TWO
Leigh Ann Kopans
Copyright 2013 by Leigh Ann Kopans
Cover art and design by Nathalia Suellen
Developmental Editing: Jamie Grey
Copy Editing: Becca Weston
ISBN-13: 978-1492176480
ISBN-10: 1492176486
All rights reserved.
This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locations are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
“I hope that one day you will have the experience
of doing something you do not understand for someone you love.”
~Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
ONE
The first time I ever leave home, I’m escaping it, flying away at supersonic speed with the girl I love. Soot coats my jeans from the explosion she just caused in the Biotech Hub’s lab. Her hair whips against my face, and my arms hug her to me so hard they overlap and my fingers dig into her ribs.
I’ve never been more terrified in my entire life.
I squeeze my eyes shut and clamp my lips together to keep my whole face from flapping in the wind like a Basset Hound with its head stuck out the car window. Merrin’s cheeks press against the space under my jaw in a grin, and I know she’s delighted at the same time I know she doesn’t want me to see her smile — doesn’t want me to know how happy she is.
Because she knows I’m not.
Not that I could see her expression, even if I wanted to — we may have gotten a transfer of indestructability, but it’s still damn uncomfortable to feel the air tearing at my face. The wind whips past us so hard and fast that, after a few minutes, my arms start to tremble and ache for holding onto her so tightly. Because no matter what else happens, my biggest fear now is losing her again.
We speed over cornfields and dirt roads, pass the wind turbines that turn lazily in the morning light, the same as always. I remember the pictures of home and try to burn them into my brain, preserve the still memories even with everything blurring around me. Especially since I don’t want to ever, ever go back.
As my fingers dig into her back, a strange, fuzzy feeling builds up around them, and her skin feels warmer where my arms meet her body.
“Mer!” I yell in her ear so she can hear me over the roar of the wind. “Our clothes! They’re not indestructible like we are!”
Her chest shakes with laughter, but she nods her forehead against my collarbone and we slow, landing on frozen ground with sparse, tall grass.
“That was fun,” she says, smoothing what’s left of her shirt down and inspecting her shoes.
Laughter bubbles out of her throat, and I try to mirror her happiness in my own expression but it doesn’t work. I know that going supersonic was everything she ever wanted, and I should be excited for her. For us. But I can’t get the image of my sisters — skeletally thin, bald, and hooked up to tubing in a tank of green goop — out of my mind. Julian Fisk, the president of the Supers’ Biotech Hub back home, the one institution our parents taught us to trust with our lives, did that to them. I’d hooked my glasses onto my shirt, and putting them back on feels like stepping into my old self. I lace my fingers together and cup the top of my head with them, staring at the ground and letting out a huge sigh. A little bit of a growl sneaks out.
Merrin’s face falls, and she steps into me, wrapping her arms around my waist and pressing a kiss to my chest.
And that’s when I know it’s going to be okay. One way or another. Merrin only ever wants to fly, but she doesn’t know just how much it means to me when she anchors me to the ground.
“So, obviously, the next order of business is getting ourselves superhero suits,” Merrin says, her voice muffled in my shirt. “Because we’re gonna want to do that again.” There’s something anxious and excited behind her words, like an engine revving.
I laugh. “I suppose so.” I glance down at my arm, where the tough nylon band of my cuff has started to shred. Out of habit, I tap on the screen to wake it up, but nothing happens. A long crack radiates across its surface, and debris has scraped across it so that it’s rough to the touch. I guess the high speed completely destroyed the insides.
I hold my arm up, showing it to Merrin. “I guess this is why no one’s figured out exactly where we are. Is yours dead too?” I ask. When she glances down and taps at her own mangled cuff, and it doesn’t light up either, I know it is.
We’re standing in the middle of another cold, grassy plain, and I finally give in to the trembling in my limbs and sink down to the ground, stretching my legs out straight in front of me.
“At least we had my bag between us,” she says. “At least the formulas are safe.”
“Oh. Good point,” I reply, trying to pretend to be excited that the bag holding the vials full of DNA-altering substances tailored to Merrin’s genetic makeup is still intact. If I’d had my way, all those formulas would have been destroyed forever when we left the Hub.
“I hardly noticed the clothes, you were holding onto me so tight,” Merrin says “I won’t fall, you know. When you’re close to me, I can fly on my own. Remember?”
I eke out a nervous laugh. No matter how well my brain knows that fact, remembers the moment when Merrin first took off on her own back in Nebraska, I can’t shake the feeling that, at any moment, she could plummet to the earth. I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to chase it away.
“Hey, you okay?” Merrin sits down next to me. Her clothing has worn away to threadbare where her body was exposed to the air. My eye catches the curve of her nearly-bare hip, and I have to clear my throat and look away.
“Same as before. Still in some pain.” I don’t mention the panic starting to run circles around my brain at not knowing where my sisters are or how they’re doing. Merrin’s the only person I can trust, and I want to confide in her but I don’t. Part of me still wants to protect her, and part of me doesn’t want to ruin her happiness at flying like that. Not until I have to.
