by Teri Terry
Well, alone except for Chamberlain, still purring, eyes closed, half on me and half on the bed.
He was Alex’s housekeeper’s cat, I was told, and decided I was his new human when we arrived a few days ago. Apparently someone who lies in bed all day is his kind of people. My hand strokes his soft fur while my thoughts jump around.
So much has happened, both before and after I was hurt—so much that I missed hiding in dreamland while I was healing.
The mob, the fire, being brought to this place when I wasn’t able to decide whether I should or shouldn’t come here. And now, most of all, there’s a question:
Should I trust Alex?
No matter how I turn things over and over in my mind, there is no answer I can give right now. I can’t discount his actions because of opinions from Mum and Kai based on who he was before I knew him. He’s a survivor now, like us; he’s changed, like we all have, in ways I’m still working out. And he saved us. We’d all be dead if it weren’t for him.
I won’t trust him, but I won’t distrust him either. I will base my opinion on his words and actions, how they reflect in his aura, and my own judgment. That’s the best I can do.
But I won’t tell him or anyone else he’s my father, at least not yet. Mum didn’t want him to know; that’s good enough for me. I’ll respect her wishes on this for now.
CHAPTER 4
“SERIOUSLY, COULDN’T YOU HAVE DONE SOMETHING to fix my hair?” I stare in the mirror and try to even up what is left with a pair of scissors.
“Ungrateful brat,” Spike says. “And no. Hair outside your scalp is dead—can’t be healed. You could try to make it grow faster, maybe? But I think the singed pixie look rather suits you.”
I lunge at Spike to smack him one, but he easily leaps out of the way. Maybe I’m still not quite myself after all. “I’ll catch you another time,” I say, and waggle a finger at him.
“You can try.”
“Do you really believe that we can somehow figure out how to stop the epidemic and stuff?”
“I hope so. Alex has been working on establishing a link with a remote computer where he has stored information the government had about the spread of the epidemic and all they learned from us at that secure facility we just escaped from. Elena has started going through all the stats and other information on the spread of the disease we have and also what she can find on the internet.”
“I still can’t get my head around the fact that Alex was a survivor all along. And not only that we didn’t know, but the government didn’t either!”
“Yeah. Freaky or what?”
“Dinner!” Elena’s voice calls up. We head down, Chamberlain nearly tripping me up by winding around my feet.
Now that I’m properly awake, I feel shy. Having people inside your mind like they all were when they healed me…well. I kind of feel like I was dancing around naked singing on TV with everyone in the world watching and laughing.
Now there’s a show I wouldn’t miss, Spike says, and this time he doesn’t get out of the way quick enough. I punch him in the arm.
I wonder how much else I haven’t screened that I should have today. Or back then, when you were all mucking about in my brain.
“Ouch!” he says and rubs his arm. Don’t worry, he adds silently. I was there the whole time. Everyone was too busy saving your life to rummage around in your memories.
Then I’m contrite. Sorry.
Don’t worry, I’d wonder the same thing. Especially if I did what you did when you were twelve.
He’s running down the stairs before he finishes the sentence, and I start to panic: what happened when I was twelve? He’s laughing, and then so am I.
He’s such a goof. He makes me smile; he makes me laugh when I wouldn’t think I ever could again.
He reminds me that I need to laugh, like I need to breathe.
He’s waiting at the bottom of the stairs, watching me walk down them—he holds out an arm. “Hit it or hold it, the choice is yours.”
CHAPTER 5
PEOPLE I KNOW SO WELL, and don’t know at all at the same time, sitting around the table, sharing a bottle of wine and eating pasta that Elena has prepared with Beatriz’s help.
“I made the salad,” Beatriz says shyly. “Is it good?”
“Delicious,” I assure her. I’m happy she is talking more than she used to.
Alex presides like the head of the table; Elena fusses. She gives him warm looks and leaps to get what he wants, almost before he knows he wants it, and now I see something I hadn’t noticed before, though I don’t know how I missed it when it is all over her aura. She’s got a crush on Alex.
I’m guessing they are similar ages—sixty or something. Does he like her? He uses her name a lot, draws it out: Elena. Like he likes to say it. He says his first love was named Lena, and Elena’s name reminds him of her.
For some reason the thought of the two of them like that is kind of…wrong. Maybe it’s because I think of the photo of him dancing with Mum. The way he was holding her; the look in Mum’s eyes.
Thinking of Mum recalls the sadness that is never far away. It threatens to take hold of me now, but like he knows it, Spike is there, cracking some lame joke about being a mushroom because he’s a fun guy to be with.
And so the three of us, Spike the clown, Beatriz the serious, and me—well, I don’t want to even think what role I play—round out the rest of the cast of this dysfunctional family.
After we’ve finished eating, my one glass of wine buzzes in my bloodstream, makes me warm. Makes me wonder out loud some of what I was thinking inside.
