The Gathering (30 page)

With a laugh, I head toward the row of coolers and pull out two bottled waters. When I straighten up, I’m standing face-to-face with the last person on the earth I want to see.

“Can we talk?” Claire asks.

“I’d rather not.” I step around her.

But she steps, too. Blocking my path. “Please?”

“What could you possibly want to talk to me about?”

“I want to say that I’m sorry.”

I let out a laugh. There’s not a trace of humor in the sound. “For what? Trying to hand me over to the other side, or your inability to successfully manage it?”

Her pale cheeks turn pink. “Haven’t you ever made a mistake?”

A mistake?
Is she serious? “Is that what you told Felix? That you made a mistake?”

“It’s the truth.”

“What you did wasn’t a mistake; it was a deliberate choice.”

“Sometimes those are the worst kind of mistakes.”

I shake my head. “Your remorse is an act. You’re playing the part now because you have nowhere else to go. You might have Felix and Cap fooled, but not me. I saw what you did. And I saw what happened as a result.” In fact, if I let myself, I see it every time I close my eyes—Luka being bound and dragged away. Luka arching up in agony, his screams shredding my soul. It has the plastic water bottles crinkling in my grip.

“Link and Luka don’t think I’m acting.”

“Stay away from them both.” Just hearing her say their names sets my teeth on edge. Seriously, if I don’t walk away now, I might set a bad example for Henry. I take a deep breath and tell my feet to start moving.

“Why are you so threatened by me?”

The words hit their mark. I stop and turn around.

A few people close by stare, some more covertly than others.

“I’m not.”

“You sure act like you are.” She takes a step closer, shortening the distance I created. I guess she’s no more eager than I am for people to overhear this particular conversation. “You don’t have anything to worry about. Link and Luka are both yours.”

“What are you talking about? Link likes Ronie.” And why are we even discussing this? I’m not worried Claire’s going to take Luka or Link away from me. That’s not why I’m upset about her being here. I’m upset because she betrayed us. I’m upset because she tried to have me killed and Luka ended up suffering for it and how do we know she won’t do the same thing if the opportunity presents itself?

“Okay, but he’s totally in
love
with you.”

I huff. Claire is nuts. “Link is not in love with me.”

“Trust me. I see the way he looks at you. I’ve been on the receiving end of that look too many times not to recognize it. Link’s definitely in love with you.” Claire looks me up and down, like she doesn’t get why. “You’re blind if you don’t see it, too.”

Clouds and Bars

I
find Link waiting for me inside a familiar gladiatorial arena. He constructed it once before—the night I perfected the art of manipulating the physical while in the supernatural realm. The night we went around Cap’s orders and ran into Scarface on a street corner in Detroit. I have no idea why the sight of him sitting there in the stands, waiting for me, should unleash a hoard of butterflies in my stomach.

It’s Link.

I don’t get nervous with Link.

But Claire’s words are still fresh in my mind.

You’re blind if you don’t see it.

I’m not sure what makes the butterflies flap faster—the idea of Link being in love with me, or my reaction to the idea of Link being in love with me. It shouldn’t make me pleased, that’s for sure. I’m in love with Luka, which means
if
Link is in love with me—and that is a monumental
if
—I can’t love him back, and loving someone who doesn’t love you back is a miserable feeling. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, especially not one of my best friends.

I shake my head. This is dumb. I’m not going to let Claire get in my head, and that’s exactly what she’s trying to do. Like I told Luka, Link and I are friends. Period. I expel a breath and hold my hand up like a visor against the sun. Link made it extra bright. “You’ve used this one before, you know,” I call up to him. “You’re getting lazy.”

He looks down at me with a smile. “Are you kidding? Do you know how much work it took constructing this bad boy the first time around? I didn’t want it to go to waste, considering this is our final lesson.”

“Our final lesson, huh?”

“After tonight, I’ll have taught you everything I know. The student will surpass the teacher.”

“I surpassed you months ago.”

