The Invisible (2 page)

The mayor and Belinda keep on cheering. Behind me, groups of people in funny hats eat and chat and watch the action in the ring, a few of them filming Martha as she closes in on the end of her course. Nobody else seems to notice the shrieking whine growing louder and louder. It’s unbearable. I press my fingers against my eardrums, trying to block it out.

Is it all in my head? A new side effect Jax didn’t warn me about? Nobody else seems to hear it.

Nobody but Martha’s horse.

As Daddy’s Girl approaches the final jump, her teeth flash in the sun and she rears up, following Martha’s order to clear the hedge, but instead the horse twists in the air, whinnying loudly, and bucks Martha off. The bleachers erupt in gasps as Martha sails through the air and lands on her back in front of the jump with an audible snap of bone. Her face crumples, her blue eyes blank with shock.

The crowd erupts with shouts, “Roll! Roll!”

Because if she doesn’t roll away, Daddy’s Girl will land on top of her, hooves smashing her skull.

At the last second, Martha seems to process what’s happening and rolls six inches to the right. It’s enough. The trample of the horse’s hooves misses Martha’s back and hands by what looks like centimeters at the most.

I’m on my feet, my chest pounding, adrenaline pumping through me as I try to block the sound with my hands on my ears. Where is it coming from? I whirl around and around, wincing at the shrill whine, until I spot the speakers mounted on several poles around the arena.

The sound has got to be coming from them.

Frantically, I look around for some sort of control room, and my eyes land on a glass-enclosed booth where the announcers sit during games. I squint at the windows until human shapes come into view. There are three or four people inside, standing up and watching the crowd. They stand very straight, perfectly still. Watchful. The outlines of their bodies look young. Perhaps just a few years older than me. Not like the usual announcer types, who are older men in suits and ties.

And I could swear it looks from here like they are smiling.

As two men in dark suits rush from the sidelines toward Martha—the black curly wires snaking from their earpieces tell me they’re the mayor’s bodyguards—I look to my parents, wondering if I can slip away without them noticing. Martha flinches from the pain. She’s broken something, maybe her ankle. The mayor leaps over the guardrail to join them, leaving Belinda with us, pale and terrified. I’ve still got my hands on my ears, the sound growing almost unbearable, louder and louder every second.

Meanwhile, among the penned-in horses waiting their turn at the rink, there is a commotion. They whinny and snort, some of them rearing up, others kicking out. Many of them tremble violently, their nostrils flared.

The riders begin to dismount, jumping over the fence toward the show organizers, who yell on bullhorns for the riders to assemble near the judges’ desk.

Everyone on the arena floor shoots worried looks at the horses, and they yell orders at a group of handlers they’ve summoned from the stables.

Just then, a chestnut mare with a tiny blue ribbon tied around the topmost section of her mane rears up on her hind legs, eyes wide and wild. On her way down, her hooves smash through the wooden fence. And then she’s out, galloping on the field, hooves thundering. Eyes bugging out as if possessed.

The other horses follow her lead, charging onto the field and galloping toward the bleachers, a row of frenzied hooves, manic nostrils flared. They move with grace and speed, their hooves biting the dirt as they race toward the far bleachers.

Toward
us
.

The entire crowd is on its feet now. I see a crying little boy launched into the air by his father, who carries him like a football under his arm and starts leaping over the bleachers, avoiding the walkways, which are clogged with people.

The horses are just a few feet from the bleacher rail now. Hooves thundering. Muscled hides shaking with the effort of the gallop. My father’s expression is dazed, like he can’t quite believe this is happening. But one look at the horses tells me they aren’t going to let a little thing like a metal railing come between them and the bleachers. They’re moving quickly, doing everything they can to escape the sound.

“We need to go!” my mother screams, lurching out of her medicated haze and onto her feet. Now is my chance.

I force myself to run like I would have before, at a normal speed, until I’ve blended into the crowd enough to move faster and head toward the sound booth without her seeing me. On my way, I spot Serge, my father’s driver and bodyguard, rushing toward my parents.

“Serge!”

When his eyes find me, I motion with my chin to the sound booth, communicating where I’m going.

