Copper Veins

by Jennifer Allis Provost

  We shared that and other war stories from Mom’s kitchen, laughing at her fallen cakes and her green eggs, and no, those eggs weren’t an attempt at Seussian cuisine, and no, we never knew what calamity had caused their sickly pallor. The best part about Mom’s kitchen misadventures was that she always laughed with us, no matter how badly dinner had turned out.

  Make no mistake, we still had to eat it, raw meat and burnt vegetables and all. Mom was not about to let all that misguided energy go to waste.

  In fact, we were laughing so hard that we didn’t hear them until it was almost too late. Max held up his left hand, motioning for us to keep talking with the right. Then he and Dad quietly stood and walked off the dock to join Sadie and me on the beach. After a moment, Max pointed toward the forest.

  “Dad,” Max whispered, “portal.”

  Reluctantly, Dad dropped the branch he was brandishing like a weapon and reached inside this shirt pocket. Before he had the chance to cast the portal, Peacekeepers materialized out of the trees and surrounded us.

  “Corbeau!” barked a middle-aged man in fatigues, who I assumed was their leader. He strode up to Dad and poked a finger into his chest. “Always trying to outsmart us.”

  “Good thing your practices mean that I always escape,” Dad retorted.

  “We’ll see about that. Put him in my transport,” the leader said. That was when I noticed that all of the Peacekeepers were wielding plastic guns just like the ones I’d seen at the Institute for Elemental Research. How could they have known that they would encounter Elementals here at this remote lake, and metal ones at that? “Keep these three together,” the leader added, indicating myself, Max, and Sadie.

  A Peacekeeper fitted Dad with some plastic cuffs and led him away. Dad hardly struggled, unless you counted a few snide remarks about how soon he’d be free again. Once our father had been loaded into the back of a large, green van, the leader turned to us.

  “What do we have here?” he murmured, his gaze sweeping over the three of us. “Three little Corbeau Elementals.” His eyes settled on Max. “You’re the one who slipped the Institute.”

  “And I’m the one who broke him out,” I said, my bravery fueled by rage. We had looked for Dad for sixteen years, and he gets hauled off while we reminisce about Mom’s bad food at the lake?

  No. I would not lose my father—or my brother—again.

  “Sara,” Max warned. When had he become cautious?

  “Sara,” the leader repeated, his eyes lighting up. “Little Sara Corbeau. We’ve been looking for you. I’ve been looking for you.”

  My bravery melted like ice cream on a summer sidewalk. “W-what for?”

  He stepped forward, reaching as if to touch my cheek. I jerked away, right into the grasp of one of his minions, who grabbed my upper arms. “I was on duty the day you had your fun at the Institute,” he said, trailing his gloved fingers down my cheek and neck. “Thanks to your antics, I got demoted.”

  He slapped me, the sound of his palm against my cheek ringing in my ears, almost as painful as the impact. Despite the resulting pain and shock, I thought it was a pretty lame attack.

  “That’s it?” I sneered. I looked at the name badge sewn onto his shirt. Girard. “Big bad Peacekeeper, and all you can manage is to slap a woman while she’s restrained by two of your boys?”

  I didn’t even see him move. Pain exploded across my eyes, my cheekbone, and my ear. After a moment, I realized Sadie was screaming, probably because I’d just been pistol-whipped.

  Before I could offer another ill-advised comeback, we were herded into the back of a covered truck. My head was swimming—and the motion of the truck didn’t help.

  “Hey!” I croaked, when something cool touched my head. My vision focused, somewhat, and I realized that Sadie was holding my face. “Sis?”

  “I’m Max,” my brother replied. “Stay with me, kid.”

  “I’m right here,” I mumbled, and then I fell into blackness.

  14

  When I woke, I was cold and damp, and I felt like I’d been rolled in some kind of gritty sand. I was lying on a stone floor, and based on the smell it hadn’t been swept or mopped all that recently. The rest of the room came into focus, and I made out matching stone walls and a wooden door. Instead of a doorknob there was a plastic lever—I couldn’t see any hinges, or anything else that might be metal. I reached out with my abilities, and my heart fell. I was trapped in this tiny, dank cell, and there was no metal anywhere near me.

