by Loren Walker
Tears welled up, and she turned away from Mr. Asanto, dragging the back of her hand across her eyes. Why did they focus on the little, stupid things she could do? What about all the other parts of CaLarca that were good?
A small rap on the floor drew her attention. When she met Mr. Asanto’s eyes, he mouthed a word to her.
Freedom.
And there was no grey deceit around him now.
*
It was nothing to leave her life behind. Rumors had circulated for years among her classmates that she was a witch; eventually, she stopped correcting it, and kept to herself in school.
When she was packed and ready, her parents embraced her and told her how they looked forward to her return, how they knew Joran Asanto would take care of their baby. CaLarca took in the unexpected warmth, for the brief moment that it lasted.
The train to the Kings Canyons was the most luxurious thing CaLarca had ever seen. On the day’s journey northwest, through mountains and farmlands and cities, she walked the length of the train, trailing her fingers over the seats, the railings, the edges of the metal doors. In between wanderings, she sat with Joran and listened to his stories.
“You’re not the only one, you know,” he told her. “Not by far. There’s so many others with your skills, and even greater abilities. My wife Tehmi, for example, can see the future. You’ll like her. She’s one of the participants in this experiment. She’ll watch out for you during all this.”
The word experiment made her nervous. “How many kids – people - are doing this?”
“Nine, including you and me.”
“Are there other kids, or - ?”
“Yes, three others. Everyone else is a bit older. But you don’t have to be friends with them; you just treat them with courtesy, like they are your co-workers.”
She liked the way Joran spoke to her like an adult: frank, without dumbing down the details. It made her feel brave enough to ask, “If we’re workers, do we get paid?”
Joran grinned. “You do, actually. It’s the least I can do, for your participation.”
“How much?”
“250,000 rana.”
CaLarca couldn’t breathe. He must be lying. But there was no gray aura around him.
“It’s true,” Joran said. “Everyone equally paid, non-taxed, in a secure account that can never be taken away from you. That’s for you, CaLarca, not your parents. They never have to know about it.”
“You’re really that rich?” was the only thing she could think of to say.
Joran smirked. “I guess I am,” he admitted.
CaLarca licked her lips. “I’m not going to do any weird surgeries or take medicines or anything,” she announced.
Joran laughed. “Deal.”
Inside, CaLarca squealed with glee. 250,000 rana! Hers, all hers, nothing for her parents, the government, no one but her. She could go anywhere she wanted. She could buy a house. She could leave Osha. Her mind swam with ideas of what she could do with all that money…
“There is one non-negotiable rule, however,” Joran added. “You cannot leave until the end of the program. You must stay underground, and within the borders of the base.”
The noise in her head died down. Locking her up underground with strangers, experimenting with her strange, frightening abilities, what was she doing? How could her parents let her go with someone like that?
It’s too late, she reasoned, staring out of the window, as the grasses turned to sand. I made the deal. I’m doing this.
I’m doing this, she told herself again, steeling her nerves. I’m not going to be afraid.
When they disembarked, CaLarca shielded her eyes, looking for civilization. Besides the dusty trainstop, there were rocks and sand, the sky above a piercing blue. More footprints led into the desert, all headed in the same direction.
Joran jumped down next to her. He drew out a parasol and opened it with a poof, holding it over CaLarca’s head. The gesture looked so comical to CaLarca, she bit her lips to hold back her giggles. The wooden handle was smooth, with a floral carving along its curved end. And it did block out the sun. She twirled it a bit between her fingers. She felt almost like a lady.
“It’s a bit of a walk,” he told her, pointing to the horizon. “But it’ll be worth it. Come along.”
It was more than a little walk. Four hours later, throats dry, lungs parched, they finally came to the edge of the canyon. Kings Canyons, Joran told her, coughing a little. CaLarca took it in. Gorgeous and isolated, the sands were crimson, the rocky cliff-face streaked with silver. A few huts sat by the precipice, long since abandoned, crumbling. Basic shelter, Joran explained. And an easy entry. Because inside one of the stone huts was a cellar, with a trap door built into its floor.
