Chapter Seventeen
Coming Apart and Coming Together
Out of the corner of my eye I see Chaste vanish. The shelf swings open, creaking on its hinges, and seven men file in one by one. They all look identical, even though it's obvious from their heights that they're not. They all dressed the same, in black hoodies, dark jeans, and black masks which only show their eyes. They are each carrying a large black gun.
"So, you all were really dumb enough to hide in here," the man in the center says loudly, stepping forward. His voice is rough and abraisive, muffled slightly by his mask.
"Lucky for us, he told us about this place. We knew about it probably even before you did," he says smugly.
Nobody says anything. Sweat drips down my back, and my heart is beating so loudly it drowns out every other noise.
"Take 'em in," commands the man, who I assume is the leader. The other men all take a step forward, prompting us to hold our hands up, but a second later the leader says, "Wait! Stop! One's hiding." He speaks louder so everyone can hear. "I know you're in here. You know why?" He answers himself. "We've got cameras. We can see everything that goes on in here."
My mind jumps to the time I came into this room with Josh and I go bright red. Apparently, my disguise can blush even though Ariah can't.
Despite the leader's demands, Chaste doesn't appear. The leader gives a hand signal and the man next to him pulls his gun on Tara, in the front. She flinches and lifts her arms up higher.
Josie steps up in front of Tara, shielding her from the gun. "No one needs to get hurt." I can see some of the graceful Jocelyn in her.
The man, undaunted, now aims his gun at Josie's forehead. "We'll see about that." He turns the safety off with a loud click and braces himself.
"No, stop!" Chaste shouts. He's suddenly there, and it's the first time he's appeared with a bang.
Reality rips apart, torn blindingly, and in line with the inevitable, deafening tear is Josie.
She convulses. There's a scream, it breaks through the black hole in my hearing, and there's red. Josie is on the ground. And she's morphing back into Jocelyn.
Then I feel it too, starting in my legs, and spreading to first my center and then my arms.
"Hey, what's she doing?" booms a man and points his gun at me. I can't speak or move.
"Don't shoot!" Smith shouts, hands up, and jumps in front of me. There's an explosion, and this time I see. The bullet gracefully leaves the barrel, flies through the air, and, staying true to its path, lodges, disappearing from my line of sight.
Smith's back knocks against my chest. He's on the ground and I'm kneeling next to him. I don't remember crying, but my face is wet. Smith's eyes are closed and his chest is leaking.
There's a pinching sensation in my thigh, and a shudder explodes out through me. I look down. A black dart is poking out of my leg. No, not a dart, a blur. I look up, and for some reason I can see the men's faces over their masks. They are horrible and grotesque, with wide, growling eyes and mouths stretched over long hooked teeth. I scream, but no sound comes out. The room spins, faster and faster, and knocks me to the ground. I feel a warm hand on my shoulder, and my body follows it, but then the hand is pulled away. Colors crawl over the walls, getting brighter and brighter, and the fire in the fireplace grows until everything is fire. Then it's dimmer, dimmer, until everything is black.
***
Black, black, and then less black. Light seeps into my vision blurrily. Then I can see a face above mine. Tara, I decide, since I can just barely make out the red frames of her glasses. Her voice comes to me next. "Ari? Ariah, can you hear me?"
I blink and scrunch up my face. When I open my eyes, my vision is more focused. "No, I'm Maria," I mumble. My mouth is dry and tastes coppery.
"It's okay, we know. When that other girl - well, woman, I guess, was shot...you turned back into Ariah."
I lift my arms slowly to my face and look at them. They are indeed mine, and when I sit up I see the rest of me is mine, too. My hair is back to its normal color and my jeans are too long.
I look around. Standing back a few feet is Chaste, and standing slightly behind him is Sadie. The room we're in is wrapped in dingy gray blocks on three sides, and the floor is cement. The fourth wall is made up of criscrossed iron bars. In the middle of them is a rectangular block of cement with hinges. The door.
But something's wrong. Besides the change of environment, I mean. Someone is missing.
"Uh....where's Sm- oh." I stop myself, the memory coming back. I take a shaky breath, suddenly remembering everything. Two bullets, two bodies, one dart. One hand.
However, someone is still missing. "Where's Carlos?" I ask quickly, changing the subject.
"We don't know," Chaste says.
"Well, what happened when I got knocked out?"
Tara sits down next to me. "Right after they shot you with the dart, the men sort of...swarmed us. You screamed, but at first I didn't know what was wrong. Carlos ran over to you but was pulled away, and the rest of us were grabbed. They pinned our arms. But they couldn't pin Carlos, because of his ability-"
"Which is?" I interrupt.
"Strength," Tara reveals. "He was too strong to be pinned, they could barely hold him. I think he actually broke one of the guy's arms."
"Is that what the cracking noise was?" Chaste shudders appreciatively.
"Anyway-" Tara casts him a look "-they had all of us, but they couldn't get him. Then one guy hit him over the head with his gun, and another shot him with a dart. He was out cold.
"So they dragged us and you out of the school and put us in the back of this van, except for Carlos. They put him up front, maybe to watch him. They asked Sadie and me our abilities at gunpoint. When the van stopped, they blindfolded us and threw us in here. And that's everything, except for...."
She pulls something out of her pocket and puts it in my hand. It's the dart, and it looks strangely familiar.
"This looks like the darts from my task in the forest," I realize.
"The hallucinogenic ones," Tara says meaningfully.
"Oh...now the crazy hallucination I had makes sense. I didn't know they knocked you out, too," I add, turning it over in my fingers.
