Toxic Heart

by Theo Lawrence

  It grows from a tiny speck to the size of my thumbnail, and then even larger, stretching out like taffy until it is no longer a circle but more of an oval. A head pops out, followed by arms, then legs.

  It’s a human figure, glowing red.

  It rushes toward me from the back of the street in the painting, dodging figures who turn their heads as this red man surges forward.

  Then it grows again and shifts. Changes from red to silvery-white.

  It’s no longer a person, I realize. The shape becomes so large that it’s almost too big for the frame. It’s a motorcycle.

  One that, despite being made up of painted dots, clearly belongs to someone I know.

  Turk.

  My body seems to fight off whatever stuff the mystics have been injecting me with. I feel alive.

  There’s a roar as the motorcycle blasts out of the painting and into the room, and it is indeed Hunter’s best friend astride the bike, which stops on the expensive-looking Oriental rug. Turk has the same black Mohawk I remember, sheared close to his scalp at the sides and spreading up toward the ceiling, the platinum tips so bright they make my eyes hurt. His tattoos pulse, and the fire-breathing dragon on his right arm actually seems to be billowing smoke from its mouth.

  There’s a familiar glint in Turk’s eyes and a wide smile across his face.

  Thomas’s eyes nearly bulge out of their sockets. “What the—”

  But Turk cuts him off by slewing his bike sideways. The white motorcycle pivots on its wheels, and the chrome-covered back knocks Thomas right on his pretty-boy face, slamming him to the floor. He goes stiff and I know he’s unconscious. No one comes running into the room, which means the guards must be out of earshot.

  Turk hops off the bike and frowns in my direction. Then he stares down the two mystics, who have frozen in fear. He pulls out a long black pistol and raises it in the air. It’s as narrow as my pinky and nearly twice the length of any handgun I’ve ever seen—there’s no hammer, only a barrel, a stock, and a trigger. Can it even hold a bullet?

  “You two are on the wrong side.” He moves the gun between the mystics. One of them drops the needle she’s holding and trembles with fear.

  Turk pulls the trigger.

  He shoots.

  Instead of bullets, thin green rays of mystic energy appear, spiraling out to connect with each mystic right in the center of their chests.

  There’s a loud clap as their skin flashes a sickly yellow color.

  Their eyes roll back.

  And they drop to the floor next to Thomas, unconscious.

  “Sweet,” Turk says. “I hate traitors.”

  He rushes over and removes the strange helmet from my head. “You okay?”

  I nod. He undoes the bands around my wrists, then my legs. I sigh with relief as I flex my fingers and toes and fill my lungs with air. My body feels lethargic from the injections, but otherwise, I’m all right.

  “Thought I might find you here,” Turk says. I am so happy to see him I could cry. Again.

  “How?” I ask.

  He nods toward one of the pictures. “We’ve worked hard to get our mystic paintings into the homes of all the best and brightest of the Aeries. It makes it easier to spy on people. And,” he adds, “it allows us to sneak in through the occasional loophole.”

  I can’t help but laugh. Thomas was right when he said mystics are good at art—he just didn’t know how right he was.

  “Come on,” Turk says, helping me out of the chair. His touch jolts me at first—the mystic energy running through him could kill me—but I watch his expression and I can tell that he’s controlling himself. That he won’t hurt me.

  “Hunter told me this business of touching humans takes getting used to,” he says. “Didn’t realize how right he was.”

  Hunter. Hearing his name makes me thankful that my memory hasn’t been erased but incredibly upset that he lied to me. I need to see him.

  “I’ve missed you,” Turk says softly. He grips the handlebars of his bike and throws one leg over the seat. He pushes a button and a metal rod comes out from one side of the bike. Turk yanks it into his hands, and his fingertips glow green as he stretches the metal, working it like putty, forming a …

  Helmet.

  “Safety first, dude,” he says, tossing me the helmet. I put it on and climb onto the bike in front of him, adjusting my barely-there dress so that I’m as covered up as possible and digging my sparkling sandals into the sides of the motorcycle. There’s only one seat, so I’m pretty much in his lap. I think back to the first time I met him, when he gave me a lift from Java River after Hunter saved my life. How scared I was of him, of mystics in general. How little I knew about my history with Hunter, thanks to my stolen memories.

