Gypsy (The Cavy Files Book 1) (2 page)

“Sorry for what? Fucking with people again?” The voice bleeds out of thin air before Haint shimmers into view around it, face first. She leans against one of the bookcases once one of her shoulders appears, examining her nails as she waits for
her
daily reprimand.

The Professor doesn’t disappoint. “Language, dear.”

He says nothing to me, not even hello, nor does he issue a warning to Haint about using her ability to go invisible. It’s not dangerous. Pollyanna could make any one of us walk straight off a cliff if she felt particularly suicidal that day and forgets to keep it inside.

The twins Athena and Goose arrive together, a tornado of rough-housing elbows and flashes of reddish hair, loosing half a shelf of books onto the floor and toppling an end table before getting themselves under control. The Professor ignores them, having long ago resigned himself to their antics.

We’re all here now, at least those who are expected. Mole is still enduring his weekly brain prodding and so is Reaper. They’re our lethal Cavies, and are kept for testing more often and longer than the rest of us. We’re categorized according to our level of usefulness, the details of our mutations and abilities listed in records the Philosopher hopes might convince the government we could be potential assets as opposed to threats.

Three Operationals, two Substantials, one Developmental, three Unstables, and one Inconsequential. That’s me. The one who will never be an asset to anyone but can’t be locked away and forgotten like an Unstable, either. They don’t know what to do with me, so I shuffle along with the group.

“Everyone sit down, please.”

The Professor’s command sounds more like a genteel request, and we drop into a circle of cross-legged teenagers on the oval Oriental rug that smothers the center of the room. He paces behind us, passing binder-clipped pages into our waiting hands.

I grab mine, excited as the title filters through my eyes and into my brain. It’s a thesis written by the Scientist back in the 1960s:
Genetic Mutation and the Human Brain.

He died before any of us were born, but his thoughts and experiments, his studies, are helping the scientists at Darley Hall figure out what might have caused the mutations that resulted in our “gifts.” Maybe one day they’ll figure out how to switch off those screwy genes and I can touch another person. Without the protection of at least one layer of something between us, touching someone means seeing a number in my mind.

The age the other person is going to die.

My “talent” is creepy at best, totally useless at worst, and being able to get rid of it has been a hidden desire for the whole of my life.

I glance around the room, feeling guilty about the thought. No one else acts ungrateful for the hand they were dealt. They spend their days and hours trying to harness their different genes, sharpen their abilities, strengthen their control—to be everything the Philosopher wants. As much as I love the other Cavies, a life where I’m not the failure, holds considerable appeal.

The Professor separates the twins, putting one behind his personal desk under the spiral staircase and the other on a window seat. I claim the second window seat, enjoying the warmth of the approaching sun on my chilly fingers. The others choose sunbeams or shade depending on their varying body temperatures. We’re all a little different. A little off the average.

We spend the next hour sprawled around the room reading. I focus on soaking up every ounce of information because that, at least, I can control.

There are five minutes left of class when the Professor asks us to gather back in the center of the room, likely to be peppered with questions ensuring we retained the points outlined in the thesis.

The pages have disappointed me, because although any information about brain research is interesting, there’s nothing here that’s new. We’re fed facts and figures and they stick in our semi photographic minds, but the Professor never encourages us to analyze or extrapolate. To find the connections, or maybe contribute to the research that goes on downstairs.

It’s only been in the past four months that they’ve taught us anything about mutation or brain activity at all, and we understand that the Professor is hiding something from us. There must have been advancements in the field in the past several decades, but we haven’t been given anything more recent.

Once we’re circled up again, Athena whacks Goose on the head with his paper and their tussle results in a snowstorm of pages that flutter down around us. Goose can move so fast—faster than light—that sometimes it seems as though he and Haint have the same talent for disappearing and reappearing. A slight breeze betrays his movements, though, while hers are silent.

Athena always seemed like a girl’s name to me, because it ends in an
A
and the only Athena we know about is the Greek goddess of wisdom. He’s named for her, sort of, because of his superhearing and the way people associated her with owls.

