Gypsy (The Cavy Files Book 1) (42 page)

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Turn the page to read the first chapter of
Alliance,
the next installment in the series!

Alliance

    
Chapter One

Flicker floats in a vat of neon green goo, held upright by wires and electrodes, naked except for a pair of white granny panties and a matching T-shirt that wafts around her thighs. One of us has checked on her every day since Haint found her on our first night here at Saint Stephen’s, but Flicker hasn’t opened her eyes. Not once.

I can’t believe we were so wrong, thinking she’s been trapped here the whole time. She hadn’t been kidnapped by the government like we thought she had. She hadn’t been forced to use her powers to do their bidding. The government that created us, experimented on our mothers to mutate our genes, might not be our enemy, even if we’ve been raised to believe it.
 

At least, maybe not our
only
enemy.

The desire to do something brews inside me like a storm, begging me to rip her free of those electrodes, dump her out of that tank. But our last rescue mission had been a bust, and we can’t risk her life when we’re not sure where to go from here. The girl we’d “saved” two weeks ago was an Older dressed up in Flicker’s skin, and now she’s spying on us, tricking us, while the real Flicker, the Cavy we’d risked everything for, floats here. Trapped by the Olders, the people who claimed to want to help us and protect us.

Not our finest moment.

The fact that we’re still pretending not to know the truth, still hanging out with the imposter Fake Flicker while we figure out what to do next, has set us all on edge. We can’t be ourselves, can’t talk freely, can’t even use our shared mental space—our Clubhouse—without fearing she’ll overhear.
 

The chill that slicks the damp walls at Saint Stephen’s sinks into my bones as I step closer, studying my suspended, unconscious friend.

I press a hand against the cool glass of the deprivation tank, spreading out my fingers, and searching my mind, wishing for the first time in my life that my skin could touch someone else’s. Even in the moments when her fingers drift toward the clear, curved surface that separates us, they don’t get close enough for me to try to see the future. Try to figure out if this is the real Flicker,
our
Flicker, or some kind of hologram. Another trick.

If we could touch, if I could see a number—the age she’s going to die, maybe how it
will
happen—at least we would know for sure.

For years, she’s been gone more than she’s been with us, a result of her inability to control her teleporting mutation, so even before we got booted from Darley Hall, the sort of research facility/group home where we grew up, she wasn’t around much. But she’s always been one of us.
 

A Cavy.
 

We might be
guinea pigs
,
but we’re the only people who understand what it’s like to grow up isolated from a world we were told would despise us, try to use us or hurt us or kill us because we’re different. Because we can do things other people can’t.

I touch my forehead to the tank and sigh. We’ve been at Saint Stephen’s with the older Cavies for two weeks, and before that, we were in the real world for a little more than four. But we lived at Darley Hall for
seventeen years
.
So even though I miss my dad, and Jude and Maya and all of the other people who became part of my life in Charleston, I hardly know them. If getting Flicker and the rest of us out of here and somewhere safe meant never seeing them again, I would do it.
 

I
will
do it. No matter how the thought of it makes it hard to breathe.

An alarm beeps on my watch, reminding me that it’s time for dinner. The Olders don’t come up here, at least not that we’ve seen, but I don’t need to give them a reason to come looking for me now.

“Flicker, if it’s really you, twitch a finger,” I say softly in the silence.
 

She doesn’t respond. Her corn silk hair billows around her head in a slow-moving halo, face so pale her freckles look like dirty flecks of copper against her skin.

It’s hard to leave. Partly because it’s peaceful in here, and the only place in this whole compound—aside from the bathroom—where I don’t have to pretend to be at ease, but mostly because she’s the reason we’ve come this far. She tried to warn us about
them
,
and we confronted the freaking CIA to try to save her, assuming that was who she meant.
 

