One (One Universe) Page 13

  But I smile and say, “Sure, Dad.”

  Mom gives us all hugs, seeming even more distant than usual, and hurries off to wherever she needs to be. Dad gives me a hug and walks off, too, and the boys start buzzing around the tables, checking everything out.

  I stand by myself, Supers spilling in all around me, and the energy of this place is so intense, I want to close my eyes and breathe it all in. So I do. I must look like an idiot, but I don’t care.

  A hand rests on either side of my waist. Elias.

  I turn, and he’s in a dark gray suit with a white shirt, no tie, the top button undone. My heart drops into my stomach. I thought he looked good in his hoodies and jeans, but clearly I hadn’t imagined all the possibilities thoroughly enough.

  “Uh,” I manage before he sweeps me into a bear hug.

  “Excited?” he asks, grinning down at me, clearly just as charged as I am.

  “I guess.” I let loose a small smile. That’s the understatement of my life.

  Elias squeezes my hand as he walks me down the hallway along with hundreds of others Hub visitors.

  About 40 feet down, right before the second security check, hangs a gilt frame with a painted portrait of a boy, about Michael and Max’s age. I drift over to look at it, bringing Elias along with me.

  A name plate beneath it reads, “Charlie Fisk. Inspiring us to make the world a better place.” I run my finger over the letters, repeating the words under my breath, trying to grasp at why they’re so familiar.

  I look up at Elias. “Fisk?”

  He nods. “President Fisk’s son. He would have been in his mid-twenties by now. Died when he was a kid, about our age. Some fast-moving cancer.”

  “What was his Super?” I wonder out loud, then feel guilty for being so morbidly curious.

  Elias shrugs. “They, uh…they say they never knew. Hadn’t manifested by the time he got sick.”

  I quickly do the math of years in my head. “Would have been late.”

  Elias shrugs. “I don’t know. Maybe they force the kids too quickly now. Especially with the Supers’ classes starting earlier… I don’t know. You want your kid to fit in, I guess. They never said it, but I think my mom didn’t want that for me. She never cared if I was Super. Just Dad.”

  We stand there, staring at the portrait, ignoring the rush of bodies behind us. I squeeze Elias’s hand so he knows I heard what he said. So he knows I care.

  He clears his throat and says, “That’s the slogan. The one they’ve been using ever since Fisk was elected. Fifteen years now. He thinks… Dad says he wants to be more than just a biotech service for the Supers. He wants to make the whole world better.”

  “Cure cancer,” I say.

  Elias nods. For a second, I stare at the portrait of Charlie, his dark hair and evergreen eyes so alive. I wonder if Fisk wants to cure anything else. I wonder if curing cancer made him think about curing people like me, too.

  After a cuff scan and a facial-recognition identity verification, we stand in another huge, cavernous white room turned into a maze of tables, vendors, and info booths.

  “What do you want to do first?” Elias asks. I think he has gotten even more excited now that he sees my eyes roving and body itching to check everything out. “There’s a demonstration, we can watch some other kids test their powers against their parents,’ um, I think there are some lectures…” He taps through the schedule on his cuff.

  “I think I really want to stay here. Is that weird?”

  “Wanting to hang with the biotech reps all afternoon?” He wrinkles his nose, still smiling. “Yes, it is weird. But I should have known.”

  “Yeah, you should have,” I say, punching him on the arm. The twins barrel over toward us, pushing through the crowd to greet Elias.

  “I’ll drag these clowns around while you check everything out,” he says.

  “They’re twice the trouble,” I tell him and give the twins a warning look, my eyebrows in the air.

  “You think I don’t know? I grew up with twin Supersibs, too. Conniving ones. These guys are cake.” He slings a long arm around each of their necks, putting them in a lock, and both of them protest, laughing.

  They walk off, and Elias yells over his shoulder, “Meet you back here at two, okay?”

  I shake my head at the three of them, smiling. The boys’ dark curly heads bob up and down next to Elias, and they look up at him like they’ve just won the freaking lottery. Boys. They’ll probably find some incredible underground basketball court and waste a whole afternoon at the Symposium doing that.

