CHAPTER THIRTEEN - THOMAS
I grab her and walk out of the room. This is just a perimeter alarm, so they’re not inside yet. I take her over to the monitors and study them.
“What’s happening?” she yells over the alarm.
I turn the alarm off. No need to broadcast what I already know. I let the buzzer ring in my ears for several seconds before I talk.
“Look,” I say, pointing to the security monitor. “They’re here.”
“Who?”
“Prodigy, most likely. Maybe Yasmine’s people. If she had those kinds of resources.”
“How will we get out?”
“Well,” I say, scratching my chin and looking around. “First I need to blow this shit up.”
“What?”
We might have an unhealthy obsession with blowing things up. I smile. “Just the hard drives. I need this fucking tower, so we’ll leave all the rest intact. They won’t blow it up. They’ll need to study it. But they’ll never figure it out. I’m the only one around here with eyes in the sky.”
I exit all the satellite programs, transfer ownership of the data to the other three towers, open the security panel, and type in the code for self-destruct.
“We’ve got five minutes before the air becomes unbreathable. If they come down here, they won’t go back up.”
“But where will we go?” Sadie asks, looking around in what might become panic if I don’t rein her in.
“Don’t worry. Do you really think I didn’t build this place with an escape hatch?”
She takes a deep breath and nods. “Fine, I’ll go with you.”
I almost snort. “Like you have a choice, sweet Sadie.”
Her whole body stiffens at my words. But I just grin and take her hand. “Come on, it’s this way.”
I lead her down a hallway, which leads to a two-foot-thick door made of reinforced steel. I key in the combination, heave it open, and wave her through.
“It’s dark,” she whispers into the blackness as I close and lock the door behind us.
“It’s this way,” I say, calmly taking the lead. She keeps hold of my hand, trips a few times over the uneven concrete below our feet, then bumps into my back when I stop at the next door.
“How can you see?” she whispers.
“No one can hear you. And I just have an excellent sense of direction, that’s all.”
There is another alarm, which makes her jump in surprise. “Why is it going off again?”
“The gas,” I say. “It’s releasing the gas now.”
“That was fast,” she says. “There wasn’t even a second warning. What if we were still in there?”
“I don’t make mistakes, Sadie. So why give the bad guys an opportunity? If you’re gonna do something, do it with winning in mind. I never half-ass my shit. If I make a security protocol, there’s no room for fuck-ups because I don’t fuck up. Here’s the car.”
“Car?”
“Train car, Sadie. Please get inside. We’re on a deadline.”
I code in the password into the security panel and the doors open, soft green lights barely illuminating the train we’ll be leaving in.
Sadie steps in. I step in after her, and then I type in the code to make the doors shut.
Another alarm screeches outside the car and green gas starts to fill the tunnel.
“Well, that was a little too close,” she snaps. “We almost got gassed!”
“Relax,” I say. “I got this. We’re fine, right?”
“Two seconds, Thomas. That’s all the time we had to spare.”
“I told you we had to be quick. Just do what I say, the way I tell you to, and you’ll be fine.”
She doesn’t like that answer, I can tell. But she doesn’t say anything else.
There’s two seats up front for a driver and passenger, even though once I program the car, it will drive itself. I take a seat in the driver’s side and start punching in codes to wake it up.
Sadie sits down in the passenger seat and looks out the window. “What if the gas seeps in?”
I roll my eyes. “I think of everything, Sadie. Just relax and enjoy the ride.”
She mutters curses under her breath, but I ignore it. Just start up the computer and get things going.
“Where are we going?”
“To the west tower. The north tower is too close to the asylum for my taste. And there’s nothing over on the east side, so I’d rather not be there unless we have to. So west it is. At least we’ll be closer to Lincoln. When we get there, I’ll contact him and have Sheila come pick us up in the helicopter. Then we’ll just go up to his mansion in the mountains and try to figure out what’s going on with you.”
She huffs out some air. “Better order a double of that. You’re not exactly in your right mind either.”
“What?” I laugh.
“Forget it. How long will it take?”
I look up at her and smile. “About eight minutes.”
She looks impressed, if I do say so myself. “How the hell did you build a fucking high-speed train down here without anyone knowing?”
“Who said no one knew about it?”
“Oh,” she says, taking her attention to the window again.
“I hired workers from out of town. They each worked on different phases. Phase one did the tunnel, phase two the track and so on. So it is secret. As secret as something like this can be, anyway.”
