VIOLET EYES

by Nicole Luiken

  But Mike hadn’t told me his secret. He hadn’t trusted me enough to bare his soul. After the Orphanage fire, he’d chosen unlikable parents so he couldn’t be hurt again, and he’d never learned how to let his guard down. But knowing the reason didn’t ease the knife in my heart.

  “Just one little thing,” Dr. Frankenstein said. “One teeny, tiny little thing.”

  Mike hadn’t told me, but I’d guessed enough of his secrets to wound him if I wanted to. He was afraid of heights. He could tolerate them, had climbed down the bridge with me, but he hadn’t flipped over the rail. He’d hesitated and stepped over. Mike never hesitated.

  “I was trying to gain his trust,” Mike said quickly, words running together. “I didn’t know you were coming, and I wanted to escape.”

  I tested the sentence for truth. I wanted to believe it so badly.

  “He could have told me chocolate ice cream,” Dr. Frankenstein said.

  “I did!” Mike said fiercely. “But he was the one who drugged you, and he remembered that it was strawberry.”

  “He knew I would know,” Dr. Frankenstein said. “He still betrayed you. He said yours was a partnership of convenience only.”

  Chest aching, I looked down at my bowl of bright pink soup, then up again. “No. Trust has to begin somewhere.” I left the room.

  The farther out the door I got, the faster my steps became. I jerked at the doorknob to my room and the door popped open, thanks to the plastic card I’d jimmied in it earlier.

  I’d covered up all the cameras I could find that morning, but I still went into the shower fully clothed. I raised my face to the jets above, letting the water pummel me. I waited until the air was thick with steam before I allowed myself to cry.

  I’d cried millions of fake tears over the years, could dredge up a sniffle at the drop of a hat, but I’d hidden my real tears. I would rather have been caught naked than crying. I leaned against the tile wall and let myself go. I was having a bad week. They’d surprised some tears out of me with the tumble down the stairs, too. Damned if I’d let Dr. Frankenstein know how much his little scheme had hurt me.

  He was trying to divide Mike and me. I knew it, but it still hurt. Mike had given him the information so easily, the very first night, only hours after we’d kissed on the bus.

  You expect too much of those you love. You always have, I told myself. It didn’t help.

  I hung my head and let the water fall in torrents.

  I was still in the shower when Mike pounded on the door. I knew it was him, but I didn’t reply to his calls.

  I still hadn’t moved when he burst into the bathroom and jerked open the shower door. He came to a full stop when he saw me, dripping wet and still fully dressed. Maybe he’d expected me to cut my wrists in the shower.

  He stepped under the water with me and slammed the shower door closed. Within seconds the torrent of water had darkened his hair and plastered his maroon shirt to him. He looked bewildered and angry and so handsome I could hardly bear to look at him. “I thought you were a spy!” he shouted.

  “So what changed your mind?” I threw back at him. “Maybe I am a spy.”

  “I don’t know why you’re so angry,” Mike continued. Water glazed his features, drowned his angry voice. “You thought the same thing about me the night of Maryanne’s party. Remember? ‘If you’re on the scientists’ side, I’ll carve your heart out with a dull knife,’ you said.”

  “Ah, but you weren’t just thinking it. You’d already made up your mind. You proposed that I double-cross them. God, I thought you were joking!”

  “So I was just supposed to trust you? Instantly? Like that?” He tried to snap his fingers, but they were too wet.

  “Yes! Like that. I trusted you.”

  “I told him what kind of ice cream you once liked. Is that a capital crime?”

  “It was a betrayal and you know it.” I closed my eyes. “Why are you even here? You still don’t trust me.”

  “Don’t be stupid. I know you’re not a spy now; I’m not an idiot. I trust you now.”

  “Do you?” I turned on him like a vampire descending. “Prove it. Tell me something. Tell me a secret.”

  Mike was silent. The shower beat down on both of us.

  “Can’t do it? Well, I’ll tell it for you, then.” I leaned forward and whispered it in his ear. “There, you see? I could have told Dr. Frankenstein, but I didn’t. And do you know why?”