  After an hour of browsing the booths, stuffing flash drives full of information and other swag into my bag, and buying a t-shirt — magenta with an illustration of a drum set the artist has turned into an lab for liquid solutions, with every drum bubbling and half-filled with bright color — I realize that Elias has never really been to the Hub, just like me. So how does he know his way around here so well?

  Finally, Elias and the boys find me. It takes everything I have not to stretch up and kiss Elias — I almost never wear heels, and I’m even closer to his face now — but there are too many people here. The boys decide to go to some static electricity demonstration, and I drag Elias to a lecture I’ve been eyeing on the schedule all morning titled, “New Horizons: Malleability of the Gene Structure and Real-Life Improvements for Gifted Individuals.”

  The word “improvements” catches my eye. I could use some of those.

  The presentation isn’t so much of an exposition as a teaser.

  Like everything else about this building and this Symposium, the background of the movie playing glares stark white. Friendly figures show up on the screen, though, softening it. A woman in a cardigan and khakis that reminds me of Elias’s mom. A kid and her dad playing catch. She has a pink baseball mitt like the one I have stashed in my keepsake box at home. The girl catches the ball and then dashes to the other side of her dad in half a second, standing 20 yards from him.

  “Getting faster every day, sweetie!” the man calls and then turns to grin at us from the screen.

  This time, a middle-aged man sits reading a newspaper at a breakfast nook in a warmly decorated kitchen. A woman stands at the counter making pancakes in a waist apron. I snort, and Elias reaches over to hold my hand.

  “Grab the milk for me, hon?” the woman asks.

  Without looking up from his paper, the man flicks a finger at the fridge, and a gallon of milk floats out and goes straight to her hand.

  The woman turns over her back to the screen and beams. “A year ago he would have dropped it.”

  A little girl reaches for a candy jar, trying to grab a piece of chocolate inside, and starts crying when the tips of her fingers disappear. A teenaged girl who’s supposed to be her sister or her babysitter comes over to comfort her, and then gives her a pill. She pulls her hand out and the tips of her fingers rematerialize.

  The older girl turns to the screen and says, “Without this patching solution from the Hub, this singly gifted little girl would have lost her fingers.”

  I squeeze Elias’s hand hard. “They fixed her,” I whisper. “Now can she…?”

  Elias shakes his head and sets his mouth in a hard line. He leans in and whispers, “Just a patch.”

  The man in the suit steps to the front of the screen again.

  “Genetic improvements are being made every day, thanks to new discoveries at the Hub regarding the malleability of the gene structure. Think of the implications. For the elderly gifted, for the worker who wants to step up in her career, even…” It switches to a photograph of a sad-looking young boy. “…for the singly gifted individual. The Hub isn’t only here to help. It’s here to make your whole life better.”

  And for the first time in a long time, since I met Elias, I feel it, strong. I can see it in this man’s face. There’s hope for people like me, for people like Elias. We’ll be more than just Ones. I know it.

  SIXTEEN

  After we leave the pre
sentation, Elias says, “I told Mom and Dad we’d sit with them for coffee.” He jerks his chin toward the hallway, and I look up and see a tall man with wire-rimmed glasses and sparkling eyes headed our way.

  “Hey, Dad.” Elias shakes his hand. Mr. VanDyne nods toward me, smiles, then turns over his shoulder.

  “President Fisk.” Mr. VanDyne pulls a figure in a dark suit, impeccably pressed, over to where Elias and I stand. The man has short hair cropped close to his head, the same length as his goatee. He’s almost as short as I am, and that alone is a total shock.

  “Miss Grey,” he says, tilting his head back a bit to get a better look at me. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

  Mr. VanDyne turns his head to President Fisk, his eyebrows pushed up in a silent question. Elias raises an eyebrow at me, and I can’t help but think I see hurt in his eyes.

  “I’ve heard about the late transfer to Nelson High,” Fisk says, “and that you’ve shown a lot of promise in your class exercises. Mathematics, especially biology. Organic chemistry.”