“It’s an old military base,” Joran told her, when he hauled open the trapdoor, and she stared down into the dark stairwell. “Long since abandoned, so I made it my own. Three distinct levels, training, sleeping, meals and recreation. It’s quite extraordinary. You won’t even miss the surface.”
At the bottom of the stairs appeared a beam of light. Inside, a woman greeted CaLarca, gesturing for her to come, introducing herself as Joran’s wife, Tehmi. Sleek and pretty in a faded way, she was also visibly pregnant, and perpetually flushed. Behind her, a makeshift medical clinic came into view, windowless, but white and clean and glistening, packed with IV stands, boxes and crates. Two gurneys were set up. An armchair was pushed into the corner. There was another door on the other side of the room; as she stood in the clinic, CaLarca couldn’t stop staring at it, wondering where it led.
“Medical review,” Tehmi told her. “There are two requirements for entry into this study. First, an injection. A specific combination of chemicals, designed to activate if your body houses any NINE characteristics. If you do, you’ll gain a small burn on your back. It will heal quickly.”
CaLarca recoiled. “You’re going to burn me?”
“It’s technically a burn,” Tehmi explained. “And it will scar. But it’s minor. And required.”
“Do I have to?” CaLarca asked, glancing at Joran.
“You can do this,” Joran told her. “I know you’re strong enough.”
They wouldn’t do anything to hurt her. They were adults. CaLarca shut her eyes tight, and gathering up her courage, she nodded and stuck out her arm.
A cool, wet swipe on her skin, and a sharp pinch.
Then the small of her back began to prickle. The skin to the right of her spine grew hot, prickling, burning, then searing. Shifting back and forth, CaLarca gripped the edge of the gurney, biting her lip to hold back her cry of pain.
“Very good,” she heard Tehmi murmur from behind, holding up the hem of CaLarca’s shirt. “Almost there.”
In twenty seconds, the heat started to recede. Quickly, Tehmi applied some kind of cold balm, and a bandage. The burn itched under the gauze. CaLarca did her best to ignore it, blinking back her tears.
“Now I have to put you to sleep to do some tests,” Tehmi instructed. “You’ll have a headache when you wake up, but it will go away.”
Still woozy from the burn, she wanted to object. But her thoughts turned to the $250,000 rana, and Joran’s promises. She had to comply. She had to get through this.
“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” Tehmi said, sliding on gloves and wheeling over an intravenous unit. “I promise, before you know it, you’ll wake up and be ready to go downstairs and meet everyone. Doesn’t that sound exciting?”
Maybe a little. CaLarca swallowed the sick feeling in her stomach as she climbed up onto the gurney. She extended her arm to Tehmi’s waiting hands, and braced herself.
A burning pinch, first in the top of her hand. Then a duller one, at the base of her skull.
And everything went dark.
“CaLarca.”
Her head was swimming, throbbing with pain, like a knife plunging into her neck.
“Can you hear me?”
“Yes,” CaLarca croaked,
surprised at the sound. How long had it been? Through her muddled vision, she saw Joran rise from his seat in the corner. Tehmi was gone. She tried to ask why, but her voice wouldn’t work.
Joran helped CaLarca to sit up. “Hold onto me,” he instructed. “A quick walk downstairs, and then you can rest.”
CaLarca could barely see, gripping his arm, stumbling down a flight of red-walled stairs, the world swirling in her drugged vision, turning sideways and forming vortexes.
Everything went black, then to candlelight softness. Warmth enveloped her. She didn’t know where she was, the foreign smell, the rough sheets, the too-soft mattress.
A knocking sound. CaLarca opened her eyes. A metal door slid open, letting light into the tiny bedroom.
CaLarca sat up, wincing at the immediate throb in her head, and looked around. The room was small, and square, and furnished with a twin bed, a dresser and a chair in the corner. Her room, CaLarca realized. How much time had passed?
Tehmi stood at the entryway, one hand on her stomach.
“Come along,” the woman said pleasantly. “Everyone is here. Time to work.”
