Two

by LeighAnn Kopans

  Vera taps the syringe, sets it down, and ties a tourniquet around Merrin’s upper arm.

  “If this works, Mom and Dad will be proud. I’ll be like Mom without the fire.”

  “Or your dad, plus flying,” I add.

  “Yeah. Cooler than the twins even.” Merrin smiles wistfully, and I catch her swallowing a lump in her throat.

  Her mom and dad had left CSH as soon as Doctor Grey recovered from her fiery escapades to run another mission directed by Masters. Merrin and her parents had spent a few hours together. They’d told her everything — how they’d spent their entire lives as double agents trying to shut down this plan for a cure and keep her and her brothers safe.

  When they were done talking, I even saw Merrin and her mom hug.

  The needle slides into Merrin’s arm, and she doesn’t make a peep; not a flinch crosses her face.

  “How does that feel?” Vera asks, and everyone stares at Merrin.

  “A little cold? I don’t know. A little tingly?”

  Vera frowns. “Do you feel like you could…do anything?”

  Merrin’s eyes close, and she takes a deep breath, wrinkling her forehead. Go light. Go light. Go light. After a few concentrated seconds, she lets her eyes drift open and shakes her head. Tears brim at her lower lids, and she makes a big deal out of rolling her sleeve down over the injection site. “No. I think I’d better get some more rest. Report back in the morning?”

  Vera nods, rubbing her hand down her face and then back to her neck, massaging it. I know she’s sore from so many hours in the lab, exhausted from the mental and physical energy it took to make that reverse Cure formula. She looks like she’s going to collapse as soon as we leave the room. Merrin catches her in a hug as we’re leaving, and the look of surprise on Vera’s face makes me smile.

  Merrin and I go back to my room and curl up to watch a holoscreen movie — a really old one about the X-Men. She folds her legs onto my lap, nuzzles into my neck, and slides her hand around my waist, under my shirt. I pull her even closer to me, gripping the backs of her legs with one hand and wrapping my other arm around her shoulders. Eventually, she raises her lips to mine, and we’re in the warm, contented bubble of knowing this doesn’t have to end any time soon.

  We’ve made a game of my mind-reading, an ability which hasn’t left me yet and doesn’t feel like it will any time soon. She thinks something at me and dares me to respond in a way that won’t make me look crazy. Since we’re alone, she’s trying to get a different reaction, I think.

  I’m cutting my hair, she thinks. It’s ugly and a pain in the ass.

  “The only thing that’s a pain in the ass is having to keep arguing with you about it.” I slide my fingers back through her hair and lean down to kiss her nose.

  She giggles, then removes my glasses, kisses my eyelids. “Are you saying you don’t care?”

  “I don’t care about very much anymore, except you alive and right next to me.” I trail my fingers down her neck, cup her jaw, and press my lips softly to the corner of her mouth.

  “Me too,” she says, but she sounds — and feels — distant. We both know what she’s thinking about: whether that reversal is going to kick in.

  I kiss her softly, and she presses in. When her lips part against mine, I feel a strange spark in my spine and then a flooding warmth. If I close my eyes and concentrate hard enough, suddenly, it’s there. A buzz.

  Merrin pulls back, sits up straight, and stares at me, eyes wide. “Elias. I just felt something.”

  I nearly jump out of bed. “Is it…?”

  “Yeah.” She draws out the syllables like she has all the time in the world. “I mean, it’s the same feeling that I got when we first flew. But richer. Stronger. Surer.”

  “Do you think you can float?”

  She smiles at me wickedly. “Maybe more.”

  Wordlessly, we slip into shoes and leave the room. I wind through the halls so quickly that Merrin practically jogs to keep up, but she doesn’t care. We arrive at an unassuming, unmarked door, which opens to a metal ladder. Merrin goes first, and rung by rung, we make our way to the roof. In the distance, the lights of downtown Washington, D.C. and a million stars above spark and twinkle like they’ve always been part of the same landscape, the same universe that holds us now. Everything feels brand-new, and on this roof, the two of us feel nothing but daring, brave, anxious, and in love.

  “Okay, Mer. Let’s see it.” I step back, holding my hands out with palms up, daring her to show me something cool. Merrin nods over and over, psyching herself up, and shakes her arms and legs out. She concentrates. After a few agonizing seconds, her body trembles, and she winces and moans, but after a few more seconds, her feet do it — they lift off the ground. She laughs so heartily that I think I might burst with the happiness. I look into her eyes, grinning my face off, and when she catches my grin, she grunts, then zooms off through the air.

  In seconds, the white shirt she’s wearing and her brown hair whipping against the indigo sky are a pinpoint, and even though I can’t see her anymore, I can feel her exhilaration as though she’s standing right next to me. My heart beats faster and faster, frantically hammering against my chest until I think it’ll either jump out or stop completely.

