Two

by LeighAnn Kopans

  “Yeah, they do. I went to Normal school, but my parents still let the Hub do tests on me because I’m rare. We could have been famous, I guess. They tested kids from all over the country like that, kids with the same problem as me. Most of us didn’t even know that the doctor visits or the blood tests were weird experiments until it was almost too late.”

  Pain squeezes my chest, quickly replaced by that rage that’s been trying to work its way out. I should have known what those tests were, should have figured it out sooner.

  But being angry about that isn’t going to get us anywhere.

  “I don’t understand why it’s such a problem.”

  “What — the One?”

  “Yeah. So you don’t have a crazy superpower — who cares? Hell, where I grew up in New L.A., those of us with the Supers were the ones who got hassled. I had a friend who was a One once, and her parents were relieved that at least she’d get away from all the discrimination.”

  “There wasn’t very much of that in Superior. Once in a while, some asshole would scribble something on the bathroom wall. Nothing too bad. I guess because Supers working at the Hub made up most of the population there, people are more used to it.”

  “The other thing is that no Super criminals are going to move to Nebraska. Nothing to steal, and no place to hide. The Normals in New L.A. think half of the Supers born are looking for ways to screw society up — like crime is in our genes or something. I mean, part of the reason why I left home is because I hated babysitting and living in a cramped house and not getting to use my Super, but mostly, I left because I wanted to prove to everyone that a poor Super girl from New L.A. could make something of herself. Something that would help people.”

  “So why are you bored here?” I ask. “If they really are going to send you around the world making it rain, wouldn’t that be helping people?”

  Hayley smiles softly, and her eyes sparkle as she focuses on something distant. I recognize that look from Merrin’s eyes. At this point, I’m just part of Hayley’s Super-powered daydream. “No, I want to be something really spectacular. A symbol, a piece of proof that we’re not all bad, and that even if some of us are, the really good ones balance them out.”

  I laugh, thinking of the old movies Merrin and I would watch together. “You want to be a superhero.”

  “Yeah,” she says, smiling gently. “I guess I do.” She sighs. “This Hub is just step one. Clandestine Services is way better because they give you awesome spy training in addition to working with you on your Super. That’s what I hear anyway. Boot camp, tactical procedures, weapons… I’m just waiting for the best excuse to get transferred over there — some epic global warming crisis or government-concealed oil spill or something.”

  “I have to say, I have never thought that much about my One. That’s Merrin’s thing — she’s the one obsessed with flying.”

  “So the One doesn’t bother you, but seriously pisses her off, huh?”

  “Right. All I want to do is live in a house, hang out with my friends, work at a job like anybody else. Use my One if I can, but if not, that’s okay. You can’t live your life under a microscope. I can’t at least.”

  “Don’t you like flying?”

  I shrug. “It’s fine, but it’s not my whole life. I like the Merrin-part of it the best.”

  Hayley looks down at her hands, biting her lip. When she doesn’t answer me for a few seconds, it hits me that I’ve never really told anyone that before. I don’t even think I’ve ever told Merrin that much — at least, not in those terms. I shift my weight, wondering if I said too much.

  “Well,” she says, “for now, you’re safe and dry. And about to be fed if you’re hungry. I asked some of the kids doing the kitchen shifts to bring you guys dinner.”

  “Thanks.”

  She arches an eyebrow and glances around the room. “Where is Merrin, by the way?”

  “She wanted to do a little research. You guys have a chem lab here, right?”

  “Yeah, of course. For classes.” Her eyebrows furrow and she looks at me, wanting more information, but just then, Merrin strides through the door.

  She plunks down next to me on the couch, and instinctively, I slide my hand over her leg and cup her knee. She gives me a warm, closed-lipped smile.

  “What’d you figure out? Anything?” I can’t ignore the refrain inside my head: Please say no.

  “No. Nothing conclusive. Not really much at all. ”

  And suddenly, I feel like I can breathe again.

  “What were you looking for?” Hayley asks, leaning forward and propping her elbows on her legs.

