Stolen (5 page)

“Yes! I mean…I guess that would be cool.” Julia walked into the bathroom with blazing cheeks and visions of finding Cayne’s prison.

Before she could gather herself, she realized her clothes were gone. Like, missing. In their place were (guess what?) a pair of loose gray scrubs, a scrubby shirt that fit her like a bag, and a pair of dark gray sneakers just like Meredith’s.

Crap! The loss of her clothes wasn’t that big a deal, but her All-Stars… Her eyes actually stung thinking about them. She would have to get them back—pronto.

…But what if she couldn’t?

As she shimmied into the creepy clothes, she wondered how likely it was that Meredith could help her get to Cayne. Hopefully very. And if the girl couldn’t? If she really was some kind of Nathan spy?

She took a big deep breath, because it was that or Freak Out.

When she got herself together and swung the door open, she found Meredith perched on the edge of the bed, bent over her flashcards.

As soon as Julia walked into the room, she straightened.

“Um…did someone steal my clothes?”

Meredith nodded, one quick bob. “That would be a Trainee.”

“Trainee?”

“Kid.”

“You call children Trainees here?”

Meredith smiled, lopsided, like she knew just how ridiculous the whole thing was but wasn’t permitted to talk about it. “I don’t;
they
do. You and I are Candidates, FYI.”

“What’s a Candidate?”

Meredith slid the cards into a pocket on the butt of her skirt. “I’ll explain everything in just a sec. The bedrooms here make me seriously claustrophobic.”

She stepped toward the door, then paused and turned, slow and dramatic, toward the wall. Julia’s mind said
no, heck no
, but her eyes saw Meredith’s foot and then her shin slide through, like a spoon sinking gently into butter.

“Holy crap.”

Meredith eased her thigh through. “Don’t freak out. It’s not that hard.”

Julia was about to. Meredith stepped back into the room, grabbed her hand, and nodded at the wall. “Stick your shoe through. I’ll help you.”

Slowly, Julia extended her left foot, and sure enough, the tip of her prison-issued sneaker disappeared into the wall, which dimpled like gel.

“Shut the front door.”

“Now try by yourself.” Meredith dropped her hand and Julia swayed, still balanced on one foot. “Focus on moving through the wall. Focus hard. Then just do it. That’s the only way.”

Julia hesitated—unable to forget the girl’s wistful face when she’d talked about Nathan in the vision. “Did Nathan send you here?”

“
Shh
! Go, go! And no, of course not. This—” Meredith gestured to Julia, then the wall— “is seriously against the rules. It’s called Floating, and only Shepherds and full-fledged Bishops can do it anytime they want.”

“What’s a Bishop?”

“
After
we break free.”

 
With a little more coaching (and after a mid-wall freak out), Julia made it through the wall. It felt like drifting through extremely dense, cold fog. The experience disoriented her, so when she opened her eyes, she was a little stunned to find herself out in the hall.

Meredith emerged rubbing her temples. “I’ve maxed,” she said, and when Julia frowned: “Too much Floating gives me an awful headache.”

“Oh.”

For a long and painful moment, Julia felt even more alone than she had before Meredith showed up. The girl seemed to think that they were friends, but—as Suzanne used to say—Julia didn’t know her from Adam’s housecat. She didn’t know anyone here, and now that she knew that Stained were Chosen, and Chosen was
this
, she really didn’t think she wanted to have anything to do with it. All she wanted was Cayne.

Suddenly it seemed imperative that she knew exactly who Meredith was and what her motives were—particularly where they pertained to Nathan. She glanced up and down the tunnel-hall, seeing nothing and no one.

“I know you,” she announced, holding her breath before spilling the next part. “I know I do, because I saw you in a—” Julia choked the word out— “vision.”

To her shock, Meredith nodded. “My specialty is astral projection, but I can also sense things about people.” She rolled her eyes. “That sounds so stupid. What I mean is, I know what’s happening in real time, somewhere else. And I’m pretty good at reading moods. What’s your thing?”

Meredith had started walking as she talked, moving through the hall in the glow of a warm light that seemed to follow her. Julia lagged behind, feeling dizzy. Genuine or not, she didn’t want Meredith knowing anything about her—at least not yet.

“I’m surprised you don’t already know my thing,” she hedged.

“I’m not a Bishop, or a Shepherd. I don’t know anything.”

Julia stared at her feet as she walked, longing for her All-Stars. “If you don’t know anything…then why were you in my vision?”

“I’m not sure.” Meredith shrugged. “Sometimes I just…find myself places. It’s kind of inconvenient.”

Julia traced a finger down her cast. She could understand inconvenient. Her whole life had been one huge inconvenience, starting before her earliest memory, when her parents had died. The only thing that had been easy, had been good, was Cayne. And Nathan thought Cayne was some kind of mass murderer.

