* * *
“Are you sure you’re okay to go on?” I whispered to Karen.
She jabbed her elbow into my ribs. Which hurt. “I’m fine, okay? Stop hovering. I’m not a marshmallow.”
Here we were, here we all were, out again, lined up along the outer wall of the mess, waiting for the break in the surveillance loop to make the dash to the next building. Waiting this part with Elle had been a lot more pleasant.
“Maybe you should keep your mind on the task at hand?”
“Maybe I’m trying to keep my mind off how many times I’ve been talked into running around after lights out this week and how my luck can’t possibly hold. We’ve got way too many people along for this. We should have come up with a simpler plan. You should go back. Rand, you should take your sister back to the dorms right now. We can get by without you.”
“No way. Chaz was my friend. Mine and Craig’s. And those kids who’re supposed to go under the knife tomorrow are our friends too. We’re doing this.”
I looked down the line of us to Craig, the Intermediate pathfinder who was going to lead us through the max security building. We’d heard it was supposed to be a labyrinth. He was looking pale, nervous, and had the saucer-eye thing going, but he nodded at me.
“Anyway,” Karen said, “we don’t know all obstacles, and you never know what Talents are going to come in handy. If nothing else, I can hear people coming by their thoughts. Since we’re not in disguise, maybe what we don’t need is a shapeshifter. You could go back.”
“Oh for Pete’s—”
I sensed a presence before I even saw the gun, and by then I was already reacting, knocking the barrel aside, out of the guard’s grip so that it spun away on the strap he wore. The heel of my hand smacked up into his nose, I drove my other fist into his gut, doubling him over, and then brought my fist down like a club on the back of neck. He was facedown in the grass before I even started to think.
“Holy shit!” Rand squeaked.
“Watch your mouth,” Karen hissed. “Jesus, where did he come from?”
“What was that you were saying about hearing them coming?” I snapped at her, shaking out my throbbing hands and trying to get my heart rate to slow. I felt like I was going to be sick and made a show of checking the guard so I’d have an excuse to get closer to the ground. “He’s seen us.”
“He saw something, maybe. He didn’t know what, so he didn’t raise an alarm, he came to check it out first?” Elle said.
“When he came around the corner, he saw us. He probably won’t be able to identify all of us, but… What are we going to do?” Rand looked as seriously worried and scared as I felt. I didn’t know what to do. I guess if I’d let myself think about it, I would have realized something like this might happen. Rand was right, if he could identify us, we couldn’t let him make a report.
The guard started to stir and I got ready to knock him out again, to give us more time to think. It was Anderson who grabbed my arm. “Let me handle this part. Help me sit him up.”
Anderson and I dragged the guard up and sat him against the wall. Anderson knelt over him and took the guard’s head in his hands. For a moment, I expected to hear the guard’s neck crack, but after a few seconds Anderson just let him go and stood up. The guard fell sideways and started to crawl away from us. Rand lunged forward, but Anderson stopped him.
“Don’t,” he whispered. “He’s just going to crawl back to the barracks, have a drink, and go to bed. He’s not going to remember anything about tonight except that drinking on the job makes him really clumsy.”
“Are you sure about that?” I asked him.
Anderson glared at me. “I’m sure. Anyway,” he said, shrugging, “he thought he saw something, so when he approached, he had his mental defenses up. He was blocking his thoughts, that’s why you didn’t hear him coming, Karen. They do train these guys you know. Just apparently not enough to overcome Mr. Fists of Death over here. I’ll remember not to try to sneak up on you.”
“Yeah, you do that,” I said. “There’s our break. Get going.”
Accessing the building we needed wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. We had been able to use Rand’s jumping ability to reposition some of the cameras, and Elle had been able to manipulate some of the locks. Ideally, we hoped to get through this without leaving any definitive evidence that Talents had passed this way. Even if they couldn’t pin anything on us in particular, there was always the chance that NIAC would punish any number of kids if a security breach was discovered.
“I can’t get this one, I’m sorry,” Elle said, shaking her head at the keypad by the door.
“It’s all right, you tried,” I told her. “What happens if I smash it?”
“Sirens, flashing lights, guys with guns, I presume.”
“Great.”
“Someone’s coming,” Karen warned. Elle and I backed off and ducked into hiding with the others. A man in a lab coat came from the other direction and entered a series of numbers into the keypad. A buzzer sounded and a green light came on as the lock clicked open. The man opened the door, went through, and shut it behind him. The light went back to red.
Karen rattled off a series of numbers. “That’s what he was thinking at the door.”
“Don’t look so smug,” I told her. “It doesn’t suit you.”
“I think it doesn’t suit you,” she grinned.
“I can’t believe this place,” Anderson almost sounded like he was complaining. “At Delta it’s all thumbprints and retina scans…”
“Bite your tongue,” Elle hissed at him.
