“Does it still hurt?” I mumbled, coming more awake and finding my voice.
He sighed, and I took that for the answer it was.
“You should tell them,” I urged gently, leaning over the bed to look down at him. “They can help you.”
“It’s a bad power, Lela. It does bad things. I’ll get in trouble. I’ll just look after you instead. That can be my other power. I can have two powers!”
I giggled at his silliness, though I was still scared for him beneath it all. I would always be scared for him. “Just… tell them if it gets worse.”
He was too quiet after that, and awareness settled into me with a sickening heaviness that made my head spin.
It had already gotten worse, and he wasn’t telling me.
Soon… soon… it would destroy him.
The image of my hospital bedroom faded away to be replaced by another; the walls melted into a puddle of pink, only to pull back up again and fade to white, backing away from me and sharpening into the four, flat walls of an empty room.
There was a mirror on one side, and I knew that Weston, Dominic, and the others were behind it. He was also there. My twin. He had been growing jealous of the way the adults treated me, and he had stopped confiding in me about his ability. My pet bunny had even turned up dead, her heart suspiciously halted in her chest as though she had simply decided to stop existing… and while I hadn’t brought it up with him, I knew that my twin was responsible for it. It was his ability after all. It caused the worry to twist inside of me; twisting and morphing, until nothing about this existence of ours seemed simple anymore.
“Lela… concentrate please.” The voice crackled over the intercom and into the room, causing my mouth to twist just like my stomach.
I hunched my shoulders a little bit, but did what they wanted me to do. I turned to a blank wall and held out my hand, furrowing my brow in concentration. The valcrick slithered down my arm, sparking a familiar warmth in my chest and unravelling some of the knots that held me prisoner. I felt the coat of guilt fall from my shoulders, and I held out my other hand, tilting my face up to the ceiling and closing my eyes. The sparks didn’t attack the wall as I had expected them to; instead, they wormed their way up my arms and over my shoulders, gradually embracing my trembling body.
I knew that the doctors and Klovoda representatives on the other side of the mirror would be whispering and gasping and scribbling their notes, but I didn’t care about them anymore. The valcrick eased my sorrow over the pet rabbit, invading my emotions like a vapor and carrying them away, leaving nothing but simple fact. I wasn’t simply healing myself, because I wasn’t hurt in the physical sense… it was something different. Something that went beyond me. The valcrick was a part of something bigger, a power that merely lent itself to me, and it wanted to ease me.
I felt connected.
“Describe what you’re feeling please, Lela,” the crackly voice demanded, severing my ethereal moment.
The little sparks spluttered out, flashing once or twice like faulty lightbulbs before flickering into darkness. I would keep this to myself, because I already knew what they were going to say. They would say that I was ‘exceptional,’ and ‘extraordinary’. They would fight over theories of why my power was so strong, and Dominic would claim responsibility once again, a hand on my shoulder as Weston leaned against the wall, ever the silent watcher.
“Her power is unadulterated,” Dominic would say. “She is not a Zevghéri born with a gift, her gift was born with her.”
The others would mutter their agreement and cast wondering eyes down at me, and then Weston would break his silence and begin his manipulations.
“She must be protected,” was his favourite way to start. “The humans don’t see what we see; they see a monster that needs to be destroyed. We need to begin spreading rumours that the Atmá powers are achieved through drugs. They can dissect as many pills as they like, and waste a good many years doing it, while we secure a way for our remaining test subjects to stay alive. We must document the effects of Dominic’s S20 pill on paired Atmás; it certainly appears to amplify their powers. That will be enough evidence for a cover story. Let the humans confiscate our hospitals, our labs, our suppliers, our pills. They’ll never get their hands on our real power.”
The others would applaud, and plans would be put into place. Weston would slink away just as silently as he had appeared, and Dominic would capture more Atmás, torturing them with his drugs in the name of protecting all Atmás from the humans.
