One (19 page)

TWENTY-FIVE

H
e lays there, in white cotton pants, chest bare, some kind of sensors strapped all over it. The knot in my stomach starts to loosen when I realize his skin is too pink for him to be dead.

Unconscious and without his glasses, he looks so young, so peaceful. Worst of all, he looks weak. His whole body jerks once. I look at the machine attached to the electrodes, and it shows a steady heart rate. So what the hell have they done to him to make his body jerk like that?

Then I lift my eyes and see something even worse.

Oh, shit. Oh, no. Not them.

Michael and Max lay just yards away. Immobile on exam tables, turned on their sides, IVs in their arms. A figure in a white coat leans over them, checking their heart rates, first one, then the other. Strange because they’re hooked to monitors. No one should have to check on them. No one cares about how Elias is doing enough to bend over him.

White drapes leave a square open on each of the boys’ backs, and my stomach turns. They’re prepped for spinal taps. Someone’s going to draw their bone marrow. The sob that started inside me at seeing Elias finally reaches my throat, and I choke it back, trying to stay silent, trying to tamp down the gasping and sniffling I know dances at the edge of my restraint.

I understand all the pieces of this individually. The testing arena. Elias, hooked up to machines, for experiments. Because they think he can fly. Michael and Max. Bone marrow taps to see why the Wonder Twins are faster when they’re together. But if I try to assemble them all into one coherent picture, none of this makes any sense.

Just as I take one step closer to Elias, someone grabs my arm, jerking me backward almost off my feet. I gasp, but another hand claps over my mouth. My eyes flare wide as I’m dragged, my protests muffled to near-silence, back into the room where I collected all the vials, then spun around to face my captor.

Brooding blue eyes as familiar to me as my own stare back at me, wide and terrified.

It’s Dad.

A memory, fuzzy and distant, hits me out of nowhere. Dad looked at me with those eyes once, in a room like this, so long ago I’ve almost forgotten it ever happened.

I’m sitting on a table with a thin padded cover and a length of white paper running down it. I stare down at the red sparkling shoes I got for my fifth birthday, swinging above a floor feet below. A shining metal rolling table waits against the wall, and it’s covered in paper, too. It holds some disinfectant wipes, cotton balls, and band-aids.

A man walks in, but I don’t remember his face. I do remember the bulb of his stethoscope swinging back and forth as he walks and a flash of the suit underneath his white coat. Pinstriped. Dad grasps my hand, and I don’t understand why at first. Then the man in the coat rubs my arm with one of the wipes, and the alcohol leaves a patch of cold there. The chill spreads up my arm and across my shoulders, running down my spine. Dad says some words to the man, words I don’t understand like “enhancement” and “additive capabilities” and “no indication of emergent risk.”

But his voice is deep and soothing and almost the same as when he reads me a bedtime story, so I know it’s okay, everything will be okay. The man draws his arm back, and I see that the pink liquid is on one end of a syringe and a long, shining needle is on the other. It can’t be meant for my arm that was just swabbed with alcohol. I won’t believe it.

When the tip of the needle pushes into my skin of my upper arm, it stings, burns, and then a dull, thudding sensation reverberates over my whole body. The needle has bumped my bone, and I cry out, even though I want so badly to be brave.

Dad brushes his fingers through my brown waves and tells me how brave I am anyway, how proud he is, how soon this will all be over. How, soon, I’ll fly like an airplane.

Then everything goes black.

“Your mother has been part of this initiative from the beginning. As have you. I gather you’ve discovered that.” Dad glances around the room at the disturbed cabinets. So he knows what’s in them. That same sick feeling punches me in the gut.

“I’m an
initiative
?”

“Well, an experiment. Part of one. A short one, unfortunately.”

My voice rises. “I’m an experiment?” I knew this. I knew it an hour ago when I found that box, knew it in my gut longer than that, but the confirmation from him starts the disbelief all over again.

“Let me start over. You know your mother is Gifted.”

“Yeah. She’s a Super. So?”

“You’re old enough to use the proper terminology, Merrin.” Dad narrows his eyes at me, and though part of me wants to shrink a way, a bigger part pushes me to stand taller. He said “old enough.” I’m old enough for him to tell me something. I’m old enough to keep someone else’s secrets.

