Titan Song (Star Child: Places of Power Book 3) Read online

  Titan Song

  By Leonard Petracci

  Book 3 of the Places of Power Series

  Dedication

  To my family, friends, and online community - without them, this would not be possible.

  Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?

  -Richard Feynman

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  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Recap of Star Child, Negative Film, and Forgotten Pages. If you have not read Forgotten Pages, do so now or read this.

  Star Child, Book 1

  The story begins as Star Child’s mother gives birth to him on a space station in secret, granting him the ability to warp space. SC stays hidden in his early years, knowing that the government would take great interest in his power, and with it being unregistered, it could result in heavy punishment. However, his mother is kidnapped, and SC hatches a plan to find her. Allowing himself to be captured, he attends an academy to hone his powers under the pretense that he is a Telekinetic and discovers a link there to his missing mother. But the academy has other plans for him, as Siri, the headmistress, has powers allowing her to brainwash students through song, and soon SC loses sight of his mission. With the help of friends, he overcomes the brainwashing and uses Siri’s powers against her, luring in The Hunter, father of Arial, to lead to her capture. As the story closes, Arial and SC share their first kiss, Darian, Slugger, and Lucio move in with SC in a subway hideout his mother’s power protects, and SC frees his mother. Deep in the subway, he also discovers that Peregrine, one of Siri’s cohorts, has started to build a machine that allows for teleportation to hundreds of end points across the globe.

  Negative Film, Book 2

  Lola, one of the students from the academy, reunites with SC as the police hunt for her. They discover that she’s royalty of a tribe in the Amazon, sent to America as an outreach with her mother. But when her mother dies, Lola is stranded and left homeless after the academy fails. Together, SC and the team travel with Lola to the Amazon to stop Lacit, a new villain with incredible Telekinetic abilities, from harnessing the power of an age-old weapon in the forest. SC learns from Lola about the other side, a double world that exists alongside and reacts against his own, one only accessed by Transients. He learns powers originate from the interactions of these two worlds, and that her tribe built a weapon of Death by manipulating this world, one that Lacit now seeks to obtain. Together, they stop Lacit—but not before meeting Ennia, a Blender attending a secret university in the Amazon, or the Litious, a hermitage believing all Specials are heretics and should be killed. One of the Litious saves SC from Lacit before disappearing, and Darian undergoes Fractonis Essentia, when a power is strained so much that one’s essence changes fundamentally in nature. After the death of her grandmother, Lola stays behind with her sister to rule over the Amazon for centuries to come due to a benefit of their power, and Darian remains there with them. The team returns home, and Zeke, their guide in the Amazon, departs as well.

  Forgotten Pages, Prequel Story

  This story covers the past of Cane, the physical education teacher at the academy. An enormous man, it’s revealed that Cane’s power is the manipulation of poison and ability to store it as fat. Generations before he was born, his family was found by a nameless man who entered their care, and now it is now Cane’s turn to guard over him. This man holds the secrets of the world through his power, but with all knowledge he intimately knows all evil, which poisons his mind. Cane works with him to remove poison and record the history and secrets of the world, keeping the man young by removing the poison of age and storing his books in hidden caches around the world. It’s revealed that this is the man who wrote the Directory, he’s near immortal, and has little humanity left within him. But Cane constructs a personality for him, and he becomes Lynns, another teacher at the academy who instructed SC on his presumed Telekinetic abilities. This story ends as they apply together for positions at the academy, because they know that Siri has stolen some of Lynns’ books and that events will soon occur there that must be recorded into history. Lynns also reveals that he is a Titan, a Special whose power is so strong that it strips away his humanity, and mentions that Siri too is affected by this condition to a lesser extent.

  Chapter 1

  The man walked with a limp —not from an injury, but from his left shoe, whose sole clung to life like a man hanging from the edge of a cliff. Stains streaked across his shirt, the likely culprits ketchup and mustard in the front, sweat in the pits, and a thick dusting of dirt over the remainder. His pants legs disintegrated about the ankles rather than a hemmed line, the left significantly shorter than the right, the fabric still vaguely reminiscent of denim.

  The bus had dropped him only a six minutes’ walk from his destination —but those six minutes seemed the longest of his entire trip. Those six minutes were all that separated him from a bed after weeks of walking, hitchhiking, and boating north. Not just a bed, but his own bed.

