Born to Darkness

by Suzanne Brockmann

  Anna nodded. She was following now—at least she thought she was.

  But Elliot sat forward. “Let me give you an example that’ll make it easier for you to understand,” he continued. “Part of our brain regulates the way our blood is pumped by our heart through our body. That’s a fact. You and I are doing that, while we’re sitting here. But it’s not conscious—thank God, right? But Dr. Bach over here, he’s a Greater-Than. He’s seventy-two percent integrated.”

  Seventy-two? Anna turned to look at Bach as Elliot went on. The dark-haired man was sitting there, legs crossed, as he sipped tea from a mug that bore a picture of Godzilla engaged in battle with a giant moth. Even holding that mug, even without his royal-looking overcoat, even dressed down the way he was in a cable knit sweater that was a muted shade of blue and a pair of jeans that stacked above his clunky boots, he still looked like a fairy-tale prince.

  But then again, he would probably still look like a fairy-tale prince if he were naked and in chains.

  “Like all Greater-Thans, Dr. Bach has studied and trained for years, and he’s identified which of his neural pathways lead to the areas of his brain that regulate blood flow,” Elliot said. “Now you wouldn’t know this to look at him, but tonight’s joker landed a very solid blow to the good doctor’s face. Ow, right? Well, someone like me or you—a ten-percenter—we would have one heck of a black eye after that. But the maestro here took that hit, and about a half a second later he started the healing process. He not only had his brain instruct his body to repair the broken blood vessels that would’ve created a very colorful bruise, but he also manipulated the circulation in his face. He got the blood flowing through the injured area and … look at him. No injury to speak of. And that’s just one of many seemingly superhuman things that he’s learned to do.”

  Anna glanced over at Bach again, and this time, he was looking rather pointedly into his tea.

  Oh, God.

  “Can you read my mind?” she asked him.

  He looked up at her and took his time to answer. “Yes. But not without your permission.”

  “How does that work?” she asked.

  “I shield myself,” he said, “from everyone’s thoughts. If I didn’t, it could get overwhelming. If I want to … share thoughts with someone, I … approach. And I ask permission to, um, enter their mind.”

  “So it’s not a can’t thing,” Anna clarified. “Like, you can’t read our minds without asking permission. It’s a won’t. You say that you won’t.”

  “I won’t,” he agreed, with a flicker of something that she couldn’t read in his eyes.

  “But how do we know that you’re not just saying that, just so that it doesn’t get awkward?” Anna argued. “I mean, if we had to sit here, knowing that you’re tapping into every thought …”

  “I don’t do that,” Bach said.

  “Well, just in case you’re lying,” she said. “Sorry.” She turned to Elliot. “I made the mistake of thinking about him naked, before I knew he could read my mind.”

  Elliot had been following their exchange with a half-smile, but now he laughed aloud.

  “It wasn’t sexual,” she told him—Bach, too. Again, just in case. “It was more of an art-appreciation thing. Although, I have to admit that once you know someone can read your mind, it’s really hard not to think about them naked.”

  Joseph Bach was actually blushing as Elliot continued to laugh.

  “What else can you do?” Anna asked Bach directly. “Can you stop a bullet with your mind?”

  “Yes,” he said. “And create an energy shield to protect myself from just about anything that gets thrown my way. But that’s a pretty basic skill.”

  “Can you …” She started over. “Have you made yourself look significantly younger than you actually are?”

  “Yes. But it’s not just about looking young. I control my body and generate new cell growth and I actually have the health of a twenty-five-year-old.”

  The concept took her breath away. It was one thing to hear about it in theory, but another entirely to see the results of that kind of mental power. “How old are you, really?” Anna asked.

  Bach shook his head. “I don’t want to freak you out.”

  Anna looked at him pointedly. “Too late.”

  He smiled at that. “I am sorry about that.”

  “So … can you rearrange the furniture in this room without getting out of your chair?” she asked, looking around the conference room at the heavy bookshelves and wooden sideboard, the enormous table …

  He didn’t blink. “Yes.”

  “Knock down a building?”

  “Or rebuild one,” he countered pointedly, taking another sip of his tea.

  “Can you … unlock locked doors?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you make people get into your car with you, even though they really don’t want to?”

  He didn’t answer that one right away. But he finally sighed and said it. “Yes.”

  This time, he didn’t look away first. This time, she did. She finished her now-cool coffee, and set the mug on the table.

  “So there are eight hundred people out there, like you, with superhero powers,” Anna said, and it still seemed surreal to her.

  “Only a handful can do all that Dr. Bach can do,” Elliot reminded her. “Most have limited talents and abilities.”

  “Still,” she said. “Why haven’t I heard anything about this?”

  Bach and Elliot exchanged a glance.

  “Is it a secret?” Anna asked.

  “Not by choice,” Bach said. “We regularly publish papers on neural integration, but …”

  “The corporate-controlled media has mocked our research—and that of all the other research facilities in the country,” Elliot said. “There are four other labs similar to OI, but we’re the only one that’s privately funded, so the others are always in danger of being closed. Particularly when the media insists that neural integration researchers are little more than a fringe group spouting crazy theories—while wearing tinfoil hats.”

