The Gathering (26 page)

I wake up in a cold sweat, unsure where I am or how I got here. It takes a few shaky breaths before clarity comes, but even then, the heaviness draped across my shoulders remains. I fumble around in the dark to get dressed while Joanna’s snores drown out my noise. It’s almost seven, but of course, there’s no light down here. After two weeks of sun, losing it again chaffs. How long will I have to wait to see it again this time?

I escape into the lit hallway, which is a ghost town. I brush my teeth and rinse my face, then make a beeline for Luka and Link’s room. I want to update them both on the situation. When I knock, there’s no answer. Luka isn’t an exceptionally hard sleeper and he’s not one for sleeping in. It’s five after seven now. I’m sure he’s awake, unless he joined the fun last night and stayed out with Joanna. I knock again, wait a few seconds, then twist the handle.

The door creaks open.

Light from the hallway spills inside the darkened room, paving a path of fluorescent yellow on a mess of comforter and sheets twisted around Link. Luka’s bed is empty, the comforter casually tossed over his pillow, glasses resting on a book on his nightstand.

“Link,” I hiss.

Nothing.

“Link,” I say, louder.

He turns over on his side, arm flung over his face.

A tornado could rip apart what remains of the old hospital above and he’d probably sleep right through it.

I walk to his bedside and pull out his pillow. “Link!”

He bolts upright, his hair sticking up in every crazy direction. “Who did it?”

I bite back a smile.

Link rubs his eyes, then glances from Luka’s empty bed to the pillow I’m holding in my hand. “Xena? What’s going on?”

“Agent Bledsoe’s on his way. I met him last night. He believes us.” Or at least he says he does. I toss the pillow back. “I’m going to find Felix and Cap and let them know.”

“Hold on. I’ll coming.” He swings his legs around to put his feet on the floor, his chest completely bare.

I avert my gaze. “Do you know where Luka is?”

“No idea. I didn’t hear him get up.”

“Of course you didn’t.”

Link shoots me his lopsided grin and pulls on a pair of socks. Thankfully, he’s already wearing sweatpants. “You can turn on the light if you want. Now that you’ve ripped me so mercilessly from slumber.”

I flip the switch.

He squints against the onslaught of artificial brightness. “Sorry, by the way. For getting you in trouble with Williams the other night. I didn’t know you hadn’t told him about our plans.”

“You didn’t get me
in trouble
with him.”

“No? He seemed pretty tense about the whole thing. But then again, Williams always seems kind of tense.”

“Around you, maybe.”

“Why is that, do you think?”

I snag a T-shirt off his floor and throw it at him. “Will you get dressed?”

Chuckling, Link pulls the shirt over his head. “So where were you last night? I kept waiting for you to show up for the movie. Ten tokens if you can guess what it was.”

“Star Trek.”

“How’d you know?”

I raise my eyebrows. “They seriously showed Star Trek?”

“
Star Trek into Darkness
. You missed out on complete and utter epicness.”

Somehow, I have a hard time picturing Joanna getting all pretty for Spock.

“Guess who’s a Trekkie?”

“Ralph the Sleeper?”

Link laughs. “Ronie.”

Of course she is. “What’s up with you computer nerds and those movies?”

“First of all, we prefer the term technogeek. And second of all, they aren’t movies. They’re a way of life.”

I roll my eyes. “Isn’t Ronie a little old for you?”

“A little old for me? Why Xena, what are you insinuating?” Judging by his smile, he knows exactly what I’m insinuating.

A slow burn works its way into my cheeks.

Link reaches past me to grab a bottle of Listerine off the dresser and leans close to my ear. “She’s twenty-three. I’m nineteen. I don’t think that makes her a cougar.” His attention dips to my lips. “And it’s not like anybody else is interested.”

The burn in my cheeks intensifies. I scratch my ear and take a quick step back, bumping into the dresser as I do. “There’s Joanna.”

