by Lan Chan
Her scowl spoke of unpleasant things for me very shortly. Thankfully, I was saved by the phone ringing. My relief at hearing Ryan’s voice on the other end of the line was tangible. His amusement said he heard it too.
“Hello, darling. Missed me?”
“What did I tell you about calling me that?”
“Now, now. Is that any way to speak to –”
I cut him off. “The Psi-Ops tried to take Abigail’s blood.” Static and then the sound of metal being bent out of shape.
“Where is she?”
I passed the phone over to her. It was like a big toy in her hands. Too late I noticed her fingers were sticky with peanut butter.
“Hello?” she giggled, all traces of the impending tantrum smoothed over. “We went on a day trip. Willow tried to clean my butt with a sponge.” I held up a warning finger at her that only served to make her grin. “Can I stay here?”
Whatever he said to her was brief because she handed the phone back a second later. Then she made a grabby motion with her arms up in the air which I had interpreted was her sign for wanting to be picked up.
“Urgh,” I said. “There’s peanut butter all over this!”
“You didn’t give me a napkin.”
“I’m not cut out for this,” I told Ryan whilst trying to balance the phone in one ear and Abigail in my arms. Setting her back down on the bed, I stepped out into the hall and closed the door behind me.
“What happened?” All traces of amusement in his voice were gone. His response to my recounting of the events was to sigh heavily.
“Should I have left her there? This place isn’t very kid-friendly.” While we spoke, I inspected all of the sharp edges in the hallway. The antiquated writing desk pushed up against the wall had some mean right angles. Though Abigail seemed happy to be here for now, in hindsight, I was way out of my league. I had school tomorrow and there was no one to supervise her while I was gone.
“Probably,” Ryan said. “But thanks for taking her. I’ll tie up some stuff and come home early. It won’t matter if they test her. She’s not the source.” He paused. “Did they take your blood?”
I swallowed, not wanting to say it out loud so it wouldn’t come true. Finally, I exhaled. “Yep.”
“And Rich just let them do it?”
“It wasn’t his fault.” Why was I defending him? It seemed that was my fate. Forever defending one of them from the other. “They had a Ministerial Mandate. It would have been a dead giveaway if I refused.”
“How long until they figure out what’s going on?”
I leaned against the wall and allowed my feet to slide on the floorboards until I was sitting down. “Not sure. They’re probably not as efficient as Lily is, but it’s only a matter of time.”
“You have to get out now.”
It was such a predictable response that it made me smile. Somehow, it was less irritating coming from Ryan than it would have been from say…my mum. That was her MO after all. Whenever things got scary, she uprooted us and we ran. At least this time, I knew what I was running from, if not exactly how it came to be.
“Jon Carra thinks he has a way to flush out the ones behind this without exposing me.”
“Using you as bait isn’t an option.”
“That’s what Zeke said, but the more I think about it, the more I think maybe it’s my best option.”
“Except now the Minister for Defence knows you’re the source of Second Sight.”
“And that I’m Spectra.”
He made a choking sound in his throat that was something between a cough and a laugh. “I’ve gotta hand it to you, darling. You sure know how to pile on with the pressure.”
“Any time you wanna weigh in, tough guy, I’ll hand over the reins.”
“Willow!” Abigail screamed. “I’m bored!”
“I have to go. My master awaits. How would you feel about me putting a sedative in her food?”
His laughter rang in my ears as the call ended. What was funny? I wasn’t kidding.
I found it very interesting that in a facility occupied by supposed elite officers, a child would be the thing to frighten them all.
We sat in mute alertness as Abigail sprawled on the couch colouring. Crayons were scattered on the cushions and the floor all around her like used bullet shells. Any time she needed to reach for a colour that had been used as a projectile, she’d scream and someone would pick it up for her.
This can’t go on, Zeke thought to me.
“No talking in secret,” Abigail pouted. “It’s not nice.”
“Smart-ass little shit,” Adam muttered from the piano chair. Abigail didn’t even blink at his cursing.
“So,” I said. “What am I going to do with her tomorrow?”
Four pairs of eyes looked at me with expressions ranging from amused to incredulous. “You’re going to have to either take her with you or stay home,” Adam said. It wouldn’t have killed him to hide the smirk.
“Come on, guys!” I turned to Bianca. “Don’t you have the day off tomorrow?”
She wagged a finger at me. “I certainly do. And I’m not spending it looking after Satan’s daughter.”
“I can watch her,” Lily said.
“Err, no thanks, Doctor Frankenstein. I saw what happened to the last pet you looked after.”
“That was a rat for experimentation purposes.” Lily looked over at Abigail quizzically. “Don’t you get curious about what might happen if someone disabled was infused with Second Sight?”
“Not particularly!”
“Don’t even think about it, Lil,” Bianca chimed in.
Sensing that she was being spoken about, Abigail raised her head and peered around the room. Child rearing was not a piece of cake. It almost made me second-guess the judgement I’d had of my mum all these years. Almost.
At the end point of desperation, I was about to go and beg Rich for a leave of absence from school when he stalked into the entertainment room. A stern expression marred his handsome face.
“What now?”
