One (One Universe)

by LeighAnn Kopans

  “It’s a sensory deprivation substance,” Fisk explains, his voice measured. I look over at Elias, and I swear he grimaces. The hint of pride I hear in Fisk’s voice — the one that causes the vial of solution to practically dance between his fingers — makes me want to sprint over to Fisk and tear his throat out with my bare hands, just to stop his voice from ever existing again.

  “We’ve been trying to utilize them and what they can do to make Elias more…effective. Now that you’ve confirmed that nothing — and no one — can do that, we’re going to try it the other way around. The stasis will kill him, eventually, but, from what you’re saying, that’s the most good he’ll ever do here at the Hub.”

  Fisk stands there, perfectly calm. “Show us what you can do, Merrin Grey. Show us why you’ve always been obsessed with biochemistry. Show us why you have a premed student’s library of genetics and organic chemistry notes on your tablet. Show us why you’re better than any high school student we’ve ever known at these things. Why do you care?”

  I clench my jaw and stare back at him. I will not cry. I will not scream. I won’t.

  “I can fix you, Merrin. I know you want me to.” He motions toward the small lab behind me, the one whose walls are lined with the neon-liquid-filled vials bearing my name. Or were before I stole them.

  “There are amazing things here. Discoveries that can push you to your full potential. That can make Elias’s sisters’ sacrifice — and your brothers’ — not be in vain. That can make you soar.” He leans in, lowers his voice again. “On your own.”

  My lower lip trembles. Mom pulls me in for a hug, and my whole body stiffens. Mom never hugs me.

  She presses me to her, her wiry arms so much stronger than I ever would have expected, and I can’t pull away. She pushes her face into the hair hanging by my ear and whispers, “The two of you can fly?”

  I nod the slightest bit.

  “Fast?” she whispers.

  I nod again. I hope, with Elias under, it’s true.

  She loosens her grip. Steps away. “President Fisk. We want to get this over with. I’ll put him under myself.”

  I let forth something between a whimper and a yell and fall on Elias. Mom bends over me, digging her fingernails into my upper arms so hard it sends streaks of pain down my back.

  “It’ll happen quickly,” she says, her voice so low only I can hear it. “When he wakes, you two get out of here.”

  I summon all I have in me — my love for the boys and Elias, my desire to protect my friends and get us all the hell out of here — to trust her.

  Mom moves to a small stainless steel tray on a table nearby and stabs a needle into one vial of clear liquid after another, lifting, peering at it in the light, tapping the air bubbles out.

  Dad walks in and sees me holding Elias’s hand, crosses over to me, and wraps his arm around my shoulders. He tries to pull me away, but he couldn’t get me away from Elias with a crowbar. Especially not right now.

  Mom looks right at Dad, back to me for a second, and then back at him again with determined eyes. She holds up the needle-tipped syringe and quickly nods, the movement so slight that no one else would notice it. Mom injects it into the port. Dad draws back from me, his eyes slightly wet, his mouth set in a hard line. I’ve seen that face before. He’s steeling himself. Saying goodbye.

  A row of ten, a dozen, no, fifteen people in scrubs and white coats, just like my parents, has lined up along the wall. But they don’t stand like nurses. They stand rigid, shoulders squared, muscles tensed. Like soldiers. That and the way they react to Fisk’s every move as he paces the room — checking the girls’ monitors, watching Mom mix the stuff in the needle, walking too close to Michael and Max — says it all. They’re security, ready to jump on me the second I — we — try to run.

  Besides that, there’s nowhere to run. The testing arena crawls with security, dotted with obstacles we could never really sprint around, and every section of the building locks down if we try to go somewhere we don’t belong. Which, I imagine, is everywhere by this point. We’re stuck.

  But Mom didn’t tell me to run. She asked me if I could fly.

  That roof. All the doors have been locked down, but maybe that roof hasn’t. Besides, that thing opens directly to the sky. What kind of security could really be on it — bomber jets?

  I feel a shortness of breath, high in my chest, paralyzing my shoulders.