Link’s smile grows.

The butterflies zoom around a little faster. I tell them to chill out as I climb the stairs and sit beside him. “So, Teach, how am I supposed to tell if somebody’s being hijacked?”

“We hop into their dream and look for the signs.”

“Like?”

“Clouds.”

I quirk my eyebrow.

“When a person’s been hijacked, they are stuck in a perpetual dream. Happily oblivious while the hijacker takes over their mind and body. In this dream world they mistakenly assume is reality, the sun doesn’t come out.”

“Ever?”

“Never. There’s also bars on all of the windows.”

“Wouldn’t the dreamer notice something like that?”

“The enemy is smart, Xena. They make their captives so comfortable, they don’t
want
to notice.”

“Is that how we free them, then—we get them to notice?”

“That’s the first step.”

“Doesn’t sound too hard.”

Link shakes his head, like I’m being naive. “Right now, this is my dream. I constructed it. If I want Cap to join us …”

All of sudden, Cap appears. Only it’s not dream-Cap with strong, sturdy legs. It’s wheelchair-Cap, slightly different from the one I know because this is Link’s version.

“Here he is. A projection straight from my subconscious mind. When it comes to hijacking, however, the people you meet inside the dream aren’t projections of the dreamer. They’re projections of the hijacker, put in place to monitor activity. If any unwelcome guests appear—like us—the projections report immediately to the hijacker. And since the hijacker controls the dream …” Link gives his wrist a bored flick, and half of the gladiatorial arena crumbles away in a deafening rumble. “The dream quickly becomes unsafe,” he yells over the sound.

I wait for the debris to settle. “It’s a dream though. The worst that could happen is waking up.”

“Well, not exactly.”

“What do you mean?”

“The hijacker is literally inside the prisoner’s mind and body, which means he’s also inside the dream. When we enter that dream, we’re stepping inside enemy territory. We’re exposing ourselves in a way that could prove incredibly dangerous, especially since hijackers are, by nature, extremely powerful.” Link leans back and clasps his hands behind his head. “To free someone, we have to find the prisoner without being seen, get them alone, convince them that they’ve been shanghaied, and help them break free.”

“When you put it that way, it sounds impossible.”

“It’s not easy, but it’s not impossible.”

I set my elbows on my knees. “How do you know all of this?”

“Experience.” Link smiles. “One of my first missions at the hub was a hijacking rescue mission. I went with Gabe and Cap.”

“Were you successful?”

“We were close.”

Somehow I get the feeling that close doesn’t mean a whole lot when it comes to this.

“Relax, Xena.” Link reaches into my lap and takes my hand. “We’re not rescuing anyone tonight. We’re just scouting the situation to see if we can find any of the signs.”

“Right.” I release a deep breath and squeeze Link’s hand. “Clouds and bars.”

He squeezes back. “Clouds and bars.”

*

Felix puts a red star next to the
king
, the
censor
, and the
idol
on the whiteboard. “You’re sure all three have been hijacked?”

“Absolutely,” Link says.

“What about Secretary Young?” Cap asks.

“We couldn’t get to him,” I say. I tried several times, and each time, nothing happened. It was a giant déjà vu, only this time I wasn’t trying to dream-hop to my grandmother in Shady Wood or Luka in that dank chamber. My failed hopping abilities then had turned me frantic. I thought it meant we were too late and they were dead. But really, I’d been too distraught to get to Luka, and my grandmother … she wasn’t sleeping.

I turn to Link, who’s looking back at me with a knowing twinkle in his eye, as though he’s waiting for me to realize something he already knows.

“Secretary Young hasn’t been hijacked.” I look at Felix. “I couldn’t get to him because he was awake. If he were being hijacked, he couldn’t be awake. He’d be stuck in a perpetual dream.”

Lexi, who’s been peering extra hard at the board while mindlessly flicking her thumbnail stands and joins Felix. She picks up a black marker and draws a confident line from each of Felix’s red stars to the same word written three different times—
neck
. The location of the mark.

