Anger replaces the fear, pushes out of my center and down through my arms. I want to punch something, to destroy something. Thanks to Nora and Lia and their dose of invincibility, I probably could. For a few long seconds, my fingers dig into the couch, and my knuckles turn white. A stiff wind whips through the room, rushing out of every pore of my skin, blowing Merrin’s hair around her face.
I don’t want to make a scene, here of all places, so I chew on the inside of my lip and take deep breaths. It still hasn’t worn off like I expected it to. I don’t really care why — all I care about is that it might be the key to helping them.
That indestructibility is the only way Merrin and I can go supersonic. Without me having it, and being able to transfer it to her, the high speeds would strip the skin off our bodies. So, really, Nora and Lia are the only reason we’d actually made it this far. We owe everything to them.
“The sooner we leave, the better chance we have of catching up with them.” My mind whirs, overwhelmed with new purpose.
“No,” Merrin sighs. “Because we still need to figure ourselves out first. And we need a Hub to do that.”
“What do our Supers — or our Ones — have to do with figuring out how to help them?”
Merrin clenches her jaw and gives me a steely look. “It’s weird that it was so hard for me to fly on my own. Don’t you think that was weird?” Her eyes search mine, looking for an answer that I don’t think I can give.
A thousand thoughts fly around in my head, and I want to be able to stand among them, pick out the one that will be the kindest way to say what I’m thinking without screaming at her to stop being so goddamn self-centered for once. I’m desperately trying to hold together hope for my perfect picture of leading a peaceful life — away from the Super community, with her beside me — even though it’s crumbling before my eyes.
There are so many words I could use, but I start with just one.
“No.”
Her face turns curious, and my need for us to be on the same team in all this overwhelms everything else. “No, I don’t think it was weird, Merrin. You’re still a One. You can’t do it alone. You just can’t.” Anger creeps into the edge of my voice, and I know it’s not just at Merrin. It’s at this whole damn situation. I try to tamp it down so she doesn’t hear it.
But she does.
She stands up, walks a few paces away from me, the line of her back tense and rigid. Dammit.
I give her few seconds, even though I don’t want to. I’ve given her enough time already; now, I need something from her. I need her to stand with me.
Still, I wait for her shoulders to heave up and down, give her the space to take a few breaths.
“It’s shitty to say that out loud.” Her voice floats through the air, and I feel like if I don’t grab for it, it might be gone forever. She spins around, says it to my face. “I know you think that. I know everyone thinks I’ll never be able to fly on my own. But it’s still shitty to say it to me.”
I stand up and pitch my words loud enough to reach her ears but gently enough for her to hear the truth of them. “I’m sorry. You know that’s not what I meant.”
“Well, it’s what you said.” She stares at a spot on the floor behind me, swallowing hard.
“I just meant we haven’t figured it out yet, and we don’t know if — or when — we will. So, no, you can’t do it now. Right now, I need you to be here for me.”
There are a few more seconds of silence. Then her voice, still with an edge to it, drifts into the air between us. Like what she’s about to say hurts her. “I know I’m not a Super. I know I probably never will be, okay? But I think… I mean, maybe doing stuff like that — flying on my own — will make it grow. Or something.”
“God, is that all you ever think about? The words fly out before I can stop them. “What about me? My sisters? Everyone back home in Superior who has no goddamn clue that any of this is going on?”
Even though she’s feet away, I sense her whole body stiffen. She stares at the door we came through and sets her jaw. “No, but while we’re on the topic, why don’t you tell me why you never think about it? Why don’t you want to be more than a One? I mean, sure, maybe things were okay back home, or we thought they were. But now…now that we know there’s more to us, you can’t tell me you don’t want to fly on your own. I am so sick of being the only one who has any freaking ambition at all about this. And honestly, I’m starting to feel very alone.” Her voice cracks, a rare falter in her unbreakable resolve.
I stare at her. I have no idea how to answer, how to reach the anger in her voice. To Merrin, everything’s so crystal clear, black-and-white. But to me, this whole situation is one rushed mess of disconnected facts and terrifyingly uncertain futures. It’s like a choose-your-own-adventure book that I want to throw into the fire instead of reading any more pages.
She sighs, and her tightly crossed arms loosen. “So are you going to let me tell you why I can’t stop thinking about flying?”
A softness brushes the edge of her words, and I know her anger isn’t just at me in the same way mine isn’t just at her. I wrap my arms around her shoulders and rest my chin on her head, matching the rhythm of my breath to hers.
“Besides the obvious? That you love it?”
She turns to look up at me. I was trying to make a joke about her legendary sky-obsession, but her expression is dead-serious.
“I think I need to try, Elias. I know that the Biotech Hub was terrible, and I was scared shitless when we were there — don’t get me wrong. Nothing scared me more than thinking you were dead. That I’d never…that we’d never… You and my brothers were my first priority. But…I stole those vials for a reason.”
When Merrin broke into the Hub to save me and her brothers from the testing that would have eventually killed us, she’d stumbled on the lab containing all of their research on Ones — including formulas based on her blood. She has a theory that they hold the key to developing her One into a full Super.