  “The entire Destiny problem has also been swept under the rug,” Bach told Anna, “allegedly to keep the public from panicking, but in fact to suppress the truth about the drug’s dangers as the pharmaceutical companies lobby to get FDA approval.”

  “But if people are jokering as violently as you described,” Anna started.

  “The cost of a single syringe of Destiny is around five thousand dollars,” Elliot said and she gasped, because even though he’d already told her it was expensive, she’d never imagined it cost that much. “Yeah. And until the expense of production is streamlined and the price drops—which it will—the number of users, and jokers, will remain relatively low. Relatively. We get a call from the police around once a month to assist with a jokering addict.”

  “The families of the jokers also work to cover-up the incident,” Bach added. “The stories that do break are quickly tagged as urban legends.”

  Anna looked from Bach to Elliot and back. “So … How do I know you’re the good guys?” she asked. “If you can do the very same things that these jokers can do?”

  “The jokers are the symptom, not the problem,” Bach told her. “The problem starts with the Organization—the unscrupulous people who manufacture and distribute Destiny.”

  Elliot chimed in. “They’re the ones who took Nika.”

  “And this … Organization took her because they think she’s … a Potential?” Anna still struggled to understand this part of it. Apparently her little sister was, without any training, already twenty percent integrated. But what would the people who made Destiny want with her?

  “They don’t just think Nika’s a Potential,” Bach told Anna grimly. “By now, they know it.”

  Nika screamed.

  And screamed.

  But the grotesque man with the surgical knife kept coming toward her.

  His face was badly scarred—as if he’d survived a fire. One of his ears a
nd most of his nose was completely gone and the scar tissue twisted one side of his mouth up into a relentless grimace.

  There was nothing she could do—the restraints were unbreakable.

  She’d woken up with no idea how she’d gotten here, into this darkened room. She was locked in place, on her back, unable to move.

  But then, moments after she’d woken up, the light had come on, glaring and bright, and Nika had seen that she was in a hospital bed, wearing a hospital gown, in a room filled with other girls who were also restrained on hospital beds.

  There were about two dozen of them in there, some much younger, but none too much older than Nika. Some of them had started to scream, and then they were all screaming—Nika, too—as she turned and saw the man who’d come in through the door, carrying that glittering knife. He was looking at Nika and pointing to her as he advanced, closer and closer.

  He was so close now that she could smell his breath—rancid and foul. “This won’t hurt,” he told her as he brought the blade of the knife to the inside of her left arm.

  But it did hurt and Nika screamed as he cut her, as her blood sprayed and splattered, bright red against the white of the bed-sheets, the walls, the floor, the man’s white coat. And the screams of the girls around her grew more frantic, more terrified at the sight.

  “What do you think?” the man asked though his misshapen mouth. “Should I just let you bleed? Should I allow you to die?”

  Nika shook her head frantically. “No, please, no!”

  And he laughed—at least she thought it was laughter, that sound he was making—and he took something from the pocket of his no-longer-white lab coat and pressed it into the open wound in her arm.

  The pain nearly made her black out, and she screamed and sobbed, with a chorus of screams echoing her, as whatever he’d put into her arm pinched and burned and stung, and she realized he was stitching her up, sticking and pulling a needle through her skin, with whatever he’d put there still inside her arm, poking out.

  It was blue and it had a little transparent tube attached. It was some kind of medical shunt or port—her mother had had something vaguely similar inserted beneath her skin when she’d started her chemotherapy.

  The man finished the stitches and cut the thread, and God, it still hurt, but at least she wasn’t dead, and she lay there, trapped and crying—unable to wipe the tears and snot from her face as, around her, the other girls continued to scream.

  But Nika caught her breath, watching as the man took his knife and his needle and his thread, and limped back to the door, opened it, and left the room.

  Her arm was still bleeding, blood oozing out from those Frankenstein-worthy stitches, and the man had done nothing at all to clean up the rest of the mess he’d made.

  Some of the girls just kept screaming because of it. All that blood … It had soaked through her sheet and she could feel it wet and cold now against her stomach.

  “It’s all right,” Nika said, as the slow closing door finally latched behind the man. “I’m all right. I’m okay.”

  Some of the girls were still crying—some noisily, some more softly.

  One of them—a girl about her own age, who was strapped into a bed almost directly across from Nika—said, “Last week, he killed Leesa. He just slit her throat and let her bleed.” The girl started to cry again in earnest. “Right in that same bed you’re in.”

  Nika had been working hard to keep herself from panicking, but with that dreadful news, her heart again began to pound. But she took a deep breath and then another and another. And when she could speak again without crying, she asked, “Where are we?”

  But no one knew. Not one of the girls had the slightest clue.

  Elliot was playing part-chaperone, part-interpreter for Joseph Bach and the incredibly lovely and charming Anna Taylor—who’d actually told the maestro to his face that she’d pictured him naked, oh snap!—when he got a text message from Mac.

  ETA: now.