As soon as she does, Connal grins—wide and proud. “That’s my girl.”

Lexi, of course, ignores him. “It can’t be a coincidence.”

She’s right. It can’t. Cormack, B-Trix, and Fredrick are all hijacked and all three of them have the mark on their neck. Young isn’t hijacked, and he’s the only one with the mark on his wrist. My grandmother also had the mark on her wrist, confirming Link’s theory—had she really been hijacked, she wouldn’t have acted out of self-preservation.

Felix caps his marker and taps it against his palm. “It certainly makes figuring out whether someone’s been hijacked or not much easier.”

Glenda wipes her nose with a crumpled ball of tissue. “What about the
physician
?”

The question bothers me. Mainly because we still have no idea who it is. I couldn’t find any mark on Shady Wood’s director or the director of Detroit’s Rehab Facility. And that’s having pored over every picture and video Ronie and Link could find. We’ve since moved on to smaller rehab facility directors, along with directors of the larger fetal modification clinics, but we’re not having any luck with those either.

“I’m sure he or she will surface eventually,” Felix says. “Until then, we have three people we need to set free. You said Cormack had the most guards?”

“Xena and I are lucky we weren’t spotted.”

“Then let’s begin with these two, shall we?” Felix points to the
idol
and the
censor
.

And the planning begins.

We split our special ops team in half, which means we need one more Cloak. Cap agrees to speak with Anna. I’d rather have her than Clive, but there’s no way I’m sending Clive with Link. Especially since he can’t defend himself. So it’s settled. Me, Cap, Glenda, and Clive will go after B-Trix. Link, Felix, Connal, Lexi, and Anna will go after Chief Fredrick. Tonight. Everyone agrees there’s no reason to wait.

“How are things progressing with the media?” Felix asks.

“Slow,” Ronie says. “The channels we’re trying to hack into are much more encrypted than we anticipated.”

Connal leans back in his chair. “If tonight doesn’t go arseways, we’ll have the Chief of Press on our side, won’t we? I’d wager he’d be able to help us with a little public awareness.”

“We’d also have B-Trix on our side,” Lexi adds. “She’s highly influential.”

The group is excited. Confident.

I’m mostly nauseous. The last big mission I went on was a big giant failure. And I’ve never done this before—freeing someone who’s been hijacked. Cap has, but according to Link, they weren’t entirely successful, whatever that means. It doesn’t instill any confidence, that’s for sure. Especially since whoever they tried to rescue wasn’t one of five key players in evil’s master plan. Their not-entirely-successful rescue mission couldn’t have been as high stakes as the ones we’re about to embark on tonight.

“What about Secretary Young?” Luka asks. It’s the first time he’s spoken since our meeting began.

Felix glances at the board of Believers, which has grown substantially over the past two weeks. Among others, we’ve gathered two more FBI agents, a CIA agent, and—thanks to Joe—two former Navy SEALs. “I think we can ask Joe to gather up a team and take care of it.”

I shift uncomfortably. “Take care of it—as in kill him?”

Felix raises one of his dark eyebrows at me. “He made his choice. Secretary Young allied himself with the enemy and he did so willingly.”

I can’t help thinking about Pete. If Luka and I hadn’t gotten to him when we did, he’d have that same mark on his wrist. Would Felix be so quick to take my brother out, too? I’m not sure Pete was so much a willing participant as he was a blind and foolish one—in way over his head. How do we know Secretary Young isn’t the same?

Felix picks up his walkie-talkie and asks Joanna to page Joe and send him inside. “Good work, everyone. Why don’t you go enjoy some lunch?”

The investigation room clears out.

I stay in my seat.

So does Luka.

He stares at the board, biting his thumbnail. I’d ask what he’s thinking, but I can make a pretty good guess. I bring my foot onto the edge of my chair and wrap my arms around my knee. “Can I ask you something?”