by Trisha Leigh
“My heavenly days, are you okay?” She pants, her face pale white with bright-red dots on the apples of her cheeks, making her look more like a doll than ever. “Who was that guy?”
“I have no idea.” My legs shake, my heart pounds, and bitter bile coats the back of my tongue. Every throb of my heart pushes the contents of the needle, unknown and foreboding, deeper into my bloodstream.
“Sweet fancy Moses, I’m gonna pass out.” Despite her words, Maya’s bright eyes snap with intelligence as she recovers from the shock and starts to analyze. “He knew your name. What was that all about?”
“I don’t know.” I don’t—I’ve never seen him before in my life—but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that this kind of thing doesn’t happen to your normal, average, everyday high-school junior. It has to have something to do with Darley, with the Cavies.
The thought arrives with a cold tingle of fear and I close my eyes for ten seconds, long enough to pop into the Clubhouse. Mole and Pollyanna clutch their necks, screaming questions at each other. Tears fill my eyes at the realization that Reaper was right. I can pretend with people like Maya and Jude, but I can’t be like them. Not really.
“Hey, I’m sorry, Norah. Stupid me, asking questions and playing Nancy Drew while you’ve just been stabbed with a needle in the middle of the street.” She reaches for me, then stops, already tuned in to my aversion. “Come on.”
“Where are we going?” Fog rolls through my mind, obscuring any inclination toward agency at the moment. I get up and stagger after her blindly until it occurs to me that I’ve been following orders my entire life. That, for all the Philosopher’s and staff’s insistence that we learn to use our abilities to protect ourselves, none of us have a clue how to direct our own lives.
I stop walking. “Maya. Where are we going?”
“My house. My father’s a doctor and his office is part of the first floor. You need to get checked out, have some blood tests done to make sure he didn’t infect you with anything.” She glances back at the street. “Too bad he didn’t leave the syringe.”
He’s too much of a professional to have left the evidence. A professional what, I have no idea, but if someone stabbed Mole and Polly at the same time I was attacked, we’re being targeted. Hopefully they’ll try to warn the others, since I’m with Maya and can’t exactly zone out.
“Okay.” I bite my lip, trying to wipe my mind of every horrible pathogen that might be eating away at my healthy blood right now. It could be HIV, or something equally deadly. With my particular situation, it could be something that could interact strangely with my unique genetic material.
I follow Maya down Meeting Street on watery knees onto a pretty, well-manicured residential block. She turns through a wrought-iron gate and hustles up an overgrown, redbrick path to a huge redbrick home with pale yellow columns. The trim around the windows matched the Charleston Green window boxes and front door. There’s a sweeping front porch that’s mostly hidden by a crop of camellias, along with a heap of other plants and bushes whose names don’t come immediately to mind. A second-story room opens onto a sweeping porch. We’re close enough to the point that I bet they can see out into the harbor from up there.
My fingers press against my neck, even though it’s void of blood or any other evidence of the incident a few blocks ago. “Your dad’s office is here?”
“Yes.” Worry pinches her face, but confusion wrinkles around the edges.
Maya’s too smart, and too curious—especially about me. She’s not going to let this go.
We stumble up the steps and into the grand foyer, tiled black and white beneath our feet to the wood-and-plaster staircase that climbs out of sight. It’s decorated for Christmas, with a lush green garland draped up the bannister that was interrupted every two feet by bright red velvet bows. Mistletoe hangs from the doorway leading to a drawing room, complete with baby grand piano, and candles stand at attention everywhere I look.
“This way.” Maya leads me past the stairwell, then past the doorways of two other rooms—a study and a dining room—before pausing at a third. There’s a bronze plaque next to the door that says Dr. Emmett Ashley and gives his office hours. Maya ducks inside, pulling me with her.
