The Ones (7 page)

The anger burst out of James in an instant of pure fury. First there was the surge of strength as he twisted his body to grab Michael behind the knees and lift him off his feet. Then he threw both of them to the ground, landing with a crushing thud as he drove his shoulder into his brother's chest. And then, as Michael rolled on top of him, James threw a violent right hook with such power and precision that it shattered his brother's nose with a crunch. James cocked his left arm, ready to throw again, but Michael had collapsed onto his back, blood streaming from his face.

James staggered a few steps away, catching his breath as his heart raced. He tried to process an odd combination of feelings—the thrill of victory mixed with remorse at having hurt a member of his family. But most of all, there was the sensation of something totally new: He had never beaten his brother before, in anything. And now he stood over him, looking down as Michael lifted an arm to gingerly touch his face and then let out a pained moan. James looked on for a moment as tears that he couldn't quite explain began to fill his eyes. Then he turned and walked away.

*   *   *

Cody didn't answer her phone as James walked toward her house, so he wasn't too alarmed when her mother opened the door with a look of surprise. Joanne craned her neck to see behind him, worry creeping across her face.

“Is Cody all right?” she asked.

“What?” James said, confused.

“Where is she? Did something happen?”

“I was just coming over to see her … is she not here?”

Now full-fledged panic came over Joanne. “She took her bike and said she was going out to meet you.”

Inside the house, they tried to call her again, looked around her room, and only after it was clear that Cody was totally off the grid did Joanne think to tell James about the guy at the diner. As she recounted what she saw, James couldn't help but imagine the worst. A stranger had approached her at the counter, whispered to her, left her shaking, and disappeared as quickly as he arrived. Well, that explained Cody's weird behavior on the car ride home. What did this guy say to her? Joanne didn't know much—she was across the diner when they were talking—but somehow saw fit to mention that the guy looked like an underwear model.
Terrific
, James thought,
the one thing we know about Cody's kidnapper is that he's handsome
. Growing more worried, James opened up Cody's computer. He typed in her password and immediately saw the last thing Cody had been looking at: a map and directions to an address outside town.

Within a minute, James was on the road, gunning Joanne's car out of Shasta and toward wherever Cody had been lured. Even as he was desperate to find her, James couldn't help but be angry with her, too. She was always running straight into trouble, and every reckless decision put her in a new, unpredictable bind. James had no idea what this current one would be, but he had a terrible feeling about it. Joanne's car was a piece of junk, and even while stomping down on the accelerator, he felt like he was barely moving.

Miles later, when James saw that he was getting close to the address that he'd written down, he began to recognize his surroundings. He was near Cal State–Redding, the university where his father worked. But instead of taking him onto the familiar campus, the directions led him to an area he'd never been before, which was run-down and seemingly deserted. He stopped the car near a crumbling church and double-checked the address. This was it. James got out of the car and walked up to the entrance of the church. The front doors were padlocked, but he could see some light coming from the windows just above the basement. James walked around to the back of the building and found a rusted metal door that was cracked open.

James stood frozen outside the church, and as he felt a cold sweat start to cover his skin, he wondered if he was about to break his own rule. Wasn't walking blindly through this doorway just as foolish as anything Cody had done? Perhaps, he rationalized, but at least he had a legitimate reason. Cody was in trouble; he was sure of that much. And she wasn't very good at getting out of it on her own.

He pulled the door open and grimaced at the grating screech of its hinges. There was a staircase directly in front of him, dropping down into pitch darkness. He started to walk down, the metal stairs echoing with every step, and reached a dank hallway that had a single lightbulb hanging in it. Then he saw the girl, seated in front of a doorway, staring at him.

James froze and tried to conceal the fear pulsing through him. After a second, though, he relaxed just a bit. All things considered, he realized, his descent into this abyss could have yielded a lot worse. Instead, there was a girl, maybe a couple of years older than him, sitting in a chair. She didn't look very nice—that much was true—but she didn't look like a serial killer, either. Serial killers didn't usually have cute pixie cuts that swooped down over big brown eyes like that. At least that was what James was counting on.

“Hi,” he said.

She didn't answer, so he began to walk cautiously toward her. James started to see her more clearly now, struck by the extreme contrast of her jet-black hair against her fair complexion. And she had a few piercings on her face that he didn't even think were possible. When James got halfway down the hallway, she held up her hand to stop him.

“What do you want?” she said.

James didn't really know how to answer that. “I'm here to meet my girlfriend.”

“Did she tell you to come here?” the girl asked, eyeing him suspiciously.

“Well … yeah. She did.”

“All right,” she said. “Then tell me which way the wind blows.”

“Huh?” James said, not even meaning to speak. Had he heard her correctly? Because if so, he had no idea what she was talking about. And as she stared at him, waiting for an answer, it didn't seem like she was going to repeat the question. “I don't understand. I'm just going to go in there and get my girlfriend, okay?” James took a step forward, but the way the girl stood up from her chair made him stop in his tracks.

“Get the hell out of here,” she said, and if she had merely seemed cold and grumpy before, her tone now was downright chilling. James saw the change in her face, the new angles of her nostrils and the flush of her cheek—whatever the “or else” was that she had only implied, James wasn't interested in finding out. So he backed toward the staircase, climbed up to the backyard of the church, and shut the door behind him.

As he stood there trying to figure out what to do next, a cool breeze rustled the branches of a tree above him. Should he go back down there and make up something about the wind? No, he didn't want to do that—it would only make him look stupider. He would be grateful to never encounter that girl for the rest of his life.

