The Violet Awakening (The Elementum Trinity Book 2) (9 page)

“He was there, and then he was just… gone,” I said, shaking my head as I sipped on the tea that had already gone cold.

“Did you check the closet
, Melody?” Grace contributed helpfully. They’d moved her in to one of the spare bedrooms while we were gone, and a massive gray cat, which I could only assume was Jackie, perched grumpily upon her shoulder as she carried a tray of cookies around the room.

I smiled weakly at the woman, having discovered very quickly that it would be of no use to tell her my name wasn’t Melody.
When I’d first tried to assure her that I was, in fact, Angie, she’d responded with a hearty laugh, a pat on my shoulder, and an, ‘Oh, Melody. I’ve missed your sense of humor.’

Lily paced the kitchen, as Emmy, Kayla, and Sarah sat quietly on the couch, huddled together like a litter of terrified kittens, taking reluctant bites from snickerdoodles. Jason and Mattie had already returned to their parents, after telling Lily all they could about what had happened to Al, which wasn’t much. Lakin gripped my hand so tightly,
my fingers had begun to tingle with numbness, and it felt a bit like a piece of soggy driftwood was attached to my wrist.

“I should have sent more people with you, I just didn’t think…” Lily said, glancing guiltily toward the kittens on the couch.

I already knew what was on her mind, she didn’t have to say it. She hadn’t thought there would be any survivors. I contemplated into my tea. What if there had been more survivors? What if nobody at The Facility had been hurt?

“Calm down, Donna. Maybe he’s with Gabriel,” Grace said thoughtfully.

Lily sighed with frustration. “Good idea, mom. Why don’t you go check?”

Grace nodded with a smile, as she sat her plate of cookies on the table, and placed Jackie next to them. “You have to stay here, Jackie. You make Rhiannon itchy. And these walls better be the same color when I get back.”

The cat looked at her with droopy eyelids, proving that even feline intuition was strong enough to sense when someone was off their rocker.

“Maybe he’s too far away to hear?” Lakin offered, after Grace had closed the door behind herself.

“We’ve been on opposite sides of the planet, without so much as static between us. There’s nowhere they could have taken him that I wouldn’t be able to reach him,” Lily said sternly, sounding more like she was trying to convince herself than explain.

“You can’t hear our parents,” I mumbled, as Jackie curled herself
up into a ball on my lap without asking for permission. I’d spent time with some of the employees’ pets in The Facility, but I had never been much of a cat person. When I was younger, I’d had a dream that all the cats in the world had grown opposable thumbs, waited until everyone was asleep, then murdered us all with swords and blunderbusses; I didn’t see myself adopting one anytime in the near future.

“That’s different,” Lily
said, collapsing into one of the chairs around the table.

“Why?”

“Because I didn’t bond with your parents,” she snapped, eyes burning with a type of rage I had never seen in her.

“Sorry,” I whispered, glancing sideways at Lakin.

“If he had, you know…
died
”—Lakin said the word as if it were a curse—“we would have felt it, right?”

She nodded somberly.

“…Then, maybe he’s just knocked out, or something.”

Lily’s eyes widened, looking up at Lakin as if he had just discovered the secret to inter-galactic travel. Beams of light shot out of her face, coinciding with a blood-curdling scream from Kayla’s general direction. Emmy clasped at her urn, as if it might embrace her back, and Sarah stared in wonder.

Without much thought, I reached out and grabbed Lily’s hand. My eyes clouded over, taking me to a place that looked an awful lot like my own generation’s Energy Room. Exactly like it, even. Except that Al was there, biting his nails as he squirmed in his blue chair.

“Lily,” he breathed, bounding to greet me with a passionate kiss.

“Ugh!” I shouted, startling Lakin as I hastily removed myself from Lily’s vision.

“What? What happened?” he asked nervously.

“He’s there.” I grimaced, the experience still fresh on my lips. “I think we can just wait for Lily to tell us herself.”

My eyes wandered to Emmy, whose questioning gaze was firmly fixed on something in the kitchen. I tried to follow her line of sight, and finally remembered something that had escaped me, earlier; the trashcan. The o
ut-of-place, ornate trashcan next to the stove was an exact replica of the one that had found a home in the kitchen of the Stein’s house. It seemed far too unlikely to be only a coincidence.

Lakin raised a curious eyebrow, trying to intercept my stare. I shook my head out of its pondering, assuring myself that I would ask Lily about it later. I meant to give a reassuring grin to the boy next to me, but I was distracted by a glint from his neck.

I lifted my hand, brushing my fingers against the tight-fitting necklace I hadn’t noticed before. Curtis had carved the stone into an odd shape. I couldn’t quite place it, but it felt so familiar—a hollow circle, with six spokes poking out from the sides. Almost like a sun…

A twinge in my chest led me to reach into my shirt, and pull out the crumpled drawing Jenny had given me for my birthday. Holding the paper next to Lakin’s very-confused face, the stone lined up perfectly with the little, purple sun in the corner. It shouldn’t have seemed odd for a child to draw the sun like that, especially a child who had never actually seen the real thing. One of the first pieces of art I remembered drawing involved apples growing from pine trees, because those are the kinds of things that make sense to young minds. They see the obvious things that adults are all too willing to overlook.

“What—” he began.

“Well,” Lily said from the other side of the table, interrupting my thoughts as she eyed me awkwardly, “he seems to be all right, but he has no idea what happened, or where he is.”

“How is that even possible?” I questioned, absentmindedly folding the drawing back into my shirt.

“I have no idea. But we do think it has something to do with The Facility.”

“You don’t say,” I huffed, fighting off the overwhelming urge to roll my eyes.

