by Lan Chan
“I’m sorry.”
His shoulders sagged. “You don’t even know what you’re apologizing for. We were supposed to be more than this. Better than them.”
“Who?”
“The Psi-Ops. All this circumventing of the law, that’s stuff they do. It’s Street King behaviour. No offence.”
“Don’t do it.”
He stopped walking. “Pardon?”
“If it hurts you, don’t do it,” I said. “We can get by on our own.” Hell, Adam and I had done it just this afternoon.
“And let them take you away?”
“I’d rather that than watch it eat you alive.”
His lips tugged into a sad smile. “Does it ever worry you that we have too much power?”
I knew then what was bugging him. All of us in Hyper were at the top of the food chain. And there were people out there willing to risk their lives on a drug that might give them half of what we had. It didn’t matter that it might also kill them. Mum always said that guilt was a silent killer and it had to be stamped out, otherwise it would drag you under. I hated that she might be right.
He started to open his mouth and then frowned at me. “Why do you have that look on your face?”
I allowed the smile that I’d been trying to hide to bloom. “Sometimes I forget that you’re the heir to the Hoffman Empire. Do you think predator animals feel guilt, Oz?”
“No, but they’re animals.”
“But do they have to work for their kills?”
“What are you getting at?”
“You didn’t get here by dumb luck. None of us did. If we wanted easy, there are a million other things we could do. The first time Adam came with me to the Row, one of the illusion parlours offered him a six-figure salary on the spot to come work for them. Lily can do anything she wants to any record ever. And do you have any clue what the Shadow Boxing League would do with a telekinetic like Zeke? But it has never even occurred to him to join.”
“What about you?”
I contemplated for a moment and then rolled up the hem of my T-shirt until half of my right ribcage was exposed. Tracing the curved bullet wound, I contemplated for the hundredth time what might have happened if I weren’t an EK. “Courtesy of an Agent Daniels of the New China Psi Enforcement division.”
Oz sucked in a breath. What for? he asked in my head.
Part of me wanted to leave out the minute details but it didn’t have the same effect without them. I went parking with a boy from school. We ended up at an abandoned warehouse near Alice Springs. We had no idea it was an arms locker. They rolled in with a motorcade, and instead of arresting people, they just started shooting. Mark, the boy I was with, he was so scared that he started crying. They wouldn’t have found us otherwise. We were just kids, but we’d seen everything. He would have been eighteen this year.
Oz’s face reflected the horror of my memories. They killed him?
I could only nod. You should have seen the place. It was wired up like an arcade. There were explosives in crates in the basement. I could have started a fire that would have killed them all. Instead, I ran.
There was no need to inform him that Mum had a fit because the agents had all seen my face. Or that she’d made sure they never breathed a word about any of it. I looked up into Oz’s face.
“Edward Blake has already offered me a contract in his court. Twice. I don’t know how you thought we were ever going to do this without bending some of the rules. We weren’t made for the straight and narrow. The system itself isn’t made for it. Why do you think half the people would rather turn to the Kings than to the Academy? Why do you think Spectra is so damned popular?”
He sighed. “They want to be like us so badly they’re willing to throw their lives away.”
“I hear Second Sight works the other way too. That it dulls the senses of some espers rather than enhances them. We all want what we don’t have. If it’s not this miracle solution, it’ll be something else.”
“You’re too cynical for someone so young.”
Another one of Mum’s many sayings almost slipped out. Instead, I looked at the spot on my ankle where the unconscious woman had touched me. “You can tell them what happened to me if you think it’ll help. But keep them away from me, Oz. For their own good.”
“Are you sure about this?”
“No.”
“Where do the favours end?”
I thought about it for a second. “Whenever you decide it’s enough.”
As I walked away, I knew it to be the truth. I also knew that Lily was right. None of the others would hold it against Oz if he decided he was finished with covering for us. But they also knew that day would probably never come.
8
By the time I made it back to the mansion, the kitchen had been cleaned. With my Sunday nights now free, Lily commandeered me for more experiments. What I really wanted to do was lie down on the couch and lobotomise myself with television. But Zeke and Adam had put on the recording of Ryan’s shadow boxing win, and I couldn’t go through that again.
Bianca joined us after making sure Oz was okay. Inside the lab, Lily rummaged around getting her experiment ready.
“How was he?” I asked Bianca.
“Guilty. Not surprising since Hoffman Industries almost levelled a city and all that happened was a fine and confiscation of the robots.”
I sniffed. “One rule for the rich and one for the rest of us.”
“It’s a hard pill to swallow.” It wasn’t until she said it that I realised she agreed with Oz. For some reason, it made me blurt out what Adam and I had done this afternoon. Her expression softened. She reached out to grab my shoulders.
“I know we have to do it,” she said. “I’m just saying it feels icky.”
“Who decides where the line is?”
“I think we all know where the line is.”
“Does that mean if I had turned out to be a complete psycho, you’d have turned me over to the courts?”
“Yeah.” For some reason, this cleared the fog from her eyes. “We would have. Same reason why we’ve asked candidates to leave before.”
