“Her power is unadulterated,” Dominic would say. “She is not a Zevghéri born with a gift, her gift was born with her.”
The others would mutter their agreement and cast wondering eyes down at me, and then Weston would break his silence and begin his manipulations.
“She must be protected,” was his favourite way to start. “The humans don’t see what we see; they see a monster that needs to be destroyed. We need to begin spreading rumours that the Atmá powers are achieved through drugs. They can dissect as many pills as they like, and waste a good many years doing it, while we secure a way for our remaining test subjects to stay alive. We must document the effects of Dominic’s S20 pill on paired Atmás; it certainly appears to amplify their powers. That will be enough evidence for a cover story. Let the humans confiscate our hospitals, our labs, our suppliers, our pills. They’ll never get their hands on our real power.”
The others would applaud, and plans would be put into place. Weston would slink away just as silently as he had appeared, and Dominic would capture more Atmás, torturing them with his drugs in the name of protecting all Atmás from the humans.
I was lucky, in that respect.
I didn’t have a pair, so his drugs couldn’t hurt me.
The walls began to melt again, and I found myself running through grass almost as tall as I was.
“Caught you!” my brother roared, barrelling into me and sending us both sprawling into the dirt.
I laughed uproariously, not caring that my throat was now scratchy with dirt and my clothes filthy with it. He fell beside me, clutching his stomach and wiping the tears from his cheeks, leaving smears of brown mud behind. It was the first time I had truly seen him smile or laugh in months, and it made my chest ache with both hope and fear. He must have seen the look on my face, because he suddenly grew serious. The details of his face were frustratingly unclear, but I knew somehow that he was frowning. He loomed over me, smashing his hand against my face.
“Stop looking at me like that,” he ground out, as the tiny pebbles stuck to his palm scraped against my cheek.
“Ow!” I tried to push him off, but his mood had switched again, and the darkness had taken a hold of him once more.
He pulled his hand away from my face, surveying the damage he had done. “You’ll tell them that Jayden did this to you, won’t you? Or Eva?”
I swallowed and nodded, because I knew that arguing would only get me into more trouble. My brother hated the others. He hated that they both had powers that didn’t make them evil the way his power had made him. Lately, he had started hurting me, and forcing me to blame it on them. I usually ended up making up an excuse about falling over or running into something, and he never discovered that I wasn’t telling the tales I was supposed to tell.
“Tell me a story,” he demanded, his face looming closer to mine.
He seemed to be entranced with the line of blood that I could feel trickling down the side of my face. Maybe it was the fact that he could cause violence without his ability that made him enjoy it so much. If I was bleeding, then he was hurting me in a normal way, because his ability was a silent killer; a killer that left no evidence.
“Five little monkeys walked along a shore,” I started, my voice shaking with the tears that threatened. “One went a-sailing, then there were four. Four little monkeys climbed up a tree; one of them tumbled down and then there were three.”
He stared as I recited, but the rhyme didn’t seem to calm him as much as it used to. He was fixated on the trail of blood, and the more I spoke, the closer he loomed. I wavered, and he smashed his palm into the other side of my face, grinding dirt and rocks and grass into my other cheek. I whimpered in pain, begging him to stop, but he was too far gone.
“More,” he demanded.
“Three little monkeys found a pot of glue; one got stuck in it, then there were two. Two little monkeys found a currant bun; one ran away with it, then there was—”
“No,” he suddenly interrupted, pulling away from me. “No, Lela, you’ll never be alone.” He wiped at the frantic tears that slid down my cheeks, smudging dirt and blood everywhere, and then his head was in my lap and the heaving sobs were tearing through him.
I held on as he cried his regret into the darkening sky.