Created (Talented Saga) (35 page)

One of the guards held a small, strange-looking gun up to Gretchen’s neck and pulled the trigger.
I winced and she swayed. Her eyes rolled around in their sockets like marbles before latching onto me.

“You could’ve been great,”
she sent, and then her lids fluttered closed, long mascaraed lashes resting on sharp cheekbones.

“You are great,”
another voice told me, as a familiar arm drew me into a familiar body.

He wasn’t a lie.
He was real and good and all that I needed in the world.

Erik held me as another group of guards led a shackled Mac from the hotel suite.
I wondered if this was poetic justice. My parents had been murdered in a hotel suite not so different from this one, and now their murderer had finally been caught.

Chapter Twenty-One

The days that followed were hazy.
After Gretchen and Mac had been taken into custody, the battle died quickly. Some TOXIC operatives surrendered, while others fled. Those identified as Created were immediately contained. The McDonough School had been turned into a makeshift containment facility, and anyone and everyone still living who’d worked on the Creation Project was being called in to help deal with the problem. The real problem, though, was how many of the created had escaped. Even more troubling? The Council had no idea how large that number truly was. If Mac had kept records of all those he’d injected, he’d hid them well.

Crane, who’d been there to see Mac and Gretchen apprehended, was helping the Council question the TOXIC higher-ups and rebuild the capital.
It was his belief that as long as the created were still running rampant, my life was in danger. This meant I was under twenty-four hour a day protection. I thought the measure unnecessary, but Victoria, who was making a speedy recovery, agreed. Personally, I thought she was more concerned with me running rampant around the world than Mac’s experiments, and was just using the whole life-in-danger angle as an excuse to keep an eye on me. I didn’t much care.

Councilman Michael Tanaka had a Virginia home that was located close enough to the capital that Crane and Victoria could use it as a temporary residence, but far enough that it hadn’t been obliterated along with most of the rest of the northern part of the state.
That was where I was hidden away. Erik, of course, came with me.

Mac had been tipped off about our plan to use the tunnels for a ground attack, which was why we’d been ambushed. No one in TOXIC who’d been questioned so far knew who the mole was, and Mac wasn’t talking. But I had my suspicions. Truthfully, it could have been anyone. Every Coalition soldier and UNITED guard present during our strategy meetings knew about the plan. For some reason, I felt confident none of them had been the source of the leak. Two others had been informed of our plan to use the tunnels. One of whom had spent six years in a TOXIC prison, and was probably willing to do anything for his freedom.

Randy Choi was at the top of my suspect list.
I didn’t share these concerns with Crane or Victoria. I wasn’t worried about what they’d do to him; he deserved the punishment. Cadence was the one I cared about. She’d be devastated to learn her brother had betrayed us. Until I was certain, I would keep my theories to myself. With everything else going on, it wasn’t exactly a high priority.

Frederick’s knowledge of the old
metrorail system was all that had saved him and Henri from being killed after the rest of our team had gone ahead. The two of them, along with the two UNITED guards who’d stayed behind, had hidden in one of the branches. Three days passed before the four of them were found. Nearly dehydrated and totally exhausted, Frederick had been taken to a medical facility to recover. The other three had been treated for minor injuries and released. Victoria, though reluctant at first, had given Henri permission to stay at the Councilman’s house with Erik and me.

It was Adam and his people who had suffered for our arrogance regarding the tunnels.
TOXIC had found the camp and used it as a base for their counterattack. Many of the inhabitants had been killed, many more unaccounted for. Mr. Kelley was among the missing. Much of the fight had actually occurred beneath the ground, causing massive cave-ins and total destruction of several sections of the system. UNITED had formed a search-and-rescue team to locate the survivors. Every morning, Erik and I watched the giant wallscreen in Councilman Tanaka’s office for the updated list of names of both the living and the dead. I constantly reminded Erik that it was a blessing his father hadn’t turned up in the casualty column.

