The Gift (15 page)

Wisty

WHIT AND I MAY have electrodes all over our arms, but at least we’re upright and sitting in high-backed leather chairs so comfy it’s like
swimming in butter. And we each have a glass of water next to us. It’s all five-star accommodations here at the Building of
Buildings, which is basically The One’s crib and bat cave–type place, and it’s where the very grumpy men in the van brought
us.

Maybe I could get used to this?

Whit and I had both been curled in the fetal position in the back of the van when suddenly we were yanked out and escorted
into the B of B. So this had started out as one of our most pathetic public parades into captivity yet.

I actually made eye contact with some of the citizens who were watching as we trudged across the luxuriously outfitted marble
lobby. Maybe I’ve been infected with a big-ego savior complex, but I thought I saw a flash of… respect, maybe even admiration,
or at least something
vaguely hopeful buried deep in some of the glazed Beaner eyes. It helped me get my groove back anyway.

The more I stare at our interrogator right now, the more I think maybe I see it in him, too. Grudging respect? He’s hiding
it pretty well, though. He’s definitely polite but sterile to the point of being scary.

The questions have also been pretty sterile so far—such as name, address, and N.O. ID number.
As if
we have an address or carry N.O. IDs!

Then he throws this real doozy at us.

“Have either of you had any children in recent months?” he asks, deadpan. We both stare at him blankly. “Now that we have
you and your parents on death row, we need to ensure there are no other living members of Clan Allgood. Please answer so that
the polygraph can register a result.”

“No,” we both manage to say.

“Excellent,” he says, watching the readout from the lie detector.

“I get an A plus for not being an unwed pregnant teenager?” I say. “Wow. Maybe I like the New Order after all.”

He completely ignores me. “Now let’s get down to some very important business. On a scale of one to five, with five being
the most, how would you characterize the efficacy of your parents’ instructions to you vis-à-vis harnessing your… abilities?”

“What are you talking about?” I demand. “As
you
said,
let’s get down to business.
Tell us when our parents are due to be executed! Are they being held here?”

“Ms. Allgood,” he says.
Ms. Allgood? Never in my life
…“I’m afraid I am the only one permitted to ask questions here.”

“News flash, mister. I’m not big on following rules!”

Whit nudges me as if he’s signaling I should settle down. Since when is he going all Golden Boy again? We’re Resistance leaders,
aren’t we?

The interrogator clears his throat. “We
know
your parents trained you. And we
know
they imparted to you certain, uh, highly sensitive pieces of information and/or equipment having to do with the scientifically
proven energy forces that you both possess by dint of your genetic makeup.”

“Are you talking about
magic?
” I ask. Whit frowns.
Mute
Golden Boy.

Mr. Interrogator looks extremely alarmed. “Shhh! Take my word and do
not
use that term in this building—or anywhere! You’re living very dangerously.”

Perfect invitation for me to get punchy. I’m practically singing at this point: “Magic, magic, magic,
magic, ma
—”

The Repressed One finally explodes. He’s up and grabbing us by our collars, my shirt in one hand and, surprisingly, that of
my Mute Golden Boy brother in the other.

“You make me
ill!
” he practically spits.

He looks at Whit. “You, with all your potential, and look what you do! Nothing! Sitting here like a mannequin! And your dynacompetent
sister, here—why, she possesses a power so amazing, so devastating, so —”

There’s a sharp noise as the automatic dead bolt on the room’s door clicks open.

“Ah,” says our interrogator, suddenly whiter than a pickled egg. “Said too much, did I?” he whispers to himself. “Oh!” he
manages to squeal as somebody steps softly into the room behind us and the temperature drops, oh, maybe fifty degrees.

And just like that the interrogator turns into a medium-size rubber tree in a large terra-cotta container. Somebody has just
made him into the quintessential potted plant.

And I have a good guess who.

Wisty

INSTANTLY, IT’S AS IF someone’s quadrupled the gravitational force in this place, and the energy’s leaking out of me. I can’t even sit up straight
anymore. He has these electrifying
Technicolor
eyes—you’ve never seen anything like them. They’d be, like,
model
gorgeous if he wasn’t so evil. As it stands, they’re like an instant barf inducer. I’m queasy. But Whit’s still locked into
his weirdly placid state.

The One Who Is The One steps around the table, sliding our former interrogator’s pot into a corner of the room with one foot.

“He’ll need some watering,” he says to nobody in particular, and then smiles silkily. “Or
not.
”

The One waves at the far end of the room and transforms what had been a featureless white wall into floor-to-ceiling windows.
He can turn a man into a plant. He can fly. He can vaporize children. I guess turning a wall into
windows with a panoramic fiftieth-floor view must be a walk in the park.

“Now,” he says, eyes briefly pulsing red but then turning a charismatic blue—a shade you might see on some touched-up face
in a magazine ad (that is, if they made magazine ads for Pure Evil).

