by Minton, Toby
"No," Nikki said more confidently to the rest of the room before glancing back at Kate. "But you can hear him, right?"
"Sometimes," Kate replied. "Sometimes he gets really loud."
"Yeah, well, the moon should be able to hear him when he does that," Nikki grumbled.
They both looked back at the others, and Kate saw even more concern on Gram's face. Ace and Elias weren't much better. In fact, only Gideon's expression was free of worry. His was the cold, calculating look he got when he was piecing data together.
"Fine," Nikki snapped. "You don't believe us? I'll prove it."
She stepped over to the table and grabbed the fork from a bowl in front of Coop. "Mind if I borrow this?" she said like she didn't care one way or the other.
"Knock yourself out," Coop replied, leaning back in his chair.
"Why do you need that, Nikki?" Elias asked. His voice rode the line between stern and soothing, like he was talking to a girl holding a live snake instead of a fork.
"I'm going to make him show up."
"So, he's not there now?" Coop asked. "Michael, I mean. He's not there? In your head?"
"No. Not always," Nikki said, eyeing the fork. "But I can make him show up."
"By eating?" Coop asked with a laugh.
"Boy," Gram barked. "Stow it."
"Hey, I'm just trying to understand here," Coop defended himself.
"Not by eating," Nikki growled. "By doing something stupid. He always shows up when I'm acting crazy, or when I'm getting my butt kicked, but since the hillbilly isn't here—"
"This voice you hear," Impact said. "You hear it when you're fighting. Do you hear it when you're training too?"
Impact's question seemed like a strange one to Kate, but he looked far less doubtful than most of the others. He looked strangely intense. Intensity wasn't out of character for him, not by any stretch, but this look was particularly focused. He looked like he had more invested in her answer than made sense.
"I guess. Sometimes," Nikki said. "When I'm screwing it up like a champ. He likes to tell me how to do stuff, and not to do stuff. He's fun like that."
Impact's reaction to Nikki's answer was even stranger than his question. He was surprised, and not. He stared at Nikki like he believed her but didn't want to. He tamped down whatever he was feeling as quickly as usual though, reclaiming the stony expression that was his bread and butter.
"OK, bro," Nikki said, looking up toward the skylight. "I'm going to do this unless you tell me not to."
Elias started to say something, but Nikki waved him down before closing her eyes.
"Don't leave me hanging," she said. "I don't want to look like a jackass here."
They all waited in silence.
"Last chance, Michael," Nikki said after a minute. "Either you show up or this is happening."
Kate's stomach twisted as she watched Nikki talk to nothing. Nikki had been so confident a second before. Kate had believed her without a doubt, but now… Is this what the others thought when they looked at her?
"Fine," Nikki said. Then, before anyone could move to stop her, she placed her hand flat on the tac table and jabbed the fork down into her palm.
Kate was too surprised to find her voice. Coop was not. His yelp nearly drowned out Gram's low oath and Ace's surprised shout. None of them competed with Nikki's pained curses. Elias started toward her, but she pulled the fork from her hand and waved it toward him like a weapon, balling her injured hand against her vest.
"I'm fine!" she shouted, her voice echoing strangely in Kate's ears. "Just give me a—" She paused and her eyes looked distant for a second then came back with renewed anger.
"Oh, so now you show up. Nice timing, dick," she said to the air over Elias's head.
Elias stopped, but Kate couldn't tell what was holding him back, the laughable threat of the fork or the fact that Nikki clearly wasn't talking to him.
Then she heard him.
What were you thinking, Nikki? Michael's voice boomed.
Kate knew it was his voice now, without a doubt. She glanced around, but no one else seemed to hear him. No one except Nikki.
I wasn't thinking about getting a fork in the hand, I can tell you that, Nikki snapped, but not out loud. She said it in her head, yet Kate heard every loud word like Nikki was shouting into her ear.
