SEVENTEEN
W
e get within about 15 feet of the ballroom exit, and Elias drops my hand and says, “Follow me in a couple minutes, okay? I’ll wait around the corner two hallways down.”
What are we about to do that we don’t want the cameras to catch?
I nod and do as he asked. I wait a few minutes and then walk down the hallway, trying to keep my heels from making too loud of a noise in the empty, cavernous space. The lights have been dimmed so that the stark white seems much softer, probably trying to achieve the sense of evening in a space without natural light. I pass the first hallway to the right, and it stares back at me, a tunnel of more unknown emptiness, the turned-out lights leaving it pitch black.
The second hallway is just as dark, and as I approach it, Elias’s hand shoots out and grabs mine. I squeak, surprised even though I knew he’d be waiting there for me. He pulls me to him and kisses me, his palm pressing against the small of my back. In the dark of the hallway, it’s exhilarating, and for a second, I forget that that’s not why we’re here. At least I didn’t think it was.
Elias pulls back and touches my face, running his thumb along my lips, and the outline of his face, dark-on-dark in the slight shadows, smiles at me. He speaks in a low whisper. “I could get used to this ‘Merrin-in-heels’ thing,” he murmurs. “Much easier to just grab you and kiss you.”
My head swims. He’s right. And if they weren’t so damn painful, I’d wear them all the time.
I would be pretty thrilled with this whole standing-in-a-dark-hallway scenario if we weren’t right in the middle of the Hub. Or if Elias hadn’t just shut me down for no freaking reason. But there’s too much of everything that makes me happy or excited everywhere around me to focus on just one thing. Even Elias.
I step back and push his shoulders playfully. “What are we doing down here?”
“I want to show you something.” He tugs at my arm and pulls me behind him down the hallway. As he steps, the lights flare up to the blinding levels I’m sure they’re set on during the day.
“Low lights,” he commands, and they dim to nighttime levels. My eyebrows go up. How does he know to do this? I look at him, and he gets it. He gets the question.
“Um, my cuff gives me clearance. I’m actually here kind of a lot,” he says quietly, nodding toward his cuff. “The security system senses its presence whenever we walk through a checkpoint. That’s why no holodoors have flown up in our face yet.”
We come to a solid door, probably the eighth on the right, even though the hallway stretches much farther down.
“No retina scans?”
He shrugs. “No, the process to get into the Hub in the first place is intense enough. Once you’re in, the cuff is good enough. And besides, no retina scan at every door frees up funding for…other things. Like this.”
He opens the door, grinning, and pulls me in behind him. I stare into a black abyss. When Elias asks, “Ready for this?” his voice echoes off the walls, and I know whatever lays waiting in the dark is huge. I nod, and his voice booms, “Lights bright.”
A white light fills the room, blinding me momentarily once again, and half a second later when I can see, I gasp.
I stare at the gigantic room before me, the size of four football fields at least. Two tracks circle one end of it, one long and one shorter, running concentric with one another. Simulation stations holding giant gyro-chairs with controls staring at the largest holoscreens I’ve ever seen; huge clear cubes; and two swimming pools, triple Olympic length, stretch out to my right. The vaulted ceiling curves high in the air, at least five stories up, much higher than I’ve ever flown with Elias.
“The testing arena,” Elias says, chest puffing with pride. “This is where my sisters are training — this is where the gap year does their stuff. I haven’t seen them yet, but I will tomorrow.” He pulls me along. “Come on. It’s like the ultimate Super testing ground.”
We walk through the arena for a few minutes, him pointing out 10 different kinds of the highest-tech equipment I’ve ever seen, until we come to an empty stretch of floor over which the roof domes slightly. Only the barest light reaches up into it, but when I squint, I see that it’s actually made up of a formation of blades, their wide ends around the circumference, all coming to a point in the middle. Elias, still holding my hand, stretches behind him and hits a huge red button on the wall. The blades slowly retract into the edge of the circle, opening up to a dark purple sky that sparkles with the brightest stars.
I know my mouth hangs open, and I don’t even care. This room could be my future. This room could be where I learn to fly. On my own.
