Gypsy (The Cavy Files Book 1)

by Trisha Leigh

  I shiver in the shadows beneath the stairwell to Dane’s apartment while Haint and Athena climb the two flights of metal steps to the third floor. The echoes of their footsteps fall around me like flakes of rust while I keep watch.

  Less than five minutes later, Haint hisses from above me. “Gypsy, come here.”

  We decided to use our old names, in case anyone overhears us. I comply, leaving my lookout position even though we agreed not to abandon the original plan. My curiosity insists.

  She’s at the top of the stairs, one arm holding open the door to Dane’s apartment, and motions me inside with harried, impatient movements. We leave Athena standing guard and step over a threshold that creaks under my weight.

  “Are you sure we’re safe?” I whisper.

  The door clicks shut behind us, and she leads me through a short entryway into a shabby but clean living area, except for gray stains trailing across the dingy carpet. There’s a couch and a coffee table, a desk scattered with papers, and a file cabinet off to one side. There’s no wall separating the living room from the kitchen, just a breakfast bar attended by two rickety stools.

  “I think he lives here alone. There’s only one bedroom, and about six changes of clothes. Not enough food in the fridge to feed a rat.”

  “What’s in the file cabinet?” I want to know. There’s little else of interest.

  “It’s locked. We could break into it, maybe?”

  I shake my head. “We can’t do it without him knowing, and maybe it’s best if he… if they think they’ve still got the upper hand. You know?”

  “What’s the difference? If we’re going after Flicker, this guy could have information we need.”

  I try to figure out the right answer, the fact that Dane blocks our talents making me more and more nervous. It will take too long to crack the lock, and cups of coffee don’t take that long.

  Haint keeps disappearing, proof that she’s feeling jumpy, too. We’re sitting ducks if he shows up now, unless Athena gives us enough warning, which is what I’m thinking when the sound of voices drifts through the door.

  The sound of the doorknob turns into a pin that pops the balloon swelling inside me. There’s no time to move, nowhere to go, before the two boys stomp into the entryway together. Dane’s strong, tanned hand wraps around Athena’s bicep, squeezing tight.

  His eyes land on mine. “Hey, Norah. If you wanted me to meet your friends, you could have called first.”

  “Well, you know me. Not a big fan of the rules.” The joke comes off better than I expect, causing Haint to raise an eyebrow. I ignore her but note she hasn’t disappeared. The block is still in place, which means it’s a good thing we didn’t come in full force and expect Reaper’s or Mole’s abilities to convince him to talk.

  Dane’s expression reveals no surprise at finding me here and no hint that either Haint or Athena is a stranger to him. A tiny flicker of resignation is all he gives me, which seems to indicate that we’re done playing games. “Can I get you all anything? Soda?

  It’s an odd relief, to be able to stop wondering what move to make next and simply play.

  We all shake our heads as he grabs a beer out of the fridge and sits on a barstool facing the rest of us. Athena lurks in the doorway to the entry hall, and Haint and I are frozen in front of the cheap vertical blinds partially covering a sliding glass door onto a balcony. The carpet captures my attention, my brain working to guess what caused the copious, quarter-sized gray stains.

  “Are you old enough to drink that?” It’s Athena who breaks the ice, his voice as tight as every visible muscle in his body.

  Confronting Dane isn’t part of today’s plan, but we’re here now. We broke into his house and he’s not acting surprised, which means that maybe he’s expecting questions, but doesn’t necessarily mean he plans to give us any answers.

  “I suppose since you’re all here, and Becca and Norah already invaded my privacy, there’s no sense in lying. Yes, I’m old enough to drink this. By a couple of months.”

  “Why did you pretend to be my friend?” The question falls from my lips, wavering and more accusatory than I mean it to be. I’d like to poke it in the hopes that it will firm up, sound more detached, but like a stubborn, undercooked cake, it seems determined to betray my mixed feelings about him.