Meredith slowed down and gave her a strangely caring look. “Hey, it’s okay. I promise. Ten bootlegged MP3s says I hate this dump as much as you do. Maybe more.”

“How did you—”

“Sensing people’s feelings, remember?”

Julia had a horrible thought. “Do other people know? How much I…um, dislike being here right now?”

“Dislike.” Meredith snorted. “You totally hate it. And no, Nathan and Drew don’t have my skill, and I’ll tell you how to ward off anyone who does.”

“How?”

“One thing at a time.” She smiled, a look of undiluted happiness. “I’ve waited on you for a while,
bestie
.”

*

Meredith
seemed
forthcoming, and thanks to that
forthcomingness
, Julia finally got an explanation of who the Chosen were: the descendants of Methuselah, the oldest man to ever live.

“He’s in the Bible, BTW. Genesis?”

Harry and Suzanne hadn’t gone to church very often. The
Raysons
had taken her almost every Sunday, but Julia didn’t remember a
Methusa
-whoever. She shook her head.

“Well, anyway, the point we care about is he wasn’t a man. He was some angel-human hybrid sent to Earth to help mankind. Not that we seem to do much of that.”

Thinking of herself as having any connection to angels made Julia feel light-headed. “Are we really? Descended from some kind of angel-man?” It sounded ridiculous.

Meredith seemed to agree. “But at least it kind of explains how we can do what we do.”

No more than the X gene or radiation. Julia was irrationally irritated at her new acquaintance. Then she remembered that Meredith could sense her emotions, and quickly asked, “What can other people do?”

“Well, Nathan has the ‘power of suggestion,’ as he calls it. What it really means is he’s effective at bossing people around.”

Like Cayne. And like with Cayne, it didn’t seem to have any effect on her.

Andrew of the English accent, fro, and placid golden aura could actually See Into the Future, Meredith said.

“He’s not very good at it. Or controlling it, I should say.”

But about two months before, he’d plopped down by Meredith in something called The Commons, handed her a mocha latté someone named Randy had smuggled in—
they have to smuggle coffee?
— and told her he’d seen her.

“With a girl named Julia… She wore these pink kicks. The two of you were…what’s the expression? B-F-F.”

When Meredith had overheard Nathan telling someone named Dizzy about “missing Candidate J.,” she had known.

“Nathan was almost as obsessed with finding you as I was,” she said as their tunnel-hall twisted. “It’s weird that you were left alone for so long.”

Left alone?
“When did you get here?”

“A year and a half ago. I was the oldest they’d brought in before you.” She smiled warily. “Longest year and a half
ever
.”

“What about before then?”

“My family lives in Los Angeles. Well, my aunt and uncle do. My parents and my older brother died when I was little.”

“Really?” The word was strangled.

“Yep.” Meredith ran her fingers down the wall, the movement casual, as if they were talking about a pop quiz. “Plane crash. My dad bought a Cessna, and he thought he could fly it when he couldn’t. My brother Thomas was three, but I was only six months. They left me home with a babysitter.”

“I’m so sorry.” Julia knew what it must have been like for the girl. The wondering.
What would things be like if they were here?
Watching other people, envying.

“Mine, too,” she murmured. “My parents—they died too. I was a baby, too. Only I didn’t have any other relatives. So…I went through the foster system.”

Meredith nodded, unsurprised. “The other Candidates, they have the same thing. Except for Drew. He says his mother gave him up. Left him on the doorstep of an orphanage in Liverpool.”

“That’s…weird.” More than weird. “
All
of them?”

Meredith nodded grimly. “I know what you’re thinking. We’ve wondered it too. But lots of kids are orphans here. Kind of comes with the mark.”

The mark
. “What is it? Just a birthmark we all have?”

“‘So we can identify each other,’” she said in a low, stilted Nathan-sounding voice. “Where’s yours?”

“On the bottom of my neck.”

“Can I see?”

“Um…” It felt kind of invasive, but Julia told herself she was being stupid. “Sure.”

She lifted her hair, and Meredith stepped back to investigate. “That’s not so bad.”

“It’s not?”

Meredith turned to her and lifted her shirt. Julia’s eyes widened. Meredith’s mark was larger than hers, covering much of her right side. “It used to drive me crazy. Until I got here.”

Is that supposed to make me feel better?
Maybe the girl was just sharing. Normal girls did that, right? They talked.

“So what are we candidates
for
exactly?”

“Good question.” They were nearing the end of the tunnel-hall now. Light from some unseen cove illuminated specs of glitter in the smooth rock walls, giving Meredith’s creamy skin an otherworldly,
Twilight
vampire quality. “
Candidates to be The One.”

“Isn’t that something from
The
Matrix
?”

“Dunno. I watched
The Matrix
in like, fifth grade. Conspiracy movies, not really my thing.”

It wasn’t a conspiracy movie per se, but Julia let it slide.

“The One,” Meredith went on, “will save the Chosen in their time of need.” She said this in a breathless, mocking voice.