The Shimmers in the Night (5 page)

He was gone.

She pulled out her phone—her heartbeat was still rapid, but she had to do something to occupy her while she calmed down—and brought up the street map with the Institute and the Kendall Square station on it. She had about three blocks to walk; it wasn't complicated. But the Institute itself, Jax had said, was in a building without a name on it, so all she had was numbers: a street address, a floor number, a room number. The kids shared rooms, Jax had said, and there would be a guard at the front desk, and if anyone tried to stop her she was supposed to duck into a stairwell and text him.

No new messages.… Should she call him?

She
should
check in with Hayley; it had been twenty-four minutes since she left the pool. She texted as she walked, asking if Mrs. M had noticed her absence. Not that it would change anything. Just that she might as well know.

N
OPE
J, wrote Hayley.

So she dialed Jax next, still jangling with adrenalin from the memory of those dancing flames in the hole of that mouth…. Could it have been the nazar? Was it just the
ring
that had made her see that?

Maybe the flames hadn't been real at all—a hallucination, a vision about who the guy was. She'd only seen them when she reached down and touched the ring. Before that he'd been just a man, staring. Yes, maybe the ring had put that picture in her head. And the flaming mouth hadn't been real at all.

It was a relief to think so.

On the other end, as she held the phone to her ear and walked, Jax's phone rang and rang and went to voice mail.

The building's number was above its revolving doors in blocky, modern letters. She went into a high-ceilinged lobby with a bright white floor; a fattish security guard sat behind a high counter.

She heard the squeak of her sneakers again as she crossed the linoleum toward him. She was still on edge from what had happened in the T; it made her self-conscious.

“Hi, uh, I'm here to visit someone on the eighth floor? At the Institute for Advancement?” she said.

Jax had said
tell no one
—did that include this guy? And tell no one
what
, anyway? That she was coming to get him? Was she supposed to be sneaking in? But how could she?

No, she thought, he couldn't have meant that.

Anyway the guard barely paid any attention, just waved a dismissive hand in the direction of the elevators and turned a page in his magazine, so she walked past him and pushed the button.

Even on the eighth floor, where the Institute housed its teachers and students, there wasn't much to trumpet what it was. When the elevator doors slid open, all there was to tell her she'd come to the right place was a small plastic sign on the wall. I.A. S
TES
800-898.

Jax's room was supposed to be 822. She walked along the corridor, watching the numbers on the doors rise.

“Why! If it isn't Cara Sykes!” said a man's voice behind her.

She spun around and saw one of the doors was open; an older guy stood there. He had a salt-and-pepper goatee and wore a suit and a beige winter coat.

“Remember me? I work with your mother!” he said. “Roger!”

“Oh, right,” said Cara, relieved.

Roger was another marine biologist who did research with her mother at Woods Hole; he studied the ocean, like her mother, and was also a professor. He was her mother's boss, basically, though he never acted bossy.

“But what are you
doing
here?” she asked, and then hoped it didn't seem too rude.

“Oh, I consult,” he said. “You know—come in and out, work on a project here and there. I was the one who first told your mother about the Institute's gifted-kid program.”

“Oh,” said Cara, and nodded.

“You come to see your little brother?” he asked.

“Yeah, I missed him,” she said, and smiled casually, she hoped, to indicate it was a routine visit.

“Oh, hey,” said Roger, like a light bulb had come on in his head, and reached into a coat pocket. “Would you give him this? It's just a souvenir pen, but he left it in your mother's office a while ago and I happened to notice it there as I was leaving for the city this morning.”

It was a cheesy ballpoint pen from the Aquarium, with a big orca bobblehead on the end.

“Uh, sure,” said Cara, and took it.

Random
, she thought. But whatever. Maybe Roger was trying to reach out because he was sorry for them. She didn't think he had kids of his own; he might just be clueless.

“I'll let you get to your visit, then,” he said, and patted her shoulder lightly before he ducked down the hall and hit the elevator button. She turned and kept walking down the narrow hall along the row of doors. 814, 816.

He must have gotten tired of waiting for the elevator, because when Cara looked over her shoulder to wave goodbye, she hadn't heard the elevators ding but he was gone anyway: she heard the EXIT door to the stairs click shut.

