Hunting Lila (20 page)

He clicked the safety back on and took his hand off mine. The weight of the gun dropped my hand a few inches; he lifted it back up to chest height. ‘Aim high, but for the chest. I guess you don’t need much help in the way of weapons, but just in case.’

I felt my cheeks start to burn but chose to ignore the comment. ‘Just in case what?’

‘I’d just feel better knowing you know how to shoot. Just don’t shoot me while I’m in the shower.’ I didn’t know how he could joke. Or was he joking? Did he think I would do that? If he did he wouldn’t give me his gun, surely?

Alex walked into the bathroom but kept the door cracked open. I stood by the window, looking out, the gun hanging in my hand, pointing at the floor. I wanted to put it down but I also felt oddly comforted holding it.

The shower started to run. I turned from the window just as Alex walked back into the room. He was wearing a towel around his waist and had his clothes in his hands. He dropped them onto the bed and took a few new clothes out of one of the bags. Then he walked back into the bathroom without a second glance at me. I commanded myself to breathe.

I heard Alex get into the shower and I walked over to the window, looking out across the parking lot to the empty, leaf-strewn pool. There was no sign of the police, no sirens, no black SUVs screeching up the road. I rested my head against the glass. When would this chase ever stop? And who was going to win?

A hand closed over mine and I almost jumped out of my skin. I hadn’t heard him even come out of the bathroom.

Alex prised the gun out of my hand. ‘Lila, I give you a gun and you don’t even hear me coming.’

‘I haven’t done three years of Marine training, I don’t have special . . .’ I trailed off. I had been going to say ‘skills’. Alex was cocking an eyebrow at me.

I sank down onto the bed. He stayed standing, watching me carefully. He looked like he was about to ask me something and I readied myself for the question about to come.

‘You should sleep. I’ll keep watch.’

I looked up at him confused. ‘No, you need to sleep. You’re exhausted.’ He looked so tired, the circles under his eyes darkening, a day’s worth of stubble giving his face a golden glow.

‘It’s OK. You go first. I’ll wake you in a few hours,’ he said, already turning away.

I lay down on the bed – I didn’t have the energy to argue. Alex shifted the chair nearer the window and sat down in it, the gun in his hand pointed at the door. I rolled over so my back was turned and stared at the other wall, trying not to think about anything, trying to breathe through my fear. I had given up trying to figure out what Alex was thinking or feeling.

This time, the men in my nightmare had faces.

As I followed the path of blood I noticed the smashed vase on the floor by the front door and the table overturned in the living room. My mum lay on the stairs like a broken doll, blood pumping from her chest, and I dropped to my knees, my hands turning red as I tried to scoop her life-blood up and push it back.

A sudden noise made me turn my head. Demos was standing right next to me, a knife in his hand. Behind him were three other men, the men whose photos I’d seen in the file. One flicked his cigarette butt towards me, smiling. Suki was a blur behind them, skipping in a puddle of blood. I started to scream and tried to lunge towards Demos to knock the knife from his hand, but my arms wouldn’t move, they were held so tightly.

‘Shhhh, shhhh, it’s OK.’

I was pulling and pulling, trying to get free.

‘Lila, it’s OK. Calm down.’

My eyes snapped open at the voice. Alex was sitting on the edge of the bed holding my wrists in his hands. I was reaching towards him as though I was trying to strangle him. I stopped fighting and let my arms go limp. Then, without thinking, I fell forward towards him. There was no movement on his part to catch me and I remembered too late, as my head collided with his chest, that Alex didn’t think of me as Lila anymore, that he was repulsed by me. I started to pull myself up and roll away when I felt his arms suddenly wrap around me and his hands in my hair, stroking it back. The feeling was so electric that I wondered if I was still dreaming. It was like a cotton reel inside me was being unspooled. Everything, all the dread and the fear and the humiliation was spinning away, leaving me feeling like I’d just inhaled a tank of gas and air.

‘It’s OK.’ He was saying it over and over again and I started to believe him, to calm down and let his touch sedate me. Then I remembered the dream and the fear rolled back in, waves and waves of it, drowning me.

