Darkhaven, page 21
I hadn’t really wanted to go to school. I’d just wanted to get away from any prying ears and speak to someone from Darkhaven, but now that I had the opportunity, I found that I was reluctant to call Stephen. What would I say? I’d failed. I tossed the book aside and plodded down the hall to my room. I still felt light-headed, unable to make sense of things properly. Perhaps reading some Discworld would make me feel better. Granny Weatherwax always left me in a good mood.
I opened my bedroom door, glimpsed a dark shape on my bed and started, staggering against the door frame. Keraun was sprawled over the unmade mess, reading my economics textbook. He was trying to look casual, but I could feel the tension rolling off him.
‘Hey,’ he greeted me, his voice taut.
‘What?’ I asked bluntly, caught off-guard and grumpy about my mission failure.
He looked up, angry brown eyes grazing my face before returning to the book. He closed it and set it on my bedside table, interrogating me with his gaze. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘Tell you what?’
‘That it was your mother you were after. That she put you into the Praegressus program.’
I stared at him. If I was awkward admitting it before, it was nothing to the humiliation that flooded me now. Now that I knew she’d left me.
‘I don’t know.’ I flopped down on the bed next to him and lay back. My head was still spinning from the wine, and words like Praegressus were slippery in my mind.
‘I found your file at the Taskforce, and more on the Praegressus. Luci’s signature is all over it.’
I didn’t answer. It was hard to form a complete idea as I swayed between righteous anger and tipsy indifference. She’d been dead to me all these years. She could just go back to being dead. Why did it matter?
After a moment, Keraun lay back too, staring at the ceiling with its galactic swirls and one lonely glow-in-the-dark star that had survived all these years. ‘I know what it’s like.’
I gazed at the star. ‘What’s that?’
‘Having a mother who doesn’t see you.’
Except my mother had seen me. Stared right at me, and told me to leave like I was just one more irritation in the ointment of her day. What she hadn’t seen was the little red-haired girl clutching an unfinished crayon drawing while her father yelled at her. ‘What happened?’ I asked.
He clasped his hands on his chest, twisting his thumbs. ‘I dropped out of school. She hasn’t spoken to me since, except for Sol meetings.’
‘Sounds harsh.’
He sighed. ‘It wasn’t just her. But she took it personally.’
‘Screw them both, then.’
Keraun flipped onto an elbow, his face just inches away from mine. His eyes burned at the edges.
‘Is she the reason you wanted to get into the Taskforce?’ He watched me, face intense. I tried to keep my expression relaxed, which actually wasn’t that difficult. The alcohol reasserted itself, making things seem trivial, and suddenly his vexation was amusing. He frowned, inhaling deeply. ‘Are you drunk?’
‘Maybe a little.’ I giggled. ‘And yeah. Well, that was some of it. So what?’
He moved his arm, lifting it past his hip towards me, but then stopped, letting it fall onto the bed. ‘What was the rest of it?’
No point holding back now. ‘Stephen promised me that I could live on my own terms if we were successful. No fake death and leaving my family and friends.’ Except all that was bust. Unless … Keraun had mentioned there were files. Files that might help Darkhaven’s research. If I could go back and get them, convince Dad to help … I toyed with the bedspread, ruffling it, then smoothing out the creases, not meeting Keraun’s gaze. After a moment, he placed his fingers under my chin and lifted my face to look at him. I pulled my chin away but held his gaze.
‘I understand why you did it,’ he said. ‘But I need you to promise me something.’
His eyes drilled through mine, straight through my brain and into the place I called my “guilt centre”, a special part of my mind that Cecelia was particularly good at appealing to when she wanted me to study with her instead of going to the Shack.
Reflexively, I nodded. ‘Sure.’
About a millisecond later, I regretted it.
‘Please don’t go back. To the Taskforce.’ It was like he’d pulled the idea out of my head with his stare.
‘Why not? Luci could have captured me today. She didn’t.’ I had to admit that the small part of my brain that seemed impervious to wine agreed with him.
