by Sophie Davis
“Yes, but report back to me immediately after you have secured the target,” he responded. “Natalia, you have my private communicator number. As do you, Mr. Kelley.”
“Sure, I do,” Erik confirmed, standing, too.
Heat tinted my cheeks as I thought of the silly, yet slightly sexual, conversations Erik and I had when he called me on Mac’s communicator.
The three of us were quiet as we made our way down the elevator to the fifth floor. Erik followed me to my room to sit while I changed. He didn’t speak while I searched my closet for black clothes similar to the ones Cadence wore and then tried to brush my hair. His eyes had the faraway look of someone lost in deep thought. His mind was open, so I closed mine. I felt intrusive listening to his inner turmoil.
Erik held his hand out to me, palm up, when he noticed me wincing as clumps of my hair parted ways with my head. “Want me to do it?” he asked absently.
I nodded and turned the torture device over to him. I stood with my back to Erik. He gently tugged the offending tangles free. When my hair was smooth – poufy, but smooth – he twisted it into a loose bun at the nape of my neck as he’d seen me do so many times before. After all my hair was more or less secured, he kissed the space behind my ear.
“Thank you,” I whispered.
Erik wrapped his arms around my waist from behind and pulled me into his lap. Erik buried his face in the side of my neck and sagged against my back, his weight heavy on my small body. I didn’t mind. Whenever I needed him, he was always there for me and while I wished more than anything right then that the situation was very different, I loved that Erik needed me for once.
In the lobby of the Hamilton, Cadence awkwardly waited several feet from a group of ten heavily armed men. Subtle, Mac, I thought dryly. He’d said the whole purpose of sending me and Erik was to prevent drawing attention to the situation. The mini army militia screamed “witch hunt” in my opinion.
A tall slender man with a full head of snow-white hair broke apart from his band of merry men. He strode purposely towards me and Erik. The vulnerability was no longer visible in Erik’s features. He was all business now.
“Operative Lyons, Operative Kelley,” the tall man greeted us without extending his hand. “My name is Graham Byrnes and I am the Head of Toxic’s extraction team.”
I blinked in surprise. I hadn’t been aware that Toxic actually had an extraction team. I just sort of assumed that when these situations arose, Mac picked a couple of Operatives who weren’t working on other assignments and sent them.
“Nice to meet you,” I mumbled.
Erik simply nodded his head, but didn’t speak.
“I assume Director McDonough filled you in on the details,” Graham Byrnes continued. Then he withdrew two handguns that were holstered at his narrow waist and handed one to Erik and one to me. I started to shake my head to refuse his offering, but he pressed the hard metal handle into my palm and held it there until I wrapped my own fingers around the grip.
“Is this really necessary?” I asked weakly.
“It’s just a precaution. My team won’t be entering the premises with you two. The situation might get out of control and we want you both to be protected,” Graham answered stiffly.
Erik lifted the back of his blazer and secured the weapon in his waistband, out of sight from the casual observer. Reluctantly, I copied him. Even if the situation did “get out of hand”, I would not be using the gun. My abilities were sufficient to subdue an untrained assailant.
Graham motioned for us to follow him and we made our way to where the rest of the group stood anxiously waiting. Cadence fell in step with me and Erik, looking relieved that we were there. She was still dressed in her business-like black suit, but she now had a weapon of her own slung across her chest. After months of trying to establish enough of a connection with Cadence to get a read on her, I was now acutely tuned to her emotions. She wasn’t nearly as calm and indifferent as she pretended. All of this bothered Cadence, too. The older girl was just better at masking her emotions.
Outside the hotel, two large black vehicles with darkly tinted windows idled, their doors ajar. I followed Erik and Cadence to the first car and slid across the leather bench. The metal of the gun was hard and cold through the back of my dress shirt, an uncomfortable reminder of the potential violence that might arise. Several of Graham’s team filed into the first two rows and Graham himself climbed into the driver’s seat.
