Born to Darkness (58 page)

“Oh, God,” Stephen murmured.

“Yeah,” Elliot agreed. “It looks like they’re trying to breed ’em now. Nika said the girl appears to be a prisoner, too—at least to some degree. But the man and the woman work there, from what Nika’s described. The plan is for Bach to essentially make her memories his own, and then pass them along to someone who can draw, like
moi
. I can draw as realistic a sketch as I can manage of their faces, and we’ll then try to get a computer match. If we can identify these people, and they live outside the Org building so we can track them as they go to work …”

“Those are some very big
ifs
,” Stephen said.

Elliot nodded. “I’m with you on that. Any word from Mac?”

Stephen shook his head. “No, but Shane’s gone missing, too. Since he’s been to her apartment before—I feel pretty confident he’ll find her. If she needs help, he’ll call in.”

Elliot took a deep breath and just said it. “Is there any chance that the vision you saw—your premonition—”

“No,” Stephen said.

“Okay, was that supposed to be funny, like you’re prescient now so I never have to finish any of my sentences again or—”

“No,” Stephen said again, but then winced. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to … I just knew what you were asking—not because I’m prescient, but because I know the way your brain works. So no, the vision I had wasn’t about Mac getting shot—”

“Well, I know
that
,” Elliot said. “But visions can be cryptic. Maybe you knew
some
one was going to be shot, but you didn’t know who, so your mind made it be me because you love me so ardently—”

“No. I mean, yes, but … No.”

“That’s too bad.” Elliot sighed.

Stephen sighed, too, and reached for him, holding out his hand first, silently asking permission. They were alone in the room, and Bach and Anna remained silent and unmoving in the lab, so Elliot interlaced their fingers.

I would know if the threat is past
, Stephen told him as their connection immediately snapped on.
I don’t know how I know that, but I do. And I know the vision was cryptic because Anna was flying away with Mac, and unless she jokers from taking Destiny, that’s not going to happen the way I saw it. But, really, it’s beside the point, because when I had the vision, I experienced this … god-awful sense of foreboding. And it’s still back there, El. You’re still in danger
.

Then I’ll continue to be careful
, Elliot reassured him.

“Calm blue ocean, calm blue ocean—it’s just
not
working.”

They both jumped and even sprang apart as Bach’s voice came through the speakers, higher pitched and odd sounding.

But then he answered himself, his voice more normal. “Give it time.”

“I’ve given it time.” That was Nika again, speaking through him.

Stephen glanced at Elliot. “You were right. That’s very weird.”

Anna spoke. “Give it a little bit more, Neek.”

They fell silent again, and after a moment, Stephen asked, “How’s Edward O’Keefe?”

“Astonishingly still not dead,” Elliot answered. The old man was clinging to life. “He’s responded to the low levels of oxyclepta
di-estraphen we’ve given him. The self-healing centers of his brain have reactivated. We’re continuing stimulation, and the damage to his heart is continuing to be repaired. His improvement is pretty miraculous.”

“That’s great news, babe,” Stephen said, managing a smile.

“It’s good,” Elliot told him. “It doesn’t get to be
great
until he comes out of the coma, which may not happen for some time. If it happens at all. But my fingers are definitely crossed.”

“Still not working.” In the lab, Bach was now up on his feet. Or rather, Nika was on Bach’s feet. “I can’t
do
this anymore!”

Anna stood, too. “Neek …”

“No, Anna, I tried it. Joseph, I tried it your way! I’ve
calm blue oceaned
ten thousand times. Now I wanna try it my way.”

Bach reclaimed his body and said, “Anger isn’t the answer. The powers it sparks are impossible to control. Yes, it may provide surges—”

“But maybe that’s all I need,” he appeared to argue with himself. “One good surge!”

Anna, too, appealed to Bach. “What can it hurt to try?” she asked. “We have no idea what’s happening to Nika’s physical self while she’s here. We need to find her, and, I’m sorry, but it does feel like we’re wasting time.”

“Nika’s certain that she got here by channeling her anger,” Elliot told Stephen, as Bach just shook his head. “She wants to try doing that again.”

Dr. Bach, of course, believed that harnessing anger—or other passions—was never productive.

“Bach would hate trying that,” Stephen agreed with a nod. “Maybe I can help.” He leaned forward and hit the on switch for the microphone that would allow him to be heard in lab one. “Excuse me, Dr. Bach? How about you sit back for this one—let me come down and run the experiment.”

Bach looked up toward the mirrored window as if his powers allowed him to see through it. Maybe they did. He finally nodded. “Thank you, Dr. Diaz,” he said, as always remarkably polite. “That would be most appreciated.”

Bach sat on the sofa in lab one, and let Nika have total control of his body.

Right now, she wasn’t using more than his vocal cords.

“It started as fear,” she told Dr. Diaz, who’d pulled a straight-backed chair across from them, and was sitting there, giving Nika his full attention. “I woke up and Joseph was gone, and … I was really scared.”

I’m so sorry, Nika
.

It’s okay
, she responded silently.
I’m sorry, too—sorry that I’m disappointing you this way
.

Sweetheart, you’re not. Just … Listen to Dr. Diaz
.

“And then what happened?” Diaz asked, obviously repeating his question.

“And then some of the girls were crying, and I got angry at them,” Nika said. “And I stayed angry and I thought about this girl they killed, right in front of us—”

“Oh, God,” Bach heard Anna say, as she reached over and took his hand.

“And then I got even more angry, because the man with the scar said he was going to make
me
pick one of the other girls, and
she’s
going to be killed.” Nika was breathing harder now, faster, as she let herself get upset all over again.

Or maybe Bach was the one breathing harder, outraged by the sheer evil of Nika’s captors.

