The Tower (27 page)

I rolled my eyes. “Don’t even ask.”

Mark laughed heartily and patted my shoulder, saying, “Thirteen is about as tough as it gets growing up, and you have a lot on your plate. Hang in there. Things will get better in time.”

I would have liked to spend some more time talking with Mark, but I was getting a bit worried about my sister. After what happened on our camping trip, I was always a bit edgy about leaving her alone.

I cycled back at top speed and, parking in the basement, I took the elevator up to the penthouse. Even before I finished unlocking the front door, however, I could already hear Alia’s voice in my head.

“Addy! You’re home!”

“What’s the matter, Ali?” I asked, opening the door. “Why aren’t you wearing your ring?”

Alia looked at me uneasily.
“Terry’s crying.”

“She’s what?” I asked, disbelieving her voice in my head.

“She came back a few minutes ago, and she had a little box, and now she’s crying.”

Terry – crying? That didn’t sound at all like the wild and tough Guardian I knew. But as I stepped into the living room, I could hear it too. Terry wasn’t just crying. She was wailing as if she had been mortally injured. I ran to her room door and just barely stopped myself from barging in.

“Terry?” I called, banging on her door with my fist. “Terry, are you okay?”

“Don’t come in, Adrian!” she shouted, her voice completely cracked. “Please, just leave me alone!”

If it had been Alia or even Cindy, I would have ignored that and busted down the door, but my combat instructor commanded a more respectful distance, and I hesitated, unsure what to do. Terry was no longer crying loudly, but I could still hear her sobbing uncontrollably.

A moment later, the door burst open and Terry practically threw me aside as she bolted for the bathroom. She slammed the door and locked it, and I could hear her sobbing for a few more minutes. It wasn’t like I enjoyed listening at the door, but I couldn’t help myself. This just wasn’t like Terry at all. I heard the toilet flush, and ducked out of sight as Terry exited the bathroom. I caught a glimpse of her as she hurried back into her room. It might have been a trick of the light, but I thought for an instant that there was a bloodstain on the front of her shirt.

“What’s going on, Addy?”
asked Alia, looking at me anxiously.
“What’s the matter with Terry?”

“I don’t know,” I said, and knocked on Terry’s door again as I called, “Terry, are you sure you’re okay?”

“I’m fine,” Terry called back in a forced voice. “Just stay out, okay?”

It wasn’t okay, but what could I do?

I led my sister back to our room. After making her put her draining ring back on, I sat down with her at the window and read one of her storybooks to her. My mind was lost to memories of Terry’s tear-stained face as she ran past me on her way to the bathroom, so I’m sure I wasn’t reading very well, but Alia probably wasn’t listening either, so it didn’t matter.

Shortly before Cindy came home, Terry visited us in our room to apologize for what she described as an “embarrassing outburst.”

“I’m really sorry, Adrian,” she said emotionlessly. “I was just upset about something.”

“That much is obvious, Terry,” I said, noticing the lines on her cheeks. “What happened?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Not even to your family?” I asked, raising my eyebrows.

Terry forced a little smile and said, “I’m okay now. Really. Please don’t tell anyone I was like that, Adrian. What will people think of me?”

I grinned. “They might mistakenly think you are actually human.”

Terry gave a weak laugh. I noticed that she had changed her shirt, but I couldn’t be sure if I really had seen blood on her. Perhaps Terry had simply changed because her shirt had been soaked with tears.

“It’s nothing important, Adrian,” said Terry. “I just had a bad relationship.”

“Boyfriend?” I asked timidly.

“Ex-boyfriend, okay? Please just stay out of my personal life.”

Chapter 9: The Closet Monster

Terry’s baffling episode had almost driven my own problems from my mind, but the day after speaking with Mark, I found myself standing at the door of 3901. I hadn’t had a one-on-one talk with Mr. Baker since arriving in New Haven, and as I knocked on the door, I wondered if I should have had Cindy make an appointment for me. There was no answer so I knocked again, slightly harder. I was about to turn and leave when I heard the lock click open.

“Well, hello, Adrian,” said Mr. Baker, opening the door. “There is a doorbell.”

“Oh, right,” I said, laughing embarrassedly.

“Come in. Let’s not stand out here.”

I followed Mr. Baker into his condo and sat with him at the low table in his living room. This time, when he offered me sugar with my tea, I accepted it and the silver spoon to stir it with.

“To what do I owe the pleasure?” asked Mr. Baker once we had taken a sip.

“I was wondering...” I hesitated. What was I going to say? That I got drunk and couldn’t remember what I was doing the night the Angel spy escaped? That maybe I had done something to help him? Now that I was actually here, the whole story sounded utterly ridiculous.

“Yes, Adrian?” asked Mr. Baker. “You were wondering?”

“About my sister, Mr. Baker,” I said clumsily. “About Catherine. Any news of where she is?”

“Ah, well, it was about time you came around on that account,” said Mr. Baker, nodding.

I looked at him hopefully, but Mr. Baker shook his head. “Unfortunately, we still have no information concerning your sister,” he informed me. “However, please do not lose heart. The Angels are a very large faction, with many subdivisions and countless servants. Just because Catherine has not been located doesn’t mean she is not with them. Besides, even if we found her today, we probably would not be able to remove her from the faction without severe damage to her mind.”

“I know of the dangers of separation,” I said, remembering the Angel pyroid who had gone insane. “But how long do people need before they can be safely separated?”

