by Leslie Rule
As for the rest of those boring dudes in white, I let them think I’d lost all my psychic ability, I guess it’s backfiring on me, because now my own parents won’t believe me that I SENSE something awful is about to happen.
I wish someone would listen to me. I wish someone would believe me! Something evil is in the air. It’s all around us, closing in, and I don’t know what to do.
It was as if Rita was speaking directly to me. Though her words were written long ago, the years had not silenced them. Her thoughts were there before me, in a lavender ink that had softened over the decades into a pale, whispering shade. Her words were no longer the bright, purple shouts that must have spilled so dramatically from her pen a century ago.
Time had faded the flowing words, but it had not completely hushed them. They were like whispers—desperate whispers urging me to listen to her. They were whispers from the grave.
“I believe you, Rita,” I said aloud. “And I would have done anything to keep you safe. If only I’d been there.”
My sister knew she was in danger. Yet, she did not guess the boy she loved would be the one to kill her. I gently closed the diary. Perhaps there would be another page for me to read tomorrow. Perhaps not.
As I sat grieving for my sister, soft thudding footsteps sounded on the stairs outside my room. That’s strange, I thought. I didn’t hear Mom’s car pull up. “Mom, is that you?” I called out.
An eerie silence followed. “Mom?” I crossed the room, opened my bedroom door, and peered into the dark hallway. Footsteps, fast and furious, thumped down the steps. Somebody was in our house!
My stomach dove to my knees as I slammed my bedroom door. With shaky hands, I slid the lock into place. Would the flimsy little lock keep out an intruder?
Our front door slammed. They’ve left, I thought, sagging against the door with relief. But then something occurred to me. How did I know they’d left? It could be a trick. Whoever it was could be downstairs waiting for me.
12
The steady knock of my heartbeat echoed in my ears as I held my breath and listened. The idea of staying in the house filled me with stomach-twisting terror. But there was no way I was going down those stairs!
I chose the route that Rita sometimes took. I opened my window and climbed into the outreached arms of the maple tree. Leaves, wet and fragrant, tickled my face as I shinnied down the trunk.
When my toes brushed the earth, I bolted away from the house, fearful that the intruder might emerge and grab me.
Someone called my name, and I turned to see Ruby hobbling out onto her porch with a walker. “I saw someone running out of your house a few minutes ago,” she said.
“Who was it?” I cried.
“I didn’t get a good look at him. I saw him from the back as he was running away. Actually I can’t say for sure if it was a man or woman.”
“Which way did he go?”
“Toward the beach, I think.”
“I was upstairs when I heard someone on our stairs. Our front door slammed, but I wasn’t sure if he left. I’m glad you told me.”
“Well, that’s what neighbors are for. We look out for each other. You were a big help to me when I fell.”
“How is your ankle?” I asked, swallowing the guilty lump in my throat. “Should you be walking?”
“I’m not putting any pressure on it. It’s been better, but it will mend. You should call the police and tell them about your burglar.”
“Okay. First I’ll look around and see if anything’s missing.”
Relieved to learn the intruder had left, I went back inside. Everything seemed just as it should be. If it had been a burglar, I must have scared him away before he could steal anything.
I didn’t call the police. I wasn’t up for explaining to the officers why I wasn’t in school.
Nervous now about being home alone, I decided to leave and try to track down my brother. On a whim, I asked our computer to access the phone directory. To my amazement, my little brother was listed there. He was living on Deep Brine Island, a retirement home on a man-made island that floats in Puget Sound, several miles off the shore of Seattle.
Route XYZ on the solar-bus heads straight for Deep Brine Island. It travels three hundred miles an hour on a thin silver track, and since my destination was twenty miles away, I could expect to be there in four minutes.
The back of my neck prickled as I boarded the bus, as if unwelcome eyes were examining me. I turned quickly, scanning the station crowd, but an impatient lady behind me nudged me up the bus stairs. I found a seat, telling myself I was jumpy because of the burglar.
All thoughts of the intruder vanished as the solar-bus soared over Puget Sound on a sparkling track that rises fifty feet above the waves before sloping gently to Deep Brine Island. All I could think of was my brother when I spotted the island crammed with tall pink buildings. He was actually there—perhaps sitting in one of the thousands of windows that winked in the sunlight.
He would no longer be the mischievous red-haired youth I’d come to know from my family photos. He might not even resemble the middle-aged teacher of the year from the old article.
Shivering with anticipation, I found his building and knocked on his apartment door—only to be disappointed when no one answered. Where was he? Had I waited too long to find him? Had he died?
Drawing deep calming breaths, I headed for the nearby cluster of shops along the water’s edge. I would pass some time looking for a gift for Ruby, and then return to my brother’s apartment and wait for him.
The island swarmed with white-haired, wrinkled people. Most were robust and healthy-looking as they strolled along the sidewalks. Cars were nonexistent here, but a few solar-powered wheelchairs zipped along the roadways,
I bought strawberry jam and imported English biscuits for Ruby, and then got myself a cup of hot chocolate. As I sat sipping it, I smiled at the old folks who ambled in and out of the shop.
