One (One Universe) (26 page)

“And, Merrin,” Mr. Hoffman says, stepping up next to them. “No has ever wanted to change her Oneness as much as you.”

“The VanDyne twins are similar to your brothers,” Fisk says. “When they are together, they are able to transfer at a near-constant rate. It’s like pressing a gas pedal. You can move in ‘drive,’ but if you press down, you go quickly. We think they can control it. We can get them to control it, here in the arena. Only in a sedated state, at this point, of course, but one day, we should be able to push their powers to such a level that they could move at light speed. Be invisible. Be endlessly useful.”

“Useful for
what
?” I glance back at Elias. I could swear he’s breathing faster than he was a minute ago.

Has he woken? Has he heard?

“At any rate,” Fisk says, “with the help of some formulas we’ve been carefully developing over the years — since you were born, in fact, Merrin — we’re hoping to research a little…deeper. Your mother’s blood,” he says as he crosses over to a locked cooler on the wall, “has helped us develop this formula. Along with our most recent addition — your sample, which Mr. Hoffman so kindly collected for us.”

Mom’s wild eyes flash to me. Like I’ve betrayed her.

I fight to keep my voice even. “If you already know how to fix me, what do you need Michael and Max for?” I know he doesn’t need them for a goddamned thing.

“Their bone marrow will tell us something, something we have never been able to figure out about you because, well…you’ve never proven you can do anything. Won’t admit to it. Even to Mr. Hoffman. So, you see…” He moves over and puts his hand on Michael’s head. “…we simply have no choice.”

That’s when I totally lose it.

“They are babies!” I scream. Mom’s small hands clamp around my upper arms, and her nails dig into my skin. “They’re just
kids
. You keep your goddamned hands off of them.”

He clicks his tongue and shakes his head, and the combination makes me want to hurl myself across the 15 feet between us and claw his eyes out.

Instead, I move back toward Elias’s bed, hoping getting nearer to him, to the buzz, will steady me. Maybe help me figure out what the hell to do in a room with passive parents, an evil Super mastermind, and an unconscious boyfriend. And my poor baby brothers, who should never have had anything to do with this, prepped for spinal taps.

Mr. Hoffman chuckles. “You, who wouldn’t be caught dead with a boy your first year at Superior High, suddenly now have a boyfriend? What makes him so important to you that you would risk everything, break into the Hub, just to make sure he’s okay?”

My stomach twists, churning out resolve to get out of this, and then make Fisk pay.

Fisk lowers his voice to barely above a whisper. The only ones who can hear him now, I’m sure, are Elias and me. “He makes you feel beautiful, makes you believe in yourself, all that. Yes, yes, fine. But that is boring. So I’ll ask you one more time, Merrin: What can the two of you do?”

Something inside me snaps at his use of my first name.

“Without each other, you are useless, pathetic Ones. Without us, you will always be nothing. We can make sure you’re without Elias for a very long time, Merrin, if it’s true that he’s no use to you as he is. We could use his body in…other ways.”

I stare at him, half to challenge him and half because terror seizes me so strongly that I have nothing else to say.

He shrugs. “Fine. So Elias VanDyne is…a nothing. In two days of testing, we’re very sure of that. He is powerless — weakly pushing air will never make him a Super. He was nothing but a false alarm. His sisters, on the other hand…”

Fisk pushes a button on his remote control thing, and I glance at Mom, hoping that she can prepare me for what I’m about to see or hear by how she looks at me. A tear runs down her cheek, and her jaw is clenched. I’ve never seen Mom cry.

She looks down, her face twisted.

One of the walls of the arena spins around to reveal the girls, wearing nothing but black swimsuits that cling to their frames — thin and almost skeletal — suspended in a tank of green goop. Breathing tubes snake down their throats, and nodes dot their heads, which are shaved bald. Their eyes are closed, and if I could ignore all the tubes and wires, they would look like they were sleeping. Every once in awhile, one of them twitches, her eyebrows draw together, then after a few seconds, she relaxes again.

“It’s a sensory deprivation substance,” Fisk explains, his voice measured. I look over at Elias, and I swear he grimaces. The hint of pride I hear in Fisk’s voice — the one that causes the vial of solution to practically dance between his fingers — makes me want to sprint over to Fisk and tear his throat out with my bare hands, just to stop his voice from ever existing again.

“We’ve been trying to utilize them and what they can do to make Elias more…effective. Now that you’ve confirmed that nothing — and no
one
— can do that, we’re going to try it the other way around. The stasis will kill him, eventually, but, from what you’re saying, that’s the most good he’ll ever do here at the Hub.”

Fisk stands there, perfectly calm. “Show us what you can do, Merrin Grey. Show us why you’ve always been obsessed with biochemistry. Show us why you have a premed student’s library of genetics and organic chemistry notes on your tablet. Show us why you’re better than any high school student we’ve ever known at these things. Why do you care?”

I clench my jaw and stare back at him. I will not cry. I will not scream. I won’t.

“I can fix you, Merrin. I know you want me to.” He motions toward the small lab behind me, the one whose walls are lined with the neon-liquid-filled vials bearing my name. Or were before I stole them.

