“I MEAN, WHO DOES SHE THINK SHE IS?” Rachel said with a loud huff.
Twelve hours later and she was still bitching about the thing with Ariane Tucker and Jenna Mayborne this morning.
I shook my head. As usual, when Rachel didn’t get what she wanted, she had to make life miserable for everyone.
I was stretched out on two wooden benches on Rachel’s enormous back deck, my eyes closed and my feet hanging off the end—one of the many disadvantages of life at six foot four. But it wasn’t uncomfortable enough for me to move yet. I held a cold beer, my third, on my stomach. Condensation rolled down the bottle past my fingers to create a damp and chilly place on my shirt.
A few feet away, Rachel and the twins, her nearest and dearest cronies, moaned about Ariane over the slosh and splash of the hot tub.
“Rachel, she’s only been in our class for forever.” Cami Andrews punctuated her disbelief with a slap of water. “She moved here from, like, Ohio. Her mom died and she came to live with her dad.” She paused. “And she was really sick a long time ago or something, but she got better.” I could hear the frown in her voice as she tried to remember the details.
Cassi seemed to be humming “The Star-Spangled Banner” under her breath, for no apparent reason.
“I know who she is,” Rachel said, sounding further irritated. “I’ve heard her name before. It’s just like, suddenly she comes out of nowhere and she’s, what, Miss Morally Righteous, Defender of the Annoying? What business is it of hers, anyway?”
In theory, it had been none of Ariane’s business at all, which made it all the more awesome. Not that I could say that aloud.
But the truth was, most people wouldn’t stand up against Rachel even if she was torturing them directly. And quiet, sit-in-the-back-of-class Ariane had come to Jenna’s defense, shocking the hell out of me and everyone else. The good timing of the unexpected special effects—apparently a transformer had blown a couple blocks away, which made the lights pop—hadn’t hurt either, adding a whole Carrie-esque feel to the moment.
Ariane hadn’t flinched, even with Rachel in full-confrontation mode and breathing fire. I never knew she had it in her—an unhesitating lack of fear. I admired the hell out of that.
“She’s in my gym class,” Cassi offered in her breathy voice. She and Cami had seemingly formed a pact early in life that Cami would be the smart one, relatively speaking, and Cassi would be the pretty one. This despite the fact that they were identical twins. Regardless, they each played their role to the hilt. “But she never participates,” she added, sounding confused. “She sits on the bleachers. Or on the grass. But only when we’re, you know, outside.”
See what I mean?
“She was in my Advanced Comp class. I think,” Cami said.
“What are we talking about?” Trey had evidently abandoned Matty and Jonas in the pool. His feet made splatting sounds on the deck as he approached.
“That girl,” Rachel said, with a pout in her voice.
Oh God, not this again. I could predict how this was going to go. Rachel would be all needy and “love me, love me,” Trey would swoop in and try to save the day, and then Rachel would find some way to bitch-slap him back to the last century. That’s the trouble with having the same friends your whole life—you know what they’re going to do before they do it. Various people on the fringes of our circle flowed in and out, depending on Rachel’s mood, but at the core, it was always Trey and me and Rachel and the twins. Since that first day of kindergarten, when Rachel had picked our table to sit at and scored us all an extra cookie at snack time by telling us to hide the first ones we’d gotten.
“Babe, you’re not still upset about her, are you?” A louder splash and a shriek from either Cami or Cassi meant Trey had joined them in the tub.
And here we go…
I opened my eyes and squinted in their direction long enough to see Trey slipping his arm over Rachel’s shoulders. I’d give that about three minutes.
“I’ve never even seen that girl before,” he said, baffled. “She must be new, right?”
Dude. Trey. I sighed. He never saw anyone but Rachel. Especially not someone like Ariane Tucker, who looked as if she practiced being invisible. To be fair, I’d never paid much attention to her either, until last year when I sat behind her in Algebra II. Then, I don’t know…no matter what my old man says, his eye for detail must have rubbed off on me. Something about Ariane was off in some vague, indefinable way. No one would probably describe her as pretty, but there was something about her that drew me in. Maybe attractive was a better word, in that I couldn’t define what caught my eye, but it was impossible to look away once I noticed her. Most people didn’t seem to notice her at all, which seemed more than fine with her. Another oddity.
