by V. E. Schwab
“Tell me the truth,” said Victor, tossing the pages back onto the table between them.
“About what?” asked Eli absently. Victor stared, blue eyes unblinking, until Eli finally set the magazine aside, sat up, and pivoted, setting his feet firmly on the ground so he could mirror Victor’s position. “Because I think they might be real,” he said. “Might,” he emphasized. “But I’m willing to consider the possibility.”
Victor was surprised at the sincerity in his friend’s voice.
“Go on,” he said, offering his best trust me face.
Eli ran his fingers over the stack of books. “Try to look at it like this. In comic books there are two ways a hero is made. Nature and nurture. You have Superman, who was born the way he was, and Spider-Man, who was made that way. You with me?”
“I am.”
“If you do even a basic Web search for EOs”—here he gestured at the printouts—“you find the same divide. Some people claiming that EOs are born ExtraOrdinary, and others suggesting everything from radioactive goo and poisonous insects to random chance. Let’s say you manage to find an EO, so you’ve got the proof they do exist, the question becomes how. Are they born? Or are they made?”
Victor watched the way that Eli’s eyes took on a sheen when he spoke of EOs, and the change in his tone—lower, more urgent—matched with the nervously shifting muscles in his face as he tried to hide his excitement. The zeal peeked through at the corners of his mouth, the fascination around his eyes, the energy in his jaw. Victor watched his friend, mesmerized by the transformation. He himself could mimic most emotions and pass them off as his, but mimicking only went so far, and he knew he could never match this … fervor. He didn’t even try. Instead he kept calm, listened, his eyes attentive and reverent so that Eli wouldn’t be discouraged, wouldn’t retreat.
The last thing Victor wanted him to do was retreat. It had taken nearly two years of friendship to crack through the charming, candy shell and find the thing Victor had always known lurked within. And now, slouching around a coffee table stacked with low-res screen shots of sites run by grown men in their parents’ basements, it was as if Eliot Cardale had found God. Even better, as if he had found God and wanted to keep it a secret but couldn’t. It shone through his skin like light.
“So,” said Victor slowly, “let’s assume EOs do exist. You’re going to figure out how.”
Eli flashed him the kind of smile a cult leader would covet. “That’s the idea.”
V
LAST NIGHT
MERIT CEMETERY
THUD.
Thud.
Thud.
“How long were you in prison?” asked Sydney, trying to fill the quiet. The sound of digging, when combined with Victor’s absent humming, wasn’t helping her nerves.
“Too long,” answered Victor.
Thud.
Thud.
Her fingers hurt dully from gripping the shovel. “And that’s where you met Mitch?”
Mitch—Mitchell Turner—was the massive man waiting for them back in the hotel room. Not because he didn’t like graveyards, he told them emphatically. No, it was just that someone had to stay behind with Dol, and besides, there was work to do. Lots of work. It had nothing to do with the bodies.
Sydney smiled when she thought of him scrounging for excuses. It made her feel a fraction better to think of Mitch, who was roughly the size of the car—and could probably lift one with ease—being squeamish about death.
“We were cellmates,” he said. “There are a lot of very bad people in jail, Syd, and only a few decent ones. Mitch was one of them.”
Thud.
Thud.
“Are you one of the bad ones?” asked Sydney. Her watery blue eyes stared straight at him, unblinking. She wasn’t sure if the answer mattered, really, but she felt like she should know.
“Some would say so,” he said.
Thud.
She kept staring. “I don’t think you’re a bad person, Victor.”
Victor kept digging. “It’s all a matter of perspective.”
Thud.
“About the prison. Did they … did they let you out?” she asked quietly.
Thud.
Victor left the shovel planted in the ground, and looked up at her. And then he smiled, which she noticed he seemed to do a lot before he lied, and said, “Of course.”
VI
A WEEK AGO
WRIGHTON PENITENTIARY
PRISON was less important than what it afforded Victor. Namely, time.
Five years in isolation gave him time to think.
