by J Boothby
I want to scream. “You've got this all wrong,” I say.
“This isn't getting anywhere—” someone says, before the woman cuts off the microphone.
They all confer with each other.
Devon, by the door, looks at me with a sad and guilty expression on his face.
“Kylie,” the woman says, coming back on the speaker. “We want you to demonstrate your abilities for us.”
“Tell me my friends are safe. You shot a five year old boy! You shot me! You owe me that much.”
The woman nods. “Sam is OK, just like you are.”
“Do you have him strapped down in a laboratory too? And Zara?”
“I can't answer that, Kylie. Not until you help us out with more information.”
“I can't do anything in here,” I say. “There's no aether.”
The woman nods and adjusts some dials on the desk in front of her. “How about now?”
The boxes around me lose a little of their glow, and as it dims I can feel aether seeping in.
A trickle.
I breathe a sigh of relief. I call up enough to get rid of the pain in my chest and side, but not enough so there's anything visible.
I have an idea.
It's not the smartest idea, but if they don't know much about me, it might work.
“I can feel it a little,” I say. “But there's not enough for me to do anything with.”
She adjusts a dial. “How about now?”
The energy increases.
I make it look like I'm concentrating really hard. I close my fists and grimace tightly.
I shake my head. “There's just not enough of it.”
The woman confers with others in the room. “OK,” she says.
She twists the dial again, and the glow in the boxes shuts off entirely.
The energy from the lei line beneath wherever we are pours in, fat and strong.
It's a huge lei line. Nothing like what was coming off the stone behind the mirror, but still huge.
It's enough. I call it all up.
And I explode in a violet fireball.
I disintegrate the boxes around me, the IVs, the cameras, the restraints. The stretcher wrecks itself against the back wall. Everyone in the room ducks.
I burn there like a violet star.
Before I head for the door, I hold up my middle finger to the people behind the window.
“How's that?” I say.
The woman with the white glasses looks up from her spot on the floor behind the desk.
She has a smug expression on her face.
“That is just perfect,” she says. “Thank you so much, Kylie.”
She reaches over and twists a different dial.
I can hear a sharp hissing sound over the crackle of my flames.
Gas pours into the room. It smells like hazelnuts.
Is that the floor flying up at me?
Why yes. Yes, it is.
24
What do you do when you realize everything you’ve built your life around might be a lie?
Devon hangs his head over the toilet and vomits. He hasn’t eaten in many hours, so nothing much comes up except some bile. He might never eat again. There’s something deeply wrong inside him now. Something twisted and mixed-up moves around in his stomach as he thinks through what they’ve done.
He signed up to keep people safe. Protecting cities, defending the border. He wanted to stand against everyone who tried to destroy the place he cares about.
This country. This Earth.
He didn’t sign up to shoot women and definitely not to shoot kids.
He heaves again and spits up yellow into the bowl.
Even with the way the shifter woman took down Mason, he can’t make it make any sense.
He watched with horror the way the wolf tore into Mason, ripping into the riot gear, tearing into skin, bones, while all of them looked on. That was tragic and wrong, and he’ll never forget Mason’s screams.
Or that cracking sound when her neck broke.
But it was also self-defense.
The way that little kid hit the wall and slid down onto the floor. That stuffed dog on the floor next to him.
He’s never going to forget that.
He closes his eyes and sees it now.
The way Kylie fell, wrapped in the Blackstone anti-smaug webbing.
It haunts him already.
The rest of the team left standing had rushed to help Mason, once the wolf was subdued.
He rushed to Kylie and the kid.
Neither of them had been breathing. The white gel had splattered across their chests, wet and glistening.
He’d yelled for help. He grabbed one of the other men who was standing over Mason’s body and shoved him at Kylie.
He started CPR on the kid.
Come on, he said, over and over. Hang in there.
After a minute, the kid had coughed, sputtered, and started to breathe on his own.
He leaped over to Kylie, then, and pushed the other guy out of the way. The guy had been sitting there next to Kylie, but staring over at what was left of Mason in shock.
Kylie looked gray, her lips blue.
He cleared away as much of the gel as he could and started chest compressions.
He put his mouth against hers.
Breathe, he thought. Breathe, goddamn you.
He shifted from breathing to chest compressions and then back again.
She’s not going to make it, he thought. She’s gone, and it’s our fault.
And then Kylie’s body spasmed, and she drew in a huge breath and began coughing too.
“Too bad you couldn’t help someone on our team,” the guy next to him said, staring at the body that was Mason.
It was all he could do to keep from punching that guy.
When the recovery team came in, he stepped back and watched in dismay as Kylie and the kid were roughly strapped down on stretchers. He tried to argue with the woman in charge about more sedation, but they ignored him and injected a ton of it anyway.
He nearly had to punch someone else to get them to let him ride along in the back of the transport to keep an eye on them, but in the end, they relented.
