Talent to Burn (Hidden Talent #1) (28 page)

Chapter Twenty-Seven

I made my way back out of the lower levels, slowly, crashing into only one person as I went. As I came to my room, my hand went to the door handle and then fell away. I needed to do something, talk to someone. What I wanted was to talk to Jamie. Failing that, I needed to find something else to occupy my time while I processed.

Heading back to the office levels, I picked a random guy in a tie. “How do I find someone here? Is there a directory?”

He shook his head. “There is, but it’s on the network, and you’d need access. Who are you looking for?”

“Justine…I don’t know her last name. Short girl, red hair, tattoos.”

“Come with me for a second.” He led me back to his cubicle, adorned with Dilbert cartoons and toy robots. After a few moments tapping on his keyboard, he turned his screen toward me. “This her?”

A photo showed Justine looking different from the way I’d seen her. Her hair was scraped back from her face, her makeup minimal. The flaming orange locks and freckles were unmistakably her though, even in this tamer incarnation.

“Yes.” Underneath the photo were a phone number, a floor and a room number. “Is that where she is?”

The guy glanced at the screen. “Yes, that’s her room.”

“Thanks!”

“You’re welcome, Catrina.”

I stopped as I was turning to leave. “How did you know who I am?”

He shrugged. “Most people know Eric. You guys look a lot alike, and I know you came in together. If I didn’t know who you were, I wouldn’t be sharing confidential information with you, would I?”

“I guess not. Thanks again.”

His eyes bored holes between my shoulder blades as I walked away. The whole encounter had creeped me out, but I had things to do, and I wouldn’t dwell on it.

A few minutes later, I stood outside a door much like my own, except this one had a nameplate on it. It said J. Bell.

I drew breath and knocked. She may not have been my favorite person, but she was Eric’s girlfriend, and I wasn’t here for myself.

No one answered. I glanced at the card reader and noted it was deactivated, like the one on my room. The handle turned in my grasp and I pushed the door open.

Justine’s “room” was an office, not living quarters. She had a desk and several tables along the walls, each covered in piles of paper, file folders, Post-its, and various other bits of stationery. A dead plant occupied one corner, and several coffee cups nestled in among all the paperwork. I couldn’t tell if she’d been in here recently—maybe not since she’d left with Eric. I wondered whether they’d put her back to work or whether she was persona non grata since then.

I’d give her a chance to turn up. I brushed crumbs from a chair and settled down to wait. I had no further appointments for the day, and nothing to do except avoid thinking.

I looked around the room, noting the blank walls and largely empty bookshelves. She was a strange character. I had no insight into what Eric saw in her, what drove her, what she did here, or even what she did for fun other than hang out with my brother. We’d exchanged a couple hundred words and that was all.

Some minutes passed. I was itchy. The air in the Institute dried out my skin. Standing up, I stretched the kinks out of my shoulders, and moved my weight from foot to foot. She had a ton of paper on the desk here.

Glancing at the door guiltily, I angled my head and began visually flicking through the paperwork on her desk. Memos about lunches, the gym, irrelevant things. The secret stuff must be in the filing folders. Looked like she never threw anything out, or filed it.

The top folder had Eric’s name on it. Interesting. I sneaked a glance at the door again, and then reached out and opened the folder. A pile of paperwork lay inside. Medical records, weight, blood pressure. Nothing that meant anything to me.

Shoes clicked down the hallway. I jumped, knocking the papers in the folder flying. Frantically, I stuffed papers back into the folder. As the door swung open I still had a paper in my hand, so I shoved it into my pocket, scrunching it.

To give her credit, Justine didn’t shriek or jump when there was an unexpected visitor intruding in her office.

“Hi,” she said. “How are you doing?”

“Not too bad,” I said, sounding even less nonchalant than I felt. “I didn’t know if you were back at work.”

She grimaced, coming into the room and dumping another folder on the desk. “I do a lot of special projects, detective work. Being able to disappear is useful for a lot of things.”

“And they took you back, like that? No trust lost over disappearing with Eric?”

One shoulder lifted inside her shiny suit jacket. “I tried to get him to come in, went back and forth with Ryder a bunch of times. No one blames me for what he did. Besides, when I came in they had plenty of work needing to be done, and no one to do it.”

“You’d think they would have put you through a debrief,” I said.

She rolled her eyes. “It went on for two days. You were in the infirmary for a while.”

“Ah.” I considered that blackout in my memory. Fair enough then. “Eric asked me to give you a message.”

Her gaze finally settled on my face. “What did he say?”

“He wants you to come visit.”

“Ah.” She moved across the room and sat down behind her desk. “I thought he might be mad at me.”

“Why would he be?” I couldn’t see how Justine was to blame for any of this.

“I thought he might blame me for us being caught and brought in.”

I shook my head. “He seems completely at peace with being here. They have his Talent back under control, and I think that went a long way toward convincing him.”

“All right,” she said. “I’ll go down and see him.”

“Thanks.” Huge shadows lay under her dark eyes. Her skin was pallid and she looked tired and vulnerable. We’d never really gotten to know each other, and I felt bad, suddenly, about that fact. “You know, I might be here for a while. Maybe we could have coffee sometime?”

“Sure,” she said, nodding. “Thanks for coming by. I have to get back to work.”

I let myself out, and it wasn’t until I got back to my room and sat down on the bed that the paper rustled in my pocket.

I pulled it out. The paper was covered in chicken-scratch handwriting—dates and numbers, in a list. It didn’t mean anything to me and I threw it on the desk with the notepad and paper that I’d been provided. Hopefully she wouldn’t miss it.