Four years in integration (thanks to budget cuts and the lack of evidence that Vale was in any way abnormal) gave him time to practice. And 463 inmates to practice on.
And the last seven months had given him time to plan this moment.
“Did you know,” said Victor, skimming a book from the prison library on anatomy (he thought it particularly foolish to endow inmates with a detailed sense of the positions of vital organs, but there you go), “that when you take away a person’s fear of pain, you take away their fear of death? You make them, in their own eyes, immortal. Which of course they’re not, but what’s the saying? We are all immortal until proven otherwise?”
“Something like that,” said Mitch, who was a bit preoccupied.
Mitch was Victor’s cellmate at Wrighton Federal Penitentiary. Victor was fond of Mitch, in part because Mitch was thoroughly unconcerned with prison politics, and in part because he was clever. People didn’t seem to catch on because of the man’s size, but Victor saw the talent, and put it to good use. For instance, Mitch was presently trying to short out a security camera with a gum wrapper, a cigarette, and a small piece of wire Victor had secured for him three days before.
“Got it,” said Mitch a few moments later, when Victor was thumbing through the chapter on the nervous system. He set the book aside, and flexed his fingers as the guard came down the aisle.
“Shall we?” he asked as the air began to hum.
Mitch took a long look around their cell, and nodded. “After you.”
VII
TWO DAYS AGO
ON THE ROAD
THE rain hit the car in waves. There was so much of it that the wiper blades did nothing to clear it away, only managed to move it around on the windows, but neither Mitch nor Victor complained. After all, the car was stolen. And obviously stolen well; they’d been driving it without incident for almost a week, ever since they swiped it from a rest stop a few miles from the prison.
The car passed a sign that pronounced MERIT—23 MILES.
Mitch drove and Victor stared out past the downpour at the world as it flew by. It felt so fast. Everything felt fast after being in a cell for ten years. Everything felt free. For the first few days they had driven aimlessly, the need to move outweighing the need for a destination. Victor hadn’t known where they were driving. He hadn’t decided yet where to start the search. Ten years was long enough to plan the details of the prison break down to the minutiae. Within an hour he had new clothes, within a day he had money, but a week out and he still didn’t have a place to start looking for Eli.
Until that morning.
He’d picked up The National Mark, a nationwide paper, from a gas station, flipping absently through, and fate had smiled at him. Or at least, someone had smiled. Smiled straight up from a photo printed to the right of a news article titled:
CIVILIAN HERO SAVES BANK
The bank was located in Merit, a sprawling metropolis halfway between Wrighton’s barbed-wire walls and Lockland’s wrought-iron fences. He and Mitch had been heading there for no other reason than the fact that it was somewhere to go. A city full of people Victor could question, persuade, coerce. And a city that was already showing promise, he thought, lifting the folded paper.
He had bought the copy of The National Mark, but taken only that page, slipping it into his folder almost reverently. It was a start.
Now Victor closed h
is eyes, and tipped his head back against the seat while Mitch drove.
Where are you, Eli? he wondered.
Where are you where are you where are you where are you?
The question echoed in his head. He’d wondered it every day for a decade. Some days absently, and others with such an intense need to know that it hurt. It actually hurt, and for Victor, that was something. His body settled back into the seat as the world sped by. They hadn’t taken the freeway—most escaped convicts knew better than that—but the speed limit on the two-lane highway was more than satisfactory. Anything was better than standing still.
Sometime later, the car hit a small pothole, and the bump jarred Victor from his reverie. He blinked, and turned his head to watch the trees that bordered the road zip past. He rolled down the window halfway to feel that speed, ignoring Mitch’s protests about the rain splashing into the car. He didn’t care about the water or the seats. He needed to feel it. It was dusk, and in the last dregs of the day Victor caught sight of a shape moving down the side of the road. It was small, head bowed and clutching at itself as it trudged down the narrow shoulder of the highway. Victor’s car passed it before he frowned and spoke up.
“Mitch, go back.”
“For what?”