Flicker represents the larger question of
why
.
Why they are doing this to her, why they used her to lure us here, what exactly they are going to ask us to do—but if I’ve learned one thing, it’s that no one does favors and asks for nothing in return. I didn’t need my so-called friend-turned-CIA-spy Dane Lee to tell me that, even though he did, repeatedly.
 

The Olders definitely want something. But what?

“See you later,” I whisper to Flicker.

I heave a sigh, then peer through a crack in the door to make sure no one is in the dark hallway before I slip out and down the steps, emerging from the stairwell near the cafeteria in the musty old basement. The church and grounds were built in the mid-seventeenth century and have been crumbling to dust for almost as long. All of the windows and at least a quarter of the exterior face are gone, and the Olders can’t exactly fix it up since their cover is that it’s abandoned. There’s a dimly lit, barely working bathroom that a well-meaning preservation company installed when they tried to get historic property status for Saint Stephen’s, and I duck inside to put my game face on—one that promises the Olders we don’t know they’re shady, and that we’re still blissfully unaware the
real
Flicker is upstairs.

I’ve managed a few deep breaths under the shuddering fluorescent lights when Pollyanna bangs out of a stall, scaring the bejesus out of me. Her sharp eyes find my blue ones in the mirror, and she watches me for a second while she washes her hands.
 

Irritation curls my fingernails into my palms, but I can’t be sure if she’s using her emotive talent on me or not since I’m always a little bristly after leaving the lab, after another frustratingly one-sided conversation with Flicker.
 

But I can usually tell when Polly’s forcing me to feel one way or another. She’s not big on hiding things like how skilled she is at controlling her mutation, so I figure this time my irritation is due to her general presence, not because she’s inside my head.

“What are you staring at?” Polly’s reflection snaps at me. Her long blond ringlets combine with her wide blue eyes and button nose to make her appear sweet, innocent even, but the wrapping is a big fat lie.

No matter how much I love Pollyanna, I’ve never really
liked
her.
 

“When was the last time you washed your hair?” Pollyanna’s pretty enough that she’s never had to take too much care with her appearance, but since we’ve been at Saint Stephen’s she’s taken it to the extreme. If I wanted to get all psychological on her, I’d suggest it’s the only thing she feels as though she can control.

“Who am I trying to impress, you? Not happening.”

I roll my eyes and walk into a stall, figuring I might as well take care of business while I’m here. The water turns off before my toilet flushes, and my fellow Cavy is leaning against the chipped porcelain sink when I emerge, her arms crossed over the college logo on her chest. It’s a strange thought, Polly somewhere as normal as college, even though she’s smart enough to do something like that.

We’re all smart. The government engineered us that way.

“Gypsy, I swear your bladder would be more at home in a mouse.”

I snort. “Maybe. Could you recommend a good physician?”

That makes her smile. We’ve hardly known anyone
but
doctors our whole lives.

Polly waits until I soap up my hands and turn on the water, then leans in close and pretends to pick at a nonexistent pimple on her chin. “Any change?”

“No. I can’t get close enough to get a good read, either.” Is Flicker dead? Alive? Going to die? I’m the one with the ability to give us at least a clue, but without being able to touch her, I haven’t been able to help at all.

As usual.

At least she doesn’t call me out on being useless. The old Pollyanna, the one confident in her abilities and her place in our little Cavy hierarchy, never missed a chance to criticize me. Her empath mutation is considered Substantial. It’s not a Lethal categorization—the Holy Grail as far as the Philosopher and the other doctors at Darley were concerned—but not even in the same embarrassing realm as my Inconsequential.

Polly breathes out, her eyes locking on mine in the mirror, full of questions without answers. We may not know everything about the older generations of Cavies, but we
do
know they’re liars.
 

Kidnapping, drugging liars.
 

The bathroom door swings open again before either of us says anything else, and a girl with corn silk hair, dark brown eyes, copper freckles, and a slender, pale frame pokes her head inside. She looks exactly like the girl I left suspended in goo and attached to all those wires four floors up.

Fake Flicker.

