Mind Games
Page 17
"Hello, Sofia." The girl has a soft voice. It's kind and cautious, but she's still looking at me in a strange way, not the way she should. She should be scared or angry. She has-what? A sense of wonder? Compassion? And still that recognition.
"I need to go to the bathroom," I say. "I kind of had a lot to drink last night." I take a step forward, let myself wobble as much as I should.
"Please stay where you are." Cole's voice is no-nonsense, and he...Hmmm. I don't feel any threat coming off him, not like before. He's not dangerous to me right now. Interesting. In fact, the only thing I'm worried about right now is Annie.
"Okay." I lean back against the wall, narrow my eyes at both of them. "I don't have very much time. Why am I here? Where is James?"
"We left James on the street." Cole sees the shift in my expression and quickly adds, "Alive."
So they weren't after James. It was about me.
"We found you because of James," the woman says. "We linked him to the school and have been tracking him for a while. So when I saw him at the club and recognized you, we finally had the break we needed." She pauses, frowns. "You're very hard to see."
Well, that's wonderful. She's a Seer. I should have known. "It's a talent."
"What are you? We know you're with Keane's school. And that you don't want to be. We know about your sister-"
"You know nothing about my sister," I snarl.
She continues on, softer. "We know that you were both taken five years ago. But in your case we don't know why. I've seen you. A few times. Just flashes, just enough to know you're important without knowing why. What do you do?"
"You mean am I a Seer or a Reader or a Feeler? They'd be the eyes, ears, and soul of an operation? I guess you could say I'm the hands."
I spring forward, grab the woman, spin her around between Cole and me, the pin out of my hand and pressed against her neck. (Can't tap tap tap my hand-I don't want to add another tap but I will; if it saves Annie, I will.) "It's not sharp but I can push it in, all the way. She'll bleed to death."
"It's okay," she says. She sounds remarkably calm. I kind of like her, actually. Cole raises his hands and backs a step away.
I angle us toward the door, keeping her body between Cole and me, always between us. "I don't want to hurt you. But my sister needs me. If I don't get back there, they'll hurt her. So we're going to go now."
"You're safe here." She is a remarkable liar. Her pulse isn't even fast. She's not panicking. I realize with a start she isn't lying, or at least she doesn't think she is. "I promise. And I'm watching for Annie. I'll know if she's in trouble. I would never risk her."
"She's not yours to risk. She's my responsibility." I back us through the door, fast, look both ways down the hall. It's clear. Blank. Fluorescent lights' monotonous hum the only sound. Right, I should go right. "Where are we? Are we still in Chicago?"
"No, we're in St. Louis."
I swear. That'll take longer. But as soon as I get out, I can call James and tell him (he knows, he has to know that I didn't do this, it wasn't my idea) and I'll email Adam and get back and Annie will be safe and I have no plans at all until something works to give us a way out.
"Sofia," she says as we walk, body to body, around a corner. There's a door with one of those small brown signs indicating it's a stairway. This place looks like an old office building, but no one is here. "I want to help you."
"Generally I prefer my help not to come in the form of being attacked, knocked out, and thrown in the back of a van."
She laughs. Why is she laughing? She's crazy. "You'll have to excuse our caution. After our last encounter with you, we thought it best to talk in a controlled environment."
(Control, control, control. Control got Clarice killed.)
(Control didn't get Clarice killed. I killed Clarice.)
"How's that working out for you?" I say. I look behind my shoulder again-Cole isn't following us, that's bad, I'd know where he was if he were following us. Then the door to the stairwell opens and I pull back against the wall, press the pin against her neck.
And Adam-big smile, gray eyes, soft fingers, gentle Adam, safe and hiding in Chicago Adam-walks out into the hall.
He actually smiles when he sees me-his first reaction is to smile, what is wrong with him? I am so shocked that I drop my hand. I don't want him to see what I would have done to this woman, don't want him to see my hands any more than he already has.