The Councilman’s estate was impressive, like a palace out of the history books.
It was post-Contamination era, with a white marble foyer with swirls of black and gray that brought to mind images of smoking buildings and scorched earth. A ballroom, large enough for three of the Council’s huge hoverplanes, was through a short hallway lined with moving images of Michael’s daughter and wife back in Fujisawa. The floors were polished to gleaming perfection, and the chandeliers looked like vines of diamonds suspended in midair. I tried to avoid the cavernous space; it gave me the creeps.

The guest wing was in the back left corner of the mansion, and that was where Crane and Victoria slept – when they did sleep, anyway.
They spent most nights questioning TOXIC personnel who’d been captured or surrendered, and planning ways to locate those who hadn’t. Erik and I had rooms in the family wing. Councilman Tanaka thought that would make us feel more at home. I wasn’t sure I’d feel at home anywhere. It had been years since I’d a home.

Joy Tanaka, the Councilman’s teenage daughter, and her mother were at their Bern house near UNITED Headquarters, under the protection of the UNITED guards.
I was offered the use of Joy’s bedroom. The room was not small, but the abundance of furniture made the space feel tight. A double bed was pushed into the far left corner, the length of which ran underneath a bay window complete with a window seat. There was a sleek wooden desk with neatly-stacked piles of books and a free-standing computer monitor. A purple velvet throw hung over the back of a gray chaise lounge that was covered with beautiful silk pillows. Most notable were the picture collages hung on the walls. When I was alone, I studied the pictures of Joy and her friends and wondered whether I’d ever have ones like them. The girl was happy, always smiling and carefree. She was probably two or three years younger than me and made me think of Kenly.

I hadn’t asked Erik what had become of my protégé.
Part of me was scared to hear the truth. Her body hadn’t been slumped outside of Mac’s hotel suite like her partner’s. I liked to think she’d escaped; although, that prospect was upsetting, too. On her own, hiding during the day and running under the cover of darkness, she’d be easy prey for all sorts of creatures. At the School she’d been sheltered, and I doubted her survival instincts were all that great. Mine weren’t, and I’d spent nearly a year with the Hunters developing them.

“Ready for this?”

I looked up from a photo album of Joy’s I’d found in her two-level walk-in closet. In it, she had beautiful prints of exotic locations all over the world. It had occurred to me that I’d been to many of these same places. The landmarks were vaguely familiar, yet I had no actual memory of visiting them.

Erik stood in the doorway of the bedroom, more handsome than ever in a dark gray suit and button-down three shades lighter.
He appeared calm, but I felt his unease with the formal attire. Normally he enjoyed dressing up; Erik was fully aware of how well he wore a suit. Today, though, under the circumstances, he felt like it was all for show.

“Ready as I’ll ever be,” I said, snapping the album shut and tossing it aside.

I uncrossed my short legs and slid off the bed. As I stood, I straightened my own suit jacket self-consciously. My jacket and slacks were black and fitted, with faint white pinstripes. Victoria had delivered the garments the previous evening, along with an invitation to accompany her to UNITED’s maximum security prison colony, Oceania. Currently, only two inmates were in residence.

Erik held out his hand to me, and I slid my fingers seamlessly into his.

“You don’t have to go just because she asked for you,” Erik told me as we started the hike through Councilman Tanaka’s winding hallways.

The house was a maze, and I normally took one or two wrong turns before getting out of the family wing.
On my first late-night visit to Erik – the Councilman said us sharing a bedroom was indecent – I’d ended up in this bizarre indoor rainforest. The air was soupy and smelled like rain, and the trees were brown with lush green leaves and looked like the ones found in textbooks from before the Great Contamination. There were even insects and birds and species of snakes that hadn’t been seen on earth in over a hundred years. Erik had found me using our mental connection, and we’d spent the night making out by a mossy pond.

I smiled at the memory.
We’d had little opportunity to make good ones lately. Besides getting to talk to Alex and Evan on the huge visual communicator in Michael’s home office, the past week had been pretty depressing. Seeing Alex’s smiling face and knowing he was safe was a daily pick-me-up that I craved. Watching Evan’s hopeful expression fall when Erik told him we still didn’t know whether their father was alive, I dreaded.

