“Me either,” I agreed, stepping into her and sliding my arms around her waist. Cassie shivered against me, so I squeezed her closer
“Remember what I said about your mother.”
I didn’t answer, but stroked my finger over her cheek, marvelling at the light blush that seemed to follow my touch. There had to be some way for us to move on from here – away from the secrets and lies – I just needed to work out how.
She pressed on. “You have to guard your thoughts when you’re around her – especially since we’ve been talking about things I’ve never even heard of before like The Collective – she’ll know there’s something wrong if she picks that up from you.”
Cassie was right. I dropped my hand, and focused instead on her eyes. They were bright and intent on me, I could see she was being driven by fear.
“And what about you, how will you keep your thoughts to yourself?”
“I’ll just keep you at the front of my mind.” Cassie shrugged. “It seems to be what my parents expect, and to be honest it’s not much of a change from normal anyway.”
I smiled at the partial compliment, and tried to hide my own fear that we were trapped inside something much worse than I had ever imagined.
“I’m scared.” Cassie’s face pressed into my shoulder, muffling her words.
“You don’t have to be scared – you’ve got me. We’ll work this out together.” I promised, stroking her hair. When the dark figures from Cassie’s dream stalked through my own mind, my arms tightened around her. “I won’t let anyone hurt you.”
“What are you going to do? Be a hero and sit outside my apartment all night to keep watch over me?”
Cassie was still squeezed into my shoulder, and her warm breath seeped through the fabric of my suit when she spoke. “Something like that,” I whispered back, realising that it was actually a pretty good idea. I leaned in to kiss her. “You’re my Achilles heel, you know.”
“Achilles shouldn’t have had a weakness.”
I might have laughed at her immediate, logical denial of the ancient myth. Except, there was no laughter inside me. “All of us – heroes and gods, but especially mere mortals – have a weakness,” I said, placing my lips onto hers.
Chapter 17
The small clock on the screen beside my apartment door told me it was 11.42pm. I was very late – later than I’d ever been out before, to my parents’ knowledge – and I wasn’t sure what I was about to walk in to.
The door whooshed open and I stepped inside.
“Hello?” I asked cautiously.
Mother appeared at the other end of the hallway. “Balik – I’ve been waiting for you to get back.”
I searched her face for any indication of anger, or even reproach for my having stayed out so late.
“I’m sorry it’s late, I was – ”
“With Cassie – I know.” She replied, cutting off my excuse. “Your Father is out – there was an emergency job he had to attend to.”
“An emergency in the Family Quarter?” I asked, unable to help myself.
“Of course, where else would he be working?” Her question was more a statement and did not require an answer. “I’ve got to go back to The Clinic. One of the nightshift has had to leave as their daughter is ill, so they need cover.”
“You’ve already been in work all day – aren’t you tired?”
Mother focused alert eyes on my face. She certainly didn’t look sleepy – she looked the same as ever – perhaps I could add not sleeping to my list of odd things my parents did!
“I’m fine. Do you need anything before I go?”
“No thanks, I’m just going to bed. It’s very late.”
“Make sure you do. We don’t want you getting ill, or being late for your placement in the morning.”
“No, Mother,” I agreed, as I walked into my bedroom.
The apartment door opened and closed a few seconds later, and I knew I was alone. It was a welcome surprise – it meant I could experiment on my mark straight away – but it also felt odd. My parents never normally left me alone overnight, why would they start now?
12.56am.
I sat on the floor of my room, an icepack held against my arm, trying to soothe the throbbing pain in my wrist. A myriad of equipment and empty tubes lay around me, discarded during my experiments. I was bruised and sore, but at least I had an answer now.
Pulling the icepack away I examined the inflamed skin beneath. Apparently the transmitter I had discovered underneath my mark hadn’t liked being prodded and jabbed with chemicals. I re-covered it with the cool pack and turned to my portable screen, which lay on the floor beside me.
I deleted all the chemical analysis data from the screen, which had tracked everything I’d done to myself in the last hour. There was something oddly satisfying about making myself disappear: removing every warning notice and investigation flag from my record, until I looked just like everyone else.
Not everyone else, I corrected immediately. I looked like every other child.
I pressed harder on the icepack and felt the dig of the transmitter beneath my flesh. It was something I had never known existed before, but I was sure that I would feel it every second of every day, now that I knew it was there. My mark was just for show: the important stuff was beneath the surface.
Once Mother had left me alone, I’d set myself up with a nice little experiment rig and begun splashing and wiping my mark with a whole variety of chemicals. I tried everything I had, in the small stock I kept hidden at home, and even ventured into my parents’ office in search of more things to try. It hadn’t taken long for it to became clear that the mark didn’t do anything much on the surface.
It was when I was wiping up some of the mess on my arm I felt something I’d never noticed before. Pressing down harder than normal, trying to wipe off a smear of sticky liquid, I felt a small solid lump beneath my skin. I pulled away the cloth and pressed the area again, until I found it. The lump was immediately below the mark: too hard to be muscle, too small to be bone.
This had to be it.
