Levitating Las Vegas

2



PRESENT DAY

Kaylee Michaels saw Holly walking toward her across the casino floor and felt her face light up. When Mr. Diamond had taken in Kaylee a year ago, he’d made her head of security at the casino though she’d been only twenty-one years old at the time. She was at the height of her mind-changing powers, the strongest person seeking refuge at the casino besides the many teenagers and twenty-somethings drugged with Mentafixol. The burden of the responsibility weighed on her every second, but she accepted it, seeing her job as a way to atone for the terrible things she’d done while she was at the Res.

Holly was her window onto the carefree life of a college girl. When Kaylee had first arrived, Mr. Diamond had encouraged her to befriend Holly and rent an apartment with her. He pointed out that, during her senior year of college, Holly would get the freedom from her parents that she’d longed for, yet Kaylee could still keep her safe. What had started as a business transaction had unexpectedly turned into Kaylee’s closest relationship ever. Despite herself, Kaylee had let her defensive walls crumble in front of this bubbly girl, and they’d been the unlikeliest of best friends since.

Now Holly glimpsed Kaylee and galloped toward her between two rows of slot machines, long brown curls bouncing, somehow looking even more glamorous in jeans and sandals than she ever did in her magician’s-assistant getup. She was leading a man by the hand. A handsome, clean-cut man about their age, but still. Even as Kaylee switched her bag of Thai food to her left hand and put out her right to greet him, her senses went on alert.

She poised to strike him with her power if she detected the slightest danger, ready to change his mind about getting close to Holly. Just because a guy had asked Holly on a date didn’t mean he was from the Res, but the timing was suspicious. For the past few days, the mind readers on the casino floor had whispered that they’d sensed people from the Res passing through, plotting to take over the casino.

He’d better not be one of them.

“Kaylee Michaels,” she introduced herself over the electronic music of the slot machines, looking hard into his brown eyes.

“Rob Price.” With no guile in his voice, he wrapped his hand around hers.

At the same time, Holly was effusing, “This is Kaylee, my roommate and the head of security at the casino. See, Rob, I told you we might find her on the floor somewhere. And Kaylee, this is Rob. He asked me out and he still wants to go, even after I told him my roommate is like the Secret Service.”

“Why is that?” Rob asked Kaylee. “Have you had security problems?”

“Well . . .” Kaylee puzzled over the strange question.

“You can tell Rob,” Holly said. “He’s a cop.”

“Oh, really?” Kaylee asked suspiciously, dropping his hand.

Rob drew his wallet out of his back pocket—slowly, as if he understood other cops and people in security didn’t like sharp movements, especially out of pockets—and showed her his Clark County Sheriff’s ID. She’d seen a lot of those cards in the year she’d been in charge at the casino. It looked authentic.

The issue date was recent. “Worked there long?” she asked, straightening.

“Just started. I went to police academy in Chicago,” he said with a flat Midwestern accent to back up his claim. “I got recruited to come here.”

She tried not to let her shoulders sag visibly with relief. If he’d arrived in town from Chicago in the past few weeks, he couldn’t have been sent here by the Res to infiltrate the casino and steal Holly away. Still, Kaylee would be researching him thoroughly as soon as she got back to her office. “Well, Holly’s one of our biggest stars—”

“For God’s sake,” Holly interrupted. “I stand onstage and point to stuff Dad does. It’s not like I personally pull a rabbit out of my hat and shiz.” She turned to Rob. “Kaylee has this thing about stalkers. I’ve told her that if she’s so concerned about me attracting the wrong kind of man, the casino might consider taking down the billboard over Interstate 15.”

Holly had a point, but the casino needed the business Holly’s billboard brought in—not just to line Mr. Diamond’s pockets, but to keep the operation running that protected all of them. Kaylee glanced at Rob to gauge his reaction. If he started salivating and his jaw dropped to the floor at the mention of Holly’s provocative photo, she was going to ixnay this ateday.

“I see why you’re concerned,” Rob told Holly, “but I’ll bet that billboard is good advertisement for the casino.” He raised his brows at Kaylee in question.

“Ugh, you act like that billboard is why you came here!” Holly gave Rob a playful shove. “Of all the casinos in all the towns in all the world, he walks into mine.”

“If that were true, I would never admit it now.” Rob grinned down at Holly.

She smiled moonily up at him, then turned back to Kaylee. “Listen, one of my friends is throwing a killer party after graduation, and Rob has to work. Come with? Pleeeease? Come on, you hardly ever go out.”