“Everybody suit up,” he said. “The city has broken out into a riot. They need us for crowd control. Not you, Willow. You’ve got other problems.”
In less than ten minutes, they were all suited up in their Hyper uniforms and tearing out of the parking lot. As the gates closed automatically behind them and Lily turned on the perimeter surveillance, I couldn’t help thinking about what Jon Carra had said to me. What if there was a way out of this that didn’t involve putting everyone else in danger? Maybe it really was time to stop running.
37
It was strange how the atmosphere in a place was predicated by the people inside it. Where the facility had been alive with mirth just an hour ago, once the others left, it felt morose somehow. Precognition might have been widely debunked as an esper ability but half an hour after the others left, Abigail grew restless.
“Up!” she said as I walked past to make a phone call.
“Not now.”
“But I feel sticky in my head.”
“Are you serious? You had a bath two hours ago!”
She swatted at the couch cushion. “No, not sticky outside. Inside my head.”
It wasn’t until she said it that I realised that was the perfect way to describe it. Sticky on the inside of my head. As though everything I was thinking had been coated in quicksand. “Wait,” I said to her. “I just need to call someone first.”
Lily had turned on the television and was glued to it. Every few seconds she changed the channel, checking to see if she could pick up details from different news feeds.
Turning my back to try and block out the sounds of breaking glass and cracking fires, I keyed in Aunt Jenny’s office number. It was past business hours but she never kept to them anyway. If it didn’t look strange, she would sleep in her office if she could. Her assistant picked up.
“Hey, Luke. Is my aunt there?”
“Better here than outside,” he said. “It’s madnes
s out there.”
“Yeah, I’ve seen it on the news. Is it bad where you are?”
“Nah. We’ve been told to stay inside as best we can, though. There’s rioting in the train tunnels. The whole system is in gridlock. They’re telling us it’s probably better if we stay put for the time being.”
“I bet Jenny’s loving that.”
He snorted. Then I heard her speaking to him from the other side of the line. “Here she is,” Luke said.
“Hello?”
“Hey, it’s me.”
“Please tell me you’re not out there in the middle of this. It’s the worst riot we’ve seen in years. Thankfully my office is on one of the upper floors and we have security.”
“Too bad for everyone else.”
“The Academy is doing the best they can. Have you spoken to Gabriel about this?”
“No. And I’m still locked out of there. He hasn’t called me since he got back.” I hadn’t enlightened her on the current situation with Gabe. He was still pretty banged up. “You know what the minister was saying to me at the Purple Plume this morning?”
“Yes.” I could almost touch her eagerness over the phone line. She’d never been this blatantly obvious at pushing an agenda aside from when she wanted me to stop ditching class and go to school.
“Tell him I agree. I’ll play bait as long as he can make my results disappear.”
She sighed. “You’ll see, love. This is really the best thing for it. If they can find a way to stop this without anyone getting hurt, then it’ll mean the city can be restored more quickly. I’ll let Jon know. I’m sure he will be in touch shortly. And Willow, be careful. Whatever was happening –”
That was about as far as she got before the electricity in the facility cut out.
Abigail screamed in both my head and out loud. Lily swore. It came out rehearsed and proper in a way that would have made me laugh in any other circumstance. In the here and now, I fought to come to grips with the nightmare that attempted to pull me under. The cordless phone rattled uselessly to the floor as my hands came up to clutch at either side of my head. Somehow I thought blocking sound would stop the nightmare from manifesting. Cold dread seeped into my bones.
I stamped my foot, trying to remember the exercises Oz had tried to teach me. Reluctantly, I forced my eyes open and attempted to find a source of light to focus on. The moon was waxing this evening and there wasn’t much to go by out here so far away from the city. The allure of hiding within the vital link was strong. It shone like a bright laser beam enticing me to withdraw from the cold clamp of the surgeon who I now remembered whistling as he sterilised the instruments he used to cut me open.
“Why aren’t the backup generators coming online?” Lily asked. Her footsteps thumped across the carpet and then I heard the door sliding open. Abigail keened like a little puppy. I felt her pushing carelessly against my shield. When she couldn’t get through, she projected against it instead. She showed me an image of a ghostly shadow moving amongst the brick fence line. Too late I saw what she was so afraid of.
Any fear of exposing myself was pushed down to the back of my mind. Electricity, fierce and bright, sparked in the palms of my hands. In the illumination that glowed from them, I could make out the shape of Lily’s body lying against the pavement outside.
“Son of a –”
Two soft thuds landed on the carpet. They billowed smoke into the room. I backtracked and held my breath. My mind snapped open, trying to get a grasp on the dozen or so individuals converging on the entertainment room. When I got to her, Abigail was already unconscious. She was too heavy for me to pick up all of a sudden. My eyelids drooped. I bit my lip, and with that movement my lungs inhaled. The cloying scent of sleeping gas coated the inside of my throat. I coughed and attempted to access the vital link before my mind blanked out completely.
A pair of arms came out of the darkness and grabbed my shoulders. Zeke’s surprised terror through the link was the last thing I felt before the darkness took me under.
