The Gatherer Series, Book 1

by Colleen Winter

  “The lab isn’t secure.”

  It was how he had explained why he had taken it on the night the fire had come, claiming he had gone home because he needed the rest. Of course he hadn’t started the fire. He would never have done anything to hurt her or the Gatherer. How could she even ask that?

  Every small imperfection of his skull showed through his shaved hair. In his hand, he held a bag of the tiniest screwdrivers.

  “What are those?”

  He looked down, surprised she didn’t know what they were.

  “Needles. For acupuncture.”

  She retreated towards the chair.

  “And you want to put those in me.”

  He stopped her with a hand on her wrist.

  “It will help you feel better.”

  Sweat formed in the deep lines of his forehead, his desperate brown eyes shining from a skull that was not far from a skeleton.

  “I promise.”

  She sensed the reassurance of his grip on her arm, the voice that he had only ever used for her, and the fatigue so insistent it battered against her like the wind. She didn’t have the energy to fight him, to tell him that it would be another false trail and this was a damage she would never be rid of.

  She knelt and eased down onto her hip.

  “Take off your boots.”

  “Daniel—”

  She recognized her stern tone, their familiarity returning fast and easy, like the day they had met, both wildly excited to finally be at university, the connection as if they had already known each other.

  “Trust me.”

  After a moment where she looked up at him, his brown eyes the only part that resembled the Daniel from before, she untied her boots, loosening the crossed laces so she wouldn’t have to struggle to pull them off. The air was cold on her toes, her skin wrinkled. She placed the boots neatly beside her. Daniel always did what he felt was right, and if today he wanted to help her, she would let him.

  She lay back, welcoming the divine release of the stone’s cold support.

  “Will they help?”

  A tiny distracted nod as he pushed up her sleeve and inserted the first needle near her elbow. His hands were warm, almost hot, and she felt the smallest of pricks as the tip pierced her skin. It calmed her to have him touch her, shifting over her as he administered his cure.

  He inserted needles in her hands, calves, and feet with the final one delicately placed between her eyes. His face was close to her as he inserted it, hovering over her as he had so many times before. She would have liked to be in that other time, when their only concern had been to quench their need for each other. She wanted to touch his hand but her arms were leaden, the thought overtaken by her body’s need to sleep. Rusted stained circles marred the plaster ceiling.

  “How long will it take?”

  She tried to sit at the sudden image of Romero barging into the small room, or one of the corporation’s goons bearing down on her.

  Daniel eased her back down, and checked that she hadn’t dislodged the needles.

  “I’ll be here the whole time.”

  THIRTY

  Storm’s hands and feet were as cold as the stone beneath her back, yet she felt as if she was waking from a deep, complete sleep. She pointed her toes to warm them and flexed her hands.

  “Hold on.”

  Daniel’s voice was close beside her, and she remembered her flight, his gaunt face and the frightening power of her fatigue. Sunlight filled the ceiling as Daniel leaned over her, and she felt tiny points of awareness wherever he touched her. She lifted her head as he pulled the acupuncture needle from the web of her hand and felt a small prick of pain between her eyebrows. She reached for it but Daniel gently stopped her hand.

  “Wait.”

  Carefully and methodically he drew out needles. As she waited, she realized she was impatient, eager to sit up with a freshness and energy she couldn’t remember feeling, like a close friend she hadn’t expected to see again.

  “You know acupuncture?”

  He drew the needle from between her eyes.

  “I know a lot of things I didn’t use to.”

  He offered his hand to help her sit, his skin deliciously warm. Her muscles were smooth, relaxed and each shade of the stone floor was finely etched.

  “Does that even work?”

  He sat back on his haunches, the shadow of a beard visible below sunken, exhausted eyes.

  “You tell me.”

  She stood slowly and stretched her shoulders, feeling a small moment of vertigo that vanished.

  “It’s like I’ve been washed clean.”

  Lines appeared around his eyes as he smiled. He looked twenty years older than he should have.

  “Can you do it to yourself?”

  He was slow to nod, the way he often did when unsure of an answer.

  “It’s not as effective.”

  Storm reached her arms over her head, stretching from side to side. She was thinner, her muscles atrophied, but she felt as if her body were her own again. She grinned, starting to peel off the suit.

  Daniel’s mouth tightened. She stopped, one arm out of a sleeve.

  “What is it?”

  Her jubilation notched down.

  “Once you’re exposed to another field you’ll be knocked out of balance again. Whatever the Gatherer does, it seems to permanently destabilize the body’s electrical balance.”

  “But I feel amazing.”

  He pulled himself to standing, running a thin hand over his head as if his thick bangs still hung in his eyes.

  “The needles rebalance it, but you’re still susceptible to any other currents or fields. Once you’re exposed, you’ll slip out again.”

  She put her arm back in the sleeve, zipping up the front. She hated the feel of it, as if it carried the pain and sickness with it.