He motions up. “The ceiling’s like that…you know…”
“For the fliers,” I finish.
He nods. “I knew you’d think this was incredible. Knew it. So. Do you want…you know…the aerial tour?”
“No.” I shake my head. “No, I want to see all of it close up, from down here. Show me everything.”
Elias intertwines his fingers with mine, and suddenly, I’m jerked back to reality — the question of how he even knows this exists. My head swims.
“So,” I say and clear my throat, “You’ve been, uh…coming here.”
“Yeah,” he says, smiling. “Awesome, huh?” He looks down at me, and my smile fades.
No, I think, it’s not awesome. It’s not okay that you were keeping something from me. It’s not okay that I trusted you with everything about my One, and it wasn’t enough.
Well, everything except meeting with Mr. Hoffman. And letting him test my blood.
“Mer, what’s up?”
I shake my head because I don’t know what to say. Two months ago, something vicious would have come flying out of my mouth, words meant to slice into him, but I don’t want to hurt him, not at all. Especially when I know that my secret could hurt him just as badly.
Suddenly, I want to take him up on his offer to fly because I want the noise and the distraction of it to block out all these thoughts, to help me figure out how to deal with them. I wrap my arms around him, press my cheek into his chest again, and then tilt my head up to kiss his neck.
I so badly want to fly in this dress. I so badly want to be beautiful, flying with him. Maybe that will fix everything. But he gently nudges me back down.
“No, you were right,” he says. “No flying.”
There’s a small eating area inside the arena, with picnic-like tables, a long top with benches attached. He hoists me up to sit on the table part of one of them, my feet resting on the bench. He straddles them, sitting down to face me. Now his face is only a little lower than mine. This is how I love to look at him, and he knows it. He’s humoring me. He cups his hands over my knees and looks into my eyes, and warmth floods me.
Like he can tell what I’m thinking, he murmurs, “I need you just as much as you need me. Probably more.” He grins. “At least floaters can spy on people.”
“Then why have you been coming here? And why didn’t you tell me?” I can hear the whine in my voice, and I hate it, but my heart twists so much that it grabs my throat and makes the words come out all funny. Needy. I don’t know why that bothers me, especially with Elias sitting here and looking into my eyes and telling me how much he needs me.
He shrugs his shoulders. “I don’t know. Hoping I’d see my sisters. Still haven’t. Hoping I’d make my dad happy. But the truth is, they’ve been doing testing on me on and off for years. They’re, uh…stubborn.” He laughs a little and smiles at me, but I can’t smile back. I must be staring at him like I don’t understand because he starts talking again.
“Let me start again. I’ve been going for…tests, I guess. I’ve known the theories about how they could make us better. Make us Supers, I mean. Real ones. I wasn’t going to show you the arena until they found something conclusive. You know, about me. Us.”
“So it wasn’t really basketball,” I say, staring at the floor. There are a lot of more important things to say, things I want to find out more about. But thinking of him with needles stuck in his arm or hooked up to medical machinery makes my stomach drop. My Elias, a test subject.
“But, Mer,” he says, his hands running up the outsides of my legs and reaching up to grab my waist, “Mer. They can’t make me fly. I’ve never flown any way but with you. You make me better. You make me fly. I need you. Not some stupid tests, not the stupid Hub.” His voice sounds kind of angry, and I can’t tell if it’s because of me or something else.
“How are you okay with that?” And now I can feel it, my real question coming out, because I always assumed Elias was okay with needing me, but of course, it doesn’t make sense, not at all, with how gorgeous and sweet and popular and, apparently, powerful he is. How well-connected. How involved in what they’re doing at the Hub.
“Okay with what? Needing you?” he asks.
I nod, looking at the floor next to him.
“I’m better with you than I was without. I mean, in a couple ways. I guess…even if we weren’t Ones. I’d still tell you any day of the week that I need you. That I…I need you, Mer.”
I sit opposite him, silent, gazing out at the arena over his shoulder, imagining what it would be like to be a part of it, for real, not just tagged onto a limited guest pass at the Symposium or sneaking into a hallway with Elias. Testing or participating or developing enhancements — I could rock it. I could be here, fit right in here. And if I could work on the research, really get my hands dirty — I know it, know it in my gut — I could fly.
