Inescapable (Talented Saga #7) (31 page)

On stage, the Dame waited for the applause
to dwindle before speaking again.

“
I thought you all might
like that.” She chuckled. “I believe you will like the videos you
are about to see even better. Please enjoy, and thank you all for
your dedication to our cause.”

With that, the Dame vanished. Like,
literally vanished.

“
I knew it!” Shyla Towers
exclaimed loudly. “She was a hologram!”

Cressa felt as brainless as a rock. She
should have realized the Dame was a hologram, since no one was
truly that flawless. Yet, her image had appeared utterly solid, not
at all like Suzu’s transparent form from earlier.

“
Of course that was a
hologram,” Daphne said. “No one even knows what the Dame looks
like, do they? Her identity has to be kept a secret. Not even all
of the board members have actually seen her. Gracia told me that
she always appears as a hologram during meetings. It’s quite
brilliant, really. This way, if any of us are captured and
tortured, we won’t be able to give out information we don’t
have.”

Several of the 2Ps, Cressa included, gaped
at the younger girl. Tortured?

Why would anyone torture
us?
Cressa wondered.

More to the point,
how
could anyone torture
them? Once they were Privileged, they would be stronger, smarter,
and just plain better than most everyone else in the world. And
those closest to being their equals wouldn’t be players in this
epic chess game much longer.

Daphne wiggled in her seat and faced
forward, seeming to not notice their reactions to her words. She
pointed towards the stage. “Oh, goody, the movie is starting.”

Still mulling over Daphne’s comments, Cressa
settled into her own seat and turned her gaze to the front of the
room. An enormous screen, the entire width of the stage, descended
from the ceiling. Once in place, the film began without
preamble.

It wasn’t like any movie Cressa had ever
seen. There were no opening credits, no music, and the picture
quality was somewhat lacking.

“
Low budget indie flick,”
Lyla muttered, echoing Cressa’s thoughts.

“
You’d think with all our
parents’ generous endowments, they could afford to rent us
something from a major studio,” Shyla grumbled.

On screen, two boys and a girl stood on a
cliff, gazing down at an island not far from the coast. Wind
whipped the girl’s platinum ponytail back and forth, and was the
only sound coming through the speakers. The actors’ backs were to
the camera, making it impossible to tell what they were looking at.
Finally, after several long, painfully boring minutes where nothing
happened, one of the boys spoke.

“
On my count.” His voice
was thick with a Middle Eastern accent. The other boy and the girl
nodded.

“
One,” he began, and all
three extended their right arms so that they were parallel with the
ground.

“
Two.” All three made a
turning gesture with their outstretched hands, as if twisting an
invisible doorknob.

“
Three!” the boy declared.
Simultaneously, the trio drew their arms back sharply, as if
pulling an invisible door forcefully shut by that invisible
doorknob.

Cressa had been so strangely mesmerized by
the synchronization that she’d missed the bigger picture. It was
only after the audience gasped, and several people around her
pointed, that she saw it.

In the background of the shot, a bridge
connected the island to the mainland. A gigantic wave—much, much
too large for the bay—had risen out of nowhere and was crashing
over the bridge.

“
Holy moly!” Daphne
exclaimed.

“
Badass,” Lyla
declared.

“
Now that’s what I call
power,” Ritchie muttered.

“
How’d they do that?”
Shyla wanted to know.

The wave cleared, and the bay returned to
the serene calm it had been moments before. It was as though
nothing had happened, with one notable exception: debris littered
the water.

It took Cressa a moment to realize the
debris were actually chunks of the bridge, along with the cars and
people who’d been on it. The wave had destroyed the entire
structure.

A shiver ran down her spine.

The trio on screen calmly turned away from
the destruction, as if they hadn’t just committed mass murder. Not
one of them looked at the camera, which, Cressa suddenly realized,
was stationary. It hadn’t moved once, not to zoom in on the bridge
or follow the threesome as they walked away.

What type of movie is
this?
She wondered.
Is this a movie at all?

Cressa got her answer a moment later.

The scene abruptly switched to a crowd
standing at the base of a tall, thin structure. Cressa recognized
the scene from her one visit to Toronto—it was the CN Tower. From
the way the picture bounced around, she assumed the video was being
shot on a communicator rather than an actual camera.

Definitely not a movie.

“
I thinks we wait a little
longer, Svetna,” a strongly accented male voice proclaimed. “Until
the tower is full, yes?”

A woman, seemingly Svetna, appeared on
screen. Her protuberant brown eyes filled the camera’s view, wisps
of gunmetal gray hair dangling over her forehead.

“
Noon. We were told noon,
Yari. It is noon. We do it now,” the girl replied. She stepped
back, again out of sight.

The person holding the communicator let it
drop to his side, giving the audience a prolonged shot of his neon
green combat boots.

“
Excuse me, please,” Yari
called. “You will please take video of me and my girlfriend, yes?
We want to make memories of our time here.”

“
Um, sure,” an uncertain
voice replied.

The communicator transferred hands. Then,
Svetna and Yari—a good-looking guy with an impressive Mohawk—came
into view. They wrapped their arms around each other, as if truly
posing for a romantic picture on holiday.

“
Please be sure you get
the Tower in the background,” Svetna ordered the
picture-taker.

Yari laughed. “Yes, that is very good, I
think. It is not something I want to forget.”