I’d gathered pieces of the puzzle that was Ariane Tucker here and there—like how she always did her homework in ink. INK. Who does their math with a pen?—but never enough for them to add up to anything.
Today’s events only gave me more mismatched details to work with, building my interest.
“Something you want to add, Zane?” Rachel’s voice cut through the too-hot August air, bringing a chill with it.
“She always missed two questions.” I wasn’t sure why I spoke up. I knew better than to engage in Rachel’s games. Blame it on the beer buzz or exhaustion from surviving the summer with my dad constantly on my case. I’d thought life would be better with Quinn—my perfect older brother—staying at college this summer to work. Less opportunity for direct comparison, and therefore less falling short on my part. But if anything, my dad was worse than ever.
I’d been living for the start of school until Rachel had to go and make things complicated this morning with her “joke.” I was so tired of all this “we’re better than everyone else” bullshit. I couldn’t believe I’d once found it funny.
“What did you say?” Rachel demanded.
I stared up at the designer Japanese lanterns hanging above my head. “I sat behind Ariane in math last year. She always used pen, and she missed two questions on every test, quiz, assignment, everything.” She was so much shorter than me, it had been easy to see over her shoulder when Mr. Scaliari handed back our stuff. I’d started paying attention when I noticed the ink thing.
“The same two questions?” Cami asked, frowning.
“No, different ones every time, but always two,” I said. Which meant sometimes she got a 98 out of 100 and other times, when it was a three-question quiz, she completely failed.
Also, she smelled like lemons, but the real kind, not the fake dishwashing-soap stuff. I was pretty sure her hair was lighter than she wanted people to think—the dark streaks were dyed. It was possible there was trouble at home—she’d had splinted fingers four times last year. And I thought she might have a tattoo. The collar of her shirt had slipped back one day on her thin shoulders, and I’d seen the edge of one of those big square bandages. The kind my mom had used on my knees for those massive skateboarding wipeouts in my earlier days. Then, once I’d noticed that and knew to look for it, I saw the faint outline of a rectangle underneath her shirt in the same place every day. It couldn’t have been an injury, not for that long. My next best guess was a tattoo, one she was ashamed of. It happened—an exercise in poor drunken judgment, usually on spring break. Marcos Pyter, one of the middies on our lacrosse team, put his exgirlfriend’s name on his arm after she was already his ex.
But quiet, obedient, possibly abused Ariane Tucker with an embarrassing tat? I couldn’t make that fit. Then again, I couldn’t make today’s events square with what I knew of her either. And unlike Rachel, I was kind of fascinated.
“Whatever,” Rachel said impatiently. “So she deliberately misses questions because she doesn’t want anyone to know she’s a brain or something. Who cares?”
A girl who took on Rachel Jacobs in front of a crowd didn’t strike me as the type to worry about people thinking she was too smart.
“The point is, she shouldn’t have gotten involved,” Rachel continued. “It had nothing to do with her.”
Trey rubbed her shoulders. “It doesn’t matter, babe, does it? It’s over. Mayborne got the message.”
I groaned and shut my eyes, bored already with the inevitable fallout. Trey was a good guy, but he seemed doomed to repeat the same Rachel-related lessons over and over again.
“Trey! No!” she said. “She humiliated me in front of everyone. I can’t let that go.”
I could have pointed out that Ariane had been far from humiliating anyone. She’d just stood up for Jenna and refused to knuckle under—which, in Rachel’s mind, was probably the equivalent of forcing her to lick someone’s shoes.
Rachel didn’t handle disappointment well. She hadn’t had a lot of experience with it. Her parents were always gone, leaving extra money in her account and Rachel to her own devices most of the time. Her father traveled for GTX, and her mother was either with him or at a “spa” somewhere. Her grandfather, Dr. Jacobs, adored her. He showered her with expensive gifts—clothes, a car, vacations to any sunny island she wanted. (I’d once seen Rachel end one of these poolside kickbacks to take his call. He was always caught up at work, and I suspected she valued the rare moments of his attention more than anything he ever sent to the house in a big red bow; not that she’d admit it.)
