Two

by LeighAnn Kopans

  “I can’t believe they did that to you, too! I thought it was just because we landed on the roof.” We round a corner, and our steps slow. “Besides that, how are they treating you?”

  She looks up at me, a worried-suspicious look in her eyes. “Like royalty. You?”

  “The same.”

  Her lips thin. “Somehow, they must have found out about what we could do. But if we were such a big secret at Biotech, I don’t know how.”

  “They’re CS, right? That’s how.”

  “Good point. So if Biotech wasn’t tracking Daniel and me, then they had to have been tracking you guys. Or trying to. How have they not found you? I mean…we were really worried, Elias.”

  “They already found us once.” My voice is low, and I give her a look that begs her not to freak out. “We holed up at the Social Welfare Hub for, like, twelve hours. They had a universal comm out on us before we even got there, and we left when they biobombed the building.”

  Tears brim in her eyes, and I want to hug her again. We round another corner to the girls’ wing.

  She lowers her voice. “Did you go supersonic? All the way here?”

  I glance around the hallway before nodding. “It’s a long story, but….”

  All of a sudden, a series of fast, light footsteps pound against the ground. Merrin jumps, squealing, at Leni, and Leni picks her up and spins her around. The girls do their screaming-hugging-kissing thing, and I just stand there, beaming, watching them chatter about the last couple days and their rooms and CSH and how happy they are that we’re all safe.

  Merrin slips her hand into mine as soon as she breaks away from Leni. It feels so right to have her next to me. I bend down to kiss her on the head, and that brief little hum she makes me want to pull her toward my room, shut the door behind us, and forget the rest of the Hub exists. I’m starting to think that the shampoo smell I love so much is really just a her-smell, and that I’m addicted to her and will never, ever get enough.

  But when I think about all the things I’d like to take my time doing with her behind a closed door, the wrong parts of my body start to get carried away, and I have to block it out. So I look at her and hope my soft “Hey” says it all. From the look in her eyes, it does. She leans in and wraps her arm around my waist.

  “Did Kara tell you guys we have lunch now?” Merrin says.

  “Did Kara sound a little too…friendly to anyone else?” I ask. The girls laugh.

  “Yeah,” Leni says. “One of the guys in charge here programmed her for sure.” Then her face turns serious. “Okay, so supersonic. Tell me everything.”

  It doesn’t take long to tell the story of how we arrived here, and by the time we make it to the dining commons, Leni’s up to date.

  I crane my neck, looking for Daniel. “What’s taking him so long?”

  “There he is.” Leni walks over to him, looking like she’s restraining herself from sprinting to where he stands.

  A guy in a suit jacket and white button-down shirt clasps Daniel’s hand and pats him on the shoulder, then both of them turn to us.

  “Hey, Elias!” Daniel grins at me, and another missing piece clicks back into place. My shoulders relax. With the four of us together, there’s nothing this place can do to us. “E, meet my cousin, Naveen. He works here.”

  Naveen has the same flashing dark eyes as Daniel, and he studies me as I approach. “Welcome to the Hub.” He looks back at Daniel, gives a slight smile, and says, “Say hello to your parents for me.” Then he’s gone.

  Daniel strides forward and shakes my hand, pulling me in to clap me on the back. His smile is infectious, and for once, there’s no sarcasm or teasing between us.

  “Good to see you, man,” I say, grinning back at him.

  “Good to see you.” His grip is strong, full of energy. That’s reassuring.

  “What did you tell him? Did he talk to your parents?” I ask him, trying not to sound too stressed.

  “I didn’t tell him anything. When we got here, they asked us not to talk about what happened at Biotech. All new arrivals are classified. But us, especially, I think.”

  Merrin nods. “There was a universal comm Biotech sent out looking for us. Social Welfare kept us safe as long as they could. Looks like Clandestine Services wants to do the same.”

  Her eyes dart up to mine, and I know she wants me to hear just one word: safe. She thinks we’re safe here or wants us to be.

  “So he just thinks your parents sent you here?” I ask.

  “He’s guessing, yeah,” Daniel replies.