  He could still remember the way he made it—or rather, kept it unmade, but specifically unmade. There were the pillows that had long conformed to the shape of his head, the mattress that folded upwards to resemble a taco, the sheets that bore his own smell. But it wasn’t just his own
smell that he longed for, the smell before the trek, before the body odor became nearly overpowering. It was the smell of the cotton trapped inside the comforter, mixed with the traces of oil from the processing machinery, and the invasive grass that had found their way into the mix. There was the smell of rust that coated the mattress springs, that doubled in intensity whenever he shifted and flakes sprayed off. And most important was the lack of any detergent—he hated the residue left over, of lavender and chemicals, that tried to suppress the others.

  His fingers scrabbled at his key ring when he reached his door, the keys of varying sizes and shapes. More than once on his return, he had woken in a panic at the middle of the night, terrified he had left them at a station or stop, or the side of the highway. A drop of his own blood coated the end of each, so short of throwing them into the ocean, finding their scent would not be an issue, but the very thought of backtracking down south made vomit track up his throat.

  With four clicks, he twisted each of the locks, sighing as the last one yielded and the door creaked open. He drew a deep breath, letting the smell of home permeate his entire being, the mix of aromas that he had cultivated so carefully. Aromas that no one else appreciated, with their children’s palates—the damp mold, the soured wine, the spices he sprinkled into carpets, and the rat droppings that scattered the floor. His heart beat in double time at that last smell—not just rat droppings, but fresh rat droppings.

  “Lucy!” he cried, as the rodent turned a wary head around the kitchen corner, then loosed an excited squeak at the smell of him. For just like him, Lucy relied on smell more than any other sense, and now she bounded towards him, scrambling up his arm to playfully nip his ear. She was fatter than when he had last seen her—far fatter, her scent heavy with the bags of stale cereal he kept in the bottom cabinet. And when he investigated, he saw the neat hole chewed through the particle board, and the plastic shredded in a winding trail across the tiles.

  He laid an affectionate finger across her head, the tears in his eyes propping the drooping lids open.

  “Smart girl,” he whispered. “I was worried you had starved.”

  He stumbled rather than walked the rest of the way to his bedroom, down a short hallway strewn with clutter, everything from laundry to paper plates to magazines. Each with a special smell he would never throw away. Each a part of his collection.

  He groaned as he lay back on his bed, shifting so his shoulders found the same worn out springs, lying at a slight diagonal so that his feet could fit. All the smells he had remembered were still there, and he relished them, the muscles in his chest and back relaxing for the first time in what seemed like an eternity. His eyelids fluttered as Lucy crept into the crux of his arm, and he had only just started to snore when three sharp raps knocked on his door.

  These were not the knocks of a solicitor, which were always timid, imploring. Nor were they the knocks of a collector, which came in rapid succession, and sounded more like rain against a steel drum. No, these knocks were different—heavy, powerful.

  The types of knocks which, if you didn’t answer your door, they’d be replaced by a battering ram.

  Three more rang out, and he forced himself not to cry as he sat up, then stumbled to his living room. He undid the latches, then opened the door, shielding his eyes to the light outside in the narrow alleyway. And cursed as he saw the three figures waiting.

  “Police,” came the curt announcement, and he snarled in response.

  “Oh, so you’re telling me it isn’t Halloween? Good, because I ain’t feeling friendly, and I don't have candy unless you want the chocolates Lucy left on my carpet.”

  “Official business, Olef,” said Roland, the chief, as he pulled out a small envelope. “We’ve been waiting for you to return. And I’m afraid it can’t wait any longer. Except,” he continued, his nose wrinkling. “Except for a shower.”

  “And lose all the smells?” Olef protested, the tears welling in his eyes once more. "But there are some I want to keep."

  Chapter 2

  “When the hell am I ever going to use this?” shouted Lucio in exasperation, swiping at a handheld pencil sharpener that snapped on contact with his fist, sending shavings flying in a cloud that rained down on Slugger and me. “What’s the point? Exponents, like what, I’m balancing a checkbook with exponents? That’s what your mum said this is for last time I asked, SC, and the last time I checked, exponents just look like little numbers and I want to make big money.”

  “Oi, it’s not that hard,” countered Slugger from across the table, blowing the dust off his own paper, the graphite leaving curving trails across the sheet. He reached across to touch an eraser that lay between them, his fingers brushing the rubber edge as he spoke.

  “Math is just takin things away,” he said, twirling his hand in a circle around the eraser as it started to float. He tapped it again to send it spinning in midair, and it accelerated again, rushing like a balloon towards the ceiling.