“Come,” he invites as if we’re old friends. He gestures at the picture windows. “Have a look.”

“Um,” says Whit, “we’re kind of hooked up —”

But all the polygraph wires are now gone, like they’d been particularly unlikely figments of our imaginations.

The One beckons gently. “I think you’ll enjoy this,” he says. I’m shaking now. The One seems to “enjoy” nothing except torture
and death.
What’s up his sleeve? And what’s up with my brother, for that matter?

Whit gets out of his chair and walks over to The One like an obedient child.

“S’all right, Wisty, come on.”
Does he have some intel I don’t?
Last I heard him say more than a few words, he was bouncing off the van walls with rage.

But I don’t want to be sitting over here alone. “For lack of anything better to do,” I say begrudgingly, “okay. Let’s have
a look.”

“Why the impudence?” The One asks. “You do know I
don’t
intend to kill you.” He puts his creepy, long arms around our shoulders and leads us to the windows. Strangely, his touch
feels totally warm, even a little reassuring.

“Will you look at that?” he asks almost wistfully. “Do you see how the sky and the mountains there seem to be joined? Almost
seem to be
one?
”

We gaze out across the city, the foggy street and building lights twinkling through the gloom. The clouds on the horizon are
a sinister purple that does kind of merge with the snowless mountains beyond the valley.

“Do you have any idea how much work it took to make this perfect evening?”

I start shaking again. It’s as if he’s a cat playing with mice. He just said he wasn’t going to kill us, but is he about to
anyway? In any case he’s definitely going to put some serious hurt on us.

“I bet you’re wondering what I mean by that,” he goes on. “A terrific high-pressure zone had been screaming down across the
northern plains and would have brought torrential downpours tonight. Possibly even hailstorms.”

We look at him blankly.

“So I
stopped
it.”

Now I get it, and what he’s done is pretty mind-blowing actually.

He raises his arms to point at a cloud on the horizon, and with the most casual of gestures,
he steers it in over the city.
Now he’s making a spinning gesture with his other hand, and the cloud rotates. And now he’s guiding in another massive cloud,
and another, and another.… Soon there’s an enormous swirling, lightning-streaked vortex circling over the entire city.

As it churns and intensifies, the winds start rattling the windows. My ears pop as the pressure in the room drains. Does he
plan to have us sucked up into the black core of the vortex? Is that tonight’s plan? The rain is crashing down in iron-colored
curtains. The building is groaning on its foundation. Is he going to vacuum the entire city off the face of the Earth?

But then he snaps his fingers, and the storm moves in reverse. The spiral turns backward and de-intensifies, and then the
clouds retreat to their original stations in the sky.

“Now, you try, Wisteria,” he says.

Wisty

“WHAT?”
I’M CAUGHT off guard—completely flabbergasted. Then it gets even weirder. Suddenly it’s as if I’m at my piano lessons again, and he’s
Mr. John Masterson, my sweet-as-pie teacher, encouraging me to believe in myself. Say
what?

“You have more than enough power to do it. Just tell the energy what it should do, and let it out. You saw what I did. Give
your power that same image, and let it go. I have every confidence in you and your wonderful Gift.”

He’s out of his mind.
Turning people into animals is, I admit, pretty cool, but it’s, like,
finite.
Graspable. I can’t wrap my mind around the sky, the wind, clouds, hurricanes—that’s big-time.

“I can’t do that,” I whisper.

“
Now,
Wisteria,” he says, a tone of threat creeping into his recently soothing voice.

I close my eyes and try to remember exactly how the
clouds raced in over the city, how they joined together and began to swirl like an upside-down, ink-filled toilet flushing
in the sky, the lights of the city twinkling below and almost disappearing as the rain whipped down. I let the tune of Mrs.
Highsmith’s song work as a soundtrack as I imagine it all playing before me.…
Can I actually do this? More important, do I want to? How can I live, and be the same person, with so much power?

And then I feel my heart flip inside me. My whole
being
flips.

“Idiot!”
he screams.

I open my eyes. The clouds are exactly where they were. The only thing that’s changed is that the city has gone entirely dark;
even the lights in the room are out. We’re bathed in evening shadow.

“You put out the lights, Wisty.
All
the lights,” whispers Whit.

Wisty

THE ONE IS PAST polite whispering. “You turned off the city’s electricity!” he screams. “Reactivate it
immediately!
”

I try, but I don’t know how I did it in the first place, much less how to reverse it.
Hum Mrs. Highsmith’s song backward?
I can’t. I’m panicked.

“You chaotic
child!
” he says. “You really don’t have a shred of control, do you? Now The One Who Manages The Power Grid and his incompetent minions
will be spending hours attempting to repair what you so blithely have done!”