by Lane, Styna
“Angie!” Lily shouted from behind me.
My reflexes took over as I looked up to find a bulky man in a black suit standing in the kitchen doorway, pointing a strange-looking gun straight at me. I dodged sideways as a blast of jagged, purple light streamed past my cheek, missing me by less than an inch. A burning sensation spread across my chest, emanating all the way down to my fingertips, until fire shot from my hands and made a direct connection with the man’s face. I gaped at my palms for a moment, as the man ran around haphazardly, screaming, and grasping at his flaming head. Where had the fire come from? There’d been no flame near me to manipulate.
My pondering was cut short by another man bounding from a doorway at the other side of the kitchen. Again, without time to think or worry, another sensation across my chest. This time, a creeping coldness, crawling down my arms until a path of frost stopped the man in his tracks, freezing him solid just before he could raise his gun. I scooted across the floor, until my back was met with the first wall it could find. I shouldn’t have been able to do what I’d just done.
I pawed at my chest, only to find my Spera Lapis fading from a brilliant blue glow, and cold to the touch. In holding it up for a better look, I noticed a different body on the floor at my side.
“Lily,” I called, throwing myself over to her.
A sigh of relief released itself from my lungs as she shook her head, pushing herself up weakly. A purplish scorch-mark ran all the way from the bottom of her right eye down to her jaw.
“I think that asshole just electrocuted me,” she said, wincing as she fingered the wound on her face.
People were pew-pewing purple electro-guns. I was manipulating elements without actually having any elements to manipulate. Lily was swearing. It was all too much to handle, and the muffled shouts coming from the door across the kitchen didn’t help.
After making certain that Lily was all right, I hesitantly moved myself across the kitchen, shuffling awkwardly around the icicle-man, and overtop the guy I had set fire to, who was currently smoldering, face-down, on the tile. Taking a deep breath, I pushed open the swinging door next to the stainless-steel refrigerator.
“Oh, Joseph,” I choked, tears welling at the sight of his bruised and bloodied face.
“Mmmmm hmmm mhmmm,” he mumbled through the patch of shiny silver that concealed his mouth.
I ripped the tape from his face, and began untying the ropes that bound him to the chair in the pantry, but I was stilled by a small, green light on his wrist—a light I was far too familiar with.
“Is he okay?” Lily asked from behind me.
“I’ll be fine,” Joseph rasped, shaking his hands as I finished untying him.
I blinked my eyes rapidly at Lily, then at the shackles on Joseph’s wrists, but she had already noticed. Before either of us could say anything, he took off through the kitchen, toward the foyer. Lily and I followed slowly and solemnly, entering upon the sight of the young man standing over his dead parent.
“There was nothing we could do,” Lily said, placing a hand on Joseph’s shoulder, which he immediately shrugged off. “He was gone when we got here.”
“I know.” Joseph’s voice was eerily unwavering. “I watched them kill him. I couldn’t get down the steps fast enough. I didn’t know how to save him.”
A shiver ran from the nape of my neck down to my toes. His words felt like an accusation. He didn’t know how to save his dad, because he didn’t know how to use his powers. He didn’t know how to use his powers, because of me.
Joseph turned from his dad without so much as a tear in his eye. He walked, stiff and rigid, through the door and stood on the porch for a moment, taking in a final view of his past.
“Pop won’t be home until late,” he said calmly, leaning against the railing of the porch as he stared blankly at the van a few houses down. His cuffs clinked as he anxiously scraped his palms together.
“We can wait, if you like,” Lily said softly.
Joseph thought for a long moment, glancing anywhere but through the doorway of the place he could never call home again. His stiffness was unsettling, like a landmine; cold and hard on the outside, but fully capable of ripping your legs from your body and sending the mutilated bits of them in every direction if you didn’t mind your step.
“No,” he finally said, straightening himself up, “it’ll only make it harder on him.”
Loss is a strange thing. There are many ways to lose someone, and they all cause an ache and an emptiness in your heart, but none so much as knowing that someone could have stayed, and didn’t. People are taken from us by illness and insanity and death, and though it hurts, somewhere deep down we find solace in knowing that they would have stayed with us if they could have. We can’t blame them for the things that were outside of their control. But when someone chooses to leave, especially when we need them most, whether it’s a parent, or a lover, or a child, they take a piece of us with them. They take a piece of our trust, and leave behind a wound of betrayal. We had all felt it. We grew up thinking our real parents had abandoned us, and we’d hated them for it. Had we only thought they were dead, the hurt would’ve still been there, but it would have been different. It would have been acceptable. It would have been unaccompanied by loathing.
In what many might have seen as an act of selfishness, Joseph performed the most selfless act I had ever witnessed; he left. Even in knowing that he might never get to see his father again, he left behind the best thing that he could; uncertainty of what had really happened. His father, heartbroken by the loss of his partner, would most likely conclude that the two dead strangers in the house had been working with accomplices, and that Joseph had been kidnapped, possibly killed. And it would hurt. It would pull at his heart from every angle, and shred his insides like shards of glass. But it would hurt less than knowing his son, who he loved so dearly, who was all he had left, chose to leave him in what would probably be the darkest moment of his life.
