As Crossley cheers along with the group at another exciting ribbon-cutting ceremony being broadcast on Channel One, I notice him discreetly holding up a small scrap of paper, shielding it in the palm of his hand so that the cameras can’t see it.
I KNOW A PLACE WHERE ERSA CAN’T HEAR US.
Another mindfreak. For the past few months, my Enemy Meter had two readings: For Us and Against Us, with His Traitorness Swain spinning the thing into overdrive. I’d wished all kids were For Us. I’d assumed it. But now?
“Maybe I can help you guys win the next competition. Come on, let’s go study!” I look at him as if he’s crazy, but then I notice he’s winking at me. Ew.
We follow Crossley out of the common room, down a couple of hallways and stairways, and ultimately to a spot just between the A Barracks and the B Barracks. He quickly points at the walls, which, for a few yards, have no cameras or microphone knobs.
“The emergency-containment doors open here, so they didn’t install any cameras or mikes,” he whispers. “So, if you want, I can tell you what I know about your parents.”
In the blink of an eye, Whit has him by the collar. “What do you know about our parents? Where are they? How do you know?”
“Whoa, boy!” Crossley gasps. “You don’t want to hurt me. There’s a lot I can do for you… if you cooperate.”
“Cooperate how?”
“Make a fair trade. I get some of your M; you find out from me where in this facility your parents are being held.”
Whit gives Crossley a perfect body slam-enough to scare him but not enough to really hurt him. “I repeat, what do you know about our parents?”
“Whit, chill,” I whisper, trying the, um, feminine touch instead. “Look, Crossley, you seem like a nice guy. We don’t want to hurt you. But you know what? We can. You’re lying about our parents. We’d never be put in the same facility with them. So first, stop lying, and second-what do you mean by our ‘M’?”
“Your magic. Your mojo. Whatever. I need some. I’m flunking out and need help.” He gives us a pathetic look, and Whit eases his grip. “Please.”
Someone’s asking me for help with his “schoolwork”? I’m just about to burst into hysterics when an alarm goes off.
ERSA’s voice echoes through the hall: “Code gray. Code gray. Code gray.”
Crossley squirms out of Whit’s distracted grasp. “Air-quality alert. Bet it’s an escape attempt,” he says, and starts tearing down the corridor. “In five secs this hall will be swarming with guards!”
The emergency-containment doors fly open and slam Whit and I against the wall behind them. Three school monitors the size of nightclub bouncers are dragging escapee Byron Swain. He’s limp-dead? No, he’s coughing now. Hard.
He sees me, of course, and croaks, “Told you. Stay away from the wrath of ERSA.”
Chapter 52
Wisty
MY FIRST CHOCO-OPP IS a contest taking place in the Dynasium-basically a gym for dynacompetents, which is what they call kids they think might have energy capabilities rather than admitting that we actually have magic.
There are weights to levitate, bottles of various liquids to transmogrify (yeah, I don’t know what that means either), metal bars to bend, braziers of oil to set alight. And there are bunnies and rats in cages for I don’t know what yet-maybe we’ll just have to change the color of their fur?
Crossley, who’s now pretending yesterday’s weird episode never even happened, tells me the kids call these competitions “spelling bees,” although that’s strictly on the down-low. So is the slang term “M,” for magic.
ERSA, like most New Order officials, has absolutely no sense of humor. So we’re not in here casting spells, you see, we’re here demonstrating “dynacompetent potentials” and transmitting “biokinetic energies.”
ERSA’s smooth-as-apple-butter voice fills the room. “Students, join your partners at the workstation identified on the assignment board and await further instruction. You will have sixty seconds to complete your assigned challenge.”
I look up at the board and moan aloud. Whit got some cute girl named Cherry Lu whom he’s been playing eye hockey with ever since we got here. And me?
Perfect.
I have Byron “Nonmagical Weasel Who Shouldn’t Be in This Place to Begin with” Swain. “Informant” Swain. “Soon to Be a Half-light” Swain.