An old guy passing my table stopped suddenly as his eyes met mine. His knees seemed to buckle beneath him, and I leapt up and grabbed his arm. Had I done it again? Had I unconsciously made an old person fall?
“Rita?” he asked raspily.
The familiar name he spoke told me who he was. For a long moment, all I could do was stare. The same gentle blue eyes of the old photos peered out from the creased face. The man’s hair was coarse and gray, but his eyebrows were fire-red. An overwhelming wave of love surged in me. I reached across the smooth tabletop and squeezed his withered hand. “Sit down,” I said. “I’m not Rita, but I am a relative. I’ve been looking for you.”
My brother sat across from me, breathing raggedly. “I thought I’d seen a ghost,” he admitted, smiling with embarrassment. “I thought maybe it was time to meet my maker. You’re the spitting image of my sister. I figured she’d finally come for me. You say you’re a relative?”
“This might come as a shock. Did you know that your parents gave a frozen embryo to science?”
“Good Lord!” he cried hoarsely. “Are you telling me that’s you?”
“Yes, Jim. I’m your sister.”
His shaky hand reached out and stroked my hair. “I tried to find out about you over thirty years ago,” he said softly. “They told me they didn’t know if you’d be born in my lifetime. I wasn’t a candidate for your guardianship because of the way the wills were written.”
“My mom is a descendant from your family,” I explained. “She was my legal guardian and I was implanted in her. She’s Ashley Fraser’s niece.”
“I remember Ashley. She inherited the family’s home. Ashley was my cousin’s niece. Real nice gal. I lost touch with her years ago.”
“She died last summer. I live in your house now.”
“Well, I’ll be,” he said. “It’s like the closing of a circle. You helped pay for that house. It’s only right you live there now.”
“What do you mean?”
“The money our parents got for you paid for the down payment.”
“Our parents sold me?” Shocked tears rolled down my face.
“Now, honey, please don’t be upset. I thought you knew.”
“How could they?”
“Oh, me and my big mouth! They didn’t do it for the money. They wanted the future to be brighter for everyone—including you. But I think Mom regretted her decision later.”
“Really?” I asked, blowing my nose on a napkin.
“Yes. She worried about what your life would be like. But our parents were young when they got involved with Twin-Star, and thought they were doing a good thing when they agreed to freeze an embryo. They hoped the work at Twin-Star would make the whole world a better place.”
“I know Rita didn’t like what they did!”
“How do you know that?”
“See this?” I said, slipping the diary from my jacket pocket. “I found it in our attic. That’s how I found out about all of you. I thought you might like to see it.”
“Rita’s diary,” he said fondly and fingered the cover. “I’m glad you have this. All my family mementos were destroyed in a fire.”
“I can send you copies of some family photographs,” I offered. “Our computer is full of them.”
“I’d appreciate that. This diary brings back memories. I used to sneak into her room and read it. She’d have killed me if she’d known.”
“Mostly she wrote about her boyfriend.”
“Ben!” He jerked his fingers away, as if the diary had given him an electrical shock. “If the state hadn’t given him the death sentence, I would have killed him myself.”
“I hate him too,” I admitted.
“Oh, he was smooth,” Jim said through gritted teeth. “And he had my sister wrapped around his little finger. She thought he was so charming, but I didn’t like the way he drank. He destroyed our family when he killed her.”
“It must have been horrible.”
“Worse than that. And the trial dragged on for months. Those idiot defense attorneys tried every trick in the book to get that killer off the hook. First they dragged in an unreliable witness and put him on the stand—a neighbor boy who was a known liar and couldn’t possibly have seen the killing. They coached him into saying Ben didn’t do it. When that approach didn’t work, the attorneys blamed it on the alcohol. They said Ben was so drunk he didn’t even remember it. They said the alcohol clouded his judgment and he shouldn’t have to be responsible for the murder. The jury didn’t buy it.”
“Good. If he’d gotten off the hook, he might have done it again.”
“Ben sobbed on the stand—said he never meant to hurt Rita,” Jim said bitterly. “But I knew he was crying for himself. My family was never the same afterward. The trial was particularly hard on Mother.”
The talk of Rita’s murder was wearing on him. His sagging skin was slightly gray, and his words rolled out slowly.
Promising to stay in touch, we hugged and said good-bye.
Home fifteen minutes later, I went straight to my room without greeting my mother.
As awful as it was, I wanted to read more about Rita’s murder. If I know everything there is to know about it, I reasoned, then maybe I can finally stop thinking about it. But I was unable to access any of the newspaper files from that year.
“That’s strange,” the librarian said when I called to ask for help. “All newspaper accounts from that year appear to be deleted from the central computer. Even the backup files are gone.”
I figured it was a fluke until I discovered all the Mills family photos were missing from our computer file. If not for Rita’s diary, there would be no evidence that the Mills family ever existed.
13
“Why would someone want to erase my past?”
I asked Kyle. It was Wednesday afternoon and he had stopped by after school to take me to Twin-Star Labs for more tests.
“Maybe it was a computer glitch,” he suggested as we pulled out of my driveway.
