Lies I Live By

by Lauren Sabel

  “We don’t have time for this,” Monty continues. “Just get her out of my sight.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And don’t sir me. Sir was my father, not me.”

  “Yes, friend,” Jasper responds.

  “Never say that again either.”

  Jasper nods and leads me away, his hand clamped around one wrist. We walk past the white van, now completely void of the Shady Hills decal and toward the aisles of emergency supplies. Without Monty on the other side of me, I could break and run at any second, and I know that Jasper knows it.

  “‘Yes, friend?’” I ask as we get closer to the aisles.

  “I didn’t say he was mine.”

  When we step into the closest aisle, I twist under Jasper’s arm like I learned in training, and he’s forced to let go. I step away from him, my back against a shelf of canned gasoline. “Tell me why I shouldn’t kick your ass right now.”

  “Because I’m taking you to Indigo before we kill him,” Jasper says.

  “I can find him myself.”

  “Not in this maze, and not before I call Monty over,” Jasper says. “Deal?” He reaches out one hand to me, as if he’s going to hold my hand instead of drag me through the warehouse by my wrist.

  “Fine,” I say, and let Jasper wrap his fingers around my arm. I’m sure that once I get to Indigo, I can get both of us past Jasper and out of this warehouse, maybe even in time to stop Charlie from coming here. “Take me to him. But he’d better be alive. And safe,” I add.

  “Alive, yes. Safe is questionable.” Jasper leads me out of the winding aisles, past the back door, through several rooms, up a flight of stairs, and to an old metal elevator. He presses the button, and the door springs open. I step inside. Jasper follows me in and pushes the button for floor two, and the door closes. As the elevator rises a floor, it makes a high metallic screech that hurts my ears.

  “You could’ve picked a classier place,” I say.

  “I didn’t pick anything,” Jasper says. “And if I were you, I’d keep your mouth shut. Monty invested a lot of money in this, and if his plan doesn’t work . . .” The doors open with a sharp cracking sound. “None of us goes home alive.”

  “Do you think he’d really—”

  “I’ve seen inside his brain,” Jasper interrupts. “And there’s not much wiggle room for sanity.”

  “You have a lot in common then.”

  Jasper shrugs. “We’re all broken in one way or another.” He turns right at an intersection of two hallways. “But unlike you, when I break, there’s no one to fix me.” He takes a sharp right at the next hallway. “But now I can afford to fix myself.”

  “So that’s what all of this is about? Money?”

  “Said like someone who grew up having it,” Jasper says. “Now be quiet.” We continue winding down the long concrete hallway until we finally reach a wooden door. He’s right; I never would have found it myself.

  “The room,” Jasper says. As he unlocks the door, I imagine the torture chamber I’m about to see. I picture chains and knives and medieval machines, but when Jasper opens the door, it’s a completely normal room. It was probably a staff room back when this place was still a salt mining factory; there’s even an old soda machine in the corner. Aside from that, there are just a few chairs around a table, like the staff room at our office. It’s shockingly normal, except for Indigo, who is sitting in a chair, staring blankly at a soda hanging halfway out of the coils.

  “Indigo,” I whisper.

  “Sorry,” Jasper says, and then he shoves me into the room and slams the door behind me. I jump for the door, but I’m too late; he’s already locked it.

  “Damn it!” I curse. I frantically jiggle the plastic handle—which has apparently been installed specifically for metal benders—but it holds tight. Panic races through me, and my hand trembles on the door handle. Good plan, Callie. Now you’re locked in here too.

  “I have information Monty needs to know,” I yell through the door. Jasper doesn’t respond, but I’m hoping he will at least deliver the message. If he does, and Monty comes to find out what it is, I might get another chance to get Indigo and me out of this place.

  I wait a few more seconds for Jasper to respond, but when I hear the horrid squeak of the elevator, I lean back against the door. Sitting at the table in the corner, Indigo is still staring at the soda machine, his lips moving silently.

  “Indigo?” I walk over to him and pull out a chair at the table. “Can you hear me?”