  She lowered herself into the chair, fresh, yet now with the awareness of her new state’s fragility and its need for protection.

  The silence in the church was complete, only she and Daniel tucked inside its sanctuary. The loneliness of it was exquisite, a low keening that vibrated through the air and walls.

  “What are you going to do?”

  She frowned, confused and distracted.

  “It’s why you’re here, isn’t it? That’s why you came back?”

  His voice had only the slightest inflection, an attempt to keep it neutral.

  “I couldn’t have come earlier. I was too sick.”

  She wondered if that was true. In the last few months she had been focused on her experiments and an unrealistic goal of creating something so she could return without pain or suffering.

  “You could have at least let me know where you were.”

  A thin crack of light outlined the door, an entrance to a different, brighter world.

  “I didn’t think you wanted to know.”

  There had been fights, screaming matches, Daniel accusing her of everything from betrayal, to using him, to her being an ego driven opportunist—some of it true, some of the wounds deep enough that they hadn’t healed.

  He stood and looked around the small room as if it might offer an alternate exit.

  “It was hard on all of us. We were in way over our heads.”

  She remembered a specific morning when the lab had been filled with sunlight, each of them working at their stations, the combined energy of their brain power so strong she could have run her fingers through it. The energy had been so palpable she had believed they were being led by a higher power, their unique group brought together to make the world better.

  It had been Maria who’d interrupted them that day with a sharp knock at the door. Even then she had been trying to protect her, as Storm thwarted her at every turn. Storm had released an unfinished version underneath the mi
litary’s nose, thinking she was so clever when she had been naïve. Stupid. Vain. It still hurt to think of it. She turned her head in the direction of the door, wanting to be able to feel Maria’s presence, know where to find her and thank her.

  “Do you know how to stop it?”

  The silence splintered, the room widened, the noises of the street suddenly there with them. Daniel stood below the window, looking up through it at the facing brick wall. From the angle of the sun it had to be past noon, its rays beginning to slant through the narrow gap between buildings.

  “There are so many of them.”

  Storm felt the web of Gatherers that spread out from Rima, its birthplace, like a never-ending cascade, expanding its outer boundaries, intensifying at the centre. A slow, fatal consumption.

  “Was it you who attacked the headquarters?”

  He asked the question with his face still lifted, the cords on his throat exposed.

  “No.”

  He was watching the brick wall, seeing something there beyond the mortar and stone.

  “Do you remember the fire?”

  The wall of smoke that had enveloped her, finding the stairs by feel, calling his name. Not knowing if he was caught with her in the fire or if he had set it. There had been burns on his hands, the smell of gasoline on his clothes. All of which he’d claimed to have gotten in the fire, and could easily have gotten from starting it.

  “Every day.”

  “Water would have done as good a job. I don’t think they really knew what they were doing. Water would have made more sense than fire. Disabled any Gatherers we had on site without the destruction or danger.”

  “They probably didn’t understand how it worked.”

  He turned from the window, his face fresher, more alert.

  “Or, it wasn’t the Gatherer they were after.”

  He smiled a little, a hint of his old energy vibrating off of him.

  “It could have been me or you. Or all of us. We knew that at the time.”

  It was one of the reasons she hadn’t thought Daniel had done it. Destroying the Gatherer and its danger, yes, hurting anyone on the team, no.

  “Once we lost the lab the Gatherer was too exposed. Ready for anyone to take it from us.”

  While she had been questioning whether they should have invented the Gatherer at all, he had been rehashing the events of what had happened, looking for a solution or forgiveness.

  “We could have told people that everything was destroyed in the fire. Kept the prototype secret and worked on it ourselves. Released it the way we wanted to.”

  He could have been telling her what could have happened, or what he had planned. Either way, that wasn’t how it had worked out.

  “I’m more concerned with what happens now.”

  He stretched out his arms, trying to ease the tension of the suit.

  “I know some people.”

  “What people?”

  “That could help us.”

  The outer door thudded shut, followed by footsteps and hushed female voices.

  Daniel pressed his eye to the crack in the door.

  There was the creak of a pew and more shuffling on stone.

  Daniel pulled back and put his hands together, nodding towards the nave to indicate the women were praying.

  Storm had prayed often enough during experiments, when she had been caught in the fire, and when she’d thought the illness would kill her.

  Daniel reclosed the door and sat carefully back in his chair. It was quiet for a long time and Storm wondered what they could possibly be praying about. Her pleas normally lasted little more than a few desperate seconds.

  Daniel placed his hat on the desk between them, its white edge smudged with dirt.

  She breathed carefully as she listened for sounds in the nave, and as the silence continued she checked in with the various parts of her body, carefully exultant when she discovered no pain or threat of spasms. As the time grew longer, her new well-being gathered into an impatience that she left untouched outside of herself, careful to protect her moment of strength.

