Mist? So the Olders are helping…
Our car screeches to a halt, sending me tumbling face-first into the opposite seat, smashing my nose so hard my eyes tear. Dane throws open the door and Geoff scrambles out, followed by Reaper.
“Norah. Move your ass. Now!” Dane’s shouting, his face calm but his eyes darting.
The sight of the tarmac, of the plane, spurs me into action and I grab his hand, letting him pull me free of the mauled vehicle. My feet hit the asphalt as a second car pulls up. Haint and Pollyanna race out, as white as sheets but looking a heck of a lot better off than the three of us do—no wounds, no banged-up car.
Haint gets halfway to the rollaway steps to the plane before she’s lifted off the ground and thrown at least ten yards.
As though someone shoved her, but there’s no one there.
Or there’s someone invisible.
The people here know about us. They know what we can do and must’ve known where we would be today. I feel betrayed, but I’m not sure by whom.
My feet hustle toward Haint, but when I’m almost there, a calm comes over me. I don’t know why I’m in such a hurry because nothing’s wrong. This is all just fine, I think. We’re with the CIA. They’ll take care of us. Contented, I stop, turning away from Haint as the third car squeals into the parking lot. Its back end bursts into a fireball, flipping it forward and onto its roof.
That’s too bad. But look, Agent Bishop is helping Haint up. Pollyanna’s facing a girl I’ve never seen before—a woman, really. They’re locked in a staring contest, and I wonder who she is. Maybe the Asset that was sent with their group today...
Agent Bishop and Haint’s foreheads smack together, gashes opening up and spewing blood. My face twists up at the sight, my brain starting to insist something’s wrong with the scene around me.
Athena and Goose crawl out of the burning car on their bellies, redirecting my attention. They reach back in for Mole, tugging him free. It’s nice that they’re okay. That we’re all here for one another, us and the older Cavies.
Except me. I’m worthless, just standing here. What would I do to help right now? A big fat nothing because that’s what I am. Nothing.
All the detached calm of the past several minutes leeches away, leaving an empty husk in its place.
All I am is a burden to my friends. If we all become Assets they’ll have to risk their lives to save my worthless one every single day. What kind of person am I, asking them to do that?
Agent Warren rolls out of the burning car covered in soot, coughing until he retches on the pavement. My eyes fill with tears that boil over, the loathing for my failures—my genetic failures—more potent than ever. It’s consuming me, this sick certainty that not only would I be better off dead but that my friends would thank me for doing them that favor, too.
I need to leave them be, to be strong enough to do what they won’t.
My eyes catch sight of a gun lying on the ground near where Haint and Agent Bishop are still battling against an invisible foe. Haint disappears then, too, as though she’s realized what I yelled at Geoff in the car—she can fight that way tit for tat.
I look at the other Cavies…my Cavies. Athena’s hair is on fire, and Mole is throwing balls of flame the direction of the airport entrance, where three more unknown people—Cavies of some kind—march forward, hands outstretched.
I ignore them in favor of the gun that fell from Agent Bishop’s hand. It’s all I can see. My mouth waters with the need to touch it, to feel the weight of it in my hand, the cold steel under my chin. As though it belongs there. As though I’ve never needed anything—not food, not water, not love—more in my life.
Twenty steps. Thirty. I’m there, crouching down, picking it up. The world around me blurs because nothing can match the elation singing in my blood. This is it. This has always been my destiny as a Cavy. To remove myself from a world where I’ve never belonged. Never been good enough. Existed only as a burden to the people who pretend to care but couldn’t possibly miss a horrible failure.
My arm moves on its own, like it’s part of a dream. The gun is heavy, beautiful. The way it breaks out gooseflesh on my skin, the trigger springy in my hands, flushes me with relief so strong my eyes gush tears.
“Norah, stop!”
The sound of my name, spoken in a voice so familiar but completely out of context, gives me pause. Not because I doubt my actions but because I’m confused. I turn and see Jude, horror on his face, running toward me at full speed.
He’s so close I think he must be a vision, a dream—maybe an angel coming to take me away.
I turn away and pull the trigger.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The light is very bright.
The observation piques my curiosity. Maybe the fanatics have been right all along, about heaven and the bright light and all that.
They must also be right about consciousness existing after death, because thoughts tumble through my head. They were wrong about there being no pain, though. My body hurts from top to bottom, but nothing aches more than my jaw. And my shoulder.
Apparently we don’t get to keep our magical healing abilities once we’re dead and gone.
“She’s waking up. Look.” The voice is soft and familiar.
My mind works on identifying it and the pounding in my head increases. Then it comes to me, along with the scene that had taken place on the tarmac in St. Petersburg, and my eyes fly open.
Then I shut them again because the light and movement and sound makes me want to barf.
“You can do it, Gyp. Come back to me.” That’s Mole’s voice—no need to think about it for an extra second—and his is the face I see when my eyes manage to stay open.
But it’s not the voice that pulled me from the blackness.
I find who I’m searching for sagging in the corner—Jude. He hadn’t been a dream. Certainly not an angel.