  We don’t get out unless we fly. If we fly, they won’t get what they want — hooking us up to monitors and injecting solutions to watch the transference — but they will want us even more. Enough to hunt us down. And between Nora and Lia in sensory deprivation fluid and the boys getting prepped for spinal taps, I know there’s nothing Fisk won’t do to figure us out.

  Which means if we fly out of here, we can’t stop flying. Ever.

  I glance over at my brothers one more time. Mom leans over and brushes Michael’s dark curls from his forehead, kissing him there.

  Like Fisk is reading my mind, he croons, “Show us that we’ve done something useful here, Merrin. Show us we’re on the right track. Let us send your brothers home.”

  He reaches a hand out to me, touching my arm, trying to draw me away from Elias. I fling my arm out and he steps away, still smiling that same stupid smile. I want to kill him.

  “You’re not touching me ever again.”

  “Oh, we’ll have to if you want us to stop testing them. And you’ll have to do it willingly. But if you won’t… The secret to why you displayed transference all those years ago could lie in their genes. We think it does. We’ve gotten so close. The only thing we can’t do is make Ones into Supers. But we will. When you show us exactly how that works.”

  There’s no way he’s going to grab Elias and me, and just let the boys go. Not when he can keep them for whatever freaky side experiments he has going on.

  “Prove to me that figuring out Elias and me is the only thing you really want,” I say. “Let my mom and dad take my brothers.”

  “Excuse me?” Fisk scoffs.

  “I don’t like to repeat myself.”

  “You mean, let them go? Oh, my dear, you can’t be serious.”

  “They get to leave. You won’t need them anyway, when you have us. Then — only then — I show you what we can do.”

  Fisk nods to the guards-dressed-as-nurses, and they step to the side so Mom can wheel Max out. Dad watches me, and I see anger, pride, and sadness in his face all at once. Each one of them kills me.

  “I’ll get the car ready,” he says, nodding at me. “She’ll be back for Michael.” Then he follows Mom out.

  “And the girls.” I nod toward Nora and Lia, still floating, unconscious in that goop. I swallow hard. I don’t even know them, but I know what they mean to Elias, and I can’t stand to see them this way. “They go, too.”

  This is the first time Fisk lets his face fall, and it fills me with a small amount of glee. He swallows and then nods his assent to the nurses. They head toward the tank.

  Fisk stays there another minute, standing too close, breathing so close to me that I’m afraid to open my mouth for fear we’d use the same air. He stares me down, looks at my hands again. He’s seen that photo of me levitating that apple. He knows I can go light, that I can make Elias do it, too. He knows we can fly. He just wants his damn machines and serums to pick up every second of it.

  Now that I’ve gotten the boys out of here, I have no idea how to stop that from happening.

  The weird sucking-and-whooshing sound of the huge door to the testing arena opening, the one that made me jump and giggle during the night of the Symposium, startles me now.

  One of the guards says, “We found more of ‘em.”

  My heart races. I hear the sounds of struggle first and then see a swoop of bright strawberry blond hair.

  My heart sinks, then soars again when I see that Leni isn’t freaking out, shaking and crying like I would have expected, and Daniel stands tall. Half as second later, I see w
hy. The guards have made one big mistake, one they wouldn’t have known not to make because Leni and Daniel burned out the lines to the security feeds.

  They’ve bound their hands together.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  “Found these two trying to sneak out the way they came in. They won’t tell us a thing,” the guard reports.

  Fisk chuckles. “Yes. Thank you,” he says to the guard and then turns. “Helen. Daniel. Welcome to the Hub’s state-of-the-art testing arena. I’m giving more tours than I anticipated today, but no matter. The more the merrier.”

  Daniel’s jaw clenches, and he stands up even straighter.

  Fisk turns to Mr. Hoffman and says, “Pity the son of the famous Doctors Suresh couldn’t make more of himself, isn’t it? It’s no wonder his parents never had any more children since he was such a disappointment.”