  “Because you trust me?” Mike said sarcastically.

  I hit his shoulder with my palm. “Because I love you. Because I’d rather cut out my tongue than hurt you. You jerk. I can’t believe I just spent fifteen minutes crying over you.” I turned my face to the wall and would not look at him.

  After a moment Mike put his arms around me. I stiffened but didn’t try to break free.

  “I’m sorry, Angel,” he murmured near my ear. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have doubted you.”

  “No, you shouldn’t have. Why did you?”

  “Have you ever wanted something so much that you didn’t believe it when you finally got it?” Mike asked softly. He looked at the tile walls instead of at me. “They started on me as soon as I got here. I demanded to know where you were, and Dr. Frankenstein said that you were perfectly safe.” He paused. “He said it in such a way that I could hear the smirk in his voice, in such a way that he knew I would get upset and insist on seeing you. So he showed me a videotape of you.” Another pause.

  I was beginning to get the gist of things. “What was I doing?”

  “You were dancing. In some kind of 1920s blues bar. You were wearing a flapper dress, and your hair was different, but it was you.”

  I had been sound asleep in my own bedroom last night, but I did not doubt Mike. It had likely been old videotape of me, modified and spliced, but still me.

  “You were dancing with somebody else. He had violet eyes. Dr. Frankenstein said you had already started your new assignment.”

  Implying that bringing Mike in had been my last assignment, one that had ended when Mike displayed his cleverness to Dave.

  “And you believed him,” I said flatly. I didn’t care how dazzling the special effects had been; Mike still shouldn’t have believed Dr. Frankenstein, our sworn enemy.

  Mike shook his head. “My instinctive response was that it wasn’t true, but Dr. Frankenstein just kept smiling and shaking his head. He said someday you were going to win an Academy Award for acting.”

  “And that made you believe him.”

  Mike’s anger began to return; he shook me by the shoulders. “I didn’t want to believe him! Don’t you understand? I wanted so badly to believe you were innocent that I knew you couldn’t be!”

  I remembered wading in the river. “Do I terrify you half as much as you terrify me?” Mike had asked, and I had said, “More,” because trust was a scary thing. Because if I had trusted and had my trust violated, it would have taken me years to recover from the blow.

  “Even then I wasn’t sure,” Mike went on, “but when Leona showed me my room she said she had tried to warn me about you at the badminton tournament, that you were Erin Reinders and had also reeled in Vincent.” Mikes face twisted with bitterness. “That was when I started to believe Dr. Frankenstein. So when he asked me for your secret, I told him.”

  I thought about settling a small score with Leona the next time I saw her, but that would have been taking the wrong tack. Dr. Frankenstein had put her up to it, blackmailed her if she was to be believed—something I no longer blindly did.

  “When you suddenly arrived, I didn’t know what to think. Dr. Frankenstein said, ‘Welcome home,’ and I wanted to kill you. I was vibrating with the need. Then you hugged me, and I knew that Dr. Frankenstein had lied, that you had never been in his pay, and that I had betrayed you. That’s why I was angry with you for coming after me, because it meant I was the one who had betrayed you and I knew Dr. Frankenstein would tell you sooner or later.”

  “Which he did, s
ooner rather than later,” I said wryly. Mike had been manipulated by a master. “Okay, I forgive you. But if you lose faith in me again I’ll get out that dull knife. Understand?”

  “Understood.” Mike hesitated, then shared a secret. “The reason I’m afraid of heights is because I had to jump from the second floor of the Orphanage to escape the fire. I still remember the sensation of falling—how it felt like flying—until I hit the ground. I broke both legs.”

  I kissed him once, hard, on the lips, then said gruffly, “Okay, enough soul-searching. Let’s blow this joint. The waters getting cold.”

  CHAPTER 16

  WE SMASHED ALL THE CAMERAS save one. We left that one filming the doorway but turned off the audio. Thus assured that we wanted only privacy, the guards let us alone, ignoring the sounds of destruction from within.

