About the Dark (6 page)

“Demi,” Fox said evenly, “if there’s anyone
who could be stewing right now, it should be me, but I’m fine.” He
kissed my knee again.

I turned away from him, and my tears
splattered the July issue of the
Gifted Times
magazine that
lay next to my thigh. Nobody was looking at it, but its cover was
etched in my memory. It was a portrait of a laughing teen girl. Her
red lipsticked mouth was pulled taut over her sharp teeth, and her
dark, slightly narrowed eyes glimmered with malice. A
black-lettered title cut her in two across her waist: “Young,
Gifted, and Dangerous.”

Demi made a guttural sound. “You’re fine? How
could you even forgive this slut for what happened before the gods
showed up?”

Fox raised his eyebrows. “Slut? Didn’t Sin
admit he started that kiss?”

“Yes, but she kissed him back.”

Fox smiled unpleasantly. “Well, that makes
them both slutty, doesn’t it? But that’s beside the point. What I
want you to understand, Dem, is this: if Sin touches Ever again, I
will find a way to break his neck no matter how carefully you
protect him.
Are we clear on that
?”

The echo from his last words reverberated in
the room. After it went quiet, Fox lovingly tapped on my foot,
meaning I was allowed to move it off the cover so he could cut the
sole out, following the outline he had made. He also glanced at my
hands to help me see what I was doing, and I felt divided between
gratitude and annoyance: I
could
tie pieces of polyester
together blindly.

Cr-r-rack
. Demi stripped a book of its
cover. Picked the next volume.
Crack
. We didn’t need any
more cardboard, but she kept on ripping books, her blond curls
clinging to her sweaty face and her blue eyes—unlike mine, they
matched perfectly—glowering at me.

Sinna gently stacked the damaged books
against the wall.

Demi hurled the covers that had accumulated
in her lap onto the floor. “And of course now Rig’s curious. Any
dimwit would wonder why Ever’s always wiped out here, in two
friggin’ rooms with supposedly nothing to do.”

I balled my fists.

“And naturally,” Demi raged on, “Ever can’t
pretend to be feeling swell. Dang it, I’ve never seen anyone who
could fake stuff worse than Ev. The only thing she can passably do
well is to look empty-faced, like she’s missing half of her
brain.”

The fabric scraps flew off my lap. “You know
what? I wouldn’t be anywhere near this tired if you didn’t make me
do all those body contortions from that sadistic
Martial Arts
Bible
of yours for ten hours every day!”

Demi curled her lip. “You’re right. I
shouldn’t have bothered teaching you to fight. You’re nothing but a
burden—weak and blind—and tonight—”

Fox rapped his lever against the floor.
“Dem!”

She held his gaze defiantly, but redness
crept up her cheeks. She picked up one of the ties I had made,
wound it around her forefinger, unwound it, then muttered guiltily,
“Nice knots, Ev.”

Since I’d made enough ties for tonight, I
stood up.

“Where are you going?” Fox asked, his fingers
coiling around my ankle tenderly, but firmly.

I blinked. Actually, I hadn’t been going
anywhere—I just wanted to give my speech standing. The whole of the
last night, I’d been organizing it in my head, and by morning I’d
nailed them: five reasons why we shouldn’t try to escape. Except
now Fox had scattered my thoughts with his question. Annoyed, I
waddled in place, straining to reassemble my reasons, but the only
thing I clearly recalled was that I had decided to deliver my
address standing to sound more impressive.

I sat back down. After everyone returned to
the sole-making, I flipped open a miniature chess set, the only
game we had, and started shuffling the pieces. The way their
magnetic bottoms glided along the board—smoothly, almost
swimmingly—focused me. I began to remember what I’d wanted to
say.

