by Lydia Millet
Roger couldn’t have gotten near to Jax himself, because Jax would have read him, Mrs. Omotoso said, and then Jax could have run. Roger was a regular person, she said. He couldn’t stop people like Jax or Mr. Sabin from reading his mind any more than Cara herself could. So, since Jax would read him the second he got near, he’d needed a go-between. Someone who wouldn’t have any idea what was in his head and would carry the poison to Jax without even knowing they were doing it.
In other words, Cara.
“But how did Roger know I was going to be here, then? How could he know?”
“He must have intercepted Jax’s communications with you, Cara. Did Jax send you an email?” asked Mr. Sabin.
“A text.”
“Hmm.”
“Wait. Roger read our texts?”
“Safe to assume he’s been a spy for some time now,” said Mr. Sabin. “Assigned to your mother. And she must not know that yet, or she would have reported him.”
“But—I think my mother can mindtalk,” said Cara. “Can’t she? She communicated with me this summer without being near. Wouldn’t she have known? Couldn’t she have seen through him?”
“Your mother does have some mindtalk abilities, that’s true,” said Mrs. Omotoso. “She’s above-average, definitely, talent-wise. But she’s not a mindreader. On that score she’s just intuitive, even if you sometimes feel she sees through you. In that way she’s just a normal mother. So, no: she couldn’t have read Roger, so she wouldn’t automatically have known that he was working for the Cold.”
“Him? It’s him?”
“It’s always him,” said Mr. Sabin.
Suddenly he seemed very tired.
“So then—what is this place? If it’s guarded against the elementals?”
“It’s guarded against all the Cold One’s methods, and it’s one place of many,” said Mrs. Omotoso. “I guess you could call it a sanctuary.”
On the outside, the Institute didn’t look out of the ordinary at all. It wasn’t supposed to, she told Cara. But it had security. It was a fort constructed to keep out the people they didn’t want to get in. That included all mindtalkers and mindreaders who weren’t expressly invited, said Mrs. Omotoso. It was by invitation only.
“No shapeshifters, either,” said Mr. Sabin. “Unless, of course, they’re our shapeshifters.”
Mrs. Omotoso shot him a look that seemed, to Cara, like a warning.
“I saw one this summer,” said Cara. “We called him the Pouring Man. He was an elemental, my mother said, who worked for the bad guys? She said the elementals operate in one of four, like, Greek elements, water or earth or air or—”
“Fire,” said Mr. Sabin.
“Anyway,” she went on, “he was a water elemental, and he took the shape of my friend Hayley.”
“Elementals aren’t real shapeshifters,” said Mr. Sabin. “They’re not changing their shape—just your perception of that shape. Real shapeshifters rearrange their molecules. It’s one of the highest-order talents.”
“We don’t want to burden her with too much right off the bat,” said Mrs. Omotoso sharply.
Cara had the feeling, from her annoyed expression, that Mr. Sabin was breaking a private rule they’d agreed to.
“You told me what this place is,” said Cara. “But, I mean—who are you?”
In the silence that followed, she could hear the slow ticking of an aged, analog clock on the wall.
“We’re just people,” said Mr. Sabin after a minute, “who are gifted in the old ways. And want to help others who are, too. We want to stop the Cold.”
“But I know that’s not the whole story,” protested Cara. “I’m not stupid. Because the enemy has these—old ways, too! Don’t they? Or some weird powers, anyway. So then what is it that they want? What are you fighting over? I wish you guys wouldn’t keep speaking in code. My mother did that, too, the last time I saw her.”
“There’s a reason for it, Cara. I promise. We don’t want to keep you in the dark, but we have to, partly. We need you to have enough information to help Jax and help your mother,” said Mrs. Omotoso, “but not enough to put you in more danger than you already are.”
“That’s how it was before,” said Cara.
She was frustrated, tired, and also thirsty, she realized. Her head ached dully. “Could I please have some water?”
“Of course,” said Mr. Sabin, and got up, headed for the corner cabinet that held the lavender tea.