He nods, and then continues toward my parents. Serge has experienced my enhanced speed and strength firsthand. He knows I can take care of myself.

The horses have cleared the bleachers now, but I’m closing in on the booth. I take a breath and start moving much faster, my heart whirring inside me, my ears echoing with the slippery scrape of hooves against metal, a drumbeat under the shrieking whine still humming deafeningly in the air.

I spot an older woman to my right who’s fallen in the clogged edge of the bleachers. She could get trampled, people all around her moving fast. In three flying steps, I’m at the woman’s side. She’s wrinkled and ancient, struggling to right herself, but the crowd around her isn’t stopping to help. Her huge robin’s-egg-blue hat is crushed beside her and covered in footprints. I get a hold around her torso and pull her up. She’s so old and dazed; I don’t think she’ll make it walking. So I hoist her up as inconspicuously as possible and carry her against my side the last eight rows to the top of the bleachers, where the sound booth is.

“What are you doing? I mean, thank you!” she cries when we reach the top of the stairs. “I—I—are you the girl from the papers?”

She means the New Hope. They were calling me that in the
Daily Dilemma
when I started rounding up members of the Syndicate. Back when I still thought they had taken my boyfriend. But I don’t do that anymore.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say, trying not to wince from the clamor in my ears. And then I’m gone, moving through the crowd until I reach a metal door with a plastic placard on it that says
PRESS BOX
.

It’s locked. Still wincing from the whine coming out of the speakers, I gather up all my strength and take a running leap against the door. As my shoulder smashes against it, the door flies open. I crash into the room, too much adrenaline coursing through my body to notice how much it hurts.

Three guys whirl around from where they stand, in front of a complicated soundboard with microphones and dozens of switches. The skin around their mouths is smeared black with what looks like traces of shoe polish, their eyes glassy but focused, their expressions mildly surprised, nothing more.

“Can we help you?” the one nearest to me says. He’s maybe twenty, a shock of black hair covering half of his pale, thin face. I open my mouth to say something, but then I see him reaching for something inside his jacket.

I run toward him, conscious of time slowing down until I can almost see the molecules of dust vibrating in the air in front of me. In an instant I am inches from him, close enough now to smell the chemical tang emanating from his pores. “Drop it,” I hiss, wrenching his arm behind his back until he squeals. He tries to twist away, but there’s no contest. I’m much, much stronger than he is, and in an eyeblink I feel him relax as he gives in.

His grip loosens on the gun, and I grab it with my other hand, shoving him away from me, hard enough so that he crashes against the wall near the door of the sound booth.

“You.” I motion at the smallest of the three of them, a blond kid around my age. He wears a black T-shirt with a drawing of a single heavy-lidded eye. Panic kicks in my stomach as the pounding of horses’ hooves, the screaming of the crowd, and the whine from the speakers crowd my skull. “Shut it off.”

“Or what?” the blond boy says. “You’ll shoot?” His expression is so smug, it’s like he’s daring me to. His lips are smeared with blue-black oil. His eyes are dazed and indifferent despite the gun I’m pointing at him. “Go ahead,” he dares me. Smirking. I cock the gun, deciding. Out of the corner of my eye I spot a huge chestnut stallion moving toward the booth, eyes wild, flanks straining up the stairs. People screaming, trying to get away.

Time is running out.

“That’s what I thought,” he sneers when I hesitate. “Why not embrace the chaos and enjoy the view?”

I make an involuntary sound of disgust in the back of my throat, and then turn toward the controls.

I take aim at the center of the soundboard where there are dozens of switches and sliders, bracing for the recoil. The last time I fired a gun was months ago, the night Gavin was killed. I squeeze the trigger, and the bullet explodes into the soundboard, sending white sparks flying and a plume of smoke rising up from the hole in the metal.

Instantly, the whine stops. I can think again.

For a half second, I stare out the window at the horses starting to relax. People continue to run toward the exit, their faces etched with fear, but the horses have already slowed their runs from a gallop to a halfhearted trot. When I turn back around, the three boys have slipped out. I race to the door, but the crowd is so thick, it’s impossible to imagine which way they might have gone.

