One (One Universe) (23 page)

Over the decades-old suburban rooftops, the sun finally begins to rise over Nebraska. The pink clouds sprawling out against a deep purple expanse reflect in a neighborhood’s worth of solar panels, giving the illusion that they’re just within my reach.

Daniel’s car turns the corner. “Where are we going?” His voice slices through the air, sharp and fast, as the driver’s side window rolls down.

“The Hub,” I say, scooting into the back seat and clicking my seatbelt into place.

“How do you know that’s where he is?” Leni asks.

I shake my head and swipe more tears off my cheek. I can’t form words.

“What did he say, Merrin?” Leni’s voice wavers.

“He… There was a letter and…” The more I try to talk about it, the more I feel myself losing control. I swallow, shake my head fast. “I just know. Okay?”

Daniel’s hand hovers over the shift, hesitating to put it into drive. “Merrin, I don’t know if we really should be…”

“Okay,” Leni says. She presses her lips into a hard line, looks at Daniel, and then stares out the front windshield as we drive off.

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.