by Jackson Ford
“Super-soldier,” he says at the same time as me.
We look at each other, Nic briefly taking his eyes off the road.
“Kind of, although they never really called it that. They wanted to build a person who could end a battle before it even started.” The words aren’t mine—they’re mom’s. It’s all too easy to picture her saying them, see the way her eyes shone. I push on, not wanting to think too hard about this. “But the government wouldn’t let them just go experiment on humans. Maybe they might have pulled it off now, but there was no way they were getting permission then. So they quit.”
“Yeah, but… I mean, Teagan, you can’t just mess with someone’s genes like that, no matter how smart you are.”
“Really? I throw a giant flowerpot through your apartment window with my mind, and you’re still not convinced?”
He grimaces. “Fine. OK.”
“You don’t get how smart my parents were. Or how determined my mom was after they dropped off the genome project. Money wasn’t an issue—my dad’s dad made a lot of it, back in the 70s, and he wasn’t around any more. They had a lot of connections with the people who made the equipment from their work on the project. They bought a place in Wyoming, a big ranch, and got to work.”
“Got to work with… what?” Nic looks like he’s struggling to take this all in. “I don’t know about a ton about gene science, but don’t you need, like, subjects? Embryos or whatever?”
“Yeah.”
“So what—”
“You have to understand, they wanted this more than anything in the world. Mom most of all.”
His voice is quiet. “What did they do?”
“They—”
I stop dead.
“They… what?” Nic says. When I don’t answer, he says, “Don’t leave me hanging.”
“Holy shit.” My words are a whisper. It’s all fitting into place. All of it.
“I know how the killer can do what I can,” I say. “I know how they got their ability.”
FORTY-ONE
Teagan
“Wait, what? How?”
I can’t believe I didn’t see it before. “You’re right. My mom and dad needed embryos to experiment on. So they… they’d find women. Prostitutes, women who couldn’t afford to have a kid. They’d offer them money.”
The car is dead silent. On the radio the Eagles are singing very, very softly about Hotel California.
“They didn’t have ethics committees to oversee them. They had plenty of money, and subjects. That was how they ironed out a lot of the early errors, before they figured out how to do it for real. And what if—”
“—one of them wasn’t an error,” he says quietly. He still hasn’t looked at me. “So what, they just let this woman go?”
“Makes sense, right? If they thought they’d failed, and the mother had been paid… Maybe they did something with the foetus in the womb… Fuck, I don’t know, Nic, but it makes sense. And she gave birth to someone with my ability…”
“Hell no,” Nic says. “I still don’t buy it. I’m not denying that you can definitely do some shit. But genetics? You’re telling me your mom and dad switched a few genes around, and suddenly you’ve got telekinesis?”
“Psychokinesis.”
“Whatever. It doesn’t make any sense. Like, at all. That’s not how genes work. Has it occurred to you that maybe there was some other explanation?”
“Like what?” I can’t keep the weariness out of my voice, and this time it has nothing to do with physical exhaustion.
“I don’t know.”
“Neither did the government. After they pulled me out, they spent months grilling me, trying to understand how I existed. They kept saying the same thing: that there was no way genetics could create kids like us.”
“So how—”
“Mom and Dad always told us they’d modified our genes. They had a genetics lab in their barn. They had backgrounds in high-level genetics. If it looks like a genetic experiment and quacks like a genetic experiment…”
“But you don’t know for sure.” He changes lanes quickly, jerking the wheel. “Didn’t you ever want to find out?”
I don’t know how to answer that.
For my entire life with them, Mom and Dad stuck to the gene story. It’s not that I never thought to question it—it’s that I didn’t know enough to tell them they were wrong. And by the time Moira Tanner got me out, Mom and Dad and almost all their material were gone for ever.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how they did it—thinking, and reading, trying to wrap my head around plasmids, drug-resistant cassettes, CRISPR, ex-vivo modification. It got me precisely nowhere. All I know is that at some point before I was born, my parents had a breakthrough that sent their research in a new direction—and led to me.
It took a long time of me banging my head against a wall before I decided that it wasn’t worth it. The simplest answer was the original one: that my parents were way ahead of their time. If there was something else, there was no way I was going to find it, and I discovered that I wasn’t willing to try any more. I didn’t want to live in the past. That part of my life was done.
“You said kids.”
“Huh?”
Nic shifts in his seat. “You said kids like us. You had siblings?”
“Yeah. Brother and sister.”
“Older? Younger?”
“Both older. They were twins. Two years ahead.”
“They were tele—psychokinetic too?”
“No.” In the window my reflection looks like a ghost. “Chloe could… she could sense infrared. She had these pits in her skin that could detect body heat. It looked like really bad acne, actually. And Adam, he—
I stop, my memory filled with burning smoke, dry heat baking onto my skin. The pop of wood as the roof beams burned. The smell of flesh cooking.
“Adam never needed to sleep.”
“For real?”
“Mom said they altered his…” It takes real effort to recall the words. “His sleep-wake homeostasis. His body could function without it.” And it made him completely, homicidally insane.
“Why those powers?”
“What do you mean?”
