I Spy With My Little Eye - 1. Chapter 1

Allan laid down his pencil when he completed his last calculation. The relief he felt at being done with his calculus homework was immense. He experienced precisely five seconds of that relief before his phone buzzed.

Brad Jones: Can you come to 5-A346 and check my work?

The message was bland and innocuous in case someone else saw it. For Allan, though, it was an order. They’d told him that he would have this semester to himself without pressing assignments beyond evaluating and protecting his roommate from outside interest. So it was a surprise that he received this text summoning him to what he presumed was a secure location hidden away in the tunnels under the dorms. The name wasn’t one he recognized personally. Still, it was a preprogrammed contact in the phone, and the confirmation code disguised as a homework check certainly was valid. His roommate looked up from his own textbook when Allan stood up from his desk chair and grabbed his sneakers to put on.

“I need to go meet with someone. I’ll be back later.”

His roommate, who looked over when he started talking, just nodded and refocused on his calculus assignment.

Allan grabbed his pocket stuff from a dish in his top drawer, pulled on his school hoodie, and ducked out the door. He dodged a few neighbors and was in the stairwell down to the tunnels in short order. The tunnels were a clean and well-maintained basement level below the dorm buildings and quads. In the heavy snows the school received in winter, the tunnels were a great convenience for the students as well as a handy way to reduce heating and cooling costs by having so much underground.

It took a few minutes of brisk walking through the nearly deserted tunnels to arrive at the right spot directly under one of the dorm towers, in room A346. The name placard outside the door called it the Honors College Academic Lab.

He found it at the end of a blind hallway just past the laundry facility for the dorm overhead, and it had, like all the doors, a badge scanner. So he tapped his ID on it, and the door clicked, letting him in. He entered the unfamiliar room as if he’d been there a thousand times before.

The room had a dozen desks and study cubes, but nothing looked out of the ordinary. There was a door with a sign for Quiet Rooms. There was an Eye of Providence symbol as part of the sign.

“All-seeing eye. Subtle.”

Allan smirked a bit as he swung open the door and stepped through. There was a hefty clunk when the door shut as a heavy set of locks sealed the door behind him. The short hallway had study rooms off to each side. The end wall had an Eye of Horus on it, and taking the hint, he approached the end of the hallway. The wall moved backward and slid to the side, revealing a handprint scanner with another, more solid-looking door. He placed his hand on it, and the scanner hummed, flashed green, and the door in front of him slid open, showing off a clean, brightly lit stairwell going down deeper under the campus.

He went down the stairs and through an open, vault-like door to a security checkpoint where a man in a black suit was waiting. “You are expected. Head straight in.”

The man gestured to the office door behind him.

Allan walked into the office and stood at attention until the man at the desk looked up and waved him to the seat across from him.

“You needed to see me, sir?”

“There has been an incident. We think your roommate’s only remaining family has been targeted. What is your current assessment?”

“Mark is solitary and barely holding himself together. We have built a friendship, as I have made it clear that I am interested in his wellbeing, going out of my way to spend time with him, but not crowding. In the six weeks we have been roommates, he’s gotten so he will join me for meals and movies as well as homework sessions. When we are alone, he initiates physical contact, and the amount of that contact has been steadily growing. He now relaxes against me, where he can maintain some level of skin-to-skin contact, likely reducing his anxiety. He has, on several occasions, appeared almost inebriated from the contact.”

“He has power?”

“He is the strongest unaligned empath I have encountered. He has some training from somewhere, or he wouldn’t be holding together nearly as well as he is. I think my own grounding allows him comfort, as does my ability to dampen my emotions. He was skittish almost to the point of comedy before he made first physical contact.”

“Is he compatible for a long-term companion?”

Allan blinked hard at the unexpected question and took a full minute before slowly nodding. It took a few bobs of his head before his mouth engaged. “I would not be averse to his long-term company.”

“Would he be interested in that arrangement?”

