“Everett was in there,” I say.
To be fair, his body is in there. But I'm positive now's not the time to get into semantics over the contents of Dad's meat suit.
Graham stiffens, and for a moment I almost expect him to perform a rarely seen display of giving a damn about our father. Instead, he pulls his hand away as soon as he sees I'm in one piece and shoots an accusatory glare at Shadow, who hovers nearby with a serious look in her eyes that's all business.
“Ivy's on it,” she says, mostly to me. Graham's already gone by the time she's finished speaking, off to join the rest of the team clearing away debris.
When I blink the clogging dust from my eyes, it's easier to see my mother flinging aside enormous cement blocks and twisted bits of rebar. Graham sweeps aside piles of crumpled iron and shredded cardboard boxes with a mere thought, while the others rummage through more manageable ruins in an attempt to reach my father.
I freeze, unable to force myself to join the others.
They'll find him alive. They will. Whoever he is, finding his dead body in the ruins of the toy warehouse is not the point.
Mom gives a triumphant cry.
She hauls him from the wreckage and the others surround them, cluster close like enthusiastic rugby players and pester the both of them with worried questions about his possible injuries or jokes about his need for a newer, cleaner uniform. Whoever he is, his telekinetic abilities must have kicked in enough to protect him from the falling debris like an invisible umbrella.
Graham hangs back, an odd duck just like myself. When I stare at him in curiosity he stares back with just as much intrigue in his gaze.
A moment later Dad speaks, his words hoarse.
“I found it.”
His voice is almost too low to be heard. But now that the rubble of the warehouse has crumbled under our feet and the sirens of emergency vehicles are still in their infancy elsewhere in the city, the words carry.
Mom strokes the dust from his face. “Found what, darling?”
He lets loose with a wracking cough. “The evidence we were looking for. It's in there under the rubble.”
I'll just bet it is, I think. The moment it dawns on me that he's lying, icy fingers trail up my spine.
Dad raises his head, punch-blue circles shading his eyes from view for a long moment. He stares at me in silent growing triumph.
“It's him,” he says, his lips twisting in a decisive sneer. “Nate was the one who released the robots.”
18.
There is no trial when they send you to Hollyoak Hills.
I don't remember much of anything that happens after Flashpoint and Graham tighten their steely grips around my upper arms. They haul me towards the SLB transport unit that roared onto the scene not long after the thing in my father's body made his stunning announcement and Noor contacted the SLB with a few quietly transmitted words. My volunteer bodyguards fling me bodily into the back of the transport unit, sending me slamming with a heavy thump against the far wall.
There are no questions, no displays of evidence, no alibis or motives to be pondered.
In the name of justice, a Noble never lies. It says so on bumper stickers and everything.
The vehicle starts to move before I manage even the slightest of protests, the bruises and lumps from my unceremonious pitch into the transport unit healing in an instant. I fumble into a sitting position and pull myself up onto one of the cold hard seats set into the wall. The SLB doesn't invest in anything elaborate for its transport units. It saves its money for the dampeners that ensure those interred in the back won't be able to escape.
Immortality is one of the many powers they don't dampen, but that's still not much of a help.
I debate pounding on the wall between the containment area and the driver and announcing that I'm not really Nate, that I'm Vera Noble and I've switched bodies, but I know from experience it will be a futile effort. The SLB's rules in regards to transporting prisoners hold firm. No stopping until the person in question is taken to Hollyoak Hills, no exceptions. Protesting that I'm not who they think I am will just be a waste of energy until I can get somewhere near a telepath.
I don't doubt that whoever's taken up residence in my father's body knows that rule as well. That means he doesn't need me gone forever, just for a little while. I'm betting he needs the authorities to put me away just long enough for him to carry out whatever nefarious plan he's attempting to pull off.