The several miles that separated the Hamilton and the city’s border took us half an hour to cover despite the fact that there was remarkably little traffic. We passed through the open gate without so much as slowing down. Both SUVs entered the sparse flow of traffic on the 495 beltway that circled Washington, D.C. It was odd to see so few cars when the couple of times that I’d flown over the beltway, it had been packed bumper-to-bumper.
Cadence and Erik sat on either side of me, gazing out the blackened windows as we sped down the cracked and uneven pavement. The exit for Toxic’s Air Base in Greenbelt, Maryland appeared after several long minutes. Graham deftly swerved the vehicle on to the off ramp. A guard station blocked the entrance to the base and Graham stopped the car just long enough to say a couple hushed words to the guard.
After we had been cleared, Graham weaved his way down a small street with boxy-looking houses, one a replica of the next. I scarcely had time to wonder who lived in the identical homes when we made a sharp right down a long, tree-lined road that dead-ended into a massive hover hangar.
Graham’s men filed on to the large plane parked out front. Erik, Cadence, and I followed suit. Graham again took the flight seat and beckoned for me to join him in the co-pilot’s chair.
Once we were high above the base, and the homes resembled a line of ants, Graham cleared his throat. “We are heading to a small town in Pennsylvania, just over the border from Maryland,” he informed me. “There have been reports of a young girl that ‘tells the future.”
“Tells the future?” That piqued my interest. Visionaries were rare these days. One or two were identified during the aptitude testing each year, but a strong Visionary hadn’t been found in decades. Now I knew why Mac was so eager to get his hands on her.
“We have no idea how strong she is,” Graham continued. “But she will be valuable to the Agency when she learns how to use her powers.”
“How old is she?” I asked.
“Not sure, but intel points to between eight and ten,” he replied absently.
“Do we know why she wasn’t tested originally?” I pressed.
“The town is pretty rural; it’s not uncommon for people from the smaller towns to disregard the summons,” he explained. “Personally, I think a lot of them don’t grasp that the testing isn’t optional. In some cases, the parents just assume nobody will know the child is Talented.”
“Mac said the parents wouldn’t be sanctioned as long as I convinced them to let her go peacefully,” I prompted, gauging his reaction.
Graham actually laughed a little at this and I feared maybe that wasn’t actually going to be the case.
“What’s so funny?” I demanded.
“Nothing. It’s just strange to hear somebody so young call him ‘Mac,’” he clarified. “I was in the Hunters with Danbury. We were on the same team for a while and only his closest friends called him that.”
“Well, what else would I call him?” I asked defensively. “I mean calling him ‘Director’ or something sounds so formal and considering I have a bedroom in his house, that would be super weird.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right. It would be,” Graham chuckled. “You’re very special to him.”
“He was a friend of my father’s. He just feels a sense of responsibility to me,” I replied sadly. Thinking about my father just then made me miss him terribly.
Graham stiffened at my admission. “Your father was an interesting man,” Graham said carefully.
“You knew him?” I asked surprised.
“I
met him a couple times over the years,” Graham said evasively. “Brilliant man. Him and your mother both.” He nodded thoughtfully, as though recalling some long ago memory.
Silence followed his statement. For my part, I wanted to know more, but was afraid to ask. Not that anything Graham Byrnes said would be earth shattering or anything. I just felt uncomfortable talking about my parents with a perfect stranger.
“To answer your question, yes, the mother won’t get in any trouble as long as everything goes smoothly,” said Graham, finally breaking the silence.
“Just the mother?” I asked.
“The father isn’t in the picture. The mother was pretty young when she had her; we’re thinking about eighteen,” Graham explained.
This made me inexplicably sad. The daughter was likely all the woman had and taking away her sole companion was depressing.
Graham began to direct the plane down towards a break in the tree cover. The craft landed in a large field with bleachers on either side, what I’d previously mistaken for a clearing was actually a sport’s field at a school. The field was marked with white lines and numbers indicating yardage at each side. A misshapen T stood in front, and behind, the plane.