“Anthem!” I look up toward the arena entrance doors, and there is Serge, waving, half-crazy from worrying about me. I nod and scurry toward him, my chest thumping with adrenaline and unanswered questions: Who were they? Where did they go? What did they want?

In the parking lot, the arena attendants have managed to round up half a dozen of the horses and stand with them in the lot under a cement overhang. I run my fingers along the mane of a black quarter horse as we pass by. I whisper
shhhhh
in its ear. It is trembling slightly, but nothing like before. All of them are calmer now that the noise has stopped. Next to the quarter horse, a white mare has a hoof-shaped red mark on her neck.

People hold each other in the parking lot as they move toward their cars. Children are crying.

I move with Serge toward a cordoned-off section of the lot where my parents are waiting with the mayor’s family and his team for an ambulance. The men in dark suits—the mayor’s bodyguards—keep pressing the wires on their ears and talking in hushed voices. The mayor is yelling into his phone. Belinda bends down to tend to Martha, ghostly pale and lying on a stretcher on the ground. She moans softly, obviously in a lot of pain.

The ambulance screeches into the lot before I can say anything, my words lost in the squeal of the siren. It pulls up next to us. The doors pop open, and two medics jump out to unlatch a gurney. In a moment, they lift her stretcher up on top of it and start strapping her in.

“Anthem,” Martha says as they hoist her up. “Tell everyone at school I’m fine, okay?”

I nod.

“You were amazing,” I say. “You would have gotten the blue ribbon.”

This seems to make her happy. Her eyes twinkle, and she’s about to say something else, but they are pushing her gurney into the ambulance. The last things I see are the mud-caked soles of her riding boots before one of the medics shuts the door.

My father’s hand clamps down on me. He grips my upper arm tightly, his other arm around my mother, who’s been silent as a stone since we left the arena. I wonder if she’s popped another dose, maybe something stronger than Vivirax. Maybe a Calmalin, which always leaves her nearly catatonic. After a moment, I squirm away from my father.

As we walk through the parking lot, the sun beating down on our heads, I notice two little kids pointing at the sky. I look up. A message, written in puffy purple smoke, floats above us. So innocent looking, that purple. The skywriting of extravagant lovers. But when I read it, a deep shiver moves through my veins.

WE ARE THE INVISIBLE, AND WE ARE EVERYWHERE.

“The Invisible,” I say out loud.
Who are they?

“Garbage,” my father mutters, looking up without breaking stride. “Someone thinks he’s a hero for causing trouble. It’s happened before,” he adds.

I shoot a look at Serge. His jaw is clenched. His eyebrows rise when he meets my stare, before we both look quickly away.

I swing around for one more look at the parking lot as I get into the car. Everyone’s looking up at the sky now. Everywhere, lips beneath sagging straw hats read the slogan in the sky. Conversation swells loud all around us. As I get into the car, I look over my shoulder, paranoid.
We are everywhere.
Suddenly, I feel certain that today was just a warm-up for something more ambitious. Something deadlier.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

Ford’s Uncle Abe lets me into the apartment early the next morning. He’s off from his shipping job at the PharmConn factory on Sundays, and it looks like he’s getting an early start on his day—a green apron smeared with pancake batter covers his massive belly and barrel chest. His bushy gray mustache fans out when he smiles at me. “Come on in, Anthem. He’s sleeping, but he’ll wake up for you.”

“Any better lately?” I ask, searching Abe’s face for clues. I haven’t been able to make it out here since Thursday.

He shrugs. “Maybe a little.” But the strain of worry is evident in his bloodshot eyes. He is trying to stay positive for Ford, and for Sam and Sydney, Abe’s daughters, still asleep in the apartment’s only bedroom.

Abe sleeps on the couch at one end of the living room, and Ford has a small, curtained-off spot near the kitchen where his bed is pushed up against the alcove wall along with a tiny desk and a rickety wooden chair. I desperately want to believe Abe that Ford is indeed a little better.

I walk toward the curtain and knock on the wall next to it before I pull it back. “Ford?”