“Will you please stop gossiping?” Lily asked. “I already said that what we’re doing is okay. Drink this.”
She handed me a vial of blue liquid. I held it away from my face. “No thanks.”
“You have to.”
“Ah, I’m pretty sure I don’t.”
She stamped her foot. “You said you’d cooperate.”
“Drinking some nasty blue shit has nothing to do with cooperation. What is it anyway?” The liquid was thin and translucent. The same colour as toilet water after one of those disinfectant blocks had been rinsed through.
“It’s a dye that will adhere to the nanobots and give us a better reading of them in your body.”
I made a face. As much as I wanted to know what was happening inside me, it seemed there was a limit to what I would tolerate. “Couldn’t you have made it a bit more appetising?”
“It’s not meant to be food.”
“Urgh.” Pinching my nose, I swallowed the offensive brew. Some of it tried to come back up, but I rubbed my throat to relieve my gag reflex. Then I walked around the room focusing on anything but the disgusting bitter aftertaste in my mouth.
Lily positioned me in front of the X-ray machine using a ruler to prod me into place.
“Take off your bra,” Lily instructed.
“Buy me dinner first.”
Thunderclouds rolled across Lily’s eyes as Bianca chuckled. Tough crowd.
“This isn’t going to hurt or take long, so don’t use any of your powers to blow up the machines.”
No matter how many times I’d claimed them as accidents, Lily still insisted that I had some control over my reactions. Like I was using the unpredictability of my powers to let off steam. She really had a one-track mind.
Despite her reassurances that I was safe, both of them scampered out of the room and watched me from the observ
ation platform. “I don’t feel so good,” I said.
“That’s just the dye reacting with the enzymes in your stomach.”
“It’s reacting very abruptly.” I clutched at my stomach, wincing in pain as nausea gripped me. “Hurry up and take the X-ray!”
“You have to straighten up.”
I did so whilst clutching my side. She pressed the remote and I heard a series of snapping sounds. As soon as it was over, I hunkered down into a crouch and stayed there until the nausea passed. Thankfully, it didn’t take long. After about ten minutes I was able to uncurl from the foetal position.
Holding a set of X-rays in her hand, Lily returned to the room. She looked up but not directly at me. “Another unsuccessful attempt.”
“You can’t see anything?”
She shoved the blurry X-ray under my nose. “What am I looking at here?”
Her finger pointed to a swirl of white specks inside a less-dense cloud. She then held up the next X-ray in the sequence. I wasn’t any kind of expert but the cloud seemed to have shrunk. “The nanobots are breaking down the dye as we speak. It’s probably why you didn’t feel well. They’re metabolising at a phenomenal rate.”
“Why would they be doing that?”
“Because they know I’m trying to experiment on you to figure out what’s going on inside your body. They may be biological, but someone’s coded them with very complex and specific instructions. They’ll attack anything they think might be detrimental to you.”
I sat down on the closest bench and crossed my arms over my chest. “Is this supposed to make me feel better somehow?”
“It’s not supposed to make you feel anything.”
“Maybe we should just leave it for now,” Bianca suggested. “We’re not getting anywhere and it’s just upsetting you.”
Lily made a frustrated growling sound. Her fingers tapped absently on the desk. “It’s been more than a month and we’re not any closer to figuring it out. May I take some blood?”
“No, you may not,” Bianca said.
“Why not?”
“Actually,” I interrupted, “given everything that’s happened, maybe it’s time I stopped being squeamish and figure out what the hell’s going on with me before something else goes wrong.”
Bianca put her arm around my shoulder. “What happened this morning could have just been a coincidence.”
“Even if it was, I’d still like to know.”
“So I can take blood?” Lily said.
“Yes, but not too much.”
I allowed her to take three vials which she then immediately started to run tests on. Bianca sent me to bed while she waited around with Lily.
Dinner hadn’t been very long ago, but with the drawing of blood and my weird reaction to the dye, I was hungry again. After swinging past the kitchen, I headed up to my bedroom with a bottle of water and a platter of leftover sushi. Inside, I found Zeke perched on the windowsill, flipping through one of my sketchbooks.
“Have you ever heard of the concept of privacy?” I shut the door with my foot. He flipped to a page with a monochrome drawing of a girl crouched on a rooftop.
“Self-advertising?”
“I’ll have you know it’s for Lily. She reads so many damned Spectra comics, I thought I might as well have some control over how I’m portrayed.”
“You’re a little tall in this one, don’t you think?”
“Artistic license.” I offered him some food which he declined. There was no room for me on the perch, so I settled on the edge of my bed with my legs tucked under me. At this time of night, the facility was quiet enough that the rotation of tyres on the driveway could be heard from my room. It looked like Rich was home. It wasn’t even ten o’clock.
“What a party animal,” I commented, knowing Zeke would know exactly what I was referring to. He raised a brow at me.
“Did you really want him around for that conversation we had at dinner?” It was a rhetorical question but it made me sigh nonetheless. I set my food aside and placed my hands in my lap. Ever since I’d forcibly ejected Oz from my mind, a heavy feeling had set in my chest. What if I just started kicking people out of my head without wanting to? What if this was the beginning of the breakdown in my mind?
