Talent to Burn (Hidden Talent #1) (32 page)

The doctor put her clipboard down on a table and shone a penlight in each of my eyes in turn. It burned, like a comet in the heavens.

“It’s working,” she said, “but we’ll give it some time before we start the tests, so the drug can take full effect. This drug reaches peak after about thirty minutes.”

“How long will it take to wear off?” My voice sounded slurred and huge, bouncing off the walls of my skull.
Focus, Cat, focus.

“I don’t know,” she said. “This is a larger dose than we’ve tried before. Perhaps twelve hours?”

Feral cunning crept over me and I couldn’t help but grin. Dr. Jenn smiled in return, her lips fixed in a rictus. Her aura didn’t taste happy.

I turned my attention to the Talents around me, considering the color and strength of their auras.

Lab techs probably didn’t have particularly powerful Talents, or no doubt they would have been put to work in one of the Major’s programs. The aides, now, they had more potential.

Turning my energy inward, I visualized the Chinese puzzle and made the mental inversion needed to activate my Talent. Nausea hit me full strength, and my mouth was like a desert. I couldn’t even spit. But my mind was open.

I reached mentally for the aide closest to me. His Talent crouched like a dark shape in the corner of his mind. As before, I took the Talent and sucked it into myself. It was much easier this time, the drug working as expected. I wrenched the Talent out of him as fast as I could.

Two things happened: first, the dark power of violence filled my body with strength and rage. Second, the aide fell to the floor like a man shot.

The techs and Dr. Jenn rushed to his side, leaving me attended by the other aide, who gawked at his fallen comrade. I already knew how to fight. My newly acquired Talent gave me inhuman speed and brute force.

Springing up, I chopped him in the front of the neck hard with the side of my hand. He too went down without even time to clutch at his throat.

I ripped the thigh cuff from my leg and began removing the other wires in handfuls. One of the machines emitted a high-pitched beeping and Dr. Jenn turned to see me standing there.

She took a step toward me. “Catrina, are you all right?” Her voice still sounded weird, far away, but I was getting used to the filters on my reality, and I could understand her this time.

“Never been better,” I said, and reached to grab her shoulder. I threw her bodily into the wall, head first. Blood spurted from her nose and she lay silent.

Chapter Thirty-One

As I stepped over the fallen aide, I bent to pluck the keycard from the clip at his waist. The room fell silent, the lab techs staring at me as if I were an escaped tiger. I supposed I was. Adrenaline surged and I took off running.

I burst through the door into the hallway, sprinting to the elevator. Pushed the button, waited an interminable number of seconds, and once inside I swiped the card and punched the button for the lowest level.

The button did not light up, and we stayed put. Damn it. The aide’s card wasn’t going to get me to Jamie. I swiped again and tried the button for Eric’s floor. The button lit up, and the elevator began to drop.

When the doors pinged open, I stuck my head out quickly, reconnoitering the reception area there. There were three people at the desk, all seated, all occupied with work. I had seconds to decide—sneak or fight?

One of the women there looked up at me and smiled. “Oh hi,” she said. “Are you here to see your brother?”

“Yes, that’s it,” I said. I fought to stay calm. How much time did I have before someone raised the alarm?

She stood up and walked down the hallway to Eric’s room. After swiping her card, she waited for the LED to go green, and then opened the door.

“You have a visitor,” she said brightly. Turning to me, she said, “He’s doing much better now.”

I stepped into the room and the door swung shut behind me. Eric sat staring into space, his eyes unfocused.

“Eric,” I said. “We’re leaving.”

“Hmmm?” His head swiveled toward me. “Leaving? No.”

“They have Jamie in a cell. I’m getting him out. I want you to come.”

Eric licked at his dry lips, pallid in his gaunt, gray face. “I can’t go back out there, Cat. I can’t risk killing anyone again.”

“We’ll wean you off the drugs this time,” I said. “Without those you’ll be back to normal.”

“It’s the drugs that keep me under control,” he said slowly.

“You should have told me you were still taking the Nova-22,” I said.

“I did. I told you everything.”

“You didn’t tell me you kept taking it after you left here.”

Eric looked genuinely puzzled. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

Nothing in his body language led me to think he was lying, and a cold, hard certainty swept over me. “You never took the drugs on the outside?”

“Never,” he said. “Why would I? There are more fun drugs to take out there.”

“Eric,” I said, my voice distant and shaking, “Justine drugged you, every day, with the Nova-22. That’s why you lost control. That’s why you burned those people. You didn’t kill anyone. You were an instrument.”

His face showed confusion. I wondered what cocktail of drugs he was under, to think and move so slowly.

“She wouldn’t,” he said. “I don’t believe it.”

“You have to believe me. We have to go and go now,” I said. At that moment, a klaxon sounded. Shit. The game was up. I took his arm in both my hands. “Come on.”

“I can’t,” he said. “I don’t understand what you’re telling me. I don’t think I can run, either.”

“I need your help to get Jamie out,” I said.

He shook his head. “I’ve taken the suppressors and I have a useless arm,” he said. “I can’t help you.”

“Damn it, Eric,” I said. “Trust me. I’ve given up everything for you.”

He paused, and then nodded, slowly. “You’re my sister. I’ll help you,” he said. “But I’m not leaving.”

I pulled him to his feet. “We can argue about that later.” I swiped the card over the panel and yanked the door open. The klaxons blared, making it hard to focus. Eric followed me down the hallway. In the reception area, the staff was all on phones, shouting to be heard over the alarm. I kept moving.

The woman who had shown me to Eric’s room saw us and dropped the phone like a stone, her mouth open. “You can’t be out here,” she said.

I stabbed the elevator call button.

She began to come around the desk.