I was lucky, in that respect.
I didn’t have a pair, so his drugs couldn’t hurt me.
The walls began to melt again, and I found myself running through grass almost as tall as I was.
“Caught you!” my brother roared, barrelling into me and sending us both sprawling into the dirt.
I laughed uproariously, not caring that my throat was now scratchy with dirt and my clothes filthy with it. He fell beside me, clutching his stomach and wiping the tears from his cheeks, leaving smears of brown mud behind. It was the first time I had truly seen him smile or laugh in months, and it made my chest ache with both hope and fear. He must have seen the look on my face, because he suddenly grew serious. The details of his face were frustratingly unclear, but I knew somehow that he was frowning. He loomed over me, smashing his hand against my face.
“Stop looking at me like that,” he ground out, as the tiny pebbles stuck to his palm scraped against my cheek.
“Ow!” I tried to push him off, but his mood had switched again, and the darkness had taken a hold of him once more.
He pulled his hand away from my face, surveying the damage he had done. “You’ll tell them that Jayden did this to you, won’t you? Or Eva?”
I swallowed and nodded, because I knew that arguing would only get me into more trouble. My brother hated the others. He hated that they both had powers that didn’t make them evil the way his power had made him. Lately, he had started hurting me, and forcing me to blame it on them. I usually ended up making up an excuse about falling over or running into something, and he never discovered that I wasn’t telling the tales I was supposed to tell.
“Tell me a story,” he demanded, his face looming closer to mine.
He seemed to be entranced with the line of blood that I could feel trickling down the side of my face. Maybe it was the fact that he could cause violence without his ability that made him enjoy it so much. If I was bleeding, then he was hurting me in a normal way, because his ability was a silent killer; a killer that left no evidence.
“Five little monkeys walked along a shore,” I started, my voice shaking with the tears that threatened. “One went a-sailing, then there were four. Four little monkeys climbed up a tree; one of them tumbled down and then there were three.”
He stared as I recited, but the rhyme didn’t seem to calm him as much as it used to. He was fixated on the trail of blood, and the more I spoke, the closer he loomed. I wavered, and he smashed his palm into the other side of my face, grinding dirt and rocks and grass into my other cheek. I whimpered in pain, begging him to stop, but he was too far gone.
“More,” he demanded.
“Three little monkeys found a pot of glue; one got stuck in it, then there were two. Two little monkeys found a currant bun; one ran away with it, then there was—”
“No,” he suddenly interrupted, pulling away from me. “No, Lela, you’ll never be alone.” He wiped at the frantic tears that slid down my cheeks, smudging dirt and blood everywhere, and then his head was in my lap and the heaving sobs were tearing through him.
I held on as he cried his regret into the darkening sky.
There were two people living inside me, and I couldn’t resolve them, so I pushed the memory of Lela to the back, and wore my fake name in the forefront of my mind like a pathetic masquerade-turned-battle-banner, blazing in all of its lowly ferociousness. My trip to the Komnata had proved itself to be enlightening, if nothing else. I had always thought
the Klovoda to be a single unit, bowing to Weston and following his every command. Instead… I found a group of people divided. Their Director had been killed, and none of them seemed to be particularly upset about it, though there was a lot of tension when Yas spoke as though she were in command, and Jack didn’t seem to like Weston at all. He didn’t even bother to mask his contempt of the Voda. I was sure that Dominic Kingsling had been the real reason that my pairs hadn’t initially allowed me to meet with the Klovoda, because none of the people inside that room had seemed to be a threat.
“Weston has informed us that you will be staying with him from now on,” Yas said, walking beside me as I made my way across the stone bridge back to the little boathouse.
I wished that she would stop talking. A hammer had taken up residence in my head ever since Jayden had returned my memories, and her cheerful voice was making it so much worse. I assumed that it was too much for my brain to cope with in such a short amount of time, because it certainly felt as though my brain were having a meltdown. I grunted in reply, unable to muster words.
