Authors: Sarah Alderson
Key was waiting when we joined the others back in Nate and Suki’s room. He jumped up as soon as he saw me.
‘Your dad’s with him,’ were the first words out of his mouth.
I stared at him, wondering what he was talking about. I looked around the room to see who he might be talking to. Whose dad was with Jack?
But when I looked back at Key, he was still staring straight at me. ‘Your dad,’ he said, ‘he’s in the hospital with Jack.’
‘What?’ Alex interrupted.
‘I just got back from another recce of the base. Your dad is at the hospital. I didn’t hang around long – figured you’d want to know.’
‘My dad?’ A bubble of realisation burst through the meniscus of my brain. Oh God.
‘Didn’t you speak to him?’ Alex asked, rounding on me.
I swallowed, my throat suddenly as dry as ash. ‘Not exactly. I couldn’t get hold of him so I left a message with Maria, our housekeeper. I told her we’d all gone on a camping trip to Death Valley and that we’d be back in a week. And then, maybe, I sort of forgot to call him.’ I gave him a big, fake, apologetic grin.
Alex didn’t say anything, he just continued to stare at me, his lips pressed together, turning slowly white.
‘He really believed that one,’ Key muttered under his breath. ‘He’s in California. At the base. And he’s wondering why Jack’s been shot and is under arrest and why you’re missing.’
‘Jack’s under arrest?’ I burst out.
‘Well, what did you think was going to happen when he got into a gunfight with the Unit?’ Key asked, looking at me like I was stupid. ‘He shot his own men. They’re not going to be giving him the Medal of Honor any time soon.’
‘Hey, hey, don’t worry her,’ Alex cut in.
‘Don’t worry me? My brother’s lying in a coma, possibly paralysed and under arrest, and my dad’s just walked right into all this. And you’re saying
don’t worry me
?’ The full awfulness of the situation settled on me. ‘What’s he even doing here?’ I asked, panic making me breathless. ‘He always said he’d never come back to the States. That he’d never set foot on US soil again. Not after what happened to my mum.’
I felt Alex’s arm come round my shoulders and I turned to him. ‘God, he doesn’t know about her, Alex. He has no idea she’s still alive. Why did he have to come back? He can’t be involved in all this.’ I pressed my head into Alex’s shoulder. ‘That’s my whole family, Alex, right there. The Unit has them all.’
There was a deathly silence.
‘What does your dad know about the Unit?’ Harvey finally said. He was puffing on a cigarette by the open door.
‘Nothing,’ I said, still reeling from shock, my legs feeling wobbly and my voice wavering. ‘He doesn’t know anything about them or us. He knows nothing.’
‘Actually, that’s not quite true.’
I looked at Demos. ‘What?’
His gaze flashed to Alex and then to me. He cleared his throat. ‘Your father knew about your mother – about her being a telepath.’
‘He what?’
‘He knows. And he knows about the Unit too, but he believes that the Unit’s mission is to contain people like us – contain psys – because we’re dangerous. He thinks I killed your mother, because that’s what the Unit told him.’
My jaw fell open. The silence thickened as I tried to get my head round the fact that my father had known about my mother’s powers all this time. It suddenly made sense – why he’d dragged me straight on a plane to London after my mother’s funeral. Why he’d been so mad at Jack for staying behind. Why he’d freaked out about me coming back. Oh God. I put a hand to my head to try to contain all the thoughts banging against my skull. How much more freaking out would he be doing now? With me missing?
This was so bad. So, so bad.
‘There’s more,’ Demos said, because clearly he could tell I wasn’t panicked enough already. I looked up warily, bracing myself.
‘Your father’s been working on something all this time.’
I waited.
‘He’s been carrying out research to find out what makes us this way.’
‘No, he hasn’t,’ I laughed, but my laugh sounded empty and false. ‘He’s a paediatric specialist. He researches childhood diseases. He writes papers. He’s always at conferences and stuff. I’ve been to the hospital where he works.’
Demos just shrugged. ‘For the last five years your father’s been trying to find a medical
cure
for what we are.’
‘But we’re not sick,’ Suki spoke up from the corner of the room.
‘No,’ Demos said. ‘But to Lila’s dad, we’re suffering from a kind of cancer and he’s been trying to invent what you might describe as a type of chemotherapy, some way of
curing
us.’