I started crying hard into his shoulder, shaking my head. ‘No, it’s not OK, it’s not OK. They’re going to find me.’ How could they not? There were two of us and lots of them, with abilities far beyond mine and weapons far beyond Alex’s.

Alex’s arms tightened around me and I shrank into him, trying to limpet myself onto him, terrified he’d let me go. I couldn’t believe he was this close to me, let alone pulling me closer. What had changed while I’d been sleeping? Since last night, when he’d come towards me in the backyard looking like he wanted to kill me?

‘I’ll get you away . . .’ He was murmuring the words and where his lips brushed my hair my scalp was left tingling. ‘I’ll get you somewhere safe, I promise. Then we’ll stop them.’ His voice was calm and the warmth in it was such a contrast to the cold front of the anger I’d been dealing with until now, that it started me crying again.

I wished I could believe him. It would be so easy to let him hypnotise me with his words but I pushed away slightly so I could look him in the face. ‘What’s a psychokenosist?’

His hands tightened on my arms. ‘How do you—’ Then he stopped and disentangled himself, stood up and walked away.

My whole body went cold and started to shake, like shock was setting in. Delayed shock, from all the way back to the mugging, like it had been storing itself up for the last week. I hugged my arms around myself, trying to get warm and to stop my teeth chattering.

‘It derives from the Greek.
Psyche
meaning “mind”, and
Kenosis
, meaning “to empty”.’ Alex waited to gauge my reaction.

‘Mind empty?’

‘Yes. Demos’s power is unique. He can literally empty your mind of every thought and every feeling you possess. He can effectively stop anyone from doing anything.’ He paused to see that I had understood. ‘Demos is the most powerful one of your kind that we know of.’

My kind?
So that was how he saw me.

‘How many do you know of?’ I asked in a whisper.

‘Nine. Well, twelve now if I count you and Key and his son. But the Unit doesn’t know about you three. Yet.’ He was pacing the small square of area between the bed and the bathroom door.

Yet? Was he planning on telling them? How else would they find out?

‘Just nine? How many more do you think there are?’

‘Conservative estimate? We think there are probably two hundred or so in the United States. Based on the numbers so far. But maybe it’s higher.’

Two hundred? Two hundred people like me. What were the odds, then? It wasn’t many. But it was actually quite a lot of people, if you put them all together in one place.

I was still shaking. ‘How long has the Unit been hunting them – I mean us?’

A scowl made its way onto Alex’s face. The anger was back and I instinctively flinched away, edging into the headboard. He must have seen my expression, because his scowl disappeared. He yanked the cover off the other bed and sat down on the edge of mine, wrapping it around my shoulders.

‘About five years.’ It was said through gritted teeth.

Five years was how long it had been since my mother died. ‘And you’ve only found nine?’

‘You’re good at keeping what you can do below the radar.’

I couldn’t interpret the look on his face. Rancour, impatience, maybe. He carried on. ‘Our focus is on Demos. And his people.’ The scowl was easier to interpret, and this time I recognised it wasn’t about me.

‘Why? Why the focus on him? You said that the Unit’s mission wasn’t to find my mum’s killers.’

‘It isn’t. I didn’t lie. The mission is to stop them, yes, but it’s not about solving a homicide.’

I frowned at his casual use of the word homicide. This was my mum’s murder he was talking about.

He hurried on, as though wanting to explain. ‘When we joined the Unit all we cared about was getting justice for what he did to your mum. But after a while it became more than that. When we saw what he was capable of, and what he was planning, it stopped being all about our vendetta and became more about stopping him before he could do far worse.’

I swallowed. What could be worse than murder? ‘This thing that he’s planning, could it have something to do with why he killed my mum? Because she found out about it? Is that why he killed the senator too?’

Alex looked at me in shock. ‘You know about him?’

‘Yes.’ I ignored the questions in his eyes, forming on his lip. ‘Why did he kill her? Them, I mean. What’s he planning?’ I needed to know what worse could look like. I might be on the receiving end of it.

Alex bit his lip and paused, then shook his head slowly, looking at me with an odd expression on his face. ‘You know what? I thought I knew. I was so sure – we were all so sure. Jack too. But now I don’t know if everything the Unit has been telling me is the truth or a lie.’