“Joanna?”

“My roommate. She thinks you’re hot.”

Link laughs and walks out into the hallway.

I take a deep breath and follow him. I don’t get very far.

Claire is standing by the doorway, looking every inch the eavesdropper as she holds out Link’s Rubik’s Cube. “You left this in the common room last night.”

Disgust blisters inside my mouth. Claire was at the party?

“Thanks,” Link says, taking it.

Her attention slides to me. “If you’re looking for Luka, I saw him go into the private wing.”

“What are you, stalking him now?”

“Just trying to help.”

“You’ve helped enough, thanks.”

“Xena …”

I don’t stick around to listen to Link’s reproof. If you don’t have anything nice to say, and all that jazz. Or in my case, if you want to karate chop someone in the neck. I quicken my stride, desperate to get as far and as fast away from her as possible.

Link catches up with me outside the door of the private wing, a bottle of Listerine and his Rubik’s Cube in hand. He let’s out a low whistle.

“What?” I stick my badge up to the lock (Glenda got me a new one with authorized access yesterday).

“Remind me to never get on your bad side.”

“Don’t try to kill me and you won’t.”

We find Luka in the training room, hooked up to the new dream simulator with Connal. Link’s new BFF is there, too, the glow from the computer monitor reflecting off the lenses of her glasses. When she sees Link, her cheeks turn pink—a reaction that has me making more insinuations—and then she quirks her eyebrow at his Listerine. “That’s one way to fight plaque.”

He glances down at the bottle in his hand, as if just noticing it.

I look at Luka, lying on the floor attached to wires. Even unconscious, frustration furrows his brow. Poor Connal will probably be stuck in there until Luka has his powers back.

“How’s it working?” Link asks.

“They just went in. So far, everything seems to be going smoothly.”

I leave the new lovebirds to their conversation and continue down the hall into the investigation room. As I suspected, Felix is already there, sitting at the table with Cap and Lexi. The three of them are hunched over something, but I can’t tell what.

“I met with Agent Bledsoe last night.”

Felix looks up. “And?”

“He’ll be at the refugee community at three o’clock this afternoon.”

He nods approvingly.

My attention drifts to the white board we created yesterday, the one with the list. “So what happens now?”

“I’ll have Isabelle meet him at three.”

“Who’s Isabelle?”

“One of our residents.” Felix stands, buttoning the single button of his suit coat with one hand. “We found her living in the refugee community, which means she’s familiar with the people and its layout. She also happens to be quite skilled at losing a tail, should the skill necessitate itself.”

My nerves start to stir. What if Agent Bledsoe is as good of a liar as Claire and Clive and my grandmother? What if I’m about to send another innocent person to their death? “How do we know it’s not a setup?”

“We’ll send Joe, just in case.”

“Who’s Joe?”

“The security guard at the bridge. He’s a former Navy SEAL officer and a very talented sniper. He’ll keep an eye on the situation should Isabelle require any assistance.”

Like Sheep

I
stand in the command center between Cap and Connal, staring at the two monitors above that show the refugee community. Felix holds a walkie-talkie as he strolls up and down the aisle of computers, each manned by someone wearing a headset. Non happens to be one of them, off in the far corner, focusing intently on her screen. Link peers over Ronie’s shoulder as she sits at a computer of her own, typing on the keyboard until a third monitor blinks to life.

“Got it,” she says.

The feed comes from Joe the Sniper’s eyepiece. Ronie rigged a tiny camera up so we could see what he sees. Right now, that’s nothing but his boots and moving patches of sparse grass. I can’t watch for too long without getting dizzy, so I focus on the screen to the left.

Three barefooted children play King of the Hill on a heap of trash. A stream of dirty water and who-knows-what-else runs beneath clotheslines bowing low with the weight of ragged laundry. I still can’t believe this exists here—in the United States. Not just one, but several. “I don’t understand why people keep coming here if this is what they’re coming to.”

