One (One Universe) (16 page)

“The other reason,” Dad raises his volume, and I know he wants the boys to hear this one, “is for subtlety’s sake. There’s been a lot of money and time poured into this place, and we’ve come up with some amazing discoveries. But we’re not here to brag. Gifted individuals are no more important or valuable than anyone else. It’s important that we all remember that.”

I try to imagine what kind of building the Hub must be that, if it were built above ground on the Nebraska plains, would intimidate anyone enough for them to get angry.

A security booth at the entrance scans our cuffs, electronically bleating out “Verified: Grey” or “Verified: VanDyne” for each of the tickets that have been programmed there.

When we park, the garage is just that — a garage, like in the airport or the hospital or any other place. I itch at the button on my cuff, impatient to get out and see the Hub. And hopefully see Elias, sooner rather than later.

We squeeze into an elevator and lurch up a few floors. I brush some lint off the black suit pants Mom made me wear and roll my ankle toward the outside of the black, pointy-toed pumps she handed me to go with it. The elevator dings, and we step out into the hugest, whitest, most glowing room I’ve ever seen.

Everything shines with its slickness, from the tiles to the walls. A solid white ceiling stretches down the wide corridor almost as far as I can see, and it’s tiled with rectangular fluorescent lights lined up in perfect diagonal rows.

“Welcome to the Biotech Hub Symposium,” a Hub worker greets us. “This is the center room, where we’ll be having the resources fair. Check out what’s available for the average Super and our scientists out there.” He turns and motions toward the stages. “On either end, we’ll have demonstrations.

“The Symposium schedule is programmed into your cuffs, and you’ll need to scan into each section of the building. Different clearance levels for each participant. You understand. They’re on high alert with so many non-personnel here.”

My heart sinks. I knew, of course, I wouldn’t be seeing the whole Hub. I guess I just didn’t think about it. But something in me knows that this might be the last chance I get, especially since I ditched Mr. Hoffman and haven’t heard from him since. All the formulas and equations and experiments of this place have been calling me since I was little. Ever since I wanted to be more than a One.

“Thank you,” Dad says to the worker and turns back to us. “Now, go anywhere, do anything you want. Anything you’re
allowed
to do, which I think…” He checks his schedule. “…is pretty much just the resources fair today. And a few demos.”

He clears his throat. “No leaving the Hub without us, obviously. You can text us as you normally would, so no excuses for anything. Meet back here at 4:00, boys, so we can take you home before the dinner, and so Merrin can go with Mom to change.”

Dad turns to me. “Merrin? You are staying here until the end of the dinner. You can ride home with Elias, but you must let us know if that’s what you’re doing, and you must go straight home. So you let us know when you’re getting in the car and when you arrive at the front door.”

I roll my eyes, thinking how if Elias and I really wanted to spend some alone time in the house, a requirement for texting wouldn’t prevent that. At all.

But I smile and say, “Sure, Dad.”

Mom gives us all hugs, seeming even more distant than usual, and hurries off to wherever she needs to be. Dad gives me a hug and walks off, too, and the boys start buzzing around the tables, checking everything out.

I stand by myself, Supers spilling in all around me, and the energy of this place is so intense, I want to close my eyes and breathe it all in. So I do. I must look like an idiot, but I don’t care.

A hand rests on either side of my waist. Elias.

I turn, and he’s in a dark gray suit with a white shirt, no tie, the top button undone. My heart drops into my stomach. I thought he looked good in his hoodies and jeans, but clearly I hadn’t imagined all the possibilities thoroughly enough.

“Uh,” I manage before he sweeps me into a bear hug.

“Excited?” he asks, grinning down at me, clearly just as charged as I am.

“I guess.” I let loose a small smile. That’s the understatement of my life.

Elias squeezes my hand as he walks me down the hallway along with hundreds of others Hub visitors.

About 40 feet down, right before the second security check, hangs a gilt frame with a painted portrait of a boy, about Michael and Max’s age. I drift over to look at it, bringing Elias along with me.

A name plate beneath it reads, “Charlie Fisk. Inspiring us to make the world a better place.” I run my finger over the letters, repeating the words under my breath, trying to grasp at why they’re so familiar.

