One (One Universe) (17 page)

Mr. VanDyne’s eyes flash down at me, and he stammers for a second before he nods his assent. And then, as quickly as they got to us, they disappear into the crowd again.

After that, I basically float on a cloud for the rest of the afternoon. It’s all I can do to keep from smiling and fidgeting as Leni and I get ready for the dinner in one of the fancily furnished ladies’ rooms.

I don’t own a single formal dress and shopping before the Symposium was the last thing I wanted to do. Thank God for Leni who volunteered to bring a few things for me to try on.

“A few things” is more like a dozen gowns. I rifle through them, ignoring anything floor length — I’d need six-inch heels just to avoid stepping on the hem — or strapless — no boobs to hold it up.

Then I see it. “Len,” I gasp.

“Oh, I forgot about that one! Mom got that on clearance, post-prom last year.” She waves her hand in the air toward the pale blue dress. “Too fluffy, too tight, way too short. Made me look like a freaking lollipop. Too cheap to bother taking back though.”

I stick my arms up the skirt through what is, admittedly, a lot of fluff. I shimmy it down over my head, and the skirt comes all the way down to my knee. Leni zips me up, and I look in the mirror.

It’s strapless, and the bodice hugs tight to my torso, hitting just at my waist. The fabric is a little shimmery but not shiny. The most incredible thing is what Leni hated about it — the ruffles. An airy, finely netted fabric peeks out in a row all around the top, covering whatever cleavage I might have had, and the same stuff lies in layers under the skirt, puffing it out and making it sway if I take a few steps.

I look like I’m in the middle of a cloud. Elias will love it.

I smile so wide I think my face will break.

“Well, hell.” Leni gives a low wolf whistle at the sight of me in it. “Obviously, it’s yours.”

“Yeah. Obviously,” I murmur, doing a quarter turn in front of the mirror. A minute ago, I was a plain, slight stick figure. Now I’m curvy and luminous. The blue of the dress makes my hair look richly colored, almost with golden highlights, and there’s a bit of pink in my cheeks that I didn’t notice before.

I launch myself at her, throw my arms around her neck, and whisper, “Thank you.”

“Okay,” she laughs, “but now you owe me. Blow-by-blow account of the entire dinner. Including,” she wiggles her eyebrows, “after.” I know Leni’s been dreaming pretty much nonstop about spending the evening with Daniel, but it doesn’t mean she’s not going to be nosy about Elias and me on the side.

Mom’s waiting for me outside my dressing room. She wears a burnished bronze ballgown with a strapless bodice, covered by a velvet short jacket and topped off with a string of pearls. Seeing her in that, you can’t help but think of her Super — this is what a flame-thrower would wear. I wonder if every woman in the room is as in love with her Super as I am with my One and dressed to symbolize it, like I did.

Dad meets us near the entrance to the ballroom and extends both his arms. Mom and I each take one.

“Two beautiful girls on my arms tonight,” Dad says, stepping through the doors.

Mom cranes her neck forward to grin at me, while she talks to Dad. “You’re a lucky man.”

Elias stands right inside the hall, and I know the moment he sees me because his mouth gapes. After a second, he closes it, and I can see his Adam’s apple bob when he swallows hard. That makes me smile even harder.

We approach him, and I’m proud because I don’t wobble at all in the silver three-inch heels I dug out of Mom’s closet before the Symposium. And because I look amazing and I know it. Thankfully, seeing Elias in a button-down shirt and jacket prepared me for seeing him in a tux. He looks only slightly more incredible than he did this afternoon.

But my Elias will always be in a t-shirt and jeans, flying with me through a Nebraska cornfield. One hundred percent himself, one hundred percent honest. One hundred percent happy. The tux is great, and the Hub is great, but my Elias will always be mine to keep, away from all this Super stuff.

I kiss Dad’s cheek and then join Elias at the VanDyne’s table. We sit through a dinner with a fancy salad, about twelve utensils at each place setting, and some kind of delicious, melt-in-your-mouth steak. The only thing more intoxicating than the taste of the food is the way Elias brushes his hand against my knee every now and then, between listening and responding to his dad talking about Hub business.

Mr. VanDyne mentions something about artificially engineering the chemicals for a suit that would be able to withstand the intense wind speed and pressure on the skin of a Super who could project the mass of her own body into a pressure vortex — basically, float and fly. I launch into some theories and formulas I’ve been kicking around for a year and a half. Hoping one of them would be useful for my own Super one day.