*
Just as Joran said, there were nine participants in the NINE study.
Two girls close to CaLarca’s age, fraternal twins. Shantou was the redhaired one; Marette was the blonde. They were like pale aliens, huddled together and whispering. And there was a boy, Ganasan, the youngest, maybe ten years old, so shy that his face was perpetually pink. He didn’t speak a word to anyone, even when addressed. When the twins tittered at him, he grew redder.
Looking around, CaLarca was disappointed. Were they her only option for friends?
She preferred the look of the older group. Kuri was maybe twenty, black and bronze, lean and mysterious. She got a funny feeling in her chest when he looked at her. To cover it up, she stared back at him without blinking. That seemed to amuse him.
There were two other men, too. Yann’s complexion was pallid, broken blood vessels along the edge of his nose, his voice a perpetual mumble. Zarek Voss was even older, olive-skinned and bearded, heavy around the middle and grinning at everyone like some kindly uncle. Tehmi and Joran rounded out the group. Nine of them, underground, for the next three months.
CaLarca was slotted into the Nadi subgroup, along with the blonde Marette, and Voss the bearded uncle. The handsome Kuri, redhaired Shantou and balding Yann were the Ekos. Tehmi and the boy, Ganasan, were both Insynns. Joran didn’t identify as anything, strangely enough. He just wandered between the groups, brought materials or injections, listened, nodded, or made notes on his Lissome.
CaLarca watched everyone, too, in the beginning. For the first few days, she refused to participate, huddled in the corner. Her head still pounded and her back itched like mad. In the privacy of her tiny bedroom, she removed the bandage and angled her body in a mirror to catch sight of the strange, swirling lines, a deep orange brown, on the small of her back. It was almost pretty.
In sessions, CaLarca watched Tehmi and Ganasan interact; she was sweet to the boy, patiently explaining things, even as he refused to respond. But sometimes, she let him touch her arm, and vice versa. When that happened, something passed between them, something that made both their bodies stiffen. But it wasn’t her group, so she wasn’t allowed to ask questions, as per Joran’s instructions. She was to get to know her fellow Nadis, memorize the provided diagrams of the body, read Joran’s notes on previous studies of Nadis, trade their own knowledge, and experiment. None of which she was ready to do. Not yet.
When the groups broke for the day, and everyone took their designated meal packs, CaLarca explored her new home. There were three floors to the base. The first with a large open room for training and exploration. The second with two large spaces, one for procuring their meal packs and liquids for the day, the other for recreation. The third and lowest floor with several small bedrooms, one for each of them, save for the twins, who shared a single space. All three floors were strangely designed, unfinished in areas. Doors and panels opened to rock, or small, dark holes in the earth, too small to shimmy into. The ventilation system stopped and started, sometimes blowing ice cold, sometimes hot and rusty-smelling. She thought she found a secret door, once, on the third-floor stairwell; when running her hands over the rocky ridges, she felt a line, and then another, hidden from the naked eye, but something was there. Still, she couldn’t wedge her fingers into anything, she couldn’t figure out what it was. So, she gave up. She had panic attacks in the dark. She cried and cried under the blanket of her bed. No one came to soothe her.
Eventually, CaLarca’s fear wore down into exhaustion. It wasn’t the worst setting, she reasoned. At least she had meals, and privacy, and safety. She had no other choice. It would be worth it when it was finished.
So CaLarca joined her teammates, and began to talk and read. Through reading, Calarca learned that manifestation was only one part of Nadi; the other two in her group could manipulate energy that already existed in the world. CaLarca generated Nadi from within, and that was rare, just as Joran said. Zarek asked her a thousand questions, utterly fascinated with her, to Marette’s visible jealousy.
With all the attention, despite her earlier protests, CaLarca was drawn into the excitement and the experimentations. Joran offered the groups a number of methods: hypnosis, psychotropic drugs, sensory deprivation, meditation, adrenaline infusion, whole brain thinking, working to activate the dual hemispheres, all to see whether their NINE abilities were decreased or magnified. With certain treatments, CaLarca’s Nadi energy flared hot and dangerous. One time, she grew so engulfed with Nadi that her heart threatened to explode. It was Zarek who plunged his fist into her stomach to draw out the excess energy while the other NINE members held her down. When that happened, CaLarca became a celebrity, as did Zarek for stopping it. He deferred all the accolades, but CaLarca drank them in.
