by Zoe Chant
That kept me going for the next six months, which is how long it took me to recover. Jager took me to my own apartment and called in someone to take care of me. He said it was a friend who was a paramedic, but I think he was a guy criminals called to treat them because doctors have to report bullet wounds. For all I know, he was a veterinarian.
I’m not sure exactly how long the vet or whoever he was stayed in my apartment. Maybe a couple weeks. After that, I felt better physically and I could take care of myself, more or less. But when I tried to sleep, I’d wake up every half hour or so, sure that something bad was happening somewhere. Probably it was, but that was useless because there was no actual information to go with it. It happened when I was awake, too. I was exhausted all the time.
But I knew there was a purpose to it. At first I couldn’t write—my hand-eye coordination was shot—so I asked Jager to get me a tape recorder so I could take notes on my symptoms and progress. He went straight out and bought me one. Once I could type again, I used my laptop.
Jager came in almost every day. We’d do experiments on me in the apartment. He’d roll dice and I’d try to guess what had come up, that sort of thing. To this day, I can’t stand hearing dice click together.
Sometimes he’d drive me around and see if I could pick up on anything going on. I definitely had gotten enhanced intuition, and what it mostly seemed to do was alert me a few seconds before something dangerous was going to happen. The closer the danger was to me, the more specific the alerts were. If someone else was in danger a mile away, I’d just get that non-specific feeling. We figured that one out by driving me near an emergency room.
At first I tried to focus on getting more information about what the danger was if it was farther away, but I got nowhere with that. So I started teaching myself to ignore those alerts. Gradually, they began to fade away.
In all this time, I’d assumed that any further actual experiments were on hold while we studied me and worked on refining the process to reduce the side effects. And then we’d publish a paper about the process and its effect on me, and see if we could get permission to use informed human subjects then. I figured we could get some volunteers from the military or firefighters or even war correspondents—people whose lives were dangerous enough already that they’d think it was worth the risk and potentially being out of work for six months.
But when I told Jager I was ready to go back to the lab, I got a sort of generalized bad feeling. It was so different from the immediate danger alerts that I didn’t recognize it. I thought maybe I was anxious about going back to work, which didn’t make sense because I wanted to.
He said, “I’ve got a surprise for you.”
And then he told me what he’d been doing in those six months. It turned out that he’d never had any intention of submitting a paper on me so we could continue working on the process legally. Instead, he’d gotten a lot of shady contacts together so he could do experiments completely underground, on people no one would believe if they turned up claiming to have been paid to try a blood pressure drug that actually made them sick for months and then gave them an extrasensory danger sense.
I was so shocked that I didn’t say a word. He went on and on, telling me how cleverly he’d planned it all and how once he had the process working perfectly, then he’d take it to his “contacts in the government.”
To this day, I don’t know whether the bad feeling about Jager that I got at the beginning of the conversation was my enhanced intuition or the regular intuition I’d had all along, but ignored. And I also don’t know which caused the feeling I got after he’d told me his plan, which was that I should pretend to go along with it because it would be dangerous if he knew I thought he was a sociopath.
Either way, I kept nodding like I agreed. Even when he was telling me what a genius I was to help create the process that he planned to use on people without their consent. Even when he said that I’d been very conservative when I’d used it on myself, and that was why my intuition was so low-level.
“Just imagine what might happen at higher doses,” he said.
I could imagine, all right. It was true that I might have gotten a stronger, more precise danger sense. But it also might have caused permanent damage or killed me.
I nodded and agreed. Yes, I was very excited. Yes, I couldn’t wait to start. Yes, I’d love to look over his plans.
As soon as he left, I packed my laptop, checked into a hotel, and contacted the Office for Human Research Protections. I told them the entire story, filed a formal complaint, and gave them Jager’s plans as proof.
For a supposed genius, I can be a real idiot.
You can see where this is going, right? He conned me, and I fell for it. The plans were fake. They had details that could be checked out, and every single one was disproven. Meanwhile, he’d already spread it around that I’d tried to take credit for his work, and I’d left the lab threatening to ruin him. The whole time I was at home, recovering from the process and thinking we were working on an important experiment, he was busy undermining me.
He’d gotten everything he needed from me, the first human subject. And when he was done with me, he did exactly what he’d told me he’d do to his next human subjects: make sure no one would ever believe anything I said about him.
My danger sense went off every time I even thought about him. I was sure he really did mean to do exactly what he’d told me, and it was only the details that were wrong. I couldn’t let him.
I reported him to the police. I reported him to the FBI. I contacted everyone I knew in the scientific community and warned them about him. And then, to make sure it would hit the news, I sued him for stealing my idea.
I knew no one would believe me, but I was hoping to draw so much attention to him that he wouldn’t be able to go ahead with his plans. Finally, he shut down the intuition enhancement project.
My plan worked, but it cost me my reputation and my career. Everyone in the scientific community thought I was a backstabber and a lunatic. I lost the lawsuit, and I was ordered to pay for Jager’s court costs. After that, I had no money and I couldn’t get hired to wash test tubes. Even my parents thought I’d had a breakdown caused by overwork.
