Talent to Burn (Hidden Talent #1) (31 page)

“What is it they want you to do?”

I hesitated, looking up for the camera.

“I wouldn’t ask if I thought it wasn’t okay to talk in front of an audience,” he said.

“They think they can unleash my Talent with drugs,” I said. “They say I might be very powerful.”

The spark I knew and loved returned to his eyes. “I knew I was right,” he said. “Have they found a way yet?”

“No,” I lied.

“Even if I wasn’t here”—he waved one hand at the walls enclosing us—“I’d tell you to do it. You need to find out who you really are.”

“A Talent doesn’t define a person.”

“Of course not, but you’ve been running away from this for years. Don’t you want to know yourself?”

I breathed in deeply, tasting his scent again. It calmed me enough to answer. “I want things to be simple.”

His arm tightened around me, his warm hand squeezing my shoulder. “Have courage,” he said. “Have courage, and do what you have to do.”

Something shrank inside. Everything was pushing me—Jamie, the Major and my conscience—to take the drugs, to push my Talent to greater heights. “I’m scared,” I whispered, my hissed words sounding loud in the naked room.

“Of what?” He sounded surprised.

“Of everything.” I breathed out. “Of failure. I’ve failed at every test life has set me, and of every test of Talent. And of success. Of opening Pandora’s box. If it turns out I have a powerful Talent, everything changes. There’s no going back. I won’t be the same person anymore.”

Jamie rolled onto his side, toward me, and I turned my head to meet his eyes. The pupils were huge pools I wanted to dive into. “You’ll be you,” he said. “You’ll be whoever you’re meant to be, and you shouldn’t be afraid of that.”

The urge to kiss him was overwhelming, but traitor and failure that I was, I did not. He inclined his head toward me and rested his forehead against mine, those dark eyes, weary and cynical as they were, watching me with care.

He kissed me, then, and like Judas, I kissed him back. His lips were dry and chapped, but precious all the same.

I realized in that moment that I had fallen in love with this contradiction of a man: this laws-are-guidelines, adrenaline junkie, clichéd bad boy. How he could be so wise was beyond me. The past few days I had missed his somehow both gentle and sarcastic company. I could not imagine going on without him.

I made a vow to myself then that I would get us both out of this damned place, even if it meant giving up everything. If Jamie didn’t want me once he learned of my betrayal, so be it. He deserved his freedom, to live outside in all his disreputable glory, and not be trapped in this cell.

When he lay back, I noticed the cuffs on his wrists for the first time. They were slim and grayish. I’d seen that material before in the thigh cuff in the testing center.

“What are those?” I said, pointing, not daring to touch.

“Oh, another of their little eccentricities,” he said, but his voice cracked. “You know, life’s indignities and all that. Let’s talk about something else.”

I felt sick. “What, like the weather?” I said, my voice breaking despite my best efforts.

“Is Eric okay? Justine?”

“He’s back in control,” I said, trying to focus.

“Silver lining,” Jamie said.

“I guess so.”

We lay there in silence for a few minutes, watching each other, holding hands, until the door clanked open.

“Time’s up.”

“Will you come back and see me?” he asked, urgently, under his breath.

“Nothing could stop me,” I vowed. I clasped his hand hard, and pressed my lips against his battered face, until rough hands dragged me from the pallet.

The Major’s aides manhandled me from the room as I tried to keep eye contact with Jamie for as long as I could. He staggered to his feet and saluted me casually with a single finger to the brow.

“’Til we meet again, princess.”

The aides pushed me into the hallway and the door clanged shut behind us.

Chapter Thirty

I stopped fighting once we were on the elevator, assuming we were going back to my room, but we only rose a few floors.

“Straight back to Testing,” one of the aides said.

My thoughts chased each other round and round. I had to calm down, step back. This was exactly what the Major—now absent, I noted—wanted. He wanted me off kilter, with no time to think strategically.