"But do you know what this means?" she prompted. "Whoever kidnapped us probably interfered with your task that day!"
"So you mean...the dart thing...I knew there was something odd about it!"
"But why would they go to the trouble to do that?"
I shake my head. "No idea."
Sadie walks over to our circle hesitantly. "So...who could it be, who's doing all this?"
Tara shakes her head. "I don't know."
"I know," a new voice says.
"Who was that?" Chaste asks the empty hallway. The four of us fly to the bars and peer between them. But there's no one there, just more cell doors exactly like ours lining either side.
Then a face comes into focus behind the bars of one of the nearer cells. A face with thick, square glasses and bangs.
"Laurie?" asks Tara, openmouthed.
She sees us and looks confused. "How did you guys get in here?"
"We were kidnapped-" Chaste explains.
"But that's besides the point. Do you know who's behind all this?" Tara asks desperately.
She nods. "Jared."
My three cellmates gasp. Sadie whispers, "Holy hell."
"Hold on, did I miss something? Who's Jared?"
Tara turns to me. "Jared is kind of infamous among people with abilities. He was in the first freshman class that ever went to AIGEA. One day when he was a senior, he just kind of...snapped, and went insane. He started attacking students and teachers. He almost killed someone! But luckily, the teachers and some of the students stopped him. He was really hard to bring down, by the way, since his ability was healing. Whenever he was hit, he would just jump right back up. Anyway, they stopped him, and he was put in an asylum. I thought that's where he still was, but apparently not...'
Her words strike a chord in me. "I think Evelyn told me about him! It was when she first gave me a tour of the school. She never mentioned a name, though."
Tara nods. "It's strange, why would he suddenly come back to kidnap a bunch of students with abilities?"
"He's creating an army," Laurie says. "You know the men dressed all in black? They're all just normal guys, without abilities. He wants kids with abilities for his army."
"Oh my God," Chaste says.
"But why? And for what?" Tara asks.
"No idea," Laurie says. "All I know is, I was a reject because I didn't have a fighting ability. And from what I can tell, this-" she gestures by waving her arm through the bars "- is the reject hall."
"We were put in the reject hall?" Chaste blurts out. "How dare they!"
Sadie, behind him, rolls her shiny-lined eyes.
"But wait!" I blurt out as something occurs to me. "If he wants kids with abilities, specifically fighting abilities, then why...well, the girl I saw being kidnapped on my task. She wasn't from her school. She couldn't have had an ability. So why did they kidnap her?"
"You're right!" Then Tara gasps. "Do you think she's here?"
"Probably," another new voice says sarcastically.
"Who was that?" I ask.
Then another face pops up inside the cell across from Laurie's. A chubby girl with blonde highlights in her long hair. "Me."
"Were you the girl Ari saw being kidnapped?" Tara asks incredulously.
"Well, I was kidnapped, and I don't have an ability. How would I know who saw us?"
"Were you in a forest?" I ask her.
"Yeah."
"Then you must've been," I conclude. "But what happened? And why were you in the forest?"
"All right, all right, guess I'll tell the whole damn story," she complains. "I was going out for a smoke. I was walking by the forest and I heard this weird noise. It was like popping, and there was also this wind, but it was like, really short bursts of wind."
I guessed that the wind she was talking about was me, dodging the darts.
"So I went into the forest to check it out, but then the noises stopped, so I walked back out. And there was this car pulled up next to the curb. This dude wearing black jumped out of it and grabbed me! I was trying to scream but they were, like, practically choking me. I didn't see what happened but then suddenly the guy stopped dragging me. Then something hit us, like, really hard, and we got knocked over."
That must have been me also.
"The next thing I know, I wake up in this nasty cell to these dudes screaming at me asking what my ability is."
Tara, who's been taking it all in, nods. "That guy must've assumed you had been the one in the forest and kidnapped you."
"But it was me who knocked into you," I say.
"That was you?" the girl cries.
I nod. "Yeah. But once that guy saw that I was the one with the ability, not you, why did they kidnap you? Not me?" I look at Tara for an answer but she just shakes her head.
I groan and run a hand through my hair. "It doesn't make any sense."
"Sorry I can't help you," the girl says, her words dripping with sarcasm.
Her tone sounds strangely familiar. I look up at her, confusedly, trying to figure out why.
"What are you looking at?" she asks.
Then it all clicks into place. "You're Maddie Sanders."
"Madelyn," she corrects me automatically. Then she's the one who looks confused. "How did you know that?"
I can't keep from smirking. "I used to...know you. You went to Bearin High School."
"Okay, this is super weird," she says. "Who the hell are you?"
"You really don't remember?" I ask. "I'm Ariah Velox and you used to bully me."
Chaste put a supportive arm around my shoulder.
Maddie's mouth drops open. "You're Ariah Velox?"
"In the flesh."
"But now you're...fast."
I shrug. "I guess you could say that."
"Um, should we be trying to get out?" Sadie interrupts timidly.
"What the hell do you think I've been doing since I got in here?" Laurie pipes up. "There's no way."
"I know a way," Sadie says.
"How?" Chaste, Tara and I all shout simultaneously. Sadie looks startled.
"My ability," she says shyly.
"You said it was mind reading to the guys in the van," Tara points out.
"I lied." She looks pleased with herself. "I can go through solid surfaces. Like walls."
"Are you kidding?" Laurie says.
"Why didn't you mention that sooner?" Chaste asks her.
She looks down. "I wasn't really sure what I'd do once I was out."
"Well, don't worry. I can help," Tara says.
"How?" Sadie asks.
Tara takes a deep breath. "I think it's time I told you guys my real ability."