“Good,” she says. “I want you with me. You’re the fastest way to find Fisk in there, and wherever he is, Merrin will be.”
A few seconds later, Gallagher comes and grabs Merrin’s mom, and blinks out of existence. Then it’s my turn. When he gets back to my room, he shakes his limbs and cracks his neck.
“You doing okay?” I ask him.
“Do me a favor, VanDyne. When we’re in there, just worry about yourself. I’ve got this.” He crushes my hand in his fingers, and we’re gone, ripped from the room one atom at a time, like we were a sticker that just needed to be peeled out of the air. It doesn’t hurt, but I feel every cell as it moves through space and reassembles itself, leaving a strange, buzzing wooziness behind.
I gasp and take a sharp breath of cold Nebraska winter air, an insane déjà vu from the hellish scene we left just a few days ago.
The Hub is just around the tree line. Merrin’s dad points, showing Hayley exactly where he wants us to clear a path for entry.
Hayley turns her back on the circle of us and murmurs, “Stand back everyone. You’re gonna want to be behind this.”
TWENTY-FOUR
The cornstalks begin to crackle and stand, shaking the frost off their hardened bodies. The ice whips around in white, streaking cyclones, starting low to the ground at the bases of the stalks and traveling up in the air, growing taller with each millimeter Hayley moves her fingers.
She throws the words back over her shoulder. “Okay, guys. Let’s do this.”
Within a few dozen yards, Hayley’s whipped up a cloud of white, swirling frost the size of a football field ahead of her, which moves as she does. The cornstalks and grass left behind are bone dry under our feet. Merrin’s mom and dad are thinking about several jumbled things, and as we walk, I catch that they knew someone like this once but Hayley is already more powerful than that person ever had a hope of being.
I wonder if Masters is right. I wonder if practicing just those few days in the Hub made that big of a difference for her power or if she was hiding something from Social Welfare all along. Either way, I wonder what she was afraid of.
We’re about to turn the corner around the tree line. The movement of the ice particles in the cold Nebraska air makes a pretty strong wind, and before I know it, a snow and ice storm forms a huge shield in front of us, roaring in our ears, flecks of frozen water blowing back in our faces.
“We’re gonna have to move fast!” Gallagher shouts. “Before their initial security gets tripped up and they head us off. Dead sprint toward the Hub and then get in as quick as we can. Daniel, are you getting a signal?”
Daniel bends over his cuff, swiping at the touchscreen every second or so. His fingers fly across it in practiced movements. “I can see the system, but their security is way more complicated than it was just a few days ago!”
We’re getting closer to the Hub — a few hundred yards to the downward-sloped walkway that will take us to the first door underground.
“We should have thought this through better!” I call, but Merrin’s dad shakes his head, bending it down against the flying frost.
“We didn’t have time!”
“I can’t hack the back door security!” Daniel calls. “All the back doors I would have used have been blocked off.” He jabs at the cuff with his index finger, and pure frustration floods his face. “Shit. I’m sorry, guys. We’re gonna have to do this the hard way.”
“Which is?” Vera manages between chattering teeth. She’s marching right next to me, and her thoughts are so strong. We’re going to die. Over and over.
We walk closer and closer, Hayley picking up even more snow and ice as she nears the Hub. Through her storm, I barely make out a line of men in black gear, holding guns. I don’t know whether they’re laser, sonar, or old-fashioned bullet, but I do know that they’re terrifying.
“Doctor Grey!” Hayley says. “I think there are seven…no, eight of them! Can you take out all those weapons?” He nods. “I’ll make a path for you on one side to get at them behind the storm.”
Gallagher turns to Merrin’s mom. “I’m still worried about those guards physically attacking. Can you take them out with the fire? It’s gross, but I think lighting them up is the only way to stop them at this point. It will at least clear a temporary path for Leni and Daniel to get to the security panel. “
“We’ll just have to burn it out,” Merrin’s mom says. “My flying’s not going to do me much good below ground, but my firepower’s pretty strong.”
“Ours is, too,” Leni says. “After the initial panel, we’ll take one half of the compound, you take the other.”
