by Sophie Davis
Which was also amplified to a terrifying degree because of the damned drug. There were times when my mood dipped so far below the equator, I prayed for the earth to open up and swallow me whole. The hardest part was the nightmares. Not just at night, but also when I was fully awake. The panic attacks left me sweaty and trembling, with a racing heart and wobbly knees. And then the rage would come again, in a vicious cycle. Fury tinged my thoughts red, fury directed at myself for being too weak to control it all. I hated feeling weak. Being weak. I just wanted to be myself again.
Of course, putting physical distance between Talia and me when my control began to slip was creating an emotional distance as well. I wanted to tell her everything, wanted to draw on her strength and have her comfort me. But I couldn’t. Her own wounds were still too raw. For me to dump my problems on her now would be unfair. She deserved better than that. She deserved someone who was strong enough to handle their inner demons, with enough strength left over to help her combat hers, too. I needed to be that man again. If only sheer will was enough.
All of these thoughts flew through my mind while Victoria waited for us to settle at a table. Trying to shake it off, I plopped into one of the three chairs.
“Let’s get started,” the councilwoman loudly proclaimed.
This jostled the half asleep agents, one of whom lost his balance and rolled off his beanbag chair. Several of us snickered. Victoria ignored the spectacle and plunged ahead.
Using a remote control, she turned on the wallscreen. The channel was already set to World Broadcast Frequency, the world’s foremost authority for international news. Dana Duval, the infamous field reporter, was front and center, as usual. Rain poured overhead and a flame flickered behind her. There was no sound and lip reading wasn’t my thing, but I had a bad feeling about what we were seeing. A moment later the camera panned out, providing a wide-angle view of the scene behind the reporter.
Large black objects flew over the Arno River in Tuscany, passing over bridges that had stood for centuries and causing them to erupt like volcanoes spewing sparks of electricity. Next, the Eiffel Tower came into view, where people clung like monkeys to the outside rungs as a dust storm whirled around them. Finally, the scene cut to the famous thrill park in Amsterdam, where the Eye Ferris Wheel—a modern reproduction of the one that used to be in London—was spinning faster and faster. Cars dangled by their hinges, before shooting free like debris evicted from a funnel cloud.
Beside me Talia swore. Penny gasped, a hand flying to cover her parted lips. I reached for Talia, threading our fingers together with a reassuring squeeze. Pained purple eyes glanced up at me, unable to watch the destruction.
“This all happened in the last twenty-four hours. Forty-three people are confirmed dead thus far,” Victoria announced somberly. “The Created must be stopped. I cannot stress this enough.”
She pounded her fist on the table in a rare loss of control before continuing.
“Their antics are becoming bolder and more lethal by the day. UNITED is losing support from many of the nations we have previously called allies. And the timing could not be worse.”
She paused to take a breath and regroup.
One of the UNITED agents took the opportunity to ask a question.
“Why are they acting out like this? We have three Created talents in this room right now. None of them are blowing things up. So what’s wrong with the rest of them?”
The question-asker was tall with disproportionately large ears and a comically large nose. I was pretty sure his name was Ryke.
Though I hadn’t gotten to know many of the others on the taskforce, Talia had, and she kept me filled in on who they were. She liked the guy well enough, so I supposed I did, too. However, the open hostility in his narrowed gaze, directed at us, was making me reevaluate my position. It was as if he thought we were the ones responsible for the destruction of those landmarks. As if the chaos in the world was directly attributable to the three of us. I wanted to punch that look off his face, break his ridiculous nose. But that wouldn’t exactly help our position.
Victoria let out a weary sigh. And just like that, like a pregnant woman on steroids with flip-flopping emotions, I was suddenly filled with empathy for the councilwoman. She carried the fate of the Talented, Created included, on her shoulders. The burden was obviously taking a toll. Victoria was starting to show her cracks.
