Authors: Amelia Kahaney
Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Love & Romance, #Action & Adventure, #General, #Social Issues, #Adolescence
The Invisible
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HarperCollins Publishers
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Advance Reader’s e-proof
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This is an advance reader’s e-proof made from digital files of the uncorrected proofs. Readers are reminded that changes may be made prior to publication, including to the type, design, layout, or content, that are not reflected in this e-proof, and that this e-pub may not reflect the final edition. Any material to be quoted or excerpted in a review should be checked against the final published edition. Dates, prices, and manufacturing details are subject to change or cancellation without notice.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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For Jeannie and Cory, who taught me to be bold
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Here’s a mouth and here’s its quelling,
here are words, hear them rebelling.
Open spaces, narrow scrapings,
near catastrophes we’re facing.
You and me too, then we threesome,
half in fetters, half in freedom.
—Paul Celan, “By Threes, By Fours,” 1963
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Spring has finally come in Bedlam, and the air in the arena smells like newly blooming roses, popcorn, and manure. I’m in the bleachers at the Spring Fling Horse Show, watching the final group of jumpers lead their horses by the reins. At the front of the line is Martha Marks, the mayor’s daughter, who I’ve known since we were little kids. Her black velvet riding helmet perched tall upon her head, Martha smiles slightly, her eyes all calm and focus, her riding jodhpurs with their leather knees pristine, her black riding boots polished to a shine under flecks of fresh mud.
I’m sitting between my mother and father in the third row, just behind Martha’s parents, Mayor Manny Marks and Belinda Bullett. The mayor’s giant head swivels around, and he flashes me that toothy grin he passed down to his daughter. Next to him, whippet-thin with her nervous bird’s face half-hidden under her giant cloche, Belinda motions to my mother to lean in for a picture—a roving
Daily Dilemma
photographer stands below them on the bleachers, his flashbulbs popping for tomorrow’s paper, which will feature lots of society ladies in their spring hats. My mother’s is wide and white, like a straw-and-silk ring of Saturn, and Belinda’s is dome-shaped, decorated with faux flowers, the straw colored antacid pink. When my mother leans down to pose with Belinda I can see the track marks on her temples just below her huge sunglasses from where she’s been injected with fillers and plumpers.
“To stay young, I guess,” she’d sighed last week when I asked her why she needed to do so much work on her face. “There’s a lot of pressure on me to look this way. And it’s good for the business.” The business is Fleet Industries, the development company she owns with my father. Then she shrugged, as if to say,
It needs to be done, so why complain.
When Martha turns her huge black horse to face the audience, I wave. “Go, Martha!” I shout. She grins, squinting out at the bleachers at the sound of her name. Her eyes find me in the third row, and she waves back.
She must think it’s strange to see me here. I’ve never come to one of her competitions before. Horses have never been my thing.
But I’m not really here to see the horse show. I’m here to keep an eye on my father. Ever since I found evidence that he could be part of the Syndicate, Bedlam’s notorious crime ring, I’ve been shadowing him every chance I get. Spying. Snooping in his office. But it’s been two weeks, and so far I’ve found nothing. Just a man with a lot of money who likes to tell business associates what to do to build his buildings higher, bigger, faster, more profitably.
I spot him picking his way back down the bleachers after visiting the arena’s snack bar. He holds a cheese plate and a plastic cup of fruit salad, three bottles of Exurbia Springs Water pressed against his gray suit. One of the bottles falls from his grasp as he’s about to reach our row. Before I even think about it, I leap up and lunge toward him with my hand outstretched to catch the falling bottle. Fast. Probably too fast.
“Some reflexes!” my father says, startled.
“Just helping out.” I shrug and give him a look like
what are you talking about
so he stops thinking about it. I’m usually careful not to move as quickly as I’m capable of, but sometimes I lapse for a second before I catch myself. I can move so fast now, do things a person shouldn’t be able to do. It’s one of the things Jax changed in me when she did the surgery, replacing my dead heart with a chimeric one she’d designed to beat faster, work harder than a human heart should.
It works. He sits down between me and my mother on the bleacher bench. “Just like old times, huh? Us three, all together on the weekend?”
I nod, careful to smile instead of scowl even as the thing in my chest twitches like a broken wind-up toy, full of misgivings and suspicion.
Nothing is like old times anymore. Not at all. But I don’t want my father to question all the “family time” I’ve been partaking in recently. If he thinks I’m watching too closely, he’ll be even more carefully guarded than he already is.
As he settles on the bleacher next to my mother, it’s her I study, not him. She stares straight ahead at the jump course, her face hidden beneath her sunglasses, her hat pulled lower now, hiding the injection marks. Is she medicated today?
I decide she probably is, her brain soothed by an every-four-hours dose of Vivirax under her giant white hat and huge sunglasses. It’s too early for wine, but she’s so placid and calm right now that she borders on comatose. She fans her fingers out in front of her, examining her bloodred manicure. Shakes her head when my father waves the fruit cup in front of her face. “No thank you, dear.”
