Kingdom Keepers: The Syndrome Read Online Free

diagnosed Rex with a benign tumor. It was on his stomach. Until that point, I just assumed I was naturally intuitive. But I could see the way people looked
at me when I touched them. Confused and lost, like there was something they needed to remember but couldn’t. It was even worse for me. Sometimes the thoughts were happy, but more often they
were filled with pain and greed and lust. Very human things. And I couldn’t turn it off. My abilities were only growing, so I made sure to limit all contact. The gloves and long sleeves I
could handle, but it was much harder to keep my distance from people.
    Jess and Amanda used to squat in this old building when they first came to Orlando. That’s how I knew it would be safe for me to stay for a while. We had been close at
Barracks 14. I showed up not too long after I discovered my powers on the pretense that I wanted to be with other kids like me. That much was true, but aside from that, the place was a nightmare.
Jess and Amanda helped. They were tightly knit, but they accepted me, and I trusted them.
    In the formerly reconstructed attic of the abandoned church, I had tried to arrange what furniture—if you could call it that—there was to make the space comfier. Even so, it was just
a bunch of couch cushions and milk crates. When I returned from some errands, I knew right away that someone had been there. I’d been squatting for months, after a harrowing series of
adventures on my way back into the United States from Mexico. I’d spent time in Los Angeles, Denver, and St. Louis in between. The attic space had grown to be a part of me. There were no
clear signs of disturbance, but something was off.
    I scanned the room, and my eyes landed on a small scrap of paper on my makeshift bed. It was in Amanda’s hand-writing, which I knew all too well. She wanted to meet, and soon.
    Wasting no time, I ran down the stairs to the back door of the former church. The fewer people who saw me, the better.
    AMANDA
    The difference between paranoia and remaining alert is how you let your fear affect you.
    I worked hard to not to cross the line into Paranoiaville, to play it safe, stay aware, and not see danger in every shadow. The working-hard part came without much effort—nothing had come
easily for me, ever. But I’d struggled enough to know I didn’t want to dwell on it, to celebrate the victories and tolerate the losses. The world was a random place. Abnormality
ruled.
    Something happening twice was a flag for me. Walking along the sidewalk at a brisk pace at night, a noise to my right could easily be a lizard darting about in the ground cover. Even so,
I’d learned techniques of personal safety. Most of them had rubbed off from being around my fellow “inmates” at Barracks 14 or spending time with the Kingdom Keepers. I knew how
to use the reflections off vehicles and buildings to see behind me without turning fully around; I could vary my speed in order to distinguish between someone walking at their own pace or copying
mine; I knew how to subtly use my phone to take a photo behind me or in front of me; to cross at a crosswalk, change my mind, and return to the corner I’d just stepped off; to cross at the
very end of the permitted time to see who dared challenge traffic to stay with me. Dozens, maybe hundreds of little tricks of timing and posturing that could help me identify possible surveillance.
I didn’t live this way—that was the definition of paranoia—but I possessed these tools for when they were needed.
    Tonight, I was likely being followed. Though I couldn’t say for sure. Being sure was another boundary between precaution and paranoia. I didn’t freak out, just went through my
routine safety checks to find out if I was right or wrong.
    I was right. There was someone following me by a block or more—enough distance to make it hard to confirm and harder still to identify. Enough distance to leave the next move up to me. I
also knew ways to