I take a deep breath so I’m better able to resist the urge to strangle him. Focus, Wisty. You must win the contest, I remind myself. Do it for the chocolate.
Byron and I head over to our station, a wooden bench with a series of lightbulbs and some big old metal drum attached to it. As we walk, I actually put my arm around his waist-but it’s only because I’ve got a pencil in my hand that I’m knifing into his side as hard as I can.
He doesn’t resist.
“I hate you forever,” I say through gritted teeth. “Forever, you hear? You’re a criminal. An informant on Freeland. You’re probably the reason Whit and I ended up here.”
Byron says nothing. He just looks… sad.
“On the count of three,” says ERSA, “you will turn over the instruction card at your station. The first team to successfully complete the task it describes will win a trip to the BNW Reward Center… for chocolates. Get ready!”
I shove Byron out of the way and give him a threatening look so he knows not to interfere. “You’re probably the reason Eric betrayed me,” I continue.
“One…”
“And the reason that Margo died,” I accuse him. “You’re a murderer.”
“Two…”
“So what do you have to say for yourself, you hideous, low-down louse?” I place my hands on either side of the laminated instruction card.
Byron looks me in the eye.
“Three!” ERSA announces.
“I promise you, Wisty,” Byron whispers, “everything I’m doing is to protect you, not to hurt you. I swear to you over my dead body. And I will be dead, soon enough. I would even die for you.”
I turn over the card and… No way.
Good afternoon, ma’am. Flame Girl reporting for duty!
Chapter 53
Wisty
IT WAS TOO EASY.
The apparatus on the table was a steam turbine hooked up to a generator, and, get this, all I had to do was use magic to heat the thing up to light the bulbs on the table. I lit those bulbs so bright the other kids started yelling at me to turn them down because it was hurting their eyes.
Sore losers.
Not that I blame them-I’d be honked off, too, if I wasn’t going to get any chocolate.
I’m so pumped I don’t even care that Byron’s coming, too. And, I have to admit, his very traitorous presence ticks me off so much it’s easy to light up every single bulb that I walk by on my way out of the Dynasium.
I hardly notice that the “Reward Center” looks like some enormous, dingy corporate call center with carpet-board cubicles all over the place. Sitting at many of them are blissed-out, brown-mouthed children, with enormous platters of chocolate in front of each of them. The kids are covered with wires and weird electro-majiggies that sometimes seem to pulse with a strange blue light.
But, OMG, I can smell the chocolate! Mouth watering. Knees weak. Can’t talk.
“Prisoner Allgood and Informant Swain, please proceed to cubicles 124G and 124H,” says ERSA.
“Follow me,” says Byron. “I’ll show you how to hook up the monitors.”
“Monitors?”
“You need to wear the monitors when you eat the chocolate.”
“Not surprised, I guess, that you’re so skilled in surveillance tech,” I snort. But just between you and me, right now I’d wear an I BYRON T-shirt if it meant I could get some more of that chocolate.
Byron helps me put these little suction-cup things on my forehead and arms. They’re like those electrodes they use on patients in the hospital, only they’re bigger, and the wires are a whole lot thicker.
And
then, Oh yeah, here comes an automated cart with two huge platters of chocolate-I’m talking bigger than my head! One has Byron’s name on it, and the other -
I’ve wolfed down at least a quarter pound before I even realize I’ve done it. The stuff tastes that good.
And I’d suck down more except my stomach is starting to protest. I guess there’s a reason people don’t eat candy for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
I take a breath and look around.
Some of the kids have clearly been here awhile and have eaten their entire trays. Most of them are now slumped over. Napping, I guess?
Except maybe that little kid over there-he definitely looks a little green.
And that girl lying on the floor. While I watch, two goons in medical scrubs come in and drag her away.
Byron looks up from his own personal choco-fest and notices my glance.
