Savant (The Luminether Series) Read online

  SAVANT

  Book 1 of the Luminether Series

  BY

  RICHARD DENONCOURT

  Copyright © 2013 Richard Denoncourt

  Self Land Publishing

  www.rdenoncourt.com

  All rights reserved.

  Cover Design: Richard Denoncourt

  Images used: “Serious Teen” by alptraum; “Blue Crystal” by Kompaniets Taras; “Collage - Landscape in Fantasy Planet” by Lukiyanova Natalia Frenta

  Savant is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  To join the author’s “New Release” mailing list and be notified of upcoming books and sequels, please go to www.rdenoncourt.com and click the link on the sidebar.

  ALSO BY RICHARD DENONCOURT

  Trainland

  Peltham Park: Dark Short Stories

  Ascendant

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Part I

  Part II

  Part III

  Part IV

  Part V

  PART I

  A LITTLE TOWN CALLED EARTH

  Chapter 1

  Milo Banks pedaled his bicycle with the vigor of someone being chased, completely unaware that today—his fourteenth birthday—he was going to witness something so extraordinary it would change his life forever. At that moment, all he could think about was how quickly summer was going by, and how anxious he was at the prospect of starting his freshman year of high school a full year younger than everybody else, thanks to his teachers and parents forcing him to skip the seventh grade. He wished he could take a year off and travel the world, then start school again when he was the same age as the other kids in his class. He pushed the thought out of his mind and made a resolution to enjoy the rest of the day without brooding.

  His house came into view on the corner of Gosling and Alcott. He relaxed his legs, letting the bike glide toward the driveway and his birthday present standing tall in the sunlight. It was a basketball hoop, one of those tall metal ones with a sand-filled, plastic base meant to be set up on the side of the driveway. He and his father had put it together the evening before, and had stayed out until the sun went down, shooting hoops and tossing the ball at each other and cracking jokes. Milo wished he and his father could do that every night, but the man was so busy these days.

  The mailbox was overflowing. Typical. His parents were two of the most forgetful people on Earth when it came to practical matters. Milo braked to a stop, pulled out a stack of envelopes thicker than his leg, and walked his bike the rest of the way.

  His house was a small, three-bedroom box with a one-car garage, identical to about ten thousand other houses in Dearborn, New Jersey. The front yard was barely big enough for a game of catch, and the Banks family shared a back yard with Mr. and Mrs. Skye and their six children, all of whom were under the age of twelve. This meant that Milo and his twin sister Emma could never go out there to relax, unless they wanted to share the tiny plot of land with a bunch of hyperactive brats with first names like Winter, Blue, Gray, and Arizona.

  He made his way up the driveway toward his house. When he was only a few feet away, the garage walls began to rumble as if an angry beast made of metal, pistons, and brick were throwing a tantrum inside. Milo’s heart pounded. The envelopes fell fluttering from his hand, along with his bike, which landed with a clatter against the pavement.

  The garage door. Of course.

  He breathed a sigh of relief. The thing was twenty years old and needed to be replaced, but his parents couldn’t afford it right now. It had only recently started making that noise.

  He watched the door rise like a giant tooth retracting into a mouth. His father was standing there, dressed in a brand-new pair of mesh shorts, an oversized Lakers jersey, and basketball sneakers so white they seemed to glow. He had Milo’s basketball tucked under one arm and was grinning like a teenager.

  “Milo, my boy”—he walked out of the garage and into the cool afternoon sunlight—“this is the year you become a basketball star. Leave that bike and those envelopes where they are and go up to your room.”

  “My room?” Milo said, frowning. “What did I do?”

  His father winked at him. “It’s not what you did, it’s how good you’re going to look when you come back down.”

  Grinning, Milo raced into the house and up the stairs to his bedroom. When he saw the cardboard box with the Nike logo on it and the plastic bag stuffed with clothing, he almost whooped in delight. He quickly undressed and changed into a brand-new set of athletic clothes. Everything was just his size.

  His father was taking practice shots when Milo came back down to the driveway. The days had been getting shorter and the sun seemed to be nodding off above the tree line, stretching the shadows as it sank. Milo’s stomach rumbled.

  “You’re going to have to earn your dinner tonight,” his father said, tossing Milo the ball. He caught it and whipped it back. His father caught the ball, then fumbled the catch and ended up lobbing it into one of the neatly trimmed bushes lining the driveway.

  “I guess someone needs more practice,” his father said.

  Milo snickered at him. Maxwell Banks—known to everyone simply as “Max”—was one of the clumsiest men alive. Milo didn’t get it; whenever his father went to reach for an object or push something aside, he almost always ended up letting the object slip from his grasp or knocking the thing onto the floor. And he would always look really upset afterward, as if he’d given in to some sort of vice.

  Milo had long ago come to terms with his own lack of coordination. But his father’s inability to interact with even the most basic of everyday household items was legendary. Even Milo’s teachers often joked about the time Max had let a cup of coffee spill all over his pants at a PTA meeting. And if that wasn’t bad enough, on his way to the bathroom he had tried to push a plastic chair out of the way and ended up knocking it right over.

