“I’ll have to interrupt you now,” he said. “Eric needs to rest and heal. As do you, Cat.”
“Okay.” I left my brother with a brief hug. I was glad to have him back in my life, even if it was to be in these strange jail cell-style visits.
As I followed Ryder back to the elevator, my mind began spinning with questions coming from what Eric asked me.
“Ryder,” I said, “am I free to go?”
“Soon,” he said. “My boss wants to talk to you first. We’d like for you to get those stitches out before you go. A couple more days, I think.”
So they wouldn’t keep me here against my will. A river of ideas floated through my brain, none of them catching hold. Where would I go next? I literally didn’t know where I would sleep when I left the Institute, or what I would do. Amazing.
I daydreamed all the way through the corridors back to the medical area.
“I’m sorry about the accommodations,” Ryder said. “I’ll see if I can get a real room assigned to you for the remainder of your stay.”
He wasn’t as bad as I had imagined. It was hard to remember the fear I’d felt when he chased us in the casino. I wondered why I’d thought him ruthless and terrifying. His oddly stern appearance had something to do with it, that white-blond hair and the piercing blue eyes, the military posture. Probably my long-held fear of anything authoritarian, and Jamie’s opinion of him hadn’t helped.
Later, an anonymous assistant escorted me to my new quarters. Someone had left me a pile of clothes—more scrubs by the look of it—and a plate of sandwiches. Starvation prevented me from noticing much else until I ate, and then I took in the plain cot, desk, and door to a bathroom. Less like a jail cell and more like a college dorm this time. Everything was depressingly olive drab and regimented. Whatever I did with my new life, it wouldn’t be military—that was for sure.
I slept again, and woke wondering what day or time it was. Not many clocks here, and my phone had vanished sometime between the car accident and waking up in the medical area. After a shower, I felt the closest to normal I had for days, and I began to get restless.
I tried the door and stepped back, surprised, when it opened. There was a swipe card lock on the outside of it like all the others here, but the LED on it lay extinguished.
Sticking my head out, I looked both ways down the hallway. Similar doors to mine lay in both directions and I knew in one direction you turned to get to the elevator. I went the other way, and turned back to pull the door closed behind me. The olive green door held the number 412. Here I was a number, not a name.
I followed the wall strip—navy, this time—past many such doors, to the elevator. The more interesting stuff had seemed to be deeper in the building. Stabbing at the buttons, I discovered the lower ones wouldn’t light up. The lowest level I could access was L3, three floors below ground level. Guess I needed a swipe card.
On L3 a profusion of stripes headed off in all directions. I wandered about, discovering that this level held administrative offices. People in business dress bustled back and forth. I felt wildly out of place, but no one stopped me. A few people nodded at me; one woman said, “Hi,” as though she knew who I was.
I poured myself a coffee in a micro-kitchen, and swiped a stale donut before continuing my explorations. Back to the elevator and up to L2—more offices—and then L1 held a fitness center. I could work out later. As I was checking out the weight machines, someone cleared their throat behind me.
“Good morning, Catrina,” a deep, clipped voice said. I turned around. An older man in a dark blue uniform stood there. He wore an air of accustomed authority and everything about him screamed military, from his grizzled buzz cut to his upright bearing. Even his aura matched, uniform navy and tightly controlled. “I understand you’ve been exploring.”
“Not much else to do,” I said.
“Let me introduce myself,” he continued. “I’m Major Hudson. Mr. Ryder works for me.”
“Pleased to meet you,” I said, fiddling with the weight adjustment on a machine.
“I’d like to speak to you about your plans.”
I glanced up. “Yes?”
“Would you come to my office?”
I trailed him back to the elevator and down through the levels to the second lowest floor, where the walls were painted charcoal gray. His office was full of monitors and indicator panels, more like a security control center than an executive office. Major Hudson must be a man who liked to keep his eyes and his hands on operations.
The Major gestured me to a leather chair opposite his desk. I sat, folding my hands on my lap like a schoolchild in the principal’s office.
He didn’t beat around the bush. “I understand that during your time with us as a child, no one was able to isolate your Talent.”
“That’s correct.”
“I now also understand your Talent has recently blossomed, and you appear to have the same pyrokinetic Talents as your brother. I’ve scheduled you for testing beginning this afternoon.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Every hair on my head stood up and my legs twitched with adrenaline. Who’d spilled the beans? Eric? Given my own betrayal, I wasn’t in a position to get angry with him.
“Do I have a choice?”
The Major smiled, but there was no warmth in it. “It would be best, don’t you think, to understand your Talent, and understand if there is a risk that you, too, may spiral out of control. I’m sure you’d prefer not to burn a man alive.”
I didn’t understand how he could still be smiling, but his lips were drawn apart. Shit. Shit. The worst thing was that he was right. Shit.
“If it turns out that you do not, in fact, have a dangerous Talent, then you will be free to go, of course. Naturally, if you have a useful level of Talent, we’d offer you a job.” He opened a drawer and took out a box of cigars, busying himself with the ritual of smoking. His hands were steady as he pulled out one of the brown cylinders. He cut the end off with a tool, making a sharp snick. The cigar’s head fell to the desk.
