She noticed cameras following them and she turned away from them and whispered. “If you could get out of here, would you?”
“Fuck yeah, Allie. What do you think—” Zack stopped wiping his face and let his towel drop to his side. He lowered his voice to match hers. “You aren’t being hypothetical.”
Allison nodded.
“If this is about Jessica, the medics will handle her.”
Allison made a disgusted sound. “Some dissident. I want out of this place. They have no right to imprison anyone here. The only thing Jessica’s making me do is try this now.”
“Do you know what you’re dealing with?”
“I need your help, Zack.”
“I don’t know what kind of help I can give you while I’m drugged.”
“I need someone who knows this place. Even if you’re drugged, I’m not.”
“What?”
She reached into her pocket. Shaded from the cameras, she opened her cupped hand slightly so he could see a single lint-covered pill on her palm.
Zack stared. Then he said, “Fuck, put that away.”
Allison did so.
“So you ain’t drugged?”
“If they didn’t have two hostages— and I could figure out how you’re supposed to levitate— I’d be gone by now.”
Zack whistled. “How’d you avoid swallowing their little pill? They’re pretty thorough.”
“I can move a Jeep, something that size isn’t much of a problem.”
“You mean you swallowed it?”
“Halfway anyway…”
Zack grimaced. “Ok, I take it you have some sort of plan?”
“We get my Dad to their airstrip.”
“Ok, how?”
“That’s open…”
Zack looked at her.
Allison’s whisper became lower and harsher. “I’m sorry, but I don’t have the time. If I’m getting out of here, it’s got to be before they have the time to really think about what happened with Jessica. I’m committed to this. Tomorrow. Do I have your help or not?”
“You know you’re borrowing trouble? Just having me around is probably going to cause enough interference to scramble anything telekinetic you do.”
Allison hadn’t thought of that. She tried an experimental feeling out with her teek, and it was like trying to drag her sense through clay. But, like she’d said, she was committed. “I need to know where I’m going, Zack.”
Zack stared at her a long time before he said, “Hell, it’d seriously fuck with my self-image if I refused.”
Allison held out her hand and said, “Tomorrow then?”
Zack took her hand and said, “Tomorrow then, beautiful.” Zack did something then that she never expected. Instead of shaking her hand, he kissed it lightly on the back.
He walked away. Around her the wind picked up, carrying warmth she felt mostly in her cheeks.
11:28 PM
When Jessica awoke from her sedation, the fire was locked in her skull. She tried to reach out, to feel, from her bed, but that part of her mind was senseless, mute. She couldn’t feel the tiny motes that made up the matter around her, and that meant that all the burning went on inside her.
They hadn’t drugged her for years, not since they had told her that she was their most valuable talent here. Today had proven them liars. Jessica Mason didn’t matter at all to these people, to Stone. Even what she could do, the one thing that raised her above everything else, that was expendable.
And they had taken it from her.
Jessica sat up in her bed, in her darkened room. She stared at the door across from the foot of her bed, knowing it was locked. She knew it was locked because her father had always locked the door after he hurt her.
He had always locked the door, and in the morning he apologized and tried to explain himself.
They would have to come for her eventually, if only to dose her again. Their injection couldn’t last forever. And she knew that Howard Stone would want to talk to her, to apologize and try to explain himself.
She had always believed that, if they didn’t love her, at least she mattered to them, that at least her well-being meant something. She had managed to convince herself that she was important.
She was wrong. She was just Jessica Mason, and no one gave a shit about her. If she screamed in the night, no one would come running. If anyone said they cared about her, it was because they wanted something from her. If she died, no one would weep over her grave.
To hell with all of them.
They had to come for her eventually. And when they came for her, she knew what she would do.
Stone’s would be the last apology she would ever have to hear.
TWENTY SEVEN
NAVARRO COUNTY, TX: Wednesday November 3, 1999
6:30 AM
“…all hell’s going to break out soon, once that redhead figures out Stone’s found his Change.”
“What do you mean—?”
“This place, the high school, it isn’t imaginary.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s all the same thing. Telepathy, telekinesis, precognition… It’s all from the same place. This is Euclid Heights High in a decade or so.”
◆◆◆
Allison sat upright in her bed, drenched in a cold sweat. It wasn’t even a dream of Chuck this time; it was more of a dream of a memory of Chuck, of what he had said.
What he had said. It scared her. It scared her that what she had dreamed might be real. What could cause that to happen to Euclid Heights High? What could cause the bodies?
I can’t think about that now. I have to think about getting out of here.
Allison took a shower, trying to plan ahead, hoping that Zack was correct about where the Ward was.
7:00 AM
John Charvat was awake and staring out the eastern windows of one of the prefab houses hugging the residential perimeter of Prometheus. The window faced ranks of similar houses marching off toward the chain-link perimeter. The dawn was quick and rose-colored, John watched out the window as the light began painting his shadow on the far wall.
