But I’d passed lie detector tests in my previous life, and I continued to do it now, though it was harder to fool the handlers.
Another bellow echoed through the dark space, and it deepened into a slurry of creative cursing that made me grin.
“You look like a fucking pig in a sausage skin three sizes too goddamn small!”
There was really no question about what I was doing. I sprinted in the direction of the thundering voice that belonged to the kid I’d just settled in his room. A shadowy figure lay on the floor, his cowboy boot kicking out at someone I couldn’t see.
I watched until he went still, until he stopped yelling. He wasn’t all the way here, though; the details of his body and clothes were blurred. Maybe it was a sort of semi-comatose state of mind.
Between us was another layer of fog, like a thin veil of material, gossamer and transparent enough that I was tempted.
Could I reach through it? What if I could bring him in here, with me, all the way?
Only thing I could do was try.
“Cowboy?” I called the moniker I’d given him to see if he could hear me.
His head turned, slowly, as if he couldn’t believe what his ears were telling him.
Now or never.
I reached through that thin veil of fog and grabbed his hand. There was a moment where I thought my fingers would slide through his, that I would be the ghost to his reality. But then his body stiffened and his palm was hot against mine—skin to skin—and in that instant, I yanked him into the darkness with me. How the hell was this possible? What was different about him and me?
“Holy fucking prairie dogs.” He stumbled onto his feet and into me as if I’d dragged him up out of a reverse limbo. His eyes were on mine, but they slid downward and then shot right back to my face.
I braced my arms against him and looked down, realizing the spectral version of me was still buck-naked.
“Get over it, kid. We have more problems than you getting a raging boner.”
“I—” he stammered, his eyes closing and then opening but locking onto my face.
“Listen to me: I don’t know how long we have here, or if it will ever happen again, so I need you to listen, hear me, and do exactly what the fuck I say.”
I kept my hands on his forearms. “Out there, you will call me Fiona. Here, you can call me by my real name. I am the Phoenix.”
God, to say that out loud gave me a shiver. I was the Phoenix. I was the killer that every abnormal knew and feared. But in the facility, I was the good girl, the one who conformed more than anyone else. Because I knew that they knew who I was, and if I gave them one iota of a reason, they’d kill me.
And I wasn’t ready to die.
He swallowed hard, and I tightened my hold on him.
“This place is designed to break you. They can see inside your head, so you have to do more than just say you believe them. You have to separate yourself from it. Give them what they want but hold a piece of yourself tight. Don’t let them see it.”
He stared into my eyes, blood trickling from his nose and mouth. “How?”
“If you’re here, I’m guessing you have the same ability as I do on some level. Meditate. Find a way to be yourself here. I see a river, and I dive through the calm they see into the current below. That angry current is the real me.” God, that sounded fucking hokey, but he nodded and didn’t laugh.
“I can do that. Visualization. My mentor taught me that.”
I didn’t let go of him. “No one else in the facility has done this that I know of. Not even the people I knew from before.”
“That was Easter, wasn’t it?” he asked softly, and I nodded. He blinked. “I’m sure I saw Snake too. He grew up not far from me.” He frowned and shook his head. “How can this be happening?”
I didn’t answer his question. “They are going to change your name. They call Easter Esther now, as if that would make her ‘normal.’” I blew a breath out. “I don’t know how to help them, Cowboy. But if you’re here, then . . .”
“Then we aren’t on our own.” A light sparked in his blue eyes. “There could be others locked up in other places around the world.”
My fingers convulsed, his words sending that current inside me into a maelstrom, even though I didn’t move. “What did you say?”
He winced. “Well, I would think there are other places like this one. I mean . . . they’ve been gathering up abnormals at a pace that . . . it hasn’t left many on the outside, and unless you’ve got several thousand abnormals here, this can’t be all of us. I’ve been hiding the last ten months or so, picking up information where I could, but it was sketchy at best. What I heard made me stay put.”
“Sweet Jesus,” I whispered, slumping to my knees. He followed me to what made up ground in this place. “Are you sure?”
He nodded. “About six months ago there was another big purge after the first, a new law passed that abnormals are an abomination. They say we’re causing humans to develop cancer, amongst a few other diseases.”
I wasn’t really surprised about that. The laws had been shifting for the last ten years, pushing abnormals into slums, out of the cities, out of schools and hospitals. What the normals—humans—didn’t understand was that they were being controlled by the very ones they feared. I knew of at least three senators who were abnormals. One was in the running for the presidency by the way the polls had been a year before.
“I was taken before any law was put into play,” I said. “Almost a year ago.”
Looking at it through the lens of a war, I knew exactly what they’d done. A pre-purge of the strongest abnormals to stop us from banding together. We must have been watched for a long time before this happened. Years before, which made my skin crawl.
“Fuck, every gang in the world is headed by abnormals of fearsome power. None of them would go down easy,” I said.
“They didn’t go down easy,” he said, closing his eyes. “They fought, but . . . they all fell.”
Chills slid over my skin, raising it into bumps as I thought about those I loved outside of these walls. All of them abnormals. All of them powerhouses.
I forced out the next question, fearing and wanting the answer in equal parts. “What about the Irish mafia? They were centered in New York.”
“Gone,” he whispered. “The big hitters were the first to go, before the purge six months ago, and the rest of us lost what little protection we got from them.”
I bowed my head, my heart thumping as I heard his voice in my head, the Irish brogue soft and rolling through me. Not real, but my memories made it so in that moment, and I clung to it with everything I had in me so I didn’t break and scatter to the four winds.
“Don’t give up, lass. I won’t be dead till you see me body.”
Slowing my breathing, my mind picked up pace as I worked through what had to happen if we were to get out of here. All along I’d been thinking I just needed to hang on, that Killian would come for me if he could. With each day that passed, I knew the chances were slimming, but I’d not had an opportunity to make a breakout here. Until now.
I lifted my head and his eyes snapped upward, caught red-handed as it were. “What are your abilities?”