“You taught me how to forget who I really am. I don’t even recognise myself anymore.” She twisted, trying to break from his grip and failing. His eyes flared with an anger as fierce as her own, his breath hot on her face.
“This was a mistake,” he said, shaking her shoulder as he spoke. “I shouldn’t have followed you, I should have let you leave.”
Exasperated and trembling from the deep pain running through the muscles in her shoulder, Christa forced her will out like an invisible fist, slamming Dylan hard in the chest and sending him sprawling to the floor. He crawled away on his hands like a crab, steely gaze still locked with hers.
“This was a ridiculous charade, this relationship of ours,” he shouted up at her. “I see that now. Surely you didn’t want to grow wrinkled and infirm as I remained young? How many people could you watch me kill before I began to disgust you? There’s a human inside you somewhere, Christa. It would only be a matter of time before it began to show itself and then you’d see that I’m a monster. A monster to be hated and reviled and feared.”
“I would never fear you, I’m not like other people. I’m not like anyone, and neither are you.”
“Stop trying to compare us, we are nothing alike. You can never know what it is to be eternal. What it is to face the long years knowing you will always be strong and vital.”
“But Bredia does know, does she? Is that why you love her so much? Because she’s an immortal monster just like you?”
“Bredia belongs to a world you can never be a part of.”
A silence filled the street, broken only by the howl of the wind rebounding against the sides of the buildings. “So you’re condemning me to a life of solitude?” Christa eventually said, her voice low and harsh. “I’m not allowed to join your club but I’ll never be fully human, either.”
“Now you’re just being childish.”
“Me? You’re the overgrown man-baby who can’t bear to be alone. You were so scared of solitude you mutilated your body and put jinn stones in your stomach. I’m surprised you don’t suck your thumb while you sleep. Maybe you’re right, maybe you and Bredia are the same. She can’t stand sitting on her ugly throne alone, either. That’s why she wants you beside her.”
“I’m not the only one who hasn’t been true. I don’t believe for a minute that you and Darrell found each other at school by chance. Do you take me for an utter fool? Is he your lover, Christa?”
“No, he’s not my lover. And maybe we didn’t meet each other by chance, but why the hell should I have to tell you everything about my life? You don’t own it.”
Christa was finding it incredibly difficult to rein her power in. As her temper burned hotter, it channelled itself through her body in fierce, sharp bursts. The tarmac surrounding her began to tear as easily as paper, peeling back to reveal long jagged scars in the surface of the road. Above them, several huge windows rippled and exploded outwards with a deafening roar, throwing a wash of glass over their heads. The fragments glittered as they spun through the air, briefly catching the light of the street lamps before littering the tarmac. Dylan scrambled to his feet when a particularly long shard struck his face, tearing open his cheek and soaking his shirt in a sudden rush of blood.
“What are you doing?”
“I can’t control it,” Christa said, ducking as a street light shuddered, the long, straight shaft beginning to bend at the middle. It wilted like a flower and crumpled to the ground, its glass head erupting upon impact and skittering huge segments of heavy glass towards her feet. “It’s your fault, you’re doing this to me.”
“How am I doing this?” Dylan roared, one hand pressed to the gushing wound in his face. “I’ve never done anything to you. I should have gone with my gut instincts when I first met you. I thought you were a crazy bitch, I should have run like the bloody wind. Instead, I let you travel with me. I introduced you to people and places you had never seen. How was that so terrible? Tell me, Christa, what on earth is it I’m supposed to have done to you?”
Christa simply stared at him for several moments, stunned by his arrogance and quivering with the effort of keeping her rampant powers locked tightly inside her body. Then, deciding she no longer cared about Dylan’s personal safety, she screamed: “You made me fall in love with you.”
The long row of street lamps stretching away behind her shattered in unison, leaving them in silent darkness. Christa waited for Dylan to say something and when he remained mute, she dropped her suitcase and rushed at him, beating at his chest and arms, unable to raise her gaze to his. “Fuck you, Dylan. I didn’t want this. I wasn’t looking for Mr sodding Right. I was fine the way I was, I didn’t need you.” With a small cry she thrust him away from her, ashamed, certain he would never reciprocate her feelings.
When she finally looked up at him, Dylan’s face had softened. His cobalt eyes shone back at her, highlighting the mask of blood drying around the wound in his cheek. “Christa, I–”
“I don’t want to hear it. Go back to Rob and have a good laugh about me. I won’t care, I’ll be far away from here.”
Breaking into a sprint, Christa barely paused long enough to sweep her suitcase up from where she’d dropped it before springing away to the head of the street. The buildings on either side murmured as she passed, groaning like the aching bowels of a great ship.
“I offered you a new life, Christa,” Dylan shouted behind her. “Are you really going to throw it back in my face?”
Christa stopped, willing herself to complete her escape but unable to ignore his comment. “That’s right, Dylan,” she said, turning to face him. “You offered me life among the dead. But I’m alive, you’re the walking corpse. We don’t belong in the same world, remember?”