There were two bedrooms in this house. The door to one of them was still closed. He turned away from the window and walked up to that door, knocking softly. There was a murmured response that sounded half asleep.
John nodded to himself and walked into the bathroom.
He closed the bathroom door, opened the shower stall door, and turned the hot water on full. With the shower stall open, the bathroom immediately began filling with humid fog. John stared at the mirror over the sink as his face dissolved into gray. He made no move to undress.
When the mirror was completely fogged over, he stepped on the lid of the toilet. His fingers slipped on condensation as he fumbled with a vent over the toilet. He moved carefully, making very little sound.
He pulled the grate off the vent, revealing the camera beyond. Its lens was as fogged and white as the mirror. He lowered the grate and placed it on the sink. Then he reached for the roll of toilet paper.
He took a single sheet and separated one ply of the tissue. Very gently he draped the single thin tissue over the fogged lens. He smiled to himself again, stepped off of the toilet, and began the work of opening the window.
7:15 AM
Jessica’s wait was rewarded. She had barely felt some return of her numbed senses when her door opened. Three orderlies and a doctor came in with little of the social pretense that seemed second nature at PRI. No one approached her until they had all entered and had positioned themselves.
Jessica didn’t move. She simply glared at them.
The doctor held an air-powered hypodermic in his hand and looked at her warily. “I hope you’ll make this easy for all of us, Miss Mason.”
“You’re early,” Jessica said.
He stared at her blankly, then glanced back at the rest of the orderlies.
“Seven thirty is when you’re supposed to dope people.” Jessica looked at him.
He shook his head and said. “We want this to cause as little disruption as possible to the other students.”
You would have done me in my sleep, if I had slept.
“I want to see Mr. Stone.” Jessica said.
No one had made a move for her yet. That was good. They were still afraid of her. But she could barely feel with her extra senses. She could do these people no damage, no matter how much they feared her, no matter how much she wanted to. From how she felt, she needed another hour, at least, before she recovered from last night.
“We need to do this if you’re to see him,” the doctor said.
Jessica nodded. “When do I see him then?”
He looked back to one of the orderlies, and Jessica noticed that the man wasn’t an orderly. He was security, a familiar looking guy in a suit and a bald eagle pin on his tie. Fred, the field agent who’d taken her in. Maybe he felt some proprietary interest in her. Fred finally spoke. “Stone wants to see her ASAP, as soon as she’s ready to go.”
While he talked, Jessica felt with her crippled senses. Her mind fell through a buzzing particulate world filled with tiny vibrating motes. The air was a swarm of gnats, and the structure of the hypo was a network of tiny snakes, each viper buzzing, and twisting in a tiny confined space. To this view, the world was vast, and her mind swept through it at impossible speeds. The bouncing rotating insects filled her point of view like a cloud filled mostly of nothingness.
It was a pedestrian exercise, simply opening her mind to the impressions of the matter around her. But on the edge that she was, the effort set her heart racing and brought the taste of copper to her mouth. She felt sweat dripping down her back, her cheek, between her breasts. It took a superhuman effort to keep from closing her eyes in concentration. She managed, by force of will, to stay motionless, sitting in the same position she’d been in since they’d entered her room.
“So,” said the doctor, “can I please have your arm?”
Jessica nodded and slowly raised her arm. As she did, her mind fell into the vial that fueled the air hypo. The few c.c.s of liquid was a thick universe as vast as Jupiter. Compared to the gnats of gas molecules, or the short vipers of polymer chains, the drug was made of minnows and leviathans. It was the leviathans that mattered. The minnows were water and salty ions. The whales floating in this Jovian world were complex neurotransmitters, each engineered to fill spaces in Jessica’s synapses.
Sweat stung her eyes as she fed the leviathans the minuscule amount of energy she could muster in her drugged state. The monster molecules spun, and bent. There was barely enough energy in Jessica’s burst to raise the temperature of the liquid, even so small a volume. But all of it was pumped into the minuscule fraction of the liquid that was the active drug.
The leviathans spun themselves past the breaking point, some slammed into the minnows, absorbing the small ones and becoming something else. Others flew into each other and disintegrated into a cloud of smaller beings. Some spontaneously exploded.
By the time the hypodermic reached her arm, most of the leviathans had died.
7:20 AM
George walked into his office carrying a large cardboard box. He slammed the door shut behind him with his foot, plunging the office into gloom. The only light came from a few ruddy trickles from the louvered windows. He made no move to turn on the lights.
He tossed the box on top of his desk, knocking his phone askew. He ignored the phone and grabbed an oversized wastebasket from beside his desk. The wastebasket had a shredder built into the top of it.
He set it down next to a filing cabinet.
The phone began beeping at him. George fished in his pockets for a few minutes before he found a key ring. His hands shook as he unlocked the cabinet. Once it was unlocked, he slid the bottom drawer open. The drawer was filled with multi-colored file folders hanging on rails.
George began pulling the files’ contents, feeding them into the shredder. Pages of notes, long passages of mathematical equations, many hand-written, all were sucked into the shredder. At least twice, George fed pages too fast, and he had to unjam the machine.
