by Lydia Millet
She looked around for a chair, as instructed. She had to trust them, she guessed—because what was the alternative? She could call 911, but what if Mrs. Omotoso was telling the truth and the doctors really couldn’t do anything for Jax? Plus, how would she tell the operator where she was? And if she did, how could they get in here? She had a feeling this part of the building wasn’t exactly open to the public.
No: right now, she didn’t have much of a choice. She didn’t see any way to go except hoping against hope that they were trustworthy.
She sank into a chair with a plush seat, the lumps and points of its carved wooden back digging into her own. (She turned to inspect it: the protrusions were fins, it turned out—the chair’s back formed of entwined, leaping porpoises or dolphins.) It wasn’t too comfortable, and she sat on the very edge, blinking away tears. Jax had called her because he was afraid of these people, and now, for all she knew, she might be giving them the power of life or death over him.
She looked at the small crowd surrounding him on the dais and the light beaming down from the domed ceiling. Then the scene blurred and disappeared, tears standing on her bottom lids without spilling. She softly touched her ring.
And while she had her finger on it and was gazing tearily at the circle of teachers, it seemed to her that they had wings on their back—great, elegant, long-feathered white wings.
She took her finger off the ring, and the wings melted away.
She touched the ring again, her tears drying in her eyes. The wings came back.
Angel wings? That was what they looked like.
Angel wings? Come on. Seriously.
Mrs. M had a thing for angels, she thought, angels and Hummel figurines. Both tacky. Mrs. M’s angels were mostly ceramic cherubs, fat and grinning and clutching arrows or trumpets in their pudgy fists….
But maybe she was being too literal. Maybe the flames hadn’t really been in the subway guy’s mouth and the wings weren’t really on the teachers’ backs, either. Maybe all the flames had meant was that the man was dangerous, that he had ravenous appetites and intended to do her harm. And maybe all the wings meant was the opposite: that despite Jax’s suspicions, the teachers were trustworthy. That she should trust her instincts, as well as her visions, and the teachers were no threat to Jax.
She hoped.
Of course, there were plenty of other ways to interpret the appearance of wings. Such as, maybe they meant the teachers could travel fast, or they were going to go somewhere. The possible meanings were practically infinite.
“Poison,” she said out loud to herself. If it was poison, and he’d been here the whole time, wouldn’t these same people have to have been the ones to poison him?
And then she remembered the tacky souvenir pen.
Ow! Jax had said, grumpily. That thing scratched me!
Scratched him.
“Hey,” she called out to Mrs. Omotoso’s straight back, getting up from the chair. “So does—is there a guy named Roger who works here? A scientist from Woods Hole?”
Another of the teachers turned around, a balding man with a big bumpy nose that looked like it had been broken.
“Roger? No, there’s no Roger on our staff,” he said, and looked at her quizzically.
“But he said he was,” said Cara. “He said he was a consultant. Then he gave me a pen to give to Jax, and left. I remember noticing because he didn’t take the elevator, he took the stairs. And while Jax and I were sitting on the bunk bed, the pen scratched his leg.”
Mrs. Omotoso turned around, and then another teacher, until most of the seven gathered there were looking at Cara. A short, frizzy-bearded teacher flipped open a cell and talked into it rapidly, his voice too low to hear. He wore thick glasses with black frames; he must have been the one she saw on Skype.
“And where did you meet this Roger?”
“Just at the elevator near Jax’s room,” said Cara. “When I got here.” They must think she was such a dolt, taking what turned out to be a poison pen—who knew they really existed?—from a stranger. “I mean, I know him a little from before, he works—he used to work with my—with our mother. At Woods Hole, in marine biology.”
The bearded, bespectacled teacher looked at another and nodded, then strode off through the door again, his cell held to one ear.
“It’s very good that you told us, Cara,” said Mrs. Omotoso quietly. “It’s very good that we know.”
Then she reached up and pulled a painted screen toward her, a screen on rollers that unfolded like an accordion, and Cara was shut out.
