by L. J. Hatton
“You don’t know me—you knew Penn. Penn was a boy.”
He opened a door I’d never tried. Behind it were halls I didn’t know. They had no tanks and weren’t the cold monochrome of the rest of the Center. Instead, they were wallpapered like a house, with rugs on the floor. Paintings filled the walls, alongside posters from The Show. Most startling was a family portrait of my mother and father with my sisters around them, and me as an infant wrapped in a blue blanket on my mother’s lap.
“Why do you have this?” The picture was so perfect I knew that if I could touch their skin, I’d feel it soft and warm beneath my fingers.
“I collect the things that interest me,” he said, twisting to look down at my face.
I pressed him away, hard as I could, but whatever defect existed in his mechanical hands proved intermittent at best; Nye was strong as ever.
“This was created by someone very much like your father. Someone who had to learn that his abilities had higher uses than his own.”
Every step I took with Nye toward the painting, my mind ordered me to keep struggling, but this was a minor battle not worth fighting. His ways were indirect, and whatever this scene was, it was sure to prove only a lead-in to whatever grander scheme he had in mind. There was no sense exhausting myself when there was no real danger.
I reached out, allowing my fingers to hover just beyond the pigment.
“Touch it.” Nye forced my fingers flat against the folds of my mother’s painted dress, but rather than canvas, I felt lace. He slid my hand down to the end of my father’s shoe, and I was touching leather. I brushed Evie’s hand and felt a rush of warmth. Nim’s hair brought the scent of salty sea breezes. Anise came with the scent of freshly turned earth, and Vesper was a breath of air.
“What sort of trick is this?”
“No trick,” he rasped in my ear. “Just a man with a gift to paint his subjects’ true natures.”
I tried to pull back, curl my fingers into a fist so I could skip the image of my infant-self, but Nye pressed harder, and my hand covered the baby’s entire face. An explosion went off against my skin. Fireworks underwater and fire below ground, air that carried ash up high to mingle with the rain. The clear sensations of my sisters’ gifts muddied and mingled until I couldn’t tell one from the other, and they all ended with a night sky that ignited along the horizon, backed by the distant clack of metal parts and grinding gears.
“Wondrous, isn’t it?” Nye asked. He wouldn’t let me move, and the strangeness of the painting kept shifting as though it couldn’t make up its mind about me. “A body could stand here for hours and soak it in. In fact, I have. Before he was discovered, the boy who made this was creating trinkets to sell on roadsides for pennies. Now he has a priceless legacy.”
“Which is it—priceless or worthless? We can’t be both.” I turned to face him, even more uncomfortable when I couldn’t see him.
“The vessel’s only value is in its contents. And you hold great value to me.” I wished he would try to crush me, so I could stand my ground and bear it defiantly, but his fingers stayed loose around mine, merely lifting my face so I had to look at him. And I still felt drunk from whatever effect the painting had on me. “All this time, I had the answer to a question I never knew to ask.”
The hall turned stifling. There were only walls and paintings and ceiling and floor. No doors or windows. No escape, and I knew Greyor couldn’t help me, either.
Warden Nye removed his hand, and to my embarrassment I stumbled once I was free.
“Come along, pet. There’s something you really must see.” Nye clasped his hands behind his back and continued down the hall.
CHAPTER 37
The hall curved at the end, forming an alcove.
“I think you’ll find this room familiar,” Nye said, opening the door.
It was the office I’d been in when I first arrived, now unpacked. Set up like a library, the whole thing was a disturbing approximation of my father’s office on the train.
Nye sat down in a large green chair. I stepped barely beyond the door, which shut once Greyor was clear of the threshold. Here the glass tanks had animals in them. Snakes in the first; I wouldn’t indulge him by asking if they were Nagendra’s. Next came a fish tank, with actual fish. Then mice, baby ducks, a tank full of scorpions, and an inert Bijou. He’d re-created the Caravan.
Nye wasn’t a collector; he was obsessed.
The walls were decorated from the looting of our train and arranged to match different exhibits. In one case unpolished jewels and their shinier counterparts, all neatly labeled, lay in rows. These had been showcased as natural wonders of the world, taken as tokens from the various regions we had visited.
Noble crests and flags formed an arc around the door, gifts my father had been given by former hosts. Some were sent from overseas as enticements to visit. All stolen by Warden Nye.
In the spaces between, weapons filled the gaps—swords and daggers, balls of spikes chained to handles, whips with hooks on the ends. Every one was a testament to brutality that had no place among my family’s memories.
“What do you think?” the warden asked.
“That you’re a thief and a liar.” Neither of those things surprised me.
“I’m a preservationist.”
Greyor entered the room, so silent I could have believed he was a hologram again. He edged to the side of the office, settling in a spot beside the sofa and table where I’d snuck a look at the warden’s tablet during my first visit.
“This is where I review security issues,” the warden said. He flipped a switch, which turned on the screen I’d seen transform into a holographic projector before. It was divided into many parts, each with the image of a different room from the Center.
