Obscure

Chapter 12

Kirill

Every hallway in PERI headquarters looked the same. Wide enough to fit two stretchers side by side, even on the levels where no experiments took place. White walls, white tile floor. Shiny with the insulating coating that would reflect back bursts of fire shot from a pyrokinetic's hands, or keep most telekinetics from collapsing the walls—although the latter had happened once.

There were no splashes of color on the walls. No artworks, certainly no motivational posters. The designers had been going for an aura of stark professionalism. What they had ended up with was despair.

That despair closed in on Kirill as he stumbled down the hallway with his head down. The sterile smell of headquarters assaulted him. It had smelled harsh and acrid when he had first come here. After a few months, it had felt like home. When he had left, years later, he had missed it. He had even missed the colorless walls. He'd had to wear sunglasses for the first few days just to stop the riot of color outside from assaulting his eyes.

Now it smelled unfamiliar again, as if he had just arrived. As if it had never been home.

But he didn't see the blinding white of the shiny walls and the freshly scrubbed floor. Instead, he pictured Elias's face. He focused in on small details—the exact shade of his dark eyes, the fitness at the corners of his mouth. He tried to imagine that face younger.

He couldn't. Every time he tried, the imagined face blurred in his mind, until Elias's face was as blank as the ghost boy's.

In the tomblike silence of the hallway, he heard two youthful voices arguing. The voices were muddy, like he was listening from underwater. He could only just make out the words, and then only some of them.

How can you think about joining them? Don't you remember what they did?

And that was it. One tiny snippet. The argument went on, but the voices grew blurrier until they were only noise.

The light changed, sharpening, stabbing into Kirill's eyeballs. He blinked, and saw blue sky. He had made it outside. He must have gone through security, but he didn't remember doing so.

There was something else he was supposed to remember. Something important he had forgotten. He felt like he had the first time Elias had hit him with his power. Everything looked unfamiliar, even the inside of his own mind. He knew where he was, he knew who he was, but there was something missing. Something he couldn't see through the dizzy fog in his head. Something...

He stumbled to his car. He had no business getting behind the wheel like this, but he couldn't stay here. If he stayed, he would be expected to pick up where he had left off. And if he looked at Elias again... if he caught another glimpse inside his memories...

A fresh wave of dizziness came over him. He half-fell into the driver's seat.

He drove, but he didn't see the road. He saw fire. His home was burning. He normally tried not to think about the fire. It was easy not to. The memory was thin—a crayon drawing, cartoon screams. There were no bodies. He had never gone back to see them.

There was a hand in his. A voice in his ear, telling him everything would be all right, even as his world burned around him. He looked to the side and saw an empty face. The blur cleared for an instant, just long enough for him to make out Elias's eyes.

A car horn blared. He was on the highway already. The twenty-mile road through the thick expanse of empty forest that surrounded headquarters had gone past in the blink of an eye. A minivan hurtled toward him. He was in the wrong lane.

He jerked the wheel to the right just in time. The minivan driver yelled something as she drove past.

He stared at the road and willed himself to focus. But memory sucked him under.