“That’s because this war is all about information” said Mrs. Omotoso. “It’s about what people know and what they don’t want to know. We have to be very cautious when it comes to knowledge. Because knowledge is not simply power. It’s the bridge between beings; in some sense it’s the medium of being. We have an old saying: ‘Knowledge is the language that exists outside time.’”
Cara didn’t quite follow that and didn’t have the energy to try.
“What kind of information?” she persisted.
Her throat was so parched it felt like it was going to crack, so she was immensely grateful when Mr. Sabin handed her a glass of water. It was a goblet, in fact, an old cut-crystal one, and heavy in her hand as she tipped it up and drained it. The water wasn’t cold, but it did taste clean.
“Information about what’s happening to the world and why,” said Mrs. Omotoso gravely. “Information not only about the history of civilization, but about its future.”
Cara gazed around her, letting the water sink into her dry throat. She let her head fall back so that she could see the paintings on the domed ceiling through particles of dust that were drifting lazily in the light. There were high windows beneath the dome, but that didn’t quite explain the way light filtered through…. Now that she had some time to study the dome, she saw it wasn’t much like the Sistine Chapel after all. At least, not like the only part of the Sistine Chapel she remembered from art class, which was two naked men with fingers touching. (Or maybe one of them wasn’t naked; possibly God had worn a pink robe….) Anyway, it wasn’t like that, really; it was more of a scene of animals, all kinds of animals in a garden.
“Jax said he found a source,” she said finally, when her throat felt better. “In my mother’s research. Of carbon gases going into the ocean? He said he thought knowing about it was putting him in danger. Except—well, he thought the danger was from you guys. But is that why Roger poisoned him?”
“Part of it,” nodded Mrs. Omotoso. “What your mother and then Jax discovered is definitely something the enemy wants to keep hidden. We know what it is; we just didn’t know exactly where. Your mother found out where”
“Is she—is she going to be OK? I mean—if she’s a prisoner, what will they do to her?”
Mrs. Omotoso and Mr. Sabin exchanged glances again.
“Your mother is a kind of hostage,” said Mr. Sabin finally. “That’s what we believe.”
“A hostage?” asked Cara. “But then—are there demands, or whatever? Isn’t that what they do with hostages?”
“We know what they want,” said Mrs. Omotoso. “They’re holding her to stop her protecting someone else. Someone they haven’t been able to take directly yet but did manage to hurt; someone whose potential command of knowledge makes him into a weapon. They tried to bring him over once this summer, and now they’re trying again.”
“We’re fairly sure,” said Mr. Sabin, “that more than your mother, Jax is the one they really want.”
She woke up and thought two things: first, she’d forgotten about the swim meet, forgotten about her phone, forgotten Hayley and Mrs. M and her responsibilities and regular life.
Second, she must have passed out.
She wasn’t the type to do that; she’d never fainted in her life, but then they’d said something about the bad guys wanting her little brother, and then a slow slide and…nothing. And now here she was.
Here was a dim, quiet room, in one of two twin beds with fringed canopies hanging over them; a few feet away, in the other bed, was someo
ne else. She raised herself on her elbows to look. Jax.
The pale-green coverlet over him rose and fell minutely; he seemed to be sleeping. She fell back and then propped herself up, plumping the pillows behind her head. Clearly she was still in the old part of the building, because the walls were covered with paintings hanging close together in golden, scalloped frames. There was no way this was part of the modern shell that housed the outer, more public rooms of the Institute.
It was almost, she realized, as if the building she’d seen from the street—the gray, boxlike office building with the large, square numbers of its street address—had been built around an ancient hub, as if that building with the gleaming, fluorescent lobby was a kind of bright new armor for an older heart. It seemed to her that this inner sanctum might have been here for hundreds of years, slowly amassing its libraries of worn books, its trove of treasures and sometimes (inside the jars she hadn’t wanted to look at) of horrors, too.