I took a syringe and slid it beneath my skin, into the area around the unknown mass. Depressing the plunger, I supplied it with small amount of hormones, and waited. At first I thought nothing had happened, but a minute later the data feed on my viewing screen began to change. Red flags appeared against my profile, along with new numbers depicting a spike in my hormone levels: testosterone and dopamine. I grabbed another syringe and installed the cartridge, before shooting the hormones into my wrist. A minute later, more data appeared: my oxytocin and serotonin levels had increased – and now had a monitoring flag applied to them.
I swallowed. Whatever was buried in the flesh of my arm was part of The Council’s monitoring system. Not only did they test my urine and blood outside my body, and scan me for undesirable emotional changes, I now knew that they were inside me as well. There was no way to escape them.
I pulled the ice pack away again, replacing it with a small freeze pack, which I bandaged to my arm to hold it tight in place. There was no way I was sitting here all night, now that I knew this.
I’d seen the light in Cassie’s room go off just after midnight. It had been a surprise to find that I could see her room from mine – I wasn’t quite sure how that fact had by-passed me before, although on days when my hormones were raging, not having that information probably hadn’t been a bad thing. I didn’t want to be that guy.
Anyway, armed with this new information, I felt even more uncomfortable about leaving Cassie alone with her parents. I didn’t know everything yet, but I did know that I didn’t trust a single adult in the Family Quarter – my parents and Cassie’s included. Slipping the wristband over the reddening mark on my arm, I left the apartment undetected.
1.07am.
I settled into place: opposite Cassie’s apartment building, nestled amongst the branches of a not-too-prickly bush. Switching on my portable screen, I kept it hidden inside my bag. It wasn’t
perfect, but it concealed the glow enough that the light wouldn’t be noticed if someone happened to look out of the window.
Ready to work I opened the link to the main Family Quarter database and pulled up Ami’s data file – understanding her story was my first step to filling the gaps in my theories.
2.56am.
I detected movement near Cassie’s apartment building. Because everything else was so still and quiet, my eyes were immediately drawn to the source of the change. I recognised Cassie’s father, and a woman, who I assumed must be her mother. They left the avenue, walking beside one another, as if it were perfectly normal to be out strolling at three o’clock in the morning.
Fear tightened in my chest. Ami’s parents had disappeared to the Retirement Quarter, the same night Cassie dreamed of Ami’s abduction. Had something happened to Cassie? Had I waited too long?
I snapped the screen off and shoved it back into my bag, leaving it in the bushes. Scanning the surrounding buildings, I saw no further movements inside or out, and so I crept out of my hiding place and moved towards Cassie’s apartment.
As I stole into Cassie’s bedroom, relief flooded through me. A Cassie-shaped lump was curled up on the bed, breathing softly, deeply asleep. I looked around me, finding her bedroom nearly identical to my own. Then I faltered.
What do I do now?
In the end, I decided that I would stay for a short while, just to make sure everything was OK. Seeing Cassie’s parents creeping out in the middle of the night disturbed me. Putting that together with everything else Cassie and I knew – and what I had found out tonight – I didn’t want to risk leaving her alone.
I settled myself onto the floor beside Cassie’s bed. She stirred in her sleep, as though her dreams were troubling her. I froze, waiting for something more, but a minute later her breathing returned to normal. So, I tried to relax a little, although I wasn’t expecting to sleep: the floor was not comfortable and my head was far too busy.
In the darkness, I lay on my back and turned over the new information I had, and tried to tie it to everything else. Without meaning to, I found myself pulling away the wristband that covered my mark, to look at it. In the last few hours, the dark red I had imagined I’d seen in Park 42, had become real. It had blossomed into a bright crimson now and spread closer to the centre of the shapes imprinted on my skin. There was no denying the change and I knew that the scanners would detect it sooner or later.
From my research tonight, I had discovered that in the days before their marks changed, Ami and Patrick had both been tracked through the data system. High levels of specific chemicals and hormones had highlighted them both for monitoring: dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, testosterone and estrogen. The same things that had brought immediate attention to me tonight, during my experiments…the same things I had been hiding in my own test results for weeks, and more recently Cassie’s.
Unfortunately, from what I could see, there was no way to hide the change to our marks. Whilst the other tests would flag up anomalies in the system, they seemed to be treated with minimal interest, which explained why I was able to change results with little difficulty. But, the change in our marks…as soon as that registered, a number of alerts were raised and circulated to unreachable parts of the system.
I hadn’t found the evidence yet – and I certainly didn’t know why all this was being done – but I was sure that some final element was needed to generate the change in our marks…the hormones and chemicals were all connected, but there was one more thing that they were interested in. Something – it seemed – that was only identified through the change in our marks.
The only thing that blocked the mark altogether was my band. Well, not the only thing: I could cut open my arm and try to remove the transmitter thing that was inside there. But, without knowing more about it, or how deeply it was embedded into my body, I did not like that idea.
So, it was back to the wristband. Both Cassie and I had one, and I was certain that we could use them to disappear completely, but that didn’t feel like a long-term solution.
Would Cassie even come with me, if I decided to hide?