“We won’t know until we have them in containment, Ryke. It could be they were given too much of the drug and have gone mad. They may be following orders they were given before we disbanded TOXIC. Or, it could be as simple as because they can. The only thing we can be certain of is that they need to be caught. Now.”
“We’re doing the best we can,” the dour Gina said. “We always seem to be a step behind them.”
“Exactly,” Victoria replied. “Thus far we have only been sending teams to apprehend the Created once an incident has occurred. Starting today, we will be responding to every tip and sighting we receive. Incidents like this one,” she gestured to the wallscreen behind her, which was frozen on the Eye and a blue car hurtling through open air, “will not happen again. Do you all understand?”
The others in the room began shifting uneasily in their seats, murmuring contrite responses to Victoria’s rhetorical question. Victoria’s golden eyes landed on each of us in turn, her underlings, as if she could make us understand the severity of the situation with her gaze alone.
“Good,” Victoria said after several moments of tense silence.
Quiet mumblings began to move through the room like a wave, as the group prepared for an imminent dismissal. Even Penny looked like she was ready to spring to her feet. Only Talia and I stayed still, save the brief worried glance we shared. We’d both been to enough tactical meetings and had spent enough time around Victoria to know that she had not flown out to the islands at dawn just to show us this and issue a reprimand. Sure, the destruction of European landmarks was a horrible tragedy. But it wasn’t exceptional considering the state of world—similar catastrophes had been occurring for weeks now. The newscast she’d just shown us was an appetizer, a prelude to the main course Victoria had come to serve up, which I was betting would be more unappetizing than the kelp cookies the Eden natives seemed so fond of.
“This display of recklessness is inexcusable. Particularly now, with the vote fast approaching. For the first time in decades, the council is truly concerned about the Coexistence Treaty being overturned. As you all know, should that occur, our kind will no longer be afforded the little protection that we have enjoyed these last seventy-five years,” Victoria said, her voice carrying over the whispered conversations and swooshing of beanbags.
All noise in the room ceased, Victoria’s words hung heavy in the silence. Her golden eyes glowed with an unreadable emotion as they traveled from one member of the group to the next for a second time.
“Of the seven islands that make up the Isle of Exile, only three are residential: Eden, Paradise, and Babylon. All of which are nearing maximum capacity. Currently, Vault is serving a dual purpose, as both a penal island and a containment facility. Oceanic is a research facility, it isn’t set up to house anyone. The remaining two, Hope and Newhaven, are currently unoccupied, and have been for some time. As we speak, construction crews are arriving at both to begin the necessary repair work before those islands can be fully functional. Should the need arise, those islands will be vital to our survival as a race. Even if we get those ready in time, only a small portion of the world’s Talented population can fit in the space available on the Isle.”
The Coexistence Treaty. It was something every student at the McDonough School learned about during their early years, and then promptly forgot as we moved on to more interesting subjects, like weapons training and offensive maneuvers. It was easy to forget about it when you grew up in the US, because we’d been the most progressive nation, with a high density of Talented. From the little I remembered, the treaty had been drawn up not lo
ng after the first generation of talented children reached adulthood.
Many nations had refused to grant our kind equal rights when Talents were first discovered. They didn’t consider us human. In some places the Talented were imprisoned simply for being who they were, what they’d been born. And, in a lot of cases, incarceration was the lesser of the evils. Lynch mobs, scared of what they didn’t understand, hunted and killed Talents. Geneticists, desperate to learn about this new breed, a new species that possessed abilities that had previously only been the stuff of fiction, preyed on my kind in the name of science.
The newly-formed UNITED had proposed the treaty as a way to ensure our safety. The treaty detailed stiff penalties for any Talent who used his or her gifts on another without explicit authorization from a governing body. In exchange, all member nations who adopted the treaty agreed to grant the Talented basic human rights.
Generous, weren’t they?