Kaylee shook her head no. She wanted to say yes but couldn’t. She was a drag, so preoccupied with her job that other people her age thought she was a snob. There was no point in going. Even if she finally met a guy (gasp), nothing could come of it. She’d dedicated her life to the casino. She had room for nothing else.

Instead, she would send a security team to watch over the party without Holly knowing and make sure Holly stayed safe. Kaylee didn’t want to ruin Holly’s good time. In fact, when Kaylee shook her head and Holly’s face fell, Kaylee found herself asking, “You have to buy new shoes for the party, though, right?” Sometimes she needed time with ebullient Holly to make herself feel human vicariously.

“I like how you think.” Holly beamed at Rob. “Indulge us for just another second? Planning. Shoes.” When Rob nodded, she drew her cell phone from her purse.

Kaylee put down the bag she’d been carrying, found her own cell phone in her suit pocket, and thumbed through her schedule. “Forum Shops tomorrow at four?” She would need to rearrange a security meeting, but Holly was busy in her own way. She had final exams and then her family’s nightly show. Holly was worth rescheduling for.

“Perfect.” Holly nodded toward the bag. “Whatcha got there?”

“Take-out Thai, Mr. Diamond’s favorite. Working dinner.”

Holly closed her eyes and inhaled the scent of pad Thai. “My mom brought me a salad from home. Because I have been extra good, she shaved some carrots on top. Party on. I wish I had a working dinner with Mr. Diamond.”

“No, you don’t,” Kaylee said, faking her smile this time. Holly’s mother watched Holly’s diet for a very good reason. And Kaylee and Mr. Diamond were meeting alone to discuss Kaylee’s fears about the Res infiltrating the casino. She wanted Holly as far away as possible.

“I’ll feed you when we go out,” Rob chuckled.

“Now you’re just blatantly coming on to me,” Holly teased him.

Kaylee leaned into Holly’s good-bye hug, then watched her bop away with Rob in tow, toward the lush theater where she would perform with her parents in a few hours. Holly had confided to Kaylee that she worried a lot about her mental illness, and Kaylee yearned to tell her the truth. But at the moment, Kaylee could have sworn there was nothing heavier on Holly’s mind than food, shoes, a party, and her hot date with Rob.

Kaylee hoped it stayed that way.

Rounding the corner, she stepped onto an employee elevator and pressed the button for the fortieth floor. The doors slid shut, closing her inside alone with the poster of Mr. Diamond. She jumped when she saw her reflection in the protective plastic, her blurry image superimposed over his clear one, as if she aimed to take over the casino.

That wasn’t what she wanted to do. She was glad Mr. Diamond could read her mind so he would know her intentions. She only questioned his policy of using Mentafixol to suppress the powers of the very people who were potentially the casino’s strongest allies.

Las Vegas had long attracted people with power because they could use their talents to make a living without being detected, and because they blended in with the other eccentrics. But over time, with so many in one city, the teenagers discovering their own powers inevitably found each other. Tested each other. Experimented on each other. Bullied each other. They became more and more withdrawn from their parents. They stopped coming home altogether, forming their own compound that moved from cheap hotel room to abandoned house to big brother’s basement faster than their parents could keep track of it. They called it In Medias Res, or Res for short, because they went there to get in the middle of all the things their parents never wanted them to see.

For a while, their parents put up with the behavior, saying it was hard to be an adolescent with power, and the kids would grow out of their dangerous needs eventually. But when three of their bodies were found in the desert, Mr. Diamond stepped up to become the parents’ leader. He set up the casino as a safe haven for people with power and started drugging the teenagers, preventing the casino’s young people from hurting themselves or their parents, and keeping them away from the Res, where they would be lost for years, if not killed.

But Kaylee recognized the catch-22 this created. Power faded with age, so the casino was suppressing the abilities of the group most able to protect it. In the past decade, the casino hadn’t needed much protection. The Res had seemed stable, only occasionally murdering its own and spitting out the body in the desert. But Mr. Diamond had warned Kaylee they shouldn’t take the stability of the Res for granted. Sooner or later someone would head the Res who tired of toying with the other people there and thought bigger. Kaylee was afraid her ex-boyfriend Isaac was that person. He was brilliant, cunning, impatient with the teens’ petty dramas, and determined to amass a fortune before he grew older and his power started to fade.

Like Mr. Diamond. Only evil.

With youth and strength and the sadistic power of the Res behind him, he could conquer even the casino—and then, who knew what he could do?