I recognized Birch’s room from the plants, and my own, where Xerxes had his front half stuck under the wardrobe while his tail flicked in the air. In the dining hall, Birch sat alone, pushing his food around his plate and not eating. Arcineaux was either gone or out of frame, but the camera angle showed three other wardens at the table. None of the cameras showed the prison or the lab where Klok was being held.
“Can you show me my friends from here?” I don’t know why I indulged the hope that the warden would help me, but I saw those screens, and all I could think was that they could show me Jermay and the others. “Let me see them, please.”
“Would that make you happy?”
“Yes,” I said honestly. “Show me they’re alive, and I won’t give you any more trouble.”
“That’s a promise you may regret,” he said.
He keyed in a sequence of letters and numbers, and the squares on the screen changed. Birch’s room was replaced with an image of Winnie in her cell. My room became Evie’s. The dining hall turned to Vesper, who was in a cell, but unrestrained. She sat in the corner, shivering, with her wig pulled over her face.
“When our incoming guests began arriving, I was pulled away from my usual duties here. There were no reported incidents, so I thought everything had progressed smoothly.”
He keyed in another sequence, and the image on the screen became my room alone.
“No! Where are the rest of them?” I demanded.
“If you want to know, remember your promise.”
I glared at him, but clamped my mouth shut.
“Close enough. I’ll give you two.”
Anise and Nim appeared on screen; they were in the same state as Evie.
“Why are you doing this to them?” I demanded, reaching for the screen.
“Leverage has its uses,” he said, and turned the screen back to my room. The recording began to move in reverse, faster and faster until lines formed between the frames.
“After considering your performance at supper and the surprise—”
“Bird attack?” I guessed when Nye paused and looked ba
ck at me to supply the answer.
“As you say. Then the incident that cost us three exterior mooring stations—”
“Three?” I’d only seen the one.
“The damage was quite extensive, and distinct. So I ran a trace on your tracker to see what you’d been up to.” He glanced at the ring on my hand. “Care to see?”
He brought up a video feed of my room. The on-screen image slowed in the moments before Greyor came to take me to the prison. The tea trolley that had flung itself against the wall turned upright, and the water from the kettle dripped up off the floor to leap back inside.
“This sequence kept me up for hours, going back and forth, back and forth, between this recording and that marvelous painting in my hall. I knew I was missing something obvious.”
Nye stopped the recording during my fit, and started it forward through the flying trolley. He changed the view once more, so it was split between that recording and one taken of my success with the sailfish.
“You’re getting stronger.”
“I got angry, then I got bored, so what?”
“I had no doubt you were responsible for the exterior damage, but I’m more interested in what took place inside. You went exploring.”
“You said I could.”
Saying that was like eating sweets laced with poison. It was an acknowledgment that he had the authority to tell me where I could and couldn’t go. Worse, it was an admission that I might not have gone against his orders.
“True,” he said. “But you took an unconventional route.”
One more command left us with a real-time view of that high-security lab and Klok. He was alive, but not moving.
“You’ve been keeping secrets, pet.”
Nye’s smile in the stark light of the recording screen was a grotesque thing, otherworldly and awful. I began tugging on my hair behind my back. I stepped away in the only direction not blocked by furniture and ended up colliding with Greyor.
“It’s more than just the elements, isn’t it? It’s more than your being able to channel electricity.” Nye took one of my hands and turned it over in his own. “You’ve got more than your sisters’ touch—you have Magnus’s, don’t you?
He backed up the video feed of Klok to the night I snuck inside, and watched me kiss him good-bye. Thankfully, the camera angle didn’t let him see the hummers being absorbed. A few seconds later, I was out of frame, the technicians were back in sight, and the power was going haywire.
“Whatever you did to that machine masquerading as a boy, my technicians can’t unravel it. He’s impenetrable. You altered your father’s tech in two minutes with your hands, no tools, and a kiss on the forehead. That’s a Level-Five skill, and it’s one I intend to see put to use.”
He flexed his fingers.
“But I didn’t. I only talked to him. I can’t fix your hands.”
“And I thought we were past the lying stage.” He smirked. “Or maybe you honestly don’t realize what you can do.”
At his command, the screens stopped receiving from inside the Center, and instead showed half a dozen shaky, amateur phone and tablet videos that had been uploaded online. Every one of them was a different angle of the table Winnie and I had shared with C. B. and Rye at the charity stop, and every one showed the creepers’ strange actions that night as they all flocked to our part of the alleyway.
“Such a delicate vessel for so much power.” The warden’s thumb traced the lines on my hand as though he were reading my palm. He straightened my fingers from their natural curl, pressing all the way to the ends. “It seems like it should consume you from the inside out.”
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I should be able to break you as easily as glass, and yet you’re what I need to save myself.” His fingers circled my wrist, over the restriction band, and squeezed. “I couldn’t imagine why your father would risk so much to keep you from me, but if he knew . . .”
The pressure on my wrist increased. His eyes twitched up, locking on to mine without a trace of the distant contemplation that had coated his voice in the previous breath.