  So much has changed.

  And yet Turk hasn’t. I remember that night at Java River, when Hunter told me I should stay in the Aeries where I belong. He was only trying to protect me—I know that now—but Turk was kind to me from the start.

  Unlike the other men in my life, Turk doesn’t want to use me. He only wants to help. And at the moment, that’s pretty damn comforting.

  “Time for us to go,” Turk says, reaching around me to grab the handlebars. He guns the engine, and we leap back into the painting.

  The first thing I notice is the stench.

  We’re going so fast I have to close my eyes so I won’t scream. It’s like I’m being sucked through a vacuum; there’s pressure on either side of me, then an audible pop!

  Suddenly, the pressure is gone. “You can open your eyes now,” Turk says. I feel us slowing down to a more normal speed.

  I follow his instructions. The motorcycle descends and lands easily on one of the streets of the Depths. Any lethargy from the injections is gone. I’m completely, incredibly awake.

  In some ways the Depths are exactly as I remember them: dark, hot, dirty. Manhattan’s streets are flooded by soupy brown water, which broke up the island’s foundation and formed canals between the century-old buildings. It’s been this way since before I was born. The air is heavy and smells sour, musty, like the back of an old closet.

  The sun is up now. Gondoliers idle in clusters by the waterways, waiting in their small, agile boats for passengers, while people hurry over the canals on the raised walkways, moving from building to decrepit building.

  This part of Manhattan is bleaker now than when it was when I first saw it, just a few weeks ago. It was never nice—with its broken shop windows, façades covered with swirls of graffiti—but it was never this devastated. Gone are the brightly colored shirts that used to hang on clotheslines outside the apartment buildings to dry in the hot, salty air. There are no children running alongside the canals, teetering dangerously on the edges as they peel oranges and stuff bits of bread into their mouths, yelling Wait up! to their friends.

  As we travel through the bottom reaches of Manhattan, toward I-don’t-know-where, I realize exactly how much has changed. The buildings here were always grimy, the cobblestones were always broken beyond repair, but there was still an overwhelming sense of life.

  Now all I see is death.

  Tiny shops have been decimated, pillars of rubble and rock left in their place. Entire buildings have crumbled and fallen into the canals, and certain streets are blocked off by piles of debris.

  A few girls whiz past us on rusty-looking bicycles—the only real form of transportation that can squeeze through the narrow alleyways of the Depths.

  Except, of course, for a souped-up mystic motorcycle.

  “Miss it?” Turk asks as he maneuvers over the narrow stone bridges and along twisting streets. I glance over my shoulder: tiny green flames of mystic energy buzz out from the chrome exhaust pipes behind us.

  “Yes,” I say, and I mean it. The Depths are where I met Hunter. I feel more at home here than I would back in the Aeries with my parents. “Where are we going?”

  “Even though we use paintings as loopholes,” Turk explains, referring to the indi
rect route we’re taking, “there aren’t any direct connections to rebel hideouts from the Aeries.”

  A mystic loophole—like the one on my old balcony that Hunter used to transport himself from the underground to the Aeries without being noticed. That explains how we got from Thomas’s hideout to the Depths so quickly.

  “As it is,” Turk continues, “we can’t use the subway tunnels for hideouts anymore, since they’ve been flooded. It’d be too dangerous to link our new hideouts with any loopholes. If they were somehow accessed by your family or the Fosters …” Turk trails off as we shoot up a walkway, crossing a wide canal that runs alongside a string of battered buildings. His words make me think back to the night Elissa Genevieve shot Turk and betrayed us by using my passkey to enter the underground rebel hideouts.

  Turk flinches; I can tell he’s remembering the same thing. “So we’ll have to get there another way,” he says.