I stared at him, stunned. After a minute or so I broke the silence. ‘What were you told?’

‘Lila, it’s going to sound so crazy.’

‘Yes, because my life is so completely sane right now. Tell me.’

‘OK, well, the Unit – our whole mission – is basically counter-terrorism. With a twist.’

‘Terrorism?’

‘Yes.’

‘So what are you saying? That Demos is a terrorist? I’m sorry, but you’ve lost me.’

‘Listen, when the Unit found out about Demos it was because he had been using one of his associates, a telepath, to access information from a senator working on nuclear defence. This was during the Bush administration. Remember those rumours about the design of new nuclear weapons after 9/11?’

I looked at him blankly.

‘Maybe you were too young. Well, it wasn’t a rumour. It was the truth. The project was so secret that only a few people were involved in the initial research. A small team within the Department for Homeland Security.’

‘My mother—’

‘No. Not at this stage. Your mum had nothing to do with the initial research and development. The rumours that weapons were being built kept circulating around Washington and further afield. It’s difficult to keep something that huge a secret. In 2004 your mother was asked to sit on a secret committee that was looking at the issue of weapon stockpiling.’

‘She was? But I don’t get it—’

‘This is where the information starts to become more vague. Somehow in that process she discovered what Demos was doing. That he was using his telepathy to gain access to information about the stockpiles.’

‘Please tell me why he would want information on nuclear stockpiles.’

‘Why does anyone want a nuclear weapon? For control, for power. With a threat like that at his fingertips he could create chaos.’

‘You know what? You’re right, this does sound crazy. Why? Why would he want to do that?’

‘Money probably, power definitely.’

‘But you can’t just waltz off with a nuclear weapon and take over the world. What can you do with a nuclear weapon, anyway? Load it into a catapult and fire? Fire it where?’

A smile twitched at the corner of his mouth and suddenly I didn’t want to talk anymore. I just wanted to watch him. He was smiling at me. First hugs, now smiles. Maybe he really didn’t hate me. Maybe I could convince him that I wasn’t subhuman or whatever he thought about me exactly; that I was still Lila.

‘He wouldn’t need to fire it – it’s just the threat of it – that would be enough.’

‘But we have a whole army – why just go after him with twenty-four men? Why not put the whole army on to him if he’s such a threat?’

For a moment I thought whoever was in charge needed to be fired. They clearly weren’t a very good strategist.

‘None of this can be made public knowledge, Lila. Do you want the general public to know about what you can do? What do you think would happen if people thought that people like you existed? That there were people out there who could control their thoughts and their actions, who could read their minds, or rearrange their memories?’

Was that what a sifter was? I wasn’t too sure what would happen if it became public knowledge – was he talking lynchings? Men in white coats carrying out vivisections on us? Other sorts of testing?

From the look on Alex’s face he thought it would be bad. I thought about how I’d instinctively hidden my ability from everyone, even the people I loved. Something inside me had known, without needing to be told, that exposing it would be dangerous. But then again, keeping it hidden didn’t seem to be much safer. The Unit were after us like we were stray rodents and being contained didn’t sound like a much better option – in fact, it sounded worse.

‘I’m not sure,’ I said finally. ‘If the option is being hunted down by the Unit or having the public know about me – I think right now I’m going with the public vote.’

Alex looked at me with an expression I could only place as anguish. ‘Well, you’ve no choice on that one. It’s coming down from the highest authority. It stays secret.’

‘What authority? Like the President?’

‘No. Higher.’

There was a higher authority? Wasn’t that supposed to be God or someone?

He saw my face, my glance up at the ceiling, and laughed at me. ‘No, not that kind of authority. You don’t honestly think that the President is in charge, do you?’

‘Er, isn’t he?’ If he wasn’t in charge, who the heck was?

‘Lila, we’re a black op. Even the President doesn’t know about black ops.’

I stared at him with my eyebrows raised.

‘The only option we’ve been told is to keep going after them. Stop them. Anytime there’s any threat of public exposure it gets covered up fast. The same way other terrorist threats do. It’s all kept under the radar.’