“Suit yourself,” he says back so quietly the mayor can’t hear. He sends the cheese plate up to the bleacher in front of them.
What does she know,
I wonder. About my father. Is she as out of it as she seems?
My father was always the parent I used to think I could sort of rely on, but he isn’t someone I can trust anymore. I need to figure out what my father knew about Gavin Sharp, once my boyfriend, then my enemy, now dead and buried.
It’s been three weeks since Gavin’s funeral, and though I’ve done as much surreptitious digging as I can, I still haven’t found any connection between my father and Gavin, other than the fact that Gavin was his employee—something Gavin didn’t tell me, but then why would he? Nothing he said turned out to be the truth, in the end. He fed me lie upon lie before his carefully orchestrated “kidnapping,” and I stupidly believed it all.
Sometimes I wonder what made me such an easy target. Why I was so duped by a handsome face, by the way he held me, by all his promises and plans. Was there something written on my face that read
fool, rube, na
ï
ve
?
Whatever might have once been there, it’s gone now.
Now I question everything, and everyone. Nothing anyone says feels like it could possibly be the truth. And my feelings about people—I question those constantly too.
I watch my father offer Belinda some Brie and fruit, pass out the remaining water bottles. “I was born to serve,” he jokes. Belinda laughs politely, and I think I see my mother roll her eyes behind her glasses.
The top of the Syndicate chart in the book I found in Gavin’s bag had one name on it:
The Money
. Gavin was a few places below. Could my father
really
be funding the Syndicate?
I’ve searched his office. Looked through the files on his computer. It’s all just contracts, plans, payroll for Fleet Industries. All of it seems ordinary, boring, the stuff you need to do to put up buildings. No more.
Not for the first time, I wonder if maybe it’s all in my head. If maybe the chart I found in the back of Gavin’s strange paperback book about police corruption and the mob—the one thing of his I kept after I let him drop to his death in Lake Morass—has nothing to do with my father. I keep it under my mattress and study it every few days as if I can glean the truth from his scratched-out names in ballpoint pen. Maybe it really is a coincidence that Gavin worked for him, and his “real” job with the Syndicate was during off hours.
A trumpet blast pierces my thoughts, and I focus back on the riding course. The riders each climb onto a little step to mount their horses as the announcer begins reading off their names. This is the final and most advanced level of the jumping competition. Martha sits up straighter on her horse when her name is called, and the group of twelve riders—three boys, the rest girls—dig their heels into their horses’ flanks, gather up their reins, and move them toward a corral where they will wait for their turn on the course.
I close my eyes a minute and tilt my face up to drink in the heat of the sunshine on my forehead. Winter was so long, and the spring feels a little like awakening into the still-dark hours before dawn, sweat drying after a series of nightmares.
I remind myself things are not all bad. The Syndicate seems to have lost its power for the moment, now that Gavin, its captain, is dead. As a result, crime is down. All the papers say so.
And the only price I’ve paid, other than my freakish heart, is the way I shudder at the memory of Gavin landing on the jagged boulders in the lake, his mouth and eyes open in shock. It could so easily have been me, not him, whose skull pooled slick black blood on the white rocks. But he’s gone, and I’m still here.
I shake the image free and turn my thoughts to Ford. Ford, who is the reason I have my chimeric heart, and the reason I’m alive today. He is alive, if not yet healthy enough to get out of bed. I picture him lying in his uncle’s living room, the greenish hollows beneath his eyes. I go over there two or three times a week, whenever I can sneak away. Every time I hope for some improvement, but he’s still so weak.
“Number four, Martha Marks,” the announcer booms, and a swell of polite applause rises up from the bleachers behind us. The mayor and Belinda turn around briefly, acknowledging the crowd with politicians’ waves, then turn back to watch Martha ride around the ring. She moves fluidly with her black mare as they canter up to each jump, easily clearing the poles, starting with the three-foot-high ones and moving on in the course to taller and taller obstacles. Her back is perfectly erect, her eyes focused, hands on the reins making small corrections, communicating with her horse.
I check the program and smirk at the name of her horse—Daddy’s Girl. Martha’s always been so proud of her father’s political career, first as deputy mayor and then as mayor.
Martha barrels around the far corner of the course and loops in our direction again. The hooves of her horse cut into the earth, sending clods of it flying as she prepares to make this next jump—the highest in the course at seven feet.
My father and mother are both using this moment while the mayor is occupied to check e-mail on their phones, oblivious to the spectacle.
But as Martha gallops toward the high hedge, a sharp, sustained, ear-splitting whistle fills the air. I grimace and clap my hands over my ears, looking for the source, waiting for others to notice it.
But my father is still tapping away on his phone. My mother is doing the same.