“It depends,” Mr. Baker said carefully. “With a child, it could be until adulthood, and even then, it is unlikely that she will ever be completely free of her conversion. She may spend much of her life longing to return to the service of the Angels.”

I frowned. Cindy had told me the same thing last year.

Mr. Baker gave me an encouraging smile. “Of course, if we could somehow kill the Angel queen, Adrian, your sister’s conversion would wear off very quickly.”

I knew that from Cindy too. Killing the Angels’ master controller, Larissa Divine, was the only sure way to release Cat from her mental enslavement. I didn’t like the idea of killing anybody, now more than ever, but if that really was the only way to recover my lost sister...

I looked at Mr. Baker hesitantly. “Are you?”

“Trying to kill the Angel queen?” asked Mr. Baker. “Yes, Adrian, we are. But that isn’t as easy as it sounds. I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but you really need to be patient.”

“Patience is my favorite virtue,” I said, forcing a smile.

I finished my tea, and I was about to leave when Mr. Baker asked, “Was there anything else you wanted to ask me about?”

I thought about Terry. Was it really a boyfriend that had caused her to act like that yesterday?

Ever since arriving in New Haven, despite the outward appearance of the moderately safe and halfway normal life I led here, I had always felt something deeper was going on. Something just beyond my grasp, like the fading memories of a dream. Like a closet monster. It was there until you opened the closet, and then it was under your bed until you looked there too. I was well past the age of believing in closet monsters, but that was exactly what it felt like. Something was always there until you looked closer, and then it was somewhere else.

“Adrian? Was there anything else you wanted to ask me about?”

“Oh,” I said, snapping out of my thoughts. “No. Thank you, Mr. Baker.”

There were so many little things that didn’t make sense in my life that, for the sake of my sanity, I decided I’d stop trying to make sense of them. Whatever had happened the night the Angel spy escaped, it probably had nothing to do with me. We still had no clue how the pair of dark-suited Angels intercepted Alia and me on the road in mid-August. If someone had told the Angels about our secret camping trip, then someone else had also saved us, so that balanced out nicely. And since we weren’t about to do anything like that again, it made little difference what had really happened. Terry’s tears were none of my business either, though I thought perhaps her ex-boyfriend might have sent her some kind of horrible break-up gift. I had enough trouble imagining what kind of boy Terry might go out with in the first place, so I quickly gave up trying to guess what her personal life might be like. I was much too old to be hunting closet monsters anyway.

As for Ralph’s words down in the shooting range, it took me a little more time to work through most of my feelings about the Psionic Research Center, and even to this day I still wonder about it sometimes. But Mark had it right: It had been a simple matter of “us or them,” and even if I did have a hand in the deaths of all of those people, there was nothing I could do about it now. I hadn’t yet directly killed anyone, and I planned to keep it that way. I decided to humor Terry and learn every nasty piece of CQC she had to offer, including how to use guns and knives and jo-sticks (whatever they were). Ultimately, it was my call whether or not to actually use these skills. No doubt Larissa Divine already had enough people trying to kill her without me joining in the hunt, and I wasn’t going to get my hands dirty in this war just because I learned how. Accepting that, I could focus on my training again.

Then, one morning in mid-October...

“Wake up, Addy!”
Alia happily yelled into my head.

“You’re awake enough for the both of us,” I moaned, yawning loudly and squinting in the early morning sunshine filtering in through the curtains. “Let me sleep a bit more.”

“No!”
cried Alia, pulling off my blanket and shaking me.
“It’s happy birthday today!”

Mornings were never my thing, and turning fourteen didn’t change that too much, but I hauled myself out of bed nevertheless.

I knew perfectly well that I was only a day older than I had been the day before, but I had to admit that “fourteen” had a nice ring to it, and it felt good to be saying goodbye to what had been a very shaky year for me. Besides, now I really was only a year younger than Terry. Sort of.

“You were talking in your sleep again, Addy,”
said Alia.
“Really loudly, too.”

“If it bothers you,” I said, stretching my arms, “get your own room.”

“It doesn’t bother me. It helps me go to sleep.”

“You’re weird, Alia,” I said dryly, though admittedly I felt the same way about her telepathic nighttime murmurs.

Alia smirked.
“Do you want to know what you were saying?”

“Not particularly, but I have a feeling you’re going to tell me anyway.”

“You were calling out Terry’s name. And it sounded like you were telling her to stop doing something.”

“I probably had a dream about being in the dojo with her,” I said.

In fact, I didn’t remember any of my dreams from the night before, but that seemed a likely explanation.

“Anyway, you better put your ring on, Ali,” I said. “Breakfast time.”

“Here we go again,”
said Alia, frowning as she slipped her silver ring on.

“Hey, you’re getting there,” I said, giving her an encouraging smile.

Alia scowled. “Ya, rye. I wiss I coo joo dis afta bay-fass.”

“Why?” I laughed. “So you can talk with your mouth full?”

Alia stuck her tongue out at me, spun on her heel and stalked out of the room.

It was a Sunday, but Terry canceled my afternoon CQC lesson, and Mark joined us for dinner. Terry had Cindy bake my birthday cake in the shape of, shockingly enough, the psionic control band I had used to learn my power balance. Such was Terry’s idea of a joke, and though I inwardly felt it more than a tad on the insensitive side, I laughed along with everyone else.