I'm undermining my own point about building the life I want, and I know it. I can't help it. Cav is telling me something I longed to hear, all those months we worked together. The decision I begged him to make. Now he's just handing it to me.
Cav goes silent. We look at each other while the waitress fills our coffee cups again. My stomach is roiling. Too much coffee. Sniper across the street with his finger on the trigger. One thing after another around here. I fiddle with a sugar packet, tearing at the edges with ragged nails.
"Alexa, it wasn't the Project that found you," Cav says at last. "It was me. It's always been me."
Sugar spills everywhere.
*
Two years ago.
For the last year, the Project has been having its way with me. Needles in both arms. X-rays, CT scans, skin tests, endless questions. They ask me about Chris. They ask me about Barker. They ask me abstract moral questions to which most of my answers are shrugs. They know everything already. They just want to hear me say it, over and over.
They make me drink bright liquids that burn my stomach and turn my mind to gelatin. It makes me pliant enough not to mind the questions and the needles. So, like Barker, they can pretend it's not coercive. They can pretend I'm saying yes. And I let them, because this time it's me I want to hurt. I still feel guilty over Barker.
I don't really know what guilt is, not yet.
Eventually, they ask me to burn things. At first they just take temperature readings and ask if I can melt some ice. I can. I do. They ask me to boil water. I do. Then a candle, a stick of incense, a tiny origami bird that Dr. Stoddard carefully folds and sets in front of me, talking calmly about how I'll get to see daylight and my mother if I just cooperate with a few more tests.
I blink and the origami bird flashes into yellow flame aimed at his face. Stoddard whoops and leaps out of his chair. I get a chuckle out of it. The promise of visiting rights is quietly revoked.
Months pass. It becomes a game. See, Stoddard was the first person I met from the Project. He showed up at our door in a suit and tie, telling my mother about how I had special gifts and should be given special treatment. My mother knew. She couldn't not know. She chose to turn a blind eye to the whole thing, the burned hand and the heat in my room and my little brother's curiously melted G.I. Joes.
She ignored it all until Dr. Stoddard wrote her a six-figure check and assured her that I would be taken care of.
But I didn't know that at the time. She told me they were going to look after me. That she couldn't anymore. She left out the part about selling me to the Project.
*
Stoddard was nice enough at first – smiles and questions, apologies over the discomfort of the needles. But then I got tired of the needles, and started melting them when they came near my arm. The orderly who tried to wrestle me into my room ended up going to the hospital with his shirt burned to his chest. He'd have some nice pink scars.
I told them I was having trouble controlling my power. But that was a lie. I hadn't had trouble controlling it since I was a kid. I'd hurt him on purpose, and I was fine with that.
A quiet arms race began. I wouldn't take the needles, so they put the drugs in my food. I stopped eating, so they waited until I passed out. Finally, they shut me in a steel cell for a month, hoping I'll just come around to their way of thinking. I couldn't burn my way out of six inches of solid steel. Not yet.
*
After thirty solid days – I mark them on the concrete wall with one brightly glowing finger – they let me out of solitary. I get a shower and a meal. There's a camera in the shower. They're not even hiding the peepholes anymore. In my delirium I think of Barker looking through the camera, jerking off while he watches, waiting for his chance to shove his hand up my skirt again. I half expect him to be waiting there, in a bright yellow windowless room, a needle in his hand, saying just gonna stick this in. But instead it's Stoddard in his lab coat, balding and thin, as asexual as they come.
"Alexa," he says, looking at my file. He's fiddling with a manila folder. BERNELL ALEXA J, it says on the label. "What are we going to do with you?"
"I don't know, Doc," I say. "What are you going to do with me?"
He smiles, a smile I'll later see on Cav's face. A smile that tells me everything is in control, and he's being nice, and so I should be nice. Or else. "Well, that's up to you, Alexa. I hope you understand that."
"That's great." I'm dressed in a hospital gown, the fabric crisp as paper. They won't let me have real clothes. That would be too humanizing. "Can I leave?"
Stoddard's smile turns impatient. "You know we can't do that, Alexa. Someone like you has very special needs. Someone with your abilities... well, you just can't function out there. You need someone to look after you. That's what we promised your mother, and that's what we intend to do."
"I'm so glad you're looking out for me."
"All we want is for you to realize your potential, Alexa." Like he's my fucking guidance counselor. "Someone like you has an opportunity to be someone truly special. You could be magnificent, Alexa. You could use your abilities to help people, to protect them."
I don't say anything.
"I don't think you realize the position you're in, Alexa. We've made no small investment in you, in terms of money and time."
"And you want a return on that investment," I say.
