Freefly

by Michele Tallarita

  She breathes heavily, as her eyes dart around the plane. They land on me, and I see her exhale. Then she looks at Thorne. “You have to let me go.”

  Thorne chuckles. “That is highly unlikely.”

  “What time is it?” she says again.

  “Sammie?” I say, confused. Why is she asking about the time?

  Her eyes flick to me, then back to Thorne. “You’re wrong about my father. You think I’d be loyal to him? He’s just like you.”

  Thorne lets out a thunderous laugh.

  “It’s true,” Sammie says. “You may not be a criminal, technically, but that’s not what I mean. You only care about making things better for yourself, no matter what you do to other people.”

  “And?” he says.

  “And I could never be loyal to someone like that. Someone who can ruin another person’s life and not even care.”

  Thorne crouches beside Sammie and examines the veins in the crook of her arm, wielding the syringe above them. His face is blank with disinterest. “It’s a nice sentiment, my dear, but I have to accuse you of being a little hypocritical. What about him?” He jerks his head in my direction. “The fact that he’s here: your fault.”

  Sammie looks stricken. Her lips barely move as she says, “I know.”

  “So much for not ruining other people’s lives then, huh?” Thorne says. “You’ve sure done a job on his. He had a pretty nice future ahead of him. Now he’s here, with you.”

  Sammie lifts her eyes to me, and her forehead crumbles. My instinct is to comfort her, and my body lifts from the seat, but I’m jerked back by the restraints on my arms. Thorne pulls back the syringe, preparing to jab it into Sammie’s arm.

  “Don’t!” I say.

  Thorne stops, then swings toward me, annoyed. “What?”

  “Don’t,” I say again. A tension in my stomach, something large and cold and tight, screams that if Thorne injects Sammie with that needle, she will not awaken. I’m not sure what this feeling is, but I’m certain it is correct. “She’ll die.”

  Thorne stares at me for a long moment, then curses and stands up straight. “What are you talking about?”

  I inhale sharply, unable to explain my own statement. “I’m not sure.”

  Thorne storms toward me, his limp making his gait wild, and whips me across the face with the back of his hand. “Explain what you mean.”

  “Stop it!” Sammie shouts.

  Thorne shoves his face close to mine, so that I can see the tiny cracks around his gray eyes. “What do you mean?”

  “Stop!” Sammie says again. Then, after a pause, “He’s right!”

  Thorne pulls away from me and turns to her.

  “You think the reason I go back to the Tower is loyalty?” she says. “You’re smoking something. The boss doesn’t command loyalty in anyone. He commands fear. You know what happens to me if I’m not back at the Tower when I’m supposed to be?” She gives Thorne a long, cold look. “I die.”

  Thorne’s gaze narrows on her. “I don’t believe you.”

  “Take a look at the back of my neck.”

  Thorne remains still for another moment, then walks heavily over to Sammie. He thrusts her head forward roughly and yanks her hair out of the way. I watch his expression turn from angry to confused.

  “What is this?” he says.

  Her head cast down, Sammie speaks in a low voice. “The boss is like you, Thorne. He doesn’t really believe in building relationships. That’s why when he hires somebody, he equips them with a little something to make sure they always come back.”

  Thorne purses his lips and touches the back of Sammie’s neck gingerly, looking half fascinated. “What does it do?”

  Sammie thrusts her face up. “Kaboom.”

  Thorne tilts his head.

  “Sammie?” I say, unnerved by her word choice.

  “Here’s an interesting riddle for you,” Sammie says, her tone acidic. “Let’s say a guy is the boss of a bunch of criminals. He doesn’t trust them. He knows that if someone offered to pay them more money, or if they got caught and interrogated, they would sell him out. How does he ensure that they always come back, and that if they were held against their will, they wouldn’t give away information about him? Can you figure it out?” She holds his gaze. “The thing explodes. If you’re not back within two hours of your appointed time, you blow up. How’s that for loyalty?”

