The Nancy Experiment

by McKenna, Tess

  “Great. Kiss and make up so we can find Moton and the others,” Elijah says, turning to open the door.

  Nate and I freeze and stare at him as he walks out into the bright hallway. Elijah turns back and sees our expressions.

  “Kidding—figure of speech—now let’s go!”

  Nate and I spring after Elijah and into the hall. Luckily, Elijah doesn’t seem too keen on running; I don’t think I could run, and I certainly don’t need them to see me weak. Elijah shakes out his right arm, and I remember him shouting to me, as he dangled off the side of the balcony, that his arm was dislocated. It looks better now… healed even. Anyways, he leads us through the empty hall to the elevator, he punches the “10” button and leads us to Moton’s office.

  The door is locked, and we hear no noise from the other side. Elijah knocks three times, then once, then twice. We wait. The door clicks, and Elijah swings it open.

  “Morning, everyone,” Elijah says.

  Nate and I tip-toe into the room behind Elijah, and everyone stares at us. Their expressions tell me that we just interrupted a climactic moment, and I wish I had stayed in the hospital room a little longer.

  “What are you doing here?” Moton says.

  I jump at his scathing tone. Among all those who would be angry at me for what I did, I didn’t expect Moton to be one of them. Ms. Grenavich, perhaps, but she’s standing behind Moton and not giving me her usual evil eye.

  “We had some questions and answers we thought could help,” Nate says.

  I turn to see Nate’s pained expression. Oh… Moton wasn’t talking to me. He’s angry with Nate.

  “What did I say? I said to stay in the hospital and take care of her and to not come up,” Moton says. “If we wanted you to come up, then we would have called for you.”

  “But we—”

  “You think you can be helpful and find the magical solution after your mistake nearly costs your friends’ lives? Get out. You’ve done enough damage here,” Moton says.

  Nate’s face begins to blush, and my heart sinks. I look around the room, and although the others appear to share Nate’s embarrassment, none are about to stand up for him.

  “I know about the mole,” I say. Maybe if I speak that will ease the tension toward Nate. “Elijah and Nate brought me up here so I could share with you the information that I know. I want to help solve this problem as best as I—”

  “Solve this problem?” Kono says. She’s staring at me directly. “You are the problem, back-stabbing bitch!”

  I would be offended, except Kono has never been my biggest fan. Despite my ambivalence, Elijah grabs my arm to keep me from charging at her. Nickel and Xander do the same for Kono.

  “It’s okay, Eli,” I whisper to him. He glances at me, ponders, then releases my arm.

  “Oh, so suddenly you’re bowing down to her, too?” Kono says.

  “Hey, why don’t you shove—” Elijah says.

  “That’s Enough!” Moton shouts. Everyone is silent, and Moton turns to me. “You have answers for us?”

  I clear my throat. There’s only one way Nate comes out of this not looking at fault, and that’s if I give Moton something valuable.

  “Yes, I do,” I say.

  “Who’s the mole?”

  “I don’t know, but whoever it is put that envelope in my room between the time I went down to the Base with Kiaria to the time I returned to my room after everyone left for Wade Oval Wednesday.”

  “She’s the mole—she’s trying to frame one of us!” Kono says.

  “Shut up, Kono!”

  “I’m not the mole,” I say.

  “Annika is not the mole,” Kiaria says. “She and I talked about the possibility of there being a mole before she found the envelope.”

  I glance Kiaria’s way, and Marissa catches my eye. She bites her lip and says nothing. That’s when I see the small purple bruises on Marissa’s neck from a hand squeezing her throat. And she’s not the only one: Kono has a cut above her right eyebrow, Xander has a black eye, and everyone has circles under their eyes.

  I did this. Even without giving them my tangible dirt, they are already carrying the weight of my decisions. I tried to save Marissa, and maybe she is still alive because I tried, but now everyone is hurt.

  “Did you tell them?” I ask Marissa.

  She shakes her head, and her eyes water.