“Jax?” she said, standing at the door marked 822. She knocked.

The door wasn't locked or even closed all the way; it pushed open on her second knock.

“Jax?” she called more loudly as she stepped in.

There was a wooden bunk bed with colorful quilts on it, a round, warm-yellow throw rug, and two computer setups at desks against the opposite wall; the room was wallpapered especially for geeks, with E=MC
²
and other equations printed on it.

She didn't see any geeks around, though.

She could sit down and wait for him, she guessed. She sat down on the bottom bunk. Although…

She flipped the bobblehead pen onto the bedspread beside her and lifted her phone. Forty-three minutes, now, since she'd snuck away from the pool. Still: Hayley or Jaye would text her if there was a problem.

“Cara!” came a hiss from beneath her. She jumped. “Close the door!”

She walked over and closed it. Then Jax's blond head and hands, covered in cobwebs, were sticking out from beneath the bed.

“What are you
doing
, Jax?” she squeaked as he crawled all the way out onto the rug.

“Hiding,” said Jax. “Clearly.”

He rubbed a cobweb off an eyelid.

“What's going on?” she asked.

“I heard you coming, and I thought you could be one of them.”

“One of who?”

“I don't know. I told you. I can't read anyone here. I'm not used to it! How do you go around all the time not knowing what's going on in people's heads?”

He looked off-balance to Cara, on edge in a way she wasn't used to.

“Jax. Welcome to the human race. It's going to be OK.”

She reached out and clasped his arm, and slowly he crept up onto the bed and sat beside her. She slung an arm around his shoulders.

“It's OK, Jax. Really.”

“I found the source
she
found, and now they're after me. I
know
it,” he said, dropping his voice to a whisper. “You have to get me out of here.”

“The source?”

“It's over there,” he said, pointing. “On my laptop.”

“The source?”

“The data!
About
the source. I'll show you at home. But now can we go?”

“Get your stuff, then,” said Cara. “Explain it to me later. But Jax, there's something—on my way over here I thought I saw—”

“We have to
sneak
out,” interrupted Jax, not listening. “They can't let me go without a parent present.”

“Well—geez, Jax!” she burst out, impatient. “Why didn't you just call
Dad
, then?”

Forty-seven minutes, said the timer on her phone. And nothing seemed dangerous in this place; so far the best word to describe it was
boring.
Dangerous was
out there
, if it was anywhere. If the man with the flames had been real. Jax was overreacting. And instead of just calling their dad, who could come and pick him up without any stress at all in an actual car, he'd made her stage a prison break and then jump through all these hoops.

Because even assuming it
was
the ring that had made her see flames—and even if, say, the flames were a vision and therefore more a
symbol
for something than real fire—a guy following her around an otherwise empty subway car had been deeply creepy. Plus she'd probably catch some serious flak when she and Jax got back, unless it was in the next half hour or so and the whole thing passed without notice. (Mrs. M, unlike Cara's own parents, was into grounding.) She could even be kicked off the team for this. There were strict rules about how you had to act when you went to meets.

And then there was the issue of what to
do
with Jax now that she had him. Maybe she could still get back before Mrs. M knew she was gone; maybe she could just explain that Jax had missed his family and showed up. Maybe they'd call her dad and it would turn out fine; they'd simply take Jax home with them. There were a bunch of empty seats in the bus, after all.

“Ow!
What's that?” squeaked Jax. He felt beneath his leg on the quilt, pulling out the bobblehead pen. “This thing
scratched
me. Right through my pants!”

“Oh, sorry—Roger gave it to me to give to you,” said Cara. “You know. Roger who works with Mom at the—”

She was about to go on when there was a sharp rap on the room door and someone pushed it open without even waiting for a
Come in.

“Jackson?”

It was a tall, thin woman with an Afro and a foreign accent—she must be one of the teachers—and she looked almost angry.

Was she one of the ones Jax said he couldn't trust?

“Jax, you're supposed to be in session,” said the teacher sternly.

Her gaze flicked to Cara, but then she and Cara were both looking at Jax. His
eyes
were odd—almost milky. Almost cloudy.