Despite (or maybe because of ) all of this, Rachel was extremely generous with those she deemed worthy. Trey, Cami, Cassi, and I had an open invitation to her house and everything that she owned, which was saying quite a bit. She treated us like family in place of her blood relatives.
But she expected blood loyalty in return.
The water sloshed loudly. “Jonas!” Rachel called in the direction of the pool. “Come here, I need you.”
“Babe,” Trey protested. “I’m right here—”
“Shut up. It’s not about that.” Rachel’s voice had taken on a greedy intensity that I knew all too well.
I didn’t like where this was going. Jonas tended to act first and think later, if at all. In Cub Scouts, on an overnight camping trip in fourth grade, he’d been showing off his supposed knowledge of karate inside the tent and snapped the main plastic support pole, collapsing the tent around us. In the rain.
I opened my eyes again.
Jonas jogged over from the pool. “What’s up?” He raked a hand through his hair and flicked the water on Cassi to make her shriek.
Rachel rested her chin on her folded arms at the edge of the hot tub. “I want you to ask that Ariane girl to Bonfire Week.”
Oh, not good. Rachel was scheming, and that never ended well for anyone but her.
Jonas’s face fell comically. “Are you kidding?”
Rachel raised her eyebrows in response.
Jonas stepped back, shaking his head. “Oh, come on, Rachel,” he pleaded. “I’m this close to sealing the deal with Lainey Pryce.”
“Lainey Pryce will sleep with anyone,” Cami said with distaste.
“Not since she went to church camp in June and became a born-again virgin.” Jonas grinned. “Challenge accepted.”
Yeah, these were my friends.
“So sleep with this one instead.” Rachel waved a hand dismissively. “You want a challenge, she barely talks to anyone.”
“Because she’s a freak. I have a reputation, you know.” But I could hear him wavering, tempted by the idea of trying his superpowers of seduction against Ariane. Jonas was all about the challenge and not so much dealing with the aftermath.
I sat up. “I’ll do it.” The words were out of my mouth before I could stop them. What the hell was I saying? I didn’t need this kind of trouble. I had more than enough already.
“What?”
I wasn’t even sure who’d asked the question: Rachel, Trey, Cami, Cassi, and Jonas were all staring at me.
I shrugged. “I said I’ll do it. I’ll ask her to Bonfire Week.”
Jonas exhaled loudly in relief. “Thanks, dude. You saved my life.” He turned and headed back to the pool, shouting at Matty about a cannonball contest.
“You hate Bonfire Week,” Trey said.
“I doubt Ariane’s much of a fan either.” I had trouble picturing her face painted in the school colors. “So we’ll have that in common.”
Rachel narrowed her eyes at me. “Why?”
“Why, what?” I stalled for time, knowing what was coming.
“Why are you suddenly Mr. Social when it comes to Ariane Tucker?”
“Rachel,” Trey muttered in careful warning.
“No, for the last year he’s been basically ignoring us. I think we have a right to know what has triggered his sudden return.”
And there it was…
Rachel would bring that up. I already lived with the pitying looks and the whispers, though they’d faded somewhat over the last few months finally. Was it necessary to keep reminding everyone what had happened?
“You want someone to ask her out,” I said. “And I’ve spoken to her a few times.” A slight exaggeration. Unless you count learning that 2.333333 was not the answer to number 10 in the homework. And she’d barely glanced in my direction during that exchange. Still, I couldn’t stand the thought of Rachel siccing someone else on her. What Ariane had done today took a lot of guts. She didn’t deserve to be demolished by whatever Rachel had planned, and Jonas wouldn’t give a damn. But I could try to stop it from getting out of hand.
I was tired of these games Rachel played, but it was too late to strike out on my own. I only had two years left here. It wasn’t worth the effort. Not to mention, being friends with a member of the illustrious Jacobs family was pretty much the only thing I’d managed not to screw up, in my father’s opinion.
