One (18 page)

TWENTY-THREE

S
ome cross between panic and hope tightens my throat as the minutes tick by and we finally reach the plains over the Hub. I haven’t even thought about how we’re going to get in.

But when we get to the ramp that will take us underground to the garage, the gate swings open.

“How did you…?”

“It’s my parent’s car,” says Daniel. “Scans right in. Now. How is us breaking into the Hub going to help Elias? How do you even know for sure that they brought him here?”

Just as I’m about to say,
I don’t
, every hair on my body stands on end. My skin prickles and pinches. I haven’t felt anything this intense since that day in art class.

“I… I can feel him.”

Daniel snorts a little, but Leni speaks up. “The buzz, Daniel. You know what that feels like.” She turns to me. “We still get it. When we’re, um…close.” She blushes.

I look down at their hands. Leni grasps Daniel’s so tightly her knuckles almost glow white against the rest of her skin in the dim parking garage light.

“So what are they doing with him?” Leni’s eyes pool with tears.

My heart surges with love for her. Because of how much she loves Elias and because of what I know she’s been through. Because I know how she got that scar on her back. What no one was ever supposed to know. How will I tell her?

I do know when I will tell her. Not now.

“I…I don’t know. I just know it’s bad. He left a message on my cuff and one at the house. He was scared.”

They both stare at me, waiting.

“I don’t know, you guys, okay? But that’s why we’re here — to figure out why. There’s something they want him for, and I’m not going to let them have him.”

“I don’t get it.” Leni looks genuinely confused. “You’re obsessed with the Hub. All you want is to get in here.”

“Did you see Lia and Nora at the Symposium?”

“Yeah.” Daniel snorts. “Smiling like good VanDynes.”

I whip my head around to look at him. “Did you even see them? Did you talk to Elias afterward? Because they were not okay. He knew it, and he knows them better than anyone.”

Daniel and Leni both kind of look down at their hands. I don’t know if they’re convinced or doubtful, so I keep going.

“My brothers are here now too, doing God knows what. The Hub took them almost without any notice.”

“Okay, so? They want the phenoms. Big deal.”

“Yeah, but Elias is not a phenom. They
think
he is. But he’s just a One.”

“Why would they think he’s a Super now?”

“Well…it’s…it’s my fault, actually. I can’t go into it now because I’m afraid we don’t have time.” My voice cracks. “All I know is that, whatever they’re doing to him, his body can’t take it. They think we — Ones — can do stuff we can’t. Or that he can. Maybe. I don’t know. But I don’t want to risk waiting to find out.”

Leni’s gaze darts between Daniel and me, and I can tell she’s going to be the deciding factor here. There are a couple seconds of silence, and then she turns to Daniel.

“You know how to get in, don’t you?”

“I have an idea. But I have no clue where to go from there. No one really knows the layout except high clearance.”

“I do.” I sit up straighter, encouraged. “I know the layout. I’ve seen it — Elias has clearance. He showed me around at the Symposium.”

Daniel’s eyes go wide. “Elias has — what? Well, okay,” he says, shaking his head, “but you don’t have clearance.”

“No. But she does have you,” Leni says, staring at him. “Hack her cuff.”

“You can hack my ID file that fast?” I gasp. “But most people — ”

“Yeah. Would take days. But he’s a genius.”

“Do you have any idea how much trouble I — ” Daniel stammers.

“Daniel. Seriously? She’d do it for you.” Leni motions for my cuff, and I whip it off and hand it to her. Daniel takes it when she shoves it in his face and pulls a tiny screwdriver out of his pocket, going to work on the cuff and muttering about how he’s only doing this because he loves Leni. I can’t help but smile.

In just a few minutes, he’s got the cuff put back together, and I strap it back onto my wrist, praying that his clearance hack is good enough to get me where I need to go.

A soft “thank you” is all I can get out, and then Leni reaches to pop open her door. We stride silently, shoulder to shoulder, toward the elevator that will take us into the Hub.