“Hey.” Mole’s eyes brim with tears, and my heart smacks into my ribs. “You’re back.”
He launches himself at me, not worried about touching me, about what I might see. I’m so wrapped up in blankets that it wouldn’t matter, anyway, but I do grunt from the pain when he jostles me too hard.
My grimace sends him back to his seat with a sheepish expression, but the light on his face doesn’t go out. His tears don’t stop. It’s been years since I’ve seen Mole cry, and the fact that it’s over me touches me with the kind of wonder I thought had disappeared with our brief childhood.
He’s Mole again in a heartbeat, a sly bend to his smirk. “You know, just because I said you look hot with electrodes stuck to you doesn’t mean you need to land in a hospital bed to get my attention.”
“I’m in the hospital?” I try to sit up and realize there are wires and an IV coming out of me. “What happened?”
He screws up his face. I glance at Jude, who avoids my gaze.
“You’re in the sick bay on the plane. You don’t remember what happened?”
It starts to come back to me in snatches, until all I can feel is the crushing self-hatred that drove me to pick up that gun. The gun that I fired.
My hand flies to my jaw, find it covered in gauze and tape. My eyes fly to Jude. “You stopped me.”
“He tackled you,” Mole amends, helpfully. “Bloody bruised you all to hell, although Agent Bishop promises most of the smaller ones are already gone. Your face was a piece of work, but it’s improving, too.”
“How do you know, dope?”
“I felt you up while you were out. Sue me.”
A smile starts to curl my lips, but then Jude’s eyes are on me, no longer avoiding. They’re deliberately blank, I think, except for a twitch of longing at the edges that he’s failing to one hundred percent hide. “I didn’t have a choice,” he says, a little defensively. “You still shot off a good chunk of your jaw.”
My heart climbs into my throat, fluttering until I’m lightheaded again at the thought. I almost killed myself. Why?
I
nstead, I just say, “Thank you.”
“It was an empath that made you do it,” he explains as though he can hear my thoughts. “Like Tate, but not a friend.”
“There were other Cavies here. Not the ones with the CIA?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re here. And you know about Tate and this plane and… How do you know about all of this? What are you doing in Russia?”
Mole gets up, leaning down to brush the lightest, briefest of kisses to my forehead and then sweeps my hair back onto the pillow. “I’m going to leave you two alone. I’ll be right outside, and when you’re ready, everyone wants to talk in the main cabin.”
Mole shuffles out, using the walls and his hands more than he does in a familiar environment. Jude moves toward me carefully, taking the seat Mole vacated but staying well out of arm’s reach. He keeps his face a blanker slate, too, but the sheen on the edges remains.
My vision of Pollyanna’s death burns like acid. Jude knew about her then, too. She thought he could help her but he didn’t.
He’s different.
“What are you doing here?” I demand now, feeling stronger and in less pain by the minute. This time my attempt to sit up sticks and I set about pulling off the wires and the gauze away from my face. The wound my fingers find feels nasty and is still open enough to make me wince.
“Those people who followed y’all back here to the airport—they’re Cavies, like I said. But not ones that were raised at Darley.”
That catches my attention, and even though it doesn’t make me forget the question I asked about Jude’s presence, it does distract me.
“All Cavies are raised at Darley.” I’m suddenly afraid there are Darley Halls all over the country. Hundreds upon hundreds of babies ripped from murdered mothers.
“Darley Hall is a special place, Norah, and all Cavies aren’t equally deserving. Surely you know that.” A sadness ghosts over his face. Maybe a regret. “There have been some the government considers failures.”
“Yeah, I’m aware.” My response drips with sarcasm, but his treatment of this conversation feels a little bit like a cruel joke. As though I, of all people, need it explained.
“No, not like your mutation is considered less than desirable, Norah. As in, the gene therapy didn’t take in the mother and no ability ever manifested in the child.”
My mind works through this, around in a circle until I come back to my initial question for the boy standing in front of me—the one who shouldn’t be here at all. “How on earth do you know all of this, Jude?”
Irony stretches his smile thin, until it’s not a smile at all but a warning. “Because I’m one of them.”
“What?” My flabbergasted response isn’t because I didn’t hear him. The truth just can’t be…the truth. “You’re not a Cavy. You grew up in Charleston with Maya. Your dad has spent years investigating the government. Your mom isn’t dead!”
“You’re right; I’m not a Cavy. I’m a Siphon. A defective experiment put up for adoption when it became clear my mother would never leave Saint Catherine’s House alive.” He nods, watching the truth sink into my skin like poison.
“What’s a Siphon?” My voice sounds far away to my ears, as though someone else asks the question.
“You just met them. The effects of the gene therapy occasionally invert, resulting in subjects who display no mutated abilities of their own, but they can siphon—or borrow—it from any Cavy in the vicinity.”
It all makes sense, then. The way Dane’s and my skin peeled off like someone was pulling it from underneath… The objects flying at us through the air… The people chasing us borrowed from Geoff and Reaper.
And Mole’s car lighting on fire. Haint fighting an invisible person.