“We have not discussed in words what our relationship is. He is clearly comfortable and only truly relaxes when he is in my arms. I have left him completely in charge of our physical contact. Thus far, it has not been sexual, and I would not object if that was his desire. I have not seen him touch anyone other than me, and he deliberately shies away from physical contact with everyone from what I have observed.”

“We don’t know yet if the uncle is going to be used as leverage or if he was targeted for information. Either way, we suspect that the Bloodhounds are onto your boy.”

The man paused and looked at his screen for a long moment before focusing back on Allan. “If he chooses to join us and you wish it, we can make arrangements for the two of you to stay together. Based on your assessment as well as our other observations, this will provide the best environment for his training. What are your thoughts on this arrangement?”

Allan slowly nodded again for a few moments before saying, “I’d like that.”

“We will attempt to retrieve the uncle, but he was not interested in working with us in the past. I suspect he will still be uninterested in a partnership. If they decide the uncle is more trouble than he’s worth, we will make arrangements for Mark to live with you going forward. No matter what happens, it is absolutely imperative that you do not let him leave your sight when he finds out. You are to do everything you can to keep him together.”

Allan long blinked again as he took a moment to process that.

“Are your orders clear?”

“Yes. What’s going on?”

“Our experts concur with your evaluation that he is barely holding together and that he is the most powerful, unaligned empath we have found to date. We assume he’s had some help as he’s not detectable by any of the standard detection methods, and he would be a very valuable asset if he doesn’t self-destruct.”

Allan frowned, his lips pinching tightly, but he remained silent.

“I am sorry for the clinical response. Of course, his life is important whether or not he joins us. You keep him safe and stable, and we’ll handle the details later.”

“I can do that.”

“He’s had a rough go of it. I know this is not your typical type of mission. Still, you were the only one that fit the mission parameters.”

“I accepted this mission for the change of pace and to enjoy some of the college experience. Mark took a long time to thaw out, but he’s coming to trust me as a reliable friend. He has a certain gravity that other people don’t have.”

“He is very unsettling to other empaths, and your gifts dull that effect for you. It also helps him not be on edge as your empathic colleagues describe you as quiet compared to others.”

“I should get back there to support him.”

“Yes, you should. Dismissed.”

Allan nodded to the man and then again to the guard outside. He went up the stairs to the door, and the indicator lights were both green, meaning that the room at the top of the stairs was empty and that the hallway outside was well. It did not take him long to get through the doors, out of the basement, and on his way back to his dorm.

He slipped back into the room and locked the door behind him.

Mark looked up from his physics textbook and smiled at him. “Back for the night?”

“Yeah. You almost done with your homework?”

“I’m done. After I finished my calculus, I thought I would do some reading ahead on my physics.” Allan gave a small smile before adding, “I’m ready for a break though.”

“Want to join me on my bed and watch a movie?”

Mark blushed a touch and looked down before replying, “Yeah, I’d like that.”

Allan turned on the flat panel that was on their wall and grabbed the remote, connecting to the campus’s streaming service. He selected an old classic science fiction movie, Star Trek: The Motion Picture. The big, brassy Jerry Goldsmith theme song started to play as soon as the movie began to roll. He leaned up against the wall, and Mark crawled onto the bed next to him. They squirmed around briefly before ending up arranged with Allan behind, and Mark snuggled into him with Allan’s arm holding him to his chest. It was the closest the two had been to date. Allan pulled a light blanket over the two of them to ward off the rapidly cooling fall air.

They made it all the way through the first movie before there was a knock at the door. Allan carefully extracted himself from behind Mark in order to answer the door. He opened the door to see the Resident Advisor (RA), a campus safety officer, and a uniformed state police officer. The RA spoke up first. “Allan, is Mark in?”

“Yeah, he’s here with me. Mark?”

Mark got up from the bed and came over to stand next to Allan. He looked quite waifish at five foot six, one hundred twenty-five pounds, next to Allan’s six foot, one hundred sixty pounds. In what was a clear, nervous tic, he stepped closer so that his shoulder was touching Allan’s arm.