Without thinking, I reached out telepathically and held on to the link in Zeke’s mind. He responded by tugging back. Do you really want to mess with this? he thought.
I can’t not know. What if it happens when I’m not prepared?
Without Oz’s Reader ability to enhance my memory, the mental image I recreated was hazy at best. My conscious mind wasn’t interested in the colour of the redhead’s clothes or the correct placement of the coffee cup Scarlet left on the table. The only vivid thing in the image was the blue veins that snaked down the unconscious woman’s arms and the way she spasmed as though she was having a fit.
In the physical world, Zeke stopped flipping pages and leaned forward, one leg dangling over the side of the ledge, the other bent and acting as support for his arm. The anticipation flowing from both of us caused the link to shimmer.
Memory me took a step forward and tried to get past the scene at Scarlet’s door. A shiver ran up my spine at the phantom touch of cold fingers against my ankle. The whispers buzzed around me like verbal insects. My fists clenched as the rush of the vacuum began. It happened in a split second, but in my mind, it felt like an age before the final pop. My eyes flicked up to meet Zeke’s brown ones.
You still there? I thought to him.
Nothing happened, he responded.
Did you even feel it?
I felt what you remembered, but it wasn’t the same thing Oz felt.
I bit my lip and my thoughts pinpointed what Lily had said to me: The nanobots would attack anything they were programmed to believe was a threat.
How exactly was what Oz did threatening to you? Zeke asked.
Maybe because he was thinking about the Psi-Ops when he felt it?
Shit. I forgot about that. Then he smiled. At least you know it’s not going to just cut us off at any moment.
Unless you threaten me!
His smile turned into a smirk. I threaten you all the time and it makes no difference.
He was right about that. I told Oz I’d speak to the Psi-Ops as long as he keeps them on a leash. The amusement faded from Zeke’s eyes.
I don’t like the sound of any of this, he sent. Bianca’s right. The way they sniffed around you after Ballarat was frightening. All it’s going to take is something small and they’re going to pounce, and the court order isn’t going to mean a thing.
I know. I’ll be careful.
It’s not you I’m worried about.
You don’t trust Oz?
It’s not that I don’t trust him. It’s that he’s too damn blindsided by what happened in Ballarat. He’s not even part of Hoffman Industries but he’s acting like it was his fault.
Do you think that’s a flaw? Or should we be guiltier than we actually are?
He rolled his eyes. We didn’t do anything wrong!
I know. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take some responsibility for what happened.
We stopped Omega. That was us taking responsibility.
That’s a hard line to take, Mr. Future Psi-Ops Agent.
He shrugged. I felt his sudden ambivalence to the thought of joining the Psi-Ops.
You’ve wanted to be one of them for as long as I’ve known you, I thought. What’s changed?
Maybe I might go overseas. Or to New China. You know I’ve never been out of Australia?
I had known that. As a ward of the state, he didn’t have that many travelling opportunities. Unlike me, who had been dragged halfway across the world with nothing to show for it besides bad memories. Then something struck me.
This sudden change of heart wouldn’t have anything to do with Ryan, would it?
He frowned and brought both knees up to his chest. Before he could answer there was a knock at the door.
“Bedtime,” Zeke repeated, grateful for the change of subject. When we first arrived, bedtime was a foreign concept. We’d stay up as long as we could without caring. But the physical training and the advanced level of our studies had started to take its toll and we found ourselves exhausted.
Now sleep was a precious commodity that neither Zeke nor I wanted to waste. He swung his legs off the perch and unrolled the sleeping bag. I thought about suggesting he just sleep in the bed, but that was probably pushing our friendship a little too far.
The blood loss hadn’t felt like much, but as soon as my head hit the pillow, fatigue clawed at me. I barely even heard Zeke’s mumbled goodnight.
The transition between my bed and the rooftop was seamless. A hot breeze lifted strands of my hair. The warmth didn’t fit with the dark surroundings. Gruff voices drifted up, and I realised I was crouching beside a heating vent. Slowly, my eyes began to adjust to the darkness and I was able to make out objects.
I was on a flat roof in a built-up area. The skyline was low, which meant it wasn’t City Square, but I was completely surrounded by buildings. In the distance, I heard the lapping of water. I sniffed and the air was salty, mixed with the sulphuric smell of smoke from the nearby factories. I’d bet a year’s salary that I was on a building in the Docks.
My head turned as the volume of the voices increased. It was difficult to make out individuals, but the number of different tones made me think there were at least six people down there. I grew impatient and stalked across the rooftop, then crawled down an exterior ladder and down to the ledge of a fire escape.
With my back pressed against the wall, I trailed my fingers across a window and felt the bumps of plywood that had been nailed across it. Newspaper had been stuck over the glass to keep out the wind in the sections where it was shattered. Through the cracks, the voices came more clearly, but I still couldn’t hear the words. With very delicate slowness, I stuck a finger into the newspaper and tried to peel it away. There was a part of me that knew this must be a dream. Never in real life would I have made such a careless mistake.