  Thorne stares at her, his face frozen in something like a shocked smile. I pull against the restraints on my arms, my breath quickening. A mix of emotions swirls inside me: relief that Sammie would never be loyal to criminals, horror at her boss and father, and extreme anxiety about the ticking time bomb attached to the person I love.

  “Sammie,” I say, my voice oddly high-pitched. “Exactly how long until—”

  “If someone would tell me the time—”

  “It’s 12:30,” Thorne says quickly.

  Sammie takes a deep breath and blows it out. “I’m supposed to be back at three. Which means I have until five. I suggest you don’t inject me with anything that makes me sleep for a week. Better yet, I suggest you let us go. Both of us.”

  Thorne watches her for a long moment. His gray hair, slick against his head, bounces off sunlight as he turns his head back and forth.

  “No,” he says.

  One of the men in the black suits, all of whom have been seated impassively until now, rises to his feet. “Sir, if the girl is going to die—”

  “I’m not letting them go!” Thorne says.

  He stomps across the jet, his jaw clenched, looking like he could punch a hole in the wall. He swings back around and screams at no one in particular, “Three years of searching, just to open the door and say goodbye? I think not!” He looks at the ground and paces. “We’ll think of something else. We’re not letting them go.”

  My heartbeat races. If he doesn’t let Sammie go, she’s going to die. I clench my fingers over the armrests. There has to be something I can do.

  “Keep me,” I say.

  Thorne looks up.

  “She’ll come back if you have me,” I say.

  Sammie scowls. “Damien, no—”

  “Damien, yes,” Thorne says, his grin spreading over his face once again. “You are smart. Free the girl.”

  Two of the men leap from their chairs and begin to unbuckle Sammie’s restraints. Thorne rubs his hands together. The men lift Sammie by the arms and shove her forward. She stumbles a few steps and then glares at me.

  “I’m not leaving you,” she says.

  “You have to,” I hiss. “I’m deeply in favor of you not blowing up.”

  Thorne grasps her arm and drags her toward the door of the jet. There’s a roar of sound as two of the men pry it open, revealing a patch of blue sky.

  “I assume your employers told you where to find us,” Thorne screams over the rushing air.

  Sammie glowers at him, her hair whipping around her face. “If you lay one finger on him.”

  “I won’t,” Thorne says, “as long as you’re back within 24 hours. After that, I’m not making any promises.”

  Sammie turns to me, her expression rigid with determination. “I’m coming back for you—”

  Thorne shoves her in the back, and she tumbles out of the jet.

  Sammie

  It’s really something to be shoved out of a jet, let me tell you. I roll through the air for a good ten seconds before I manage to get sky-side-up, and even then, I feel like I could wretch. Could be related to other things. I can’t describe how bad I’ve screwed up today. I’ve been exposed, captured, and, worst of all, forced to leave Damien in the claws of the mad scientists. If they don’t kill him, I may strangle him myself for volunteering to be held hostage. Doesn’t he see that I’m doing my best (and failing) to preserve anything of a life for him? That every time I plunge him into one of my problems, it’s like a stab to the chest?

  Thorne is right: I’ve broken my own rule; I’ve let my own selfish desires r
uin the life of another person. And not just any person: a person I love (as if there are a lot of them). I deserve whatever I get when I go back to the Tower, which I imagine will be seriously painful. But I almost crave it, at this point. I want to suffer for what I’ve done to Damien. If there was just some way to take it back.

  I push my face into the wind and inhale deeply. Below, flat fields of corn unfold for as far as I can see, and a mountain range forms round green humps in the distance. I’m not entirely sure where I am. The jet took off from Reading about an hour ago, and I suppose it was headed for...the white place. A chill shoots up my spine. The boss clued me in on the fact that it’s nestled in some mountains in Upstate New York. He ordered me never to go anywhere near there. I spin myself in the opposite direction of the mountains and head south, judging by the sun.