When the kid stopped breathing again, he was the one who pulled out the defibrillator, who got an oxygen mask on him.
The others couldn’t have cared less.
It was worse when they got to the facility.
They were stripped and searched, hosed off, and strapped down again in different stretchers and then trundled off to separate holding cells.
The shifter was brought in a cage, unconscious as well, and delivered to another wing.
Devon doesn’t know what sort of experimentation was done on shifters.
He’s not sure he wants to know.
Particularly after he’s seen what they’re doing to Kylie.
He wasn’t sure what she was. But she didn’t deserve to be treated that way.
When he complained to Dr. Echols, he was summarily dismissed. “Go home, agent,” she’d said. “You did your job. Now let us do ours.”
He heaved over the toilet again.
This wasn’t right.
Something was going to need to change.
And it looked like he was going to need to change it.
25
The testing goes on for what must be several days.
There are no windows where they have me, but there are times when it’s quiet and times when there are more people around in the hallways. I’m guessing that’s night and day.
I get food slid on a tray through a slot in the door. I have a cot, a single gray blanket.
In the ceiling are cameras—when I need to use the toilet in the room, I give them a middle finger.
There’s no aether at all in the room. On each of the walls is a version of one of the boxes they used in the first room, which either keeps the aether out or just interferes with my ability to reach it. No way for me to know which.
&n
bsp; I lay on the bed, exhausted, and try not to twitch. I feel like an addict, detoxing.
Several times a day, some very nervous-looking guards come in. They have me lay down on a stretcher, and they strap me down using heavy, fireproof restrains. One of them carries the aether-box in front, and one has one behind me as they wheel me into different, larger experimentation rooms.
They put patches on my temples, shoulders, upper arms, and various other parts of my body. Each patch has a wire attached to it, and the wires all run into a cable that feeds into the wall, and I expect into monitors.
I don’t recognize any of the guards. Devon is nowhere to be seen. They don’t answer any of my questions about where I am, why I’m here, or when I’m going to be able to get out.
When I ask about Sam or Zara, they shake their heads and tell me nothing.
The people behind the glass don’t respond to me either. They just throw different dials and switches and watch what happens.
What is really frightening is that they don’t actually need me to listen to pay attention at all, or to decide to do anything consciously.
They hook me up to the monitors and dial up the boxes. The glow shifts from red to violet, and the room fills up with so much aether, I can’t help but react to it.
My hands burst into flames before I know what’s happening. They flip a switch, and it spreads across me and then spills out into the air in waves.
I try and breathe my way through it, to keep the fire down, to keep them from using me as some sort of flamethrower. But then as soon as I get the fire under control, they throw more energy at me, and I light up all over again.
I’m getting better, though.
I’m remembering all the tricks my uncle taught me. Breathing. Meditation. Visualization. In the thick of it, when they’re pushing a lot of energy at me and I’m wrapped in fire everywhere, I imagine walking through an elegant castle. In every room, I can keep a different part of myself. I place all of the fire in the grand ceremonial hall.
When I want to, I shut the door, and the fire goes out.
At least until they blow the door open again and I’m sucked back inside. But I’m learning to handle more and more fire. More than I ever did as a kid.
I have a lot of time to think, too, which is not good. I’m terribly worried about Sam and also feeling really guilty for what has happened to him.
Are they treating him the same way they’re treating me? It’s bad enough for me—I can’t imagine how that would feel for him. Alone in a room somewhere. All of us gone.
And I worry about Zara, too. I had no idea she was a shifter or that wolf I saw at the riot.
As I was going down, I saw her tearing into the Blackstone Institute woman. What would they have done to her for that? She’s not the first werewolf I’ve met. My ex Michael and I ran into two packs of shifters while we were camped in the desert in New Mexico, north of Albuquerque. One pack did cause us a lot of trouble and almost had us for dinner. But the other was actually really nice to us. While they still ate most of their food raw, they cooked us a great—cow—steak, and we sat up late into the night drinking whiskey. We watched a beautiful moon rise up over the mountains and took turns howling at it.
They were a lot better at howling than we were.
I hope she’s all right.
And I sure hope that woman, the one who shot us, isn’t.
On the fourth “day” of tests, they’re able to use me to get to the Elhyra.
I’m brought in and hooked up as usual. They dial up the aether in the room, and I burst into flames.
But they keep adding more power, even after I’m filling up the room with fire.
And they don’t stop.
I pull it all in, and I burn hot, almost as hot as I did by the stone. A lens on one of the ceiling camera cracks. Part of the wall starts to liquefy.
I can feel the fire in every nerve, all across my skin. My hair stands straight out from my head. I can feel those wings start to form, and the stretcher and I rise up into the air with only the wires holding us down.
