by L. J. Hatton
There’s a tonal phenomenon that happens in crowds that controls how a person picks up voices. People rarely notice what’s being said by those in whom they have no interest. But if someone in that same crowd calls your name, you’ll hear it perfectly. You’re actually hearing everything, but your ears are filtering sounds without your conscious mind being aware. Apparently eyes do the same thing, because mine zeroed in on a figure outside that giant viewing window. It was so small in relation to everything else that I shouldn’t have noticed it, but my brain latched on and refused to let go until I paid attention.
“Nim,” I breathed out.
Her hairpins and shimmering clothes were gone, but I knew my sister when I saw her. She was there. Really, really there. I could have touched her image if I wanted to draw more attention to myself than I already had.
“We’ll be waiting to welcome you abor—brrt—brrt.” Warden Dodge’s message became garbled. Her image splintered into collections of disembodied pixels. “Ab—brrt—brrt.”
The hologram whirled around, bringing Nim into the foreground. Her face was drawn and pale, with dark circles under her downcast eyes.
Our tour guide clicked her remote furiously, but the image wouldn’t change.
“She looks so sad,” Callie said, with the detached pity of someone remarking on a documentary about a tragedy half a world away. “Look at her eyes.”
“You’d be sad if you were like that, too,” said a boy with Peter on his jacket.
“What’s that on her neck?” Lawrence asked. He traced the curve of Nim’s collar with his fingertips. “Look at that burst of light. It looks like a static charge, but she’s underwater. It can’t be static.”
“It’s electricity,” I said softly. “The collar’s electric.”
“Shut it down,” our guide ordered into her headset. “Someone shut off the projectors.”
“A shock collar in the water?” one of the others said. “Isn’t that kind of dangerous?”
“Maybe the freak’s part eel.”
I didn’t see who said that, but their voice cost me my last thread of self-control.
Nim and everything around her disappeared. The holographic hallway embarked on a tour unlike anything our harried guide was authorized to give. We plowed through walls into areas a bunch of freshman silvers were never meant to see. Holding cells where the hydros were locked in while they weren’t at work, all languishing beneath heat lamps. Labs displaying data from human experiments, dozens upon dozens of faces marked “expired.” The prison level, which had replaced the sound of clocks with that of constant dripping that made me wonder if the cells were actually being filled with water. An assembly line setting up Medusae-farming tanks like the ones that had filled Nye’s Center.
“What’s going on?”
“Is this real?”
“It’s a test, right?”
Now there were more than enough questions to go around.
“Shut it down!” our tour guide pleaded, but no one could switch it off. “Everyone out! Now! There’s something wrong with the equipment.”
I tried to move with the rest of the group, but none of us went anywhere. The heat had settled in my feet instead of my hands, and like that boiling glass of water at Baba’s table, the energy had tried to disperse. The Commission’s floor was made to conduct heat in winter to warm the building, but I’d released so much that it had melted the bottoms of all our shoes. We were stuck.
The other silvers panicked, linking hands to pull each other out of their shoes, but the floor was too hot to run across barefoot or in socks. The lower holographic projectors were so close to the heat that they melted, dropping their glass lenses to the floor, finally granting our guide’s request to kill the video.
Sprinklers activated from recesses in the ceiling, engulfing us all in clouds of steam.
“Melted shoes. That’s a new one,” Warden Nye said.
I was back in his office, dismissed from the tour along with everyone else. The first few who’d gotten their shoes off were in the medical office having their skin treated for contact burns.
“Back at the hotel, you said you knew why things like this keep happening to me.”
“I already told you: you’re stardust, and stars aren’t meant to walk the earth in mortal flesh. You give off a radiation signature—nontoxic, from what I can tell, but the amount of power released is increasing with every episode you have. You’ll keep getting stronger until you’ve consumed yourself and only the Celestine is left in all her glory. Your father knew this was where you were headed, but even he couldn’t predict what you’d become.”
“You mean it’s going to kill me?”
“The butterfly kills the caterpillar, but it doesn’t really die,” he said. “I still don’t know how I’m going to spin twenty pairs of melted shoes and the unauthorized behind-the-scenes action down there.”
“A major malfunction in the radiant heat pads below the carpet started a chain reaction that overloaded all of the projection equipment, scrambling the images and warping the audio,” I said. “I’m the only one who got a really good look at the place. The others didn’t know what they were looking at.”
“That’s actually not bad. Maybe I should offer you a job in public relations once you’ve dismantled the Sea Center.”
“They’re still sending the finalists?”
“In thirty-six hours, which is when you need to be back here to join them.”
Pulling off this façade among people who had never met me was one thing, but he wanted me to get into the personal space of a woman who had been to his Center while I was the main attraction.
“Warden Dodge and I ate at the same table.”
“Trust me. That woman isn’t known for her powers of perception,” he said. “She wasn’t interested in anything she couldn’t keep.”
I didn’t trust him. I couldn’t, even if I needed him to help me pull this off.
“She won’t have much face time with the prospects, anyway,” he said. “She’ll glance, she’ll smile, and she’ll forget. Go with the silvers. Disrupt the Center, and free your sister. We all get what we want.”