Merrin’s dad tenses and loosens his arms as he walks, and steps sort of funnily like he’s doing the same thing with his legs.
More momentum, he thinks. Gotta get going faster. His words jolt and skitter through my head, making me anxious, too. But that’s not going to do us any good right now.
“Can you just do a lap to the forest and back?” I ask. “They won’t see you through the storm.”
He looks over at Merrin’s mom, and she meets his eyes. Then, with a quick nod, he’s off.
Even as he first starts off, his body is a blur. By the time he’s rounded back to the tree line and approached the guards again, he’s almost invisible. I’ve seen Michael and Max run; they’re a blur when they get going, but this is incredible. And then the force of it hits me. I really am like the Funnel now because his Super changes the atmosphere so quickly that it makes me stumble. If I didn’t realize what was happening right away, I would have fallen down, but somehow I resist it. An ache spreads from deep in my bones, but I resist that, too.
This is what it feels like. There’s going to be a lot of this going on, and you’re going to have to deal with it. To find Merrin.
My head snaps to Merrin’s mom and sure enough, her tear-filled eyes are boring holes into my head. I swallow hard and nod at her.
The blur that is Doctor Grey approaches the guards, to hopefully snatch their weapons. Even though all I can see is their stiff black forms, I stare toward the guards, hoping they won’t even see it coming. I hear all eight clicks of the safeties removing from their rifles, and Merrin’s dad hasn’t snatched them yet. One, then two guns are hoisted into position, and I can’t take it anymore. Leni’s eyes are trained in the same direction as mine, and she freezes.
I scream, “Everybody DOWN!”
Leni drops, and so does Vera, but Gallagher steps closer to Hayley, peering through the storm.
It’s almost as if I’m Merrin’s dad, inside his head, as he rushes the guards. He’s counting out eight guns as he snatches them a fraction of a second away from each other. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven… And then one gun fires.
“He’s down!” The shouted words hang in the air.
A strange flash of heat emanates from Merrin’s mom, and then all at once, she’s on fire, cutting a steaming path through Hayley’s storm with her body. I’m on fire, too, my clothes itching and burning off in chunks, dropping to the ground. It takes me a second to realize that’s just the Funnel again. I’m not on fire, Merrin’s mom is, and I’m just feeling everything.
In an instant, she’s plowed through the line of guards, and they all shout and yell as they try to extinguish the fire eating through their clothes and skin. Eight charred bodies writhe on the cold ground, trying to put themselves out.
“Dammit, Stephen!” she screams. Don’t die, don’t die, don’t die.
“Hayl, wind it down!” Vera shouts as she dashes towards Merrin’s mom and dad on the ground.
The storm calms, the air in front of us instantly clearing, and Hayley collapses to her knees in the middle of the field, just feet from the hatch down to Biotech. She’s panting and sweating, but she has the biggest, most satisfied smile on her face. Her head tilts up at the sky, at the air all around her. She looks like Merrin did the first time we flew. I did that, she keeps thinking. I created that. She feels exhilarated and peace
ful at the same time. It’s a feeling that I’ve rarely felt, but I kind of really love.
Daniel and Leni kneel on the other side of Merrin’s dad, while Merrin’s mom tries to hoist him to sitting. “We have to get him inside, Doctor Grey!” Vera says. “We can treat him better in there.”
“It’s just a shoulder,” he manages, his voice already weakening.
Vera kneels beside Merrin’s mom, grips Doctor Grey’s shirt with both hands, and tears it without hesitation. The corners of her mouth turn down. “Help me pull him up so I can check for an exit wound,” she says. I relax a little bit when I see the exit wound. Vera nods, lowers him back down, and touches her fingers lightly to the shoulder. Merrin’s dad sucks in a sharp breath.
“It’s good that it’s not in there, but I’m still worried he’ll bleed out,” Vera mutters. She shrugs out of the jacket she’s wearing, tears off her overshirt, and presses it to Dr. Grey’s shoulder.