  I rolled onto my side and saw Max sitting in the corner opposite me, knees against his chest and his face hidden by his crossed arms. He looked like a little boy, frightened into silence by the bogeyman.

  “Max,” I rasped, but he didn’t acknowledge me. I wondered if he had even heard me, being that my voice was hardly audible—idly, I wondered if I’d been throttled as well as punched. I tried to rise, but every time I raised my head my stomach protested. Then my field of vision was obscured by a glass of water.

  “It’s clean, as far as we can tell. The water and the glass.” I propped myself up on my elbow and saw Sadie standing next to a standard-issue water bubbler. Beside it was a wooden bookcase, its shelves stocked with cellophane-wrapped packages. “There are cookies and crackers, too.”

  Is hell an office break room? Figures. I pushed myself into a sitting position and picked up the glass, wincing only a bit as I brought it to my mouth.

  “He whaled on you pretty hard,” Sadie said, crouching in front of me. I pressed the glass to my cheek and jerked my head toward Max.

  “Did they hurt him?” I asked.

  “No. Not like they hurt you.” Sadie dropped her gaze. “Why did you have to mouth off like that?”

  “It’s what I do.” I drank, ignoring the pain in the side of my head, then I put down the glass and crawled over to Max. Walking was still a bit beyond me. “Hey.”

  He made a grumbly noise, but that was all. I poked him, just to make sure he was conscious. “Goddamnit, what?” he growled.

  “Just wanted to make sure you were in there.” Now that I was next to him, I could see that he was shaking, and that rivers of sweat poured down his face and neck. “Are you okay?”

  “This is just like the cell they kept me in during my trial. For all I know, this is the same cell.” He made a snuffly sound that I assumed was supposed to be laughter. Then he raised his head. I could his pupils were dilated, and his jaw looked painfully clenched. “Yeah, I’m real fucking okay.”

  I blinked—of all the things I’d expected to witness, my brother having a panic attack was not one of them. “I thought you went to them willingly.”

  “I did,” he replied. “That doesn’t mean they were glad to see me.”

  I shuddered at that, more than aware of the atrocities the average Peacekeeper was capable of. I noticed that Max was shivering, and that he was barefoot. I wasn’t surprised that the Peacekeepers hadn’t retrieved Max’s shoes from where he’d left them by the dock.

  “What are you doing?” Max asked when I started shedding my own footwear.

  “You’re gonna freeze to death,” I said. I slipped my socks onto his feet—if he hadn’t been so cold, he would have protested a bit more forcefully. Once the socks were on he shut up, and leaned his head back against the wall. I stuffed my feet back into my sneakers and laid my head on Max’s shoulder. Sadie sat in front of him and took his hand. The two of us made a Corbeau fence around him, protecting him from anything the Peacekeepers might do. While a few decades of therapy would have been a much better option, we’d always been good at working with what we had.

  And it worked. After an undetermined amount of time (don’t havewhy don’t jail cells come with clocks?) Max’s breathing slowed, and his heartbeat was no longer ragged. Once he’d relaxed enough to stretch out one of his legs, I asked the burning question on all of our minds.

  “Do you know where we are?”

  “Hell if I know,” Max replied. “All these cells look the same to
me.”

  I munched on a cookie—gingersnap, not one of my favorites—while I considered our situation. “Warded against dreamwalking?”

  “Yep,” Max replied while Sadie elaborated, “Max tried while you were out. It’s what pushed him into PTSD mode.”

  Max glared at our sister, and I felt more than a bit of sympathy. Sadie had always been a tattler. I shoved more cookies in my mouth while I considered our options. We didn’t seem to have any, other than to wait for our captors to open that door.

  “So, Dad was taken who-knows-where, we can’t dreamwalk, and Micah and Mom don’t know where we are,” I listed. “Awesome.”

  Max nodded—Sadie, deflated, slumped against the wall. Me, I refilled my glass at the bubbler and pressed the damp coolness against my bruised face. We would think of something. We had to.