The office is big, as though it might have been two rooms at one point, with a wall of bookcases separating the reception and examination areas. Files line the shelves from one end to the other, a rainbow of tabs sweeping left to right, ceiling to floor. A youngish woman looks up from behind the desk, her bored gaze barely registering our presence before refocusing her computer screen.
“Hey, Jacqueline. We need to see Daddy right now.”
“He’s with a patient, dear.” She glances at me, still uninterested. “Who’s your friend?”
“This is Norah. It’s an emergency.”
Part of me, the part desperate to fit in, wants to shush her. To act like this is nothing to fret about, that random men stabbing me on the street is something I can handle without freaking out, but I’m freaking out. The sooner a doctor can check me out, the sooner I can start to feel better. I shoot her a grateful look.
“It doesn’t look like an emergency.” The woman, Jacqueline, sneers a little, but in a pretty way.
I wonder whether or not Maya’s father hired this chick for more than her administrative skills, then hope that suspicion isn’t on my face.
“We need to see him now,” Maya insists.
“Who’s stopping you? Do I look like your personal messenger?”
“No, you look like a receptionist. A shitty one.”
They look like they’re gearing up for round two hundred and sixty-seven of this argument, and I’m dead on my feet. “Maya.”
She closes her mouth at the same moment the connecting door swings open, turning loose a woman and her son. A tall, handsome man in a white coat trails behind them, typing something into a tablet.
“Keep an eye on him, but as long as the fever goes down in the next forty-eight hours or so there’s no reason to worry.” He levels the kid, who’s toying with the white bandage around his wrist, with a serious gaze. “And Joseph, no more poking snakes, okay?”
The kid’s face splits into a wicked grin that leaves everyone in the room certain that the good doctor will be treating more snakebites before Joseph moves out of his mama’s house. They stop at the receptionist’s desk, and Maya’s dad notices us. He breaks into a genuine smile, opening his arms to his daughter. She steps easily into his embrace, and he lifts her off her feet, then sets her down and turns his attention to me. I stand still, feeling awkward and out of place in this house, in this life where everyone fits like pieces of a perfect puzzle.
“Hi there! Are you a new friend of Maya’s?”
Maya bounces to my side. “This is Norah, Dad. She’s one of the kids they found out at that old plantation. We met at school today.” She casts another distrustful glance at Jacqueline. “Can we talk to you in private for a sec?”
“Anything for my angel, you know that. And her friends.” He winks at me, and it’s clear his interest level went up ten notches when his daughter mentioned Darley. Curiosity must be genetic.
We follow him into the exam room adorned with a paper-covered table, two badly upholstered chairs, and a bunch of framed posters depicting human anatomy. The doctor leans back against a counter, his head blocking a picture of the nervous system, and waits in silence.
Maya nudges me with her hip, letting me know this is my show now.
It’s hard to swallow with what feels like feathers coating my throat, but I manage, then wet my lips. I’m ready to tell the story of what happened but figuring out how to begin turns out to be harder than I think. In the end, I just go for it.
“A man came up to us on the way home from school. He asked me my name, and when I turned around to see if I knew him or recognized him or anything, he jabbed me in the neck with a needle.”
“What? Where?” He pushes off the counter, at my side in fewer t
han two steps. To my relief, he pulls on a pair of latex gloves from his pocket. Thank goodness for good physician habits.
“Here.” The room tilts with my head, Maya suddenly tipped at an angle. She makes a face when our eyes meet, and I give her a tight smile. There’s little room for playfulness around my unease.
My brain goes a mile a minute as his cool, gloved hands probe the side of my neck. The attack wasn’t random, because it happened to at least three of us. The homeless man knew my name, my real name. Who was he? Why did he do it? And what exactly runs through my blood now?
The snap of the doctor’s gloves brings me back to the present. “Well, it looks like a clean injection site. The wound is small and there’s no redness or swelling. Are you sure he injected something? Could you see whether or not the syringe was full?”
“There was something in it,” I reply without thinking.
“It was yellow,” Maya adds.
