The light is very bright.
The observation piques my curiosity. Maybe the fanatics have been right all along, about heaven and the bright light and all that.
They must also be right about consciousness existing after death, because thoughts tumble through my head. They were wrong about there being no pain, though. My body hurts from top to bottom, but nothing aches more than my jaw. And my shoulder.
Apparently we don’t get to keep our magical healing abilities once we’re dead and gone.
“She’s waking up. Look.” The voice is soft and familiar.
My mind works on identifying it and the pounding in my head increases. Then it comes to me, along with the scene that had taken place on the tarmac in St. Petersburg, and my eyes fly open.
Then I shut them again because the light and movement and sound makes me want to barf.
“You can do it, Gyp. Come back to me.” That’s Mole’s voice—no need to think about it for an extra second—and his is the face I see when my eyes manage to stay open.
But it’s not the voice that pulled me from the blackness.
I find who I’m searching for sagging in the corner—Jude. He hadn’t been a dream. Certainly not an angel.
“Hey.” Mole’s eyes brim with tears, and my heart smacks into my ribs. “You’re back.”
He launches himself at me, not worried about touching me, about what I might see. I’m so wrapped up in blankets that it wouldn’t matter, anyway, but I do grunt from the pain when he jostles me too hard.
My grimace sends him back to his seat with a sheepish expression, but the light on his face doesn’t go out. His tears don’t stop. It’s been years since I’ve seen Mole cry, and the fact that it’s over me touches me with the kind of wonder I thought had disappeared with our brief childhood.
He’s Mole again in a heartbeat, a sly bend to his smirk. “You know, just because I said you look hot with electrodes stuck to you doesn’t mean you need to land in a hospital bed to get my attention.”
“I’m in the hospital?” I try to sit up and realize there are wires and an IV coming out of me. “What happened?”
He screws up his face. I glance at Jude, who avoids my gaze.
“You’re in the sick bay on the plane. You don’t remember what happened?”
It starts to come back to me in snatches, until all I can feel is the crushing self-hatred that drove me to pick up that gun. The gun that I fired.
My hand flies to my jaw, find it covered in gauze and tape. My eyes fly to Jude. “You stopped me.”
“He tackled you,” Mole amends, helpfully. “Bloody bruised you all to hell, although Agent Bishop promises most of the smaller ones are already gone. Your face was a piece of work, but it’s improving, too.”
“How do you know, dope?”
“I felt you up while you were out. Sue me.”
A smile starts to curl my lips, but then Jude’s eyes are on me, no longer avoiding. They’re deliberately blank, I think, except for a twitch of longing at the edges that he’s failing to one hundred percent hide. “I didn’t have a choice,” he says, a little defensively. “You still shot off a good chunk of your jaw.”
My heart climbs into my throat, fluttering until I’m lightheaded again at the thought. I almost killed myself. Why?
Instead, I just say, “Thank you.”
“It was an empath that made you do it,” he explains as though he can hear my thoughts. “Like Tate, but not a friend.”
“There were other Cavies here. Not the ones with the CIA?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re here. And you know about Tate and this plane and… How do you know about all of this? What are you doing in Russia?”
Mole gets up, leaning down to brush the lightest, briefest of kisses to my forehead and then sweeps my hair back onto the pillow. “I’m going to leave you two alone. I’ll be right outside, and when you’re ready, everyone wants to talk in the main cabin.”
Mole shuffles out, using the walls and his hands more than he does in a familiar environment. Jude moves toward me carefully, taking the seat Mole vacated but staying well out of arm’s reach. He keeps his face a blanker slate, too, but the sheen on the edges remains.
My vision of Pollyanna’s death burns like acid. Jude knew about her then, too. She thought he could help her but he didn’t.
He’s different.
“What are you doing here?” I demand now, feeling stronger and in less pain by the minute. This time my attempt to sit up sticks and I set about pulling off the wires and the gauze away from my face. The wound my fingers find feels nasty and is still open enough to make me wince.
