by JA Huss
“Whatever you say.”
“But you… you really have some kind of link, right?”
She stares out the front window for a few seconds. Mulling it over.
“To people’s minds. That shit makes no sense at all, thus it’s a trick.”
She rolls her eyes. “A better trick than yours. I can make people hallucinate.”
“But how long does it last?”
She shrugs. “About ten seconds.”
“Bullshit,” I say. “You have three to five good seconds if you’re lucky. You’re a mirage, Sadie. Nothing more. A trick.”
“Well, as fun as this whole my-superpower-is-better-than-your-superpower shit is, I’m tired of it. Let’s move on to something else. Like why you were in the crazy house to begin with.”
I catch her smirking reflection in the front window, her face lit up by the dim green dashboard lights.
“I tried to kill myself,” I say. I figure I’d have to tell her eventually.
“What?” She sits up in her chair and looks straight at me. “Why?”
I let out a long breath of air. It’s my turn to stare out the window. “I haven’t thought about it much. Things just got… crazy about a month back. My friends and I were… doing… shit.”
“What kind of shit?”
“Evil supervillain shit.”
This makes her smile. “Like what?”
“It’s not important. The important part is what went down a few months back. When my friend, Case, also a Prodigy student, shot me with a drug that disrupted a carefully concocted protocol I’ve been using for more than fifteen years to rein in this stupid mentalist bullshit.”
“Hmm,” she mutters, then stays silent for a few seconds. “So you don’t like your power?”
“My power is a force of nature. I could do without blasting people like a bomb when the wrong set of circumstances randomly happens. So no. I don’t enjoy what they made me into.”
“So you were… what? At the end of your rope? You had like a… breakdown?”
“Sure. You can call it that.”
“Who cares what I call it. What do you call it?”
“Temporary insanity, I guess.”
“But why?” she asks. “What triggered that?”
I’m not even remotely interesting in talking about what went down that day. Not to her. Not to Case or Lincoln. Hell, not even to myself. So I give her the only part I am willing to talk about. “This mentalist shit. It’s a mind fuck, right? For me it is, anyway. I never asked to be this guy. I never wanted to have that power. So I’ve been taking drugs for a long time to keep the emotions at bay. I think it’s triggered by emotions. Brain chemistry and all that bullshit. But Case shot me with an inhibitor or something. None of the drugs worked after that. It was one emotion after another. A constant stream of fucking feelings.”
I stop. Because I’m getting dangerously close to the end of that train of thought.
“What’s it like to live without emotions?”
“It’s bliss,” I say. “Pure motherfucking bliss.”
“Sounds sad to me.”
“Says the girl who doesn’t even know where she came from.”
“I just lost my memory. From that stupid power of yours. I’ll get it back. I can feel it coming, anyway. There’s static in my head.”
“What kind of static?” I’m happy to switch the conversation back to her.
“Like electricity. Like… static. I don’t know. Flashes of light and… words.”
“Words?” I ask. “You said that before. Messages across your eyes.”
“Do you know anything about that?” she asks.
When I look over at her, she’s staring at me intently.
I shake my head. “Nope. Never heard of that shit before. Prodigy must’ve really upped their game if they’ve invented a vision screen overlay.”
“Vision screen overlay?”
I stare back at her, looking right at her eyes. “I can’t really tell in this light but once we get up top again, I’ll see if I can detect a lens. If they have invented an overlay, I’ll be able to see it.”
“Hmm,” is all she says.
“You’re probably a pretty dangerous girl, you know that?”
“Says the pretty dangerous guy.”
I smile. “Which is why we’re gonna make an awesome team once Sheila and Linc figure out what they did to you.”
“What makes you think I want to be on your team?”
“Why wouldn’t you?” I ask, glancing at her for a second before looking ahead again. “What could you possibly have to look forward to going back to Prodigy? You’re nothing but a slave to them, Sadie. They keep you like a pet. Like a project. They’ll use you again, you know.”
“So will you.”
“I said T-E-A-M. I never said I’d use you for anything.”
“You’ll use me for a friend.”
I laugh. “Since when is friendship using someone?”
“Since we discovered we’re pretty equal opposites. Who understands you, Thomas?”
“Case,” I say. “Lincoln. Sheila. Probably Molly. Lulu, maybe. One day. That’s more than most people have, I bet. I’m not using you. I don’t need you. I just want you.”
I smile at her, but she’s not smiling. “Lots of people probably want me. I’ll take ‘need me’ any day of the week over ‘want me.’”
I shake my head and roll my eyes. “There’s the next gate. We’re almost to the tower.”
“Will it close behind us again?”
“Yup. Just like clockwork. The ones on the other side will close too. So they won’t be able to get inside the underground rooms from the tunnel.”
“It’s quite the set-up you have here—”
But she stops talking, stands up, and looks out the back window as we pass through the gate. “Fuck!” she says, holding her head like she’s in pain. Then she drops to the floor and screams, “Fuck!” again.
Bang! The gate spirals closed.
Then the next one.