I wasn’t sure of that either, although I did know that time to decide was running out. Running out fast.
Through the darkness, I heard a quiet beep, followed by the swooshing sound of a door opening. Footsteps followed. Rolling off my back, into a crouch, I made my way to the edge of Cassie’s bed. If someone was coming in, I would be ready.
I waited. One minute. Two. Then three. No one came and I began to relax again. It must have been her parents coming back in. That wasn’t perfect: I’d have to find a way to sneak out of the apartment now, but I was sure I could find a way. Hopefully.
“No!” Cassie screamed.
She launched herself from the bed, scaring the breath out of me, with her shout. I only just had time to roll aside, as I thought she was going to stand on me, but then she lost her footing and plunged to the floor.
Cassie hit the ground with a dull thud, and shouted out again, as she jarred her shoulder. In the next moment, I saw her gaze focus on me, and her eyes went wide with fear. Panicking that she might scream, and bring her parents running, I clamped my hand over her mouth. It wasn’t a perfect idea, but I didn’t want to get caught here.
Cassie began struggling and somehow, I ended up on top of her as I tried to keep her mouth covered. Several times, I tried to whisper that it was me, but I wasn’t sure she heard. Finally, she stopped thrashing around, and I thought she had realised who I was.
“Sssshhhhh,” I whispered near her ear, trying to calm her down.
Cassie remained still, and I tried to readjust my position to give her more space, but couldn’t. We were so tangled together, and my other hand was holding my weight off her body, so that I didn’t hurt her.
Maybe I shouldn’t have worried too much about that. A split-second later, Cassie’s right hand lashed out and caught me hard across the throat. Bright spots flashed in my eyes, as I rolled away and tried not to choke. Cassie clambered to her feet, whilst I fought for breath. She looked like she was about to run.
“Good shot!” I managed to croak, hoping it would stop her.
She froze. “Balik...? What the hell are you doing?!”
“I was keeping you safe,” I wheezed, trying to sit up, then not bothering when I realised I still didn’t have enough air in my lungs to begin moving. Cassie had crippled me with a single blow. “Well I was trying to, but it doesn’t seem like you need my help.”
“I thought you were – ” Cassie paused and changed to a different question. “What are you doing here?”
I was still struggling to breathe. Knowing that her parents were just down the hall meant that I couldn’t cough too loudly, so I couldn’t clear my throat.
“What if my parents catch you here? Or your parents for that matter?” She demanded, when I didn’t answer.
With difficulty, I dragged myself into a sitting position, leaning against the wall. Through the dim light, I saw Cassie move towards me and take a seat on the edge of the bed.
“Are you OK?”
“Fine.” Despite my pain, I managed a smile, impressed by Cassie’s ability to defend herself. Rubbing my throat, I tried to massage away some of the pain. “Like I said, maybe you don’t need looking after as much as I thought!”
“Thanks.” Cassie smiled. “And I am sorry,” she pointed at my neck.
“Not your fault. You didn’t know that it was me lying on the floor next to your bed. You did exactly what I would hope you would do if you found a stranger in your room.”
Cassie nodded thoughtfully, before returning to her previous question. “So, why are you here?”
“You were upset earlier and I didn’t really want to leave you. My parents disappeared out of the apartment after I came back and so I sneaked out. I came here thinking that I could keep an eye on you whilst you slept.”
Keep an eye on you whilst you slept? Yeah, that doesn’t sound creepy
at all!
Cassie didn’t seem to notice.
“And what about my parents?”
“I was hiding outside at first, but then I saw both your parents leave a couple of hours after you fell asleep, so I crept in just to check you were OK.”
“They left?” Cassie sounded uncertain.
I nodded. “Yes. But, they returned a little while ago.”
“What time is it?”
I glanced at the miniature viewing screen on my wrist, which sat just next to the other wristband. It was quite a useful little device I’d built a few months ago: there were not as many functions as a normal screen, but it was good for detecting scanner positions, chemical analysis and, right now, telling the time. “Coming up to six o’clock.” I stared into the darkness beyond the bedroom window. It would not last much longer. “The mirrors will be turning soon for morning.”
“Fantastic!” Cassie rolled her eyes at me. “Now that my parents are back, how am I supposed to sneak you out of here?”
“Don’t worry.” I’d already figured this out while I was on the floor. “You can listen for them and let me know when it’s safe to go. Then I’ll come back to walk you to The Clinic.”
Cassie went quiet for a few moments. “I can’t hear anything,” she decided. “They’re not moving around, I think they must be in bed.”
I shook my head, realising that she hadn’t understood. “I meant that you should listen for what your parents are thinking and see if it’s safe for me to leave…I can hear for myself that they’re not moving around.”
She looked doubtful. “I don’t know if I can do that. I’ve only ever heard people when I’ve been looking directly at them before.”
“But, you’ve heard voices in your sleep,” I reminded her. “That means you must be able to do it from a distance – you’ve just not done it consciously, until now.” She still looked unsure. “It might just take a bit of practice,” I encouraged. “Maybe if you try to focus on your parents particularly and listen for their voices, that might work?”
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