The elevator opens into a long hallway, the white shining surface barely reflecting back the dull grayish light. It’s on low lights status and doesn’t automatically change when we walk through, to my surprise and relief.

“We’re before the checkpoint, so the building doesn’t care what we do. Not yet,” Daniel explains. “But right at the end of this hallway…” he gestures to a box on the wall right before the doorway to the entrance. I remember it from the Symposium.

“Facial recognition and serum,” Daniel whispers. “You have to let it scan you, then give it a drop of your blood.”

My thumb rubs against my middle finger, which is the one I used to get the blood sample for Mr. Hoffman.

“Shit,” I say. “Dammit.” No way can we pass this scanner. The way the two of them look at each other, I can tell they’re thinking the same thing.

“Okay, Merrin. That’s enough.” Daniel’s eyebrows squeeze together, and he puts a hand on my upper arm, trying to turn me back toward the way we came. I shrug away from him, my face screwing up with the tears and anger I’m trying to keep from flooding out of it. “We’ll figure this out back home,” he says, his voice dropping even more. He turns toward the door, back from where we came.

I plant my feet firmly on the floor. “I know he’s here, you guys. I know it. He told me he needed me.” I dig the white slip of paper out of my pocket and wave it in front of me. “Daniel, he texted you. Trusted you. What else could
M will need you
mean besides ‘Help Merrin get into the Hub?’”

“A lot of things,” Daniel says, clenching his jaw, although he stops, facing the wall, not ready to go back or to continue.

Leni’s eyes turn sad again, and she grabs Daniel’s upper arm.

“Helen,” his voice is soft. “My parents…”

“Merrin is serious. Elias needs us. Elias, who we’ve known since we were little. Okay? If he’s really in trouble…your parents won’t care.”

I want to ask them what the hell they even think they can do, but I’m so grateful for Leni, that she’s even making Daniel hesitate at all, that I bite my lip.

He looks up, his eyes burning a hole in me. “Do you know where to go?”

I close my eyes for a moment, and I can imagine where the hallway curves around, can visualize where it leads into the main lobby and the demonstration rooms. Can remember the hallways I sped past with Elias and the one he pulled me into that night at the Symposium.

“I have an idea.”

“Okay,” Leni says. “After we do this, you just…go. We can take care of ourselves.”

“What are you going to do?” I hiss in a whisper. I’m almost as worried about them as I am about Elias. Almost.

Daniel closes his eyes and shakes his head. Leni snakes her arm around his waist and puts her forehead up to his while she extends her palm out toward the retina scanner. “This is Elias. He would do it for us.” I can’t tell whether she’s speaking to me or Daniel or both of us. “He would do it without thinking.”

I nod, watching her, knowing what she’s going to do and half-wanting to stop her because I know that nothing that comes from it will be good. Not for them, anyway. Not for any of us, but at this point, I don’t really care what happens to me.

A low
whoosh
emits from Leni’s hand, followed half a second later by the most intense column of blue-fading-to-white fire I’ve ever seen, three times denser and brighter than a blow torch. She targets the column behind the retina screen where all the computers are.

The metal glows hot and red, and Leni winces. Something bubbles out from the joints of the box and melts down the sides. She’s completely destroyed the insides, and the plastic has melted and is oozing out of the scanner.

It’s surreal how quiet the whole thing is except for the low, steady whisper of the flame. Like I’m moving in slow motion, I step past the scanner, and nothing happens. It works. No alarm.

“It should take the mainframe a few seconds to catch on. Go!” Leni whispers, her eyes wide.

I reach back, squeeze Leni’s hand, and start down the hallway toward the main section of the Hub.

And then, the alarms sound. Huge whoops that start down the hallway and creep toward us, running through the building section by section. A robotic voice echoes through the speakers: “Facial recognition checkpoint compromised. Please check and reset.”

Yeah. Resetting that thing’s never going to happen.

The sound of footsteps echoes down the hallway. When I imagined the hallways, I forgot to visualize the security checkpoint with real, live guards just around the corner.