James knew Cody was somewhere in the basement of that church, but he still didn't know if she was actually in danger. As he walked back to the street, he looked helplessly at the small illuminated windows that rested just above the ground. Something was happening down there, but the glass was clouded over and he couldn't see inside. Maybe he could slip in through the front doors and find a different way downstairs. Granted, they were locked, but they seemed a lot easier to get past than that girl.

Then, as he made his way back to the front, he noticed a metal grate set against the foundation of the church. He walked over and saw that it was covering some ancient heating equipment with plenty of room in the window well for a person to squeeze in on either side of it. And best of all, James saw on the boarded-up window down there that the wood had half-crumbled off already. He knelt down next to the grate and tried to pry it up with his fingers. It didn't move easily, but he could tell it was just grass and mud holding it down. He pulled harder, got the grate in the air, and gently leaned it against the church, taking care to be as silent as possible. Then he lowered himself into the well, landing softly on the gravel bottom. He turned his attention to the boarded-up window and found a crack that was almost big enough to see through. He could tell there were people on the other side and could hear voices now. If he could just shift it open a little more, he'd have a clear view of what was going on.

But just as James was about to peer inside, he heard the gravel crunch behind him. Before he could turn around, his face was pinned against the concrete wall of the church basement.

“I told you to leave.”

It was the same voice that James had heard in the hallway. He twisted his neck just enough to see out of the corner of his eye. The girl was standing behind him with a gun pointed at his head.

 

CHAPTER 5

CODY HAD SPENT
most of the meeting trying not to draw any attention to herself. Between not knowing exactly what was going on and seeing that everyone else was a few years older than her, it seemed wise to find a seat in the back and keep her head down. When she had arrived at the church earlier, she found Kai outside, and he greeted her warmly and led her downstairs. But as other people filed into the large storage room, Kai took a seat up front and left Cody to fill in the blanks herself.

It was pretty obvious that everyone in the room was a One. There were maybe two dozen of them, and Cody realized she had never been in one place with so many Ones before. The thought thrilled her as she contemplated the talent and potential that was gathered in this grimy church basement. At the same time, she had the unfamiliar feeling of being intimidated. It wasn't just that they were older; they also had a confidence and seriousness that she envied. It was the same feeling Kai gave off in the diner, that mix of passion and self-control that Cody found so difficult to balance in her own life.

So Cody sat in the back and listened. A well-dressed, preppy guy named Brandon stood up and began to speak.

“Welcome to the Northern California chapter of the New Weathermen,” he said. “I know many of us have been talking in smaller groups, but it's time we get more organized.”

“Fuck Amber Reed!” a wild-haired kid shouted from the back.

“Indeed,” Brandon said, trying to continue. “But let's not get distracted with the Supreme Court. We can't fix that. It's all these new local laws that are really the problem. And now Congress is writing a new bill they are calling the Equality Act. It's going to make it legal everywhere to discriminate against us for the sake of national security.”

Daphne, a girl in the front who looked like an Olympic swimmer, stood up. “People are already starting to get hurt. They found a One in Arizona hanging from a tree last night. He was only fifteen.” Daphne wiped tears from her eyes.

“Suicide, they said,” someone else mumbled in disgust. “Interesting call, since the victim had cuts and bruises all over his face.”

Cody stiffened up imagining this: a boy, all of fifteen years old, hanging by his neck. She thought about how many people must have had the opportunity to stop it, but not a single one did. Rage began to bubble up inside her.

“An eye for an eye—let's hang one of
them
!” the loudmouth from the back shouted. As everyone yelled at him to calm down, they all called him J-Dog, Cody wondered how his obvious over-aggression had slipped past the genetic engineers.

Brandon tried to get back on track. “Before we do anything, we need to figure out a leadership structure. We need a public relations strategy. We need to figure out how we are going to communicate with the other chapters.”

A geeky guy named Marcus jumped in quickly. “I can build a secure server to send messages—”

Daphne interrupted him. “How is this going to stop the next lynch mob?”

A few of the other Ones yelled in agreement. Cody sided with this faction, and she wanted them to go even further. If Kai had been telling the truth about the Vaccine, what were they going to do about
that
? She could barely get her mind around such an absurd idea—technology that could somehow alter your genetic makeup even though you were already a fully formed person. It seemed impossible, but so did a lot of things, including her own perfect genetics.

Cody squirmed in her chair as the debate continued, everyone talking over each other about logistics and how the group would function. They all had a lot of passion, but there was no cohesive plan. It seemed the only thing they agreed on was calling themselves the New Weathermen.

Cody leaned over and tapped Marcus on the shoulder. With his dorky glasses and ill-fitting shirt, he seemed like one of the few people there who wouldn't bite her head off. “What does that name even mean?”

Marcus smiled at her with pride. “We know which way the wind blows.”

Oh, really helpful
, Cody thought. She was getting frustrated, but then she saw Kai stand up. He surveyed the rest of the Ones, stepped to the center of the room, and spoke for the first time.

“Fact number one: The rest of the country has every right and incentive to be afraid of us. Our society is set up as a gigantic zero-sum game. As we start to acquire more resources, both tangible and intangible, there will be less for everyone else. They are going to act rationally and try to prevent this from happening.

“Fact number two: They can, in fact, do just that. They control the government, the financial system, the media, and the military. We, on the other hand, have nothing. No money, no organization, no access to the traditional levers of power. This is going to be the harsh reality for at least the next five to ten years.

“Fact number three: If we don't do something, we are doomed. Inaction is capitulation. So our choice is already made. We must resist, we must fight back, and we must degrade any entity that seeks to force us down. Whether we have a vice-treasurer or an encrypted e-mail network, I don't care. Whether we use pipe bombs or speeches, I don't care. Until total victory or total annihilation, we follow one rule: The New Weathermen protect the basic rights of Ones at any cost.”