Born to Darkness

by Suzanne Brockmann

  “If it’s urgent, sir,” Robert said, “I can connect you to one of the other staff members.”

  Hah. He was right. Mac was staff.

  “Or,” Robert continued, “I can send someone up to escort you over to the health center …?”

  Staff at OI’s health center …? Was Mac a doctor or maybe some kind of paramedic?

  “Oh, nah, that’s okay,” Shane said. “I’m sure I can find my way over there, if I need anything.”

  “Well, no, sir, I’m sorry, but you can’t,” Robert told him. “You haven’t been cleared for movement throughout the facility. Besides, all of the Potentials go into lockdown from midnight to oh-seven-hundred.”

  Shane went over and tried to open first the slider to the balcony and then the door to the hallway. Sure enough, he was locked in. Sort of. The slider could be taken off its tracks and the main door’s hinges were on the inside, all of which made the lockdown mostly symbolic—at least to anyone who absolutely needed to get out. Although there were probably security cameras outside of the building and in the halls …

  “I’m putting in a request for someone to come to your room,” Robert decided, and as Shane started to speak, he added, “And I’ll leave your message for Dr. Mackenzie, although I have no idea when she’ll be back.”

  Dr. Mackenzie. Holy shit. Mac was a doctor. “Thanks,” Shane managed. “But—”

  “Someone will be with you immediately,” Robert said.

  “That’s really not necessary,” Shane said as the bell on his door buzzed. “Wow, that was fast.”

  “Have a pleasant morning, sir,” Robert said, and cut the connection.

  Shane hung up the phone and went back to the door—which he still couldn’t open. But there was some kind of intercom system right near a standard peephole, so he leaned on the button. “I’m kind of locked in.”

  The peephole revealed a tall man wearing a lab coat and … Yeah, it was Dr. Zerkowski. He was just as rumpled, but a lot more tired than he’d looked all those hours ago, when they’d spoken via Vurp. “I have a master key,” the doctor said now. “May I come in?”

  “Knock yourself out,” Shane said, and the door opened. “I’m sorry you were bothered, Doc. I really don’t need anything—”

  “Yeah, I know,” the doctor told him. “I scanned the transcript of your phone call—the beginning of it, at least. Did you get the information you wanted?”

  Shane laughed his surprise, which kind of killed his ability to play dumb. He tried anyway. “I’m sorry …?”

  “Not entirely, huh?” Zerkowski said. “Thanks, I will come inside for a minute. And it’s Elliot. Please.” He stepped forward, a move that forced Shane to shift back, and the door closed behind him. “Actually, I was in the building when I heard that you’d arrived. Since you’re obviously still awake, I thought I’d drop by.” He smiled at Shane. “And keep you from giving another entry-level worker the third degree about Mac, who happens to be a friend of mine. Didn’t it occur to you that it might be problematic for a Potential to be asking a lot of questions about her, leaving her messages …?” He answered his own question as he went into the living room. “Probably not. Same way it probably didn’t occur to her that you’d put two and two together and show up here with a lot of questions needing answers.”

  “I just want to talk to her,” Shane said.

  Elliot gave him a pointedly oh really? look as he sat on the sofa. But he changed the topic. “You have any questions about the program?” He gestured toward the e-reader. “I see you’ve been given an overview.”

  “Yeah, I guess my biggest question,” Shane said as he stayed standing, leaning against the wall that separated the main room from the bedroom, “is about how to handle the anticipation. I mean, I’m not sure I can wait to find out whether my big superpower is going to be flying or invisibility.”

  The doctor laughed. “A nonbeliever. Better and better. For the record, Mac thinks you could be very special.”

  Shane had to work it, overtime, to keep himself from reacting, and this time he was pretty sure he’d pulled it off.

  “And excuse me for the incredulous staring,” Elliot continued, “because you’re even more … military in real life than you are over Vurp, and you come across as pretty intensely military, even over the Internet. I think I’m also having a bit of a disconnect because you’re not at all what I’d imagined as Mac’s type for a bar hookup.”