‘She also didn’t call off security. When that agent caught you in the hallway, there was nothing I could do. Not without risking everything. And Gabby, I don’t want…’ he trailed off, eyes glowing yellow. I met his gaze questioningly, waiting for him to finish. He looked away. ‘Just be safe, okay?’
‘Okay.’ For an alien god, he was rubbish at explaining things. I figured I could be safe on my own terms. I didn’t want or expect him to swoop in and save me from anything. He stared at me again. It was mind-scrambling, with the yellow eyes.
‘Sure? You did just promise. You can’t get out of it because you had a glass of wine.’
‘I promise to be safe.’ I had no idea how exactly to keep that promise, so I tried changing the subject again, just to ease the gaze he had skewered me with. ‘How do you know it was wine?’
He laughed and rolled away, his eyes returning to brown. The pressure that had been building between us simmered down. ‘I can smell it.’
I giggled again, almost swallowing a burp. Half of it escaped. We lay in comfortable silence for a few minutes.
‘Can I ask you something?’ I said, speaking up to the swirly ceiling.
‘Sure.’
‘What else did you find in the Taskforce files?’
‘Praegressus is a retrovirus that rewrites human DNA with subtle magic. You wouldn’t be the first race to genetically modify yourselves to accelerate your evolution, but very few actually make it work.’
‘There have been others?’
‘It’s happening all over the universe as we speak. Our history books cover major events. Usually, modification goes horribly wrong without the magic to back it up.’ A cloud drifted over his face.
An unsettling sensation crawled through my stomach. I rolled over to look at him. ‘Am I, like, healthy?’
He grinned. ‘More than healthy. Whoever started this used Ma, the healing magic, so it’s stable. We all have basically the same DNA, humans all over the universe. Other civilisations have wiped themselves out with accelerated modification, but you now have genetic expression that just about matches mine. Of course, you need to train it. You can’t cheat that part.’
So we were magically modified humans. I recalled an earlier conversation. ‘Could you help me train so I can travel to other star systems?’
This time he laughed outright. ‘Talk about pick the hardest thing.’
‘Why is it the hardest?’
Before he could reply, my phone rang. I bent down to pick it up from the floor where it must have fallen and saw Stephen’s name flashing. I silenced the phone and clambered back onto the bed.
‘Shouldn’t you answer that?’
I shrugged. ‘It can wait. He didn’t exactly drop everything to see me off before sending me into the Taskforce.’
Keraun pretended to look hurt. ‘And here I was, thinking you were just enjoying my company too much to leave.’
Rolling my eyes, I turned to give him a sarcastic smirk, but I stopped – he had slid closer, and his face was inches away from mine. I swallowed, uncomfortable looking into his eyes this closely, but unable to look away. In my peripheral vision, his hand hovered in mid-air, indecisive, inching towards me as his eyes began to glow with their surreal yellow. I was acutely aware of the doona rustling with every micro-movement and the feel of my shirt on my back as I let my eyes drift down to his lips. They were closed, but I knew that if I leaned a fraction closer, they would part, and so would mine, and I hadn’t refreshed my lipstick when I got home, although maybe lipstick was actually kinda gross for kissing, or perhaps he wouldn’t want Siren Red on his face, and I could hear both our hearts beating, this close; mine was racing, and his barely above a slow thud so it could be that I had read this whole thing wrong and how was a person ever supposed to –
My phone rang again, puncturing the moment like an overinflated balloon and leaving it in tatters on the floor. I fumbled for the phone. It slipped down between the front of the bed and the wall and continued ringing on the floor.
‘You’re a woman in demand. I’ll go,’ Keraun said, already standing and stretching one side, his lanky arm reaching up to the ceiling.
‘Stay,’ I urged. Belly down on the bed, I thrust my arm after the phone. It stopped ringing.
‘It’s okay. Call me.’ Keraun flashed a grin and, in a movement so fast he might have just vanished, disappeared out the door.
I crawled under the bed to rescue my phone from the dust bunnies and saw it was Zenna calling this time. Head still spinning from either Keraun’s recent proximity or perhaps the three glasses of wine and sudden standing up, I flopped back on the bed and sent Zenna a text.
