When Merrin sees me coming, she immediately starts toward me, throws her arms around my neck, buries her face against my shoulder. I rest my chin on her head and watch one of her legs kick up. She’s floating to hug me, which always means one thing. She’s happy.
She descends, keeping her hands pressed against my chest. “Hey. We were waiting for you.”
I raise my eyebrow.
She continues, “Okay. Okay. I have good news and bad news.”
“Me too.” I’m hoping my expression communicates to her that the bad news is much, much worse than the good.
But she barrels on, dragging me back to Gallagher. “I gave Vera the vials. Not all of them,” she rushes on. “I thought it would be best to keep that bag stashed and to keep some of them to ourselves. Just one of each color. I thought I knew which was which based on the preliminary structure outline on each vial, and for this one, I was right. I was right, Elias!”
“Okay. You were right. And?” Her babbling enthusiasm can make me smile, even on a day like this.
“And it’s an opener, Elias.”
“Which means…”
“Which means that when I take it, it totally activates my transferability. My One can match with other Supers, just like when you and I touch, except with anyone. And I don’t know why the one they made for you didn’t work when they tried it or maybe they didn’t administer it correctly, but it did, Elias. It worked for me.”
“Hold on,” I say, tugging my fingers from hers. My skin going cold. “You injected yourself with this stuff?”
“In small intervals, okay? I wanted to make sure it didn’t kill me or send me into shock or give me seizures or whatever.” Her face is pleading and expectant, like she expects me to give her a damn cookie for not trying to kill herself outright.
Some of the sadness I was feeling about not having Nora and Lia with me begins to bleed into my feelings for Merrin. I can’t tell if I’m disappointed or angry or just plain sad that she would risk her own life like that. But at least I can see her face and I know it didn’t turn out to be a big disaster. Yet. It took Nora and Lia time to lose control, too.
“Who did you test it with?” That’s the next most pressing question on my mind, even though I know it should be…anything else.
Merrin lets out a breathless laugh and looks back at Gallagher who steps up next to her and watches me carefully.
I try to keep my voice calm. “Him? What does he even do?”
He coughs. “She said you wouldn’t mind.”
“I’m not her owner or in charge of her or whatever.”
Merrin’s eyes spark with excitement. “He teleports. And goes invisible. And — get this — whatever he touches does, too. It’s like transference on anything he touches, except it’s not transference, of course, it’s just how his Super interacts with other matter. And so, I did it, too!” She grins like I’m supposed to be excited. “We don’t know if canceling mass in one way — my weight — makes it easier to do so in another — his visibility — but holy shit, Elias, it was awesome.”
Gallagher’s eyebrow arches. “‘Awesome’ wasn’t the word you used before. It was more like…stuff I’m not gonna repeat. And some screaming.”
“Okay, so it hurt like hell. But we made it work for a split-second. I think with some practice, we could do real time and space jumps.”
“‘Hurt like hell?’ Merrin, what were you thinking?” I feel panic start to really take hold. Partly because she really could have gotten herself hurt but mostly because — and I know this is the real reason — I really thought I was the only one she’d be able to combine Supers with. I hate that I was wrong.
“I was thinking we could actually make a freaking contribution and also figure out how the heck our freak genes work instead of freeloading for a change.” She clamps her lips tightly together as soon as the words spill out and stares at me with wide eyes.
There are about thirty questions I want to ask. They all boil down to one thing: Are we still in this together? Now that she doesn’t need me…will she stay?
“The only problem is,” Merrin says, “that with the crappy equipment she has, Vera couldn’t see that much detail on the formulas. She definitely can’t break them down any further to figure out how or why they work.”
I shake my head. “But the combination of your Supers. What was the point of that?” I should be able to make sense of it, what putting teleportation and floating and invisibility all together would achieve, but my brain is so exhausted I don’t. I just don’t.
Gallagher’s tentative words fill the tense void between us. “She could float me above the security scanners. It would be pretty awesome.”