I sat like a statue, unable to find anything to say while the Major lit his cancer stick and drew smoke into that corpse-like mouth.
“I’ll have one of my aides escort you to testing,” he said easily, and then used the fingers that held the cigar to depress a button on his phone.
A neat, burly man appeared instantly, and did not need instruction. They must have discussed it before I arrived. I felt myself on the conveyor belt to destruction, but I didn’t even begin to know where I would run to this time. All roads led back here, eventually.
Like a lemming, I followed the aide down in the elevators, down a hallway, down over the cliff to my doom. On some level, some part of my brain screamed, but it was too late. I’d given myself up, broken my own spirit. All those years of running for nothing.
We arrived at a set of double doors where the aide swiped his card and pushed a button. The doors swung inward, and we passed into the testing area. He showed me to a small room, where a set of paper pajamas lay on a hospital bed.
“Please put these on, and someone will be right with you.”
He left. I changed into the paper pajamas and waited until a pale, thin nurse came in and instructed me further. I answered thirty questions about whether I had any metal in my body. Piercings? No. Surgical appliances? No. Tattoos? I thought of Jamie’s body beneath my hands. No.
My body followed along like an obedient zombie while she checked my blood pressure, took my pulse and listened to my heart.
Finally, I followed her to the testing room. In the middle sat a huge machine, open on one side like a sunbed. I guessed it was an MRI or something similar. I lay down, as instructed, and tried to lie still, as instructed. The various nurses, technicians—whatever they were—retreated from the room to another area behind a glass panel, and closed the door.
A squeal of feedback announced someone opening a line of communication. A nasal male voice said, “Can you hear me?”
“Remain still during the test, please.”
“Okay,” I said.
The voice began to read through what I assumed was a script. It began, simply enough, with what sounded like a relaxation exercise. I was to imagine a pleasant meadow, filled with flowers. My imagination didn’t seem to be working today, or at least I found it hard to relax while remaining still with a group of people staring at me.
After the initial relaxation phase, we got into the meat of it.
“We understand you used Talent to start a fire. I want you to think through the incident, the events leading up to it, how it felt when you used your Talent, and remember exactly what happened. Don’t try and use your Talent. Just remember.”
I let that day play back in my mind. The training session, heading back to the cabin with Jamie. Jamie, oh God, Jamie, where are you? I remembered every second of that encounter, relived it, my skin shivering with the echo of sensation. I remembered falling into boneless relaxation, and the feeling of release. And then the fire, eating away at the cabin.
“Again, please.”
I ran through it again. What had been different that time? The only thing I could put my finger on was the obvious: I’d been with Jamie. But the other times I’d been with him I hadn’t started any fires. I couldn’t make sense of it.
The lights came on, and the techs came in to help me out of the machine. I was taken to another room, fitted with electrodes on my forehead, at the base of my skull, over my heart and on my wrists. They put a blood pressure cuff on one arm, snapped a device on the end of one finger, placed a thin transparent cuff around my thigh, and left me waiting. I scratched at the cuff, wiggled my finger, and shifted my weight on the cold metal chair.
After some minutes, a thin-faced woman in a white coat joined me. “I’d like to ask you a few questions,” she said, and began an interrogation about the same events I’d been rehearsing in my mind. Where? When? What exactly was I thinking at each stage? Feeling? Did I undergo any unusual physical sensations associated with the manifestation?
I left out what Jamie and I had been doing prior to the fire, embarrassed. If it were relevant, I’d figure out how on my own. They had me over a barrel, but I wouldn’t give them my soul.
Finally, she came to the end of the questions.
“Now,” she said, “I’d like you to try and use your Talent again.”
She pushed a buzzer and two techs appeared, wheeling a metal cart. On top of it were a number of items on metal dishes—some shredded paper, matches and a handful of twigs. To one side stood an open glass jar, smelling of kerosene.
“All right, Catrina,” she said. “Can you start a fire for us?”
Crunch time. Should I try? Given my success at Miller’s camp, it probably wouldn’t work anyway.
Major Hudson scared the crap out of me, but he had a point. I remembered the cabin burning to the ground, and the smell of barbequed human flesh in the bar in Vegas. If there was even a tiny chance I might have the same kind of accident as Eric, I needed to know about it. Screw it. I’d play along. For now.
I picked the shredded paper at random as a target. It occurred to me that I didn’t know what to do with it—should I visualize it bursting into flames? That did nothing. I tried to imagine a connection flowing from my mind to the paper. Still nothing. I realized I was holding my breath, and let it out in an exasperated sigh.
“Put yourself back in the day you started the fire,” she urged. “Feel what you felt, imagine yourself there again.”
I ran over the scene again, losing myself in the memory of Jamie’s arms, his scent, the taste of his mouth. I got hot, but nothing else did.
We continued like this for a while, and I became more and more frustrated. I’m sure the techs knew. God knows they were monitoring enough things.
“Let’s try something else,” the doctor said.
I nodded, and the moment I did agonizing pain began in my leg. The transparent band tightened, sending incredible bolts of electrical agony though my body. I screamed. “My leg, my leg.”