“I’d rather bite yours.”
“Hey—”
“Children,” Karen interrupted us, “Can we do this before I forget these numbers, please?”
“This must be the labyrinth,” Elle said once we’d all come through the door. We were in a narrow, grey corridor, and whichever way we looked, the hallways looked exactly the same.
“I’m up,” Craig said, taking point and starting confidently down the hall. He turned this way and that, without hesitation, even though he had never been here before, and even though all the many branching hallways looked exactly the same to me, with only slight variation in the number of doors before the next branching corridor or turn. At first I tried to keep track of it, counted doors, steps, left and right turns. But it didn’t take long before my brain just dumped and I was left blindly following with no idea how to get out again if I had to.
Calm down, Ethan. You’re really letting this stress you out.
Hell yeah, I’m stressed out. I’d be an idiot not to be stressed out about this.
You’d be an idiot not to be concerned, yeah. Okay, okay, worried, et cetera, whatever. You need to slow your heart rate. You don’t feel in control of the situation and that’s causing you to feel frustrated, anxious. You know that’s not good.
Yeah, yeah, okay. I tried to calm down like Karen wanted me to. She was right, I needed to keep a clear head. I’d never thought of myself as claustrophobic before, but maybe I was.
“This is it.” Craig had stopped in front of a door that looked like every other door we’d passed in every other hallway.
“How do you know?” I asked him.
He gave me a look. “I know.”
Karen confirmed, “He’s right. Someone in there is thinking about the surgeries. He’s alone.”
“Anyone else around?” I asked.
“No,” she answered. “These other rooms are empty.”
“That makes it easier.”
I snapped a kick at the door and we all rushed in. Dr. Piers jumped up from his chair and started to move for a panel on the wall but Rand sailed across the room in one of his impossible martial arts moves and kicked him in the chest. The doctor was thrown back against the wall, clutching his shirt front.
“You’d better hope that didn’t break anything,” I told Rand.
He shrugged. “Maybe Elle can fix it. He murdered Chaz.”
&
nbsp; I didn’t really have an argument for that. I noticed that Elle had just repaired the door and was pushing it gently closed while Karen seemed to be listening intently beside it. Craig shuffled his feet nervously.
Piers, still clutching his chest, stood up. “Anderson,” he rasped, “you’ve come to see me. And you’ve brought friends. Never really thought of you as the type to make friends.”
“You never thought of me as anything but a lab rat.”
“That’s not true. I think of you as a tremendous achievement. You were my first success. You’re just the kind of Ability-Affected person people are afraid of, putting thoughts into people’s heads, making them do anything you want.”
“The way you do.”
Piers smiled. “I guess you’d see a certain irony in that. But that kind of power can’t just be running amok. It scares people. It needs to be in the hands of an organization people can trust.”
“Like NIAC.”
“People do trust NIAC. We’re helping you kids control your abilities so that you won’t accidently hurt anyone or use them for personal gain. This technology I’m developing will eventually allow all people with abilities to be controlled. Of course, we’re still a long way from that…”
“No. It stops now.”
“Is that what you’re here for? To threaten me? Anderson,” Piers scoffed, “you must know that’s not going to work.” He reached for a small electronic device on the table. I looked to Anderson who shook his head at me. Piers reached under his hair and in the stillness of the room we could hear something snick into place. “Convince your friends to leave the room at once. Have them turn themselves in to the guards.”
“Um…no. I don’t think I’m going to do that, Dr. Piers.”
Piers looked shocked. His hand shot up into his hair where he’d put the device. “Anderson, tell these kids to go.”
“I heard you the first time. Here,” he pointed to his ear, “and in here,” he pointed to his head. “See, that’s what I’m telling you. I’m through taking orders, yours or anyone else’s. My mind is my own again. Do you know what that means, Dr. Piers?”
Piers shook his head. He was pale and his eyes were wide.
“It means no more experiments. This whole sick dream of yours is all over.”
Piers backed away another step and fell into his chair. His hands were shaking. “N-no m-more experiments,” he stuttered. He reached behind a stack of books on the table, pulled out a gun, and without pausing stuck it in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
The sound of it echoed with Elle’s scream and for what seemed like a long time I couldn’t stop looking at the pattern of blood and brains on the wall. But I think it was really only a second.
“Holy Jesus Christ, Anderson! You were just supposed to convince him to stop the research.”
“It’s stopped,” Anderson said blandly.
I wanted to wring his neck right there, but I had to keep it together. We all did. “Hey, you guys,” I snapped, pointing at Rand and Craig. “Don’t you even think about getting sick and leaving your DNA all over this room.”
“We gotta go,” Karen said. “Now.”
We’d hardly taken but a few running steps down the corridor when the alarms started to sound. “Someone in one of the rooms hit a panic button!” Karen told us.