Bang!
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” I ask.
But then the power goes out. The train slows and the next gate—BANG!—comes so close to cutting the ass-end of the car off, I forget about her and take my attention to the next gate.
We’re still going fast—but not fast enough. It starts to close too soon.
“Shit!” I grab her by the arm and lift her up. But she’s unconscious. Dead, heavy weight. “Sadie, get up! We need to move to the back! Now!”
She’s not moving, so I throw her over my shoulder and run to the back of the car just as the final gate slams down on the roof. A deafening crushing sound of metal on metal. Screeching as the magnetic field under the car collapses and the car—at least the part we’re in because the fucking thing has been cut in half—wobbles for a split second, before it flies backwards from the blast force of… my fucking mind!
We roll with what’s left of the car as it spirals through the air. I lose hold of Sadie’s arm and she goes tumbling out in front of me, hitting her head on the ceiling. Metal collapses in on top of us. Pinning her, me, everything to the floor as the car spins wildly—tossing us both like rag dolls against sharp edges and jagged pieces of ripped interior.
We slam into the concrete walls of the tunnel and everything goes black.
I come to groaning, but obviously still alive. I’m hurt, but not dead. Never dead.
My skin has a grid of mesh embedded underneath it that will heal most wounds instantly. I don’t know how long I was out, but it was definitely longer than instantly.
But I can feel it working. It makes me sick to my stomach to know that shit is inside my body. Makes me want to hurl. Makes me want to rip my flesh off. Makes me want to… die.
“Sadie,” I croak out, the crash coming back to me. We are both encased in a coffin of train parts. “Sadie,” I say again.
I hear moaning from off to my left. But I can’t see her. Everything is dark
and it feels like there’s a mountain of steel on top of me.
“Sadie,” I say again. More moaning.
I grab a long piece of twisted metal pinning my leg to the floor (roof?) of the car and push until I can bend my leg. I pull out my phone, thankfully still mostly intact, tabbing it awake so I can find my flashlight app.
There is an open gash in my leg. I’m talking visible bone.
But I can also see the little mesh framework doing its best to patch me up.
My fucking head spins just looking at it.
Case and Lincoln think I wear armor under my suits all the time because I’m paranoid.
I’m not fucking paranoid. Not about getting killed, at least. I don’t want to get hurt. I don’t want to be cut. I don’t want people to know what I am. What they did to me. And most of all—I do not want to see or feel this healing shit happening in real fucking time.
I force myself not to think about it. I force myself to ignore it. I force myself to move all the metal around me, bending it with my Prodigy-provided superhuman strength, until I’m free.
Then I go looking for Sadie.
She’s only a few feet away. The car—what’s left of the fucking car—wasn’t cut in half. We are in a section about eight feet long.
I think about Sadie’s suspicions about the gates. I’m gonna have to apologize to her. She was right. Nothing about us or our lives follows the laws of nature.
I pull the metal off her too and stop. Sickened at what I see.
She is… mending. Healing herself. The minuscule criss-crossed wires underneath her skin doing to her exactly what they do to me.
We are so much more alike than I ever thought possible.
Later. You can think about that later when she’s out of this tin can of a train car.
I lift each piece of metal, extracting her like one of those game pieces in that wooden puzzle tower, until she’s free.
She’s pale. Paler than I’ve ever seen her. Her face is cut, bleeding still. The little machines inside her—just little dots of charcoal-black, not even the size of a pin prick—slide along the mesh as they knit her biological components back together. Her dark hair is covered in a thin layer of white dust and debris. Her clothes are ripped, one of her legs is even more fucked up than mine.
But she will live.
If there’s one thing I won’t have to worry about, it’s that.
She will live. Because those fucking sickos at Prodigy did the same thing to her that they did to me. They fed little monsters into her bloodstream. They spent months torturing her with pain to get the framework established.
I have wanted to kill those Prodigy assholes for as long as I can remember. I have wanted to torture them the way they tortured me.
But the rage I feel right now…
It comes out as a mind blast that creates a wind of power. Pieces of hot, twisted metal move aside as I stumble forward.
Everything but her moves.
She is immune to me because we are the same model of monster. We cancel each other out—or, if we’re lucky, build to synergy.
I pick her up in my arms, carefully, even though I know I can’t hurt her. And I carry her. I create another mind blast—smaller this time, because I’m not very good at this. It never works great when I need it most. Just enough to clear debris away so I can slide my back down the concrete wall and cradle her in my lap.
There’s more to this girl than I realize. There has to be more. Otherwise she’d be conscious right now, just like me.
But that’s the only reason our body parts aren’t cut in half right now. That’s the only reason our limbs aren’t strewn about in pieces, inching their way towards one another, desperate to put themselves back together.
Something happened in her head to make the car stop.
She shut a maglev train down with her mind.
Who is this girl?
I want to think about that for a while. Mull it over good in my head. Roll it around in my hand, see it from all angles. But exhaustion overtakes me.
I’m not used to this, I realize.
I need her help.
