Mindstormer Read online

  I stare at Dr. Swan, mouth open. He doesn’t deny it. His face is a tight mask of pain, though whether it’s from his broken nose or something else, I don’t know. I wait, holding my breath, and still he doesn’t say anything. “That’s not true.” My voice wavers. “What they’re saying. It’s not true. Is it?”

  He doesn’t answer.

  “Why are we wasting time?” the rodent asks. “Let’s just shoot him.”

  “No!” I lurch forward, but Rhee just tightens her grip.

  Steven stares at Dr. Swan for a long moment. His finger rests on the trigger of his rifle, and a muscle in his jaw flexes and clenches. Then he lowers his gun. “We’re taking him back to the Citadel. We can decide what to do with him once we get there.”

  Rhee narrows her eyes, then gives a small nod.

  Dr. Swan twists on the floor, his face contorted. His wrists are still bound, but he’s managed to loosen the restraints. His fingers creep toward something at his hip. I glimpse the hilt of a neural disruptor—or is it a gun?—peeking out from under his jacket. “Look out!” I blurt.

  Steven’s eyes widen. He brings his rifle up. In the same instant, Dr. Swan’s fingers close around his weapon. A sharp crack rings out, and Dr. Swan slumps to the floor. He twitches once, then goes still. Blood pools beneath his head. I hear someone screaming and realize that it’s me. I thrash blindly, trying to pull free. Rhee’s grip tightens. “Murderer!” I shout at Steven, my voice choked with tears. “You killed him!”

  “No, he didn’t,” Rhee says quietly. “Dr. Swan shot himself.”

  My jaw drops. A cold shock hits me as I look at the inert form and realize she’s right. Dr. Swan managed to angle the gun toward his own head. His finger is still on the trigger. I start to shake. “Why?” I whisper.

  “Probably so we couldn’t get any information out of him,” she replies. “He had conviction, I’ll give him that.”

  Steven is breathing hard, still clutching the rifle. His face has gone pale, his eyes glassy. He turns to face the others. “Why didn’t you search him for weapons?”

  They shift their weight and hang their heads, like children caught playing hooky. Silence hangs over the hallway.

  “Oh well,” the rodent woman says. “It’s easier this way. Now we don’t have to worry about bringing him back—”

  Steven shoots a glare at her, and she falls silent. He looks down at the rifle in his trembling hands, sheathes it, and takes a deep, shaky breath. “Get him out of here.”

  “And take him where?” the snow leopard asks.

  “I don’t care.”

  The wolf and snow leopard grab Dr. Swan by his bound arms and drag him off, leaving a smear of blood.

  “If I let you go, do you promise not to do anything crazy?” Rhee asks.

  Numbly, I nod.

  Rhee releases me, and I slump against the wall. She follows the others around a bend in the hall.

  The rodent woman starts to follow, too, then stops, and turns to face me. I can’t tell exactly what her mask is supposed to be. She looks like a cross between a rat and a skunk, with a dash of bear thrown in. “Let’s get one thing straight,” she says. “The only reason I’m here is because I owe you. Besides, if we left you behind, lover boy here—” she shoots a glare at Steven “—would probably spend the rest of his life moping and writing crappy, angsty poetry. And none of us want to see that.” She points a gloved finger at me. “After this, we’re even.”

  Nothing she says makes any sense to me. I can’t even bother trying to work it out. “All right,” I mutter.

  She stomps down the hall and disappears around a corner, leaving me alone with Steven in the charred, blood-spattered hallway.

  He looks into my eyes. The lines in his face deepen, and his shoulders slump. “I’m sorry,” he whispers.

  So much blood. It’s on the walls, the floor. A chunk of something pinkish clings to the tiles nearby. A wave of lightheadedness passes over me.

  Dr. Swan did this to me against my will—he didn’t deny it. He didn’t deny any of it, not even the part about being responsible for Father’s suicide. The thought makes me sick. And now he’s dead. I don’t want to stay here, in IFEN headquarters, but I don’t trust these people with the black coats and guns either. I don’t trust anyone.

  Steven reaches toward me. “Lain…”

  “Leave me alone,” I whisper.