I knew I’d done the right thing, but that’s cold comfort when you’re unemployed, broke, and the best anyone thinks of you is that you temporarily lost your mind.
It turned out that when I got stressed, it was harder to screen out my danger sense. Any time anyone was about to have a heart attack or crash their car or get lost, I’d suddenly get a gallon of adrenaline dumped into my bloodstream, along with the feeling that something terrible was happening and I had to go save someone, right now. Except I had no idea what was happening or who was in danger or where they were. It was like the world’s most useless superpower.
But that was only because the danger was too far away. If I had a job where I was in danger, my enhanced intuition might be useful in exactly the way I’d intended when I started the project.
So I joined the Marines. I wanted to make my father proud, and I thought that once they saw me shoot, they wouldn’t dig too closely into the rest of my background.
You won’t be surprised to hear that I didn’t fit in. But I’d been was right: I was useful.
I already told you how I got kidnapped and changed, but I left out some key details. When my fire team was ambushed by the wizard-scientists, my danger sense went off a second before. I had just enough time to shove my nearest teammate, Ethan, into a river before I was hit with a tranquilizer dart.
I woke up strapped to a hospital bed, with doctors and technicians working on an apparatus I recognized. It was the intuition enhancement process, but different. More complex, but also more streamlined. If mine and Jager’s was 1.0, this was something like 10.0. And the other thing I saw was a doctor filling a syringe with one of the drugs we used for the process, at a dose twenty times what I’d given to myself the first time.
One of the techs said, “He
’s awake. Give him more sedative.”
I was so panicked at the thought of getting an overdose of that stuff that I blurted out the only thing I could think of that might stop them, which was, “I’ve already done the process!”
A woman came forward. She wore a white doctor’s coat embroidered with symbols in black. Scientific symbols and magic symbols. I learned later that it meant she was a wizard-scientist, but I’d never heard of them then. Even later than that, we encountered her again, so I know now that her name was Morgana.
She said, “We know. That’s why we’re so curious to see what will happen when we put you through it again.”
“It’ll kill me, at that dosage,” I said.
Morgana shook her head. “We’ve improved the process a great deal since you left the project. There was a conceptual breakthrough on the level of the one you had to create it. Ours allows us to enhance the subjects’ healing abilities and endurance, which enables them to survive much higher dosages. Well. Mostly they survive.”
I said, “So Jager’s been working on this all along?”
She waved her hand dismissively, and said, “He was working on it. After you betrayed him, he took the process to the government. They saw more possibilities in it than he ever had. It was one of them, a shifter, who had that conceptual breakthrough.”
And then she told me all about shifters, and how making the human subjects into them was what allowed them to survive the process. I thought it was some weird mind game, but I played along. I was hoping that if she talked long enough, I’d figure out how to escape. I figured Pete and Merlin were trapped along with me, and whatever was really going on, I had to get to them before they got put through the process.
But I couldn’t budge. The straps were incredibly strong. And my danger sense was going off like a fire alarm inside my head. It made it hard to think.
Meanwhile, Morgana was monologing away. She said at one point how much she enjoyed having a subject who understood the technical side of things, not to mention having been present at the very beginning. She gave me the entire history of what happened after I left. The more she talked, the more convinced I was that she was telling the truth. And afterward, I found out that it was all true.
Jager had partnered with government black ops to create an agency devoted to the intuition enhancement process. They called it Apex.
They used unwilling human subjects—people they literally kidnapped—to test the process. A lot of them died. The survivors, who had powers that went way beyond enhanced intuition, were forced to work for them as spies and assassins. But some of them had fought back, destroying Apex bases and freeing the captives. Jager had been killed in one of those battles, blown up along with his base.
The whole time she’d been talking, I’d been planning to go after Jager and kill him. When I heard he was already dead, it was like the floor dropped out from under me. I realized that I’d been plotting revenge on him to distract myself from my own guilt.
I’d created the process that had been used to kill all these innocent people, and ruin others’ lives. I’d known Jager had planned to do something just like what he did do, but I never followed up after I learned that he’d supposedly ended the project. I went and joined the Marines, when I should have been monitoring him and tracking his movements.
Everything, all of it, was my fault.
I barely heard the rest of what Morgana was saying—how the wizard-scientists had taken over from Apex, and had their own master plan that involved me and my fire team. I was drowning in guilt like I’d fallen in a well of it and breathed it into my lungs.
She could tell I wasn’t really listening. She snapped her fingers, and one of her techs turned into this huge black hound with fiery eyes. It leaned over me and opened its jaws. I guess I couldn’t have fought anyway, but I didn’t even try.
The last thing I remember thinking was, I deserve this.
I woke up in a cell with a collar around my neck. It had a shiftsilver disc on it, which kept me from shifting and kept my hellhound from speaking to me, though I didn’t know that at the time.
