Kess sat in her car outside the coffee shop in Lawrenceville where Elias had agreed to meet his Internet mystery person. She thought about how Elias had kissed her.
He’d kissed her, and she’d shocked him, and he’d gotten over that for some reason, and he’d turned out to be so… so smart. And now he was inside the coffee shop, waiting for Kess. It made her want to drive back home at two-hundred miles an hour. But instead she got out and went inside. It helped to think of it as “possibly deadly intrigue” rather than “meeting up with a boy.”
Elias was slouched in an armchair in a back corner. He looked up at Kess when she got close. She’d forgotten how much she liked his deep-set wizard eyes.
“So he’s not here yet,” she said.
“Nope.”
“He’s probably a murderer. You know he’s probably a murderer, right?”
“If he looks like a murderer, you can leave.”
Kess sat in a chair next to Elias. There was one more chair in this corner. Kess’s eyes flickered between the empty seat and Elias as her anxiety flickered between Potential Murderer and Boy.
How did her mind classify Elias, given that he was neither a Red nor a Blue? Now that she saw him in person again, there was something… strangerly about him. He was other, un-Blue, not to be trusted. But he also didn’t inspire the bitter, insurmountable antagonism she felt towards the Reds. And if she thought about all the conversations they’d had, the information he’d shared with her, she could push past the fact that he wasn’t a Blue and the vague uneasy feeling that gave her. Then she could see him as himself. Elias. Her friend. She remembered feeling something similar about her parents before they left on their trip.
“Has anyone looked at your eyes since you started seeing waves?” asked Elias. “Studied them, I mean.”
That snapped her out of her anxiety loop. “Ugh, no.”
“Then you don’t know how it works.”
“I don’t know how any of it works.”
“Yeah, but electricity comes out of your hands because your hands changed. You can see strange things, so your eyes must have changed.”
She hadn’t thought of that, which embarrassed her a little. That old newspaper article about Vance Holifeld really had shaken her disbelief in magic. She was half convinced that her powers were a divine blessing, like Lorraine had joked, or a curse or a possession or something.
“You’re right, you’re right.” She gripped the edge of her chair. “Okay. Do it.”
Elias laughed. “You look like you just asked me to punch you.”
“I don’t like… eyes. And the looking into of them.”
“Pretend I’m the optometrist.”
“I hate optometrists. I hate doctors generally. They ask questions and touch you and look in your eyes.”
Elias held up his phone. “Just look at this.”
And she did, holding her eye wide open, and he took a picture and showed it to her.
“There’s little things,” she said.
“They look like beads. Little clear beads in the whites of your eyes.”
“My eyes burned before I first saw the lights. They burned for days. It must have been those things, growing.”
“I can sort of tell, now that I know they’re there. When the light hits your eyes just right, it glitters off of them. And they look sort of blue-ish gray-ish. They’re usually brown, right?” He got a funny look on his face for a moment. “After this, you should show me what they can do.”
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He didn’t sound jealous of her powers, like Lorraine, or supportive, like Danny. He sounded curious. He sounded like he wanted to know what she could do just so he would know.
“I can’t believe you happened to me,” she said. And then she cringed, hearing herself, and pulled away from him back into the furthest corner of her chair.
“Kess,” said Elias. “Kess—Kess—he’s here. I mean…”
A woman loomed over them. Somehow Kess hadn’t noticed her walk up.
She had the stretched-out look of a fashion model, though she wasn’t dressed fashionably—her slacks and button-up shirt were both business-like and business-appropriate. Her face was long and narrow and nosily attractive, and her hair was pulled high and tight into a glossy dark ponytail. She was, more than anything, composed. She looked as if someone had sculpted a Tribute to the Professional Woman out of acrylic.
Kess disliked her the way a dog dislikes a person—instantly, stupidly, and with nervous anger.
“Power is knowledge?” said Elias, like a test.
“Indeed. Though my real name is Silver. Clever Handle?”
“That’s me,” said Elias. “But my real name is Clever Handle.”