Cara hadn't noticed it before.

“Mrs. Omotoso, I don't feel so good,” he said slowly.

And Cara could see it was true.

Mrs. Omotoso crossed the room quickly and put her slender hand over his forehead.

“Cara, we need to move him right away,” she said. “To the infirmary.”

It wasn't till later that Cara realized that, at that particular moment, she hadn't yet told the teacher who she was.

Three

By the time more of them came to get Jax, his eyes were closed
and his breathing was shallow. His skin was pale in a way that scared Cara.

Two men slid him off the bed and onto the gurney, a slim, sheet-covered cot with wheels that rattled loudly. Then they were headed out of the room and other adults were converging on them. Cara practically had to jog to keep up.

She hustled alongside the gurney as Mrs. Omotoso and the men—other teachers, she guessed—pushed it quickly down the corridor; kids popped their heads out of doors to watch the hurrying crowd pass by. At the end of the hallway the group turned and went into a small elevator, angling the gurney in through the narrow door and squeezing in around it, pressed up against each other and the walls; but just a few moments after it had dinged closed, the elevator door slid open again and the crowd was squeezing out, Cara tripping and righting herself in their wake.

And in an instant the Institute seemed like a whole different place—dimmer, older, softer. In here the corridors were more like tunnels than halls; she thought of the back stairways of medieval castles seen in movies. It was incredible that this ancient-seeming place was part of the generic office building: there was dark wood everywhere, shadowy corners and niches, ornate light fittings on the walls instead of fluorescent tubes on the ceilings. Barely lit alcoves housed statues, large amber-tinted oil paintings, and faded tapestries hung on the walls.

“Where
are
we?” asked Cara, but she was still being rushed along as the teachers concentrated on Jax, whose small, skinny body jiggled inertly as the gurney bumped over the well-worn planks of the floor.

Now the place reminded her of a musty, half-neglected museum, she was thinking as she kept up with them. Set into the walls were endless rows and towers of shelves and cabinets lined with artifacts whose nature she couldn't quite discern…. She tried to hear what the teachers were saying, trying to figure out why exactly they thought they should take Jax
deeper
into this nameless building instead of calling an ambulance.

Trying to figure out if she should be afraid.

So far the teachers were ignoring her. Jax hadn't trusted them—she wasn't forgetting that. She couldn't. On the other hand, they just didn't feel that sinister. The man on the subway had been sinister, but these people didn't have that vibe. And they had to care enough about Jax to be so serious and preoccupied. Didn't they?

She wondered if the way she
felt
about things was the truth of them, whether instincts could be trusted more than the reasons you might think of—the reasons why the instincts might be wrong.

Her eyes lit on objects peeking out of wall niches, looming down from high shelves—a series of porous rocks and minerals, one of which bore the curling, weathered label P
OMPEII
; glass cases of fossils and bones; a fancy gold pocket watch with Roman numerals; what looked like parts of antique machines she couldn't identify, convoluted and graceful with spirals and tubes and wheels of discolored, dented brass; and a peeling, faded old painting of a smiling, proper-looking gentleman in a black bowler hat leaning on a walking stick in a leafy, sunlit garden. That picture looked genteel, until she noticed there was a long and hairy tail curling down onto the ground behind him.

They turned another corner. The gurney pushed through a set of heavy drapes, and she followed, silky tassels brushing over her forehead and eyes.

The room behind the velvet drapes was only slightly less dim and musty than the wood-paneled, winding hallways that had led them into it.

What made it different was its airiness, topped by a high, domed ceiling painted with what reminded her—though it was too far above to be seen exactly—of slides she'd seen of the Sistine Chapel. Far beneath the dome, through which a silvery light filtered, was a raised platform. The teachers trundled the gurney around to the side of the platform and lifted Jax on; then they bent over him, talking, and Cara couldn't understand them.

“What's
wrong
with him?” she asked urgently as soon as there was a small lull in the burble of conversation.

“Poison,” said Mrs. Omotoso over her shoulder.

“Poison?”
cried Cara, her voice shrill.

