Raven: The Young Adult World of Genetically Modified Teens and the Elite (Swann Book 6)

by Ryan Schow

  “The doctor,” I say, and I know he knows exactly who I mean, “he changed me. You changed me. Enzo Holland, Josef Mengele, he changed me, too. And none of you can control me. Not now. Never again.”

  “You killed him, though,” Delgado said into the empty, straw-smelling emptiness, even though I’m all the way across the United States and only in his head. “Tavares is dead?”

  “Dead because of you.”

  “Yes,” he says, closing the laptop computer, or as he likes to think of it, putting away his girls. “Your mission is complete. You may relax. Unwind.”

  “Using me is your last mistake of many, Delgado.” Reaching deep into him, I take ahold of his heart and feel him squirm. This is my signature move. “That’s my hand on your heart,” I tell him. With all the psychic strength I can muster, I squeeze and squeeze and squeeze his heart until he’s writhing and howling, until he’s clawing at his chest.

  The pounding meat is warm in my hands, pumping, working, but it’s also ballooning out against my grip, straining to do its job. My invisible fingernails tear apart the outer walls. Five little fingers puncture the organ, gnashing it like Play-Doh in my hand. The man is blinking out. He’s dying.

  I feel him thinking, “How in the blue fuck is she doing that?” and then I feel him dead.

  6

  Just before I killed Frederick Delgado, I dragged from his mind the Senator’s name and private number. Time to find the client.

  Is she the client?

  Flashes of my training with Sensei Naygel flicker into my mind; I shove them away. The time for peace is later. Looking at Tavares on sheets so red they are almost black is the same as throwing gasoline on fire. This is about retribution. The only thing I have left to do is mete out justice. People have to pay for their wicked ways, the same as Cameron had to pay for what she did to Abby, the same as Jacob Brantley had to pay for what he did to Savannah.

  My tentacles shoot out, searching and then eventually finding the Senator. She is an old, dying woman in a bed surrounded by wealth and opulence and two giant Greyhounds. The dogs’ ears perk up the minute I slip inside her head. In the backs of their throats, they’re whimpering, not understanding why they feel what they feel when they can’t see a thing. Both animals rise to their feet, still but unnerved.

  Senator Wexford stirs. Jocelynn. Seventy-two with throat cancer. She’s dying on her own, and fighting it. Her eyes open, take a long time to adjust to the darkness. Digging around in her head, I find the answers to so many things I never wondered about. Like JFK’s murder. The Bin Laden hoax. 9/11. The fraudulence of government on countless measures. The mighty reach of the United States into other economies, into wars, into endless streams of its false flag terror. The dead bodies I find inside her head, people killed to further agendas and politics, they mount up. They pile up. My head is throbbing, being in hers. My head and now my throat. It feels acid worn, skinned raw.

  “Who’s there?” Jocelynn asks into the dark room.

  “Your weapon,” I say into her head.

  “What…what do you want?” she asks, looking around because she can’t trust her own feeling: that she’s being haunted inside her head. Vulnerability is what she feels. Weakness. Fear. These are unfamiliar emotions to her. Upsetting emotions.

  “I want to kill you for what you’ve done,” I say. My words slither along the surface of every nerve, coiling around them the way snakes coil around their prey before squeezing the life from them.

  “What did I do?” she asks, her old-woman voice so much different from the power voice that occupied Delgado’s thoughts before I took from him his ability to live.

  “Everything. But mostly this is about Tavares Baldridge.”

  “Where are you?” she asks. “I can’t see you.”

  “Perhaps I can peel back your scalp, cut a hole in your head and show you. I’m in your brain, Jocelynn. I’m in your soul and I see everything you’ve ever done.”

  “You’re not possible.”

  “Ah, but I am.”

  “MK ULTRA,” she says, after a moment. “Project Open Eyes.”

  “MK ULTRA is so nineteen-sixties,” I reply. “I’m an anomaly now. Unexplainable. Unkillable. Besides, that archaic mind control program doesn’t explain this conversation.”