Of course, I’m opposed to that unspecified glowing goo getting anywhere near her, but she’s so damn determined that she’s carried them with her all the way here.
“I know you hate the idea of me using those formulas, Elias, but I think I need to try.” Her voice twists at the last word, and her bottom lip trembles. Tears form along her bottom lids, but I can tell from the look on her face that she’s determined not to cry.
Or, at least, not to let me see her cry. And that’s one thing I refuse to ruin for her.
So I spin her around and pull her to me. Her head drops onto my chest, and I remember the last time we stood exactly like this. She had just blown me away playing the drums. We stood there alone together for the first time, and that’s when I’d realized how much trouble I was in. How much I’d already fallen for her.
Back then, the most complex problem occupying my brain was how soon I could kiss her without freaking her out. And how to keep other parts of my body calm enough to hide that fact from her.
I bite back a little laugh at the thought because, honestly, just touching Merrin is still enough to make me go crazy. I want my hands on her everywhere. And if I thought that wrapping her in my arms and kissing every inch of her would make all this go away, I’d never stop.
But we’re homeless and directionless and have a lot more to worry about than how to get some alone time. I’m scared, and even though I know she’ll never admit it, she’s scared, too. I can tell from the way she stays pressed against me, and I squeeze her hard in response.
“I think that’s one reason I really want the Super.” Her muffled voice steams into my shirt. “The biggest reason.”
I draw back to let her talk. “Why?”
“Because I think we could help them. I don’t know. If we had any chance of, you know, swooping in and saving the day — ” A smile stretches across my face at the image of what I know must be in her head. “ — or whatever, we could do it much better if we could fly on our own. Not together.
You can’t tell me you don’t feel like it’s us against the Biotech Hub right now. We need all the power we can get, and no one’s going to give it to us but us.”
I sigh, and she jumps in again. “I swear to you, Elias. I’m almost as worried about them as you are. When you’re worried like this, it hurts me, too. But it’s not only them — don’t forget that I have a stake in this, just as much as you. Seeing my brothers lying in the Hub like that was freaking horrible. I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to stop thinking about it.”
I feel awful because I haven’t really stopped to think about Michael and Max. I’ve been too worried about my own siblings. The only thing that makes it a little better is that Mer’s parents actually seemed to be taking care of the boys in the midst of our explosive Hub breakout. Still, there’s no guarantee they can protect Michael and Max if the Hub or Fisk or whoever the hell is in charge now, decides it wants them.
I run a hand through my hair. “I’m sorry, Mer. I know you’re worried about them, too.”
“Fisk said they were close to figuring us Ones out. He sounded like he really meant it. If I could just get a little time in a lab somewhere, figure out which vials are supposed to do what, I could at least try to do the same.”
My breath hisses out of my lungs. I let my arms drop from around her and take a step back. “Try what? Don’t tell me you’re going to inject yourself with one of those serums, Mer.”
She just stares at me, taking measured breaths, a steely look in her eyes.
Oh, God. She is. She actually intends to take a goddamn needle and inject a syringe full of neon liquid from the Biotech Hub into her veins
“Stop looking at me like that.” Merrin rolls her eyes. “You know I’m a biochem genius, and I know my own genome better than anyone else. I didn’t say I was going to do it right this second, Elias. Just give me a day here at this Hub. Let me see if I can find anything out. I’m going to get some lab time, map out exactly what’s in those vials, see if I can observe what effect it has on my DNA. If that doesn’t work, we’ll think of something else, okay? We’re in this together. I promise.”
“But you have to keep me in the loop,” I say. “You have to tell me everything you discover in that lab. No secrets, and we decide everything together. What you do affects us both.”
Her lips crook up at the edges, and she steps close to me again. “I know I’m obsessed with flying, but that doesn’t mean that you’re any less important to me. Don’t forget it.” She draws in her eyebrows in an expression of mock-sternness.
I look into her eyes with a resigned sigh. “So what now?”
“I’ll take the vials to the lab. I’m going to see if I can get any of the formulas into a spectrometer and try to pick them apart. I need to see every molecule to predict how it’ll affect our genes.”
I hate to let her out of my sight, but she needs to know I trust her. She needs her space. “I’ll go find a computer or at least a TV. Try to figure out where the girls are.”
She squeezes my hand and nods. “Okay. If they come back with dinner, save me some.”
I nod, and she leaves, the damn messenger bag containing the vials banging against her hip. The main door to the residential wing falls shut with a heavy, soft thwump. My eye catches an old-fashioned remote, and I grab it and sit down on the couch, flipping on the holoscreen and dealing with the weird, gut-twisting hope that I might see an update on the last thing I’d ever wanted to watch on broadcast news.
FIVE
The midday local newscasts are running. I flip through the stations, staring blankly at the holoscreen. No matter how much channel-hopping I do, I can’t seem to miss some chipper newsperson announcing that tomorrow’s high is sixty-eight degrees — December in California isn’t too shabby — and that one of the local football teams won the state championship.