“Sit down, dear. I know it's difficult. Be patient. Your brother's in good hands.”

“Poison?” repeated Cara. “But then—but you're not doctors! Are you? So shouldn't we—we should call 911!”

“No,” said Mrs. Omotoso, and turned back to Jax again. “Believe me. Doctors and hospitals can't help him. It's not that kind of poison.”

One of the other teachers was rolling over a cabinet on wheels, whose shallow trays clicked open. Around Jax, who was hidden from her behind the wall of people, it slowly got brighter, a dimmer switch being turned up.

She looked around for a chair, as instructed. She had to trust them, she guessed—because what was the alternative? She could call 911, but what if Mrs. Omotoso was telling the truth and the doctors really
couldn't
do anything for Jax? Plus, how would she tell the operator where she was? And if she did, how could they get in here? She had a feeling this part of the building wasn't exactly open to the public.

No: right now, she didn't have much of a choice. She didn't see any way to go except hoping against hope that they were trustworthy.

She sank into a chair with a plush seat, the lumps and points of its carved wooden back digging into her own. (She turned to inspect it: the protrusions were fins, it turned out—the chair's back formed of entwined, leaping porpoises or dolphins.) It wasn't too comfortable, and she sat on the very edge, blinking away tears. Jax had called her because he was afraid of these people, and now, for all she knew, she might be giving them the power of life or death over him.

She looked at the small crowd surrounding him on the dais and the light beaming down from the domed ceiling. Then the scene blurred and disappeared, tears standing on her bottom lids without spilling. She softly touched her ring.

And while she had her finger on it and was gazing tearily at the circle of teachers, it seemed to her that they had wings on their back—great, elegant, long-feathered white wings.

She took her finger off the ring, and the wings melted away.

She touched the ring again, her tears drying in her eyes. The wings came back.

Angel wings? That was what they looked like.

Angel
wings? Come on. Seriously.

Mrs. M had a thing for angels, she thought, angels and Hummel figurines. Both tacky. Mrs. M's angels were mostly ceramic cherubs, fat and grinning and clutching arrows or trumpets in their pudgy fists….

But maybe she was being too literal. Maybe the flames hadn't really been in the subway guy's mouth and the wings weren't really on the teachers' backs, either. Maybe all the flames had meant was that the man was dangerous, that he had ravenous appetites and intended to do her harm. And maybe all the wings meant was the opposite: that despite Jax's suspicions, the teachers were trustworthy. That she should trust her instincts, as well as her visions, and the teachers were no threat to Jax.

She hoped.

Of course, there were plenty of other ways to interpret the appearance of wings. Such as, maybe they meant the teachers could travel fast, or they were going to go somewhere. The possible meanings were practically infinite.

“Poison,”
she said out loud to herself. If it was poison, and he'd been here the whole time, wouldn't these same people
have
to have been the ones to poison him?

And then she remembered the tacky souvenir pen.

Ow!
Jax had said, grumpily.
That thing scratched me!

Scratched him.

“Hey,” she called out to Mrs. Omotoso's straight back, getting up from the chair. “So does—is there a guy named Roger who works here? A scientist from Woods Hole?”

Another of the teachers turned around, a balding man with a big bumpy nose that looked like it had been broken.

“Roger? No, there's no Roger on our staff,” he said, and looked at her quizzically.

“But he
said
he was,” said Cara. “He said he was a
consultant.
Then he gave me a pen to give to Jax, and left. I remember noticing because he didn't take the elevator, he took the stairs. And while Jax and I were sitting on the bunk bed, the pen scratched his leg.”

Mrs. Omotoso turned around, and then another teacher, until most of the seven gathered there were looking at Cara. A short, frizzy-bearded teacher flipped open a cell and talked into it rapidly, his voice too low to hear. He wore thick glasses with black frames; he must have been the one she saw on Skype.

“And where did you meet this Roger?”

“Just at the elevator near Jax's room,” said Cara. “When I got here.” They must think she was such a dolt, taking what turned out to be a poison pen—who knew they really existed?—from a stranger. “I mean, I
know
him a little from before, he works—he used to work with my—with our mother. At Woods Hole, in marine biology.”