Joseph pulled his shoulders back, and pushed his chin forward. His muscles tensed and his fists balled as he stepped down from the porch, away from his life, away from his family, away from his home. And he didn’t look back.
Chapter Nineteen
Vertigo
There was nothing any of us could say to Joseph. Not because we didn’t care about his loss, but because ‘sorry’ was the only thing that came to mind, and it seemed wildly inadequate. He’d had the good life, out of all of us, and William had ripped it away from him in moments. Leaving it behind would have been hard enough for him to begin with, but now he was leaving a scene of heartbreak for one of his dad’s to deal with alone. So we rode in silence. Because silence was safe, and protected us from having to feel.
I’d seen New York City in movies before, but it was so much grander than I had ever imagined. We emerged from a tunnel, and massive buildings towered all around us, gleaming as the sun hung low on the horizon at our backs. The streets were packed with cars and bikes and feet. Drivers yelled at each other from open windows, and pedestrians ignored each other as they shuffled down the sidewalks in herds. It was amazing, and impressive, and extreme, and I didn’t like it at all. It was overwhelming to be surrounded by so much, by so many things, and it felt unnatural. I found myself longing for the greenery and quiet of the Eden, where smog didn’t stab at my nostrils, and where I wasn’t concerned about who might or might not be carrying a gun.
Lakin was equally as amazed, having grown up in a tiny town where buildings rarely made it over two stories, and stoplights weren’t really a necessity. Bryant, on the other hand, continued to stare down at his book after nothing more than a glance at the steel-and-concrete jungle we were trudging through. Joseph remained stiff and rigid between them, staring straight ahead through the windshield, jaw twitching from the pressure of his grinding teeth.
“And we have no idea what part of the city she’s in?” Lily asked, finally breaking the four-hour-silence.
“Not even a little,” I
mumbled, all but sticking my head out the window to stare up at the buildings around us. The City in The Facility was nothing compared to this.
With a sigh of exasperation, Lily cut off a beeping car behind us, and squeezed the van into a tight parking spot at the side of the road, as easily as if she’d been doing it her entire life. She tugged her gloves tighter, before checking her mirror and opening the door. “Come on.”
We followed closely behind her, down the over-populated sidewalks, in awe of what surrounded us, and pissed that people made no effort to watch where they were going. Lily seemed to weave with ease through bodies, not even grazing them as they passed, but I managed to bump at least a shoulder with every living thing in a two-mile radius, as well as some not-so-living things; I winced, rubbing my elbow as we left the impolite lamppost in our wake.
“Shouldn’t we get a map, or something?” I called to Lily, who was a few paces ahead.
“I lived here for a while. I know my way around.”
At first, I was surprised to hear that Lily had ever lived outside of the Eden, but then I remembered Al mentioning that he’d lived in New York with five roommates during college. I realized that his entire generation must have been with him, furthering their educations in the big city. I wished I’d remembered that when Lyla had said the thing about the hippie-commune; I’d never known a hippie to choose to relocate from a beautiful, nature-based home to a pollution-riddled city. Then again, I’d never known any hippies.
We eventually found ourselves in the center of Times Square, and even Joseph’s eyes were wide with awe, the recent experience of pain and despair being replaced, for just a moment, with the fresh sight of something new and wonderful.
I had to clamp my eyes shut, desperately trying to steady myself from an unexpected wave of vertigo. The sounds of shouts and laughter and car horns all blended together into a white noise, and gnawed at my brain with a dull ache. When I finally pried my lids open, Lily had tucked her gloves into her pocket, and was holding Lakin and Joseph’s hands as she stood with her head lowered, as if in prayer.
“What are they doing?” I whispered to Bryant, leaning against his shoulder to support my knees, which had been left startlingly wobbly by my dizziness.
“She’s ‘listening’ for Lyla,” he said, streaking the air with his fingers in quotation marks. “She said it would help to touch the brother and the bond.”
“Huh…” I murmured, slightly weirded out by every new thing I witnessed from my kind.
After a good fifteen minutes, Lily’s eyes popped open, and she swung her head around frantically.
“What is it?” I questioned from the bench Bryant and I had migrated to, a few feet away.
“I heard her. She’s in trouble,” she said, vision finally landing on an alley to our right.
“What kind of trouble?” Joseph barked like a protective Rottweiler.
“I don’t know. But she’s being kept somewhere.” And with that, Lily took off for the alley, treading ever so slightly faster than a brisk walk.
Joseph kept pace, but the rest of us struggled to keep up. When we finally came to a stop at the back of a somewhat-terrifying alley, Lakin, Bryant, and I leaned against the damp brick wall, gulping in breaths of heavy night air as we tried to regain our composure. At least I wasn’t the only one who was out of shape.
Lily stared up at a black, metal door with locks lining nearly one entire side. After glancing back up the alley to check that we were alone, she knelt down to the doorknob, and whispered a breath so light, you would have struggled to hear it if she’d been right next to your ear. I jumped with a squeak as the door flew backward off its hinges, landing with a crash at the end of a dimly-lit hallway. We halted at the bottom of a seemingly-unending staircase, and stared with wide-eyed concern at an old man who had popped his head out of one of the apartment doors.