"Fia!" He closes the few feet between us with his arms out and I tense (I don't want to hurt him, I never wanted to hurt him), and then he wraps his long arms around me in a hug. And my head doesn't scream wrong, wrong, wrong.
Oh, Adam. When will you stop messing everything up? And why do I keep letting you?
Chapter Seventeen
FIA
Sixteen Months Ago
"HOW CAN SOMEONE WHO SPENDS SO MUCH TIME IN the sun still have such pasty skin?"
I roll my eyes at Eden. "It's called porcelain. And sunscreen is my best friend." I love this soft white chair. I love this huge, smooth boat. I love the ocean. I love the wind and the waves and the spray. There is nothing out here. There is nothing to do. And since there is nothing out here and nothing to do and only James or Eden or the small, deliberately anonymous crew to talk to, there is nothing to make me feel sick and wrong.
Or at least only a little bit. Because there is still the tap tap tap. It never quite goes away. And the wrong feeling, too, but now it's a gentle hum and I can pretend like it isn't there. Pretending is another way of lying, and I am so good at both.
"Girls," James says, coming from the main cabin onto the deck where Eden is writing a letter to Annie and I am doing nothing, because nothing, nothing, nothing is my favorite. "Are you ready for an adventure?"
I sit up. Eden does, too, casually shifting in her bikini, stretching her legs. I wonder what she feels from him. I don't like it. I wonder if she feels that I don't like it from me. I decide to feel nothing, instead. "An adventure?"
"I think we've had enough of the open ocean and tiny islands. Time to begin the official study abroad section of your schooling. Or, really, time to club our way through Europe."
I raise an eyebrow. "Clubbing? Really? Do I strike you as the dancing type?"
"You strike me as exactly the dancing type. You just don't know it yet."
Eden jumps up, stretches her arms over her head, the tiny jewel piercing her navel winking an invitation in the sunshine. "Sounds good to me. As long as this adventure includes shopping, too?" She smiles hopefully. James nods and she turns to me and does a ridiculous, exaggerated victory shimmy.
I roll my eyes and snort. She's funny and beautiful. I wonder if we would have been friends in another world.
"See? Is that so hard?" Eden grins smugly and walks inside, and my accidental smile turns into a scowl.
"Did we have to bring her?"
James throws himself on the lounge chair next to me, putting an arm over his face to shade it from the sun. "Yes, we did."
"Why? She's obnoxious."
"Because," he says, reaching over and taking my hand from where my fingers are doing the tap tap tap on my thigh. "You tried to kill yourself, remember? So Eden had to tag along to make sure you didn't get that bad again."
I start to pull my hand back so I can cross my arms, but he keeps it in his, making a show of examining my fingernails. His fingers trace the inside of my wrist and something flares up inside me and, oh, I am so glad Eden is not here anymore.
James is the only person I can handle touching or looking at my hands. He knows everything they did. He doesn't care.
"Plus I am terrible at girl talk, and without Annie I figured you'd need someone."
This time I do yank my hand back. I hate that he brought up Annie. Because the thing about Annie is, I miss her, I do, I worry about her, but...
I also don't.
Being away from her for the first time in years is a huge relief. And I know she's safe because they have her and as long as they have her, they have me and for whatever reason they still want me. So Annie is safe. And she's alone and locked in that horrible prison of a school, and I am a terrible, terrible person for leaving her there.
But I don't have to look at her and know what I've done. I don't have to listen to her voice get gentle and soft and pierce right to the core of me and remind me, always remind me, of everything I've lost and taken. Of everything I still have to lose.
I know that Annie loves me no matter what, that she will always love me, and it is the very hardest thing of all to deal with. I do not want to be loved.
"At least you didn't bring a Reader. I hate them."
He laughs. "Me, too. You know the trick to Readers, though?"
"I swear in my head over and over again."
"That's a good one, but they get used to it pretty fast. If you can't focus on pissing them off, then always have a really obnoxious song going in the background of your brain. And if you need to make them feel so uncomfortable they stop listening, think about sex."