Rachel cocked her head to one side, giving me a considering look. Then she stood up in the hot tub and stepped out. The ends of her dark hair were wet, and goose bumps covered the skin that was not covered by her red bikini.
I braced myself, expecting her to begin firing off questions, her suspicions aroused.
But instead she leaned down, smelling of chlorine and that heavy musky perfume she favored, and said, “Welcome back, Zaney.” Then she brushed her mouth over mine, which shocked the hell out of me.
She strolled off toward the house, leaving me to deal with Trey, who was glaring at me like he wanted to set me on fire.
Great.
That was Rachel for you—always looking for the two-for-one when it came to causing chaos.
MY FATHER WAITED until my second bite of breakfast on Wednesday (four scrambled eggs for my higher protein needs) for the ambush.
He slid a newspaper across the table. “Were you planning on telling me about this?” he asked, leaning forward in his chair.
The edge in his voice took me aback, as did the faint smell of alcohol on his breath. It wasn’t really morning for him, as he’d yet to go to bed, but still. I hadn’t seen him drink—at all—since the first few months of my life Outside, when he was mourning the loss of his daughter. I’d only been living with him for a couple weeks when he received word that she’d died. Back then, I would slip out of my room—which I wasn’t supposed to do—and find him in the living room drinking scotch and staring at photos of his Ariane, which he normally kept hidden in the basement. He had not expected her to recover; I’d known that much when he’d given me her name. But that knowledge had not helped him in any way. If anything, it had only made his grief worse. He’d gone through a period where he always had a bottle in hand. But that was a long time ago.
So I knew even before looking at the newspaper, something was very wrong.
The article was in the middle of the paper and tucked beneath a gigantic ad for the local tire store, Rubber Mike’s. I didn’t read the whole thing; didn’t have to.
Lights Out at Ashe High
An unexplained power surge yesterday morning shattered lightbulbs in an upper hallway of Ashe High School, raining glass shards down upon students.…
Crap. I sucked in a breath and choked on my eggs.
I’d stayed up late last night to watch the news and run a few Internet searches—not too many, in case GTX was monitoring—to see if the incident had caught media attention. But what wasn’t big enough for TV or showy enough for the Internet (had to leave room for imploding celebrities and cute cats stuck in boxes) was just right for the Wingate local paper.
God, why did yesterday have to be the one day free of the small-town idiocy that normally dominated the paper, the day that someone hadn’t stolen an entire neighborhood’s worth of garden gnomes and arranged them in various sexual positions on the front lawn of the Methodist church?
(Actually, I’d found that pretty funny at the time. You can’t get better examples of hypocrisy than people confronted with blatant—albeit gnomish—displays of sexuality. They get red-faced and blustery all the while intensely wishing they could get their significant other to try what the red gnome was doing to the blue garden fairy. You can’t hide thoughts like that from me, people, not without a lot of training and practice. Genius advancement or design flaw, take your pick.)
Coughing, I spit the eggs into my napkin. “How bad is it?”
“Bad enough.” My father looked grim and tired, but he wasn’t shoving me toward the back door with an urgent whisper to flee, so I wasn’t, it seemed, in immediate danger of being recaptured. I relaxed a fraction.
“Were you going to tell me?” he asked again, tapping his finger against the paper. He looked every inch the imposing head of security that he was. He was still wearing his uniform, and his shirt bore the impressions of his shoulder harness, though it and his gun were probably already locked in the safe in his bedroom. His jacket, emblazoned with the GTX logo, hung from the back of his chair. Normally he would have put it out of sight already, knowing how much I hated it.
(At some point in my very early life at GTX, maybe right after I was born, they’d marked me like livestock. My right shoulder blade held a tattoo of the GTX logo, a big stylized G, and my project designation, GTX-F-107, just beneath it in crude lettering. I wore a bandage over it to keep anyone from seeing it, but I still had to look at it in the mirror every day when I applied a new bandage. And the sight never failed to make me feel sick and so very angry.)
“I can’t protect you if you’re going to hide things from me,” he added with a deep frown.