I look at her and see her arms trembling, too. Not the fits-and-starts shiver that would mean she was cold, but the same full-limb rumbling she had after we first flew together. “You?”
“Other than scared shitless, I’m fine.” Her smile is tight.
She’s lying. I know she’s not fine, but she’s well enough to talk to me — at least for now — so I don’t press it.
“Where are we gonna go?” she asks, her eyes wide and fixed on mine. When it comes to flying, she’s brave and alive. Now that we’re on the ground, the reality of the events at the Biotech Hub must be hitting her again.
I scoot over until my body is flush with hers, wrap my arm around her shoulders, and hug her until she turns into my body. I speak against her hair, inhaling the sweet smell of her. “The Social Welfare Hub is closest. I know how to get there, and I know how to get in.”
She pulls back to look at me, takes a deep breath. “You really were getting ready to leave town, weren’t you?”
I nod, squeezing her hand, because I hear what she’s not saying. When Merrin told me Mr. Hoffman, her organic chemistry teacher and an undercover Hub official, had taken her blood for testing, I’d known we didn’t have a lot of time left to escape before the Hub’s tests turned deadly. I’d packed the trunk of my car with cash and supplies to last us weeks, planned three separate locations for escape, figured out how we could arrive safely. The only reason I didn’t leave before everything got really bad was because Merrin protested.
Instead, I ended up hooked to machines and trapped in the Biotech Hub, near death.
The last place I want to end up is anoth
er Hub, but that’s where Merrin and I have decided to go: the Social Welfare Hub on the West Coast. Even though my head tells me it’s the safest place for Ones like us to be, my gut tells me something different.
I bring my other arm up around her and rest my chin on top of her head, watching white puffs of air blow out of my nose against the frigid air. I really can feel her skin through the now-threadbare shirt she wears. She’s so real, and I never want to lose that feeling. Her and me, together, in real life. A feeling that might seem simple to a lot of people, but to a kid like me who grew up being treated like a test subject, it’s something I was never really sure I’d have.
“We can’t go supersonic anymore,” I say, burying my lips in her hair.
She puffs her frustration.
“These clothes won’t last very much longer, and us walking into a Hub unannounced is going to be weird enough. I’d rather not be half-naked when we do it.”
“Yeah, I know. You’re right.” She hoists herself up and reaches her stick-thin arms down to help me up.
I smile at the gesture and join her in looking at the horizon. “So, normal speed, due west?”
She reaches down to intertwine her fingers with mine and turns the both of us so that the sun glows warm on our backs. Our shadows stretch out long in front of us, their edges jagged in the wild grass. We stand in the comfortable silence we’ve developed, our breaths falling into the same rhythm.
“You’re worried about your sisters.” Merrin’s eyebrows pull together, and her eyes search mine. Her tone reminds me that she knows me so well I can’t deny it.
My throat feels painfully thick. “I just wish I knew something. Where they are. What they’re doing. If they’re even still together.”
“We do,” she says, absently stroking the back of my thumb with hers, looking up at me with those deep blue eyes that tear my heart out every time. “We know how kickass their Supers are.”
I scoff and try to smile while I blink my eyes hard.
“Stop that now. Seriously. They’re so strong. We saw for ourselves.” She squeezes my hand. The look in her eyes, combined with the conviction in her voice, takes my breath away. She’s as desperate for me to be okay as I was to get out of Superior, Nebraska.
“Okay,” I say, looking down at her. “You’re right.”
“They took out all those guards. They killed all those duplicates that Fisk made of himself. Elias, they made the Hub shake when they teleported out. They are powerful.”
“You’re right,” I repeat. I take the worry working its way into my brain and squeezing its fingers around my heart, and I push it back, knowing that it will destroy me if I let it.
Besides, the first thing is to find somewhere safe. And the Social Welfare Hub, with its public location and noble mission, will be that.
The air whooshes lightly in front of me, and Merrin’s face fills my vision, her skin warming mine. I close my eyes when she kisses me, trying desperately to feel nothing but her and this moment. My hand pushes back through her hair, and another goes around her waist, under her shirt. The feel of her back against my forearm is comfort and promise at the same time. Whatever else happens, I know we’ll be together now, and that’s enough to push us up into the air and away from another nondescript plain that holds nothing but grass, wind, and silence.
TWO
A couple of hours and some landings to readjust our bearings later, we’ve taken a wide path around Sacramento and overshot it by five miles, just like I’d planned before the Biotech Hub shot me up with gene-changing serums and basically left me to die in their med lab. A sprawling white office complex, framed by palm trees and stone gardens, sits before us.
“Where do you think we go in?” Merrin asks, alighting next to me and smoothing down her hair. She doesn’t need to — it’s so fine that it never puffs or frizzes, no matter how severe the wind. It’s like her whole body was made for flying.
It’s exactly the opposite of my lanky, awkward frame. Even when Rosie fed me all my favorites, I could never gain very much muscle.
I shrug. “I don’t know. I guess I never thought about that too much. But they must have an intake station, right? A front desk?”
