The Butterfly Code

by Wyshynski, Sue

  In the bathroom, I take the red pills and dress quickly. My worry for Dad, Sammy, and Gage, fear about my modification, and confusion about Hunter show in the blue shadows beneath my eyes.

  Hunter continues to bang away in the airplane hangar.

  There’s no point delaying this. Bracing myself, I pad out the door into the big, arched space. The plane looks large and impressive, enclosed in this personal room. The Porsche Cayenne SUV is there, too, shiny and new and mobile.

  Hunter appears, sauntering around the tail of the plane. He’s got a bucket in one hand, a large soapy sponge in the other. He’s wearing a pair of low-slung, faded jeans, rolled up to just below his knees. And that’s it. His feet are bare. A dusting of hair runs the length of his arms, looking like it would be soft to run your fingers over. His chest spans at least five, maybe six of my hands, tapering downward into a well-sculpted six-pack. The masculine curve of his hip bones draws my eyes even farther downward, toward that low waistband and …

  This is ridiculous! I’m ogling him. How does he do this to me? I’m staring at him and feeling the most outrageous erotic sensations rippling down my belly.

  Pull it together! After last night, you need to be distancing yourself!

  I tear my gaze upward. His devilish eyes are fastened on mine, and his mouth turns up into a half grin.

  “Good morning,” he says.

  “Yes, hi.”

  “There’s not much for breakfast, I’m afraid. Half a loaf of bread in the freezer, peanut butter and jam if you want toast.”

  “I’m fine. How’s the plane?”

  “Sturdier than she looks.” He motions with his sponge at the bucket. “Just washing off the salt water. I made a few repairs. Have to get parts in at some point.”

  Silence follows. We’ve run out of things to say. I shuffle my feet, tongue-tied.

  “Guess I’ll go empty this,” Hunter says.

  He disappears and I see one of the giant doors crack open a few feet. Wan sunlight pours inside. There’s a splash of water being tossed and then he returns.

  “I’ll just rinse off and we can go,” he tells me.

  “Go? Where?”

  “Victoria told me you have a work interview in Hartford.”

  “I forgot about that,” I say, stunned at how far away Dad’s house and that world seems. “But it’s not for another two weeks. You think I need to hide out for that long?”

  “I’m not sure. But we need to stay somewhere. I have a relative in New Haven. It’s forty minutes from Hartford. We can hole up there while we’re waiting.”

  “I guess you don’t want to stay here.” Obvious. Maybe I don’t, either.

  “Can’t. That was my last packet of spaghetti.”

  “Won’t the interview be too dangerous?”

  “Can’t imagine it’ll take more than an hour.”

  I knot my fingers. “I’m going to be able to stop running, right? Because otherwise, what’s the point?”

  He sets down the bucket. “Yes. As soon as you’re clear, I’ll make sure King knows. Even if that means meeting face-to-face.”

  “Maybe I’m already better?”

  “Maybe. But I don’t think so. I have a blood kit. Let me get cleaned up and we’ll see.”

  I follow him back inside. “Why am I so important? Why doesn’t King go after you?”

  “He’s tried. You’re an easier mark. If he comes after us, he knows he’ll lose. Like always.”

  Maybe. Or maybe someday Hunter and the others will mess up.

  “I just want you better, Aeris. I hate that you’re feeling threatened. I hate that I put you on the run.”

  “You know what? I don’t care. It’s a lot better than being dead.”

  He emerges from the bathroom in jeans and a fitted heather-gray T-shirt. His brushed steel watchband makes his already thick wrist look even more muscular. He opens a cupboard and takes down a small, hard plastic suitcase. Inside are various needles, alcohol swab packets, some glass petri dishes, and a few bottles of liquid.

  “Here, rest your arm on the table.”

  I do as he says, aware of his intoxicating nearness. The brush of his fingers electrifies my forearm. His face is unreadable, yet the faint color in his cheeks tells me he feels something, too.