  Soon, I see land, the outline of one of Manhattan’s older streets rising above the water. “Hold on,” Turk whispers, then flies off the walkway, landing solidly on the street. A few scraggly passersby turn their heads, but we’re already gone, rounding a corner into a shady alley.

  Turk skips us around too-full garbage cans and an uneven line of potholes. Then he slows down and comes to a stop. “Where are we?” I ask.

  He lowers the kickstand and hops off the bike, extending his hand for me as I slide off the seat. “Just going to meet a friend of mine real quick.”

  The shadowy alley is cooler than the street, which is baking with morning sun, but it’s still unbearably hot. Even though it’s backless, the red dress I’m wearing is soaked with sweat. The straps of the glittering sandals dig roughly into my skin.

  Turk wheels the bike slowly to the end of the alleyway. He glances out at the street, then waves me forward. “Come on, slowpoke.”

  I take off my helmet and hand it to Turk as we turn onto the street, which is mostly deserted save for a tiny flower stall with a tattered blue awning and buckets of dried-up daisies. Within a few seconds, he manages to reduce the helmet to the simple metal rod it was before.

  At the corner, a woman with long blond hair and leathery skin is manning the flower stall. She wears oversized sunglasses and a pea-green dress, and she’s incredibly thin—her arms can’t be any thicker than my wrists. “Seems like a waste to be selling flowers down here,” I say, thinking of the Aeries greenhouses full of exotic mystic-enhanced greenery.

  “Everyone can do with a bit of beauty,” Turk says. He reaches the woman and taps her on the shoulder.

  “You!” She throws her arms out and pulls him into a hug. “Where have you been, stranger?”

  “Here and there,” Turk says. He gives the woman a kiss on the cheek, and I feel slightly uncomfortable, like I’m watching something I shouldn’t be.

  “You don’t call, you don’t write … I thought maybe you’d left the city,” she says.

  Turk shakes his head. “Leave Manhattan? Nah. You know me. I’m just lying low.” He motions to his bike. “Lock her up for me, will ya?”

  The woman shakes her head and—even though she’s wearing sunglasses—I can tell she’s rolling her eyes. “So that’s why you came to visit. I thought you missed me.”

  Turk chuckles. “I do miss you. But can you help a brother out?”

  “Yeah, yeah.” The woman pulls a tarp from underneath the stall, unfolds it, and throws it over the bike. “Don’t worry. I’ll take good care of it.”

  “I know,” says Turk. He reaches into the front pocket of his jeans and removes a gray bag the size of his palm. It jingles. Coins.

  She pockets the money and kisses Turk again on the cheek. Then she looks past him, at me, and frowns. She reaches back underneath the stall and pulls out a wad of folded black fabric. “For your friend,” she says. “Bye now.”

  “Bye,” Turk says, taking the clothing and tossing it to me.

  I unfold the fabric. It’s a cloak—not unlike the one Davida gave me that I lost. I drape it around my shoulders and pull up the hood, relieved to not be so exposed.

  Turk grabs my hand and leads me down the street, away from the leering gondoliers smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and calling out for customers, away from the mothers hustling their children down the grimy sidewalk.

  Who was that woman? How does she know Turk?

  “Hey, Aria,” Turk says, eyeing the cloak.

  “Yeah?”

  He smirks. “You look good in black.”

  As we walk, Turk gives me a tour of war-ravaged Manhattan. “Violet’s death was a huge turning point,” he tells me. “In a lot of ways, it finally united the mystics and the poor in the Depths. They’ve always been at odds, ya know?”

  I nod. In the past, the poor despised the mystics the same way the rich in the Aeries did. They blamed mystics for the deaths in the Mother’s Day Conflagration and feared their powers. The mystics resented the poor for not accepting them as part of the city when they were abiding by the rules, registering with the government and submitting themselves to be drained.

  “Where’d you go?” Turk asks.

  “Hmm?”

  “You drifted off. What were you just thinking about?”

  “The night we met,” I say. “Back at Java River.” Hunter had left me at the coffee shop, sending for Turk to pick me up and drive me home. “I was so scared to be near the Magnificent Block, where the registered mystics were.… I’d been taught to fear them. Fear you.” I wipe my hair back from my forehead. “I’m glad the poor and the mystics have reconciled.”

