gifted

by Charmaine Ross

  I let all the bad things twist around me, let them fuel my anger. Let the seething rage wash through me without restriction. Pain spiraled through me, but now I used it. Rode the waves of absolute burning fury until I could explode.

  All of that was nothing compared to the pain of Julius’s deceit.

  “How could you?” I seethed.

  “I had ... no choice.”

  “Everyone has a choice. Everyone had a price. What was yours? Did Victor pay up front? Or did you just like the perverted idea of getting to me like you did?”

  He hesitated. “It wasn’t like that. I didn’t do it because of Victor.”

  “Just a sick kick then.”

  He shook his head, his features stretching tight. “You were never anything like that to me. You have to believe me, Katia.”

  He was pleading. To me. The thought made me laugh. Nearly. But there wasn’t any laughter inside me now. “Begging for forgiveness, Julius? Bit late for that.”

  “Don’t believe everything you read.”

  I stared at him. Uncomprehending. Read? What the fuck did that have to do with me wanting to rip every limb from his body.

  “Katia, my dear. I don’t know how you’re coping with all that electricity running through your brain. I need to use it before you fry yourself and waste all of my work.” Victor’s cold voice sliced through my mind.

  “I’ll do whatever the fuck I want to do.” I couldn’t take my eyes from Julius. I wanted him to see my rage, see the betrayal on my face, make him remember that he’d done this to me.

  “I’m sure you saw the child,” Victor said.

  The child? Surely he couldn’t mean the little girl asleep in the capsule. So beautiful. So innocent.

  “There’s more than just her.” Julius’s voice was strained. Washed with utter hopelessness. More! Nausea squeezed my gut with an iron clamp. There couldn’t be. It was cruel. Inhumane.

  “Katia, you will be responsible for the deaths of many children if you don’t comply. I will ensure it personally,” Victor said.

  “You are a soulless bastard.”

  “A century hasn’t stopped your temper. Maybe the death of one of these children might.”

  “No. Please.” I hated myself for sounding so pathetic. “Leave them. I’ll do whatever it is you want me to do. Just let them live.”

  Victor chuckled. It was a toneless sound that didn’t suit him. It wasn’t an expression of joy. Victor wasn’t capable of that. It was one of manipulation and conquest.

  “I knew you would see it my way. Eventually. I should have thought of this decades ago. Now my dear, you have made me wait long enough. I don’t see the need to delay things anymore. I want your mind, and now I’m going to have it. Julius, we have a job to do.”

  “That’s what this is all about? You want this ... curse?” I couldn’t seem to grapple with the idea. Victor wanted what I would sell my soul not to have.

  “Why else do you think I’ve let you live so long? After all this time. All those experiments. I learned your power can’t be stored. It looks for a host. In the end, the answer was so simple. Your friend Julius helped me with his inroads into Genome Technology. All that cell regeneration and sleep therapy. I used that all to my advantage. You really don’t know how smart he is. Quite intelligent. That’s why I needed him on my team. With his research, I was able to find a way to filter your power into my body.”

  I tried to imagine Victor with my thought-energy. He would be completely unstoppable. It was unthinkable. The destruction. The power. No one to keep him in check. The people he would kill.

  It would be hell on earth.

  “You may proceed, Julius,” Victor said.

  There was a timeless moment when I thought Julius would not move, Then he took a slow step toward me. I could barely breathe. Time slowed. I held his glance, seeking—I don’t know what—but there was nothing else beyond utter and complete sadness.

  He drew blood from the stint in my arm. Red—my life force—filled the thin tube. Julius attached the other end into a type of control box, then from the other side into Victor’s arm. My blood would drain into him.

  Julius moved to me, making sure the attachments were secure at my temples. I don’t know how they could have moved, since I couldn’t move my body a millimeter. He bent and pressed his lips to my forehead for the longest moment, and I could feel absolute pain thundering through him. His lips moved from my forehead to my temple. “You know what to do.”