Disrupt.
Destroy.
A subtle difference, but in subtlety lay the magic that had kept the man alive since the day he met my father on Brick Street.
“They were building tanks,” I said. “Similar to the ones you had, but bigger.”
“I know. Althea’s aren’t for show. They’re not the aesthetically pleasing aquariums I hoped would be too shallow to allow new specimens to grow. Apparently she and Arcineaux decided that redundancy held the key to success. They wanted their own crop for study in case something happened to mine; I guess they didn’t trust me to share.”
“Will it work?”
“If it does, I can promise you one thing. She won’t have to bring the rain.”
“Bring the rain” was the unofficial Commission statement. When the Medusae arrived, it rained. When they left, it happened again, with both phenomena being caused by atmospheric agitation. That rain carried genetic fragments that found a home in the water supply and eventually made their way into the children who would grow up touched.
Nye’s Center had been designed to re-create the conditions that caused the rain, in hopes that the Commission would be able to create their own gifted people—ones they could control. But Dodge was already in the second largest ocean on the planet, with more than thirty percent of the total volume of Earth’s water outside her windows. If she released genetically reengineered Medusae into that environment . . .
Suddenly, this wasn’t about saving my sister or my family, and it wasn’t a matter of protecting the rest of the touched or finding a way to stomach choosing the many over the few. Warden Dodge was a threat to everyone, everywhere, and I was the only one who could stop her.
CHAPTER 27
I seriously considered skipping the meeting I’d arranged with Jermay and the others. I could have gone off on my
own and let them think things went badly, but at least one of them would have done something stupid to try to find me or rescue me.
“He wants to you to go alone into a high-security, isolated, underwater Commission Center? Alone.”
Jermay had managed to work alone into every sentence he’d spoken since we reached our hotel. Each time he asked, I answered in the affirmative. I even answered in other languages, as yes and no were about the only things I could say in another language.
“Yeah,” I said. I was down to half-grunted sounds.
“Alone?”
I sighed. “Yes, Jermay. Yes, alone. Yes, by myself, because he can only add one name to the list.”
Klok tapped my shoulder and handed me a sketch I dubbed “Penn’s Dismemberment: Version 2.0.” This one was even more detailed than the one he’d given me on the train, which made me think he’d spent the day working on it.
I’d never thought of Klok as the artistic type, but he got more across with that one image than if he’d used the time to write down all the reasons I shouldn’t go along with Nye’s plan.
“He’s not going to kill me,” I said. “You didn’t hear him, guys. The Commission is coming apart at the seams. They’re going to take a lot of people down with them unless the rogue wardens are taken out of the picture. So far the only thing that’s worked is to destroy their home base, and I’ve got to do it before Warden Dodge gets those tanks in place.”
If I waited, then even destroying the Center became a risk. The tanks would shatter, like the ones in the air, and they’d empty their contents directly into the ocean itself. Another concentrated dose of alien genetic material that could alter humanity or our planet beyond reckoning.
“Winnie, tell her she can’t go,” Jermay said.
“She won’t do that.”
“Don’t bet on it,” Winnie said. “I don’t feel like helping you run a suicide mission.”
“I’m not going to die!”
“Dying is the best-case scenario here,” she said.
“I saw her,” I said. “I saw Nim. She’s nothing to them but construction equipment, and the people in that room barely batted an eye.”
And if Warden Dodge was on board with expanding the resuscitation program to touched subjects, there was a very real chance she’d start with the resources she had on hand. No one was turning my sister into a hydro-zombie.
“Ellie Hammond.”
I’d been repeating the name Warden Nye gave me for so long in my head that I almost missed it when our handler called it out loud.
“That’s me,” I said. I was back in my silvers, waiting to board the transport vessel that would take me to Nim.
That’s how I had to think of it. I was on my way to see Nim. If I thought about everything in my way, I’d throw up, which would probably get me booted off the transport in the name of public health.
I’d had to sneak out of the hotel while the others were asleep. I’d lied and told them I had another day before I was due back so they couldn’t find a way to stop me. Even so, Xerxes was waiting for me by the door.
“You understand why I’m doing this, don’t you?” I asked him. He’d been completely different since Klok removed the toxic code from his programming. More like the golem who reminded me of my father than the metal-feathered menace who acted like a spoiled tabby.
He flew up to perch on the back of a chair so we were roughly at eye level, leaned in, and tugged my ear.
“I’ll be careful,” I promised. “And I’ll bring her home.”
I kissed him on the forehead and slipped out.
Now I was standing with the rest of the silvers as a man with a clipboard checked us off one by one and told us to take a seat.
“Lawrence Hillard.”
“Right here,” he said, and chose the seat next to me.
Callie and Peter were already on board, and we were nearing the end of the list. It would only be a few more minutes before the transport would be rolling, then diving. I had no idea how long it would take to reach the Sea Center, but even the shallowest parts of the ocean floor were unthinkably deep and isolated.
All these people thought they were stepping into their future, and I was about to sink it.