“Is that why you’re doing this, Merrin? Is that why you want to do the intern thing? Because you’re…you’re not okay with it?”
I hear the part he didn’t ask.
Because you’re not okay with needing me?
My words catch in my throat, but I have to say them. “Don’t you ever dream of flying on your own?”
“No. Not really. Not until you brought it up. That’s always been my dad’s thing.”
His eyes look sad, so sad they make my heart sink into my stomach. So sad they make his feelings more important, for the moment, than my frustration that he kept something from me. More important than my frustration with myself, that having Elias in my life somehow still doesn’t make me quite happy enough.
I don’t feel the same way about my Oneness as Elias does about his, but I’m pretty sure I feel the same way about him as he does about me. I don’t want him to hurt. I definitely don’t want to be the one who makes him hurt.
I reach down, lace my fingers through his hair, and kiss him on the forehead, then the lips, a gentle kiss becoming deeper.
“I don’t mind being stuck with you,” I murmur between kisses because I don’t, I really don’t.
Most of life isn’t flying, I remind myself. Most of life is about the people you love. I know that. Flying hasn’t made me forget.
I swing my legs out from between his and hop down off the table, standing so I look curviest in my dress. I’m not going to be dressed up like this again for awhile, so I need to milk it. I stretch my hand out, smiling an apology.
“Show me everything,” I say. And we spend the next hour looking at supersonic accelerators and fireproof cubes and electron-neutralizing gel.
And I am happy.
The next day, Elias seems like himself again. I try to hide my sigh of relief that my boyfriend is back and that we can enjoy the rest of the Symposium together, even if he is mostly humoring me.
I have no idea what Michael and Max are doing — Dad’s keeping track of them today since his ultra-boring presentation is over. It was something about home safety for families with early-displaying Supers — how to keep your electricity-emitting baby from blowing the house up, for example.
The biggest problem my parents ever had with the twins was that it was hard to bathe them. That’s how Dad got into this field in the first place, actually — my brothers were born, and what with my being a One and all, Mom and Dad had never really faced the challenges of having Super kids to take care of.
I’m all excited to go to Mom’s demonstration today, but I see it’s marked “Authorized Personnel Only” when I read the listing closely on my schedule. I blow it up on my cuff’s screen and shove it in Elias’s face.
“What the hell?” I grouse.
He looks at the listing, too. “Yeah. And it’s the only thing in the training arena at that point. What does your mom do?”
I shrug. I’ve never asked Mom exactly what she does — never cared enough. I mean, I know that she combusts and that she’s indestructible — never had a match in the house. But she’s never bothered to talk to me about it. Dad’s always clued me in on what he’s doing at the Hub, but Mom? Never. If I think about it, I never thought it was because her work was too awesome or important. I just thought it was because she thought I wasn’t awesome or important enough to hear about it.
“What’s the matter?” Elias nudges me. I would tell him, but I know he’s excited because he finally gets to see his sisters today. I’m not about to ruin anything for him, especially after all I said last night.
“Nothing.” I shake my head and give a closed-lipped smile. “I just… I’m really glad you showed me the arena last night. Otherwise I would never have seen it.”
“Never say never, Mer.” He reaches an arm around me and squeezes my shoulder, pulling me close to him.
We go to a couple presentations, including one for a pressure-enhancing suit to make some flier kid — the air-blowing kind, like Elias should be — push the air so hard and fast that she’s nearly supersonic. “While we had hoped to break the sound barrier this time,” the announcer intones, “this gap year student strengthens her abilities daily, and we have every confidence that by the next symposium she’ll be far past supersonic status.”
“Supersonic,” I whisper. Elias gives me a sad smile. The girl, her skin the color of coffee glowing almost golden from the exhilaration and the sheen of sweat, runs a hand over her head, which has hair cropped so close it’s nearly shaven. For speed, I think.
Elias looks at me, and I swear it’s another instance where he knows what I’m thinking. “Don’t get any ideas,” he says, and he rolls the end of some of my hair between his fingers lightly.
Yep. He knew.