“Well, that was anticlimactic,” I say to Mona.
“Marston has always been a bit prickly,” Mona says carefully, “and he takes his duty very seriously. He went into this mission with almost no intel. When I explain everything to him, he’ll warm up. He may even apologize.” She smiles wanly, and I return the look, though I imagine my expression is even thinner and more lacking in hope.
“Did Marston explain about your ability to you? Did he tell you you’re a Jumper?” Mona asks.
“That’s what he says,” I reply carefully, chewing on my lip. “He says I may need to stay here for a while, for my own safety,” I venture.
“That’s true.”
Half of me is relieved, but the other half is more scared than ever at her reply. Because it must mean that I really am in serious danger. “So the Canceler is still out there?”
Mona gasps. “Oh, no. No, that threat is over and done.”
“Yeah, but Marston says whoever sicced the Canceler on me is still out there and will try again.”
Mona emphatically shakes her head in the negative. “No, dear girl, you are no longer in any danger now that you’re here.”
A little blossom of hope spreads in my chest, the first warm feeling I’ve had since I thought our plane was going to crash. “Really?”
“Really.” Mona nods firmly.
“But how do you know for sure?”
Mona’s eyes shift back and forth a little bit, just enough to make her seem guilty, but that look passes quickly. “I’m aware of the circumstances surrounding the Cancellation attempt and I can assure you that it was really more of a misunderstanding than anything else.”
“Um…”
Before I can articulate all the crazy thoughts that swirl in my head when Mona calls what happened to me a “misunderstanding,” she interrupts in a rushed voice. “But you are a hazard to yourself.”
I sigh. “The teleportation.”
“Yes. I’ve never seen a novitiate like you. At most, people usually only shift an inch or two the first time. We have to watch very carefully to register any movement at all. What you did…”
Now it’s my turn to interrupt her. I think she’s going to let me stay here so that I won’t get shoved into a gray slum when I’m dismissed from the factory for this whole debacle, but she won’t if I’m not honest with her, if I try to pretend to be someone I’m not. I have to come clean. “You guys keep saying ‘what I did,’ and Mona, the thing is I didn’t do anything. One minute I was lying here on your floor, and the next—” I shudder and leave my sentence unfinished. “I doubt I could recreate it or do it again,” I say lamely.
“That’s the issue,” she says, nodding. “You have vast ability, but no awareness or control. We’ll teach you all of that. We have schools.”
“I know,” I say. I close my eyes and picture my factory, the bobbin station, and the hard, tiny eyes of my floor supervisor. “I have to be really honest with you. I was tested after my ninth birthday, just like most children. I wasn’t simply ungifted. I was deemed ‘exceptionally unextraordinary.’ Are you sure you didn’t make a mistake of your own and accidentally teleport me yourself?”
A glint appears in Mona’s eye. “You don’t speak like someone who’s exceptionally unextraordinary.”
I feel a blush color my cheeks. “Well…I like to read. Even though my schooling ended at age nine, I’d already learned my letters and how to sound out words. I’ll read anything. Mostly what I have access to are technical manuals, instructions, service agreements, things like that. But sometimes I’ll come across a real book here or there. I like to talk properly, the way smart people do in books.”
Mona nods. Her lips don’t move, but her voice speaks in my mind. “I’m proud of you.”
I shudder at the creepy feeling of someone else’s mind oozing around in my own.
Her hand darts out to touch my arm. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean…”
I bite my lip. “No, please don’t apologize. I’ll get used to it, I’m sure.”
She holds herself a little straighter. “Still, we don’t do that to one another if it’s not welcome. I slipped, and I am sorry.”
I blink several times in a row. “I think some things probably need to be spoken silently.” I dip my eyes quickly to the floor, then raise them again to meet her gaze. “I appreciate the things you said to me about John.”
She raises an eyebrow. “The smarmy man with the bad hairdo who completely occupied your frontal cortex?”
“Used to occupy,” I say quickly. “Thank you for your help with that. It feels really weird to have someone talking inside my mind, but like I said, I’m sure I’ll get used to it.”
