The microphone muffled voices in the background. A moment later, Lex came back on, clear as day. "Okay, Marigold. You've convinced me."
I smiled, much wider than if it had been all about the books. Because even though I apparently couldn't harm Lex while he was outside of my room, he was no longer the only one manipulating people around here. I didn't need his books, but I did need him to believe I needed them, to think he held this power over me.
What I took away from the Gerbil Test was that the White Coats, Lex included, and whoever he was accountable to, they would push me to the brink of death to get what they wanted from me. They might even kill me, if I refused them.
So I would give them what they wanted. I would betray myself and the promise I'd made. But I wouldn't let them get inside my head.
This was my Room 101 now but I wouldn't be their victim, not any longer.
I'd be the rat.
❚❚
THEY PUSHED ME to limits and beyond over the next few months. During that time, my "brother" Parker had always been a ghost in my thoughts, whispering in the halls of my mind, smiling at me from darkening recesses of memory. I dreamed about him often. Aside from Ms. O'Shaughnessy, he was the only real person I ever dreamed of--unless you counted my parents, who sometimes showed up in my dreams in various incarnations even though I didn't know what they looked like. I suppose those dreams of Parker, where he would show me kindness, where we would hold hands and sometimes kiss, had solidified our relationship long before I ever saw him again. I often woke up wondering if he dreamed of me the same nights I'd dreamt of him. If somehow we had shared the experience.
One day the scarred woman injected me with something that made me groggy and giggly before she brought me to a room so tall it could have been an old missile silo. At the center of the tall white room was a school desk, the kind made of chrome and orange fiberglass and wood laminate. It stood under a great big skylight, with a view of the perfect blue sky way, way up top.
"This is The Eye," the woman told me, and left me there to wander. We'd passed no one in the halls as we traveled there. It seemed as though, aside from Lex and me and the woman with the scar, the place was deserted.
I ran a hand along the smooth, circular wall, feeling cold where it must have been its outer edge, on the opposite curve of the wide room from the door we'd entered. Seeing the sky above got me really thinking of escape, though I'd been vaguely plotting it since the Gerbil Test. I wanted to work on a map in my head of what places might potentially lead outside, and how I might get out there. Aside from the single door and skylight, The Eye itself seemed to be impenetrable.
"Hello, Marigold," Lex said over a loudspeaker, his voice strained. He cleared his throat. I heard a small squeak I assumed to be his chair as he situated himself.
"Hiya, Lex," I replied brightly, feeling what I would later discover was very similar to drunkenness.
He chuckled. "You're sounding very chipper today."
"Why wouldn't I be? It's a beautiful day."
I heard the smile in his voice. "It is, isn't it? Marigold, why don't you have a seat at the desk so we can begin our lesson."
I sat obediently. He thanked me.
On the desktop were several sheets of blank beige drawing paper and three black Crayola crayons.
"Do you like to draw, Marigold?"
I shrugged. "I kinda suck at drawing."
"Well, that's not really the point of drawing, now is it?"
"I don't know." I was deliberately argumentative at that point. I couldn't let them have everything they wanted without a fight, or it would look suspicious.
"Could you do me a favor?"
I nodded.
"Pick up a crayon and just start drawing. Whatever pops into your head. A tree, a pony--"
"A pony?" I said, rolling my eyes.
"Right, you're too old for ponies. Well, why don't you draw something you dream about?"
Immediately Parker came to mind, and my cheeks flushed red. The camera pointing at my face buzzed. I felt their eyes on me, and it only made my face and neck hotter.
"Marigold?"
I cleared my throat. "Mm-hmm, yes?"
"Might be better to draw something you've never seen before, okay?"
I picked up a crayon, put the tip to the paper, no idea what I would draw, certain it would all end up looking like stick figures even if I force my imagination to play nice.
The walls began to rumble, as if the air conditioning had come on. The temperature didn't change, but I did feel a rising vibration in the legs of the desk. I hummed along with it, trying to find the right pitch, until my voice melded with the sound of the walls.