38
I came to because of the sound of a life-support machine. It was now up there as the worst possible way to be woken up. It was no wonder hospitals were such dreary places. One of Mum’s many overlapping rules of survival was that if you could gain the element of surprise, then you could half win the battle.
That pretty much went out the window when the pain in my arm twisted so badly I yelped.
“You’re awake,” said a voice that caused ice to draw from the metal slab I was lying on and into my bones. When I allowed my eyes to open, Claudia Di Grassi, Queen of Industry Place, was standing at the foot of the table.
“You,” I croaked. The room I was in had ceilings too high for a normal house. There were exposed beams with huge pendulum lights hanging from them. I would guess a warehouse of some sort. The beeping didn’t appear to be coming from close to me but it irritated me all the same.
“Me.” Claudia’s cupid’s bow lips twisted. Blessed with a mane of chestnut-brown hair that bounced as she turned her head, I couldn’t imagine Claudia’s life to have turned out any other way than it had.
“Selina.” It wasn’t a question.
She blinked slowly. “Unfortunate but necessary. She was the best.” Just like that. So it was true that you had to be cold to be Queen in this world where Kings tried to murder you at every turn. When I looked up again, the smile had disappeared from her face.
Following the direction of her attention, I found myself staring into the face of a ghost. Or in this case, the quadriplegic girl from Abigail’s care facility. Izzy’s unrelenting gaze bore into me from a metal slab beside mine. Her hair massed in strands around her head as though she’d been thrashing. She looked like one of those demons in a horror movie. All hair, white gown, and bare feet. What in holy hell was going on?
Acting on pure instinct, I tried to shrug away. That was when it dawned on me that I’d been strapped down to the table with thick rubber restraints around my chest, neck, and on each of my wrists. Not this again.
Up close, Izzy reminded me of somebody but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Her expression was blank. She didn’t blink but there was such depthless desperation in her eyes that I felt as though she was attempting to see right into my soul. Somebody sitting above me whimpered. A small hand clutched my right shoulder, and I gritted my jaw, hoping that what I suspected wasn’t true.
But when I tipped my head up as far as it could go while restrained, I saw Abigail seated in a chair behind me. One of her hands rested on my shoulder, the other one on Izzy’s. My eyes sought a trail down Izzy’s body until I came upon the IV stuck in her arm.
The expression on my face finally broke her blank mask out of hibernation. She blinked and nodded her head once at me. I tried to reach out to her telepathically and came up against a blank wall of static.
“Anti-psi,” she rasped, pointing to the cuffs around my wrists. Her identity hit me like a static hammer. It was ironic that the woman who manifested in my dreams as Fake Spectra was a quadriplegic. Who else would be so desperate to walk again that they would risk getting the tumours? Did she even know about the tumours?
“What are you doing to me?”
She smiled then. I wished it was the kind of smile a supervillain in a movie would give before twisting their handlebar moustache and divulging their dastardly plan. Instead, her smile barely moved her lips and caused my gut to churn. It was as if she was too weak to even muster up that much because her eyes closed again.
“What the hell is going on?”
“Make as much noise as you want,” Claudia said. “Nobody’s going to hear you, and by the time they realise where we are, it’ll be too late.” She made a move around the table to where Izzy’s IV line was twisted around her at a weird angle. “Besides, most people will be grateful to us for ridding the city of the source of Second Sight.”
“You know they’re coming for me—”
“Who, exactly? Gabriel? He can barely take
himself to the toilet. Your Hyper friends are too busy trying to contain the rioting, and half the city would be more than happy to see you six feet under. I know Moe especially would send me a thank-you card when he hears that Willow Nguyen will be out of his hair forever.”
The truth really did hurt. “And what happens to Izzy when I’m gone? How is she going to keep walking?”
Claudia rolled her eyes at me.
My top lip curled in tandem with the flip of my gut. “Have you had her checked out for neurological changes to her brain? I have it on good authority that my blood kills other espers.”
“Of course it does.” The way she started tapping on the keys of her phone made me think she believed me as much as she believed that there was a bogeyman. Which was a bit short-sighted considering technically, one was lying on the table next to me.
I reached out telepathically to Abigail. Busting through the anti-psi bracelet around my neck wasn’t a problem while we were in physical contact. But knowing it was there caused anger in my stomach to spasm uncontrollably.
Hey, I thought to Abigail. It’s okay. Don’t worry. I’ll get us out of here somehow.
Maybe it was because she was getting used to having me around now and could tell I was lying out of my ass, but it didn’t seem to comfort her any. It was hard to appear tough when you were strapped to a table and being experimented on. Abigail’s hand gripped my shoulder tighter as another set of footsteps paced across the room.
My eyes darted towards the sound. I almost gagged when I saw who had come up beside Claudia. Senator Collins followed by a West Indian man with a stethoscope around his neck. That was when it hit me. Izzy had the same dark hair and oval face as Officer Collins. They must be related.
The Indian man came around to check on the machine that Izzy was strapped to. They had at least been smart enough to limit my telepathy. That only meant that they knew more about me than I knew about them. Yet another thing I didn’t like.
The senator deigned to give me a passing glance. “Good. She’s awake. Speed up the process, Raj. We don’t have all night.”