Resistance (The Institute Series Book 2) (16 page)

“Sure. How about you walk me to your house? I need to tell my mum something.”

Chapter Twelve

Drew and I walk in to find Mum, Dad, and Shilah at the dining table, eating.

“Lia! What are you doing here?” Mum asks, surprised. She then looks to Drew before I have a chance to answer. “Sorry. We had to start without you, it was getting cold.”

“No problems, Seph. I ran into Allira on my way home. Got held up a bit.” Dad shoots us a stare. If I didn’t know Dad any better, say if he was a stranger and I saw him in a dark alley in the city and he gave me this look, I would assume I wasn’t going to make it out of that alley alive. “Talking,” Drew clarifies. “We got held up talking.” Dad doesn’t say anything and goes back to eating.

“Join us,” Mum says. I pull up the chair next to Mum as Drew sits at the head of the table, opposite Dad. Shilah seems oblivious to anything around him and keeps shovelling food in his mouth like he’s worried he won’t get enough now that he’s sharing with me as well as Drew. “How was your first day working with Cyrus?” Mum asks.

“Uh … fine,” I stutter. Geez, if I go at this rate, I’m never going to tell her about me. “Could have gone better.” I tell the nerves that have started to build in my stomach to calm down. Like Cyrus said, this will make me more valuable to them. They’re not going to be angry, right? For me lying to them? A high pitched sing-song tone starts ringing in my ears,
‘Hypocrite! H-Y-P-O-CRITE!’
Ugh.

“Did I miss you falling on your face or something?” Shilah asks. “I thought it was a pretty good day.”

“Something like that,” I reply, while shoving a fork full of charred roo meat and salad into my mouth.

“So you’re not going to elaborate?” Dad asks me.

I just shake my head and eat. I don’t have the words. Blurting out ‘I have a double ability’ seems extreme. Easing them into it by announcing ‘I have something to tell you’ seems unnatural.

“Mum?” I ask, putting my fork down.

“Uh oh. That sounds like a pretty serious ‘Mum’ tone,” she replies, smiling. If only she realised what she was saying was the truth and not so much a joke.

“What’s the plan? The big plan. The whole point to the Resistance?”

“Whoa,” she says putting down her cutlery. “This did just get serious. Why do you want to know?”

“Just something I noticed today in training. It started to make me think.”

“What did you notice?” Dad interjects into the conversation.

“I just got the feeling we aren’t really training for recruitment purposes only.”

Mum goes stiff. “What makes you say that?” she asks.

“Just a few of the things Cyrus said. Plus the fact his eldest two kids are being trained when their abilities would be absolutely no benefit in recruiting people. Actually, there’s a few like them. Also the fact that there used to be eight teams of two out there at any given point, now there’s only three.”

Mum puts her hand up to stop me. “We’ve had a run of misfortunes lately with recruiting. Our best team, Tate and Chad, obviously can’t recruit anymore. We had a few people pull out after what happened to Tate. I think they finally realised they aren’t invincible. We don’t have many out there at the moment because the majority – as you would’ve seen in training – are young. Too young for such a big responsibility.”

“And Cyrus’s kids?” Drew asks, suddenly interested. 

Shilah is sitting across from me, taking it all in. He’s also giving me a stare similar to Dad’s earlier. I can almost hear him thinking, ‘Why can’t you just leave well enough alone?’

“I’d like to say they deserve to be there,” Mum says. “We do always need people who can defend themselves. But I’m going to be completely honest here and say Cyrus wanted them there. And usually what Cyrus wants, Cyrus gets.”

“Because of his double ability?”

She looks at me, contemplating how to answer that. Instead of answering, she starts picking up the plates and tidying the dining table. I’m pretty sure that means ‘yes’.

“I’m just curious, because there’s something you all don’t know.”

I remind myself to breathe, I didn’t even realise I had stopped. I’m about to tell everyone, when I hear footsteps behind me. I didn’t hear the front door open though.

“Allira,” Chad voice startles me. “I’ve been looking for you. When you didn’t come home I … Ebbodine got worried.”

“But not worried enough to come herself?” Shilah asks. “Wouldn’t it have been much faster for her to come and check?” I shoot Shilah a ‘shut up’ look.

“I had to come here first,” I say to Chad. “I had an interesting afternoon. I was just about to fill my parents in. On
everything.
”

“Can I talk to you for a minute? Outside?” he asks.

I sigh as I get up from the table and follow him out the front door, closing it behind me. “Want to fill me in on what happened today?” he asks.

“Not really.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because I’m scared you’ll try to talk me out of it.”

“Why are you going to tell them? I thought we—”

“Not
we
. You
. You
decided we shouldn’t tell them. But you were right. About Cyrus. He knows. He tricked me into borrowing his ability, confronted me, and told me I had a few days to tell the rest of the council before he did.”

Chad runs his hands through his hair and down his neck. He must be really nervous. He goes to say something but stops himself. He opens his mouth again to say something, but nothing comes out.

“What?” I ask.

“I don’t know. I don’t know what to say. I guess I wasn’t expecting you to expose yourself so easily.”

“Did you really just say that to me?
Really?
”

“Well I don’t know what else to say,” he says, clearly pissed off. “The only reason you haven’t told them yet is because of me, because I asked you not to. Maybe you were hoping to slip up. Maybe you weren’t using your usual amount of caution.”

“And you think Cyrus would be the first one I would choose to show my abilities to?”

He pauses, thinking. “I guess not. I just … I’m sorry. I guess we’ll just have to see what happens now. It’s done. There’s not much else we can do but admit it.”

“We?”

“You think there won’t be consequences for me knowing and not telling them? Not telling my mother?”