Merrin steps forward, her voice softer, calmer. “We’re excellent break-in artists. We think we would be, anyway. We’d be going light, so we wouldn’t trip off any wires or sensors, and of course, no one would see us so….”
The whole world feels like it’s caving in on me. I can’t make sense of anything — not the empty walls or the holoscreen maps or exactly what the hell just happened to me today, what I saw. My sisters. Hurt, desperate.
And now, my girlfriend. Combining Supers with another guy like it’s not a big deal at all and spending all damn day figuring out how to be a spy while she’s connected to him.
“Mer, can we talk? Alone?”
Her mouth drops at the corners, and her eyes lose some of their sparkle. She’s not bouncing anymore. She takes another step toward me but turns her head to speak to Gallagher. “Tomorrow we’ll try again. Okay?”
“Yeah. Thanks, kid.” When he says “kid,” he looks at me meaningfully. He’s not going to hook up with her and doesn’t want to. No harm, no foul. All business, no romance. It should relieve me, but it doesn’t — probably because my worry about Merrin runs far deeper than whether she’s going to make out with somebody else, even though that would kill me.
I let her into the room, and she flops back on the bed, folding her forearms beneath her head. “Pretty amazing, huh? I feel like we’re finally getting somewhere, like we can — ”
“I thought it only worked because we had a connection.” The words rush past my lips. I don’t even try to stop them, even though I know my disappointment, my bitterness, my creeping jealousy toward Gallagher, bleeds into my voice.
Her expression instantly hardens. “Well, maybe the connection I have with Gallagher is that he’s actually interested in seeing how he can make this happen for me as opposed to being worried about whether I’m safe all the damn time.”
“Make what happen for who, Mer? I thought you wanted to develop your Super so that we could help people.”
“Ultimately, yeah. But I’m only sixteen. I have my whole life to live, and I’ll be damned if the chance to make my body do what I always wanted to do was staring me in the face and I didn’t take it.”
“There will be other chances for you to improve your Super. There may not be any more chances to help my sisters.”
“But you’re perfectly happy staying a One, Elias. And that is not okay with me. Not if I knew I could do something about it. Doing this with Gallagher — it could be the beginning of something amazing.”
“Would you please tell me exactly what you’re supposed to be doing with this newfound Super? When you get it to work? If you do?”
Merrin’s eyes narrow, and her shoulders tense. “We. First of all, it’s not just me; it’s me and Gallagher. It’s not like he’s using me — it’s equal risk.’
“Risk?” I say, a mixture of anger and panic burning through me at the word.
“Vera thinks she could make my flying permanent — or be well on her way — if she can get these samples in front of better microscopes and see them up close. She says they don’t even exist, but Biotech has them. I can’t believe they had spectrometers that the rest of the world doesn’t even know exist, can you? She even thinks that, if she had them, she could duplicate them into synthetic formulas that could help other Ones… But she
needs some stuff, Elias. Stuff they only have back at Biotech.”
Oh no. I didn’t even think this was a possibility, but I know it before she can get the words out. I can’t believe she wants to go back to the one place on Earth we’ve been running from.
Holy shit.
“Merrin, you are NOT going back there. I don’t care how compelling the science is or how badly you want this. NO.”
“Don’t you even want to ask me why I want this?” Her thin arm wraps around her waist, and she looks at me like she’s about to tell me the biggest secret of her life.
But I know. “Yes, Merrin. I’ve always known that flying with me isn’t good enough. I was just a step toward getting what you always wanted. I get it, okay? I know you better than you think I do. I know that shaking my involvement in this whole flying power is the only thing you’ve wanted since the first time we went up together.” She thinks that this flying thing is her big brooding secret, but I pay attention to the feeling behind her words and the look on her face she gets in that split-second when we land and she looks wistfully down at our hands clasped. The truth is, I’ve known it the whole time, but I haven’t often cared. I never thought there was a way to make it any different, and I guess I just hoped eventually she’d stop caring, too. Hoped that, at some point, she’d love me just as much as the flying. And I guess now that this argument is no longer really about me, I finally have the guts to bring it up with her.