Victor turned his attention to the massive man behind the wheel. “Don’t make me ask again.”
Mitch didn’t. He threw the car into reverse, the tires slipping on the wet pavement. They passed the figure again, but this time going backward. Mitch shifted the car again into drive, and crawled up alongside the shape. Victor rolled down his window the rest of the way, the rain pressing in.
“You all right?” he asked over the rain.
The figure didn’t respond. Victor felt something prickle at the edge of his senses, humming. Pain. It wasn’t his.
“Stop the car,” he said, and this time Mitch put the vehicle promptly—a little too promptly—into park. Victor got out, zipped his coat up to his throat, and began to walk alongside the stranger. He was a good two heads taller.
“You’re hurt,” he said to the bundle of wet clothes. It wasn’t the arms crossed tightly over the form’s chest that gave it away, or the dark stain on one sleeve, darker even than the rain, or the way the figure pulled back sharply when he reached out a hand. Victor smelled pain the way a wolf smelled blood. Tuned to it.
“Stop,” he said, and this time the person’s steps dragged to a halt. The rain fell, steady and cold, around them. “Get in the car.”
The figure looked up at him then, and the wet hood of the coat fell back onto a pair of narrow shoulders. Water blue eyes, fierce behind smudged black liner, stared up at him from a young face. Victor knew pain too well to be fooled by the defiant look, the set jaw around which wet blond hair curled and stuck. She couldn’t be more than twelve, thirteen maybe.
“Come on,” he pressed, gesturing to the car that had stopped beside them.
The girl just stared at him.
“What’s going to happen to you?” he asked. “Couldn’t be worse than what already has.”
When she made no motion toward the car, he sighed and pointed at her arm.
“Let me look at that.” He reached out, letting his fingers graze her jacket. The air around his hand crackled the way it always did, and the girl let out a barely audible breath of relief. She rubbed at her sleeve.
“Hey, stop that,” he warned, knocking her hand away from the wound. “I didn’t fix it.”
Her eyes danced between his hand and her sleeve, and back again.
“I’m cold,” she said.
“I’m Victor,” he said, and she offered him a small, exhausted flicker of a smile. “Now what do you say we get out of the rain?”
VIII
LAST NIGHT
MERIT CEMETERY
“YOU’RE not a bad person,” repeated Sydney, flinging dirt onto the moonlit grass. “But Eli is.”
“Yes. Eli is.”
“But he didn’t go to prison.”
“No.”
“Do you think he’ll get the message?” she asked, pointing at the grave.
“I’m pretty sure,” said Victor. “And if he doesn’t, your sister will.”
Sydney’s stomach twisted at the thought of Serena. In her mind, her big sister was two different people, two images overlapping in a way that blurred both, and made her feel dizzy, ill.
There was the Serena from before the lake. The Serena who’d knelt on the floor in front of her the day she left for college—they both knew she was abandoning Sydney to the toxic, empty house—and who used her thumb to wipe tears from Sydney’s cheek, saying over and over, I’m not gone, I’m not gone.
And then there was the Serena from after the lake. The Serena whose eyes were cold and whose smile was hollow, and who made things happen with only words. The one who lured Sydney into a field with a body, cooing at her to show her trick, and then looking sad when she did. The one who turned her back when her boyfriend raised his gun.
“I don’t want to see Serena,” said Sydney.
“I know,” said Victor. “But I want to see Eli.”
“Why?” she asked. “You can’t kill him.”
“That may be.” His fingers curled around the shovel. “But half the fun is trying.”
IX
TEN YEARS AGO
LOCKLAND UNIVERSITY
WHEN Eli picked up Victor from the airport a few days before the start of spring semester, he was wearing the kind of smile that made Victor nervous. Eli had as many different smiles as ice cream shops had flavors, and this one said he had a secret. Victor didn’t want to care, but he did. And since he couldn’t seem to keep himself from caring, he was determined to at least keep himself from showing it.