“Is
that
what you’re worried about? Getting into trouble with your
mother?
”

Chad sighs. “Of course not. I mean, that won’t be fun, but I’m more worried about you.”

“What about me? Why? Please explain it to me.”

“I don’t know what they’re going to do with you and that scares me, okay.” He takes a breath before slowly speaking his next words. “I have a bad feeling about this. I don’t want to lose you.” He pulls me in close.

“I thought you said the most they’ll do is just keep me here, like they do with Cyrus.”

“That’s just a theory. What if, for instance, they
are
planning a take-over of the Institute? With your borrowing capability, they’ll use that to their advantage. They’ll spare everyone else by putting you in the line of fire. You have the potential to use numerous abilities at once.”

“Well both of my abilities could come in handy that way.”

“And here you are almost volunteering for such a position!”

“It’s a hypothetical situation!”

Chad runs his hand over his head again. “Let’s just do this,” he says, exasperated. He begins to walk inside but I grab his hand and pull him back.

“Tell me we’re okay,” I plead.

He shakes off my hand. “We’re okay,” he says, walking into the house.

Yeah, really sounds like it.

Walking back inside, we find everyone staring at us as we appear through the entryway.

“Everything alright out there?” Drew asks, knowing full well it’s not. The amount of frustration coming from both Chad and me could fill the entire house.

“Perfect,” Chad answers, putting his arm around me. I roll my eyes at the obvious manoeuvre. “We have an announcement.”

“If this is about you two living together, we already know,” Mum says.

“What?” I respond, my cheeks embarrassingly flushing, giving away my guilt.

“Please. We knew the minute Ebb asked to be your roommate in a single bunker,” Mum says.

“Well, no. It’s not that. Although, that’s actually true too,” I say. Chad turns his head to smile at me. I don’t think he was expecting me to ever tell my parents where I’ve actually been sleeping.

“Then what’s the big announcement?” Dad asks.

I feel as though my dinner is about to come back up.

Mum’s face turns to brief elation. “Oh! Are you getting married?” she asks excitedly.

“What?! No! Really no. Really, really, really, no.” I can’t seem to find other words right now.

“Oh. That’s probably for the best anyway,” Mum says, slight disappointment in her voice.

“Just tell us already!” Shilah exclaims.

I look to Chad, and he gives a small head nod.

“Okay,” I say. “So, I told everyone I found out I was Defective because of the incident with my guard. That’s actually not entirely accurate – I knew before then. A few days before, actually. I … I was in my cell the first night after being arrested and I heard a voice. Tate’s voice. Only it wasn’t his voice, it was his thoughts. So at first we thought I was telepathic, right? That would make sense. Only, when I was being interrogated, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t hear anyone’s thoughts. Tate and I just figured it was too stressful or something – I couldn’t focus on it properly. Then we discovered I could amplify other abilities around me through touch. But it wasn’t all I could do. Am I making any sense at all?” I don’t even know what just came out of my mouth.

“You’re saying you’re telepathic
and
you can amplify?” Drew asks.

“A double ability?” Mum asks, her eyebrows rise in surprise.

“No. Yes. No to being a Telepath, yes to having a double ability.” Silence fills the room. “I can borrow other’s abilities if I’m close to them … and amplify through touching.”

All I can hear is crickets. All four of them are looking at me like I’m some kind of freak.

“Why didn’t you tell us sooner?” Mum asks. I can tell she’s trying to stay calm, be diplomatic. She’s holding back anger, hurt, worry. I wish Drew wasn’t here so I didn’t have to feel it, too.

I look at Chad. “That’s my fault,” he admits. “We knew it would’ve been dangerous for her to reveal herself while at the Institute, and so Tate and I advised her not to say anything. When we came here, we didn’t really know what to do. Paxton knows and he didn’t tell the council, so we figured it would be best to keep it a secret.”

“But Cyrus found out,” I say. “He told me I need to tell the council or he will.”

“Well,” Mum says, “The rest of the council will want to know. It probably would’ve been a good idea to have filled us in on that particular piece of information when you first got here.”

“Allira was just following my advice,” Chad says. “We were going to talk to Paxton about it when he came back, but he hasn’t been here.”

“Okay. We can probably work that angle with the others.” Mum thinks for a moment. “I think it should work out okay.”

“Angle?” I ask.

“The council won’t like being betrayed like this,” Mum says.

Dad, Drew and Shilah are completely silent, sitting there with nothing but shock across their faces.

“Betrayed? That’s a bit extreme don’t you think?” I ask.

“Being lied to about the nature of your ability? Sorry, abilities – plural. That’s a big issue. The way they’ll see it is if you have hidden this, what else are you hiding? Could you still be an ally to the Institute? And the fact that it’s something as big and important as a double ability … I don’t know how they’re going to take it. I’ll talk to Cyrus tomorrow. Maybe this doesn’t need to get out.”

I should’ve just announced it the minute I arrived.

Drew excuses himself from the table and goes to his room, slamming the door behind him. Shilah sits at the table, his eyes focused on me.

“So that’s the thing?” he asks. “The thing you’ve been hiding from me?”

I nod. “That’s the thing.”

He gets up from the table, walks over and hugs me. “I wish you felt like you could have told me,” he says.

I don’t reply, I don’t know how. I wish I had told him.

“I don’t really see what the big deal is. That Cyrus bloke has a double ability, he does fine,” Dad says.

“Thanks Dad. I think.” The way he said it almost sounded like he thinks I’m more broken than I already was.

“I’ll talk to Cyrus tomorrow,” Mum repeats herself, a lot calmer this time. “If I get to him soon enough, I could maybe erase that he found out in the first place. Hmm … but if he has already told one of his wives, they would know I tampered with his memory.” Mum looks up at us as she mutters her words to herself. “You two go get some rest. I’m sure we can work something out with him.”