One (One Universe) (27 page)

“What…what are they doing to them?” Leni chokes, staring at Nora and Lia. But I want to maintain eye contact with her. Need to.

“Getting them ready to go home,” I say, keeping my voice steady, squeezing Elias’s hand to tell him that it’s true because I know he can hear me now. Elias’s head moves one way, then the other, making the paper under his pillow crackle.

Fisk’s voice floats between us like noxious gas. “Trust me, Merrin. You’ll be glad you agreed to this.”

If he keeps saying my name like that, I swear to God I will kill him. I will rip his throat out through his eyes.

I didn’t agree to a goddamn thing, but I know what he means. Staying. Testing. What Elias has been doing since he was a little kid. Poking, prodding, sensory deprivation goop. I look up to where Nora and Lia’s tank is being drained, where nurses pull tubes out of their throats and wrap waffle-weave bathrobes just like the one I have at home around their atrophied bodies. I choke, try my best to keep the vomit down. Something that reminds me of home has no place here.

“Mrs. Grey,” Leni wails when she sees Mom coming back into the room for Michael, “You said they were making me stronger.”

I look from Leni to Mom and back again. Leni’s remembered. After all this, she remembered what Mom was to her and what Mom did to her all in the same breath.

“We… Honey, we thought we were. Thought we could enhance your indestructibility.”

“Indestructibility,” Leni says. “I’m not indestructible. Only when I’m with… But if I ever was… I could have…” She looks quickly at Daniel, then stares at the ground, her face contorting between pained and composed.

I think of that snapshot of Mom and Leni I found. Of course she needed a mom-substitute. Sucks that it was just for research purposes. A flash of hate for Mom burns through me.

Yeah, Leni trusted her. Not only that. Leni loved her. That’s why it worked.

I was just a kid, too. I should have trusted Mom. It should have worked for me, too. But my instincts have always been pretty damn good, apparently, because I’ve never really trusted anyone — never transferred a thing — until I met Elias.

Mom stares at the ground, too, then clenches her fists around the side of Michael’s bed and walks him out without another word. My heart twists for Leni, but there’s no way to comfort her now.

Suddenly, the electric prickle of the buzz overwhelms me. I turn around to see Elias sitting up.

I whimper and bury my face in his shoulder. I can’t possibly do anything else. “You’re awake.

“You made it,” Elias says. “You actually broke in to the Hub.” His voice is filled with awe. “But, Mer,” he says, his breath hot against my neck. “Michael and Max. They’re…”

“I know. And the girls, too.”

He swallows, blinks hard, and I motion behind me. Nora coughs and sputters from the tube removal. Lia’s still. A look I’ve never seen on Elias before roils in his eyes. Pure, unadulterated rage.

“I heard them talking about me. They said I was going under…indefinitely. What did you do? How did you get them to wake me up?”

“I told them if the twins all go home, we show them what we can do.”

Tears fill Elias’s eyes. “Thank you.”

I nod, resting my forehead against his. Then something catches his eye to the side, and he takes in a shuddering breath.

Leni murmurs, “Elias…” and puts her head on Daniel’s shoulder.

Elias’s head jerks up and then falls back to my shoulder. “They got Len and Dan, too.”

I don’t say anything. I can’t.

“They helped you. They helped you get in.”

I nod. “I never wanted them to get involved in this.”

“They always were. You knew that.”

“How are we going to get out of here?” My voice breaks.

“Hey,” Elias says, his arms shaking, fighting to stay around me. He’s still so weak from being sedated. “It’s going to be okay.”

Fisk clears his throat, causing me to whip around and glare at him. I feel Elias’s shoulders tremble above my arm, which I’ve wrapped around his chest. Elias may know what he’s going to do to get us out of here, but he’s not going to do it when he’s so weak.

I’ve got to buy us some time.

Behind me, where my hands join with Elias’s, my messenger bag bobs against my back. I swing it around front and fumble through, my hands shaking as I hold out a vial. “I know what you’re doing here. Know what you have been doing, ever since we were little kids.”

Leni’s face screws up.

“This is your whole life’s work, isn’t it?” I continue, glaring at Fisk. “Trying to fix all the Ones? Using us as a key to the whole problem?”