“What’s the matter?” Lawrence asked. “You’re not claustrophobic, are you?”
“Something like that,” I said.
I was going over my cover story in my head. Nye had given me a dossier to memorize so I’d be able to fake my way through an interview if I wasn’t able to finish the job before they started the final evaluations.
My name is Ellie Hammond, and I’m sixteen. I’m a student at P.S. 97.
It was probably a bad sign that I didn’t know the P.S. stood for “public school” until Nye told me. He chose the name to make it generic enough to be a school in any city I was familiar with. I was more concerned that they were going to ask me questions about subjects I’d never learned. My Show family had been my teachers, and while Nagendra had made sure I could quote Hamlet, act and scene, by the time I was seven, and Squint was a whiz with math who had taught me basic algebra, I doubted I was actually scholarship material. It would have been a shame for the Pythagorean theorem to ruin my cover story. Maybe they’d ask me to bake a cake, and I could wow them with Mother Jesek’s secret recipes.
It also would have been easier for me to concentrate on remembering the things I needed to know if Lawrence wasn’t looking right at me every time I turned my head.
“What?” I finally said. “Do I have something on my face?”
“Is it that obvious?” he asked.
Why would I have asked him if it wasn’t?
“Sorry, but you look so familiar to me. I know I’ve seen you somewhere before. Like on TV or something.”
Great. I was trying to pull off the normal-nobody effect, and I had to get a seat next to a guy who remembered me from The Show. That was exactly what I needed just before a sabotage mission.
“I was in commercials as a kid,” I lied.
Little lie. I was on Show posters, and they were sort of non-moving commercials.
“Oh! That’s what it is!” Lawrence said happily.
If I hadn’t given him an excuse, he would have obsessed over it until he came up with The Show and me as its ringmaster—or, worse, the online video of me making the creeper lights dance in the charity café where Winnie and I had met the undercover unnoticeables C. B. and Rye.
The man with the clipboard called out the last name on his list and slapped the side of the transport to signal the driver.
“That’s twenty! Seal her up!”
“Wait! Hold the truck! I’m coming!” someone shouted from the dock.
“Who’s that?” Lawrence asked.
I nearly fell out of my seat at the sight of a girl pulling on a dull-gray shirt like a jacket as she ran toward us. What was Winnie doing here? Was she crazy?
“We’ve already got everyone on the list, miss,” the man with the clipboard said.
“Got a phone call,” Winnie huffed, overselling the idea that she was out of breath. “Said to show up. I know my name’s on there if you’ll look.”
The man ran his finger down the side of the list as he scanned it again. He never asked her name.
“Well, what do you know? I must have skipped right over you, honey. Sorry about that.”
“That’s okay,” Winnie said.
“Find yourself a seat.”
Winnie hopped up on my other side and buckled herself in.
“Not open to discussion,” she whispered. Her mouth had healed to the point of looking like severely chapped skin. It didn’t bleed when she spoke anymore. “You’re going for Nim. I’m going for Greyor. It’s what he’d do.”
“How—” I started, staring at her silvers, which were nothing but the faded gray shirt Nafiza had given Birch, and not nearly convincing enough to pass for real ones. “Just how?”
“You have your secrets. I have mine.”
The loa
ding hatch closed on a hydraulic hinge, slowly plunging us into darkness.
“They won’t make us ride like this the whole way, will they?” Callie asked.
I hoped not. I was liable to start glowing from the pressure, and someone was bound to notice.
The seal hissed shut, pressurizing our cabin, and the outer skin of the transport retracted. We were left sitting inside an amphibious truck that functioned as the opposite of a glass-bottom boat. The floor was the only part that remained opaque.
“Cool!” Callie exclaimed.
Most of the others shared her enthusiasm, like we were kids on a midway ride. The transport drove down the dock ramp and out into the water. The wheels lifted into the floor with a blunt thump.
“Okay, guys, this is it,” the driver said over the intercom. “Everybody hold your breath.”
I guess he thought that was funny.
A soft yellow-green light came on as we lost the sun overhead. So different from the spike. No one ran for cover; instead they turned their hands over, bathing them in glow-stick tones.
Our driver called out schools of fish, some that had been tagged and named, others that he apparently just found interesting and wanted to share. We spent fifteen minutes in a vertical descent. It got cold, and despite the light, it got dark. The sea life thinned along with the plant life as we moved onto what I could only think of as a road. Colored flags cropped up in pairs, moving from green to red.
“That’s the warning to watch our step, folks. Hang on. The ride’s about to get bumpy.”
The wheels came down for our landing on the ocean floor. We drove between the flags and right off a cliff, allowing our weight to drag us down to a pad site that was lit up twenty feet below us. Ironically, at this depth, among enduring sights were blooms of jellyfish. Silent and graceful, with frilled heads and curtains of stringy tentacles and arms. They surrounded our transport, bumping against the sides as soft as balloons. In practice, space wasn’t all that different from the ocean.
A pair of hydros kicked past on their way to do who knows what in service of the Center.
“How do they breathe?” Peter asked. “Gills?”
