“Look where you’re going asshole!” a driver yelled at me. I ignored him as I wove through the cars.
As soon as I crossed the street, I ran through the main entrance of the stone building in front of me, the Unitarian church.
The sacred silence that enfolded me would, at any other time, have been calming. Now it made me feel exposed.
I slipped down the halls of the church, my footfalls muffled against the plush carpet, until I exited into the courtyard it shared with several other buildings, one of which contained a series of medical offices. I entered in through the back of the building and made my way to the front lobby where a row of chairs lined the walls. Bored patients sat in several of them and waited for their names to be called.
I glanced out the window. There was a bus stop right outside. It would be my getaway car.
I sat down in the general waiting room, switching between watching the hall I came from and watching the traffic outside. When I saw no signs of the agents who were after me, I willed my muscles to relax. Only now did I let myself think of what it meant to be wanted. And I evaded capture—that was criminal.
Now I really had to will myself to stay calm. I’d broken a whole lot of laws while teleporting, but I’d never gotten caught. Now that was a very real possibility.
From my view of the street, I could see a bus line heading my way. I hiked my backpack onto my shoulders and got up from my seat. Only when the bus came to a stop and slid its doors open did I make a beeline for it.
I joined the loose crowd of people waiting to get on and tried to look inconspicuous. It didn’t work.
Just as I reached for my MUNI pass, a hand caught my wrist and dragged it behind me.
“I don’t think so, tiger.” The voice was low and sexy, and I could hear the smile in his words. That did nothing but piss me off.
“What. The fuck?” I said. Loudly.
We San Franciscans are the people’s people, loving, forward thinking, and ready to fight for the underdog. I just hoped those who watched saw me as that.
Apparently, some did. Two separate men who’d been waiting to board the bus now stepped towards us.
The man detaining me slid my backpack off, grabbed my other arm and tugged it behind me as well. “Nice try,” he whispered into my ear. I could just tell by the way he spoke that he was good looking. And he knew it too.
To the men in front of us my captor said, “I have a warrant for this young lady’s arrest. Get involved and I’ll get a warrant for yours.” That was enough to dismantle my rescue mission. Looking somewhat regretful, both men backed away and eventually boarded the bus.
I glanced down at my captor’s shoes. Unlike the other agents, he wore casual tennis shoes and jeans. That’s why I hadn’t noticed him inside the building. I wondered if he’d been watching me the entire time.
I tensed my leg, visualizing myself slamming my foot into his. I’d enjoy wiping that cocky tone from his voice.
“If I were you, I wouldn’t do that,” he said from behind me, as though reading my mind. “Not only will you get charged for attacking an officer, I’ll have to tackle you to the ground and frisk you.” Again, I could hear the smile in his voice.
I turned to give him a nasty look, but once I did so, my throat caught. The first thing I noticed was that I had to look up to meet his eyes. I wasn’t short; this guy was just huge, and every inch of exposed skin was muscular and tan.
The next thing I noticed were his dimples, which bordered a self-satisfied smirk. Disheveled, golden hair curled along his hairline. Someone so annoying didn’t deserve to look that good.
Hazel eyes watched me, and judging by the laugh lines that creased the corners of them, he found me amusing.
“Enjoying the view, princess?”
Screw the extra charges. I brought my foot up and slammed it down into his.
He grunted. “I was hoping you’d do that.” He swept my feet out from under me, and I slammed into the ground.
A second later my captor’s hard torso pressed into mine. We made eye contact for a moment, just long enough for me to realize that even this up close, he was every bit as beautiful as his voice originally indicated he’d be, and he couldn’t be much older than me.
Go figure I’d meet two devastatingly handsome men in a week, and one would arrest me while the other would think I was trying to kill him.
Life just wasn’t fair sometimes.
He flipped my body over, his knee digging into my back, and he restrained me with plastic handcuffs. He recited my Miranda Rights as he frisked me, spending an inordinate amount of time feeling up my back pockets.
Around us, people stared, some taking photos and videos with their smartphones.
So much for my grand escape.
“Got her Boss.” My captor watched me as he spoke into the phone, flashing me another one of his sickeningly perfect smiles. Around us cars honked and people walked by. Life went on as usual for everyone except me.
I leaned my head back against the wall of the office building I’d so recently hidden in, my hands twisted behind me.
I couldn’t hear the other end of the line, but he must’ve asked for our location, because my captor rattled off the street we were on.
Shortly after that, the call ended, and he sat down next to me.
I wouldn’t look at him, but I still watched him from the corner of my eye. He was checking out my bag. “What do you have in this thing? It weighs a ton.”
When I didn’t answer him, he unzipped it and peered inside.
“What do you think you’re doing?” I asked, turning to him.
“What does it look like I’m doing? Checking out your bag.” He pulled out my water purifier. He raised his eyebrows, a hint of admiration in them. “You planning on living off the grid?”