  Thorne wasn’t lying: the boss is my father. Of course, he never actually told me this himself. Jiminy did. He said I had a right to know, though I’d be wise not to bring it up. I guess it made sense: how else would the boss have even known I existed, a flying girl hidden away in a secret laboratory? At first I was heartbroken: my father, someone I’d imagined my whole life, was a terrible man who forced me to steal and fight? Then I got angry. How could he do this to me, his own kid? If he had the power to rescue me from the scientists, why didn’t he use it to give me a normal life? His actions were unthinkable, atrocious. I raged at the thought of being related to him in any way. Later, I just got numb. I didn’t think of him as my father anymore. I just thought of him as the boss. I also resolved that I would never, ever be like him.

  I push the boss out of my mind and focus on gliding forward, on pushing myself as fast as I can. Thorne’s given me 24 hours to get back to Damien, before...I can’t even think about it. Dread spreads from the center of my chest to the tips of my fingers, like dark ink unfurling in water. Even if I manage to get back to the Tower, suffer the consequences of my actions, and return to the white place in time that Damien isn’t hurt (or worse), I’m going to be living a nightmare. What am I going to do: work for the criminals by day and be a guinea pig by night? Meanwhile, Damien will be rotting away in some room, trapped in that godforsaken place to ensure that I will always come back. There’s gotta be a way out, some way to be free.

  The solution hits me.

  Damien

  The building comes out of nowhere, sitting at the end of a long, smooth driveway that twisted through dense woods. It is astoundingly large, with a gray stone exterior that seems impenetrable. I sit in the backseat of a car, wedged between two of the black-suited men. My heart is going wild within my chest. While I realize I basically offered to be here, the sight of the building terrifies me. It looks like the sort of place you enter but never exit.

  The car stops, and one of the men shoves me out the door. I stumble as my feet hit the pavement, but am immediately steadied by the vice grip of one of the black-suits. I’m guided up three cement steps, and the front door of the building opens with the sound of a sliding bolt.

  I’m pulled into a long, whitewashed hallway with many doors on both sides. Extraordinarily bright lights blaze from the ceiling, making the place seemed washed out and vaguely heavenly. I remember Sammie saying she disliked the hallway in my high school with the bright fluorescent lights. Now I understand why.

  I’m pushed through the steel doors of an elevator, and two black-suits follow me inside, their faces pale and blank. The door drifts shut with a foreboding thud, and my stomach lurches as we begin to rise. The silence is tangible. It alarms me how lifeless the scientists seem, how robotic and empty. Have they, like Thorne, smothered their humanity by involving themselves in such a scheme?

  The elevator door springs open, revealing a hallway identical to the one before. The men grasp my arms and force me out. We walk for what feels like miles, through a labyrinth of identical hallways. The air is chilly and smells vaguely of antiseptic. Finally, we stop in front of a metallic door. One of the black-suits puts his hand on a small panel, which flashes green before the door slides open. A sharp jab to the back launches me inside, and I tumble to the floor. By the time I scramble to my feet, the door has slid shut again, and I am alone.

  I take a deep breath and analyze my surroundings. A rectangular strip of yellow foam sits in one corner (a bed?), and a metal chair is bolted to the floor. Other than that, the room is bare. I saunter to the tiny window and close my eyes against the sunlight. Is this where Sammie spent her entire childhood? The thought makes me sad to the bone. It also makes me feel like pummeling someone.

  The door grinds open behind me, and I whip around. Michael Thorne comes inside, his face glowing with triumph. Two black-suits follow him.

  “Hello, Damien.” Thorne stops in the center of the room and looks around happily. “Liking your accommodations?”

  I put my back against the wall and say nothing. This feels remarkably like high school: a bully and his goons, terrorizing me. As usual, there is nothing I can do but grit my teeth and bear it. At least I chose this. Yes, that is the difference between this episode of bullying and those of my past. This time I’m enduring it for the sake of someone I love. The thought makes me feel strong.

  “I think the place could use a little color, personally,” I say.

  Thorne lets out a chuckle. “I don’t know, my boy. I kind of like the blankness. No distractions from the task at hand. Surely, as a science man like myself, you can understand the need for focus and concentration.”

