Entanglement (YA Dystopian Romance) (16 page)

Aaron
scanned the audience for Amber’s father, but there were too many faces, their
identities lost under red hoods. Coincidence or not, the blue Corvette had
gotten him to thinking about Amber and her disturbing, impenetrable life. There
was so much she hadn’t told him, and now, as Aaron sat in the cult’s secret
warehouse, her secrecy stung like betrayal.

A
moment later, Father Dravin stepped behind the podium and took hold of the
microphone. He peered around the room, hawk-like, until the conversations
trailed off.

“Schrödinger’s
gift,” he began. “The gift that keeps on giving. Your half
is your
slave; cherish her, and the depth of her loyalty shall touch your heart.”
Dravin smiled. “Please look to the Brother next to you and recite the creed.”

The
din of low voices and sliding chairs filled the warehouse. Aaron crossed his
arms and stared at the ceiling. Stupid cult formalities.

Dominic
and Clive had already paired up. A hand gripped Aaron’s arm, and he glanced
over as a wrinkled old man settled into the seat next to him. The man started
to speak.

“I
am master and keeper of my half—” He paused. “Eh? You got to speak up son.”

“Keeper
of your
half?
” said Aaron in disbelief. “That’s how it starts?”

A
deep chorus resonated around them as everyone else recited the creed.

“Eh?”
The man cupped his hand behind his ear and leaned closer. “You don’t
know
it? Listen closely,” he said, and then his gruff voice articulated every
syllable. “I am master and keeper of my half
.
So was my father, and so
too shall be my son. Bind me to my birthright, brother, I shall bind you to
yours . . . ”

The
old man was oblivious that everyone else in the warehouse had finished.

At
last, there was quiet throughout the warehouse—an embarrassed, echoing silence.
Aaron pulled his sleeve out of the man’s iron grip. He caught Dominic’s gaze
and rolled his eyes, then slumped in his chair and tugged his hood until it
covered his face.

Father
Dravin nodded, pushed his glasses up his nose, and continued his talk. “Eighty
years later, the clairvoyant channel is stronger than Schrödinger could have
dreamed, and each new generation knits it tighter . . . ”

So
this was the Juvengamy Brotherhood—men who thought their halves
were
slaves. It made sense that Clive was here, but why Dominic? Aaron shifted, and
his cloak peeled away from the chair, stuck with sweat.

“Unlike
our bodies, clairvoyance lasts forever, which makes our commitment to forging strong
channels at birth all the more pressing . . . ”

Dravin
finished an incomprehensible philosophical lecture an hour later, and there
were sighs of relief as the men rose for intermission. They congregated along
the back wall at tables laid with whisky and crackers. Badly in need of fresh
air, Aaron slipped out a back door.

Outside,
dark clouds swallowed the full moon. Before he could sift through his thoughts,
though, Aaron heard a muffled roar of applause inside the warehouse. The door
unlatched, and Clive poked his head out. “Harper, get inside,” he said. “It’s
time for my father’s demonstration.”

***

Back
inside the warehouse, chairs tipped back as the audience stood to cheer for
Casler. The doctor leaned against the podium, let his hood fall to his shoulders,
and flashed his dazzling grin. A dozen men lined up to shake his hand and
congratulate him, but there were too many and he waved them all back to their
seats. While his standing ovation roared on, he pointed to different people in
the audience and winked.

Aaron
squeezed into their row and sat in the empty seat next to Clive. The applause
trailed off.

“A
quick demonstration—” Casler boomed, and he produced two vials from the pocket
of his cloak, a bottle of red dye, and an eyedropper. Each vial was half-full
of a clear liquid. Then he hoisted a blowtorch onto the podium, crumpling
Dravin’s notes.

“May
I have a volunteer?”

A
palpable excitement rippled through the crowd as Casler picked his volunteer
from a dozen hands—a man in the seat in front of Aaron—and handed him one of
the vials.

“Hold
that up so everyone can see,” said Casler.

