Vengeful

by V. E. Schwab

He wanted to be saved.

  XI

  FOUR YEARS AGO

  EON—LABORATORY WING

  STELL knocked his knuckles on the counter.

  “I’m here to speak with one of your subjects,” he said. “Eli Cardale.”

  “I’m sorry, sir, he’s in testing.”

  Stell frowned. “Again?”

  This was the third time he had come to see Eli, and the third time he’d been fed a line.

  The first time, the excuse had been believable. The second, inconvenient. Now, it was obviously a lie. He hadn’t pulled rank up until this point, but only because he didn’t want the headache, or the reputation. EON was still a new venture, his venture—so new that the building around them wasn’t even finished—but it was also his responsibility, and Stell knew in his gut that something was wrong. The unease pinched, like an ulcer.

  “That’s the same answer I was given last time.”

  The woman—Stell didn’t know if she was a doctor, a scientist, or a secretary—pursed her lips. “This is a research lab, sir. Testing is a frequent component—”

  “Then you won’t mind interrupting the current session.”

  The woman’s frown deepened. “With a patient such as Mr. Ever—”

  “Cardale,” corrected Stell. Ever had been a self-appointed moniker, aggrandizing and arrogant (if slightly prophetic). His real name was Eliot—Eli—Cardale.

  “With a patient such as Mr. Cardale,” she amended, “testing requires immense preparation. Ending an exam early would be a waste of EON resources.”

  “And this,” said Stell, “is a waste of my time.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “I’ll observe the session until it’s finished.”

  A shadow crossed her face. “Perhaps if you’d rather wait here—”

  With that, Stell’s unease turned to dread.

  “Take me to him. Now.”

  XII

  TWENTY-THREE YEARS AGO

  THE FIRST HOME

  ELI sat on the porch steps and looked up at the sky.

  It was a beautiful night, the strobe of red and blue lights painting the house, the lawn, the chapel. The ambulance and the coroner’s van parked in the grass. One unnecessary, the other waiting.

  He pressed a worn old Bible to his chest while the cops and medics moved around him as if in orbit, close but never touching.

  “Kid’s in shock,” said an officer.

  Eli didn’t think that was true. He didn’t feel shaken. Didn’t feel anything but calm. Maybe that was shock. He kept waiting for it to wear off, for the steady hum in his head to give way to terror, to sadness. But it didn’t.

  “Can you blame him? Lost his mother a month ago. Now this.”

  Lost. That was a strange word. Lost suggested something misplaced, something that might be recovered. He hadn’t lost his mother. After all, he’d been the one to find her. Lying in the tub. Floating in a white dress stained pink by the water, palms up as if in supplication, her forearms open from elbow to wrist. No, he hadn’t lost her.

  She’d left him.

  Left Eli alone, trapped in a house with Pastor John Cardale.

  A female medic brought a hand to Eli’s shoulder, and he flinched, half from the surprise of contact, and half from the fact the latest welts were still fresh under his shirt. She said something. He wasn’t listening. A few moments later, they wheeled out the body. The medic tried to block Eli’s view, but there was nothing to see, only a black body bag. Death made clean. Neat. Sterile.

  Eli closed his eyes and drew up the image of his father lying broken at the bottom of the stairs. A shallow red pool spreading around the pastor’s head, like a halo, only in the dim basement the blood had looked black. His eyes wet, his mouth hinging open and closed.

  What had his father been going down there to do?

  Eli would never know. He opened his eyes and began to absently thumb the pages of the book.

  “How old are you?” asked the medic.

  Eli swallowed. “Twelve.”

  “Do you know your next of kin?”

  He shook his head. There was an aunt somewhere. A cousin, maybe. But Eli had never met them. His world had been here. His father’s church. Their congregation. There was a phone tree, he thought, a communication network used to spread the word when there was a celebration, a birth—or a death.

  The woman slipped away from his side and spoke to two of the officers. Her voice was low, but Eli caught some of the words: “The boy has nothing.”