The paintings that covered the wall beside her bed were all portraits, she saw—portraits from different periods, it looked like. Some were more cracked and chipped than others; some were so muddy she could hardly make out what they depicted; some had glass over them and others did not. Some were very flat looking, and it was because, she realized, they didn’t even use perspective, which she remembered was an advance that painters made at a certain point in history. The portraits were mostly of people, mostly in fancy clothes and formally posed; most of them looked smug or imperious or arrogant or, at the very least, puffy.
On a table beside her bed there were miniatures, paintings in oval settings not larger than the palm of her hand. She rolled over and gazed at them—noblemen and noblewomen, maybe, like the ones on the walls. But there was also something stranger: portraits of animals. One of them looked a little like an anteater, except that it had brown scales; one looked like a big duck; one looked like an oceangoing creature, with a long, slender neck and flippers.
Very bizarre, she thought lazily.
She was still wearing her same clothes, she registered in relief as she woke up more, but there were no windows in this room, so she had no idea what time it was.
Peering over the side of the bed she found her pack on the lower level of the bedside table; she grabbed it by a strap and pulled her phone from the outside pocket.
It read 6:14.
And also You HAVE 7 NEW TEXT MESSAGES.
She jumped out of the bed. Both her feet hit the rug at the same time, bedclothes partly snarled around her legs.
And then she realized there wasn’t much she could do. It was six o’clock.
When it came to Mrs. M, she was screwed.
She sat down heavily on the edge of the bed, untwisting the trailing coverlet from her ankle, and brought up the list of texts. They were all from Hayley.
The first read Come bak ASAYGT, shes asking abt u. Sed u wr sik in BR.
Then WAYN? Tell me! Come bak!
Then OMG. Weer n dp sht.
Then Call me ASAP.
Then Goin bak 2 hotel. Had 2 tell hr re Jax.
Then She wants 2 cal yr dad.
Then She wants 2 cal the cops.
Cara squeezed her eyes shut and took a deep breath. Then she started punching the numbers in to call her dad at home, and was lifting the phone to her ear when there was a knock on her room door.
It was Mrs. O.
Cara pushed the hangup button, holding off.
“I think you needed that rest,” said the teacher. “You were exhausted.”
“But—my friend’s mom wants to call the police!” burst out Cara. “Mrs. Moore, who I told you about? Who’s in charge of me on the trip? I got a text about it. I’m going to be in such trouble!”
Mrs. O shook her head.
“I spoke with her,” she said. “The number was right there on your cell, so I took the liberty. I told her you and Jax were here. I said you were both under our care, that Jax had gotten upset and asked you to come get him. I said you were spending the night here and we’d drop you off tomorrow.”
Cara exhaled, then turned back to look at her brother.
“Is he better?” she asked, and tiptoed to the side of his bed to bend over the sleeping form. She could see his eyes making small, trembling movements beneath the shadowed eyelids. “Is he really?”
“His physical health is fine,” said Mrs. O. “We won’t know about the rest until he wakes. We did what we could. And my guess is, he’ll be in this deep sleep for a while yet.”
“What should I do about—I mean, I’m supposed to be with the swim team. I’m supposed to do a relay tomorrow. In the morning.”
“Come, have dinner with the rest of us,” said Mrs. O, and beckoned. “You need to eat a square meal.”
“But—and just leave Jax here? Alone? What if he wakes up alone?”
“He needs his rest,” said Mrs. O. “And security’s on high alert now anyway; this room is protected, though I know you can’t see that. The light treatment we gave your brother has…draining side effects.”
Cara saw there was a pedestal sink in the corner, towels neatly hanging on a brass rack beside it, and walked over to scoop cold water onto her face and neck.
“Did they catch Roger, then?” she asked when she had dried off again. She felt better already.
“Not yet,” said Mrs. O.
Cara took a last look at Jax as she followed the teacher out the door: he seemed peaceful in the dim light, surrounded by the walls of portraits—as though they were looking down on him, a host of guardians.
Four
Cara went to supper at a long table in the Institute’s kitchen, a room that was so big she couldn’t see all of it at once. It was down several flights of stairs from the room under the high dome—in the core of the building, as Mrs. O called it.
