“What, are you losers just going to stand there and look at mind numbing data while that girl runs free?” The air in the room rose at least ten degrees as Randy entered from the other door. “Or do you expect me to continue to do all the work?” And with his brother’s first footsteps into their family’s house in weeks, it was truly time to get down to business. Still, Ryan wished for once he could take off this burden.
* * *
Donna
At home, Donna bypassed the table of sugary sweets from her grandmother that had put her dad into a deep slumber with Smoky on the couch. She went straight into her dad’s room and to the boxes of missing kids stuff. Like a maniac, she took the box that said David on it and went into her room. She was going to find a clue, something that fit the Applegates to this crime if it took her the entire night. This day reminded her of another terrible day from her past …
Five years ago when she was twelve and had returned home from the city for the first time, Donna had needed to tell Ryan that something terrible had happened to her. Something she’d witnessed that had broken her and was making her see gray every time she closed her eyes.
She tried going to Ryan’s door, but he had refused to see her. Not knowing where else to go, Donna had stayed at her grandmother’s before the first day of middle school, and she’d been eating her grandmother’s sweets almost obsessively, because at that time Donna just needed something of comfort, something to do with her moments that would make sense.
Then on the first day of middle school, Ryan wouldn’t let himself be around her at all. He had suddenly made new, cooler friends. He’d also shot up in height a full foot and lost the small amount of acne that had been on his face the year before. And his voice had also gotten deeper. Ryan had gone through puberty, becoming a man before all the other boys in school had even gotten close, and everyone had taken notice. Everyone, including the kids in the older grades that wanted to be his friends; that was such a cool and strange deal.
Every time Donna tried to get his attention, as if he’d been commanded to, he’d look away; always leaving the room of the class they had together before she was even quick enough to get up. Donna had wondered back then what she had done. Had she become some kind of freak that her best friend wouldn’t talk to her? And Ryan had been even more than a “normal” best friend, he’d been her first kiss. And he’d told her never to forget something, something she couldn’t remember … she didn’t understand.
By the second week of school that year, their town had gotten two new kids at the same time, which had been quite the scandal in their classes. One was a beautiful little girl, who Ryan had welcomed into his new group of friends instantly, Lynn Eris. Even at thirteen, Lynn too seemed older, something was different about her, and she had seemed breathtaking until she opened her mouth. Donna soon found out Lynn wouldn’t stand for her trying to get her old friend Ryan’s attention.
“Why don’t you just keep eating all those sweets your grandmother packs for you baby cow or should we call you the chubby gymnast?” Lynn had teased Donna after one week of knowing her. “No one here wants to speak to you.” Ryan hadn’t been there when Lynn had said that, but the hysterical scene of the new girl becoming cool and Donna’s being defined as a loser spread around their small pre-teen campus like wild fire, and then nobody wanted to talk to her.
Totally lost, Donna had stayed in the middle school bathroom long after the bell had rung one day. She had cried and cried and cried, and strangely, her salty tears had just made her want to eat more. What other comfort did she have? That’s when Donna met Spencer and Rebecca.
Rebecca had walked into the bathroom and had paused and stopped when she saw Donna. Rebecca had always hung out with younger kids because she was the tiniest girl in their class and looked a lot younger than everyone else did. Turns out she had been smarter than all the students put together.
“What’s wrong?” Rebecca had asked her.
Until then, Donna had never told anybody what had really happened in New York. She answered, “Every time I close my eyes, my head throbs and all I see is gray.”
“Why don’t you try reciting an arithmetic, or counting backwards from ten thousand,” Rebecca suggested. “My mom always tells me when things seem bad to try and get your mind off yourself and onto new things. It’s something I have a lot of trouble doing, too.” Rebecca admitted as she dried Donna’s tears away. Then she’d recited an arithmetic in a whole other language. That day Rebecca would soon become the most interesting person Donna would ever know in East Applegate. Her parents were geologists and had traveled the whole world.
When Donna and Rebecca had left the bathroom, they’d found Spencer, the other mysterious new kid, outside in the halls. Spencer at the time had refused to go to class. He apparently was from a bright, cool, and sunny place called Florida, and was boycotting his mom’s sudden decision to move there. The three of them all became instant friends, though Spencer had never quite opened up completely, there had always seemed something very secretive about the reason his mom had really come to their small town.
Yet, with all the bullying that was ahead of them, they’d stuck together for each other. Of course, that was all until the accident, when at sixteen a car came speeding down the road and had slammed into Donna head on, changing her life forever.
Somehow, now in present time, as she searched through bizarre pictures that her brother had drawn of himself before he ran away—where he’d sketched multiple images of himself on a single page—Donna refused to bury her panic in eating or feeling depressed. Instead she searched for information until her mind was so tired that she finally, after a long while, fell asleep. That was until a loud clatter in her room awoke her in the middle of the night.
Donna woke up and found herself face to face with a little, violet eyed girl.
Chapter Nine
Donna wanted to scream but found she couldn’t as she jumped off the bed and onto her feet. Her body became lighter, as light as a cat as her gymnastics training allowed her to land right on her toes. She knew she was growing more and more transparent by the minute, her shock and fright giving her most deadly secret away. God, she needed to learn how to control her powers more before she turned into an electric ghost in front of the entire town.
