The Awakening (26 page)

Except for the occasional glimpse of her in the greenhouse, I don’t see Anna much. Every time I do, my sense of alarm grows. In my opinion, she looks worse than Fray. Luka spends his afternoons training with Gabe, and whether motivated by Gabe’s training style or the nightmares he keeps hiding from me, he’s turning into an incredibly powerful Keeper. When he joins us in the dream dojo, nothing and nobody can touch me. Claire, Jose, Cap—they all take turns trying to get at me. Sometimes all three of them will try at once. But Luka can throw a shield that is impenetrable. Not only that, Gabe has taught him how to cloak me. Once, he even prevented me from dreaming. It required so much energy it made him physically ill.

I forbid him from doing it ever again.

I’m too busy at night to afford dreamless sleep. I’ve learned how to dream hop, dream link, and dream spy. I’ve learned how to sense and find doorways and walk through on my own volition. According to Link, my territory is unheard of. I can jump to California, and I can jump to New York. I can jump as far north as Adak, Alaska and once, I even made it to Mexico City. Link was practically beside himself when he added another circle to the map—bright red, around the entirety of the United States, plus a substantial chunk of Canada and Mexico.

My bi-colored hair grows to my shoulders. Dark at the roots, then two inches down, a wall of lighter brown. My already pale skin grows paler. I forget what the sun feels like against my skin. All of the physical training makes me stronger. And Claire’s resentment grows darker. According to Jillian, she was the hot shot before I came, the promising one. The drastic shift in attention hasn’t been easy on her.

The evening news has been odd. Either President Cormack’s new initiatives are seriously doing the trick or the Chief of Press finally had enough and started popping Prozac. The crime rate and unemployment rate has dropped significantly and the U.S. dollar is worth gold. Cormack, of course, uses the statistics to fuel her increasingly popular campaign—eradicate weakness, unite as one. Now more than ever. She’s the first president in a long time who’s not only adored domestically, but internationally. A true friend of refugees and immigrants. She’s even appointed Secretary General of the United Nations and takes the lead in negotiating a potential cease-fire in North Africa. It all seems great. Grand, even.

And yet several times, I’ve caught Non muttering at the television screen.

Every night before bed I pore over the journals. They’ve become a bit of an obsession. I have a list of each journal writer in chronological order tacked on the wall above my dresser. The first on the list is
Fire Heart
, a Shawnee Indian whose entries span from 1755 – 1762. He helped the French in the French Indian War. There are plenty of other entries before his, but the authors are unknown. Next on the list is a young Ukrainian man who wrote from inside Kiev jail. He recorded several frantic entries in 1929, of fellow
kulaks
being pulled from their cells at night and shot in the head. Judging by the way his writing stopped so suddenly, I believe he became one of them. There are a string of entries from a young Jewish girl who wrote from the hell that was Auschwitz in the early 1940s. She met several other Jews like her and wrote about them, too.

Next was a Chinese man living in Cambodia in 1975, where he and his people were starved and worked to death and separated from their children. I circled the phrase “what is rotten must be removed”—a phrase touted in Cambodia during his lifetime—startled by how similar it sounds to our own president’s slogan today. The most recent entries date back to 2005 and were written by a Darfuri woman who lived in West Sudan and told of unspeakable horrors done to her and the rest of her village—so many raped and slaughtered by what she called “devils on horseback”.

It’s not easy reading.

The first connection I come up with is that they are all fighters. When I bring this up to Non, she looks disappointed and tells me to dig deeper. So I do. Google becomes my best friend and I repeatedly come across names like Stalin and Hitler and Pol Pot and the Janjaweed—names that might not mean much had Mr. Lotsam not been my teacher back in Thornsdale. It was the project Luka and I worked on together in World History—the one on genocides of the past.

I flop my research notes onto Non’s desk. “Each one was a victim of genocide.”

“Interesting, isn’t it?”

“I guess. Yeah.” Although I’m failing to see why it’s relevant. In fact, I’m much more interested in something I ran across the other night—a reference to some prophecy. I pored over the rest of the notebooks, but couldn’t find anything more about it. “Do you know anything about a prophecy?”

“I know many things about many prophecies.”

“I’m talking about one in particular.” I scratch the inside of my wrist. The dry air down in the hub has been irritating my eczema. “I think it relates to The Gifting. I think it might be mentioned in one of the other notebooks. Did you ever read about it?”

“Maybe I have.” Non picks up my research notes and hands them back to me. “Make sure to look for the connections.”

Non speaks in riddles.

Later that evening, I’m curled up on the couch in front of the TV, looking through a printed-out database for a rehabilitation center in Phoenix when an anchor for CNN catches my attention with the results of a boring national survey. “And finally, the number one profession on the rise in America is the mental health industry, most likely due to the dramatic increase in mental rehabilitation facilities.”

An image comes—one that is never too far from the surface. Rows and rows of patients in medically induced comas, all in the name of
rehabilitation
. Non’s words from earlier wiggle like a puzzle piece attempting to shift into place.

*

Cap, Luka, and I stand outside the warehouse, Anna’s flickering cloak a constant reminder that I need to learn this already. I try kicking a pile of rocks, but my foot passes right through.