  “I was just trying to analyze some of these formulas we…uh…had with us.”

  Hayley’s eyes snap up to Merrin’s. “What kinds of formulas?”

  Merrin bites her lip, realizing she’s said too much, and looks at me. I squeeze her knee. “She’s cool. I told her about why we left.”

  Merrin leans in and drops her voice. “We stole them from Biotech. On our way out.”

  “Does Eisenhardt know you have those?”

  “We didn’t want to say anything about them to anyone here just yet, so — ”

  “Don’t worry about it,” says Hayley. “Elias is right — I’m cool. I won’t say anything.” Her dark eyes flash, reminding me of the way Daniel’s always did when he was excited about something but didn’t want to betray it with a smile.

  A brief flash of guilt hits me. The swirling storm of Merrin and my sisters and “danger” and “what if” and “if only” has clouded my head so much.

  “Thanks,” Merrin says, her body sinking into the couch. “So I did find the mass spectrometer and ran some of the vials through. It came up with all the basic information — a chemical breakdown, location scan, timestamp… But there was a problem. The spectrometer is connected to a computer, and I couldn’t break the connection. Every scan I did pinged some larger network.” She takes a shaky breath. “I think one of the scans got sent back to the Biotech Hub.”

  Hayley’s eyes widen. “What makes you think that? We never communicate with the Biotech Hub. Haven’t for decades.”

  “I know that’s what President Eisenhardt told us,” Merrin says, “but I saw the latitude and longitude of the Biotech Hub come up onscreen. It was embedded in a whole string of numbers, but I caught it.”

  Hayley raises an eyebrow at her. “You know the longitude and latitude of Biotech?”

  “Well, yeah. I’m a sky geek.”

  I smile and reach for her hand.

  “What does that have to do with the sky?” Hayley asks.

  I let myself smile for just a second. “To Merrin, everything has to do with the sky.”

  “I don’t know if anyone back there is watching or if these formulas are unique enough for them to recognize, but I deleted it as fast as I could,” Merrin says.

  “Things were insane there. I’m sure no one’s watching.” As soon as I say it, I know it’s a lie I’m telling myself to keep from going completely over the edge. I keep talking anyway. “There’s nothing we can do about it now except be ready to run. Just like we were already.”

  Merrin nods and continues. “I think I have an idea of which vials do what. Based on what I remember from the Biotech Hub, I think the pink one would give me a boost to my flight abilities, but it wouldn’t be long-lasting. I think the green changes something essential in our DNA, but I just couldn’t be sure of what yet, so…”

  “So what?” I interrupt, suddenly feeling very tired and hoping we don’t have to argue over this, too. I just don’t have that much energy left to reason with Merrin that she can’t inject shit into her body based on formulas for other colored liquids she may or may not remember correctly. Especially not with this extra concern about the Biotech Hub maybe, possibly, having seen someone running tests on one of their formulas.

  “So I haven’t figured anything out. Yet.”

  I hold her gaze. “So?”

  “So no injections. No pers
onal experiments. I promised. I’m not gonna break a promise, Elias. But we do have to figure out some way to at least categorize them.”

  I don’t really understand how, but in her head, she has it all worked out. And as long as there’s no possibility of my girlfriend injecting herself with some sinister, Biotech-engineered formula and dying and leaving me all alone in this mess, I’m cool.

  Hayley rubs at her eyes with her fingers, looking weary and worried. “Does it freak you out? The possibility that your scans pinged a Biotech server?”

  “No.” Merrin’s gaze flicks to mine. “What I’m more freaked out about is what happened when I searched through the mainframe system for my med files. I wanted to bring them up so I could scan the formulas against my genome. I should have just drawn my own blood. It was stupid, but I wanted to be quick.”

  “What was freaky?” Hayley interrupts, her words clipped. “Did you find the comm that said they were looking for you guys?”

  “No.” Merrin’s eyes are wide. “The fact that we were nowhere in it.”

  “That’s impossible,” Hayley says. “Our network has information for every Super on the grid. Social Welfare’s job is to track every Super in the country so that they’re available if there’s a crisis, something their particular ability can address. You have to be there. Just hold on.”