  Merrin clears her throat. “So what have you guys figured out?” She and Daniel have always made a curiously great match — both intense, both laser-focused on what they want. Even though she’s only known them for a few months, Merrin knows well enough to squeal and hug Leni and get right down to business with Daniel.

  “First, we need to eat.” He motions back to a table with four empty seats, where he already has a tray loaded with food for him and Leni. “You guys should, too. Leni and I only have an hour until some intake session.” We head over to the table and take our seats, scooting the chairs closer and continuing the conversation in lowered voices – a habit from being on the run we’ve developed already.

  “I have a debrief then,” I say.

  “Me too.” Merrin’s eyes shift to all of us. “What was your debrief like?”

  Leni swallows a bite. “They wanted to know the whole story. How we got here.”

  “Did you tell them?” Merrin asks.

  “We had to,” Leni says. “They had us in separate rooms. They were fact-checking.”

  Daniel’s eyes flare. “What was your intake like at Social Welfare?”

  “I’m not hungry,” Merrin says. “I’ll tell you everything.”

  “I’ll walk with you,” Leni says. We do a quick survey of all the food stations, each manned by an automated system where you can punch in exactly what you want and a machine kicks it out onto your tray. I go simple with pizza and salad for Merrin and me, and then Leni and I walk back together. She takes a seat next to Daniel and watches him talk like there’s nothing else in the world she’d rather be doing.

  “So,” Daniel says, speaking between mouthfuls of some burrito thing he’s scarfing down. “About that biobomb. Something’s really screwed up with the Hubs if they’re attacking each other.”

  Merrin nods enthusiastically. “We think so too, but they’re also the only places that can really help us.”

  “Right,” Daniel continues, “Which is why we figured if we wanted to meet up with you two, this was as good a place as any. We never really considered you’d go to the Warfare Hub.”

  “Aside from the nice winter weather, that place is terrifying,” Leni says. She picks at her sandwich.

  “Eat, Len,” I tell her gently. She glares at me while she takes a bite. I’m the big brother Leni never had — she listens to me when she knows I’m right. Most of the time.

  “We’ve only been here a few hours, so we don’t know much. Yet.” Daniel leans forward, and Merrin’s eyes dart to the ceiling and walls around us.

  “You noticed the cameras?” I ask her.

  “Yeah. I’m pretty sure they’re bugged, too.”

  “I asked Kara. She said they scan our movements for typical behavior patterns, but they’re not on a vid feed unless there’s something out of the ordinary.”

  “And you believe that?” Daniel asks.

  We all eye the cameras for a long minute, and then Merrin leans forward, speaking in a hushed voice. “Did you find out anything about the situation from your cousin?”

  “No. I couldn’t even ask him, just like he couldn’t ask me. But at least we got one thing out of him.”

  “He’s so nice. I felt so bad,” Leni murmurs.

  “What?” I look at Daniel. I just really hope he didn’t do anything stupid. As wary as I am of this place, I don’t know where else we’d go.

  His eyes scan the room again before he say
s, “I stole his ID and logged into their network. I got into one of the intel intake rooms. There were a ton of reports about Biotech from the last few days cached in the most recent files. Everything was what you would expect — ‘Singularly gifted individuals escape,’ ‘Possible threats to Hub welfare and society at large,’ ‘Return to Biotech Hub immediately,’ ‘May be carrying Cure-related materials.’” He takes another bite, and Leni takes over.

  “But then in the next update we saw was, ‘May be carrying biohazardous material.’”

  “So they know we have the vials? Didn’t seem like CS cared too much about that when we arrived. They didn’t even search us,” Merrin says.

  She rolls her shoulder back, and I notice that her messenger bag is gone. I furrow my eyebrows and tilt my head to her shoulder.

  “I stashed ‘em,” she says in a quick whisper. “Scattered around our room.”

  Leni shrugs. “They probably knew it was bullshit. They scanned you as soon as you stepped in the neighborhood and didn’t find anything.”