“Now that we’re not being watched and don’t have to be careful what we say anymore, like we were at the air force facility, I’m really curious about everyone.”
“Like what? Who was my best friend, what subjects I liked in school, my favorite color?” Beatriz says.
“Yes, all of that.” I smile at her. “But also, what can we do as survivors? I know we can all talk telepathically, for instance, though I don’t think all twenty-three of us at the facility were that good at it.”
“You mean talking in our heads?” Beatriz says, and I nod. “Some of them were really terrible at it. I almost had to shout to make them hear anything when we were showing everyone how to stop the drugs from working inside.”
“Maybe there are more things we can do that we haven’t worked out yet,” Alex says. “Maybe if we share the things we’ve discovered on our own, there will be things we can learn from each other? And this may help all of us.”
“What I really want to know is how we do stuff,” I say. “They were doing brain scans and other tests at that facility, weren’t they? Did they come up with anything?”
“I can show you the data,” Alex says. “There were odd patterns they couldn’t explain, but they hadn’t worked much of anything out yet. I’m not sure they ever would have, using those methods. They needed to engage you in the process. Something they didn’t want to do.”
“So, what can we all do?” Spike says.
“There is the internal stuff,” I answer, “like healing yourself, speeding up the metabolism of drugs to make them inactive. And external stuff: talking in each other’s heads, choosing what to project and what to keep to yourself.”
When you remember, Spike says, an aside to me. I project an image of a cream pie splatting on his head. He smirks.
“And suggesting things to others who aren’t survivors,” Alex says.
“We need a shorthand term for non-survivors,” Elena says.
“Like what?” I ask.
“Let’s call them Muggles,” Beatriz says, and Spike laughs.
“Why not?” Alex says. “So, suggesting things to Muggles, planting thoughts in their minds to get them to do what we want them to do.”
“Also being able to tell if Muggles are lying or t
elling the truth, what they are feeling,” I add.
“I can do that a little, but I’m not always sure of it,” Elena says.
“It’s the colors you need to look at,” Beatriz says.
“What do you mean?” Elena asks.
“The colors around people.”
“She means their auras. They’re something like color, something like sound,” I say. “Everybody’s is different. It’s like their own unique voice—their Vox.”
“Exactly!” Alex says, but Spike’s and Elena’s eyes are on me; they don’t know what I’m talking about. I can tell that Beatriz does, as well as Alex. In fact when I said about everyone having their own voice, his eyes opened wider.
I explain how to unlook to see an aura. Spike gets it quickly. Elena struggles until I show her in her mind.
“You can use auras to heal too. Elena, you’ve got a headache?”
“Yes; too much staring at computers with the wrong glasses. How did you know?”
“It’s in your aura; there is a shadow around here.” I gesture around the back of her head and neck. “If you let me, I may be able to help?”
“Go on,” she says nervously.
“Hey, relax; this is nothing compared to what you all did to me after the fire.” I hold my hands behind her and pulse waves of gentle energy into her aura, into the shadow until it eases.
She smiles. “That’s brilliant. We could hire you out.”
“I have a question,” Spike says. “Could you do that if she said no, if she resisted?”
“I don’t know.”
“Punch me in the arm again,” Spike says. I roll my eyes and oblige.
“You didn’t have to hit me that hard! Now try to make me feel better without my cooperation.”
His arm does have a rather sore place, there—another shadow. Sorry, didn’t mean to hurt you; I don’t know my own strength.
Sure.
I try different ways to affect Spike’s aura; first gently, like I did with Elena’s. Then using more and more effort until finally I give up, afraid if I push it too hard I might hurt him if I get through.
I shake my head. “Nope. Can’t do it. Let me try again without you blocking me now?”
“Go ahead.” This time there is no resistance: a gentle readjustment soothes his aura and the slight pain in his arm.
“Nice work,” Spike says.
“Of course that’s not all you can do with auras,” Alex says. “You can use them against others too.” He’s looking at me.
“What do you mean?” Elena asks.
“For self-defense.” I say it quietly.
“Or offense,” Alex adds.
“How?” Spike says, but I don’t want to tell them what I did.
“They may need to know,” Alex says when I don’t answer. “To save themselves or each other.”
I know he’s right, yet…
“Show them.” Alex’s voice is insistent.
I link them to my memory: the five men running at me with flamethrowers, Alex behind me frantically pulling at wires, trying to open the door. The way I slammed into the auras of the first few—hit hard into the colors around their hearts—and they just fell to the ground. Hearts stopped. Dead.
I look down, avoid their eyes and auras and the judgment I’m afraid to see and feel.
“You did what you had to do,” Spike says.
“Yes,” Beatriz agrees. I raise my eyes. She’s shocked, they all are, but they don’t say murderer, a word I hear whispered in my mind late at night.
“Show us again,” Elena says, steel in her voice. “If anyone comes around with a flamethrower, I want to be sure how to do it.”
And so I find myself teaching them all how to kill.