Leni and Daniel press up against each other and fold themselves into a small, tight closet a few feet behind me. But there’s no going back now. I squeeze my eyes shut. If there’s any time for going light to work perfectly on demand, now is it.

Leni hisses, “Go! I know you can!” She gives me an apologetic look, then swings the door shut, pulling it the rest of the way closed with a soft snick.

I tell my body to float, and when I fly upward, I can almost feel it sigh with relief. When did it start to feel more normal for me to be up in the air than down on the ground?

The air must be blowing through the ventilation system at a pretty good pace — even though in this high-tech building it makes almost no noise — because I drift, little by little, around to the corner.

At six o’clock on a Sunday, there won’t be many backups. They’ll have to run to get someone else out here quicker than the few minutes it will take them to find the location of the sirens.

Two rows of security guards, each six deep, patrol down the hallway, checking inside every alcove and unlocked door. When they reach Leni and Daniel’s, and it won’t open, one of the guards in the back reaches for something in her pocket and pulls out a key. My heart beats a mile a minute.

I plunge my hand into my pocket, searching for something — anything — I can throw. I find a balled-up foil wrapper from some junk food I ate God knows when and roll it in my palm for a second. I hurl it down the hallway, and it clatters to the floor, startling the guards and moving them all forward.

I hover an inch below the ceiling, keeping my body rigid as a board, holding my breath inside me, hoping it doesn’t push me down like it always used to back when my biggest concern in life was trying my hardest not to float.

TWENTY-FOUR

O
nce the guards leave, I reluctantly sink down to floor level. As relieved as my body felt at going light, as much as it needed it after all that pain, I can’t move that fast — not nearly fast enough — when I’m light.

Plus, the system will register my cuff, and if it doesn’t sense my weight on the floor, I’m pretty sure more alarms will go off.

I speed down the hallways, the alarms from the entrance echoing down and sounding almost as loud as they did back there. The noise makes everything seem chaotic, a grotesque contrast to the spotless gleaming surfaces of the floors and walls.

Next to each door hangs an identical etched placard, all bearing equally boring names like “Meeting Room” and “Conference Hall.” I stop at some that say “Lab,” but peering in the windows, see nothing but empty space and tall lab benches holding only trays of empty test tubes.

I whip around, not knowing what to look at, where to go. How to find Elias. My eyes catch the words on one of the placards: “Medical Wing.”

There’s an entire medical wing here? My heart sinks just as a familiar warm buzz takes over my whole body. Elias is in here. Are the boys in here, too? Or Elias’s sisters?

I burst through the door, and the system gives off a pleasant ping instead of a screaming alarm. Nice work, Daniel.

A short hallway leads to one other door, labeled simply, “Lab.” I peer in through the narrow wire-crossed window, just like the ones on all the doors at school, and see empty lab benches, long tables at standing height. A few microscopes, countless incubators, a mass spectrometer. No big deal, nothing out of the ordinary.

My hand hovers over the door handle, and I’m about to turn away, look for a room with people in it maybe, when something glints off the wall. I look harder and realize — these walls are lined with glass cabinets. Worth a look.

I walk into the room, and the lights flare up. Startled, I say, “Lights low.” They go down again, and I try to blink the shock of the sudden brightness out of my eyes.

It’s dead quiet in here, except for the faintest hum of electricity. With my palm out, I step up to the door of one of the glass cabinets, and I feel the chill of it from inches away. These are all refrigerated. Now that I’m closer, I can clearly see that behind each door are rows and rows of solution-filled vials.

The liquid in the vials glows bright pink, orange, green, yellow. Labels clearly identify their type according to color: Generative. Opener. Terminative. Developer. I have no idea what exactly they’re supposed to generate, open, terminate or develop. Some look like they were typed on an old computer program, others with punched labels, others with wax crayon. Some of them have stickers with sloppy handwriting. The only other thing on them is a rectangular sticker showing the formula for whatever’s inside.