  He’s competent, and I barely feel the prick of the needle.

  “Hold that.” He nods at the cotton ball pressed into the crook of my arm.

  I press on it as he withdraws the syringe.

  “Now we’ll see.” From the case, he takes a petri dish and squirts my blood onto it. Next he adds drops of various fluids. My blood changes color, turning darker until it’s a deep shade of blue. Blue as a starry sky. Blue as ink, and now rapidly turning black. He grimaces and carefully washes the contents down the kitchen drain.

  A pulse, dark and stormy, seems to shoot from his back, straight into my heart. It’s brief, disappearing almost as quickly as it began. Whatever the results are, I know they’re bad.

  “How is it?” I ask.

  “Better.”

  “But not good enough.”

  “Not as good as I’d hoped.”

  He’s obviously disappointed, and I wonder how long we’re going to be trapped together, running from King. He must be wondering the same thing. My stomach aches.

  He joins me at the table. “There’s something I need to say. Last night I was rude. I apologize. No—” He holds up one hand to keep me from replying. “Don’t say anything yet. Just listen. The drugs aren’t working as quickly as I’d hoped. And I can’t in good conscience keep hiding this.”

  I wait, staring, wondering what it could be.

  “After last night, you deserve the truth.”

  “What truth?” I say, although somehow I already sense the answer before he tells me.

  He doesn’t speak. Instead, it comes across from him like a release. Like a dam slowly inching open until a few drops trickle into me. It’s a feeling, an emotion, a sensation. Totally masculine. Totally his. And if there were words attached to the emotion, they’d be saying something like, You already know. You know without me telling you. Aeris, you know.

  My eyes snap up to his, and he nods.

  So it’s true. I’m not crazy. I feel a lump in my throat. Half relief, half disbelief. I’m not crazy. I can sense him. And he knows it. One hundred percent knows it. And now I’m angry.

  Because he can sense me, too.

  He didn’t tell me. I thought I was going mad, and he didn’t tell me?

  My mouth opens to speak, yet all I can do is stare into his eyes. Sensations come flooding in. A whole river. An ocean. Bursting into my mind.

  All of it, everything. The knowledge of how he’s feeling as I look at him, or as he looks at me. Both, reflections yet different. Mine. His. Confusing and hard to pull apart, like mirrors facing each other and replicating unto infinity. Other sensations, ones I can’t put names to because I don’t know what thoughts are behind them. Concern, perhaps. Caution. Watchfulness. I never realized how much free-floating emotion exists in a person’s body, a person’s mind, until mine starts blending with his.

  It’s too much.

  The flow is too strong. Way too strong. I frown, twisting and struggling under the weight of so much information. My synapses are firing out of control. The room fades out of my vision. Desperately, I try to focus on my surroundings. On the table. On my hands that are gripping the chair so hard I fear my fingers might break. I throw them up and clap them to my ears.

  “Stop! Make it stop!”

  It does. He does.

  I go limp, sagging onto the tabletop, burying my face in my arms.

  “So it wasn’t just me,” I whisper. “How could you not tell me? You knew what I was feeling.”

  Hunter rubs his face.

  “You had to know everything I was going through,” I say through gritted teeth.

  “I thought if you experienced some minor emotional link, you’d believe it was nothing. A fluke.” />
  “Minor? It wasn’t minor. That’s pretty damn obvious. How could you not tell me?”

  “It’s more than you and me that’s at stake here. I broke our number one rule by saving your life. A consensus was reached. I voted to tell you, but the others wanted you kept in the dark. In their opinion, it was the only way to protect you and themselves at the same time. Humans want what they can’t have, and empathic abilities would fascinate a lot of people. The human psyche is not ready for them, I can tell you that much. It never will be. They’re a curse. I had to stick by their decision. But do you see on some level why we’d want the truth hidden?”

  I stand, overwhelmed. It’s all too alien to seem real.

  I need to do something. I want to feel normal, safe. I go to the kitchen. There’s a box of tea. I’ll make tea. That’s normal. I grab the kettle, fill it with water, and plug it in.