The censure in his voice made my stomach ache. I hated disappointing him, this man who’d risked everything for me. “I wasn’t hiding it.” I swallowed hard, avoiding his gaze. “It was just…nothing.”
He didn’t say anything, but his dark expression told me how “nothing” he thought it was.
“It was over as soon as it started,” I added quickly. Like every other similar incident since my departure from GTX, though admittedly it had been almost a year since the last one (in which I might have turned a page in my English lit book without touching it) and this one was slightly higher profile. “Mr. Kohler made an announcement about it being a bad transformer, and no one thought anything about it.”
“Were you in control?” my father asked.
I hesitated and then said, “No.” Just like always, the barrier in my mind—the one that cut me off from the most powerful of my abilities—had fallen and then gone back up with no direction from me.
“Are you sure?” he persisted. Clearly we’d reached the interrogation portion of this conversation.
Yes, I’m sure, because if I’d had my way, there would have been a Rachel Jacobs–shaped hole in the wall instead of just a few broken lights. Not a good answer. “Pretty sure,” I said instead. “And I tried again when I was alone, a few minutes later. No luck.”
Technically, I hadn’t been alone. Not completely. Jenna, the sole other occupant of the bathroom, had been in the handicap stall, sobbing too hard to let me in. The metal latch on a stall door is as simple a mechanism as they come. But with every bit of focus I could summon, to the point of making my head throb with the effort, I hadn’t been able to make that little metal bar rise up and drop away.
Eventually I’d given up and simply knocked. Some super-secret weapon I am. Behold my ability to knock. Sometimes I wondered why GTX would even want me in my current condition. The mental wall that my six-year-old self had erected around my telekinesis as a self-protective measure was incredibly effective. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t make that wall drop. I could still hear people’s thoughts and sense their emotions—those functions remained intact. But everything else? Gone.
The ability to manipulate objects without touching them—throw, bend, deflect, speed up, slow down, summon from across the room, all of that—had once been as easy and simple for me as breathing. It hadn’t seemed magical or special, any more than a human would have been astounded by their brain translating electrical impulses into sight. It was just something I could do. A seeing person among the blind.
Toward the end of my stay in the lab I’d progressed beyond controlling inanimate objects and moved on to bigger and better things. With enough concentration I’d been able to target specific muscles within the body, stop them from moving. I was that good…or bad, depending on how you wanted to look at it. I could keep the muscles in your legs from working, and hold you quiet and still while I did whatever I’d been commanded to do.
I’m not sure anyone should ever have that kind of power.
And now I didn’t. Not in a readily accessible or controlled manner, anyway.
My father leaned back in his chair with a sigh. “You created the block, you should be able to bring it down,” he reminded me for the millionth time.
“I know,” I said tightly. But knowing that didn’t seem to make a difference.
After what had happened in the lab all those years ago, after what I’d done…it was as if that part of me had been lopped off or shut away behind an impenetrable wall. My father told me it wasn’t uncommon for human children to block memories of a traumatic event. He suspected my sudden inability to access that part of myself was a more severe form of this same phenomenon.
He thought that with time, patience, and practice, what I’d lost would return to me. But it had been ten years of all three now with little or—let’s face it—no progress. Except, apparently, when Rachel Jacobs was on a rampage.
On rare occasions, like yesterday, the block would sort of thin out for a few seconds, and my telekinesis would break through, like a buried memory floating to the surface. Usually with disastrous results, because I wasn’t in control of the flood of power. And then, before I could even try to get control, the block would close me out again.
Honestly, most days I didn’t care that my ability was gone. I wasn’t really sure I wanted it back—it had only brought me fear and pain. But I couldn’t tell my father that.
“You need to start practicing again.” He scrubbed his face with his hands. He probably hadn’t slept since sometime yesterday; exhaustion was catching up to him. “If the block is finally starting to disappear and you don’t have control, those bursts of wild power are going to lead GTX right to us.” He looked at me, worried. “You’d be completely defenseless.”
In spite of my reservations about getting my ability back, I knew he was right. But more practice?
