by Jalex Hansen
Connor folded up his script, stood, and stuck it in his back pocket. He could memorize these lines in his sleep. “Will do, thanks. I’ll be out of here soon myself.”
“Man, you act like you wanna live here, like you’re afraid of the world out there.”
Con shrugged. “It’s just the girls I’m afraid of,” he said.
“You and me both, man, you and me both.” The grip dropped his cigarette on the floor. “See ya.”
Con padded through the darkened hallways, back to his dressing room. He locked the door behind him out of habit, and stripped off his shirt to admire his hard-won six pack, the way the shadows of his brown skin accentuated the muscles. He was turning around to study his tight- million dollar ass when the girl in the corner stood up, making him shriek like, well, like a thirteen-year-old girl.
“Joanne!”
“Hey, Con.” She strolled over to him tracing her fingers down the line of his stomach muscles making him shiver. “The limelight looks good on you. I remember the first day on the set. Your eyes were all big and you couldn’t even look me in the face. Now you’re not just famous, you’re a phenomenon.”
“Yeah, factory-made.”
“That factory did both of us a lot of good.”
“I’ve had all the good I can take. And lucky you, you’ve moved onto bigger and better things. ”
“I wouldn’t necessarily say that,” she corrected, looking up at him in that way she had, the way she looked up at cameras and people who could do something for her.
Everything she did worked on him, she was his Achilles heel.
He leaned down and kissed her, the pouty softness of marshmallow lips thick with candy flavored gloss. Even her damn shampoo smelled better than anyone else’s. “The only thing good that I got out of this deal was you.”
She pushed him backward with small hands. “You didn’t like it enough to keep me.”
“Maybe I made a mistake.”
“Maybe you did.”
He knew he had. About her, about everything. He would never admit it to anyone but he would trade in all of this just to be useful at something. Petty when you thought about it, most people would trade their left anything to be where he was. But they didn’t know what it was like, how your life wasn’t your own, your face wasn’t even your own.
Joanne curled up in front of the mirror talking to her own eyes. “You want out of it?’
“What?”
“Your ‘mistake.’ I know how you can get out of your contract, now.”
“Sure you do.”
Her eyes flicked to his. “Angine,” she said.
“Uh, the Senator?”
“Mmm hmm. He owns the studio now. You’re not supposed to know that. Nobody is really. He owns most of the studios in town now.”
Connor swiped a bottle of mineral water and slugged the whole thing down. “And how do you know this?”
“He came to me, asked me if I wanted out of my contract in exchange for a few favors.”
“I bet he did.”
She threw a hairbrush at him; it hit his belly with a satisfying smack. “Political favors, you idiot.”
“Political favors? And what in the hell does that mean?”
“You’d have to ask him yourself. I can’t tell you anything. I’m just the messenger.”
“He sent you here? Why would he even care about me? What could I do?”
“Maybe he thinks we’d make a good team.” Her eyes hung on his, liquid amber, sunset at the end of a hot day. “I think we would. I always thought we were good together, Con.”
“You must want something.”
“Sure I do.” She tucked her hair behind her ear and left the rest unsaid.
Knowing he was going to regret it, Con said, “Arrange something and let me know.”
“It’s all arranged. The car is waiting downstairs.”
“You knew I’d say yes.” This made him feel a little sick somehow, weaker than ever.
Joanne came and stood up against him, the glossy brown of the top of her head just below his chin. “I knew you would run out of no’s for me,” she said and tilted her face up to his to be kissed again.
Chapter
Four
Lissa woke disoriented and sat up so fast the room went into a wild spin. She was in the strangest room she had ever seen, a hollowed cavern in red earth, full of soft ambient light.
Though it should have been primitive, it wasn’t. The floors were finished in thick slabs of stone and there were modern conveniences, controlled air, electricity, furniture.
She whipped her head around looking for implements of torture, cameras, anything to suggest interrogation, maybe a guard, but she was alone. She was not restrained and her wounds were dressed lightly.
There was a camera, discreet and almost unnoticeable up high near the ceiling, and she stared into it now, trying to imagine who was watching her. In a flash she remembered the explosion, her parent’s deaths, her own headlong rush into the dark and over the edge, that strange suspension that had held her in midair and kept her from falling.
She felt tears burning against the back of her eyes, but suppressed them, not wanting to show any weakness. The hiss of an airlock made her jump and she sank back against her pillow as the door slid open.
He had longish brown hair that curled at the nape of his neck and a five o’clock shadow that suggested maturity, but the lanky jumble of his bones, the loose swing of his hips, and the way he ducked even though the door was tall enough for him, told her he wasn’t much older than she was. Still, there was an odd poise about him, a certain tension and awareness in the lines of his body, as though he carried the burden of something, like he had seen too much, knew too much, and this lay on his shoulders where he held it up with grace. And most startling of all, his eyes were an unusual shade of gray, one she’d never seen before on anyone, the gray of a sky just washed by rain but not yet clear. He was in a word, beautiful, and after the first erratic skip of her heart, Lissa tried to remind herself that an enemy was sure to use whatever tactics would work to gain her cooperation, including a boy that could have been a Calvin Klein model.