  As accurate as his being a bar hookup was, it was entirely possible that Elliot was on as much of a fishing expedition as Shane had been on earlier. So Shane kept his face blank and his mouth tightly shut.

  After a good thirty seconds of sitting there in silence, Elliot nodded and stood up. “Good, then. I like you. A fast learner. You’ll do.” He headed for the door, but then turned back. “Have you ever broken a bone?”

  It was an odd question, coming out of left field like that. But Shane nodded. “Yeah. My collarbone. I was fifteen, playing baseball …”

  “Okay,” Zerkowski said. “So much for that theory.”

  “What theory?”

  “My theory that your big superpower is an ability to instantaneously heal yourself—and anyone else that you come into, um, intimate contact with. And as far as big goes, that would be really big, in the superpower world that we’ve documented here at OI. We haven’t seen anything like that before. I mean, aside from some vaguely mythical superhero-type, who allegedly lived over two thousand years ago.”

  “Why would you think that I could …?” Shane shook his head.

  “I should probably let Mac tell you,” Zerkowski said. “But on the other hand, she’s probably gonna go into serious avoidance mode, and you might not see her for a while, so … I’ll just say it. Mac broke her ankle tonight. Badly. And something happened between the time that she broke it and the time she showed up back here, with the injury completely healed. And I’m pretty sure that the something that happened was you.”

  Shane was now guilty, himself, of some incredulous staring. “I don’t believe that,” he said. “There’s no way her ankle was broken.” He’d seen her running on it, but he stopped himself from saying that—he’d already given away too much.

  “I can show you the results from her med scans,” the doctor said. “Yesterday’s, without any indication of a break, and then today’s, with the break fully healed. But it’s unethical for me to do that without her permission. So we’ll have to wait for her to return before we can completely blow your mind.” He clapped his hands together. “In the meantime, what do you say we get started on some of those tests that were outlined in your overview material? Since it appears that neither one of us is very good at sleeping …?”

  Shane shrugged. “I’m up for anything. But I’ve got to warn you, you’re going to be disappointed. You might be better served recalibrating your medical scanner.”

  “I’ve done that,” Elliot told him. “Twice.”

  “Maybe you should let me lay my special Jesus-hands on it,” Shane said.

  Elliot laughed as he unlocked the door and held it open, gesturing for Shane to exit first. “Sarcastic mockery of my life’s work—that never gets old.”

  “Just tell me this,” Shane said as they headed down the hall, toward the elevators. “In all your years of research, have you ever found anyone who can actually do the things described in those reports?”

  Elliot smiled. “There are dozens, currently right here, training at OI. Of course, most of them don’t make it beyond more than thirty-percent integrated, so they have beginner-level skills, at best. The training is intense, and progress is slow, so attrition tends to be high. About ninety-five percent of each class drops out—that should sound familiar to you.”

  Shane nodded. SEAL BUD/S training also had a notoriously high candidate dropout rate. “But if five percent stay in the program,” he pointed out, “that means you’ve got people walking around, right here at the Institute, with scientifically proven telepathic and telekinetic
powers.”

  “That’s right,” Elliot said as he pushed the down button for the elevator.

  “Okay, then. I want to meet someone,” Shane said, “who can do a whole lot more than guess what I had for breakfast or push a pencil across a table without the use of hands—or gravity.”

  Elliot smiled as the elevator door opened, and he gestured for Shane to get in. “You’ve already met someone,” he said, “who can pick you up and throw you, while standing twenty feet away.”

  Shane knew what he was implying, and he couldn’t help but laugh. “Mac?”

  The doctor nodded serenely. “Mac Mackenzie can kick your ass—without her foot getting anywhere near your posterior.”

  “Yeah,” Shane said. “Sorry, but I’m going to have to see that to believe it.”

  “That can be arranged.”

  Shane nodded. “I can’t wait.”

  But what he really couldn’t wait for was a chance to see Mac again.

  And even though Elliot didn’t say as much, Shane was well aware that the doctor knew that, too.