"Sex?"
"Sex." He is so beautiful I want to crawl across my chair and onto his and have him give me specifics to think about. But he is and has always been and will always be wrong, and I can't ignore that.
Can I?
"Should you really be giving me tips on how to bypass the people your father has spying on me?"
He smiles, and it's his sharp smile that I think he only uses with me. "You're my star pupil, remember? Just because you have to do what he wants you to doesn't mean you can't keep parts of yourself secret. It's about balance, Fia. Balance and patience and time."
"You've never struck me as the patient type."
He leans back, puts his arms behind his head, and closes his eyes. "Like I said. Secrets."
James was right. I love dancing. I love it so much I almost don't crave the alcohol being passed all around me, the drugs I see people taking. I almost don't wonder how much better the dancing would be if I took something. When I'm really dancing, when I'm in the middle of a crowd in the dark with the pulsing lights and pounding beats, I can lose myself in a way that's easy to get back from.
I love it.
We're somewhere in Germany. I don't know where; I don't care. Eden goes out most days and sightsees. I sleep in our obscenely expensive hotel suites and wait for the clubs. James has meetings, makes sure I eat enough, and prods me to do the occasional "assignment" (learning how to operate pretty much any common tech platform, for instance), and then we go dance.
I send Annie postcards that Eden buys for me, since it doesn't matter what they look like anyway, and pretend like I'm the one visiting mountains and castles and historic squares. Annie will like that. I hate that someone else has to read them to her, though. I hope it isn't Ms. Robertson.
"You aren't going to get ready?" Eden asks, eyeing me as she puts on another coat of lip gloss.
"Shoes. Skirt. Top. Ready."
"I mean, let's do something with your hair. Put it up. Twist it. And you could rock more makeup. You're not really selling it."
"What am I supposed to be selling?"
"Guys are pretty hot for you at these; I can feel them out for you, if you want."
"Do I strike you as particularly lusty?" I lay my emotions open, imagine them washing over her. I am the ocean we lived on for two months. I am empty. I am nothing.
"Stop it. You're so creepy." She stalks out of the room, muttering about missing Annie, and I smile.
"I need to go to the bathroom," I say. "I kind of had a lot to drink last night." I take a step forward, let myself wobble as much as I should.
"Please stay where you are." Cole's voice is no-nonsense, and he...Hmmm. I don't feel any threat coming off him, not like before. He's not dangerous to me right now. Interesting. In fact, the only thing I'm worried about right now is Annie.
"Okay." I lean back against the wall, narrow my eyes at both of them. "I don't have very much time. Why am I here? Where is James?"
"We left James on the street." Cole sees the shift in my expression and quickly adds, "Alive."
So they weren't after James. It was about me.
"We found you because of James," the woman says. "We linked him to the school and have been tracking him for a while. So when I saw him at the club and recognized you, we finally had the break we needed." She pauses, frowns. "You're very hard to see."
Well, that's wonderful. She's a Seer. I should have known. "It's a talent."
"What are you? We know you're with Keane's school. And that you don't want to be. We know about your sister-"
"You know nothing about my sister," I snarl.
She continues on, softer. "We know that you were both taken five years ago. But in your case we don't know why. I've seen you. A few times. Just flashes, just enough to know you're important without knowing why. What do you do?"
"You mean am I a Seer or a Reader or a Feeler? They'd be the eyes, ears, and soul of an operation? I guess you could say I'm the hands."
I spring forward, grab the woman, spin her around between Cole and me, the pin out of my hand and pressed against her neck. (Can't tap tap tap my hand-I don't want to add another tap but I will; if it saves Annie, I will.) "It's not sharp but I can push it in, all the way. She'll bleed to death."
"It's okay," she says. She sounds remarkably calm. I kind of like her, actually. Cole raises his hands and backs a step away.
I angle us toward the door, keeping her body between Cole and me, always between us. "I don't want to hurt you. But my sister needs me. If I don't get back there, they'll hurt her. So we're going to go now."
