Catalyst (3 page)

“How long do we have?”

“I don’t know, but we can’t wait for someone to knock down our door. We’ll prepare as fast as we can, and get out of here.”

“Where can we go?” Vera asks.

“There’s a safe house in Chicago.”

“Okay,” Hex says, two of his four arms crossed, the other two waving about. “I’ll grow some fake F-TIDs. Every fingertip-ID is registered, but we can generate some black-market ones in a pinch. I have enough of that retinoic acid growth medium to make one for everyone. Vera, you get our provisions ready. Something that will keep for weeks, high protein and carb stuff. We need to load up more ethanol to run the chars. Dyl needs to destroy our DNA samples in the labs. We may even need to torch the rooms, to get rid of any lingering evidence. And Zel, you get medical kits ready to take on the road. Everyone’s gotta pack their own clothes and disguises.”

Vera, Marka, and I gape at him.

A small squeak issues from Vera’s unbelieving mouth. “Since when did you become so . . .
responsible?
”

Hex reddens. “Is that a problem?”

“Hells, no. It’s hot!” she coos. I smile and Marka laughs quietly, when a feathery hand touches the back of my neck. I grab at it, but the wispy feeling goes away.

I cannot . . .
It’s the faintest whisper.

It’s not Ana. I know Ana’s voice inside my head, and this wasn’t hers. I spin around, but no one looks at me like I’m crazy. Hex and Vera quickly separate, startled.

. . . This place
 . . .

“Holy crap. That sounded like Cy. Did you hear that?” he says.

I freeze, waving my hands at him to be quiet. But the touch that’s not Ana’s, and the voice—they’re both gone.

“I heard it too,” Vera says.

We all look around, confused at Cy’s voice in our midst, when a loud pounding echoes from the main door upstairs.

We all freeze. No one ever knocks on our door. No one.

Thump, thump, thump.

My heart jumps a mile. Cy!

“He’s here! He’s back!” I scream. I tear out the door and up the stairs. I can’t see where I’m going, all I can think is, it’s really happening. He’s really back! Marka, Vera, and Hex follow me, barely able to catch up. As soon as we careen into the common room, tripping over the piles of pillows on the floor, a voice yells from behind the door.

“Open this door!”

We all freeze, the excitement on our faces melting instantly.

It’s not Cy’s voice.

CHAPTER 2

I
T’S A GIRL’S VOICE.
M
Y SKIN DROPS
ten degrees from disappointment and fear. I turn back to Marka.

“If it’s not Cy, then who—”

“They’re here,” Vera cuts me off. Her body is poised to run in five different directions. Running wouldn’t do any good anyway. We’re totally unprepared.

“No. It’s too soon,” Marka says.

Hex unfreezes quickly. “Don’t open the door. We’ll try to get to the chars by the transport—”

“The transport is broken,” I say. I neglect to say that I’m the one who broke it.

“The medical room can’t be opened from the outside without a verbal order from whoever’s inside,” Marka says. “It’s the best we have for a panic room. Vera, can you—”

“I’ll get Ana and Dyl in there.” She gallops off in a blur of green. Hex ducks into the side door to the kitchen, emerging with a knife in each hand. I want to cry at the sight of him. I don’t want anyone in my family to fight. Knives are no match for neural guns carried by the police.

I run to the window. On the ground, there are no flashing lights that warn of an imminent, violent takeover of Carus by law enforcement. Just the normal midday magpod traffic. Strange.

Thump, thump, thump.
The last thump sounds more like a child’s knock, it’s so weak.

“Open up! Please!” the voice behind it cries.

“That doesn’t sound like cops,” Hex murmurs. “Too polite. And too girly.”

“How could anyone even get up this far, without bypassing the mirror password program?” I wonder out loud. We gather around the image on the door’s scanner pad. A blur at the bottom tells us the person out there is lumped on the floor and unmoving.

Marka passes her elegant hand over a scanner pad. There is a silky stuttering of clicks of multiple bolts receding into the doorframe. Hex takes a step forward, readying his knives. With one smooth movement, Marka tugs the door open.