Feeling a tremendous pressure just to start something, whether from the White Coats or myself, I just started scribbling. The scribbles came together, darker in places, lighter in others. Eventually almond-shaped eyes begin to take shape. A sharp nose. A narrow mouth with tight lips. The crayon snapped and I kept going, wearing it down to a nub. Small ears with slight elfish upper curves. Angled eyebrows, one raised slightly higher in a look of suspicion. A square jaw and dimpled chin.
Finally, I set the crayon nub down on the page and looked at the woman I'd drawn. My own skill surprised me. I'd never drawn anything as realistic in my life. Whoever she was, I was certain I'd never seen her before.
The air conditioning died down, the hum giving way to silence.
"You're finished?" Lex's voice startled me. I held it up for him to see. I heard clapping in the background before he covered the mic. "That's good, Marigold. That's very good."
"Who is she?"
"I'm sure I don't know that. She came from your imagination, I suspect."
The woman with no name came to collect me and my drawing, and brought me back to my room. They gave me a chocolate popsicle with lunch, and we never spoke of the woman I drew again.
Over the next few months they asked me to draw more things, like men I'd never met, whose faces seemed to jump into my head full-born like the woman with the dimpled chin had the first time, and a bus, and black stretch limousines. During the second session I noticed the air conditioning or whatever it was began to hum again just before I started to draw, only it was a different tone from the first. I drew an angry-looking man with a small head, narrow eyes and a curled goatee. Again, he looked like no one I knew or had even dreamed.
Over the months, I began to see the pattern. The hum, the seemingly automatic drawing, the praise from Lex and the nameless woman. I never really got any better. All of my drawings remained scribbles, only vague impressions of what I supposed they were meant to be. And the tone of the hum changed every time. I began to understand it wasn't air conditioning at all. They were making the walls vibrate, controlling the sound. And something about that sound was connected to the scribbly people I drew for them.
One day the woman and I entered The Eye to find a standup piano set up where the desk used to be, its back to the door. Lex stood beside it, smiling, a hand on its gleaming wood surface. He was dressed in his typical white jumper, but I half-expected him to be wearing a topcoat and tails.
"Good morning, Mary."
"Morning," I said as I approached him. "I hope you don't expect me to play that thing."
A smile crept onto his lips. He sat down behind it, an old red chestnut-stained Steinway, and ruffled the cuffs of his white coat before playing the high notes of "Heart and Soul"--and not very well.
"You stink," I told him.
"It's really a duet." He shifted on the seat, and patted its surface. Reluctantly, I sat with him. I noticed in the interim the nameless woman had made her exit.
Lex shifted his knees toward me. "I thought maybe you were ready to know a little bit about why you're here."
"Okay..."
He pressed down on what I now know was Middle C, but then I just saw it as a white key near the middle. The note rang out in the wide, tall room. "I'm sure you know what we hear as notes are actually vibrations. The way we per
ceive pitch or frequency is through the oscillation of thousands of tiny hairs on our tympanic membrane, or ear drum. They convert the sound to electrical impulses that travel directly to our brains. You know this, right?"
I shrugged. I don't recall Ms. O'Shaughnessy ever teaching me that, but it seemed to make sense.
"What if I told you, each of our brains works on its own frequency? And that frequency is as unique to us as our fingerprints."
I folded my arms across my chest. "That sounds a little farfetched, honestly."
Lex laughed. "Well, for the sake of argument, let's say it's true. Now, you can see the piano has a wide range of notes, or frequencies..." He thumbed the lowest key, which rumbled out into the spacious room. For some reason those low notes on the piano have always given me the creeps, and I was glad when the sound faded away. He did the same with the highest key, reaching over me. His elbow brushed against my left breast, which was still no more than a nub, but it made my cheeks feel hot. Lex didn't seem to notice. The note he'd played was so high it didn't resonate long.