"You're safe here." She is a remarkable liar. Her pulse isn't even fast. She's not panicking. I realize with a start she isn't lying, or at least she doesn't think she is. "I promise. And I'm watching for Annie. I'll know if she's in trouble. I would never risk her."
"She's not yours to risk. She's my responsibility." I back us through the door, fast, look both ways down the hall. It's clear. Blank. Fluorescent lights' monotonous hum the only sound. Right, I should go right. "Where are we? Are we still in Chicago?"
"No, we're in St. Louis."
I swear. That'll take longer. But as soon as I get out, I can call James and tell him (he knows, he has to know that I didn't do this, it wasn't my idea) and I'll email Adam and get back and Annie will be safe and I have no plans at all until something works to give us a way out.
"Sofia," she says as we walk, body to body, around a corner. There's a door with one of those small brown signs indicating it's a stairway. This place looks like an old office building, but no one is here. "I want to help you."
"Generally I prefer my help not to come in the form of being attacked, knocked out, and thrown in the back of a van."
She laughs. Why is she laughing? She's crazy. "You'll have to excuse our caution. After our last encounter with you, we thought it best to talk in a controlled environment."
(Control, control, control. Control got Clarice killed.)
(Control didn't get Clarice killed. I killed Clarice.)
"How's that working out for you?" I say. I look behind my shoulder again-Cole isn't following us, that's bad, I'd know where he was if he were following us. Then the door to the stairwell opens and I pull back against the wall, press the pin against her neck.
And Adam-big smile, gray eyes, soft fingers, gentle Adam, safe and hiding in Chicago Adam-walks out into the hall.
He actually smiles when he sees me-his first reaction is to smile, what is wrong with him? I am so shocked that I drop my hand. I don't want him to see what I would have done to this woman, don't want him to see my hands any more than he already has.
"Fia!" He closes the few feet between us with his arms out and I tense (I don't want to hurt him, I never wanted to hurt him), and then he wraps his long arms around me in a hug. And my head doesn't scream wrong, wrong, wrong.
Oh, Adam. When will you stop messing everything up? And why do I keep letting you?
Chapter Seventeen
FIA
Sixteen Months Ago
"HOW CAN SOMEONE WHO SPENDS SO MUCH TIME IN the sun still have such pasty skin?"
I roll my eyes at Eden. "It's called porcelain. And sunscreen is my best friend." I love this soft white chair. I love this huge, smooth boat. I love the ocean. I love the wind and the waves and the spray. There is nothing out here. There is nothing to do. And since there is nothing out here and nothing to do and only James or Eden or the small, deliberately anonymous crew to talk to, there is nothing to make me feel sick and wrong.
Or at least only a little bit. Because there is still the tap tap tap. It never quite goes away. And the wrong feeling, too, but now it's a gentle hum and I can pretend like it isn't there. Pretending is another way of lying, and I am so good at both.
"Girls," James says, coming from the main cabin onto the deck where Eden is writing a letter to Annie and I am doing nothing, because nothing, nothing, nothing is my favorite. "Are you ready for an adventure?"
I sit up. Eden does, too, casually shifting in her bikini, stretching her legs. I wonder what she feels from him. I don't like it. I wonder if she feels that I don't like it from me. I decide to feel nothing, instead. "An adventure?"
"I think we've had enough of the open ocean and tiny islands. Time to begin the official study abroad section of your schooling. Or, really, time to club our way through Europe."
I raise an eyebrow. "Clubbing? Really? Do I strike you as the dancing type?"
"You strike me as exactly the dancing type. You just don't know it yet."
Eden jumps up, stretches her arms over her head, the tiny jewel piercing her navel winking an invitation in the sunshine. "Sounds good to me. As long as this adventure includes shopping, too?" She smiles hopefully. James nods and she turns to me and does a ridiculous, exaggerated victory shimmy.
I roll my eyes and snort. She's funny and beautiful. I wonder if we would have been friends in another world.
