Metawars: The Complete Series: Trance, Changeling, Tempest, Chimera Read Online Free PDF Page A

my dull, purposeless existence. I didn’t want my powers back, didn’t want the fear and uncertainty and responsibility of the Ranger legacy.
    We didn’t know why our powers left and had no chance to ask. We were just children—separated, split up, and shipped out to different corners of the country. Schools enrolled me under my first foster family’s name, Kimble. A name I’d kept, only Teresa Kimble wasn’t really me.
    My father’s surname was West. I was Teresa West—someone who’d ceased to exist fifteen years ago.
    I balled my trembling hands into fists and waited for my brain to catch up and tell me I was wrong. It was an illusion, all of it—Metas didn’t exist anymore. Two years of workingthree jobs, eating crap food and barely sleeping had finally culminated in an hysterical breakdown. Or I really had burst my appendix at work, and I was in the ICU, slowly dying from complications. I just had to play along with the delusion until death claimed me.
    No problem.
    Unless this really was happening, in which case I needed to accept it and move on, before I collapsed into a puddle of hysteria.
    Move on to what, though? Tomorrow’s House of Chicken shift? Forget it. My eyes were lavender, and I couldn’t afford contacts. My fingers looked filthy. The boss would take one look and fire me on the spot. Two firings in twenty-four hours would completely suck.
    I gazed at my hands. This was my future now, as it always should have been, and as right as it felt it was also very wrong. I swallowed, stomach quaking, mouth dry. Nothing about my life as a Ranger trainee reconciled with the appearance of my hands and eyes.
    I could accept that I was once again a Meta (maybe). I could accept that my brain was more than a little trauma-warped (definitely). I could even accept that everything I remembered about my life before the age of ten wasn’t all childish cowardice and failure (with more therapy). I just couldn’t accept the extra purple or the floating orbs.
    Of all the things I had ignored or forgotten, I knew this for certain: they weren’t my original powers. My Trance ability had been a kind of telepathy—the power to plant suggestions and influence the minds of others. While not exactlythe same, these new powers were oddly similar to Granny Dell’s.
    Had all the powers been released from the ether and played musical chairs with their former owners? Like me, were the other eleven kids-now-adults waking up with someone else’s powers? What about the sixty-odd Banes imprisoned on Manhattan Island?
    Dozens of tiny tremors shot up my spine.
    The high walls and harbor patrols of the world’s largest man-made prison would not keep the Banes contained once they began to manifest their powers.
If
they began to manifest. At that moment, I had no proof anyone besides myself had powered up. I also had no proof that this wasn’t some sort of psychotic break. The result of too many sleepless nights, unsanitized bathwater, and bad nutrition.
    My ICU/appendicitis theory was still on the table.
    I squinted at my reflection in the dented surface of a toaster. Those eerie eyes winked and shimmered. If I had some warped version of Granny Dell’s power, who had mine? I had to find the others (if they were still alive) and make sure I wasn’t the only one turning strange colors.
    Something squealed, sharp and muffled. A smoke detector in a nearby apartment, maybe. It ceased, and something new niggled at my memory. An item I’d kept ever since the War. Something I hadn’t allowed any of my foster parents to take away. The squeal repeated itself, lasting only a few seconds. Definitely not a fire alarm.
    Half a minute passed.
Scree!
    I stumbled across the small apartment to a warped closetdoor. It screeched on its rusty hinges, and I yanked on the string of a bare bulb, drenching the small space in sickly light.
Scree!
Behind a pile of winter boots, old sneakers, and an antique wooden baseball bat, I found a dusty cardboard