Something between a bitter laugh and a scream of frustration lodged in my chest with an ache. The truth was, “practice” was a joke. For years I’d spent several hours a day after school trying to move a red foam ball into a plastic blue cup without touching either one. It was pointless. I’d stared at those objects for so long it felt as though the afterimages were permanently burned into the backs of my eyes. And the only time that stupid ball ever moved was when I accidentally jostled the table with my knee.
How was I supposed to regain control over a power I couldn’t even access with any degree of regularity? I’d given up trying about six months ago.
“Practice won’t help.” I rubbed at the ache beneath my breastbone. “It hasn’t helped.”
“We have to do something,” he said. “We’re running out of time.”
I froze.
“One of my sources at GTX says they’re ramping up the search for you. With the changeover in the administration, new people are in key positions, and the hearing committee on DOD spending is making everyone jumpy. Someone’s going to be checking to see where all the government funds went for this research, and GTX will want to have something to show for the project,” he said. The “project” meaning me.
I shivered. That explained the phone call yesterday morning and why he’d been following the news about the hearing committee intently. “How close are they?” I asked, my throat suddenly tight with fear.
My father closed his eyes. “I don’t know.”
He looked tired—the skin sagging around his eyes—and so much older. As if twenty years had passed instead of ten since the night at GTX when he’d first acknowledged my existence with a discreet wave. He was the only human ever to treat me as a person and mean it. For the first six years of my life, give or take, I’d thought my name was Wannoseven. It was only after I escaped—with Mark Tucker’s help—that I learned Wannoseven wasn’t a name at all but a numerical designation. 107. Pathetic. I’d answered to a number, one Jacobs and the others had assigned me.
My first few years in the lab weren’t bad. Actually, they were awful, but that’s only based on the knowledge I have now, thanks to ten years of living Outside. At the time, the lab was my home, and while I certainly hated parts of it (the constant testing—no kid likes to get shots or have her blood drawn; and let me tell you, electrodes inserted at the back of your head aren’t much fun either), I didn’t know any different. It wasn’t that I thought other children were undergoing similar experiences in their own homes; it was more that I’d never met another child. I knew they existed—I’d seen them in my cultural training sessions, but I’d also seen talking dogs (Scooby-Doo), a man who rode a brontosaurus at work (Fred Flintstone), and countless women who woke up from long hospital stays to discover they were someone else entirely (soap operas).
Consequently, my views of the “real” world were initially a little jumbled. I could find Earth in the solar system, identify the various countries on the planet, and pinpoint our location in Wingate. I could even tell you something about all of those things in any one of the five different languages I’d been taught (English, Chinese, Spanish, German, and Arabic).
But none of it meant anything to me. I’d lived inside the same four white walls every day. The world of Little Red Riding Hood described in the book of fairy tales I’d memorized was as real to me as any map of Earth. Knowledge without context. That was my problem.
It led to an obsession with Outside. That was how I’d thought of it then, a vast location that was as mysterious, exciting, and frightening as anything I could imagine. The logical part of my brain knew there were states and cities and countries and oceans. But the other part of me, the bit that was both fascinated and horrified when the wolf ate Grandma and she survived, thought of it as a wild and unruly place where anything was possible. And I wanted to experience it. I wanted to feel the grass beneath my feet, to see if it could really grow taller than I was. (I’d seen only part of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and misunderstood what was happening in the back half of the story.)
I wanted to see where Dr. Jacobs and all the lab techs (save one or two on the night shift) went when I slept. I think I somehow had the idea that they were all getting together and doing something fun without me.
I wanted to see the sun, feel the warmth against my skin. (You have no idea how often you all talk and think about the weather: what it is, what it will be tomorrow, what it should be.)
Dr. Jacobs, who I thought of as my ally, my friend, at that point (he wasn’t the one holding me down to stick me with needles or taking away my dessert when I bit someone), kept promising me that I would go Outside one day, but for now I was special and they were keeping me safe. And I believed him.
I know, I know. But I think he believed it too. Or at least I never picked up any thoughts from him that indicated he was lying.
No, that I got from Leo.
The lab techs didn’t wear name tags or have their names embroidered on their white coats, the way Dr. Jacobs did. But when you can hear thoughts, even as sporadically as I could, it’s not hard to pick up names and make the connections.
