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

box. Inside the box, swaddled in an old T-shirt that had belonged to my dad, was a six-inch-square, carved jewelry box. I held it to my nose and inhaled. It still smelled like roses, even after all this time.
    Scree!
I almost dropped the jewelry box. The sound, so familiar now, came from inside. I lifted the lid and put it aside. Picked out the small assortment of pins and baubles I’d collected as a teenager. I pulled at the bottom of the box, and the faded satin gave way.
    An old Corps Vox communicator was nestled on top of the cotton batting, shiny black and unmarred by age or war. My hand jerked. I struggled to breathe as I picked up the Vox, smaller than the palm of my hand, smooth and warm. My thumb brushed across the silver
R
and overlapping
C
engraved on the plating, and beneath it, the name
Hinder
.
    Hinder. Dad’s alias in the Corps.
    I closed my eyes and held the Vox close. I could see his face, rugged and tired. Wide brow, thick hair, and an ever-present grin, always trying to keep us in good spirits. He told terrible jokes, and we laughed at their sheer awfulness. We read the comic strips every Sunday morning. He made pancakes shaped like the letter T. His laugh sounded like music, reverberating in my chest long after he stopped.
    Grief squeezed my heart; an ache settled deep in my gut; tears stung my eyes. How could it hurt so badly to remember a man who died more than half a lifetime ago? Momdied when I was five. She was only a shadow in my mind, unformed and barely visible. But Dad … I’d tried so hard to box him up and push him away, so that the grief of losing him didn’t kill me.
    It hadn’t worked too well.
    I flipped open the Vox and studied the colorful buttons. Open channel. Private channel. Alert. Vibrate. It fit in my hand perfectly, fingertips lined up with small grip indents along the sides. I pressed the red “alert” button, praying it still worked and that someone received the signal.
    “Identify,” a computerized voice squawked out of the Vox.
    Since it was Dad’s Vox, I said, “Hinder.”
    “Invalid identification. Identify.”
    I grunted. We each had code names, given the day we officially became Ranger Corps trainees. My father chose mine—a name that matched my old powers.
    “Trance,” I said.
    “Identification accepted. Message sent.”
    “Thanks.”
    I put the Vox down on an overturned crate serving as my coffee table. It stayed in plain sight as I yanked a gray sweater off its wire hanger. Corps Headquarters still existed in Los Angeles—a crumbling monument to an era of failed heroics. Someone there would know what to do next.
    Was that what I wanted? To walk out of my life and its never-ending cycle of dead-end jobs, which were relatively safe? To return to a life that had almost killed me once but had also, even as a child, made me feel necessary, like I was doing more than just floating through my life?
    I was no hero, but I was sick of being a waitress—of simply existing, rather than living. It was time to get dressed and figure out how to get almost a thousand miles from my little apartment in Portland, Oregon, to Southern California as quickly as possible with no car and twenty bucks in cash. My next payday was five days away, so short of bumming train fare from a Good Samaritan or using my newly acquired powers to rob a bank, I would be hitching.
    My other unique challenge: concealing my newly acquired amethyst eyes from the general public. I scrounged a blue knit cap from a box of winter clothes to hide the purple hair streaks. Odd-colored hair wasn’t altogether unusual; the eyes were harder. I finally settled on a pair of cracked sunglasses.
    With my father’s Vox—mine now, I supposed—in my jeans pocket, and extra clothes, and the last of my cheap, taste-like-cardboard protein bars in the cloth knapsack slung across my shoulder, I set out, wondering if there was anything more pathetic than a broke superhero.

Three
Cipher
    I don’t remember dozing,