by Rysa Walker
“Is that why we’re here?” I ask. “Do they want us to pick up more hitchers from this place?”
“How would I know? My only part in this was supposed to be getting you into the chopper. Lying bitch said she’d take me and Lily to Knoxville.”
Sophie seems a little naive to have believed that story when they clearly need her here to block Pfeifer. And I’m guessing from her expression that she didn’t believe it. Not really. She hoped Dacia would keep her word, but she didn’t have a choice as long as Dacia had her baby.
Miller and Smith are heading over. I lean across the table quickly and tell Daniel, “The lump is gone in my vision. It’s just a bruise.”
“What vision?” Sophie asks, but I don’t have time to answer.
They herd us into a hallway. There’s a gate about ten feet down, which is closed. I assume we’ll be here for a few minutes while Miller shuffles through his keys. But he just shoves the metal bars with one hand, and it slides open. I flash back on movies I’ve seen where all the prison doors open in unison. Maybe it was computerized back when this was an actual prison.
The corridor beyond the gate is dimly lit, and aside from the cells being stripped down to bare metal, the place resembles every cellblock I’ve seen in movies or on TV. As we go deeper into the facility, Sophie keeps looking back at Daniel. Her eyebrows are raised in a very clear message—I’m not blocking you, so you know . . . anytime you’re ready.
Daniel ignores her. He may not even see her, to be honest, because he keeps looking back over his own shoulder. At first, I think he’s worried that Miller is going to shove them again. But he seems to be watching Smith more than Miller.
About halfway down the long row, we reach a group of larger cells that appear to have undergone renovation. They’re now double-wides—two cells combined into one. Each has four cots, where the others had two. And the cots here are topped with mattresses.
“In you go,” Miller says. “The accommodations are a little less . . . posh . . . than what you’re used to at Sandalford, but at least you’ve got a bed. Hard to believe people pay to sleep here. Gotta be an easier way to act out prison fantasies.” His eyes do a perverse elevator ride, first at me and then at Sophie, which is doubly messed up since she’s holding Lily.
As soon as the words leave Miller’s mouth, the leg cramp comes back. He leans down, cursing and clutching his calf. Smith gives him a confused look, then steps into the cell and cuts our zip cuffs.
Blankets and clothing are piled on top of one bunk, and several crates of bottled water are stacked at the rear of the cell, along with a box of rations. The place has even been given a fresh coat of paint, and I send a silent prayer of thanks to the person who realized that tourists would be willing to give up a bit of authenticity in order to have a curtain around the toilet.
Smith loops a heavy chain through the bars to close the door. “Food, water, and a first-aid kit back there. This wouldn’t have been my first choice for housing you, but it should take care of your basic needs until the others arrive and we can get you transferred over.”
“Others?” I ask.
Miller limps forward and nods toward the stack of linens. There’s an envelope on top. “From Magda.”
The sound of Smith clicking the padlock shut sucks the air out of me. I sit on the edge of the bunk, waiting for my panic to abate. I’ve never been locked in a prison cell before, but I have been locked inside hospital rooms. It’s pretty much the same thing.
I’m not the only one freaking. “Are you really going to just leave us here?” Sophie asks. “Without a guard or anything?”
“Miller will check on you tomorrow,” Smith says.
“The hell I will. Not unless you’re sending in some backup. I’ve dealt with that one”—Miller nods toward me—“for about six months. She convinced my guards to load up a truck with my equipment that she and her friends then drove off the premises. She convinced them to let her out of the building unsupervised on more than one occasion. We’re a damn sight more likely to find all of them where we’ve left them if there is no guard nearby that she can trick into opening that lock.”
“I thought your boss solved that problem for you?” It’s clear from Smith’s tone that this is code of some sort.
Miller shakes his head. “Hasn’t kicked in yet. And there’s no guarantee it will.”
“Doesn’t matter, though,” Smith says. “The girl is a blocker. If she wasn’t blocking them, we wouldn’t have gotten them into this cell, right?”