He nods, glad to see I'm being reasonable. "Yes."
"So, do what? I put on some yellow tights and fight the mob? Maintain plausible deniability in Afghanistan? You've got to be kidding."
"Alexa, let's not be naive," Stoddard says, and snaps the folder shut. Let's not. As if we're on the same side and I just haven't realized it yet.
I look at my name on the tab again. I barely recognize it. I try to remember who I was before the needles.
Stoddard's still talking. "You have a huge opportunity in front of you, and you're just going to throw it away. You have to understand that we are prepared to take whatever measures are necessary to keep you safe–"
I laugh. He doesn't like that. He thinks I'm laughing at him. I'm not. I'm laughing because I'm already safe, safe as houses, locked away under some mountain and drugged up, invisible to the world, invisible to everything but the cameras and the peepholes and the CT scanner. What could be safer?
But he's angry now, and he decides to play hardball.
"You need to smarten up, Alexa," he says. "If you want to keep your family safe. Do you understand? They'll be safe as long as you cooperate with us."
"And if I don't?"
"Then we may have to do something we'd regret." He glares at me. "Do you understand?"
"Sure." I don't suppose Stoddard ever quite figures out the joke, because I blink and he's gone. In his place, there's a living, shrieking column of flame.
The walls blacken. The klaxons roar.
In a few minutes, soldiers will burst in and fire tranquilizer darts into my neck .
But right now, I just watch Stoddard burn, thinking of matchboxes on a hot August day.
*
Eighteen months ago. Almost done.
They can't really hold me after that. I find out I can burn through steel after all, and I'm finally mad enough to try. I get out of my cell and blast my way out of the compound. I don't remember much of it. The frequent drugs and sleep deprivation had turned it all into a blur of charred bodies and hot metal dripping like orange rain. I hurt a lot of people. I consider it payback. I've never been very good at doing the right thing.
I go to ground. I track down my mother, the only person I ever trusted. I show up on her doorstep in stolen clothes, wild-eyed and weeping. I tell her what they'd done to me. I beg for us to go away together, somewhere safe, somewhere where they won't find me. All of a sudden, I'm a little girl again, trusting my fate to someone else's hands, hoping they'll make me safe.
Mother hugs me close. Strokes my hair. Smiles. Tells me everything will be okay. Gives
me some tea to calm my nerves. Then goes into the other room and calls the Project on her cell.
They aren't far away, because if I were them, this is the first place I would have looked. I didn't care. I just wanted my mother. Somehow, I trusted that she'd make everything all right again. I don't know why I thought that.
I catch her in the act. and it's one more needle in my heart, one more smile that hides a lie. Now I'm the one asking the questions. When she doesn't answer me, I hurt her. It's easy to hurt people by this time. She doesn't ask forgiveness. Maybe she doesn't think what she did was wrong. Maybe she knows I won't forgive her anyway.
Before they show up, she tells me how she'd known about the Project from the beginning. How they'd paid her to give me treatments. How she'd put it in my food. How the big show of Stoddard showing up on my door was for my benefit. How they'd been known each other for years. How she took the money because Dad's job didn't even pay for the mortgage, much less the bills. How I should be grateful, how she did it for me.
She tells me everything. More than I can take, I guess, because when the Project agents burst through the door with their helmets and tranq guns, I blow the house into an inferno. My mother goes up with it.
It's hot enough that she doesn't feel anything. She burns to ash. So there's your heroine. Matricide and cowardice. It would make a shitty comic book.
I run. But they find me.
*
One year ago. A new compound, a new cell. A better cell.
They introduce me to Cav. My first instinct is to burn him. That's how far gone I am. But he doesn't jab me with needles, doesn't deliver ultimatums or make veiled threats. They have nothing to threaten me with anymore. I've killed the last person who ever meant anything to me.
He smiles. He talks to me. He tells me about the Project, how they really are trying to build an elite infiltration and assault unit. Which is a bad-ass and sanitized way of describing a group of thugs who kill people. About how the people who work on the Project can do things no one else can do. How we really could be heroes, just for one day.
His smile makes me trust him. He does what no amount of threats and coercion could do. He makes me believe. I believe in the Project's cause.
So I go to work for the people who stuck me full of needles and questions. We go after criminals and terrorists, in the places the law can't get to. A year goes by. The bodies stack up while I grow back my conscience. The Project tells me the people I kill are bad, implying that somehow makes me good. I believe that, too, for awhile. Not because it's true, but because I don't have anything else left.
After awhile, I fall in love with Cav. I believe he loves me back. Maybe he even believes it too.