  How could he keep this from me? I had every right to know!

  The water begins to boil, and so does my indignation.

  I glance over my shoulder and his eyes snap to mine. I realize then that although he’s locking himself in, part of him can sense my swelling emotions. Does the connection always go both directions, or can he sense me even though I can’t sense him? If so, it’s just one more way he has control over me. From the hospital to this forsaken place, even into my mind.

  I have no secrets from him. No private feelings. No silent dignity.

  The kettle whistle blows high and loud. I yank the cord from the wall and dump the scalding water into a cup. It splashes onto the counter.

  “All that time you knew I was sensing people, you said nothing. I could have lost my mind!”

  “You didn’t. And if we had sensed that, we would have told you the truth.”

  “We? So Ian, Victoria, all of them can read me?” I glare at him. “And so that’s why you’re telling me now? You think I’m losing it?”

  He’s a powerful, solitary figure, alone at the kitchen table. His rugged face seems so steadfast and honorable and true. I want to trust him. I so badly want to trust him. What is he really, though?

  He grunts. “I’m telling you because from when I picked you up on that road, it’s been a losing battle keeping you out. Obviously last night I couldn’t. That’s why I was angry. Not with you, with myself.”

  The tea leaches dark orange ribbons into the hot water. Both my hands are braced against the counter. They’re shaking. This isn’t how human beings are supposed to work. Tampering with the mind to open up connections between people is disturbing, impossible. Unthinkable. “I don’t get it. This is what you’ve been researching? Linking yourselves up this way? Why?”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “Then what is it?”

  Hunter remains silent for a long moment. I can still feel the threads faintly between us.

  “It’s a side effect. A horrible side effect of the genetic modification.”

  “I didn’t feel it between me and my dad. Or my friends, Ella and Gage.”

  “Because they’re not like us.”

  Us. Me and him. Because I’m no longer normal. No longer a safe, sound human being. I’m something different.

  “Who is ‘us’?”

  “You and me,” he says. “Victoria, Ian, Edward.”

  “And Lucy, too?”

  He pushes back his chair. “There are others. Thirteen of us.”

  I let go of the counter and straighten up. He’s right. On some level, I can sense them all. It’s like low-level chatter. Perhaps because Hunter’s physically closest, he’s the loudest. There are others in the near distance like the wind in treetops. If I focus really hard, I realize I can sense Victoria’s emotional signature. She’s worried. From farther away comes the faintest murmur like the burble of a tiny stream—the people across the ocean in Switzerland, perhaps.

  “And they’re all struggling to shut me out?”

  “Yes.”

  I think of Ian, who wanted this the least. No wonder he was so cold. So angry.

  “Is that why you left, then?” I ask.

  “Partly.” He’s holding back. “I wanted to stay, Aeris. It’s different for me. Harder.”

  “Why?” I ask, more deeply hurt than I could ever imagine. “Why is it different for you? You act like you care for me, and you’re the one who turned me into what you are! I heard them try to stop you from doing it, from saving me. And then you leave them to take care of me while you disappear? You made me one of you. You could have at least told me the truth. I never asked for this. I never told you to inject me on that operating table. Yes, I wanted to live. But I never told you to use some experimental drug to restart my heart.”

  “Stop.” His palms are facedown on the table, muscles twitching in his wrists.

  I’m breathing hard, my chest rising and falling under the oversize shirt.

  “It’s different for me because I injected you with my own blood.”

  Hunter’s words hover ghostlike between us.

  His blood.

  “I thought you gave me a drug.”

  “There is no drug. Not anymore. It’s gone. It’s been gone for a long time. I didn’t even know if infusing you with my blood would save you. I certainly didn’t realize it would work almost instantly. We were shocked. There you were, eyes open and speaking.” He shakes his head. “We’ve been keeping up walls between us for so long that when you came into your awareness on that table, we were caught off guard. I had to send Victoria out, to pull herself together.”