“Sorry… I couldn’t find my key,” Bryant said with amusing sincerity, as the man grumbled and shut himself back inside, the distinct clicks of multiple locks emanating from his door.
Each stair felt as though it could have given out beneath me, caving a bit in the middle with foreboding creaks as we continued upward. If we were attempting to catch someone unawares, we were doing a terrible job.
Our upward trek ended at a door on the sixth floor. Three of us—guess who—wheezed and panted, clutching our sides as we doubled over in pain and fatigue. When I was finally able to bend myself back to a relatively-upright position, Lily’s eyes were glowing their ghostly white.
“What… is… it?” I choked between gasps.
“It’s one of the answers you’ve been waiting for,” she said, before rapping with unusual politeness on the door.
“You can’t take her! I won’t let you,” a voice squeaked from inside the apartment, less than deterring.
Joseph leaped forward, eyes fierce and dark, and pounded on the door. “What have you done with Lyla?”
Lily placed a soothing hand on his shoulder and shook her head, stepping between him and the door.
“I’m keeping her safe,” the voice called.
“I know that’s what you think you’re doing, but she’s in danger, here. You can’t protect her, not like we can,” Lily said, ignoring our confused stares as she had her little chat with the person who’d apparently kidnapped Lyla.
“Who are you?” the voice questioned.
“We’re her family,” Lily paused, “We’re… like her.”
There was a long moment of silence, during which I seriously considered blowing the door off with a jet-stream made from the sweat that was pouring down my forehead. But, finally, a series of clicks came from the door, and a middle-aged woman pushed it open—chain-lock still latched—just enough to see our faces in the sickly, yellow light of the hallway.
“How do I know you won’t hurt her?” she asked, eyes jerking nervously between us.
“The people you have to worry about wouldn’t have waited for you to open the door,” Lily assured.
The woman glanced at us one final time, assessing us, before slamming the door shut, unhooking the chain, and swinging it open wide enough for us to file through. Joseph’s frame went rigid as he passed her, but he showed no signs of potential attack.
The inside of the apartment was a disaster, to say the least. Boxes and piles of random things leaned in from the walls, leaving only a narrow, cluttered path to follow. The woman looked about Emmy’s age, but much more unkempt. Her hair frizzed out in waves of white and brown, and her clothes looked as though they could use a good washing… or three. Close-up, I noticed the oddness of her eyes. They were mostly dark brown, but conspicuously flecked with the same unnerving clear-gray of Abigail’s.
“Help!” A muffled shout rang from somewhere near the room. “Help! I’m in here!”
I instantly recognized the voice as Lyla’s. Joseph moved to search for her, but Lily stopped him. Either she was unbelievably strong, or he respected her enough to listen.
“We don’t know what those things will do,” she said, nodding at his cuffs, “if you bond while they’re on. You can’t, and I mean can’t, look Lyla in the eyes until we get them off.”
Joseph’s face twisted into a moment of remorse, but he nodded and looked to Lakin, who anxiously went off in search of his sister. The woman watched uneasily, as he crawled over her piles of stuff, as if he might mess up her strategic system of organization. Still, she seemed unsure of our intentions. In the absence of anyone saying anything at all, and being relatively certain that Lakin was capable of retrieving Lyla from whatever closet she was tucked away in on his own, I launched into an ambush of heated questions.
“Why did you kidnap Lyla?!”
“Kidnap? She was afraid. I only wanted to keep her safe,” the woman said quietly, looking down at her feet. Her meek nature made it rather unbelievable that she had even managed to capture the Lyla-shaped firecracker.
“Why? Who are you?” My voice cracked as it got louder through my
dry, burning throat.
“Angie…” Lily said, cocking her head as she reached for my shoulder.
“Don’t ‘Angie’ me… and none of that hand-on-the-shoulder crap. What’s going on?”
Lily remained quiet as the woman meandered her way to the kitchen, returning with a tray full of mismatched cups of water.
“What’s this?” I questioned, wary of drinking something from a total stranger, especially a total stranger who had also just abducted one of my friends.
“You’re thirsty,” the woman said, urging the cups toward us.
At Lily’s nod, I took one of the drinks and downed it, sighing at the instant relief of the desert in my throat.
“So… You’re, like, a psychic or something?” Bryant asked, wiping his lips on the back of his hand.
The woman looked nervous and sad, like she didn’t know the answer to his question. She was frightened. Judging by the bulging vein in Joseph’s forehead, I’d say her fear was pretty justified.
“In a way, yes,” Lily answered for her, calmly removing one of her gloves, and then the other. “She’s a Violet.”
The woman looked just as baffled as the rest of us, but the Q&A was halted as Lakin helped Lyla over a box to join us. She glared at the woman ferociously.
“What the hell is your problem, you psycho?” Lyla shouted, flailing her fists in the woman’s general direction, as Lakin held her back by the collar of her shirt.
“You were scared,” the woman whispered, almost on the brink of tears, “I needed to keep you safe.”