  She jogs down the hall, ducks into the girls’ side, and comes back out second later holding a laptop. Twisting the tablet screen slightly so we can see it, she taps furiously at the keys.

  “Okay, so I’m bringing up the Codex.” She taps some more and then spins the screen. “Like, here’s me. Haley Ortiz, born in Playa Vista, parents, siblings, all of our birthdates, all of our Supers, all of our stages of education.”

  “Holy shit,” Merrin breathes. “There really are eight of you.”

  “I told you,” Hayley says absently. “Part of the reason coming to school at this place was so appealing.” She smirks. “Okay, so you’re Merrin…”

  “Grey,” we say together. She smiles at me, and my heart still does that familiar flip-flop.

  “Okay.” Hayley taps some more. “There are a ton of Greys. With these birthdates, that must be your mom and dad…and then Michael and Max…”

  “My brothers.”

  “Okay. But I don’t see you here. Hmm.” Her eyebrows furrow, and then, still staring at the screen, she hollers over her shoulder, “Hey, Click?”

  “Who?” Merrin asks.

  “One of the kids here,” Hayley says. “CLICK!”

  “What the hell kind of a name is ‘Click?’” Merrin grumbles.

  “They pick their own here,” I explain. “It’s a Hub thing.” I wonder if the kids at Superior did something like that, but I just left those schools so early I missed it. What would they have called me?

  A lanky kid with floppy hair and a cocky smile jogs down the hall, wearing the same regulation clothes the rest of us are wearing. He grins. “What’s up, Storm?”

  “Hayley to you.” She punches him on the shoulder. He grins like it’s the best thing that’s happened to him all day. “Give us your magic touch, huh?”

  “Yeah, whaddaya need?”

  “Merrin’s not showing up in the Codex. What’s that about?”

  “It could only be a couple of things,” he says, cracking his knuckles and motioning for the laptop. “Either she was never there in the first place, or she’s been hidden.” He pauses, studies Merrin with dark eyes. “Were you raised by wolves?”

  Merrin gives the kind of short laugh that means she’s being polite but doesn’t have that much patience left. “Definitely not. But there has been some…shit hitting the fan. Where we’re from.”

  Click peers at the screen. “Grey?”

  Merrin nods.

  “Superior, Nebraska, huh? Hub kids?” He passes his outstretched fingers over the keyboard, brings them around to the back of the screen, then back over the keyboard again. He doesn’t touch a thing, but the screen’s scrolling through letters and numbers like crazy.

  “Yeah. What does it say?” Merrin peers at the screen, but I’m pretty sure she can’t read it; it’s scrolling too fast. And I’m right. She sits back after a second.

  “Well, I brought up your name, but it was hidden way back in some encrypted and double-hidden folder. And the really weird thing…” He waves his hands over the keyboard one more time. “…is that there’s nothing under your name. Just a set of numbers.”

  He spins the screen around so we can see it.

  Merrin’s face blanches white, and she puts her head in her hands. “Holy shit,” she mumbles.

  I have no idea what she’s upset about, but I do know a hidden name and a numbers-only identification can’t be good.

  “Do those numbers lead anywhere?” I ask.

  Click’s face screws up, and he turns his head so his ear is over his hands, which still float over the keyboard. “I’m trying to…geez, it’s buried deep. Let me try… Yeah, here we go.”

  “What is he doing?” I whisper to Hayley.

  “I have no idea how he does it, but when he’s near a motherboard, he can kind of…make it do whatever he wants.”

  “The connections talk to me. They tell me what they want, what they need. You know, I can do it on other things besides motherboards.” He looks up long enough to wink at Hayley.

  “Oh my God.” She rolls her eyes. “Find the information, huh?”

  “Done, Hayley.” He smiles. “Okay, so this number is connected to a Biotech Hub file, which makes sense because you’re Hub kids, so… Oh. Whoa. Whoa whoa whoa.” His fingers slam down over the keys, and both Merrin and I sit up straight.