My brain works a mile a minute, piecing each chemical together in my mind. Hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, joining into hexagons, linking together. I’ve seen this pattern before, the one listed on this pink vial. It’s a deaminator. It will break down the guanine in someone’s DNA. It is a mutagen, designed to mutate someone’s DNA on the spot. Reversible, maybe. Barely. If conditions are perfect.

I read the formulas on the orange tubes in the same way. This combination of chemicals, in theory, would stop someone’s DNA from mutating further. Ever. The Terminative formula. In theory, this is what Charlie Fisk would have needed to stop his One from taking over his body.

My hands shake, but I wrench open one of the fridge doors and grab the green vial. I have to know. One more time, I stretch my brain, structuring the formula in my head.
Just pretend this is an organic chem assignment, Mer.

I gasp a little at this next one. This one will deaminate cytosine into uracil — hydrolysis. This is a mutagen. Most of the time, your own body would know how to address the breakdown. Most of the time, a chain reaction would start. Enzymes would sense it and repair the damage in the DNA. Make it better.

This solution would force a mutation. And it depends on the body’s instincts to make it work. But only after it’s fundamentally changed what already exists there.

If the Hub is giving this to people — to Ones — it would take away even their One. Could the Hub really be trying to kick-start bodies into making their own powers?

If I hurt my One — if I made it so I could no longer float — would my body know how to correct it? Fill in the gap? Make it better — make me fly? Would my DNA know what to do? Could it be true that all I have to do is inject myself with this green stuff?

I do know one thing for sure: It could just as likely kill me as give me a Super. Or take everything away completely.

The yellow one is unlabeled. Somehow, that scares me even more than the others.

Then I see, on the label, in the tiniest print — names. Each one of these is personalized. My heart sinks. Each one is designed for a specific person. Allen, Baker, Cole, Dunham — a categorized, alphabetical lineup.

Now, I can’t stop myself. I really can’t. I move from cabinet to cabinet until I reach the Fs. I run my index finger along the vials, squinting at the tiny print. The Fs move to Gs. One, two, three names precede the one I’m looking for. And then I find it, and the world stops around me.

There are three, maybe four times as many tubes labeled “Grey” as there are most others. I force my lungs to take a breath and grab every vial labeled “Grey” I can find, slide it into one of the test tube racks on a cart nearby.

I move three doors down, guessing, and breathe out with mixed sadness and relief when I’m right. Two rows full of vials marked “Summers” and, right next to them, a row marked “Suresh.”

I shove all those in my bag too, pulling a few “Grey”s out to make room for them in the stand. They clink in the bottom of my bag, whispering,
What if we’re the ones?
in the back of my head.

There’s only one other door in the room, and I whip around to it, ready to get the hell out of there and finally find Elias. But something tugs me farther down the wall, to the last cabinet. My hands shake even harder, and I take a deep breath, telling myself this is the right thing to do. He would want me to take these.

There are three times as many vials marked “VanDyne” as there were for the Grey. I take all of them, too. I probably have 40 altogether in my bag now, and some of the “VanDyne” vials won’t fit either. I yank my arms out of Elias’s sweatshirt, shimmy out of my long-sleeved shirt, pull it off, and roll the whole stand up in it so the light clicking of the plastic vials is muffled, tucking the ends of the shirt in around them. I stuff the whole thing into my messenger bag.

Whoever thought that Fisk’s plan to quit any kind of dangerous experimentation after his son died either didn’t know about this or was hiding something. Even in Supers, whose genes have already taken so much mutation and still left them human, these mutagens could kill.

Or they could make a One a Super.

I glance back at all the cabinets. Who are all those people? Are they kids, walking around Nelson, Nebraska, or moved somewhere away from here? Were they all in a Hub study like we were? If they were, did they know? If they knew, did they survive it? If they survived…what happened to them? Where are they? Can they do what we can do? Can they combine to make a Super?

There is no placard on the only other door to the room. My skin buzzes, drawing me toward it, telling me that I have to go through. I crack it open and, hearing no alarm, swing it open the rest of the way.

The testing arena spreads out before me, high domed ceiling directly above. And in front of me, there’s a hospital bed. And Elias is on it.