Intrepid by J.D. Brewer Read Free Book Online Page B

made her feel different. I knew more about the girl than she knew about herself, but that was my job. As a Watcher, I was trained to sift through data until my eyes burned from forcing my inadequate brain to process what was gathered by the Explorers.  
    There were so many differences between the lives of Explorers and Watchers, but both jobs are equally important. Some might argue the Explorers have a more exciting time, but I disagree. Watchers? We find the connections Explorers miss because they are too close to the problem, and we help give meaning to a system that otherwise appears to be random and haphazard. To me, that’s far more exciting.  
    I sat in my chair that used to be plush but now was worn from the hours I sat in it, and I replayed the feed. I ignored the snarky message that came with it, and wondered what was so important about it. The scene in this feed didn’t seem special. Texi leaned on a wall between the gym doors, clearly not partaking in all the cheer.  
    I’d always wondered what a pep rally would be like, and I wished I could experience Collective Energy for myself, especially when it was so young and contagious. Young Energy inspired the inert into motion and had its own gravitational pull like a current in the tide. Yet this current bounced off Texi. Even if she wanted to be pulled into it, there was something beyond herself holding her back, like when a baseball player revs his arm back before the pitch releases a flurry of movement.  
    That girl was a rubber band being pulled back, alright.  
    We all waited to see if the mutation caught—to see if she was a threat, an asset, or dead.  
    I looked for any information I could pull out to prove the Change was coming, and I jotted down notes in the journal. I wrote down every thought, even the ones that seemed unimportant, and I wondered if I was finding anything Nobu wasn’t. Then I shook my head to get Nobu out of it. It was important that Condensing happened in solitude. It allowed us to draw our own conclusions before the Calibration, and I’d have to wait for this evening to find out what Nobu thought. Being a Watcher was all about the checks and balances to filter which data is important and which is not. After we Calibrated our conclusions, our Calibration Reports usually went up the Hierarchy of Watchers to a Level Two Watcher. They Collaborated our work with other Calibrations, and this process was repeated until it finally reached a Grande Master.  
    The Grande Master was the most objective position in all the Multiverse and had the most comprehensive access to the bigger picture. One day… I was going to be a Grande Master.  
    But for now? Condense. Calibrate. Collaborate.  
    Texi was a strange case, though. Nobu and I were told we were the only two who saw these feeds in order to protect her. The more people who knew about her, the more danger she was in, and analyzing her data was terrifying because Nobu and I could only figure out so much with our limited perspectives. We both knew there was too much at stake, and whenever we got data on her, there was an intense amount of pressure to find everything we possibly could. Our chain of command stopped at an unnamed Level Two Watcher, and we suspected that there was no Collaboration going on beyond that. Whoever our Collaborator was simply double-checked our Calibrations and attempted to make them as useful as possible.  
    So when a vid like this came in, it was extremely frustrating to discover it was useless. It appeared that there was nothing important going on, and it was the same thing we saw every day.  
    I replayed the vid again, and groaned. Why was this sent to us? It wasn’t showing us anything special, and by now, something should be happening if the Change was coming. I stood up to try and readjust my perspective. “Expand images in the doors to her right,” I said, and the double doors next to her blew up so I could see a reflection of the bleachers and the