Donna blinked to make sure she wasn’t dreaming as the violet eyed girl moved closer. She wasn’t afraid of Donna at all, and that’s when Donna knew exactly who she was: the boy’s sister. Which meant she had a power too, and that she, like Donna, was some kind of solider.
This was the one Spencer had crashed into. “Donna,” the little girl breathed. “Donna Young?”
How does she know my name? This whole thing couldn’t be real. How was it others like Paul, like this girl and her brother, seemed to know more about Donna than she did herself?
“How do you know who I am and where to find me?” Donna demanded once she found her voice, and immediately felt a stroke of guilt. She didn’t understand where it came from, but it was there. Guilt for letting this girl’s brother get taken without acting to stop it, guilt because there was a child in front of her and Donna didn’t know how to help. But what could she do really? She wasn’t trained or brought up to know about any of this.
“My brother told me, we communicate telepathically. He told me about your abilities and where to find you. I’m Alexis, by the way, and my brother’s name is Xander,” she went on to tell Donna as she held out her hand like a little business woman for Donna to shake. Donna just stood there dumbfounded at the twelve year old.
Hold on … did she say her and her brother communicated telepathically? As in heard each other’s thoughts? Jesus, what else was it people like Donna were able to do? Boy would that ability be convenient for Donna to find her own brother.
“How is that possible? How does your brother know about my powers?” Donna demanded. “What are you two?”
“We’re like you, Donna,” the girl reminded her of the obvious. Donna made h
erself human so she could pinch herself. God, she wasn’t dreaming at all. “We’re Biomax soldiers.”
Biomax? Donna had heard the term at the plant when she had tried to brake out Paul, but it was still a blurry foreign word to her. What is Biomax, and what does it mean?
“Biomax as in the study of live organisms multiplied over and over again to the max or to their maximum potential.” Alexis answered and Donna literally jumped. Was she able to read Donna’s mind too?
“So that’s what we are?” Donna tried to understand this. A Biomax solider. Donna and these younger children weren’t even adults, how could anyone give them the label of solider? Then again, this girl’s brother had moved like he knew how to evade people in that store. He’d have escaped all those agents if it wasn’t for Randy, all without his powers. That’s more than Donna could ever do. And the way this little girl was acting so professional now … Another deadly chill went down her spine. Donna was untrained, a mystery, and knew nothing.
“Well, we’re a little more than that,” Alexis said matter-of-factly, as if she was teaching Donna something. “But basically yeah.” There was something about her that, like her brother, made her seem smarter, more in control and aware of what was going on. Like they were above what was happening around here.
“How are you and I … how are we like this?” Donna found herself asking desperately. She wanted to know, needed to know, these answers no one had been able to give her. Paul probably could have filled her in, but he was dead. Donna had failed him.
“I don’t know all the answers like how you’ve come to be this way,” Alexis disappointed her, even though it was hard to judge whether she was telling the truth. “But my brother and I were born like this, and we need your help.”
“My help?” Donna breathed the words as a string of fear pulled at her. The last time she’d tried to help someone they’d died and Donna had barely gotten out alive.
“Yes, my brother has been taken,” Alexis went on. “But I hear what he hears. They are moving him to New York tomorrow whether they find me or not. Now that the power plant has been jeopardized, they need to move him to where they take all the other kids, to the compound, and they know I’ll try to come after him.” Something in the girl’s tone reminded Donna of her own past thoughts. The thoughts she’d had when Paul told her someone would come after her if anyone ever learned about her powers. “Run, tell no one about this! If they catch you, they’ll kill you!”
Those terrible phrases ran through Donna’s imagination as gray flashes erupted in her head. Would they kill this girl if they caught her, too, or worse? And what was it they were doing to her brother now? Dear God, they were just kids. They looked about same age Donna had been when she and Ryan had still been friends, and then something terrible had happened to her.
“We need someone else with powers, someone stronger than us to catch them off guard. You’re the one that Paul Cohen saved. It was his virus that freed me. I need you to help get my brother back before they bring him to Decacrowns. Please help me save my brother,” Alexis pleaded as another mind numbing, migraine worthy, terrible gray flash went through Donna’s mind like a thunderbolt.
Donna had to hold her head and turn partially electric to get it to stop. Once the molecules in her body came to life and her body grew electrically light again, she could think, and thinking had a deadly price right now. “What did you just say?” she asked Alexis, who was taken aback by Donna’s strange behavior.
“I asked you to please help me save my brother. Please, Donna!” she began to plead but Donna stopped her.
“Before that, where did you say they would take him?”
“Decacrowns, it’s this—”
“Old, shut down hospital in New York City,” Donna finished for her and the little girl nodded.
“The compound’s underneath it. How do you know that already?” Alexis asked her as she took a step closer.
Something rocked Donna’s entire soul. “Because I’ve been there before, or near it anyway.” Donna remembered running toward the giant, old building in the city when the most terrible thing had happened to her childhood self. Something that couldn’t possibly be connected to her powers, the Applegates, or these kids, and yet it all was. This was a key to the puzzle Donna couldn’t handle, and now she knew without a doubt what she’d have to do.
“I’ll help you.” Donna breathed the heavy words, and she knew where she would have to go. A place that held dreams of freedom, big odds, and an old ghost of a nightmare: New York.
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