She just stares out the window at the green gas. It’s all around the car now, the thick cloud falling down the windows like slow, twisting tentacles of an octopus.
I study her for a moment as I wait for the operating system to run through all the necessary checks before we get going. She’s not looking much better than the first day I found her. Her skin is still slightly pale and she’s hardly eaten at all.
“We’ll get some real food when we get to Lincoln’s. I’m sure you’re starving.”
She shrugs. “I don’t think I eat much. I’m not really hungry.”
Right. “Well, generally speaking, people need to eat.”
The system checks are over and the engine starts. Less than a minute later we move forward. It’s not like a regular train. It’s quiet for one. Sadie leans forward in her seat, then glances over at me. “Are you driving?”
“I don’t need to drive. It’s only one stop.”
She leans forward again, just as we begin to really pick up speed. “What’s that?”
She’s pointing to the first of many metal gates that will spiral closed like an iris less than a second after we pass through.
“Security,” I say. “In case anyone thinks they can follow us.”
We’re only going about a hundred miles an hour, but it’s fast and the iris begins to close before we even get there.
Sadie stands up, her hands braced on the dashboard. “It’s gonna close before we get there! It’s gonna cut us in half!”
“You have no trust.”
But she doesn’t hear me because we fly through the gate and her head whips around to look out the back window to watch the iris close with a bang.
Before she even looks back we pass through another one. Bang!
Then another.
Bang!
Then the final gate on this end.
Bang!
“Holy fucking shit!” she says, holding her hand over her heart. She looks at me and says, “You’re fucking insane! Those things barely missed us! Was that… was that a blade in the center of the gate?”
I grin and soak up the impressive display of my genius. “We made it, didn’t we?”
She shakes her head and sits back down in her chair. “That’s dangerous. How does it know we’re through? We were like milliseconds from being sliced like salami!”
“Relax,” I say, easing back in my chair and putting my feet up on the dash. “It’s all math, Sadie. The physical laws of nature never let you down. Life is predictable and boring if you know the right equations.”
“Right.” She snorts, blowing up the hair that’s fallen over her face. “Because all that weird mental shit follows the laws of nature.”
“Well, what you do is just tricks.”
She huffs more air. “Whatever. I’m pretty talented.”
“I’m sure you are, but it’s a trick. Like a magician. What I do is command a force of nature.”
“What kind of force?”
“You know… like… wind, right?”
“Wind?” Everything I say seems to make her scoff. “How the hell do you get wind from that freak show of a display back at the asylum?”
“Well, wind is caused by the sun heating the earth. The air moving around it too. So it creates this force, right? You can’t see it, but it’s there. And it’s all based on natural properties because the earth has different topography so it heats unevenly. Which creates wind, or moving currents of air. When I use that mentalist power I’m creating uneven heating of things around me, which creates a force. Like wind, only… on an extreme scale. So there’s heat and air and then pressure, which makes the blast.”
“Freak,” she says again. “No one’s supposed to be able to do that with their mind.”
“Yeah, but it makes a whole lot more sense to have my power controlled by my mind than it does to have it controlled by two non-sentient forms of energy, don’t you think?”
“Whatever you say.”
“But you… you really have some kind of link, right?”
She stares out the front window for a few seconds. Mulling it over.
“To people’s minds. That shit makes no sense at all, thus it’s a trick.”
She rolls her eyes. “A better trick than yours. I can make people hallucinate.”
“But how long does it last?”
She shrugs. “About ten seconds.”
“Bullshit,” I say. “You have three to five good seconds if you’re lucky. You’re a mirage, Sadie. Nothing more. A trick.”
“Well, as fun as this whole my-superpower-is-better-than-your-superpower shit is, I’m tired of it. Let’s move on to something else. Like why you were in the crazy house to begin with.”
I catch her smirking reflection in the front window, her face lit up by the dim green dashboard lights.
“I tried to kill myself,” I say. I figure I’d have to tell her eventually.
“What?” She sits up in her chair and looks straight at me. “Why?”
I let out a long breath of air. It’s my turn to stare out the window. “I haven’t thought about it much. Things just got… crazy about a month back. My friends and I were… doing… shit.”
“What kind of shit?”
“Evil supervillain shit.”
This makes her smile. “Like what?”
“It’s not important. The important part is what went down a few months back. When my friend, Case, also a Prodigy student, shot me with a drug that disrupted a carefully concocted protocol I’ve been using for more than fifteen years to rein in this stupid mentalist bullshit.”