“Why would they only take him?” Sarah piped up from the living room. “Why wouldn’t they take all of us?”

Kayla seemed almost appalled that her friend was participating in our conversation. Her eyes were about the size of melons, and her gaze shifted between us, as if we might burst out of our human-like shells and eat her face off.

“You were under the protection of Jason and Mattie’s gift. Nobody would have even known you were there,” Lily explained, throwing Sarah a sweet smile.

“But why would they want Al?” The question came from Emmy’s lips, this time. She seemed absolutely befuddled as she rested her cheek on her fist, elbow propped up on the urn.

“Seriously?” Lakin cocked his head, jaw slightly agape. My elbow
accidentally
met his ribs with full force, as I feigned a sip from my empty teacup.

“Mrs. Stein… what, exactly, did they tell you when you and your husband were hired in to The Facility?” Lily squinted with accusation.

Emmy’s eyes wandered nervously around the room, lingering on my face for just enough time to make me squirm in my seat. Having spent a significant amount of my life in her house, I thought I had seen every one of her expressions, but this was something new. This was something that made my insides boil and freeze and turn to overcooked, frost-bitten spaghetti; she looked guilty.

With an uncomfortable sigh, Emmy plunged into a story that had, conveniently, never come up at the dinner table.

“At first, they didn’t tell us much. Only that I would be in charge of the greenhouse, and Eddie would be head of research… but they didn’t say what kind of research, exactly.”

“Why would you accept a job that you knew so little about?” Lily questioned.

“We were in a rough spot. We had both been out of work for a while, we were getting evicted from our apartment, and with a baby on the way… we couldn’t see any other option. It was a paycheck, and a place to stay. We didn’t even know where we were going.” Her stare ventured off into her past, as she relived the story she told. “They told us to meet them at the airport. And we did. Then they put us on a private jet, and blindfolded us before we landed. When they took them off, we were in Mr. Slate’s office. He explained what The Facility was, and how it operated. He said they were initially running experiments on volunteers with marked psychic abilities, but something went wrong, and they all… died. He never said what happened to them, only blamed it on the employees. That’s why they were hiring new people. Then Paula came in, holding the tiniest bundle of white blankets.”

Emmy forced her eyes in my direction, but they seemed to have trouble meeting my own. She nervously swept a tangle of hair from her face, before carefully sitting the urn at her f
eet and standing to move toward me. Each step was tense and cautious, like she was treading toward her own demise.

“Mr. Slate said some of the volunteers had had children while in The Facility. By the time they’d realized the children had inherited their parents’ powers, they’d already put most of them into foster care. He said they would continue trying to find the other babies, but for now, they just had you. Then Paula held you out, and you looked up at me with your big brown eyes… Mr. Slate went on and on about how you were different, and dangerous, and all I could think was, ‘how could something so little, so beautiful, be dangerous?’”

Emmy was so close, I could feel the warmth of her arm against my face. She kneeled down, so our faces were on the same level, and she finally looked me in the eyes. Her cheeks were damp with tears, but something was hidden in her voice that I couldn’t place.

“You have to believe that neither of us wanted to contribute to what William was doing to you, Angie. What kind of person experiments on a child? But the moment Paula handed you over, when I held you in my arms… I knew we needed to protect you in any way we could, even if that meant heading the research. So
, we signed our contracts. We took you in, so you didn’t have to grow up in the infirmary. You were like a daughter to us. Eddie loved you. I love you. Eric, well…” she trailed off, brushing the last stray tear from her cheek.

As Lakin’s grip tightened around my hand at the mention of Eric’s name, I suddenly remembered the ring that was currently cutting into my finger. I had forgotten to take it off when we returned to the Eden. Nobody had noticed, yet. Maybe they wouldn’t.

“So,” I cleared my throat, “you knew about the others like me?”

“We—” Emmy began, glancing at Lily and then Lakin, “we didn’t know there were so many. We only knew about the ones born in The Facility. We certainly didn’t suspect Al was a… After so many years had gone by, we’d assumed William had given up looking for them.”

“Didn’t you ever wonder why they were doing the research?”

“Well,” she said, looking down at her hands, “like I said, they told us it was all about understanding psychic abilities. We thought, you know… telepathy, or something. The thought that psychic abilities were even real was completely new to us. We had no idea what you were actually capable of. But we were under the impression, in the beginning, that they just wanted to understand the abilities. Not all research is carried out with the intention of using data for anything specific; it’s not uncommon for studies to be done just for the sake of knowing. As you got older, we started to see… Eddie realized, by the type of tests they were running and the data they were collecting, it was never just about understanding. It was about
harnessing
.”

“Harnessing?” I breathed.

“Nobody ever said it, not outright, but… it became very obvious that William wanted to be able to use your power.”

I looked at Lily, who was glaring
, cold and hard, at the woman kneeling next to me. I wondered if this was new information to her, or if they’d just neglected to tell me that William had intended to turn me into some sort of fireball, freeze-ray soldier.

“Do you know how close they came?” Lily questioned distantly.

“How close they came to what, dear?” Emmy asked.

“To harnessing Angie’s power.”

Emmy’s eyes lingered on Lily for a moment too long. “They were about to start testing the reversal when they brought Al in, but Angie’s powers went haywire. The data they were collecting was unlike anything they’d seen before.”

“Wait, the reversal?” I asked, perplexed.

“Of your Electro-Cuffs,” Emmy said, with a look that suggested I should have already known the answer.

“I don’t understand.”

“Your Cuffs were never intended to only prevent you from using your powers. They were designed to eventually force you to use them.”

I jumped to my feet, ripping my hand out of Lakin’s. My mind was moving so quickly, my body felt the need to join it. I paced around the kitchen, trying to organize my thoughts into sensible words.