“Not a problem, Merrin. Not anymore. Not now that we know about you and Elias. Helen and Daniel. You are the next step in the evolutionary chain. To lift the Ones up from their pathetic situation and make them better. If you’ll only show me what you can do… Merrin, you could change the world. Be the biggest biotech advance the Hub has ever seen.”

I only ever wanted to help formulate an advance that could help kids like me, something that could give us options. Not something that could manipulate us into experiments or weapons.

I don’t want to be something that the Hub could use against others.

Behind me, Elias clears his throat, and I notice how hard he’s squeezing my hand. His shoulder steadies.

“Where are the rest of the vials?” he whispers to me, so light that I swear only I can hear it. I motion toward the lab door with my head.

Fisk strides over to the door to the lab and flings it open. Inside, behind all the lit glass cases, the vials of creepy neon liquid wink and gleam.

“All my life’s work, since Charlie died — it’s all in here. The highest security, the deepest part of the Hub. I’ve been keeping it safe, you see, for exactly this moment. And now, with so many of you here…”

I swear his eyes glisten with tears. I wonder if there is remorse behind the smirk, if there was ever a time he felt guilty when testing or injecting a little kid. I like to think there was. I’d like to think he never meant to use weird green sensory deprivation goop or throat tubes or electric sensors or sedatives or spinal taps. I’d like to think he never meant to put pieces of the poor little transferring five-year-old Ones in vials and collect them, hoping that one day all the pieces together would add up to more than the loss of his son.

I’d like to believe all that, but looking at him now, I can’t.

Daniel speaks up. “How come I never knew about this? I would have…” He clears his throat when Leni looks at him, her eyebrows bunched together. “My parents would have brought me in for testing…”

“Ever since Charlie died… Well, of course we were supposed to stop all this activity. The trustees sanctioned us. But he so badly wanted to be more than a One. And for all the times he came home with a black eye, for all the opportunities he was denied while he was alive, I couldn’t bear to give up on him. Besides, there is always some way, some other channel, to get what you want.” Fisk steps even closer. “I’m sure you can understand that, can’t you, Merrin? Can understand the desire to be something more than a sad, mediocre outcast who will never fit in anywhere? Something more? Something your family always wanted you to be?”

“I’m fine with being a One,” I say, my voice low and snarling.

“Then why are you here?”

“For my brothers. For Elias.”

And for the first time ever, I mean it. Now that I thought I could lose Elias, lose the boys, I’m fine with being a One. As long as it means we never have to come back here again.

Fisk pulls a vial out of his pocket again, and a solution sloshes inside of it, so thick it coats the glass. “And for this. The solution based on your blood. It could be the key to making you a Super, Merrin, but only if you let us test it on you.”

My heart shudders to a stop. He knows that the promise of flying on my own can convince me to do anything.

Almost anything.

I open my mouth, about to sling another retort his way, and then a strange ripping sound steals through the air.

Elias gasps and sits upright. “They’re back,” he chokes.

TWENTY-NINE

B
efore I can blink again, a robe-wrapped emaciated figure appears in front of Fisk. Her hands are cuffed behind her, and her head still has red marks where the nodes were attached. She whips around to assess Elias, looks him up and down, and her eyes flash blue. It’s Nora.

“It’s nice to see you awake, Miss VanDyne. I hope the titanium cuffs aren’t uncomfortable. Security measure, you understand,” Fisk says, smirking.

In one swift motion, Nora pulls her wrists apart, breaking the chain and shattering the cuffs, and lifts Fisk off the ground by the throat.

“I think we get stronger the more pissed off we are. But since you hacks didn’t test for that… What do you think, Leelee?” she calls over her shoulder.

Fisk’s eyes practically bulge out of his head.

“Holy shit,” Daniel breathes. He looks back at Elias, who stares back at him with wide eyes. I gather that this super strength is new.

Another ripping sound follows, and one of the guards cries out. Lia has teleported between two of them and busted out of her cuffs as well. She elbows one of them between the legs while wrenching the guns, one at a time, out of the holster of another. She cocks one and tosses the other to Nora.

Nora fixes her eyes on Fisk, who struggles and gasps. She wedges the gun against the inside of his jaw and takes another hard look back at Elias. “This won’t buy you much time.”

“But —” Elias sputters.