“Those people who followed y’all back here to the airport—they’re Cavies, like I said. But not ones that were raised at Darley.”
That catches my attention, and even though it doesn’t make me forget the question I asked about Jude’s presence, it does distract me.
“All Cavies are raised at Darley.” I’m suddenly afraid there are Darley Halls all over the country. Hundreds upon hundreds of babies ripped from murdered mothers.
“Darley Hall is a special place, Norah, and all Cavies aren’t equally deserving. Surely you know that.” A sadness ghosts over his face. Maybe a regret. “There have been some the government considers failures.”
“Yeah, I’m aware.” My response drips with sarcasm, but his treatment of this conversation feels a little bit like a cruel joke. As though I, of all people, need it explained.
“No, not like your mutation is considered less than desirable, Norah. As in, the gene therapy didn’t take in the mother and no ability ever manifested in the child.”
My mind works through this, around in a circle until I come back to my initial question for the boy standing in front of me—the one who shouldn’t be here at all. “How on earth do you know all of this, Jude?”
Irony stretches his smile thin, until it’s not a smile at all but a warning. “Because I’m one of them.”
“What?” My flabbergasted response isn’t because I didn’t hear him. The truth just can’t be…the truth. “You’re not a Cavy. You grew up in Charleston with Maya. Your dad has spent years investigating the government. Your mom isn’t dead!”
“You’re right; I’m not a Cavy. I’m a Siphon. A defective experiment put up for adoption when it became clear my mother would never leave Saint Catherine’s House alive.” He nods, watching the truth sink into my skin like poison.
“What’s a Siphon?” My voice sounds far away to my ears, as though someone else asks the question.
“You just met them. The effects of the gene therapy occasionally invert, resulting in subjects who display no mutated abilities of their own, but they can siphon—or borrow—it from any Cavy in the vicinity.”
It all makes sense, then. The way Dane’s and my skin peeled off like someone was pulling it from underneath… The objects flying at us through the air… The people chasing us borrowed from Geoff and Reaper.
And Mole’s car lighting on fire. Haint fighting an invisible person.
The person I never saw who grabbed hold of Pollyanna’s bone-chilling ability and used it to try to make me kill myself in front of my friends.
My throat burns at the memory, part from shame because she or he could never have used those emotions against me so easily if they weren’t already there to a lesser degree, and part anger over being manipulated at all. Almost murdered.
My face feels like stone by the time I look up at Jude, ready to do whatever it takes—even continue weapons and combat training like we had at Saint Stephen’s—to make sure those people never steal from us again. Never turn around the things that make my friends feel safe and confident, using them to flip us on the defensive instead.
There’s something so dirty about it. So underhanded. Like stabbing someone in the back.
If there’s one thing in the world I’ve never been able to stand, it’s a coward. And if they’re trying to stop us, these are cowards who want to let a deadly computer virus run rampant in the world. But why?
My hands shake and my heart thuds. Betrayal, hot and painful, sluices through me as I realize Jude’s lumped in with them. That he could have stolen my ability at any time—because of course he knows what it is. And that’s the real reason he never asked.
Losing him this way hurts worse than any other injury I’ve sustained today. “You’re here with them. The ones who tried to kill us.”
His eyes go wide and he reaches for me, missing when I jerk away. “No! Norah, God, how can you think that? I would never, ever hurt you. I’m here to protect you.”
I feel deflated, like all of the oxygen left my body at once and I hadn’t even realized I’d stopped breathing. “Why should I believe you?”
The hurt in his face shatters my heart. We’ll never be the same.
“How can you say that?”
“I don’t know, Jude.” I refuse to give in to the desire to take it back. “Because you’re here?”
“I’m here because the CIA asked me to come.” The way he says asked, like it’s a joke, tells me he was commanded, probably with some kind of not-so-subtle threat against his father’s life as the pressure.
“So they knew this might happen. That the…the Siphons might come after us.”
