Chosen Ones (The Lost Souls, #1)

by Tiffany Truitt

  And James did nothing to stop it.

  The other boys filed into the hallway to watch, laughing. Always laughing. I couldn’t help the angry tears that filled my eyes as George pushed me into the arms of another waiting boy. This sort of connection was so different than the moments spent with James. I cringed at their touch. It felt wrong, like they were taking something from me they shouldn’t be allowed to have. As I was thrown into the arms of a third boy, my body covered with their fingers, I tripped over my skirt and fell to the floor.

  James rushed in and helped me up. He didn’t let go of my hand as he led me down the hallway, the boys’ snickers echoing off the walls.

  He gently brought me into a closet and shut the door behind him. We were shrouded in darkness, the only sound our breathing. His was much heavier than mine. I didn’t speak. I didn’t want to.

  “Tess,” he whispered.

  “Don’t.”

  I wasn’t sure if the word was meant for him or me. I didn’t want to hear his excuses or lame promises of friendship. He was just like them. No, he was different than them: he was scared. He was the weakest among the chosen ones.

  And I wished desperately that I didn’t want to hear his excuse.

  He had abandoned me. Why was I not used to that by now?

  I tried to shift myself around him to get to the door.

  “No. You can’t leave.” It was a command. I heard his power slither out between the short letters of the word.

  “Why not? Is there something you need? What would you like from me, sir?” I could hear it, the voice I had become so used to hearing come from my mouth. The voice that made others shy away from me. It sounded empty.

  “You don’t understand.”

  “Of course I do. Now what do you need me to do, sir?”

  “Tess. Enough.”

  “Would you like me to stop talking, sir?”

  “I swear, if you call me sir one more time…” I had never heard him sound so hard, so cold.

  I shook my head as I once again moved to leave. James grabbed my arm and pushed me deeper into the dark room, my back against the wall. He leaned his forehead close to mine. “You can’t leave yet.”

  I gritted my teeth.

  “What are you thinking?” he asked suddenly.

  I bit my lip. He didn’t want to know, not really.

  “Tell me,” he replied as if he could hear my thoughts.

  “You’re just like them.” There was no anger to my words, only truth. I wouldn’t let this bother me. It was fact.

  Fact.

  I always knew this. Always. It was the grief that had fooled me.

  How could I have ever thought he would allow me to be myself?

  “Please, don’t say that,” he whispered.

  “You let them. You let them…”

  Suddenly, the door flew opened. A Templeton boy was laughing and dragging a worker with him. She was laughing, too. She was drunk. The boy mumbled an apology.

  James turned to me. I could see his face now as the light from the hallway revealed it.

  “Just go, Tess. Go.”

  I started to leave but something inside of me wouldn’t let me move. I had a voice; I just needed to use it. I reached my hand forward and grabbed the doorknob, pulling it shut.

  “What is this place?” I asked.

  I could feel James stiffen. We weren’t touching, but we were so close I could sense when he moved. The air between our bodies shifted with us, connecting us. “It’s a training center.”

  His voice was emotionless.

  “Don’t,” I warned, knowing I was getting closer to the point where I couldn’t turn back. I took a deep breath. “Last week, my supervisor made me do something. Something I didn’t quite understand. There was a girl and she was hurt, really hurt. Do you know anything about it, James? I mean, this is a training center, right? Shouldn’t this be the safest place for us naturals?”

  I thought about my run-in with George, and how I’d promised myself never to tell James. It felt like I should tell someone.

  “Safe?” James scoffed. He turned to leave but I grabbed onto his arm and he froze. I could feel him begin to shake as I moved my hand from his. Did something about me frighten this boy?

  “Tess,” he replied. “This place isn’t safe for anyone.”

  The heavy silence that followed filled in the empty spaces between our words. Without a noise, he grabbed onto my hand. The feeling of his fingers wrapped so tightly around mine stole the breath from my throat. It wasn’t a completely unwelcome sensation, just new. He pulled me gently from the closet and began to lead me to the third floor. We didn’t speak as we moved through the halls of Templeton. All I could think about was the feeling of his skin against mine. It was warm. Nice.

  We stopped at the entrance of his room. James still didn’t look at me as he opened the door. I knew I could speak if I wanted to, but I didn’t. My mind was still reeling from the events of the night. When he returned to me, he held the book in his hand. His book.

  “I want you to take this,” he said shakily.

  “But—”

  “I’m sorry about tonight. I should have stopped them. I’m not…I don’t know how to do this. They don’t teach us about this…”

  “About what?”

  We were whispering even though no one was around to hear us.

  “About what it means to want something outside of this place. I wanted to speak up. I just didn’t know if I could. I’ll regret it for a long time.”

  He gently lifted my hands and placed the book into them. “Please, take this. I need you to see who I am and what I want to be.”

  “You don’t have to,” I offered, knowing I would never be so brave.

  He shook his head. “Yes, I do. Because when you find out what this place really is, what it means to be sentenced here, you knowing that I mean you no harm is the only hope I have of protecting you.”