  Indigo continues to stare at the machine, but he starts sputtering words out loud. “He’s gonna miss another soccer practice,” Indigo drones, and then he shakes his head back and forth, and another phrase comes barreling out: “They all know I’m ready to retire.” Indigo slams his head against the soda machine, leaving a moon-shaped streak of perspiration on the glass. “I’m going to be home late again, honey,” he says, and then he slams his head once more. I place my hand between his forehead and the glass before he can hurt himself again. When his forehead hits my palm, it’s sweaty.

  “What’s happening to you?” I ask him.

  “Get them out,” Indigo whispers, and he sounds exactly like Michael did at Shady Hills, when I asked him about Operation Firepoker.

  And then a headache hits me, and the force of it snaps my head back on my neck. The pain is worse than anything I’ve ever felt. I grab my head with both hands and fold myself forward until I’m leaning into the table. I can’t hear anything but my moaning and the sound of Indigo’s head pounding against the soda machine.

  The pain gets steadily worse, and then I start to hear words and phrases. “Gotta get out of here,” I hear a woman’s voice saying. “It’s been days since I’ve gone grocery shopping.” A man’s voice chimes in, “So what if I was late for work again?”

  There are other people in my head, I realize. I feel the hard wooden tabletop hit my forehead. And not just one person: lots of people.

  “Why does it keep making that noise?” a voice in my mind asks, and then another one says, “I hate the smell of paint.” I feel the hard tabletop against my head again. “At least we didn’t have to get on that thing,” someone else says in my mind, and then several voices start in at once, blending together so that I can’t understand any of them.

  I force myself to stop hitting my head on the table and look at Indigo. He’s still staring at a soda hanging from the machine’s coil. Thinking he might be trying to tell me something, I force myself to my feet and walk past him to the vending machine. I grab the side of the machine and shake it, and the soda falls to the slot at the bottom.

  “What’s going on, Indigo?” I ask, attempting to ignore the voices yelling in my head. “What are you trying to tell me?”

  Indigo just stares silently at the machine, so I reach in and grab the soda. I pop it open and pour a few drops into Indigo’s mouth, and his eyes clear for a second. It looks like a thick film is lifted off his pupils, and underneath, his eyes are raw and red.

  “You have to distract them,” Indigo says.

  “Who?”

  Indigo shakes his head. “I’m not sure who exactly. But we’re part of it now.”

  “Part of what?” I ask, pouring a little more soda into his mouth.

  “Operation Firepoker,” he says, and then a thick film covers his eyes and he shrieks. His hands fly to his head, and he leans forward so far that he falls off his chair and collapses to the floor, eyes squeezed tightly shut.

  I get down on the floor and shake him. “What is Operation Firepoker?” I ask. “Indigo? Answer me!”

  Indigo opens his eyes, but there’s nothing there.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Time passes slowly, and the voices and pounding increase tenfold in my head. I try to wake Indigo with more soda, but when that doesn’t work, I drink small sips of it myself, whenever I feel myself drifting away with the pain. I keep hoping to hear Monty’s footsteps coming up to find out what I know and give us a chance to e
scape, but it never happens.

  After a while, I hear a voice coming from outside the warehouse, followed by a slamming door. I quickly scan the room and see a tiny, grimy window over the soda machine. I climb up on the counter beside the machine and press my head against the bars until I can see Jasper standing outside.

  The warehouse door slams again and Monty steps out into the quickly approaching night. From above, I see that the center of his scalp, where the hair should be growing from, is in the wrong place. He stops, grabs the top of his head, and shifts his whole head of black hair over several inches. First, his bangs tilt absurdly high on his skull, and then he moves them down until they are over his eyebrows.

  Jasper jerks his thumb upward. “Up a bit more,” he says.

  Monty shifts his hair backward, and his wig finally settles in the right place.

  “Now that’s a good look,” Jasper says sarcastically.

  “You think so?” Monty asks. He turns around and checks himself out in the door’s reflection, and then he glances back at Jasper. “Not that I need your help.”