What’s up?
Meet outside the surf club, ten minutes?
Sure. Aren’t you at school?
I didn’t really expect her to answer that, since I was obviously absent too. It was about ten minutes into lunchtime. I booked a rideshare and waited in the driveway, thinking of what Sean had said and hoping she hadn’t done anything reckless.
Chapter 22
More Like Mutants
I found Zenna sitting at a picnic bench next to the West Beach Surf Club, listlessly picking at chips and gravy with a plastic fork. I climbed onto the bench next to her, plopping down as I lost my balance. My butt cheek landed on something hard – the disk from the Taskforce was still in my back pocket. I took it out and put it on the table so I could sit comfortably. ‘Hey, girl.’
‘Hey.’ Zenna’s voice was bleak, like all the life had been sucked out of it.
‘What’s wrong?’
She heaved a sigh and flicked a fallen chip off the bench onto the grass. An opportunistic seagull pecked it up.
‘Zenna?’ I asked softly.
Her face scrunched like she was about to cry. ‘I’m not going to graduate.’
‘What?’
‘I flunked my English test. Now I’m going to fail the unit and I won’t get the internship if I don’t pass high school this year.’
‘What, like, literally failed?’
‘Forty per cent.’
‘Well, the marks still count. That’s only a small difference to make up in the final exam, right?’
‘I’ll be lucky if I even get fifty on the exam, and I’ll never scrape sixty.’ She tossed another morsel out to the gathering seagulls. They squabbled and consumed it before it even hit the ground.
‘The exam has more weighting, you wouldn’t need sixty. I thought you were going okay with English this year.’ Last year, after Zenna had nearly failed first semester, her parents had arranged a tutor for her. She had pulled things together by the end of the year.
Now she shrugged. ‘I just can’t do it.’
‘You can,’ I urged, stealing a chip before the whole lot went to the birds.
‘That’s easy for you to say. You’ve always been smart.’ The words stung a little, until she continued, voice lowered to a miserable whisper. ‘I think I’m a mistake. God, or whatever it is, made a mistake with me.’
My hand was halfway back to the chips. I redirected it to her shoulder. ‘You are not a mistake. You have amazing talent. Besides, God or whatever has nothing to do with it.’
‘So I’m an evolutionary failure.’
I went for the chips. ‘More like an adaptation that will go on to be something totally new and brilliant.’
Her lips almost twitched into a smile. ‘So a mutation, then.’
I giggled. ‘If you like. Maybe you’re at the wrong school.’
‘Mutant school.’ She smiled wanly. ‘Sounds about right. What’s been going on with you lately? I’ve been trying to find you to talk for ages, and you’re never around.’
It was my turn to shrug, although the accusation felt unfair. She’d bailed on me often enough, and for every message she answered there were three she didn’t. ‘Just study. I’m worried about passing too.’
‘Yeah right. When have you ever been worried about studying? You can’t lie to me, Gabs. I know you’re hiding something.’
She was right. Although Cecelia was my oldest and closest friend, Zenna had a knack for seeing straight through me. I was so tired of lying. I yearned to tell someone about what I was going through, someone who wasn’t involved in all this crap, someone who just cared for me and not what I could offer the organisation. I closed my eyes for a moment, sinking into my quiet place, testing the feeling. Was it safe to tell her? And then the question hit, the question so obvious and stupid that it had never occurred to me to ask in all my training with Liam. How would I know? What if I didn’t? Fear shot through me as I recalled being in the stairwell a few hours earlier. I’d used my intuition. I’d made the wrong call. Because I didn’t know.
And just like that, it turned off. The calm place that helped me know what to do, what people around me were feeling, how to react, was gone. My intuition vanished, leaving me adrift. I scrambled internally after it, but I couldn’t find it. There was no calm place, just a tumultuous sea of ragged thoughts and jumbled emotions.
‘Gabs? Are you okay?’