Everyone wanted to know what went through her head in that moment, how exactly it felt when she was on the brink of explosion. The boy, Ganasan, even brought her dinner in bed that night, blushing as he handed over the tray to her surprised hands. “Just thought you should eat,” she heard him mumble before he bolted from the room.
There were more incredible moments. Ganasan experienced what was called a “full Insynn flash,” where he received a flash forward of events to come when he touched Tehmi’s hand. The boy convulsed so violently that he went unconscious, sending Yann running with the first aid kit. When he finally woke up, covered in sweat and shivering, Ganasan went to his room and refused to speak to anyone. It unnerved the group. For the rest of the day, everyone paused before using their abilities, found themselves breaking from long trains of thought.
In the evening, CaLarca carried a freshly-heated meal pack into Ganasan’s room. The door was ajar. Someone else was already in there, sitting on the boy’s bedside, talking in a low whisper. At her entry, Kuri’s dark eyes swung over to CaLarca’s, his words dying off. She felt that funny pull in her chest again, but this time, there was a weird twist to it, as she caught sight of the hazy gray aura around Kuri. Whatever he was saying to the boy, he was lying.
“Think about it,” Kuri told the boy. “Whatever you want in exchange.” Then he left.
“What is he asking you to do?” CaLarca asked as she set down his tray.
“Nothing,” the boy mumbled.
“You don’t have to talk to me about it,” CaLarca added. “But I know what it’s like to lose control. It’s scary, right?”
His cheeks flushed crimson. “You brought me dinner?”
CaLarca smiled at him. “Sure. You did it for me.”
“He wants my memory.” The boy’s voice was barely a whisper.
“Your memory?” CaLarca looked over her shoulder for eavesdroppers. “What do you mean?”
“The Insynn rush. He wants to go inside my head and experience what I felt, what I thought. As research.” Ganasan glanced at her. “Do you think I should let him? I don’t know anything about Ek
os. Would it hurt?”
“I don’t know,” CaLarca admitted. “It might. But – “
She thought about it for a minute, forming the right words. “He should only experiment on people who are willing to do it,” she concluded. “So if you don’t want to do it, then don’t.”
“Okay,’ he said, smiling for the first time, his eyes shiny. “You’re right.”
But Kuri was insistent, not just with Ganasan, but with the group. He was always hinting, whispering, asking for permission to peer inside their minds. He claimed it as his specialty as an Eko, as a means to better understand the human soul. His goal was to gain the trust and respect of everyone in the base, and earn the opportunity to “touch” them. So far, no one was willing, save for the redhaired twin, Shantou. When they sat together, a charge of electricity coursed between them. They started spending more time together, CaLarca noticed. Marette, the blonde twin, was on her own more and more, watching mournfully. Ganasan kept staring at CaLarca from across the room, a strange look on his face. CaLarca chose to ignore it.
One night, there was a knock on CaLarca’s door, startling her from near-sleep. A rumpled blonde head peered through.
“What do you want?” CaLarca whispered.
“Could I stay in here for a little while?” Marette whispered back.
“I guess. Why?”
The girl shut the door behind her. She looked pale, and disturbed. “Kuri’s in there,” she confessed to CaLarca.
“Oh.” CaLarca didn’t know what to say.
Marette moved to the corner, sinking into the armchair. Her bare feet kicked in the air, rustling her white cotton nightgown. “I think he’s gross,” she confessed to CaLarca, who remained in her bed. “And Shantou’s being dumb.”
“Maybe,” CaLarca said. “How long - I mean, when do you think you might - ?”
Marette shot a wounded look at CaLarca. Both girls went silent. The night was filled with echoes, pipes, clicking rocks, the hint of voices. CaLarca would have thought being underground would be quieter. But there was always something making a sound.