“Hmph,” Miller says. I’m not sure if he’s agreeing or disagreeing.
“At least put me and the baby in a separate cell,” Sophie says. “I’m the one who ratted them out. We’re not safe in here. What if Pfeifer wakes up? I jabbed a needle in his arm, for God’s sake!”
“Oh, he’ll wake up.” Miller’s tone remains light, almost teasing. “I’m thinking two, maybe three, hours, now that the tube is out of his arm. Guess we’ll find out how good you are at blocking, won’t we?”
“What about formula for the baby? I’ve only got one bottle and a couple of teething biscuits.”
“You’ve got food back there,” Miller says.
“She’s thirteen months old! She needs formula. And not cow’s milk. She’s allergic. Soy Enfamil.”
Smith runs one hand across the stubble on his head and then sighs at Miller. “Go into town and get the baby’s formula first thing tomorrow morning.”
“There’s no point!” Miller says. “We’re only talking, what, thirty-six hours? They can crumble up the adult food and—”
Smith’s eyes flash. “That was not a suggestion, Mr. Miller. I am in charge of these . . . prisoners. I can call your employer, if you’d like, but she instructed you to cooperate. And while you may no longer be in the military, I’m sure you remember the Geneva Conventions. There are special rules about the care and treatment of children. Those rules have already been broken once by taking that child from her mother and using her as a hostage, but that was before I was placed in charge. There will be no further violations. Are we understood?”
Miller nods, but he looks like he bit into something rotten.
“Then you are dismissed.”
After Miller sulks off, Smith tells Sophie, “I’ll check in tomorrow after the conference, to make sure he actually follows orders. We’ll keep your little girl healthy. You have my word on that.”
She thanks him, and Smith gives the five of us in the cell one last look. Daniel, who had previously been trying to avoid the Colonel’s gaze, seems to have changed his mind. He’s staring straight at Smith now, and the man’s frown deepens as he looks back at Daniel, like he’s trying to place him but can’t. He’s still puzzling over it when he walks away.
As soon as we hear the loud clang of the metal gate leading out to the cafeteria, Sophie whirls around, her eyes shooting fire at Daniel.
“I wasn’t blocking you!” she hisses.
“Yes,” Daniel says. “I know. If you’d been blocking me, Miller wouldn’t have been limping his way out of here. But you heard Dacia when we left the cabin. She said Taylor and Aaron wouldn’t be harmed as long as Miller checked in with her by midnight.”
“And you believed her?” Sophie says.
“Do I have a choice? Did you have a choice when she was holding Lily?”
Daniel’s voice is raw with emotion, and I hate to pile anything else on him. But I didn’t hear or see what happened in the cabin, so I have to ask.
“You weren’t able to nudge her? Dacia, I mean.”
“I didn’t try. Miller had Taylor. Gun pressed to her temple. I couldn’t risk it. If there had been even a second’s delay between my suggestion and his reaction . . . Plus, she was in the room,” he adds, jerking his head toward Sophie. “What if she was blocking me?”
“You weren’t in my radius at the beginning. I’ve got a ten-foot span, max, and it gets weaker the farther out I am. Or if I use it too often. But yeah,” Sophie says, getti
ng right up in his face, “once I got into the living room, I was blocking the hell out of you. Because that was the deal. I get the three of you on the helicopter, and Dacia doesn’t hurt Lily.”
Dacia’s voice runs through my memory, whispering to Hunter Bieler, I make it quick for you.
“You were smart not to test her, Sophie. She’s killed at least six children. I doubt she’d balk at one more. Do you think Dacia will keep her end of the bargain with Daniel?”
