Select Few

by Marit Weisenberg

  He was angry. He was also angry with himself, thinking he should have been alert to this possibility. I experienced his memory of my mother, buried deep. I got the sensation that she scared Novak. It was the same thing that scared him about me as well—that he hadn’t seen me clearly. Surrounding that was a deep love for both Elizabeth and me and also his shame for having this weakness.

  There was his ego, his unwavering certainty of his leadership and also the weight of responsibility for so many people. There was a stubborn need for control but also a boyish fear of Relocation and never wanting to experience another one again. I saw a glimpse of the one that haunted him the most—the one when he was still young, taking me with them, wondering when Elizabeth would realize we weren’t coming back. Then Novak was inscrutable again.

  It was the first time I ever knew him.

  “It’s over,” I said. One way or another it was. Paradise changed completely when you knew you were a captive.

  Victoria had come to stand by his side. Gently, she touched his shoulder.

  Suddenly, Novak moved away from her and stalked toward one of the tunnels. The one closest to the kids. Confused, we all watched him go.

  Move, I suddenly thought. Move! I mentally screamed to the Lost Kids before I started screaming it out loud. Like John had tossed me a baseball with the image of the explosion, I mentally tossed it to Angus, to the Lost Kids, praying they could catch it and hear me the way the group had once before.

  Then I saw Novak touch his fob to another silver panel before he entered a tunnel. Seconds later, metal plates ground down from the ceiling, at every point of the star, covering each passageway. The movement of the plates disturbed the foundation, unsettling a large section of ceiling. The kids had just cleared the mound of debris, but a new onslaught of gas rushed in.

  Novak sealed only himself in, destroying his paradise for the rest of us.

  Nighttime

  Chapter Thirty

  The elevator shook. Packed in tight with eight others, I kept thinking it was too good to be true. Something else bad would happen. One hand trembled during the endless transition to the top. The other gripped John’s hand so tightly I could feel the bones of his fingers.

  When the doors opened, I didn’t know where I would find myself or who might be waiting for us. It didn’t matter. All I cared about was getting out. Judging by how fast the elevator made it to the top, we hadn’t been nearly as deep as we’d been led to believe. No doubt, the tranquilizers and hallucinogens Novak used on everyone helped create that illusion.

  Suddenly, there was fresh, cold air. I stepped out into it, letting it surround me.

  No one else was there. We quickly sent the elevator back down.

  It was night. I led us out into the moonlight.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “No,” he said.

  John let go of my hand and walked a short distance away, taking in his surroundings.

  I immediately wanted his hand back in mine.

  There had been silent screams in my head when I thought that Novak had sealed the passageway where John was located, trapping him on the other side. That momentary terror would haunt my nightmares for the rest of my life. I wouldn’t have put it past Novak to take one last shot at revenge.

  John had met me in the stone stairwell where I’d run to find him. Without a word, he grabbed my hand and led me to the elevator. The group let him leave first. He was Novak’s great hope, but a lot of things had just gone wrong. We had an outsider in our midst with natural gas flooding the space and he needed to get out. It was the first kind gesture I’d ever seen from the group toward an outsider. I still didn’t understand how he hadn’t seemed afraid.

  It wasn’t the time to talk. It felt like we had to take one step at a time; to make sure we quickly put a distance between this nightmare and ourselves.

  It was taking an interminable amount of time, waiting for the entire group. The remaining elevator could only take groups of eight, packed more tightly than was comfortable, gas leaking in increasing volumes. The cave had been built in a hub-and-spoke design and Novak had just rendered the hub useless while making sure the spokes were sealed. He’d remain untouchable for the rest of his life.

  The group who came out with us had been quiet but unable to stand still and wait, jittery to get out of open sight.

  “Where are we?” I heard Paul ask George.

  “It looks like Colorado,” he replied.

  “I thought we’d be across the world.”

  I saw the Aspen trees and felt the dry, mountain air. Novak stayed so close to home. He was crazy. And brilliant.

  Angus had reached the top, Victor by his side. Angus spoke as he walked up to me, gesturing to our surroundings. “Remember when we passed through Colorado? I kept waiting for you to feel it too—that we were close. And then we got that warning in the restaurant. About being sick of our kind?”

  Victor snapped his head to look at Angus. “That wasn’t us,” Victor said, confused. “We came from Austin, directly to the mouth of the cave.”

  “What do you mean, that wasn’t you?” Angus said to Victor. Then he put his hands on his hips, eyes gleaming, looking like he was about to say I told you so. “There’s another group out there.”

  I reared back and punched Angus as hard as I could. He jolted backward but stayed on his feet, fingering his jaw and looking at me while the numbers of the group continued to grow around us.

  “You asshole,” I said. John came to stand next to me, across from Angus.

  “I knew you had it in you,” Angus smiled. “I just had to get you down there.”

  “Don’t tell me you planned that,” I said, my voice cracking. I wanted to smack the self-satisfied look off his face again. I’d seen how scared he was. “Finding John for them was the deal you made to stay down there and get your family in. You led them to Kalamazoo.”