I flashed him a nasty look. That seemed to only encourage him. He glanced back down into the bag and pulled out my compass and fire starter kit. “Damn, but I’m impressed. You know how to use this stuff?” he asked, looking up at me.
“No, Sherlock,” I said, “I just threw it into the bag purely so that it could weigh me down.”
The glint in his eyes and the smile he flashed let me know that I’d played right into his hand. He wanted to goad me into talking.
“Any food in here?” he asked, rummaging through the bag. He pulled out a freeze-dried bag of food—the kind you needed to pour boiling water over to eat.
Without asking, he opened the bag and reached in. He picked out a few pieces of food and tossed them into his mouth.
He grimaced. “That tastes like shit,” he said. He flipped the bag around and studied it. “You were really going to eat this?”
“What do you think?”
Ignoring me, he glanced back into the bag and let out a low whistle. “We have a winner.” He held up a tiny G-string. “Now this, I approve of.”
If my hands weren’t tied, I would’ve throttled him. As it was, I was tempted to kick him. But I wouldn’t be fast enough, and I’d probably end up beneath him. Again.
So instead, I leaned my head back against the wall and closed my eyes. I began humming a childhood lullaby, one that my mom used to sing to me when I couldn’t fall asleep. Sometimes it’d helped me cope when I teleported into awful situations.
Only once the song came to an end did I realize that my captor hadn’t spoken in a while.
I opened my eyes and found him staring at me, his gaze softer than it had been.
“Don’t look at me like that,” I said.
“Like what?”
“Like you pity me.” Or care about me.
It was human nature to want to connect with others, and I definitely didn’t want to feel anything other than animosity for the guy who arrested me.
Arrested. The term didn’t sit well with me. Nor did the term officer. He’d used a lot of pretty language when he grabbed me, but had he even flashed a badge? I didn’t think so.
“You’re not a police officer,” I stated.
He smiled. “I’m not.”
My heart dropped. “Do you work for the government?”
His smile became sly. “You could say that.”
“So you came with those agents to capture me?”
He pulled his leg up so that it was bent at the knee, and he slung an arm over it. “I didn’t come with them, but I do work with them.”
He made his next words sound deliberately casual. “And when they told me they’d found you, my pair, I requested that I personally be there to bring you in.”
Pair?
His eyes flicked over me. “Have to say, you didn’t disappoint. At all.”
I had the oddest temptation to blush at his words.
He stood up and glanced at his watch. “Looks like our time’s almost up, princess.”
“Stop calling me that.”
His eyes sparkled mischievously. “But it’s so much fun getting a rise out of you.”
When I shot him a mean look, he sighed, as though his life were real tough. “I’ll see you tonight, Ember.”
He knew my name. I raised my eyebrows, ignoring the way my skin heated at his words.
His watch beeped twice, and then he vanished.
Chapter 5
For a moment, all I could do was gape.
He was just like me.
I didn’t know there were others out there who shared my ability, but my captor did.
My captor. He’d vanished, leaving me alone. I could still escape.
As soon as that thought entered my mind, several black SUVs rounded the corner, their sirens on. They slammed to a stop in front of me, and then agents poured from the car.
Rough hands grabbed me and pulled me toward one of the vehicles. Guess I wasn’t escaping after all.
Dane Richards rounded one of the cars and assessed me. “Caden was right; you did run. Good to know that boy’s instincts were on the mark.”
“Caden?” I asked.
“The guy who caught you.”
He now had a name. Caden.
“He’s an extractor,” Richards continued. “And one of the best damn ones we have.”
“What’s an extractor?”
He put a hand on my shoulder and shook it. “All in good time, Ember. For now, your job is to focus on getting acquainted with our staff and the facility you’ll be living at.”
He let me go, and the other agents threw me into the backseat of an SUV. A moment later my backpack hit my side as one of the agents tossed it in after me. The door slammed shut behind me, and two agents I’d met earlier slid into the front seats.
The driver looked at the female agent in the passenger seat. “What’s the ETA, Debbie?”
The woman glanced at the dashboard and tilted her head. “We should arrive around seven—eight at the latest.”
Wherever we were going, it would take us five to six hours to get there.
The engine turned over and we pulled out into traffic.
I looked out the window and my chest constricted. The scenery flew by, and with it, my freedom.
“Where are we going?” I asked, already tired of watching San Francisco fade away behind me. The whole scenario felt like a nightmare—horrible, but too fantastical to be true.
“The facility is in the California costal hills near Big Sur,” said Debbie, a curly-haired brunette. “It’s full of teens who share your ability to teleport.”
My head snapped up.
“Just like Caden Hawthorne, the boy who cuffed you,” she continued.
Hawthorne. I now had a last name to go along with the first. I didn’t linger on that piece of information for long though, not once I processed Debbie’s words.