Outside in the hallway, a girl is slumped on the floor. Dirty skin is stretched over too-thin arms and legs. Her hair might have been white once, but is now dishwater gray, matted with dreads and debris. Tired, strangely scarred and wide-open eyes search us, barely focused.

Marka feels it before I do. She staggers back, stumbling, holding her hand to her neck in a protective gesture. A soft wave of an invisible, anesthetic cloud hits my face and hands, along with an unmistakable wave of nausea. I’d go blind if I didn’t stagger backward as well. The horrifying numb sensation is spreading over my skin. I’m not sure which is stronger—the numbness, the nausea, or the hate boiling in my chest.

“What is she doing here?” Hex asks. He rubs his face, irritated and grunting as she affects him.

It’s Caliga. From Aureus. The girl who stole Dyl away without an ounce of regret. The first person that might be able to tell me where Cy is.

“Where is Cy?” I almost scream at her. “Where is he?”

“Not now, Zel! Everybody, get far back!” Marka orders us.

I gesture to Hex, who’s still clutching the knives. “Give me one of those.” Hex hands it over, but Marka shakes her head at me.

“No, Zelia, don’t,” she says.

My hand grips the knife handle so hard my palm hurts. I want to throw it with all the force I have, right into her face, because I can’t see Caliga anymore. All I can see is Dyl, and all the horrible things that happened to her because of Caliga. My knuckles crack sharply from squeezing the knife. I’m shaking with fury.

“He said you’d help me,” Caliga mews, hardly a whisper.

“Wilbert left this family a long time ago,” Hex fires back at her.

Caliga twists her scrawny neck and her eyes converge on me, pinning me in place. The last time I saw those eyes, they had multiple pairs of eyelids, thanks to Hex’s duplicative tissue serum. Now the whites of her eyes are bloodshot, the lids scarred and stretching her eyes open. She takes a gasp before letting her head gently touch the ground, unable to keep it up.

“Not Wilbert,” she rasps. “Cy. Cy said you’d help me.”

Her body sinks to the floor as she passes out.

• • •

W
E MANAGE TO PULL
C
ALIGA INTO THE
common room far enough to shut the door. It takes us minutes before we have normal sensation in our hands and the nausea subsides. Vera, Ana, and Dyl have since emerged from the infirmary.

We stand at a healthy distance in an arc around her. Just staring.

“How did she even get up here?” Hex asks.

“Wilbert must have hidden access for Caliga in the mirror password program,” Marka thinks aloud.

“What are we going to do?” Dyl whispers. Her face is pale. She’s not close enough to feel Caliga’s effects, but not far away enough to forget her memories of Aureus. Caliga abducted her, and Micah expertly played with her mind and heart, just as he’d done with Ana. He’d impregnated her. Then he’d coldly and brutally ended Dyl’s pregnancy because it was useless to him, and to Aureus.

Micah makes me sicker than Caliga’s trait ever could.

As if thinking the same thing, Vera growls, “I’ll tell you what I’d like to do to this piece of—”

“No.” Marka tilts her head, studying Caliga’s body. “None of that. We need to know what happened. I don’t think it’s a trap. I’d have smelled the deceit on her by now.”

Caliga’s so thin that her knees and elbows are disproportionately huge and knobby. Wherever she’s been lately, there hasn’t been much food. One shin sports a three-inch wound oozing pink liquid and resembling raw hamburger.

“Let’s put a watch on her. She’ll need to be searched, and scanned for any tracking implants,” Hex says.

“And she needs medical care,” Marka adds. “Zelia—”

“No way!” I grit my teeth. “Hell no.”

“You have more training than anyone else.”

“But—”

Marka stares helplessly at me. I’ll do anything for Marka, but this? She serves me a look that tells me there’s no choice.

“We’ll all take turns watching her at night,” she reasons. “In the meantime, Hex, bring her to the med room. Take a few swigs of that No-PuK and we’ll make a stretcher so you don’t have to touch her directly.”