The pain intensified. I could think of nothing else, and I slipped out of my chair to the floor, the world graying around me.
Abruptly the pain vanished, as quickly as it had begun.
The doctor offered me her arm to get back up. I took it, shaken.
“I’m sorry about that,” she said. “No harm done, see?”
I looked down at the transparent cuff on my leg. There were tiny ribbons of metal running through it.
“It’s a nerve stimulator. Unpleasant, I agree. Sometimes it helps if we can provoke the fight or flight reflex. It breaks down all kinds of blocks in many people.”
“I’ll bet,” I muttered, rubbing at the skin of my leg below the cuff. “Can I take it off now?”
“I think we’re done,” she said brightly. “Get dressed, and we’ll talk about your test results.”
One of the techs brought my scrubs back, and they all left the room so I could dress. Looking at the metal tray, I had a pretty fair idea about my test results.
Had the fire in the cabin been a coincidence? Maybe I hadn’t started it at all. Maybe it had been Eric, at a distance. The pieces didn’t add up.
One of the techs escorted me to the doctor’s office. It was the most normal room I’d seen since I’d been here, painted a soothing shade of pink with the usual commodity watercolors hanging on the wall. The thin doctor waited for me behind her desk. A plaque on the desk read Dr. A. Jenn. She hadn’t bothered to introduce herself before the tests, I noted.
“Catrina,” she said, once I was seated in an uncomfortable visitor’s chair. “I have some interesting news.”
“Oh?” I said.
“Your test results are a little unexpected. We understood from witness accounts that you had started this fire, a large manifestation.”
Witness accounts. Plural. I guess both Eric and Justine had shared that little gem. My brother I’d forgive, but when I saw Justine to relay Eric’s message, I’d be sure to mention my gratitude to her.
“We ran you through the usual tests for someone who has displayed an uncontrolled incident of Talent. We expect to see particular patterns in the brain during the fMRI, and again during the test attempt.”
“And?”
“We didn’t see those patterns with you.”
I shrugged. “I guess I’m back where I started. It must have been Eric that started the fire, by accident.” Relief turned my muscles to rubber.
“This is the interesting part. We did see unusual patterns in your brain waves.” She leaned forward over the desk, her cold blue eyes locking with mine. “Not like anything I have ever seen before. And I’ve seen a lot.”
My stomach dropped, and a hint of cold dread began to trickle down my spine.
“When we look at the patterns…let me see, I’m trying to think how best to describe this in layman’s terms. Your brain activity is virtually the perfect inverse of what we see in the normal Talented individual.”
“You’re saying I’m remarkably un-Talented?” Typical.
“No, that’s not what I mean. There are parts of the brain, in the frontal lobe, and also in the brainstem, where we see activity in Talented individuals when they are using Talent, or recalling using Talent. Normal individuals don’t have a lot of activity in those particular areas. You have a great deal of activity in those parts of the brain, as much as I have ever seen.
“The pattern—the brain waves, if you want to think about it that way—is the inverse of a typical Talented pattern.”
I struggled to grasp what she was trying to tell me. “What does that mean? I don’t understand.”
“I don’t understand it either, Catrina, but I intend to figure it out. If we can find a way to invert these patterns, you will be one of the most Talented individuals we have ever encountered, if not the most Talented.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I made my way back out of the lower levels
, slowly, crashing into only one person as I went. As I came to my room, my hand went to the door handle and then fell away. I needed to do something, talk to someone. What I wanted was to talk to Jamie. Failing that, I needed to find something else to occupy my time while I processed.
Heading back to the office levels, I picked a random guy in a tie. “How do I find someone here? Is there a directory?”
He shook his head. “There is, but it’s on the network, and you’d need access. Who are you looking for?”
“Justine…I don’t know her last name. Short girl, red hair, tattoos.”
“Come with me for a second.” He led me back to his cubicle, adorned with Dilbert cartoons and toy robots. After a few moments tapping on his keyboard, he turned his screen toward me. “This her?”
A photo showed Justine looking different from the way I’d seen her. Her hair was scraped back from her face, her makeup minimal. The flaming orange locks and freckles were unmistakably her though, even in this tamer incarnation.
“Yes.” Underneath the photo were a phone number, a floor and a room number. “Is that where she is?”
The guy glanced at the screen. “Yes, that’s her room.”
“Thanks!”
“You’re welcome, Catrina.”
I stopped as I was turning to leave. “How did you know who I am?”
He shrugged. “Most people know Eric. You guys look a lot alike, and I know you came in together. If I didn’t know who you were, I wouldn’t be sharing confidential information with you, would I?”
“I guess not. Thanks again.”
His eyes bored holes between my shoulder blades as I walked away. The whole encounter had creeped me out, but I had things to do, and I wouldn’t dwell on it.
A few minutes later, I stood outside a door much like my own, except this one had a nameplate on it. It said J. Bell.
I drew breath and knocked. She may not have been my favorite person, but she was Eric’s girlfriend, and I wasn’t here for myself.
No one answered. I glanced at the card reader and noted it was deactivated, like the one on my room. The handle turned in my grasp and I pushed the door open.
Talent to Burn (Hidden Talent #1) Page 20