The bearded, bespectacled teacher looked at another and nodded, then strode off through the door again, his cell held to one ear.

“It's very good that you told us, Cara,” said Mrs. Omotoso quietly. “It's very good that we know.”

Then she reached up and pulled a painted screen toward her, a screen on rollers that unfolded like an accordion, and Cara was shut out.

She got restless after a couple more minutes sitting in the knobby carved chair; she could hardly bear not knowing if Jax was going to be all right. She thought of calling someone, Max or Hayley or even Mrs. M or her dad, but she thought it dully and without momentum—as though it was preordained that she couldn't call anyone. Not until this part was over. Right now there was no way she could explain. So she got up and began a slow circuit of the room, walking along the wall, trying not to think about Jax's still, pale face.

Mrs. Omotoso had called it an infirmary, but it wasn't anything like the hospital room Max had been in when he broke his arm. For one thing, Cara didn't see medical equipment. There were books and yellowing maps, like in an antiquarian library; there were glass-topped tables at waist height, full of medieval-looking pages from old books with fancy, gilded letters in what appeared to be Latin. There were Asian scrolls with pagoda-style temples and water-color trees on them, dragons and lions and bulgy-eyed fish. There were mosaics made of small tiles in brilliant colors; one looked like the sun, but the rays coming from it were snakes, and another was of a naked man with beard and trident, riding a chariot pulled by seahorses over some foaming ocean waves.

The artifacts seemed delicate and precious—and
old
. But maybe they were just fakes—they made great replicas these days, her mother had told her, of practically everything. There were copies of great paintings that most people couldn't tell from the real ones—some hanging in museums, to be admired by audiences who never knew the difference.

Did all the kids at the Institute come in here? Had Jax been in here before and already seen this? Maybe they studied this, maybe it was part of what they did…she'd thought they would be doing math and computers all the time. It hadn't occurred to her there would be history or art or subjects like that.

But now she'd come to a section that was hundreds of wooden cubbies stretching up to the ceiling, and in each hole stood a bottle or sometimes several of them. They were a great variety of shapes and sizes—large, handmade-type bottles shaped like bottom-heavy teardrops, tall greentinted thin ones like pillars with old cork stoppers in the top, murky fluid inside and things floating in it.

Suddenly she caught sight of a bumpy white line inside one of them—a line up a minuscule back. It was a
spine.
She turned away, shocked, and walked fast past the rest of the bottles, concentrating on not looking.

Dead things in jars. That didn't exactly bode well.

If she thought of that and then the painting of the man with the tail—if she thought of the darkness in the corners….

Jax might be right about these people. Her own instincts might be dead, dead wrong. After all, Jax was the genius in the family. Not her.

Skirting a wooden ladder on wheels, she was close to the dais—close to the huddle of the teachers with their trays and lights, bent over Jax. There was a gap, she realized, a gap between the screen and the wall, near where the top of Jax's body should be; if she stood on one of the rungs of the ladder she might be able to see what they were doing.… She grabbed a rung and stepped up. One rung, then two, then three; her feet creaked when she put her weight on the wood. But she was three feet up now, and the backs of some of the teachers' heads were in her line of sight—the bald man, an elegant woman with sleek, bobbed silver hair.

She craned her neck to see between them. But the gaps were too narrow, after all. So she stepped up to the fourth rung.

And there was her brother, bathed in light.

There were streams and threads of light falling across his face and his bare chest (they'd taken off his shirt, which made him look even younger). The light fell over him in lines that crossed each other and made patterns. After a few moments she realized the narrow strings of light came from things the teachers were holding—handheld instruments that might have been pens or scalpels or even wands, for all she knew. She couldn't tell. Just small, thin sticks in their hands.

It was beautiful, how the light fell. Like spiderwebs or cat's cradles or graceful woven nets.

Could it be laser beams? Surgeons used lasers, after all. But these threads weren't sharp and straight; they were curved and soft. They were so lovely, in fact, that it was hard to believe they could be doing Jax any harm. It
had
to be a good light. It even felt good to her, some distance away. Its threads were soothing to look at: she watched in awe as they danced and trembled, joined and parted again.