  “I’m going to turn this place into kindling!” I yelled banging a lamp against the table edge, while offscreen, Mike began the serious business of battering a hole in the wall.

  Medieval man battered down thick castle gates with logs. Thin gypsum board didn’t stand much of a chance.

  Mike first punched a hole through the gypsum board with a chair leg, then, when that proved awkward because the hole needed to be low to the ground, he lay on his back and hammered at the frail wood with his heels. Cracks appeared and chunks of wall fell to the floor, raising dust.

  Since it was an inner wall, there was no insulation. I cleared away the fallen scraps and stored them in the bottom desk drawers, careful to leave no telltale speck. I took a turn on my back, kicking through the wall on the other side while Mike unscrewed half of the lightbulbs and threw them at an invisible bull’s-eye on the door as if competing for a carnival prize.

  When we finished, the ragged hole was just big enough to wriggle through. On the other side lay a similar but unoccupied bedroom suite.

  I grinned at Mike. “Looks nice.”

  “I’m thinking about making it my life’s motto,” Mike whispered back. “If the door’s locked …”

  “Go through the wall.”

  Only the final touches remained. I wrote a note for Dr. Frankenstein and pinned it to the bed. “Don’t try to catch us. Where we’re going, you can’t follow.”

  It was the literal truth. No way could Dr. Frankenstein fit through that hole, not even after liposuction.

  I blew a kiss at the camera and mouthed, “Good-bye,” just to speed things up.

  Offscreen, we crawled through the hole and, with a lot of grunting effort, pulled the desk back in front of it.

  The room was dark, but the layout was identical to that of my room. We pulled this room’s desk in front of the hole in the wall, then crawled under the bed and waited. There was a small possibility that the room’s cameras were on, recording us, but with so many other locations to watch, I didn’t think they would bother with this one.

  About ten minutes later we were proved right when a guard knocked on my bedroom door. He spoke in odd, broken cadences, leaving out half his words. “Sorry to disturb, need to confirm you’re still there.”

  “We’re not here,” Mike sang softly in my ear.

  I choked back a giggle.

  “Respectfully request to talk,” the guard said. “If won’t talk will come in.”

  He didn’t sound very enthusiastic. I wondered if he just didn’t want to interrupt something embarrassing or if he was worried about getting bonked over the head. He should have been. I’d considered it very seriously.

  “Damn hell.”

  At least the swearwords hadn’t changed in a hundred years. I wondered if the guard’s strange clipped English was just military jargon or how regular people now spoke. Catherine and the other doctors didn’t leave out the pronouns and articles, but that might just have been Historical Immersion training. The thought depressed me.

  The guard fumbled with the door, then buzzed some kind of electronic lock. I imagined his eyes widening as he stepped inside and saw the wreckage, then widening further when he realized we weren’t there.

  I was grinning so hard my cheeks hurt. I’d always adored locked-room mysteries.

  “Captain, send backup. Nobody here. Will check bathroom but have bad feeling.” I pictured the guard talking into his watch or pen, like James Bond with his spy toys.

  Backup arrived. We heard cabinets and closets being opened and air vents poked into, but nobody thought to look behind the desk and nobody saw the plywood in the bottom drawers.

  “Progress?” a new voice asked. I decided he was the captain.

  “No persons. Just note.”

  The captain swore. “Better go wake Napoleon.”

  I convulsed with laughter. Mike stroked my back soothingly. Napoleon was an even better nickname for Dr. Frankenstein—a short little man with a God complex.

  It took Dr. Frankenstein another few minutes to arrive.

  The captain summarized things for him. “Cameras still filming door. Have to be here somewhere.”

  “‘Where we’re going, you can’t follow’” Dr. Frankenstein quoted, and my guts clenched. Had we been too obvious? “You’re assuming,” he told the captain. “I could fool the cameras and escape from here if I really wanted to, and so can they.”

  My heart beat even faster.

  “They’ll be out in the town by now,” Dr. Frankenstein said crisply. “Alert the checkpoints. Start a house-by-house search. Check everywhere—especially small hiding places. The Renaissance kids are good at making friends. Someone may be hiding them.”