  Angus looked at me like he was explaining something gently to a two-year-old. “They saw him at the cove. They were even going through his phone. It was going to happen. I had to control the situation and make sure you somehow got down there too.”

  “That was almost it—all of you down there, me up here.”

  “Once I saw where they were living, I knew I needed to get them out. We needed you to do it.” Angus moved closer to me. “Growing up, I wanted to be the next leader. Then I thought you and I would make a new world like the one at the cove. When that didn’t work, I thought, okay, I’ll beg to get my family back in. I’ll try to believe in Novak. But you saw it down there. It was complete BS. And then I realized what I’m meant to do.”

  “What’s that, Angus?”

  “I’m meant to lead the kids home.”

  I looked over at Liv who slowly approached, listening to our conversation.

  “Where’s home?” I asked Angus, shaking my head.

  “It’s where you are.”

  When the group was entirely present, a natural segmentation occurred—the teens grouped together, the older adults separate.

  I glanced at John, his eyes large as he regarded us all, no more glass barrier between us. Out of the cave, there was a general sense of the Puris snapping out of it. Nothing felt surreal anymore. If anything, the opposite was true—everything felt hyperreal.

  Victor approached me, having never spoken to me directly before. “We’re going to do what we’re best at—we’ll keep moving.”

  “But how are you going to just disappear?” I asked Victor. As far as I knew they had only the clothes on their backs.

  “We always find a way,” he said. “But we need to go. Now.”

  “I’m not running anymore,” I warned. “I want to have one life instead of starting over and over again.”

  “Good luck to you then.” Victor started to walk away. A large group of adults filed after him, no one thanking me,
no one saying good-bye. They were calm, but their posture and utter silence indicated that they were on high alert and they were scared.

  “I don’t know, Julia,” Angus said. “The general population wants to believe it’s a single-species world.”

  “So you’re going with the rest?” I asked, accusation in my voice. I felt John stiffen.

  “We could find that group. They’re out there. I know it.” Angus motioned with his head, away from John.

  John stood at my shoulder, his body language defensive. After all we’d been through, he was waiting to see if I would choose my family over him now that I had a second chance. John had always been scared I’d regretted my decision before.

  “I can’t,” I said. It didn’t come out strong though. More like a whisper.

  “What about the FBI?”

  “It’s a risk. But most of us haven’t done anything, and it seems we aren’t as different as we think. I think it’s worth it. For us kids, at least. We have our whole lives ahead of us, and we might get a chance to start over.”

  Victoria soundlessly approached, laying an elegant hand on Liv’s back. A light seemed to have gone out of Victoria. She’d just lost her husband, but she still had her daughter.

  Victoria nodded to me. I didn’t know if it was a thank-you, but it wasn’t angry or accusing. It was almost like I was suddenly her equal. For better or worse, me, Victoria, and Liv had lost the most—our closest family member.

  The adults were growing impatient.

  “Come,” I heard Victoria murmur to Liv. I steeled myself for the good-bye to my sister. The first had been horrible, and now I had to relive it. I had no idea what we would say to each other. She had helped take everything away from me, but then she had wanted to give it all back, desperately. In that moment, she’d wanted to return years of what she’d taken.

  Liv looked from her mother, to me, to Angus. I was aware of all the kids watching what move she would make.

  In a thousand years, I would never have guessed she would hesitate. I suddenly wanted to ask her, Who do you want to be? The best parts of yourself—warm, giving, kind?

  Instead I said, “Thank you. Thank you for helping me.” It had been a practice my whole life; I had never asked Liv to choose me. Now she needed to make up her mind—it had always been her battle to fight.

  “We have to go. If we’re caught, they may not let us stay together,” her mother said, real fear in her eyes.

  Liv looked from her mother to me. Under the night sky, I felt Victoria’s energy pulling Liv toward her.

  “What do you want to do?” Victoria stepped forward and put her hands on Liv’s cheeks. Liv pulled her mother’s hands away and held them in her own. The two stood almost nose-to-nose.

  “I want to go with Julia,” she said, drawing out the words, apology dripping from each one of them.

  I wasn’t sure I’d heard right. Then Liv said, “He always talked about our potential, all the amazing things we were going to do. Then I was brought here and that was gone.” She turned to me. “You started something down there, and now you can’t stop. Like you said, you’re supposed to bring us into the world.”

  It was a lot of responsibility. But I knew Liv was right.

  “Come on. Are you sure?” Angus asked, even though he’d always known my answer. “Oh, God. Fine. We’re going with Julia.” He took a giant step away from the group and began to walk over to me.

  “Really?” I said.

  “What?” John’s voice was nasty. It made me want to smile that one thing was back to normal. Then John’s body relaxed when at the same time, we saw Angus surreptitiously touch Liv’s hand as he passed her.