  Turk gives me a wink that lets me know he agrees. “Violet wanted the best for everyone in the Depths. Not just the mystics. When she died, everyone felt the loss, realized they need to team up if they’re ever going to defeat the Aeries. Your father and brother, though”—Turk frowns—“took it an as opportunity to kick us when we were down.”

  Around us, the light spires, which were once full of green mystic energy, are dark and empty. The city has been overdraining the mystics for years; I’m sure there’s a fair energy reserve to run Manhattan for the time being, but what will happen once it’s gone?

  I can’t tell how many hours have passed since my abduction from the compound, but I have definitely lost an entire night: the sun is up, people are awake.

  And I’m exhausted.

  “Just after Hunter took you to the hospital, your loving father and Elissa Genevieve bribed a few mystics to help create mystic bombs—like the one she used in the Mother’s Day Conflagration,” Turk says, referencing the attack over twenty years ago that took hundreds of human lives. Initially, this was blamed on the mystics, and was the impetus for the city to drain their powers—to prevent them from hurting any more ordinary humans, to stop them from overthrowing us.

  In fact, Elissa was the one responsible: she had offered up her energy to my father in return for a place on his staff, along with privileges no other mystic would receive—like keeping her powers—and, I’m sure, a good deal of money. She created the bomb that caused the Conflagration, betraying her own kind and killing hundreds of innocent people. She fooled people back then just like she fooled me into trusting her this summer. She told me she was a double agent, working for the rebels, and that she needed my help to gain access to the underground.

  Well, it turned out that she did need my help. But she was no double agent. Patrick Benedict, another mystic who worked for my father, was the good one, actually trying to help the rebels from the inside. Elissa was working solely for my father, and she used me to help him wage war on the mystics. I still don’t understand her motives entirely, why she would betray her people time and time again.

  Now Benedict is dead and Elissa is … well, I’m not sure where she is.

  “Why would any mystic help her?” I ask. “It makes no sense. She’s pure evil.”

  Turk shrugs. “Some mystics and humans are exactly the same. It all comes down to money. They’d sell their own mother down the river for a coupl
e of bucks.” He laughs. “I’m not sure what that expression means, exactly. Where do people sell people down a river? Which river? Doesn’t make sense. Aside from being offensive on so many levels.”

  I smile. Even amid all this destruction, Turk can find a way to lighten the mood.

  We walk past Times Square, which has been bombed out completely—leaving a hauntingly quiet wasteland. Just a few weeks ago, I was here with my father as he dragged Hunter along the streets on a search for the entrance to the rebels’ underground hideout. I remember thinking how seedy Times Square was, old theaters and faded marquees, buildings practically on top of each other, trash and dirt and rats everywhere.

  But at least there was something.

  Now there is nothing. Just a pit of blackness on a stretch of old land, bisected by filthy canals clogged with brick and plaster and scraps of metal. All I can smell is dust and dirt and death.

  It almost doesn’t seem real.

  Then I see us.

  Scattered across the ground are posters of me and Hunter—huge glossy pictures that read SUPPORT THE NEW MANHATTAN. The images make it seem like we’re standing next to one another, even though we’ve never been photographed together. Hunter is dressed all in black, no smile, very serious. His dirty-blond hair, which is usually messy and just long enough that I can run my fingers through it, has been clipped and sheared close to his head on the sides. He looks older this way, more intense.

  The picture of me is from a charity event last fall: I’m wearing a baby-doll dress the color of a ripe plum, with a soft-pink sash around the waist. My dark hair is up in an elegant twist, and I’m smiling like a little girl on her birthday. The image makes me feel uncomfortable, fake. I want to gather all the posters and tear them to shreds, but there are dozens and dozens of them.

  So I just turn away.

  “Anyway,” Turk continues. “The good thing that has come from all this is that most mystics now refuse to be drained. Pretty much all of us have joined up with the rebel cause, and we can defend ourselves and fight.”