I’d planned to start by pointing out that we
had no idea how the world outside worked. Yes, Rig and sometimes
Bones had chatted with us, telling us things. That’s how we learned
that it was NYC outside this mall, and that it was the twenty-first
century, and that people had thought it would be paradise on earth
after it had been discovered that everyone had a talent. Only it
wasn’t a paradise. Instead, a new crime had arisen: stealing and
selling gifted kids. Gift trafficking. At first only older kids had
been snatched, yes, the ones who’d already come into their talents,
but then some particular jerk—Rig had called him “that bro”—had
surmised that if you looked into a baby’s dreams, you’d see what
talent he’d been born with. And that’s how it had been done ever
since: dreams, people who could peek into other folk’s night
visions, would check out newborns’ talents, then sell this
information to the highest bidder among the gift trafficking gangs,
who would then hasten to kidnap the children with talents useful
for theft and murder. Only, of course, the stolen kids would be
useless for many years, so they locked us up to be raised by
guards, who were exclusively sadists, pedophiles, and psychos.
Nobody had told us the last fact, of course. We’d figured that out
on our own.

Since by a stroke of luck we’d ended up in a
bookstore rather than, say, a clothing department, we had plenty of
printed materials to learn things from. Fox had somehow divined
this most amazing skill of reading, then painstakingly taught it to
the rest of us. The only problem was that while books had told us a
prodigious amount of stuff, from word definitions to how one could
survive a zombie apocalypse, there was nothing on how to make it
through a normal day in a normal city. How would a bus stop look?
How would you get a taxi? How would you use a phone? And it wasn’t
like we could just ask any of these things after we escaped,
because what if the person we stopped worked for Horgreth or some
other gift-trafficking lord?

Next, I had meant to talk about our clothes.
The gods handed us whatever rags they chanced upon as long as these
things remotely fit us. Our current outfits weren’t the worst we’d
had so far, but still, who knew how appropriate they would be to
rush out of a mall and into the wide world full of normally dressed
people? The only gear I didn’t doubt was Demi’s. Just yesterday
Bones had brought her a pair of light blue jeans and a black,
long-sleeved T-shirt that said, “I Heart New York.” I had seen
people dressed like that in the magazines, and besides, these
clothes seemed plain enough not to invite gawking.

Less lucky, Fox had gotten a shabby, tight
black suit and a weird white T-shirt with no sleeves, but only a
pair of narrow bands over his shoulders. An iffy combination. But
still, if Fox turned his collar up, his white shirt was almost
invisible, and Fox looked almost like guys in
Business Gift
mags. And that’s where our luck ended because my dress, white and
long, with torn ruffles and a plunging neckline, was a wedding
gown, and the only time a teenage girl with vampire-pale skin,
thigh-long hair, and cardboard soles might slip by unnoticed while
dressed like me was probably Halloween. Which had happened two
months ago.

And yet it was Sinna’s attire that I figured
would do us in. Out of cruel perversity, the gods had supplied him
with a loose suit of seizure-inducing periwinkle. With a pattern
printed all over it. No, the color, I believed, was okay. After
all, people couldn’t wear sensible colors day in and day out. But
the pictures—I don’t even know how to put it—they were surreally,
grotesquely bad. It was a nightmare captured on cotton. Imagine a
herd of bloated, dandruff-ridden sheep. As one, they were all
squinting at you, their matchstick legs splayed under them as if
these beasts couldn’t hold their own weight, and their mouths, evil
and crooked, emitting strings of gigantic Zs. What these letters
signified I had no idea, but altogether this suit was far too
sensational for someone on the run.

So our clothes and our ignorance of the
world—I slid a pawn across the chessboard—that made two reasons to
stay put.

The third reason was Fox. He didn’t look
human, or at least not normal-human. If his talent, time, wasn’t
tattooed on him, I’d have sworn he were a color, because where it
came to time, he couldn’t twist it, not even a second forward or
backward, but his colors were amazing. His hair, eyebrows, and
irises were the hue of dark red tulips. I could just picture him
playing with his colors when he was little and then forgetting to
change them back. Or choosing not to. Still, whether a time or
color, Fox
would
stand out, which, added to Sin’s and my
clothes, would make people remember our motley crew, and then the
gods would have a picnic of finding us.

I knocked a king off the chessboard with my
pawn, trying to recall my fourth point. Oh yes, money. We had none
because the gods for some reason never carried even a dime.