“I saw you wake on the camera,” he said. He held out his hand, on the inside of his left wrist there was a strange glowing mark. “I’m Gideon.”
She watched his hand warily and did not reach for it. “Are you in the habit of introducing yourself to your prisoners?”
“You’re not my prisoner. Not anybody’s unless you are your own.” He pulled up a rolling chair and sat down beside her bed. “How do you feel?”
“Confused.”
“I meant physically, although I’ll address that confusion in just a moment.”
“Oh, fine I guess.”
“Good. Are you hungry?”
Lissa shook her head. “Thirsty maybe. Where am I?”
Gideon smiled at her. “The desert, although if you don’t mind I won’t be any more specific than that for the moment.”
“New Mexico?”
He held on to small serene uplift of his lips. “No.”
“Are you one of us?” she asked.
“In a manner of speaking, yes. Your mother sent us a message on her way back to the lab just before the explosion. We came as fast as we could. Not fast enough for your parents and almost not fast enough for you. Why did you jump?”
“I thought you were Them.” She looked up at the camera. “How do I know I can trust you?”
“You don’t. But I imagine after you eat something, and heal, and wander around and see what we have here, you will realize that we’re on the same side.”
“Can I leave if I want to?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Then I am a prisoner.”
“It’s for your own good.”
“All my life I’ve been locked up for my own good. Can I go outside?”
“Eventually. Do you know why you were kept on the compound?”
She nodded. “I know things. S
ecrets that my parents have given me.”
“But there’s more. Something about you.”
“No. Nothing. They just told me that it was very important that I remember everything they told me. They said a time would come that I might be needed.”
Gideon’s cool exterior wavered. “They never told you why.”
“They said there was trouble coming, political changes, war. That the information they gave me would be useful to turn the tide.” She stared right into his eyes. “I won’t tell you,” she said. “I am keeping their secrets.”
“You don’t have to tell me. I already know about their studies in electromagnetics, and the Tesla device, and many other things. We’ve been communicating with your parents for a long time.”
Lissa sagged against the weight of his words. “Then there was no reason to save me.”
“There was every reason to save you.” There was still just the trace of a smile on his lips. “Lissa, your parents weren’t protecting information, they were protecting you. You’re very special. Like me.”
“I don’t understand.” Something stroked a cold finger down the back of her brain and she shivered unwilling to consider it.
“I would like to be gentle with you, to tell you what you need to know in small increments so that I don’t overwhelm you, but there just isn’t time.”
Gideon reached out his hand toward the glass of water and Lissa watched in amazement as it lifted into the air and floated toward her. It hovered in front of her, nestled in a cocoon of blue-white light. She reached out slowly and wrapped her hand around the glass feeling that strange icy warmth for a second before the light evaporated and she held an ordinary glass of water. She took a sip and tasted nothing different about it.
With wide eyes she held it out to him and felt it leave her fingers, traveling through the air back to the table. “You’re the one that kept me from falling with that light or whatever... How did you do that?”
“These are things you will learn,” he said. “Things that are already possible for you.”
“I can’t do that, lift things with my mind.”
“You have the potential to do that and many other things besides, to control energy, other people’s thoughts--”
“What are you talking about?”
“The genetic marker is in your blood. The Lux Marker. And we aren’t the only ones.”
“So we’re related?” Figures the hot guy would be my cousin or something, she thought.
“No. We are only the same in this way.” His speech had odd cadences to it, as though he had learned a different English, an older one perhaps.
Lissa shook her head, rubbed her hands over her eyes. “Really, I think there’s a mistake. If I had a gift like that I would have known.”
Gideon shook his head gently. “No mistake.” He looked tired suddenly and maybe even sad. He traced the mark on his wrist absently. “And it’s not necessarily a gift.”
Lissa looked at the glass of water, focused all her attention on it, a laser beam of will, but the glass didn’t so much as shiver. “See, it’s a mistake.”
Gideon shook his head. “You’re trying too hard. There is no mistake.”
Tired beyond imagining, Lissa lay back on her pillow and closed her eyes.
“Do you want to rest some more?”
“I don’t think I can.”
She heard Gideon rise and opened her eyes again. He stood over her, his expression thoughtful. “I’m sure you can, just close your eyes again.” In the darkness she felt his hand on her head, his touch cool and warm, burning like ice, and then she knew nothing else as sleep claimed her.
Lissa stayed in the room three more days, until the curving earthen walls became their own torture. She wanted to walk around in the sunshine again. She was sick of living like a bat underground.
She’d been left to herself mostly. The bandages had come off yesterday. Food came to her like clockwork. Gideon made sure she had books and magazines, and even an iPod with a list of her favorite songs. Each time he came to the room he asked her if she had any more questions and if she was ready to meet the others in what he called ‘The City’. Each time she said no.