  Merrin shakes her head. “But I still have the vials. Why would they call them ‘the Cure?’ I haven’t found anything in them that would indicate that’s what they are. What the hell?”

  “Exactly.” Daniel waves his fork at us. “I wanted to know, too. I was able to hack far enough in to discover a weak firewall workaround. I found all these semi-classified documents with the word ‘Cure.’ CSH has figured out that Biotech is working on it, that it’s funded and possibly in conjunction with the U.S. government, and that Fisk’s name is all over it.”

  “We know what that is,” Merrin says, staring at her pizza and not taking a single bite.

  “A cure for superpowers?” Leni asks, swallowing and wiping her mouth with a napkin. “That doesn’t make any sense. I mean, sure, the government would love to get rid of Supers — we’ve always freaked them out a little — but not that much, I don’t think.”

  I think back to the beginning-of-the-year holoteacher lecture on internment camps at Normal High and nod. It’s the same damn lecture every year. Like we need to be reminded that Supers are freaks. Something to be afraid of.

  Merrin continues. “I always thought Fisk wanted to make our Supers better, not make them go away. I still can’t understand why in the world he’d be working on a cure, but back at Social Welfare, we hacked into the Codex and found out I was one of the first test subjects.”

  “Obviously, it didn’t work,” I say, giving her a slight smile, which she returns before attacking her pizza.

  “I don’t like it…” Daniel says.

  “Obviously, none of us do,” Merrin says, polishing off the rest of her slice.

  Daniel swallows. “What’s really disturbing is that they care about it enough to still be talking about it.”

  “I think they’ve been working on it all along. With me.” I clear my throat, forcing the words out. “All along, I thought they were trying to make me stronger, and I was failing. But now, I think they were trying to make me weaker, and I was winning.”

  Merrin’s face is solemn, her eyes wide. “Is that good or bad?”

  I try to laugh, but I can’t. “It sucks because my parents were trying to take my One away. It’s great because I’m a hell of a lot stronger than I thought.”

  Merrin blinks hard, then reaches for my hand. I clasp hers in mine, and we both squeeze so hard our knuckles turn white. This is us. This is solid. This is our assurance that we’ll always have each other.

  Hayley joins us at the table, bumping shoulders with Merrin. “Hey, guys. Making friends already?”

  “Actually, these are our friends from home,” I say. “My best friend Leni Summers…” She leans across to shake Leni’s hand, who takes it with a shy smile. “…and this is Daniel. Suresh.”

  “You one of the Sureshes?”

  He smiles. “Probably.”

  “The ones who refined in vivo electroporation devices for vaccines?”

  “Yeah. And my parents discovered the true force of epigenetics in the last twenty years. Which is why it’s so…uh…ironic, I guess, that I’m their kid. Being what I am.”

  Hayley’s face twists up. “Okay… What are you?”

  “Me? I’m a One. So is Leni.”

  Hayley’s eyes widen. “Wait. Don’t tell me you two do that freaky combining thing that Merrin and Elias do. Because that is weird in about ten different ways.”

  “Oh, yeah, we do that,” Daniel says. I can practically see his chest puffing out, him sitting a fraction of an inch taller. “Wanna see?”

  He presses his palm against Leni’s. “The pudding,” he whispers, and Leni gives a sly grin, looking around the room first. Then she holds her finger out to Hayley’s cup of vanilla pudding and a blue-white flame, concentrated in narrow stream, shoots from her finger. It scorches the top to make a mini crème brûlée , with the edges of the cheap plastic cup waving in around it.

  A laugh bursts out of Hayley’s mouth, and she shakes her head, smiling. “Amazing. But neither of you can do that on your own.”

  Leni grins. “Nope. I just catch on fire, but my body can’t handle it.”

  “Ouch,” Hayley winces. “So he’s indestructible, I take it?”

  Leni’s face flushes when she looks at Daniel. “Yep. It’s actually pretty perfect.”

  “Damn,” Merrin breathes. “That’s incredible control. When did you guys get so good?”

  Daniel’s smile stretches wide. “We’ve been practicing, a lot,” he says, his eyes searching Leni’s. “Plus, you know. The…closeness helps.”

