Chosen One Protective Services

Cyrus had never enjoyed July in Texas. He enjoyed it a lot less now, when his skin was all fucked up from the grafts, and he spent most of his days sitting in chairs. He invariably ended up in a puddle of his own sweat. Baths were only a temporary reprieve at best, and usually required assistance from one of his siblings.

That was hit or miss. Though there hadn't been much discussion on it, Mom and Dad had pretty much appointed Bill to take Rusty's place. Bill was a good kid, but he didn't like work much, wasn't as dutiful as Rusty had been. And lately he'd been making a habit of being somewhere else at the usual times that Cy needed an extra pair of hands.

It also hurt a little, to see how easily the family had folded in after Rusty's disappearance. His Mom was still quieter than usual, but if there was any sign of grief, she didn't show it. His Dad had made a show of listening to him and to be fair he HAD driven Cyrus to Dallas, but now he was right back on old habits, drinking away their money and sitting around complaining about immigrants instead of actually doing anything to help the family.

The boys, to their credit, had mourned. The other six had run and left Rusty alone with the stranger. There was a good dose of shame from that, and Trent had told Cyrus that they were holding onto Rusty's stuff until he came back. Nobody was taking anything from his box, even though they knew he had a Charlie Gorin card, and that would finish out Ray Ray's collection for the Longhorns.

Cyrus was pretty impressed about that. They were taking this seriously. And they still had hope.

But it was the girls that surprised him the most.

On the fourth of July, when the rest of the family had crammed themselves into the battered old Chevy 3100 and headed out to Carson's field to get a good view on the township's fireworks celebration, (and a free dinner from the church potluck,) Cyrus had his arms buried deep in the guts of the house wiring, swapping out the fuses in the box, and flicking switches on and off to make sure that the latest tests wouldn't blow the breakers too early. His tests required a hell of a lot of power, and constant maintenance to ensure that the draw wouldn't cause any accidents. And this was one of the rare occasions that the house was empty, and he wouldn't trouble anyone by doing his calibrations.

So when he heard feet creak on the floorboards above, Cyrus reached over, put out the kerosene lantern, and pulled his demo knife out of his shirt pocket, flicking out the blade. He waited there in the darkness of the cellar, stilling his breathing and straining to listen.

Footsteps creaked as someone padded across the kitchen, and he heard them pause at the open cellar door. Then they descended, slowly.

But they were light, too light, even for someone trying to be sneaky. They were... a child's?

“Rusty?” Cyrus called out.

They stopped moving. “No,” came the reply, and Cyrus relaxed, slide the blade back into the knife.

“Beth,” he said. “Why aren't you with the others?”

“We decided we had to talk with you. And they figured I was best 'cause I could miss a meal if I had to.”

“Talk about what?”

Beth was silent for a bit, then he heard her kicking the side of the wall. “Can you turn on the lights?” she asked. “I don't want to walk any further down into this dark.”

Cyrus chuckled. “Yeah, all right. Go on back up, I'll join you when I'm done. Won't be but a minute.”

“Can... can you get back up okay? I know your legs are, uh...”

“I was planning on coming back up alone, anyway. Figured you'd all be out a while. I'll be fine, I'll manage,” Cyrus told her. “Go on now, git.”

Truth be told, he wouldn't have minded her help getting back up the stairs. His knees had never healed right, and he'd put on quite a few pounds since he'd gotten back stateside. But he knew that the stairs were rickety enough that he didn't want to risk Beth getting hurt if they broke.

Ten minutes later, she was sitting with him in his room, looking curiously over his workbench, and picking the tools up one by one. She was short and stout, was Beth. It had been unkind for the others to tell her she could afford to miss a meal, she was nowhere near what any sane man would call fat,. But to be fair, for a Colfax, who was always competing for food with a baker's dozen of other children, she was large for her fifteen years of age. She had a mop of curly black hair, taking after Mom's side of the family with that, and two bright green eyes that moved fast, taking in everything like it was about to disappear on her the second she looked away.

That thought hurt; it brought his mind back to Rusty.

“Okay,” he said. “We're here. They said we had to talk. Who's they?”

“Us,” Beth said, picking up a screwdriver, and twirling it on two fingers. “Sue and Meredith and June and me. We need to know if—” She stopped. “Um,” she added.

“You need to know if...”

“It'll sound really impolite if I say it.”

“Say it anyway. I don't worry much about polite these days.”