"See? Is that so hard?" Eden grins smugly and walks inside, and my accidental smile turns into a scowl.
"Did we have to bring her?"
James throws himself on the lounge chair next to me, putting an arm over his face to shade it from the sun. "Yes, we did."
"Why? She's obnoxious."
"Because," he says, reaching over and taking my hand from where my fingers are doing the tap tap tap on my thigh. "You tried to kill yourself, remember? So Eden had to tag along to make sure you didn't get that bad again."
I start to pull my hand back so I can cross my arms, but he keeps it in his, making a show of examining my fingernails. His fingers trace the inside of my wrist and something flares up inside me and, oh, I am so glad Eden is not here anymore.
James is the only person I can handle touching or looking at my hands. He knows everything they did. He doesn't care.
"Plus I am terrible at girl talk, and without Annie I figured you'd need someone."
This time I do yank my hand back. I hate that he brought up Annie. Because the thing about Annie is, I miss her, I do, I worry about her, but...
I also don't.
Being away from her for the first time in years is a huge relief. And I know she's safe because they have her and as long as they have her, they have me and for whatever reason they still want me. So Annie is safe. And she's alone and locked in that horrible prison of a school, and I am a terrible, terrible person for leaving her there.
But I don't have to look at her and know what I've done. I don't have to listen to her voice get gentle and soft and pierce right to the core of me and remind me, always remind me, of everything I've lost and taken. Of everything I still have to lose.
I know that Annie loves me no matter what, that she will always love me, and it is the very hardest thing of all to deal with. I do not want to be loved.
"At least you didn't bring a Reader. I hate them."
He laughs. "Me, too. You know the trick to Readers, though?"
"I swear in my head over and over again."
"That's a good one, but they get used to it pretty fast. If you can't focus on pissing them off, then always have a really obnoxious song going in the background of your brain. And if you need to make them feel so uncomfortable they stop listening, think about sex."
"Sex?"
"Sex." He is so beautiful I want to crawl across my chair and onto his and have him give me specifics to think about. But he is and has always been and will always be wrong, and I can't ignore that.
Can I?
"Should you really be giving me tips on how to bypass the people your father has spying on me?"
He smiles, and it's his sharp smile that I think he only uses with me. "You're my star pupil, remember? Just because you have to do what he wants you to doesn't mean you can't keep parts of yourself secret. It's about balance, Fia. Balance and patience and time."
"You've never struck me as the patient type."
He leans back, puts his arms behind his head, and closes his eyes. "Like I said. Secrets."
James was right. I love dancing. I love it so much I almost don't crave the alcohol being passed all around me, the drugs I see people taking. I almost don't wonder how much better the dancing would be if I took something. When I'm really dancing, when I'm in the middle of a crowd in the dark with the pulsing lights and pounding beats, I can lose myself in a way that's easy to get back from.
I love it.
We're somewhere in Germany. I don't know where; I don't care. Eden goes out most days and sightsees. I sleep in our obscenely expensive hotel suites and wait for the clubs. James has meetings, makes sure I eat enough, and prods me to do the occasional "assignment" (learning how to operate pretty much any common tech platform, for instance), and then we go dance.
I send Annie postcards that Eden buys for me, since it doesn't matter what they look like anyway, and pretend like I'm the one visiting mountains and castles and historic squares. Annie will like that. I hate that someone else has to read them to her, though. I hope it isn't Ms. Robertson.
"You aren't going to get ready?" Eden asks, eyeing me as she puts on another coat of lip gloss.
"Shoes. Skirt. Top. Ready."
"I mean, let's do something with your hair. Put it up. Twist it. And you could rock more makeup. You're not really selling it."
"What am I supposed to be selling?"
"Guys are pretty hot for you at these; I can feel them out for you, if you want."
"Do I strike you as particularly lusty?" I lay my emotions open, imagine them washing over her. I am the ocean we lived on for two months. I am empty. I am nothing.
"Stop it. You're so creepy." She stalks out of the room, muttering about missing Annie, and I smile.