I very much do not want to think about what he plans to do while I'm gone. I may only be incarcerated for a few short hours, but any villain worth his salt could pull off a hell of a lot of damage in under an hour. Morris's bloodless takeover of the planet Ferlo only took thirty-seven minutes, and twenty-eight of those minutes were swallowed up waiting for the intergalactic pizza delivery.
Annoyed, I give the wall a good thump. “Hey, any chance I could hit a bathroom on the way to the joint?” I call out.
Silence greets me.
“Guess that's a no, then,” I mutter to myself.
The ride to Hollyoak Hills continues in a tense silence only broken by the occasional thump of the tires dipping into a pothole or two, rattling my teeth in the process. The drawn-out ride gives me plenty of time to consider my options, what few of them there are. I wish throwing a balls-out melodramatic tantrum would get me released, but unfortunately it's not that simple. Better to just wait it out and play my hand when I can.
I wish I could teleport. Even when I wasn't using my powers these past five years, the neon insistent spark of them shone brilliant enough to light and warm the inside of me. Without my powers I feel untethered and lost, unconnected and anxious, like I'm a zoo animal released into the wild without a map to direct myself homeward. I've never been one to get carsick, and this body isn't built for it. But there's something dizzying about being metaphorically handcuffed the way I am.
After a long dull drive, the transport unit stops. I can't help but tense up, backing against the wall farthest from the doors, my fingertips a bit numb from the dampeners.
I shouldn't have bothered. Guardsmen ripped with enormous muscles will not be tearing open the doors to subdue me.
I blink and miss it, the lightning-quick swap from the back of the transport unit to a sparsely appointed waiting room in muted shades of gray. Flickering fluorescent lights give the room a washed-out pallor, like some surreal oncologist's waiting room competing with you to see who'll turn out to be more ill. The walls feature only a single painting, an unsettling abstract in slashes of black and white that causes me to wonder if I've suddenly gone colorblind. The sickly-sweet tune of early-era Madonna done in Muzak fills the air. I wonder sarcastically if this is how I'm about to be punished for a crime I didn't commit, by suffering through chintzy canned dance-pop I hate.
An insistent throat clears on the other side of the room. I look over from the chair I've been dumped into to see a wizened elderly woman with thick bifocals tucked away behind a receptionist's desk. Her desk sits bare save for a single small flat touchscreen set into the desk's polished surface, but from this angle I can't see what's displayed on it. She fixes a gentle smile on me, her dark skin furrowed with deep lines.
Uncomfortable and confused, I push myself to my feet and approach her desk.
“State your name,” she says, her voice a singsong.
I debate telling her the truth. In these sorts of circumstances, the authorities never say, “Oh, well, in that case,” and send you on your merry way, especially if they're merely lowly nine-dollar-an-hour security guards or office clerks. They don't get paid enough to believe a word I or anyone else in my position would say.
“Nathaniel Doe,” I blurt out.
She gives me a gracious nod, and slowly types it into the scanner in front of her. After a long moment, she says, “State your date of birth.”
That would require me to know my date of birth, I'm tempted to say. “I'd prefer not to.”
“He's immortal, Rose. He doesn't
have to answer that question.”
I turn to see Marla standing behind me as though she's been there the whole time. She wears a dusty-rose pantsuit and subtle pearl jewelry. Her dark auburn hair tumbles over her shoulders in a rumpled cloud. She looks like she's just gotten off work at some real job with a definite dress code.
There's something about the wry twist of her lips and the twinkle in her eyes that makes me stiffen.
She knows Nate. I don't know how, but she does.
“Well, aren't you a sight for sore eyes?”
If she knows Nate, she'll know I'm not him. If she's a telepath, she'll know I'm not him.
I wait. And wait. And after a long awkward moment, I say, “I suppose I just might be at that.”
Somehow I just can't say it. Why can't I just say it?
She approaches, her arms crossed, and the whole time I try to shove the words past my lips. I'm Vera Noble, I want to say, to shout at the top of my lungs. I know I didn't admit as much when I first got here, but I'm here now and I'm saying it. I'm Vera, not Nate, so you've got to let me go –
She can't even hear me. Shouldn't she be able to hear my thoughts?
