Whisper

Chapter 42

"So who did you recruit exactly?" Frost poked her head around, just seeing Whisper and Link. 

Whisper got back in the passenger seat without saying much just a quick, "He's my new shadow." 

Thoroughly confused and unquestioning they just sat around, waiting for the next stop. Their minds tingled with a connection from Link. 

"Guys, this is Phantom," Whisper's voice echoed in their minds as they awaited some sort of introduction. 

"Hey," his inside voice sounded as tired as he was, "Uhh I guess I'm just a shadow person." 

"Nice to meet you," Weaver was just slightly weirded out by the fact that Whisper now that there is someone quite literally living in her pocket. 

"Were you a project?" Spring asked what everyone was thinking. No one has a strange name like they do unless they were a project. 

After a moment of silence, Phantom finally spoke, "Yeah, I was." 

No one asked further questions. Just another person who's life was ripped away from them. 

Phantom was 8 when he was taken, yes taken.

Back when the playground was new and bustling, a little boy suddenly began screaming bloody murder. Decked out in a t-shirt and shorts, his tanned skin suddenly turned red as third degree burns and boils started forming on top. 

The sun was almost melting him. 

He sought cover in the wings of the swan, his foot sinking right into the shadow as he tumbled right into it, his whole form disappearing. 

BEYOND was quick to figure out how to draw him out, just shining a bright 10,000 lumen light right on the swan, his body being ejected right out of the ground. 

His parents, who had been looking for him for almost 20 hours, were never told of the big scary men to whisked him away, shining blinding lights all over him to make sure his physical form stayed. 

One lucky power outage allowed him to escape, and one lucky failed backup generator later he found himself back at the swan. Travelling under busses and birds to make it back to that safe place. 

His parents had moved, to get away from the thoughts of their missing son who was gone for a decade. They had a new child, a daughter, who enjoyed spending days in the sun. 

They moved on.

And he didn't know what to do. 

"You alright Phantom?" Whisper asked. "Oh, I had Link give us a private connection, no one else can here us." 

He was silent for a second, "You know what they did to me?" 

"Yeah." 

"I can still feel the light just burning me, over and over again. It hurts." He didn't know why he was so comfortable with just talking to her, he literally met her less than an hour ago. "They thought if they built my tolerance I could be the perfect spy. A normal man by day, an invisible agent who can go anywhere and everywhere." 

She stayed silent, just listening to him. 

"They made me mold to the littlest of shadows, all the way down to the smallest toothpick just sticking out of the ground." 

"But you can do way more than that, can't you?" Whisper knows, and he knows too. 

"I'm a murderer Whisper, aren't I?" He felt his stomach churn at the memories. The scientist who would torture him everyday, twisted and turned into a bloody mess. It was so easy to break him too, almost no effort was needed as the shadows molded his body into what Phantom wanted. 

"You're a survivor," Whisper corrected, "We are all survivors." 

Finding comfort in her words, he fell silent, just listening to her heartbeat. He was basically wrapped around her torso, hiding away from the sunlight. She was quite thin, though he couldn't feel her he could tell from how she was sitting in the chair.  

While he's a shadow he can't feel anything, but all of his other senses are heightened. Being able to see better than he's ever seen before and hearing more and clearer. 

"I heard something weird while I was at my facility," he began, feeling like this is important. 

"The trackers in every single one of us? Yeah I know." 

"What?!" Link screamed from the back, shooting out of her seat and ripping the divider right open, "We have trackers?" 

"Huh?"

"What?"

"I'm sorry, repeat that?" 

"We have trackers in us!" 

"Link, I'd appreciated it if you didn't listen into a private conversation," Whisper leaned over and dug something out of Weaver's pocket. A weird remote of sorts that had wires and other things poking out. "Look this is a disorient-er I made myself back in town. It interrupts the signal of our trackers and makes us virtually invisible." 

"Oh." Link felt a bit flushed from her outburst, but her worries were justified. 

"What about the others?" Weaver asked what everyone was thinking. 

"Magma gives off a natural electromagnetic field that tampers with his group's trackers, and he doesn't have one to begin with. In Raptor's group, one of the members, Sonar, also gives off her own sort of field. She unconsciously redirects electronic signals to other areas making her virtually undetectable. She affects other signals too." 

"Oh." Link repeated, feeling dumb even though she genuinely did not know. "Uh, sorry." 

"Don't worry about it," Whisper sat back in her seat and tucked the device into her jacket, Phatom taken hold of it and putting it away in his form. He absorbs light and pretty much everything else. 

Phantom and Whisper seemed to have some sort of unspoken agreement. A small bond over their entire childhoods stolen away from them. A symbiotic relationship has formed between the two in an instant as soon as Phantom went to Whisper's side quite literally. 

Phantom didn't know it, but Whisper knew it well. 

She didn't have the physical capabilities to do what she needed to accomplish and Phantom made up for that. He cannot go into the sunlight and barely knows anything about the outside world and she does both. 

A perfect duo.