RISING MIND

Clarice Bridger sat on the fire-escape platform of the abandoned building, watching the sunset. In the summer time, this was her favorite place to sit, for the concrete of the old office building absorbed the heat of the sun, keeping it warm even in the cooler nights.

Of course, it was hardly safe. A sixteen-year-old girl sitting six stories up in a reportedly abandoned section of the city is never safe. Clarice hardly cared. She'd been coming here since she was ten years old, and she'd keep coming here until something very bad happened.

She began twisting her earring around, idly. The sun sent out rays of searing, blood red light as it set, reminding Clarice of her alternate ego.

Someone had told Clarice once that she was afflicted by multiple- personality disorder. She, in her blunt manner, had said, "I'm not schizophrenic. There is only one me, and that's Clarice." Although her friend came back with a number of arguments that her having multiple personalities didn't exactly mean she was insane, Clarice just shook her head. That was the end of that.

But it wasn't.

Clarice really was two people. She was most often Clarice Bridger, a calm, polite, and quiet girl, the type that always seems to be lonely, even when surrounded by friends. However, there was a side of her that only one person had ever seen. Michelle, her best friend, had been present when Clarice let her alternate identity slip. Unfortunately for Clarice, Michelle had been forced to move a few months afterwards.

The other person that made up the entire Clarice was called Liral. This alternate-ego shared some of the qualities of Clarice Bridger, but she was. different. Her mind operated more like a computer: more logic, less emotion. And there was power there. Liral's mind contained a latent power that Clarice could only dream of touching. Clarice, however, couldn't control Liral. "She" came and went at will.

At last the sun slipped below the horizon, the blood-red rays disappearing along with it. Clarice sighed and stepped away from the railing of the fire escape.

Something thumped behind her.

She whirled around to see a young man with dark eyes and wild brown hair. He straightened, and looked at her in the eye with a cocky little smirk on his face. "Well, well, well." He said out loud, scanning Clarice's body in a mocking kind of way. "What do we have here?"

Clarice stepped back in fear. Suddenly her body went rigid as Liral took control of her conscious mind.

"You have a sixteen-year-old female watching the sunset." Liral replied coolly, responding to his mocking looks at her body with a scornful glance at his. She reached behind her and took a small lock-blade from her pocket. "And an armed one at that."

The young man threw back his head and laughed, long and loud. "Pleased to meet you too, my good lady!" He bowed, almost sincerely, to Liral. "My name is Hatcher, and I am a dangerous criminal."

Despite his offhand remark about how dangerous he was, Liral saw him as little to no threat to herself. She slid the blade back into her pocket.

She studied Hatcher for a moment. He looked slightly familiar, perhaps she had seen his face on TV before. If only he had stepped forwards out of the shadows!

Another thump sounded behind Liral. Sliding back into the Clarice mindset, she gave a short squeak of surprise. As the shadowed for straightened, she realized who it was.

"Ricrin!" she gasped, and so it was. The single most dangerous man in the city, infamous for both theft and arson, stood before her. His green T- shirt was dulled by the sparkling emerald chips that were his eyes, his hair was the same as Clarice remembered from the news reports: dark brown and impossibly tangled.

The well-known criminal winced as she pronounced his name wrong. "That's Recrin." He corrected, his voice hardly the way Clarice had imagined it, rather nasal, but there was a strange musical quality to it just underneath the tones. "Who is this, Hatcher?"

The other criminal snapped to attention. "Clarice Bridger, 16. Also known as Liral, the Scarlet Lynx." He took a deep breath and let it out. "The target."

Recrin nodded and stepped into the light for a moment. Liral gave a slight start, as he and Hatcher looked exactly alike, except Recrin's eyes were a striking, poison green. Recrin gave a slow, catlike smile, one that Liral returned rather nervously. "Yes, yes. The little target. Not so little, actually." He reached into his boots and pulled out a throwing knife and waved it towards Liral. "I have about a ninety-percent accuracy with one of these things at a distance of forty to sixty meters. Meaning that if I missed you once," he pulled another blade from his boot. "I'd be sure to hit you the second time."

Liral rolled her eyes. "Typical masculine reaction." She said flippantly. "Brag about how strong and skilled you are."

Recrin and Hatcher shared a look for a brief moment, and then both burst into hysterical laughter. Wiping tears from his eyes, Recrin sighed. "Alright, Liral. You seem to have some... ah, spirit in you." Hatcher giggled absurdly. Recrin ignored him. "Meet us here at this same time next week, is that understood?"