  “What do you want with me? I’m nobody.”

  “No?” I say. “You are everyone. And you don’t want to die. I know you are in pain all day long, yet you cling to life so fervently, so vehemently. You want to live so you can continue your work. But your work is pestilence. Your work is endemic. You are the virus, the disease; you are plague, old woman. That breath you’re breathing, it’s going to be your last.”

  “What…what was Tavares?” she asks. “What was he to you?”

  “A boy I could have loved. A boy who would have loved me back. He was also the last vestige of my innocence torn from me. The last shred of humanity just…gone.”

  And with that, I lift her from the bed, relishing the fear that has her heart pumping all too fast. I elevate her from her oversized bed and float her across the bedroom to her eight hundred square foot bathroom with a mirror the size of a damn billboard. The lights come on and I see her, and she sees herself, and it’s then I start peeling the skin from her face.

  For making me kill Tavares, I take her derma the same way you would remove a coat from a houseguest. For what she’s left me with—these dreams, these horrible memories, this body dead on my bed, at my feet—I rip and peel her painfully from this world. Her heart fails halfway through the skinning, which infuriates me, so I let her fall to the floor, a half-skinned beast, a blight on humanity.

  7

  The next person I find, it’s Senator Baldridge of Virginia. Tavares’s father. It’s the middle of the night, and instead of opening a telepathic connection, I troll his brain, find a number, then physically dial it and let it ring through. A groggy voice answers.

  “Hello?”

  “Senator Baldridge?” I say into the phone.

  “It’s late.”

  “Tavares is dead.”

  He’s suddenly wide awake, asking what I said. I tell him he heard me right, and he wants to know how Tavares died because—and I know this because I’m in his head as well as speaking to him on the phone—he doesn’t believe me.

  Mental fatigue sets in. Not his. Mine.

  Three dead people. My tentacles going out, killing people from a distance, it’s taking its toll, as does any such act of reprisal. To hate this hard, to strain under the burden of such sorrow, to turn these debilitating emotions into fast-burn fuel reserved solely for nefarious purposes, it is the same as a fatal illness, how it settles into you, pulling at your life, tugging irrationally at your innocence. I’m not innocent anymore. I’m neither tempered nor humane. I am a weapon.

  But now I’m my own weapon.

  “His throat was slit this evening,” I say to Tavares’s father.

  “By whom?”

  The breath I take, it’s weak, shallow. “By me.”

  His tired, anxious voice becomes shaky with fear and a unsettled with rage. “Why would you kill my son?” I didn’t know until I crawled his brain, but putting two and two together has produced an answer.

  “Senator Williamson of Virginia is a slimy prick, but you already know that.” Senator Williamson, his mortal enemy. The client who paid the Senator for Tavares’s death.

  “I want to know about Tavares!” he booms.

  “Tavares’s murder was about a vote,” I tell him. He falls silent, remorseful. “You know exactly what I’m talking about, don’t you?” He gives me no response, but I know that he knows. “The approvals Williamson wanted that you refused to back, they were worth forty-three million to him. Personally. He threatened to kill Tavares and Sabrina if you didn’t steer the vote. You didn’t. He contacted Senator Wexford—”

  “No,” the Senator says, the first signs of grief hitting his voice.

  “—who in turn used her vast re
sources to put a hit on Tavares. But you sent him to Astor Academy thinking he would be safe because officially Astor doesn’t exist. You put both of your kids there. He wasn’t safe, though. Not from me. No one is safe from me.”

  Not even myself, a voice says inside me that isn’t mine.

  “Who are you?” he asks. I pull out of his head. There’s too much pain, too much regret. He’s no longer a father, or a victim. He’s not even a man. He’s just the voice of a broken soul. I want to hang up on him, but I owe him for that which I have taken.

  “I’m a product of Dulce Air Force Base’s Mind Science’s Division. Which I know you know about because it’s in the black budget, which you are also privy to. Dr. Frederick Delgado programmed me through modern technology. He also programmed me the way Mengele used to do it when he was on the CIA’s payroll.”