Kate blinked at the decibel attack, but her wince had more than a little smile in it. She really wasn't going insane after all. No bugs in her system, just a new program she had yet to learn, one she'd have to figure out the hands-on way, or go brain deaf trying. I don't guess there's a Telepathy for Dummies book, she thought, her smile-wince slipping.
Nikki shot her a look.
Oh, God. Sorry, Kate thought. You can hear me, can't you? I meant me, not you. I'm the dummy.
Nikki squeezed her eyes shut and turned her head away, warding Kate off with the fork.
"Enough with the shouting. I'm standing right here. OK," she said to the others. "He's here, so…ask me something only Michael would know."
Again Kate heard the strange echo as Nikki's spoken and thought words overlapped. The delay between them was almost unnoticeable, but the excessive volume was unbearable. Kate sidestepped away from Nikki. She didn't know if distance would help, but she had to try something. When she did so, she saw a flicker. For a second it wasn't Nikki she saw standing there. It was Michael, like in the gym earlier. Then it was gone, and Nikki was the one wielding the fork again.
Kate squeezed her eyes shut, feeling her balance waver slightly. Then she felt a hand on her arm. She looked up into worried but reassuring eyes as Ace eased her into one of the rolling chairs.
"I'm OK," she said. "Just…dealing."
Ace didn't look convinced.
"Come on," Nikki snapped. "Ask me something."
"Honey, you know Michael better than any of us ever could," Ace said, pulling her gaze from Kate. "What could we ask that you don't already know? We trust you. You don't have to do this. If you believe Michael is still—"
"Nope. No, no, no," Nikki cut in. "We're not playing that game. I thought I was cracked for too long. I'm not about to have you guys think it now."
And Kate, Nikki, Michael said in their heads.
Kate put her hands to her ears, but that didn't muffle the volume.
"Right. Kate too. We're done letting you think that about either of us. This ends here. Ask something. There has to be something you guys know that I don't."
Nobody spoke up.
Kate forced her eyes open again—Nikki's deafening mental shouts kept pushing them closed—and her gaze drifted to Elias, who was looking troubled on multiple levels, or maybe that was just Kate's imagination. There was something she knew that Nikki didn't. Something she was pretty sure Michael knew as well.
"What?" Nikki asked, just as Michael said, You're right. There is that.
NO, Kate wailed in her mind. God no. They could hear everything she thought. How could she stop them? This wasn't her secret to tell. This was not her place.
Blank thoughts, blank thoughts, she repeated over and over in her mind, until, of course, she realized that had to be booming in Nikki's mind as well.
Kate took deep, fast breaths and tried to blank her mind. She opened her eyes, and her gaze drifted past Gideon's shoulder out into the darkness of the server pit, her place of comfort. She focused on the tiny red lights glowing out of the darkness, the eyes of her silent sentinels, and her breathing slowed. She cleared her mind as best she could.
For a minute she had no idea whether it was working. Then she heard Nikki's reaction to Michael's words—words Kate had barely registered.
"Son. Of. A. Bitch," Nikki said slowly.
No one else said a word.
Nikki stared at Elias in silence, like he was something she'd never seen before. He was staring back, his jaw tight with emotion. Kate had never felt so out of place. She felt dirty, like some kind of voyeur. She shouldn't be watching this. None of them should. This was betwee
n Michael, Nikki, and Elias—or it should have been.
"Huh," Nikki said after a long pause, nodding slowly as she chewed at the inside of her lip. The silence stretched again, and Kate saw some of the other uncomfortable faces in the room looking back and forth between Nikki and Elias.
"So you're our father, huh?" Nikki said with little emotion that Kate could interpret. "And you've just been sitting on that one all this time. Both of you have."
"You had enough to deal with," Elias said. "When you were ready—"
You didn't want to know, Nikki, Michael said over him, and Kate swallowed hard. She wished she could turn this new connection off, if only for a few minutes.
"No, I get it," Nikki said, but her voice was so flat, her expression so…nothing, that Kate's heart ached for what she knew Nikki was hiding. "Makes sense.
"Well, there it is," Nikki said, pulling her gaze from Elias and glancing around at the others. "You believe us now?"
