A light. Was it the fire? No, that had gone out a long time ago. It tinged the darkness. Violet. Dawn was coming. But that wasn’t right either. This light was sharp, focused, and moving. There was a sound too—a loud whooshing from above. The water in front of my face rippled from the wind created by the helicopter blades. Helicopter! I had to look up, shout, wave, do something so they didn’t leave.
I was being lifted into the light, but I was still cold and wet and I still couldn’t feel my legs. The light wasn’t warm and welcoming. It was harsh and bright, and the loud whooshing overwhelmed me. Someone lifted me from behind. An arm wrapped around my middle, holding me steady. The water seemed really far away now.
It was loud inside the helicopter. I was being jostled where I lay, tied down with something over my chest and hips. I couldn’t see. My eyes were closed, and I didn’t know how to open them. Voices shouted over the helicopter engine, only snippets of conversation.
“. . . only survivors? Are you positive?”
“Yes.” A firm “yes.” His voice was clear, close. Strong and masculine, but smooth like warm honey. “We searched the whole area. Only her and the copilot. I don’t know how she even survived. She was in the water so long.”
Then a sliding sound and a third voice, farther away. “. . . in touch with her people . . . never got on the flight . . . last minute change of schedule . . . good intel, but can’t predict . . .”
A hand landed on my calf. The man with the honey voice. I knew it belonged to him, but I didn’t know how. It was good that I could feel my legs again.
When I woke up in the hospital, I had been asleep for nearly two days, but I didn’t know it at the time. They told me all of it later. Nurses and doctors piled into my room, marveling at the lack of permanent injury and my fast recovery. Variants were more resilient against injury and faster to recover, but I, as someone who was only human, was lucky to have survived, or so the doctors kept saying. I didn’t feel lucky.
No. When I first woke up, it was only for a few moments. The sounds came first: the soft thrum of machines, a quiet beeping, muffled voices. Then I felt the soft blankets and pillows under me.
I managed to lift my heavy eyelids and found myself looking up at those corkboard squares that make up the ceilings of hospitals and office buildings. The fluorescent light was off, but it was still very bright in the room. It must have been morning.
I angled my head down and scanned the space. There was a door on my left and a window on my right, a hospital tray on wheels under it. In the corner, next to the window, was a chair. A man was sitting in it.
I could tell it was a man by the broad set of his shoulders, the muscles in his tattooed forearms. His elbows rested on his knees, and his head was in his hands. He had dark hair and a buzz cut. His fingers were digging into his scalp; I had a feeling that if he had more hair, he would be pulling at it. He was dressed in black: black boots planted firmly on the floor, black pants, and a black T-shirt.
I tried to speak, but all I managed was a straggled inhale. It was enough to get his attention anyway. His head snapped up. He looked young, maybe in his twenties, but the look in his intense eyes gave me the impression that he had lived a thousand lifetimes while he’d sat in that ugly hospital chair. He had a five o’clock shadow covering his strong jaw and shocking ice-blue eyes. They pierced me, as the frigid water had pierced me.
“You’re awake.” I don’t think he meant to say it out loud. It just came out on a breath. And then he was on his feet and next to my bed, leaning over me.
He reached a hand out as if to touch me and then pulled it back sharply. “I’ll get a doctor.” It was the man with the honey voice.
I was asleep again before he’d even left the room. The ice in his eyes was making me remember, and I couldn’t handle it yet.
The next time I woke up, it didn’t take me as long to gain consciousness.
I opened my eyes and lifted myself into a more comfortable position. I felt so much stronger than the first time, as if I didn’t need to be in the hospital at all. It was dusk, the window on the right still letting in the fading light.
My eyes immediately went to the chair in the corner, but the room was empty, and for a second I wondered if I had hallucinated the man with the ice-blue eyes. Then I heard the tap turn on in the bathroom, and a moment later he walked out of it. He was still dressed in all black, but this time he wore a long-sleeved T-shirt, fitted enough to hint at the strong torso underneath. He was tall, his head nearly reaching the top of the doorframe.
As he turned, closing the door behind him, our eyes met. He paused for a second and then stepped up to the foot of my bed, resting one hand on the railing. He watched me with a neutral expression on his face. I watched him back, not feeling at all awkward about maintaining eye contact with a complete stranger for so long. A scar cut through the middle of his right eyebrow, and a black-and-gray tattoo was peeking out of the black fabric at his neck.
“How you feeling?” His voice was firm, forceful, but it still felt like honey washing over me.
My own voice was groggy, though clear enough in the silent room. “You pulled me out of the water.” I didn’t bother answering his question. It wasn’t important at that moment.
“No. My colleague did. I pulled you into the chopper.”
He wasn’t going to insist I focus on my health, on getting better, on getting my strength up—all those empty things people insisted when they were trying to avoid speaking about the difficult things. The important things. Good.
“You sat with me. I could hear your voice. Even over the engine.”
“Yes . . .” He looked away briefly before meeting my gaze again, letting the word trail off. As if he was going to add more but decided not to.
“Only the copilot and I made it. There were no other survivors?” I had to be sure. I had to hear someone say it.