Aaron
leaned forward, as the man held up a four-inch long glass vial exactly like the
one Clive had brought to the beach. A chill fluttered down his spine.

Casler
stepped back to the podium and held up his own vial. It was open at the top
like a test tube. “Mr. Lilian, is that vial sealed?”

“Yep.”

“So
there’s no way for anything to get out?”

“I’m
wondering how stuff got
in
,” he muttered.

Laughter
trickled nearby, but Aaron’s body had gone rail stiff. He was sitting directly
behind Amber’s father—whose cloak, he noticed, was just as decorated as
Casler’s.

Casler
grinned. “Excellent. Now watch closely.”

He
filled the eyedropper with red dye and held it over his own open vial. Before
he released it, he peered stoically at his audience. “You are about to witness
something spectacular—”

Then
he squeezed the dye into his vial, and Aaron heard gasps, mutters.

“Mr.
Lilian, hold that up so everyone can see.”

Red
dye swirled inside the vial in Mr. Lilian’s hand, the same dye in Casler’s
vial.

Casler
didn’t wait for the chatter to stop. He lit the blowtorch and propped the open
vial in the blue flame. The crowd waited anxiously. Half a minute later, the
liquid boiled. The liquid in Mr. Lilian’s hand bubbled also.

In
two minutes, the liquid in Casler’s vial had boiled away completely.   

And
the vial in Mr. Lilian’s hand was also empty.

Casler
smiled and collected the vial back from him.

“When
I put dye in one, it colored both. When one boiled away, they both disappeared—why?”
He chuckled. “Because the molecules of both vials exist in a state of quantum
entanglement.”

The
audience sat in dumb silence. Casler paced the stage. “But the demonstration
was merely an analogy. I’m sure you’ve guessed what for—”

He
peered around at them all. “The clairvoyant channel. Only instead of test
tubes, you have living, breathing human beings. Instead of clear water, you
have clairvoyance. Drop ink into a man, and his half will feel it.”

“Dr.
Selavio—” A hostile voice drawled from the corner. Dravin. “What do you suppose
the halves feel if their clairvoyance boils away, as you demonstrated here?”

Casler
held out his hand to silence the hisses. “A human being is not an open test
tube,” he said.

“Right.
I suppose you’d have to cut a hole in one first,” said Dravin.

“Nor
are they made out of glass, Father.”

“But
you do have to cut a hole,” said Dravin. “Am I mistaken?”

“Just
poorly read,” said Casler. “As I announced at Monday’s press conference, I aim
to
seal
the hole created by half death, not the other way around.”
Casler beamed at them, despite their somber expressions. And then he stared
straight at Aaron. “In fact, I’ve sealed a boy who should have died—a boy who
had no half.”

The
mutters trailed off.

“For
eighteen years, his condition has been kept a secret, but now he sits in this
very room. Now he will come before us.”

Aaron
wasn’t sure he’d heard him right.

Casler
scanned the wide-eyed and quiet audience. “I invited him tonight, although—”
Casler looked in Aaron’s direction again and chuckled. “I wasn’t entirely sure
he would come.”

Sweat
prickled on Aaron’s face.

“On
March 30
^th
, eighteen years ago,” said Casler, louder now. “I severed
this boy’s channel, sealed the leak—and saved him from half death.”

Aaron
watched in horror as his life unraveled before his eyes. The article. He should
have known tonight was a trap, that he would be exhibited before the
Brotherhood as Casler’s twisted science experiment, as the boy without a half.
An anomaly of the living world. There were a dozen seats between him and
freedom—too many. They’d stop him.

Once
again, Casler scanned his audience and stopped at Aaron, still beaming, full of
pride. Others were turning in their seats, trying to get a look at him. “And
now,” he said, “let’s have him come forward—”

Next
to Aaron, Clive tensed. He was going to hold him if he ran. It was an ambush.

Casler
raised his arm and pointed, and Aaron gaped, petrified, down the length of the
man’s finger as it bored into him like a spotlight.

