Gypsy (The Cavy Files Book 1)

by Trisha Leigh

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Also By Trisha Leigh

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Thank You!

  Alliance

  Also By Trisha Leigh

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  BY:

  TRISHA LEIGH

  Copyright 2014 by Trisha Leigh

  Cover Design by Nathalia Suellen

  Developmental Editing: Danielle Poiesz

  Copyediting: Lauren Hougen

  All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations or locations are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used factiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

  Also By TRISHA LEIGH

  THE LAST YEAR

  Whispers in Autumn

  Winter Omens

  Betrayals in Spring

  Summer Ruins

  THE CAVY FILES

  Gypsy

  Alliance

  Buried

  THE HISTORIANS

  Return Once More

  Adult titles written as LYLA PAYNE

  WHITMAN UNIVERSITY

  Broken at Love

  By Referral Only

  Be My Downfall

  Staying On Top

  Living the Dream

  Going for Broke (published in Fifty First Times: A New Adult Anthology)

  LOWCOUNTRY MYSTERIES

  Not Quite Dead

  Not Quite Cold

  Not Quite True

  Quite Curious

  Not Quite Gone

  Not Quite Clear

  Quite Precarious

  Not Quite Right (April 26th, 2016)

  Mistletoe & Mr. Right

  Sleigh Bells & Second Chances

  SECRETS DON’T MAKE FRIENDS

  Secrets Don’t Make Friends

  Secrets Don’t Make Survivors (March 15th, 2016)

  For Leigh Ann Kopans, who taught me that superheroes are awesome, that Alias is not optional viewing, and that people who hold chunks of your heart can be found on the Internet. And also in Ohio.

  Thank you, for everything.

  Chapter One

  “Have I ever told you how hot you look with electrodes stuck to your head? Not everyone can pull that look off, but you…” Mole makes an exaggerated smacking sound with his lips, like a cartoon character enjoying a decadent meal.

  I roll my eyes and scoot away from his hand, which is drifting toward my shoulder. “I hate to be the one to break this to you, but you’re blind. So I’m afraid your testimony is inadmissible.”

  “Wait, I’m blind? You’re kidding me!” He grins. “That does explain why I’ve always assumed you’re beautiful. Carry on.”

  His typical, good-natured reaction tickles me, as usual, and I laugh even though we’re not supposed to display any outward emotions—or talk, for that matter—while hooked up to the machines. I swat at Mole without making contact, making sure he feels the breeze, to get him to sit back in his chair before one of the nurses notices us horsing around.

  “Subject Nine, unless you want to start your time from the beginning, I suggest you get to work on that puzzle.”

  Too late.

  Mole crosses his eyes in my general direction, and to anyone who doesn’t know him it would seem as though he sees perfectly. His ability to explode objects with a glance caused his blindness in infancy, but it also gave him a weird gift for sensing heat signatures. It works well enough that sometimes we forget he’s disabled.

  He drops his hand. I bite my lip and return my attention to the three-dimensional computer puzzle. It usually takes me less than the allotted time to solve them, but it’s not as though we get any kind of reward for finishing faster. The computers analyze the way our mutated brains process and apply information, not how swiftly we problem solve. No cheese at the end of this mouse’s maze, but it doesn’t stop me from wanting to excel where I can.

  Mole and I work in silence until the same militant nurse comes to unhook my head twenty minutes later. They’re all the same—white-clad, thick but not overweight, squeaky sneakers, and grayish brown hair tucked into buns. I used to think they were clones, but there are differences.

  Some of them carry candy in their pockets.

  The adhesive grabs strands of hair as she rips the electrodes free, making me wince, and leaves behind little circles of glue on my forehead. I pick at them, rubbing the sticky remnants into balls between my fingers as she disconnects the monitors attached to my finger and chest.

  “You may go,” this particular drill sergeant snaps. “You’re expected in the library.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I reply out of habit. I wish Mole could see me roll my eyes. We could use the nonverbal Cavy network to communicate, but it seems like a lot of work to make fun of a nurse. I’ll see him later, because despite his sightlessness, Mole always knows where I am and what I’m up to. He can track the others, too, but doesn’t as often. “See you, Mole.”

  “Later, Gypsy.”

  The big house at Darley Hall sits quiet in the afternoon, content to hide our weekly tests and daily assessments, and to support our education without judgment. Willingness to bear silent witness must be a prerequisite for a slavery-era plantation home. A breeze, too warm for late November even here in South Carolina, wafts through the towering open windows. They stretch from the floor to the ceiling and open onto verandas on all three levels, and like the faded, reinforced wooden floors and peeling paint, are original to the late-eighteenth-century construction. The house has been preserved when necessary but not restored, which means it’s stable but shabby.