But before I can even wonder what kind of help that might be, the blackness comes to take me away.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN - SADIE
Sadie, Sadie, Sadie.
The words are in my head but they are flashing across my eyes too. My closed eyes.
Where are you? Where are you? Where are you?
It must be them. It must be Prodigy School. They’re looking for me. Or maybe hunting me.
They’re trying to communicate with me with some kind of link. Mentally? I don’t think so. I think there’s something inside me. Some kind of computer or—
Sadie, Sadie, Sadie, “Sadie!”
I open my eyes and see Thomas. His face is right up next to mine, eyes searching me—filled with questions. He smells like charred metal.
“You had me worried.” His voice is low and deep. Some kind of flashlight is illuminating his face from below. There’s black soot on his cheeks, giving him a hollowed near-death appearance. Like he just walked through fire.
“Thomas,” I whisper.
He strokes my head softly, moving my hair out of my eyes. “Try again.”
Shit.
And this time I’m not asleep. I know that for sure. This is real. “Sullivan?” I say, trying out the name.
“Ding. Ding. Ding.” He says the words slowly, pausing between each one. “You’re gonna be OK. You seem to be… working the way you’re supposed to.”
“What the hell happened?”
“You tell me. You’re the one who did it.”
“What?”
“You grabbed your head, Sadie. You and Thomas were talking about things you shouldn’t be talking about. Then you grabbed your head and the fucking train just shut down.”
“We were coming up on the gates.”
“Correct again. If this was a game show, you’d be two for three. What the hell did you do?”
He’s got a very stern look on his face. But it’s so different from the other times I’ve met him. This is real. And clearly those times were real too. He really had me tied up. He really did touch me that way. “I don’t understand.”
“That’s because,” he says, letting out a long sigh. “It’s because you have no idea what you are.”
“What am I?”
“How the fuck should I know? But look.” He points to my body. I’m lying down with my head resting on this thigh. So I have to sit up a little to see what he’s pointing at.
My leg is… disgusting. My jeans are ripped open. But that’s not all that’s ripped open. The denim is covered in blood and the wound is gaping and huge. But it’s… “Oh, my God. There’s little things moving around. Are those bugs inside my leg?”
“No,” Sullivan says. “They’re little fucking computer fuckers. Nanites, but like… supernanites. Globs of them. Gross, isn’t it?”
“What the hell is a nanite?”
“What part of little fucking computer fuckers didn’t you understand?”
Dick. “What are they doing?” I try to sit up to get a better look, but Sullivan’s hand is on my shoulder, pushing me back down.
“Don’t get up. Just let them work. They fix you, Sadie. They repair you. Prodigy put a scaffolding mesh of healing… whatever the fuck it is. I don’t know what it is. But Thomas and I have it too. It repairs tissue damage.”
It’s weird hearing Sullivan refer to Thomas and him as separate people.
“You were hurt pretty bad but they were already working by the time I got out from under all that goddamned steel and found you. We’ll be fine. Eventually.”
“Who? You and Thomas? Or me and you?”
“All of us,” he says, waving a hand in the air. “It just takes a little while.”
“Where are we? Can we get out of here?”
“Well.” He laughs. “As if things couldn’t get any worse, we’re on the other fucking side of the gate abo
ut a mile from the west tower.”
“How do we get through the gate?”
He shrugs. “We don’t.”
“Then how can we get out of this stupid tunnel?”
He sighs again. “We can’t.”
I just stare up at him. “Surely there is a door? There’s always a door. Some secret access point or something?”
“Yeah,” Sullivan says, absently stroking my head again. “If this were a normal tunnel there would be. But it’s not, so there isn’t. We could walk back, but we’re still on the other side of the south tower gate. And the walk back…” He shakes his head. “I’m not even sure that’s possible. My leg is fucked up just as bad as yours. It’s going to take the better part of a day for it to really heal. At least to make a walk like that. It’s sixty miles to the south tower. There’s a tunnel that connects to the other towers somewhere in that blackness. But the east tower is probably a hundred miles away. And the other tower even farther than that. Besides,” he says, exhaling loudly. “My phone battery will die and then we’d be in total darkness.”
I picture that whole scenario in my head as he’s talking. The distance, the state of my leg, the darkness. “So we’re fucked.”
“Good. And fucked.”
I let out a breath and close my eyes. “I’m going to die down here.”
“No,” he says. “We can’t die. We’ll starve. And we’ll go crazy from lack of water. But we’re not going to die. There was an emergency kit in the train car with water and rations. But—” This time his laugh is curt. “It’s gone now. The whole car is gone thanks to your little trick.”
“I didn’t stop the damn train car, Sullivan. Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Then who did?”
“How should I know. Maybe something is happening up top? Maybe the power went out or something?”
“This tunnel is powered by the towers. And if they weren’t still standing there’d be green gas in here. We have it set up to self-destruct.”
“Wait,” I say, realization hitting me in the face. “If you guys set it up so the green gas releases when anyone breaches—we’re going to die anyway!”