She got restless after a couple more minutes sitting in the knobby carved chair; she could hardly bear not knowing if Jax was going to be all right. She thought of calling someone, Max or Hayley or even Mrs. M or her dad, but she thought it dully and without momentum—as though it was preordained that she couldn’t call anyone. Not until this part was over. Right now there was no way she could explain. So she got up and began a slow circuit of the room, walking along the wall, trying not to think about Jax’s still, pale face.
Mrs. Omotoso had called it an infirmary, but it wasn’t anything like the hospital room Max had been in when he broke his arm. For one thing, Cara didn’t see medical equipment. There were books and yellowing maps, like in an antiquarian library; there were glass-topped tables at waist height, full of medieval-looking pages from old books with fancy, gilded letters in what appeared to be Latin. There were Asian scrolls with pagoda-style temples and water-color trees on them, dragons and lions and bulgy-eyed fish. There were mosaics made of small tiles in brilliant colors; one looked like the sun, but the rays coming from it were snakes, and another was of a naked man with beard and trident, riding a chariot pulled by seahorses over some foaming ocean waves.
The artifacts seemed delicate and precious—and old. But maybe they were just fakes—they made great replicas these days, her mother had told her, of practically everything. There were copies of great paintings that most people couldn’t tell from the real ones—some hanging in museums, to be admired by audiences who never knew the difference.
Did all the kids at the Institute come in here? Had Jax been in here before and already seen this? Maybe they studied this, maybe it was part of what they did…she’d thought they would be doing math and computers all the time. It hadn’t occurred to her there would be history or art or subjects like that.
But now she’d come to a section that was hundreds of wooden cubbies stretching up to the ceiling, and in each hole stood a bottle or sometimes several of them. They were a great variety of shapes and sizes—large, handmade-type bottles shaped like bottom-heavy teardrops, tall greentinted thin ones like pillars with old cork stoppers in the top, murky fluid inside and things floating in it.
Suddenly she caught sight of a bumpy white line inside one of them—a line up a minuscule back. It was a spine. She turned away, shocked, and walked fast past the rest of the bottles, concentrating on not looking.
Dead things in jars. That didn’t exactly bode well.
If she thought of that and then the painting of the man with the tail—if she thought of the darkness in the corners….
Jax might be right about these people. Her own instincts might be dead, dead wrong. After all, Jax was the genius in the family. Not her.
Skirting a wooden ladder on wheels, she was close to the dais—close to the huddle of the teachers with their trays and lights, bent over Jax. There was a gap, she realized, a gap between the screen and the wall, near where the top of Jax’s body should be; if she stood on one of the rungs of the ladder she might be able to see what they were doing.… She grabbed a rung and stepped up. One rung, then two, then three; her feet creaked when she put her weight on the wood. But she was three feet up now, and the backs of some of the teachers’ heads were in her line of sight—the bald man, an elegant woman with sleek, bobbed silver hair.
She craned her neck to see between them. But the gaps were too narrow, after all. So she stepped up to the fourth rung.<
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And there was her brother, bathed in light.
There were streams and threads of light falling across his face and his bare chest (they’d taken off his shirt, which made him look even younger). The light fell over him in lines that crossed each other and made patterns. After a few moments she realized the narrow strings of light came from things the teachers were holding—handheld instruments that might have been pens or scalpels or even wands, for all she knew. She couldn’t tell. Just small, thin sticks in their hands.
It was beautiful, how the light fell. Like spiderwebs or cat’s cradles or graceful woven nets.
Could it be laser beams? Surgeons used lasers, after all. But these threads weren’t sharp and straight; they were curved and soft. They were so lovely, in fact, that it was hard to believe they could be doing Jax any harm. It had to be a good light. It even felt good to her, some distance away. Its threads were soothing to look at: she watched in awe as they danced and trembled, joined and parted again.