  Bach was deeply into his explanation of why Anna’s sister Nika had been taken. The bottom line was that because the girl was a rare raw Twenty, she was going to be strapped to a hospital bed and kept in a state of near terror to keep her adrenal system active, so that her captors could, essentially, milk her of a hormonal complex found in its highest concentrations in preadolescent girls. Those hormones would then be used to manufacture Destiny.

  Bach was being much more tactful and far less alarmist as he explained the science to Anna. Eventually, however, he’d have to get to the horror of it all, because the truth was the truth. Nika had been kidnapped by some real asshole-bastards who belonged to a group called the Organization, who were going to terrorize her and possibly beat or even rape her to keep her in a constant state of fear that would allow them to increase production of a drug that killed nearly everyone who used it.

  A drug that made its manufacturers and dealers insanely rich …

  Elliot pushed himself to his feet, and Bach trailed off mid-sentence to look up at him questioningly. There were shades of don’t leave me here alone with her in his eyes—which, okay, could really just be a figment of Elliot’s creative imagination. Joseph Bach was, after all, afraid of nothing.

  He was especially unafraid of attractive young women who pictured him naked.

  “I gotta …” Elliot pointed to the door. “Mackenzie surfaced.”

  Bach looked across the conference table at Anna, then back at Elliot as he took a deep breath and managed a curt nod. And wasn’t that interesting? Maybe Elliot wasn’t imagining Bach’s trepidation at being alone with the woman.

  “Good,” Bach said. “Tell her I want to see her before she vanishes again.”

  “I will.” Elliot looked from Bach to Anna. “Did anyone show you to your quarters yet?”

  She blinked up at him, then looked to Bach for confirmation. “Quarters?”

  “We’re going to want you to stay here,” Bach told her. “At least until we find Nika.”

  He hadn’t gotten even close to what they all hoped would come after they rescued Nika from the nightmare in which she was trapped. They hoped that Nika would sign on for training here at OI—which would mean that she and her older sister would become full-time residents.

  Here and now, however, Anna was nodding. “And if I don’t want to stay here, you’ll … use your powers to muck around inside my head and make me think that I do.”

  Awkward.

  Apparently Anna wasn’t just going to forget about that little unauthorized personal B&E that Bach had performed on her, in order to get her here safely.

  Elliot took that as his cue to exit stage right, and he slipped out the door. He loved Joseph Bach like a brother, but the man was on his own for this one. As he hit the corridor, he set his phone on its intercom feature and buzzed the nurses’ desk. “Kyle, send Dr. Mackenzie into exam room one when she arrives.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Oh, and she injured her ankle while she was out there tonight, so be aggressive in checking to make sure she doesn’t need assistance.”

  “I’m on it, Doctor,” Kyle’s voice came back.

  This had been one long, awful, total bitch of a night, and it wasn’t over yet. And after Elliot gave in to the fatigue and collapsed in his bed, he knew he was going to stare at the ceiling, unable to sleep because he was going to be thinking about Nika. The kid’s night wasn’t anywhere close to over, and daybreak wouldn’t save her. She was going to have to endure whatever nightmares were being thrown at her until they could pinpoint her location and kick down the doors and get her the hell out of there.

  It was at times like these that Elliot wished he were on Bach’s door-kicking-down team, instead of merely being in charge of research and support. And as long as he was wishing for things that would never happen, he also wished he could learn how to become more fully integrated.

  But he couldn’t. He was—without a doubt—a mere fraction. Early on in his career, he’d thought he might be one of the g
ifted ones, since he tested, at times, at a higher-than-average fifteen percent. But try as he might, he was unable to move beyond that.

  Eventually he’d come to accept that there was no chance of his ever learning how to fart lightning bolts. Fate had sidelined him, and the best he could do was provide assistance and support to the Greater-Thans like Bach and Mac. And Diaz.

  Elliot sighed as he opened the door to exam room one. It was dark inside and the automatic sensors didn’t make the room light up, which was odd. So he slapped the wall switch, and the fluorescents sparked to life.

  And illuminated Stephen Diaz, who was sitting on the floor in the corner with his knees drawn up to his broad chest, his head in his hands.

  “Oh, sorry,” Elliot said. “I’m so sorry—I didn’t know you were in here.”

  Diaz was up and on his feet so quickly, in one smooth motion, that Elliot almost doubted what he’d just seen. Almost. But he closed the door and stepped directly in front of it, blocking the exit, as he asked Diaz, “Are you okay?”

  The other man couldn’t—or wouldn’t—meet Elliot’s eyes as he shook his head no, even as he ran his hands down his face and said, “Yeah, I’m just … I needed a minute. It was a really rough night and …” He made a sound that was vaguely laughter-like as he shook his head again.

  “Yes, it was a rough night,” Elliot agreed. “Come on. Quick med scan. Off with your clothes and up on the table. Computer, access EZ. Prep full scan of Dr. Stephen Diaz. I know you did this when you first came in, but … It’ll take us two minutes, tops.”

  Diaz looked as if he were going to give birth to a water buffalo, right there on the exam room floor. “Oh,” he said. “No. No, I just … I really need to be alone right now. I need to not, um …”