I look up at Elias. “Fisk?”

He nods. “President Fisk’s son. He would have been in his mid-twenties by now. Died when he was a kid, about our age. Some fast-moving cancer.”

“What was his Super?” I wonder out loud, then feel guilty for being so morbidly curious.

Elias shrugs. “They, uh…they say they never knew. Hadn’t manifested by the time he got sick.”

I quickly do the math of years in my head. “Would have been late.”

Elias shrugs. “I don’t know. Maybe they force the kids too quickly now. Especially with the Supers’ classes starting earlier… I don’t know. You want your kid to fit in, I guess. They never said it, but I think my mom didn’t want that for me. She never cared if I was Super. Just Dad.”

We stand there, staring at the portrait, ignoring the rush of bodies behind us. I squeeze Elias’s hand so he knows I heard what he said. So he knows I care.

He clears his throat and says, “That’s the slogan. The one they’ve been using ever since Fisk was elected. Fifteen years now. He thinks… Dad says he wants to be more than just a biotech service for the Supers. He wants to make the whole world better.”

“Cure cancer,” I say.

Elias nods. For a second, I stare at the portrait of Charlie, his dark hair and evergreen eyes so alive. I wonder if Fisk wants to cure anything else. I wonder if curing cancer made him think about curing people like me, too.

After a cuff scan and a facial-recognition identity verification, we stand in another huge, cavernous white room turned into a maze of tables, vendors, and info booths.

“What do you want to do first?” Elias asks. I think he has gotten even more excited now that he sees my eyes roving and body itching to check everything out. “There’s a demonstration, we can watch some other kids test their powers against their parents,’ um, I think there are some lectures…” He taps through the schedule on his cuff.

“I think I really want to stay here. Is that weird?”

“Wanting to hang with the biotech reps all afternoon?” He wrinkles his nose, still smiling. “Yes, it is weird. But I should have known.”

“Yeah, you should have,” I say, punching him on the arm. The twins barrel over toward us, pushing through the crowd to greet Elias.

“I’ll drag these clowns around while you check everything out,” he says.

“They’re twice the trouble,” I tell him and give the twins a warning look, my eyebrows in the air.

“You think I don’t know? I grew up with twin Supersibs, too. Conniving ones. These guys are cake.” He slings a long arm around each of their necks, putting them in a lock, and both of them protest, laughing.

They walk off, and Elias yells over his shoulder, “Meet you back here at two, okay?”

I shake my head at the three of them, smiling. The boys’ dark curly heads bob up and down next to Elias, and they look up at him like they’ve just won the freaking lottery. Boys. They’ll probably find some incredible underground basketball court and waste a whole afternoon at the Symposium doing that.

After an hour of browsing the booths, stuffing flash drives full of information and other swag into my bag, and buying a t-shirt — magenta with an illustration of a drum set the artist has turned into an lab for liquid solutions, with every drum bubbling and half-filled with bright color — I realize that Elias has never really been to the Hub, just like me. So how does he know his way around here so well?

Finally, Elias and the boys find me. It takes everything I have not to stretch up and kiss Elias — I almost never wear heels, and I’m even closer to his face now — but there are too many people here. The boys decide to go to some static electricity demonstration, and I drag Elias to a lecture I’ve been eyeing on the schedule all morning titled, “New Horizons: Malleability of the Gene Structure and Real-Life Improvements for Gifted Individuals.”

The word “improvements” catches my eye. I could use some of those.

The presentation isn’t so much of an exposition as a teaser.

Like everything else about this building and this Symposium, the background of the movie playing glares stark white. Friendly figures show up on the screen, though, softening it. A woman in a cardigan and khakis that reminds me of Elias’s mom. A kid and her dad playing catch. She has a pink baseball mitt like the one I have stashed in my keepsake box at home. The girl catches the ball and then dashes to the other side of her dad in half a second, standing 20 yards from him.

“Getting faster every day, sweetie!” the man calls and then turns to grin at us from the screen.

This time, a middle-aged man sits reading a newspaper at a breakfast nook in a warmly decorated kitchen. A woman stands at the counter making pancakes in a waist apron. I snort, and Elias reaches over to hold my hand.