"But it doesn't have quite the same range as the human ear, or the human brain, which can sense far more frequencies than the ears can perceive. Those lower frequency vibrations, lower than 20Hz, are practically ghosts of sounds. And anything higher than about 20,000Hz can damage our ears even if they don't perceive it. There are studies now that are looking into ultrasound--higher than the human range--and infrasound--lower--that are producing excellent results which may lead in the future to acoustic weaponry."
"Great," I said sarcastically.
Lex flashed a grin. "Anyway, as you can tell, the human limit of hearing is not anywhere near the limit of sounds that can be produced. Even just within the range of human perception, there are nineteen-thousand nine-hundred and eighty different frequencies that we know of. There may even be frequencies in between those frequencies that we've yet to discover!"
His eyes twinkled at the thought of it. "I can see your eyes are glazing over. To the point then. Think of these frequencies as radio waves. On a simple radio, you have your FM band and your AM band. There are millions of stations around the world, but since these waves travel over the air, we're only able to hear a certain number of them in any one place, and the rest of the dial is filled with static. Now think of each radio station as a person, or more specifically, a person's thoughts. That's seven billion radio stations! Instead of the latest Beyoncé chart-topper, or the local weather in Kazakhstan, as you turn the dial you're hearing thoughts. There's absolutely no static on the dial, because there's barely enough room to contain the stations we've got. Some children can tap into those thoughts like they're listening to the radio. We call them Psychs, which is short for psychic. Others can tap into only the emotions. Here at The Eye we call them Empaths.
"You, Mary--" He'd started calling me Mary a few months into our drawing sessions. While I didn't so much like the name, it meant he was feeling more familiar with me, which was to my advantage. "--we don't have a name for children like you yet, because there are no children like you. You've been able to mimic just about every frequency we've thrown at you, with or without your drawings. And when you tap into the frequency of someone's thoughts, you tap into their mind. You may not be able to hear their thoughts, or sense their emotions..." His eyes twinkled with unknown possibilities. "But you can tinker with their brains, and that's far more powerful. Those other abilities are parlor tricks compared to what you can do--especially when we boost your signal here in The Eye."
I considered this. Somewhere along the line I'd figured out what they had me doing here was far less innocent than mere doodling. But the exact nature of their experiments, considering I hadn't been able to "tap" into Lex's mind when he was sitting in the next room from me, didn't quite fall into place. Now it all clicked. I felt a hollowness in the pit of my chest, and swallowed hard.
"All those people you had me draw..."
"Criminals, gangsters, killers," he said. "Evil men and women, every one of them."
My head was spinning, but I struggled to gain control of myself, on the verge of blacking out. I stood up from the chair, needing air. The faces I'd drawn over the months and days rose in my rapidly grayed-out vision. I grabbed the piano to stay upright, heard the wires hum discordantly at my touch.
"I never wanted to hurt anyone," I choked out.
Lex had stood up and took my shoulder, but I shrugged it off violently. He stepped away, looking wounded. I paced the room, getting my sight back, gaining more control with each step away from the piano and Lex.
I thought of the limousine. The bus. How many people...? Surely I couldn't have crashed a whole bus to kill a single victim?
I wiped tears and snot from my face, and looked up clearly, as fiercely as I could, at Lex. He shrank from my gaze. The walls began to hum at a very low frequency.
"Marigold..." Lex pressed a finger against his right ear. "Mary, you don't want to do that now--"
The walls rumbled. The piano began to match its resonance with a deep twang.
I had found Lex's frequency: a very low minor chord.
He stood and staggered to the door. I saw blood trickling down from his ear as he pushed past me.
The sound ceased immediately as the door slammed behind him. I sat cross legged on the floor, staring up at the camera.
Eventually, I began to laugh.