  “What?” Merrin, Hayley, and I say at once.

  “Shh. Saving. It’s… They’re erasing it from under me. Hold on. And…yeah. Got it. Here.”

  Click leans back in the chair and runs both hands through his hair. “Jesus. Yeah. They figured out I was hacking. Though my magic fingers erase any trace of an IP address, so you should be safe. It…uh…it looks serious.” He hands the laptop back to Hayley. “Anything else, boss?”

  “‘Boss’ is right,” Hayley grins. “No. Thanks, though.” Click beams and settles back against the couch, looking pleased with himself. I would laugh if I wasn’t so freaked out about what information he’d just found.

  Hayley leans in, her eyes scanning the laptop screen. After a couple seconds, her mouth drops open. “Mierda.”

  So far, we’ve made this girl say that twice since we’ve been here.

  “What?” Merrin says.

  “You need to see this.”

  Merrin and I stare at the screen together.

  United States of America Biotechnical Institute Official Record

  Subject: Merrin Grey

  Identification #: 070407112408042210041612

  Date of Birth: July 17, 2107

  Testing: One research

  Cure research outcome: Of possible interest for testing the Cure formula, batch 6, derived from test group formula at original Super Creation Initiative, Lake Michigan, April 2023. Subjects remained genetically altered despite Cure administration. Preserve Cure formula for further testing for unique reactions in singularly gifted individuals.

  File Under: Uranium Wars Official Files

  “What the hell?” Merrin’s voice is mixed up in a variety of tones, her voice choking around each word.

  “I’ve never heard about any of that before,” Hayley says. “What does Super Creation Initiative mean?”

  “I don’t know.” Merrin presses her lips into a thin line and lets out a shuddering breath. “All I know is that the Uranium Wars were in April 2023, too.”

  I put my arm around Merrin’s shoulders and hug her to me, trying to absorb the slight trembling I feel in her muscles.

  “Why does it say they tested a cure on me?” she continues.

  “Whatever it was, it failed.” I squeeze her hand.

  “It did fail,” Merrin says. “They didn’t cur
e us. They didn’t cure me. But I thought…I thought they were trying to make me better. Make me Super.” I watch her chest rise and fall while her breath stutters in and out, over and over again. “That’s what my dad said anyway.” Pain twists her features.

  “They were,” I say, feeling my own breaths becoming short. “They had to be. That’s why I did what Mom and Dad told me to do, why I never complained brought me in for testing. They always said they were trying to make me better.” My face feels numb, and the room swirls around me. My grip on Mer’s shoulder loosens, and now she’s the one squeezing my hand.

  “They were trying to make you ‘better,’ according to them,” she growls. “They never liked us. Ones weren’t even allowed to work in the Hub. And you heard the way that Fisk talked to us, like we were the biggest disappointment on Earth. He was only trying to make our Ones into something more for his own sick satisfaction, because he couldn’t quit playing God even after his Cure formula didn’t work.”

  The pieces click into place inside my head. To my dad, my genes weren’t the promise of something better, just the promise that Ones like me would lead to something less embarrassing. Every smile, every buddy-buddy pat on the shoulder he ever gave me was a lie. He wasn’t trying to make me Super. He was just trying to make me Normal.

  ”Well, they definitely didn’t want you to know anything about it,” Click yawns, letting his head loll back on the couch. “That stuff was buried deep.”

  Hayley’s watching both of us with pity on her face. She keeps her voice gentle, but even I can’t miss the fire behind her eyes. “Those formulas you brought with you? You said they were based on your blood, right? I wonder if any of them is linked to that cure. If the Biotech Hub really is trying to figure out a formula to eliminate Supers and hand-picked you as one of the test subjects, I bet you have it right in that bag. And I’d bet anything that that’s the reason Biotech sent the universal comm when we normally don’t hear anything from them at all. They want that formula back.”

  Hayley stands up. “I’m gonna take my tablet to the research room. See what else I can find out about that date — anything. I know there won’t be anything direct, but even just news articles from that day might help.”