Secrets [5] Echoes: Part One by A.M Hudson Read Free Book Online

sat on the chair beside me, sliding back a little too far, then pulling himself closer again with a steady hand under the desk. “Go ahead. Check it out.”
    I leaned in and peered at the graphs and numbers on the screen. “What am I looking at?”
    “Your results, Ara.” He pulled himself closer to the keyboard again and started typing. “Your electrical readings are off the chart. They’re some kind of crazy mix of static and … I don’t even know. It’s just a mess. But you, and those tiny little hands of yours, are more powerful than we’ve realised.”
    “And you made me heat up water while we were in it?”
    He winced. “Had I seen these, I might've thought twice about that.”
    I sat back, slapping my brow.
    “Anyway, you might not understand these numbers, but look at this—” He typed again at a-hundred-words-per-second, and a video came up on screen. “Remember when I filmed that training session last week—when you shot Falcon?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Check this out.” He offered the screen, and I watched the replay, seeing Falcon’s body shake as it absorbed the energy from my hands, lifting off the ground a second later to fly back and hit the wall.
    “Okay, so, we should upload this to the Internet. It’s very cool, but I don't get what I’m supposed to be seeing.”
    “Look now,” he said with a grin, typing something else.
    The video slowed, and I practically put my nose to the screen, squinting like an old lady reading fine-print.
    “See this?” He pointed to a very thin blue line of light coming from my hand—wispy and branch-like.
    “Yeah.”
    “Now, look here.” His finger moved off to the far left of the screen—to where one of my knights stood watching, laughing—and the same kind of spark was there, emanating off his head.
    “What the…?” I leaned closer. “How did the spark get there?”
    “Simple. He’s a vampire, Ara, not a Lilithian.”
    “So?”
    “So … do you know how light ning grounds itself?”
    “Um … I think I remember something from primary school.”
    He laughed and sat back, folding his arms. “Well, there are many different types of lightning: cloud-to-ground, ground-to-cloud, intracloud ; heaps, right?”
    I nodded.
    “But, basically, all lightning is essentially the same thing—just an electrostatic discharge. It’s the conditions that affect the way it discharges, and how we, essentially, see it appear in our atmosphere.”
    “Okay.”
    “So,” he started, using his hands to demonstrate as much as his words. “Imagine a negative build up of energy shooting from the base of a cloud, taking off through space and time in what we call a stepped leader—which is basically like a branch of negative protons rushing toward the earth. You following?”
    I nodded.
    “Before it gets there, though, objects on the ground sense the electric field and respond with their own positively charged streamers—” He made a separating motion between his hands as if pulling a string of invisible clay up from the ground. “When the stepped leader meets those streamers, or in layman’s terms, the negative and the positive meet, this violent charge of electricity can then drain toward the earth, right, creating a massive flash of light that we call lightning.”
    “Okay.”
    “But, it began as a negative charge looking for a place to ground itself,” he said with hinting eyes.
    “So … I’m the negative charge?”
    “Right,” he continued. “When you use your power this way—” He tapped the screen. “That’s exactly what you are. And it really got my brain ticking,” he said, now tapping his head, leaning forward eagerly. “See, I think the reason you can sense vampires and the reason you can make them feel like their hearts beat is because that’s exactly what you’re for.”
    “Huh?”
    “Why doesn’t the streamer rise off a Lilithian—or objects on the ground?”
    “Because they’re not compatible?” I asked, the uncertainty