Judging from the Res’s visits to the casino in the past few days, it seemed Isaac was about to make a move. Kaylee had warned Mr. Diamond that she and her aging guards would be no match for a group of Isaac’s most powerful twenty-somethings. The casino needed to take some of its own young people off Mentafixol to face down the Res and protect them all.

Mr. Diamond had balked, but at least he’d agreed to discuss the idea over pad Thai. She hoped he would show her the list of people the casino currently drugged so she could get an idea of whom she could train to help her.

The elevator doors slid open. She stepped quickly onto the fortieth floor. All day she’d used her mind-changing power to handle minor security emergencies, which made her metabolism skyrocket. She was famished to the point of nausea. Mr. Diamond must be too—

She stopped short on the rich carpet.

The guards outside Mr. Diamond’s door were missing.

She felt in her suit pocket for her phone to call them, but it was too late. She knew exactly what had happened. Her skin went cold. She dropped the pad Thai and ran through the doorway.

Mr. Diamond’s power had diminished considerably with age. But folks at the casino said he’d been the strongest mind reader around in his day. Even now that he was sixty-five, Kaylee’s panicked thoughts, if not the noise as she burst into his office, should have woken him from his uncharacteristic catnap.

He didn’t stir from his position, head down on his enormous desk. The dull Vegas skyline through the windows flickered to neon life in the dusk just as Kaylee realized Mr. Diamond was dead.

Even as she put both icy hands to her mouth in despair, her training as head of casino security kicked in. Drawing her pistol, she scanned the room to make sure Mr. Diamond’s killers had left. His office was huge but streamlined, dominated by the view of the Strip. There was nowhere to hide. His attackers from the Res were gone.

Next she needed to sound the alarm about the security breach, in case the people from the Res were brazen enough to stick around the casino. Her hand found her phone in her pocket and stopped again.

People with power tended to be headstrong and paranoid, with good reason. They were prone to infighting. Even here in the relative peace of the casino, there had been provocations by mind readers and mind changers, and minor assaults by levitators in the employee break room. The only thing that had kept them safe in this loose confederacy all these years was their confidence in Mr. Diamond’s leadership. Kaylee had no idea how she could break the news of Mr. Diamond’s demise to them without causing mass hysteria and exodus, which would leave people like Holly vulnerable to kidnapping by the Res.

So Kaylee wouldn’t tell them.

She rounded Mr. Diamond’s enormous desk, watching him warily the whole time, half expecting him to rise up suddenly and say “boo!” She wished he would. Blinking back tears, she slipped one hand onto his neck to feel for a pulse. Nothing. A levitator had pinched his carotid artery until he expired.

As if comforting him, she put her hand on his shoulder. Then she leaned over his body and tapped on his keyboard, accessing the security camera outside his office door. She started the video thirty minutes before her arrival, then fast-forwarded until the scene suddenly changed.

Sure enough, the security guards on either side of the closed door walked away from their posts without a glance at each other. Seconds later, Nate in his cowboy hat and red-haired April, mind changers Kaylee knew from the Res, came into view. They’d made the guards think it was a good idea to go home early. Carter came to stand with April and Nate at the door. Violet approached last in gauzy purple skirts embroidered with stars. She looked up at the camera and stuck out her tongue.

Kaylee’s face burned. She and Violet had arrived at the Res at about the same time seven years ago, when they were both fifteen and new to their power. They’d struck up a friendship at first. That had lasted less than a day. There were no friendships at the Res, only temporary allegiances as innocent girls and sweethearts of boys turned jealous and cruel with the knowledge of what they could do to each other and the guilt about what they had done.

Suddenly Kaylee realized she was gripping Mr. Diamond’s shoulder hard in anticipation of what Violet was about to do to him on this video. She snapped her hand away—as if she’d hurt him herself—and wrung her hands instead as she watched. She was glad the placement of the camera meant she wouldn’t be able to see into the office. She didn’t have to see. She knew. She could easily have been a part of it herself if she hadn’t escaped from the Res. There was too fine a line between herself and Violet. The only difference was that Violet was still at the Res and Kaylee was not.

The group appeared to stand quietly outside Mr. Diamond’s door, but Kaylee understood their strategy. Carter was listening to Mr. Diamond’s mind through the door. Because Mr. Diamond was so old, his power was too weak to detect danger at that distance. Carter nodded to Nate. Now Nate and April preemptively changed Mr. Diamond’s mind about defending himself or calling for help. Violet opened the door with her hand on the doorknob—she could have blown the door open with her mind, but this job was so easy, why bother?—and all four of them disappeared inside the office.