  Fisk grabs each of their hands and walks them over to where we stand. Leni moves with jerking steps, like she wants to stand her ground, to fight him touching her, but she knows it’s futile. Daniel hangs his head.

  He pushes them so they’re standing right next to me, shoulder to shoulder, like we’re dolls or pawns on a chess board. Like he’s posing us for a picture.

  He steps back, clasps his hands together, fingers interlocked, and brings them to his mouth, smiling a little behind them.

  “Yes. Yes, lovely.”

  Behind me, the paper on Elias’s bed rustles, and my heart thuds to a stop. I whip around and watch his chest inflate fully and quickly. His head moves to either side, and his eyes flutter open. I squeeze his hand for dear life, but I don’t bend over him. I won’t make myself look weak either. Not now.

  Next to me, Leni gasps. Her eyes focus on something behind Fisk and become pools of tears. She sees Nora and Lia in the sensory tank, now only a quarter filled with green goop, behind me.

  “What…what are they doing to them?” Leni chokes, staring at Nora and Lia. But I want to maintain eye contact with her. Need to.

  “Getting them ready to go home,” I say, keeping my voice steady, squeezing Elias’s hand to tell him that it’s true because I know he can hear me now. Elias’s head moves one way, then the other, making the paper under his pillow crackle.

  Fisk’s voice floats between us like noxious gas. “Trust me, Merrin. You’ll be glad you agreed to this.”

  If he keeps saying my name like that, I swear to God I will kill him. I will rip his throat out through his eyes.

  I didn’t agree to a goddamn thing, but I know what he means. Staying. Testing. What Elias has been doing since he was a little kid. Poking, prodding, sensory deprivation goop. I look up to where Nora and Lia’s tank is being drained, where nurses pull tubes out of their throats and wrap waffle-weave bathrobes just like the one I have at home around their atrophied bodies. I choke, try my best to keep the vomit down. Something that reminds me of home has no place here.

  “Mrs. Grey,” Leni wails when she sees Mom coming back into the room for Michael, “You said they were making me stronger.”

  I look from Leni to Mom and back again. Leni’s remembered. After all this, she remembered what Mom was to her and what Mom did to her all in the same breath.

  “We… Honey, we thought we were. Thought we could enhance your indestructibility.”

  “Indestructibility,” Leni says. “I’m not indestructible. Only when I’m with… But if I ever was… I could have…” She looks quickly at Daniel, then stares at the ground, her face contorting between pained and composed.

  I think of that snapshot of Mom and Leni I found. Of course she needed a mom-substitute. Sucks that it was just for research purposes. A flash of hate for Mom burns through me.

  Yeah, Leni trusted her. Not only that. Leni loved her. That’s why it worked.

  I was just a kid, too. I should have trusted Mom. It should have worked for me, too. But my instincts have always been pretty damn good, apparently, because I’ve never really trusted anyone — never transferred a thing — until I met Elias.

  Mom stares at the ground, too, then clenches her fists around the side of Michael’s bed and walks him out without another word. My heart twists for Leni, but there’s no way to comfort her now.

  Suddenly, the electric prickle of the buzz overwhelms me. I turn around to see Elias sitting up.

  I whimper and bury my face in his shoulder. I can’t possibly do anything else. “You’re awake.

  “You made it,” Elias says. “You actually broke in to the Hub.” His voice is filled with awe. “But, Mer,” he says, his breath hot against my neck. “Michael and Max. They’re…”

  “I know. And the girls, too.”

  He swallows, blinks hard, and I motion behind me. Nora coughs and sputters from the tube removal. Lia’s still. A look I’ve never seen on Elias before roils in his eyes. Pure, unadulterated rage.

  “I heard them talking about me. They said I was going under…indefinitely. What did you do? How did you get them to wake me up?”

  “I told them if the twins all go home, we show them what we can do.”

  Tears fill Elias’s eyes. “Thank you.”

  I nod, resting my forehead against his. Then something catches his eye to the side, and he takes in a shuddering breath.

  Leni murmurs, “Elias…” and puts her head on Daniel’s shoulder.