“That’s good,” Yas decided out loud. “We would have had to find an apartment to put you in, or a family to place you with. We can’t have you and your brother floating around the way you are. You are both much better off with Weston.”
I opened my mouth to demand that she pick one of those alternatives, but managed to stop myself. I had bargained for the safety of my friends and family, so for the next eight months at least, I would go where Weston wanted me to go and not complain a whit. Unless he broke his end of the bargain, then all bets were off.
“Sure.” I gritted out the word as my head pounded away.
“Please return as soon as you’re feeling better,” she continued, her voice growing even more chipper. “There is much to discuss.”
Much to discuss? A stalker? A couple of homicides? The years of assault dealt to me by one of their human agents pretending to be my father? What they wanted from me? What I wanted from them?
“Better clear your schedule,” I muttered. “It’ll take a while.”
She laughed good-naturedly and I sighed, glad to be away from her as she waved us off from the boathouse and I trudged after a silent Weston. I felt bad for being rude, but I was seconds away from fainting, and I wasn’t sure I was far enough away from Maple Falls yet. Darkness had fallen, and I didn’t want to give the messenger any reason to make my head go boom.
I got into the back of Weston’s limo, trying to ignore the bloodstains on the seat as I laid my head against the window, wishing the cold glass would numb everything inside.
“When Kingsling kidnapped me,” I began, as Weston finished speaking with his driver and the car started to move, “you stormed into the house and demanded that he release me. I heard everything; I was in the basement.”
“Oh?” Weston blinked. “Why didn’t you make any sounds?”
“Didn’t trust you. Still don’t. But now that you know… why did you demand that he release me if you were planning on kidnapping me yourself?”
“First of all, this isn’t a kidnapping. This is an agreement. Second of all, I’m not going to lock you in a basement or arrange to have you snatched out of a club and provoked into an accident. And finally, I demanded that he release you because he went too far. Haven’t we already been over this?”
“Been over this? Do you mean the night you forced Silas to shoot me?”
He released a scoffing sort of laugh, his eyes settling on the bandages that still wrapped my hands. “I hadn’t been informed that you had lost the ability to heal yourself with your valcrick.”
“Even if I could have healed myself, I STILL GOT SHOT!” I refrained from shouting about the thing that was really upsetting me, because I wasn’t about to get into a battle with Weston about Silas.
“It had to happen.” Weston sounded tired. He slid down in his seat slightly, bunching his shoulders up as he turned to stare out of the window. “You don’t know Silas like I do. He was out for blood and he needed to get it one way or another.”
“He had already shot and killed Kingsling. Isn’t that blood enough?”
“It’s never enough for him. He would have killed Jayden for helping, and anyone else who stood in his way.”
“But isn’t that your fault? You made him like that. I saw it with my own eyes, you slashed your knife right across his stomach just to see if I was bonded to him! It’s hardly surprising that he turns to violence to make himself feel better.”
“Silas is a casualty of something much greater than him or me, or you for that matter. You probably won’t ever understand.”
“Because his Atmá is the real Voda Heir? Because she was inside his mind the night you tried to kill him—meaning that he knew about her and was keeping her from you, just as you suspected? I understand better than you think, Weston. He told me everything.”
Weston had pulled his attention from the window, his eyes cutting to me and widening, his posture straightening out again.
“He told you all of that?” he repeated, dumbstruck. “Why would he do that?”