  Anna didn’t think that she’d be able to sleep.

  But the word came back—pretty quickly—that the mechanic’s garage in South Boston was deserted. Sometime during the past afternoon or evening, Nika had been moved to a different, as-yet-undetermined location.

  Joseph Bach had called Anna himself to deliver the bad news. “We’ll find her,” he said, but at this point, his words sounded a bit hollow.

  “I don’t know how,” she admitted quietly.

  “Have faith,” he said and ended the call.

  The fatigue that replaced her spark of hope was overwhelming, and Anna curled up on the sofa in the OI apartment’s spacious living room, and closed her eyes. It seemed impossible that she would actually fall asleep, but she must’ve done so, close to immediately. Because it wasn’t long before she began to dream.

  Nika was back in the hospital, getting an outpatient medical scan for the chronic sinus infections that had been troubling her for nearly two years. Her new scholarship to Cambridge Academy had included health care, so for a hundred dollar co-pay, they were finally able to buy her the tests needed to make sure the situation wasn’t something more serious.

  It wasn’t. The doctor had called Nika’s sinuses a swamp and had prescribed a heavy-duty, long-term dose of antibiotics, which had finally begun working to clear up the recurring infections.

  It was obvious, upon waking, why Anna had dreamed about that somewhat mundane and insignificant hospital visit.

  Because Elliot Zerkowski had told her it was those very hospital records that both the Obermeyer Institute and the underworld Organization had hacked that identified Nika as a Potential. It was through that medical scan that both groups had realized that the girl was already a Twenty, which was very rare.

  Apparently, even though a standard med scan wasn’t calibrated to report integration levels, it did provide information on brain activity. And certain activity combined with various hormone and enzyme levels was found, more often than not, to occur in Potentials.

  If Anna hadn’t been sick and tired of Nika’s constant coughs and sore throats, if she hadn’t pushed Nika finally to go to the doctor’s …

  In her dream, Nika had looked balefully up at her from the table where the doctor—tall and dark-haired and oddly familiar—had scanned her, as if to say that this was all Anna’s fault.

  But then the dream shifted, and suddenly she was Nika, and the table where she was lying became a hospital bed with restraints that bound her arms and legs. The white cover that had been pulled over her was stained with a horrible spray of blood, the sight of which still made her terribly, breathlessly afraid. Her left arm burned and throbbed with pain, and she realized that some sort of medical port had been inserted, giving access to her vein. A tube was connected to the port, leading down to a bag that was slowly filling with her blood, as her heart continued to pound.

  Around her, other girls, most much younger, were screaming and weeping. They were all trapped in beds like hers, and there were about twenty of them in the room.

  A badly scarred man was making his way around the room, attaching tubes to the ports in the remaining girls’ arms. He was wearing a bloodstained white lab coat and carrying a surgical knife. He used it not merely to frighten or threaten. Occasionally he would strike and slice, and blood would flow, which made his threats to the other girls that much more potent.

  Not all the girls were screaming, though. One girl, her name was Zooey, several beds down, just watched silently, expressionlessly, with dull eyes. The man stopped and looked at her, and the girls around her screamed as if to try to rouse her, but she didn’t move, didn’t speak, didn’t look up from some invisible point on the far wall. And finally the man moved on.

  He traveled the room twice—once to attach the empty bags, and then again when they were filled with blood, to collect them, detach the tubes, and reinsert the plugs in their ports.

  But for Zooey, he didn’t remove the tube or reinsert the plug. He just left it open and flowing, and her blood soon soaked the sheet that covered her legs.

  Nika expected him to return to the little girl, especially when she seemed to awaken and started to cry and moan, but he didn’t. He left the room without looking back, closing the door behind him with a solid-sounding thunk.

  “Help me, please help me,” Zooey sobbed, but the man was gone.

  All of the girls were crying then, and Nika shouted above them, “Pinch the tube! You can reach it with that same hand. Just grab it and bend it and the blood flow will stop! Come on, Zooey, do it!”