“I understand, and I assure you I know how to respect boundaries.”
“Thank you.” I stare at my bare feet for a moment. I lost both flip flops somewhere along the way. “It’s odd, for me, as a gray. I’ve never been allowed boundaries before. Not really.”
“I can help you with that too, if you’ll let me.”
I meet her gaze levelly, but rather than answering her implied question, I ask a question of my own. “Are my shoes still here?”
Mona sucks in a breath. “And you were barefoot the whole time. Let me see your feet.”
There’s no need to tell her about the missing flip flops. I was barefoot for long enough. I sink to a sitting position, draw my knees to my chest, then bend my feet at the ankles to reveal the soles of my feet.
Mona clucks. It feels so weird to have someone so obviously above my station touching my filthy, torn-up feet, but she doesn’t act disgusted. “God’s teeth, the things you’ve been through,” she murmurs. “You have an injury. Not new, but not terribly old. What happened?”
“I don’t really want to talk about it,” I whisper. “It was a John thing.”
She touches my jaw gently and I meet her eyes. “May I?”
Trembling, I give her the tiniest nod, and she moves the tip of her index finger to my temple. I feel her consciousness slip into my mind again. It has that squishy feeling, and I picture someone walking through a boggy marsh, their feet making sucking sounds as they free themselves from the muck and gunk, step by step.
Mona chuckles softly. “Nice imagery,” she says. “Try to relax.”
I do as she says, and it feels less squelchy.
“Oh dear,” Mona says inside my mind as she easily finds the right memory. “Those shoes must have cost you a fortune.”
“They did.”
She sucks in her breath. I’m sure she’s watching the metal shards imbedding themselves in the bottom of my foot. Or maybe she’s not actually watching it, since the memory is from my perspective. I don’t feel the pain anymore, but from the sounds she’s making, I wonder if maybe she does.
Those rocks must have hurt as well, she says.
I wonder how she can so easily isolate memories I have about my feet. How is my mind organized anyway? Is there a section on feet? And does she know I’m thinking that right now? I open my eyes and she has a slight smile on her face. I’m pretty sure she’s reading every thought that crosses my mind and I try to wipe my mind blank and just think about my feet.
She must be done, because she draws her fingertips away from my temple and I feel her slide out of my mind. It reminds me of what happened when I was nine years old and I was baptized as a factory gray. They dipped me under the water, holding me there so long, I thought they’d changed their minds and decided to drown me. Eventually, they pulled me gasping and terrified from the water. Afterward, my ears were plugged for hours until finally, with a tiny little pop, the film broke and a single drop of liquid leaked from each ear. That’s what Mona’s consciousness feels like when she leaves my brain.
She points at a cubby. “Your shoes are right over there.”
She isn’t reading my mind anymore, so she doesn’t know the baptism story. I wonder if maybe, someday, I’ll tell her about that. Maybe. Maybe not.
I cross over to the
cubbies and pull my sturdy, serviceable shoes out and slip them on my feet. “Wait a second,” I say slowly. “Where is Clarissa’s stuff?”
“Oh,” Mona says cagily, “we sent her home.”
We? I tuck that word away into my brain, hoping Mona isn’t poking around in there surreptitiously, watching me hide that little piece of knowledge like a squirrel tucking away an acorn for winter. I don’t feel her in there, but this is all so new, so how would I really know? Maybe she does know my baptism story. I speak quickly, hoping to distract her just in case she’s still prowling in my mind. “Obviously, I want to learn about Jumping, but I have a work assignment at the bobbin factory up north in the sector. I might be in serious trouble already, if I’ve missed the start of my shift.” I shake my head slightly. “Scat, I don’t even know what time it is.”
“You have nothing to worry about.”
I give her a wry smile. “I don’t think you’ve met too many grays, have you? Worry is my constant companion.” I bend over and fasten the closures on my shoes. “I need to check in at my work assignment or there’ll be hell to pay. You might let me stay here, but they’ll still expect my quota. They’ll charge me interest. Eventually, it’ll catch up to me. I have to deal with them now.”