  The thing that made it even stranger was Max’s physique. He was the tallest man Milo had ever seen in person, a full six feet, five inches, the height of a professional basketball player. And he was jacked. Many a neighborhood mother would swoon at the sight of Max trimming the bushes in a white undershirt, the bulging muscles of his arms agleam with sweat.

  And yet the man seemed oblivious to all the attention. Even Milo knew about the nickname the neighborhood moms had given him: “Red,” after the actor Robert Redford, who had the same strawberry blond hair and oceanic blue eyes.

  Basically, Maxwell Banks was a handsome devil.

  And Milo? Well, he was the complete opposite of his father.

  A classmate had once told him he looked “squirrelly” and the word had stuck with him. He was short, that much was obvious, but squirrelly? His ears were a little big, and his hair and eyes were a flat brown color (inherited from his mother, though it looked good on her), and he was pretty skinny—but squirrelly?

  “All right,” Max said, “first things first. Dribbling.”

  He hunched over and dribbled the ball from one hand to the other. Milo didn’t know how he was supposed to react, so he held his hands up, bent his knees, and waited to hear what he should do next. He caught the ball when his father tossed it to him.

  OK. So far, so good.

  “Well? What are you waiting for?”

  “Oh, right,” Milo said, slapping the ball against the pavement a few times.

  His first attempts at walking while dribbling were pathetic. If he wasn’t slapping the ball against his own toes, he was flinging it every which way like a hot pota
to. His father tried to reassure him.

  “It’s OK. It’s all about skill, and that takes time to develop. Just focus on one thing at a time.”

  “I’m trying, Dad.”

  At one point, Milo’s father hugged the ball to his chest and jerked upright.

  “Holly!” he shouted, waving one arm like a madman. “Hey, Holly Gerald!”

  Milo followed his father’s gaze.

  Holly Gerald, one of the neighborhood girls who had a reputation for sleepwalking and was once caught in a neighbor’s kitchen scooping peanut butter out of the jar with her fingers, perfectly oblivious to her surroundings, was walking down Alcott Road wearing a gigantic set of headphones connected to a CD player in her left hand. In her right hand was a cheerleader’s baton, which she kept tossing up into the air and catching.

  Every few seconds she would weave toward the middle of the road.

  “That’s girl’s going to get herself killed,” Max said, astounded.

  “At least she’s awake this time,” Milo said

  Holly saw Max waving at her and waved back. When she realized he was motioning for her to get off the street, she gave him a thumbs-up and stepped onto the grass. Max nodded once to show he was satisfied, and Milo took the opportunity to slap the ball out of his hands and dribble it across the driveway toward the hoop. He tossed it up—

  —and watched in disappointment as it slammed into the backboard and bounced away.

  “We should practice layups,” his father said.

  “Yeah, no kidding.”

  They practiced for another twenty minutes as Holly Gerald went up and down the road, tossing her baton, probably practicing for cheerleader tryouts or something. It was getting late, and Milo was starving. He hoped his mother had made lasagna again. She made the best lasagna.

  “We should go in,” Milo said. “It’s almost dinnertime, isn’t it?”

  His father picked up the ball and held it against his chest. “You’re not giving up, are you? Come on, let’s play a little one-on-one. How about it? I win, I get to eat your dessert.”

  Milo winced up at his father, whose face looked as hard as granite in the golden, late-afternoon sunlight. “Dad, you’re like seven feet tall. How would that be fair?”

  His father tossed him the ball. “I guess you’ve never heard of a big guy named Goliath, and a little guy named David.”

  The roar of an engine sounded on Gosling Road.

  Milo and his father looked at the same time. Sunlight reflected off the windshield of a large, silvery SUV as it turned onto Alcott. The driver was a pudgy man with a cell phone pressed to one ear. He had one hand on the steering wheel but kept lifting it and waving it around as he shouted into his phone.

  Soon Milo saw only the backside of the SUV as it went barreling past his house.

  An urgent thought formed in his mind: Holly.

  He looked up the street. Holly had turned in the other direction and was now heading back toward her house. There was no way she’d be able to see the SUV, and with the headphones clapped over her ears, no way she would hear its droning engine, either.

  The baton slipped out of her hand and went rolling into the middle of the street. Milo heard his father’s voice—

  “Holly!”

  —and felt a violent gust of air as something exploded right next to him.

  The force of it almost threw him back. He staggered for a bit, then looked at his father to see if he had felt it too.

  But his father had disappeared.

  Milo just stood there with his mouth open and observed the next series of events unfold in what felt like slow motion.

  He saw his father zoom across the driveway, and then the front yard toward the spot where Holly was calmly gathering her baton from the pavement—the spot where she was about to be flattened by the SUV, which was actually going faster than before.

  Max ran like a track runner, head tipped forward into the wind, and Milo knew, as he noticed the little clods of dirt and grass that his father’s sneakers had kicked up into the air, that something highly unusual was taking place.

  His father and the SUV seemed to meet at a single point in space, a point wherein Holly Gerald also happened to be standing. For a fraction of a second, Milo was certain that his father, the SUV, and Holly Gerald were going to come together in a terrible, bloody crash.