“There are amazing things here. Discoveries that can push you to your full potential. That can make Elias’s sisters’ sacrifice — and your brothers’ — not be in vain. That can make you soar.” He leans in, lowers his voice again. “On your own.”

My lower lip trembles. Mom pulls me in for a hug, and my whole body stiffens. Mom never hugs me.

She presses me to her, her wiry arms so much stronger than I ever would have expected, and I can’t pull away. She pushes her face into the hair hanging by my ear and whispers, “The two of you can fly?”

I nod the slightest bit.

“Fast?” she whispers.

I nod again. I hope, with Elias under, it’s true.

She loosens her grip. Steps away. “President Fisk. We want to get this over with. I’ll put him under myself.”

I let forth something between a whimper and a yell and fall on Elias. Mom bends over me, digging her fingernails into my upper arms so hard it sends streaks of pain down my back.

“It’ll happen quickly,” she says, her voice so low only I can hear it. “When he wakes, you two get out of here.”

I summon all I have in me — my love for the boys and Elias, my desire to protect my friends and get us all the hell out of here — to trust her.

Mom moves to a small stainless steel tray on a table nearby and stabs a needle into one vial of clear liquid after another, lifting, peering at it in the light, tapping the air bubbles out.

Dad walks in and sees me holding Elias’s hand, crosses over to me, and wraps his arm around my shoulders. He tries to pull me away, but he couldn’t get me away from Elias with a crowbar. Especially not right now.

Mom looks right at Dad, back to me for a second, and then back at him again with determined eyes. She holds up the needle-tipped syringe and quickly nods, the movement so slight that no one else would notice it. Mom injects it into the port. Dad draws back from me, his eyes slightly wet, his mouth set in a hard line. I’ve seen that face before. He’s steeling himself. Saying goodbye.

A row of ten, a dozen, no, fifteen people in scrubs and white coats, just like my parents, has lined up along the wall. But they don’t stand like nurses. They stand rigid, shoulders squared, muscles tensed. Like soldiers. That and the way they react to Fisk’s every move as he paces the room — checking the girls’ monitors, watching Mom mix the stuff in the needle, walking too close to Michael and Max — says it all. They’re security, ready to jump on me the second I —
we
— try to run.

Besides that, there’s nowhere to run. The testing arena crawls with security, dotted with obstacles we could never really sprint around, and every section of the building locks down if we try to go somewhere we don’t belong. Which, I imagine, is everywhere by this point. We’re stuck.

But Mom didn’t tell me to run. She asked me if I could fly.

That roof. All the doors have been locked down, but maybe that roof hasn’t. Besides, that thing opens directly to the sky. What kind of security could really be on it — bomber jets?

I feel a shortness of breath, high in my chest, paralyzing my shoulders.

We don’t get out unless we fly. If we fly, they won’t get what they want — hooking us up to monitors and injecting solutions to watch the transference — but they will want us even more. Enough to hunt us down. And between Nora and Lia in sensory deprivation fluid and the boys getting prepped for spinal taps, I know there’s nothing Fisk won’t do to figure us out.

Which means if we fly out of here, we can’t stop flying. Ever.

I glance over at my brothers one more time. Mom leans over and brushes Michael’s dark curls from his forehead, kissing him there.

Like Fisk is reading my mind, he croons, “Show us that we’ve done something useful here, Merrin. Show us we’re on the right track. Let us send your brothers home.”

He reaches a hand out to me, touching my arm, trying to draw me away from Elias. I fling my arm out and he steps away, still smiling that same stupid smile. I want to kill him.

“You’re not touching me ever again.”

“Oh, we’ll have to if you want us to stop testing them. And you’ll have to do it willingly. But if you won’t… The secret to why you displayed transference all those years ago could lie in their genes. We think it does. We’ve gotten so close. The only thing we can’t do is make Ones into Supers. But we will. When you show us exactly how that works.”

There’s no way he’s going to grab Elias and me, and just let the boys go. Not when he can keep them for whatever freaky side experiments he has going on.

“Prove to me that figuring out Elias and me is the only thing you really want,” I say. “Let my mom and dad take my brothers.”

“Excuse me?” Fisk scoffs.

“I don’t like to repeat myself.”

“You mean, let them go? Oh, my dear, you can’t be serious.”

“They get to leave. You won’t need them anyway, when you have us. Then — only then — I show you what we can do.”

Fisk nods to the guards-dressed-as-nurses, and they step to the side so Mom can wheel Max out. Dad watches me, and I see anger, pride, and sadness in his face all at once. Each one of them kills me.

“I’ll get the car ready,” he says, nodding at me. “She’ll be back for Michael.” Then he follows Mom out.

“And the girls.” I nod toward Nora and Lia, still floating, unconscious in that goop. I swallow hard. I don’t even know them, but I know what they mean to Elias, and I can’t stand to see them this way. “They go, too.”

This is the first time Fisk lets his face fall, and it fills me with a small amount of glee. He swallows and then nods his assent to the nurses. They head toward the tank.

Fisk stays there another minute, standing too close, breathing so close to me that I’m afraid to open my mouth for fear we’d use the same air. He stares me down, looks at my hands again. He’s seen that photo of me levitating that apple. He knows I can go light, that I can make Elias do it, too. He knows we can fly. He just wants his damn machines and serums to pick up every second of it.

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.