Mona crosses to me in a blink and puts her hands on my upper arms and stares at me so intently, I’m afraid she’s about to dive into my mind again, but she doesn’t. Instead, she speaks slowly and clearly. “You never have to go back to that gritty little factory ever again. You don’t have to listen to the whine of the fiberglass spinning up and down the bobbins or rethread a spool. You don’t have to breathe in fiberglass fluff. You don’t have to clench your muscles when your supervisor walks past, afraid of what liberties he might take or how he might try to grind his body against your backside. You are done with all of that. Do you understand? Done.”
My eyes water, and a knot in my chest that’s been tied so tight for so long that I’m not even sure I knew it was there, loosens, but only fractionally. I shake my head slowly, sadly. “I can’t stay with you forever, Mona. I have to fend for myself sometime. I’ll need a job, and with a black mark on my record, I’ll have no options.”
Mona’s mouth curves into a smile. “Oh, you’ll have options. Plenty. Marston didn’t tell you about the Academy?”
I blink a couple times. “No. But an academy is a school, right?”
“Correct. You’ll be enrolled at our training facility, where you’ll receive a non-standard but essential education. As soon as we figure out how you tick, you’ll be trained for all the jobs open to a Jumper.”
My heart beats fast in my chest. “I can do that? I thought the schools were just for children. They let grays my age in?”
“Darling, you’re not a gray anymore. I don’t think you ever were.”
Oh, I was. I definitely was. But hope surges through me unbridled. “Is the Academy here in Region One?”
Mona shakes her head. “This area is far too populated for a school like ours. We’ll charter you a private flight.”
I bite my lip and give her a nervous look through lowered lashes. “Is there any way I can get there by train?”
Mona smiles gently. “I can make it so that you’re not frightened of flying in airplanes anymore, if you trust me to do so. You must let me in freely, or I won’t do it, because without your cooperation, it would hurt tremendously and I won’t do that to you.”
I blink once, twice, three times, and I nod. “I trust you.”
Mona brushes my hair back from my face, the backs of her fingers trailing across my cheek. “I know you do, sweetheart.” Her eyes, blue with deep navy flecks, stare into mine. “I know you do.”
17
Marston
Mona’s voice snaps me out of a petit mal. “I thought you were being uncharacteristically patient.”
“Scat.” I twitch, my movements jerky and uncoordinated. “I’m drained. I should never have let that happen.”
I burned twice as many minerals on the Jump when Heidi grabbed me around the middle. Of course that was probably all part of her plan. Keep me in a weakened, depleted state so I wouldn’t push back while she weaseled her way into The Order. Not that I’m ever going to let that happen.
“You’ve been through a lot, Marston. Don’t be so hard on yourself.”
I rub the back of my neck. I need a haircut, but that’s just one of the many things I don’t have time for. “Yeah, but this is kind of a special situation. I shouldn’t have left you alone and undefended.”
“You don’t have to worry about me. The Canceler didn’t come anywhere near me. I was never in any danger.”
Crap. I thought, when she sent me to the back room, that she was taking care of things and giving me plausible deniability. Now I’m not so sure. Did she neutralize Heidi? Or did she let her go? “Mona, you misunderstand,” I say, my body thrumming with tension like a taut wire. “There was no cancellation. Heidi staged the whole thing.”
Mona’s eyes flare, spots of fire blazing in each pupil. “Excuse me?”
“She’s a plant. This whole rescue operation was a setup. I’m not sure how they staged the teleportation, because you know nobody can actually Jump that far. Maybe she’s a twin and one girl was planted here and another was placed inside The Region Four Citadel. We’ll figure out the ‘how’ eventually but it’s even more important that we figure out the ‘why.’ Was it a legitimate assassination attempt? I don’t know. I think it was more likely an attempt by the Seers to get an operative into our organization, or somehow goad us into breaking the neutrality agreement. Hell, why not both?”