“Why is this taking so long?” I hate failing. I hate even more the relief in Luka’s eyes every time that I do. He doesn’t want me to master this skill. No, he’s never come out and said it, but he doesn’t have to. My failure means that I am still relatively safe, and my safety means everything to Luka. Another point of frustration. I try kicking the rocks again. Nothing. “What if I never figure out how to do this?”

“You will,” Cap says. “Now focus.”

“I
am
focusing.” Harder than I’ve ever focused on anything. Figuring out how to do this is essential. Not just to add another Cloak to our number, but to get my family back. I have no idea how they are doing. I haven’t allowed myself to visit them since the night I hopped into Pete’s nightmare. I’m too afraid of what I will see.

There’s a tug behind my belly button.

I pull my shoulders back and cock my head. I know a doorway when I feel one. It’s not very often one opens up when I’m already in the spiritual realm. And this one is strong, intense. It fills me with the oddest sense of urgency. I take a couple steps in the direction of the pull.

“Tess?”

A scream fills the night, only this isn’t from a lady down the street or a young boy fighting off black mist. This is a scream that comes from the doorway. I’ve only heard my mother scream once in my life, when I was in third grade and Pete fell off a tall set of bleachers. The horrified cry left an indelible mark on my memory, so much so that I recognize beyond a shadow of a doubt who is screaming now.

Horror propels me forward.

Cap raises his voice. “Do not take another step.”

As if realizing what I’m about to do, Luka grabs my arm. Cap lunges for my ankle. But it’s too late. I’ve already jumped through, and I’m dragging them both with me. When we tumble out, we’re nowhere near the warehouse. We are on the floor of my parent’s bedroom, in my old house back in Thornsdale.

And we aren’t alone.

Scarface is there, black mist coiling from his fingertips and wrapping around my mother’s head. She arches up in bed and screams as though she’s in unbearable pain. My heart careens out of control. She needs to wake up. This pain she’s feeling isn’t real, it’s in her mind. This man is putting it there. But my father isn’t here to wake her up and somehow, my mother’s door is shut and locked. Pete is on the other side banging, banging, banging. To no avail.

“Stop!” I yell.

The man does. He stops and he turns and he looks at me with unhinged triumph. He barely takes a step toward me before Luka throws out a shield that slams him back into the wall. My mother arches up again. Her body twists—an awful, unnatural twist.

Love swells inside of me—hot and white and fierce. I dive onto the bed and I shake her. I actually shake her.

Her eyes flutter open.

Luka must be as shocked as me, because his shield falters. Scarface recovers and runs toward me. But it’s too late. I do what Cap is shouting for me to do. I startle awake.

Unfortunate Consequences

E
xhilaration and terror are two very odd emotions to feel at the same time, but these are what hit me. In fact, they slam into me with such force, I can barely breathe. My mother, being terrorized in California. Me, shaking her awake when my body was here in Detroit. I grabbed a hold of her shoulders and I jarred her awake.

There’s commotion in the hallway. My bedroom door bangs open and the light flickers on. Cap wheels inside, his hair a mess, his white whiskers thicker than normal. “You disobeyed a direct command.”

Luka walks inside behind him wearing a pair of sweatpants and a white undershirt. “Cap, it was her mom.”

The captain rounds on him, and although he’s pointed at Luka, I catch myself shrinking back. “She never should have gone through the doorway.” He spins his chair and jabs the air with his pointer finger. “Never again, do you hear me? Never. Again.”

I swallow, unable to respond—not with words, not even with a nod.

Cap mutters a curse, then wheels back out into the hallway. He didn’t comment on the fact that I finally did it. That seeing my mother being tortured was all the emotion I needed to accomplish what I’ve been trying and failing to do for weeks now. Nor does he tell Luka to get back to his room. This, more than the former, proves just how irate he is about me disobeying orders.

“Are you okay?” Luka asks.

I open my mouth to speak, but the terror and the exhilaration has rendered me mute. I take a deep breath and try again. “My mom.”

The corners of his eyes crinkle with concern. He moves to take a step toward me, but before his foot even hits the ground Cap bangs on the wall. “Get back to your room! We’re done for the night.”

Luka doesn’t budge.

As much as I long for his warmth, his embrace (it’s been much,
much
too long), I think it might be my undoing. “You should listen to Cap’s orders before he kicks us both out.”

He fists his hair at the crown of his head, a world of conflict raging in his eyes.

“I’ll be okay.” I manage the weakest of smiles. “I promise.”

When I go back to sleep, I find Link in his dream and tell him exactly what happened.

*

Cap cancels our afternoon training the next day. He doesn’t even tell me himself. I show up to the training room to find Link attaching probes to Sticks, Claire, and Jose. No sign of Cap at all.

“Sorry Tess, I thought he told you,” Sticks says. “Dr. Carlyle is here to run some tests on Fray. Cap said he wanted to oversee the appointment.”

I have a feeling that had last night not happened, Cap wouldn’t have felt so compelled to oversee anything. With nothing else to do, I head to Link’s lair and boot up his computer. I’ve been spending enough time in here that I know his password. I type it in, pull up the database for Shady Wood, and study my grandmother’s case while fiddling with Link’s Rubik’s Cube. I can never solve it. He can in less than thirty seconds, no matter how much I twist it around.

Patient:
Elaine Eckhart,
Age:
72,
Diagnosis:
Paranoid Schizophrenia,
Symptoms:
advanced psychosis,
Medication:
olanzapine & lorazepam
,
Treatment:
ECT, psychotherapy
.