  “You don’t? Great,” Jasper says. “Then I’ve done my job. I’m leaving.”

  “Good try,” Monty says. “But you’re not finished. Not even close.” He slowly crosses the pavement toward Jasper. “It’s time to join the others.”

  Jasper backs away. “You didn’t tell me this was part of the job.”

  “I don’t remember you complaining when you were living in my pad,” Monty says, “or driving my car, or that death trap you insisted on buying.”

  Jasper takes another step backward, toward the street running parallel to the dry white salt flats. “Look, I hid everything from her, like you asked me to. No thanks to you,” he says, shaking his head. “Showing up at the office and buddying up to Indigo like you did.” He glares at Monty as he takes another step backward. “But Callie still knows nothing.”

  “You know better than that,” Monty says. He slowly rotates his collar around on his neck with one black-painted fingernail. “She knows about the asteroid, and the telescope, and the lasers.” Monty takes the last few steps to reach Jasper and glares down at him. “Without her, billions in thulium will rot on the sea floor. Is that what you want?”

  Jasper shakes his head. “But what are you gonna do with her?”

  “It’s none of your business. You got your money.”

  “She’ll never tell,” Jasper protests, but I can tell he’s backing down.

  “I know she won’t,” Monty says. “Because once they drive her out of her mind, I’ll make sure she ends up in Shady Hills, where no one will ever believe what she says.” He claps his hand on Jasper’s shoulder, and leads him back toward the warehouse. “You chose the right team.”

  When they get close to the front door, Jasper stops and looks up at my window. Two stories below, his upturned face is stained with regret. “I would never have helped you if I’d known,” he says to Monty, almost too quietly for me to hear.

  “Then it’s a good thing I didn’t tell you,” Monty says. He waits for Jasper to pull the door open, and when he does, he kicks his boot against it and blocks the whole doorway so Jasper can’t get by. “If the metal gets to earth safely, you can keep the pad. And the car. You’ll have so many girls you’ll forget all about her.”

  “I doubt it,” Jasper says.

  Monty glances at himself in the door and readjusts his wig. “Stop stalling,” he says.

  “Okay. She does know something,” Jasper says, glancing at Monty as he walks past him into the warehouse. “If I were you, I’d find out what it is.”

  “Thanks for the advice,” Monty snarls as he follows him in and shuts the door behind them.

  Pounding immediately bursts through my temples again. Without Jasper and Monty to distract me, I can’t handle the pain in my head. I grip onto the window bars and grit my teeth as voices break through my mind, hurtling toward me as if a talk radio station is pressed inside my ears.

  And then, just as suddenly as it came, the voices disappear from my mind, and the pain is completely gone.

  “Callie,” I hear Indigo say from across the room. I pull my head away from the bars, jump off the counter, and hurry over to where he’s sitting on the floor. He’s staring at me with unclouded eyes, so I’m guessing the pain in his head is gone too.

  Indigo grabs my hand. “This won’t last long. Something’s distracting them,” he says quickly. “So listen carefully: Operation Firepoker was a government experiment. A group of psychics were hired to find a new type of metal, and figure out its military potential. It led to a new generation of deadly radioactive weapons.”

  The pounding in my head starts lightly, and Indigo’s must too, because his eyes start to zone out. I snap my fingers in front of his face. “Go on!”

  “Michael saw too much. He figured out there were billions’ worth of this metal on asteroids, and envisioned how to get to it. Once he gave them all they needed, they drove him out of his mind,” Indigo says. He lifts his hands to his forehead and massages his temples with his thumbs. “They used you to find where the asteroid will land in the ocean.” Indigo rubs his temples harder. “When I figured out what was going on, they took me away. And now they’ve taken you.” His eyes start to roll back in his pasty face. He’s getting worse, and quickly. “You’ve got to find them. Break their concentration,” he says, “before they destroy you. And then find Michael—he’s the only one who can help you stop Monty’s plan.”

  The pounding breaks through my mind with such intensity it makes me dizzy, and Indigo’s thumbs stop moving on his temples. His eyes go as blank as an unpainted canvas.