Still, I roll my eyes because he has the gall to scold me here and now. Like this. With formulas and chemicals and serums based on my body clinking around in my freaking messenger bag.

“Yes. Since your mother was a child, she had the spontaneous combustibility, combined with indestructibility. Never very powerful, but…”

“Right. A fire girl.”

“When you were five, she received an injection. We knew it had enhancement properties, and we thought it would give her greater heat or range. But it added a new ability instead. We actually don’t know if it might have been latent, but…”

“But what? What else can she do?”

Dad takes a long breath and looks at me, giving me that same damn look Elias used to give me when he thought I couldn’t handle hearing something. I challenge him, stand up as tall as my frame can stretch, and growl, “What. Can. She. Do?”

“She can fly.”

“Are you kidding me?”

Dad shakes his head.

“Are you telling me that Mom is the
freaking Human Torch
?”

“Merrin. Calm down. Let’s be serious now.”

I look back at him, cross my arms, wait for him to say anything reasonable.

“The Human Torch is a story. A comic book character. Your mother…your mother…can actually go quite a bit faster than that,” he says meekly. “But yes, it’s a lot like the Human Torch.”

My mouth hangs open. I don’t know what to say to that. I’m sure I look like I’m about to lose my lunch because he shakes me a little, jolting me back to reality. I fill my lungs and look Dad in the eye.

“There’s something else,” I say. “Isn’t there?”

Dad swallows and looks down. “The amazing part about all this — about you and the reason you were involved in the experiment in the first place — is that she couldn’t do that until you were born. The day we brought you home from the hospital, she started floating in her sleep.”

“Floating in her sleep,” I repeat, my lips feeling numb.

“Yes, it was incredible, actually. There had been theories about transference of powers, but we never proved… Anyway, she went through intense studies. It was painful — excruciating, actually — but the enhancers turned the floating ability into a flying one, and for the longest time, we thought it was she who had absorbed the power from you. But we realized pretty quickly…” His voice trails off.

“That I was transferring the power to her,” I say, like he’s simple, forgetting that I’ve been hiding it all from him.

“Yes. But when we tested you, we couldn’t get your body to pick up a second. We gave you the enhancers, but for whatever reason…”

“It didn’t work,” I say, and Dad nods.
Until now
, I think, but I can’t bring myself to say it, can’t get the words out of my mouth.

He nods. “Didn’t even make your float stronger. But, then, none of the Ones responded. Not in the way we’d hoped. We thought the youngest would be…”

“The most malleable,” I finish.

He stares at me for a second and then takes a deep breath. “But you
were
the youngest, and you didn’t respond. And since then, we haven’t seen you transfer, either.”

I stare at him, my eyebrows raised. I probably didn’t transfer after having a needle shoved into my arm because I was so damn terrified that I didn’t think about my One for a long time. Couldn’t engage it. But later, when I really tried, I floated higher and higher. I wait, listening to see if Dad really hasn’t thought about chemicals not being the only factor in this.

“Some stayed the same, like you,” he continues. “Some…became very ill. One girl lost her power entirely.”

“Leni,” I say, under my breath, so low I’m not sure he hears it. She didn’t lose a power, she switched. She used to be indestructible. She got Mom’s power in place of her original. Mom, her tester. She transferred then, but never did again. Until Daniel. Same story with Elias and me.

“And Elias,” Dad says, “transferred like you. To his sisters. Their ability became even more powerful, accelerating their teleportation speed significantly.”

My brain bounces from piece to piece, my attention span some crazy warp-speeded pinball inside it. “So, transferring means we give our power away and absorb another at the same time?”

“Yes. Well, no. You were unique in that regard.”

Elias does it, too. I know that, but I won’t say anything. Can’t reveal anything to Dad now.

“So we transferred — okay. And then we didn’t. It’s over. Why is Elias back here? And what the hell are they doing with Michael and Max?” I know my voice rises, I know it, but I can’t stop it.

“Merrin! Get a handle on yourself,” he says and steps toward me, looking like he’s going to clap his hand over my mouth again. Something rumbles deep inside of me.