“Hmm,” she mutters, then stays silent for a few seconds. “So you don’t like your power?”
“My power is a force of nature. I could do without blasting people like a bomb when the wrong set of circumstances randomly happens. So no. I don’t enjoy what they made me into.”
“So you were… what? At the end of your rope? You had like a… breakdown?”
“Sure. You can call it that.”
“Who cares what I call it. What do you call it?”
“Temporary insanity, I guess.”
“But why?” she asks. “What triggered that?”
I’m not even remotely interesting in talking about what went down that day. Not to her. Not to Case or Lincoln. Hell, not even to myself. So I give her the only part I am willing to talk about. “This mentalist shit. It’s a mind fuck, right? For me it is, anyway. I never asked to be this guy. I never wanted to have that power. So I’ve been taking drugs for a long time to keep the emotions at bay. I think it’s triggered by emotions. Brain chemistry and all that bullshit. But Case shot me with an inhibitor or something. None of the drugs worked after that. It was one emotion after another. A constant stream of fucking feelings.”
I stop. Because I’m getting dangerously close to the end of that train of thought.
“What’s it like to live without emotions?”
“It’s bliss,” I say. “Pure motherfucking bliss.”
“Sounds sad to me.”
“Says the girl who doesn’t even know where she came from.”
“I just lost my memory. From that stupid power of yours. I’ll get it back. I can feel it coming, anyway. There’s static in my head.”
“What kind of static?” I’m happy to switch the conversation back to her.
“Like electricity. Like… static. I don’t know. Flashes of light and… words.”
“Words?” I ask. “You said that before. Messages across your eyes.”
“Do you know anything about that?” she asks.
When I look over at her, she’s staring at me intently.
I shake my head. “Nope. Never heard of that shit before. Prodigy must’ve really upped their game if they’ve invented a vision screen overlay.”
“Vision screen overlay?”
I stare back at her, looking right at her eyes. “I can’t really tell in this light but once we get up top again, I’ll see if I can detect a lens. If they have invented an overlay, I’ll be able to see it.”
“Hmm,” is all she says.
“You’re probably a pretty dangerous girl, you know that?”
“Says the pretty dangerous guy.”
I smile. “Which is why we’re gonna make an awesome team once Sheila and Linc figure out what they did to you.”
“What makes you think I want to be on your team?”
“Why wouldn’t you?” I ask, glancing at her for a second before looking ahead again. “What could you possibly have to look forward to going back to Prodigy? You’re nothing but a slave to them, Sadie. They keep you like a pet. Like a project. They’ll use you again, you know.”
“So will you.”
“I said T-E-A-M. I never said I’d use you for anything.”
“You’ll use me for a friend.”
I laugh. “Since when is friendship using someone?”
“Since we discovered we’re pretty equal opposites. Who understands you, Thomas?”
“Case,” I say. “Lincoln. Sheila. Probably Molly. Lulu, maybe. One day. That’s more than most people have, I bet. I’m not using you. I don’t need you. I just want you.”
I smile at her, but she’s not smiling. “Lots of people probably want me. I’ll take ‘need me’ any day of the week over ‘want me.’”
I shake my head and roll my eyes. “There’s the next gate. We’re almost to the tower.”
“Will it close behind us again?”
“Yup. Just like clockwork. The ones on the other side will close too. So they won’t be able to get inside the underground rooms from the tunnel.”
“It’s quite the set-up you have here—”
But she stops talking, stands up, and looks out the back window as we pass through the gate. “Fuck!” she says, holding her head like she’s in pain. Then she drops to the floor and screams, “Fuck!” again.
Bang! The gate spirals closed.
Then the next one.
Bang!
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” I ask.
But then the power goes out. The train slows and the next gate—BANG!—comes so close to cutting the ass-end of the car off, I forget about her and take my attention to the next gate.
We’re still going fast—but not fast enough. It starts to close too soon.
“Shit!” I grab her by the arm and lift her up. But she’s unconscious. Dead, heavy weight. “Sadie, get up! We need to move to the back! Now!”
She’s not moving, so I throw her over my shoulder and run to the back of the car just as the final gate slams down on the roof. A deafening crushing sound of metal on metal. Screeching as the magnetic field under the car collapses and the car—at least the part we’re in because the fucking thing has been cut in half—wobbles for a split second, before it flies backwards from the blast force of… my fucking mind!