“Grab the milk for me, hon?” the woman asks.

Without looking up from his paper, the man flicks a finger at the fridge, and a gallon of milk floats out and goes straight to her hand.

The woman turns over her back to the screen and beams. “A year ago he would have dropped it.”

A little girl reaches for a candy jar, trying to grab a piece of chocolate inside, and starts crying when the tips of her fingers disappear. A teenaged girl who’s supposed to be her sister or her babysitter comes over to comfort her, and then gives her a pill. She pulls her hand out and the tips of her fingers rematerialize.

The older girl turns to the screen and says, “Without this patching solution from the Hub, this singly gifted little girl would have lost her fingers.”

I squeeze Elias’s hand hard. “They fixed her,” I whisper. “Now can she…?”

Elias shakes his head and sets his mouth in a hard line. He leans in and whispers, “Just a patch.”

The man in the suit steps to the front of the screen again.

“Genetic improvements are being made every day, thanks to new discoveries at the Hub regarding the malleability of the gene structure. Think of the implications. For the elderly gifted, for the worker who wants to step up in her career, even…” It switches to a photograph of a sad-looking young boy. “…for the singly gifted individual. The Hub isn’t only here to help. It’s here to make your whole life better.”

And for the first time in a long time, since I met Elias, I feel it, strong. I can see it in this man’s face. There’s hope for people like me, for people like Elias. We’ll be more than just Ones. I know it.

SIXTEEN

A
fter we leave the presentation, Elias says, “I told Mom and Dad we’d sit with them for coffee.” He jerks his chin toward the hallway, and I look up and see a tall man with wire-rimmed glasses and sparkling eyes headed our way.

“Hey, Dad.” Elias shakes his hand. Mr. VanDyne nods toward me, smiles, then turns over his shoulder.

“President Fisk.” Mr. VanDyne pulls a figure in a dark suit, impeccably pressed, over to where Elias and I stand. The man has short hair cropped close to his head, the same length as his goatee. He’s almost as short as I am, and that alone is a total shock.

“Miss Grey,” he says, tilting his head back a bit to get a better look at me. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

Mr. VanDyne turns his head to President Fisk, his eyebrows pushed up in a silent question. Elias raises an eyebrow at me, and I can’t help but think I see hurt in his eyes.

“I’ve heard about the late transfer to Nelson High,” Fisk says, “and that you’ve shown a lot of promise in your class exercises. Mathematics, especially biology. Organic chemistry.”

For the first time ever, I wonder who else can see the answers I punch into the computers at school besides the remote teachers. I wonder who else is watching. Paranoia skitters over my shoulders.

Fisk lowers his voice and leans in a bit. “A second round of application testing with Mr. Hoffman during your lunch hour. I’m sorry you never felt…comfortable at Superior. Unfortunate, really, since we expect so many of your classmates to work and be quite influential at the Hub. I assume you plan to pursue a career with us.”

Something about the way he draws out every “S” freaks me out. I feel the familiar skin crawling sensation but tamp it down.

“Oh.” I blush. “I’m flattered that the Hub selected me for the second round. But…I’m just a One, sir.”
But maybe you can fix me. Can you?

President Fisk waves a hand in the air, as though he’s never heard about what a disappointment Ones are or how they never get picked for a Hub internship, certainly not one as important as Biotech. Like he’s hardly ever thought about it. Like everyone doesn’t know.

“Yes, I know. And there is a place for everyone, I believe, Miss Grey. Especially if what Mr. Hoffman tells me about your intelligence and drive is true.”

Drive? At least the intelligence part is right. My grades are nearly perfect, even though I’m not really trying. I know I’m crazy smart, probably smarter than a lot of the kids who made it into the Hub internship.

I must have been quiet too long because President Fisk speaks up again. “Can you really tell me you’d have nothing to contribute to the Hub?”

“Well, sir, uh, President Fisk, I do. I think I would.” I clear my throat and use the most mature voice I can muster. “Biotech is a fascination of mine. And I’m working at a graduate school level in organic chem.”

“A young girl this enthusiastic about biotech when her peers are only worried about boys and shopping? And a Grey girl at that? Andrew,” he says, turning to Elias’s dad, “make sure she gets in.”