Chapter Eighteen

Aiden

Someone. Is drilling. Fucking holes. In my head.

I thought I knew what physical pain was, but Jesus, I’d been wrong.

I almost don’t recognize my deep, abrasive voice—my own screams. Lights blaze in my vision like someone holds a mega-flashlight point-blank at my eyes. Shoving my palms against them does nothing to dull the stabbing sensation, and I’m burning, burning, burning…

Elena’s angular face fades to darkness. The room melts into a gray I don’t understand before bright color explodes behind my eyelids. There’s a sensation of warm sunshine on the back of my neck, a breeze brushing my skin. More colors. Blue and then green, more blue, then a bright, raging orange. Vibrations shoot through me like I’m on the wrong end of a firing squad.

But there is no sunshine. No breeze. No colors.

Whatever is happening in my head isn’t real. Or right. I clamp my mouth shut, force my eyes open, and squint at Elena, trying to bring her back into focus. Her face…her beautiful face. Wide eyes. Trembling lips. My gaze falls to her hands, which shake as they hang in the air, stretched out toward me, but not quite touching me. Hell, she’s probably too scared to touch me.

Finally, the pain ebbs, becoming a dull pounding, and I loosen the grip my hands have on my hair. A door clatters open and slams against a wall. Panicked, heavy footsteps echo through the house, growing louder.

“What happened? What’s wrong?” Dr. Niels shouts as he enters the room. “Aiden? Elena? What’s going on?”

“He—I don’t know,” Elena says. “He just started screaming. It—oh my God, I don’t know.”

“Aiden?” He kneels on the carpet next to me, placing his hand on my shoulder like he always does. “Are you okay?”

My gaze hones in on his salt-and-pepper scruff, his expanding irises and furrowing brow, then I drop my hands and ball them together. “I think so.”

Another door creaks open, and Zoe appears in the living room. “What the bloody hell happened?”

I squeeze my eyes shut. Focus on breathing. In and out, in and out. “Something like a headache, I guess. All of a sudden there were fireworks of colors and…pain. I think…” I think I sound crazy. “I can’t explain it. I don’t know what happened. The other times weren’t half as bad as this.”

“The other times?” Zoe steps closer, leaning forward to inspect me. “This happened before?”

I nod. “This is the third time in the last two days.”

She presses her lips together, watching me like a dog about to lurch.

“It’s better now.” Instead of holes being drilled into my skull, there’s a slow and steady hammering.

“What were you doing when it happened?” Dr. Niels puts his hand under my jaw, twisting my head from side to side as any typical doctor might.

“We were just talking the first time.”

Zoe crosses one arm over her chest and brings the other up to her mouth, tapping against it. She frowns, then rests her chin on her hand. “How about the second time, and now?”

My gaze eagerly finds Elena, who’s still watching me. Still frightened. Her cheeks redden as she blinks. My lips open to respond, but I’m not sure she wants me telling them what we were just doing. “We were inside Dr. Miller’s office, hacking into her computer. I had a weird…vision. It felt like a memory, but that doesn’t seem possible. Especially considering I never forget anything…” And the fact that I didn’t exist before a year ago.

“What was this memory?” he asks.

“Well, when I overrode the system and changed the computer password, the name Velveteen popped into my head. I thought it was just the first word my brain had conjured up, but then I got mental images of a cat. An orange, fluffy cat named Velveteen. That’s when the pain started.”

Dr. Niels crosses his arms, pacing in front of the couch. He only paces when he’s worried. “That is…interesting.” It’s more of a mumble to himself. “These incidents must be connected somehow… Tell me, what were you doing before it happened this last time?”

“I—we were just…”

“Just what?” Dr. Niels urges. “Aiden, this is important. I need to know absolutely everything if I’m to understand what’s happening.”

“We—” I blow out air that sends a fresh wave of pain through my skull. “I kissed her.”

Dr. Niels’ gray eyes open even wider, holding an array of emotions. He rocks backward. “You…what?”