  Not the oldest plantation in the lowcountry, but perhaps the most forgotten.

  We live in the old slave quarters—one-room, brick buildings within view of the big house, but separate, too. Like the previous occupants of our little homes, the Cavies didn’t originate here. We’re part of what makes Darley work, but we’re not its family.

  I avoid the floorboards that squeak—no small task in a house this old and in need of attention—and tiptoe into the library. The Professor favors quiet, and although there are no rules regarding noise since we’re surrounded by empty acres that used to nurture rice, cotton, and pecan trees, we indulge him. Cavies don’t need to speak aloud, but we do prefer it. The rest of the staff avoids speaking to us at all unless necessary, erasing any illusions that they could see us as children, not subjects for study.

  They’re afraid of us even though only a handful of our mutations make us more lethal than a normal human. Those who are that dangerous wouldn’t dream of using their abilities against the peop
le who have fed and clothed us our whole lives, protecting us from a world that would trap us in labs, experiment on our brains.

  See us as less than human.

  The library is one of the bigger rooms in the house, converted from what used to be the upstairs parlor. The Professor looks out a window that overlooks the back lawn. Shelves, sagging with dusty books, cover every inch of the light blue, fifteen-foot tall walls. The morning sunlight still lingers around the front of the house, making this space dim, but motes of dust twirl and waltz like members of a royal court on the pale, reaching sunbeams.

  All at once, happiness floods my bloodstream, as though someone has smacked good cheer into my chest cavity. The strange desire to burst into song hums along my nerve endings, as though I’m a Disney princess summoning her bird and varmint attendants at the window. It takes serious concentration to bite back the urge.

  The abrupt change in mood announces another Cavy’s presence, but as hard as I try to glare at Pollyanna, my mouth refuses to cooperate. Her mutation, a reverse empath alteration that allows her to affect the moods of people in close proximity, is more… invasive than most. Losing control of my own emotions never fails to make me feel icky.

  And given her insistence on cynicism and anger, she’s not aptly named. Not at all.

  “Feeling good, Gyspy?” She shakes out her long blonde hair and pins me with china blue eyes. The faux-happy shroud crawling over me dissolves and my smile finally falls away. Polly nods. “That’s better. You look weird when you smile.”

  “Pollyanna, we have spoken at length about the perils of using your gifts on your fellow Cavies.” The Professor’s patient, tired voice reprimands her, the youngest of his students by several months.

  The Philosopher, who runs Darley, took us in before we were three months old, and we all arrived between sixteen and seventeen years ago.

  “Sorry, sir.”

  She’s not sorry, but his chastisement and her apology are part of our daily routine. Of all the kids here, Pollyanna is my least favorite. She’s everyone’s least favorite, and even though she knows it she doesn’t change. I guess she doesn’t care.

  “Sorry for what? Fucking with people again?” The voice bleeds out of thin air before Haint shimmers into view around it, face first. She leans against one of the bookcases once one of her shoulders appears, examining her nails as she waits for her daily reprimand.

  The Professor doesn’t disappoint. “Language, dear.”

  He says nothing to me, not even hello, nor does he issue a warning to Haint about using her ability to go invisible. It’s not dangerous. Pollyanna could make any one of us walk straight off a cliff if she felt particularly suicidal that day and forgets to keep it inside.

  The twins Athena and Goose arrive together, a tornado of rough-housing elbows and flashes of reddish hair, loosing half a shelf of books onto the floor and toppling an end table before getting themselves under control. The Professor ignores them, having long ago resigned himself to their antics.

  We’re all here now, at least those who are expected. Mole is still enduring his weekly brain prodding and so is Reaper. They’re our lethal Cavies, and are kept for testing more often and longer than the rest of us. We’re categorized according to our level of usefulness, the details of our mutations and abilities listed in records the Philosopher hopes might convince the government we could be potential assets as opposed to threats.

  Three Operationals, two Substantials, one Developmental, three Unstables, and one Inconsequential. That’s me. The one who will never be an asset to anyone but can’t be locked away and forgotten like an Unstable, either. They don’t know what to do with me, so I shuffle along with the group.

  “Everyone sit down, please.”

  The Professor’s command sounds more like a genteel request, and we drop into a circle of cross-legged teenagers on the oval Oriental rug that smothers the center of the room. He paces behind us, passing binder-clipped pages into our waiting hands.

  I grab mine, excited as the title filters through my eyes and into my brain. It’s a thesis written by the Scientist back in the 1960s: Genetic Mutation and the Human Brain.

