She dabbed cold corn batter on my nose and I screamed. Then, when Daniel snuck up behind her, she grabbed him up and ran him piggyback around the dining table while he howled.
I was probably a little in love with her that night.
Nat came over two or three times a week. We cooked and made crafts or sometimes just watched things on the screen in the den, suspended in that space children existed in, a sweet present focus, which might have had something to do with the fact that we were, after all, there for my brother. Keeping him cushioned from the raw tension. A diversion for him, but also for us.
Nat introduced us to crafts and games that, though geared for a kid, also interested and challenged me. One day, Nat brought a box of dead leaves, all faded to nothing but delicate skeletons. She showed us how to mold them and apply glue and varnish to create art. My brother fashioned an abstract piece, while I took my time, tongue in my teeth.
“What are you trying to do?” Nat finally asked, with laughter in the arch of her eyebrows.
I did not smile, intent on my work. “Trying to make a lamp.”
“A lamp? Why don’t you try something simple to start, like Dan?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“No?”
“No.” I couldn’t explain it. How could I explain it? With a little impatience, I said, “It has to be useful.”
This appeared to mystify Natalia, my need to make things with purpose. Because why make anything without one?
But the next visit she brought a bulb and helped me to place it in the careful sphere I had created.
Funny how she still intimidated me. It was a different kind of intimidation though; it had become more of an intense awareness. I responded to her as iron fillings to a magnet, all aligning to a point.
I didn’t mind sharing her attention with my brother, because I fed off the childish joy that came over her when she interacted with him. It gave me a chance to be a little louder than I would have been, a little more humorous, less shy under her direct focus. Because I did become shy when we were alone. On a few nights, Dan had a friend over or joined my parents in the living room, and Nat and I cleaned the kitchen together, just the two of us. Our conversation quieted down and waxed sarcastic, the kind you had while drying pans and pretending the whole world wasn’t poised to explode around you. Adult talk. I was twenty, and she couldn’t have been more than ten years older. Suddenly that kind of gap didn’t feel as wide as it would have a few years before.
It went on like that for a month or two, though it might have been years to my mind. Time did funny things.
* * *
They took the neighbor’s daughter on an autumn afternoon. None of us were home. We heard it from another neighbor. He told us men and women in uniform came for the girl, and guns were drawn. The entire family had been arrested.
“She was a shaper, I’m sure of it,” he said. “The family was hiding her from the government.”
I wondered if he’d been the one to tell on them.
I went straight to my room when I got home and stomped on my handscreen, and on every other altered electronic. I did not try to do undo my alterations. There was nothing magical about the obliterated pieces of shaped machinery. They were just wire and metal, like any broken machine. I swept them into a bag and dropped them into the trash.
Daniel was inconsolable. The girl had been his friend. He spent a lot of time in his room after that. Even Natalia had trouble coaxing a smile or even a little interest from him. At nine, he was too old for redirection but too young to work through trauma.
He said something to me, something that surprised me although I didn’t give it much stock at the time. “I’ll find her,” he said. “I’ll rescue her.”
I hugged him and murmured into his hair. “My Danny,” I said.
Natalia began to end her visits early, as soon as Dad or I arrived. She’d spent more than a few evenings reading in the living room with no company but Daniel’s closed bedroom door, so I didn’t blame her for not sticking around. She probably had her own responsibilities, after all. It occurred to me for the first time to wonder what her life was like outside our evenings together and if she had kids of her own, a family to protect from strangers with guns.
I understood her leaving early. But it hurt.
I took to watching Daniel when Dad’s friend was over in the evenings, which seemed to be every night at that point. I didn’t know what they talked about in the den, but it was with quiet voices, quiet enough that sometimes the only way I knew they were still talking was by the light under the door.
I missed my handscreen. Evenings were silent in my room. The air was empty of rebel news. I was alone.
* * *
My heart gave a jerk to come home from school one day and find Nat in the kitchen with Daniel. For a moment, things were the way they’d always been. Nat, sitting on a kitchen chair, giving my brother her undivided attention. My brother, his face lit, presenting Nat with something he’d made.
Then I realized it wasn’t something he’d made. It was something he was making. A bowl of water that rose and formed itself into a rough cylinder. Shaping.
I bolted into the room and grabbed his wrist. The bowl dropped to the ground and shattered, splashing water and ceramic pieces everywhere, but I registered that only distantly. I knew only my hand around Daniel’s slim wrist and my own stark fear. My eyes looked up to meet Nat’s.
Dad stepped in. I ushered Daniel out, my heart pounding. If my brother protested, I didn’t hear it. Numbly, I directed him to brush his teeth and put on his pajamas. By the time I returned to the scene, the water and broken bits had been cleaned up, Nat was gone, and my dad sat in his chair, chin on fist, lost in thought. Terrified, I didn’t say a thing to him about it, and he didn’t bring it up. Maybe Nat had said nothing. I had no idea. My heart had never beat quite like that before, like it was its own entity, a wild bird thrashing at the cage of my ribs. Mom was the one who pointed out, when she got home, that I’d put my brother to bed before we’d even had dinner.