We don’t know which of the Olders is the shape-shifter because she or he is so wicked fast we can’t figure it out. During the confrontation in the warehouse when the Olders got ahold of us, whoever it is impersonated both Dane and Flicker without anyone catching on.

“You girls are about to be late for lunch, you know.”

Pollyanna strides out of the bathroom without responding. Fake Flicker raises her transparent eyebrows at me, and I give her a tight smile, squeezing past her and out into the cafeteria. Even though
our
Flicker started disappearing around the time we were ten, I remember her as fun-loving. Quick to laugh. Not a rule follower.

But the impersonator has no way of knowing any of that.
 

Cavies, old and new, are gathered around tables throughout the room, plates loaded with grilled chicken and leafy green salad. I get in line behind Chameleon, the Older who freaks me out the most. Maybe it’s because of the way he can completely blend in to the world around him, or maybe it’s because he’s kind of the unofficial leader of the Olders, which means he
definitely
knows what’s going on in the lab. Either way, he’s too involved in his conversation with Goose to pay me much notice at the moment, thank goodness.

I watch my friends,
my
Cavies, while I pile lettuce and vegetables next to my chicken, then absentmindedly douse it all in Italian dressing. Pollyanna’s still in line, along with Goose, but the rest of them sit around one of the Formica tables, faces blank as they pick at their food.

Haint looks angry, stabbing at a limp chunk of salad too forcefully, glaring when it sloughs off before she can get it into her mouth. She’s started to care less about her appearance, too, her black hair in unkempt snarls and a permanent sheen to her coffee-bean skin. Athena has already wolfed down his entire plateful and stares mournfully at his empty dish, picking at tufts of red eyebrows. His despondency
could
be because of the “no second helpings before everyone’s had a first helping” rule and not our current predicament, but who knows.

Geoff—who prefers we not use the nickname Vegetable because it’s just too cruel now that he’s kicked that pesky lifetime coma—takes small bites of grilled chicken, eating them plain. There’s more shine to his mouse-brown hair, more pink in his pale cheeks, every day. The simple fact that he’s sitting upright still amazes me. He smashed himself in the head as an infant, before our Darley Hall caretakers even knew about his telekinetic abilities, and he hadn’t functioned on his own basically our whole lives. The Olders and the serum they inject us with daily did what the Philosopher couldn’t accomplish in more than a decade of trying, and I know Geoff’s grateful to them. It’s hard to blame him for being content and happy for the first time in his life, even with the rest of us wondering if the Olders are bad news.

I look around the table at each face. We’re missing a couple others besides Flicker, and my chest aches from the loss. Prism has never been stable enough to be with us in any sense of the word, but like Flicker, she’s still one of us and her absence is palpable. Her ability is the opposite of Pollyanna’s, which means she feels everything the people around her are feeling, often in a deluge she’s never been able to control. She’s in some kind of mental facility in Charleston.

And now—or any time, really—isn’t the time to think about Reaper and her recent betrayal, but it’s hard not to. Just like it’s hard to believe she sided with the CIA when they tried to bring us all in by force or that she chose to work for them, to leave
us
.
Her family.

Mole’s blind, pea-green eyes find me across the room as if he can read my thoughts and knows I’m nearing a meltdown. He waves me over. I smile automatically, even though he can’t see it, and his lips play with a tiny smirk of their own. The sight of his familiar face, his sandy hair, and broad shoulders, forces a deep calm through me. My hands, which I hadn’t realized had taken to trembling, relax their grip on my plate as I cross the room and slide into the chair next to him.

Our knees touch under the table, and my heart slows down for the first time since Fake Flicker popped into the restroom.

“Hey. Any trouble?” he asks.

I shake my head, glancing around to see if we can be overheard, but none of the Olders are close by. Despite the fact that they went to plenty of trouble to get us to Saint Stephen’s, none of them actually seem to
want
us here. They don’t go out of their way to talk to us or get to know us or generally make us feel better about the whole situation.