Gypsy (The Cavy Files Book 1) (3 page)

Despite my reassurances, my stomach clenches. Thinking about leaving is one thing, but the prospect of being torn away against my will, maybe separated from the Cavies, breaks sweat out on my palms. We all know what the staff says will happen if the real world, the
modern
world, finds out about us. About what we can do.

They say that the world won’t understand. That out there different is bad, it’s dangerous, and people shoot first and ask questions later. That we’ll end up in government laboratories at best, tossed in some kind of mental hospital at worst.

“I don’t know. It’s just a feeling. Like, the winds are changing. Sherman’s marching East.”

“The Yanks didn’t burn Darley the first time. Maybe the plantation is magical, like Mole thought when he was little.”

She snorts. “Too many Harry Potter books. He thought Darley was like Hogwarts, invisible to the unmutated world.”

“Wouldn’t that be nice? To think that we’re special? That people would envy us our invitations here?” The memory of Mole, his little boy face twisted into a determined frown as he tried to convince us all we were witches and wizards, makes my heart ache even now.

That was before they made him kill that damn chicken he loved so much. Before they learned he’s lethal. So many things changed for him that day.

“
I
think we’re special, Gypsy.”

“You are, maybe.”

“You are, too. If I can stick my arm through a wall, and Reaper can pull the blood straight out of a rat’s veins, and Athena can hear people chatting in the secluded gardens at Middleton, who’s to say there’s not more to what you can do, too?”

It’s nice of her—of most of the Cavies—to take the time to reassure me I’m not worthless. Not Inconsequential. The truth is I am, and furthermore, I’m not sure that in the real world it would matter. They spend their days wishing they were
more
powerful,
more
different. I spend mine daydreaming about what life would be like had I never come here. If my brain and genome had never been mapped, I’d never come to the Philosopher’s attention, and I could have gone through life with a single strange quirk.

Okay, I probably have more than one, but just the single
big
one.

“You’re right,” I agree so she’ll go away. Her training session is about to start, anyway, and a brief birdcall a moment later verifies my guess as to the time. I smile at Haint, one of my best friends at Darley, and tip my head. “See you later.”

“Later, Gyp.”

She disappears into thin air a few steps onto the tree-lined drive. I try to make out footprints or a shimmer in the muggy winter afternoon, anything to tell me when she crosses through the gates and into the big house, but it’s too far away.

It’s idyllic in that moment. Suspended in time.

And then it shatters, like a perfect, crystal vase smashing onto a tile floor.

A black-and-white police car screams up the drive, freezing me in place and chasing away the plantation’s peaceful afternoon. Another follows, then another, and another—so many that I lose count. They stir up dirt into a massive cloud, like a bunch of roadrunners whirling through a cartoon desert.

The dirt clogs my mouth, dries out my tongue. Snakes down my throat and into my lungs, choking off all the warnings that beg to be shouted. The realization that everything is about to change closes my throat the rest of the way.

Fear nips at my stomach, bites my heart. My friends are in that house. My family. Adults who may not love me but have spent sixteen-plus years caring for me. The Cavies, who
do
love me.

The only people in the world who will ever know what it’s like to
be
me.

My eyes are glued to the sight of strangers swarming the big house, black and thick like ants on a hummingbird feeder. The bricks of the only home I’ve ever had feel warm against my back. The dirt settles, then poofs up again under the feet of too many cops to count. Their uniforms are black and blue, with a few tan ones thrown in for good measure, and they all draw guns as they move toward the big house in a fanned-out formation.

None of them notice me, my mouth gaping in silent warning. There’s nothing I can do as they burst through the front doors. They’re going to find us.

Dread chills my skin, makes me tremble as I watch the police storm the house, as the faint strains of yelling and screams and protests surf the stagnant air toward Slave Street. But for all of the terror making it impossible for me to breathe, for all the desperate need to cling to the way things have always been, the dragon inside me celebrates.

He twitches his tail, grins a dragon grin, and thinks,
Now, Gypsy, you and I might be able to fly. And even if we can’t, no one out there will think we’re lesser for it
.

Chapter Two

Everything that happens over the next twenty-four hours globs together, like an anthill after the twins squeeze a whole bottle of honey onto it. My hospital room hosts a slow-motion parade of cops and doctors and suspiciously nice ladies called social workers. There are blankets and coffee and eyes.

All kinds of eyes.

Kind ones, worried ones, scared ones, curious ones. Mine, which have barely closed.

The television in the room plays a live feed, not just movies like the ones at Darley, and the news of our discovery and “rescue” has been on a continuous loop. When it’s verified that no one at Darley had legal custody of us, the local cops turn into FBI agents within a couple of hours, and are then joined by less identifiable government agents. Homeland Security, maybe, or CIA. They flop out their badges when they introduce themselves, asking a bunch of questions that slide together, the letters from one word jumbling with the next. It’s deafening.

I never noticed how quiet it is at Darley Hall. Never realized how lost I would feel without the other Cavies; even our connection has gone silent.

At first panic overwhelmed us and we all tried to crowd the shared, private, safe mental sphere we use to communicate. Our emotions and thoughts were too big, made the Clubhouse too crowded and unbearably loud until we shut the doors that connect us.

Now they sit in their hospital rooms and I tremble alone in mine. Listening. Trying not to cry. Needing my friends and wondering if all my wishes for a different life brought this fate down on the rest of them, who had been perfectly happy with the way things were. If my selfish jealousy would land us all in a permanent government laboratory, poked and prodded and caged like rats.