  Steven stands motionless. His fingers tighten on the grip of his gun, and his expression contorts, as if he’s about to roar or scream. Then, all at once, the pain in his face vanishes, as if wiped away by an invisible hand. “We can’t stick around. The police will show up any minute.”

  “And what then? Will you kill them?”

  “If I have to. If someone points a gun at me with intent to kill, I shoot back.”

  I shouldn’t be arguing with him now; not only are we in danger, but I have no idea what he’ll do if provoked. Still, I look him in the eye and say, “You’re the ones who broke in here and started setting off bombs.”

  “We broke in here to rescue you.”

  So I’m the reason that those guards are dead—that Dr. Swan is dead. A dull ache spreads through my chest. “I never asked to be rescued.”

  He doesn’t reply.

  I press my fists to my temples. If I stay here, what then? Will IFEN wipe this entire incident from my memory? I think about the guards’ bloody bodies contorted on the floor, about the moment when Dr. Swan went still, and I wonder if forgetting would be so bad. Push the reset button and wash away this whole, confusing, horrible night.

  But it would be a lie, a voice inside whispers. I’m breathing so hard and fast, my head starts to feel light, like it might drift away. “I wish Ian were here,” I whisper. The words slip out of me without my permission.

  There’s a long pause. Then Steven replies in an odd tone, “He is. He’s on the roof, waiting.”

  My head jerks up. “That makes no sense. Why would he be on the roof?”

  “He’s one of us now.”

  Ian, a terrorist. The thought is so ridiculous, I would laugh if I wasn’t so scared. “You’re lying.”

  Steven smiles a tight, humorless smile. “He’s there. Scout’s honor. New haircut, same Ian. We’ll go up there and he’ll greet you like a big, overexcited puppy. Probably slobber on your face and everything.”

  “But he left a card—” I stop, feeling silly. Dr. Swan probably forged his signature. All part of the ruse.

  Of course, there’s no way to know whether Steven’s telling the truth, but at this point, it’s a chance I have to take. I need to know what happened to me during the missing months of my life. I search the inside of my head for some flicker of memory, but there’s only a blank, like a paragraph in a book that’s been neatly and completely inked out.

  If Ian’s really there, he will explain all this to me. He’ll make sense of this chaos.

  Steven’s gaze drills into me. “So what’ll it be?”

  I breathe in slowly, meeting his eyes. His eyes. Pale blue mixed with silver. I’ve seen them before, I know I have. “Let’s go.”

  Again, he extends his hand to me, and again, I take it. His skin is warm, his palm studded with small calluses, his fingers thin and strong. They tighten on mine until I squirm. “You’re hurting me.”

  He loosens his grip. “Sorry.”

  The apology catches me off guard.

  We take an elevator up to the top floor, to Dr. Swan’s office. Steven doesn’t let go of my hand, even when my palm starts to sweat. The picture window is broken, and a rope ladder hangs down, swinging. We climb up, into the cold, clear night. A few stars shine dim and faraway, pinpricks in the black dome of the sky, and all around us, the city of Aura twinkles—towering skyscrapers, gleaming high rises, toy cars moving through the grid of streets below. Wind whips through my hair. On the roof itself is a gray helicopter, its propeller whirring.

  A figure steps out, black coat billowing behind him.

  My hea
rt leaps. His hair is longer, and he appears thinner, all sharp angles. But it’s unmistakably him.

  “Ian!” I release Steven’s hand, rush forward, and tackle him in a hug. He wraps his arms around me and squeezes me tightly. I pull back to look into his eyes. Warm, deep, velvety brown—though they’re a little darker than I remember. For a long moment, I just soak in the sight of him. Slowly, I reach up and run a finger over his stubble. “You need to shave.”

  He laughs, a small, choked sound. “God, I’m so glad to see you. You have no idea.”

  I swallow. There’s a feeling of something sharp in my throat. “Ian… Dr. Swan is dead.”

  His expression turns serious. “I know. They told me. I’m sorry, Lain. This must be terrible for you.”

  I press a hand over my mouth. Tears blur my vision.

  He frames my face between his hands. “It’s gonna be okay.”