Oh, he’d heard me, and there’s no way in hell I’m going to repeat it.

He looks to Elena, whose cheeks have turned five shades brighter red, like a ripe tomato, and she steps back, anchoring herself against the glass. She nods once, and Dr. Niels returns his attention to me. Some of the most uncomfortable seconds of my life pass, the four of us eerily silent.

Dr. Niels touches his throat with his fingers, and his face pales more than it already had. “You’re sure you’re all right now?”

“I’m fine.”

He rises from his position next to me. “I’ll see what I can do about uncovering what might be causing these…headaches.”

I take his hand when he offers it, and I wobble under shaky legs. “Do you think it’ll happen again?”

He frowns. “I wish I could say. However, I would probably expect them to continue, yes.”

“What if it’s some kind of wire misfiring?” Elena suggests. Everyone turns to look at her. “I mean, it’s something a normal brain might do, but with a supercomputer brain? It could be a missing piece of code or—never mind, I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

“No.” Zoe steps forward. “You could be on to something. There are a lot of special things about Aiden’s brain. A number of things could go wrong. I’ll look into it. See if we can find the root cause.”

After a few minutes, the two of them wander toward the back of the house. Elena and I sit on the couch. When they’re both out of sight and earshot, Elena and I stare at each other.

“Am I more horrified? Or mortified? I can’t freaking decide.” She mumbles the last bit and hugs her elbows. Her flawlessly curved brows pull together, but half of her mouth really wants to smile.

“I’m sorry,” I say, sitting next to her. “I didn’t expect that to happen.”

“That’s putting it mildly, don’t you think?”

“Ah. Yes.” I’m dying to kiss her again, but I resist. Even if it doesn’t send me into a whirlwind of physical agony, I doubt she’d want me to. So much for feeling human. “It won’t happen again.”

Elena blinks, tucking hair behind her ear. “Oh,” is all she says in a tone that’s brittle, half defeated. But then she chews on her bottom lip and breaks our intense eye contact. Her voice drops to a worried whisper. “Before, you said you were fine.” She swallows hard. “You weren’t fine, were you?”

My chest tightens as I curl my hands into fists. Her eyes widen when I do, so I release them quickly, sighing. “No.”

I wasn’t okay. I kept brushing off the headaches, but each time gets worse, more intense. If these headaches—or whatever the fuck they are—keep happening, keep getting worse…I think they might kill me.

…

Elena falls asleep sitting up, and in her unconscious state, her head finds my shoulder. We’ve been like this for almost an hour, and I’ve been paying more attention to her steady breathing than to the screen in front of me. I don’t care about the movie. I’ve seen this one twice. Stretching out my hand, I flip the TV to a local channel. The early morning news started seven minutes ago.

I doubt I’ll see anything good on the news, but like some kind of masochist, I don’t change the channel to something better. Like cartoons.

It takes the robotic-like anchor a whole three minutes before he says the words breaking news and missing girl.

An image of Elena pops up on the top right-hand corner of the screen. Her smile in the picture is so bright, so full of happiness.

The reporter looks up from his desk. “Authorities are searching for seventeen-year-old Elena Carter. Police believe that she was taken by this young man.”

Me.

Somewhere inside me, I’d known this was coming. But seeing it, hearing it is worse than I imagined, and my heart responds by beating wildly. On the local news channel is a photo of me for all the world to see. It’s a snapshot from the security cameras outside AIR, captured next to those two armed guards, mid-fucking-swing.

“His identity remains unknown, but he is believed to be armed and dangerous. If anyone comes into contact with this man, local authorities are urging the public not to take action on their own.”

Armed and dangerous. To them, I’m the villain in this story. And honestly, I guess I am. I’ve left several others with broken bones and concussions. Now they have proof of the damage I’ve done. Witnesses. Just how high is my victim count?