  …

  As I made my way through the quiet compound, my fellow naturals sleeping, I held Shelley’s Frankenstein. While I felt some jealously over the fact the chosen ones were allowed books, I wasn’t surprised their library was only filled with ones belonging to the time period so beloved by their creators. It seemed that even the chosen ones were forbidden to experience things outside of what their council deemed appropriate. Maybe they were no freer than us naturals.

  I found a place that I knew would keep me hidden and safe.

  The Void.

  I couldn’t recall the origin of the nickname. It was a room kept for the purpose of holding naturals selected during a wrangling, a time when a natural was to be accused of a crime. They would stay here before facing their public trial and, in most cases, execution. When I was little I always thought it would be the perfect hiding place during a game of hide-and-seek. But even then, even before I knew what the world really was, I never stepped foot near The Void. Stories of men going crazy in the enclosed space were tossed around the compound. It was said that once a man clawed out his own eyes.

  It was merely a room devoid of light. People would whisper that the space must be haunted, or some unnatural presence must have driven these men to the brink of insanity. But I had another theory. Our world was one where we were told what to think. When you were in The Void, you had no one. Just yourself.

  And that was scary as hell.

  I opened the door and stepped inside. Here, no one would bother me, not that anyone besides Robert even checked on me at all. I knew some part of him once cared about Louisa and me, but I think the part that felt anything true must have died with Emma. How could it not? He only looked to us now out of obligation.

  I sat against the wall of the black room, lit the lamp I had stolen earlier in the night, and pulled the door shut. Slowly, I brought the tattered book out from inside my shirt. I held it in my hands for the longest time before opening it. I was slightly afraid of what lay in these pages. Not of the story but of James’s interpretation of it.

&nbs
p; I began to read.

  Hours later, halfway through the book, I found myself exhausted from the text and James’s notations. It wasn’t a very pleasant story. It was a narrative of violence and struggle, love and loss, creation/birth and death. The story of a man who attempted to reach for seemingly unattainable knowledge—the ability to create life outside of God’s will. The man, Dr. Frankenstein, succeeded only to later be horrified by his own creation. The creature, left to devise his own understanding of the world, turned to violence.

  But the real story held within the pages of the book belonged to James. He questioned everything, almost obsessively. Sometimes he wrote so furiously it was difficult to construct meaning from the sentences. He wanted to know if, like the creature, he was doomed to destroy.

  Near the end of the book, my name appeared. How strange to see writing in a book and know I was part of the story. I mattered. Even if it was just a little bit.

  The book became almost like a journal. Some of what James wrote was painful. He had guessed my outcast status. He wondered why I had chosen to distance myself from my people. He pondered what I thought of him. Was I repulsed? Or could I see beyond the reasons he was created?

  He wrote about how pretty I was. But this wasn’t a good thing. It made him nervous, even frightened. He spent so much time writing about how it was wrong to think such things, convincing himself he would never reach for me. But constantly wondering if I would allow him to if he were human and we lived in some different place and time.

  He wrote about how strange it was to look at me and feel the things other boys, other chosen ones, had described to him so vividly. Things he thought he would never feel. He wrote about the way a loose strand of hair always seemed to fall and graze my shoulder. How hard it was for him not to reach for it. The way I bit my bottom lip when I was deep in thought. Attraction. His teachers never explained what it meant to want to touch. All he had was what the other boys said.

  He wondered if what his teachers told him about my people was true? Or if I was merely an exception.

  I didn’t finish the book. I only read till the place where James’s notes stopped. I was left breathless by the end of my reading. Never in my life had anyone shared so much of themselves with me. Not Emma or even Henry. Those I was once close with remained guarded. But this boy let me see everything.

  Maybe he didn’t have a soul. But maybe something else made one a human. Maybe us naturals had forgotten what it meant to be one. But this boy, with his questions and insecurities, seemed more human than was possible.

  And it was beautiful.

  Chapter 15

  “So tell me,” James urged.

  “Tell you what? You need to be a bit more specific than that.” I laughed.

  “About the book, of course,” he said, lightly tapping me on the head with the treasured novel, the forbidden fruit.

  We had just finished reading Jane Eyre.

  When I had returned James’s book, we didn’t speak of it. He simply took it from my hands and placed it back inside the drawer. I knew when I was ready to talk he would be there to listen. I’d still made sure to smile when he opened the door, though I wanted to somehow communicate to him that I understood the things he wrote, the parts of himself he had revealed, even though I didn’t have the words to tell him.

  I insisted as I entered the room that he give me some task to complete. I needed boundaries to remain in this new friendship. After I dusted his room, James suggested we read more of Jane Eyre, and I didn’t refuse. I wanted to read more. I wanted some sense of normalcy before it all got so complicated.

  And I knew it would.

  The things he wrote and the things I saw would force us into a place where we both would have to re-examine everything. I knew that now.

  But not yet.

  I didn’t pull away from him when he carefully grabbed my hand as we sat on his bed reading the novel and his fingers interlaced with mine. It was a simple gesture. A safe gesture. Yet it caused me a moment of hesitation. Is this where it all started?