After spending far too much time digging around in Devon Caine’s disgusting head, he was well aware of the ways the Organization kept their girls terrified. But this was particularly awful, especially for a sensitive girl like Nika. If such a terrible thing were to happen, even if Bach and his team found Nika and got her to safety, she would be irrevocably changed. She’d be scarred for life.

But they weren’t going to let it happen. They were going to find her and they were going to get her out of there and—

“I’m sorry,” Nika said aloud to Diaz. “I need to … I just need … Joseph is, um …”
You’ve got to stop that
, she thought at
Bach.
At any other time, it would be great, but … It’s not helping. And it’s particularly not helping because unless I learn to do this … this …
impossible
thing, to lower these blocks that I can’t even
feel,
you’re
not
going to find me, and you’re
never
going to get me out of there. And I don’t know why I’m blocked—I don’t even know what it means
—blocked.
It’s not something
I
did, not intentionally, so I don’t know how to fix it. And you say I’m special, but I don’t
feel
special and—

Wait
. Bach stopped her. “Holy shit.”

“That was him, not me,” he heard Nika say to Anna.

“It’s not something
you
did,” Bach repeated to Nika, saying it aloud, looking to Diaz to see if he was following. He wasn’t. “The blocks. Nika’s blocks. If
she
didn’t erect them …”

Diaz got it. “Then someone else did,” he finished for him.

“I’ve been looking in the wrong place,” Bach said, laughing his amazement. He spoke aloud so that Diaz and Anna could follow. “Neek, I assumed you erected those blocks unconsciously, but there
is
another option entirely. And that’s if someone else entered your mind and created these obstacles.”

“Someone else?” She was confused. “Who else?”

“I don’t know,” Bach told her. “But whoever it was, they surely knew you were a Greater-Than.” And if
that
wasn’t a big enough bomb, he dropped another, “It’s possible they created those blocks in an attempt to protect you—to hide you from people who might try to exploit you.”

“That’s absurd,” Anna said.

“No, it’s not.” Bach turned to look at her. “With those blocks in place, Nika has access to only a small fraction of her power. And yet she
still
scanned at twenty.” A fact that was amazing. “Whoever did this knew that her integration was going to explode off the charts when she hit puberty.”

“And actually,” Diaz broke in, “
who
did it is secondary. A mystery for a rainy day. Our primary goal right now is to knock the blocks down. ASAP, Maestro.”

“I’m on it,” Bach said. “Nika, I know we tried this before, but we didn’t really try
this
before.”

She knew what he wanted.
You want me to breathe. And think about a perfect, still ocean. A cloudless blue sky. A drop of water flowing into the—

And just like that, approaching from the outside, instead of trying to unblock her from the inside out, Bach was in.

“Whoa!” If he’d thought Anna’s mind was chaos … Being in the unfettered middle of Nika’s mind was like being caught in a paint store when a tornado hit.

It caught him off guard and he didn’t know where to look first, and for a moment he just spun.

From the corner of his eye—although it really wasn’t his literal eye, it was more his own mind’s perspective—he caught the shape of a woman, a shadow, a shade, as she leapt and faded away. He almost followed, intrigued, certain it was a memory of Anna and Nika’s mother, long dead.

But he needed to focus on this mission, which was hard enough as it was.

Because Nika was emotion personified. She was a thirteen-year-old girl, and her thoughts and observations and memories swirled and skipped and sparked and danced around him in age-appropriate madness, as he took another moment just to get his bearings.

He spoke aloud, though, for the benefit of everyone—including Nika. “I’m in.”

And Bach saw it all now—her vivid memories of everything she’d lived through in the past few days: the abduction, her waking up in the room with the other girls, the visit by the scar-faced man, the dying girls, the port in Nika’s arm, her awakening in the safe room, the steak and french fries, the view out the window …

The window.

The window!

“Nika tried to write SOS on the window in ketchup,” Bach said.

“Tried and failed,” she said. “I only got as far as an S and an O, before Rayonna came in and wiped it off.”

“But it was up there for at least five minutes,” Bach confirmed,
replaying her memory. “Rayonna is the pregnant girl,” he added for Anna and Diaz’s benefit.

He jumped back in time, into Nika’s memory of the view out that window, the way she’d looked to see what type of building she was in, the glass and steel. As she looked down to the ground, he slowed the memory wa-a-ay down, and counted forty floors below them. She’d then looked up—again just a glance—and he counted, as best he could, fifteen above.

“She’s in a building with about fifty-five floors,” he reported, “across the street from both a CoffeeBoy and a Burger Deluxe and a former Burlington Coat Factory, which was next to what looks like a now-defunct florist—called Maxie’s Best.”

Although Nika hadn’t paid any attention at the time, Bach now made note of the angle of the sun in the sky. It was either morning or afternoon, which meant the window was facing either southeast or northwest and … He focused his attention on the horizon, where—there it was—a shimmer of water. It was morning, and southeast, because that was the harbor.

“There was a Maxie’s Best on Washington Street,” Diaz reported from the comm-station. “And … up until about four years ago, a Burlington Coat Factory.”

“Have Analysis check satellite footage,” Bach ordered, “from the past few days, from six to ten in the morning. I want to find and verify the building in which an S and an O appears on one of the windows, somewhere around the fortieth floor.”

“I’ve already sent out the request,” Elliot said, after clicking on the speaker from the observation room, where he was watching.

Bach turned to Anna, who was wide-eyed and nearly breathless with hope.

“We found her,” he said, and she launched herself into his arms.

Or maybe it was Nika she was hugging.

You’re only going to have to hang on a little bit longer
, he told Nika, as he felt the girl use his arms to hug her sister back, enthusiastically.
As soon as we verify your location, we’re coming to get you out
.