  For the first time ever, I wonder who else can see the answers I punch into the computers at school besides the remote teachers. I wonder who else is watching. Paranoia skitters over my shoulders.

  Fisk lowers his voice and leans in a bit. “A second round of application testing with Mr. Hoffman during your lunch hour. I’m sorry you never felt…comfortable at Superior. Unfortunate, really, since we expect so many of your classmates to work and be quite influential at the Hub. I assume you plan to pursue a career with us.”

  Something about the way he draws out every “S” freaks me out. I feel the familiar skin crawling sensation but tamp it down.

  “Oh.” I blush. “I’m flattered that the Hub selected me for the second round. But…I’m just a One, sir.” But maybe you can fix me. Can you?

  President Fisk waves a hand in the air, as though he’s never heard about what a disappointment Ones are or how they never get picked for a Hub internship, certainly not one as important as Biotech. Like he’s hardly ever thought about it. Like everyone doesn’t know.

  “Yes, I know. And there is a place for everyone, I believe, Miss Grey. Especially if what Mr. Hoffman tells me about your intelligence and drive is true.”

  Drive? At least the intelligence part is right. My grades are nearly perfect, even though I’m not really trying. I know I’m crazy smart, probably smarter than a lot of the kids who made it into the Hub internship.

  I must have been quiet too long because President Fisk speaks up again. “Can you really tell me you’d have nothing to contribute to the Hub?”

  “Well, sir, uh, President Fisk, I do. I think I would.” I clear my throat and use the most mature voice I can muster. “Biotech is a fascination of mine. And I’m working at a graduate school level in organic chem.”

  “A young girl this enthusiastic about biotech when her peers are only worried about boys and shopping? And a Grey girl at that? Andrew,” he says, turning to Elias’s dad, “make sure she gets in.”

  Mr. VanDyne’s eyes flash down at me, and he stammers for a second before he nods his assent. And then, as quickly as they got to us, they disappear into the crowd again.

  After that, I basically float on a cloud for the rest of the afternoon. It’s all I can do to keep from smiling and fidgeting as Leni and I get ready for the dinner in one of the fancily furnished ladies’ rooms.

  I don’t own a single formal dress and shopping before the Symposium was the last thing I wanted to do. Thank God for Leni who volunteered to bring a few things for me to try on.

  “A few things” is more like a dozen gowns. I rifle through them, ignoring anything floor length — I’d need six-inch heels just to avoid stepping on the hem — or strapless — no boobs to hold it up.

  Then I see it. “Len,” I gasp.

  “Oh, I forgot about that one! Mom got that on clearance, post-prom last year.” She waves her hand in the air toward the pale blue dress. “Too fluffy, too tight, way too short. Made me look like a freaking lollipop. Too cheap to bother taking back though.”

  I stick my arms up the skirt through what is, admittedly, a lot of fluff. I shimmy it down over my head, and the skirt comes all the way down to my knee. Leni zips me up, and I look in the mirror.

  It’s strapless, and the bodice hugs tight to my torso, hitting just at my waist. The fabric is a little shimmery but not shiny. The most incredible thing is what Leni hated about it — the ruffles. An airy, finely netted fabric peeks out in a row all around the top, covering whatever cleavage I might have had, and the same stuff lies in layers under the skirt, puffing it out and making it sway if I take a few steps.

  I look like I’m in the middle of a cloud. Elias will love it.

  I smile so wide I think my face will break.

  “Well, hell.” Leni gives a low wolf whistle at the sight of me in it. “Obviously, it’s yours.”

  “Yeah. Obviously,” I murmur, doing a quarter turn in front of the mirror. A minute ago, I was a plain, slight stick figure. Now I’m curvy and luminous. The blue of the dress makes my hair look richly colored, almost with golden highlights, and there’s a bit of pink in my cheeks that I didn’t notice before.

  I launch myself at her, throw my arms around her neck, and whisper, “Thank you.”

  “Okay,” she laughs, “but now you owe me. Blow-by-blow account of the entire dinner. Including,” she wiggles her eyebrows, “after.” I know Leni’s been dreaming pretty much nonstop about spending the evening with Daniel, but it doesn’t mean she’s not going to be nosy about Elias and me on the side.