I didn’t sleep that night. I couldn’t think the next day, my mind stuck on Daniel, and my parents, and Natalia, her blue gaze meeting mine. I’d had no time to gauge fear, or distaste, or disbelief in it. But I replayed that moment anyway, trying to read it. There had been no surprise. Of that, I was sure. The look in her eyes had been anything but surprise.
Would she come over again that night? I couldn’t remember if this was a day she’d been scheduled. I wondered what she would say, if she said anything. But my mother called me before I’d made it home and said, “Run.”
I ran. They’d come for Daniel. Maybe they’d come for me, too. Maybe somehow they knew about my own ability. Who knew what kind of technology they had, to detect the shaper skill? Who knew what Natalia had unearthed in my bedroom while we were away from home?
Men pursued me. I ran for a long time, past the boundary of the inhabited city and into Shapertown.
That was where I saw Nat again. She dropped from the sky to land in my path, and as her feet touched the ground, the two officers on my tail fell over, dead. I didn’t recognize the look on her face. She wore a terrible expression, as lifeless as the men on the ground, her blue eyes glass. Those eyes met mine and terror gored me.
I didn’t have time to apply thought. I responded on pure emotion. I ran from her.
Right into the arms of the police.
* * *
I’d wondered what happened to the neighbor’s little girl. I woke to the answer. “Prison” was a kind word for it. I found myself in a cell with three other girls. Two were in their teens. One looked barely older than Daniel.
We couldn’t talk. We could breathe but otherwise existed in a vacuum. Not a sound passed to our ears. I thought I was deaf, that we were all deaf, until later that afternoon one of the teens, who had had a look of concentration on her face, suddenly focused her eyes on me and said, “Can you hear me?”
Yes, I mouthed, and shifted
forward on the bench. I heard that little sound, and realized it wasn’t just the teen who could talk. She’d restored sound to the cell. “Yes.” My heart quickened with hope and because, besides Daniel that one fateful night, I’d never witnessed another person shape before. The two other girls stared at us with wide eyes.
“I think I can get us out of here,” she said, barely whispering the words.
Something told me not to reveal my own talent. Maybe habit, or continued fear. We waited for a while. The lights turned on and off at strange intervals, so they couldn’t have been marking actual day or night. After what must have been hours, food was brought. It came on a single plate and we divided it up. I ate all of mine. I was starving. I didn’t know what else to do.
The teen shaper tried opening the door during a period of dark. I heard her moving near the door.
The light came on. The door slid open and the shaper stared up into the face of a guard. She stood swiftly, automatically. The guard’s hand snapped closed around her wrist. She opened her mouth but then her eyes rolled to the back of her head. She went limp in his arms.
He took her away. The door slid closed.
* * *
Silence returned. The other girls and I avoided each other’s eyes, afraid that a stray look would give us away. Or maybe we feared each other. Who were we, and what were we capable of?
The silence, too, was terrifying. It isolated us.
After some time, the door opened again. No one was at it. We glanced at each other and at the door, until finally I stood and glanced out.
I looked out into an open hall. Others ventured from their rooms and down the hall, some hesitant, others striding as with purpose. Most were children. Some were adults barely out of their teenaged years, like me.
I went. I needed to know if they’d taken Daniel. Mom had been breathless with terror. I couldn’t remember now what she’d said, if they’d taken Daniel or only come for him.
We stopped in a big space and stood shoulder to shoulder. After the silence of the room, the din of voices deafened me. I couldn’t find my brother in the sea of bodies, but that could have meant anything. I hoped it meant he’d escaped this hell, and my parents had, too. I tried not to imagine them in it.
I wondered what they would do to us. A man appeared at the front of the room and told us to separate into two groups. Shapers at one side of the room. Non-shapers at the other. The shapers would be taken to a different facility for training, with their own quarters and better meals.
We looked at each other in surprise. No one moved. He shouted at us—what were we waiting for?—and the sea of bodies began to part. I let it carry me to the non-shaper side of the room. We looked out across the divide at each other. I saw trepidation on the faces of those shapers who’d identified themselves, but relief too. This was a way out for them. An opportunity to train for the force, to sleep in a real bed and eat food and to exercise power and never again feel this wretched.
I didn’t trust the man with his promises. I didn’t want to stay here, but I didn’t want to leave the known. And I wanted to keep an eye out for Daniel.
They led the shapers off through a door that opened behind them. Afterward, they went through a list, identifying shapers who’d separated into the non-shaper side like me. My name was not on the list.
As they led this second group of shapers away, I realized two things. One, they had no secret way to detect the shaper ability. And two, they had no idea about me. They had only their cameras and their instruments to spy on us in our cells.
* * *
They put me into a different cell, this time by myself. Silence again. There was no practical reason for the silence this time, except to frighten. The silence took on new terror when experienced alone. They brought more food, but the packaging was impossible to remove without a tool or without shaping. Eventually I gave up and curled up on the cot. It smelled of soap, the scent left by the last person to lie here. I had nothing to do except stare at the wall, thinking about Natalia and feeling everything turn to ice inside of me.