“No.” His answer was definitive, but his eyes narrowed slightly, wondering whom I was asking about. Whom I had lost.
I screwed my eyes shut, fisting the hospital sheets in my weak fingers.
My mother . . .
My mother was on the plane with me.
There were no other survivors.
She was not a survivor. She was . . . she . . .
“My mother.” I opened my eyes as I said it.
His face fell when the two words left my mouth. He lifted his other hand to the railing of my bed and leaned heavily on the utilitarian gray plastic, hanging his head. He swore under his breath and started breathing hard.
Why was he so upset?
I had so many questions. What happened? Why did the plane crash? How did no one else survive? Why did I make it? Why not her? How did you know where to search? Where am I? What’s going to happen now? Who are you? Why are you still here? Why do you care?
But I couldn’t find it in me to care about the answers.
No. That one little word had confirmed what I had suspected since I’d first woken up, with a stranger sitting in the chair at my bedside instead of my mother.
I’d felt strong when I’d woken up a few moments earlier, but now I felt weak again. An awful pressure built in my chest, and a lump formed in my throat.
She was gone. Forever. I would never see my mother again. Never speak to her, hug her, argue with her. Argue. That was the last thing we’d done. She died thinking I was mad at her.
I was alone in the world. I was motherless. An orphan. I had felt lonely for much of my life, but whatever my mother’s reasons were for keeping us distant from other people, she had always been there for me. She was the one constant in my life, the one person I could always rely on.
Yes, I had felt lonely in the past, but lying in that hospital bed with a stranger at my bedside, I truly knew what it meant to feel alone.
I’m alone.
Fat tears finally overflowed, and I wrapped my arms around my torso. I began to sob as I rolled onto my side toward the window, every muscle in my body taut with desp
air.
Boots squeaked across the linoleum, and then the thin hospital blanket was pulled over my shoulder. The bed behind me dipped, and his body pressed into mine from behind, his arm snaking around my front. He held me tight and I heard his voice, close to my ear.
“You are not alone.”
I must have said that out loud. His declaration made me cry harder—ugly, unrestrained tears. Sobs wracked my body as I curled into a ball.
He held on to me through it all. We didn’t touch, nowhere did our skin make contact, but he held me tight until my crying calmed down to soft sobs. He held me tight as the sobs gave way to silent tears pooling on the pillow. He held me tight as I drifted off into blissful unconsciousness again.
When I woke up the next morning, there was a nurse at the foot of my bed, writing something on a clipboard, and the stranger really was gone.
Two
On the morning of my eighteenth birthday, I woke up half an hour before my alarm in a bed that didn’t feel like mine. In a room that belonged to me but held none of my personality. In the life I had been living for the past year but still didn’t fit into.
I didn’t have that moment of bliss, those hazy few seconds when you don’t know what day it is or what’s going on. I opened my eyes and immediately knew it was my birthday; it had been exactly one year since my mother died.
I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling.
Swallowing hard around the thick lump in my throat, I just managed to stop myself from falling apart first thing in the morning. I had to keep going, be strong. It’s what my mom would have wanted.
I tried to concentrate on something else, running through what my day looked like, but other than a chemistry quiz, there wasn’t much noteworthy. My thoughts kept turning back to the moment my world had come crashing down as hard as the plane we were on. I rolled onto my side. Instead of getting lost in the memory of when I’d realized I was alone in the world, I forced myself to focus on what had happened after.
When the hospital in Hawaii released me, social services had decided it was best to send me on to the destination my mother had chosen for us. They couldn’t have known she had randomly opened a map and pointed.
After a long boat ride and several trains and buses—because I refused to get on a plane—it was the Idaho social services who placed me in Nampa with Martha and Barry, or Marty and Baz, as they liked to be called. They were a nice enough couple in their fifties, semiretired and a little bored. Why not get a foster kid to spice things up a little? Unfortunately, I wasn’t that exciting.
I had my own room, and as much as they encouraged me to make it mine, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I looked around at the twin bed, desk, and mostly empty wardrobe as I pulled the blanket tighter around my shoulders. I was still stuck in my old ways—not getting too comfortable, the next move always around the corner.
Marty and Baz made an effort to get to know me, to make me feel like part of the family. It wasn’t their fault I didn’t know how to be part of a family.
The alarm I hadn’t needed went off, filling the impersonal room with a high-pitched beeping. I reached for my smartphone and turned it off. Sitting on the edge of my bed, I scratched at the tingling sensation at my wrists, willing my body to catch up with my mind and get moving.
I had bought the smartphone myself after selling some fake IDs, feeling too awkward to accept anything other than the basics—food and clothing—from my would-be parental figures. Marty and Baz had repeatedly offered to buy me more clothes, books, makeup, and other “normal teenage girl stuff.” I refused, but one indulgence I did allow them to provide was journal subscriptions. I devoured scientific literature the way most teenage girls went through fashion magazines. I was top of my class in all my science and most of my math classes at school. I had subscriptions to The American Statistician, Advances in Physics, New Scientist, and a few others.