“Don’t know . . .” Judging from her tone, I’m certain she’s going to add don’t care. But she doesn’t. She just stands there, rocking Lily back and forth, hovering on the brink of tears. “Dacia didn’t exactly keep her end of the bargain with me. Sure, I got Lily back. But we’re inside a prison, in a cell with a man whose head is chock-full of ghosts that aren’t exactly friendly. I jabbed them with a needle a few hours ago, so I’m a little worried they’re going to forget I was in The Warren with them. A little worried we might not get out of here alive. So, yeah, maybe Dacia will do as she promised. Senator Cregg told her to behave while he’s still negotiating with this Magda woman and the military officials. That’s why they’re involved in transferring you guys over. But even if she keeps her promise about your friends on paper, she’s Dacia. She’ll put some kind of psycho spin on it.”
We’re all silent for a moment, even Lily, who’s studying her mother’s face with worried eyes. Sophie kisses her on the forehead and says, “Mama’s okay, little one,” before looking back over at me. “What were you saying before about a vision and the bump on your dad’s head?”
“You don’t have to worry about whether we get out,” Daniel says. “We do. It just may be a few days.”
I give her a brief overview of my visions in general as we make one of the cots so that she can put the baby down to sleep, and then explain about my most recent flash-forward.
“You were inside a van in the vision. And I can’t be sure, but I think it’s the one parked over by that cloverleaf-shaped building.”
Once Lily is down, pacifier securely in her mouth, Sophie turns back to me. “And these visions are solid? Not crystal-ball stuff that sometimes happens and sometimes doesn’t?”
“Rock solid,” Daniel says. “I’ve been in her head when she has them. The only limitation is that the vision only shows what she’s seeing and thinking at that moment. And”—he turns toward me—“that’s why I’m not worried about the fact that you don’t remember seeing me in the vision. If you were worried about me or even if I was dead, you’d have been thinking about me.”
Sophie rolls her eyes, possibly because it sounds egotistical when he puts it that way. Or, even more likely, because she can see that Daniel is very much alive, and all of the other hitchers she’s heard of, either in my head or my father’s, are dead.
“Daniel used to be dead. But now he’s not.”
I leave Daniel to explain that one while I open the note from Magda. There’s no salutation—as usual, Magda is as blunt as a sledgehammer.
I regret that this is the only option, but please trust that it is. You were dishonest with me in several regards. I, on the other hand, have never hidden from anyone the fact that my chief concern is the welfare of my daughters. Most of the adepts will remain here at Sandalford at least through the end of the year. Caleb will be transferred to Senator Cregg’s custody, due to his volatility. Once I have the formula for the cure in hand, Deo will be transferred as well, again due to the danger he poses to the larger community of adepts. You have been transferred to the Senator’s custody because you are apparently housing his psychopathic son, and the Senator wants to ensure that he does not harm anyone else.
After the election, the Senator has assured me that he will reunite you and Deo with the other adepts if he is satisfied that it can be done safely. By that point, he believes that many will be stable enough to return to the general population. In the interim, he has promised you will not be harmed and my daughters will have the medical treatment they need. Again, the next few months may be unpleasant for you and indeed for the other adepts who are averse to change. Maria will do her part to ensure they adjust to the inevitable. I just wish you and the Quinns were even half as cooperative. But rest assured this is all for the best.
Magda Bell
I toss the note to Daniel when I’m finished, and he reads it aloud.
“What she said about Maria,” Daniel says once he’s finished. “You think it’s true?”
I consider my answer, but in the end, I shake my head. “No. Just before we left, she was saying how easy it is for people to turn on those who are different. How easy it is to scapegoat them for everything that goes wrong in your life. Her family was killed in that sort of violence, and . . . if that was a performance, she wins the Oscar. Plus, most of the other things Magda said are bullshit. Why should that part be true?”
“So you think Pfeifer’s right when he says that a cure isn’t possible?” Sophie asks, confirming what I suspected—she was listening the whole time my father and I were talking the other night.
“Yes. For one thing, he’s the expert, but it also syncs up with everything Dr. Kelsey—the psychiatrist back at Sandalford—told me about the regions of the brain the drug affects. But Pfeifer did say they were close to creating a drug that would mitigate symptoms even before he was imprisoned. And it’s been fifteen years since, with others probably continuing his work. So maybe this formula the Senator is supposedly handing over will actually be helpful for some of the adepts.”