“Let go,” I said.
“Make me.”
I tried to twist free, but he’d left me no room to move.
“Not like that. Make me release you.”
He cued up an empty cell on-screen.
“Prison’s no threat to me,” I told him defiantly.
“It’s not empty,” the warden said. “You won’t see the child, but she’s there.”
“Birdie?” I touched the screen. There was no outline or shadow, but I knew he wasn’t lying. Birdie was doing what she did best—hiding.
“We’ve seen some interesting variations, but she’s our first invisible girl. Do you think your Birdie would flap her wings if I had her thrown from the station’s rim?” Nye asked.
“No . . . please . . . She’s just a little girl.”
At my back, Greyor’s breathing sped up. I could feel his heart pulsing through the fabric of my dress, though he maintained his posture.
“The garbage has to be taken out once in a while, Chey-chey.”
His baiting threats to my family and friends had taken me to the edge, but hearing him turn my family’s endearment into a slow, mocking drawl forced me past my limits—and those of the restriction bands. Sand in the cases behind him started to churn.
Smash him! Hurt him! Break him!
The desire to inflict pain screamed inside me while spiraling tendrils of power reached for anything they could get a solid grip on. But rather than showing fear or caution, Nye was excited.
Smash! Break! Shatter . . .
The beat of blood against my ears turned to the sound of something pounding against glass and the rattle of metal.
“You can do better than that, pet.” His thumb took up its path across my palm again. “You have the ability. You have the strength—make me.” He wasn’t even blinking. “Keep your promise, and do as you’re told. Or I’ll force it out of you.”
One last time he reached for the screen’s controls, and changed the image to Jermay. He was here! His face was bruised, and I could see the stains from his bleeding nose and lip, but he was alive!
“How strong are you, Celestine?” the warden asked. “Can you stop the flow of blood in someone’s veins? Can you take the air from their lungs? Are bones close enough to rock for them to shatter on your say-so? Could you burn him with his own body heat?”
“Stop it!”
“What say I put that shiny collar back on and find out?”
Something tore loose inside me. I screamed from the pressure against my wrists, and then louder from a feeling like stones ripping through my body. When the moment passed, a rock the size of my fist had imbedded itself in the wall over the screen after shattering the reptile enclosure it came from. A jeweled necklace with stars made of diamonds sliced so close to my arm it ripped my sleeve before coming to a stop in Nye’s chair. Greyor hit the floor beside me, face-first, to duck a hail of stones that had hurled themselves sideways at the blight of a man who held me prisoner.
“Look out!” Greyor cried, and covered his head.
Nye released me; I dodged as an ancient sword whose hilt was topped with a magnificent gem hurtled straight at his face. He caught the sword out of the air.
“Remarkable.” He held the sword out before him, horizontal to the floor, as though testing its heft and balance. “Anger and instinct.”
“Was that . . . was that me?”
I glanced from the sword in his hand to the screen, and back. Nye had an eager anticipation about him, unrestrained to the point that he was nearly hyperventilating. The maniac was smiling again—that same frozen mirth that had nothing to do with joy.
“It can’t be.” Greyor moved closer, staring in awe.
“I told you she was
something new,” Nye said. “The first viable Level-Five female. Let Arcineaux and the others scramble around trying to create power perfected. I’ve already found her.”
“I won’t help you,” I insisted.
“Yes, you will. You’ll do it for him.”
Like he’d done with the film of my escape from Arcineaux’s compound, Nye pulled the feed from Jermay’s cell into the center of the room as a life-sized holographic projection.
“You’d let him go?” I asked, eyes blurring. I walked around the hologram so that Jermay and I were eye to eye. I reached for his face, but couldn’t touch it.
Still, he raised his head as if he’d felt something.
“Safely to the ground, released anywhere you like. I’ll even have Greyor escort him.”
“Birdie, too. And Klok and Winnie.”
“I’ll give you the child, but the machine is too valuable. As for Winifred—” Nye’s tone stayed conversational, bordering dismissive.
“She goes or you can forget it.”
“It’s not a negotiation.”
“No, it’s not.” I forced myself to turn away from Jermay and face the warden. “I may be my father’s daughter, but I am not him. I don’t make deals with lives that aren’t mine. All or none.”
“Then you are definitely making deals with lives that aren’t yours.”
He didn’t understand at all. Jermay would never agree to let someone else stay a prisoner so he could be free.
“This hologram, is it the same system you use to create the unnoticeables?” I asked.
“Same neural projection technology, different pathway.”
“Neural projection like my father’s traveling coat?”
“Similar, yes. Why?”
Because he was right about instinct triggering my abilities, and before it was destroyed, my father’s coat could take me anywhere I wanted to go, if I could picture it in my mind. Every instinct I had wanted Jermay. I wanted to hear his voice and have him hear mine. I closed my eyes and imagined that we were only as far apart as we appeared in that office. All that separated me from him was a curtain thinner than the ones I pulled for The Show. I pulled it back and stepped across the threshold.
