Calvin got home from school that day, passing through the partying crowd with a serious look on his face. They called for him to join in, but he waved them off, heading straight to his room to flop onto his bed and wrestle with his feelings.
Caledonia was driving him crazy.
He wanted to be with her every minute of the day, but she obviously didn’t feel the same way. She made him think about the future and question the way he’d been living his life; she made him dream about having things that he never thought he’d want. He’d never felt this way about anyone ever before.
But she didn’t trust him, and he knew it.
He could feel her resistance, and it scared him; it seemed like she was always on the verge of slipping out of his reach. Her ability to control animals, and now even people, only pointed out to him how far out of his league she was. She might not know much about everyday life, but she was the smartest person he’d ever met, and from what he’d read on the internet, both of her parents had been practically geniuses. They would probably never have approved of her being with someone like him.
His feelings were so powerful it was alarming; he couldn’t imagine going back to the way his life was before he found her.
Or rather, before she found him, he thought, recalling the night she’d saved him from a brutal beating. The fact that her aunt’s boyfriend was the reason she wandered the streets at night filled him with a renewed surge of vengeful hatred, and he had to fight the urge to run back to her house and beat the hell out of the big bastard. He sighed, remembering the way she controlled his brother and the cops.
She really didn’t need his help.
She didn’t need him for anything at all, he thought, a lump of dread settling in his stomach. She could run away and disappear as mysteriously as she had arrived, and he had no idea where he would look for her if she did. As far as he knew, Caledonia was still planning on leaving, and he knew how elusive she could be when she wanted to hide.
He sat up with determination.
He had to find a way to make her trust him. He had to make her want to stay. He started formulating plans, thinking about all the places he could take her. Her strange upbringing made her easy to impress, because even the simplest things were brand new to her. Maybe if he kept her entertained enough she’d want to stick around … Maybe even forever.
He wondered about her parents, finding it hard to imagine why two such intelligent and highly educated people would choose to raise their only child in such a primitive way. What could possibly be awful enough to make them hide out for all those years? The more he considered it, nothing about their story made sense at all. He reached for his laptop.
He went back to the group photo on a hunch, looking up a few of the other student researchers to see what had become of them. What he uncovered made his hair stand on end. All six of the other students in the photo with Caledonia’s parents had taken their own lives.
There was a hanging, two overdoses, and a flying leap from the Golden Gate Bridge. One graduate student had jumped from a twentieth floor balcony, leaving her twin toddlers orphaned. All the accounts attributed the bizarre suicides to depression, alcoholism, or paranoid schizophrenia.
The most astounding death was the widely covered case of a man who had set himself aflame on the steps of the university’s admissions office. Calvin remembered hearing about the shocking self-immolation when he was a little kid, and his mind started racing.
Caledonia had described how her parents suffered from terrifying visions and seizures, and now he knew that all of their fellow researchers had killed themselves. Project Athena must have done something to them.
Calvin took a closer look at the professor. He came across a university newsletter that reported the suspension of his funding, announcing his immediate dismissal for ethics violations. Professor Reed left the university in disgrace, and there was nothing more to be found about him; it was as if he simply dropped off the face of the earth along with Caledonia’s parents.
Calvin fell back on his bed with a great whoosh of an exhale.
Whatever the cause, it was clear that Caledonia had been raised in isolation by a couple of very troubled people. Her parents sounded disturbed at best, and it was possible that they were slowly going insane. Could they have been afraid of something that existed only in their own minds?
Calvin went back to look at all of the smiling young faces in the original photo, searching for any sign of the tragedy that lie ahead of each of them. There was nothing there but hopeful optimism and great expectations for a brilliant future. He could see Caledonia in her parents’ faces, and he was suddenly more afraid for her than he was for himself.