  Mom’s waiting for me outside my dressing room. She wears a burnished bronze ballgown with a strapless bodice, covered by a velvet short jacket and topped off with a string of pearls. Seeing her in that, you can’t help but think of her Super — this is what a flame-thrower would wear. I wonder if every woman in the room is as in love with her Super as I am with my One and dressed to symbolize it, like I did.

  Dad meets us near the entrance to the ballroom and extends both his arms. Mom and I each take one.

  “Two beautiful girls on my arms tonight,” Dad says, stepping through the doors.

  Mom cranes her neck forward to grin at me, while she talks to Dad. “You’re a lucky man.”

  Elias stands right inside the hall, and I know the moment he sees me because his mouth gapes. After a second, he closes it, and I can see his Adam’s apple bob when he swallows hard. That makes me smile even harder.

  We approach him, and I’m proud because I don’t wobble at all in the silver three-inch heels I dug out of Mom’s closet before the Symposium. And because I look amazing and I know it. Thankfully, seeing Elias in a button-down shirt and jacket prepared me for seeing him in a tux. He looks only slightly more incredible than he did this afternoon.

  But my Elias will always be in a t-shirt and jeans, flying with me through a Nebraska cornfield. One hundred percent himself, one hundred percent honest. One hundred percent happy. The tux is great, and the Hub is great, but my Elias will always be mine to keep, away from all this Super stuff.

  I kiss Dad’s cheek and then join Elias at the VanDyne’s table. We sit through a dinner with a fancy salad, about twelve utensils at each place setting, and some kind of delicious, melt-in-your-mouth steak. The only thing more intoxicating than the taste of the food is the way Elias brushes his hand against my knee every now and then, between listening and responding to his dad talking about Hub business.

  Mr. VanDyne mentions something about artificially engineering the chemicals for a suit that would be able to withstand the intense wind speed and pressure on the skin of a Super who could project the mass of her own body into a pressure vortex — basically, float and fly. I launch into some theories and formulas I’ve been kicking around for a year and a half. Hoping one of them would be useful for my own Super one day.

  Mr. VanDyne sits back and looks at Elias approvingly, but Mrs. VanDyne just gives me a polite smile. “Clearly a young woman this
brilliant has earned a pass into the program. And to think Elias only ever mentioned how good you are at calculus.”

  Elias leans in, lips against my ear, and whispers, “You are truly amazing,” and I know he’s talking about my conversation with his dad, but the feeling of his breath against my neck makes me think that he means a couple other things, too. If I don’t get up and move, I’m going to jump on him right there. Or at least drag him down some dark corridor outside this ballroom, if those even exist in the Hub.

  The way Elias looks at me now, I know he’s feeling the same thing. He folds his napkin, puts it on the table, and grabs my hand. “Dance with me?”

  He smiles, and I glance at everyone around the table, murmur an “excuse us,” and follow him to the floor.

  We try to mimic the way everyone else dances, hands on waists and shoulders. I glance over at Leni tugging Daniel to the dance floor, and he holds her at quite a good length — confusing, I think, since they’ve been even more inseparable since that in the woods. But then I see why: His parents, the Doctors Suresh — both influential in the genetics department, I know — watch them dance with dead faces. Poor Leni.

  The big band plays “Blue Moon,” a song I love, naturally. The beat is faster than I’d like, but we take it as slow as we can. My arm snakes up along Elias’s. Because my heels give me some height, my hand rests comfortably wrapped around his shoulder, and I don’t have to crane my neck quite so much to look at him.

  Elias reaches his arm out, still holding my hand, and makes me spin under it. He pulls me back to him, hugging me tight, and I clutch at his waist. It can’t get any better than this. It just can’t. Not in a crowd of people, anyway.

  I remember that my parents are somewhere around here, and I pull back and smile at him but don’t get close enough that I want to stand on my toes to kiss him for real because that would be beyond embarrassing.

  He spins us in a circle, pressing my body to his. “So, what do you think? Can we skip prom now?”