  “Look, you obviously suspect I’m not a real student at Charleston Academy. I’m spending time there as part of an assignment for my job.” He sips from the dark brown bottle, swallows, then licks his lips. “Obviously I can’t discuss the details, but it piques my curiosity that you’ve jumped to the conclusion that it has anything to do with you. And by you, I mean at least three of the kids liberated from Darley Hall.”

  It seems naive and silly that we ever thought we could trick Dane into telling us anything—about Flicker or anything else. In the movies, government agents always have another play. A cover story. True to form, this one makes me wonder whether Dane’s not in Charleston, or at the Academy, for me or any of us. Maybe he’s investigating our humorless principal, or the science teacher who seems to know a bit too much about making explosives.

  Maybe we’re trained to be paranoid.

  “Cut the crap, pretty boy,” Athena spits, letting me know he’s not buying it. “You started out trying to get close to Norah, and now you’re spending all your time with Eve. You’re watching them, or maybe all of us, and we want to know why.”

  “We have a right to know why.” I level my gaze at him, feeling fed up with having to beg for information about my own life. ‘These are our lives.”

  He pauses, takes another sip of beer. “Are they?”

  “Who else’s would they be?” Haint sounds breathless. It must be freaking her out, not being able to disappear.

  “Who do you think?”

  “We think you’re with the government,” I say, forgetting for a moment that we’re playing a game, long enough that I’ve leaned too far to one side, given Dane a glimpse at my hand.

  The answer is obvious, anyway. The government is interested in the ten of us because they’re invested. Because they chose our mothers, they made us, and they’ve had plans for us that spanned the seventeen years of our lives, not only the past month.

  But I still want to hear what he’ll say.

  “Ah, the mysterious government.” He smiles faintly, the amusement making me want to smack him. “Let’s see, if this were a movie, what would be their reason? The circumstances of your lives until now have certainly been interesting. Perhaps they just wanted to have someone, or a few someones, on the ground in order to monitor you, to make sure there’s nothing you weren’t saying after your rescue. Or just to keep watching, report back, make sure nothing goes awry during your transition.” He pauses again, his gaze locked on mine. “If this were a movie, I mean.”

  I know Dane Kim well enough by now to hear the truth, no matter that it’s masked by a smart-ass confidence that’s unfamiliar on him. On the outside he’s making fun of us, but in reality, he’s giving us at least a little of why we came here—a confession.

  He’s at CA to watch, to study, to report back.

  And maybe he thinks it will make me grateful but all the confirmation does is make me mad. He didn’t have to pretend to understand me, to get me to admit all of my feelings about being in the real world, or my father, or going on a date with Jude. I feel exposed and as though he crossed a line, even though there aren’t any rules here. “Well if this was a movie, the people watching us would have been fired for letting us all get stabbed in the neck by random strangers our first week out of Darley.”

  Dismay twisted by anger pinches Dane’s handsome features. The attempt to hide it comes fast and is convincing, but not enough of either. Not to mention his fingers are gripping his bottle so hard I’m worried it will crack. “What do you mean, attacked? I’ve talked to you almost every day, seen you at school, and you’ve never looked injured.”

  The venom in his words, the rumble of violence thicke
ning them into a paste, send shivers down my spine.

  “It was nothing,” Haint rushes in. “No harm done.”

  His brow wrinkles, but the knuckles covering the label on his beer relax, turning back to his normal golden skin tone. “It couldn’t have been nothing.”

  “This is bullshit and you guys know it,” Haint spits, her typical easygoing demeanor completely gone. “Stop tiptoeing around the point.”

  When no one replies—either to argue or support her—she blows her bangs out of her eyes and continues. “He’s not here for some random case. He’s here to watch us.”

  Dane stays silent, twisting his beer bottle in his lean fingers. The simple fact that Haint’s visible, combined with Mole’s and my experiences touching Dane, seems to prove her point. If it’s a fluke, the worst-case scenario is that he thinks we’re all paranoid freaks. The little bit of fear in his eyes as I walk closer seems to confirm our suspicions: If I’m just a normal teenage girl, what reason would he have to fear me?