They stared at each other across the gulf of the glass-strewn street, standing like two gunslingers in a Western. Christa jumped back when a huge tumult of anguished emotion broke from her body and slammed into the building beside her, the glass facade already cobwebbed with hairline cracks. It trembled violently, steel struts screaming like a train screeching to an emergency halt, before slowly tipping forward. Christa watched as, seemingly in slow motion, the building fell across the street, exploding into the structure standing opposite like a great glass tsunami. The noise was incredible. The sound of breaking glass, of concrete and steel smashing against each other, filled the early morning streets with the force of a bomb, setting off a dozen car alarms and whipping numerous unseen dogs into a frenzy of barking. Office chairs and desks, ceiling tiles and paper rushed into the air, borne up by the impact.
Narrowly dodging a heavy desk lamp as it spiralled back down to earth, Christa stared round at the devastation, her eyes burning in a choking cloud of concrete dust, painting the scene in shades of grey. She could just about make out Dylan at the far end of the street, his arms still over his head in an effort to protect himself from the raining debris. The sound of racing police sirens echoed in the distance but Christa couldn’t bring herself to leave. She could hardly believe what she had done. The broken road was a picture of Hell, the felled building before her a twisted mass of sighing glass and sparking electrical wires.
Finally, brushing herself down but unable to remove the thick layer of grey dust from her clothes and hair, Christa began to run. She ran until her feet began to throb in agony and all breath had left her body, eventually halting at the entrance to a subway station. Behind her, shining like a malignant beacon beneath the rising sun, a mass of blue flashing lights surrounded the scene of her transgressions. Christa took a deep, shuddering breath, turned and began the long descent into the train station.
Part Three: And Now We’re All Alone
Sixteen
Outskirts of Greater London, UK – Two Years Earlier
The noise of the exploding window was so loud it seemed to fill the entire world. Christa jumped through the shattered frame, rolling onto the grass outside in an untidy ball of arms and legs amid the sharp-edged rain of falling glass. Behind h
er, trapped within the rapidly burning building that had been her home since she was a child, Christa could hear cries for help and long, low wails of pain.
She looked around for Darrell, her heart prickling with fear when she realised he was no longer beside her.
“Darrell, where the hell are you?”
No one answered her and when Christa tried to stretch her thoughts out to his, to grope for her friend amid the smoke and debris she’d left behind, all she could hear were the last prayers and frenzied curses of the guards and scientists, trapped behind a wall of roaring flame.
To the outside world, the Institute for the Study of Psychological Phenomena was an expensive joke, populated with eccentric scientists burdened with too many government grants who, instead of discovering the cure for cancer or aids, spent their days attempting to prove the existence of psychics. Christa had been so young when she was sent to live there, for a long time she didn’t understand that her life wasn’t normal. The knowledge dawned on her slowly, like heat creeping into a cold kettle. Puberty brought a heightened sense of awareness and she began to loathe her captivation for the first time, pulling faces at the joyless guards as they patrolled the long, sterile corridors.
A succession of people filed in and out of the building every day, mostly gypsies and travellers claiming to be mediums or fortune tellers. Darrell was the only other person kept at the Institute against his will. Their bedrooms were next to each other, hidden at the back of the compound away from prying eyes and devoid of televisions or even a radio. The scientists knew they would find it hard to control their subjects if they learnt too much about the outside world. Instead, they made up their own games, scrawling puzzles on the large flagstones of the courtyard in chalk and chattering to each other in a secret, made-up language during their English and Maths lessons.
Christa was tested every day. Sometimes she was locked inside a long, coffin-shaped box, devoid of light and so stifling she had to breathe in short, shallow gasps. A small keypad was attached to the inside of the door and Christa could only escape once she’d gleaned a code from the minds of the assembled scientists and punched it into the pad, triggering the door’s release mechanism. Other days were easier – the scientists simply held cards before Christa’s face and asked her to guess which symbol was printed on the other side. By the time she was sixteen, Christa was so bored of this game she often used to give false answers, just to see the scientists’ faces colour with horror as they scurried away to discuss the disappointing results. They soon realised what she was doing, of course. That was when they decided to shoot her in the back with a low-voltage taser gun every time she gave them a wrong answer, refusing to remove the stinging, vibrating darts from her exposed skin until she agreed to behave herself and take the experiments seriously.
When Darrell was with the scientists Christa would often watch the line of new arrivals, idly searching their minds for clues as to their authenticity. It was rare for the Institute to discover a true psychic amongst the hacks and fantasists. On one such afternoon she was leaning against a wall, half-dozing in the warm summer sunshine and brushing the thoughts of the people filing into the main office before her, when a young man with long auburn hair felt her eyes upon him and turned around. Christa stepped back into the shadows, suddenly embarrassed. When she concentrated on him, a blue light played around his head and shoulders.
“Hello.”
For several long seconds, Christa wasn’t sure how to react. The man had broken into her thoughts, had spoken to her silently across the expanse of the courtyard.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you. You can hear me, right?”
She nodded, her eyes locked with his, and the man grinned. “Shit,” he said, “I’ve never met anyone else who could do this before.” He looked around to make sure no one was watching before breaking from the line of would-be psychics and sprinting across the flagstones. He stopped before her, still smiling. “Now I can talk to you normally,” he said. “If I do it the other way for too long, I get a headache.”