  But as we delved deeper into the story, I couldn’t move away from him.

  “I thoroughly enjoyed it,” I replied.

  “But…you’re holding back something.”

  Was I that easy to read? Or did he just know me?

  I hesitated. “Well, I don’t think she got it exactly right.”

  He wasn’t letting me off that easily; he simply sat there, expecting an explanation. I had to remind myself not to stare too long at his wondrous face. He cleared his throat.

  He thought I was pretty, too.

  I licked my lips. “Well, she makes it seem like Jane and Mr. Rochester are two halves of one soul.”

  James nodded at my assessment. “But you believe the soul has many parts. I remember you saying so.”

  “You remember that?”

  “I remember everything you say.”

  “Um, well, yes, that’s what I believe. I think there were others who had a claim to Jane’s soul.”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “Her aunt who made her feel so insignificant certainly claimed a part. Jane spent her whole life wanting to fight this sense that she was worthless, unlovable. That fear and her aunt’s malice most certainly possessed part of her. It’s not only love, affection, that can touch one’s soul.”

  The words had all come out in a rush. I was afraid to look up at James, afraid that his face would show me how stupid my thoughts were. I picked at a single thread on the blanket of his bed. But I knew I wasn’t done.

  “I think in the end, Rochester won her soul, just as she won his. But there was always a battle for it. From the very start, before she even knew him—a battle between the light and the dark. And even in the end, he didn’t have her whole soul; he had what was left, what survived. And that was enough.”

  I brushed a loose strand of hair off my face. The room had become stifling.

  I saw his free hand gently caress the book’s cover. He was silent, his eyes somewhere else. But then, quickly, they found mine.

  “Is that how you feel about your soul?”

  I was caught off guard; I could feel the blush creep into my cheek.

  He seemed to sense this. “Am I making you uncomfortable?”

  I shook my head, mostly in an attempt to clear it. “No, it’s just, I didn’t realize. I didn’t remember how overwhelming a good book can be.”

  “Yes, overwhelming.” He chuckled. “What about his secrets? Mr. Rochester’s? Jane was such a good sort of girl, a bit stubborn, but good to the core. He, on the other hand, left something to be desired when it comes to fictional heroes. How do you feel about him and all his dark secrets?”

  What secrets does James have left?

  I shrugged. “Not sure I really thought about it. You’re supposed to believe they were made just for each other. They exist for each other, despite his secrets. They exist for each other despite everything.”

  James shifted. It seemed like he was uneasy. Was it my imagination or had he moved away from me? Still his hand clutched onto mine.

  “And do you think it is possible,” he continued, “that two people can exist for each other despite secrets, despite everything?”

  It was as if all the air had been sucked from the room. I could feel my heart begin to dance, to bounce against my chest. My mind was racing, always coming to the same image—the way Robert had appeared at her funeral.

  I looked away from James. “No. Not in the real world. I don’t think that is possible.”

  I was unsure why, but I felt angry. I pulled my hand away from his, and I stood up quickly. “I think it must be time for me to go.”

  James glanced at the clock. “Yes, I think so.” His voice sounded so formal, so controlled.

  For many days after that, we avoided talking about this new, strange thing between us. I would spend my mornings cleaning around the estate house and my afternoons with James. There was always something to tidy up in his room. I wondered
if the boy ever slept. He would always insist I didn’t have to do anything, but it helped me control the nervousness that consumed me around him.

  I wasn’t afraid of him. But that was the problem.

  We would spend our afternoons reading or listening to music. James would hold my hand, or his knee would graze mine as we sat on his bed. His hand would touch the small of my back as he walked me to the door. And every time he touched me, I wanted more.

  I wondered what it would feel like if he touched my face or brushed my hair from my forehead. I would find myself glancing at his lips, imagining what being kissed felt like. I wasn’t thinking of consequences in those moments; I was only thinking of want.

  Desire.

  Need.

  I would think about the consequences of such feelings later, on the transport home. I would convince myself I was only experimenting, that I would never fall in love or get married. But did that mean I had to give up everything? Did that mean I couldn’t allow myself anything at all? Couldn’t some sort of balance be found?

  Besides, soon, once some member of the council claimed him, he would be gone. He would leave me before it could progress anywhere. What harm could a little handholding really do?

  Later in the week, my supervisor once again informed me that I was to help her for the morning instead of the usual work around Templeton. I felt my whole body slump with the news. Of course I knew why she’d selected me; she had made it very clear. But she was wrong.

  We continued our usual routine of not speaking as I followed Gwen down into the lower levels of Templeton. I knew where we were going—the place where the young chosen ones slept. It was where I’d scrubbed the blood from the floor and walls, hiding the evidence that one of them had been found deficient.

  As we passed through the room with the incubators, I couldn’t help but look more closely at them than I had before. Had James woken up here? Was this the very room where he had slept so peacefully till it was time to enter into the life that was chosen for him?

  They seemed so helpless amid the tubes and machines that kept them alive.