“Hmm.” Questions race and tumble through the deep brown of his eyes, tangling with potential answers, then more questions. “Well, for one thing, we need to report this to the police. It’s an attack, and we can’t have psychos running around stabbing people with hypodermics.”
Seeing that he asked my name first I doubt that’s going to be an issue, but I keep my mouth shut. It’s best to downplay that particular aspect.
“Second, I’ll go ahead and draw a few vials of blood and send it out for testing, just to be sure. Otherwise, be vigilant over the next couple of weeks. If you notice any change in your health, come back and see me.”
There’s nothing more he can do, no way to know immediately if I’m about to croak or slip into a coma or turn into a full-fledged freak of some kind. As hard as that is to accept, I nod and thank him. Maya lets out a breath at my side. It sounds like relief, and it’s nice to know that she’s worried about me even though we’ve known each other for less than a day. Maybe she’s right about the whole fate thing and we’re meant to be friends. As though whatever god is actually in charge of this whole bizarre world shoved her into me at school this morning so that she could be with me this afternoon.
Either way, it’s nice to have her here while I’m stabbed with yet another needle, and I watch my blood flow into test tubes. It worries me, letting him take it. Something odd could show up. An anomaly that will betray the Cavies, the real work the Philosopher was doing.
But the doctors at the hospital already ran tests, and one of the nurses at Darley had a favorite phrase: Don’t borrow trouble. I suppose it applies, and even though it doesn’t mean there won’t be trouble, it makes me feel better.
Chapter Nine
I let myself into my father’s empty house and trudge up the stairs, drop my backpack on the white-painted chair at my white-painted desk, and fall face-first onto the bed. Dr. Ashley said it will take a few days for the blood test results to process, a time frame that seems slow compared to the all but immediate feedback from the biometric machines at Darley.
What’s a few days while you’re waiting to explode, or die, or start having seizures, or… The list of potential hazards goes on forever.
He said he’d give me the opportunity to tell my father about the incident myself and for the two of us to report it to the police. That conversation is going to be brutal, but it can be avoided for a couple more hours. Now that I’m alone, I race into the mental cavity of our Clubhouse, but no one’s there besides Veg… Geoff. His head rolls in my direction and gives me what we think is a smile, even though fear clouds his eyes.
It’s always struck me as sad, the way he’s trapped in his body. Outwardly, in the real world, the staff at Darley doubted he had any usable brain function. We told them that he seems to understand us in the Clubhouse, that he follows our conversations and that his eyes communicate. It gave the Philosopher hope, for a time, that they could rehabilitate him, but they never had.
“Hey, Geoff.” His smile grows. He likes his new name, and I suppose calling him Vegetable had never been politically correct. Not that my name is, either. “Where are the others?”
He doesn’t answer, so I reach out to Mole, then Haint, and then, out of desperation, Pollyanna. We can’t talk in each other’s minds or anything as cool as that, but if we’re in the shared space and kind of… knock, it’s kind of like a drum beating or a light flashing in the corner of your mind. We leave notes here often, which have the same effect.
None of them show up, and I try not to worry. It probably means they’re in a situation like I had been in earlier, with other people and unable to zone out mentally for a few minutes.
I curl up in Mole’s chair, breathing deep. The man’s face, the one who jabbed me, hovers behind my closed eyelids. The longer I stare, the more sure I am that I’ve never seen him before in my life. It’s not a long list, the people I know, but there were staff that came and went at Darley.
I wake to a tap on my shoulder and no memory of falling asleep.
Haint’s chocolate skin is transparent, making me blink. She closes her eyes and grimaces, then focuses on becoming more solid. “I only have a second. My grandparents went downstairs to cook dinner, but she’s already checked on me twice.”
The words wake me all the way, and I sit, grasping the arms of Mole’s recliner. “Tell me what happened.”