“Well, we’re not kids anymore, Merrin, and we’re not playing games. Our parents aren’t here, we’re on our own, and we’re responsible for a lot more than flying around over the goddamn cornfields. In case you haven’t noticed.”
She stares at me, eyes wide, brows pressed up to her hairline, chin tilted down. I stare back while the anger bubbles up in me to a boiling point. For the first time ever, I actually think Merrin is speechless. I should walk over to her and hold her, make her unfreeze, tell her I’m sorry and I love her and I’m just scared. But the anger has already taken over.
She trembles as the words fall from her lips. “I have the right to love something just as much as I love you. Yes, I love flying. And I love myself, too. And if you can’t be with someone who has a freaking ounce of respect for her own dreams, then you can’t be with me.”
“God, Merrin. Why do you care so much? I’ve tried to be supportive. I’ve tried to be happy for you. But I can’t watch you run into a suicide mission just because it might help your One become a Super.” I’m breathing fast, and I look down at the ground, try to regroup. After a few seconds, I look up, and Merrin’s staring at me. Giving me space — the one thing I haven’t been able to do for her. Still, I want to make her understand. I sigh. “You’re still you without a Super. I love you without it. Why can’t you?”
She marches up to me and plants her feet so that her shoes touch mine. Her eyes blaze as she spits out the next words. “I want to help people, too, Elias. I feel like a freaking broken record. Have you been listening to me at all? We could be so much more effective at everything if we weren’t attached to each other all the freaking time.”
She floats up, her face hovering a foot from mine. Her eyes flash with the defiance and independence that, if I think about it for more than half a second, are the things that made me fall in love with this girl. A million things want to be said — that I saw my sisters; that maybe they’ve been inside my head; that I’m so close to figuring out a way to help them, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t involve flying around at top speed; that I’m exhausted and hungry and confused about what to do next — but none of those things will stop her in her tracks.
I blurt out, “I just didn’t think you’d run right back to the place that tried to kill you. I thought you were smarter than that.”
She freezes, and her eyes go wide. She’s so still and her breathing’s so obvious that it’s almost scary when her eyes pan to mine. The only time I’ve ever seen her this angry was when she stared down Fisk, all the way back at the Biotech arena.
After a few seconds, she speaks in a gravely whisper. “Gallagher’s working on some stuff. I’m going to go get some rest.” She holds up her cuff. “Let me know when you’re ready to talk to me like a normal person.”
She has a straight face, but her breaths are quick and there’s a hard look in her eyes. She is pissed off and controlling it remarkably well. And she’s doing it for me — for us. She drops to the ground, agile and solid, and stalks to the door.
“Mer, I…” I don’t know what to say, can’t come up with a single word that makes sense right now, but God, I don’t want her to go.
“Later. I’ll be around. I promise.”
The door clicks shut, and my mind rages. The fact that she said that means she thinks I’m needy. Or clingy. Have I lost her? Or did she just want me to know?
And what the hell am I going to do about my sisters?
I can’t stand still, but I can’t go anywhere. Shouldn’t, anyway. Leni’s the only person here I know for sure I can trust, but I’m not dragging her into this.
Shower. I need a shower to cool off. I strip out of my clothes, throwing them down the chute. I crank the water all the way on hot, and steam fills the room almost immediately. I don’t want to see myself in the mirror. Don’t want to see myself at all. Ducking under the water, I let it run over me, wishing it would melt me away, wishing my body could combine with it and run right down the drain.
Stupid emo thoughts. I just finished telling Merrin we weren’t kids anymore, we had to take responsibility for things, and here I am wishing I could disappear. A snarl rips from my throat; frustration with myself takes over. I grab a washcloth and the soap and scrub so furiously my arms get sore.
