The Test [Book One of The Test] (Watty Award Winner 2014)

Chapter Twenty-two

The Test

Chapter Twenty-two

I opened my eyes to see I was alone. I was near the memory wipe tree, or at least something that looked like it. Instead of blue, it had purple icicle leaves and the roots didn't just curl they also had spikes sticking out of them. Besides for the patch of grass I was sitting on and the tree, everything was covered in black.

"I must say, I wasn't to shocked to find out you could disrupt, Lexi." I male voice said behind me, causing me to turn my head but still see nothing but darkness. I heard noise to the other side of me, turning to see that someone had suddenly appeared in front of me. "Let's talk, shall we." Reid said, a look of wonder filling his eyes. 

Frightened, I backed away, pushing myself backwards on the ground. Part of my body went over the edge of the patch of grass, causing Reid to move forward and grab me, preventing me from falling. Maybe he viewed it as heroic, I would have rather fallen to an uncertain death. "What do you want?" I asked, the sentence barely escaping my mouth.

"Like I said, I want to talk." He said, steadying me on the ground, keeping me away from the edge. "I know that Natalie has been keeping you being able to disrupt a secret. I couldn't understand why you and not the others. You didn't seem like anything to special. Looks like I was wrong."

"What do you mean?"

"Why do you think I took Luke from the test and not you, Lexi?" He asked.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Yes, you do. I heard Natalie tell you why he left. He can disrupt. What about you, you can too. Why didn't I take you from the test?" 

"I don't know." I told him.

"Of course you don't. But i've decided to be nice and tell you. Your precious Natalie may not have told you, but being able to disrupt is something you pick up through how your brain waves react to certain things. We've developed a scale to measure just how high those waves could go, to see how powerful someone's disrupting can be." He said, holding a flat screen, different percentages shown on it. He pointed to the first one, a tiny bar shown on a graph. "This is the normal average human brain. But this," He said, moving his finger over to the next bar which showed at least a seventy five percent increase. "is the brain of a disrupter. Every disrupter seems to have around the same amount of waves when it comes to who can disrupt."

"That's a big difference." I said flatly. 

"Yes, it is. And now, i'll show you your power level." He told me, opening a new thing on the device. It showed a different graph. He pointed towards the start of it. "This is what your brain activity looked like when you came in the test." He moved to to end. "This is now. Your brain has been disrupting far more than the normal disrupter, Lexi." He said, handing me it.

On the screen, there was a huge increase. Much much higher than the disrupter percentage. "What does this mean?" He took it back.

"You are more powerful than all the disrupters put together, Lexi. You have the ability to resist my attempts at forcing you to leave the test, even if you didn't know you were doing it. I even had to make you pass out so I could send you here, to a different locked space in your mind. But you can do much more than just that."