Eli had spent the whole break on campus doing research for his thesis. Angie had complained because he was supposed to go away with her; Angie, as Victor predicted, was not a fan of Eli’s thesis, neither the subject matter nor the percent of his time it was occupying. Eli claimed the holiday research stint was a token to placate Professor Lyne, to prove he was taking the thesis seriously, but Victor didn’t like it because it meant that Eli had a head start. Victor didn’t like it because he had, of course, petitioned to stay over break, too, applied for the same exemptions, and had been denied. It had taken all his control to hide the anger, the desire to pen over Eli’s life, and rewrite it into his. Somehow he managed only a shrug and a smile, and Eli promised to keep him in the loop if he made any headway in their—Eli had said their, not his, and that had helped placate him—area of interest. Victor had heard nothing all during break; then a few days before he was scheduled to fly back to campus, Eli called to say he’d found something, but refused to tell his friend what it was until the two were back on campus.
Victor had wanted to book an earlier flight (he couldn’t wait to escape the company of his parents, who had first insisted on a Christmas together, and then on reminding him daily of the sacrifice they were making, since holidays were their most popular tour slots) but he didn’t want to seem too eager, so he waited out the days, working furiously on his own adrenal research, which felt remedial by comparison, a simple issue of cause and effect, with too much documented data to make for much of a challenge. It was regurgitation. Competently organized and elegantly worded, yes, but dotted by hypotheses that felt, to Victor, uninspired, dull. Lyne had called the outline solid, had said that Victor was off to a running start. But Victor didn’t want to run while Eli was busy trying to fly.
And so, by the time he climbed into the passenger seat of Eli’s car, his fingers were rapping on his knees from the excitement. He stretched in an effort to still them, but as soon as they hit his legs again, they resumed their restless motion. He’d spent most of the flight storing up indifference so that when he saw Eli, the first words out of his mouth wouldn’t be tell me, but now that they were together, his composure was failing.
“Well?” he asked, trying unsuccessfully to sound bored. “What did you
find?”
Eli tightened his grip on the steering wheel as he drove toward Lockland.
“Trauma.”
“What about it?”
“It was the only commonality I could find in all the cases of EOs that are even close to well-documented. Anyway, bodies react in strange ways under stress. Adrenaline and all that, as you know. I figured that trauma could cause the body to chemically alter.” He began to speak faster. “But the problem is, trauma is such a vague word, right? It’s a whole blanket, really, and I needed to isolate a thread. Millions of people are traumatized daily. Emotionally, physically, what-have-you. If even a fraction of them became ExtraOrdinary, they would compose a measurable percentage of the human population. And if that were the case EOs would be more than a thing in quotation marks, more than a hypothesis; they’d be an actuality. I knew there had to be something more specific.”
“A genre of trauma? Like car accidents?” asked Victor.
“Yes, exactly, except there weren’t indicators of any common trauma. No obvious formula. No parameters. Not at first.”
Eli let his words hang in the car. Victor turned the radio from low to off. Eli was practically bouncing in his seat.
“But?” prompted Victor, cringing at his own obvious interest.
“But I started digging,” said Eli, “and the few case studies I could dig up—unofficial ones, of course, and this shit was a pain to find—the people in them weren’t just traumatized, Vic. They died. I didn’t see it at first because nine times out of ten when a person doesn’t stay dead, it isn’t even recorded as an NDE. Hell, half the time people don’t realize they’ve had an NDE.”
“NDE?”
Eli glanced over at Victor. “Near death experience. What if an EO isn’t a product of just any trauma? What if their bodies are reacting to the greatest physical and psychological trauma possible? Death. Think about it, the kind of transformation we’re talking about wouldn’t be possible with a physiological reaction alone, or a psychological reaction alone. It would require a huge influx of adrenaline, of fear, awareness. We talk about the power of will, we talk about mind over matter, but it’s not one over the other, it’s both at once. The mind and the body both respond to imminent death, and in those cases where both are strong enough—and both would have to be strong, I’m talking about genetic predisposition and will to survive—I think you might have a recipe for an EO.”