Think of my intuition power as a dripping faucet. One drop of information at a time. What I woke up to was a firehose. I was getting flooded with information, so much that I couldn’t think for myself, couldn’t pick out any individual pieces, and couldn’t block it out. I felt like I was losing myself.
I didn’t rescue anyone. I just sat there, fighting just to hold my ground, fighting to stay me, until my teammates and some bodyguards from Protection, Inc. came and rescued me. They say I helped them in the fight they had to get out of the lab, but I barely remember that. Mostly, I remember what happened when they got my collar off. That was when my hellhound started talking to me.
Chapter 20
Ransom fell silent. His eyes were more than sad, they were haunted. The bruises on his face had darkened, making him look like he’d lost a fight, and his posture was one of utter defeat. Natalie longed to comfort him, but he’d flinched every time she’d reached out to him. At first she’d thought he didn’t want to be touched, but now she wondered if he thought he didn’t deserve it.
She wanted to throw her arms around him and tell him none of it was his fault. But he hadn’t yet finished his story. And she knew him well enough now to be sure that until he’d told her everything, he’d think that one last bit of information would be the one thing she could never forgive.
It felt cruel to push him to talk about what seemed to be the most painful part of all. But she thought of the blisters and bruises she’d gotten learning to be an acrobat, and of a surgeon’s scalpel. Sometimes you had to endure some pain to get what you needed. And if there was one thing Ransom could do, it was endure.
“Ransom?” she prompted him. “What did your hellhound say?”
He looked away, unable to meet her eyes. When he finally spoke, his voice was barely audible. “He said it was my fault. He said I killed all those people. He said I was worthless, and a failure, and there was nothing in the world but pain. He spies on the worst moments of people’s lives, and he makes me watch.”
“Ransom…”
He didn’t seem to hear her, but went on, his voice rising. “The Protection, Inc. team came to rescue us from the lab. Three of them were Apex subjects. My hellhound showed me the worst moments of their lives—being tortured, being forced to kill, watching their friends die, knowing they’d been turned into monsters—and it was all my fault. My process did that to them. I did that to them. Carter was kidnapped and imprisoned for a year. His inner animal—a part of his self—was destroyed. Pete’s power was out of control. Whenever he touched anyone, it physically hurt him. And Roland… When they captured him, a woman tried to defend him. They took her too. And the process—my process—killed her!”
He glanced around, then lowered his voice. “Roland puts up a strong front, but that broke him inside. He walks around like a widower who was married for thirty years, grieving for a woman whose name he doesn’t know. I did that to him. And every day at work, my hellhound reminds me.”
Natalie’s heart broke for the victims of the experiments, the living and the dead, and for all that pain and guilt Ransom had been enduring every day, silent and alone. She was so full of emotion, she couldn’t find words for it.
After a long silence, he went on, “Your shift form is a part of you. It can’t be anything you’re not. If my hellhound is a monster, it’s because I’m a monster. It’s my dark side—the part of me that hates me—the part of me I hate—the part of me that hates myself. That’s why I tried to kill it. But I couldn’t. It’s stronger than I am. I was wrong to imagine I could ever be with you. Now that you know what I am, of course you wouldn’t want—”
“Hey!” Natalie spoke loudly enough to cut him off. He glanced up, startled. “That’s it, right? Every single secret you’ve been keeping? Is that all of it?”
He nodded. With the faintest glimmer of dark humor, he said, “Seems like that’s plen
ty.”
“Right. Well, let me tell you the secret I’ve been keeping. I love you.”
His dark eyes widened, his lips parted, and then he blinked a few times, slowly. He looked more like he’d been hit over the head than like he’d heard a declaration of love. Finally, he said, “What?”
“I love you,” she repeated. “I’m in love with you. Ever since you slid my Kindle under the bathroom door. And absolutely nothing you’ve told me tonight has changed that. What does your hellhound have to say about that, huh?”
“Uh… ‘She doesn’t mean it… You heard that wrong… She’ll have second thoughts tomorrow…’”
“I do mean it, you didn’t hear it wrong, and I won’t have any second thoughts. I had all my second thoughts already. They’re what kept me from telling you till now. And none of them were about you not being good enough. Or anything about you, really. They were about me. Not me as a person, but my limited time. I thought it would break our hearts. And it will. But now you know. I must be on my five thousand and eighty-ninth thought by now, and it’s this: I love you.” She grinned fiercely. “What’s your hellhound have to say about that?”
“Nothing,” he said, after a moment. “I think you scared him off.”
At last, their eyes met with no barriers between them: no fear, no doubt, no guilt, no shame. She knew what he felt without him having to say a word.
“I love you,” he said. “But you knew that already, didn’t you?”
Natalie nodded. She’d always known, she supposed; she’d only conned herself into believing anything different.
The room around them and the bed beneath them seemed to fade away, until nothing was left in the world but the two of them. The air was hot and still, holding them suspended as if in amber.
She was utterly focused on Ransom, catching and savoring the smallest details. His still-damp hair was drying in waves and curls. If she watched closely enough, she could see individual strands coming free, sparkling copper or glittering bronze where the light caught them.