  15

  The three of us sat rotting in that cell for what seemed like eternity. Since there weren’t any windows, we couldn’t even determine if a day, or days, had passed.

  “It probably just feels like a week,” Max said at one point. “We haven’t gone through all the food and water, so it really hasn’t been all that long.” I looked toward the bubbler and small wooden bookshelf. There was still plenty left of everything, not that we’d really been in a mood to chow down. And as cookies and crackers went, these were pretty horrendous.

  “Why cookies?” Sadie wondered, echoing my own thoughts. “Why leave us sweets, or anything at all?”

  “Simple.” Max leaned his head back against the wall, closing his eyes as he replied. “They want us for something, so they don’t want us to drop from dehydration or malnourishment. But they also don’t want us to be at our peak, which is why they left us all that refined crap. No proteins, no fats, no real food.” He rubbed his eyes before he continued. “After they’d kept me like this for a week, they let me into an exercise yard, telling me that they wanted me to get out into the fresh air, stretch my legs. Acted like they cared, like they were trying to help me.”

  I shuddered. “Do you think they’re watching us?” I asked. “I don’t feel any metal, but…”

  “They’re watching,” Max said sharply, with a look to match. I understood—don’t say anything you don’t want overheard. Which meant I wasn’t going to ask my next question—if we went outside, what were the chances one of us could dreamwalk?

  “I hope we get outside soon,” I said, stretching my neck from side to side. “I miss the sun.”

  “They’ll probably wait until it’s raining,” Max muttered.

  Even that would have been an improvement.

  We languished in that cell, dozing and pacing, until we heard footsteps coming down the hall. We’d been in this forgotten hole for so long I hadn’t noticed the total lack of sounds from the other side of the door, having just assumed that it was soundproofed. Then a key scraped against the lock.

  Max was on his feet in an instant, putting himself between me and Sadie and whoever this newcomer was, feet planted and fists clenched. Then the door swung open, and my jaw dropped.

  In the doorway stood Jerome Polonsky.

  “Come on,” Jerome whispered. “We don’t have much time!”

  “Where are you taking us?” Max demanded. “Another Institute?”

  “I’m getting you out of here.”

  Max frowned. “Define ‘out.’”

  Jerome hissed, “‘Out,’ as in not a prisoner. Here or anywhere.”

  If anything was more amazing than Jerome appearing at our cell door, it was the knowledge that he was organizing our prison break. “Seriously?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Jerome replied. “I’m a rather high-ranking member of the resistance, you know.”

  I sort of knew that, being that I’d seen him nod deferentially at my father, and heard Dad’s admission that Jerome was on our side. Still, this was all a bit too convenient.

  “If you’re lying, I’ll kill you,” Max said.

  “If I was lying, why would I be here alone?” Jerome countered. “Why would they send one Peacekeeper to escort three Elementals?”

  I hated to admit it, but that made sense. Not to mention, it’s not like we had any other options lined up. Max eyed him for another moment, then he waved me and Sadie forward.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Max said.

  And we went. Jerome held the cell door as we filed into the hall, carefully locking it behind him. “The plan was to leave you guys in isolation for a week,” he muttered. “Hopefully they haven’t sped things up.”

  “How long have we been here?” I asked.

  Jerome fixed me with his brown eyes. “Three days. Now, let’s go!”

  Jerome grabbed my elbow and shoved me before him, but I hardly knew where my feet were taking me. All I could think about was Micah not having any idea where I was for all this time… and Mom not knowing where her children or her husband were. Three days was a long, long time when your loved ones were gone.

  “How far are we from the lake?” I whispered.

  “Patriot Pond?” Jerome asked, referring to Moose Lake by its postwar name. “Pretty far. Walking, at least two days, maybe more.”

  Sounds of marching came from the far end of the corridor. We flattened ourselves against the wall, not moving or even breathing until the company passed us by. Once the sounds faded into the distance, Jerome crept forward and looked up and down the corridor. After ensuring it was clear, he waved us forward. Slowly, silently, we followed him down the corridor until we reached a nondescript door, though this one was plastic instead of wood. Jerome pulled out a massive key ring and searched for the key he needed. The plastic components made clacking sounds loud enough to wake the fricken’ dead. When he finally found the right key, he unlocked the door and we stepped into a garage.