“I need to,” I said, coming back to the present.

“Figured you’d say that.”

Victoria wasn’t alone in the foyer.
Penny, dressed in a suit identical to mine, appeared polished and mature. As where I’d chosen flats so I wouldn’t fall on my face and make a fool of myself, Penny was in four-inch black leather heels with a silver toe. She wiggled one in my direction when she caught me gawking.

“Brand went to Bern to meet with some of the Council; he took a day trip to Milan just for these.”

Brand turned a brilliant shade of oxblood and muttered something about it being no big deal. Penny beamed. I hated Brand a little less.

“We should get going,” Crane said.
“I want to get this over with.”

“You?” I asked.
“I’m the one she wants to talk to.”

Despite the best efforts of UNITED’s interrogators, Gretchen was keeping her vault of secrets locked.
Enough TOXIC researchers were spilling theirs that her testimony wasn’t strictly necessary. Nothing she said could help her now anyway. But after over a week of silence, she’d agreed to talk, on one condition. She wanted to talk to me. From an unauthorized peek into Crane’s head the previous night, I’d learned that Victoria, Crane, and the other powers-that-be had given this request lengthy consideration before finally relaying it to me.

“I know.
It worries me,” Crane admitted. “She’s used her talent to control several interrogators already, and nearly escaped because of it. I don’t want her doing that to you.”

He didn’t add that she already had, twice.

“We have been over this, Ian,” Victoria said sweetly. “Ms. Lyons is prepared and will be taking precautions to prevent Mrs. McDonough from doing the same to her. Right, dear?”

I nodded.
Precautions weren’t how I’d put it, but I was aware Gretchen could manipulate me, and I figured that was one step towards preventing it from happening again.

The flight to Oceania took an hour.
We flew on a sleek hovercraft that looked more like a luxury passenger plane used for civilian travel than a military vessel. Had it not been outfitted with attack lasers – better than standard guns, according to Victoria – I’d have thought she’d stolen it from one of the private hoverlines.

The main cabin was fashioned to look like a living room.
Semicircular couches sat on either side with bolted-down glass tables in front of each. I’d hoped for some privacy to collect my thoughts and figure out what I wanted to say to Gretchen. That was not an option. Instead, Victoria gave us a history lesson.

The Oceania had not been designed as a prison originally.
It had been built as a safe haven for Talents approximately twenty years after the Great Contamination. At the time, Talents were being persecuted, and the newly-founded UNITED worried a time would come when they would need a place to live, separate and apart from the rest of society. The Oceania, and other colonies like it, had been built in the one place the non-talented were unwilling to go: the middle of the water. Because many had believed the nuclear waste floating around in the waterways was what had led to our talents in the first place, no one wanted to risk infection by getting too close. Entire island nations had been quarantined, cut out from the rest of the world, just in case talents were contagious. This gave UNITED the idea to build floating islands in the middle of the oceans.

Few of these colonies had ever been inhabited.
With UNITED’s help, most countries had instituted laws to protect the talented. To date, five such colonies were active. They all held refugees from the more conservative nations, the ones who still ostracized the talented. UNITED used others of these floating meccas, like The Oceania, as operations bases. Victoria didn’t elaborate on what operations UNITED ran from them.

I found myself fascinated by her story.
All of this was new information for me. At the McDonough School – I wondered if they’d rename it – students were required to take the History of Talents. Interestingly, this part of our history hadn’t been covered.

“They probably worried we’d go live on one if they told us,”
Erik sent.

“I might have,”
I agreed.

The colonies were news to Crane, Penny, and Brand, too.
All three of them sat wide-eyed and at attention as Victoria explained that, even though scientists had failed to find a direct link between contaminated water and the mutation that makes us talented, few conservatives were willing to dip a toe in the water.

“Has UNITED maintained all of the colonies for the past eighty years or whatever?” I interrupted her at one point.

“Yes we have,” Victoria said proudly.

“Isn’t that expensive?” Erik asked.