The person I never saw who grabbed hold of Pollyanna’s bone-chilling ability and used it to try to make me kill myself in front of my friends.
My throat burns at the memory, part from shame because she or he could never have used those emotions against me so easily if they weren’t already there to a lesser degree, and part anger over being manipulated at all. Almost murdered.
My face feels like stone by the time I look up at Jude, ready to do whatever it takes—even continue weapons and combat training like we had at Saint Stephen’s—to make sure those people never steal from us again. Never turn around the things that make my friends feel safe and confident, using them to flip us on the defensive instead.
There’s something so dirty about it. So underhanded. Like stabbing someone in the back.
If there’s one thing in the world I’ve never been able to stand, it’s a coward. And if they’re trying to stop us, these are cowards who want to let a deadly computer virus run rampant in the world. But why?
My hands shake and my heart thuds. Betrayal, hot and painful, sluices through me as I realize Jude’s lumped in with them. That he could have stolen my ability at any time—because of course he knows what it is. And that’s the real reason he never asked.
Losing him this way hurts worse than any other injury I’ve sustained today. “You’re here with them. The ones who tried to kill us.”
His eyes go wide and he reaches for me, missing when I jerk away. “No! Norah, God, how can you think that? I would never, ever hurt you. I’m here to protect you.”
I feel deflated, like all of the oxygen left my body at once and I hadn’t even realized I’d stopped breathing. “Why should I believe you?”
The hurt in his face shatters my heart. We’ll never be the same.
“How can you say that?”
“I don’t know, Jude.” I refuse to give in to the desire to take it back. “Because you’re here?”
“I’m here because the CIA asked me to come.” The way he says asked, like it’s a joke, tells me he was commanded, probably with some kind of not-so-subtle threat against his father’s life as the pressure.
“So they knew this might happen. That the…the Siphons might come after us.”
“Of course. They wanted you here, on the ground, to try to draw them out. I wouldn’t be surprised if they leaked the fact of your involvement in the mission, though it’s as likely that the Siphons have infiltrated the CIA. Either way, the government has been looking to recapture them ever since they realized not having powers of their own didn’t mean they don’t have powers.”
The influx of information sucks at me like a hundred leeches stuck all over my skin. It dries up the little bit of the comfort I took from my life in Charleston and extracts the little bit of sympathy I had for the CIA’s cause. What it can’t totally rid me of are my feelings for Jude, which linger too deep to be touched.
The pain etched on his face, the desperation trembling at the corners of his eyes, as though he’s afraid if he looks right at it it’ll swallow him, the way I know he’s dying to reach out to me—they all conspire to make me see the boy I knew, not the one more like me than I ever could have guessed.
“How does that even happen? I mean, the government not knowing what they could do?”
“They were stumped at the beginning, too, and by the time they figured it out, we were scattered—adopted by unsuspecting families.” He rakes a hand through his hair, wincing as though telling me this hurts him. “But you can’t mess with someone’s genetic code and expect to get away scot-free. We were different.”
I frown and cringe at the odd stretching sensation in my jaw. “If they can only tap into the abilities of other Cavies, how did any of you figure out you could do anything?”
“How do you think? The government is greedy. Once they realized what was resulting from the failures, they experimented on some of the first defectives—” his lips twist over the word, like it tastes awful “—thinking the subjects wouldn’t figure out what it all meant. They did, and some of them escaped to go looking for more like them. Other Siphons.”
“Why are they after us?”
It doesn’t escape my notice that I keep referring to the Siphons as they, not you. Beli
eving Jude could have anything in common with the group of people who just tried to kill us is too much right now.
“The Siphons hate what was done to them, how they were treated like rats in a lab. They want to wipe out the program. All of you. Like it never existed.”
“So, they want to kill themselves, too? That’s ludicrous.”
He shakes his head. “No. Without successful mutations to borrow from, the Siphons become just like everyone else. Which is probably what they’re actually after.” Jude pauses, seeming to consider saying more before he does. “It’s not all of them, you know. The ones here, the ones after the Cavies, are a small but determined group.”
“Don’t they realize we didn’t ask to be this way any more than they did?”
“They don’t care. They want the program destroyed, and even if they get to every last bit of research, it’s not complete without wiping the specimens, too. I mean, do you think there should be generations after yours?”
A world without Cavies is a world without me, without my friends, makes my blood run cold. These rogue Siphons are nothing but more enemies.
“I don’t know. But I don’t think it should be up to the Siphons to make that call.”
Jude gives me a tight nod. “You’re right about that.”
“How long have you known? About who you are?” I ask with a tongue as dry as the desert.
His brief hesitation reveals everything. Jude has known for longer than he’s known me. He knew when we met what I was, where I came from, and what would be asked of me…and he lied.
“You lied to me,” I whisper, wishing my voice sounded more angry and less wounded.
Jude starts to shake his head but stalls when he sees my face. I can only imagine what it looks like. My insides are about to boil away, and his face falls to pieces.
“I didn’t tell you the truth.”
“Semantics,” I sigh. “You could have helped me. When you heard about how I was attacked on the street with that needle. You must have known what really happened. Who was after us.”
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