  “Somehow, I doubt that,” I murmur.

  Steven walks briskly past us. “Let’s go. We don’t have any time to waste.”

  We climb into the chopper, and Ian slides into the pilot’s seat. “You can fly this thing?” I ask.

  “I used to take lessons during the summer,” he says. “Never thought they’d be so useful.”

  All right, I think, trying to arrange the chaos inside me into some semblance of order. So we’re going to fly away in a helicopter. To Canada—to someplace called the Citadel. Where I’ve apparently been before. And then we’ll do… what?

  Dr. Swan’s corpse floats up behind my eyes again, and a wire starts to tighten around my throat. Did he really drive my father to suicide? Did IFEN truly do those horrible things? I don’t want to believe it. I can’t believe it.

  Steven shuts the doors, and I buckle myself in.

  Consciously, I slow my breathing. I walk through my compartmentalization exercises, shutting my emotions away in a big wooden box, closing the lid, and locking it tight. Dr. Swan’s suicide, the revelation about my father, about IFEN… I’ll deal with those things later. There’s no space inside me for anything except the present.

  The wail of sirens drifts toward me on the wind. In the streets below, police cars are pulling into the parking lot. It feels like a scene from a movie, or maybe a dream. Surely, any moment now, I’ll wake up in my own bed.

  Ian adjusts the controls, and the helicopter lifts into the sky. My stomach lurches, and the chicken pot pie I had earlier shifts uneasily inside me as the roof drops out from beneath us. We break through a screen of low-hanging clouds, and then we’re skimming along through the open sky, surrounded by nothing but vertigo-inducing darkness. Through breaks in the clouds, I glimpse the city below, sailing past. I lean back. A dull pain pulses behind my left eye.

  Steven’s fingers drum rapidly on the seat as he stares out the window. “They’re going to come after us. Stealing these choppers was a risky choice.”

  “It was the only possible way to get her out of IFEN headquarters,” Ian says. “If we tried to escape by car, they’d just block off all the city exits.”

  I close my eyes and focus on the rumble of the engine, the faint vibration of the seat. My throat throbs with thirst, and I rub it absently.

  “Here.”

  I open my eyes to see Steven holding out a bottle of water. I accept it, twist off the cap, and take a swig. “Thank you.” I steal a glance at him from the corner of my eye. He sits motionless, staring straight ahead. He has an attractive profile. It’s an absurd thing to notice, under the circumstances. Is this some sort of early onset Stockholm syndrome? I take another sip of water and ask, my voice faint and scratchy, “So, what is the Citadel?”

  “The base of the rebellion against IFEN,” Ian replies.

  Oh. Apparently, I’m not just associating with terrorists; I’m part of a plot to overthrow the government. The world swims and wiggles like something seen through a foot of water, and darkness eats at the edges of my vision. My fingers clench on the half-empty bottle, nearly crumpling the thin plastic.

  “Maybe you should just rest,” Steven says.

  “Fuck that,” I snap. “I want answers.” My own language surprises me—and apparently Steven, too. He looks at me like I just started speaking in Aramaic. “I want to know how, in the space of a few months, I went from being a Mindwalker-in-training and a good student to… this.” I wave a hand, indicating the entire situation. “And I want to know who you are. I don’t just mean what sort of political stuff you’re mixed up in. I want to know who you are to me. That rodent woman called you ‘lover boy.’ She said I was your Pookie. What was that about? Were we actually…” I trail off, unable to finish the sentence. My ears burn.

  Steven shifts in his seat. His face has gone pink. “We kissed. A few times.”

  It’s surreal, to see him blushing like a schoolboy after how ruthlessly he behaved in IFEN headquarters. I’ve had my first kiss, and I don’t even remember it. Maybe I should be relieved that it was just kissing.

  What else have I lost?

  Steven’s shoulders droop, as if he’s bearing a tremendous weight. His eyes are hollow with exhaustion, the black circles around them as vivid as makeup. I didn’t notice that before. “There’s something else you should know,” he says. “You got mixed up in this because you made a choice to help someone. Someone the rest of the world had given up on. Dr. Swan didn’t want you to do it, but you wouldn’t let him stop you. That’s how IFEN became your enemy.”