Kaylee couldn’t see them. But, staring at the video of the empty hallway, she knew Violet was crushing Mr. Diamond’s throat with her mind.

Kaylee’s heart beat faster until it burst and shattered into pieces, the shards piercing her chest. She grimaced against the pain and forced herself to watch the video of the hallway until Violet, Carter, April, and Nate walked out of the office. Violet shot the camera the bird.

Kaylee swallowed the lump in her throat. She’d told Mr. Diamond the casino was vulnerable. She’d told him they needed their powerful young people off Mentafixol to help protect the casino. “I guess I won that argument,” she said aloud. Her voice surprised her. She sounded like a child, but she felt a million years old. The casino was her sole responsibility now.

With a shaky sigh, wishing she were a levitator instead of a mind changer just this once so she wouldn’t have to disrespect Mr. Diamond’s body, she slipped her hand into his pocket and drew out a single key—his only key for which Kaylee didn’t already have a duplicate. She unlocked the bottom drawer of his desk, reached inside, and placed the binder on the desktop. He’d scrawled on the label:

For Kaylee—in case I die. LOL! : )

He’d tried to keep up with changing technology for the sake of the casino. He even texted her sometimes in his approximation of online lingo, the big dork.

She squinted against her tears once again.

But only for a moment.

Leaning forward and tossing her blond hair out of her eyes, she flipped the binder open. Here were the instructions for how to wean people off Mentafixol when they were thirty years old, too weak for the Res to want and too mature to seek that kind of life. And here was the long list of teens and twenty-somethings the casino currently drugged. Some of these people she knew about already. At Mr. Diamond’s insistence, she’d played a part in putting a few of them on Mentafixol herself. Some of them were surprises to her. Mr. Diamond had shared this information with her on a need-to-know basis.

She scanned the list for people she could wean quickly. Preferably about her age, at the height of power. Preferably a levitator and a mind reader, possessing the powers she didn’t have. Without thought she dismissed Elijah Brown and Holly. Considered the rest of the list. Came back to Elijah and Holly.

No. Anybody but Holly. She had to protect Holly.

However, the other people on the list knew Kaylee only as the aloof head of casino security. When she took them off Mentafixol and approached them about joining the casino’s protective force, they might see her as a threat and run straight for the Res. Holly at least knew Kaylee as a roommate and best friend and was more likely to stand with her.

Plus, it would be simple to wean Holly and Elijah off Mentafixol. All the young people being drugged were told they were the only ones, and they received the pills from various places, so they wouldn’t compare notes and get suspicious. But Holly and Elijah both received the drug from the casino pharmacy. Kaylee could make a phone call and stop the shipment.

Mr. Diamond’s scribbled notes indicated the strong emotion that had brought on Holly’s and Elijah’s powers in the same night had to do with each other. Elijah had asked Holly out. Holly’s parents had wisely told her she couldn’t go. If Holly and Elijah had been allowed to date, they would have talked about MAD eventually, gotten suspicious, realized their powers were real, and stopped taking Mentafixol. They might have hurt each other accidentally, just as couples at the Res hurt each other on purpose.

But if that spark between them was still there now, Holly and Elijah off Mentafixol would be fiercely loyal to each other. That could make them even more useful to the casino.

Or, if they were captured, even more useful to the Res. The Res would absorb them into its society and turn them against the casino. Kaylee would be no match for them by herself.

At that thought, Kaylee paged frantically through the binder one last time, hoping a new alternative would appear. If she drafted Holly and Elijah to help her, she would be putting Holly in so much danger. And likely ruining any chance Holly might have had at a relatively normal life with a nice guy like Rob. Kaylee thought of Holly, so book smart yet ditsy, so witty in an off-key way that some people never got her jokes. She wanted to keep Holly innocent and happy in a world where shoes still mattered.

But if Kaylee did nothing, everyone would be in danger from the Res. Could she really pull this off?

She fought the urge to look to Mr. Diamond for guidance. His dark suit slumped beside her.

God help her, she’d have to pull this off.

Decision made. She’d call Peter Starr and convince him to give up his magician act to Holly in a few weeks, after she was Mentafixol-free. She’d let Jasmine Brown know what was going on and send her out of town so Elijah couldn’t read her thoughts about the Res while he was coming off the drug. If he could, he’d likely get curious and head straight there.

But first—she looked out the window behind her and gathered strength from the beauty of the glowing and dancing fountains of the Bellagio in the distance down the Strip—she needed to hide Mr. Diamond’s body.