Leo was the short but strong tech they always sent in on bone-marrow days. Having your bone marrow taken is extremely painful, so whenever I saw Leo coming, I knew what was in store. And I did everything I could to stop it, which was more than your average human child of three or four.
One of my most vivid memories—one of those pivotal moments that divided my existence into Before and After—is of Leo leaning over me in the corner of my room, where he’d trapped me. His mouth was bleeding. The sharp edge of a book had split his lip.
He caught my wrists together in a single thick fist, grinding them together until I cried out. “They’re never going to let you go,” he whispered, his teeth stained a horrible pink. “They’re going to keep you in a jar just like all the other freaks.”
I felt the truth in his words, along with the hate and fear bubbling out from him like his foul breath. Alien. Freak. F*cking Martian.
I knew those words, knew what they meant—the Great Gazoo on The Flintstones was an alien—but I’d never heard them applied to me before.
It didn’t make sense. But it also spoke to some distant feeling I’d felt flitting around inside me—that I was different from everyone else. Not special, as Dr. Jacobs had said, but different. Even as sheltered as I was then, I’d grasped the nuances between the two: special was good, revered even; different was not.
If Leo was trying to shock me into compliance, it worked. I froze, his words banging around in my head like noise I couldn’t shut off, and he hauled me out of the corner without a fight.
That had been the last time I’d seen Leo. The techs weren’t supposed to interact with me, except as required by their tasks. (“Stand up.” “Sit down.” “Does that hurt?”) I’d heard Dr. Jacobs warning them about “unnecessary conversation” before. Looking back on it now, I suspect he was probably trying to limit any outside influences beyond what he approved and introduced.
But getting rid of Leo was too little, too late. The damage was done. After that, I knew I was different, even if I didn’t exactly understand how, and that Dr. Jacobs might not be the friend he wanted me to think he was.
That was the first time I remember feeling trapped. Not just in the room, but by my inability to do something about the knowledge I’d acquired. I’d changed—my mind had cracked open just that tiniest bit to the reality around me—but nothing else had.
It would be years before I’d have a chance to act on the information, but the seed had been planted and it would grow, reaching up for the sun I hadn’t yet seen.
I couldn’t go back to that room now, to that existence. The thought of it made me feel like I couldn’t breathe.
“We should leave, just go. Right now,” I insisted, pushing my chair back from the table. My father had heard from his GTX sources that families who moved away from Wingate were subject to intense scrutiny, especially if they had children of an appropriate age (as in ones who could be GTX’s missing experiment in disguise). We had never wanted to take that risk—not when hiding in plain view was still a good—if not, the best—option. But now, if they were closing in on us, what did it matter?
“It’s too late.” My father opened his eyes and gave me a weary smile. “If anyone is keeping an eye on us here, they’ll be expecting us to spook. We might confirm something they’ve barely had time to consider as a possibility.”
And running when they already had us in their sights and I wasn’t able to defend myself—or him—would prove pointless. A lame mouse trying to outrun a cat in a closed maze. They’d get us in the end. I wouldn’t be able to stop them.
A fresh burst of hate for Dr. Jacobs bloomed inside me. If he hadn’t tried to force me into obedience, I wouldn’t be this broken. I’d still be a freak, but a fully functioning one, at least.
“Maybe we’re going about this wrong,” my father said, with a thoughtful frown. “What happened yesterday? What was the trigger? If we can replicate the situation, maybe we can use that to figure out how to keep the barrier down and get you back in control.”
He was probably thinking about things like my mood or the actual environment—lighting, sounds, smells, etc. He’d hypothesized something similar before, during the year we experimented with hypnosis. Turns out I’m not particularly susceptible. Not altogether surprising if you consider how unwilling I might be, even on a subconscious level, to let someone mess with my head.
I hesitated before responding, mainly because I knew he would not like the answer. I didn’t even like the answer.
“Ariane.” He leaned forward, elbows on the table. I shouldn’t have to ask twice was evident in his tone.