  But again, she was wrong.

  Eli didn’t have a mother, or a father, or a home, but he still had faith.

  Not because of the scars on his back, or any of Pastor Cardale’s less physical sermons. No, Eli had faith because of how it felt when he pushed his father down the basement stairs. When the pastor’s head struck the basement floor at the bottom. When he finally stopped moving.

  In that moment, Eli had felt peace. Like a small sliver of the world made right.

  Something—someone—had guided Eli’s hand. Given him the courage to place his palm flat against his father’s back and push.

  The pastor had fallen so fast, bounced like a ball down the old wooden steps before landing in a heap at the bottom.

  Eli had followed slowly, taking each step with care as he drew his phone from his pocket. But he didn’t dial, didn’t push Call.

  Instead, Eli sat down on the bottom step, safely away from the blood, and held the phone in his hands, and waited.

  Waited until his father’s chest stilled, until the pool of blood stopped spreading, and the pastor’s eyes went empty, flat.

  Eli remembered one of his father’s sermons, then.

  Those who don’t believe in the soul have never seen one leave.

  He was right, thought Eli, finally dialing 911.

  There really was a difference.

  “Don’t worry,” said the medic, returning to the front porch. “We’re going to find somewhere for you to go.” She knelt down in front of him, a gesture clearly meant to make him feel like they were equals. “I know it’s scary,” she said, even though it wasn’t. “But I’m going to tell you something that helps me when I’m feeling overwhelmed. Every end is a new beginning.” She straightened. “Come on, let’s go.”

  Eli rose to his feet and followed her down the porch steps.

  He was still waiting for the sense of calm to fade, but it didn’t.

  Not when they led him away from the house. Not when they perched him on the edge of the unused ambulance. Not when they drove him away. Eli looked back once, and only once, at the house, the chapel, and then he turned, facing forward.

  Every end is a new beginning.

  XIII

  FOUR YEARS AGO

  EON—LABORATORY WING

  STELL entered the observation room just in time to see a man in a white lab coat crack open Cardale’s chest. The patient was strapped to a steel table, and the surgeon was using some kind of saw, and a collection of clamps and metal pins, and Eli was not only still alive—he was awake.

  A mask ran across the EO’s nose and mouth, with a hose connected to a machine behind his head, but whatever it was feeding Eli, it didn’t seem to be helping. The pain showed in every muscle, his whole body tensed against the restraints, the skin around his wrists and ankles white from pressure. A strap held Eli’s head back against the steel table, denying him a view of his own dissection, though Stell doubted he needed to look to know what was happening. Beads of sweat ran down Eli’s face and into his hair as the surgeon widened the cut in his chest.

  Stell didn’t know what he’d expected to find, but he hadn’t expected this.

  As the surgeon finished sawing through his patient’s sternum and pinned the flesh back, Cardale groaned, the sound low and muffled by the mask. Blood poured out of his open chest, slicking the metal table, the lip of which was too shallow to contain the ceaseless flow. Ribbons of red spilled over the sides, dripping to the floor.

  Stell felt sick.
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  “Remarkable, isn’t he?”

  He turned to find an average-looking man tugging off a pair of blood-slicked gloves. Behind round glasses, the doctor’s deep-set eyes were bright, pupils dilated with the pleasure of discovery.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” demanded Stell.

  “Learning,” said the doctor.

  “You’re torturing him.”

  “We’re studying him.”

  “While he’s conscious.”

  “Necessarily,” said the doctor with a patient smile. “Mr. Cardale’s regenerative abilities render any anesthesia useless.”

  “Then what’s with the mask?”

  “Ah,” said the doctor, “one of my more genius moments, that. You see, we cannot anesthetize him, but that doesn’t mean we can’t dampen his functions a little. The mask is part of an oxygen deprivation system. It reduces the breathable air to twenty-five percent. It’s taking all of his regenerative ability to stave off the damage done by starving the cells, which buys us a bit more time on the rest of the body before it heals.”