“What kind of field is this?” I whispered to Erik once our feet were on solid ground again.
Erik and Cadence, who were standing within earshot, laughed and looked at each other conspiratorially. Several of Graham’s men were also trying to hide smiles when they heard my question.
“What?” I demanded, confused. Of course, I knew it was a sport’s field. The McDonough School had a huge field and bleachers, too. A lot of the combat training took place on that field and when the advanced combat students sparred, the other students came to watch. Many of the physical aspects of the Placement Testing also took place on that field. But ours didn’t have the weird metal posts or the strange lines. Upon closer examination, I noticed that the “grass” we were standing on wasn’t even real grass. It was some odd synthetic substance only made to look like grass.
“It’s a football field,” Erik explained kindly.
“Football,” I repeated softly. “Where’s the goal?”
“You’re thinking of soccer,” Cadence supplied.
Then I remembered the American’s definition of football was decidedly different from the rest of the worlds’. As a child, I’d traveled the world with my parents, but recreational sports had never been high on the “must-see” list. I once again wondered what it would have been like to be normal. Would I have gone to a regular school? Played regular sports? Not American football, of course. Soccer maybe?
“Ready?” Graham asked us, coming to stand beside me.
I nodded. No use dwelling on things that would never be, I decided.
On the other side of the gate marking the entrance to the stadium was a huge parking lot. Two identical black SUVs waited for our entourage. A solitary man dressed in a light-weight brown suit leaned against the hood of one car. He was skinny and awkward in his ill-fitting clothes. He stood up straight, fidgeting nervously with two sets of keys as we approached.
I tried to put myself in his scuffed brown loafers. Most of Graham’s men were large and physically imposing and the arsenal of weapons each man had strapped to various parts of his oversized body was intimidating. Cadence might have been small, but her rigid demeanor made her very unwelcoming. Erik, who was so gentle and kind to me, was terrifying when he was in one of his moods. The fading bruises covering his face gave him a tough appearance; one that said “Don’t mess with me.”
For my part, I doubted I looked menacing, but my odd purple eyes were frequently off-putting. And then there was the fact that my mere presence gave some people the creeps. Not everyone felt it, but those with the ability to sense my power, reacted in one of two ways: they gravitated towards me or they ran for the hills, screaming. The young guy with the car keys undeniably looked as though he wanted to do the latter.
“Hello,” he stammered when Graham was a few feet from him.
“Keys,” Graham demanded gruffly.
The boy extended his arm and with one shaky hand, dropped the keys in Graham’s outstretched palm. Graham threw one set to a guy with a shaved head and ears so large, I questioned whether his haircut was the result of a dare.
“Lyons, Kelley, Choi with me,” Graham called, throwing the driver’s side door open.
The boy in the brown suit barely had time to jump out of the way as Graham threw the car in drive and sped from the parking lot.
Not long after leaving the school, we turned down a gravel road with small, neat houses lining either side. The lingering effects of the Great Contamination were more pronounced here than anywhere I’d been in years. Deformed trees and strange-looking shrubbery decorated yellow lawns. Warped flowers adorned the landscape like a neon rainbow. Vibrant pink fruit hung from badly gnarled tree limbs. Even the sky seemed to be the wrong shade of blue here. It was more like a scene from a cartoon movie than real life.
The houses became farther apart and shabbier the farther we traveled down the unpaved road. We finally stopped in front of a short driveway leading to a ramshackle of a structure. It reminded me of the dilapidated safe house I’d stayed in on my first hunting mission, except that house had been made to look that way from the outside. The interior had actually been clean and well-maintained. I highly doubted the same was true in this case.
Paint that might have been blue in a past life was peeling off the shutters that actually remained attached to the two small windows. The front door hung, cracked and slightly askew, on its hinges. The metal roof was heavily rusted and I bet some portions no longer kept the rain out.
At the very least, Toxic would provide the little Visionary with better living accommodations. The thought didn’t totally absolve my guilt for the role I was about to play in taking her away from her mother, but it did lessen the impact.
