The Nancy Experiment

by McKenna, Tess

  “Are you here to confess your sins?”

  “No.”

  “Well, what are you here for?”

  “To talk.”

  The priest nods. “What’s troubling you, child?”

  “Well… to begin… I don’t like the sunlight, and someone stole my quarter.”

  “Annika,” the priest gasps, finally recognizing the voice.

  He stands up and folds the partition against the wall to look at the teenager. The teenager pushes the hood back and stands up, too. The priest and the teenager hug each other tightly, and they hold onto each other for a seemingly endless moment. Finally, they pull away from each other and sit back down in their seats, this time facing each other and smiling.

  “I had a feeling,” Warnock says, shaking his finger at the teenager. “You never cease to amaze.”

  “I can say the same for you―a bulletproof vest!” Annika responds.

  Warnock smiles.

  “Well, when your Goddaughter is an international terrorist, you take the necessary precautions.” Annika blushes and laughs. “Though, I always knew you were a troublemaker since you were young.”

  “Something I get from my mother?”

  “Something that just comes naturally to you.”

  Annika smiles and stares at the priest, searching for the right words.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, at last. “I’m sorry you were shot and that those people destroyed your church, and I’m sorry I put that stupid copy chip in that whatever-you-call-it…”

  “You mean this?” he says. He digs into his pocket then holds out a light blue copy chip suctioned to a white notecard. The teenager stares at the notecard with eyes wide and mouth half open.

  “You… is that…?” she stutters. “How did you…?”

  “I made a copy when I first found it. Took me a while to find another copy chip. Everything’s there,” Warnock says. “I figured you could use some back-up.”

  He hands her the notecard, and she smiles, tracing it with her finger like it’s a baby.

  “Oh my God… I can’t believe you. You rock, Warnock,” Annika says, smiling.

  “Yes, I know… but this isn’t what you came for, is it?”

  She looks up at him. “Yeah, I came to say goodbye.”

  “Goodbye? Already?!”

  She nods and looks away.

  “I need to just disappear for a while. Find somewhere safe and peaceful. You know, a place to unwind and time to heal,” she says.

  “You have a specific place in mind?”

  “Not yet… someplace no one would think to look for me.”

  “I know a place that you might like,” the priest says.

  The teenager turns to him curiously.

  “There’s a monastery I know of… actually, I know the monk in charge of the monastery. It’s in a remote location I think you’ll enjoy, and my friend and his faction could be a blessing for you. Don’t worry; they’re technically not a specific religion… just an old order of the sort,” he says.

  “Wow… first the bulletproof vest, then you’re looking through my files, and now you’re buddy-buddy with an old order of monks? I knew you couldn’t be an average priest,” the teenager teases.

  The priest laughs.

  “Thank you,” the teenager says. “For everything.”

  “You’re family to me, Annika,” the priest replies. “It’s what family does for each other.”

  The teenager gives him another hug.

  “Goodbye, Warnock.”

  “Bye for now, Annika,” the priest says.

  The teenager lets him go and stands up to leave.

  “Well,” he says. “Anyone else you want to say goodbye to before you leave?”

  The teenager smiles.

  Nate stands in front of the rubble and ashes where a deserted barber shop used to stand. He stares at the black and red bricks, his mind far, far away. The sun lays low in the sky, shining a crimson orange in the pink sky and casting shadows over the debris. He bends down and picks up a piece of glass. He turns it in his hand, letting the red and orange lights from the sun reflect off the glass like a gleaming fire.

  “I miss her, too,” Zoë says from behind him.

  The other Metanites stand in the street looking out at the sunset and the wreckage. Nickel and Elijah venture into the debris and look around, not really knowing what they’re looking for, and not really looking for anything. Abraham stands with his hands buried deep in his pockets and his eyes cemented to the ground.

  Nate glances over at Lazzer, who’s sauntering through the ashes and red bricks. Their eyes meet, and Nate looks away.

  “You two should talk,” Zoë says.

  “Not interested,” Nate says.

  “He feels bad about it, too, you know.”

  “Don’t care,” Nate says. He throws the piece of glass into the wreckage; it bounces off a red brick and lands by a strip of white paper.

