The Gift (19 page)

She bursts into flames.

“FINALLY!” SAYS THE ONE Who Is The One triumphantly. “This is what I needed to see.

“Clearly,” he continues, walking away from one of the dozens of video monitors, stroking his chin, “it’s just as I hypothesized.
It appears she manifests especially in moments of great duress. Which clearly indicates she has little or no mastery of her
Gift.”

The man at his side types this up in his mobile data pad and nods.

“Once they’ve doused the flames, put her in the Isolation Ward. We need to study her abilities in a controlled environment.
And, needless to say, show no mercy. Not to either of them. I need results, results,
results!
”

“Yes, Your Excellency,” says the assistant.

“The Allgoods believe they’re here to get closer to me, and they’re absolutely right,” The One reflects. “In time, once I
know them better than they know themselves, I will get very,
very
close to them.”

Wisty

“WELL, ‘GRIM’ HAS A new dictionary entry,” I comment aloud to myself as I explore my latest venue. The Isolation Ward they put me in is actually
the vast, windowless, unbearably dank basement of the BNW Center. “This place makes the General Bowen State Psychiatric Hospital”—one
of the dungeon cribs that we busted out of—“look like a flower shop, a tea parlor, and a cribbage hall.”

Great. Five minutes in solitary, and I’m already talking a blue streak to myself.

No worries, though. My giant bunker is about to be filled with six bighearted scientists running inane tests on me. You know
how your doctor bangs your knee, shines a flashlight in your ear, and presses your tongue down with a stick and never finds
anything wrong? It starts out kind of like that. The medicos seem particularly interested in my fuzzy head, examining it with
a magnifying glass.

“A shame that the original was destroyed,” a giantess I
decide to call Helga says to another “researcher,” who looks like a beautician from a backwater town—who nearly flunked out
of cosmetology school. I call her Gigi.

“The informant has provided a small specimen, but the rest is said to be lost, or possibly under heavy guard,” says Gigi.

Am I actually hearing that my hair has become like the Holy freaking
Grail?

Then someone starts plucking out some samples of my hair—or, rather, reddish stubble—with a tweezerlike tool.

“Ouch!” I yell, and try to slap the hand away, but my wrists are grabbed by a doughy-faced lab assistant I call Hans.

Gigi, who I think is the lead scientist, steps back and looks intrigued, almost pleased, by my reaction.

“Why don’t you just wax my whole scalp while you’re at it?” I spit out sarcastically, and then instantly regret it.

Because that’s when the torture really begins.

Wisty

IT BEGINS with the waxing. Helga takes the hot substance and sticky fabric strips and starts ripping the eighth-of-an-inch-long precious
regrowth right from my skull. Okay, it’s my scalp, but it feels like my skull.

Note to self: Never make torture suggestions to captors. They have plenty of their own creative ideas.

As in, testing my response to sudden, random eardrum-breaking air-raid sirens. Or to lights that strobe really slowly so my
eyes nearly adjust to the darkness and then—
flash
—I’m blinded by an eye-exploding random pulse of pure white light. It’s truly the stuff that migraine headaches are made of.

“If this were an interrogation,” I tell them, “I’d have given you your answers long ago. So what are the questions? I repeat,
what do you want from me?
”

“Give us your Gift,” Gigi demands. “That would be sufficient.”

“No way!” I wouldn’t do that even if I knew how.

While Gigi executes the experimentation, Hans and Helga hold me in place as needed. Their three white-suited compatriots are
now sitting in a row of chairs in front of me with their notebooks, watching as if I’m the season finale of their favorite
TV show. The only thing missing is the popcorn.

Next they’re delivering hot steam into my face and nostrils like a facial from hell. Suffocation by dragon breath. Give me
waterboarding any day.

Then they demonstrate an acute pinching technique that takes six hands—Helga’s, Hans’s, and Gigi’s—and if that sounds like
child’s play, think again. It’s like being attacked by fire ants with road rage.

“Give us your Gift!”

“WhmmaMMMMMphhhhhh!”