  “Dad…” was all he could say.

  And then it happened—the moment that would change Milo’s life forever.

  His father wrapped his arms around Holly Gerald and picked her up off the ground, and the two of them went sailing into the sky.

  The SUV passed beneath them with a dull flash of sunlight that brightened the reflective strips on his father’s sneakers for the briefest of moments. Then Milo was tilting his head back to watch his father rise through the air, a silhouette against the clouds.

  When he reached the peak of his terrific jump—well above the trees and houses in their neighborhood, probably as tall as the tip of a radio tower—Maxwell Banks, commonly referred to as “Red” by the neighborhood moms and “Max” or “Dad” by everyone else, executed a forward flip, dove through the air, and landed in the yard five houses down the street.

  His body made a loud thump as it met the ground, so loud that Milo could hear it five houses away. His knees bent to absorb the impact. There was a loud screeeech as the SUV came to a sudden stop a short distance away.

  Milo didn’t notice the basketball roll out of his hands. He watched his father put Holly Gerald down next to him on the grass. And then Milo was sprinting down the street, a tornado of questions swirling in his mind.

  He was out of breath when he arrived. His father, looking refreshed and calm, had a kindly smile on his face. Holly Gerald stood wincing up at him like someone under a bright spotlight.

  “Wow,” Max said. “It’s been a long time since I did that.”

  “Dad?” Milo said. “Dad, what—Dad, you just—Dad…”

  That seemed to be the only word his brain could form right now. Like a robot with a short-circuit in its central processor, he wanted to say Dad, Dad, Dad, Dad, Dad, until his father did something to either calm him down or shut him off.

  Instead, his father gave him a look of intense concern.

  “Relax, Milo.”

  A car door slammed shut. The driver of the SUV came running across the yard. His enormous belly shivered as he pumped the air with his meaty fists. It was Mr. Leroux from down the street, still holding his cell phone in his right hand.

  “Max, wow!” he said. “You must be some sort of a-a-a-athlete or something! Heck, you could be in the Olympics!”

  Milo studied his father’s face to see how he would respond. His father frowned so deeply that a dozen lines that weren’t there before were suddenly etched into his skin. Milo had never seen him look so worried.

  He put his hands on his hips and glowered at the man who had nearly killed Holly Gerald.

  “Bill, you know you shouldn’t talk on your cell phone while you’re driving. You know how many kids there are in this neighborhood. And the speed limit…”

  “Yeah, of course, Max. You’re definitely right about that.” Mr. Leroux backed away toward his car. He lifted one arm and waved. “Just another day in the neighborhood, I guess. Well, you take care now!”

  He ducked into his SUV, started the engine, and drove away, making sure to keep well under the speed limit this time around. Holly’s headphones and CD player lay in scattered bits on the pavement, a good thing since it could have been her brains all over the road instead.

  Milo looked down and saw inch-deep depressions in the grass, shaped like the bottoms of his father’s sneakers.

  “No way,” he said.

  Holly Gerald was also looking at the imprints. She leaned over and whispered in Milo’s ear.

  “Dude, your dad’s a superhero.”

  She gave Max a wide smile before skipping away toward her house. This time, she made sure to look both ways be
fore crossing. As soon as she was out of earshot, Max looked down at his son.

  He was frowning, and his next words sent a chill down Milo’s spine.

  “You can’t tell anyone about this, Milo. Do you understand me? Just forget it happened.”

  Milo could only stare at his father in bafflement. “But...”

  “Not another word. Now come on, let’s go home.”

  They walked back to the house together, side by side, in complete silence. It was the longest walk of Milo’s life.

  Chapter 2

  Emma Banks threw herself across the living room, executing a series of twirls and leaps as she did so. Perfect, and yet there was no one there to see it.

  She had been dancing and singing since the age of four, and she was spectacular. Her mother had told her many times that she had a gift. Her father called it a god-given talent. But Emma knew the truth. Years of practice—the sort that leaves you exhausted and crabby at the end of the day—had made her this good.

  And yet every time she performed in public, she became a shivering blob of jelly shaped like a person.

  No one in her family—not even Milo, who knew her better than anyone else on Earth—could figure out why such a fierce talent was so hesitant to step outside the house and reveal itself. Not even Emma understood what was wrong with her. Whenever she got up in front of anyone besides her mother, father, and brother (her only family; there were no cousins, aunts, or uncles for reasons unknown to the Banks children) those familiar black waves of fright would wash over her as if she were a tiny boat stranded in an ocean during a terrible storm.

  First her limbs would go cold, and then her breathing would speed up and beads of sweat would roll down her face. Then her chest would feel constricted, as if someone had tied a rope around her ribcage and was slowly squeezing it tighter and tighter.

  It had happened only once before, but once had been enough.

  The Dearborn Elementary Spring Talent Show, the year before: Emma had decided, after weeks of deliberation, to perform one of her favorite songs by Christina Aguilera. She should have known at the time that it was a bad idea, which of course it was. Every levelheaded girl knows that attempts to impress a boy always end in disappointment.