  When an eternity had passed, Daniel checked the door again, moving even slower. After confirming the women had not left, he removed his outer clothes, draping them over the back of the chair. A long string hung from the back zipper of the wetsuit and he unzipped it slowly, one tooth at a time, each tiny click as loud as the rap of knuckles on the door. There was the quiet sound of rubber stripping off flesh, and Daniel’s ravaged emaciated body stood before her. His clavicles rose high out of boney shoulders, a spotty violent rash covering his right side. Boxer shorts hung on sharp hip bones, the hair on his legs dark threads on white flesh. She turned her gaze away, his deterioration so much worse than watching her own.

  Unconcerned with her scrutiny, he laid the suit on the floor and slipped back into his outer clothes. Once dressed, he lay on the suit and drew a handful of tiny packets from his pouch. She watched in fascination as he gently inserted the needles into his feet and shins moving up to hands and arms. He had to pause on several of the needles when his hand shook.

  He lay down and placed a final needle between his eyes. As it leaned towards his forehead, the women’s voices started, louder than before. Storm moved to the door. The women were older, thick in shoulder and waist, their gray hair neatly coiffed tight against their skulls. As they made their way out of the church, they donned gloves, speaking with their heads together. The door thudded closed.

  Daniel laid his hands lightly on his hips.

  “Will you turn the needles for me?”

  The request was strangely intimate, knowing as she did that there would be an exchange of energy between them, something baser and more absolute than sex or exchanging bodily fluids.

  She knelt down beside his shoulder, the balls of her feet pushed tight to the wall.

  “Just turn. Maybe five degrees. Back and forth.”

  Daniel closed his eyes and she could almost see the illness that spread through him. There was a heaviness to his shoulders, his feet splayed apart. His silver cross hung on a chain around his neck, a fixture since the day they’d met.

  She started with his hand, turning so gently it barely felt like she had touched it at all. When he didn’t respond, she moved to his elbow, making infinitesimal twists of the tiny needle. She didn’t know if she had been expecting lightning bolts racing out of her fingers, but as she moved from needle to needle like a hummingbird hovering over him, she felt more calm than energized, with a complete, contented focus on each thin stick of metal.

  When she had finished, Daniel was watching her.

  “Thank you.”

  She nodded and sat back. His eyes closed.

  He looked fragile on the bare stones in an office devoid of comfort, the stone and the metal legs of the desk speaking of hardness and impenetrable surfaces, like he had been banished from the softness of daily life.

  “Don’t leave.”

  The pull of something deep inside her resonated, of guilt, fear. She felt him slip away from her, dragged into whatever depth waited for him. Her legs were strong where she leaned against the wall, her body ready in a way she hadn’t felt for months. And Daniel looked worse than her.

  When his breathing deepened, she stood and, checking first that the church was empty, slipped into the nave. The air was colder, damper, the high ceilings and stone floor incapable of providing any warmth. The stone would stop any electric fields, but she was still tuned for the magnetic fields that could penetrate the thick walls and arrive from any direction or source.

  She took in the dimness of the pews and the cross mounted high above it all. Red and blue light refracted through a stained-glass window to a single point of colour in the sanctuary. She ran her hand along the wood, recognizing the relaxed smoothness of her muscles at each step. It reminded her of standing i
n the middle of Romero’s web, its energy holding her gently in its palm.

  She craned her head to the high peaked roof, scanning for any kind of pattern in the pews. There was no web or grid, just the stone walls, wood pews, and the tiny flicker of two candles along the side.

  She approached the shrine, drawn to the restless light, the drafts from the church buffering the small flames so they were never still. She lifted her palm to it, grateful for its small heat and the warm reflections on the stone. It reminded her of long nights in the cabin, the wood stove her small source of heat against a vast landscape, its light battling alongside her against the loneliness.

  She stopped at the exit doors on her second lap. There was a whistle of air sucking beneath the door. It would be so easy to push open the heavy doors, take her momentary return to health and run with it. It made sense to keep moving, to make the most of this new energy while she had it.

  She eased open the door, colder vibrant air rushing through the thin opening. The light was strong and clear, like looking onto a stage before a performance begins.

  “Leaving again?”

  She let go of the door. Daniel had dressed, his cap pulled low over eyes almost darker than they’d been before the needles.

  “Will you come with me?”

  * * * *

  He took them down the alley beside the church into a narrower, tighter laneway that ran behind the businesses, the reek of old garbage and the skittle of an empty chip bag blown across broken pavement. They walked fast, their long strides easily matched, a fresh wind bringing the taste of salt.

  Daniel held the meter in his hand, veering around fields that formed in their path. She tried to believe she would have brought hers if she hadn’t left the cabin in such a hurry but she wasn’t sure. Daniel had done a better job of looking after himself.

  “Stay close.”

  They passed around the hulking hum of a refrigeration unit. When they approached power lines strung above the alley, Daniel took her hand and led her through as he watched his meter intently. He drew her under as if they were playing a game of double dutch. One quick hop and they were past, the field little more than a shadow over her skin.