I turned blindly towards the sound before registering that I could still physically see, even if I could no longer sense anything intuitively. I stared at Zenna. ‘I’m not the same,’ I whispered.
‘I know that much. What’s happened, Gabby?’
Her voice was soft, gentle, yet firm, like it could handle what was happening. I didn’t need intuition to know that even if I could tell Cecelia, she was too busy and under too much stress to take it right now. I couldn’t implicate Alex in something that his brother had been hiding for years. I couldn’t trust Dad, not completely. I wasn’t ready to be vulnerable with Keraun. And everyone at Darkhaven was on the wrong side of the looking-glass. They hadn’t tried to live in the real world with this. Zenna’s voice, concern cracking around the edges, broke through my front. ‘I was struck by lightning. About a month ago, I guess.’
Zenna gasped. ‘What? How are you, you know…’
‘Alive?’
She nodded. ‘Isn’t that supposed to kill you?’
Flamebeard’s lesson popped into my head. ‘Apparently not, but that’s not the point. Something happened. When I was a baby, my mum put me in an experiment that means when I get struck by lightning, I get all this enhancement. Long life, super-fast healing, stuff like that.’
Zenna’s eyes widened. ‘So you’re, like, superhuman?’
I shifted. ‘I guess so.’
‘Wow.’
‘I’ve been working with a team who find people like me – the other kids who were in the experiment – and train us. Sort of. Stephen can talk to animals telepathically. Liam is clairvoyant. I saw Donovan get run over by a car and just get up and walk away. And she’s crazy strong.’
Zenna’s eyes kindled. ‘Strong like … super strong? Like, lift-up-a-car strong?’
‘Fish it out of a dam and throw it over her head like it’s a handbag.’ I’d seen her do it. I’d have been amazed if I hadn’t been in the car.
‘That would be awesome.’ I could see Zenna’s mind working at about a million miles an hour, melancholy forgotten.
‘You can’t use Donovan for your film project. Actually, yes, yes you can. Take her away. If I never see her again, that would be great.’
‘What else can you do?’
I told her everything. I told her about the casino, the rally drive and my advancing intuition. My chest lightened tenfold just talking about Donovan’s torture sessions. I choked up as I explained how I’d screwed up at the Taskforce, taking the wrong door and getting caught and not noticing that I’d lost the tracking bracelet. To cover my emotion, I told her about playing poker with Liam.
‘That sounds fun,’ she remarked.
‘You’d be rubbish at poker,’ I said. Zenna’s face was a picture book of her feelings.
She pouted. ‘I might not be.’
‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter because it’s gone. My intuition. I screwed up. I’m basically a human with a keen sense of smell who has no idea what to do with her much-extended life.’
‘Well, look on the bright side,’ she said. ‘At least you have a lot longer to figure it out.’ Then she stabbed me, hard, with her plastic fork.
‘Ow! What are you doing?’ I pulled my arm away, rubbing at the red marks on my skin. The fork was bent in half.
‘Testing your healing thing. Apparently you have iron skin now.’
‘It’s a plastic fork. It folds up at the sight of a cooked potato. Are you some kind of sadist?’
‘No, more a masochist,’ she replied, shadows deepening in her eyes. ‘Sorry.’
‘Yeah.’ The marks were gone, but I was still miffed. ‘Do you really need proof?’
‘Would it bother you if I said yes?’
I considered, then stuck with candid honesty. ‘A bit, but I understand.’
‘I believe that you’re telling the truth.’
‘But you think I’m a crazy person?’
A frown darkened her face. ‘If anyone is crazy around here, it’s me. But I guess I just can’t reconcile it in my mind.’
‘That makes sense. Really. I would struggle to believe this if I hadn’t experienced it first hand.’ And also met a lightning god in the same month. But I’d left Keraun out of my narrative. I was too churned up about him, and besides, an alien god was a level of unreality that no one could be expected to believe.
‘What are you going to do?’ Zenna asked, interrupting my personal Keraun tangent.
‘About what?’
‘Donovan. She’s abusing you, Gabby. You don’t need that.’
‘I don’t know.’