We roll with what’s left of the car as it spirals through the air. I lose hold of Sadie’s arm and she goes tumbling out in front of me, hitting her head on the ceiling. Metal collapses in on top of us. Pinning her, me, everything to the floor as the car spins wildly—tossing us both like rag dolls against sharp edges and jagged pieces of ripped interior.
We slam into the concrete walls of the tunnel and everything goes black.
I come to groaning, but obviously still alive. I’m hurt, but not dead. Never dead.
My skin has a grid of mesh embedded underneath it that will heal most wounds instantly. I don’t know how long I was out, but it was definitely longer than instantly.
But I can feel it working. It makes me sick to my stomach to know that shit is inside my body. Makes me want to hurl. Makes me want to rip my flesh off. Makes me want to… die.
“Sadie,” I croak out, the crash coming back to me. We are both encased in a coffin of train parts. “Sadie,” I say again.
I hear moaning from off to my left. But I can’t see her. Everything is dark and it feels like there’s a mountain of steel on top of me.
“Sadie,” I say again. More moaning.
I grab a long piece of twisted metal pinning my leg to the floor (roof?) of the car and push until I can bend my leg. I pull out my phone, thankfully still mostly intact, tabbing it awake so I can find my flashlight app.
There is an open gash in my leg. I’m talking visible bone.
But I can also see the little mesh framework doing its best to patch me up.
My fucking head spins just looking at it.
Case and Lincoln think I wear armor under my suits all the time because I’m paranoid.
I’m not fucking paranoid. Not about getting killed, at least. I don’t want to get hurt. I don’t want to be cut. I don’t want people to know what I am. What they did to me. And most of all—I do not want to see or feel this healing shit happening in real fucking time.
I force myself not to think about it. I force myself to ignore it. I force myself to move all the metal around me, bending it with my Prodigy-provided superhuman strength, until I’m free.
Then I go looking for Sadie.
She’s only a few feet away. The car—what’s left of the fucking car—wasn’t cut in half. We are in a section about eight feet long.
I think about Sadie’s suspicions about the gates. I’m gonna have to apologize to her. She was right. Nothing about us or our lives follows the laws of nature.
I pull the metal off her too and stop. Sickened at what I see.
She is… mending. Healing herself. The minuscule criss-crossed wires underneath her skin doing to her exactly what they do to me.
We are so much more alike than I ever thought possible.
Later. You can think about that later when she’s out of this tin can of a train car.
I lift each piece of metal, extracting her like one of those game pieces in that wooden puzzle tower, until she’s free.
She’s pale. Paler than I’ve ever seen her. Her face is cut, bleeding still. The little machines inside her—just little dots of charcoal-black, not even the size of a pin prick—slide along the mesh as they knit her biological components back together. Her dark hair is covered in a thin layer of white dust and debris. Her clothes are ripped, one of her legs is even more fucked up than mine.
But she will live.
If there’s one thing I won’t have to worry about, it’s that.
She will live. Because those fucking sickos at Prodigy did the same thing to her that they did to me. They fed little monsters into her bloodstream. They spent months torturing her with pain to get the framework established.
I have wanted to kill those Prodigy assholes for as long as I can remember. I have wanted to torture them the way they tortured me.
But the rage I feel right now…
It comes out as a mind blast that creates a wind of power. Pieces of hot, twisted metal move aside as I stumble forward.
Everything but her moves.
She is immune to me because we are the same model of monster. We cancel each other out—or, if we’re lucky, build to synergy.
I pick her up in my arms, carefully, even though I know I can’t hurt her. And I carry her. I create another mind blast—smaller this time, because I’m not very good at this. It never works great when I need it most. Just enough to clear debris away so I can slide my back down the concrete wall and cradle her in my lap.
There’s more to this girl than I realize. There has to be more. Otherwise she’d be conscious right now, just like me.
But that’s the only reason our body parts aren’t cut in half right now. That’s the only reason our limbs aren’t strewn about in pieces, inching their way towards one another, desperate to put themselves back together.
Something happened in her head to make the car stop.
She shut a maglev train down with her mind.
Who is this girl?
I want to think about that for a while. Mull it over good in my head. Roll it around in my hand, see it from all angles. But exhaustion overtakes me.
I’m not used to this, I realize.
I need her help.
But before I can even wonder what kind of help that might be, the blackness comes to take me away.