We kept running, with Craig in the lead, back the way we came. Suddenly, he just stopped. “That path just ended,” he told us, before taking off in a different direction. I heard a groaning sound coming from above. I looked back to see a fire barrier drop down and block the way we had come. As we ran, more came down behind us. Craig continued to move rapidly, never pausing, sometimes almost tripping over himself as he made a quick turn down a new corridor. Then I heard the groaning sound up ahead.
“Craig, stop!” Somehow I managed to reach him and yanked him back just in time to avoid seeing him squashed by a fire door.
We were trapped.
“Ok, everyone, just calm down,” Karen said.
“Calm down? What’s there to be calm about?” Craig shrieked.
“Calm down, or I’ll have Anderson calm you down,” Karen said, but she was looking at me. “Elle, can you fix this? Can you return it to its original state of not being in our way?”
Elle concentrated on the mechanism, and the door began to inch up. “I’m not…sure…I can do this.” Her face was white with the strain and she had broken out in a sweat. As soon as there was room, I pushed myself under the door. Once on the other side, I started to lift. The other guys came through and tried to help, but it was a ton steel that wanted to come back down. My muscle mass grew as I tried to keep the door up. “Pull. Her. Through,” I gritted out. Rand crawled back under. I knew the moment he had Elle because suddenly it was twice as hard to hold it up, and I prayed, terrified that I would drop it before they were clear.
“They’re through, Ethan.” I felt Karen’s hands, pulling me away. “You can let go.” She pulled me back as the door crashed down again.
There wasn’t even time to be relieved. We were back to running. Craig said we had a clear path to the outside, but fire barriers were still coming down and we were barely staying ahead of them. I looked back and saw that Karen was falling behind. Elle was pulling at her arm. I turned to go back for them.
“Ethan, look out!” One of the fire doors dropped down and almost cut off my toes. I hadn’t even heard it coming. And now it stood between me and the girls.
“Elle!” I called to her. “Can you lift it at all?”
“She’s trying, but I think she’s pushed too far already.”
“I know it’s hard, but even just a few inches. Just enough to let me get my hands under it. Can you do that much?”
“I’m sorry. I just can’t.” Elle’s voice was faint. “Ethan, you’ve got to get the boys out of here.”
“We’re not leaving you.”
“No way!” Rand yelled through the door. “We’re not going without you!”
“Rand,” Karen said, “the guards are mobilizing to come in here and investigate. You’ve got to get out of here.”
“Anderson,” I said, “take the boys. I can get them out.”
“How?”
“Ethan, no,” Karen said, though the door, while in my mind she was chattering away about self control and all I’d worked for. Like any of that mattered.
“Just take them and go. Hurry.”
“Rand, I need to you to go with Anderson. Ethan’s going to get us out, but you have to go right now, do you hear me?” Karen called.
“Karen, what’s happening?” I heard Elle ask.
I had the ridiculous thought that I never wanted her to see me like this.
Then don’t do it, Karen thought.
I could hear Anderson barking at the two boys as their footfalls faded down the hallway and disappeared amid the sirens that continued to blare. I thought about sirens, opened myself up to the noise, the insanity-inducing noise of them. I thought about the guards Karen mentioned outside, and how they were coming with their guns and their boots, and about what they might do when they found Karen and Elle, how they would treat them. It made me angry. Sick and angry and terrified because I couldn’t do anything about it. I couldn’t stop them. I couldn’t stop anything. Not really. I couldn’t stop this mess from happening. Couldn’t stop Karen and Elle from getting trapped behind this door. I couldn’t open it, couldn’t get to them.
I let all that frustration and fear fill me, let it turn to anger, let it burn through my veins until it felt like fire under my skin, boiling me from inside. I felt my muscles pop and swell, felt like my skin was being peeled away. I heard myself screaming, felt the hot air tearing out of my throat in a mindless roar.
Somewhere inside the conflagration of rage that had taken over my body, I was still there, a small, quiet presence in the middle of the storm that was watching, thinking, seeing, but didn’t have any control of the beast I’d unleashed. I could see my own limbs, now
grotesquely muscled and disproportionate to my body. They tore through the steel door and stomped it down.
Karen and Elle were huddled in a corner. Elle screamed when she looked up at me, and Karen wept. They were swept up in those huge arms, and then we were moving, faster than anything that big and ungainly should move, back down the corridor in the direction the boys had gone.
There were stairs, and at the top an open door was letting in the smell of the outdoors. The girls were clinging to my misshapen body and bounced against me as I barreled up the steps and then we were out the door and onto the roof. Rand was there, alone, waiting for us. The beast didn’t pause to acknowledge him, but I’ll never forget the look of horror on his face when he saw what had his sister. And then we were flying over the edge. And then we were falling.