  If he wasn’t so close, I wouldn’t have heard him at all. He spoke on a breath. I had a moment when I struggled to comprehend that he had spoken to me at all. That it wasn’t just my imagination.

  “I hope you enjoy your last moments on this earth, my dear. I will be glad to finally be rid of you,” Victor said.

  “You underestimate how much I want to see you in hell.”

  Victor didn’t answer me. “When you are ready Julius.”

  I watched Julius set the machine. A series of lights blinked on and off on a panel. What did Julius mean, I would know what to do? Die? Watch my blood slowly drain away? What was he trying to tell me? Something about reading? Too confusing. No answer. I couldn’t think through the scorching pain ricocheting through my brain.

  “Level one starting,” Julius said.

  I started to itch from the inside, as though there were millions of bacteria feeding off the cells of my veins. My arm tingled. Cold. Tingling around the sensors on my forehead. Now pins and needles. Headache pulsing behind my eyes.

  I hoped the children would be saved from this. A flickering memory—about the children. The little girl. A wisp of recognition, too fast for it to snap into a solid thought. Think past the ache that was taking over my whole brain. Think, damn it!

  “Level two starting,” Julius said.

  The noise increased. Pain clawing my brain, tearing white-hot electric paths into the center. I refused to scream. I knew the pleasure it would bring Victor.

  Focus on Julius. His face. I cleared my mind past the pain to the illusive memory that wanted so badly to come to me. Her face. Familiar. The hair ... the eyes ... They were ... his.

  The photograph lying face down in his bedroom. The same child. I knew where the slant of her eyebrows, the straight nose with the tipped-up end, and pixie chin came from.

  Her father. Julius. The little girl ... was his!

  Victor had his child, and Julius was fighting for her.

  If only he had told me.

  His eyes caught mine. “Celia. Her name is Celia,” he said so softly, it was as though I felt his words rather than heard them. Then louder, “Level three. Starting now.”

  There was an explosion of pain, and my mind fell to pieces.

  Chapter Eighteen

  My consciousness twisted through red and black. I went at a fantastic pace and at the same time felt no movement from my body. No wind through my hair, no touch on my skin, no momentum. No body. I was part of the eternity. I was free. If I was dead, I didn’t feel a thing.

  Would the darkness lead me to the next life? Hopefully it would be a great deal better than the one I had just left. Maybe I would meet my birthparents again. I hoped they hadn’t forgotten about me. Even though I was orphaned, I’d always liked to think they wouldn’t have given me away if they had a choice. That they would have kept me and loved me and I would have had a real family. I bore them no ill will because the only reason I was adopted was because they’d died. You couldn’t help death. I’d like to think they’d be waiting in Heaven for me, and we could be a family there.

  I wondered what Heather would say to me. Would she damn me to hell for not giving in and doing what they wanted me to do? I could tell her she died for nothing. That I wasn’t actually the miracle she thought I was. I suppose now that I was dead, it didn’t matter. Wasn’t that what death did? Wipe away the sins and regrets of the life? I floated in the blackness. It was nice and warm, and no one hurt me here. I waited for my parents or a guardian angel to gui
de me to another place. But no one came. There must be more to the afterlife than sitting alone in the dark.

  No matter how much I wished for it, the reality was that I wasn’t dead at all. Just in some sort of mind-space. Fuck. I wanted to cry, stamp my foot, and demand God to take me. But then I wouldn’t have Julius. Couldn’t save his child—Celia. She would die. With all my heart, I knew I couldn’t let that happen. I could save her.

  Julius had told me I knew what to do. What could I possibly know? Read, he’d said. Read what? The LearnX? His notes? Genome Technology. He’d told me to read them. For a purpose?

  I filtered through the notes in my mind. He suggested cells could be regenerated through stem cells in the blood. That the healthy cells and all their energy could be transposed into another body. The new body would replicate the cells with the new memory. Maybe that was how Victor hoped to gain my power. Use the cells in my blood, bond them, and grow new cells with memories from my body. My power would become his.