I can’t stand feeling this way about Dad, absolutely can’t stand it, and now that it’s happened — him keeping secrets and shushing me — I’ll never be able to forget it.

“You have to keep quiet,” he says, more gently, and glances out the door’s narrow window. He pulls me toward it, turns me so I’m looking out.

The petite figure in a white coat hovers between Michael and Max’s beds and then looks anxiously toward our door, right at Dad. It’s Mom.

“See? Your mother’s got everything covered. They’re letting her oversee the bone marrow tap, but she’s not going to do it, okay? When she takes them back for the procedure, she’s going to give them something to wake them up, and we’re all going to get out of here. I’m going to take you to the back room, and we’ll all leave together.”

“After all you’ve kept from me, you expect me to believe you? How do I know they’re not going to just come and drag us back to the Hub?”

Dad reaches out to try to take my hand, but I pull away. “We very much regret everything we put you through all those years ago. How much you’ve suffered. We wanted to give you a better chance. And it didn’t work, and we’re sorry. But we have a plan. Plans work. Storming the Hub with your friends from high school to save your boyfriend without a plan? Stealing valuable formulas that you have no idea how to implement? Without a plan, Merrin? That doesn’t work.”

I just glare at him for a second.

“And giving your blood to Stephen Hoffman in the Nelson High School library doesn’t help much either.”

“You knew about that,” I say, pushing my shoulders back, trying to breathe deeply.

“There’s a reason he didn’t want you to tell us, Merrin. We would never have… Well, let’s just say that them having current genetic material from you complicated things quite a bit.”

Bile burns at the bottom of my esophagus, and it takes everything in me to keep my voice steady. “That’s why the boys are here, isn’t it? So they can take some of their genetic material to figure me out?”

Dad looks at the door. “They wanted to see how close the match was…” He shakes his head. “The whole family is leaving town. Today.”

“Leaving?” My eyes narrow. I can’t leave Nebraska, not when the other half of me — of my Super — lies strapped to a table with electrodes dotting his chest. “I’m not going anywhere.” I look pointedly out the window at Elias.

“There’s nothing we can do for him, honey. He told us he displayed a second, after all this time. Vice President VanDyne brought him in, saying he finally flew. But when they tested him, nothing showed up beyond his One. They’re doing some more intensive testing with the girls now — to see if they can transfer between the siblings. But I’m afraid… Well, I don’t even know what substances they’ve got in him, to be honest. It’s best to leave him.”

At that, it’s all I can do to keep from snarling at Dad, from lunging at his throat and beating him senseless. If there was ever a time I could bring myself to do it, now would be it.

“Dad, I
love
him. I am not leaving him.”

Dad takes a step toward me, reaches an arm out, looks at me with sad eyes. “Oh, honey…”

“Don’t you dare call me that after all you put me through, after all you’ve kept from me. And when you want me to just leave Elias here like…like a failed experiment.”

I jerk my arm from his grasp, surprised at my own strength.

Dad’s face twists, and his lips set in a hard line. “You’re not thinking clearly. Your mother and I have planned this. Just stay here while I make sure the coast is clear. Your being here… Well, it’s a complication, Merrin.” I bristle at the way his voice raises at the end, the way he uses my full name. “But we are going to get you out. We’re not going to let them test you like they’ve tested…others.”

I cross my arms and stare at the wall. I have nothing to say to him, can’t look him in the eye.

He closes the door carefully behind him, and I watch him cross the testing arena floor, check Elias’s chart, and grimace. He looks back at the window, meets my eyes, and shakes his head, slightly, once. I don’t exactly what that means, but tears prick my eyes. I know enough from the look on his face to know that something’s wrong.

Dad crosses to stand next to Mom, who seems to be the only one besides the nurses in the arena. Must be too early for anything to have really gotten going yet.

He leans in to her, puts his lips to her ear. Her eyes jerk over to me, then close for a few good, long seconds like they do when she’s upset about something and needs to take a deep breath.

She reaches out and runs a hand over one of the twins’ heads — Michael’s, I think. Then Mom and Dad walk out together, through a door on the other side of the arena, not looking back.