One of the masked figures waved at Rachel, and she smiled back. “Hey, Max! Got a newbie here. Show her what you’ve got!”
Max nodded and probably smiled, but the mask covered his face. He definitely didn’t seem scary, not like the hooded figures at my house.
Rachel closed her eyes. “He can only take one observer so far, and that’s already impressive.”
If I was meant to understand what she was saying, I missed it.
“Watch the tree!” Max called to me, pointing to a big dead fig tree that lay near the side of the training ground, close to where Rachel and I were standing.
A few seconds later, there was a colossal crack, and the whole thing burst into flames. Heat and smoke billowed up towards me. I swore. The tree split apart, and not just from the fire. It splintered and broke, dark lines running its full length. It was torn limb from limb, ripped apart, and disappeared completely in a burst of sawdust.
“Is he done?” Rachel asked.
“I have no idea.”
She opened her eyes. “Wow, he vaped it. Show-off.” Max gave her a thumbs up. I got the distinct impression he was flirting. Rachel turned to me. “Cool, huh?”
“I still don’t even know what I saw.”
“In a word: resonance.”
Resonance. Again, that word. I frowned, and Rachel continued. “You know how when you’re in the car you can feel the engine vibrating? Not heaps, and you hardly ever notice it, but it’s always there whenever the car is on? Or when you crank your music really loud and you can feel the bass buzzing through the floor?”
I nodded.
“The lower the sound, the bigger the buzz. Everything in the universe vibrates at its own particular frequency.” She placed her hand on the guard rail and looked out across the cubicles. “At the tiniest, most microscopic level, this whole cave and everything in it is vibrating. The tables. The walls. The stairs. You. Me. We’re all buzzing at our own frequency. It’s what holds the atoms in our bodies together. It’s what stops us from flying apart.”
“That’s comforting.”
“You know when it’s really quiet, like dead quiet, and you hear that weird ringing in your head? People think it’s just their ears playing tricks on them. But in those moments, when you hear that ringing, you’re actually hearing the sound of the universe vibrating around you, like someone’s plucked a giant guitar string.”
“Whoever’s playing needs lessons.”
Rachel smirked. “Imagine you could change the frequency of an object. Imagine you could alter the resonance. You’d change what held that object together. You could alter the nature of the object itself. You could make it hotter, or colder, or pull it apart. Change the resonance, and you change everything.”
It started to make a strange kind of sense. “Max destroyed the tree by changing its resonance?”
“Right. He basically unmade it at a subatomic level. Pulled its essence apart.”
This was a lot to take in, and I fell silent.
One of the other figures let out a pointed cough, and Rachel took the hint. “We should go. Very few of these guys can train with any observation. We’re messing up their tunings just standing here. That’s why the cubicle walls are so high—prevents any accidental interference from others on the ground.”
I still only understood about half of everything she said but nodded anyway.
She put her hand on my shoulder. “Max isn’t the only one who can do that, you know.”
“You too?” I asked.
“Me. Everyone here.” She paused. “You.”
“You think I can do that? Blow up trees and stuff?”
“Why do you think you’re a target of our enemies? We’ve been keeping an eye on you for a while.”
“You’ve been watching me?”
“Of course. Since the first accident, anyway. We knew there was something different about you. Your survival so close to the blast was highly unlikely. And if we’d noticed you, we knew our enemies would too. We arranged protection after that, although we should have organised a higher-level bodyguard. I’m really sorry you had to see him die. No one could have guessed how much of a target you would become.”
Noah. He’d been sent by the Kindred?
“He was a recent transfer to our district,” Rachel explained. “We overestimated his abilities. Unfortunately, the others got the better of him. They would have taken you too if I hadn’t been close by on backup. We intervened, and Noah’s dad managed to cover things up. It hurt him, though. I can’t even imagine having to cover up the death of my own child.”
She kept talking for a while, but I didn’t hear it. I was dealing with some badly conflicting feelings. Noah had been lying to me the whole time I’d known him, pretending to be something he wasn’t. But he’d also died trying to protect me. I was mad, and grateful, and shocked, and broken-hearted. I couldn’t figure out what to feel.
Noah had died because of me. No one should have to deal with that responsibility. It felt selfish to think, but it was true. My heart raced. “I want to see Josh.”
“We haven’t even begun your training,” Rachel said.
“I want to see him.” I was losing it. I had to see someone normal, something from my real life, to ground me before I went insane.
“That’s not the right—”
“I want to see Josh!” I ran for the door. Rachel was faster and dove in front of me, grabbing my wrists. I tried to wrestle them free, but she was surprisingly strong for her size. I kept screaming, shouting, and scratching, until her voice broke through my anger.
“I’ll take you to him. Ari, I’ll take you to him. Just settle down!”
My cheeks were wet, and I was breathing way too fast. I doubled over, my vision blurring.
Rachel’s hand was on my shoulder. “Ari, look at me. You’re panicking. Just slow your breathing down, and look at me.”
I forced myself to make eye contact, and it helped. Rachel breathed slowly, encouraging me to do the same. Eventually, my heaving breaths became slower and more controlled.