“Lyons, Kelley, you’re on,” Graham called to where Erik and I sat in the back of the car.
I glanced at Erik and he nodded without meeting my eyes. We climbed out of the SUV, Graham and his men only seconds behind. Graham handed us each a small ear piece that fit, undetected, inside, allowing us to communicate with the extraction team. Cadence stood uneasily off to one side, not sure what to do with herself.
Erik and I walked up the short drive, gravel crunching loudly underneath our feet. We were so close, my arm brushed his with every step.
“You okay?” I sent.
“Yeah, sure,” he sent back, grabbing my swinging hand and giving it a gentle squeeze.
At the front door, I paused, held up a hand to Erik, a signal for him to wait before knocking. I closed my eyes and expanded my senses. Two distinct minds buzzed inside. One was just on the other side of the door, the other in the back corner of the house.
“She’s in there,” I sent Erik.
“I can feel her, too.”
Erik banged three times on the broken wood. A shuffling of feet greeted my ears as someone crossed the room. The hinges protested when the door moved unsteadily inward. An arid odor assaulted my nose when the door opened, causing me to gag. I quickly shut down my sense of smell, blocking the offensive stench.
A heavyset woman I gauged to be in her early twenties stuck her greasy blonde head through the small crack she’d made. Eyes of liquid gold glanced nervously between me and Erik. The woman jutted out her ample chin and asked, “Whadda you two want?”
I sucked in a breath through my mouth, preparing to take control of her mind. “We’d like to come in,” I said evenly.
The woman complacently opened the door wider, allowing me and Erik entrance. Erik’s hand flew involuntarily to his nose as he fought the urge to retch just as I’d done moments before. I felt guilty that my senses were so conditioned that I could have easily turned one off at will. He didn’t have that luxury. Unfortunately, it was a learned behavior, so Erik couldn’t mimic the act.
“Breathe through your mouth,” I adv
ised.
The interior made the outside look glamorous by comparison. A dirty three-seater couch dominated the living space. Springs burst through the filthy cushions in several spots and I decided against sitting. Behind the couch, I found the source of the putrid smell. Several wire cages were stacked on top of one another. A handful of scrawny chickens clucked noisily.
Erik coughed and his eyes began to water. All sense of decorum forgotten, he raised an arm to his face and covered his mouth and nose with his coat sleeve. Either the woman was used to the reaction or she didn’t care. Either way, she wasn’t offended.
“What’s your name, ma’am?” I asked the pudgy woman. I finally got my first glance at the length of her entire form. A dirty blue smock-like dress was drawn tight across her well-endowed chest and protruding stomach. Her swollen feet were stuffed in worn synthetic shoes. I felt miserable for the young woman and her squalor-like living conditions.
“Lisa,” she whispered without emotion.
“Lisa.” I smiled to put her at ease. “My name is Talia and this is Erik and we’re from Toxic. Do you know what Toxic is?”
“Yeah,” she said robotically.
“Good. Is your daughter here?” I asked, wanting to get to the point and get out of this make-shift chicken coop before Erik hurled all over the dusty floor.
“What you want with Bethy?” she asked suspiciously. The chickens had momentarily distracted me and my hold on her mind had slackened.
“We want to ask her a couple questions. You don’t mind, do you?” Erik soothed, taking over.
“Course not.” She smiled, slipping back in to robot mode. “Bethy,” she hollered towards the back of the house.
The pitter-patter of small bare feet filled the tiny house and then a miniature version of Lisa appeared in the doorframe demarcating the living room and a small hallway. The child had the same dirty blonde hair and goldenrod eyes and was a testament to the notion that obesity might be genetic.
“Hello, Bethy,” I greeted the girl.
“Hi,” she said in a small voice. She gazed longingly at the clean, comparatively stylish clothes that Erik and I wore. An expression of wonder at the two strangers that must’ve appeared so out of place in her dingy house came over her features.