“
Yeah, okay, got it,” the
picture-taker announced, zooming out.

Svetna and Yari stared into each other’s
eyes, seemingly transfixed. Slowly, they brought their foreheads
together until they were touching. Above the collars of their
matching leather jackets, Cressa could just make out tendrils of
black ink. It reminded her of the tattoo she’d seen on Sir
Tate.

“
That’s good,” the
picture-taker said. “You guys look adorable.”

“
Wait for it,” Yari
muttered.

There was a loud cracking sound, like a
thick tree trunk breaking.

“
Wait for it,” Svetna
repeated, the smile lighting her features positively
blissful.

The camera shook as the earth began to
rumble from somewhere deep within. Behind Svetna and Yari, people
started to scream. The sound became louder, the ground rippling
beneath the crowd’s feet. As the person holding the communicator
fell, Cressa caught a fleeting glimpse of the CN Tower; a
lightning-shaped zigzag ran all the way from the top to the
bottom.

The communicator hit the ground with a
clatter. Pounding feet flew across the screen as people clamored
away from the falling building. Just as Cressa was starting to
wonder how they’d ever recovered the footage, someone picked up the
device.

Yari’s face filled the screen. His eyes,
wide and feverish, rotated in their sockets, one clockwise and the
other counterclockwise. To Cressa, he looked deranged.

The boy stuck out his tongue, revealing two
dice tattooed in the center, each with one dot—snake eyes. Cressa
briefly wondered if the one on the back of his neck was a
match.

But every thought in her mind fled when Yari
spoke.

“
We are the Privileged.
Soon the world will bow to our command.”

And then, the auditorium was bathed in
blackness.

The spotlight reappeared, along with the
holographic representation of the Dame.

“
These are just two of the
missions our field Privileged have carried out recently. The attack
on the bridge was attributed to the Created, just as we had hoped.
Leaving nothing to chance, the Toronto footage was sent to all
media outlets, with one minor tweak.”

The Dame pointed behind her, where Yari’s
face came back on screen. This time, the image was blurred. And
when he spoke, his voice sounded different, as though filtered
through a modulator.

“
We are Created,” he said.
“We cannot be stopped.”

“
This was the message we
sent to the world,” the Dame continued. “Our existence has only
remained a secret for so long because we do not claim credit for
our actions. That will change in the very near future. Soon, each
and every one of you that achieves Privileged status will be hailed
as a leader, a champion, a hero. You will receive more than enough
accolades to make up for those denied to the fallen ones who came
before you.”

All around Cressa, cadets leapt to their
feet, clapping so vigorously that she was sure their hands stung
from the effort. Some hooted and pumped fists in the air. Someone
at the front began stomping his feet, chanting, “Privileged,
privileged, privileged.” Others took up the cry, until finally the
entire auditorium was stomping and chanting in unison.

Cressa joined her peers half-heartedly.
Again, she didn’t really know why everyone was so excited. The
videos were disturbing. Countless people had died during those
events. And for what? What was the point?

What’s the point of any of
this?
A niggling voice in the back of her
mind whispered.

To become Privileged.

The prospect made her sick
to her stomach. In the last twenty-four hours, Cressa had seen more
than enough to know that she’d never truly be Privileged. Sure, she
might complete the program—she
had
to, since the only alternative was to end up a
lab rat—but she would never stare into a camera lens and gloat over
killing thousands of innocent people. She would never feel okay
using her peers as unwilling test subjects. She would never saunter
off after committing mass murder. She wasn’t like those Privileged
in the videos. She wasn’t a bloodthirsty killer.

Is everyone else here like
that?
Cressa wondered, her veins turning
to ice as she took in the room brimming with enthusiasm.

She peered over the heads of her classmates,
to see the Dame on stage. The woman was smiling serenely, her
crystalline blue eyes as calm and tranquil as the bay had been just
before the trio conjured the wave. Cressa saw it as an omen.

A storm was coming their way. And it would
destroy everything in its path.

Erik

Eden, Isle of Exile

Three Days Before the Vote

“
You look like hell,
kid.”

Through eyes puffy and bloodshot from lack
of sleep and tears I couldn’t will back, I glared up at Miles.

“
Yeah, not sure if you
recall, but my girlfriend is missing. That hour I spent in my bed
didn’t involve a lot of sleeping,” I growled, voice gravelly as
though I’d been chewing on pavement. Then, noting the coffee mug in
Miles’s hand, I added, “You’d better have made enough for
two.”

The older agent took a long, slow sip from
the mug, studying me through the wisps of steam rising from the
contents within. He smiled, baiting me.

“
They pay me to protect
you, not to wait on you.”

“
They also pay you to
protect others from me. Believe me, your job is going to be a hell
of a lot harder, especially today, if I’m not properly
caffeinated,” I grumbled, plodding through the living room and into
the kitchen. “And why are you here, if not to help me out? I don’t
need protection in my own apartment.”

I smiled despite myself when I entered the
kitchen. A full pot of coffee was sitting on the counter, a clean
mug sitting beside it.

“
Bring me a refill, will
you?” Miles called. “And this morning, I’m here as a friend. I got
news for you, kid. Right now, you need friends more than a
bodyguard.”

Three short knocks sounded from the front of
the apartment, followed a moment later by a set of electronic beeps
and the sound of the door opening.