The Shimmers in the Night (6 page)

The teachers were silent as they worked. She wondered what they had in common. Mrs. Omotoso looked African; the bearded man who'd left before had caramel-colored skin, like maybe he was from the Middle East, she wasn't sure. Then there were white people—the bald man was white, the elegant woman with the silver hair…one other woman might be East Indian…what were they, those beautiful threads of light?

Then Mrs. Omotoso turned and caught her looking down at them. Feeling almost guilty, Cara was startled and looked away.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,'” said the teacher.

“Pardon?”

“It's not my own. I'm just quoting—a famous line from the science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

“OK,” said Cara uncertainly.

“That doesn't mean, of course, that magic isn't real.”

“The poison wasn't the kind you find in bottles with skulls and crossbones on them,” said the balding teacher with the broken nose. His name was Mr. Sabin, and he had a voice so deep it was almost comic. “It wasn't the kind they can pump out of your stomach or soak up with charcoal.”

They sat at a thick oak table not far from where Jax was lying, apparently in a recovery mode, on his dais: Mr. Sabin, Mrs. Omotoso, and Cara. The other teachers had left the room when they finished with their light sabers (as Cara thought of them).

“It was for his mind. His mind that makes him so special,” said Mrs. Omotoso.

She'd brewed a kettle of tea on a hot plate in the corner and sipped from a steaming cup of it now; Cara smelled lavender, a tea her mother also drank. Cara didn't like it, but she loved how it smelled. In their corner of the big, high-ceilinged room there were deep, overstuffed armchairs and a few floor lamps that shed a quiet orange light. Behind them were shelves of leatherbound volumes, and beneath their feet was an intricate rug that might have been Turkish. It reminded her of the flying carpets depicted in her old Arabian Nights treasury.

“Special,” repeated Cara.

She felt dazed by what had happened; she wondered if she was all here.

How much did they know about Jax?

“Jax has a very special mind,” said Mrs. Omotoso.

“But we don't have to tell
you
that,” added Mr. Sabin. “You're his sister.”

“Yeah. Jax is really smart,” said Cara, and nodded carefully.

The two teachers glanced at each other sidelong.

“Smart, yes,” said Mrs. Omotoso. “But that's not what we're talking about.”

“It's not?” asked Cara.

She wondered if this was the moment where Jax's ESP got them locked up. She saw, in a flash, both of them being kept as prisoners here, in the company of relics. Confined here along with the paintings of fine-looking gentlemen who were secretly devils, tails curving behind them. Along with the bottles of grisly, pickled specimens…

But at least, when she thought it, she wasn't touching the ring. Maybe it wasn't, in fact, a glimpse of the future.

“We know about Jax's talents,” said Mrs. Omotoso. “At least, we know about some of them. You don't have to conceal your own knowledge, dear.”

Cara didn't know what to say. Or whether she should speak at all.

“We think it's time we brought you in,” said Mr. Sabin.

His voice was so deep it was a spoof of deep voices.

“Brought me in,” she repeated warily.

“Now that you're involved, we think you need to know more than you do.”

“There's a reason we've been keeping Jax here with us, you see,” said Mrs. Omotoso.

“I thought he was here for—I thought it was an educational project?” faltered Cara.

“Of course, we
do
help bright students develop their talents,” said Mr. Sabin. “But in Jax's case it was more of a pretext.”

“Cara,” said Mrs. Omotoso, and set down her china cup on its saucer delicately, “we brought your brother here to protect him. Because something is happening.”

“You—you mean…”

She didn't know how much she could say. Would her
mother
want her to talk openly to these people? Jax hadn't trusted them. Jax's not trusting them was why she was here in the first place.

“We
know
Jax didn't trust us,” said Mr. Sabin. “We know that's why he called you. Although, to be perfectly honest, we didn't find out about the call till afterwards. Jax concealed it. As we concealed our own minds from him.”

Cara stared at him.

He could do it, too. Couldn't he.

“Excuse me,” he said, nodding apologetically. “Yes. Jax has far more raw talent than I do, but I have experience on my side. As do all of the teachers here. I assure you, I usually ask permission to read people. We all ask permission. Unless we're dealing with hostiles. But this isn't a typical situation.”

“We share some characteristics with your brother, you see, Cara,” said Mrs. Omotoso.

She took the beaded headband out of her hair, flicked it onto her wrist absent-mindedly, and then smoothed her hair back and replaced the band more neatly. The familiarity of the gesture comforted Cara.

She had to rely on her intuition, she thought. It had gone OK so far, hadn't it?
Rely on your intuition.
Her mother had told her that.

“We call them ‘the old ways.' Those senses your brother has. The thing about your brother is that he has more old-way abilities than—well, than most other people who have them,” said Mrs. Omotoso. “He kind of has, or will have—well, it looks to us like he has.…”

“Basically everything,” said Mr. Sabin.

“What do you mean,
everything?”

“Well,” said Mrs. Omotoso, as she got up to lift the teapot off the hot plate and pour herself some more, “what he means is, most of us have one innate talent—one old way that we were born with and work to develop as we grow up. The old ways tend to run in families.”

Mr. Sabin cleared his throat but didn't say anything.

“I'm what we call a mindtalker, for instance,” went on Mrs. Omotoso, “and Mr. Sabin here is a mindreader, but Jax can do both of those things, can't he? And quite a number more.”

“That makes him very valuable,” said Mr. Sabin. “And unfortunately, very vulnerable, too.”

“In this war,” said Mrs. Omotoso, spooning honey into her cup, “he occupies a unique position. He's…well, people know about him. People on both sides. Do you remember that verse your mother left for you?”