“I think it’s equally likely that he’ll give her the formula for drain cleaner,” Daniel says. “I don’t get why Magda would believe him. She never struck me as naive, but suddenly she’s accepting everything the Senator tells her at face . . . value.”
A far more likely explanation has just occurred to me. Judging from Daniel’s expression, he’s reached the same conclusion.
“But if she was nudged by one of Cregg’s adepts,” I say, “why would she hold back on handing over Deo? If you were doing it, wouldn’t you have just convinced her to hand everyone over at once?”
“Maybe. But a hard push like that would be less likely to stick. I might be able to do it, but . . .” Daniel turns to Sophie. “Does the Senator have any adepts with my ability?”
“You mean useless tricks like giving people leg cramps?” she asks. “No, I know what you mean. Pushers. Yes, they’ve got two, at least. Otherwise they wouldn’t have been able to pull off most of their fake terrorism stuff. I know one of them. Terrance. He wound up at The Warren about two years ago, after he was arrested for holding up convenience stores. He was, like, thirteen years old, and he’d just stroll in and convince the cashier to give him a few hundred in change for that ten-dollar bill he paid for the Slim Jim or whatever. The video shows what happened, but the cashier didn’t even remember the kid coming in. First two times Terrance got caught, he convinced the cops to let him go, but he has trouble sending out a group message—like when you told everyone to hand over their guns in the lab. If there’s more than one person in a room, someone will know Terrance is lying. And it usually wears off after a few days, anyway. How long does it stick when you do it?”
“Depends,” Daniel says. “Sometimes it’s permanent. Is this Terrance the strongest . . .” He hesitates, clearly not liking the label, but it’s the one that all of the adepts seem to use. “Is he the strongest Pusher . . . they have?”
“Maybe. But they could easily have someone more powerful or even have more than two. We had several dozen new adepts come in while I was there. Most of them within the past month, and most brought in through that Sanctuary organization Cregg’s wife runs. Some were like . . . really new. Not second-gen and not stable yet. One died, and a bunch of them had that . . . smell. Like your boy back at the cabin. The kid with the hair.”
“The ozone smell?” I ask.
“I guess? Kind of burns your nose. The girl who died had it bad. She only lasted about a week after she reached the ca
mp in Nevada. She was like most of the newbies they brought in. None of them seemed to know what had hit them. I’m beginning to think they’re right about it going viral.”
“Not viral,” I say. “But it’s definitely spreading, at least in areas that have early political primaries.”
Daniel gives me a cautionary look. “Do we want to go into that right now?”
“Sophie’s telling us what she knows,” I say. “And a few days from now, we—or at least I—will consider her an ally. There’s a chance she could turn on us after the vision happens, but I suspect the Senator’s people have already figured out what’s going on with the drug sales. They probably got Cregg’s iPad from Taylor, too. Plus, to be honest, if Sophie spills this information to the Senator and he somehow manages to stop the transfer of drug formulas to those dealers, would that be a bad thing? It’s killing people.”
So we grab food and water from the boxes at the back and exchange information. I’ve no clue how long we talk because we don’t have phones or watches.
Sophie doesn’t know as much about the Senator’s operations as we’d hoped, but at least she’s able to provide us with a rough estimate of the people he has working for him—or simply has captive, in some cases—and what they can do. They have a few Zippos, a half dozen or so Movers, and some low-level Peepers. A couple of Fivers, including Olivia Wu, the girl who gave us the information on where to find Hunter Bieler and the other kids at Overhills. Sophie says they have two adepts who might be able to blow the circuits on household appliances, but none who could blow out an entire electrical grid. The two Pushers she mentioned. Terrance has been traveling with the Senator, and the other one with Dacia. She doesn’t believe they have an amp, which explains their interest in Deo, and as far as she knows, they don’t have any vessels. But with the steady stream of new people coming into the camp, she really couldn’t be certain about anything.