Hex drops a large sheet on the floor and rolls Caliga onto it. What a trouper. It takes him three breaks and a bout of projectile vomiting before he gets her up the stairs to the med room.

Hex is too depleted of bodily fluids to lift her onto the table, so he leaves her splayed out on the floor. By then, Dyl pops in.

“Let’s get a blood sample. We need to reverse this numbness-nausea thing.”

“Why, so she gets to be normal?” I scowl.

“No, so
we
can be normal,” Dyl says. “You’re the one working with her the most. Also, if she’s waiting to pounce on us because she’s still working for Aureus, we’ll be able to neutralize her.”

“Oh.” My eyes fall closed for a second. I’ve been thinking with my heart. All red-hot blood and not a single brain cell. Survival has to come first.

“We only have seconds before we succumb, so a blood draw isn’t going to happen. Let’s just cut her skin, get a quick sample, and scoot away.”

Caliga is so out of it, she doesn’t flinch when I cut her. Dyl stares at the vial of blood while I recover.

“You okay?” I manage to ask. “With her being here and all?”

“I don’t know. It’s not so much her, but everything else. You know.
Him. Micah.
” She crosses her arms and stares at the floor. “There are things . . . I can’t remember. But I remember Micah’s smile.” She shuts her eyes and tilts her head, as if listening to sweet music. “He made it so easy to fall in love with him. I was the center of his everything. Even if I was drugged half the time, I remember that so well.” Her eyes snap open. “And then I remember him hurting you and me. I was in love with an actor.” Her eyes are dry, though mine aren’t.

I still have the scars on my arms from where Micah used his electrical trait to burn me. The scars are a landscape of puckered skin. Unlike Dyl, I remember everything. And I imagine a hell of a lot of what happened to Dyl when she was captive. Particularly where Micah was involved.

After Dyl leaves, I try to check my anger. If Cy sent Caliga here so that I would help her, then fine. I’ll help her until I can figure out what happened to Aureus and Cy.

“After that,” I say to her motionless body, “I owe you less than nothing.”

• • •

N
O-
P
UK AND
I
ARE THE BEST OF
friends. I’ve been chugging it so regularly over the past twenty-four hours that the essence of spearmint and ginger oozes out my pores.

I’ve cleaned Caliga’s cuts and put a dressing on her gaping leg wound. A transdermal patch the size of a small plate is now on the floor. It was supposed to infuse a giant bag of liquid vitamins, calories, and protein, but Caliga is so sick and confused that she’s ripped it off twice.

I hook up the liquid bag of nutrients to a new patch, and peel away the backing. The sticky side has a million microscopic needles. It itches, which is probably why she keeps yanking it off.

“If you touch this one, I’ve no problems with tying you down,” I say, taking a breath and readying to jump into the anesthetic field around her.

“If you try to tie me down, I’ll kill you.”

My hand twitches. Caliga hasn’t moved, and her eyes are still closed. I drop to a squat, many feet away, watching her with narrowed eyes. Her skin color has grown less pasty in the last several hours, and her cheeks are less sunken. The button lead I’ve stuck to her chest reads out on a wall monitor. Her vital signs are almost normal.

“Well,” I say at last. “It speaks.”

Caliga groans, and props herself up on her elbows. Her stiff eyelids blink and it takes nearly a minute for her to focus on me. She licks her cracked lips. “Water.”

“Say please.”

She delivers me a withering glance.

I stand up and back away. “I can throw you out the window without even touching you. Really, I’ve been rehearsing it in my brain. It involves a pole, a knife, and a homemade catapult. Want to try me?”

Caliga’s eyes bore into me. Her shoulders start to quiver from the effort of holding her body up. Finally, she gives in to her exhaustion and lies back down, shutting her eyes.

“Fine. Do what you want.”

I turn to leave, when a voice chimes into my head.

Wait.

My hand goes to my chest. It’s Cy again.

“Wait for what?” Caliga groans.

God, she heard it too, so I can’t be hallucinating. I know it was Cy. I’m absolutely positive. Of course, Ptolemy was sure the Earth was the center of the universe, but still.