I don’t know. It’s still a girl’s name.

He has no qualms about tossing us into the mud for a down-and-dirty wrestling match over voicing that opinion, and since it rained last night, I keep it to myself.

Once the boys break apart, the Professor continues without cleaning up the mess. “Around the circle, starting with Haint, one fact about genetic mutation, please.”

“Genetic mutation can be inherited or acquired.”

“And which is your ability to become invisible?”

“We don’t know since I’m an orphan.”

“Very good,” he says, lips turned in a slight smile. “Pollyanna?”

“It can be caused by damaged DNA.”

“And what can cause such damage?”

“Ultraviolet light, radiation, maybe chemicals.”

“Correct. Something else that can damage DNA, Athena?”

“Plain old simple mistakes.”

“And how do those mistakes occur? Gypsy?”

Hearing my name drags my brain from the rabbit hole formed by the word
mistake.
What most of us believe we are. Nothing more, nothing less. Certainly not something to be thankful for, as the staff here pretends to believe.

“During replication,” I answer, having already committed most of the paper to memory. “They split and one doesn’t form like it’s supposed to.”

“How often?” The Professor’s still looking at me.

“One in a hundred million.”

It’s not as big a number as it sounds, given how many genes make up every living thing and how many times they replicate. Significant mutations, the kinds that make Cavies, are rarer than that. It’s not like having one blue eye and one green, or an allergy to peanuts.

The Professor grunts in my general direction, the most exuberant approval granted to me in any circumstance. Goose rattles off an answer about reproductive versus nonreproductive cells, then we’re dismissed. Normally we have lessons for four hours a day, but on testing days it’s only one. I’m tired from my electrode fest, in fact, and shuffle toward my cabin making a plan that includes washing my face and falling into bed for a nap. Probably in that order.

The dirt of the path between the big house and our tidy row of brick cabins clings to my shoes, whirls in my wake like little Tasmanian devils. As I pass the iron gates at the front of Darley Hall, thrown open in an ironic expression of welcome, a second set of footprints appears alongside mine. The rest of Haint solidifies over the next couple of minutes until her chocolate brown skin and swinging jet-black braids keep pace with me down the live oak–lined drive.

“What did you think of the lesson today?” she asks, the nervous rumble under her words laughing at her attempt at a casual tone.

I shrug, not wanting to talk about how we’re all a bunch of freak mistakes, but Haint is either really bad at taking hints or doesn’t give a shit. The jury has been out for years.

“It’s better than more books on South Carolina history, or memorizing the names of every slave owned by the Darley family between 1785 and 1862.” She pauses, then heaves a sigh when I don’t respond. Those studies were about keeping us busy while the staff studied us, and we all know it. “More applicable, anyway.”

The street of single-story, one-room brick cabins stretches in front of us. It may look sad to some people, but we have everything we need, including at least a little privacy. Reaper and I share the cabin second closest to the big house. Haint lives next door with Pollyanna, but she and I spend most of our time in Mole’s cabin, since he’s the lucky one who ended up with a single.

I peek inside and see that Reaper isn’t here—she’s probably still finishing up her testing. The lethal Operational testing is a secret, but even though Mole never talks about what they make him do, we suspect it’s bad. He never shuts up otherwise.

Haint and I sit on what’s left of my crumbling stoop. The ancient concrete slumps into the grass and mud, trying its best to bury itself alongside the era that constructed it. I nudge a clump of mangled earth and gray pebbles with my toe, resting my elbows on my knees. The sun has crested in the sky, signaling lunchtime, but I’m not really hungry.

I squint up at the glowing ball. “Don’t you have training soon?”

“Every day. It coincides with your nap time, doesn’t it?” She bumps my knee with hers.

“I like to mix it up. Sometimes I take a walk down by the boathouse or paddle one of the canoes out on the river.” Most days, while the Operationals, Substantials and Developmental are working on honing and maximizing their mutated genetics, I choose the water.