“Of course. They wanted you here, on the ground, to try to draw them out. I wouldn’t be surprised if they leaked the fact of your involvement in the mission, though it’s as likely that the Siphons have infiltrated the CIA. Either way, the government has been looking to recapture them ever since they realized not having powers of their own didn’t mean they don’t have powers.”
The influx of information sucks at me like a hundred leeches stuck all over my skin. It dries up the little bit of the comfort I took from my life in Charleston and extracts the little bit of sympathy I had for the CIA’s cause. What it can’t totally rid me of are my feelings for Jude, which linger too deep to be touched.
The pain etched on his face, the desperation trembling at the corners of his eyes, as though he’s afraid if he looks right at it it’ll swallow him, the way I know he’s dying to reach out to me—they all conspire to make me see the boy I knew, not the one more like me than I ever could have guessed.
“How does that even happen? I mean, the government not knowing what they could do?”
“They were stumped at the beginning, too, and by the time they figured it out, we were scattered—adopted by unsuspecting families.” He rakes a hand through his hair, wincing as though telling me this hurts him. “But you can’t mess with someone’s genetic code and expect to get away scot-free. We were different.”
I frown and cringe at the odd stretching sensation in my jaw. “If they can only tap into the abilities of other Cavies, how did any of you figure out you could do anything?”
“How do you think? The government is greedy. Once they realized what was resulting from the failures, they experimented on some of the first defectives—” his lips twist over the word, like it tastes awful “—thinking the subjects wouldn’t figure out what it all meant. They did, and some of them escaped to go looking for more like them. Other Siphons.”
“Why are they after us?”
It doesn’t escape my notice that I keep referring to the Siphons as they, not you. Believing Jude could have anything in common with the group of people who just tried to kill us is too much right now.
“The Siphons hate what was done to them, how they were treated like rats in a lab. They want to wipe out the program. All of you. Like it never existed.”
“So, they want to kill themselves, too? That’s ludicrous.”
He shakes his head. “No. Without successful mutations to borrow from, the Siphons become just like everyone else. Which is probably what they’re actually after.” Jude pauses, seeming to consider saying more before he does. “It’s not all of them, you know. The ones here, the ones after the Cavies, are a small but determined group.”
“Don’t they realize we didn’t ask to be this way any more than they did?”
“They don’t care. They want the program destroyed, and even if they get to every last bit of research, it’s not complete without wiping the specimens, too. I mean, do you think there should be generations after yours?”
A world without Cavies is a world without me, without my friends, makes my blood run cold. These rogue Siphons are nothing but more enemies.
“I don’t know. But I don’t think it should be up to the Siphons to make that call.”
Jude gives me a tight nod. “You’re right about that.”
“How long have you known? About who you are?” I ask with a tongue as dry as the desert.
His brief hesitation reveals everything. Jude has known for longer than he’s known me. He knew when we met what I was, where I came from, and what would be asked of me…and he lied.
“You lied to me,” I whisper, wishing my voice sounded more angry and less wounded.
Jude starts to shake his head but stalls when he sees my face. I can only imagine what it looks like. My insides are about to boil away, and his face falls to pieces.
“I didn’t tell you the truth.”
“Semantics,” I sigh. “You could have helped me. When you heard about how I was attacked on the street with that needle. You must have known what really happened. Who was after us.”
“Whoa. Slow down, Norah, you’re leaping while I’m still taking baby steps.” He runs a hand through his sandy hair, revealing greasy roots. It must have been at least a few days since he’s had a wash. “I’ve known what I am and where I came from since I was about seven. My father knew for longer.”
“But he’s not your father.”
“Not technically. I’m adopted. Noah Greene, that big-hearted loon, is in jail because he wanted to know where the boy he adopted came from and stumbled on way more than he could handle.”
“How did he find out where you came from? What they did to you?” The suspicion pushing on my insides, forcing its way out, is black and oily. Gross. But if not trusting people is the only way to survive, so be it. “Surely the government hid those records.”