Mona holds up her hand, shaking her head back and forth. “Stop.”
I clamp my mouth shut. She looks furious.
“You need zinc, copper, and magnesium,” she snaps. “Your mind is obviously misfiring.” She whirls around and storms from the office.
I leap up and follow her. My eyes widen as I take in the fact that Mona’s alone. “Where’s Heidi?”
“She’s freshening up downstairs in my private quarters.”
I feel like I dry swallowed a lump of granite. “What?” I’m aghast. I fall into a petit mal for – how long – and Mona loses her damn mind? I don’t have time to berate myself, though. I need to get on top of this immediately.
“She’s in your home? Alone? Mona, I thought you understood what was going on.” I lower my voice to a hiss. “Heidi’s in league with the enemy. She faked her cancellation. The whole thing was a setup. We have a lot to unwind here.”
Mona’s eyes grew larger as I spoke, I thought with astonishment, but when she responds, it’s a different type of shock than I expected.
“Marston Faulkner, what in the hell are you talking about?”
I shove my balled fists into my pockets and rock back on my heels. “I know you found out about my visions from Darius. I hadn’t told you before because I didn’t want to worry you, and I was still trying to understand the whole thing myself. But they’re real, Mona. And I had a vision when Heidi and I hit the midpoint layover on the Jump here. After that, everything was clear. I tried to leave her behind, but I couldn’t shake her.”
Mona’s face twists, and she looks like she wants to simultaneously scream, cry, and punch me in the face, but when she talks, her voice is so level, she could be the scales of justice. “Everything you believe to be true, this is all based on a vision?” Her control breaks and her last word rises into a screech.
“I didn’t ask for the gift.”
“And you shouldn’t accept it!” she cries.
“It’s not something I can return, Mona.”
“That’s not what I mean, Marston, and you know it. You can’t trust visions; half the time they’re inaccurate, a quarter of the time they’re tricks, and one hundred percent of the time they’re open to interpretation. There’s nothing honest about visions; they’re all smoke and mirrors. It’s not like teleporting, where you start one place and move to another, cut and dried, e
nd of story.”
“End of story?” I choke out. “Spoken like a true Minder. What happens when a novitiate leaves a hand or a foot behind? What about when we splice? What about when we’re off target? What about spontaneous Jumps? Nothing about teleportation is easy, either.”
“You think I don’t know that? But that’s what I’m talking about. Teleportation is straightforward. It never lies to you. You cannot say the same for a vision.”
“I know what I saw, and I trust myself. Heidi’s direct from the Watcher Citadel. None of this made any sense until my vision. Her so-called cancellation? She was well rehearsed on that one. I honestly believed it was real. I brought her into the void to ‘protect’ her myself. She never actually used her ‘powers,’” I say, making air quotes to punctuate my words. “I initiated every Jump we made. Now, there’s some things I can’t explain yet, but give me some time. I’ll figure it out. She’s not one of us, though, that much is crystal clear. She’s an enemy plant.”
Mona’s mouth opens and shuts silently several times. Finally, she finds words, but when she does, they’re not the ones I expect. “Faked her cancellation? Are you mad?”
“No one tried to cancel her, Mona,” I say patiently. Why isn’t she getting this?
“Oh, someone most certainly did. That cancellation was very, very real. I tried to stop him. I did everything I could, but he wouldn’t reason with me, wouldn’t compromise.”
“Wait…who?”
Mona crosses her arms over her chest and looks like she’s spitting the name out when she says it. “Darius.”
I feel like I’ve run face first into a brick wall. “Darius?” I whisper. “It was real?” My voice grows louder. “Darius ordered the cancellation? Against one of his own people?”
“Well, he didn’t agree with me that Heidi was one of our own.”
“Mona, I don’t mean Heidi. I was there too. I was talking about me.”
I think Mona was expecting me to say that Heidi wasn’t one of her own because she opens her mouth to retort but snaps it shut when my words register. “You can take care of yourself,” she mutters.
Destination Unknown (Lumen Academy Book 1) Page 11