She spent most of her time trying to come to grips with what had happened to her over the past week, of alternately trying to remember her last moments with her parents and to forget them.
She was angry at them for not telling her what she was. She felt that it was the greatest betrayal possible, to keep secrets about someone’s own self, but at the same time she knew they had been doing what they thought was right.
Once or twice, Lissa tried to summon that blue light, to lift something using only her mind. She never even noticed a change. She thought maybe she was too aware of the camera on the ceiling, of who might be watching her.
Now, she threw back the covers and went to stand below the camera. “I know you’re there,” she called. “I’m ready to come out.”
Within minutes a young woman arrived with clothes draped over her arm. She was the most beautiful girl Lissa could imagine, with smooth, milky skin and blond hair that rippled down her back like titanium in the sunshine. Her eyes were also gray and on her wrist was another shining mark. “I’m Gabrielle,” she said. “Gideon’s sister.”
“I thought as much. It’s nice to meet you.” Lissa held out her hand and took Gabrielle’s cool slender fingers in her own. The girls smiled at each other instantly liking one another.
“Your head must be spinning,” Gabrielle said.
“It is a little bit. Every time I think I’ve got a handle on things I go out of control again.”
“I’m sorry about your parents.”
“Me too.”
Gabrielle laid the clean clothes across a chair. “I’ll step out and let you get dressed.” The door slid shut with a cold hiss and Lissa took off the clothes she had been wearing and pulled on the strange clothes, tunic-like things in a dove gray color. She studied herself in the mirror propped on a table noticing that she was pale, as though all the years in the New Mexico desert had been eradicated in just a few days. She brushed her dark brown hair until it snapped and crackled. Then she approached the door hesitantly looking for a button of some sort, it slid open as she approached. She stepped out into a corridor where Gabrielle waited and the door slid shut. “I could have walked out at any time, couldn’t I?”
Gabrielle nodded. “But I think you were smart to stay put and sort things out.” She gestured in the direction they were to go and Lissa fell into step beside her. All of the corridors were carved out of the ground but lit brightly with halogen lights.
“There are three levels, four if you count the utility tunnels,” Gabrielle explained as they walked. “The one we’re in houses the hospital and laboratories. The others have apartments, meeting rooms, and a common area for eating.”
“It’s a giant rabbit warren,” Lissa remarked. “How many people live here?”
“Right now about five hundred, but we can hold many more.”
“Wow. Five hundred people living underground.”
“Yes, it’s incredible.” Gabrielle led them up to a large metal door with a key pad embedded in the wall next to it, totally strange and out of place in the earth. “We’re very secure here. Each section is only accessible with a different code, and those change frequently. You have to have clearance to get on this wing. I forgot to mention that we also have the holding cells in the same level as the hospital.”
“For what, like prisoners?”
“Yes, although we haven’t had any yet.”
Lissa watched the lights flash on the key code panel, lurid red and blue and then a steady green before the door slid open and they stepped into an elevator. “How old is the city?”
“The oldest part is hundreds of years old.”
“But--”
“You’ll learn more later. I don’t want to overwhelm you now.” Gideon’s words. Lissa hated to break it to them but she was already way more than over
whelmed.
Gabrielle was talking again, continuing her bizarre tour. “In this section we have the dining halls, kitchen, and living quarters. Rooms are supposed to be shared except by the higher ups, but since we aren’t full you’ll have one to yourself, and you’ll pretty much have your pick.”
As they walked through people passed them going in both directions eyeing her curiously. She was sure they knew who she was. “Are your parents here?”
Gabrielle stopped and laid her hand on Lissa’s arm. “We have that much in common,” she said. “We’re both orphans.”
“What happened to them?”
A real pain, a blistering grief darkened Gabrielle’s features. “They were killed, because of me and Gideon, and what we can do.”
And what she could do too supposedly. A black guilt rose up in Lissa. She had thought her parents died because of their experiments, but now it looked like they had died because of her.
“Don’t blame yourself.” Gabrielle said. “You couldn’t have known. It was out of your hands before you were even born.”
Lissa was disconcerted, Gabrielle seemed to have read her thoughts. “Can you read minds?”
“Sometimes. But this time I don’t have to. I just understand.”
“Hey ladies, what’s up?” A young man threw an arm around each of their shoulders. He was the oldest person Lissa had seen yet and still he couldn’t have even been twenty-five. He was kind of a scruffy guy, with bed head and an easy grin.
“Lissa, meet Jared.”
Lissa tried to figure out how to get out from under his arm without being rude. She glanced up at him quickly and realized that his eyes were blue. “You’re not one of them…us I mean?”
Jared’s entire face fell and he took his arm off on his own. “Wow, you know how to melt a guy’s ego.”
Gabrielle was laughing, a pretty girlish sound that didn’t fit with her rigid beauty. Lissa immediately realized that there was something going on between them. “He’s one of us in spirit, although he’s in complete denial.”