  “Mengele was never on the—”

  “Dr. Green,” I say.

  “Green was…Mengele?”

  “Who do you think is on staff at Astor now, Senator Baldridge?”

  “He’s dead,” he says, flat boned and emotionless. Like this is an indisputable fact.

  “No. Just changed. Changed the way your daughter is changed, the way Tavares was changed, the way I have been changed so many times now. I’m a tool no longer at their disposal. I’m the once fat, once sorry daughter of Silicon Valley power couple Atticus and Margaret Van Duyn.”

  “Wait a minute,” he says, trying to wrap his mind around all this. “You’re…Savannah?”

  “In a former life. Now I’m someone else. Something else. Mengele, who now goes by the name Enzo Holland, he took me out of New Mexico, away from Dulce, and he changed me, got rid of the hardwiring in my head. But Delgado, the man behind the Virginia Tech massacre, he tinkered with my head. Programmed me organically. Holland didn’t see it, and neither did I until I was having sex with your son tonight and the programming took over.”

  “Is he really—?”

  I pump a picture of my bloody bed and his dead son into his head and he cries out. I hear the phone drop. His wife, who sleeps in the bedroom next door, she is already knocking on his bedroom door, worried sick. Tavares’s father never gets back on the phone as much as he just sobs and moans and loses himself to the anguish.

  I want to kill him, if only to have somewhere to store this never-ending pain, but he did nothing wrong. Senator Baldridge is truly a good man. The nature of politics, however, is far too often about deception and posturing; it’s about secrets and blackmail; it’s about favors and power and contract killings; and mostly it’s about money for the purposes of control. Sometimes you win that game of politics, but most times you lose.

  The Baldridge family is losing here.

  They’ve lost.

  I also know from being in Senator Baldridge’s head he’s going to kill Senator Williamson with his bare hands. It’s something he has to do, despite the cost.

  To try to do right in this wrong and blasphemous world, the Senator was thinking, and in return have a man go after your family because of it, because of money, is an unconscionable act deserving only of murder in the first.

  In the end, I can’t take that from him. I can’t and I won’t.

  8

  I hang up the phone, then pick it back up and call Jake. “I need you,” I say, then I force him to come to me. He doesn’t want to, but my mind inside of his means I’m in control.

  He arrives and blanches at the scene.

  “Tell me it’s all bullshit,” I say. He’s mesmerized by the blood on the sheets, the dead body, how I’m dressed but there are smears of Tavares Baldridge’s blood on the places I could not get cleaned in a hurry. “Say it’s a lie.”

  “Say what’s a lie?” he asks, barely present because he isn’t strong enough for this kind of thing.

  “Time travel.”

  “You know it isn’t. I already showed you proof.”

  “I know, but this can’t be you. You can’t be married and…old.”

  “Who are you?” he asks. He asks this like he’s worlds away.

  “I’m Raven, formerly Abby Swann, formerly Savannah Van Duyn, and if you’re lying to me about time travel I swear to Christ I’m going to gut you like a pig.”

  “Wha…what?”

  “Tell me it’s a lie!”

  “It’s not!” he says, still stuck on what I told him. “It’s not.”

  “I fell in love with you,” I say, not at all interested in his opinion about the truth. “You could have told me you were married, but you didn’t. You didn’t have to kiss me. Or come to Maggie’s funeral and give me your hotel number. But you did anyway. And you’re old as hell! A senior freaking citizen. Why?”

  “You’re…Abby?” he asks, and for the first time he’s looking at me. Staring deep into my eyes, shaking his head, no. The way things are looking, the luscious Jake Teller is about to go into shock.

  “I told you after we had sex I was going, that I might look like I was here, but I was gone. Abby Swann, the girl still going to Astor Academy, is not me. She’s a stand-in. No, not a stand-in. My replacement. I was never coming back to Abby Swann.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me? Earlier, I mean.”