“I don’t think so,” I said. I rolled down my window. My eyes felt small and gritty, and I couldn’t stop yawning. I’d slept very little the last couple of nights and my tiredness was catching up with me. As the car picked up speed, a crisp breeze rushed through the window, refreshing me. It slid coolly over my face, blowing back my hair.
“Computers aren’t infallible,” Kyle said.
“Why did my family photos and the newspaper files on my sister’s murder disappear at the same time? It’s too much of a coincidence! Someone came into my house and erased everything, and then they went to the library and did the same thing.”
He regarded me skeptically. “Why would anyone do that?”
“That’s what I’d like to know! All I know is someone was in my house. My neighbor saw him running away. He must have been watching the house and came back when I left to—”
I let the rest of the sentence hang. I didn’t want to tell Kyle about my visit to my brother. He would never understand why I felt such a connection to Jim.
“Your neighbor saw the burglar? What did he look like?”
“Ruby didn’t get a good look at him. She said it could have been a man or a woman.”
“Maybe it was Suki. She’s a weird girl. Didn’t you say she was always stealing stuff from you?”
“Yes,” I conceded. “She’s stolen some of my makeup, but this is different. Why would she mess with my computer?”
“Why would anyone? This whole thing is crazy, Jenna. My theory about Suki makes as much sense as anything else.”
He was right. Maybe Suki did erase my past. Maybe she was jealous because I knew more about my history than she knew about hers. She’d seemed so sad when she told me all she had left of her mother was three photographs. But she’d made such a point of wanting to help me “re-create” my family in the VR program. Was that just an act?
Suki was strange. Still, I could not believe she’d be that cruel. My gut feeling said someone else had erased my family history—someone who wanted to harm me.
Something evil is in the air. It’s all around us, closing in, and I don’t know what to do. I shivered, remembering Rita’s words. No one believed she was in danger—until it was too late. Was I in danger? Or was I only imagining things because I was spooked by what had happened to Rita?
With my mind so cluttered, it was harder than usual concentrating on Dr. Grady’s rambling monologues. When he pulled out the visor, I perked up. Though my powers scared me, I admit I was intrigued.
Kyle asked to sit in on my session, and when he saw the visor, he grinned at me, his face flushed in excitement.
“You’re ready for the next big step, Jenna,” Dr. Grady said. “As I explained earlier, the visor is fueled with a PK enforcing substance. When I flick the visor’s ‘on’ switch, the inner tubes heat to 120 degrees. In cooler temperatures the fuel is dormant, but the heat brings the fuel to an active state. The visor’s fuel will pull the PK energy from your brain waves and circulate it back through, strengthening it.”
I slipped the visor over my head. The instant I turned it on, it grew warm. It felt natural, as if it were a part of me. Energy—in the form of crackling, blue rays of light—shot from my eyes. Instantaneously, the energy circled back to an area above my ears and into my mind. It was an odd, tingling sensation that left me heady with power.
“Let’s see what you can do with this,” Dr. Grady said and placed a tall, green bottle behind a Plexiglas screen.
I stared at the bottle, imagining it blowing apart into a million pieces. I channeled all my energy—my anger, frustration, and fear—into the rays aimed at the bottle. The blue rays washed over it, but it remained intact.
“Focus, Jenna,” Dr. Grady urged. “Focus!”
I concentrated harder and the rays deepened with the intensity of my thoughts, finally darkening to midnight-blue as my mind seemed to hum. Then, suddenly, the bottle exploded with a bang, sending sharp sprays of glass to the corners of the room.
I leapt back, startled to see I’d actual
ly done it.
“Not bad,” Dr. Grady said. “Two minutes and forty-five seconds.” He tried to sound casual, but there was a breathlessness to his usually gruff voice.
I discovered I could control the dice ninety percent of the time while wearing the visor. And in just two minutes, I twisted a paper clip into a knot. After forty minutes of PK exercises, I was mentally drained and the visor was nearly empty. As the fuel ran low, my abilities weakened.
“That’s enough for today, Jenna,” Dr. Grady said, reaching for the visor. I flinched as his fingers brushed my hair. His touch made my flesh crawl.
“We must be conservative with the fuel,” he cautioned. “It’s mixed from several rare substances. Every drop is expensive and hard to come by. Obviously, you’re exhausted, and therefore using the fuel at a faster rate. We’ll experiment again tomorrow when you’re rested.”
His assumptive attitude annoyed me. He thought he could snap his fingers and I’d obey.
“What if I’m busy tomorrow?” I said coolly and glared at him.
He pretended not to notice my resentment, but his eyes flickered darkly. He smiled stiffly and asked, “What day would be convenient for you, Jenna?”
“I’ve got lots of homework,” I said. “I’ll call you when I get some free time.”
I didn’t really have much homework. The truth is, I was anxious to wear the visor again. But I was more anxious to take control of my life. So far, the scientists had made all the decisions for me. They’d suspended me on ice for a century and chosen my birth time as casually as they would plan an office party. It was their fault I was born in the wrong time—their fault I'd never know my real family!
In this day and age, animal experiments were illegal. Yet I felt like the proverbial guinea pig. No more! If I helped with the experiments, it would be on my terms.