“A woman grabbed me outside my grandparents’ house a little before three-thirty. She knew my whole given name and when I stammered that was me, she stuck me in the neck with a needle.”
“Were you alone?”
“Yeah. Mole and Polly were together.”
“I was with a girl from school.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah. Her dad’s a doctor, and he took some blood. At least we’ll know if we should be worried.”
Her face paled, coffee-bean eyes sharp. “We should be worried about what they’re going to find that has nothing to do with that injection. And what the police are going to make of the fact that he was looking for you specifically.”
“I know. I’m sure my father will insist on reporting it.” I pause. “Have you talked to the twins?”
“No.” Haint stops, casting a glance at Geoff when he grunts. “Were they here?”
He makes a gargantuan effort to nod. “Too.”
“It happened to them, too?”
“Me,” he pushes out.
“And you?” My heart speeds into a gallop. Geoff and Prism are still in the hospital, as far as we know. If these attackers got to them, too, they’re ballsy. Or desperate.
The second scares me more.
“Okay, so we assume that these people targeted all of us, at the same time, for a reason,” Haint recaps.
“Obviously, Becca.”
“Don’t call me that. Not in here.”
“Fine. Oh, and I saw Reaper. We’re going to the same school.”
“How is she?”
I shake my head. “Not good. Depressed and scared.” And pissed.
“Tell her welcome to the club.”
“You know it’s worse for her because of what she can do.”
She closes her eyes again. “My grandmother’s hollering for me to come set the table. Let’s meet back here later and figure out a plan, okay? Midnight?”
“Yeah. I’ll leave a note. You go.”
Haint tugs the sleeve of her thin, red shirt over her hand and reaches for me. Her caution reminds me that there’s more about today that needs to be relayed, including that my gift malfunctioned when Dane Kim touched me. I’ve hardly thought about it since school ended, and there isn’t time to discuss it now.
We need an agenda for tonight. It’s going to take multiple meetings to discuss everything, and trying to figure out what in the hell happened this afternoon is most pressing, for sure.
She gives me a squeeze, letting me know that her frustration isn’t for me but for the potential hazards of this new world, and leaves. To go set the table.
The thought of her in such a normal situation makes me both happy
and sad. Happy because we should be able to do normal things like set the table at our grandparents’ house. Sad because it’s going to change the core of who she is, how she deals. How will she concentrate without her pattern of disappearing herself, one body part at a time?
Worse, if she forgets and doesn’t concentrate, those parts could go invisible before she realizes.
Worries, too many to count or name, settle heavy on my shoulders as I scrawl a quick note asking everyone else to meet back here at midnight. I pin it to Geoff’s shirt since he’ll be here and no one would sit on him.
I’m intent on finishing this task and getting back to the house before my father gets home when Geoff’s hand grasps the note, his fingers closing around it. Our eyes meet. His reflect the astonishment numbing my limbs—he moved. With purpose.
We share a thought: the injections.
Time passes without my noticing it. Five minutes might have ticked by, or it could have been an hour before the sound of the front-door buzzer shakes me from my state of shock. My brain isn’t working properly, not even wrestling with the questions of what might have been in that injection or how someone could know what affect it would have on Cavy DNA. Know we have Cavy DNA.
My mind just drifts. Blank. Stunned.
The buzzer sounds again, insistent, and my legs respond on autopilot. It never would have occurred to me this morning to check out the front window to see who’s ringing, but after what happened, I do.
The sight of Jude stops my heart and snaps my brain to attention, flooding me with trepidation fast enough to make me shake. Maybe it’s best not to open the door.
I’ve almost decided on that course of action when the wrinkle between his eyebrows and the downturn of his lips catch my attention. The concern draping his entire body like a cloak tugs at my heart and I open the door without another thought, wondering how I can be happy to see him and wish he weren’t here at the same time.
Relief slumps his shoulders, relaxes the muscles in his face, but he doesn’t smile. “Maya called and told me what happened. Are you okay?”