  “I should have taken more art classes,” I snap.

  “Art?” Thorne scoffs. “There’s no time for that. Not when we’ve got a monumental scientific discovery on our hands.”

  “She’s a person,” I say, “not a scientific discovery.”

  “You know what your problem is? You’re thinking too small, my boy. You may think of her as a person, but I think of her as a threshold, a gateway to the improvement of the entire human race. You think I’m being inhuman. I think it would be inhuman not to keep her here. Don’t you see we could change the lives of those who cannot walk, improve our armed forces, lessen the use of pollutive and finite fossil fuels for transportation? Don’t you see how it would be selfish of me to sacrifice these discoveries for the happiness of a single person?” He breathes heavily, a drop of spittle on his lip.

  I say nothing.

  “You’re convinced, aren’t you?” Thorne says, grinning. “You know, Savage, we’ve had some harsh words before, but I could use a sharp guy like you. With a little more schooling—”

  “You’re psychotic,” I spit.

  His face reddens. “Psychotic?”

  “I love her, you idiot. You think I’d betray her by joining ranks with you?”

  Thorne lets out a low, throaty laugh, his pointy teeth glinting in the light. “Oh, it’s such a loss. Such a great, great loss. Never fear, though. I’ll find a use for you. Boys.”

  The black-suits jerk to life, grabbing me by the arms and forcing me down into the metal chair. Before I have time to even process what’s happening, they’ve secured my arms behind my back and fastened my ankles to the chair’s legs.

  “What are you doing?” I croak.

  Thorne pulls a syringe from his pocket and limps closer to me, tilting his head with something like fascination. “I’ve seen you fly, my boy. I don’t know if it was the girl’s influence or something you did on your own, but I’m certainly going to find out.”

  Sammie

  The familiar sight of Reading, with its cramped streets and rising church spires, does nothing to calm the anxiety thrumming within me. The Tower blares in the distance, bright red against its green backdrop, its color coming off as poisonous. With all the havoc I’ve caused, there’s nothing good waiting for me there.

  At least this will be the last time I ever come back.

  I curve upward and then dive, my stomach twisting at the sudden drop. The top of the Tower, a blotch of red, grows larger and larger, like a spreading sore. My determination grow
s solid within me, until I can practically feel it, like a ball of steel in my chest. I can get Damien his life back.

  All I have to do is give up my own.

  I land softly in the grass outside the Tower. Black smoke swirls from the chimney, and the windows reflect the gray city below.

  “Sammie.”

  Jiminy comes blasting out the front door, his bald head slippery with sweat. He looks angry enough to pulverize steel.

  “What the hell happened?” He grabs me by the arm and drags me toward the front door. “You know what’s been going on here? Not good things. Your photo’s all over the news, you know that? The boss is angry out of his mind.”

  We hurtle inside. The air conditioning in the lobby is freezing, the golden elevator large and intimidating. Evan spots me and leaps from his seat, grabbing the telephone and dialing rapidly. Jiminy pins me against the wooden wall, one hand on my shoulder.

  “Say something already,” he says, his brow bulging. “Explain yourself.”

  I keep my voice low and steady, more like a drone’s than a person’s. “I’m leaving here and not coming back.”

  Jiminy’s anger twists into confusion, his head jerking to the side. “Excuse me?”

  “You heard what I said.”

  There’s silence between us. When Jiminy speaks again, his voice is softer, his eyes concerned.

  “You sick or something?” He lifts his hand off my shoulder and touches the back of his neck. “You’re not here when you’re supposed to be, you know what happens.”

  I nod, letting Jiminy know that I’m fully aware of what I’m doing. He shakes his head violently.

  “Come on,” he says. “I know this is bad, but it’s no reason to go and get yourself killed—”

  “I’ve got to.” I duck my head and say, very softly, “Damien.”

  Jiminy’s face is blank for a moment, before he registers the name. He takes a step back and blows out a breath.

  “So, it’s about that guy,” he says. “Sounded young.”

  “The scientists have him. It’s my fault.”