“We need to know if it was really a wizard that took Rusty, or if you're crazy!” Beth blurted out.

Cyrus laughed. “Okay, that's fair.”

That seemed to catch Beth by surprise. “You're not mad?” she squeaked. “I mean, not crazy mad, but angry mad, and I thought you'd be angry mad that we thought you might be crazy...”

“No, it's fine,” Cyrus said. “I did have a screw loose, once. Back when I was lying in a hospital bed in Okinawa, trying to deal with the pain. They had to strap me down, so I didn't rip myself to bits to stop it.”

“Susan said it was pretty bad,” Beth said, biting her lip. “She wouldn't tell us what happened, just that it was a miracle you lived through it.”

“It was pretty bad,” Cyrus said, staring out the window, and seeing a memory from five years back, and thousands of miles away. An ambush, a falling tree... waking in the still hours of the night, and realizing that his legs were under the tree, and he couldn't feel them. And then the crump, crump, crump of artillery, and the white light that lit up the night, and that terrible heat on the wind...

Cyrus closed his eyes. There would be enough reminders of that night later, when the fireworks got going. That was why he was here, and not with the rest of the family. Cyrus forced his mind back to mundane matters. Girls. What were the girls up to? He knew a little about recent events, a little he heard when people talked as they passed by the door to his room. “Susan. Susan's beau is going to propose soon, right? What's his name? Mickey, like the Mouse?”

Beth giggled. “Oh, he's sweet on her. As soon as he gets the money together they're gonna get hitched. Yes, it's Mickey. Like Mickey Rooney. Maybe not in the looks, but he's got a pretty good voice. He sings in Hostetler Baptist, you know.”

“I didn't know,” he said. “Baptist, huh? All right, he'll have a job soon enough if he doesn't already. That church practically runs this place, and they'll be happy to have a young married couple to parade around.”

“I guess,” Beth blinked. “Susan's worried his mom doesn't like her much. I don't know one way or the other on account of we don't attend there.”

“If they're Baptists then his Mom's preferences won't matter as much,” Cyrus shrugged. “That's how I see it. If the rest of the church is fine with it she'll come around.” The talk settled him some, and he felt comfortable getting back to the touchy subject. “No, I'm not mad you thought I was crazy. I was once, and I worry I might end up that way again. So I'm very, very careful about keeping tabs on myself.”

“And you think it was a wizard?” Beth squinted at him. “Like Gandalf?”

“You know about Gandalf?” Cyrus was surprised.

Beth slid down a bit in her chair. “Meredith and me, our bedroom is above yours. I overheard you and Rusty reading that book through the register. And uh,” she found her nerve again, and shed the embarrassment. “I believe that a stranger took Rusty. The other boys, they ran from him. But why did you call that man a wizard?”

“Well. He was wearing a robe, and he was holding a staff. But that wasn't why. Look here,” Cyrus said, waving to his prototype.

It was big and boxy, and sitting on a rolling cart. He'd repurposed the box that a movie projector had come in, snagged it when the Monarch cinema in town had gone out of business, and now that box was the casing for a lot of vaccum tubes and wires. More wires trailed from it, some going to a splice in the wall, and a few others leading to buttons and switches draped around the workbench. A pair of telescopes poked out of the far end of the casing, pointing toward the window. It was messy, but that was fine. It worked... sort of, and to Cyrus it was both hope and the culmination of three years of obsessive work.

Beth watched with no small amount of trepidation, as Cyrus rose, picked his way around the wires, and unshuttered the viewing port he'd put into the back of it. “Come on,” he told her. “Put your eyes up here, I'll get it fired up and adjusted.”

She picked her way behind it like it was going to explode at any second, and hesitated, watching him flick the switches one by one, push buttons, and turn dials. The lights flickered, and an ozone scent filled the air. Cyrus kept his lips pressed tight as he watched the ends of her curls lift up slightly, as if pulled by dozens of little threads. But he kept his mouth shut. That'd be a fun prank when she noticed it later.

“Okay,” he said, opening the window blinds, keeping them just above where the setting sun glared its baleful eye. “You should be sighted on roughly where Rusty was, when he disappeared. That's how I had it that day, I was working and keeping an eye on them, because Mom asked me to.”

“Oh wow!” Beth said, when she finally screwed up the courage to press her face against the viewer. “Okay, that's what those telescopes are for. And this rainbow thing is pretty. It makes it hard to see, though.”