“Feels so weird to walk,” Merrin mumbles as we start toward the Hub, both of us trying to shake our air legs. We’d never flown that long before, and being on solid ground makes the concrete feel unstable under my feet, even though I know it’s my legs doing the shaking.
We round the corner of the building, and there it is. The entrance. There are two gates, and each has two guys with handheld metal detectors that sweep them over us as we pass, even though I’m sure they could see through our shirts.
They wave us through the front door, and we’re in. No bioscanners upon bioscanners like at the Hub. No lasers sweeping across our corneas, or tiny needles poised to prick our fingers and scan our blood. I can’t seem to get my feet to move smoothly. My shoulders are tight, and my neck is tense, waiting to snap around to see some oncoming threat. The lobby has a shining black marble floor and a fountain surrounded with greenery at its center. Flowers bloom in planters every few steps, and softly glowing decorative lights dot the walls.
This doesn’t feel like a Hub at all, and as much as I hated the Biotech Hub’s insane security, the fact that there’s a Hub out there without it is somehow even freakier. The Social Welfare Hub seems to be so trusting, so open. So unafraid. This kind of lax security could spell serious trouble for two kids on the run.
The water splashing and trickling into the pool below makes my bladder beg for mercy. “Okay, first order of business is to use the bathroom,” I lean down and whisper to Merrin.
A grin cracks across her face, way too huge to match the humor of what I just said.
“What?”
“Just that that’s the first thing you’ve said since we left that’s anywhere near normal.” I raise my eyebrow at her. “I just really, really like normal Elias, that’s all.”
“Well, that’s too bad,” I say, scanning the room for what feels like the twentieth time in the few minutes we’ve been here. “Nothing about this Hub is normal.”
“And there’s my freaked-out Elias again.”
I should smile, hearing her use the words “my” and “Elias” in the same sentence — and I try to. I really do.
“I’m serious,” I say, frowning. “Have you noticed the lack of security here?”
“It’s Social Welfare. They’re do-gooders. Who would hurt them?”
“Someone looking for us.”
Merrin’s face falls when I say that.
At the intake desk, a guy who can’t be too many years older than us, wearing a white polo and khakis and with perfectly arranged curls on his head, taps at a glowing desktop in front of him. He looks up from his otherwise flawless desk when we reach it.
“Can I help you?” His smile hardens as he inspects us. We’re absolutely filthy, and we must look like a wreck. We don’t exactly look like we belong in the gleamingly clean building we’re about to enter.
I shove my hands into my pockets and shrug, trying to seem nonchalant. “We’d like to…uh… We came from Nebraska so…”
The guy cocks his head and gives a slight smile. “For a tour? Our tours are usually scheduled at least a week in advance, and I don’t see anything like that on the schedule.”
Merrin looks up at me, arching one eyebrow in that confused expression of hers that says, “Is everyone but me stupid?” It would be hilarious if I wasn’t about to collapse from exhaustion.
I close my eyes, push my fingers up under my glasses to rub the bridge of my nose, and try to find the words that will get us where we need to go. “We’re students from the Supers’ Biotech Hub in Nebraska,” I explain. “There’s been…uh… Something’s going on there. We’d like to talk to one of your officials.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t… Are you reporters or…?”
“We need help,” Merrin says, floating up a few inches from the flo
or for better eye contact. Her voice sounds scratchy and rough. Deflated. It reminds me of right before the first time we flew together. I just wanted to make her happier. That time, I did. “We just escaped the Biotech Hub in Nebraska, flew here at supersonic speed, and we really need to talk to whoever is in charge.”
The guy still stares, like he’s never even considered the idea that something could go wrong at any of the Hubs. I guess until a few weeks ago, I didn’t think that either.
I lean in, lower my voice. “We’re looking for asylum, okay?” I don’t break eye contact with the guy, and he stutters his agreement as he punches some numbers in his cuff and speaks to it in an undertone. Then he looks up at us, pastes on the same smile he had when we first walked up, and says, “Someone will be right with you.”
Merrin nods, lowers herself, crosses her arm, and does a full one-eighty look around the lobby like she owns it. “I think this is gonna be okay.”
The woman who meets us in the lobby carries only a set of keys and a brown leather folio. Looking us over and raising her eyebrows, she says, “Rough trip in, I hear.” She extends her hand, and we take our turns clasping it. “I’m Ana, and I’ll be showing you in for your debriefing.”
“Yeah, if we could use the bathroom…” I’m seriously going to piss myself if I wait any longer.
“Of course,” she says, starting down the hall.
Merrin and I exchange glances of relief when she stops in front of a pair of bathroom doors. I never thought taking a leak would feel so good. Afterward, I stand in front of the mirror, letting the water run, leaning on the edge of the sink with one hand and splashing a handful of water on my face with the other. I push my glasses up to my forehead, run my wet hand up through my hair so that it stands on end, and look at myself in the mirror.
God, I’m a mess. My eyes are bloodshot, and purple bruises carve into the space underneath them. My face looks dirty with days’ worth of scruff, and my jaw is more angular than I remember it. My collarbones jut out sharply. If it’s possible, I’m skinnier now than when basketball season started.
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