My heart has twisted and wrung so many times since those cops showed up at Darley, since they dragged our benefactors out of the big house and shoved us into ambulances that it sags toward my knees making apathetic attempts to beat, to pump blood normally. But how can it do such a thing when nothing is familiar?

My friends are nearby but impossibly far away. The life they were content with—and maybe that I should have been, too—is gone forever.

Despite the scrubbed hospital air and all of the eyes peering at me, loneliness sits on my chest like an elephant. It scratches my skin, makes me itch as if these crisp sheets and extra blankets are lined with poison oak. The whole world is an unknown and my body seems determined to treat it all as a threat. It clams up at incessant questions. I refused to let the nurses take my vitals or give me any kind of IV, but they took some blood and seem satisfied that we’re fine, physically. Mentally is another matter, and they’re not wrong. My mind feels torn apart, lying in chunks that have no idea how to get me through the coming conversation, never mind the rest of the day.

Whether or not what the Philosopher told us all these years holds true, whether or not they would harm me if they knew the truth, all of my instincts scream to protect the secret—mostly because it’s not only mine. My stomach hurts, won’t stop hurting until I know what will happen to us now, know that my friends haven’t been discovered, either.

The man who had “accidentally” stumbled onto Darley Hall is a reporter of some kind, and had been following up on a tip from a local fisherman who claimed to see children on the property. Darley was abandoned so long ago that most people have forgotten it ever existed, and the family had never been as well known or as well off as much old Charleston blood. It had taken the reporter weeks to figure out where the fisherman had spotted us, and longer to figure out how to get to the plantation without using the river.

This is what the cops and agents and doctors tell me, over and over, until it starts to sink in. They talk and talk, but when they want me to respond, fear holds my tongue captive. It’s like balancing on an invisible beam above a river filled with crocodiles—I have no idea where to step.

No matter how many times I’ve tried to convince myself I’m not like the other Cavies, it doesn’t change the fact that I’m not like the people in this world, either.

“What’s your name?”

A woman poses the question after advising me she’s a social worker. It’s just her and me in the room and I take a moment to study the gray streaks through her mahogany hair, the wrinkles that cut fissures around her kind eyes and mouth. There’s a difference about her that unnerves me—a determination in the set of her jaw, tangled with sympathy and truth in her gaze. She’s going to insist on what the others have let slide. Make me talk.

The realization pushes my heart into overdrive again, dries out my mouth. At least I slipped the monitor off my finger before it had the chance to register that my heart rate, like my fellow Cavies, rests above what’s considered safe or normal. No one’s said anything about it and they’re not afraid of me, instead treating me more like an injured animal than anything else. One without teeth.

I guess they think I’m Inconsequential, too. It should be a good thing, but after a lifetime of hating the classification, it prickles.

“What’s your name?” she repeats, insistent but firm as she crosses her legs. “I’ve got all day.”

Telling feels like a betrayal. Of the Professor and the Philosopher and everyone else. The patient air about her validates her willingness to stay in this room however long it takes to earn my confession, though, and they won’t let us go if they think we’re all dumb or mute.

“Do you
have
a name?” she tries.

I shrug again, then work on negotiating the release of my tongue, succeeding as the fear recedes to the back of my throat and burns. “Not a real one.”

“Well, that’s okay. What did they call you at Darley?”

It probably doesn’t matter if I tell her. No one is going to guess that my name relates to a strange genetic mutation, that I’m called Gypsy because of my way of seeing the future.

My caretakers are beyond help, anyway, and the amount of guilt and pain and loss at the realization that they’re gone from me forever threatens to curl me into the kind of ball that even the pushy social worker can’t unfurl.

“What’s
your
name?” I ask, trying to buy time to find my footing. Anything that feels solid in this new world.

“You can call me Sandra, if you like.”

“They call me Gypsy.”

Her shoulders fall from around her ears. “Okay, Gypsy. Well, first of all I suspect you’re right about it not being your real name. Your given name.” She pauses, picking a piece of animal hair off her dark wash jeans. “What did they tell you about where you came from? Anything?”

“I’m an orphan. All of us came to live at Darley Hall before we were three months old.”

“So Darley is an orphanage.”

I nod, unwilling to lie when she’s being honest. I don’t want her to stop talking, not if she can maybe tell me who I was. Where I came from. And it’s not a lie. It’s a house where orphans live, so maybe it is an orphanage.

That’s just not
all
it is.

“And they took good care of you?”

“Yes.”

“You were living in old slave cabins. No heat, no air-conditioning.”

She hasn’t asked a question, so it seems best to keep my mouth shut. With the mutations running rampant through most of us, keeping hot or cold was never an issue. But I can’t tell her that.

“Did you go to school?”

“Yes.”

“We’ll need to test your education level. It will be imperative to determine where you fall in a traditional schooling system.”

My ears perk up. “Traditional schooling system? Like in the movies?”

The thought of school brings to mind a slew of films that were available to us—
Mean Girls
and
Clueless
and any number of older choices featuring Molly Ringwald. Excitement stirs within my throbbing uncertainty.

“Yes. We’re going to do our best to find your parents, and if we do, your future education will be up to them. If we can’t, we’ll find somewhere for you to stay. Either way, I assume traditional schooling is in your future.”

A smile spreads across my face. It takes Sandra aback, startling an incredulous smirk out of her in response. They’re going to let me out of here. I’m going to a real school, one with a bunch of kids who know nothing about genetic mutation, who don’t know I see death when I touch people. A place with cliques and fights and school plays and football games on Friday nights.