Gram whistled through his teeth. Ace's hand on Kate's arm squeezed rhythmically, like she didn't realize what she was doing.
"Did he plan this?" Impact asked.
Everyone looked at him.
"Did Savior design them this way?" His eyes were on Gideon, so he didn't see the hard looks his question earned from Padre and Elias—from everyone, actually. Everyone except Gideon. Impact didn't seem to mind.
"Jesus," Mos breathed.
"We have no way of knowing," Gideon answered, his eyes never leaving Nikki. He looked more excited, for him, than Kate had seen him since…since everything changed.
Everybody started talking at once then, so much so that Kate couldn't focus on a single voice to follow. She looked over at Nikki, who was standing in silence, her arms crossed, her hip cocked to the side. She and Michael were both silent.
Nikki met her gaze and smiled slightly. Then she nodded and winked, almost like her whole world hadn't just been turned on its head. Almost like all that mattered was that nobody thought they were crazy anymore. Almost.
"What's the other thing, Nikki?" Padre asked.
Everybody quieted down, the three competing conversations trailing off.
"When you walked in, you said, 'two things,'" he went on. "What's the second?"
"Oh, yeah," Nikki said, standing up straighter and trying to wriggle a hand under the edge of the padded vest. "Can somebody get me out of this stupid vest? It's driving me nuts."
Chapter 25
Nikki
"You want to talk about it?"
Forty-eight minutes. Far longer than Nikki had expected.
When Nikki had climbed into the four-seater with Ace, she'd expected the question right away. The fact that the older woman had held out for a full forty-eight minutes was both impressive and kind of insulting, especially considering they were alone in the transport, which until now had been silent.
"Not even a little," Nikki replied, staring out her side window at the dark landscape streaking past.
"Didn't think so," Ace said with a smile Nikki could hear. "It might help though, you know."
"Maybe." Nikki rolled her neck to try to ease the tension that had been building since she'd made the decision to out Michael. "But I have one or two too many people in my head already. No offense."
"None taken. If you change your mind though, my door's always open," Ace said.
After pausing for far too long, Nikki said, "Thanks." That should have been her first response, probably. Aside from running her half to death every day, Ace had been good to Nikki during the past week, the closest thing she'd had to a girlfriend in a while. Well, not a girlfriend girlfriend, but a friend girlfriend—someone to talk to, someone without a testosterone surplus, a burning desire to get into Nikki's pants, or some sinister ulterior motive. At least, she didn't think Ace had any of those.
She glanced over but Ace was focused on the sky outside as she piloted the shuttle through the darkness. Night had fully fallen before they left, and their southerly course had taken them over and beyond Seattle, replacing the lights of civilization with cloud-filtered starlight.
If Nikki was being honest with herself, she did want to talk about it. Elias, that is. She'd thought about little else since Michael's revelation. The wanker. He'd known Elias was their father for who knew how long, but he'd said nothing. Sure, she'd told him repeatedly for years that she had no desire to go haring off to find their parents, but that didn't mean she didn't want to know when one of them was right under her nose. What kind of jackass would hide something like that from her?
Two kinds, apparently. Elias had kept his trap sealed all this time too, and that's what was really twisting her up inside.
She knew Michael's silence was driven by love. He was simply trying to protect her the way he always had. He knew how much she was dealing with at the moment, and he didn't want to add to the mix. His execution may have been thumb-fisted, but his intentions were lovely. Elias, on the other hand, was more of a mystery. She couldn't feel what he was feeling the way she could with Michael, so she could only imagine why he hadn't said anything to her, not even when she was at her lowest and thinking she was now a family of one.
Speculating on Elias's motivation was a frustrating and time-consuming exercise. It had her asking questions she'd never thought she would have to wrestle, like, "Why didn't he want her to know he was her father?" Or worse, "Was he ashamed of the way she'd turned out?" The obvious answer to both made her squirm in the worn seat.