I forgot to mention—they seem to need to try everything twice: once with duct tape on my mouth/eyes/hands, and once without.
This time, it is
with
duct tape.

Then there is the force-feeding of unmentionables (I can’t even write it without serious gagging). Let’s just say I would
rather be biting off live bat heads.

What ends up being the worst part, you ask?

If you have an aversion to dismemberment, don’t read any further. (Okay, that pretty much includes everyone.) While my limbs
remain intact, someone else’s apparently haven’t.

They bring Drummer Boy’s hands. On a platter.

I know from his insignia ring. They force me to hold those hands, and, by God, they are real.

I used to think that the New Order had banned all art, but I now realize I was wrong:
The fine art of human torture is alive and well here.

Wisty

THEY FINALLY GIVE UP on me. At least for now. I curl up in a tight little ball, trying to recoup my energy for when they come back. The endless
hours of drip-drip-drip quiet are interrupted only by the occasional scuffle of a rat, the noise of the grate opening in the
food chute, and the
thunk, thunk, thunk
of a loaf of stale bread and a semifrozen block of lima beans descending to me.

Yes, lima beans. With freezer burn.

I pick up the crumbling block, and I’m startled by what I think sounds like a sizzle. Must be my imagination. It reminds me
of when I was six, when Whit and I plotted to steal Mom’s lima beans out of the freezer and flush them down the toilet without
her knowing. We succeeded with part A, but not part B. And guess who got in trouble? Me. Always me. And
still
it’s me, alone in my punishment.

Whit, I need you here now!
I hurl the chunk of beans at
the door with a power I didn’t even know I had, and it shatters with a satisfying crunch.

“Uh-oh.” I hear a voice from behind the door. “You okay in there, Wist?”

Whit?

“Whit?” I shout, running toward the door as I hear a key in the lock.

In comes my brother, escorted by a chunky school monitor. Much to my amusement, the guy actually slips on a couple of lima
beans as he enters the room but tragically doesn’t fall flat on his face.

“Jeez, Wisty, what happened to your head?” is Whit’s greeting.

I’m hugging him in an instant, and then I see who’s being escorted in behind him. Sporting a black eye.
How predictable is this?

I glare at the weasel. “I thought this was supposed to be
solitary.
”

He glares back. “Don’t blame me, Wisty. It wasn’t my decision. Ask your brother.”

I let Whit go as the grunting monitors shove their wards into the basement with me. Without a word they leave, the door clicking
and locking behind them.

“What
happened
to you two?” I ask, not entirely hiding my delight at their imprisonment, or really at the fact that I have some company,
which, as you probably know, misery
so
loves.

Whit shrugs. “Byron and I got in a good old-fashioned fistfight. You know. Guy stuff.”

“Well, good for you, boys. And good for me. I have company now!” I spread my hands out grandly. “Welcome to my little shop
of horrors. They do free head-waxing here, by the way. I’m sure they’d do your chest for you, Whit. And your monobrow, Byron.”

“That’s vile,” Byron remarks, picking up a lima bean from the dirty floor and examining it.

And it’s going to get a lot more vile down in this dungeon.

Wisty

I’M CLUTCHING A LIMB, or I guess I should say a dismembered arm.
Drummer Boy No More’s.
Then suddenly it’s pulsating and starts moving as if it’s a living thing, first caressing my face, then, like the traitorous
soul it belonged to, clawing viciously at my eye.…

I wake up screaming and with my head pounding. Even worse, Byron is leaning very close to my face. I can smell his dippy cologne.
“Are you okay, Wisty? You’re as white as a sheet and you’re sweating like a soaker hose.”

They’ve clearly given Byron some sort of script that’s been diabolically designed to keep me on an emotional knife-edge between
suicide and murder.

The dayless, lightless monotony down here also creates the ideal conditions for psychosis. We’ve already taken bets on who’ll
succumb first. Byron’s been—I kid you not—counting beans (lima beans, that is), just like his deadbeat New Order dad. Whit’s
been writing in his
journal and searching for the Shadowland (and Celia, of course), and I’ve been self-inflicting pain in order to steel myself
for the next visit from the torture brigade.