One (21 page)

Now that I’ve gotten the boys out of here, I have no idea how to stop that from happening.

The weird sucking-and-whooshing sound of the huge door to the testing arena opening, the one that made me jump and giggle during the night of the Symposium, startles me now.

One of the guards says, “We found more of ‘em.”

My heart races. I hear the sounds of struggle first and then see a swoop of bright strawberry blond hair.

My heart sinks, then soars again when I see that Leni isn’t freaking out, shaking and crying like I would have expected, and Daniel stands tall. Half as second later, I see why. The guards have made one big mistake, one they wouldn’t have known not to make because Leni and Daniel burned out the lines to the security feeds.

They’ve bound their hands together.

TWENTY-EIGHT

“F
ound these two trying to sneak out the way they came in. They won’t tell us a thing,” the guard reports.

Fisk chuckles. “Yes. Thank you,” he says to the guard and then turns. “Helen. Daniel. Welcome to the Hub’s state-of-the-art testing arena. I’m giving more tours than I anticipated today, but no matter. The more the merrier.”

Daniel’s jaw clenches, and he stands up even straighter.

Fisk turns to Mr. Hoffman and says, “Pity the son of the famous Doctors Suresh couldn’t make more of himself, isn’t it? It’s no wonder his parents never had any more children since he was such a disappointment.”

Fisk grabs each of their hands and walks them over to where we stand. Leni moves with jerking steps, like she wants to stand her ground, to fight him touching her, but she knows it’s futile. Daniel hangs his head.

He pushes them so they’re standing right next to me, shoulder to shoulder, like we’re dolls or pawns on a chess board. Like he’s posing us for a picture.

He steps back, clasps his hands together, fingers interlocked, and brings them to his mouth, smiling a little behind them.

“Yes. Yes, lovely.”

Behind me, the paper on Elias’s bed rustles, and my heart thuds to a stop. I whip around and watch his chest inflate fully and quickly. His head moves to either side, and his eyes flutter open. I squeeze his hand for dear life, but I don’t bend over him. I won’t make myself look weak either. Not now.

Next to me, Leni gasps. Her eyes focus on something behind Fisk and become pools of tears. She sees Nora and Lia in the sensory tank, now only a quarter filled with green goop, behind me.

“What…what are they doing to them?” Leni chokes, staring at Nora and Lia. But I want to maintain eye contact with her. Need to.

“Getting them ready to go home,” I say, keeping my voice steady, squeezing Elias’s hand to tell him that it’s true because I know he can hear me now. Elias’s head moves one way, then the other, making the paper under his pillow crackle.

Fisk’s voice floats between us like noxious gas. “Trust me, Merrin. You’ll be glad you agreed to this.”

If he keeps saying my name like that, I swear to God I will kill him. I will rip his throat out through his eyes.

I didn’t agree to a goddamn thing, but I know what he means. Staying. Testing. What Elias has been doing since he was a little kid. Poking, prodding, sensory deprivation goop. I look up to where Nora and Lia’s tank is being drained, where nurses pull tubes out of their throats and wrap waffle-weave bathrobes just like the one I have at home around their atrophied bodies. I choke, try my best to keep the vomit down. Something that reminds me of home has no place here.

“Mrs. Grey,” Leni wails when she sees Mom coming back into the room for Michael, “You said they were making me stronger.”

I look from Leni to Mom and back again. Leni’s remembered. After all this, she remembered what Mom was to her and what Mom did to her all in the same breath.

“We… Honey, we thought we were. Thought we could enhance your indestructibility.”

“Indestructibility,” Leni says. “I’m not indestructible. Only when I’m with… But if I ever was… I could have…” She looks quickly at Daniel, then stares at the ground, her face contorting between pained and composed.

I think of that snapshot of Mom and Leni I found. Of course she needed a mom-substitute. Sucks that it was just for research purposes. A flash of hate for Mom burns through me.

Yeah, Leni trusted her. Not only that. Leni loved her. That’s why it worked.

I was just a kid, too. I should have trusted Mom. It should have worked for me, too. But my instincts have always been pretty damn good, apparently, because I’ve never really trusted anyone — never transferred a thing — until I met Elias.

Mom stares at the ground, too, then clenches her fists around the side of Michael’s bed and walks him out without another word. My heart twists for Leni, but there’s no way to comfort her now.

Suddenly, the electric prickle of the buzz overwhelms me. I turn around to see Elias sitting up.

