I’m surprised at the fact that Mara speaks next. “If Stella actually did tell you the truth about us, she would’ve also told you that we’re loyal.”
“We’re in the same place, mate,” I force myself to say. “These abilities—we’re going through shite other people don’t know enough to have nightmares about, even. We don’t need to know who you and your other friends are to care about you not being fucked with.”
“All for one, one for all?” Leo asks. He knows I’m full of shit. Must do.
“Something like that.”
“Then why don’t you seem like you’re worried about turning up dead yourselves?”
This, at least, I can answer honestly. “Because some of us have experienced things worse than death. Hope you don’t have to find that out for yourself.”
28
MEMORABLE COLLISION
MY LITTLE PROPOSITION SEEMS TO have worked, however, for Leo leads us up the stairs into a large red room with a cracked nonworking fireplace and one long, massive desk along the wall—a counter, more like. The rest of the place might be falling apart, but the Mac is massive and new. What holds my attention though, is the map.
The thing spans an entire wall of the room, crisscrossed with differently coloured threads and pins. I move toward it, but Leo closes the drapes, shaking dust into the air and making Jamie sneeze. And casting the map in shadow.
The monitor blinks, swinging my attention toward it. Leo gestures us all to the screen, opens an app and types in a URL.
“You’re using Tor?” Jamie.
“Wouldn’t you?”
“Touché,” Jamie acknowledges.
Mara raises a hand. “Um, Tor?”
“The dark web,” Daniel says.
“Because let’s make everything sound as sinister as possible,” Jamie says.
“Some of it is,” I say. “Snuff films on there, aren’t there?”
Jamie nods. “Afraid so.”
“Lots of porn though, I imagine?” Goose says.
“If one can think of it, there’s a porn of it,” I say.
Mara half smiles. “Oh?”
“It is known,” Jamie agrees.
Leo clicks an app that looks like a globe. “So this is the Tor browser,” he says when it opens. “Like Google, but completely anonymous. If we’re going to work together on this, you should probably all download it.”
Goose looks rather sceptical. “Won’t that land us on some Big Brother American Patriot Act government watch list of some sort?”
“We . . . crossed that bridge a while ago,” Mara says.
Jamie turns his palms up as if to say, What can you do?
“Well, I haven’t crossed it,” Goose says.
“Don’t whinge,” I say as a page appears on our screen as if from 1997, a message board, with the words “special snowflakes” written in Comic Sans.
The messages vary in their weirdness. One post is titled “How do I make myself psychotic?”; another one “gifted cats?” Jamie sweeps by Leo and clicks on it before he can stop him—dozens of cat GIFs appear, mostly of kittens falling off things, others of kittens riding things. Scottish folds are quite popular.
A shadow darkens Leo’s face. “Um, can I have that back?”
“Sorry,” Jamie says. “I just really like cats.”
Mara puts her hand on his shoulder. “Who doesn’t.”
Leo types a URL into the browser: 61f73d/4ffl1c73d “Wow,” Jamie says. “Takes me back to my MUD days.”
“MUD?” I ask.
“Multi-user dungeon.”
My mouth silently rounds the word “Oh.”
Jamie looks at Mara, “You deserve better.”
Haven’t got the time or the interest to decode whatever Jamie’s on about. “So what are we looking at?” I ask Leo. I hadn’t known it was possible to be impatient and bored simultaneously. Leo clicks on a screenshot of a local news site in Charleston, South Carolina.
SUICIDE CULT CLAIMS FIVE
South Carolina: Police discovered the bodies of five students in a basement on Montagu Street on Monday, victims of an apparent suicide pact.
They included two students in their senior year at Ashley Hall, and one student from Summerville High, also in his senior year. Two freshmen at the College of Charleston were also among the dead.
No further details are available at this time.
Below the screenshot is a post from someone calling themselves truther821: “This never happened. I was one of Marissa’s best friends. She never would’ve killed herself. She was GIFTED, like us. Cover-up maybe???”
I try and match up what I know to be true with that post, and . . . it doesn’t. I’d have seen them die if they were like us, no?
Leo scrolls down. On and on they go, posts from teenagers, purportedly Gifted, in several states—in several countries, in fact, though I don’t call attention to that detail—posts about teenagers going missing or committing suicide in the past three months.
“They’re not all legit, obviously,” Leo says, reading my mind. “But they’re getting more frequent. All feature someone eighteen years old or close to it, all with prior diagnoses of mental health disorders, or so the media claims.” Leo sucks in a breath. “I also know that some of the posts are about people we knew, and some are written by Nons.”
“You keep using that word . . . ,” Jamie starts.
“Non-Gifted. Friends of theirs, or family I guess. Anyway, word’s getting out, is the point.”
But how could it? He claims to have known some of these people—past tense. But again, I’ve seen only three deaths thus far.
We’re all silent, until Leo says, “And in the interest of not wasting any more time, I also know that this doctor—Kells?—wasn’t just experimenting on you. She was injecting other kids with something, trying to induce abilities in them.” He walks over to one of the plastic card tables and holds up a file. “I imagine the name Jude rings a bell?”
29
A MELANCHOLY ACCIDENT
I DON’T LOOK AT MARA and Jamie, but I’ve no doubt they’ve got FUUUUUCCKKK written all over their faces, because, well. That’s the expression I’m trying to keep from mine.
“Stella told us about what happened to her. What the guy, Jude, did, to her, to you—” He nods in Mara’s direction. “She told us about the gene—1821? That gets switched on in some of us and not in others, and she told us how Kells set out to try and create someone like you.” Leo looks at me.
“All true,” I say, ever so calm. “But how, precisely, does that help find Stella, exactly?”
“We don’t know who was experimented on and who wasn’t.”
I offer a general-purpose smile. “Neither do we.”
He falls back into the chair, rolls up his sleeve to scratch his arm, exposing the edge of a tattoo.
“What’s that?” Mara asks.
He rolls the sleeve up the rest of the way. On his biceps, curling over his shoulder, is a black image of a sword, curved, sprouting feathers on each side, as if the sword is the spine of it.
I seize on it immediately. “Where’d you get that?”
“The tattoo? Pen and Ink—”
“No. The idea for it.”
He shrugs like it’s nothing. “They’re symbols of justice—the feather and the sword.”
All roads lead to him. My blood is electric, and there’s an acrid taste in my mouth. “Who told you about it?” I ask Leo.
“Why?”
I round my hands into fists to keep myself still, even. In control. “I’m not going to ask you again.”
“Look, most of us here? We don’t really have what you’d call a happy home life, okay? Some of us don’t have homes at all. Or families. Some have one dead parent, one abusive one. Others come from places, backgrounds, where they’re shunned for who they are—not in the Gifted sense, but in every other sense. For being gay. For being Latina or black or Asian. For liking the wrong music, the wrong clothes, for being depressed, for being anxious, or angry, or scared. For being who we are. Anyone who walks through those doors knows that they’re not going to be persecuted or harassed or told they’re broken. They come here because they want what we want—to use the Gifts we have to make the world a better place.”
Familiar words, those.
“And most of us tattoo ourselves as a reminder to use our Gifts for good.”
More familiar by the second.