  “Good. Thank you,” I say. I turn back to Moton and Ms. Grenavich. “I have those files.”

  A gasp and a murmur echoes through the room. “I knew it!” and “Shhh!” fire back and forth among the Metanites. Ms. Grenavich looks to Moton, and the circles under her eyes look a shade heavier. Moton glances at the floor then back up at me. Maybe he’s disappointed that I lied to him, or maybe he knows that by having the files I’ve already signed my own death wish.

  “What files?” someone asks.

  “Jericho wasn’t lying when he said that I had stolen something from Dr. Nancy… something that could defeat him. That’s the reason why I came back to Cleveland and the reason why they’re hunting me so desperately,” I say.

  “You’ve had them all this time?” Moton asks.

  “But how can we trust her or Jericho?”

  “Jericho also wasn’t lying when he said that Dr. Nancy would kill you all if I turned them over to you,” I say. “He didn’t say that he was willing to kill you regardless.”

  “So you lied?” Zoë asks.

  “I said what I had to.”

  “It’s still a lie.”

  “Would any of you have done differently if you were in my place? If I had given you those files earlier, who’s to say I wouldn’t have handed them over to the mole? For all I know it could be any of you, and I wasn’t willing to take that chance,” I say.

  “Mole or not, she shouldn’t be here,” Lazzer says. “She’s putting everyone in danger the longer she’s here.”

  “Wow. Really, Lazz?” Nate says.

  “Hey—you know as well as the rest of us that things have gone downhill since Annika came here.”

  “We have to protect her and the information she has about Dr. Nancy!”

  “We have a duty to protect the people of Kenyon and Cleveland, too. We can’t do both,” Ms. Grenavich says, looking to Moton at the end.

  “You’re right,” I say to the wrinkled woman. “I shouldn’t be here.”

  “What?!”

  “Annika!”

  “No way,” Nate says. “If you go out there, they will kill you.”

  “No they won’t,” I say to him. “They can’t kill me until those files are destroyed. Put a tracker on me so you can follow where I go, and after the hunting crew has captured me, come finish them.”

  “That’s the dumbest fucking idea you’ve had all month,” Zoë says. “It’s suicidal.”

  “Why not just release the files?”

  “To whom?” I ask.

  “So you didn’t trust any of us?” Nate asks.

  “She’s been holding out on us the whole time! It seems like she’s protecting Dr. Nancy.”

  “No! It’s not—I mean—”

  “Jesus, Annika. We could have used those documents to stop him a long time ago! You should have given them to us.”

  “Hey! Those documents are all I have! You don’t know what hell I’ve gone through or what I had to do to get them. I’m not about to hand them over if I’m not one-hundred-percent convinced that they are going to count for something!” I shout, my composure denting at last.

  Everyone is finally quiet… and staying that way.

  “Those files… that’s all I have,” I repeat. My eyes begin to water, but I bite the inside of my lip and force the tears away.

  Moton steps toward me and puts his hand on my shoulder.

  “Annika, what’s on those documents?” he asks.

  I glance up to meet his eyes. “Everything.”

  “And you can’t give us… anything?” he asks.

  “No,” I say.

&n
bsp; “We need those—”

  “Alright, alright!” Moton says, trying to quench the murmur echoing through the room again. But the Metanites are bickering amongst themselves now, and everyone’s in on it.

  “I’m so sick of you using us for security from your little family feud!” Kono says to me.

  Elijah grabs my arm again, now with good reason.

  “You know nothing of my life!” I shout.

  “You’re a selfish criminal!”

  “I’ll leave today!”

  “Annika, just answer a few more questions for us…”

  “You want answers?! I’ll give you answers—no. I’ll give you something better than answers.” I tell them. All eyes are on me, waiting. I take a breath.

  “I’ll give you Jericho.”

  XIX: More Than Friends

  Thursday, March 27, 2065; 11:05 a.m.