“Yeah, she probably hasn’t learned her limit yet. They’ll take her to the vomitorium.”
“The vomitorium?” I ask, not really thinking it through.
“That’s what the students call the place where they pump your stomach.”
“Ah,” I say, vaguely finding that disturbing, but I feel another choco-craving coming on and quickly turn my attention back to my glorious platter. I swear, if they’d had this stuff back in my high school, I would have weighed 250 pounds.
But right then I start to get really tired, and the suction cups on me-it’s as if they’ve gotten very cold. They’re almost burning, the cold stings so much. The wires are glowing an unearthly blue color. And my stomach’s totally knotted.
And I don’t know that I’ve ever been so tired in my whole life. It’s as if these wires are sucking the life out of me…
Byron is giving me a worried look. What’s he saying? Maybe if I just put my head down on the desk for, like, a few seconds, just close my eyes…
Chapter 54
Whit
POOR WISTY COULD BARELY sit up and, for two days afterward, had to stay in her bunk, subsisting on water and the soup crackers that I stole from the cafeteria.
But the craziest and scariest part of it was, even in the height of her sickness, she was still craving more chocolate.
My sister was officially an addict.
“I actually fantasized before we got here that it would be like a celebrity-rehab center where I could just do nothing but recover all day,” Wisty confesses to me at one point. “Now that I’m doing it… well, it sucks.”
It’s not easy for a champion athlete and a whip-smart troublemaker who loves the spotlight, but we resolve from here on out to be the most average, unremarkable students in the building.
We’ll do everything asked of us, but no more than that. Nothing that will make us stand out. Anything to keep us from getting any special attention.
It’s nearly impossible to stay under the radar with Crossley and Byron on the premises, since we’d love nothing more than to interrogate the heck out of them. But we quickly figure out that the best strategy is to nod politely and do our work with as much mediocrity as possible.
Our assignments center around the “brilliant efficiency” of the New Order’s world vision. Essays in which we prove that The One Who Is The One is the most powerful visionary in all of human history. Math problems in which we demonstrate that never before have more people been more productive than under the New Order. Science readings in which we learn that magic, art, music, and most of the rest of humanity’s former extracurricular activities were harmful to humankind.
One day our plan to blend in goes up in smoke, though, when Crossley does something really stupid. He’s still peeved at Wisty for not giving him some of her M.
We’re sitting in the cafeteria, eating the usual nutritious but antidelicious porridge, when he throws a piece of chocolate out on the table right in front of her. I figure it must be stolen, since he doesn’t get to the Rewards Center much.
“Want some choc-o-late, Wisty?” he says real slowly, smacking his lips.
My sister looks down at the candy and literally starts to tremble at the temptation. She drops her spoon and grabs the edge of the metal table with both hands.
“Yeah,” Crossley goes on, despite the “I’m going to grind you into burger meat” look I’m giving him. “I won a contest. Guess I didn’t need your help after all. But maybe I could use your help eating my rewards,” he says, pushing the chocolate closer to her. “Or not.” He pops it into his mouth.
Wisty’s shaking. In fact she’s shaking so hard the whole table’s moving around. And now, oh no, not again -
She bursts into flames.
Chapter 55
“FINALLY!” SAYS THE ONE Who Is The One triumphantly. “This is what I needed to see.
“Clearly,” he continues, walking away from one of the dozens of video monitors, stroking his chin, “it’s just as I hypothesized. It appears she manifests especially in moments of great duress. Which clearly indicates she has little or no mastery of her Gift.”
The man at his side types this up in his mobile data pad and nods.
“Once they’ve doused the flames, put her in the Isolation Ward. We need to study her abilities in a controlled environment. And, needless to say, show no mercy. Not to either of them. I need results, results, results!”
“Yes, Your Excellency,” says the assistant.
“The Allgoods believe they’re here to get closer to me, and they’re absolutely right,” The One reflects. “In time, once I know them better than they know themselves, I will get very, very close to them.”