She knew she wasn't what fathers pictured when they imagined the perfect daughter. She could be a little stubborn, a touch argumentative, a tiny bit unreliable, and occasionally, rarely, suffer the odd violent outburst. She'd gladly own up to every one of those traits, but that was just the way she acted. It didn't describe who she really was deep down. He had to know that. Didn't everybody know that?
Does it matter? she asked herself. You've never cared before. Why start now?
Her stomach burned in answer to that question, a feeling she didn't want to examine too closely, so she squirmed in her seat again and changed the subject. "Where are we going anyway?"
Ace laughed and checked her watch. "Fifty-three minutes. Coop owes me another five."
"What?"
"You're predictable, kiddo," Ace said, shaking her head but not looking over. "You'll hop in any transport heading out without any idea of where it's going or why. Coop said you'd ask within five minutes. I said longer."
Nikki considered being upset, but after a little thought, she decided she'd rather not care. She snorted a laugh. "What a boob. He keeps leaving bets wide open like that? You'd think he'd learn his lesson."
Ace smiled. "He is a slow learner, but I don't like to give up on a student. As long as he's dumb enough to throw away his money, I'll be kind enough to take it, to keep him in check of course."
"Of course."
Ace settled back into silence like she'd forgotten the original question, so Nikki gave her a friendly reminder. "So…where are we going, again?"
"To someone who might be able to help Kate," Ace replied evenly.
"What? I…but you all…I told you she's not crazy." Nikki felt the stirrings of panic. She'd thought this was settled. She'd confessed about Michael to make it so.
"Relax, kiddo. We believe you," Ace said, looking over. "But sane or not, Kate has no control over what's happened to her. I'm sure you noticed."
Nikki nodded dumbly, but she wasn't sure what Ace meant. She'd noticed Kate needed a volume knob for her mental shouting, but otherwise everything had seemed fine. She also didn't know why Ace would ask her to come along if they were trying to talk somebody into helping them. The last time she'd gone on such an outing, she'd turned it into a spectacular cluster.
"Why'd you ask me to come?"
Ace looked at her like she was joking, but her smile slipped when she realized Nikki was serious.
"Didn't you see what being next to you did to her? Kiddo, she was barely holding it together." Ace turned back to her driv
ing. "Until Kate gets a handle on whatever this is, the farther apart you two are the better."
"Oh," was all Nikki could say. She shifted in her seat again, even though her squirming hadn't done anything to settle her twisting stomach yet.
"Cheer up, kiddo," Ace said. "At least I'm taking you somewhere interesting." She nodded toward the windshield. "Take a look."
Nikki didn't have to look far to see what Ace meant. They were coming up fast on a maelstrom of lights on the forest floor. At first Nikki couldn't understand what she was seeing. The lights swirling and lancing out into the darkness looked almost alive, like the whole thing was some glowing woodland creature nobody had ever seen. If that was the case, the secret was out. People were swarming toward it now. As Ace banked the four-seater around a massive, shell-shaped structure at the center of the spectacle, Nikki stared at the slowly waving spotlights and the multi-colored lasers illuminating people streaming toward the building from every direction. For several seconds, her mind struggled to comprehend a rave of this scale. Then it hit her.
She knew this place. She'd never seen it from this angle, of course, which had to account for her slow reaction, but she'd been here, twice—two nights she would never forget.
Built off the I-5, in the heart of the no-man's land equidistant between Seattle and Portland, the theater Ace was slowly circling was known to every zoner breathing. She'd said as much about Avalon before, but this place was known to more than just the club rats and dance junkies. Everybody, literally everybody, knew about the Zone Theater, the one place anyone and everyone could go to see Max perform for free.
He wasn't the only performer who used the theater, but he was the one every zoner breathing hoped to see, not just because of the free admission, and not even because Max was one of the biggest live performers in the known world. Zoners loved Max because he'd built this theater for them. More accurately, he'd built it to cater to anyone who couldn't afford even discount ticket prices for his shows, but the zoners took it as a personal gift. They adopted him as one of their own, something they didn't do for anyone rich and famous.