“They don’t know any better,” Lexi says. “The refugee and immigrant communities I saw advertised in Great Britain—and I’d wager, everywhere else in the world—are the same staged advertisements on the news here. Everybody wants to come to America, because America promises hope. By the time we arrive and catch on, it’s too late to go back.”

That niggling sensation returns. Something’s not adding up. Our country was a hot mess until recently. The turnaround in unemployment rates and street violence happened so fast it still has most people’s heads spinning. Lexi and Connal and Newport’s refugee community have been around long before the change. So why would they think America could offer any hope?

A flash of sunlight fills the screen of the third monitor, momentarily blinding us as Joe peers into the sky. The camera jostles downward. Blades of grass and weeds poke up from the bottom of the screen, as though he’s lying on the ground.

The walkie-talkie crackles to life.

“Found a secure location. Have Isabelle in my sight. Over.”

Sure enough, the monitor from Joe’s eyepiece comes into focus, and off in the distance stands Isabelle—a large, hefty woman with dark skin and a head wrap made out of brightly-patterned fabric. According to Felix, she came from the refugee community she’s standing outside of now. Supposedly, several people in Headquarters have.

Felix pushes a button. “Copy that.”

Movement in the periphery of my vision grabs my attention. Luka walks inside the room, the tension around his eyes not as intense as it was after his training session with Connal. Afterward, he met with Dr. Sheng again. Either the session helped, or he’s getting better at hiding his frustration.

Luka stops beside Connal and nods at the monitors. “Any trace of Bledsoe?”

“Not yet,” Cap says.

I look at the clock on the wall. Ten to three.

A monitor showing newsfeed from a local station cuts to commercial. B-Trix fills the screen, her pearly white smile undoubtedly dazzling millions of viewers as she starts talking about an amazing new breakthrough in pregnancy screenings.

“Not only is this new screening less invasive,” she says, “it’s five times as accurate, virtually eliminating the risk of false negatives.”

“What a load of bollocks,” Connal mutters under his breath.

I couldn’t agree more. Is B-Trix even aware of what she’s saying? What she’s supporting? Those screenings are nothing more than a ploy to eradicate The Gifting.

Pregnant women aren’t the only ones being screened.

The thought comes out of nowhere, bringing about the shape of an epiphany that has my heartbeat picking up speed. I step closer to the three screens, my eyes darting back and forth, taking in all the people. Immigrants and refugees crammed together.

From all over the world.

It doesn’t make sense. Why invite these people in when up until very recently, we were struggling to take care of our own citizens? Why continue to invite them in when we’re still trying to get our feet under us as a country? It’s a question Jillian had in the hub. A question I’ve had before, too. One that’s never made sense. A disconnect in President Cormack’s manifesto. The singular odd duck that doesn’t fit with the rest of her philosophy—
we’re only as strong as our weakest links
. My mother made a flippant comment once—that we were only letting in the strongest and the smartest. That’s what the screenings were for. But the people I see now, foraging for food, don’t look strong at all.

“Hey Connal, when you went through your immigration screening process, did you undergo a body scan?”

“Sure. Is there a reason yer asking?”

Goose bumps march across my skin.
“We are gathered like sheep to the slaughter.
”

“What are ye going on about?” Connal says.

“Our
president.
Our
chief of press.
Our
secretary of security and defense.” The missing puzzle piece falls into place with astounding clarity. I point at the screens. “This is why.”

Everybody stares. Even Non from across the room.

“We’re being herded. The United States is like a giant pen.” I stare from Isabelle, waiting by the statue, to B-Trix, flashing her smile. I see it, right there on her neck. “And I think I just found our
idol
.”

*

The investigation room hums with palpable energy. All of us—me, Luka, Link, Ronie, Lexi, Connal, Felix, and Cap—have come alive with my latest discovery. Our uncertainty, our sense of something missing, has turned into confidence.