Chapter 56
Wisty
“WELL, ‘GRIM’ HAS A new dictionary entry,” I comment aloud to myself as I explore my latest venue. The Isolation Ward they put me in is actually the vast, windowless, unbearably dank basement of the BNW Center. “This place makes the General Bowen State Psychiatric Hospital”-one of the dungeon cribs that we busted out of-“look like a flower shop, a tea parlor, and a cribbage hall.”
Great. Five minutes in solitary, and I’m already talking a blue streak to myself.
No worries, though. My giant bunker is about to be filled with six bighearted scientists running inane tests on me. You know how your doctor bangs your knee, shines a flashlight in your ear, and presses your tongue down with a stick and never finds anything wrong? It starts out kind of like that. The medicos seem particularly interested in my fuzzy head, examining it with a magnifying glass.
“A shame that the original was destroyed,” a giantess I decide to call Helga says to another “researcher,” who looks like a beautician from a backwater town-who nearly flunked out of cosmetology school. I call her Gigi.
“The informant has provided a small specimen, but the rest is said to be lost, or possibly under heavy guard,” says Gigi.
Am I actually hearing that my hair has become like the Holy freaking Grail?
Then someone starts plucking out some samples of my hair-or, rather, reddish stubble-with a tweezerlike tool.
“Ouch!” I yell, and try to slap the hand away, but my wrists are grabbed by a doughy-faced lab assistant I call Hans.
Gigi, who I think is the lead scientist, steps back and looks intrigued, almost pleased, by my reaction.
“Why don’t you just wax my whole scalp while you’re at it?” I spit out sarcastically, and then instantly regret it.
Because that’s when the torture really begins.
Chapter 57
Wisty
IT BEGINS with the waxing. Helga takes the hot substance and sticky fabric strips and starts ripping the eighth-of-an-inch-long precious regrowth right from my skull. Okay, it’s my scalp, but it feels like my skull.
Note to self: Never make torture suggestions to captors. They have plenty of their own creative ideas.
As in, testing my response to sudden, random eardrum-breaking air-raid sirens. Or to lights that strobe really slowly so my eyes nearly adjust to the darkness and then-flash-I’m blinded by an eye-exploding random pulse of pu
re white light. It’s truly the stuff that migraine headaches are made of.
“If this were an interrogation,” I tell them, “I’d have given you your answers long ago. So what are the questions? I repeat, what do you want from me?”
“Give us your Gift,” Gigi demands. “That would be sufficient.”
“No way!” I wouldn’t do that even if I knew how.
While Gigi executes the experimentation, Hans and Helga hold me in place as needed. Their three white-suited compatriots are now sitting in a row of chairs in front of me with their notebooks, watching as if I’m the season finale of their favorite TV show. The only thing missing is the popcorn.
Next they’re delivering hot steam into my face and nostrils like a facial from hell. Suffocation by dragon breath. Give me waterboarding any day.
Then they demonstrate an acute pinching technique that takes six hands-Helga’s, Hans’s, and Gigi’s-and if that sounds like child’s play, think again. It’s like being attacked by fire ants with road rage.
“Give us your Gift!”
“WhmmaMMMMMphhhhhh!”
I forgot to mention-they seem to need to try everything twice: once with duct tape on my mouth/eyes/hands, and once without. This time, it is with duct tape.
Then there is the force-feeding of unmentionables (I can’t even write it without serious gagging). Let’s just say I would rather be biting off live bat heads.
What ends up being the worst part, you ask?
If you have an aversion to dismemberment, don’t read any further. (Okay, that pretty much includes everyone.) While my limbs remain intact, someone else’s apparently haven’t.
They bring Drummer Boy’s hands. On a platter.
I know from his insignia ring. They force me to hold those hands, and, by God, they are real.
I used to think that the New Order had banned all art, but I now realize I was wrong: The fine art of human torture is alive and well here.
The Gift Page 11