❚❚
I FIRST NOTICED Lex's lingering looks--jeepers, there's a mouthful--the year I turned sixteen. That was the year the girl I saw in the mirror begin to change into the woman she would become. My button nose straightened out. I lost the baby fat in my cheeks, my cheekbones becoming more prominent. My blonde eyebrows darkened, and my lips grew plump. I wouldn't exactly say I was pretty, but I was definitely not what people would consider ugly.
At first I thought it was fear in his eyes from our encounter in The Eye, but soon I realized I was mistaken. The day I found Lex's frequency--not to kill him, I don't think, just to assure them I wasn't quite as helpless as they might've imagined I was, that I still held some power in our arrangement--that happened so long ago I could barely recall what had started it by then, but the consequences of that day remained. Lex never entered The Eye with me again, and I never saw the woman again. I suspect she must have quit, thinking her life might be in danger. Lex came to my room to present me with food and clear the tray, but we never talked like we had. From that day on, we only spoke with the loudspeaker and camera between us. On those brief visits, and while he walked me to the silo, I noticed an addition to his wardrobe: a small black earpiece.
They were jamming my signal.
The day I discovered Lex's feelings for me, I'd just gotten out of the shower as he brought me my lunch. I'd put on the T-shirt I'd worn the day before, and was changing into a fresh one when the door opened. I turned to find Lex's mouth agape, the tray of food just about forgotten in his hand. When he closed his mouth his teeth clacked together.
I stood there with my not-so-small-anymore breasts exposed beneath the rumpled shirt, my elbows still in the air, marveling at his reaction.
"I... sorry, Mary, I... here's your lunch." He set the tray down and scurried out, his cheeks revealing the embarrassment if his stammering hadn't already.
He waited until I'd sat down to eat before addressing me again, but by then a vague plan was in motion. He'd pulled the lever himself, and the rats had moved into the front compartment. With a little bit of coaxing from me, I would chew off his face.
"Mary." He cleared his throat. "I've got a special surprise for you."
I chewed silently, not reacting until I'd swallowed. Then I looked up at the camera. "Oh?" I said.
"You have a visitor."
The news caused me to drop the spoon into my tomato soup, tipping the bowl. A splatter of red stained my white shirt as I stood abruptly, rattling the kitchenware.
"You've spoken quite a bit about this person recently, I thought maybe you might like to see him."
<
br /> I scurried to my drawers and put on a second fresh T-shirt, thinking it could be only one person. In all the years I'd thought about meeting him, I'd never thought it would be here. I'd expected to be out in the world by then, living on my own somewhere in a nice-sized condo, working a job I didn't care about just to pay the rent while I... well, that was where the fantasy ended. I had no idea what I would do out in the Big World, aside from be relatively free and live.
I didn't know then I would end up running for my life.
We met outside in the yard, which was just a long stretch of concrete that may have once been a runway. Lex hung back at the door, within earshot. Parker stood under the silo's shadow, and when he turned to me I saw just how much he'd changed since I last saw him at Ms. O'Shaughnessy's.
"Hello, Marigold." Parker twiddled his fingers in a wave. He wore a tweed jacket and tight blue jeans, not skinny like people wear them these days, but form-fitting enough that I got a good look at the shape of his ass.
"Parker," I said, trying my best to play it cool. The teenage scruff he'd had on his chin had spread, thickening to a dark day's growth of stubble. His blue eyes took me in with intense curiosity.
"So... this is where you live?"
I looked back at the enormous, windowless facility and shrugged. "Beats Ms. O'Shaughnessy's."
Parker laughed. "Yeah, I suppose it does." He scowled, the sun in his eyes. "Are you happy here?"
"Is anybody really happy these days?"
This got another chuckle out of him, before he looked at me seriously. "They say you're doing good work here. That you're helping the government with a top secret project."
I glanced back at Lex, who shook his head so subtly I might have imagined it.
"Yeah. It's interesting work," I said. "Experiments and stuff. Mostly I just spend my time reading."
"Same old Mary." He smirked. The diminutive didn't bother me so much when Parker said it.
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