  “Because you shot me in the face, you f*cking butthole. Because you’re a traveler. But mostly”—and here I take a steadying breath—“because I’m in love with you. I didn’t impress upon you this fact enough because I’ve always been in love with you, but all you ever do is reject me.”

  His head droops. “I know.”

  “And now because of her.” His wife.

  “Since I left, after I stole the time displacement devices, all I’ve ever thought about is my wife and getting her back. In fact, tomorrow Holland is giving her the injection. The one that’s going to kill her. I have to stop it. I have to stop him or this journey will be for nothing. But if I can stop him, then maybe she will never die and this will all just become some alternate universe that never existed.”

  I’d help him with Holland, but I won’t be here. So I can’t. Part of me doesn’t want to help him anyway. If he saves her, and this time travel thing isn’t complete bullshit, then he’ll leave here, return to his time. Which means he’ll leave me for good. Or maybe he will have never come here, and this tender heart of mine won’t break over and over again.

  “Well, good luck with that,” I say.

  “Why did you…kill this boy?” he finally asks, horrified.

  “He was a mind control program from Dulce AFB ran out. I did it, but I didn’t do it. Do you understand?”

  “I know about the mind control programs of last century and this one, so yes. You are talking about Project Open Eyes?”

  “Not exactly that program, but yes. Same as MK ULTRA, same idea.”

  “It’s basically separate personalities working without each other’s knowledge, right? Is that it?” I nod. “Which means you shouldn’t know about this. You should not know how this happened.”

  “But I do. I watched it from inside myself much the same way you watch TV.”

  He sits with that for a long time, trying to understand, trying to stop the flip-flopping in his brain. He looks up at me and for the most meager of seconds I see the old man in him. The weariness sits behind his eyes, not on his gorgeous GQ face.

  “What’s going to happen now?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe I’ll disappear from here. If you don’t kill Holland, then I think that’s what I’ll do. Or I’ll leave. He’ll understand. He’s a gosh damn monster, but he’s also a genius. Which is to say he understands things whether he likes them or not.”

  “So why am I here?” Jake asks. “For you to confess these things to me? To show me you’re capable of murder? Why the hell did you drag me down here at this hour?”

  “God, you’re such an ass sometimes!”

  “None of this is easy to take,” he says, his eyes roving around, bouncing from me to the blood caked sheets to the body on the bed to me looking at hi
m like my very existence rests on his desire to let go of his dead wife and just be with me.

  “To see if you’ll change your mind. If you’ll just let Holland inject your infant of a wife and come with me to Nevada.”

  “Nevada?!”

  “I’m taking the fake Abby back home to her real parents.”

  “And you want me to come with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “No,” he says, seemingly offended by the request. “Absolutely not!”

  “Because I’m a child and you’re old as f*ck?”

  He huffs out an ironic laugh. “Partly.”

  “But?”

  “I miss her,” he says, his harried voice suddenly becoming tender. He looks like he’s recalling the grief he once felt, the grief that pushed him through time, to here, to me, to Astor. “I miss her and I want her back.”

  “Then why have sex with me?” I ask. I really want to know.

  “I wanted to see if I could move on, in case I fail. But I can’t. And as much as I enjoyed Abby, you I guess, what my wife and I have is decades old. I have to stay positive. I have to see this thing through until it works or doesn’t.”

  “Then get out,” I say, my tone low and chockfull of resignation.

  Rejected again.

  “Are you just going to leave him like this?” he asks, on his way out. “Just a corpse on a bed?”

  “What do you care?”

  He doesn’t say anything. He just shakes his head and walks out. When he’s finally gone, I do the same thing I have always done, which is cry and feel sorry for myself. What an asshole, I think as I wipe my eyes. I’m talking about me, not Jake. That he loves his wife so much that he traveled through time to save her is the sweetest thing I’ve ever heard. Then I cry because I think I truly love Jake. And I could have loved Tavares if I hadn’t killed him.