The teachers were silent as they worked. She wondered what they had in common. Mrs. Omotoso looked African; the bearded man who’d left before had caramel-colored skin, like maybe he was from the Middle East, she wasn’t sure. Then there were white people—the bald man was white, the elegant woman with the silver hair…one other woman might be East Indian…what were they, those beautiful threads of light?
Then Mrs. Omotoso turned and caught her looking down at them. Feeling almost guilty, Cara was startled and looked away.
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,’” said the teacher.
“Pardon?”
“It’s not my own. I’m just quoting—a famous line from the science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
“OK,” said Cara uncertainly.
“That doesn’t mean, of course, that magic isn’t real.”
“The poison wasn’t the kind you find in bottles with skulls and crossbones on them,” said the balding teacher with the broken nose. His name was Mr. Sabin, and he had a voice so deep it was almost comic. “It wasn’t the kind they can pump out of your stomach or soak up with charcoal.”
They sat at a thick oak table not far from where Jax was lying, apparently in a recovery mode, on his dais: Mr. Sabin, Mrs. Omotoso, and Cara. The other teachers had left the room when they finished with their light sabers (as Cara thought of them).
“It was for his mind. His mind that makes him so special,” said Mrs. Omotoso.
She’d brewed a kettle of tea on a hot plate in the corner and sipped from a steaming cup of it now; Cara smelled lavender, a tea her mother also drank. Cara didn’t like it, but she loved how it smelled. In their corner of the big, high-ceilinged room there were deep, overstuffed armchairs and a few floor lamps that shed a quiet orange light. Behind them were shelves of leatherbound volumes, and beneath their feet was an intricate rug that might have been Turkish. It reminded her of the flying carpets depicted in her old Arabian Nights treasury.
“Special,” repeated Cara.
She felt dazed by what had happened; she wondered if she was all here.
How much did they know about Jax?
“Jax has a very special mind,” said Mrs. Omotoso.
“But we don’t have to tell you that,” added Mr. Sabin. “You’re his sister.”
“Yeah. Jax is really smart,” said Cara, and nodded carefully.
The two teachers glanced at each other sidelong.
“Smart, yes,” said Mrs. Omotoso. “But that’s not what we’re talking about.”
“It’s not?” asked Cara.
She wondered if this was the moment where Jax’s ESP got them locked up. She saw, in a flash, both of them being kept as prisoners here, in the company of relics. Confined here along with the paintings of fine-looking gentlemen who were secretly devils, tails curving behind them. Along with the bottles of grisly, pickled specimens…
But at least, when she thought it, she wasn’t touching the ring. Maybe it wasn’t, in fact, a glimpse of the future.
“We know about Jax’s talents,” said Mrs. Omotoso. “At least, we know about some of them. You don’t have to conceal your own knowledge, dear.”
Cara didn’t know what to say. Or whether she should speak at all.
“We think it’s time we brought you in,” said Mr. Sabin.
His voice was so deep it was a spoof of deep voices.
“Brought me in,” she repeated warily.
“Now that you’re involved, we think you need to know more than you do.”
“There’s a reason we’ve been keeping Jax here with us, you see,” said Mrs. Omotoso.
“I thought he was here for—I thought it was an educational project?” faltered Cara.
“Of course, we do help bright students develop their talents,” said Mr. Sabin. “But in Jax’s case it was more of a pretext.”
“Cara,” said Mrs. Omotoso, and set down her china cup on its saucer delicately, “we brought your brother here to protect him. Because something is happening.”
“You—you mean…”
She didn’t know how much she could say. Would her mother want her to talk openly to these people? Jax hadn’t trusted them. Jax’s not trusting them was why she was here in the first place.
“We know Jax didn’t trust us,” said Mr. Sabin. “We know that’s why he called you. Although, to be perfectly honest, we didn’t find out about the call till afterwards. Jax concealed it. As we concealed our own minds from him.”
Cara stared at him.
He could do it, too. Couldn’t he.