When the hot water starts to run out, the relative coolness is a shock on my skin. I trudge out of the shower, towel off in one swipe, and run the towel back through my hair. I know it’s standing on edge, and I don’t give a shit. At the last minute, I swipe a spot on the mirror of steam and lean forward, inspecting my upper lip. Damn half-assed mustache. I grab the razor from the corner of the sink and make quick work of shaving it off. No one in mission control is going to respect a kid with stupid peach fuzz growing in patches.
And one way or another, I’m going to be speaking to mission control. I glance at the clock. It’s six-thirty in the evening. They can have all night to work out where the hell my sisters are and figure out how I’m going to be involved in finding them. Twelve hours, and I’ll call them.
God knows I wasn’t helping anything anyway.
I almost trip over the wooden tray with two covered plates and a napkin on it, waiting for me just inside the door. I step into some sweats and carry the tray to the bed. The sight of the thick sandwich and chips makes my stomach growl, and I down them in a couple minutes. I guess anger and confusion and panic will make a guy forget how hungry he is. I pick up the napkin to swipe my mouth clean and find a note, handwritten on stiff paper.
I MEAN IT. GET SOME REST. I’LL BE IN TOUCH. MASTERS.
Exhaustion rolls over my body just from reading the word “rest.” I force myself to get to the bathroom one more time to run a toothbrush through my mouth. The aftertaste of salami isn’t good to wake up to.
I turn the lights out and slide my body under the covers. The fact that my feet almost stick out over the edge of the bed actually makes me feel a little more at home. In the pitch black, the clear memories of the sounds of Nora’s panic and Merrin’s anger twist together until I can’t tell one from the other, and the only thing I can do is let the darkness take me under for a few hours of rest.
SEVENTEEN
My eyes fly open, but the pitch black engulfing me means I don’t see a thing. I’m moving somewhere, my legs carrying me without me directing them.
My senses strain against the darkness, looking for anything to tell me where I am — street signs, landmarks, smells, sounds.
The silence and the blindness drown out everything else.
I move faster. If
I just go far enough, fast enough, maybe I’ll reach someplace where I can see or hear something. Twenty paces, then thirty, and still nothing. I break into a run, but even as my legs get faster, a heaviness seeps into my chest, over my whole body. Soon the labor of my breathing will stop me. The heaviness blankets my front like a soft, flexible wall, slowing me down again, keeping me back, holding me away from them.
My breaths come in gasps now, and a sob wells up out of my throat. Pure desperation propels me forward.
And then something breaks the heavy barrier, moves it away from my chest. My eyes fly open. I can barely see, but now, at least, I can hear.
“Shh. Elias, it’s okay.” Her soft voice is sweet and warm, but oh, God, how did Merrin get into this dream?
A breath rushes out of my mouth, and my face turns, meeting a soft pillow. Cool fingers trail down the side of my face, and my breaths slow.
“There. There. It’s okay.”
My eyes drift shut, and a strange mixture of relief and disappointment swirl around me. “Merrin,” I croak in a whisper. “Merrin, how did you…”
“Daniel’s hack, remember? It’s okay.”
Her body is flush up against mine. I remember every word of our fight like a knife in the chest, but I’m so glad she’s here. My eyes have adjusted to the dark, and now I can see her in relief, gray-on-gray forming the image of her face in the darkness surrounding us. The delicate outline of her nose, her dark eyelashes blinking at me.
She props herself up on her elbow, keeping her body against mine, letting her other hand trail down my neck and rest on my chest. She is so sure, so steady. So definitely here, with me, despite all the shitty things I said to her.
“Are you okay?”
My eye trains down to her shoulder, perfectly round and starkly white. A heavy pressure begins below my waistband. I have only one overwhelming thought: I hate the thin strap that runs between her shoulder and her collarbone more than anything else in the world right this moment. Somehow, I nod my head in answer to her question.
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