“I’ve been told that Silas offered to get close to me for the Klovoda, and I’ve been told that he did it just to punish you, to keep me away from you, because I’m important to you.” Weston nodded in response, and I tried not to roll my eyes. He couldn’t even comprehend Silas doing something to protect another person when there was a more antagonistic alternative for his actions. “Well maybe that’s true,” I lied, “but now that’s exactly what we are. We’re close. I consider him a close friend, as well as the others. They kept me away from you for as long as they could, and I understand why. You aren’t a nice man; you aren’t a nice person. Maybe you’re a good leader, I don’t know and I don’t particularly care. You torture people and tell yourself that there’s a greater purpose for it, you kidnap people and tell yourself that it doesn’t count because they’ve endured worse. You wanted Silas to kill Kingsling; it was written all over your face, not that you really tried to hide it. Kingsling was another casualty of something greater, just like Silas, just like me. And what about your other sons? What about the countless other children you’ve fathered in your quest for a replacement Voda Heir? What about their mothers? What about your own pairs? How many casualties do you deem acceptable losses in your quest for this greater thing?”
I heaved in a deep breath, my headache beginning to ebb away as fury broiled inside of me, rising through my body until I was sure that the fire burned in my retinas, spitting heat at the poor excuse for a man sitting opposite me. He seemed to be at a loss for words, torn between a fury to answer mine and a bafflement at everything I had just spat at him.
“I’ll have to go back to the Komnata tomorrow to find out what they want from me,” I continued, forcing my voice to return to a semblance of calm. Weston was a political man above everything else, and if I wanted to survive him, I needed to play his political games. Scathing him with just how lowly I thought of him had been nice, and it had certainly made me feel better… but it wasn’t going to help my situation. “But what they want from me is different to what you want from me, isn’t it, Weston? That’s why I’m here. Dominic might have been impossible for you to control, but at least he wanted the same things from me as you did. You’re not so sure about the rest of the Klovoda. You aren’t so sure that they’ll accept your casualties, or agree on this greater vision that you’re so obsessed with, isn’t that right?” I didn’t even pause to allow him to confirm or refute my claims, because I could see from the rapidly growing astonishment on his face that I was correct. I forced myself to continue. “You’ve managed to win Yas over, for the most part. That much is obvious—but it’s not just obvious to me, because the rest of the Klovoda can see it, and they don’t like it. They don’t want another Kingsling. So tell me… just out of curiosity… who chooses the Director? Is it you, or is it the Klovoda?”
This time I waited for a response, sinking my teeth into my lower lip to keep
from blurting out anything else just to combat the nervous fear that danced around my lingering migraine. Weston fought down his anger, folding his arms loosely and observing me for a short time, before turning to the window again in an impression of feigned nonchalance.
“The Director is chosen by a majority vote,” he informed me evenly. “Everyone in the Klovoda is expected to appoint a favourite. My opinion will be called upon in the event of an even vote.”
He turned his eyes back to me as he finished, the expression in them expectant. He actually seemed to want me to conclude my theory.
“You don’t think Yas will be chosen,” I mused out loud. “You think it will be someone who doesn’t agree with you, so if I am ever taken to the Klovoda, you feel that you need to be the one bringing me there. You would never have allowed me to make contact with them on my own; my business with them is a convenient way for you to assert your claim over me. You want them to acknowledge that I am your test subject, not theirs.”
The expectant look in his eyes remained, though there was now a spark of appreciation. His mouth hooked up and he tilted his head forward, a silent acknowledgement.
“That means…” I spluttered out the words as the epiphany crashed into me. “That’s why your sons refused to let me meet with the Klovoda! They knew that you were only allowing me to stay with them because I hadn’t tried meeting with the Klovoda.”
Weston still refused to give me any vocal confirmations, but his body language remained open and honest, clearly admiring of my deductions so far. I really was important to Weston, but it didn’t entirely make sense to me. I found myself thinking about the conversation that I had overheard between him and Kingsling while locked in Kingsling’s basement, since that was the first time I had really begun to gain an understanding of how important Weston assumed me to be.
“Don’t get ahead of yourself, Dominic. I’m still the Voda, and I don’t plan on dying anytime soon. You need to release the girl. We agreed that we wouldn’t force her. She needs to be properly taught and integrated, like the others—not tested and tortured. Do you really think that she will help us now, after what you’ve done to her?”
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