  Elias’s head jerks up and then falls back to my shoulder. “They got Len and Dan, too.”

  I don’t say anything. I can’t.

  “They helped you. They helped you get in.”

  I nod. “I never wanted them to get involved in this.”

  “They always were. You knew that.”

  “How are we going to get out of here?” My voice breaks.

  “Hey,” Elias says, his arms shaking, fighting to stay around me. He’s still so weak from being sedated. “It’s going to be okay.”

  Fisk clears his throat, causing me to whip around and glare at him. I feel Elias’s shoulders tremble above my arm, which I’ve wrapped around his chest. Elias may know what he’s going to do to get us out of here, but he’s not going to do it when he’s so weak.

  I’ve got to buy us some time.

  Behind me, where my hands join with Elias’s, my messenger bag bobs against my back. I swing it around front and fumble through, my hands shaking as I hold out a vial. “I know what you’re doing here. Know what you have been doing, ever since we were little kids.”

  Leni’s face screws up.

  “This is your whole life’s work, isn’t it?” I continue, glaring at Fisk. “Trying to fix all the Ones? Using us as a key to the whole problem?”

  “Not a problem, Merrin. Not anymore. Not now that we know about you and Elias. Helen and Daniel. You are the next step in the evolutionary chain. To lift the Ones up from their pathetic situation and make them better. If you’ll only show me what you can do… Merrin, you could change the world. Be the biggest biotech advance the Hub has ever seen.”

  I only ever wanted to help formulate an advance that could help kids like me, something that could give us options. Not something that could manipulate us into experiments or weapons.

  I don’t want to be something that the Hub could use against others.

  Behind me, Elias clears his throat, and I notice how hard he’s squeezing my hand. His shoulder steadies.

  “Where are the rest of the vials?” he whispers to me, so light that I swear only I can hear it. I motion toward the lab door with my head.

  Fisk strides over to the door to the lab and flings it open. Inside, behind all the lit glass cases, the vials of creepy neon liquid wink and gleam.

  “All my life’s work, since Charlie died — it’s all in here. The highest security, the deepest part of the Hub. I’ve been keeping it safe, you see, for exactly this moment. And now, with so many of you here…”

  I swear his eyes glisten with tears. I wonder if there is remorse behind the smirk, if there was ever a time he felt guilty when testing or injecting a little kid. I like to think ther
e was. I’d like to think he never meant to use weird green sensory deprivation goop or throat tubes or electric sensors or sedatives or spinal taps. I’d like to think he never meant to put pieces of the poor little transferring five-year-old Ones in vials and collect them, hoping that one day all the pieces together would add up to more than the loss of his son.

  I’d like to believe all that, but looking at him now, I can’t.

  Daniel speaks up. “How come I never knew about this? I would have…” He clears his throat when Leni looks at him, her eyebrows bunched together. “My parents would have brought me in for testing…”

  “Ever since Charlie died… Well, of course we were supposed to stop all this activity. The trustees sanctioned us. But he so badly wanted to be more than a One. And for all the times he came home with a black eye, for all the opportunities he was denied while he was alive, I couldn’t bear to give up on him. Besides, there is always some way, some other channel, to get what you want.” Fisk steps even closer. “I’m sure you can understand that, can’t you, Merrin? Can understand the desire to be something more than a sad, mediocre outcast who will never fit in anywhere? Something more? Something your family always wanted you to be?”

  “I’m fine with being a One,” I say, my voice low and snarling.

  “Then why are you here?”

  “For my brothers. For Elias.”

  And for the first time ever, I mean it. Now that I thought I could lose Elias, lose the boys, I’m fine with being a One. As long as it means we never have to come back here again.

  Fisk pulls a vial out of his pocket again, and a solution sloshes inside of it, so thick it coats the glass. “And for this. The solution based on your blood. It could be the key to making you a Super, Merrin, but only if you let us test it on you.”

  My heart shudders to a stop. He knows that the promise of flying on my own can convince me to do anything.