Nora shakes her head hard and steps back to brandish her gun at the rest of security as Lia rips through the air again to take down the guard calling for reinforcements at the main door.

In an instant, the room fills with 30 Fisks, all grinning maniacally, all dangling vials of the serum he knows I want.

“What the…”

“He can make duplicates,” gasps Daniel. “With kinetic energy?”

“Yeah, but they’re not that strong. They can barely think for themselves,” says Lia. “And he forgets that girls who see through matter can tell which of these ugly assholes is the real Fisk. I mean, he’s practically a One himself.”

“You can tell?” the Fisks all sputter at once, and panic runs wild in their eyes.

Nora laughs. “Yes. Half-assed duplicated matter looks different than the real thing. Idiot. Couldn’t one of these fancy electrodes show you that?”

She looks at me as she steps back from of a crowd of 10 Fisks, then trains her gun on one, nodding her head upward once.

“This one, Merrin,” she says.

Fisk gives an anguished shout and yells, “Take them all down!”

His duplicates swarm toward Leni and Daniel, who squeeze hands and send streams of flame in their faces. Mr. Hoffman dashes in, yelling, and grabs for one of the vials of serum a dupe is holding. A strangled sob escapes my throat as the white-hot fire devours his clothing and blackens his skin before my eyes.

Nora and Lia each pick a crowd of dupes and start firing. I grab Elias around the waist and yank him off his hospital bed with all my strength, ducking for cover. I pull off his sweatshirt that I wore over here and tug it down over his head. He still shivers beneath it.

As the duplicates’ bodies hit the ground, they dissolve into shimmering nothingness, and Fisk screams and drops to his knees.

Nora presses her gun to his temple. “Just try to muster up some more kinetic now, you sorry excuse for a human being. I dare you.” She looks at Elias. “We can take care of ourselves,” she says, her voice stronger than I would expect for having been in disuse. “You just take care of the lab.”

“There’s no way you two can — ” Elias says, just as Lia draws back and delivers a roundhouse kick to one hulking security guard, sending him skidding halfway across the arena and leaving him unconscious on the floor.

“We. Can take care. Of ourselves.”

Still holding the gun to Fisk’s temple, Nora inclines her head to read the label on the vial he still clutches in his hand. “Merrin,” she says without looking away. “I think that President Son of a Bitch here was about to hand this over to you.”

Without even thinking, I drop Elias’s hand and stride over, grab it, and tuck it greedily into my bag, inside the sleeve of the shirt I stuffed in there, then hurry back to him.

Nora speaks to Fisk again, her voice getting louder and steadier each time. “Now. You’re going to let my baby brother and his friends out of here. And you know how they’re going to leave. So you might as well call all your goddamned security off the roof.”

Fisk groans.

“Fisk,” she growls. “don’t make this harder on yourself than it has to be.”

“Guards,” he croaks. “Call off the missile surveillance.”

Lia shouts a warning from where she stands, 20 feet away. “You can quit playing these games, you asshole.”

“I don’t know what you’re — ”

Nora delivers a swift elbow to the side of his head, knocking him flat on the ground. She digs her heel into his collarbone, edging it against his esophagus, and trains the gun between his eyes.

“You know damn well what I’m talking about! The lasers! The lasers, too!” Lia shrieks, her eyes growing fiercer by the second. “I’ll be damned if my baby brother’s getting sliced to ribbons after all this!”

“Lia,” Nora says, much more quietly, shaking her head once.

“And the lasers,” Fisk moans.

Nora looks back at us one more time, her eyes darting between Elias and me, who nods curtly, his eyes glistening.

Elias swings his legs down from the bed. “Get ready, you guys,” he chokes to me, Leni and Daniel. Leni whimpers. The smell of melting plastic and smoldering cloth fills the air. They’ve got to be exhausted after torching half the place.

Fisk’s voice, weak and wheezing, comes slithering through the air. “You’ll never be anyone, Merrin Grey. Not without us. And you’ll never be able to come back after this. You’ll regret it the moment you leave the arena. You know the life of a One is… Well, it doesn’t have much of a point.”

No, it doesn’t.

No, it doesn’t
, I want to scream, but life without Elias doesn’t either. And gaining a Super for myself while others pay the price certainly doesn’t.