My fingers freeze on the remote at the flash of an image. I clutch the plastic and stare at the knobby bones of my sister’s collarbones as they jut above some cheap t-shirts. Even their skulls look thin, if that’s possible. Nora’s alarmingly pale skin and shaved head set off her blue eyes like gems, but they’re starker than I ever remember them being. Hard. At least she looks alert, though. When the camera actually shows a glimpse of Lia’s face, it’s sallow, and her eyes are distant. Focused on nothing. She looks even worse than she did at the Symposium a couple of weeks ago.
Dammit. Restless panic vibrates through my libs, and the desperate sensation of being frozen in place and needing to do something — anything — overwhelms me.
But how they look isn’t even the worst part; it’s the fact that they made the news at all. Hayley was right. The convenience store they supposedly broke into — even though there was probably no “breaking in” involved, just utter destruction — is a disaster. A huge crack runs down one of the walls, and pieces have shaken loose and litter the floor. Everything in the store is messed up — bags of chips blown open and covering the floor, shelves overturned, computer wires ripped out of the wall.
My guess is that they teleported straight through wall with even more force than when they left the Hub a couple days ago. They’d shaken the reinforced walls even then, so of course the concrete sides of this dinky little shop weren’t going to hold up well.
A reporter stands against this backdrop of destruction, jabbering into his microphone about whether Supers are once more posing a danger to society.
My stomach clenches. We cannot go back there, back to the war between Normals and Supers that started the isolation of Supers into Hubs in the first place. Damn Fisk to Hell for starting up this panic again. Damn him for his experiments and his kidnapping. My sisters had no choice but to escape that sensory deprivation goop — they were almost dead, and obviously, very unstable. And now they’re on the run.
Fisk’s desperation to figure out the key to solving Ones will have some serious consequences for all of us.
Just then, a group of five or six kids bursts in through the door of the residential wing, giggling and pushing each other around. They can’t be more than a year younger than Michael and Max, and I wonder if Merrin has seen them here. Wonder if she’s okay.
I do a quick head count — four boys and one girl. One of the boys slings an arm around the girl’s neck, catching her in a headlock, and her sleek ponytail swings furiously against his arm as she twists around and clamps a hand down on his head. Immediately, the kid’s body goes completely rigid. The girl ducks out of his arms and dashes down the hallway as his body crashes to the ground.
Hayley bursts into the room on their heels, crouching down next to the poor kid’s stiff body. “I saw that, Amber!”
The boy’s eyes are frozen open, and for a second, I stop laughing and feel bad for him. But Hayley runs her fingers over his forehead, and right away, he blinks. After a couple seconds, he wiggles his fingers, and after a couple more, he’s standing and shakily jogging down the hall to join his friends.
“You’re lucky I can’t use my Super in here, Amber, or you’d SO be in trouble!” the boy shouts.
Amber’s high-pitched squeal comes from the back of the hallway, where I assume the kids have settled down.
Hayley sits down on the couch opposite mine. “Sorry about them. They’re a little crazy sometimes.”
I shrug and smile. “That’s pretty awesome — her Super. Stuns people just by touching them?”
“It’s more like…she petrifies them. It doesn’t hurt, as far as we can tell, just makes them stiff.”
I nod. “Just coincidence her parents named her Amber?”
“Nah, that’s not her given name. It’s Katalina, I think. A lot of them change their names in here. I think a few years ago one of them found an old box with some X-Men comics on it, and now they all want a superhero name. Amber is one of the more normal ones. Some of the others are pretty hilarious.”
I snort. “I can imagine.”
“The thing is,” Hayley says, “if you want to be a superhero — or if your
parents want you to be — working at the Social Welfare Hub is kind of the closest thing to it, you know? I don’t know how Amber’s gonna end up using her ability, but they’re going to find a way to help someone with it.”
I just nod, my eyes drifting back to the newscast, which has switched over to a story on a local three-legged dog.
“So…those girls on the news. They were your sisters, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“What went down out there? At Biotech?” She can’t help the curiosity in her gaze, and I don’t blame her for it. I’d wonder the same thing in her place.
I keep my words measured. “Long story short, Biotech treats their kids more like science experiments and less like superheroes. They did a lot of ‘studies,’ pumped a lot of stuff into our bodies that almost killed my sisters and me. They would’ve killed Merrin and her brothers if she hadn’t busted in to save us.”
I shake my head. This is all so ridiculous. I should be playing basketball or touring colleges or watching a movie with my girlfriend right now, not trying to figure out how to keep us from getting killed. Not running from the people I’d always trusted most.
And I should know for sure which side my parents are on. I ignore the twinge of anger and sadness that twist through me. They’re my parents. They were supposed to protect us. At least Merrin’s parents were working from the inside, trying to get her brothers out.
“What the hell were they experimenting on you for?” Hayley demands. “What were they trying to figure out?”
I drag my gaze back to hers. “How to fix us.”
Her eyes sweep down over my body and back up to my face again. She shrugs. “Here they would have sent you to Normal school and left you alone. They don’t have Normal school out in the cornfields?”
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