I whimper and bury my face in his shoulder. I can’t possibly do anything else. “You’re awake.

“You made it,” Elias says. “You actually broke in to the Hub.” His voice is filled with awe. “But, Mer,” he says, his breath hot against my neck. “Michael and Max. They’re…”

“I know. And the girls, too.”

He swallows, blinks hard, and I motion behind me. Nora coughs and sputters from the tube removal. Lia’s still. A look I’ve never seen on Elias before roils in his eyes. Pure, unadulterated rage.

“I heard them talking about me. They said I was going under…indefinitely. What did you do? How did you get them to wake me up?”

“I told them if the twins all go home, we show them what we can do.”

Tears fill Elias’s eyes. “Thank you.”

I nod, resting my forehead against his. Then something catches his eye to the side, and he takes in a shuddering breath.

Leni murmurs, “Elias…” and puts her head on Daniel’s shoulder.

Elias’s head jerks up and then falls back to my shoulder. “They got Len and Dan, too.”

I don’t say anything. I can’t.

“They helped you. They helped you get in.”

I nod. “I never wanted them to get involved in this.”

“They always were. You knew that.”

“How are we going to get out of here?” My voice breaks.

“Hey,” Elias says, his arms shaking, fighting to stay around me. He’s still so weak from being sedated. “It’s going to be okay.”

Fisk clears his throat, causing me to whip around and glare at him. I feel Elias’s shoulders tremble above my arm, which I’ve wrapped around his chest. Elias may know what he’s going to do to get us out of here, but he’s not going to do it when he’s so weak.

I’ve got to buy us some time.

Behind me, where my hands join with Elias’s, my messenger bag bobs against my back. I swing it around front and fumble through, my hands shaking as I hold out a vial. “I know what you’re doing here. Know what you have been doing, ever since we were little kids.”

Leni’s face screws up.

“This is your whole life’s work, isn’t it?” I continue, glaring at Fisk. “Trying to fix all the Ones? Using us as a key to the whole problem?”

“Not a problem, Merrin. Not anymore. Not now that we know about you and Elias. Helen and Daniel. You are the next step in the evolutionary chain. To lift the Ones up from their pathetic situation and make them better. If you’ll only show me what you can do… Merrin, you could change the world. Be the biggest biotech advance the Hub has ever seen.”

I only ever wanted to help formulate an advance that could help kids like me, something that could give us options. Not something that could manipulate us into experiments or weapons.

I don’t want to be something that the Hub could use against others.

Behind me, Elias clears his throat, and I notice how hard he’s squeezing my hand. His shoulder steadies.

“Where are the rest of the vials?” he whispers to me, so light that I swear only I can hear it. I motion toward the lab door with my head.

Fisk strides over to the door to the lab and flings it open. Inside, behind all the lit glass cases, the vials of creepy neon liquid wink and gleam.

“All my life’s work, since Charlie died — it’s all in here. The highest security, the deepest part of the Hub. I’ve been keeping it safe, you see, for exactly this moment. And now, with so many of you here…”

I swear his eyes glisten with tears. I wonder if there is remorse behind the smirk, if there was ever a time he felt guilty when testing or injecting a little kid. I like to think there was. I’d like to think he never meant to use weird green sensory deprivation goop or throat tubes or electric sensors or sedatives or spinal taps. I’d like to think he never meant to put pieces of the poor little transferring five-year-old Ones in vials and collect them, hoping that one day all the pieces together would add up to more than the loss of his son.

I’d like to believe all that, but looking at him now, I can’t.

Daniel speaks up. “How come I never knew about this? I would have…” He clears his throat when Leni looks at him, her eyebrows bunched together. “My parents would have brought me in for testing…”

“Ever since Charlie died… Well, of course we were supposed to stop all this activity. The trustees sanctioned us. But he so badly wanted to be more than a One. And for all the times he came home with a black eye, for all the opportunities he was denied while he was alive, I couldn’t bear to give up on him. Besides, there is always some way, some other channel, to get what you want.” Fisk steps even closer. “I’m sure you can understand that, can’t you, Merrin? Can understand the desire to be something more than a sad, mediocre outcast who will never fit in anywhere? Something more? Something your family always wanted you to be?”

“I’m fine with being a One,” I say, my voice low and snarling.

“Then why are you here?”

“For my brothers. For Elias.”

And for the first time ever, I mean it. Now that I thought I could lose Elias, lose the boys, I’m fine with being a One. As long as it means we never have to come back here again.