I got up from the bed only to sit back down at my desk, pushing an old issue of New Scientist out of the way. I turned on the ancient computer running Windows XP and waited impatiently for it to wake up. We both struggled a little to get going in the mornings.
While I waited for the geriatric tech to boot up, I stood and reached into the half-empty closet for an outfit. My eye caught on my mother’s sundress with the big poppy flower print, and the lump in my throat reappeared.
If all it took to push me over the edge today was a glimpse of fabric, maybe I needed to skip school.
Not much had survived the plane crash. The crash investigation team had managed to recover some luggage, and the only salvageable items were a few photos and some clothes, including my mother’s favorite summer dress. None of our documents were found. My mother’s body, along with more than two hundred others, was also never found.
I got dressed in jeans and a loose sweater, consciously training my mind on how the cotton-poly blend aggravated the persistent itch at my wrists. The lump had receded, and I planted myself in front of the computer once again, giving my mind another distraction.
There were only two constants in my life now—science and my bordering-on-obsessive search for the honey-voiced stranger who had saved me in more ways than I could articulate.
I opened Tor—I only ever used the secure browser—and logged in to some of the forums I frequented, as well as checked a few non-mainstream sites for any news.
I hadn’t even learned his name before he’d disappeared. I had tried asking the nurses and doctors when I woke up, but they couldn’t give me any information on his identity. They just said he was part of the Melior Group rescue team who had brought me in. He had not spoken much to anyone but had been very interested in my progress and test results, ensuring I had the best care possible.
I didn’t know much about the Melior Group at the time. I had heard of them, of course—the elite private security firm that employed Variants with rare abilities almost exclusively, had ties to Variant communities as well as mainstream law enforcement, and operated all over the world. Every high-profile Variant had a Melior Group bodyguard on the payroll, and governments often employed them to aid in peacekeeping, rescue missions, and other shadier things, I was sure. Things with words like intelligence and dark ops involved.
When the air crash investigators interviewed me, I did my best to get them to shed light on my stranger’s identity. They wouldn’t elaborate on why a Melior Group team had been sent out on a simple rescue mission for a civilian plane crash. The word classified was thrown around more than once.
I tried contacting Melior Group directly once I was settled in Nampa, but I hit a brick wall and more classifieds. That’s when I’d powered up the ancient computer and put my research skills to use. Unfortunately that wasn’t getting me anywhere either. I was really getting sick of the word classified.
I was no closer to finding him now than I had been that first day in the hospital, but it had become a bit of an obsession. At some point I turned to shadier corners of the Internet, posting to forums, detailing my experience, and chatting to other people who’d had run-ins with Melior Group special teams. I was trying to find any link, no matter how tenuous, to someone else who may have crossed paths with him.
As with a complex mathematical problem or opaque scientific theory, the harder it was to puzzle out, the more determined I became to solve it.
But it wasn’t just the challenge of it. The fact that the word classified had come up so often told me there was more than just a simple engine failure to blame for my mother’s death. I had made it my mission to find out why my mom had lost her life. The stranger was my closest link to that information.
On a more emotional level, I needed to find him. The strength of my inexplicable pull to this man who had held me in my darkest hour frightened me a little. His team had saved me—they had pulled me out of the icy water and provided first aid—but my honey-voiced stranger had saved me on a much deeper level. He had stayed with me, cared for me, held me as I completely fell apart. Had I been alone
when I woke up in that hospital, I don’t think I would have had the strength to get better, to keep living my empty life. I was too emotionally wrecked to realize it at the time, but his presence had given me a tiny scrap to hold on to—a glimmer of hope that maybe I didn’t have to be alone in the world.
Yes, I wanted to find the answers to all my questions surrounding my mom’s death, but I also needed to look into his ice-blue eyes one more time and thank him for saving me.
The itching, which was spreading up my forearms, reminded me I needed to get to school, so I logged out and headed into the kitchen.
Marty was bustling about near the stove, her gray hair perfectly combed into a “fashionable” bob.
“Good morning!” She beamed at me over her shoulder, rushing to turn knobs and juggle pans. “You’re up a little early, but it’s good timing.”
Marty was a morning person, always full of positive energy. I was not a morning person. Coffee would have helped, but even after living in the States for a whole year, I still couldn’t get used to the filtered crap they drank.
I rubbed my temple and went to extract the milk from the fridge, trying to decide if Cap’n Crunch or Wheaties was a more anniversary-of-mother’s-death kind of breakfast cereal. Marty stepped in front of me and smiled, holding a plate of pancakes in front of her.
“Happy birthday, kiddo,” she said, much softer than I was used to hearing her speak. “I know this day is bittersweet for you, but hopefully this will help to make it just a little sweeter.”
“Oh.” I hadn’t realized we were on birthday pancakes terms. “Thank you.” My own voice was soft and, I hoped, genuine.
She gave me a little squeeze just above my elbow. Marty and Baz were not huggers, and for that at least, I was grateful.
I sat at the breakfast bar and ate my pancakes, Marty next to me with a large mug of American pond sludge coffee. They were delicious—Marty was a great cook—but they weren’t my mom’s.
Variant Lost (The Evelyn Maynard Trilogy Book 1) Page 2