Fic: Chase the Morning {23/37}
Chapter Three: Sight
Date: August 19, A.I. 7 [2007](day)
Location: Orchard, Rio Grande National Forest, Colorado, USA
Peter dropped the last of the apples into his basket, taking a step back and surveying his work as he took a long drink from his canteen. The basket was three-quarters of the way full, and Peter figured that maybe another five to ten minutes’ work would see it filled. He was happy with that fact, as well as the fact that he was enjoying the chance to get out of Atlantis, even if it meant he had to do some manual labor. He didn’t mind so much, especially since some of the fruit would be going to Hawk’s Flight, and he always like chatting with the villagers. Peter liked living in Atlantis, that was for sure, but he enjoyed getting the occasional chance to breathe some fresh air and feel the sun and the wind on his face.
Contentment welled up in him as he lowered his canteen, as did a mild wave of surprise and sudden caution. Peter paused, wondering where the last two emotions had come from. He looked around for his fellow harvesters, figuring that maybe he had picked it up from one of them, but they were all too far away from him to read them that easily. Peter was a passive empath, which meant that while he could See and sense just what emotion someone was feeling, he couldn’t manipulate their feelings in any way. He could also See lies, a trait passed down from his mother’s side of the family. All of Peter’s family- his parents, his wife, and his close blood relatives on both sides- were Abnormals, including himself. Their talents ran towards the Sight and its variants, though it tended to change from person to person. His wife, Sasha, for example, had been an active empath and had been a psychologist, of all things. It had been a good fit for her, and she had enjoyed helping her patients. She and Peter had balanced one another out very well; their talents muted the other’s considerably, and they enjoyed a relative normality when near one another.
Of course, none of that mattered now. She and Peter’s parents had died in the First Wave, when the Wraith had hit Los Angeles, or as far as Peter knew. Peter had been at the Denver Sanctuary when the Wraith attacked, and had fled with those who could blend in with the baseline humans into the mountains. Eventually he’d been picked up by one of the Lantean patrols and had been in Atlantis for six years now.
Peter shook his head to clear his morbid thoughts and returned his attention to the situation at hand. All of his fellow workers were at least two hundred feet away or more from him, and since his empathy had a radius of one hundred feet, Peter knew that the caution and surprise hadn’t come from them. He frowned, his eyes narrowing behind his glasses. Where, then, had it come from?
Someone was close enough for him to sense, but wasn’t currently visible. Right. Well, he could at least get a general direction of where the emotions were coming from, and then maybe investigate it further. He closed his eyes briefly, taking a deep breath as he did so. When he opened his eyes, they had changed color from a moderate shade of blue to a deep cobalt hue. The world as Peter saw it had shifted to a grayscale environment, filled with varying shades of black, white, and gray. It always reminded the computer engineer of the scene in Wizard of Oz when Dorothy stepped out of her house and into the color-filled world of Munchkinland, save for in reverse. The only colors Peter ever Saw were those of people’s emotions, and they stood vibrantly out against the plain backgrounds of the altered world.
He searched for those splashes of color now, ignoring those he could see out of the corner of his eyes and focusing on the landscape in front of him, turning his head slowly so he wouldn’t miss the source of the emotions he had felt earlier. A small stand of trees up a nearby gentle slope caught his eyes, and he focused on it, seeing the tell-tale ribbons of emotions wending their way towards him. Silver flashes laced some of the emotions, marking them as belonging to an Abnormal. Peter smiled slightly and then blinked, letting the Sight fade back to its normal levels. The world regained its regular colors, the leaves of the trees once more their proper green and the apples their bright reds, greens, and yellows.
Peter picked up his basket, balancing it on his hip as he did so. With a sudden thought, he took a few apples from the basket and set them on a flat rock that he figured would be visible from the hill. He then wrote a quick note and stuck it under one of the apples so it wouldn’t blow away, using a pad of paper and a pen he had stuck in his pocket earlier that morning. The harvesting party from Atlantis was staying the night in Hawk’s Flight, and Peter figured he could slip away some time later that evening and return to the orchard. It wasn’t a long walk from the village, and he was relatively sure that he could make it undetected.
Of course, it all depended on whether or not the person or people who had been on the hill had seen him place the note, would read it, and then meet him here at the appointed time. Peter filled his basket the rest of the way and went to deliver his current load of fruit to the beat-up truck they were using to transport the fresh-grown food back to Hawk’s Flight, leaving the note behind. He didn’t return to that specific area of the orchard, not wanting to scare off whoever it was, and hoped that he wasn’t making an irreversible mistake in contacting them.
Will and Henry watched one of the harvesters below pause in his work and slowly look around, a frown forming on his face.
‘What’s up with him?’ Henry asked, keeping his voice low so that it wouldn’t carry. ‘He can’t see us, can he?’
‘I don’t think so.’ Will murmured. ‘But I suppose we can- now what is he doing?’
‘I think he’s leaving a note.’
‘That’s weird.’
‘Yeah. We should probably see what it says once everyone’s gone.’ Henry said. Will nodded, and the two men sat back and waited. It took some time for the gatherers down below to leave; they were making multiple trips to and from the far side of the orchard, refilling their baskets with each trip back and forth. Once they’d been gone for a while, though, Henry and Will made their way down the slope, quickly grabbing the few apples left on the flat stone and the note, and then returning to their campsite of the previous night.
When they made it back and settled in, Will took the note out of his pocket and opened it. He scanned it and then handed it to Henry. The note was short and to the point.
Meet me where you found this note. No weapons. I’ll know if you have them. 2130.
‘Are we actually going to go meet this guy? For all we know, he could be working for the Wraith.’ Henry asked, looking up from the note. Will shrugged, running a hand over his face.
‘I think we’re going to have to take that risk, unfortunately.’ He said. ‘From the way he looked, though, I got the feeling that he was a hell of a lot healthier than anyone under the Wraith’s rule. They’re not exactly known for keeping everyone in top shape, and from what I could see, every one of those people looked healthy and whole.’
‘True,’ Henry conceded. ‘So, we’re going to meet him, then?’
‘Looks like.’