by Sarah Noffke
Without seeing another option, I slip the first cuff on my wrist. To my dismay it only fits if I stick it on over the glove, which pins the rubber casing more permanently on my hand. “Happy?” I say when the other handcuff is tightened all the way, tethering my gloved hands together.
“Oh, exceedingly,” Vider says, standing from the table where dream travel children’s abilities are severed. “Join me, won’t you?” He takes five steps and pushes the door behind me shut. I didn’t need him to be this close for me to smell what he had for breakfast on his breath or hear the calm beats of his pulse. But now I’m ultra-aware of his movements and how they’re coated in a mesmerizing grace, one used to deceive. To lure his prey into a state of confusion so he can insert his messages. But this gift of his doesn’t work on me.
I reverse until the stitches on my back press into the door. Vider leans down over me, his nostrils flaring. “Do you enjoy leeching me? Do you like having heightened senses and the power to allure prey and trap their mind?”
I want to spit in his face, which doesn’t hold as many wrinkles as most men in their mid-forties. Instead, I slide to the right, trying to capture some distance.
“What have you done with Ren?” I ask, my voice calm, although seeing the blood in the hallway makes me fear the worst.
“What I find entertaining,” he says, sliding over closer to me, “is that you were able to successfully go behind my back in my Valley and save so many Defects from conversion. I’m always happy to offer praise to a worthy opponent and you and Ren have proven to be that. But to think that my own citizens wouldn’t confess their wrongdoings and seek my forgiveness makes me awfully disappointed in you. When are you going to realize that I control these people, Em?”
So someone ratted us out. A weak Defect probably, fearing Vider’s wrath if they were caught. Good thing I never shared everything with the Defects I saved from conversion.
“What have you done with Ren?” I repeat.
Vider’s long pointy fingernail finds my side. He drags it up my torso, along my chest, then my neck, and pauses at my jaw. Revulsion churns in my stomach.
“Ren, like you, is going to be punished. His punishment, though, will be short and painful.” He slides the finger down my jaw and pinches my chin, his fingernail sinking into my skin. “How dare he come into my Valley, at my invitation, and go behind my back to help you,” Vider says, pressing his face in close to mine. “And you, sweet Em, will also be punished, but yours will be long. Exceedingly long. After your conversion I’m keeping you. Personally keeping you. How does that sound?”
I open my mouth to protest, to argue. But before I can Vider presses in so close, his mouth whispers against mine. “And you’ll be such a zombie from the conversion that you’ll have zero capacity to fight me ever again. I’m not taking any chances with you. Yours will be an aggressive conversion.” He pulls back, the taste of his breath still in my nostrils. “And that’s fine by me because I don’t want you for your mind. I want you to serve as an example,” he says with a long growl.
I sidestep to the left and find a way to break away from him. I back toward the opposite wall and Vider stands looking pleased.
“This war you think you’ve waged is over,” he says. “A valiant effort but know that it was never going to work. You have lost Rogue. You will lose Ren. All Defects will undergo actual conversion. And you will march alongside them. You will become my model citizen.”
“I would die before I allowed myself to become that,” I say.
“Oh no, that’s not how this is going to go. I’ve decided that your fate is that you’ll live. You’ll live while everyone you love dies. That is their fate. And your memories will stay intact so that you realize how much you’ve lost just by trying to defy me. I will go to great lengths to keep you alive. And please know that I’ll take great pleasure in watching your heartache, knowing I was the one who ensured all the people you cared about died while you survived without them.”
“You said you wouldn’t harm Nona if I did what you wanted, if I didn’t harm you,” I say, panic exuding out of my voice now.
He wrenches open the door and gives me one last look over his shoulder. “I lied.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
I jerk at the handcuffs, securely tightened around the rubber gloves. The gloves and handcuffs that I put on my own hands. Rogue would have told me never to believe his father. Never to trust him. I should have electrocuted him when I had a chance and run after Nona and Ren. But honestly, where would I have run to? He obviously has them held somewhere secret. And my electricity reserves deplete fast. I might have emptied them by the time I knocked down Vider. Then I’d be confronting three angry Middling men and the fact that Ren and Nona were ordered to be murdered if anything happened to Vider.
The gloves chafe my wrists as I yank against the cuffs, trying to work my hands out of their confines. I’m the most powerful person in this Valley, and somehow I find myself trumped by some rubber and a piece of metal. I can’t rely on my gift or my electricity. There’s only one way to save me and therefore Nona.
Please, gods, watch over her. Don’t let her be hurt. Please.
I race to the door Vider just went through. The door lever is a long-handled one. Perfect. I guide the chain between my handcuffs over it and pull down. The door opens and I yank it back, slipping the chain free of the handle at once and standing in the entryway. In front of me stands a single Middling. Dean. I grew up alongside him in the fields planting crops, harvesting them, and sharing stories. But from the cold look he punishes me with I don’t think he recognizes me, or at the least all the goodwill that existed between us has been squashed out by Vider’s brainwashing.
“Get back in there,” he says over his shoulder. “Your conversion doctor will be in there in a minute.”