  “And putting things back in,” he continued, and with another tap the eraser slammed back down to the desk, catching on its edge at the precisely right moment to bounce in a trajectory that caught Lucio straight on the nose.

  “Ow!” he shouted, nearly toppling back on his chair. “What made you such a genius? And when the hell did you learn to float things like that?”

  “Ye always knew I was a smartass. Turns out the smarts just go farther than my ass,” Slugger answered. “But math, math always made some sense to me. All just plusses and minuses at the end o’ the day. Anyway, I picked up that trick back in the jungle—watching some leaves getting caught in a dust devil. Figured out I can make something just about as weightless as air, then make the air lighter to push it around. Good craic, eh?”

  “When it’s not in my face,” Lucio answered, still rubbing his nose and glowering. “Besides, if you’re such a genius, you should have given Lola a run for her money.”

  “Aye, but this,” Slugger said, jabbing the tip of his pencil down on the page. “Hardly takes anything remotely like a genius, lad. This is the easy stuff.”

  I sighed, running my fingers through my hair as I listened to them bickering, staring at my own sheet. We were in the subway, and it was nearly three PM, the final stretch on my mother’s self-ordained school day. Only thirty minutes until we were out, but those last thirty minutes were always the worst —my mother would leave us with our homework during that time, under the condition that if we finished it accurately before she returned from errands, we could be done for the day. Otherwise, there was another hour in store—and whenever Lucio’s and Slugger’s chatter started revving up, it nearly always meant a another hour.

  “Guys, come on. Let’s focus,” I said, feeling a slight headache coming on. “We don’t need to do this any longer than we have to.”

  “Oi, I’m already done,” bragged Slugger, slinging his heel up on the table and putting his hands behind his back. “It’s up to you two to catch up.”

  “That’s not how it works; we all have to be done. And I might just not finish on purpose!” sneered Lucio, standing up and pushing his paper away.

  “You wouldn’t, ya bastard,” retorted Slugger, his eyes narrowing as Lucio snapped his pencil in half.

  “Yeah, that’s right, I’m a mathematical terrorist,” Lucio announced, strutting around the table. “Looks like it’s in your best interest to do some extra problems, right? It’s for the good of us all!”

  “Ugh,” I said as I heard my mother’s footprints sounding in the corridor, descending towards us. “Really just want more schooling, don't you?”

  I turned, ready with an excuse for my mother, to plead for five more minutes. But another shape stepped from the tunnel, a man with long enough hair to cover his face, cracking his neck as he entered the enclose.

  “Stop right there!” I shouted, advancing and generating two dark orbs as I leapt to my feet. “Don’t move or I'll fire!”

  “Stop?” shrieked the man, throwing his eyes wide
but continuing to walk. “Stop? Do you know how long I’ve waited to do that? No, you listen here, you—you left me stranded in the middle of the Amazon. I had to work my way with smell alone back to the city—turns out the scent of burnt rubber makes its way even to the center of the forest.”

  He jabbed his finger forwards accusingly, his face livid, and I bristled, the orbs in my hands growing as he continued shouting.

  “And then when I got there, I didn’t have a lick of cash to my name. So you know what I did? I panhandled and begged, and offered my services finding lost items until I had enough to buy a bus ticket. Then another bus ticket. Then I clung the side of a train for two hundred miles. Next it was the sea—you know how seasick I get? You don’t. I assure you that you don’t.

  “And eventually, I caught smell of home, but even then it took days. You owe me weeks of my life, and some new clothes, and, and—”

  “Olef—is that you?” asked Lucio, tilting his head. “What—ooooh, did Lacit’s team not take you back?”

  “Yes, Olef. Olef, the forgotten, until the police chief comes knocking on my door the second I arrive home. Oh, how happy was I to hear he wanted to see just the people that left me behind. With a letter,” he sneered, throwing down the envelope with a slap on the table.

  “How the hell did you get in here?” I demanded. “This place is closed off.”

  “Where the smells get out, I get in. Job finished,” he said, turning on his heel. “And back to my and Lucy’s nap. I swear if I hear word of you again, I’m leaving the city for good, and no amount of smells can bring me back. I don't care how much they pay, it ain't worth it."

  Chapter 3

  “How do we trust it?” Lucio asked, peering down past his homework sheet to where the envelope lay on the table, poking it with the end of his pencil.

  “Oi, what do you think, that it’s gonna bite?” retorted Slugger. “You just as scared of that paper as your sheet of homework? Spooky numbers might be inside.”