Fisk pulls a vial out of his pocket again, and a solution sloshes inside of it, so thick it coats the glass. “And for this. The solution based on your blood. It could be the key to making you a Super, Merrin, but only if you let us test it on you.”

My heart shudders to a stop. He knows that the promise of flying on my own can convince me to do anything.

Almost anything.

I open my mouth, about to sling another retort his way, and then a strange ripping sound steals through the air.

Elias gasps and sits upright. “They’re back,” he chokes.

TWENTY-NINE

B
efore I can blink again, a robe-wrapped emaciated figure appears in front of Fisk. Her hands are cuffed behind her, and her head still has red marks where the nodes were attached. She whips around to assess Elias, looks him up and down, and her eyes flash blue. It’s Nora.

“It’s nice to see you awake, Miss VanDyne. I hope the titanium cuffs aren’t uncomfortable. Security measure, you understand,” Fisk says, smirking.

In one swift motion, Nora pulls her wrists apart, breaking the chain and shattering the cuffs, and lifts Fisk off the ground by the throat.

“I think we get stronger the more pissed off we are. But since you hacks didn’t test for that… What do you think, Leelee?” she calls over her shoulder.

Fisk’s eyes practically bulge out of his head.

“Holy shit,” Daniel breathes. He looks back at Elias, who stares back at him with wide eyes. I gather that this super strength is new.

Another ripping sound follows, and one of the guards cries out. Lia has teleported between two of them and busted out of her cuffs as well. She elbows one of them between the legs while wrenching the guns, one at a time, out of the holster of another. She cocks one and tosses the other to Nora.

Nora fixes her eyes on Fisk, who struggles and gasps. She wedges the gun against the inside of his jaw and takes another hard look back at Elias. “This won’t buy you much time.”

“But —” Elias sputters.

Nora shakes her head hard and steps back to brandish her gun at the rest of security as Lia rips through the air again to take down the guard calling for reinforcements at the main door.

In an instant, the room fills with 30 Fisks, all grinning maniacally, all dangling vials of the serum he knows I want.

“What the…”

“He can make duplicates,” gasps Daniel. “With kinetic energy?”

“Yeah, but they’re not that strong. They can barely think for themselves,” says Lia. “And he forgets that girls who see through matter can tell which of these ugly assholes is the real Fisk. I mean, he’s practically a One himself.”

“You can tell?” the Fisks all sputter at once, and panic runs wild in their eyes.

Nora laughs. “Yes. Half-assed duplicated matter looks different than the real thing. Idiot. Couldn’t one of these fancy electrodes show you that?”

She looks at me as she steps back from of a crowd of 10 Fisks, then trains her gun on one, nodding her head upward once.

“This one, Merrin,” she says.

Fisk gives an anguished shout and yells, “Take them all down!”

His duplicates swarm toward Leni and Daniel, who squeeze hands and send streams of flame in their faces. Mr. Hoffman dashes in, yelling, and grabs for one of the vials of serum a dupe is holding. A strangled sob escapes my throat as the white-hot fire devours his clothing and blackens his skin before my eyes.

Nora and Lia each pick a crowd of dupes and start firing. I grab Elias around the waist and yank him off his hospital bed with all my strength, ducking for cover. I pull off his sweatshirt that I wore over here and tug it down over his head. He still shivers beneath it.

As the duplicates’ bodies hit the ground, they dissolve into shimmering nothingness, and Fisk screams and drops to his knees.

Nora presses her gun to his temple. “Just try to muster up some more kinetic now, you sorry excuse for a human being. I dare you.” She looks at Elias. “We can take care of ourselves,” she says, her voice stronger than I would expect for having been in disuse. “You just take care of the lab.”

“There’s no way you two can — ” Elias says, just as Lia draws back and delivers a roundhouse kick to one hulking security guard, sending him skidding halfway across the arena and leaving him unconscious on the floor.

“We. Can take care. Of ourselves.”

Still holding the gun to Fisk’s temple, Nora inclines her head to read the label on the vial he still clutches in his hand. “Merrin,” she says without looking away. “I think that President Son of a Bitch here was about to hand this over to you.”

Without even thinking, I drop Elias’s hand and stride over, grab it, and tuck it greedily into my bag, inside the sleeve of the shirt I stuffed in there, then hurry back to him.

Nora speaks to Fisk again, her voice getting louder and steadier each time. “Now. You’re going to let my baby brother and his friends out of here. And you know how they’re going to leave. So you might as well call all your goddamned security off the roof.”