“We've got a twenty-four hour hold on you,” she states, and before my heart can sink like a steel weight in my chest she continues. “They find anything on your sorry ass by this time tomorrow, we won't have much of a reason to hold you.”
The words just die on my tongue, weightless and airy, and float away before I can speak them. I'm not sure why or how, but if there is a switch in my brain labeled, “Say your own name,” somebody's poked their way in, flipped it into the “off” position, and glued it firmly in place.
I can think of only one person who might be able to pull that off. And if whoever is in my father's body has managed to tighten his grip on Dad's mind control enough to keep me quiet, that doesn't bode well for my chances of fixing any of this.
“Yeah, well, sometimes that's all they need,” I say, resting my hands on my hips.
Marla's expression doesn't change.
“You accusing Everett Noble of lying?”
God, I wish.
I lower my head. “Everett Noble wouldn't lie about something like this,” I declare.
That's true on a few levels. If that were Everett Noble in my father's body, he certainly wouldn't resort to subterfuge to get someone out of the way. He's already got quite enough bold-faced lying on his plate already without adding falsifying witness accounts or making up psychic evidence.
Marla cocks an eyebrow. “Is that an admission of guilt?”
I say nothing.
“Didn't think so,” she says after a long moment. She sounds like she wasn't expecting one.
She rests her hand on my cheek, a warm weight punctuated with a few “I told you so” pats.
A moment later, without any sort of warning, everything goes dark.
I reappear, to my stunned surprise, in a simple prison cell.
The walls have been painted a dull off-white and the floors tiled in gray linoleum flecked with black. A stainless steel toilet is attached to the wall opposite a simple bunk tucked with rough sparse bedding. Weak fluorescent lighting flickers overhead, highlighting the already pasty cell with an even more sickly tone.
It's decidedly less terrifying than I've been given the impression to expect.
I sit down on the bunk with an exasperated sigh, my boots skidding a pair of black marks across the linoleum.
It's only a matter of time, of course. I don't believe for a moment that whoever is in my father's body had enough time to frame Nate for the release of those gargantuan robots before the Fairness Brigade arrived, or – an even more implausible option – that Nate genuinely is the person responsible for the spider robots. It's a gamble, what Dad's doing, but it gives him quite a bit of time to play. By the time they let me go from this place, he could –
A low clanging sound echoes down the hallway.
I stare in vague curiosity at the door.
An even lower rustling drifts pasts my cell, skirts the floor as someone passes by, too short to be seen through the small rectangular window in the door.
I try to shrug off the eerie feeling that tenses my shoulders and settles there, but it doesn't work.
Another clanging, this one slightly farther away, sharp and meaningful like someone with a crowbar hitting one of the doors.
My fingers tighten in the coarse sheets.
It's not claustrophobia. It's not. Teleporters can tolerate the most appalling of conditions while they retain their abilities. Knowing full well you can escape oppressive heat or intense weather conditions or invading aliens with a simple thought does wonders for your state of mind. But there's no escaping this. There wouldn't be even if I were in my own body, with my own powers.
It doesn't matter where they keep me.
I'm not going anywhere. That's the whole problem.
Voices carry from down the hall, raising and lowering in what sounds disturbingly like a growing argument. My teeth clench in a tight grind as someone shouts out an unintelligible threat. No one knows exactly what the interior of Hollyoak Hills contains. Former prisoners exit the prison vague or forgetful, their memories patchy. An ordinary jail, with the expected noises of disruptive prisoners or banging metal, just doesn't feel like this.
An alarm begins to bleat elsewhere, screeching in a high needy tone that does nothing to calm me.
The window in the door is too high, still just too high, so that when there's the recognizable rhythmic thumps of people in heavy boots running past the door I can't see them. My brain registers how many people – one, two, three, and two more as well – in a distant fog.