“The poem about the
Whydah?
The shipwreck?”

“That was part of a longer—I guess you might call it a prophecy. And in the full prophecy, Jax is important. You are, too.”

“Wait. My mother didn't write it? I thought she wrote it for us. As instructions that other people wouldn't get.”

“No, dear. That text is far older than your mother.”

“An old prophecy…that talks about Jax? And me?”

Mr. Sabin nodded gravely.

“And a couple of weeks ago something happened that made Jax…more exposed than he used to be,” said Mrs. Omotoso. “So until we could get permanent protections into place—around your home and Jax's school—we brought him here.”

“But as you saw, they reached him anyway,” said Mr. Sabin, and cast a look over at the dais, where Jax appeared to be sleeping. “Luckily, I think we got to him in time to prevent permanent damage.”

“What
happened,” said Cara.
“What
happened a couple of weeks ago?”

She wasn't giving them any information, she thought, but it didn't matter, because they knew it anyway. Even this, what she was thinking
right now
, was audible to Mr. Sabin. If he wanted it to be. She might as well be yelling her deepest secrets from a rooftop.

She felt deflated, as well as spied on. Before this, her brother was the only one who had been able to see into her mind. And that had been bad enough.

“I won't keep doing it,” said Mr. Sabin. “I promise. As of right now, I'm not going to listen. I'll agree to trust you if you agree to trust me. OK?”

Cara hesitated a moment and then nodded reluctantly.

“Cara, we want you to brace yourself a little,” said Mrs. Omotoso. “It's your mother.”

She leaned in close and took Cara's hands.

Cara's anxiety spiked.

“She's not hurt,” said Mr. Sabin quickly. “She has some excellent defenses. Believe me.”

“But she is
captive”
said Mrs. Omotoso. “The enemy has her confined. And so she can't help you or your brother. Not right now.”

So it turned out that if Cara hadn't been there, Roger wouldn't have been able to get to Jax at all.

In a way, it was her fault.

Or at the very least, her
and
Jax's fault, since he'd begged her to come. But poor Jax was the victim. She shouldn't have come, she thought, she shouldn't have listened to him; she shouldn't have broken the rules. She should have just called her dad. What had she been thinking? She should have done it all differently.

Roger couldn't have gotten near to Jax himself, because Jax would have read him, Mrs. Omotoso said, and then Jax could have run. Roger was a regular person, she said. He couldn't stop people like Jax or Mr. Sabin from reading his mind any more than Cara herself could. So, since Jax would read him the second he got near, he'd needed a go-between. Someone who wouldn't have any
idea
what was in his head and would carry the poison to Jax without even knowing they were doing it.

In other words, Cara.

“But how did Roger know I was going to be here, then? How
could
he know?”

“He must have intercepted Jax's communications with you, Cara. Did Jax send you an email?” asked Mr. Sabin.

“A text.”

“Hmm.”

“Wait. Roger read our
texts?”

“Safe to assume he's been a spy for some time now,” said Mr. Sabin. “Assigned to your mother. And she must not know that yet, or she would have reported him.”

“But—I think my mother can mindtalk,” said Cara. “Can't she? She communicated with me this summer without being near. Wouldn't she have known? Couldn't she have seen through him?”

“Your mother does have some mindtalk abilities, that's true,” said Mrs. Omotoso. “She's above-average, definitely, talent-wise. But she's not a mind
reader.
On that score she's just intuitive, even if you sometimes feel she sees through you. In that way she's just a normal mother. So, no: she couldn't have read Roger, so she wouldn't automatically have known that he was working for the Cold.”

“Him? It's
him
?”

“It's always him,” said Mr. Sabin.

Suddenly he seemed very tired.

“So then—what is this place? If it's guarded against the elementals?”

“It's guarded against all the Cold One's methods, and it's one place of many,” said Mrs. Omotoso. “I guess you could call it a sanctuary.”

On the outside, the Institute didn't look out of the ordinary at all. It wasn't supposed to, she told Cara. But it had security. It was a fort constructed to keep out the people they didn't want to get in. That included all mindtalkers and mindreaders who weren't expressly invited, said Mrs. Omotoso. It was by invitation only.

“No shapeshifters, either,” said Mr. Sabin. “Unless, of course, they're
our
shapeshifters.”

Mrs. Omotoso shot him a look that seemed, to Cara, like a warning.

“I saw one this summer,” said Cara. “We called him the Pouring Man. He was an elemental, my mother said, who worked for the bad guys? She said the elementals operate in one of four, like, Greek elements, water or earth or air or—”

“Fire,” said Mr. Sabin.

“Anyway,” she went on, “he was a water elemental, and he took the shape of my friend Hayley.”

“Elementals aren't real shapeshifters,” said Mr. Sabin. “They're not changing their shape—just your perception of that shape.
Real
shapeshifters rearrange their molecules. It's one of the highest-order talents.”

“We don't want to burden her with
too
much right off the bat,” said Mrs. Omotoso sharply.

Cara had the feeling, from her annoyed expression, that Mr. Sabin was breaking a private rule they'd agreed to.

“You told me what this place is,” said Cara. “But, I mean—who are
you?”

In the silence that followed, she could hear the slow ticking of an aged, analog clock on the wall.

“We're just people,” said Mr. Sabin after a minute, “who are gifted in the old ways. And want to help others who are, too. We want to stop the Cold.”

“But I know that's not the whole story,” protested Cara. “I'm not
stupid.
Because the enemy has these—old ways, too! Don't they? Or some weird powers, anyway. So then what is it that
they
want? What are you
fighting
over? I wish you guys wouldn't keep speaking in code. My mother did that, too, the last time I saw her.”