Planet XO

Prologue

Gloria had lost count of the times her daughter had come home crying from school. Her keen eyes spotted a dozen signs of physical abuse. Her hair was bunched up on one side, her eyes puffy from crying, her collar was messed up and folded over, the top button of her shirt had come off, there was dirt all over her skirt, over her legs, a red scrape on the little finger of her right hand, another on her left knee. "What happened, my love?" she asked, as she went down on her knee and embraced her daughter. Juliana had given up answering such questions a long time ago. She knew her silence drove her mother mad, but it was pointless to share the same story over and over again. Besides, there was nothing her mother could do to help her. Kids of pets always got bullied. Her mom had prepared her for it even before she had reached middle school. Yet, a part of her couldn't help but blame her mother. She knew they would never be so unscrupulous with a forceling's daughter. "Why couldn't you be a forceling, mom?" Juliana burst into tears as she pulled herself away from her mother's embrace and ran to her room. Gloria wanted to run behind her child and console her, but her feet refused to move. Deep down, she felt just like her daughter – a little girl crying all by herself, knowing fully well that no one can help her. She had lived through such moments far too many times to still be hopeful that this time would be different. I tried, my love! She let out a silent sigh as she resigned to what she always did when she felt overwhelmed by guilt – retreat to her room and drown herself in work. It was the one thing in her life that never made her feel inadequate. She wished she were half as good a mother as she was a detective.

"Darn it!" she barked as a young girl's photograph on the wall reminded her of what her current case was all about – the death of a ten-year-old girl in what seemed like a case of bullying gone wrong. Someone, possibly one of her classmates, had used gravity manipulation to make her jump thirty meters off the ground. It was not uncommon for kids who develop the ability to manipulate a force to test it on their classmates. The usual target for such tests were their peers who had not yet exhibited any signs of force manipulation, especially if they came from a pet family. They had always been easy targets with little ability to retaliate or escape. No one knew exactly how force-manipulation worked, but around the time they hit puberty, most children gained the ability to subtly influence one of the three known forces of nature – gravity, electromagnetism and nuclear. Nearly two-thirds of humans could manipulate a force by the time they were teenagers. The forcelings. The ones who couldn't manipulate any force, the regular humans, were often called pets by the forcelings even though the use of that name had been officially banned several decades ago. Gloria was one of the pets. As a kid, she had watched enviously as one by one, all her friends in school had gained the ability to manipulate a force while she was left behind. Most of them had gained the ability to manipulate gravity. It was the weakest of the three forces and according to her textbooks, it somehow made it the easiest force to manipulate. In fact, nine out of ten forcelings were gravity manipulators or as they called themselves – Gravs. Gravs could strengthen or weaken gravity at a region of space by focusing their force manipulation ability on that region. If a Grav were to weaken the gravitational force under her feet, even for a second, she could jump several feet higher than normal. It was usually the first trick Gravs learnt when they discovered their ability. But making someone jump thirty meters high was beyond even the strongest forcelings until much later in their training if they ever made it that far. It was this anomaly in the case that bothered Gloria. The school believed one of their pupils was at fault, but she found it hard to imagine how a school kid could have thrown the girl so high. She wondered if it could've been an Elf – a manipulator of the electromagnetic force. It was the force that made two objects attract or repel each other based on the kind of charge they carried. Like charges repelled and unlike charges attracted each other. Although it was much stronger than gravity, it was also much harder to control. It was unlikely that any of the young girl's classmates had achieved such levels of mastery before getting trained in a force-school. Besides, Elfs were much rarer than Gravs and as far as she knew, none of the girl's classmates had been an Elf. The third force, the nuclear force, was deemed to be the hardest to manipulate since it was also the strongest of the three forces. It was also the rarest form of force manipulation among the three. In fact, it had been a long time since there was a verified manipulator of the nuclear force in any of the four continents, although history was filled with legends of forcelings who could - the Nukes. It was believed that Nukes could make atoms of one element transform into another element. The modern-day version of Alchemy, only grander. The absence of Nukes in recent decades had made them a subject of many myths and rumours. Every now and then, there would be news of a Nuke popping up in faraway lands, especially in rebel colonies. Yet, despite innumerable attempts by the Department of Force Manipulation to chase down such leads, the world still awaited a modern-day Nuke. Nevertheless, the rumours kept hope alive that someday, there would be Nukes among humans once again.