  Of course, my worthless talent doesn’t scare anyone but me. But maybe the government’s not confident in the knowledge that they know everything there is to know about us.

  “Tell us where she is,” I say softly.

  “Where who is?”

  “You know damn well who she means, and why we want to know,” Athena says, coming to stand at my side. The threatening tilt to his head and his fisted hands say that he picked up on Dane’s uneasiness, too. “You’re probably just a cog in a wheel, like a fucking fresh-faced Nazi in 1939, goose-stepping along, happy to believe following orders is the right thing to do. But someone is hurting our friend, and we’re going to make sure they stop.”

  Dane’s eyes go wide, focused over my shoulder. I don’t have to turn around because a moment later, Haint appears beside us. Out of thin air.

  It’s working. Her gift.

  My mouth falls open. It gives us more options, for sure, but it pushes me a few steps back from Dane, too.

  Athena recovers, a grim smile on his face. “The three of us, we’re pretty harmless, all things considered. But your little friend Eve? She manipulates blood. She can stop it right in your veins, keep it from entering your heart or your brain.”

  “Even just pull it all out of your body, straight through your nose,” Haint adds casually, as though she’s admiring the cheap artwork over the dining room table.

  Dane swallows hard. He’s not calling us crazy, not denying anything, but still not talking, either. Then he licks his lips and says the last thing I expect.

  “You all are special. If you sign up with us, we can help you. Give you lives you feel content with, instead of always wondering why you’re so different. You’d be heroes.” His gaze pleads with mine, his words culled from what he thinks he knows about me based on our friendship-that-almost-was. “Not freaks.”

  He’s trying to recruit us. Bring us onto his team. I saw the worry on his face when we mentioned the injections, and how it increased when Haint was able to go invisible, even for a moment. It makes me think he—and whoever he works for—know they have competition from the underground Olders. Maybe they know the Olders can help our abilities increase.

  We’re getting more powerful. We know now that they want us, but at what price?

  The anguish in Flicker’s eyes as she gasped for breath on that picnic table, her blood pumping loose with every heartbeat, answers the question.

  Anger flares through me, so hot it’s white around the edges. I’ve never been more pissed at anyone, not the first time the Philosopher had Reaper practice on our pets, and not when Mole held me down and shaved all the hair off my head. At the core of it sits betrayal, and maybe it’s because there’s been so much of it lately that it escapes my control. “We’re not freaks, and we’re not joining your team or your agency or whatever. Not after how you’re treating Flicker.”

  “It’s interesting that you keep bringing her up. I don’t recall that name among those rescued from Darley Hall.”

  “You know what’s more interesting?” Haint asks through clenched teeth, her whole body trembling in time with mine, sympathetic to my rage. “That someone might be willing to exchange Flicker for you.”

  Shock, real and unmanaged, straightens Dane’s shoulders. He’s shaking but manages to get to his feet, sneaking glances at the door. He must be thinking about what he knows about us, about what we can do. He must know he can’t win, even if our gifts only work a little bit.

  The expression on his face, the one that’s turning him into a scared kid, younger than his twenty-one years, halts my malice in its tracks.

  I want Flicker back more than anything, but this isn’t the right way. We’re not thugs. We don’t hurt people—even people who have access to information we’re desperate to grab. It’s exactly what they want to believe of us: that we’re not human, that we’re some kind of animals to be made and poked and prodded and even caged, should it suit their needs. We can’t be those things.

  “We’re not hurting Dane, and we’re not holding him hostage or threatening him or anything else.” No one moves. I nod toward the desk. “We’ll take his computer and that file cabinet, and find out what we can.”

  Athena doesn’t take his eyes off Dane Kim. “He’s going to report us. You know that.”

