Brothers

Prologue

It was quite the fight.  Sam had stood back, shielding Astrid from all the dust and shrapnel that flew erratically in the air by the force of Gaia and Little Pete - although in the form of his twin brother, Caine - in the midst of the final battle.

Sam had never seen anything like it.  Gaia was throwing every power known in the FAYZ at Pete, canceling gravity beneath him and using Sam's own power to fire green beams as he fell back to the ground.  She flung rocks sporadically in his direction.  Although it was hard for Sam to keep up with their movements through the polluted air, he could tell Gaia was struggling.

Little Pete was only using Caine's trademark power, telekinesis, but the range and strength of it was nothing like he'd ever seen coming from Caine.  He would pull up entire chunks of the ground as if they weighed nothing at all and sent them flying at incredible speeds towards Gaia, and without Brianna's speed she was quickly overwhelmed. 

In the end, Little Pete raised a beaten, bruised Gaia far into the sky and sent her rocketing back down. He then smashed several large chunks of land over her. No living thing could have survived, not even a creature like Gaia.

It wasn't such a victorious event as one might imagine. Sam remembered the silence that fell over those who were watching, Pete stood for only a moment before collapsing to the ground. Diana ran to him screaming Caine's name.

It took moments before Sam had even realized the wall had come down. Police, paramedics, and distraught parents rushing to the kids.

Sam had found his mother. It was an awkward reunion. He felt like she didn't know him anymore, like he didn't really need her. He had felt agitated and betrayed that she never told him about Caine, and Sam couldn't understand why she would give her son away at all. It was betrayal.

The last thing Sam wanted to do was live with his mom again, but to his dismay the government declared that all children in the FAYZ were to stay with their parents due to fear of emotional or sometimes physical damage.

Sam and the other kids had been trapped in the FAYZ for over a year and were all behind on their education. Because if this, inevitably, they all had to repeat a grade. Sam and his mom - along with many of the other families relocated to a town near Perdido Beach and he would be starting at a new school, with new people, and he would be older than all the kids in his grade. Sam was disoriented, to say the least.

An effort was put in to keep the names and faces of the kids off the internet in an attempt at letting the children recover and return to something of a normal life. The kids involved were kept more or less anonymous after they left the FAYZ. Although Sam's name had been thrown around in the media and news articles as well as Caine's, Drake's, Brianna's, and a few others, his face was far less known.

And so came the start of Sam's attempt to start something resembling a normal life.