Fisk groans.

“Fisk,” she growls. “don’t make this harder on yourself than it has to be.”

“Guards,” he croaks. “Call off the missile surveillance.”

Lia shouts a warning from where she stands, 20 feet away. “You can quit playing these games, you asshole.”

“I don’t know what you’re — ”

Nora delivers a swift elbow to the side of his head, knocking him flat on the ground. She digs her heel into his collarbone, edging it against his esophagus, and trains the gun between his eyes.

“You know damn well what I’m talking about! The lasers! The lasers, too!” Lia shrieks, her eyes growing fiercer by the second. “I’ll be damned if my baby brother’s getting sliced to ribbons after all this!”

“Lia,” Nora says, much more quietly, shaking her head once.

“And the lasers,” Fisk moans.

Nora looks back at us one more time, her eyes darting between Elias and me, who nods curtly, his eyes glistening.

Elias swings his legs down from the bed. “Get ready, you guys,” he chokes to me, Leni and Daniel. Leni whimpers. The smell of melting plastic and smoldering cloth fills the air. They’ve got to be exhausted after torching half the place.

Fisk’s voice, weak and wheezing, comes slithering through the air. “You’ll never be anyone, Merrin Grey. Not without us. And you’ll never be able to come back after this. You’ll regret it the moment you leave the arena. You know the life of a One is… Well, it doesn’t have much of a point.”

No, it doesn’t.

No, it doesn’t
, I want to scream, but life without Elias doesn’t either. And gaining a Super for myself while others pay the price certainly doesn’t.

Elias cocks his head toward the wall about 10 feet away at one edge of the testing arena, toward the huge red button that will open the ceiling. He looks up at the hatch that unfolds to the sky.

“Get ready,” he mouths. Leni and Daniel step closer to us.

Fisk’s left the door to the lab with all our formulas — all the ones except those I’m smuggling out — gaping open. Elias hasn’t missed it. His gaze burns past me right at the door.

Elias drops his hand from mine, holding his palm out flat. He sends a blast of air against the ground, swooping one of the medical-grade oxygen tanks up from the floor and sending it careening through the air. I have no idea what he’s trying to do — create a distraction? — until it hits the doorjamb and cracks open, hissing.

Elias says, “Flame on, Len.”

Leni clamps her eyes shut, reaches out, squeezes Daniel’s hand tight, and stretches her other one out toward the door. A powerful column of flame shoots out and torches the inside of the lab, together with all its vials, in less than 10 seconds.

Elias sends a stream of air straight at the button. The blades of the ceiling split open, petals of a flower gliding out toward the edges like they’re welcoming the sunlight, which now streams down into the area in ash-filled beams.

Some of the guards, coming out from cover now, try to tackle Nora and Lia, but Nora rips over to Lia in a flash. They join hands and teleport out so quickly and violently that the whole room trembles.

Elias wraps his arms around me, and I almost sigh with relief at the sensation of takeoff. Together, we zoom across the floor, picking up Leni and Daniel, grunting against their weight.

Now we really lift off to go back up through the ceiling. I put everything I have into helping Elias push us out of that roof — this is our only chance.

From 20 feet above the arena, I see my parents roll the boys out a side door to a waiting car hands placed protectively on their bodies. I have to trust Mom and Dad now, with Michael and Max at least. I’ll go crazy if I don’t.

Fisk limps into the lab, making a strange noise like moaning and screaming combined, and another stray oxygen tank rolls into the room after him. I wonder if Elias did that, too.

A great boom sounds, and a plume of flame shoots up after us. The fire must have reached the second oxygen tank. We just destroyed the years of research about how to make Ones into Supers, how to transfer powers, and who knows what else?

We did our job.

So why is my heart sinking into my stomach even as we climb up into the sky and out of the arena?

The ceiling closes, probably automatically, before any of the security can jump on a hovercraft or summon a flier to chase after us. I know they won’t die unless they’re stupid enough not to close the door to that lab. One good thing about an underground compound is that it’s very hard to blow up — the lack of renewable oxygen will quench any explosion. The arena will still be there.

The rest of the Hub’s research won’t suffer — that, at least, is something.

We thud down, and the frozen grass field crackles beneath our feet. Leni and Daniel gasp and place their hands on their knees to try to catch their breath — they’re not used to the sensation or quick ascent of flying like we are.