There were more of us. I guess I wasn’t quite as anomalous as I’d thought.
I rubbed my wrists, which were still red and sore. It had taken me twenty minutes to get my Swiss Army knife out of my bag and cut them off. The two agents hadn’t tried to stop me, but they hadn’t tried to help, either. Most interesting of all, they hadn’t taken away the knife.
They didn’t see me as a threat.
“I know this must be hard for you,” Debbie said, “but I promise you’ll love the facility.”
Unlikely.
I looked out the window, choosing my words carefully before I spoke. “You’re not taking me to jail or recruiting me for the military, are you?” It was a rhetorical question—I knew they weren’t. I was receiving special treatment—the SUVs, the multiple agents, the escorted ride to the facility. Neither a typical soldier nor a criminal would receive this type of treatment.
Silence. Then, “Our program is called the Prometheus Project. It is a secret operations unit funded by the U.S. government, and its aim is to protect and maintain national security. To those without clearance it goes by the pseudonym the Generation Project.”
This was the project name Dane Richards used in front of my parents. I was taken aback by the government’s audacity. They hadn’t even allowed my parents, who consented to the program, to know its real name. That might be innocent enough, except that if the project’s true name was classified, then there must be other things about it that were classified as well.
Technically, I could be going anywhere and used for any purpose the government deemed necessary.
Debbie continued. “The Prometheus Project began over two decades ago when a group of scientists were hired by the U.S. government to mutate human genes. These scientists discovered that by manipulating the genetic code, they could alter a person’s appearance and intelligence. They could even create abilities never before seen. One of these was seeing if the human body could teleport.”
She fell silent, letting me take this in.
I felt my throat work, but no words came out. They made me a freak. On purpose. It was unforgiveable—I wouldn’t wish this ability on anyone.
“But when the children with this mutation were born,” Debbie continued, “they weren’t teleporting. And, after seven unsuccessful years of trials, the funding was pulled, and the program was shut down.
“It wasn’t until the oldest group of teleporters hit puberty that the project was revived.”
I remembered my first trip was shortly after my thirteenth birthday. Puberty had triggered it.
“When strange reports surfaced of children appearing and disappearing, the program was started back up. Ever since, we have slowly reclaimed the children with these abilities, most before they were eighteen. We’ve found the earlier we bring them in, the less traumatic the experience.”
That was an understatement.
“Of course, we’ve had to make some adjustments,” Debbie continued. “We had no idea that only the initial stages of sleep triggered the teleportation mechanism. Or that the body can only trigger a single ten-minute trip—nine minutes and fifty-six seconds to be exact—once per circadian cycle.”
Huh. That was interesting. I guess it explained why I only teleported once during fitful sleep.
“But we’ve sorted all those problems out. Now the ultimate goal of the Prometheus Project is to train you to use your talents to protect our country.”
Chapter 6
The drive was long, and we didn’t end up arriving at the facility until the evening. Other than the disturbing information Debbie told me at the beginning of the trip, we hardly talked, and the male agent driving us hadn’t even attempted conversation.
For a long time all I could see were the dark forms of the coastal hills below an equally dark sky. Then at some point we pulled off the lonely freeway an
d drove into the ominous hills. I tried to keep track of all the turns we made, but gave up after a while. The winding hills and night sky made it impossible to orient myself.
The SUV turned off the paved road onto a dirt one, and I sat up a little straighter. We drove for another fifteen minutes before the sky lightened up ever so slightly.
Lights. We must be close to the facility.
Sure enough, our car began to slow. I leaned forward in my seat to catch the first glimpses of my new home. A tall chain-link fence came into view first. Razor wire wound itself around the top of it. On the other side someone sat in a guard tower, a gun in their arms.
Perhaps this was all meant to keep people out. Perhaps. But I wasn’t a trusting person by nature.
My muscles coiled, and as silently as I could I tried the door handle next to me. It didn’t surprise me when it didn’t budge. They’d locked me in from the outside.
When our car pulled up to the gates, the chain-link fence rolled back and the guard in the tower waved us in.
Our car crested a small hill, and then the facility stretched out in front of me. From the dim glow of the artificial lights, the facility appeared to be an off-white, industrial building three stories high. It was ugly and unimpressive to look at, and behind it were a series of similarly ugly buildings.
Great. This looked an awful lot like prison to me.
We came to a stop in front of the building. Our driver went to the back of the car and pulled out luggage from the trunk while Debbie opened my door.
“Nervous?” she asked me.
I slid out, slinging my backpack onto my shoulder.
I shrugged. The truth was, at the moment a whole lot of emotions swirled around, and I didn’t want her to know any of them.
“You can always come to me if you need someone to talk to. I’m the resident counselor here, so it’s my job to help you make a smooth adjustment to living here.”
The Vanishing Girl Page 3