There’s blood, so much blood coating his skin and pooling in the folds of his shirt, and when it starts to color the snow beneath him, my breaths become short. I don’t know whether he’s going to be okay or how we can follow through, but Vera grabs a handful of the wetly packed snow and daubs it against the skin there, then presses her t-shirt back to the wound.
“The bleeding is slowing,” she announces after a few minutes of staring at the wound. “I don’t think they hit any major arteries, or you’d be feeling dizzy by now. Are you dizzy?”
Doctor Grey’s face is gray, and his lips are such a pale, cracked pink it’s hard to believe he’s fine. He shakes his head steadily, though, and I feel calmer. “Just in shock.”
Tears roll down Merrin’s mom’s face, and she speaks between short, quick breaths. “Can you move?”
“We’ll have to change our plans,” Gallagher grunts, glancing up at a large side door, which is cracking open. “I’m sure there are more guys coming. We’re going to have to burn them out again. Doctor Grey, can you do that?” Merrin’s mom nods. “We’ll locate the Cure formula first, get it back to you. Then you and Doctor Grey get the hell out of here. When you get back to Clandestine Services, tell Masters everything. Tell him you have the Cure formula and ask him to hold off as long as he can before giving the missile codes.”
“What about finding the rooms?” Merrin’s dad asks.
Leni sniffs, her eyes fixed on the blood in the snow. “We have the Hub map on our cuffs. They’ll get the Cure. It’ll be fine.”
“Yes, but navigating in all the chaos is going to be impossible. I’ll be fine. I’ll go with you.” Mr. Grey winces and grunts with every movement but manages to get up. “I know there’s a lot of blood, but it really did just graze me. I can still move fast enough to make it out with plenty of time.”
“No,” Merrin’s mom growls. “I’ll do it. Gallagher, get him out of here.”
Gallagher doesn’t hesitate, and before Merrin’s dad can get two syllables out, he’s gone.
When Gallagher rips back into the space in front of us, it’s not a second too soon.
The crunch of dozens of booted footsteps on snow fills the air around us as another line of guards comes barreling up out of the underground. There are ten, twenty, thirty of them. Merrin’s mom is pissed off now. She sets her jaw, and steam rolls off her skin and billows up from the snow where her bare feet are planted. The suit she has on underneath — the only thing that didn’t burn off with her first burst of fire — is like a swimsuit with long shorts, and I wonder if she always wears it, just in case. In an instant, her whole body is on fire, and she shoots toward them.
“Now! Go!” Gallagher screams.
We rush past the flaming river of guards, some of them firing off laser guns, the broken red beams raining over the white and brown field.
We’re finally standing inside the Hub, and Leni and Daniel get right to work burning out cameras and torching security panels. Hayley stands with her hands on her hips, still trying to recover from the snowstorm.
Vera and Gallagher have their arms around each other. Vera’s just trying to breathe deeply.
Merrin’s mom swipes her eyes one more time, sniffs, and looks right at me. “These two need me to navigate their way to those rooms. You’re going to have to find Merrin without me.”
“I don’t see how I can do that. I can only hear the ones with a power.” Merrin doesn’t have a power anymore, and I have three. The world is so damn backward I hardly recognize it.
She grabs my wrist, forces me to look at her. “Remember — find Fisk, and you find her.”
I swallow down a lump in my throat and nod. I did it once, and I hope to God I can do it again.
Merrin’s mom steps over to Gallagher, checks the first location on his cuff, loops her arms around both him and Vera, and they’re gone. Leni and Daniel’s fires have finally pushed this building to a breaking point. The sprinklers hiss and spray water everywhere. Beside me, Hayley grins and tips her face upward, making a dome over her skin to keep the water out.
“Ammunition,” she says, smiling. Then she turns to me, grabbing my hand and extending the bubble over both of us, like a suit that moves perfectly with me.
“Well, loverboy,” she says. “Let’s find her. I’m following you.”
I decide to follow the path with the burned-out cameras. The pristine hallways of Biotech are charred, damp, and filled with smoke. I catch a glimpse of Leni and Daniel sprinting down the hallway, stopping at one security panel, and quieting the whooping alarm in this hallway with a burst of fire.