That was the worst part, thinking about Natalia and her betrayal.
* * *
The alarms began after I finally fell asleep. They came at odd intervals, like the change in the lights. Shrieking alarms and alarms that came in sharp bleeps. I sat shivering with my arms around my knees, my heart beating like a rabbit’s, until I wished for the silence to return.
They let us out again, and when they asked the shapers to separate from the group, more of the group obeyed this time. We were all hungry and at wit’s end. Still, something held me back, even when the officer stalked in front of us, shouting at us loudly enough for spit to fleck his mouth. The worse fate awaited those who were not shapers, he assured us.
I almost gave myself up as I watched most of the group trickle away, leaving only a few of us, the leftovers, the unwanteds. But: Tell no one. Another boy crossed to the shapers, and that left only a dozen of us, the most unfortunate of the lot: those with no potential, who had been captured purely out of punishment for concealing a shaper.
Another group of officers came to fetch us. With a jolt, I recognized one of the men. My dad’s friend from work, the man who had sat on the couch in our living room, sharing our beverages and passing tense conversation with my dad, smiling like an uncle at Daniel. He caught my eye before I could look away.
I stood frozen as he approached. My heart thundered. For a split moment as he leaned close to put his ear inches from mine, I thought the hateful look in his eyes was an act and that he had some secret message of hope for me.
He whispered, “I will make it my personal mission to find your brother and ensure he grows up faithful to the service. Until then, I will make you pay.”
* * *
We exited through the door at the far end of the room. It led into another part of the facility. I had no idea what awaited us. My dad’s friend’s words hissed in my mind, and I could not shake the image of his eyes. That hate cut me to the bone.
There had been no hate in Natalia’s eyes. Just that terrible blankness.
* * *
A doctor saw me. She stripped me, and examined me, and put me in a box with a lot of buttons and panels. She took me out again and put a gown on me. They remembered to feed me.
They brought me to a gym with some of the others. We played ball, sometimes alone in an empty room, sometimes together. Testing our reflexes, I thought. They made us run. Listen to sounds in a dark room. Make our way across an obstacle course.
Then one day they put me into a transporter. That alarmed me. The doctor and her assistants crowded the room. Where were they sending me? Only, the machine wasn’t a transporter. Not exactly. I came out of another door, but in the same room. I came out—
CHAPTER THREE
Different. Everything was different.
I woke on the couch. Blue aquarium light washed over me. The faint smell of fried corn hung in the living room. I was alone.
Something was wrong. Everything was the same, but changed. I felt it in every cell of my body. The entire world had shifted, and I had shifted with it.
And I knew.
I sat up. In the birdcage, a few of the birds reacted to my movement, jumping on their perches and ruffling their wings. I heard the small sounds of their claws on the branches and the whisper of their feathers.
I knew where to find Natalia. I stood and padded in my socks across the cool floor, past the kitchen, down a hall, and down a flight of stairs. I followed her smell, a mix of fried corn masa, lotion, and something indescribable that the animal part of me responded to.
I found her at the bottom of the stairs in an underground garden that wasn’t a garden at all, but a room. A room with wall-to-ceiling shelves, all filled with plants and animals. There were no cages or tanks here. They all sat free on the shelves—birds, flowers, mammals, vines—but not one of them moved. I knew because the only sound I heard came from Natalia, a slightly harsh, slightly wet breathing
. She sat in a chair, staring off. Her brown hair fell limply over her shoulders. She sat up straight, but her hands were curled in her lap like limp creatures.
She looked at me with the blank face I recalled from the worst of my nightmares. But this time, her eyes were swollen and red.
My heart stopped but immediately picked up the beat. My heart couldn’t stop anymore. Might not ever stop. From where I stood, I could see the few strands of hair that strayed over her face and stuck there with tears, the single eyelash that flecked her cheek.
I’m retired, she’d said.
She stared at me bleakly. The picture of Death without her cowl, tired.
There had been ten of us altogether. They’d put each of us into the transporter that was not exactly a transporter, a machine that had scanned my makeup and uploaded every bit of my information into the computer, and there the software had manipulated my design, rewritten my code. The machine had destroyed my original body and then its sibling had recreated me atom by atom. I had exited it a different entity. A newborn, stumbling and wild-eyed. I hadn’t known my own body.
They’d made us into something no longer human, a hybrid of flesh and machine. They manipulated us, programmed us. Tested our abilities in the elaborate gyms they’d designed, which would have killed a normal human. Some of us did die. They made us fight their impossible creations, animal and machine, as well as some of the shaper prisoners. That was how I learned what happened to the individuals unwilling or unfit to join the government’s trained agents.
I regretted every story I’d made up for Daniel.
When we began to buckle under mental stress and strain, the human part of us reacting to the horror we had become, they stripped our memories. They turned off our emotions, dulled our brain chemicals. They made us into their living weapons.
And then they let some of us go, released us to burrow into the rebellion.
“I remember now,” I told her. “Everything. I remember everything.”
Shaper (The Mi'hani Wars Book 1) Page 3