  He died before any of us were born, but his thoughts and experiments, his studies, are helping the scientists at Darley Hall figure out what might have caused the mutations that resulted in our “gifts.” Maybe one day they’ll figure out how to switch off those screwy genes and I can touch another person. Without the protection of at least one layer of something between us, touching someone means seeing a number in my mind.

  The age the other person is going to die.

  My “talent” is creepy at best, totally useless at worst, and being able to get rid of it has been a hidden desire for the whole of my life.

  I glance around the room, feeling guilty about the thought. No one else acts ungrateful for the hand they were dealt. They spend their days and hours trying to harness their different genes, sharpen their abilities, strengthen their control—to be everything the Philosopher wants. As much as I love the other Cavies, a life where I’m not the failure, holds considerable appeal.

  The Professor separates the twins, putting one behind his personal desk under the spiral staircase and the other on a window seat. I claim the second window seat, enjoying the warmth of the approaching sun on my chilly fingers. The others choose sunbeams or shade depending on their varying body temperatures. We’re all a little different. A little off the average.

  We spend the next hour sprawled around the room reading. I focus on soaking up every ounce of information because that, at least, I can control.

  There are five minutes left of class when the Professor asks us to gather back in the center of the room, likely to be peppered with questions ensuring we retained the points outlined in the thesis.

  The pages have disappointed me, because although any information about brain research is interesting, there’s nothing here that’s new. We’re fed facts and figures and they stick in our semi photographic minds, but the Professor never encourages us to analyze or extrapolate. To find the connections, or maybe contribute to the research that goes on downstairs.

  It’s only been in the past four months that they’ve taught us anything about mutation or brain activity at all, and we understand that the Professor is hiding something from us. There must have been advancements in the field in the past several decades, but we haven’t been given anything more recent.

  Once we’re circled up again, Athena whacks Goose on the head with his paper and their tussle results in a snowstorm of pages that flutter down around us. Goose can move so fast—faster than light—that sometimes it seems as though he and Haint have the same talent for disappearing and reappearing. A slight breeze betrays his movements, though, while hers are silent.

  Athena always seemed like a girl’s name to me, because it ends in an A and the only Athena we know about is the Greek goddess of wisdom. He’s named for her, sort of, because of his superhearing and the way people associated her with owls.

  I don’t know. It’s still a girl’s name.

  He has no qualms about tossing us into the mud for a down-and-dirty wrestling match over voicing that opinion, and since it rained last night, I keep it to myself.

  Once the boys break apart, the Professor continues without cleaning up the mess. “Around the circle, starting with Haint, one fact about genetic mutation, please.”

  “Genetic mutation can be inherited or acquired.”

  “And which is your ability to become invisible?”

  “We don’t know since I’m an orphan.”

  “Very good,” he says, lips turned in a slight smile. “Pollyanna?”

  “It can be caused by damaged DNA.”

  “And what can cause such damage?”

  “Ultraviolet light, radiation, maybe chemicals.”

  “Correct. Something else that can damage DNA, Athena?”

  “Plain old simple mistakes.”

  “And how do those mistakes occur? Gypsy
?”

  Hearing my name drags my brain from the rabbit hole formed by the word mistake. What most of us believe we are. Nothing more, nothing less. Certainly not something to be thankful for, as the staff here pretends to believe.

  “During replication,” I answer, having already committed most of the paper to memory. “They split and one doesn’t form like it’s supposed to.”

  “How often?” The Professor’s still looking at me.

  “One in a hundred million.”

  It’s not as big a number as it sounds, given how many genes make up every living thing and how many times they replicate. Significant mutations, the kinds that make Cavies, are rarer than that. It’s not like having one blue eye and one green, or an allergy to peanuts.

  The Professor grunts in my general direction, the most exuberant approval granted to me in any circumstance. Goose rattles off an answer about reproductive versus nonreproductive cells, then we’re dismissed. Normally we have lessons for four hours a day, but on testing days it’s only one. I’m tired from my electrode fest, in fact, and shuffle toward my cabin making a plan that includes washing my face and falling into bed for a nap. Probably in that order.

  The dirt of the path between the big house and our tidy row of brick cabins clings to my shoes, whirls in my wake like little Tasmanian devils. As I pass the iron gates at the front of Darley Hall, thrown open in an ironic expression of welcome, a second set of footprints appears alongside mine. The rest of Haint solidifies over the next couple of minutes until her chocolate brown skin and swinging jet-black braids keep pace with me down the live oak–lined drive.

  “What did you think of the lesson today?” she asks, the nervous rumble under her words laughing at her attempt at a casual tone.

  I shrug, not wanting to talk about how we’re all a bunch of freak mistakes, but Haint is either really bad at taking hints or doesn’t give a shit. The jury has been out for years.