  First person

  I stand at the door to the interrogation room where Jericho waits for either Marissa or Kiaria to come in and batter him with questions. After some more protest, Moton and Ms. Grenavich agreed that I would be allowed to interrogate Jericho, under a few, trivial conditions: no violence, no talking about the Metanites, and no talking about Kenyon.

  Marissa and Zoë were responsible for making me look presentable; that included taking off the bandages on my wrists that revealed red rings where the radiation handcuffs had burned my skin and dressing me in a long sleeved shirt to hide them. My back started to kill, so Nate gave me some pain medication that made my entire back feel numb. Probably not a good thing, but as long as I don’t tell him that, it can’t hurt him. Kiaria is now the only one left standing in the hall with me as the rest of the Metanites squeeze into the small watch room. She’s hiding a chip in my ear so she can communicate with me while I’m on my own in the interrogation room. She’s making some last minute adjustments that are taking way… too… long… but if it means she has a moment in private with me, she’s going to take all the time she needs.

  “He’s not expecting you,” Kiaria says to me.

  “I know,” I whisper back. “Is everyone in the watch room now?”

  “Yes, even Moton. He wanted to be close in case anything were to happen. Some of them are worried that—”

  “—that things might get out of hand?” I finish.

  “Something like that.”

  “I’m in control. You can trust me on this one,” I assure her.

  “I trust you,” she says. She finishes fine-tuning the chip, and now straightens my long-sleeve shirt that hides the burn marks on my wrists. I guess I’m not the only one nervous for this confrontation.

  “I trust you, too. It’s just… those files—” I say.

  “You don’t have to explain yourself to me. I’ve seen enough to know how important they are… whatever you have.”

  “Kia,” I whisper. God I hate myself for this… “I need you to read his mind and get all the information you can.”

  “But what if he catches on?”

  “He won’t. He’ll be focused on me,” I say.

  Kiaria nods and steps away.

  “Okay,” she say. “But if anything goes wrong, I’ll call for you to come out.”

  “Agreed,” I say.

  Kiaria smiles and walks into the watch room. I stare at the door of the interrogation room. Thoughts of running away flutter through my mind, but I push them aside. I have to confront him, and I want to. There’s so much I’ve wanted to say to him in the past twenty-two months, so many lines I’ve conversed back and forth in my head, but now I have no plan of what to say or what to do. I’m sure something will spill out of my mouth… something I’ll probably regret.

  I open the heavy door, and instantly the brightness from the white room shocks my eyes. The room is smaller than I remembered it to be, and in the utter silence lays a low humming too quiet to be unimagined. The dark figure in the room sits at the table in the exact bearing he carried days ago. His legs stretch under the table; his back arches against the back of the chair; and his cold, dark eyes bury into the table. A short beard grows down his jaw and around his mouth. Last time I knew him, I didn’t think he was capable of growing facial hair. There were a lot of things we didn’t think the other to be capable of.

  When the door creaks open and I enter the room, he resists glancing up, but soon he succumbs to his curiosity and looks up. He recognizes me in an instant. His eyes bulge with either anxiety or zeal—maybe a touch of both. His silence is louder than the silence of the room, and we can’t remove our eyes from each other’s stare. The door closes with a piercing intensity, and I step toward the table.

  “You…” Jericho mutters. He’s stunned. I stand over him at the other side of the table without saying a word. “What are you doing here?”

  “Really?” I reply.

  Jericho straightens his posture as I take a seat at the opposite end of the table. We are both very conscious not to touch each other, especially our feet under the table.

  “I thought… the others… are they watching us? Do they know?” he asks.

  “Tell him no,” Kiaria says from the chip in my ear.

  “Forget them. You’re talking to me.”

  Jericho is quiet again and shifts in his seat. My eyes stay locked on him the whole time, but his eyes flutter around the room with sporadic urgency. I’m not letting him weasel out of this one. His walls are history now.

  “You look like you’re seeing a ghost,” I say.

  “Maybe I am,” he replies. “I didn’t think you wanted to see me.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “So what made you change your mind?”