  “Oh.” Hayley’s eyes go wide. “So, hold on. I know you two birdies are together.” She motions to me and Merrin.

  “Birdies?” Merrin asks, a look of supreme annoyance on her face.

  Hayley throws back her head and laughs. “Lovebirds. Because you fly? Get it? And you two…” She flicks her head at Leni and Daniel, whose hands are still clasped. “…are together, too. So is that part of it? Is that why you’re so strong?”

  Merrin nods. “We think so. We think the closeness makes it more powerful. Elias and I have gotten faster the longer we’ve been together.” I clear my throat, and she adds, “But it’s not just this kind of closeness. My twin brothers and his sisters aren’t even Ones, but they get stronger when they touch. They’ve been together all their lives.”

  “So you’re telling me that Ones can combine their powers if they’re in love or whatever, but no one figured this out till now?”

  “We don’t know if they all can. We do know we’re different, though. We think… I found out …something that happened to us when we were kids. We were part of an experiment.”

  Merrin eyes Leni, who blinks hard. “You’re right.” Merrin opens her mouth, but Leni stops her. “I’d forgotten all about your mom, what she did to me. I was so little when it happened, or maybe I blocked it out. But I remembered when I saw her.”

  Of course, I’ve known about this all along. My parents talked about progress and goals, about treatments and genetic innovations. I knew every single time they walked me through those Hub doors to make me better — to make me Super. I never protested because I wanted to keep the peace and because, up till those last few weeks, nothing they did ever hurt anyone, as far as I knew.

  I didn’t know that the experimentation on Ones had once been an official Hub initiative, and I only knew that Merrin had been involved when she was small. I never knew what they learned about her, what was special about her that would one day apply to me. But I was no better than the Hub officials, or her parents because I kept what I knew from her, too. I hadn’t told her anything because I’d wanted to protect her. I hate that she had to find out by Fisk trying to kill her.

  That turned out to be the dumbest plan I ever had because it got us into even more trouble. It got us where we are today. Far from home and being hunted by Biotech — by my own parents.

  Not to mention that those experiments probably contributed to the formation of a cure
for all Supers, a thought that makes guilt pulse through my brain and sends my stomach sinking. Listening to Merrin and Leni sift through the disconnected facts connecting their pasts kills me.

  Merrin stutters, her voice choked. “I found out right before I saw you that day. I…”

  “It’s okay,” Leni says. “You didn’t have time to tell me.”

  Hayley leans back and crosses her arms. “They experimented on you, didn’t they? Is that why you have those vials in your bag?”

  Merrin jolts. “How did you…? I kept it on me the whole time we were at Social Welfare.”

  Hayley’s smile is almost smug. “You can hear them. I notice a lot.”

  “Yeah.” Merrin’s voice lowers even further. “There’s something in those vials that could change us — that much is obvious. They were ID-tagged, so we know which ones were based on our genetics.

  “We say exactly what happened, and by playing nice, we make them promise not to separate us. Right?”

  Leni sucks in a breath. “Oh, we can’t be separated.”

  “Do you think they would separate us?” Daniel asks.

  “Hopefully they’re just trying to get the facts. Telling them the truth is the best we can do.” Hayley says, taking in the four of us. “I don’t want to think about what they would do if we lied, you know?”

  “Yeah, I know,” I murmur. I can only imagine. I swallow and push away the memories of what Biotech was willing to do to its subjects, especially when we didn’t comply. “We’re still minors. They could get in a lot of trouble letting us in here, not asking us about our parents, and especially not turning us back over to Biotech. As long as we don’t cause trouble, I think we’re fine. And I just want all of us to be.”

  “Safe.” Leni and Merrin interrupt at the same time, their gazes connecting in a slight smile.

  I smile back, even though I know that they’re at least a little amused by my constant watchdog tendencies. It’s been a rough few months though. No one can blame me.

  The click of heels that stops next to our table interrupts my thoughts. Emily has the same bemused smile on her face that she did when she showed us our rooms.