Elias snags my wrist and whips me into him for a tight hug. I can’t tell if he’s gripping my waist this hard on purpose or depending on me to keep him upright. He breathes hard against the biting cold air.

“Thank you,” he chokes as he presses his face into my hair.

I squeeze him even tighter. Having him here in my arms after all that is almost too good to be true.

“Can you run?” I ask him.

“I think so. Better than I can fly right now, at least.” He lowers his voice. “And we can’t leave them.”

I turn out from Elias’s grasp, as much as I hate to. “You guys,” I say to Leni and Daniel, “can you handle a sprint?”

They both nod, still trying to catch their breath.

“Let’s put a good mile behind us.”

We run for a very long time, until the sun is well into the sky. Our lungs huff hot air into the cold, pushing clouds out against the perfectly clear white-blue expanse ahead. It’s a new day.

The tracks of Leni’s tears have left bright, freckled lines through the soot on her face. Daniel stares down at the dirt like there’s a weight on the back of his neck.

No matter how cool Daniel acts, I know how much he loves his parents, how much he doesn’t want to disappoint them. He gestures toward my messenger bag. “Did you get any of ours out?”

“Let me…” I look down into my bag. I know for a fact I got one of his and one of Leni’s, at least. I debate for a split second. Do I send them with this stuff, with no knowledge of how to inject it or exactly what will happen if they do?

All I know is that if I were them, I would kill me for keeping it from them.

I fish out a couple of their vials, hold them out between my fingers. He glances at me quickly, takes them, murmurs a “thanks.”

Leni looks at him with tears in her eyes, then squeezes his hand and shifts her stance.

“We’re going West,” Leni says. Maybe finding work, maybe hiding out. Definitely not going back to school. Just until we know things are settled. Until we know we’re not in danger. We don’t want to lose you.”

“Okay,” Elias says. “Here’s what you do. When you settle anywhere, put an ad in the local paper’s classifieds. Look for a biochem tutor with eleven years’ experience. And, uh…a personal interest in the topic.”

Daniel finally smiles. “You going all badass spy on me, man?”

Elias punches him on the shoulder. There are some things I’ll never understand about boys.

Then Daniel pulls Elias into a fierce hug. Leni and I grin at each other, and for the first time since we broke into the Hub, I cry. Giant tears roll down my cheeks, and I can’t even move.

She crosses over to me. “Hey, it’s gonna be okay.”

“I’m just…” I snot and sniffle into her shoulder. “I’m so, so sorry.”

Her whole body shakes, and I can’t tell if she’s laughing or crying or shivering.

“For what?” she asks, and I hear the smile in her voice.

“I don’t know. For dragging you here. For my mom. I don’t know. For everything.”

“Listen.” She lowers her voice, glances at the guys, who talk in quiet voices. Daniel grips the back of his neck and scuffs the ground with his foot. “I would have ended up at the Hub again anyway, okay? Except maybe…it would have been in some green goop. With no Daniel, and no one to save me. And Fisk wouldn’t have… Well, everyone wouldn’t have heard that. Heard what happened to us. To me.”

I nod a little. Her eyes flash over to Elias. “Take care of him, okay? We… He’s like my brother, and he can’t see his real sisters for a long time, so…”

“I know.” I nod again, and a lump rises in my throat.

“I remember now.” Leni says, looking at nothing in the distance. “I remember… It was right at the beginning. I remember your mom. But she was kind. And then…I remember him. Fisk. He was like this even then. Now maybe he’s a little worse than he was.”

“Yeah. Guess we don’t know, do we?”

“No. And we won’t.”

I don’t tell Leni about the duplicates I glimpsed lining up along the wall on our way out. No point in mentioning the possibility that Fisk, in some form, will be back. Not now.

I hug her one more time.

“You guys be careful. We’ll see you again. Maybe take this whole shabby operation over,” she says.

“How are you traveling?” I ask.

She shrugs. “There’s a car rental place half a mile south if my GPS is right. Daniel has a debit account and plenty in it to get us overseas if we need to go.”

“Oh. I didn’t realize…”

“I don’t think anyone really did. But, yeah. Trust fund kid, and he just turned eighteen, so…” She huffs out one laugh. “Okay. Now let’s laugh a little. So they’ll think we’re alright.”

I do my best to do that. It feels like an eternity since I last laughed, a memory stuck in my old, beautiful life that I used to think was so ugly. Leni goes off with Daniel, and without another word, they duck into the woods and they’re gone.