When the basket filled, he dumped the contents in the corner of his office, and began on the next drawer. Sometime in the middle of the third drawer, long after the phone had given up on attracting his attention, there was a knock on the office door.
George froze, a personal memo trembling in his hand.
The knock came again, more insistent this time. George looked down at the shredder and backed away from it, dropping the memo. He kept backing away until he was next to his desk. He had to step over the phone.
He faced the door as the knock became an insistent pounding.
“Y-yes?” He said quietly.
His visitor took that as the cue to enter. The door swung inward, flooding the office with light from the hall beyond. George blinked at Barney. Barney was shaking his head. Unlike George, Barney’s clothes were neat, he’d shaved, and he appeared as if he’d gotten at least some sleep in the past 48 hours.
George bent down and picked up the phone at his feet. “What do you want?”
Barney was still shaking his head. “Never play poker, George.” He said in his western twang. Barney reached over and turned on the light switch with his cast, flooding the room with more light.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about…”
“Don’t fuck with me. You’re not good enough to fuck with me.” Barney looked around the office, which showed all its disarray in the unkind light. “You’re panicking, George.”
George laughed, almost a hysterical giggle. “Panic? That’s what this is?”
“I can’t let you rabbit on us.”
George shook his head. “You’re perfect, you know that? They couldn’t have done better if they engineered you for your job.”
Barney took a step into the room and closed the door behind him. “I think you should calm down before you do something regrettable.”
George kept shaking his head, waving the phone in his hand. “You never had any morals for this place to corrupt, did you?”
“Cut the sentimentalist bullshit, George.” Barney reached into his jacket with his left hand and removed a gun, an automatic with a silencer attached. George backed up, instinctively. “Fred gave me a job. If something becomes a security risk, I have to deal with it.”
George laughed again, “Christ. You’re enjoying this, aren’t you? There aren’t any other security people here because they might spoil your fun.” Barney leveled the silenced gun at George, but he couldn’t stop laughing. “Go ahead, shoot. It’d be the capping insanity.”
Barney kept the gun level. “I never liked you.” He took another step toward George. “What the fuck did you think you were doing?”
“Coming to my senses. Elroy—” George caught his breath. “I mean Billy— Billy was one thing. That was accidental, and maybe he’d gone beyond hope. But we went and forced another kid to go through the exact same thing. We placed a sensitive too close to that girl when she lit up. We deliberately drove another kid insane.”
“I’m touched. That doesn’t answer my question. How were you intending to get out of here?”
“I wasn’t.”
Barney stopped approaching and stared.
“That surprises you?”
“If you weren’t about to bolt what the hell are you—”
“You don’t understand guilt, do you? This isn’t something I can run from. The blood’s on my hands.”
Barney kept staring at him.
“You see, all that’s really left for me is to erase whatever contribution I’ve made to this insanity. My work, my notes…” George gestured toward the corner of the office, where the shredded documents were piled.
Barney stepped back and looked where George had indicated. “I don’t see what—”
Barney was interrupted by George swinging the base of the phone into his face. The gun, in Barney’s off hand, discharged with a muff
led report, and both men fell to the ground.
Despite the sudden pain in his gut, George brought the phone down twice more on the back of Barney’s skull. The gun didn’t go off again. He dropped the phone and rolled over on his back, gasping and clutching his belly.
Beneath him, shreds of paper began to absorb a spreading red stain.
7:35 AM
Allison waited for Zack in the courtyard between the dorms. She kept her attention divided between the cameras and the residence building. She was alone out here. The only people she’d seen had been a few boys who’d slipped into the gym.
Standing here made her feel exposed. Their security had to be paying extra attention to her, after yesterday. In a way, she counted on that attention. If all of Prometheus’ attention was directed inward, at their potentially dangerous kids, that meant they might overlook people on the fringes of their security— like Dad and Macy.
She just had to pray that Macy had gotten her message to Dad, and they managed to slip away to the airstrip.
Early sunlight washed over the courtyard, and the air felt hot and dry. It felt too much like the air in the medical building yesterday. Allison found herself looking around for Jessica more than once. She had to tell herself that it was an irrational fear. Jessica was drugged and under guard somewhere. What Allison had to worry about was Prometheus security, the little gray men behind the cameras, the men with the guns.
More people began emptying out of the buildings around her and she began worrying about Zack. About the time when she seriously began to think he might not show up, Zack came out of the boy’s residence. He looked flushed, and his eyes showed lack of sleep. He walked right up to her and pulled her arm, “Come on.”
Allison followed, away from the courtyard and the half-dozen other early birds. Zack led her to a corner of the academic building, away from everyone, and stopped. “If we’re lucky,” he said, “this is a blind spot.”
“Good. How much time do you think we have before security is on to us?”
“You really haven’t planned this out, have you?” Zack shook his head. “Minimum, they’re after us already. Maximum, two hours when we don’t show up for a class.”
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