And he’ll stick me with a sedative and I’ll be out and when I awake I’ll be a zombie. I’ll be a robot who screams from inside knowing everyone I love is dead, at Vider’s hands.
“Where are the other two men? The other Middlings?” I ask.
Dean bristles. “They’re accompanying the President. They’ll return soon. Get back inside that room before I have to encourage you back inside,” he says, whipping around and brandishing a Taser.
I don’t appreciate Vider’s choice of weapon. It feels too personal.
My tethered hands reach into the air. “Look, I’m not trying to cause a problem at all,” I say. Vider has thought of everything. He’s figured out how to incapacitate my electricity. How to make me cooperate. He even trapped me after figuring out what I’d been doing. But I do have one advantage on Vider. I know how he controls Middlings and I’ve undone his brainwashing. “All I want, Dean, is to ask you two questions.” I say his name with the same inflection I used for so many years, drawing out his name into two syllables when it should be one. “The first is about your happiness. You don’t look like you used to. With a hopeful spirit. With a resilient determination to be happy in the face of awful circumstances.”
He inhales a sharp breath, and the way he whips around and comes at me makes my pulse pause. “If you must know, I’m not happy!” he roars right up against my face. His hot breath and spit assault my skin. “Do you know what it’s like to live as a Middling? I don’t assume you do since you’ve been graced with the pampered life of a Dream Traveler. But things aren’t always chipper in our world. Things are wrong and awful and dirty. Miss Em,” he says, using his old title for me, “you wouldn’t appreciate living like we do.”
I smile inside, although angry hands have pinned me against the sidewall. At least I know the drugs in the water have worn off. Now I have an extremely angry and bitter Middling who is diabolical in nature after everything he’s had to endure. But he’s my best chance. Either he’ll kill me or I’ll kill myself at this point. “If you allow yourself to remember, I always campaigned for you to have better living assignments,” I say.
He blinks, like searching for the memory in
his mind.
“Dean,” I say, “did all these emotions of dissatisfaction just set in?”
“Like a flood,” he says, his words hot and angry.
“That’s because I took the happy pills out of your water supply.”
He holds the Taser up close to my neck, confused outrage on his face. “What are you talking about?” he says through crooked, clenched teeth.
“Vider has been drugging you for over a decade so that you’d be complacent and go along with all of it: long hours, menial jobs, rough living assignments.”
“No,” he rejects at once, pinching my forearms to the wall.
“Why do you think he wants me here? Because I’m a problem and he has no idea what sorts of problems I’ve created for him. I’ve undrugged his people. I’ve made you wake up. Don’t you remember the euphoria you used to feel living in this Valley? It’s gone, isn’t it? In the last day or two? Don’t you wonder why?”
He steps back, his hands releasing me. Shakes his head, his loose, greasy hair flowing with the movement.
I make to move away from the wall and he warns me with a single angry look, one I don’t want to challenge. “I’m not going anywhere. But you see it, don’t you?”
He makes to nod, but then shakes his head again. “I don’t know,” he says.
“Well, I had two questions I wanted to ask. May I ask you the other one?”
He looks up from where his hands had been cradling his forehead. “What?” he says, his voice sharp, his eyes blazing with frustration.
“Do you remember her? The infant you and Patsy lost? The one who died and you were told it was from a genetic disorder?”
He blanches at the random question. Scratches his head. “Barely.” His temper seems to slip to the backstage as his mind trails back into the past. I watch his eyes look without seeing. The modifier has been used on him, but I know it’s not strong enough to block the entire memory. “Think, Dean. Think about her. About your baby. The moment you saw her in the doctor’s arms. The moment he returned and she was gone. Think!” I implore.
“Why are you so cruel?” he says suddenly, his voice harsh and deep. “Yes, of course I remember. I can’t completely forget. What kind of corrupt human being throws that up in someone’s face?”
“The kind who knows exactly how she died and how deceived you’ve been,” I say.
He searches me, waiting for an alarm detecting my lie to go off.
“She didn’t have to die, Dean. She was an experiment of Vider’s.”
“Stop it,” he says, a vengeful tone in his voice.
“No,” I demand. “Kill me now if you want to. But you’re my last chance to save my sister and my uncle and a population of Middlings and Defects who have been traded for the happiness of a few elite Dream Travelers. Do what you will to me after hearing what I have to say, but you need to know the truth. The man you work for made mistakes and one of those mistakes involved your daughter. He stole too much of her spinal fluid too prematurely after her birth and it killed her. This spinal fluid he used to create the drug he injects into Defects. It’s this drug that suppresses our gifts, that makes us Defects. Vider is lying about who we are and what’s wrong with us. When we are without the injections our gifts surface.”
“Why would he do that?” He’s not convinced, but Dean is something I’ve rarely witnessed in a Middling in this town. He’s skeptical. He almost looks willing to believe his world isn’t as it seems.
“Because Defects are rebellious in nature and threaten his authority,” I say. “And he’s drugged your water supply, taken your children’s spinal fluid, and suppressed an entire generation of children to maintain leadership over the Reverians. I’m not the enemy that you think I am. He has you holding me here so that I don’t create the war that will bring him down.”