  “You can’t blame him for what happened to Annika; he was just trying to make sure you got out of there before the place went up in smoke. He cares about you, and maybe he doesn’t show it now, but he’s suffering just like the rest of us,” Zoë goes on, but Nate isn’t listening.

  Something reflecting in the piece of glass catches his attention―something light blue and wrapped in a strip of white paper. He steps toward it and picks of the mysterious blue object and undamaged paper.

  “Nate, what is it?” Zoë asks.

  Nate’s light blue eyes dazzle in the glimmer of the sun as he clutches the notecard with the light blue spot on it and reads the handwritten note scribbled on the paper.

  “Nate?”

  He glances around the wreckage, and his eyes open up to the clues and the shadows among the wreckage. The red sides of the bricks face the sky; the ashes float up in the breeze.

  “Zoë, do you remember the red bricks like this?”

  “What are you talking about, Nate?”

  “Look at the red bricks. What does that look like to you?”

  “I don’t know… it doesn’t look like anything… a bird, maybe.”

  Nate leaps into the air and hangs there, almost two stories over the Metanites and the debris. His eyes grow brighter and brighter as they trace the layout of the bricks. He glances down at the blue copy chip when the epiphany hits him, and then he looks once more at the paper:

  Yet, a flame. Small, mighty, and bright.

  From the ashes of my death new wings will take flight.

  “It’s not just a bird,” Nate says. He smiles. “It’s a phoenix.”

  Epilogue

  The man steps out of the confession room and looks around the spacious church. A hooded teenager sits in one of the aisles, waiting for his or her turn to speak with the priest. The man, confident that no one else is present and that no one recognizes him, strides out of the church. A light breeze blows through the air this afternoon, and the man likes the smell of it. He knows a storm is brewing in the distance. To his left, a black car sits on the street, waiting for him. The man approaches the car and climbs into the passenger side.

  “To the airport, my good man,” the man says. The driver starts the engine and drives the car toward I90.

  “Short trip, my friend,” a voice says from the back seat. The man sitting shotgun looks back at the shadowed figure through the mirror. In the backseat, veiled by the black shadows, sits the sullen Dr. Nancy.

  “Doctor,” the man says. “Good to see you above ground, not that you’re staying in plain sight for long. Your factory―”

  “An unfortunate step backward, that’s all,” the doctor replies. “Not that I ever cared much for the outside world. Any word on the priest?”

  “He’s no longer a threat; for all he knows, the girl is dead.”

  “Very well.”

  “She is alive, you believe?”

  “I know she’s alive. She’s out there, somewhere.”

  “We’ll find her, Stefan.”

  “No.
She’s not the one who concerns me at the moment.”

  “But if she turns herself in―”

  “She won’t. She’s free now; she’s not about to give that up.”

  “She can still spoil our plan!”

  “The girl will come back. That’s inevitable. But right now, there’s someone else I want more. Someone you, my partner may find of interest.”

  “Is this a target of revenge or someone we can use?”

  “Both.”

  Author’s Note

  As many of my close friends know, I have vivid dreams every night, mostly nightmares. (Note: I despise scary movies and jump at the slightest screech, boo, or crack; therefore, my definition of a "nightmare" might be very broad to you.) After reading a collection of science fiction short stories for my English & Reading class, I had this dream of a mysterious fugitive with an even more mysterious mark on her back: a radiation symbol. A group of students were hunting down this teenager, and the closer they came to finding her, the more the mark appeared. And, the more they began to see the fugitive not as a monster but as a human. Not as the nuclear bomb they needed to stop, but as a martyr then needed to help.

  I owe this odd nightmare to my eighth grade English & Reading teacher, Ms. Warenke. She asked us what "sparked" the boom of science fiction literature that occurred toward the middle and end of the twentieth century. We had no clue. Then she told us:

  Hiroshima

  The nuclear bomb.

  Oh... We now have the power to obliterate the entire human race...

  The nightmare developed into a story throughout high school, and that story changed and developed. Names changed, scenes were cut, adjusted, thrown away. The tone changed. I learned what tone actually meant, and it changed again. But I never forgot where the original inspiration came from.

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