  “Confining to town won’t be easy,” the captain said evenly. “Half town has evacuated. Other half is packing up to leave. Riot put hell of scare on everybody.”

  “Then you’d better try very, very hard.” Dr. Frankensteins voice was soft with menace. I was surprised at how easily the deep, smooth tones carried through the wall.

  “Right on it.”

  The worst danger had passed, but the captain was too thorough—and too sure of the truth his cameras had recorded—not to search the compound. Mike and I had to hide in the bathroom cupboards twice, but the soldiers that came looking expected to find nothing and so did. They rarely did more than look under the bed and check the closet.

  Catherine came the closest, mostly by accident.

  Dr. Frankenstein’s voice from the other side of the wall sent us sliding under the bed. “As you can see, Catherine, they totally destroyed the room. That, coupled with the dead guard and the missing aircar, means we have to consider them potentially violent. I told the guards not to use force unless it was absolutely necessary, but with their comrade dead, I fear they may be a little … enthusiastic.”

  Dead guard? Missing aircar? The fun of putting one over Dr. Frankenstein suddenly vanished like air sucked into a vacuum.

  “We don’t know that Mike and Angel hurt anyone,” Catherine protested. “The military were called in because of rioting all over Chinchaga. Absolutely nothing points to Angel and Mike being responsible. And even if they were, we don’t know the circumstances: it could have been self-defense.”

  Mike and I exchanged glances. We hadn’t killed anybody, so who had? Rioters? Dr. Frankenstein, to justify classifying Mike and me as violent? It seemed a little extreme. Then I made the connection. “Leona?” I mouthed the name, and Mike nodded. Leona and Vincent must have taken advantage of the confusion to escape.

  I wished them luck, even while feeling chilled. They had killed to get away. How far would Mike and I go to obtain freedom?

  “I agree with you entirely,” Dr. Frankenstein said soothingly. “But don’t you see that from their point of view almost everything will be self-defense? They’re a hundred years out of date, remember? Picture a Victorian lady suddenly transported from a small country lane to the five-lane highways so popular in the late twentieth century. She would be startled and terrified, would probably get herself killed. It’s the same with these kids. We have no idea what might alarm them or what commonplace little thing might prove fatal. We
have to act fast. Mike and Angel must be apprehended before they reach a city. For their own sake as well as others’.”

  “I suppose you’re right.” Catherine didn’t sound happy about it. Wood creaked, and I realized with a speeding heart that she was leaning against the desk we’d used to hide the hole in the wall. The desk whose drawers were stuffed with give-away chipboard.

  “I’d like you to fly out this afternoon,” Dr. Frankenstein said. “Coordinate the search from Peace River. With an aircar at their disposal they could go almost anywhere.”

  “But what about you?” Catherine sounded troubled. Wood creaked again as she got off the desk. I prayed that her slacks wouldn’t snag on a partly open drawer. “Shouldn’t you be coordinating the search?”

  “No, I’m going to stay here and tidy up a few loose ends,” Dr. Frankenstein said.

  Warning bells sounded in my head. Mike and I exchanged glances. Were we the loose ends? Had Dr. Frankenstein not been fooled, after all?

  But surely, if he knew where we were, Dr. Frankenstein would simply send some guards to collect us. We were in his hands. He had no need for games.

  “I really think you should go,” Catherine said.

  “No doubt you do.” Dr. Frankenstein’s mellow voice hardened to concrete. “I know who you are. When Angel ripped up the message you had the techie give her, she gave you away. I looked deeper into your background and found out your name was very familiar. You’re one of the original birth mothers.”

  The hairs stood up on the back of my neck.

  “Records of surrogate mothers for Project Renaissance were erased. If you recognized my name, it’s because you were part of the original project, under the Needham government. You’re one of them.” Catherine’s voice shook with rage. “I was sixteen when you bastards implanted a surgically altered zygote inside me. I couldn’t fight you then, but I can now.”

  “You were paid fifty thousand dollars to bear one of the Renaissance children. Do your underground friends know that?”