No one spoke. It seemed like this was news to everyone – not just to me.
I drew in a breath. All this time. The whole time we were in London. The trips abroad, the hours spent in his study, in his lab, working, working, working. And never enough time for me. And there I was thinking my dad was just working to put my mother out of his mind when all the time he’d been working with her right at the forefront of his mind.
For
her. Because he thought if he could find the answers to curing us, he could what? Stop Demos? Undo what had happened? Fix something? Is that what my mother had wanted too? To be cured? Because I wasn’t sure it was what
I
wanted.
‘How do you know this?’ Alex asked.
‘Because I’ve been keeping a close eye on him,’ Demos answered, his eyes darting to me. ‘And Lila. And Jack. I promised Melissa that I would look out for them and protect them if anything ever happened to her.’
‘You’ve been spying on us? Since when?’ I shouted.
‘Lila,’ Demos said, his voice shot through with weariness, ‘I was only interested in making sure you were safe. When your dad took you to London I breathed easier, but I still needed to make sure the Unit weren’t going to try something. Luckily they didn’t see the need to.’
‘Why not?’ I demanded.
Demos chewed his lip. I guessed he was trying to evaluate how many more surprises I could take, which I had to admit wasn’t many.
‘We think the Unit knows about your father’s research. It makes sense. It explains why they’ve left you both in peace.’
Why we’re still alive
, he meant.
Suki stamped her foot. ‘Can someone please start explaining everything to me in simple English. I’m just not getting it. Any of it. And it’s very annoying.’
‘They want Lila’s father’s research,’ Alex said, almost as if he was speaking to himself, ‘because it might help them unlock the secrets about what you are. He’s helping them – without meaning to.’
‘Alex is right,’ Demos said. ‘The Unit is waiting until Michael unlocks the answers to the genetic code that makes us this way. There’s almost no better person to do the job. He’s an expert in childhood diseases – hereditary ones.’ He paused and I thought about what he was saying.
Whatever we all had that made us this way, it was genetic. Everyone seemed to agree on that. But no one knew how many people had the gene, or how many people it was active in. I had it but Jack didn’t – why that was, was a total mystery. But perhaps not to my dad.
‘And more than any person on the planet,’ Demos continued, ‘Michael’s got the incentive to find the answers. They don’t even have to pay him.’
‘So, what? They’re waiting until he cracks the cure or whatever the hell he’s doing and then they’ll steal it? I don’t get it. They don’t want a cure. They don’t want to destroy the gene or whatever the hell it is that makes us this way, they want to generate it. They want to create more people like us.’
‘The science is the same,’ Alex said, glancing at me, but his thoughts were miles away, already evaluating what new mess we were in. ‘To fix something you’ve got to understand first how it works. Your dad thinks he’s making things better. But really he’s making it worse.’
‘Why didn’t you stop him if you knew that the Unit were wanting to steal his work?’ I yelled at Demos.
‘Stop him
how
exactly?’ he asked.
‘Er,’ I looked at him like he was lobotomised, ‘you know that little ability you have? Could have been useful, don’t you think?’
Demos rolled his eyes at me. ‘I couldn’t spend my life following your father around freezing him. I do have other things to do. And besides, he thinks I killed your mother so he’s not likely to listen to anything I have to say, is he?’
I scowled at him. I didn’t want to listen either. I got up and walked unsteadily to the door.
Alex dropped onto the sand next to me a metre or so away. I glanced over at him. He was sitting like me with his knees drawn up, his arms wrapped round them, staring out at the sun as it melted into the sea. The beach was completely deserted. I stopped toying with the leather bracelet wrapped round my wrist and shifted in the sand towards him until I could rest my head against his arm. He reached out and curled his fingers through mine.
‘I just can’t believe my dad has been working on this all this time,’ I murmured. Alex didn’t say anything.
‘And I don’t know how to feel about it. Or the fact he’s trying to cure me. I don’t want to be cured, Alex. There’s nothing wrong with me.’
He glanced at me out of the corner of his eye, a smile twitching at the side of his mouth. ‘Debatable,’ he said. I kicked sand at him and he pulled me down so we were lying flat on our backs, looking up at the purple sky.
‘Why’d my dad have to come back?’
‘Same reason you’re going back. Same reason I gave you. When you love someone, you don’t have a choice.’