And my fifth reason? I couldn’t remember it,
and it was the most convincing of them all. It drove me nuts, but
presently, I came up with yet another reason: Sinna’s smell. The
poor soul reeked of rubbing alcohol. Yesterday, very late in the
evening, the gods had taken him to a doctor. Given us no
explanation, naturally. After an hour or so, Sin had returned, told
us the doctor had drawn a blood sample from his arm, and made us
all but drunk with his alcohol stench. Then, since it had been
pretty late, he’d simply gone to sleep, and now, even if he took a
shower and washed his clothes, there was no time for them to
dry.

We were so not going to pass for normal
people out there.

I got to my feet. “Listen.”

Demi looked up, and we both saw her
reflection in the steel door—she was rolling her eyes. “Ev, we’ve
been here for fifteen years,” she said. “We heard all your friggin’
reasons before. Do you suggest we rot here?”

“Ev.” Fox stood up and put his arm over my
shoulders. “I know you’re unhappy with my decision to try to escape
this hellhole. You—and Sinna—would much rather we mastered our
talents and then showed Horgreth and the gods how wrong they were
to mess with us.”

“Exactly,” I began, but Fox didn’t let me
finish.

“There are just two problems with that, Ev.
One small and one big. So the small one is this: have you ever
considered that there might have been a mistake and we might not be
gifted in what our tattoos say at all? Because we’re fifteen—in
fact, fifteen and three quarters in my case—and we haven’t had even
a glimmer of any of our alleged talents.”

“Wait.” Sinna jumped to his feet, then
quickly glanced at Demi and pressed his hand to his mouth. “No,
nothing. Sorry about that,” he murmured through his fingers.

He must have wanted to tell Fox and Demi
about the nightmare he’d made for me. Why’d he stopped? Maybe
I
should tell them…or maybe I should wait. Right now Demi
just might kill me if she learned Sinna and I had shared more than
a kiss.

Fox returned to his spiel, “So, as I said
earlier, the dream people might have gotten our gifts wrong, and if
we don’t perform real soon, Horgreth will have us killed and fed to
those rottweilers. That’s the small problem.”

I suddenly recalled the ice I had tasted that
morning. Yes, I’d felt the hard, cold chips on my tongue, and I’d
known the people around me were frightened, which could only mean
that I had sensed their emotions and that the butterfly woman had
been right: I was becoming a heart!

Fox plowed on, “Now, the big problem I
explained to you many times before, but it bears repeating because
that’s how kids learn. Ever-Jezebel, all the hearts who have ever
lived have turned evil. Catherine the Great, Queen Victoria,
Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin. They butchered millions. And you can
only do something like this if you don’t have to feel rotten about
it afterward. I guess they simply channeled happiness into
themselves after the deed and went right ahead with their day. And
I’m sure they didn’t start out that way, they weren’t born horrid
monsters, but if you can play with your feelings—create them, erase
them, channel them—then how long will it be before you start
cutting ethical corners, hmm?”

I stood silent. There had been decent
hearts—must have been—even if we’d never heard about them.

Fox sighed. “And I know my own moral
standards are awfully low because, given an opportunity, I would
not hold back from ripping any gift trafficker into bits the size
of our keyhole. Nor would I stop you from channeling pain into
them.
Save for one catch
. If you channel torture, it’ll be
all agony in your nerves. No love for me at all. Then, of course,
you’ll kill the pain and you’ll love me again, but with time—and I
can only imagine how dreadfully short that time will be—you’ll feel
that your love for me is just another feeling, nothing special, and
why even go back to it if your feelings are your juggling pins? And
then, with no goodness in you and no love, you’ll abandon me, and
I—” His voice broke, and he pulled me into a crushing hug. “I will
die without you.”

Terrified, I hugged him back.

“So, you see that I’m right, don’t you?” he
said.

Yes, I saw it; his words were logical; it all
made sense. I nodded into his chest, and he kissed the top of my
head. “Good girl. I love you.”

“Well, that settles it.” Demi stomped in her
new cardboard soles, testing them. “We’re escaping tonight. And we
are going to make it.”

***

Thank you for reading!

Into the Blind
is available for purchase on
Amazon.com.

About
the Author

Helen Rena loves reading and writing novels.
And short stories. And flash fiction. She has a Ph.D. in
Comparative Literature, and a vast collection of books and green
bottles. She is still not sure why green bottles. She lives in
Southern Oregon with her husband and two children. Please visit her
at
helenrena.com
.