“It is reasonable of you not to reveal your true identity,” she said. “I will not press the issue.”
Something about the way she spoke…
Silver sat primly in the third chair—though “primly” was the wrong word, too feminine. She sat with perfect posture, her back rail-straight, balanced near the front of the seat as if poised to leap to her feet at any moment.
“So are you going to explain everything?” asked Elias.
She nodded. “I will explain chronologically. In 1975, Holifeld Company was founded by Vance Holifeld.”
“We know,” said Elias.
“How do you know?”
And so Elias explained how he had traced clues on the Internet to the 1975 newspaper article about Vance Holifeld.
“Clever,” said Silver. “And resourceful. We like the way you think.” Her face did not show approval or otherwise waver from neutral.
“Who’s ‘we’?” asked Kess.
“I represent a consortium.” (Kess had to stop herself from sarcastically repeating, “Oh, a consortium.”) “We are highly concerned with Holifeld Company and its products.”
“What are its products?” asked Elias. “We haven’t been able to figure it out.”
“As a young man, Vance Holifeld wanted to believe in magic. Many people want to believe in magic. For most of them, that desire is not useful. Holifeld made his desire useful. He is admirable in that regard.”
Useful. The word chimed a sour chord somewhere in Kess’s head.
“When he inherited his fortune, he first used his money to travel the world, to consult shamans and magicians. After some time, he realized that he did not believe in any of it. He only wanted to believe.”
Elias nodded as if that made sense. Which maybe it did a little.
“He used the rest of his inheritance to found a company dedicated to creating things which Holifeld considered to be as good as magical.”
“Technology,” said Elias. “It’s a technology company.”
“Yes. The human desire for magic and the supernatural is rarely useful. Vance Holifeld’s case was unusual.”
Kess shook her head. “I don’t get it. If it’s technology that’s giving… these kids superpowers, then what technology is it, exactly? There’s nothing like this out there. I’ve looked. There’s no one researching anything like this. There’s no one saying, ‘Oh, we’re five years out from developing superstrength.’ And it’s doing things to their brains too and no one even understands brains.”
“Vance Holifeld has many skills. One is the ability to identify and attract brilliant scientists. Another is a remarkable intuition as to which projects are likely to be successful. Or perhaps he was lucky. Either way, over sixty years his company has made many advances, only some of which were shared with the broader community. Remember, Vance is not entirely motivated by the chance to boast or to sell. And when he does sell, he likes the uniquely powerful bargaining position afforded him by completely unmatched technology.”
“But that would take a sixty year conspiracy with nobody talking,” said Elias. “That doesn’t happen. Secret technology doesn’t happen, not like that. The Manhattan Project was secret, but everyone and their brother was trying to develop nuclear weapons, and they knew everybody else and their brothers were trying too.”
“Another of Vance Holifeld’s skills was inspiring loyalty. Loyalty is often useful. Perhaps someday you will be loyal to me and my colleagues, Clever Handle. Then you will waste less time on suspicion.”
Useful again. The way Silver used the word reminded her of something… someone… Not something pleasant. “Elias…”
“May I ask why you brought your friend?” asked Silver.
“What do you mean?”
“Based on our conversations, you have considered me paranoid. Did it not occur to you that a paranoid person might be put off by seeing that you had brought a third party to the meeting without informing them?”
“Oh yeah,” said Elias. “That makes sense. I didn’t think of that. I guess I knew she’d have wanted to be here.” Silver cocked her head to the side, and though her expression didn’t change Kess suspected she didn’t quite understand what Elias was saying. He continued. “Anyway, you don’t seem paranoid in person.
“Paranoia is rarely useful.”
Fear is only useful in so far as it tells you what to do.
Kess jumped to her feet. “Elias,” she said. “We have to get out of here. We have to get out of here right now.”
Silver lunged out of her chair. There was something in her hand—where had it come from, her sleeve? A plastic syringe with a sharply gleaming silver needle, and the stuff inside was gray. She grabbed Elias’s hand, yanked him forward, and plunged the needle into his arm.