaaay,” I said.

I hadn’t known Alex had done that, but I liked that part. Getting medical professionals to volunteer their time at clinics like this was not always easy.

“It has to do with the mental health professional,” she said, then paused.

“Whatever you’ve done, I’m sure you did it because you thought it was the right thing to do. You all seem determined to do whatever you think is in my best interest, regardless of what my position on the matter is. It’s done now, so just say it.”

I made sure my tone wasn’t angry or accusatory. I knew they really did mean for the best, and had accepted this was going to be the way things went sometimes.

“In talking to people in the charity field, everyone seems to agree one of the biggest challenges they face, is people with mental health problems. These people are suffering all the way from schizophrenia to PTSD and everything in between, and have no real place to turn. These are people who need ongoing, monitored treatment and don’t have the personal safety net to help them. Since the eighties there hasn’t been much in the way of support for people with long term mental health problems, and the charities and social services that do exist to help them, can only offer short term band-aides.”

“And we have something more long term,” I said.

It was a statement, not a question, and I was pretty sure what the long term solution was.

“Yes. We know what the change does to people with physical problems, and I talked to Alex and she is pretty sure it will do the same thing for most mental ailments, as well. We'll have to check them for being a genetic negative, of course, but those that aren’t we can cure. Their only option is lifelong medication, with really bad side effects that many times drives the people off the drugs. It creates a big cycle that never fixes anything. I know you hate changing people without their permission, but these are people whose lives are often really, really bad. I don’t think we should stand by when we can do something about it.”

“Won’t people notice if we start curing a long of people with incurable problems?”

“Maybe, maybe not. These are people who’ve fallen out of civilized society. Most of them live on the streets. No one is looking for them, no one is paying attention to them. I won’t lie, there’s some risk, but I think the risk is worth it.

I paused, pinching the bridge of my nose, and then said, “Well, I guess you’ve already done it. I’m not crazy about the solution, but I can’t argue that your heart's not in the right place and it seems you’ve thought this through. So who’s going to be doing the testing and giving the injections?”

“One of Alex’s people. She officially quit the lab, and is now working for Next Step. She was one of the first researchers who was changed when we … uhh …”

“Went behind my back and changed everyone around me?”

Zoe rolled her eyes, but kept going, “She’s been changed. Because she was working on your samples, and helping study your biology, she’s been told the full truth.”

“I didn’t know you guys were explaining everything to people I didn’t know.”

“Mom has,” Zoe said, crossing her arms defiantly. “She said some of her people had to know, to do their jobs properly.”

“I guess I’m going to have to talk to her about this then,” I said, putting a smile on my face. I knew Zoe wouldn’t buy the attitude switch for a second, but she didn’t call me out on it either. “Let’s go check out opening day.”