  Stell stared at Eli’s chest as it struggled to rise and fall. From this angle, Stell could almost see his heart.

  “We’ve never come across an EO like Mr. Cardale,” continued the doctor. “His ability—if we find a way to harness it—could revolutionize medicine.”

  “EO abilities can’t be harnessed,” said Stell. “They aren’t transferable.”

  “Yet,” said the doctor. “But if we could understand—”

  “Enough,” said Stell, transfixed by the sight of Eli’s ruined body. “Tell them to stop.”

  The doctor frowned. “If they take out the clamps, he’ll heal, and we’ll have to start all over again. I really must insist—”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Haverty.”

  “Well, Dr. Haverty. I’m Director Stell. And I’m officially discontinuing this experiment. Make them stop, or lose your job.”

  The sick smile slid from Haverty’s face. He pulled a microphone from the viewing room wall and clicked it on.

  “Terminate the session,” he ordered the surgeons still in the room.

  The men and women hesitated.

  “I said—terminate it,” repeated Haverty curtly.

  The surgeons began to methodically remove the various pins and clamps from Eli’s open chest cavity. The moment they were gone, the tension in the EO’s body began to recede. His back sank to the metal table, and his hands unclenched, the color returning to his limbs as his body put itself back together. Ribs cracked into place. Skin settled and fused. The lines of his face smoothed. And his breathing, while still labored (they left the mask on), began to even.

  The only sign that something horrific had happened was the sheer quantity of blood left pooling on the table and floor.

  “Are you happy now?” grumbled Dr. Haverty.

  “I’m a long way from happy,” said Stell, storming out of the observation room. “And you, Dr. Haverty—you’re fired.”

  * * *

  “PUT your forehead against the wall and your hands through the gap.”

  Eli did as he was told, feeling for the break in the fiberglass. He couldn’t see anything—his world had been a mottled black wall since the soldiers had thrown the hood over his head and dragged him from the concrete cell that morning. He knew, before they came, that something was wrong—no, not wrong, but certainly different. Haverty was a man of habit, and even though Eli didn’t have a perfect sense of time, he had a tenuous enough hold to know their last session had ended too abruptly.

  He found the gap in the fiberglass, a kind of narrow shelf, and rested his wrists on the lip. A hand jerked his hands farther into the gap, but a few moments later the cuffs came free.

  “Take three steps back.”

  Eli retreated, expecting to meet another wall, but finding only space.

  “Reach up and remove the hood.”

  Eli did, assaulted by the sudden brightness of the space. But unlike the sterile overheads of the operating theater, the light here was crisp, and clean, without being glaring. He was facing a floor-to-ceiling fiberglass wall, perforated by holes and interrupted only by the narrow cubby through which he’d placed his hands. On the other side stood three soldiers in head-to-toe riot gear, their faces hidden behind helmets. Two gripped batons—cattle prods, judging by the faint hum, the slight current of blue light. The third was coiling the discarded cuffs.

  “What am I doing here?” asked Eli, but the soldiers didn’t answer. They simply turned and left, steps echoing as they retreated. Somewhere a door opened, closed, pressurized, and as it did, the world beyond the fiberglass disappeared, the wall, transparent seconds before, becoming opaque.

  Eli turned, taking in his new surroundings.

  The cell was little more than a large cube, but after the months he’d spent strapped to various surfaces, sealed in a cell no bigger than a tomb, Eli was still grateful for the chance to move. He traced the perimeter of the cell, counted off the steps, took note of the features and their absences.

  He noted four cameras set flush into the ceiling. There were no windows, no obvious door (he’d heard the fiberglass barrier retract into the floor, rise again behind him), only a cot, a table with one chair, one corner fitted with a toilet, sink, and shower. A wardrobe consisting solely of gray cotton lay folded on a floating shelf.

  Victor’s ghost ran a hand over the folded clothes.

  “And so the angel trades Hell for Purgatory,” mused the phantom.