“Excuse me,” he said, nodding apologetically. “Yes. Jax has far more raw talent than I do, but I have experience on my side. As do all of the teachers here. I assure you, I usually ask permission to read people. We all ask permission. Unless we’re dealing with hostiles. But this isn’t a typical situation.”
“We share some characteristics with your brother, you see, Cara,” said Mrs. Omotoso.
She took the beaded headband out of her hair, flicked it onto her wrist absent-mindedly, and then smoothed her hair back and replaced the band more neatly. The familiarity of the gesture comforted Cara.
She had to rely on her intuition, she thought. It had gone OK so far, hadn’t it? Rely on your intuition. Her mother had told her that.
“We call them ‘the old ways.’ Those senses your brother has. The thing about your brother is that he has more old-way abilities than—well, than most other people who have them,” said Mrs. Omotoso. “He kind of has, or will have—well, it looks to us like he has.…”
“Basically everything,” said Mr. Sabin.
“What do you mean, everything?”
“Well,” said Mrs. Omotoso, as she got up to lift the teapot off the hot plate and pour herself some more, “what he means is, most of us have one innate talent—one old way that we were born with and work to develop as we grow up. The old ways tend to run in families.”
Mr. Sabin cleared his throat but didn’t say anything.
“I’m what we call a mindtalker, for instance,” went on Mrs. Omotoso, “and Mr. Sabin here is a mindreader, but Jax can do both of those things, can’t he? And quite a number more.”
“That makes him very valuable,” said Mr. Sabin. “And unfortunately, very vulnerable, too.”
“In this war,” said Mrs. Omotoso, spooning honey into her cup, “he occupies a unique position. He’s…well, people know about him. People on both sides. Do you remember that verse your mother left for you?”
“The poem about the Whydah? The shipwreck?”
“That was part of a longer—I guess you might call it a prophecy. And in the full prophecy, Jax is important. You are, too.”
“Wait. My mother didn’t write it? I thought she wrote it for us. As instructions that other people wouldn’t get.”
“No, dear. That text is far older than your mother.”
“An old prophecy…that tal
ks about Jax? And me?”
Mr. Sabin nodded gravely.
“And a couple of weeks ago something happened that made Jax…more exposed than he used to be,” said Mrs. Omotoso. “So until we could get permanent protections into place—around your home and Jax’s school—we brought him here.”
“But as you saw, they reached him anyway,” said Mr. Sabin, and cast a look over at the dais, where Jax appeared to be sleeping. “Luckily, I think we got to him in time to prevent permanent damage.”
“What happened,” said Cara. “What happened a couple of weeks ago?”
She wasn’t giving them any information, she thought, but it didn’t matter, because they knew it anyway. Even this, what she was thinking right now, was audible to Mr. Sabin. If he wanted it to be. She might as well be yelling her deepest secrets from a rooftop.
She felt deflated, as well as spied on. Before this, her brother was the only one who had been able to see into her mind. And that had been bad enough.
“I won’t keep doing it,” said Mr. Sabin. “I promise. As of right now, I’m not going to listen. I’ll agree to trust you if you agree to trust me. OK?”
Cara hesitated a moment and then nodded reluctantly.
“Cara, we want you to brace yourself a little,” said Mrs. Omotoso. “It’s your mother.”
She leaned in close and took Cara’s hands.
Cara’s anxiety spiked.
“She’s not hurt,” said Mr. Sabin quickly. “She has some excellent defenses. Believe me.”
“But she is captive” said Mrs. Omotoso. “The enemy has her confined. And so she can’t help you or your brother. Not right now.”
So it turned out that if Cara hadn’t been there, Roger wouldn’t have been able to get to Jax at all.
In a way, it was her fault.
Or at the very least, her and Jax’s fault, since he’d begged her to come. But poor Jax was the victim. She shouldn’t have come, she thought, she shouldn’t have listened to him; she shouldn’t have broken the rules. She should have just called her dad. What had she been thinking? She should have done it all differently.