Recently, I had learned that the seven islands that make up the Isle of Exile were originally built as a precautionary measure, in the event the treaty wasn’t ratified. Even after it eventually was accepted, UNITED feared that it would not be honored for long. So they kept the islands, just in case. As it turned out, that was a necessary safeguard. Because not all nations had signed the original treaty. And many who did were very liberal in their interpretations of the language. As a result, many Talents had relocated to the islands over the ensuing years to escape persecution. At this point, the islands were a choice. Soon, they might be a necessity.
For a brief moment, while Victoria’s words sunk in, there was absolute silence in the room.
And then I was assaulted.
In such a confined space, with emotions running higher than Kilimanjaro, it was impossible to block the barrage of disjointed thoughts and feelings of everyone around me. Inside my head, all I heard was the frantic ramblings of others. Their fear became my fear. Their panic became my panic. Their fury became my fury.
I wanted to scream. The voices inside of my head, the ones that weren’t mine, were like hundreds of tiny bombs exploding in unison, blasting holes in my mental shields. The invisible barriers I’d built and reinforced regularly to keep Talia from my darkest thoughts wavered.
She must have guessed. Or maybe I was physically slapping at my skull to get rid of the voices. Either way, Talia’s fingers were dry and cool as they skimmed my wrist, up over the base of my palm, before sliding home between mine.
She didn’t speak inside my head, but her physical presence was enough to quiet the others. She alone understood, to some degree, what I was going through.
Unfortunately, my balm morphed into yet another symptom. Every reaction was amplified by the drug. Including the effect she had on me. Her touch caused my heart rate to reach near painful speeds, and my thoughts instantly turned indecent. Images of her chestnut curls wreathing her delicate face as she stared up at me through those long, black lashes, only the tiniest hint of vibrant plum peeking out from beneath the lids, made me abruptly pull my hand away. As pleasant and preferable as thoughts of my girlfriend were, the uber-serious briefing was neither the time nor the place to be fantasizing.
I felt her questioning gaze on me, but didn’t turn. Had I done so, mental barriers or not, she would’ve known my mind was no longer in the theater, but back in our bedroom. Or the shower. Hell, even the elevator was sounding good right then.
“And you really think that is going to happen?” Janelle called out, her voice shattering the silence as effectively as a hammer taken to glass. “Like, the Treaty might really be overturned?”
“Yes, Agent Longpre, I do believe that is a very real possibility,” Victoria replied.
“Why don’t we just kill all of the Created and be done with it? They’re the problem, after all,” a male agent lounging near our table muttered, punctuating his opinion with a snort. “Or let the mobs take care of them. Vigilante justice—nothing wrong with that.”
“Agent Olenginski,” Victoria addressed him, turning a deceptively friendly smile on the guy. “You might think that having vigilantes, as you call them, doing your job for you is a good thing.” Her smile disappeared. “I do not. Ordinary men hunting and killing Created is only one step removed from ordinary men hunting and killing Talented. People who are frightened are not reasonable. They will not take the time to discern between the two, to somehow recognize which are the Created. And even if they do, they may not care. So, tell me, Agent Olenginski, is that what you want? To have the added worry of being shot on sight the instant you set foot on one of the continents?”
The agent was short, only three or four inches taller than Talia, and the way he folded into himself at Victoria’s rebuke made him look like a child.
“No, Ma’am,” Olenginski said meekly. “I was merely suggesting….”
His voice trailed off, eyes bugged as he searched for something that would pacify Victoria.
Lucky for him, Olenginski was saved further scrutiny by Penny. She raised her hand before speaking, like this was a classroom. Welcome to Hunting the Created 101.
“How will the council decide who gets to come to the islands?”
Beside me, Talia nodded and her adorable button nose wrinkled in disgust. Had my mind been open, I’d probably have been involved in the mental conversation obviously taking place between my girlfriend and her best friend. Penny may have asked the question, but the look on Talia’s face told me that she’d been the one to think it.
Annoyance flashed in Victoria’s gaze, causing her eyes to appear more feline than human. This was evidently something she didn’t want to discuss.