“Of course they did. But my father didn’t trust the representative from the Department of Family Services who came to check on me every three months at first, then every six—and of course, he was right. She was CIA. My father hasn’t always been an obsessed borderline psychotic, but he has always been a reporter. He’s got a nose for it, like it’s his calling, and he started digging.” Jude shrugs, but it’s easy to see that not one syllable is being said without cost. “It didn’t take him long to figure out something weird was going on, especially when the state claimed they’d never sent anyone to our house. It kind of snowballed from there. Real records led him to Saint Catherine’s once he found the name of my birth mother, and to Darley from there. To you.”
“So you and Dane were working together, spying on Reaper and me.” Bile rises in the back of my throat thinking about how he made me feel. The way he kissed me. “Who are the others? The agents pretending to be friends with the other Cavies?”
“No. The CIA didn’t know who I was until the incident at the warehouse. I confessed in an attempt to trade myself for my father. To show them that I’m the only reason he couldn’t stay out of it.” His eyes grow warm, rake my face with an intensity that heats me up from the inside. “I knew what you were because you came from Darley, but it didn’t—doesn’t—have anything to do with the way I feel about you.”
Despite everything else he’s said in the past ten minutes, those are the words that lodge in my heart. That feel like blessed honesty, that jam emotion into my throat until it throbs.
I stare at him and he stares back, eyes dipping to my lips.
I lick them, then clear my throat and hope it will transfer to my head. “How could they not know who you are? You just said they’ve been keeping tabs on you since you were a kid.”
Jude appears startled at the change in subject, as though someone dumped cold water on him in the middle of a dream. He manages to accept it after a deep breath. “As soon as my father learned the truth, he convinced my mother we needed to go into hiding. We changed our names, they changed professions, they had my sister. I was three.”
The light dawns. “That’s when you moved to Charleston. Met Maya.”
He nods, reaching for me again. My hand is under the sheet and he rests his on top of it. As hard as I try to force my hand to pull away, it takes me a full thirty seconds to make it happen.
“So when did you find out about the other Siphons?” I ask, needing to move away from the question of Jude and me and how we relate to each other now with more untruths and new distance between us.
“The same time I found out what I was. My father found Darley, but he also started looking into the traditional adoptions coming out of Saint Catherine’s. That’s when he found the others like me. Since the majority of them are older—I’m the first defective in over ten years—the government was already well aware of what I could do.”
“Why didn’t you tell me who you are last semester? Why did you lie just a few days ago when I asked why the CIA was so keen on letting you go?”
“We’re not so different, Norah. We’ve both spent out lives hiding. I suspected you didn’t know about the Siphons and I didn’t know what you would think about me. About everything.” He leans forward, his hand brushing mine with the softest of touches. “I should have told you when you first showed up.”
“Well, I suppose I can’t blame you for not pouring out your biggest secret to a perfect stranger.”
“I admit that, at first, the chance to get to know someone at least sort of like me for the first time in my life was intriguing.” He smiles, and it’s the first open expression he’s showed me in this room. “You were intriguing, and it had very little to do with a few tweaks to your genome.”
A blush creeps up my neck and into my cheeks, baffling me further. This time when my fingers explore the wound on my jaw, I find it’s almost scabbed over.
“You still look beautiful. With or without electrodes, in my opinion.” He gives me a wink, and it’s so Jude my heart actually leaps in my chest.
I don’t know what all this means. For Jude and me, for the Cavies. For what we’re fighting for, who we’re fighting against.
“Okay, so the Siphons want to get rid of the Cavies, that part I buy. And maybe I even agree that the CIA used this whole mission to use us as bait. But this computer virus is real, and the Siphons just stopped us from completing our mission to try to stop it. Are they involved? Or is the whole damn thing just a red herring?”
Jude shakes his head, directing his eyes toward the ceiling. “I don’t know the answer to that, Norah, but I’d be more than a little interested in helping you figure it out.”
Before I formulate a response the plane pitches sideways, tossing us both to the floor. The horrible screech of an emergency siren, like fingernails down a blackboard, assaults my ears. The lights flash, as my breath catches and terror shoots through me, and the sick bay goes dark.