It takes a while for my own lies to wear thin enough to see through. When they do, I ask Cav to flee the Project with me. Go somewhere far away and start again. I cry.
He cries. But he's a true believer. He says no. So I run.
But in the end, Cav finds me again.
*
"It was always me," Cav says again. "That's my ability. Do you understand? I can find others like me. Like us. That's how the Project found you after you ran away the second time."
"So you led them here," I say. I don't want my coffee anymore. "You led them here, and told them where to aim the gun, and when to shoot. Well, now that you put it that way, Cav, I see no reason not to trust you."
"Alexa –"
"Fuck you, Cav," I grip my fork, and it's getting hot, bending like silver putty in my hand. I have to be careful not to let the waitress take it. If she touches it, her skin will bubble off like melted cheese, and the sniper will probably just shoot. Stoddard was right, after all this time. I was safe there, in the Project. Safer than I would ever be out here.
"I didn't want it to be this way, Alexa," Cav says. "I didn't expect this to happen. It was just a job to me. It was just something I did. They paid me very well. I didn't expect to care. To be honest, I didn't even think about the people I found as people."
I can understand that. I didn't think of Stoddard as people.
"I don't want to take you back to Project," he says. "I want us to go away. Just you and me."
"Awfully tricky way of proposing, Cav," I say. "The sniper rifle and all, how can a girl resist?"
He looks down at his cup and doesn't say anything. See, that was Cav too. He had lofty ideas and made shitty plans. I liked that about him.
I don't imagine Cav will ever know how close I came to taking his offer. Even if it was all a lie, it was a lie I could enjoy living for a little while.
But I want it too much. And the Project knows that. Cav is their tool, just like I once was. But if they wouldn't let me go, they sure as shit wouldn't let him.
I have to kill him. But I can't. Whatever is left of me still loves him.
So I have to hurt him as much as I possibly can.
"Now I want you to listen to me," I say. "Can you do that for a minute?"
He looks up, and nods silently. I try to swallow down the tight feeling in my throat. I am, after all, probably about to die. But my gaze is steel. It has to be, or I'll fly apart.
"I don't know yet how far I can go. You've seen a little of what I can do, but I've never really pushed it. Do you understand? I've never really tried. And I've gotten this far by not really trying. If you and the Project don't leave me alone, I'm going to find out how far I can go. I'm going to find you, and I'm going to kill all of you. Starting with you, Cav. Starting with you right now, if you don't turn around and leave."
"Alexa, please –"
The look in his eyes puts a knife in my stomach. I know he means it. It's not an act. He means every word. That's why I can't say yes.
"Don't say anything else. Get up and walk away, Cav. Tell them what I said."
He pushes his chair back and stands up. Opens his mouth to say something, shuts it again. He looks broken. I take a drink of coffee that I don't want, and stare past him. He turns to go. I put down my coffee and close my eyes, taking a long, slow breath. I wonder to myself if I can stop a bullet, melt it in its trajectory, vaporize it before it blows through my skull and sprays my brains all over this shitty diner.
I open my eyes and look left. There it is: a dim glint of metal gun barrel from a cracked second-floor window.
I smile and wink. The tabletop blisters and cracks under me. The air turns to smoke. The diner window bends out and shatters, the muzzle flare from the rifle lost in blossoming flames. The building across the street explodes into shards of smoking brick.
Surprisingly, I manage not to get shot.
Screams as the people scatter. The diner is starting to burn now, flames licking at the wooden counters and the cheap furniture. A young couple cowers in the corner, staring at me like I'm a monster.
I can't take the front door – mostly because it's a smoking plank lying out in the street. I decide to go out the back and burn myself an exit. A charred oval appears in the back wall, splitting open to give birth to cinders. I'm careful not to hurt any bystanders. I've gotten better over time. I can thank the Project for that much. I'll never be a hero, but at least I can try to be a human being.
Shouts from outside as the agents close in. They'll start pumping rounds into the building in a few seconds. I want to stay and protect these people, but I'd just be endangering them more. The safest thing for them is for me to get as far away as possible.
I have to run again, and hope they're smart enough to stop looking for me. Even though I know they won't. I only hope it's not Cav next time. I can't live with the temptation of a life I'll never have.
That's how he saved me, you see. It wasn't the training or the Project missions. Cav made me feel like I was somebody. And as long as I'm somebody, they'll never let me rest. Cav helped me understand that.
So I'll be nobody, for as long as I can. For as long as they'll let me.
As I step through the smoking hole I've made in the wall, I see Cav,
crouched behind an overturned table, looking at me. I don't see any love. Not anymore. I just see terror.
It's good. It's the best goodbye I can hope for.
I blink and he's gone.
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