“Now,” the woman with the glasses says over the speakers. “Kylie, over on your left, there’s a tunnel in this room. Can you see it?”
I want to ignore her and shut the door, but despite myself, I look around.
I don’t see anything.
“Look really hard.” There’s nothing there.
Not at first. But then I see my fire starting to spin around one of the boxes, one that has begun flashing in some kind of pattern.
“Do you see the tunnel?”
I don’t, not really. It’s just aether, spinning around a central point.
The point widens. Is that my doing? I think it might be.
The fire stretches thin across a circle of air.
I push against it. It’s like a membrane—plastic wrap across the top of a bowl.
It doesn’t feel particularly strong.
You know when you were a kid and had a loose tooth that you couldn’t leave alone? This is like that, too.
I push at that thin spot. I can’t help myself.
With a sound like a bomb, a jagged tear rips open into the world of the room.
It hangs there about halfway between the floor and ceiling, shimmering. The edges of the tear flutter black and gold, silver and violet, as a cold wind whips into the room.
It brings the smells of spice and smoke.
I can see things through the tear: a field of dark grass. A forest of spindly, dark trees.
It’s the Elhyra, I’m sure of it.
I’m shocked. I did this? I shake my head. That’s not possible.
“See if you can keep the way open, Kylie.”
There are two huge moons in the sky. The dark branches of trees reach for them.
In the distance is a silver castle, spires reaching up into the air.
The trees are moving in the wind.
Something else is moving over there, too. It’s coming closer.
Something?
Someone.
I jerk my head back and slam the incursion shut. The edges of the tear seal themselves together with a pop.
Behind the glass, the woman hits the switches to kill all the aether in the room. My stretcher slams to the ground.
I see them cheering and high-fiving each other back there.
The woman with the glasses leans over and opens the mic. “You did great, Kylie. A few more days like that, and you’ll get to see your friends. I promise.”
If she thinks I believe her, she’s dumber than I thought. “Who are you?” I say. I want to know.
“You can call me Dr. Echols.”
“Dr. Echols,” I say. “You can kiss my ginger ass.”
But she doesn’t hear me—she’s too busy getting congratulated by everyone else behind the glass.
I lean back onto the stretcher, out of breath and sweating. I feel exhausted, very used, and trapped.
There has to be a way out of this.
I have to find it.
26
Four days later, everything changes.
I’ve been here at least a week now, and I’m really starting to lose hope. Every day, they bring me in and hook me up to Dr. Echols’ machine. Every day they throw aether at me until I open up an incursion.
And then they start to experiment.
When they’re done, I’m put back in my cell. No one speaks to me. No one even makes eye contact anymore.
I’m some piece of machinery to them.
Two days ago, three mercenaries were sent through my incursion.
They wore night-vision goggles on their helmets and full black bodysuits to keep them hidden and to insulate them from my fire. They were heavily armed: machine guns across their chest, grenades and knives on their belts.
Yesterday they came back, with streaks of dirt on their faces and clothes and excited expressions on their faces.
I think it takes a lot to get a mercenary excited.
They were immedi
ately whisked away by other people in uniform, I guess, for some kind of debriefing. I have no idea what happened over there.
Today, as I’m brought in, there’s a larger group ready to go through. Ten men and women in dark camo, also carrying guns and grenades. They watch me curiously as my stretcher is wheeled in, tilted up, and as I’m hooked up to the wires.
Dr. Echols switches on the aether.
I burst into flame.
Dr. Echols dials up the power.
The room starts to vibrate.
“Look for the door, Kylie.”
I so hate her saying that. But like a trained dog, I can see it. The place over the spinning box where everything starts to fade.
Behind it, just like before, just like every day for the last few days, I can sense a place.
I blow open the incursion.
But this time, the smaug are waiting.
As soon as the incursion opens, smaug soldiers of the Elhyra burst through it.
There are four of them, and they are tall and dark and glittering, with bright armor and whirling cloaks.
They move so fast it’s hard to see them, except as a black and violet blurs. They whirl through the room like person-sized cyclones, cutting through the Blackstone soldiers before most of them even have time to react.
They have long, flashing knives.
They go for the jugular.
They are fast, sharp, and precise. It’s a massacre. Most of the mercenaries are down in the first few seconds. The remaining ones die reaching for their guns.
Not one of them can get off a shot.
Behind the glass, I see a look of panic on Dr. Echols’s typically smug face.
She slaps a button and cuts all the aether to the room. The boxes around me glow red. My fire falls away.
But there’s no effect on the incursion. It’s being held open now from the other side.
The edges of it flash bright violet.
Two of the smaug dervishes spin up to the observation glass.
Dr. Echols shoves herself back from her controls. Behind her, people throw open the door to a hallway and try to run for it.
None of them are fast enough.
The smaug bring up guns of their own and fire at the glass. It shatters, and they’re through it in an instant.