“That’s good. Slow it right down.” Her voice was intentionally calming.
I eventually composed myself enough to apologise.
She shrugged “It’s okay. That’s a pretty common response when people first learn the truth. We grow up so strongly believing our own idea of the world that when we find out we’ve been wrong the whole time, it unhinges us just a little bit. I was the same, although a little less hysterical.” She smirked, and I felt better.
“I still want to see Josh.”
“You will. But for the time being, you need to clean up and rest. I’ll talk to the powers that be and arrange it.” She led me out of the training ground and back across the Apex towards my room. But instead of going all the way back, we made a detour down a long corridor.
Rachel turned into a room marked showers. I gasped as we rounded the corner. The shower room was most definitely in use. I’ve never been good in public changing rooms, and this one was mixed gender.
I tried to avert my eyes as best I could and stare at the floor, the ceiling, anywhere but the other occupants of the room, both male and female.
Around the perimeter of the cold, circular cavern were ten shower heads, out in the open, no walls or curtains between them. White tiles were poorly installed along the floor and up to about waist height on the wall, at least one attempt to make things normal. In the center of the cavern was a circular bench where towels and clothing sat ready for their owners. Thankfully, nobody seemed to notice us come in, and everyone kept their eyes squarely on the wall in front of them. It was as if they didn’t even notice the others in here.
“We’ve picked you up some clothing,” Rachel said, oblivious to my reaction. “It should fit. You look about my size. You can change here.”
I glared at Rachel. “Are you kidding me?”
“What? You do look my size.”
“No, not that. I mean there are people in here. There are … men!�
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“So don’t look.”
“What? What if they look at me?”
She sighed. “We have no secrets here. The Kindred believe in total transparency. Complete honesty. Modesty is for those who have something to hide. Don’t worry, you get used to it.”
I didn’t want to get used to it. All I could do was desperately stare at the ceiling, but the flush I could feel spreading from my ears to my cheeks must have been obvious, because Rachel took pity on me. She asked the other occupants to go once they were finished. They smiled at me as they picked up their stuff and walked out the door, not even bothering to cover themselves with their towels. I tried very hard to keep my vision squarely at eye level. If I’d been with Josh or Caitlyn, I would have burst out laughing as soon as they left, but since Rachel already thought I was being ridiculous, I managed to control myself.
She left too then, giving me some privacy. I got undressed as quickly as possible and showered facing the wall, paranoid that someone would walk in and see me. God forbid they decided to bring Josh in here as well. I would never be able to look at him again. These people were the good guys, but they had some really strange habits.
As I showered, I inspected the black dot on my stomach. It had grown. It was cold to touch, even under the hot water. I tried to scrub it off again, but it didn’t work. Hopefully it wasn’t some kind of disease.
I dried myself and put on the clothes Rachel had given me: a white button-up shirt with no sleeves that hugged me tightly, along with a knee-length black skirt. I felt a little like a businesswoman. Even the underwear they provided fit perfectly. That was weird. Hopefully Rachel had picked them out, not Hackman.
On the way out, I glanced in a mirror on the wall. The bruises from the accident had all but gone now, and although I could still feel the stitches in the back of my head, they remained invisible. There was no longer any evidence of that fateful day, at least not on the outside.
My damp hair hung in waves over my shoulders. It looked a little messy, but I liked it. Inhaling deeply, breathing in the shower fog and musty cold, I tried to prepare myself as best I could for whatever was coming.
There was darkness on the horizon. For all the awful things that had already happened, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the worst was yet to come.
I swallowed hard. Pull it together, Ari. I had gone to the edge of sanity and looked over, but at least I was still here. And as long as I was still here, there was a chance I would see my family again. I was trying not to think about them, not right now. Spending any time on that road would lead me right off a very nasty cliff.
Rachel was waiting for me in the hall, and she led me back to my room. She didn’t say it, but I was definitely under guard. I still had to earn their trust.
In my room, I fell onto the bed and was asleep before I knew I was tired. I dreamed of Noah, and Skye, and flame, and shadow, and death.
FIFTEEN
“He’s ready for you.” Rachel beckoned me from the door.
I followed her out of my room and down the hall. Josh’s room was two corridors over, but the hall looked identical to mine. The only difference was the lime stains down the wall, caused by constant dripping from who knows where. I stepped in a puddle of water outside his door, and it was cool under my bare feet.
Rachel bashed on the door, and it creaked open. “The girlfriend’s here,” she joked and stepped back to lean against the wall opposite the door.
I opened the door fully and walked inside. Josh lay on his bed, his face covered in bruises. A large gash was stitched up across his forehead, and his arms were all scratched. In the corner near the door, a hooded and masked figure kept watch.
“Ari?” Josh croaked.
I ran to him. “It’s me, I’m here. Everything’s okay. What happened to you?”
“You know how my mum’s always harping on about wearing a seatbelt? Turns out she’s right. But don’t tell her that.” He laughed, and then winced, grabbing his ribs.
“You shouldn’t be making jokes right now.”
“The alternative would be screaming. Jokes keep me distracted.”