  I chew my lower lip, wondering how much to believe. Ian glances back at us, but says nothing.

  Below us, the clouds break, and I see forest sprawling for miles like a dark green blanket. In the distance, some huge body of water—Lake Michigan?—shines like steel.

  Questions circle through my head and crowd my throat. But I wonder if I really want the answers. My mind has shifted a little to the left, and everything feels unreal—like I’m watching a documentary about myself. That sense of unreality is probably the only thing keeping me from a full-fledged mental breakdown. I’m sitting next to the man responsible for my guardian’s death. I should want nothing to do with these people, but Ian’s presence among them makes me question everything.

  I sink into the seat. The steady hum of the engine blends with the whir of the propeller blades, the sound surrounding and enfolding me like a cocoon. Steven keeps stealing glances at me from the corner of his eye. I half expect him to reach over and touch me, brush his hand against my hair. For some reason, I almost want him to do it, but he doesn’t. He sits with his hands balled into tight fists in his lap, staring out the window.

  “They’re tailing us,” Ian says suddenly.

  Steven jerks upright. “Shit.”

  I crane my neck, and sure enough, two white helicopters with IFEN’s logo are behind us, gaining rapidly.

  “Brace yourself. I’m gonna try to shake them off.” Ian grabs the cyclic stick and pulls. The helicopter veers to one side, and I let out a shriek.

  Gunfire explodes behind us. Ian yanks the cyclic again, and the helicopter plunges straight down, then bobs up again. My stomach roils, and the chicken pot pie tries to crawl up my throat. I clamp a hand over my mouth.

  “We just have to make it across the border.” Ian’s breathing fast, fingers clenched tight around the steering bars. “They won’t follow us into Canada. International treaties.”

  Below, I see nothing but a dark ocean of pines. Where is the border? How close are we? I want to ask, but I’m afraid if I open my mouth, I’ll throw up.

  “They’re right behind us,” Steven says.

  “Hold on,” Ian says. We’re picking up speed. The hornet-like drone of the pursuing choppers fills my ears, growing louder and louder. The thunder of gunfire fills the air, and there’s a sickening lurch.

  Then we’re falling, plummeting like a stone. Ian wrestles with the controls, trying to slow our descent. Smoke fills my lungs, choking me. This is it. I’m going to die here. Without thinking, I grab Steven’s hand and clutch it tight as the helicopter s
pirals down and the ground races toward us. There’s an impact, and I could swear that every bone in my body shatters in that instant.

  Nothingness seizes me and drags me under.

  ‌

  3

  Summer sun warms the back of my neck as I clutch Father’s hand. I lick my apricot ice cream—it’s cool and sweet, melting on my tongue—as I count the sidewalk cracks, skipping to avoid stepping on them. Don’t step on the cracks, or you’ll break your mother’s back. That’s the rhyme I’ve heard the other kids chanting. Except I don’t have a mom. Father has explained to me that I came from one of his cells, and that I grew inside a tube instead of a lady’s tummy. I watched you grow, he said. Until you were big enough to come out.

  I see a chubby green caterpillar crawling over the sidewalk. “Look.” I point, smiling.

  Father slows. “He’s a long way from home, isn’t he?”

  “Can we take him back with us?”

  Ahead, I hear loud sobbing, and I freeze. A woman in ragged clothes and a collar is struggling as two men in IFEN uniforms grip her arms, pulling her toward a white car. “They took my baby!” she screams. “I just want to see my baby! Please let me go!”

  One of the men says something quiet to her. She screams louder—bad words, now, words I’ve heard bigger kids saying at school. Then she jerks and goes limp, like a dead fish. The men push her into the car, and the car drives away.

  Father puts a warm, steadying hand on my head, and I press closer to his side, clutching his shirt. “Was that lady sick?” I whisper.

  “Maybe,” he replies.

  We stand on the sidewalk as people brush past us, talking and laughing on their phones. No one seems to care that a lady in a collar was just shoved into a car.

  “Are they going to make her better?” I ask, looking up at him.