This was decision time. Every moment Jamie lay in that cell was a weight on my soul, a mark of guilt that would never be erased. I was going to have to embrace my Talent to get us out of here.

I needed to find a Talent that I could use to escape, take it from the owner, and make it my own. I shuddered involuntarily and the aide on my left glanced down at me, his gaze flat and his face emotionless.

None of my hosts had seen fit to provide me with a directory of the local Talents. I ran through the people I knew. Justine’s Talent came to mind immediately. The ability to blend in, to hide in plain sight, would be useful in escaping. It wouldn’t open doors or unlock locks though, so would be no use in getting Jamie out.

Jamie’s Talent would be handy in itself in finding a way out, but he was locked up in a Talent-proof cage.

We arrived in Testing. I took a deep breath. Courage. I had to face the situation to save Jamie.

Dr. Jenn, standing in the hallway, looked up from her clipboard.

“Catrina,” she said, sounding surprised. “We weren’t expecting you back yet. Did you have a question?”

The aide on my right, a little more animated than the dead-eyed guy on my left, spoke up. “Major Hudson has ordered the next round of tests on Catrina. You are to give her 200 units of the Nova-22 immediately.”

Dr. Jenn’s mouth tightened, and she folded her arms. “Major Hudson doesn’t control the experiments. I do.”

“We are here to see you comply with his orders, ma’am.”

“That’s
Doctor
to you,” she snapped. “This is most irregular. I’ll need to speak with the Major.”

“We’ll wait while you call him.” They frog-marched me over to a steel bench by the inner door. I sat down without being asked. Some things weren’t worth arguing about.

If I couldn’t get Jamie’s Talent, there was always Eric. His fire starting gave me the creeps, but it could be effective in creating a diversion long enough to get us out of here. In a fire drill, what would happen to the incarcerated Talents? Would they be taken to a safe location?

Years of Dad’s strategy training filled my head. Find an opening. Find a weakness your opponent is unaware of, and exploit it as hard as you can, doing as much damage as you can.

This was all assuming I could use a Talent well enough, for long enough to coordinate an escape. I played back in my head what I’d felt under the drugs the last time. I’d looked at the tech and felt that strange sensation of being turned inside out. My Talent must be a warped kind of telepathy, for I’d been inside her head and had seen her Talent clear as day. I hadn’t been able to read any of her thoughts, though, so it wasn’t a true telepathy, but my own twisted Talent.

I laid my head back against the wall and rehearsed. First, take the drugs. Second, take a Talent. Third—I didn’t know what came third. Create a diversion? Become invisible and walk out? Burn down the building? I shivered again. I didn’t want this Talent, but I wanted to kill people with it even less.

Opening my mind, I tried to reproduce that feeling, the twisting-inside-out wrongness of using my Talent. It was a Chinese puzzle inside my head: I couldn’t see how to make it work, so I twisted and tugged at it and then—there. Smoothly, the world turned inside out. Not only could I see the auras of the aides beside me, but I could also now see their Talents. It was like standing in a workshop looking at a bunch of pegs with saws, hammers and drills at my disposal, except I didn’t know what all of them did.

Dr. Jenn came back down the corridor. I blinked, for it was as though I saw her with double vision: a woman, and a Talent that could be mine if I reached out for it. Turning my head from side to side, I could see the aides’ Talents that way as well.

I seemed to be limited to line of sight this time, perhaps because I wasn’t drugged, or perhaps because I didn’t have the nurse empath’s Talent. Either way, I’d wait for the Nova-22. More power had to be better for this.

The doctor started to speak. I couldn’t understand what she was saying: her words vibrated like we were in an echo chamber. She was looking at me oddly, and reached out a hand to my shoulder.

Turning the puzzle in my head back right side in, my stomach protested. I stifled a gag as I came back to myself. My head spun.

“What did you say?” I asked.

“Are you all right?” Dr. Jenn said, leaving her hand where it lay. “You look ill.”