  And Zooey finally heard her, but like Nika, she was dizzy from lack of sleep, from the constant interruptions and visits from the awful scarred man. She had to be dizzy, too, from giving so much blood without any solid food.

  It was awful to lie there, trapped and helpless, as the little girl’s strength ebbed, as she finally fell asleep, exhausted. Nika tried to wake her by shouting and screaming, but by then Zooey was unconscious and there was no way to save her, nothing to do but watch that blood dripping, dripping, dripping onto the floor as the girls around her wept.

  Nika must’ve dozed off, because she jerked awake to the screams of the other girls, and she saw that the man with the scarred face had finally come back into the room.

  Hope bloomed as he went to Zooey’s bed, but he didn’t remove her tube and plug her port. Instead, he unfastened her restraints and as he picked her up, her head lolled back. And Nika got a nightmarish glimpse of the girl’s small, pale face, with her eyes wide open and staring at nothing, before the man threw her lifeless body into a garbage bin.

  And he took out his knife and asked, “Anyone else want to go out with the trash?” as he slowly spun to look at each one of them.

  He pointed at Nika, maybe because she didn’t scream, maybe because she looked at him with all of her hatred for him burning in her eyes. But he said, “You. You are a fountain. Devon Caine will be rewarded for bringing you to us. I’ll let you choose one of your new friends. She’ll be given to him as a gift.”

  “Fuck you,” Nika said, even as her heart again began to pound. Devon was the name of one of the men who’d kidnapped her—the bigger man. The man who bit her on the shoulder, the man she’d been terrified was going to do awful things to her, before the other, smaller man yelled at him and made him back down.

  The man with the scar smiled—or at least she thought that his grimace was a smile. It contorted his face and made him look even more frightening, and the girls around her screamed and screamed and screamed …

  TEN

  Bach awoke with a gasp.

  He’d stopped for a quick combat nap in the Star Market parking lot in Newton. But now, awakening from that mind-blowing nightmare about Nika and the scar-faced man—if that was indeed what it was—he put his car back into gear. He quickly pulled out of the lot, hurrying back toward OI, taking the Pike west, with the dawn lighting the sky behin
d him.

  He turned off the heat in the car and opened his window several bracing inches as he drove. He let the early morning air slap his face as he made a quick call to Analysis, asking them to pull whatever files they could find on a Devon Caine.

  Finding Rickie Littleton and his unidentified cohort had been Bach’s highest priority, past tense. Tracking them down was, of course, still way up there on his to-do list. Except now his newest high priority was to check in with Anna Taylor.

  And run some more detailed tests on the woman, because, what if …?

  Bach still couldn’t quite wrap his brain around what had just happened while he was asleep, but he’d lived long enough to know that just because he hadn’t imagined something was feasible didn’t mean that it wasn’t.

  A joker delivering punches with the sound of his voice was tonight’s Exhibit A.

  And yes, it was possible that Bach had simply had a nightmare about Anna’s little sister, and that his mind had conjured up that name—Devon Caine—from a memory of something he’d read or heard or perhaps a photograph he’d seen in the past.

  But there were other possibilities, too.

  One was that Anna—whose head he’d spent some significant time inside of tonight—was, like her little sister, in possession of significant power that hadn’t shown up on the med scan she’d received upon arrival at OI. And that Anna’s power, plus Nika’s, plus Bach’s had combined to …

  What? Create a telepathic ability to project thoughts over distances that heretofore had been unheard of?

  Again, in Bach’s world, unheard of wasn’t really all that big of a shocker.

  Another possibility was that Bach had suddenly spiked—gone from seventy-two to seventy-three. Increases of power rose tremendously as integration levels got bigger, so that while the difference between a Ten and a Twelve wasn’t that significant, the difference between a Seventy-Two and a Seventy-Three was vast.

  Bach had been training and working for years now without the slightest increase in his integration. It was time for a bump upward. And maybe the ability to receive some type of thought projection from Nika was one of his newest skills.