“You can move things with your mind, your sister sees infrared, your brother doesn’t sleep. Why those?”
“Imagine a soldier who doesn’t need to carry ammo or night-vision goggles. One who never has to rest. You have those, you could end a war before it started.”
A car pulls up next to us at a light: a group of teenagers, laughing like they don’t have a single thing in the world to worry about. I make myself look away. “Mom and Dad couldn’t put all of it in one of us—that was too complicated, even for them. But they wanted to show the world that it could be done.”
“What was it like?” Nic says.
“What was what like?”
“Growing up with your mom and dad. Your siblings.”
“You know what homeschooling is, right?”
He gives me a look.
“Well, we were, obviously. Can’t have three superpowered kids running around kindergarten. But my mom and dad… they weren’t evil.”
“Seriously? They—”
“I know. I know what I said before, about the babies and everything. And yes, it was messed up. But you gotta understand, after they had us…”
I’ve gone through this in my head so many times, and I still struggle with it. “They weren’t bad parents. They didn’t mistreat us. It wasn’t a cult. We didn’t get to hang out with other kids or anything, but when you’re seven years old and you’ve got a brother and sister and ten thousand acres of countryside to mess around in, you don’t really know what you’re missing.”
“You didn’t ever want to hang out with other kids?”
“The one thing Mom and Dad drilled into us, from like age three, was that we could never show anybody our powers without telling them. That if we did, people would come and hurt us. Hurt us, and take t
hem away.”
“That is messed up.”
“Also true. But they made us believe we were all special, and gave us a huge wilderness to play in. Like I said, kind of hard to know what you’re missing.”
“And nobody came along? Nobody ever visited?”
“Of course they visited. We weren’t completely isolated, and we still had to go into town for groceries or whatever. We just never showed what we could do in front of strangers.”
“And you were homeschooled.” He nods to himself. “Nobody from the government ever came by, said maybe you should get these kids into a classroom?”
“Wyoming, dude. Nobody gives a fuck.”
“Fair enough.”
“And like, Mom and Dad looked after us. Yeah, it was homeschooling, but we could read and write. We didn’t think Jesus was coming to murder all the gay people. And they taught us about our abilities too—plenty of tests in the lab, out in the barn. Well, tests for Chloe and me—Adam’s power wasn’t really something he did, it was more like something he was. He was smarter than me and my sister, mostly because he could stay up all night reading. Mom and Dad couldn’t buy enough books for him.”
If memories have a taste, these are dark chocolate: bittersweet, mysterious. Mom in her usual jeans and flannel shirt, sitting with us at the big table, a stack of books in front of her and her greying hair pulled back in a ponytail. Dad in the kitchen behind her, whistling very quietly, shoulders hunched over something hot and bubbling on the stove. The windows behind him steamed up, hiding the outside world. Cooking chilli con carne with homemade chilli paste. Venison from the elk that sometimes wandered onto the property. Then fruit salad, rough-cut, tossed with mint and brown sugar.
He’d let me cook with him—neither Chloe nor Adam was ever interested. I would stand next to him at the kitchen counter, hulling strawberries or trimming sinew or chopping herbs.
Those memories open up more. The ones that hurt the most because they’re so good.
What Mom and Dad did to us was awful, and what Chloe and Adam became was… even worse. But it doesn’t change the fact that I still rode horses with Adam and Chloe, played tag, shot air rifles, the three of us tearing across our little chunk of paradise. It doesn’t change how good Dad’s food tasted, or how it felt to hug my mom.
“So why’d you leave?” Nic says, jerking me out of my thoughts.
“Puberty.”
“Come on.”
“I’m not actually kidding. All three of us were fine until we were about twelve or thirteen. Then it’s like something inside us just… woke up. Chloe and I had the usual teen bullshit, but Adam…”
Nic flicks me a glance, not saying anything.
I swallow. “They had to lock him up. He stopped being able to tell what was real and what wasn’t. He… he hurt Mom.”
Nic says nothing.
“Mom and Dad started to fight. About everything. About us. Chloe hated them for what they had done to Adam, because they were twins and all, and it just got worse and worse, you know? Mom and Dad were still testing us, or trying to, and they started to get angry when we couldn’t do stuff.”
I can feel tears pricking at my eyes—even now, years after the fact. “I can’t move anything organic with my mind. I don’t know why. It doesn’t listen to me. When I was little it didn’t matter, but as I got older Mom started making out like it was my fault… like I wasn’t trying. She said the same things to Chloe, when she couldn’t see far enough or deep enough.”
I’m clenching my fists and have to make myself relax. “The one time, Mom got this cat. A kitten, really. She told me to move it, or she was gonna kill it.”
“Jesus.”
“She didn’t, in the end. Just let it go. But she would never have done that before. And that’s when they really started to lean on the whole super-soldier thing. End all wars. Greater purpose. Problem was, none of us wanted that any more.”
“Why didn’t you just leave?”
“I thought about it. A lot. Nearly ran a couple of times too. But they were still my mom and dad, so I told myself it would get better.”
“And Chloe?”
“She’d never have left Adam. And that was the problem. Mom and Dad fucked up—they kept the two of them separated after Adam lost it. She didn’t know how bad he’d got, so when she let him out—”
“She let him out?”