Mr. VanDyne sits back and looks at Elias approvingly, but Mrs. VanDyne just gives me a polite smile. “Clearly a young woman this brilliant has earned a pass into the program. And to think Elias only ever mentioned how good you are at calculus.”

Elias leans in, lips against my ear, and whispers, “You are truly amazing,” and I know he’s talking about my conversation with his dad, but the feeling of his breath against my neck makes me think that he means a couple other things, too. If I don’t get up and move, I’m going to jump on him right there. Or at least drag him down some dark corridor outside this ballroom, if those even exist in the Hub.

The way Elias looks at me now, I know he’s feeling the same thing. He folds his napkin, puts it on the table, and grabs my hand. “Dance with me?”

He smiles, and I glance at everyone around the table, murmur an “excuse us,” and follow him to the floor.

We try to mimic the way everyone else dances, hands on waists and shoulders. I glance over at Leni tugging Daniel to the dance floor, and he holds her at quite a good length — confusing, I think, since they’ve been even more inseparable since that in the woods. But then I see why: His parents, the Doctors Suresh — both influential in the genetics department, I know — watch them dance with dead faces. Poor Leni.

The big band plays “Blue Moon,” a song I love, naturally. The beat is faster than I’d like, but we take it as slow as we can. My arm snakes up along Elias’s. Because my heels give me some height, my hand rests comfortably wrapped around his shoulder, and I don’t have to crane my neck quite so much to look at him.

Elias reaches his arm out, still holding my hand, and makes me spin under it. He pulls me back to him, hugging me tight, and I clutch at his waist. It can’t get any better than this. It just can’t. Not in a crowd of people, anyway.

I remember that my parents are somewhere around here, and I pull back and smile at him but don’t get close enough that I want to stand on my toes to kiss him for real because that would be beyond embarrassing.

He spins us in a circle, pressing my body to his. “So, what do you think? Can we skip prom now?”

Even through his glasses, the colors in his eyes stand out, like a kaleidoscope, and they completely mesmerize me.

“I thought that was always the plan,” I say, my voice low. “Skip prom. I’d rather be flying.” I flash him my most charming smile.

“You and me flying in prom clothes? Tux and gown?” he asks, chuckling. “Mer, you’re gonna make me feel like Superman. Give me a complex or something.”

I laugh. “No way. You’re as handsome as Superman,” I say, brushing my fingers at the hair right above his ear, enjoying my extra height, “but if you even suggest that I’m anything like Lois Lane ever again, I’ll kill you.” Then I lean in, lowering my voice. “Plus, you’ll always need me to fly.”

There’s something behind the slight smile he gives me in return, but I can’t put my finger on it. It’s not sadness. Maybe resignation.

“So what did you think of Fisk?” Elias sways with me to the music. I try to focus on the conversation.

“President Fisk? Um…it was kind of surreal talking to him,” I say.

Elias nods, his mouth turning down into a bit of a frown. “The way he talked to you bothered me. I don’t like how he knew so much about you. How he just assumed you’d want to work here.”

“What do you mean? The summer internship, Elias? That’s amazing! That’s…”

Elias’s face drops. “Everything you dreamed of, I know. But this place… I don’t think it’s what it seems.” His eyebrows bunch up, and his face has that look again, like he’s trying to decide if I can handle something.

“What do you mean?”

He shakes his head and looks off into the distance. He thinks I don’t know all his faces, but I do. This is the one he uses when he’s angry but not at me and doesn’t want me to think he’s angry at me, so he just glares at nothing.

“Okay, seriously, Elias.” I stop really dancing and kind of sway in place. “What are you talking about?”

His mouth twists down on one side, and he looks down and to the side, at nothing for a second before he says, “You know how Fisk’s son died.”

“Cancer.”

“Yes…kind of. But that’s not the whole story. He was a One.”

My heart lurches. “Okay…?”

“And they tried to cure him.”

“Cure him of the cancer?”

“No. Of the Oneness.”

I have trouble finding my breath.

“He was doing really well for awhile. Displaying some signs he was going to go Super, even. He was a kid, then — they figured his genes were still malleable.”

“Real-time mutations aren’t possible. I mean, you’re either born with a Super or you’re not.”