  “I know.” I don’t even blame him. He has his job, and whether or not he agrees with his mission isn’t for me to say. It doesn’t change anything. “We can’t turn into monsters, guys.”

  Haint frowns but doesn’t argue. I want to reach out and take her hand, but I’m too scared. That’s one of the few things that hasn’t changed.

  “Let’s go,” she says. Her eyes are bright, fixed on me with a new respect.

  Everyone might not agree with my decision to protect Dane. My lingering connection to him entwines with my desire to do the right thing, to make sure we’re still able to look at ourselves in a mirror, until they’re impossible to separate. I’m not stupid enough to think our personal relationship, formed however recently, and however thin and rocky it has become, isn’t influencing me at all.

  The moments of truth we’ve shared, the glimpses into the man, not the spy, leave me unable to see him as all bad.

  Athena grabs the file cabinet. The ring where it sat on the carpet is at least four shades lighter than the material surrounding it. Haint grabs the laptop and power cord. They both walk out, but I’m frozen, still standing in front of Dane as though one of the others might change their minds and call Mole to come light him on fire.

  His fingers surprise me when they slide between mine, squeezing hard for several seconds before letting go. I still see nothing, and breathe a sigh of relief mingled with frustration.

  Haint may be getting stronger, able to overcome Dane’s nullifying ability on our gifts, but I’m not.

  “Thank you, Norah.”

  “Don’t think it means I’m on your side. I’m on theirs.” The statement is strong, full of all the truth in my heart. I gather my courage and step away. I’m out the door and it’s almost shut behind me when I think I hear him say, “You should be.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The twins are the best with computers, so Athena takes the laptop home. We drop the file cabinet off at the group home where Mole and Pollyanna are staying because they have the most unsupervised time and no one to ask questions about where it came from. I’ve got to meet Maya, since half of the afternoon disappeared during the surprisingly productive standoff with Dane Kim, but Haint and I both promise to come back and help them sort through the files.

  If they can get the damn thing open.

  Mole considers burning a hole through it, but since the injections, his ability teeters on the edge of his control, like everyone else’s. We can’t afford to incinerate the whole thing.

  I’m supposed to meet Maya at the market by four, which gives us an hour to shop before the vendors close up for the day, and will still get me home before my father. Part of me feels like it’s a w
aste of an hour that could be spent staring at a locked file cabinet with Polly and Mole, but I promised. And more than that, I want to see Maya, to remember what we’re all fighting for, because standing in Dane’s apartment it started to become clear.

  It’s not about all the Cavies wanting the same life, post-Darley. I might want to have normal friends and go to white elephant parties and wonder whether or not I can find a way to save Jude Greene from his fate. Maybe Mole will want to work at my father’s law firm, or Reaper will decide to become a homeless Older.

  The point is, we should all have a choice. Even Flicker.

  My father did approve the shopping with Maya, since I committed to the party before he grounded me and we already drew names. I think he’s not any clearer on what exactly grounding me means than I am, not that I’m complaining.

  The market is mostly full of trinkets and crap that appeals to the massive number of tourists that shamble through Charleston on a yearly basis, but it’s quiet this late in December. There are high-quality vendors—local artists and jewelers, mostly—but also those that offer lower-quality options. We should be able to find several cheap, fun Secret Santa gifts. It turns out Secret Santa is pretty self-explanatory, since it means I get Izzie—the girl whose name I drew—presents every day for a week, drop them off at her house, but don’t tell her who they’re from. Then at the white elephant party we find out who’s been treating us.

  Maya waits at the entrance on Market Street with Savannah. Maya smiles, Savannah frowns, and we start prowling the stalls. The market has existed for ages, and is sometimes referred to as the Old Slave Market—because it’s where the slaves sold their household’s goods, not where they themselves were sold. The booths are covered but open on the sides, letting a slight chill into the space. When it’s crowded, I imagine this place can be unbearably stuffy, but today it’s pleasant.