  I remember that. I remember him ordering her from the room.

  He rakes a hand through his hair. “I had no idea that injecting you with my blood would create a more direct link between us. It’s not like with the others. It’s stronger.”

  As we face each other, understanding passes between us. We’re in this together. More deeply than either of us could have imagined. We were drawn to each other before the accident. Yet now there are threads knotted around both of our hearts, tied tightly and pulling us inextricably near. In some ways, we’re closer than two people could ever hope to become. And in others, we’re miles apart.

  “You were ill,” I blurt out as the realization comes to me. “After you left. I felt you. I made you sick because of this.”

  “No. That was different.”

  “And you came to me once at Dad’s, when I was afraid.”

  “What was that about? I only knew you were frightened. I couldn’t tell why.”

  “I was late taking the silver pill.”

  His face pales. “So that’s twice? We can’t let that happen again.”

  “No. And last night when I was singing it felt like I was crossing over into you or something—is that how it works? Is that what you do to me?”

  “Honestly, I spend most of my life trying to avoid it.”

  “But it could be so interesting.”

  “I’m not so sure.”

  “You’ll have to teach me to put a up a wall, then. It’s only fair.”

  “You’re right. But I can’t lie. With you, it is appealing. I’m not blind to the temptation of what it might be like to explore it further. But earlier, when I showed you what we were capable of, for a minute I thought I wasn’t going to be able to regain control. It’s never happened to me before. It was like being pulled into an ocean current. One minute everything was fine, and the next I thought we were both going to get swept under.”

  I try to laugh. “What are you saying—that we almost got locked in each other’s minds?”

  “Yeah. I am.” He shrugs. “It felt good at first. Damn good. But I almost couldn’t stop it. I almost didn’t want to.”

  Twenty-Nine

  The door to the airplane hangar stands open, and the grassy runway is just visible.

  “I have to go outside,” I say.

  He sends his chair scraping back. “I could use a walk. If you don’t mind the company.”

  I shrug, but am somehow glad when he reads that as a yes. The world
is awash in morning glow. We stroll along the plane’s landing path, stepping over crushed daisies and dandelions. The sweet, tannic scent of rosebushes permeates the air. I spot them blooming in great tangled masses like rolls of barbed wire blossoming into life.

  When I reach them, I pluck a half-opened bud.

  “Aeris?” Hunter says abruptly. “I don’t think we should wait.”

  I turn, surprised.

  “You need to be able to protect yourself. I know it’s too late to say sorry for what I put you through, but I am. And I hope you’ll see that someday.”

  It feels good to hear his acknowledgement, even if I am still mad at being kept in the dark. Judging by his furrowed brow and pleading eyes, it’s clear he means it.

  “Okay…” I say. “Apology accepted.”

  He blows out a sigh and the worried lines on his face ease. “I’ll make it up to you. I promise. Starting right now. Let’s do this.”

  I won’t lie. I feel my excitement rise at the thought of being able to control my empathic ability. Although what happened in the hangar scared the living daylights out of me, there’s an addictive pull that has begun to take hold. I want this. I want to know everything about it.

  “Copy me. Cross your arms over your chest, tightly,” he says. “It helps, in the beginning, to have a protective stance.”

  I do what he says.

  “Good. Now glare up at me like you don’t trust me. Use your eyes. Like you’re pushing me away with your expression. Like you’re building a distance between us.”

  I give him my hardest, mistrusting stare.

  “Okay, ouch. I guess I deserve that, but it’s a little intense coming from you.”

  “Just doing what you tell me.”

  “Yeah.” His mouth curves with the hint of a grin. “I just didn’t think it would come so easy. Then again, I have been a bit of a bastard…”

  “Hunter. Can we get on with it?” I say, struggling to stay serious.

  “Okay, right. So keep that look. And start to imagine a barrier of ice around your heart.”

  “Stop grinning,” I tell him. “And it might be a little easier.”