“Oh, I’m fine,” I said. “A little tired.”

She looked daggers at each of the aides in turn. “I spoke to the Major,” she said, “and he insists we go ahead with the next experiment now. This is not what I had planned, Catrina. I’m sorry.”

I shrugged, deliberately casual. “It’s all the same to me. We may as well get it over with.” Her apparent sympathy irked me. It was the politics of the situation that annoyed her, not any real care for my welfare. I was, after all, just a guinea pig.

I stood and the aide on my left took my elbow. “That’s not necessary,” I said. “I’m going along.”

He hesitated and I shifted my elbow out of his grip.

“Let’s go,” I said to Dr. Jenn. Despite my cooperation, the aides followed me into the lab.

The lab techs had me wired up and ready to go in record time. I had my game face on, but my palms sweated and my knees trembled. Fighting not to flinch as they hooked up the pain cuff, I thought of Jamie in his cell and the cuffs on his wrists. It gave me the strength to sit still while they strapped me in.

They had no reason to experiment on him, which meant that the cuffs were part of the same systematic beatings they’d given him—to control him, to control me. That was going to end today, if I could do anything about it. I’d give up my pathetic fears and dreams—anything—to get him out of here.

Dr. Jenn approached me with a syringe on a metal tray. The liquid in the syringe was bright blue, like drain cleaner. Terror shot through me for a moment but then I thought of the myriad of ways they could kill me if they wanted and rationality returned.

“This is Nova-22,” she said, putting the tray down. “It’s the newest generation of drug we have. While it’s been more successful than some of the other generations, it has a number of side effects, not all of them pleasant.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said.

“It matters to me,” she said, and I began to wonder if she wasn’t as cold as I had thought. “You may not have a choice about accepting the treatment, but you should understand the consequences so you’re not surprised.”

I nodded. What could it hurt?

“The drug may cause flushing, euphoria, sweating, dizziness, fainting and a dry mouth. Those are the mild and expected effects. In more extreme cases, it may cause a fast and irregular heartbeat, and may reduce clotting in some patients.”

“Is that all?” Her litany reminded me of a late-night television ad for performance-enhancing drugs. I supposed that was what I was taking, in a way.

She shook her head. “It can cause mania, psychosis, hallucinations, delusions.”

“Those wear off, right?”

Dr. Jenn paused. “There have been cases where they don’t.” Her gaze flicked off to one side, and she assumed a curiously blank expression.

I thought of the cages on the lowest level, of the madwoman I had seen, and wondered again how she’d ended up there.

“However, these are not the worst possible effects. We have seen various forms of burnout.”

“Burnout?”

“Some people see a permanent change in the power level of their Talent, sometimes to a negligible level. Some become complete vegetables.”

In my journeys through the Institute, I hadn’t yet seen anyone that looked like a vegetable. What became of them?

“That is all,” she said suddenly. “Do you have any questions?”

“How addictive is it?”

“An excellent question. Our studies so far show no signs of physical or psychological addiction.”

Was she lying, or did she not know about Eric? How reliable was the other information she’d given me about the drug? Not that it was relevant, since I had no choice but to take the Nova-22, even if it would send me straight to hell.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s do this.”

Dr. Jenn nodded her assent, then took my left arm in her hand and swabbed it thoroughly with alcohol. I might go crazy or become a vegetable, but I wouldn’t want to get an infection, after all.

The needle entered my skin, and again the coolness of the drug ran up my vein, burning an icy trail through my blood to the Talent center in my brain. When it hit, my head exploded.

Around me, the hospital walls glowed with color. As the lab techs moved slowly around me, monitoring, checking, they left rainbow trails through the atmosphere. Every sound was magnified. Every inch of my skin vibrated sensation: the roughness of my clothes, the micro-currents from the air conditioning brushing over the hairs on my arms, the warmth radiating from other human beings. Each of their smells was unique and amazing.