  Eli didn’t know what this place was—only knew that he wasn’t being strapped down, wasn’t being cut open, and that was an improvement. He peeled off his clothes and stepped into the shower, luxuriated in the freedom of turning the water on and off, washed away the scents of rubbing alcohol and blood and disinfectant, expecting to see the water at his feet run thick with the grime of a year’s torture. But Haverty had always been meticulous. They’d hosed Eli down every morning, and every night, so the only traces left behind were the scars that didn’t show.

  Eli lowered himself onto the cot, pressed his back into the wall, and waited.

  XIV

  TWENTY-THREE YEARS AGO

  THE SECOND HOME

  THE phone tree worked.

  Eli arrived at the Russos’ house that night with a backpack full of clothes, and the knowledge that his stay was temporary. A place for him to wait while the authorities tracked down a living relative, one willing to collect him.

  Mrs. Russo met him at the door in a robe. It was late, and the Russo kids—there were five of them, ranging in age from six to fifteen—were already asleep. She took Eli’s bag and led him inside. The house was warm and soft in a lived-in way, the surfaces scuffed, the edges worn smooth.

  “Poor thing,” she clucked under her breath as she led Eli into the kitchen. She gestured at the table for him to sit, and continued to murmur, more to herself than to him. The sound she made was so different from his own mother, whose whispered words had always been tinged with a hint of desperation. My angel, my angel, you must be good, you must be light.

  Eli lowered himself into a rickety kitchen chair and stared down at his hands, still waiting for the shock to come, or go, whichever it was meant to. Mrs. Russo placed a steaming mug in front of him, and he curled his fingers around it. It was hot—uncomfortably so—but he didn’t pull away. The pain was familiar, almost welcome.

  What now? thought Eli.

  Every end is a new beginning.

  Mrs. Russo sat down across from him. She reached her hands out and wrapped them over his. Eli flinched back at the touch, tried to pull away, but her grip was firm.

  “You must be hurting,” she said, and he was—his hands were burning from the mug, but he knew she meant a deeper, heavier pain, and that he didn’t feel. If anything, Eli felt lighter than he had in years.

  “God never gives us more than we can bear,” she continued.

  Eli focused on the small gol
d cross that hung around her neck.

  “But it’s up to us to find the purpose in the pain.”

  The purpose in the pain.

  “Come on,” she said, patting his hand. “I’ll make up the couch.”

  * * *

  ELI had never been a good sleeper.

  He’d spent half of every night listening to his father move just beyond the door, like a wolf in the woods behind the house. A predator, circling too near. But the Russos’ place was quiet, calm, and Eli lay awake, marveling at the way eight bodies under one roof could take up less space than two.

  The quiet didn’t last.

  At some point Eli must have drifted off, because he started awake to raucous laughter and morning light and a pair of wide green eyes watching him from the edge of the couch. The youngest Russo girl perched there, staring at him with a mixture of interest and suspicion.

  Four loud bodies came crashing suddenly into the room, a cacophony of limbs and noise. It was Saturday, and already the Russo children were running wild. Eli spent most of the time trying to stay out of their path, but it was hard in such a crowded house.

  “Weirdo,” said one of the boys, knocking into him on the stairs.

  “How long is he staying?” asked another.

  “Don’t be un-Christian,” warned Mr. Russo.

  “Gives me the creeps,” said the oldest boy.

  “What’s wrong with you?” demanded the youngest girl.

  “Nothing,” answered Eli, though he wasn’t sure if that was true.

  “Then act normal,” she ordered, as if that were such a simple thing.

  “What does normal look like?” he asked, at which point the girl made a small, exasperated sound and stormed away.

  Eli waited for someone to come and get him, take him away—though he didn’t know where they would take him—but the day passed, and darkness fell, and he was still there. That first night was the only one he spent alone. They put him in the boys’ room after that, a spare mattress tucked in one corner. He lay there, listening to the other boys sleep with a mixture of annoyance and envy, his nerves too fine-tuned to let him rest among the various sounds of movement.