  That had to be it. The rock, making it explode. Regenerating Julius’s tissue. They were both at microscopic sizes. Julius had given me the knowledge on a subconscious level through the LearnX. It had never occurred to me to use my thought-energy like that before; maybe it was the power of suggestion from his notes that created the inspiration. The way he’d let me use it for all of those hours. The way he’d suggested what I should read, where I should learn. God, he’d been helping me all along. He had given me the tools to defeat Victor despite the threat to his daughter.

  Victor and I now had a blood connection. We were an inseparable part of each other on a cellular level. He could access the information from my cells, but I could also access his. How much of my blood had been filtered out of my body? How much blood did the body need before it started to shut down? I didn’t know, but I knew I only had minimal time.

  I scraped myself off whatever ground was in my unconscious mind and focused on my blood. Cells flying through the veins. Willed my energy into a pinprick. I became the muscle, sinew, bones. I was tossed into a vein, bouncing against other cells as large as my consciousness.

  I felt where the needle punctured my vein. Steel flashed, and I was flung up the needle, into a tube and then thrown out into a foreign world.

  Victor’s body. I sensed masculinity. Intelligence. Insanity. His body had suffered massive changes. He’d experimented on himself. His balance had been thrown off; the chemicals that were now an inseparable part of his body were making it grow unnaturally.

  I saw my energy mingling with his blood. The cells clinging to the walls of veins, dividing and multiplying in front of my eyes. He was absorbing the energy. Growing powerful. I had to stop it at the epicenter. His brain.

  I sensed my way there. I was thrown into a black cavern. I floated in the dark where ghostlike, filmy figures surrounded me. An image melted into focus out of the darkness. I was in a kitchen. A woman appeared, a cigarette hung from the corner of her mouth. She walked right past me, as though I wasn’t there. She threw a sandwich in front of a sallow-faced, miserable looking child. Other than that, she ignored him. The boy had a shock of greasy dark hair that protruded over a long face. The eyes were keenly intelligent, but there was a deep sense of hurt and anger as he watched his mother.

  The scene merged. I saw myself, drugged and lying on a table. Victor stood over me and was doing something to my arm. He looked younger. There was no gray at his temples, no crease between his brows, or line around his mouth. I was very young. Maybe only twelve years old.

  Victor put a needle into my arm. More body-changing, mind-bending drugs. More pain. More torture. Red-hot pure rage blurred my vision. I swung a fist to his face. Nothing happened. My hand went right through his jaw. I hit again. My fist passed right through him. What the fuck? I knew I was somewhere in Victor’s mind. What the hell was I seeing? The past ... A memory!

  “I thought I might find you here. From my experience, the dying mind will abandon ship when faced with its survival.”

  Victor appeared at my side. This Victor appeared solid with salt and pepper hair and a black soulless gleam in his eyes. The Victor I knew today.

  The scene unfolded all around me—in front, behind, above. I was surrounded, observing it like a movie. “How could you, Victor? I was just a child.”

  “A young woman with a power far greater than she could ever handle,” Victor said.

  In his memory, Victor paused in his work and smoothed the hair back from my young face. His movement looked gentle and tender, as though he cared for me in some perverse manner.

  “You were never gentle like that with me, Victor. You hurt me, each and every day.”

  “I was always gentle with you.” Victor watched his memory, standing rigid with his hands clasped behind his back. The consummate scientist watching an experiment. In his mind, he was perfectly justified. If only he knew what it was like being at the other end of his “gentle administrations.”

  “It was never like this. You are sick, Victor. Your memories are sick. You tell yourself that you’re not really bad. That you really didn’t do all those bad things to me. You don’t see how it actually happened.”

  “I did it for your own good. You never wanted your power. You never did what you were told to do to build it. I guided you. I gave you chance after chance to discover who you could be, and you never took the step. You let it bring you misery,” Victor said.

  “At your hands.”

  “It was a waste for you to have it when someone like me could use it to its full potential.”