  “This is an interrogation, Jericho. I’m the one who asks the questions.”

  “Is that what this is?” he says. I shoot him a hateful look and say nothing. “Alright, what do you want?”

  “What are you doing here?” I ask.

  “What—you think I’m choosing to stay a prisoner of these bratty pseudo-heroes?”

  “Yeah, I do think you chose to be here.”

  Jericho hesitates. “I see you got into some trouble recently,” he says, looking at the burn marks on my wrists peeking out from under the sleeves of my shirt.

  I pull my arms off the table and fold them across my chest. So much for hiding those. Jericho is gradually overcoming his shock and growing angry, which for my purposes is exactly what I need.

  “Why did you come here?” I ask again.

  “Because I had to see you!” he says. “I wanted to see you so that we could have this conversation without trying to beat the crap out of each other.”

  Now I’m the one caught off guard, but not for long.

  “You wanted to see me?” I ask. “No—what are you really doing here, Jericho?”

  “What am I doing here? What are you doing here? Why did you come back to Cleveland? You must have known they’d find you.”

  “I had to come back. I had to put an end to this once and for all.”

  “At the cost of your own life?! What were you thinking, Basia?! Are you completely suicidal?”

  “I did what I had to do.”

  “No! You could have disappeared forever and lived. You might have even had a chance at a normal life… but no! No—living just isn’t good enough for you, is it? You just had to come back and steal those files, not to mention all the blood you spilled along the way. Now you’re just choosing to die.”

  “I didn’t have a choice!”

  “Yes You Did!” Jericho yells. “You’ve had plenty of chances to save yourself in the past twenty-two months, but you chose to go risk everything, and you’re still choosing to go this way! You’re digging your own grave now.”

  “What do you care, Jericho? You’re working with them!”

  “I don’t understand why you came back and chose to die. There’s a price on your head for what you stole, and now they are never going to stop coming after you. It’s only a matter of time now.”

  “I may go down, bu
t I’m taking as many of you with me as I can.”

  “You may go down?” Jericho says. He shakes his head. “You chose your path twenty-two months ago when you chose to run away. You’re a dead man walking.”

  “Yeah? Well you made a choice that day, too. You betrayed me and chose them. I may be a dead-man, but at least I’m not a traitor or a coward!”

  Jericho stands up and puts his face right in front of mine. Am I… when did I stand up? Now Jericho stares at me with hateful eyes, both of us refusing to be the first to recoil. I wait for Kiaria or Moton or another Metanite to rush into the room and pull me out of there, but nothing. Not even from the earpiece. I imagine they’re all stuck to their seats, waiting, too enthralled to stop me if I were to start attacking Jericho. Hell, maybe they’d even cheer me on.

  “What happened to you?” Jericho says in disgust.

  “I was about to ask you the same,” I reply. “After all the torture you saw me and the others go through, you still chose to partake in one of his experiments. What did he do: bribe you with power and invincibility? You should have asked him to give you the power to open up to people, maybe then you’d have the guts to stand up for yourself. Or I bet you wanted it, didn’t you? All that suffering you saw… that power… you got a thrill out of it. You just had to taste it for yourself.”

  “You’re doing well, Annika. Keep it up,” Kiaria says in my ear.

  Jericho says nothing and sits back down. I place my hands on the table for support and take my seat. It’s a low blow on my part, and I almost regret saying it. Then he looks back up.

  “I’ll tell you what, for someone who comes off like she doesn’t give a damn what others think of her, you’re just as broken as ever. The girl I knew would never throw her life away like this.”

  “I guess you didn’t know me as well as you thought,” I reply.

  “Don’t pretend like I don’t know you,” he says, waving his finger at me. His expression deviates, and he looks at me the way he did when he broke into Kenyon… that familiar, desperate face.

  “Your walls are strong,” he says, “but I see right through them.”

  “Stop it, Jericho.”

  “What’s wrong Basia? You afraid to have anyone close to you, too?”