“Eric,” I said, “can you do something?” I looked back at him.

His eyes were closed, and he swayed slightly, back and forth, back and forth. “I can’t reach my Talent,” he said.

“Shit,” I said. I put my hand on his arm and made that inner twist inside my mind, the world inverting, my stomach going with it, and I was inside his head. It was easier each time.

Embers here, only embers of the flame that usually burned strongly. His mind was full of chemical fog. I reached out and took the spark of his Talent for myself, carrying it like a lit torch.

How to rekindle it? I threw myself open, willing every ounce of Talent I had to build the fire stronger. Power ripped through my head. Abstractly, I felt a distant pain, the sinews of my power tearing with the effort of absorbing a second Talent on top of the power and speed. A migraine throbbed instantly, but the drugs kept me from caring.

A woman’s scream brought me back out of my head. Everything burned: the walls, the ceiling, the floor tiles, even the potted plant on the desk. I’d started the fire without even trying. The woman took off, running down the hallway in the direction of the EXIT sign.

“We’ll go that way too,” I said. Stairs went down as well as up. “Come on,” I said, tugging Eric’s hand. He stumbled along beside me as we hurried to the stairwell.

The fire door slammed behind us and we were in a polished concrete stairwell. I began to jog down the stairs as fast as I could. Eric’s fight-or-flight reflex seemed to be kicking in. He’d sped up, and could keep up with me now.

The klaxon that had started before stopped and was immediately replaced by an unbearably loud whooping sound. A distorted electronic voice cut in: “Evacuate the building. Follow secure evacuation procedures. This is not a drill.”

People began to enter the stairwell, all heading upward. A man grabbed my arm. “You’re going the wrong way,” he said.

“Following procedure,” I parroted. “We have a task on the lower levels.”

He shrugged and ran. The whooping continued.

We finally arrived at the bottom of the stairs. Unlike most fire stairs, this one did not have a push bar door at the bottom, but another of the ubiquitous swipe card doors.

I swore, long and loud. I had assumed the doors would open on the lowest level, but this wasn’t the exit level.

“It’s a fire door,” Eric said. “You can’t burn your way through it.”

“I have to think. Think.” Maybe I could burn through the walls. I put my hand on the wall next to the door, pushing power outward, and recoiled. The wall felt like a cold slap in the face to the heat of Eric’s Talent.

The cage. The whole floor was wrapped in it. We had no way through.

Finally, it was all too much. I lost it, screaming wordless obscenities and pounding on the door with my fists, breaking my knuckles, pouring out my fury on the damned thing until I could scream no more. At last I rested my forehead against it.

Eric said nothing. He sat down on the bottom stair and put his head in his hands. “You can’t beat them,” he said. “We keep losing.”

His words carried even through the continued whooping of the fire siren. This couldn’t be the end. But it was.

The cold door against my face calmed me down a little, and suddenly I realized something.

“Eric,” I said. “This is a fire door.”

“Yes,” he said, his voice barely audible in all the noise.

“It’s not a special door. It’s a fire door.”

“So you keep saying.”

I closed my eyes and probed the door with Talent. There was no cage mesh embedded in the door. The door itself might be fireproof, but it was not resistant to Talent.

I thought back to my visit to this floor earlier. The fire stairs had to be accessible from the guard station. I tried hard to recall where the fire exit signs had been, but I hadn’t been paying attention to that at the time. All I knew was that somewhere on the other side of this door were Jamie’s guards.

Eric had used this Talent at a distance, which meant I could too. I visualized the guard station as I had seen it earlier—the bored guards sitting in a booth. Gathering up power, I pulled it into a white-hot fireball inside me. A fireball that would get me in to see the man I loved, the man I had betrayed.

I paused for a second. Embracing my Talent was one thing. If I did this, blindly, there was a good chance I would hurt or kill those guards. They were Institute staff, true, but they were human beings. Human beings who imprisoned other human beings. Innocent ones.

“This is war,” I said.

“What?” Eric said, looking up.

“Nothing.”

I drew a long, slow breath, and held it for a second. As I let it out, I visualized blowing with it a stream of Talent through the door. A tiny stream, that grew into a cavalcade, a bolt, a weapon of unspeakable power. I let it loose.

The door jumped under my hands, a muffled explosion. I stepped back, involuntarily, and then readied myself.

A few seconds later the door opened and one of the guards came through, his face black with soot. He stopped, shocked, when he saw me, long enough for me to punch him hard in the nose. He doubled over, blood mixing with the soot on his uniform.

“Get his card,” I said to Eric, who began reaching for it.

I hadn’t hit him hard enough. He recovered enough to slap Eric’s hand away, then straightened up.

“You,” he said.

“Me.” I kicked at him, aiming for his groin. He caught my leg and dragged me toward him, trying to throw me off balance.

“Eric,” I gasped.

My brother brought down his elbow on the back of the guard’s neck and he fell to the ground. I kicked him hard, and he grunted and lay still.

Eric bent over him and came up with the card. He swiped it over the card reader, the LED turned green, and we were back in business. The handle turned in his hand. We made eye contact, and then burst through the door together.

The scene that greeted us was horrific. There was little left of the front wall of the guard station, and flames licked at every surface, filling the area with a thick, choking black smoke. Broken glass lay over everything like hail. Another guard lay on the ground, blackened and not moving. I had done that. I had killed him.

I didn’t let myself look at his body, but swung around the corner into the booth. Despite the front wall burning, the monitors were still running. Each of the prisoners still waited in their cells. On the last monitor in the row, Jamie.

He was up and pacing back and forth. No doubt he must have heard the explosion. I tore my gaze away from him and down to the array of switches below. Despite the fire alarms, the doors were still locked. I began pushing buttons, and the doors began to open.