CHAPTER 6
SOON AFTER THAT I RETREAT the way I usually do: into books.
Alex’s library is an Aladdin’s cave. It’s huge, with bookshelves covering every wall. The ceilings are so high there is a ladder for the top shelves, and I’m looking everywhere at once—reading titles, touching books, smelling them—the very old and very new on every subject I can imagine.
What do I want to read?
Everything we are able to do—for me anyhow—seems to relate to waves: waves of energy, color, and sound, the same things that make up auras. Vox was what Dr. 1—the doctor responsible for the underground Shetland research institute—called it. A word that I used today, and I’m puzzled as to why I’d chosen to use his word when I usually just think of it as aura.
Human auras are the brightest, especially survivors’, but all living things—and inanimate objects too, like stars—have their own patterns.
Except for Callie: she’s the only one I’ve ever come across who doesn’t have any aura at all.
The scientists and doctors seem to struggle to understand that a disease can be caused by a physical agent instead of a biological one, like a bacterium or a virus. Maybe the things we can do mirror this. Do they relate less to biology and more to physics?
Niggling away inside me is the feeling that while the answers I want may have huge consequences, they are actually small, infinitesimally so. We were infected by particles of antimatter, much smaller than atoms. And when I reached inside to heal myself, I focused in and in—on molecules, then atoms, then particles. Smaller and smaller, and the smallest things that exist became waves that I could use to heal myself. Is this the same way I can act on someone else’s aura to hurt or heal or speak in someone’s mind?
I gather an armload of physics texts, settle into an armchair, and open the first one. But I want quantum physics: this text starts from the big bang, the theory that a massive explosion at the beginning of time released equal amounts of matter and antimatter and created the expanding universe. I should swap it for another book, but I can’t stop myself reading. This is all stuff we touched on, superficially for sure, in school physics. But reading it now at a higher level and understanding things in a way I couldn’t before is exciting.
It’s like in science fiction: antimatter plus matter equals big explosions—both cease to exist. So how do we walk and talk with antimatter ticking away like a bomb inside each of us?
And at a universal level, how does anything exist? The matter and antimatter created by the big bang should have blown each other up until nothing was left, and why they didn’t nobody really knows. For some reason matter won. That we—and our matter-based universe—are here is the proof.
The universe keeps expanding, and it shouldn’t do that either. There isn’t enough gravity from all the matter in the universe to make it behave as it does, and since they can’t explain it, physicists invented an explanation: there must be more matter—matter that cannot be seen, felt, or measured, but must be there if they’ve gotten the rules of physics right. Because they’ve got a sense of humor, they call this made-up matter you can’t see dark matter.
But what if they’ve gotten the rules wrong, instead? Physicists must have really big egos.
Spike and Beatriz wander in and I barely notice. Spike is soon on the other side of the room with a pile of books of his own. Beatriz settles closer to me.
She yawns and I look up over a page.
I smile to see she’s got a Harry Potter book. She found that in Alex’s library?
“It’s late. Time for you to get some sleep, maybe?” I say.
“Probably.” She closes her book but holds her eyes on mine, unblinking. She is still, quiet, intent—when she is like this, she is so not like a child. “Olivia,” she says finally.
“What’s that?”
“My best friend—she was called Olivia. She died like everybody else. I liked reading best at school. And purple.”
Best friend—favorite subject—favorite color: the things Beatriz had mentioned before when I said I wanted to know more about everyone.
“Mine were Iona. Science. And turquoise blue, like the tropical sea.”
“Is your Iona all right?”
“I don’t know,” I say, disquieted. “She was, last time I checked in with her—but that was ages ago really. I actually can’t believe I haven’t thought of her lately.”
“You should find out.”
“Yes, and I will. Thank you for reminding me, Beatriz. Good night.”
She walks across the room, and the door shuts behind her.
I look across the room at Spike just as he looks over at me. “I’m worried about her,” I say.
“I’m worried about all of us.”
I put my book down, lean back, and sigh. “She’s not exactly having a normal childhood.”
He walks across the room and sits on the other side of me than where Beatriz was before. “She’s not exactly normal. Neither are we. Neither is our world anymore.”
“About that. There’s one more thing I’m a bit worried about,” I say.
“Only one? What’s that?”
“That brain stuff we were working out together earlier. Among ourselves—us wizards and witches,” I say, and he grins. “You know how I could only heal you if you let me?”
“Yes. And it was the same when we healed you: you had to let each of us in to help.”
“Likewise I’m sure I could only hurt another survivor if they allowed it.”
“And?”
“Well. I’ve felt like I can read everyone here—what they’re feeling and so on, how truthful they are being. But maybe that isn’t true. Maybe it’s only what they allow to be seen.”
Spike gazes back, his face serious for once; one heartbeat, two. “Everyone has a mask, Shay,” he says finally. “Otherwise it’d be like we’re all wandering about naked in front of each other, and who’d want that?”
He gets up, heads for the door, then turns to look at me when he reaches it.