“Jokes it is, then.” I reached out and stroked his hair. “Look at you.”
“Yeah. When the car exploded, I was thrown onto the road. I went via the windscreen. In retrospect, that was a bad choice.”
I smiled. “You really should be more careful.”
“They haven’t told me much. Are we in the hospital? Do my parents know I’m here? They’re overseas. Were they able to get a hold of them?”
I shook my head. “No to both. Josh—”
“They won’t even know I’m missing,” he interrupted. “What about your mum?”
Tears fought their way into the corners of my eyes. “Taken.”
“What do you mean taken?”
After a deep breath, I explained everything. Where we were, who was watching over us, what had happened. But I didn’t tell him I was the one being targeted. I knew he would react badly to that.
When I finished, he was quiet, thoughtful for a moment and frowned.
“You know this is nuts, right?”
“You saw the flames. You saw the shadow.”
“So I’m nuts too. There’s a whole heap of nuts flying around at the moment.”
I started to giggle.
“Yeah, I just heard that back,” he laughed.
My giggle broke into a full-blown snort, which made Josh laugh even more. He was still wincing, but he didn’t care. My stomach began hurting, too, and every time we tried to get ourselves under control, we started back up again. What made it even funnier was the motionless masked figure in the corner. He looked so serious, like a stern teacher, and it set us off every time we looked at him.
Eventually, I asked him to leave for a moment, so we could compose ourselves. He complied, but I could have sworn he was smiling underneath his mask.
It was good to laugh. Still, we settled ourselves down, and Josh got back to business.
“So, what’s the plan? We getting your family back or what?”
“I’m honestly not sure. There’s a plan, but they haven’t told me what it is.”
“How much do we really know about these guys?” Josh whispered with a glance towards the hallway, where the guard stood next to Rachel.
“I know they’ve saved my life at least twice now. I know they want to get my family back, and I know Noah was one of them. That’s more than enough for me.”
“Let’s push them for more.” Josh sat up slowly and swung his legs around so he was facing the door. “Hey, you!”
“Rachel,” I prompted.
“Yeah, Rachel!”
She came inside.
“What’s the plan?” Josh pressed her. “We need to get Ari’s family back. You’ve been in here a bit, you seem to know the answers. So, what are we doing?”
“I don’t really think it’s wise for me to discuss things with you.”
“Even things that have to do with me?”
“Any Kindred plans at all.”
“Good Lord! ‘Kindred plans’? It’s not a bloody picnic we’re talking about, it’s a six-year-old girl and her mum. Ari’s mum.”
“You don’t have the clearance to—”
“Stuff clearance!” he yelled. “Ari doesn’t have the clearance to find out what you’re doing to get her own family back? They’re probably holed up in some cell somewhere, trapped by this ‘enemy,’ who, by the way, we have no name for. We don’t even know what this so-called war is about. You’re being so damn obscure about everything, and you want us to be on your side? You’re thicker than a rhino’s rectum if you think we’re just going to sit here and help you without knowing more. Ari deserves answers, and based on these scars”—he pointed to his face—”I think I deserve answers too.” He stopped to catch his breath. The guard had moved closer to the door, watching.
Rachel pursed her lips. “You do deserve answers. But I’m not the one to give them to you. That’
s better off coming from someone higher up the food chain than me. I can’t give you clearance, but he can.”
“Who?”
“Hackman.” She swiftly turned and left the room, closing the door behind her.
I smirked at Josh. “Thicker than a rhino’s rectum?”
“Shut up,” he laughed. “It worked, didn’t it?”
I smiled. “Hopefully. Thanks.”
“Anything for you.”
I wasn’t sure how to respond, so we sat in silence until the door opened and Hackman entered. I almost didn’t recognise him in the robe he was wearing. It was black, with an insignia sewn into the top left corner, where a pocket might go. The symbol was the same one painted on the floor of the Apex: two offset triangles, a smaller one inside, and a circle in the center. It was obviously some kind of logo. I pictured some hip graphic designer with thick-rimmed glasses working tirelessly to create the logo for a supernaturally powered clandestine organisation. It made me snigger.
“Everything all right?” Hackman asked, frowning at me.
“I like your logo,” I giggled.
“Thanks.” He’d either missed or deliberately ignored that I was mocking him. “The first triangle represents the real world. The second, turned triangle is the true reality that most can’t see. The inner triangle and circle stand for our unique sight, something that will make more sense to you as time goes on.” He paused and sat on the edge of the bed. “I hear you’re ready for some answers.”
“It’s about time,” Josh snapped.
“I’m sorry, I’ve been busy in strategy meetings.”
“You important or something?” Josh asked, still abrasive.
“You could say that. But I would prefer to have the bulk of this conversation with Ari, as she is, after all, the one with the most at stake here.” Josh took the reprimand and sank back into his pillows. Hackman turned to me. “In fact, I’ll answer any question you like, my dear girl. But not here.”
“Josh can’t walk yet.”
“I know. He’s not cleared for this conversation anyway.”
“Hey!” Josh butted in. “You’re not taking her anywhere without me. Who knows what you’ll do.”
The Fire Unseen Page 9