  “Wait,” I say to Indigo. “Do you mean crazy Michael?”

  “Your only hope is to leave,” he mutters. “Get away.” Indigo’s lips stop moving and he slowly slumps over.

  My head is pounding harder with each heartbeat, and voices are streaming in from all sides. What did Indigo mean by leave? We’re locked in here, and the window is barred, and too tiny to climb out of anyway. But as I cup my head between my hands and push on both temples, trying to squelch the pain, a thought comes to me: maybe Indigo doesn’t mean leave the room; maybe he meant that I have to leave my body.

  It makes a crazy sort of sense: If there are people in my head, I have to astral project in order to get out of my physical body. These psychics, whoever they are, are focusing all of their psychic energy on my physical self, and they are getting into my mind that way. But if I’m not in my body anymore, then my mind is no longer attached to my physical body, and they can’t get in. It’s a long shot, but worth a try.

  Trying to remember how I astral projected when I found Charlie at the lighthouse, I lie down and picture myself floating toward the ceiling, attached to my physical self only by a thin silver cord. I immediately start to feel woozy. My head spins as if I’m seasick, but this sickness is coming from deep down inside my body, at a cellular level.

  After a minute or two, I feel a strange disconnection in my body, like two of Colin’s Legos taken apart, and then my body cracks out of its casing.

  First my feet get sucked up, and then my legs and torso, like mist rising out of the water. My head pulls away from my body last, with the most resistance, and my neck bends backward until the back of my head finally snaps out of my body. My headache goes away instantly, and the voices fade to nothing.

  This sudden, hollow feeling, like being ejected from a seat, is completely different from the peaceful feeling I had when I floated up to the ceiling of my bedroom. That was a choice; now I’m forced to flee my body in order to escape the people in my mind.

  I float upward, the thin silver cord stretching between my body and me until it snaps tight like a rubber band, and I’m at the end of it. I put my hands out and catch myself before I bump my nose against the ceiling.

  Suspended in the air, with my back pressed against the ceiling, I see Indigo from above. His skin is bloodless and pale, and his eyes are staring upwar
d, wide open and vacant like mine. In the air above his body is a silver cord leading to his astral body. I follow the cord straight up through the ceiling and into the sky, passing the stars. Soon I’m flying upward so fast the wind is whooshing in my ears, and I feel the heat from solar flares at my heels. I am part of the night sky: the universe isn’t big enough for me.

  I sail upward for a long time. I’m not sure how much time passes, but it could be a minute, a week, a year. Light filters away as the darkness gets darker, the space between floating chunks of rock more distant.

  I think about my life, about how much my mom loved me, although she made mistakes I’ll never understand; about how Charlie picked me out of all the other humans to give his heart to, even if I did screw it up; and about my calling as a psychic spy, and how few people in this world get the chance to do something really meaningful with their lives.

  It’s like I’m dying, but my life isn’t exactly flashing before my eyes. It’s more like a catalog of people, their faces rotating before me, and I want to hold onto them so badly, but they’re slipping away.

  I’m slipping away.

  Eons later, I’m surrounded by complete blackness.

  But then light again.

  And soon, bright pinpricks of light are rushing past me, and in the center of all those silver flares is Indigo.

  I can barely see him at first. He is almost translucent, like the fog that comes in over the Bay. He is floating cross-legged among the stars, quickly fading into the blackness behind him. From his spirit body dangles a silver cord, worn down to a thread.

  “Indigo,” I call out to him. My voice doesn’t travel, or maybe it travels too fast to make any sound, because his gaze remains focused downward. Somehow, though, I think he knows I’m here. There’s some sort of charged energy between us; it ripples across the air like waves. “Indigo,” I call out again, but he doesn’t look at me. He just stares down through the stars and the clouds, a frown tugging at his lips.

  In this moment, I want to tell him that he’s always been there for me, that he’s been like the father I never had. I want to tell him that he’s the only one who believes in what I’m capable of, even more than I do.