“The thing that looks like an oil slick? Yeah, that's a side effect,” Rusty said, turning a knob on the side of the case. “How about now?”

“It's still there, but yeah, I can see the creek.”

Cyrus glanced over, fiddled with his glasses, and waited. A moment later, he had what he wanted. “Okay, you see that crow coming down for a drink?”

“I do!”

“Great! Push the button on the left side of the viewer.”

It took her a second to find it, but she managed just before the Crow finished getting its drink and fled.

“Did that do anything? I heard it click, and the left telescope flickered.”

“Yeah, I've got an old camera rigged up to it. You took a picture of what you were looking at.”

“Oh! Oh, okay. This'll take a while to develop, won't it?”

“About half an hour. We don't have a proper dark room, so I have to wait until nightfall to start, that's the only problem with it. But here's the thing.” He started the long process of powering down the prototype safely. “While they were at the river, I wasn't watching them the whole time. I was working out equations at the desk. I didn't know anything was going on until they screamed.

“And when I got to the prototype and looked through it, I took pictures.” Cyrus reached into his desk drawer, and pulled out the prints he'd painstakingly developed from the 35mm film roll he'd shot that day.

Beth looked to the pile of film, then back to him. “You just sat there and watched while he took Rusty?”

Cyrus grimaced. He'd beaten himself up over that, too, so he didn't grudge her getting in a lick or two. “At first I didn't know what was going on. And Rusty seemed excited... almost happy. So I watched. And I figured that if anything went wrong...” Cyrus pointed to the rifle leaning against the window.

“Oh! Oh. So... what went wrong?” Beth squinted at him.

“Here's a shot I took. Mind you, the quality's bad. It's in the middle of the day.” Cyrus slid over a print. It showed a great, dark backlit form, and a little in front of him, a black outline of a slightly different hue, and outline that you could squint at, and maybe recognize as a child.

“There's no oil slick colors here,” Beth said, looking it over.

“Yeah. I can't afford a color camera. Have to use black and white.” Cyrus shrugged. But here's the thing. You see that branch in the creek?” He tapped a white stick, caught as it bobbed merrily downstream.

“Yeah...” Beth looked from it to him. “So?”

Cyrus pulled out a second print. “This is from a second after I watched them both disappear into thin air.”

It was a shot of the empty riverbank. And the stick was a few feet from where it had been a moment ago.

Wordlessly, Cyrus pulled out print after print, showing in stop motion, the journey of the stick downstream and out of his prototype's field of vision.

Beth's face turned white. “You're not crazy,” she whispered.

“No. And he just... I don't know. Whoever that guy was, if he was a wizard or something else, I can't explain how he took Rusty away. It might not be magic but it might as well have been. And the Sheriff didn't find any tracks leading away, so...” he collected the prints, and put them back in the drawer. Beth watched them go.

“Has he seen the photos?” she asked, and Cyrus felt a surge of pride that his sister was so keen. His brothers hadn't been much use at all.

“No, he hasn't,” Cyrus told her. “If I showed them to him, he'd just take them as evidence and not do anything useful with them. He doesn't have the imagination to figure out a way to help us, or the power and resources to go up against someone who's got something like magic.”

“Then who does?” Beth asked.

Cyrus leaned back in his chair, and studied her. He thought about telling her how the wizard had glowed and swirled with the moire effect, while he was watching the stranger interact with his brother. He considered talking about how a strange mix of colors had puffed out, when they'd disappeared, so thick that he thought he was looking at a fog of glitter. That cloud had lingered for a full minute, until it dissipated.

Cyrus rather thought that he might have a way to do something about the situation, maybe, if the right sort of people helped him in the right sort of ways. But he knew that anything he told her would get back to the girls, and from there to who knows who else's ears, and he didn't want to skunk the work he'd put in back at that cramped office in Dallas. He wanted to see if that bore fruit, before he got her hopes up.

“I don't know who can help us,” Cyrus told her. “It might be just us. We might have to sort this out ourselves.” He didn't fancy the odds, there, but he would try if he had to.

“Oh,” Beth said. Then she drew in a deep breath. “I don't think you're crazy,” she said.

“Thanks,” Cyrus told her.

“This means it's okay to tell you.”

“What?” Cyrus lifted an eyebrow.

“Rusty isn't the only kid who's gone missing.”