I took a deep breath and explained what had happened, as clinically and unemotionally as possible. Except for the part where I’d lost it a little when confronted by Rachel. Couldn’t de-emotionalize that.
When I finished, my father was furious. “Do you have any idea how dangerous that was? What if someone had taken video of you with their phone? It would be all over the Internet and then where would you be?”
I grimaced. Locked up again at GTX, no doubt. They had teams searching for any sign of me, and a video of what happened yesterday—small, pale girl in the midst of a mysterious explosion—would be more than enough to catch their attention.
“And we’ve been over this before.” He pointed an accusing finger at me. “You’re supposed to stay away from the Jacobs girl. You know better than that. She causes problems for you.”
I shifted uncomfortably. He was right. Avoid Rachel Jacobs had been an unofficial Rule since third grade.
Rachel had been mocking Kyla Portnoy for her four-color box of generic crayons, and, infuriated, I’d accidentally turned Rachel’s box of 120 Glitter Crayolas into a colorful mound of wax confetti. It was another instance in which the barrier in my head had temporarily vanished and my out-of-control ability had resurfaced.
Fortunately, the crayons had been in Rachel’s desk at the time, so other than a muffled thump, no one had noticed a thing until she went to take them out. And discovered that poor Kyla Portnoy now had more crayons than she did. She threw a huge fit, kicking and screaming and threatening retribution. It had been, simply put, awesome, even if I hadn’t done it intentionally. I’d told my father about the incident, though, and received the first and only addendum to the Rules.
And I did try to steer clear of Rachel, but yesterday had been an unavoidable exception. “She was hurting Jenna,” I protested. “Being deliberately cruel.” Which, as my father well knew, was a kind of hot-button issue for me. The powerful lording it over the powerless. I couldn’t stand to see it, knowing how it felt to be so helpless at someone else’s hands.
He sighed heavily, some of the anger draining out of him. “Jenna is a prop. Part of your cover,” he said slowly and with great emphasis, as if he could drill the words into my brain. “She doesn’t know the real you, and if she did, I can assure you, she wouldn’t be nearly so quick to defend you in the same, or worse, situation.”
I winced. The emotional side of me wanted to argue that he was wrong, but I knew that he wasn’t.
“You’re not normal, not one of them. You can’t forget that.”
Fury swelled in me. Like I could forget. Like I wanted to. To be clear, I don’t wish to be more human. After all the thoughts I’ve heard rattling around in your skulls? No thanks. But to have a taste of the ease with which most of you coast through life? Never having to worry about anything other than being yourself ? Must be nice.
My father got up to scoop more eggs onto my plate. Some of what I was thinking must have shown on my face. “What I mean is,” he said in a gentler tone, “you can’t get caught up in petty games and manipulations. You have to be above it all.”
Don’t get involved. Keep your head down. “So in other words, Rachel Jacobs and her clot of humanity do whatever they want, and I have to be the better so-called ‘person,’ ” I muttered.
“They have the privilege of being the primary species on the planet.” He returned the skillet to the stove top with a clatter. “Hey, look at me.”
I turned in my chair.
His face was lined with tension. “We can’t afford any more mistakes.”
“I know.”
“So do what you got to do, kid.”
I nodded reluctantly. I had to be above it all. If I let Rachel get to me, if I slipped too often, it wouldn’t be about letting her win anymore. That would be the least of my problems, especially if my father was right about the increased efforts to find me.
He patted me gingerly on the shoulder. “I’ll check with my sources and see what they can find out about the new search. You keep working on your control.”
Or lack thereof, but he was too kind to say it. The fact was, at this point, after so many years and so many different attempts at bringing down the wall in my head, I was fairly certain it was hopeless. Unless we could convince Rachel Jacobs to move in. Ha-ha.
“Finish your eggs,” he added. “You need the protein. Don’t make me nag you.” He gave me a fond but sad smile.
My father, ever watchful, waited until I picked up my fork, though my stomach roiled at the thought of food, especially cold eggs tainted by the fear and momentary panic of this morning. I wasn’t sure how I’d ever eat again, never mind enjoying what had once been my favorite meal.
Guess I’d have to fake it. Just like everything else.