There was the “core” and the “shell,” she’d told Cara as they came in; the core was the old part and the shell was the new, which looked like a thousand other office buildings. Like the rest of the rooms in the core, the kitchen had no windows, but there were open fireplaces at each end. And there was an actual stone floor with big gray flagstones, which made her wonder how many floors there could be beneath it. After all, a stone floor had to be heavy.
The table was lined with adults she assumed were teachers. She sat down beside Mrs. O, and someone handed her a plate with spaghetti and sauce on it, then a small bowl full of grated cheese with a delicate silver spoon. Cara was reaching for the spoon, idly wondering why the parmesan wasn’t just in a green-plastic shake container like it should be, when it occurred to her that half the teachers could be reading her mind at that very instant.
Her hand went a little limp.
“So—if some of the people here are mindreaders,” she said under her breath to Mrs. O, “does that mean they’re reading me right now? Because with Jax…”
“No, dear, we have an amnesty,” said Mrs. O, smiling. “What Mr. Sabin was talking about. Amnesty’s what we call it between friends. We don’t use the old ways on each other unless there’s either a clear crisis or a personal understanding. That’s why we didn’t find out about Roger until you told us. We don’t read people as a matter of course—only when we feel we have no other choice.”
“In that case,” said the bearded teacher with the glasses, “we erred on the other side, didn’t we? Big mistake. We were so busy with Jax, we didn’t bother to read you. Or we might even have caught up to Roger.”
“In other words, don’t worry,” said the teacher with the neatly cut silver hair. “You’ll have the usual amount of privacy while you’re eating your spaghetti.”
“Unless you do something that enrages us, that is,” said the bearded teacher, jokey. “By the way, I’m Glen. Or Mr. Trujillo, if you prefer. Like the despot.”
Cara went to reach for the spoon again, but the bowl of parmesan had already moved down the table. Still, she was too hungry to wait, so she started to eat without it.
“I didn’t get to te
ll Jax this,” she said slowly, twirling spaghetti on her fork as Mrs. O poured herself a glass of red wine from a fat-bottomed bottle in the middle of the table and Mr. Trujillo, across from them, forked up salad in a messy way that left white dabs of dressing on his beard.
“But I have a question about something I saw? In a—I guess it was a vision?”
“Go on,” said Mrs. O.
“Spill it,” said Mr. Trujillo.
“So the vision was—well, I saw this man in a subway train, and it seemed to me he was following me. We were alone in the subway car. I have this ring my mother gave me, and when I looked at him and touched the ring, he opened his mouth…”
The teachers were both waiting, gazing at her.
“…and it looked like there were these flames in there.”
Mr. Trujillo let his fork hand rest on the edge of the table, the lettuce sticking out and trembling a bit.
Mrs. O put her wine down and swallowed.
“A vision of a Burner,” she said quietly.
Mr. Trujillo raised his napkin with his free hand and patted at his beard.
“A Burner?” asked Cara.
“They used to be called fire-eaters,” said Mr. Trujillo, nodding. “They were made by the Cold, some time ago. They’re part of his army. He was in England first, you know. That is, his army operated there. Birmingham, England, in the 1740s. Paul and Wyatt—”
“Birmingham?” echoed Cara.
She had no idea what he was talking about.
“It was all his work, you see…hie was behind it all. The first mills, the first seeds of what would be a worldwide movement toward the massive use of coal. The poet William Blake wrote about it. Those dark Satanic mills…”
“You’re being obscure, Glen,” said Mrs. O. “As usual. She won’t know anything about that. They probably haven’t even gotten to the Industrial Revolution in her history class yet. Nor is she ready, Glen, for our…particular take on it.”
“Later, in the 1850s,” went on Mr. Trujillo, holding his napkin out in front of him and apparently studying the food smears upon it, “they were also linked to some people in the South who were extremists in support of slaveholding for tobacco and cotton. Who helped get the Civil War started, in fact. Although that was only a side project, basically a hobby, for the most part—”