Christa laughed with delight, relaxing before the warmth of his smile. “They don’t get many real psychics here,” she said. “The only other one I can remember was an old woman who could read crystal balls. She had no teeth and stank of BO.”
“Nice,” he laughed with her. “That’s a shame though, I came here looking for answers.”
Christa stared blankly.
“I wanted to find out why I can hear what people are thinking,” he explained. “I can’t do it all the time, but some days I can’t turn it off and I hate it. I was hoping this place might be able to, I don’t know, help me control it, I suppose. But it’s not very reassuring to hear they don’t get real psychics here.” His forehead creased as he studied Christa. “You can do it, though. You heard what I was thinking.”
“Yes, but I’m not like them.” She gestured at the line of people, slowly shuffling closer to the office. “They come in the day and leave at night.”
“And you don’t?”
“No, I live here.”
“Really? Why?”
Christa shrugged as she grappled for an answer. “It’s my home, I’ve always lived here.” The man stepped back, suddenly regarding her as if she was some otherworldly, alien being. “I could show you how to do stuff,” Christa said, attempting to regain his interest. She didn’t often get the chance to talk to anyone besides Darrell and the scientists; this was a rare treat she wasn’t willing to give up readily. “If you want.”
The man looked back at the queue of people, each staring stony-eyed at the back of the person in front, before turning to Christa and nodding.
Christa led the man back to her Spartan bedroom, peering around each corner on the route to make sure they wouldn’t be caught by a scientist or a guard. When they finally slipped inside her room and closed the door, she felt as if she had smuggled in some great treasure. He looked around, his lips pressed together, taking in the thin single bed and the lone shelf housing her three worn paperbacks and meagre collection of biros and exercise books.
“This is where you live?”
“Yes.” Christa didn’t understand why he looked so appalled. She sat down on the bed and motioned for him to join her. “Can you see colours when you look at people?”
“Like auras?” His eyes lit with eager curiosity and, his apprehension forgotten, he sat beside her and they began to talk.
Christa soon found out his name was Jake. He was twenty years old, a full three years older than her, and he was studying Art History at university.
“Do you go to Oxford or Cambridge?” she asked him.
“Neither. I don’t have the money or the brains for those places.”
Christa was perplexed. She had only heard people talking about the two universities; the knowledge that there were more was bewildering.
“So does everyone go to university?”
“No, of course not.” Jake was looking at her strangely again, his hands braced against his thighs.
Christa desperately wanted him to like her, to look at her as if she wasn’t some freak of nature. The wish bubbled out of her, making her skin tingle and sigh as it exited her body. To her amazement, Jake began to smile again. He relaxed and settled further back against the pillows on the bed.
“So, does anyone else stay here?”
“Just Darrell. His room’s next door.”
“Cool.” Jake nodded, still smiling. “Hey, maybe I can move in. We could be neighbours.”
Christa hardly dared to breathe. Somehow, her wish had manifested itself. Just by wanting it to happen, she had made Jake forget about her ignorance of universities and life outside the Institute. She began to wonder what else she could make him do.
“Do they charge you rent for the room?” he was saying. “No, I bet they don’t. I bet I could live here free of charge if I agreed to let them test me and stuff. That’s how it works, right? Perhaps I’ll–”
“Would you like to kiss me?
”
Jake blinked, his smile faltering. A deep silence fell upon them and Christa shifted uncomfortably. She looked away, only returning her gaze to Jake’s when she heard him cough and sit up straighter. His eyes had taken on a dewy, glazed look and his mouth was slack, his lips moist.
“Okay,” he said.
“What?”
“I would like to kiss you.”
Christa’s throat suddenly felt tight, constricted, as if her airway had shrunk. “Stand up first,” she said, her voice wavering. “Stand up and touch your nose.”
When Jake did as she asked without questioning it, Christa had to stop herself from crying out with excitement. She laughed as he stared back at her, right hand pressed to his nose as if it was the most normal thing in the world.
“Now stand on one leg.”
Christa clapped with delight when Jake shrugged and lifted his left leg, wobbling slightly before regaining his balance.
“Tell me something you’ve never told anyone else,” she said.
“When I was little I used to piss the bed on purpose because I couldn’t be bothered to get up and go to the toilet.”
“That’s disgusting,” Christa said, wrinkling her nose. “Okay, you can stop doing that now. Sit down next to me.”
Jake dropped his raised arm and leg before seating himself on the bed in a slightly robotic manner. Christa lifted her hands to his shoulders and gently turned him to face her, taking a deep breath before closing her eyes. She and Darrell had practiced kissing once, drawing inspiration from one of the few novels the scientists had deemed suitable for their consumption: an overblown historical romance written by a woman called Crystal Fitzgerald. The main character was a beautiful young girl called Gertrude, born of noble blood but by some evil twist of fate forced to work on a sheep farm among peasants. Darrell had played the part of the strapping farm hand who seduced Gertrude in the barn before discovering her secret. Their first kiss had been short, uncomfortable and wet. When it was over, they had both agreed never to mention it again.
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