“He got in the house.” My voice is a dull monotone. “If it hadn’t been my day to chop the firewood, I would’ve been inside too. Mom was dead. Dad was dead. Chloe was… He’d broken her leg, I think. The fire had reached the top floor by then, and he was just… laughing.”
I rub my face as if I can shield myself from the flames. When I pull my hand away, he’s there. Adam. Grinning back at me, eyes horribly bright, face ringed in fire. I blink, and he’s gone.
“He came for me, and I just ran. Bolted. I wanted to save Chloe, but it was like… like I didn’t have a choice. Before he could get to me, the whole roof collapsed. Crushed them both. Missed me by like half an inch.
“I don’t remember a ton of what happened next, but someone must have spotted the smoke. By the time the fire brigade got there, the house and most of the barn were gone. Nearly all of my folks’ research was destroyed, all except one or two computer towers. One of those towers had video files on it.”
He whistles long and low. “Tanner?”
“Not right then. But once they realised what had been happening, the government took over pretty fast. They put me in this facility. In Waco. Every test my mom and dad had ever done, they made me do again, and again.”
I don’t remember a lot about the place they kept me. I do remember crying a lot. And the two psychologists they assigned to me: an older guy with round glasses who had a way of looking down his nose at me, and a young woman with red hair who always seemed like she was about to start screaming just because we were in the same room. Most of all, I remember grey. Everything grey. Walls, ceiling, my bed frame. The rocks in the tiny fenced-off garden.
“They didn’t hurt me,” I say. “But they wouldn’t let me leave. Every time I asked, they’d just throw more shit at me—comic books and video games and fucking Seventeen magazine. Like I was a zoo animal they had to keep fed. Of course, after a while I realised I didn’t have to put up with their shit any more. Broke a few locks. A jaw or two. Made it all the way to the end of the driveway before they tasered me. After that they got smarter. Kept me dosed.”
As I talk, Nic’s eyes get wider and wider. We’ve come to a stop in the tangle of roads where the Ventura and Hollywood Freeways meet. We’ve stopped because the traffic has got worse. So has the hooting. And despite the fact that the windows are closed and the aircon is off, smoke digs into the back of my throat.
“How long were you there for?” he asks.
“Four years? Give or take?”
“Four? Holy fuck.”
“I don’t remember a lot of it. And of course being dosed didn’t do wonders for my PK control. I don’t how long I was there for, but I guess at some point they decided I wasn’t worth keeping. The problem was, they couldn’t just pop me back into society because that might lead to all kinds of uncomfortable questions.”
There’s a sick, curdled feeling in the pit of my stomach. “Anyway, about that time Moira Tanner came by, introduced herself, said the government wanted to euthanise me and cut me open.”
“She…what?”
“I know. Kind of a downer.”
“Teagan, that’s… Jesus, you’re a U.S. citizen. They can’t do that.”
“Yeah, because the government is really good at taking care of its citizens. Point is, it didn’t happen—obviously. Tanner offered me a deal.”
And all at once I’m back in that tiny grey interrogation room, with a camera in each corner of the ceiling and the metal table with a big dent in the middle, like someone a lot larger than me had punched it in frustration. Tanner sitting opposite me, hands clasped, dark suit, white s
hirt buttoned to the neck. Hair pulled back. Eyes the colour of the room, and face as hard as the walls.
Here’s how it’s going to work. You’ll do the jobs I tell you to do, work with who I tell you to, live where I tell you to. In return, you’ll be my responsibility and under my protection. So long as you never reveal your abilities to anyone without security clearance, you can live a normal life.
“She’d keep the government off my back,” I tell Nic. “In return, I do whatever covert bullshit she needed done.”
“And you could never quit?”
“Nope.”
“Or live outside LA.”
“Nope.”
“But…” His face contorts like he’s struggling to put it all together. “You wanted to open a restaurant. How were you planning on—”
“Please. How hard could it be to run a kitchen and do black-ops shit on the side? Gotta admit, that’s a hell of a secret identity.”
“How are you still doing that?”
“Doing what?”
“Making jokes. All the shit that’s happened, and you still…”
“You’re right. I should totally be crying and screaming right now. Sorry, I’ll get on that.”
“No.” I look over to see that there’s genuine frustration on his face. “That’s not what I mean. You… you’re…normal.”
“Gee, thanks.”
He gives an exasperated growl. “What I mean is, I’ve known you for a while now. I’ve spent time with you. What you’re describing… it’s like you’re talking about a different person. If even half of what had happened to you happened to me, I’d be in an institution.”
He realises what he’s just said and drops his eyes. “Sorry. That kind of came out wrong.”
“Kind of.”
“But just—”
“Number one: it’s rude to diagnose someone like you just did. You should stop that. Number two: just because I look totally normal doesn’t mean everything’s OK. Number three…”
I don’t actually get to number three. Once more, I’m back in the facility—not just seeing it but feeling it. Feeling the awful, awful despair, the sense that everything had gone to shit and there was no way out. And then, worse, the numbness from the drugs after my escape attempt.