“A lottery system, Agent Crane. The council has decided to use a lottery system to raffle off the remaining slots.”
“What about the tens of thousands of people who aren’t selected?” Talia blurted.
She was now sitting ramrod straight, hanging on Victoria’s every word for the first time in their acquaintance.
Victoria met Talia’s challenging gaze.
“Agent Lyons, if you—if all of you—” Victoria made a sweeping gesture with one arm meant to encompass the entire theater, “do your job, and apprehend the Created, then that may not be an issue.”
“That’s not an answer,” Talia snapped.
So attuned to my girlfriend’s moods, her own dramatic up-and-down swings, I felt the horror and rage warring within her just as strongly as if the emotions were my own. Talia was a heartbeat away from a tirade like I’d never seen or heard. Which was saying something, since neither Talia nor I were exactly known for our impulse control.
I understood why she was so upset. For the same reason my stomach was tied in knots and I suddenly wanted to break something.
What Victoria was refusing to say, but every single agent in the room knew, was that those Talented, the unchosen ones, would be left to fend for themselves. That they’d be as good as dead. Or worse.
Yes, there were fates worse—much worse—than death. I had firsthand knowledge of that. There were times when I’d craved death, just to escape the hell I’d been living.
Victoria refused to take Talia’s bait. Refused to give voice to what we all already knew. Naturally, my feisty girlfriend repeated herself.
“That’s not an answer,” Talia hissed through clenched teeth. “What about the people who aren’t selected?”
Victoria leveled her gaze on first Talia, and then me. She shrugged, clearly at a loss for an answer. Because there wasn’t one.
“Heaven help them, Agent Lyons. Heaven help them.”
“AGENT LYONS? CAN I speak with you?” Victoria called.
Our meeting ended after Victoria’s ominous pronouncement. Once she uttered the words, there was no going back—there was no denying the inevitable outcome for our kind if the treaty failed to pass. The Talented were about to become extinct, unless UNITED did something to sway public opinion back in our favor. Every one of us understood that and the horrific ramifications, so there was nothing le
ft to say.
“You, too, Agent Kelley,” Victoria added.
Erik and I stood, preparing to join the councilwoman at the front of the room.
“I’ll meet you guys upstairs for breakfast,” Penny said, heading for the door. As she scurried to catch up with Henri and Frederick, she gave me a small, sympathetic wave over her shoulder.
Wishing that I could bolt, too, I watched her go longingly. Victoria and I butted heads when it came to every little thing, and I didn’t relish the idea of being alone with her. At least in a group setting, like the meeting, we were both on our best behavior.
“Let’s go see what she wants,” Erik muttered, squeezing my fingers reassuringly.
Not alone, I reminded myself. Erik was here. Here to keep me grounded, from making a comment I’d later regret.
Unable to resist, I poked at his mental barriers, testing their strength after the beating we’d both taken from all of the other minds in the room. The others had been projecting so strongly that it had felt as though they were cramming their emotions down my throat. It was undoubtedly even more difficult for him to experience. But somehow, even with the barrage, I hadn’t felt even a hint of what was going on with Erik, the person whose mind I was most familiar with.
I felt the same thing when I search for any cracks he might’ve left behind. Nothing. Physically Erik was here. Mentally, he was, as usual, a million miles away.
Although I debated pushing harder, and really wanted to, I decided to give Erik the privacy he deserved. When his gaze met mine, the bottomless pools of turquoise were roiling with anger that contradicted his lopsided grin. That façade made me want to scream at him, to demand that he let me in. To stop pretending like everything was okay when it so clearly was not. But I didn’t. I returned his smile with a fake one of my own.
Victoria was deep in conversation with one of her lackeys when we reached her. They were speaking Portuguese, a language I spoke fluently. Or I thought I did, anyway. Their word groupings and phrases made little sense to me, in the context. Either they were talking in code, or Victoria was ordering up a lavish breakfast for the short flight back to UNITED headquarters in Bern, Switzerland.