  “It was never yours to have. I earned every single bit of it.”

  “You would never have had it, if not for me” Victor gave me a cold sideways glare. I was getting under his skin. His ego was his weakness. To him, I was unworthy of his skilled experiments and intellect. Only he could have given me such a precious gift.

  “Then why didn’t you do it to yourself?”

  “It was experimental. I needed the technique perfected before I attempted it on myself. Think what would happen if it backfired on me. My genius. Gone.”

  “What a shame that would have been.”

  But it was my power to use. I’d earned it through years of torture. I might only be in Victor’s mind, but I still had control over my thoughts, and that meant power over my energy. Our cells were merging, but it wasn’t all just one way. Victor could also receive memories on a cellular level. My memories. “I like seeing your memories, Victor. They paint such a pretty picture. Almost like reading a fairy tale. But they’re completely wrong. Let me show you how things actually happened. Let me show you as you really are.”

  I imagined wiping away Victor’s contorted memory. I brought the space around me to a standstill, until it was a relaxed darkness. Something that I owned. I let the comfortable feeling wash through me, eradicating the tumult until everything was still and calm.

  Then I readied myself for the memories I had tried to forget for so long.

  I let them slide through the darkness. But instead of crashing through me in waves of terror, I let them ease in. They were no longer nightmares, but things that just were. Memories. They couldn’t hurt me anymore. I didn’t let them.

  I was in control.

  I focused. The darkness became a dim multicolored hue that gradually became brighter and morphed vividly into solid shapes. I saw myself lying on the table that Victor favored when he conducted his experiments. There was nothing to scare me or hurt me here. It had all happened a long time ago. It couldn’t happen again, but unlike Victor, I remembered it clearly. The way it actually happened.

  I drew my attention to my young face. My eyes were puffy and red from crying, my hair lay in scraggly tufts. I definitely wasn’t lying still and calm. I was scratching and fighting for all I was worth. I remembered Victor’s “gentle” touch as he tried to control me. A slap on the cheek, then two more, hard on the side of my face. The sound of his hand was a sharp crack. I saw myself reeling against unconsciousness, struggl
ing to move from the table, calling for a mother that I knew would not come.

  “Now feel it, Victor. Feel my pain.”

  Energy surged within me, and I unleashed what I had felt. Beside me, Victor cried out, stumbled to his knees, and raised his arms over his head. His face was bruised, his lips bleeding. I’d made him feel what he’d done to me. If only I could unleash all of the years of torture and let him feel it.

  In my memory, I managed to rise to my elbows. I spat right in his face. Victor roared a high-pitched sound as he wiped my spittle from his face. He punched me in the temple. I crumpled to the table, blood splaying from the gash he gave me. It ran down the side of my face and onto the pristine slab beneath me.

  “This is not right,” Victor said.

  “This is the way it happened. I still have the scars to prove it. If you were honest with yourself, you would remember it the same way.”

  “Just look at you. You were making it hard for me. I had to do something to get you under control. You wouldn’t conform.”

  “You never had the right.”

  Victor lurched to his feet, wiping the blood from his lip. “It doesn’t matter what has happened in the past. Your power should have always been mine. I own you. I created you. You are my daughter!” There was a manic edge to his voice. A lunatic gleam in his eye.

  “It will never be yours. I will never give it to you, and I am not your daughter!”

  In a flash, Victor was face to face with me. His hands clawed my arms, nails biting into my flesh. He bared his perfect white teeth. “You are my flesh-and-blood daughter, Katia. And I will have it now!”

  He couldn’t be. No! Not my blood father! My parents had died when I was a baby. I was left orphaned. They were waiting for me. They had wanted me. They had loved me. I couldn’t believe Victor. He was mad. He had to be telling me anything just to fuck with my head.

  I grabbed his wrists and tried to pull them away. He was fueled by a mad rage, a frenzy so deep it gave him superhuman strength. But I was fighting him in his mind, on a level playing field. He could overpower me in the flesh, but not here.