One (One Universe) (24 page)

The liquid in the vials glows bright pink, orange, green, yellow. Labels clearly identify their type according to color: Generative. Opener. Terminative. Developer. I have no idea what exactly they’re supposed to generate, open, terminate or develop. Some look like they were typed on an old computer program, others with punched labels, others with wax crayon. Some of them have stickers with sloppy handwriting. The only other thing on them is a rectangular sticker showing the formula for whatever’s inside.

My brain works a mile a minute, piecing each chemical together in my mind. Hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, joining into hexagons, linking together. I’ve seen this pattern before, the one listed on this pink vial. It’s a deaminator. It will break down the guanine in someone’s DNA. It is a mutagen, designed to mutate someone’s DNA on the spot. Reversible, maybe. Barely. If conditions are perfect.

I read the formulas on the orange tubes in the same way. This combination of chemicals, in theory, would stop someone’s DNA from mutating further. Ever. The Terminative formula. In theory, this is what Charlie Fisk would have needed to stop his One from taking over his body.

My hands shake, but I wrench open one of the fridge doors and grab the green vial. I have to know. One more time, I stretch my brain, structuring the formula in my head.
Just pretend this is an organic chem assignment, Mer.

I gasp a little at this next one. This one will deaminate cytosine into uracil — hydrolysis. This is a mutagen. Most of the time, your own body would know how to address the breakdown. Most of the time, a chain reaction would start. Enzymes would sense it and repair the damage in the DNA. Make it better.

This solution would force a mutation. And it depends on the body’s instincts to make it work. But only after it’s fundamentally changed what already exists there.

If the Hub is giving this to people — to Ones — it would take away even their One. Could the Hub really be trying to kick-start bodies into making their own powers?

If I hurt my One — if I made it so I could no longer float — would my body know how to correct it? Fill in the gap? Make it better — make me fly? Would my DNA know what to do? Could it be true that all I have to do is inject myself with this green stuff?

I do know one thing for sure: It could just as likely kill me as give me a Super. Or take everything away completely.

The yellow one is unlabeled. Somehow, that scares me even more than the others.

Then I see, on the label, in the tiniest print — names. Each one of these is personalized. My heart sinks. Each one is designed for a specific person. Allen, Baker, Cole, Dunham — a categorized, alphabetical lineup.

Now, I can’t stop myself. I really can’t. I move from cabinet to cabinet until I reach the Fs. I run my index finger along the vials, squinting at the tiny print. The Fs move to Gs. One, two, three names precede the one I’m looking for. And then I find it, and the world stops around me.

There are three, maybe four times as many tubes labeled “Grey” as there are most others. I force my lungs to take a breath and grab every vial labeled “Grey” I can find, slide it into one of the test tube racks on a cart nearby.

I move three doors down, guessing, and breathe out with mixed sadness and relief when I’m right. Two rows full of vials marked “Summers” and, right next to them, a row marked “Suresh.”

I shove all those in my bag too, pulling a few “Grey”s out to make room for them in the stand. They clink in the bottom of my bag, whispering,
What if we’re the ones?
in the back of my head.

There’s only one other door in the room, and I whip around to it, ready to get the hell out of there and finally find Elias. But something tugs me farther down the wall, to the last cabinet. My hands shake even harder, and I take a deep breath, telling myself this is the right thing to do. He would want me to take these.

There are three times as many vials marked “VanDyne” as there were for the Grey. I take all of them, too. I probably have 40 altogether in my bag now, and some of the “VanDyne” vials won’t fit either. I yank my arms out of Elias’s sweatshirt, shimmy out of my long-sleeved shirt, pull it off, and roll the whole stand up in it so the light clicking of the plastic vials is muffled, tucking the ends of the shirt in around them. I stuff the whole thing into my messenger bag.

Whoever thought that Fisk’s plan to quit any kind of dangerous experimentation after his son died either didn’t know about this or was hiding something. Even in Supers, whose genes have already taken so much mutation and still left them human, these mutagens could kill.

Or they could make a One a Super.

I glance back at all the cabinets. Who are all those people? Are they kids, walking around Nelson, Nebraska, or moved somewhere away from here? Were they all in a Hub study like we were? If they were, did they know? If they knew, did they survive it? If they survived…what happened to them? Where are they? Can they do what we can do? Can they combine to make a Super?

There is no placard on the only other door to the room. My skin buzzes, drawing me toward it, telling me that I have to go through. I crack it open and, hearing no alarm, swing it open the rest of the way.

The testing arena spreads out before me, high domed ceiling directly above. And in front of me, there’s a hospital bed. And Elias is on it.

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.”