I turned my head to look at him and he held my gaze. I felt tears pricking the back of my eyes and turned to stare up at the sky so Alex wouldn’t see.
‘I should go back and apologise to Demos for storming out like that,’ I said, making no move to get up.
‘Tomorrow,’ Alex answered. ‘I talked to the others. I told them your plan. They thought it might work. But we’ll discuss it tomorrow and everything about your dad, because first I need to do something.’ He pulled me closer towards him until our lips were almost touching.
‘What might that be?’ I managed to stutter, closing my eyes, anticipating the warmth of his lips against mine. But the kiss didn’t come. I opened my eyes. Alex had jumped to his feet.
‘Swim,’ he said, grinning at me. ‘Come on.’
‘Swim?’ I pouted, unable to hide my disappointment that he wanted to swim rather than make out with me.
Alex pulled his T-shirt off in one swift move. My eyes fell straightaway to his chest – which was tanned, smooth and ripped with muscle, and which, when you studied it as I had done, in fine detail, you discovered wasn’t a six-pack but actually a twelve-pack. My eyes flitted to the shadowed hollows where his hips disappeared into his shorts, causing a flutter in parts of my body that up until three weeks ago had been flutter-dormant. Alex’s hands dropped to his shorts and he started undoing his belt.
I reassessed the swimming option. I could definitely do swimming.
He shrugged off his shorts, but before I could catch an eyeful of anything, he was off, jogging towards the water. I paused for a nanosecond, weighing up my embarrassment at stripping naked over my desire to follow him. With a deep breath, I tore off my dress then kicked off my underwear and started running towards the sea, praying Nate wasn’t doing a fly-by.
The water was warm and flat as a bath. I could see Alex in the distance, his skin gleaming in the now inky moonlight. When I got close to him, his hand snaked under the water, wrapped round my waist and pulled me towards him. I didn’t resist because I’d forgotten in that instant how to swim. And then he kissed me and I prayed silently and fervently that he took my shudder to be the effect of the cold water.
I tried sticking myself onto him like a barnacle, but eventually Alex managed to pull himself free, holding my wrists in his hand so I couldn’t reattach. His resolve was as solid as a nuclear bunker’s walls. Alex had said there were always chinks. But I couldn’t seem to find the one in his armour. He swam two long strokes away from me. I trod water and stayed where I was, feeling confused, glad that the night was dark enough to hide my expression.
‘I’m just trying to protect your honour,’ he said, guessing it anyway.
I groaned and rolled my eyes. When was he going to understand that I was happy for him to protect every other part of me, just not my honour?
He swam silently back to my side.
‘I know we have to leave,’ I sighed, ‘but it feels like this is the only place in the world right now where we’re safe. Where nothing bad can happen.’
‘We’ll come back,’ Alex said, his hand reaching under the water to stroke down my back.
‘You think?’ I looked at him hopefully.
‘I know so,’ Alex said, pulling me close once more. ‘I’ll bring you back here. It’s inevitable.’
I couldn’t work out if it was the salt water that was making me float like a jellyfish on the water or him.
‘I like it. Lila, it’s a genius idea.’
I hadn’t said anything. I’d just been thinking idly, following random ideas this way and that in my head while the others talked about Stirling Enterprises and how we were going to destroy them – as if bringing down global corporations was as easy as knocking down a house of cards.
‘What? What idea?’ I glanced over at Suki. She was bouncing on her heels and clapping her hands.
‘Carlos. The Mafia man.’
Carlos? What?
‘I didn’t have an idea. I was just thinking,’ I blurted, suddenly fearing where this might be heading.
‘What were you thinking?’ Demos asked, swivelling to me.
‘You were talking about how we needed to bring down Stirling Enterprises,’ I said, squirming in my seat. ‘Not just destroy the Unit, but the whole company, and I was thinking about how to do that.’
‘And she thought about this man.’ Suki bounced forward. ‘This Carlos. With the bald skeleton head and the mean eyes and the baddie tattooed bodyguards. I like this plan.’
‘It’s not a plan,’ I almost shouted.
‘No, there’s something there. Wait,’ Alex said. He took a few seconds to think. Everyone waited.
‘It was stupid,’ I interrupted before he could think any further. ‘I just thought that the only way to really hurt Richard Stirling and destroy his company would be if we could set him up somehow.’