Elias nods, once, slowly. “Right. That’s what we’ve always thought. But…it’s epigenetics.”

“Epigenetics only influence development on organisms with short life spans. Plants, fungi. The things whose survival depends on the short term.”

“That’s what they thought.”

“That’s what’s in my grad-level bio book.”

“You’re taking grad-level bio?”

I nod. “Med school level. With, uh… It’s a private tutor.”

Elias looks at me with drawn eyebrows. “You should have… Mer, I had no idea.” He shakes his head. “Anyway, for the last 30 years or so, the Hub has known differently. With us mutants…”

“Supers,” I say firmly.

“Okay. Yeah. Or Gifteds. Whatever. Our adaptations happen much more quickly. A layer of code extraneous to DNA.”

I roll my eyes. “I know about epigenetics, Elias.”

“So this’ll make sense to you,” he says, sounding exasperated. “For Ones…they think it might be even more accelerated. We were born with only one Super, so…”

“Our genes are looking to adapt.”

He just looks at me for a few moments.

“How do you know?” I ask.

“My dad… We have a lot of…resources lying around our house. Classified ones.”

My eyebrows go up.

“I can’t understand most of the scientific reports about Charlie Fisk, but this much I do understand. Something about attempted Super gene replication, the mutated DNA causing a cell growth explosion. But only the genes displaying the One replicated. Massive tumors invaded his body everywhere within weeks, out of control. The One took over.”

I gasp. I can only imagine what a nightmare it must have been.

“Of course, the Hub continued ‘treatment,’ except now it was actually…treatment.”

“But he died.” I’d read all about the difference between mutations that caused cancer and mutations that cause Supers back in seventh grade. I remember being terrified even then at how similar they were. “Must have been so fast.”

Elias nods again. “Something like a month. Six weeks, maybe.”

“Why didn’t they wait? Test it on rats or something?”

“They did. And they thought they had the human formulas all set. Even tailored it to his specific mutation. And it kind of…exploded. Like his One genes got excited or over-stimulated or something.”

“And he was a kid.”

“I know. Sucks, right?”

“No, I mean…that’s why. Everything I’ve been able to figure about malleability… Well, there’s not much, but it’s only going to work on rapidly growing bodies.”

Elias nods. “Little kids. Teens, at the latest. That makes sense.”

“What do you mean?”

He does that thing where he looks off into the distance again and kind of blows out a breath. “The Hub has been kind of hyper-interested in me since I was a kid. Because I’m a One, you know? Testing my power, trying to strengthen it… I’m a mystery because my sisters are so awesome.”

If Elias is a mystery, so am I. And the two of us together are freaking Grand Unification Theory.

“Anyway, I don’t know if you want to become kind of a resident freak around here like I was, you know? You can make your own way. We can make our own way. We don’t need the Hub.” Suddenly, Elias seems more distant than ever. There’s something behind his eyes, like he’s holding something back from me.

“I don’t know.” I shrug, try to look nonchalant. “I always thought maybe I’d figure out a way…”

“To become a Super?” Elias shakes his head again. “If they could have figured it out, they would have. The existence of Ones… It bothers Fisk. Always has. You read the news feed, right? You sat in that lecture? He’s been trying to solve us forever when no one else really seems to care.”

No one cares except me.

I’ve never
really
wanted to tell anyone else about the flying, not even Leni and Daniel. I haven’t minded that it’s just ours. Especially since I’ve known I couldn’t duplicate the dual power I feel with Elias on my own, not the full extent of it. No matter how hard I try. But now that we’re here and there’s so much interest in Ones, maybe we can help. Maybe our bodies have the answers.

“Should we… Do you think we should say something? About what we can do?”

Elias shakes his head, fast. “No. No, Mer.”

“Seriously, Elias. They’re researching it, and maybe we could even – ”

“Merrin, I said no.”

Suddenly, this dance feels a whole lot less romantic. I barely put up with my parents talking to me like that. My eyes flare at his sudden change of tone, and Elias sees it.

“Hey,” he says, “Hey, Mer. Let’s get out of here for a sec, okay?” From the tone of his voice, I know he wants to talk to me for real, not on a dance floor and not to find somewhere dark to kiss. So I nod and follow him, trying to keep the tears behind my eyes instead of spilling out from them.