I stare at my hands, the muscles taut, the skin white. My chest is heavy and damn it, I’d love to throw my fist through a wall. What has my life been for? All this time everyone put into me. All those months at AIR. All those goddamned tests. All those lies.

Elena shifts against me, cuddling closer, a soft sound escaping her lips, and just like that, my inner thunderstorm calms. I’m offered a reprieve from the acid rain of feelings eating away at me. I can see again, think again, breathe again.

“Sorry about making you my human pillow,” she murmurs, blinking up at me through half-closed eyelids.

“Don’t worry.” I attempt to smile, but it feels wrong. Her choice of words gnaws at my soul. I’m not human.

Nothing, nothing will ever change that.

Elena yawns audibly, lifting her head a little. “What time is it?”

“Just after five.”

She glances at the screen still playing the morning news. Thankfully, they’ve moved on to a different story. “Anything interesting?”

I stare at her without a word. Her face falls, and it doesn’t matter that her picture is no longer a highlight on the five o’clock news. She sees it in my eyes.

After a steady stream of silence, she shifts away from me, pulling one leg up, then the other, cradling her knees with her hands.

“I dreamed about you,” she says. “And my family. But it wasn’t a good dream. In it, I lost you. I lost my whole family, everyone I loved. It was—never mind. It’s silly. It was just a dream.” She plays with a strand of her hair, chewing on her lip. “Although…the dream wasn’t entirely wrong. I am losing you. And my dad, well, that relationship is broken.” Elena shrugs, but I can tell it’s bothering her.

I squeeze her hand. I don’t know the right things to say.

“Do you think Dr. Niels has a family?” she whispers, leaning into me. “Is there anyone who’ll miss him when you two disappear?”

Shit, I don’t know how to answer that one, either. “I’m sure there’s someone.”

All this time, I thought I knew him so well, but there are so many things I’m still clueless about. In reality, he only let me see parts of him he chose to show, so how much about him can I claim to truly understand?

Elena bends over, reaching across the floor. When she sits upright again, phone in hand, I ask, “What’re you doing?”

“Is it so awful that I want to know?”

I open my mouth but quickly shut it because if I’m being honest, I’m curious, too.

She powers the phone on, and an instant later, missed call notifications light up the screen. Her body goes stiff, but she quickly dismisses notifications and opens Google. She scrolls, and I take that time to admire the way her lips shift, the way her nose wrinkles in thought.

“I found something that isn’t about him being an amazing doctor,” she says, and I attempt to act like I hadn’t been staring at her. “It’s about his son. Seth Niels, a seventeen-year-old boy from Canton, Ohio… Seth and his mother were both”—she gasps—“killed in a home invasion. The two perpetrators were believed to hold intent to rob the Niels house and expected no one to be home.” She pauses, sadness coating her features. “Mrs. Niels was shot at close range and pronounced dead on the scene. Seth was Care-flighted to the local hospital, where he was put in the ICU under critical condition.”

“That’s the end of the article?”

“Yes.”

We clearly both know the ending, even if the report doesn’t spell it out.

“God, can you imagine?” she says, her voice soft. “Losing both your wife and son that way?”

No wonder he feels the way he does about his work—about me. He’s already lost his whole life. All he has left is work. And me.

“I wonder if they ever caught the monsters who did that.” Elena taps the screen, swallowing her disgust, and continues to search the internet for more answers. “Of course not,” she murmurs. “This one says that Dr. Niels was pulling an all-nighter at work and wasn’t home at the time. If he had been, he’d be dead, too.”

I nod, even though I don’t entirely agree. Maybe if he’d been home, he could’ve saved them. Maybe they’d all still be alive.

Maybe. Such a pitiful word.

I nearly jump when someone pounds on the door.

“Who do you think it is?” Elena asks in a worried whisper.

I stand, trying to decide if I should try to hide or go wake everyone up. “It could be anyone.”

“United States Military Security Forces,” a gruff sounding voice shouts from outside. “Open the door or we’ll disable the security system and break it down.”