Clive
shifted again. He edged closer, his arms flexed.

But
Aaron wasn’t about to be taken by a cult in a dark warehouse and paraded as a
freak.

A
dozen seats. A dozen grown men. Aaron stood, and his chair toppled backwards.
He balled his fists, ready to fight, as Casler spoke.

2 Days,
11 hours, 11 minutes

“I would like to present
my son, Clive Selavio . . . ” He saw that Aaron had stood and trailed off.

Aaron
froze. Slowly, he stared around the warehouse at a hundred puzzled faces, and
the thumping of his heart echoed, as if amplified over a loudspeaker. He faced
the podium again, Casler—and they stared at each other in shock across three
rows of blood red hoods.

Clive
grabbed his cloak and tried to yank him back down. “Aaron,” he spat. “Sit down!
You’re ruining it!”

Aaron
no longer had a choice. He plowed toward the aisle, shoved aside knees, and
stumbled. Clive grabbed his cloak and it ripped off his shoulders. Without it
he felt naked, exposed, with only jeans and a T-shirt protecting him from a
hundred pairs of gleaming eyes. He kept going, vaguely aware of someone rising
behind him—and acutely aware of Casler’s gaze drilling into the back of his
skull.

Finally,
he lunged through the door and stumbled into the night. A moment later, Dominic
ran onto the field after him.

“Number
eleven, you can’t just leave!” he yelled.

“Yeah—”
Aaron spun, and his face burned with sweat. “Then stab me.”

“This
is a big moment for Clive. You walk out on him, you walk out on Dr. Selavio,
you walk out on us,” said Dominic.

“Can
I throw a ‘fuck you’ in there too?”

Dominic
just raised his eyebrows, then shook his head. “That’s a big mistake, number
eleven.”

Aaron
marched toward the street.

 “A
very
big mistake,” Dominic muttered, before slipping back into the
warehouse.

Aaron
walked under the blotted out moon, between dark, hungry-looking Cadillacs.

He
had gotten it so wrong.

No
shit the date in the article matched his birthday; March thirtieth was
Clive’s
birthday too. Dr. Selavio had tested the device on his own son, not on
Aaron . . . and, according to his speech, cured him of half death. A chill crept up
Aaron’s spine.

He
was now outside the warehouse, missing the crucial truth—and in fifty-nine
hours, he was due at the Chamber of Halves. Aaron reached the road and began to
jog, then to sprint. Anything to burn off his adrenaline. The orange
streetlights swam overhead, and a humid wind whipped his hair. He passed parked
cars for several hundred feet, then his thighs gave out and he keeled over,
gasping for breath.

A
boy who had no half
, Dr. Selavio had said—no doubt just rhetoric to play up
his cure for half death. Because it didn’t make any sense. Or did it?
Technically, children were born halfless all the time. Those babies were always
stillborn, though—

Aaron
jolted upright, distracted by the car parked next to him. There was someone in
the passenger seat.

He
approached the window, heart pounding. But it was too dark to see. He leaned
closer, pressed his forehead to the glass, and waited while his eyes adjusted.
When they did, he jerked his head back.

For
several agonizing seconds, a woman peered at him blankly through the glass,
emotionless, her gaze eerily vacant. Aaron returned her stare, fighting the
urge to look away—until he realized there was nothing staring at him. There was
nothing behind the woman’s eyes, no spirit, no life, only a lonely cavity where
a person should have been. A hole.

And
Aaron understood the hideousness of juvengamy.

The
woman’s half was in the meeting, whom she had joined with as an infant. After
juvengamy, most of the clairvoyance linking their bodies he had come to
possess. Hardly anything was left inside her. She was a shell, his slave, and
he her master.

***

After
school the next day, Aaron staggered out of Health class into a humid Thursday
afternoon, still haunted by the woman’s ghostly eyes.

People
said the discovery of halves had cured humanity of all that . . . The atrocities of
war, slavery, crimes against humanity. Now there was a whole new kind of
genocide.