“Mark Franklin Jackson?” the state police officer asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“I am very sorry to tell you this, but your uncle, Franklin W. Jackson, was involved in an automobile collision this evening. He is currently missing from the scene, and witnesses say he was forced off the road and dragged into another vehicle. We are doing everything we can to locate him. Do you know of anyone that would want to hurt him?”

The anguished noise he emitted was muffled as he buried his face in Allan’s chest quickly. Allan, because he had close physical contact with Mark, was able to draw in a great deal of the empathic burst that likely would have devastated the mundanes standing close by.

“I’ve got you, Mark,” Allan said into his roommate's ear as he sobbed into his chest.

The RA told Allan, “He doesn’t have anyone else on his emergency contact list. Do you know of anyone?”

“There isn’t anyone. His uncle is the only one left. I will stay with him and make sure he’s not alone.”

“If he thinks of anyone, please contact me at this number,” the officer said, passing over a card.

The two officers looked at each other before nodding to the RA.

They all accepted that someone else had the hard part of dealing with an emotionally wrought teenager. They all left the room, with the last one out pulling the door closed behind them.

Allan kept his arms wrapped around Mark, rubbing his back in slow swirls as the sobbing eventually tapered off. They simply stood there for a long time as things eventually settled into near silence and matched breathing.

“You’re too stable,” Mark eventually said. “Nobody else is this calm all the time. It’s like you have the emotional foundation of bedrock.”

“I do spend a decent amount of time in meditations as part of my martial arts training.”

“It’s more than that. You have power, too.”

“Technically speaking, I do have some psionic capabilities, yes. But they are not the flashy sort of skills that attract the attention of all the competing factions. Unlike you.”

Mark stilled utterly but did not pull away.

“Is this just recruitment?”

“If you mean the feelings between us, no. You’re in physical contact with me, so you know I’m not lying. I know you are powerful enough to detect if I was lying without the contact if you are trained well enough for it. I have been conscientious to speak only truth to you. Enough so that you should have noticed. So many people tell little white lies all the time.”

“Yes. That’s why I risked touching you the first time. I noticed how careful you are and how supportive. I have pretended that was because you liked me and weren’t attempting to recruit me.”

“I do like you. My mission is to evaluate and protect you. Though now you know about that, I’d imagine you’ll be given a recruitment speech by our faction. Ours is a voluntary one, unlike the compulsory one you have thus far evaded.”

“How did you evade them?”

“I’m not flashy enough in power for them. My power is far better suited for intelligence gathering and not being noticed.”

“What is your evaluation of me?”

Mark looked both scared to hear what was said and eager for him to say something.

Allan reached up with both hands to gently cup Mark’s cheeks, providing both comfort and direct skin contact to maximize the effectiveness of their empathic connection.

“You need to be trained and soon. You are barely holding it together on your own, and I think you would have lost it by now if we hadn’t started our close physical contact.”

“I don’t think I would have held It together if it weren’t for you. What do you think I should do?”

“I’m strongly biased here, and our physical contact is coercing your thoughts even further.”

“I need the contact.” Mark looked deep into Allan’s eyes, showing the emotion that Mark could feel through their contact.

“That is what makes it coercive. I think you should join my side, of course. It is my opinion that we’d be able to train your talent and apply it better with our ideals than your main alternative that you have already been actively evading. You need to be trained. No matter who you go with, you cannot do this alone any longer.”

“I feel your belief of the truth of your statement. I feel what you feel for me. I admit to reveling in the feelings you generate in me and for me.”

“I’m here for you, and if you join us, we’ll be assigned together.”

“Can I just join you?”

Allan rubbed Mark’s cheek with his hand. “Yes. We can find a way to still get you trained if you just want to stay with me.”

“I’ll take the leap.”

Allan leaned in and kissed Mark on the forehead. “Then we’ll work together and figure out what happened to your uncle.”