Not five seconds later, another group runs by, pounding the walls, shouting out in triumph at newly allowed freedom.
I don't notice myself slipping down to the floor, crab-walking my way backwards until I collide hard with the cinder-block wall. My teeth clank together from the impact.
I don't have to be frightened. I don't have to be frightened, damn it, except every noise and sound and voice that echoes through the place dances across my nerves wearing tap shoes tipped with razor blades.
It sounds like a prison break, like a riot in its infancy.
I know better, on some level. Hollyoak Hills doesn't have prison breaks. Those confined within its walls never encounter one another. They're kept isolated, safely contained in solitary quarters. Even a kindergartner in his first year at superhero day school knows that much about Hollyoak.
My lizard brain, on the other hand, doesn't want to listen.
It wants to cry out, wants me to teleport away and run for a secure haven. If I were in my body, I might be able to stifle the anxious tremble running through me and force myself to stay, would have the practiced fortitude not to pop out in fear simply knowing there's always the possibility I can do so whenever I choose.
But here, in a different body with the door firmly locked to keep me in, with the raucous din rising outside, I sink into terror faster than I normally would under the circumstances.
I bury my face in my folded arms and wish to myself that this would all just end.
As if on cue, everything goes silent in an abrupt cutoff.
“It knows who you are.”
I open my tightly clenched eyelids to see Marla crouched in front of me. Her auburn hair tumbles loosely over her shoulders, and she's changed from her pink suit into the faded jeans and flannel I'd expect from her. She grips my hands, her work-roughened fingertips rubbing away at them in a calming massage. It takes me a moment to register what she says, my mind too busy reining in my fear.
“Come again?”
“Hollyoak gives you what scares you, deep down in your guts. You can't even tell what's hiding there, but it can.” Marla's maternal gaze connects with mine, less quietly flirtatious than it was when I first arrived. She gives the room a cursory gaze. She doesn't look impressed, and for a moment I'm almost insulted. “A jail cell with no escape
? That's never been any immortal's worst fear as far as I've seen, and I highly doubt it's Nate's.”
I laugh, this high-pitched cackle, thready and surreal. I don't even know where it comes from. “You know him that well, do you?”
Her answering smile is soft but secretive.
I wonder for a moment just whose secrets she's keeping.
She eases me to my feet and steers me to the bunk, sitting me down whether I like it or not. Her head tilts in a curious-puppy maneuver, and invisible fingertips skim the edges of my consciousness in a light airy touch that's meant to gentle a skittish mind as well as take a quick glimpse inside. I flinch, barely restraining myself from bolting for the still-secured door. The only fact that keeps me from doing so is that she doesn't seem to be reaching much deeper than the outermost borders of me, forced back the more she pushes.
I'm definitely not doing that on my own.
“There's a cloud in your head, you know,” she says, curious in a faint way. “Fog's thicker than beef gravy in there if you've got the power to peek in. No wonder nobody can tell it's not you.”
My breath shudders out of me, and I make a soft happy noise I don't intend anyone to hear.
“You think it's a side effect of the swap?” I blurt out.
She watches silently for a long moment as I run my hands over the battered denim of my jeans in a nervous gesture. I feel well in so many ways, a steady heartbeat and a settled stomach, but my racing mind more than makes up for it, churning in my head and trying to force me to wallow in dizziness.
“Could be,” Marla says. She stuffs her fists in her pockets and leans against the opposite wall. We could be at a backroads bar somewhere, the unvarnished floors covered with peanut shells and sawdust, Skynyrd on the jukebox and some unshaven biker fetching her a beer. It's a relaxing sight, whether she means it to be or not. “Could be someone else went poking around in there, too, while they were at it.”
My head bobs in a distracted nod, but my mind narrows in on that comment. It's not a possibility I care to entertain. It's easier – for me, at least – if there's only one person behind all of this.
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