The rest of the day passed as slowly as the continental drift. I waited for someone to come and tell me what to do next. I figured they wouldn’t let me leave now, not after Dr. Jenn’s pronouncement. I should have made a break for it before the testing, but how far would I have gotten? Escape seemed like a far distant possibility, given how well Eric’s attempt had ended. Counting the cracks in the ceiling passed the time until I fell into a restless sleep.

The next morning, someone shaking my shoulder awakened me. I threw myself out of the bed, half-awake and ready to fight, my knees bent, my hands cocked.

The Major’s aide stepped back from me, looking confused. “I’m sorry to wake you,” he said. “The Major wants to speak with you again.”

“What time is it?” I said, standing up and making myself deliberately casual. My cheeks burned. If I wasn’t going to fight back, there was no reason to be ready for action.

“Oh-seven-hundred.”

“Huh.”

“The Major tends to run on military time,” he said, not unkindly. “It’s probably something of an adjustment.”

I followed him downstairs, not to the Major’s quarters this time, but instead through a heavy door like a bulkhead into a room with a counter and rows of metal cabinets behind it. He unlocked one of the cabinets and produced two sets of earmuffs, one of which he handed to me. We proceeded through an inner door into a shooting range. The Major stood alone at a station at the end of the room, taking shot after shot at a target.

When he ran out of ammo, he double-checked the magazine and chamber were empty, set the gun down on the bench in front of him, and removed his own ear coverings.

“Good morning, Catrina,” he said without looking in my direction, and I wondered what the Major’s Talent was. His aura held rock steady around him, navy blue and regimented like his uniform.

I slid the earmuffs off and stood silent, waiting to find out what he wanted from me.

“I understand you went through testing yesterday, and I have been apprised of the outcome.”

I waited.

“Today we will run some more tests.”

My patience and strategy ran out. “What this time?”

He pushed a button on the bench, and the paper target began moving toward us, making a squeaky noise as it came. It was remarkable that anything in this place was allowed to squeak.

“I believe Eric has spoken to you of the array of Talent-affecting drugs we have available. Dr. Jenn has something to try that she hypothesizes will open up your Talent.”

“Those drugs didn’t do so well for Eric,” I said quietly, not wanting him to see my fear.

“Nonsense,” Major Hudson said cheerfully, taking down his target and turning to look at me for the first time. “Right now, those drugs are saving him from a lifetime in jail.” His cold blue eyes burned pale in his ruddy face. “I look forward to hearing the results of the tests.”

“What if I decline?” My voice came out small, as if it were coming from the end of a rabbit hole.

The Major opened his gun and began to reload. “Why would you? You’ve spent your entire life as a failure.”

I recoiled, physically taking a step back from him.

“A failed Talent,” he continued, “turning into a failed adult, without any education or skills—and note, I don’t count the ridiculous training your father gave you as any kind of life skills—ending with failure to help your brother. This is your chance to be someone, to be worth something. Why would you decline?”

The bullets snicked into the gun, one by one. “You should be grateful to be away from that abomination of a Talent, James Murphy, as well. Using such power for minor criminal ends. We could have done a lot with him. Terrible waste.”

“Do you know where he is?” I said, painfully aware of the desperation in my tone. The blood rushed through my ears and the world had taken on a decidedly gray aspect.

Major Hudson snapped the gun shut and put his earmuffs back on. Turning back to the range, he said absently, “You may take her back down to Testing now.”

I’d all but forgotten the presence of the aide, who took my elbow, whether for support or to restrain me, I didn’t know. As he led me out of the shooting range, gunshots resumed behind us.

How did the Major know about my upbringing? We’d been in a race to find Eric so I wasn’t surprised he knew about Jamie, but how did he know about my father? Had they been watching me this whole time, waiting to see if a Talent emerged?

The insults he’d delivered casually stuck with me like thorns under my clothes. A failure. My skin ran hot and cold and my hands shook. A small child fought to break out inside my head, shouting,
“I’ll show them!”

The drugs terrified me, but I didn’t see what option I had. If got out of this place, they’d bring me back. Maybe if I could reach some level of trustee, I could find out where Jamie was, and go to him.

Of course, for all I knew he’d wandered off to Atlantic City or Monaco, to find the next girl he could charm with his silver tongue and sparkling dark eyes. Would he?

Gah.
So many questions, so few answers. I had no plan, no goal to move toward. I’d take the drugs, and failure be damned.

The testing center was cold this morning. I sat down in the chair, twitching numb fingers and toes while techs wired me up as they had the day before. I flinched when they put the cuff on my leg.

“Do I have to have that?” I said.

“Standard protocol,” one of the women said. “You get used to it.”

I found that hard to believe.

The doctor came in. She smiled at me with what appeared to be genuine warmth. I supposed cooperating with her experiments had put me in her good books. I swallowed the lump in my throat.

“Good morning,” she said brightly. “Are we all ready?”

“As ready as I’ll ever be.”

“This morning, we’re going to give you two injections. The first is a light sedative. This will relax you. From our analysis, I believe you have some emotional inhibitions to using Talent, so the sedation should help to free you of that inhibition. It shouldn’t be enough to make you fall asleep, only to make you calm.”

I couldn’t imagine falling asleep with all these monitors strapped to me and all these people staring.

“Then we’ll begin with the minimum dose of one of our new drugs.”

“Is it the Nova-22?” I asked.

“Ah.” She folded her arms. “I suppose Eric must have told you about that. No, this contains a similar compound but without the de-inhibiting effect. This way, we can adjust the levels of the Talent amplification and the sedative separately. The Nova-22 does both. I’d like to get you calibrated before we try that, although it is a lot more effective.”