“How do I know you’re telling the truth?” he says, a cold look of animosity in his eyes.
I blink. Think. “Because I’m willing to die to help you achieve freedom and equal rights. I risked my life to take those meds out of your water supply so that you’d wake up. So that you’d fall out of the euphoria and realize you don’t like living a life as a slave. And I woke you up so you could fight beside me and obtain the freedom and true happiness you deserve.” I point my cuff-linked hands at myself. “I’ve lived in secrecy in this Valley when as a Dream Traveler I could have been anywhere. I could have run from the Valley, you know that. After I broke into the labs and Rogue and I fled our fathers you know I could have kept running. I could be so far away from this Valley and living a safe and happy life. I can have any gift I want using my leeching ability, which means I can have anything I want. But I didn’t flee. I’m not off living on some exotic beach. I stayed all so that I could create this war and free my people. If you can’t see that my every intention is good, if you can’t remember my good intentions from years of working beside me, then leave me here to be converted.” And knowing I can say no more, I press my eyelids shut and count back from thirty.
It’s his hand on my wrist that makes me stop counting. I fear he’s about to pull me forward and slam me against the wall. The anger in him has boiled to a new degree. But then something jostles the handcuffs followed by a sharp click. I open my eyes to find a sobering look in Dean’s expression.
“Tell me what happens next, because letting you go isn’t my last job,” he says, pulling the handcuffs off me. And he does look angry. But I know instinctively that it isn’t at me anymore.
I slip off the gloves, tossing them by the examining table, but I grab the handcuffs and key from Dean.
“Go and gather every Middling you can. Take them to a place large and private,” I say with a wink, hoping he’ll know where I mean. “I’ll meet you there in less than an hour.”
I run for the exit at once, knowing I have to get out of here. I need to find Nona and Ren, but I have to be ready first, because right now I’m completely unprepared. I turn at the door. “And thank you, Dean. Thanks for believing in me. I’ll die if I have to, to ensure you’re set free.”
“I believe you wholeheartedly, Miss Em,” he says. “That’s why I let you go.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I sprint down the hallway still flecked with blood and bound through the door, relieved to find it’s not jammed shut anymore. In the next hour I will need to travel to three opposite ends of this Valley. And I couldn’t care less that the act of running isn’t appreciated by my injuries. I set off down the back alley to the neighborhood where I was born.
Zack’s parents’ house is down the street from my old home. I’ve spent almost as much time there over the years as I did in my own house. John and Molly Conerly never seemed to mind my constant presence in their home. That might change after today.
I burst through the door without knocking. Zack spins around from his place on the couch. His mother is crying, her hand in her fair hair which is pinned back in shiny barrettes. John, who is my father’s age but looks older somehow, has a comforting hand on his wife’s distressed shoulder.
Zack bolts into a standing position at the site of me. “Em,” he says, a frantic worry jumping to his features. “What is it?”
“Nona,” I pant, having run nonstop for the whole two miles. “And Ren,” I say. “Vider has them. He’s made threats. He’s going to kill them.”
Zack doesn’t flinch from my panicky words, but instead his eyes search me. They stop on my wrist. I peer down to notice that the tight handcuffs have chaffed my skin, creating red bands.
“The President was holding you, wasn’t he? But you got away,” Zack states, his brain working as fast as ever, filling in details, piecing together evidence.
I nod, my breath whipping through my lungs in ragged spurts.
A look of fear mixed with relief blankets Zack’s face. It almost makes me crumble from the emotions bounding out of my chest. Luckily his arms wrap around me at once, holding me up.
“Gods, I’m so grateful you got away,” he says,
relief in his every word. Over his shoulder I spy his parents, who are now standing. His mother is trembling slightly.
I stand back from Zack. “We need to act fast,” I say. “I have to get Nona before it’s too late.”
Zack swipes his hands through his hair, which isn’t governed by its usual product and hangs loose. “Nona,” he says, and in just the mention of her name I hear my same fear radiate in his voice.
“Do they know everything?” I say, indicating his parents.
Zack nods.
I step toward them and John Conerly steps forward. Before I have a chance to say anything he says, “What can I do to help you save your sister?” And there’s a genuine concern in his voice, one that’s reinforced by the look in his blue eyes.
I have always trusted Zack’s father. Now I’m going to have to put my life in his hands. “Mr. Conerly, I need you to go to Government Center. Use the excuse that you’re cleaning out your office. Get into my father’s or Vider’s office and find any evidence you can linking them to the crimes Zack explained to you.”
He gulps and suddenly looks much older. And yet he nods and the way he does it instantly reminds me of Zack. “I might also have financial records from my own files I can grab,” John says, “I never thought much of them before but under this new light I think they tell a different story than I originally believed.”
“Perfect,” I say but my voice carries zero enthusiasm. Then I grab a pen and paper from the writing desk that’s been in their living room for all my life. I scribble down a name, an email address, and a phone number. I’m grateful Ren demanded I memorize it. “Get the information as fast as you can and then send it to this man.”
John stares at the paper and then his son.
“Thank you, Dad,” Zack says and grabs my hand and pulls me through the open door without saying goodbye. We don’t have time for such luxuries.