  I watched first my friends, the former Lost Kids—Paul, Ellis, Sebastian, Cyrus, Rob, Roger—and then all of the kids reach out to their parents who squeezed them tight in a never-let-go hold. But then, the parents slowly relented, helpless, and one by one, the kids walked to where I was standing on uneven, rocky ground until there were two sides: those running and those staying. It became cleanly divided between those under and those over the age of twenty.

  Liv held her mother close, and they stood for a long moment. They whispered to each other, and then Liv pulled back. They held hands until their fingers had to part, Victoria walking in the opposite direction, not looking back.

  We were all silent, watching the older group walk away until they disappeared from sight into the dark mountain terrain. It had all come to an end—the end of a way of life and of staying together.

  Now we were solely a group of seventeen kids, almost entirely made up of the last generation of Puris, taking a gamble to have a bigger life.

  “Where to?” Angus asked.

  The wind was whipping up, the sky beginning to lighten. “I have an idea—I’ll need to talk to her first.”

  Angus laughed and nodded in agreement, knowing who I meant.

  At the exact same second, we all heard the helicopter in the distance.

  SEPTEMBER

  Chapter Thirty-One

  The engines roared, and the plane tore down the runway until it seamlessly took flight. I closed my eyes to avoid the stares, waiting and waiting until I could get up to change seats and finally talk to John.

  We’d arrived at the airport in separate groups, dropped off by unmarked white vans. After Rafa and his pilot had located us in the mountains, I had a moment of panic. As they landed, I remembered looking around at the sixteen of us Puris, out in the open, so vulnerable. I couldn’t believe I’d put all of us right back into a powerless position.

  Rafa approached me by myself.

  “You’re here,” I’d said to him, confused. He had been so disgusted when he said the investigation was closed that I’d believed him.

  “I decided not to listen. I flew back to Texas and reopened the case.”

  “Then you kept following me?” I asked, incredulous, feeling the visceral panic and uncertainty of the group rising like a curtain of steam behind me.

  “Yes. And then I lost you.”

  “What are you going to do with us?”

  “I have always told you, your father is the only one who’s committed crimes as far as we know. We aren’t interested in the rest of you except for what you can tell us about him. But now you need to show me where he is.”

  When the SWAT team arrived shortly after Rafa, it had been almost as scary as what we’d just been through underground. Novak’s words about what the government would do to us rang in our ears. I didn’t want to let go of John’s hand, but we were quickly separated. After a medic provided water and a blanket, Rafa led me to a vehicle where we waited for hours while the SWAT team explored what they could of the mine. From the radio Rafa used, I overheard that the elevator no longer worked and exploration was contained to just the opening of the mine. Rafa questioned me relentlessly, wanting me to retrace every inch of what I could remember about the space below. He thrust a pencil and a piece of paper at me and made no comment about my shaking hand as I sketched as best I could. When I was done, Rafa held out the paper, and I had the feeling he wondered if I’d made up what I’d elaborately sketched. It looked like a fantasy, the scope unbelievable. How could such a large, self-contained world exist just below us?

  According to Rafa, he had been sweeping the area for the past five days. That was how long we’d been gone. Five days. It was hard to comprehend that there was a real, quantifiable number attached to an event that felt more unreal by the moment.

  I’d overheard that they would be getting an evidence response team based out of Denver to begin drilling into the mountain. Rafa wouldn’t believe me that Novak was no longer a threat, no matter how I explained that he was trapped.

  After I’d served my purpose at the site, I was transported to a nondescript office in a strip mall with an empty parking lot where, thankfully, I was reunited with John and the others. Before
I could speak to anyone, I was taken into an office where Liv was being interviewed by Rafa.

  After harassing me for several months, once he finally caught me with the group, what he was most interested in finding out, in addition to Novak’s location, was what had happened to Kendra.

  “She was electrocuted when she jumped over my father’s fence. Then they buried her,” Liv told him point-blank.

  I was so relieved Rafa finally knew for Kendra’s family’s sake. There was no reason to protect Novak now. He couldn’t come out from the shadows and punish anyone for telling the truth.

  Agent Kelly had wanted to know one additional thing. “Who are you?”

  When we both remained mute, Agent Kelly had said, “Look, I know there’s been interest in your group that’s ebbed and flowed over the years, but just because you may look and act differently, we can’t put you under surveillance. At this moment we’re only concerned with your father. So as long as you are law-abiding citizens, you’re safe.”

  It was a relief too when I decided to say, “I can only tell you what we know. We originally come from Peru, but that’s over a hundred years ago now. We can do some extrasensory things, but then, so can other people.”

  Agent Kelly looked nonplussed, like he didn’t believe in that kind of thing.

  After everyone was individually interviewed about Novak’s whereabouts, Rafa said we were free to go. There was no other choice but to trust his word and his integrity. In order to release us, they needed the guarantee of a guardian for the members of the group who were under eighteen. I’d told him where we wanted to go and somehow he had made it happen. He arranged transportation to the Denver airport and our plane travel. Time would tell whether they forced us to disband, but for now, they allowed us to leave together.