  I would worry whether she’s okay, but from the joy and excitement coursing through my veins, I know she’s perfectly fine. I can almost feel what she feels on my skin, she’s thinking of it so hard. The air seems to still all around me, instead of whipping back against my face like it had been. It’s impossible, unless… My eyes close, trying to get so completely inside her head that it’s like I’m with her.

  I feel like I’m being sucked into a vortex, except I’m still moving forward. At exactly that moment, my eyes snap open. A great hissing sound fills the air, and then a huge white circle ripples out from a tiny point in the distance.

  A tremendous peace overwhelms me.

  She’s back.

  Three, four, five agonizing seconds later, and she’s coming back into view, moving from hundreds of miles per hour down to safe landing speed with remarkable control. Even so, her landing on the gravel sounds hard and gritty, and she kicks up a long cloud of dust regaining her footing.

  She stands there, twenty feet away from me, staring down at the palms of her hands, the biggest smile I’ve ever seen on her. When I jog up to her, her eyes sparkle with something wild and joyful.

  She jumps and hugs me around my neck, and I spin her around, our laughter filling the night sky where fear once did.

  “Supersonic,” she says, breathlessly, when I set her down. “All on my own.”

  I tuck some stray strands of hair behind her ear so I can see her face. “I knew you could,” I murmur, letting the sensation of relief flow from inside her through my fingertips, letting it fill me up, too. “I knew you would.”

  She pushes her hands against my chest playfully, and I tug her back to me just as quickly. “No, you didn’t. You thought I’d be stuck on the ground forever.”

  “Nah. Super or not, I knew you’d find a way to do it.”

  She floats up right in front of my face, just like she used to, and presses a long, slow kiss on my mouth. In that instant, I’m so, so happy she flew because the scent of the stratosphere and the feel of her wind-blown hair against my fingers makes Merrin so completely herself that my heart feels like it will burst.

  But then I tug her down to earth because all I’ve ever wanted is to feel something solid beneath us. And I think she finally knows that. We stand there, wrapped in each other’s arms, shivering but no longer as afraid as we were in that frozen Nebraska field just a couple of weeks ago. Merrin feels her love for me in a thousand ways that have no words, and now that I can feel them all, I am a thousand times happier.

  “Will you always be here to watch me fly?” she asks, turning her face up to mine.

  “Always,” I say.

  “Will you still come with me sometimes?”

  I feel safer on the gr
ound, but being safe is not what we’re always meant to do. I know that now. I shrug like I don’t care either way, give a half-smile. “If that’s your sort of thing,” I answer.

  “You’re my thing,” she replies. “And besides, I’ll always want you to be here when I land.”

  And so the both of us turn and walk back inside with our feet planted firmly on the ground.

  Acknowledgements

  The second book in a series is a significantly less flashy production, but requires no less love and support to come to life.

  As always, first thanks go to my editor and unflinching best friend, Jamie Grey, who balances the two roles so beautifully I can’t imagine doing any of this without her. Thank you, Jamie, for having the patience to tackle the atrocious first draft of Two, tear it apart until the document bled red, and still make it sound like you adored it. I love you.

  Thanks to my mentor and hero, Trisha Leigh, who read the same first draft and dispensed similarly loving advice. Thank you, Trisha, for showing me how to publish with class and professionalism. I wouldn’t be here without you.

  Becca Weston, thank you for being just the eagle-eyed copyeditor this project needed. You were a saint for taking it on, and I’ll never forget it.

  Huge thanks go to Darci Cole for dissecting the big fight scene at the end and helping me rewrite it so that it actually made sense. Along with Rachel Solomon and Amanda Olivieri, you combed through the edit notes along with me and gave me much needed input and laughs when I sometimes felt like crying.

  Being an early beta is thankless work - it means dodging typos and wading through clunky sentences to get to the story underneath. Thank you, Alexa Hirsch and Brett Jonas, for being my brave volunteers. It means the world to me that you believe in my work that much.

  Thanks to Jamie Krakover for putting up with my endless questions about supersonic flight, and to Olivia Jones for knitting me custom fingerless gloves so that my December drafting wouldn’t destroy my poor fingers.

  Thanks to Katalina, Zev, and David, for being real live kids who read One, loved it, and told me you were excited for Two. I hope you know how much you’ve encouraged me, and how priceless that is.

  To my informal #TeamTWO for carrying your excitement for this series over months and months - since I don’t have an official list, I’m afraid of leaving one of you out, so I won’t list you here. But I hope you know how much I love and appreciate you all.

  Last but, of course, not least, thank you to David, who loves and supports this series despite not having actually read it - and me, in everything.

  About the Author

  Raised on comic books and classic novels, Leigh Ann developed an early love of science fiction and literature. As an adult, she rediscovered her love for not only reading, but also writing the types of fiction that enchanted her as a teen. She is the author of ONE, TWO, and the upcoming SOLVING FOR EX (coming in 2014).

  Leigh Ann, her husband, and four children live in Columbus, Ohio. When she’s not immersed in the world of fiction, you can find her obsessing over the latest superhero movie or using her kids as an excuse to go out for ice cream (again).

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