"You make a thinly veiled threat to stab me, then you expect me to return to this very spot in a week? How stupid do you think I am?"

Not surprisingly, it was Hatcher who responded. "You really don't want an answer to that." He then turned to his leader. "Rec, it's time to get back to base. Come on."

The two disappeared without another word.

The Clarice mindset slowly took her over again as she left the Old City. Even as she returned to the more familiar streets, Clarice couldn't shake the feeling of being watched.

As she was being watched.

Recrin and Hatcher leaped from catwalk to catwalk through the Old City. Every so often, one of them would grab onto a railing and flip over it, showing off, as Hatcher said, their "mad skillz."

The darkness was nearly complete, as the skies were overcast. Gangs who thought they owned the place had knocked out any streetlamps that might still have functioned after the Old City had been abandoned.

The irony was magnificent.

The Old City certainly was owned by what was once a street gang, but was now something far more powerful. They called themselves the Rising Mind, and, although they weren't exactly a criminal organization, they were pretty damn near it. Recrin was the most well known of them, as he somehow managed to rob pretty much anything containing a sizable sum of money. He also had a terrible reputation of burning down buildings, but Recrin himself never did that. That honor belonged to his best friend and near double, Hatcher.

Recrin paused on the very edge of a building, letting the wind toy with his dark hair. Hatcher appeared by his side within seconds. They sat down, and looked out over the city.

"You seriously think that girl's the target?" Recrin asked.

Hatcher shrugged. "You know my Gift. She fit all the profiles we worked out."

The green-eyed man shook his head, smiling slightly. "Hatch, you're Gift is with pyrokinesis, not this kind of thing."

"Hey, hey. Anybody should be able to pick up all the psychic activity in the area lately. And that girl, man oh man, she was just radiating power!"

Recrin sighed. "Hatcher, I don't think..."

"No, you don't."

Both males spun around to see a young woman wearing a tight red bodysuit with green marks along the neckline. Twined around her wrists and ankles were strands of barbed wire. Also of the Rising Mind, this woman, known only as Barbwyr had an extremely strong, but half the time useless, gift: the ability to shape the air and make it solid.

Recrin smiled up at the abnormally tall female. Hatcher, however, was staring several inches south of her face, and had to be smacked in the head by Recrin to wake up from whatever perverse fantasy had trapped him.

"Hey, Barbwyr. What's up?"

The female in green smirked slightly. "The usual. Mec's being an asshole, there's been several false targets located, and Bane stole my favorite quarterstaff." Bane was Recrin's doberman pinscher, well known for his habit of stealing various objects and hiding them in Recrin's quarters to be found several days later amid piles of books and old uniforms. "Other than that, nothing really."

Hatcher laughed again, and said something in a code that only he and Barbwyr understood. True to form, Barbwyr's smirk merely grew a bit wider.

"What did you say?" Recrin asked, suspiciously. "I swear if it has anything to do with me, I'll slit your throats in the dead of night!"

This threat merely made Hatcher laugh all the more. Everyone in the Rising Mind knew that although Recrin was certainly capable of carrying out this threat, he hated killing.

Without answering their leader, Hatcher and Barbwyr disappeared, leaving Recrin behind to wonder about recent events.

A few miles away, Clarice Bridger was also wondering about recent events, recording them all in her diary so that she might remember her state of complete confusion later on in life.

Her mind was, at the moment, full of questions that all seemed to ask: What the hell is going on here?" in varying measures of complexity. Her main problem was not that she had just experienced a near brush with death, (she hardly realized this) but more of the fact that she had a full research paper to write and very little time to do it in.

She continued writing in her diary.

Dear Diary, I could not possibly be more confused at the moment, unless, of course, a large panda bear jumped through my bedroom window and hit me over the head with a sledgehammer. As my room HAS no windows leading outside, this would be extremely odd. Other than the usual randomness that is my life, I have been having strange feelings lately. It's like I know what people are going to say before they say it, I know exactly what they MEAN when they say something, which is a mixed blessing, I suppose. People often have very cruel meanings behind kind words, and sometimes, kind meanings behind cruel ones.

She paused for a moment, trying to decide whether or not she should mention her encounter with the two criminals, Hatcher and Recrin. She knew for a fact that her older brother, Chris, made a frequent habit of reading her diary. She hadn't the faintest idea of what he planned to accomplish from this. She figured that Chris was just a control freak. Clarice pitied his girlfriend.

She decided instead to write about the new guy in school, and what she thought of him.

She'd record her meeting with the criminals later, and in a different format.