The lights flicker eerily and, mixed with the pouring sprinklers, make the hall look like some freaky apocalyptic thunderstorm, made that much weirder by the fact that Hayley’s keeping us dry in the middle of it.
“You don’t even look like you’re breaking a sweat,” I pant. I’m a good runner, but the pain of my rapidly changing mutations is slowing me down. The fact that Hayley’s jogging while holding the water back blows my mind.
Not that my mind is exactly stable right now. My genes are shifting into overdrive with all the Supers around me. The new mind-reading trick has me wondering what the hell I’m doing or what I’m actually thinking myself. I’m surprised I can see straight.
All I know is that I have to move forward, listen for Merrin. No matter how hard it is.
We pass through another hallway, and I recognize these rooms. Just like at Clandestine Services, during all time I spent at Biotech, the map built itself in my head. I don’t know where to find Merrin, but I think I know where not to find her. Probably not in the wing that holds lunchrooms and bare conference centers with only tables and chairs. Not in any of the bathrooms. I shout for Hayley to follow my lead as I follow Leni and Daniel’s charred path.
I wind my way toward the section of the Hub that housed the labs, but I don’t think they’d be holding her in there. She knows top-secret information they can’t risk getting out, so they need to keep her secure, in a room she couldn’t easily escape. And where they can watch her.
Like the holding cell they had my sisters in.
“I have a guess,” I say to Hayley, and she nods. The jumble of voices in my head feels calmer now, more comfortable, and I realize that, just like I could pick out the different kinds of Super activity, I might be able to pick out words and thoughts, even when my head is filled with them.
Her mom’s words echo through my memory: Find her.
If I focus, I can practically see Gallagher, Vera, and Merrin’s mom teleporting in and out of each room that holds a component of the Cure — four in all. They’re only on number two.
Another vision replaces that one as Vera holds a vial up to the light. My eyes adjust, and I see what Vera sees: a molecular image, like the ones they made us build in organic chemistry over and over. She really is a human microscope.
I check my cuff. My stomach clenches at how close we are to the time that Clandestine Services is going to bomb this whole building. We only have eight minutes to complete a mission that re
lies largely on an emotionally traumatized 50-year-old-doctor and a kid who’s still trying to figure out what the hell his abilities even are.
Panic threatens to overwhelm me again, but I tamp it down. Listen for Merrin. I have to listen for Merrin. We’re closer and closer to the testing arena, and still no guards in sight. It’s almost eerie.
A vision of Vera checking out another substance pops into my mind as she examines a vial. “Not this one. Shit.” She looks through two more before she gets it. “Okay. One more room to go.”
Gallagher, Vera, and Doctor Grey join hands and blink out of existence.
One to go. Have to get the Cure formula out of the Hub’s boundaries for my sisters. Find Merrin. Get her out.
Hayley’s still right next to me, running along and propelling the water like nobody’s business. I do notice the dome getting smaller. She’s running out of steam.
I check my cuff. Six minutes and forty-five seconds left. We turn the corner, and the arena doors are in front of us. The signal in my brain tells me that Vera’s crew have teleported in and out of two more locations in this Hub. They’ve found the Cure components and are gone. I let out a shaky breath of relief.
I push my way through the doors to the testing arena with Hayley right behind me.
Memories of this huge white room fill my mind. The track, where they let me run laps on some of my first visits as a little kid; the holosimulations, where they let me pretend to fly in hopes that it would get my brain to actually do it; the small sitting area, where Merrin and I hid from the Biotech symposium, held hands, and talked. Finally, the huge sensory deprivation tanks where I saw my sisters held captive just a few days ago, hooked to tubes and wasting away.
And, sure enough, Merrin stands in one of those damn glass cases. Her hands are fisted at her sides, and she’s bouncing on her toes. Ready. Waiting.
Waiting for me.
I head straight for her, not knowing how I’m going to break her out and, for just this second, not really giving a damn. I just want to get up to that glass, look into her eyes, press my palms against hers, and tell her it’s going to be alright. She’s going to be alright.
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