I drift and think about how, when Edward Darley built this plantation, the river was the road. It ferried visitors from neighboring homes, and the family rode it to their house in the city.

There’s a question that lives inside me, restless and separate. It feels like a dragon breathing fire, molten words that spurt into my belly while the canoe rocks gently:
What would happen if I oared past our property line and into Charleston?

I’m not like the others, after all; I could hide out there in the world. No one would know what I can do, not unless I tell them.

But I stay. And the dragon seethes.

I want to change the subject. My afternoons are mine, and I like them that way. “How’s training? Manage to walk through anything solid yet?”

Her face glows. “Yes. I stuck my arm through a door the other day.”

“What? Why didn’t you tell me? That’s amazing!”

Whether or not our mutations can be developed has been a pet project of the Philosopher’s and one of the reasons for our tests and our ever-changing holistic medicine regiment. Potential progress from
any
Cavy might mean my own ability could evolve into something useful, but I’m not holding my breath.

“I don’t know. It was just my arm, I couldn’t get all the way through. And it’s one of those old doors. It’s half faded into history already.”

“It’s
amazing,
” I reassure her softly. Because it is. Jealousy and pride wrestle inside me, neither winning, neither losing. I’m used to not being able to decide.

She shrugs, then gets up to stretch, but the sparkle in her dark eyes betrays her pleasure. Her feet disappear, then come back. She repeats the exercise with her shins, then her knees, followed by her thighs, vanishing one section at a time until she’s doing a convincing impression of the Headless Horseman, which never fails to freak me out. I don’t think she realizes she’s doing it—melting away pieces then bringing them back before doing another chunk was the first assignment she’d conquered, and now it’s like comfort food.

It’s her tell. She’s got something on her mind, something more than training.

“What’s going on?” The quiet, unsettled feeling breaks free of her restraints and tweaks my nerve endings.

“Nothing. I have a weird feeling, that’s all.”

“Are you still thinking about that guy who showed up here last week?”

We had a stranger at Darley, the first one since any of us came to live here. He claimed to be lost, and the Philosopher let him charge his phone before giving him a map and directions to Magnolia, another plantation situated several miles down the river. Haint’s the only one who laid eyes on the stranger, because we’ve been instructed and drilled on the proper procedures should a stranger ever wander onto the property. They boil down to one thing—stay invisible. Haint’s the only one who can accomplish that but still be wherever she wants, and her penchant for eavesdropping is legendary. Maybe it comes with the territory, because who could resist?

The man was middle-aged and alone, she reported. Handsome, tall, disheveled, and sporting a pair of eyeballs that never quit moving. Even with his jeans, T-shirt, Windbreaker, and sneakers—typical attire for plantation visitors—he unnerved her.

It did seem suspicious that he would
accidentally
find Darley, given no one else ever has. Drayton, Middleton, and Magnolia are all accessed from the same road as we are, but their big signs are hard to miss. Darley isn’t marked, it sits down a different fork in the road, and vegetation grew over the once dirt-and-gravel path that connects us to the modern world long ago.

The Philosopher doesn’t seem worried, though. No one is, and the boys are convinced our savior had the mystery man murdered before he got back to town. I don’t agree with them, not aloud, but it’s possible. We’re a secret. People do things—in the movies, at least—to protect those kinds of things. The people they care about.

Even though the Philosopher cares
for
us, it’s never been clear whether he cares
about
us. His work, though… nothing is more dear to him.

“I can’t forget about him,” Haint admits, finally appearing again as solid matter. She stands on one foot, then the other, biting her full bottom lip and casting wary glances toward the big house. “I don’t like him knowing about Darley. About us.”

“He doesn’t
know
about us, though. He only met the Philosopher and the Professor, and they showed him around the parts of the house that aren’t full of medical equipment. Didn’t you say they told him they were preserving the property?”

“Yeah, but…”

“Well, what do you think could happen?”