  “Wow,” Sadie murmured. “Is this where old cars go to die?”

  It was a valid question. There were cars and Jeeps and trucks packed together, some of them stacked three high, all in varying states of disrepair. Jerome, not amused by Sadie’s comments, beckoned us to follow, and we wound among the rusted hulks toward two sliding doors.

  “All these cars,” I murmured. “Why couldn’t we feel the metal?”

  Sadie shrugged. “Maybe it was too far away?”

  I nodded, but that explanation didn’t feel right. In fact, none of this felt right.

  “This is a storage facility,” Jerome explained, looking inside the driver’s side window of one vehicle after another, probably to check for keys or eyeball the gas gauge on the older models. “The ones in back are pretty rough, but the ones up front are in good shape. We can hop in one of these and be out before they know to look for you.”

  We? “Hey.” I grabbed Jerome’s arm. “Why are you doing this?”

  “Commander Corbeau sent me,” Jerome replied, as if it was obvious.

  “Dad?” the three of us said in unison. “He’s okay?” I asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” Jerome replied. “Can’t hold a man like him for long. Once he escaped, he went right to the resistance and sent me here for the three of you.”

  Untold layers of panic and stress were rinsed off of me like grime in a rainstorm. If Dad had gotten free, it was only a short amount of time until we’d be back in the Otherworld. Maybe we’d even meet him, Micah, and Mom as they charged to our rescue.

  “This one’s the one!” Jerome proclaimed, thumping the door of an old blue truck. “Windows are tinted, and I can hotwire it. Let’s hope it has a full tank.”

  “Why do tinted windows matter if you’ll be the one driving?” Sadie pressed.

  Jerome blinked—something told me that he wasn’t an intelligence officer. “The fact that I can hotwire it is more important.”

  “No need for hotwiring,” Max said, stepping forward to lay his hands on the trunk. “I can start it.”

  “Really?” I mumbled. Talk about a convenient, if somewhat criminal, talent.

  “How do you think I used to get to school?” Max asked.r />
  “Like you ever went,” I smirked.

  Max’s smirk faded as he shot me a glare, then he stretched his fingers and repositioned his hands.

  Nothing happened.

  Max stretched, replaced his hands, and tried again.

  Nothing happened again.

  “Fuck!” he yelled, kicking the tire for good measure. “They drugged us!”

  “What? When?” I demanded. “No one’s been near enough to drug us!”

  “The water,” Max said. “Goddamnit, I should have known.” He leaned against the truck and scrubbed his face with his hands. “They dissolved the dampeners in the water. That way, they didn’t need to risk being near us when we had use of our abilities. We drugged ourselves.”

  “Dampeners,” I repeated. I’d never heard of any drug called that before. “How were they so sure they’d work on us?”

  Max lowered his hands just enough to make eye contact with me. “Who do you think twas their guinea pig?” I shuddered, the chill in Max’s tone turning my blood to ice. I remembered when I found him at the Institute, closed up in that plastic tube with wires and probes covering his skin. I’d never felt so helpless in my life, seeing my big brother reduced to little more than a glorified lab rat. And now we learned that for the past three days we’d been guzzling the same drugs that had been tested on Max. Just another one of life’s cruel little jokes.

  “We can still take the truck,” Jerome said, rousing me from my dark thoughts. “I can get it running.” He opened the driver’s side door and wiggled under the dashboard. After a bit of rummaging and swearing, the truck’s engine roared to life.

  “Like no one can hear that,” I muttered. Everyone ignored me, probably because I’d been drowned out by said roaring engine. Jerome got behind the wheel as Max and Sadie dragged open the garage doors. I squinted into the sunlight, wondering if this was how moles felt, then my siblings and I hopped into the bed of the truck. We covered ourselves with a ragged tarp that had been left moldering away in the bed, and placed our lives in a Peacekeeper’s hands as Jerome pulled out of the garage.