Shine: Season One (Shine Season Book 1) Page 4

  “What the flick was that, some sort of subtle torture technique?” she asked the others. “Designed to completely freak me out?”

  Twinge shrugged as she folded her laundry. “You get used to her after a while.”

  “Do I really have to make cupcakes?”

  “Hey,” Dream said, “feel lucky she didn’t want to braid your hair.” She returned her attention to her magazine.

  Harriet didn’t even look up.

  She returned to her unpacking. At least she didn’t feel Judy hated her. As for her roomies, she wasn’t so sure.

  “If you’re waiting for some big reception,” Dream said, “it’s gonna be a long wait.” She noticed Dream was out of uniform, in a light blue t-shirt with sweatpants. The casual wear made her look even more fabulous than she had before. Witch.

  “I’m sensing some tension in the room. Was it something I said?”

  “Harriet isn’t strong on chitchat, as you may have noticed. Twinge is afraid she’ll get too excited and give you an enema.”

  “That is so not so,” Twinge protested, not looking up from her socks.

  “Anything I should know about this place?”

  Dream laid down her magazine. “Sure, I’ll give you the sixty-second skinny. There’s two rooms of Shines here, the cool room, which is ours, natch, and the LL. Where you find Tank and Mnemo and Gearhead. We expect you to be loyal to your room and roomies. Uphold the honor of 4A.”

  “There’s honor here? We’re practically in prison.”

  “Yeah, but there’s a big distinction between practically in prison and actually in prison. Like the availability of the pool and beauty care products.”

  “Why shouldn’t I be equally loyal to the girls in the other room? We’re all Shines.”

  “Well, who’s gonna have access to your pretty little butt when you’re sleeping?”

  “Good point.”

  “Just so you know, you’re already on my sewer list.”

  “What did I do to deserve that?”

  “Everyone starts on my sewer list. Many are still there. You have to prove yourself worthy of promotion.”

  “Which I do by…?”

  “You’ll have to figure that out on your own, girl.”

  “Razor.”

  “As you’ve probably deduced,” Twinge said, “Dream’s the princess. Judy’s the perky girl, Harriet’s the nerd.”

  “Does everyone need a label? Don’t we get enough of that in the outside world?”

  Twinge didn’t blink. “And I see you’re gonna be the emo.”

  “I am not the emo. I am not remotely emotional!”

  “Uh huh. Where you from, Aura?”

  “Around here. LA.”

  “That explains the hipster wardrobe.”

  “You’ve seen me in, like, one outfit.”

  “Is what it is, girl. Is what it is.”

  She looked to the other roomies for support but found none.

  “What’s with the red hair and blue bangs?” Dream asked. “Did you have them frosted by an alcoholic on psychedelic drugs or something?”

  “Gandhi, no. This happened when I was a kid. I got sick, had a bad reaction to the meds, and my hair changed overnight. Been this way ever since. I’ve tried to dye it, but it only makes it worse. I gather you think it’s a fashion crime?”

  “I think all bangs are a fashion crime. Yours are a felony.”

  Dream returned her attention to the mag. Harriet stared straight ahead like a zombie, her fingers tapping some invisible typewriter.

  She finished unpacking. Wasn’t life razor? First day in rehab and her roomies already hated her.

  “What are you in for, anyway?” Twinge asked.

  “Oh, who cares? I’d rather hear about your Shine, Twinge. Sounds like it must be amazing.”

  Dream covered her mouth with her hand. “That would be one word for it.”

  “You said something about projectile vomiting?”

  Twinge ran her fingers through her dreadlocks and ignored the question.

  “I’ll give you a hint,” Dream said. “Think enzymes.”

  She pondered. “I don’t get it.”

  “You know what enzymes are?”

  “They’re like…thingies that speed up or slow down chemical reactions.”

  “B-plus answer. So there are lots of those…what was your technical term? Thingies in the human body. And Twinge here can manipulate them. Also hormones and neurotransmitters. The upshot is she can control your bodily functions. Make them happen or not happen. Speed them up or slow them down.”

  She started to get it. “Like vomiting, or…”

  Twinge buried her head beneath a pillow. “Stop already. It’s disgusting.”

  “It’s…certainly unusual. I didn’t know a Shine could do that.”

  “It’s not just the vomit thing,” Dream continued. “Think of any bodily function. She can make you desperately need to pee. She can make you take a dump in your pants. She can make you so horny—”

  “Stop!” Twinge beat her legs down on the bed. “I told you already. Revolting.”

  “So you can see why they wouldn’t want a dangerous creature like her out on the streets,” Dream concluded. “Tank wanted to call her Trigger, since she triggers bodily functions, but Dr. Cootie—that’s what we call Coutant—said that sounded too weapony, plus for some reason I don’t comprehend it made her think of a horse. So we settled on Twinge.”

  She tried to drink this all in. “Could you speed up my metabolism? So I could like, eat three hot fudge sundaes but never gain a pound?”

  “Stop it, you dog biscuits!” Twinge screamed from under the pillow. “It’s so sewer!”

  “All right.” She redirected her attention. “Why do they call you Dream? Does that relate to your Shine?”

  “Yes.”

  “Which is?”

  “I prefer to let people figure it out on their own.”

  “Hard to do when we’re not allowed to use our Shines.”

  Dream just smiled.

  “It’s not what you’d call a great unsolved mystery.” Twinge threw her pillow at Dream’s head. “She can read your dreams.”

  “Really? Like you’d read a book?”

  “Exactly,” Twinge said. “Can’t do a thing about them. But she can read them.”

  “So you get inside people’s heads.”

  Dream sighed. “Inside their subconscious, technically. There’s a specific part of the right frontal lobe where dream info is stored. And I can read it. They think maybe it has something to do with psionic waves. They don’t really know.”

  “But it works,” Twinge said. “So be careful what you dream about.”

  “Is this Shine useful? Or dangerous?”

  Dream shrugged. “You’d be amazed how freaky people get when they think someone’s playing around in their head.”

  “I’m surprised you ever—”

  “Beverly is trying to call you.”

  Harriet’s voice came out of nowhere and put an instant chill on the convo.

  “What did you say?”

  Harriet sounded strangely strident. It took a moment to realize that was because her voice was almost completely devoid of normal vocal inflection. She raised both hands and twisted her fingers in the air, as if she were sculpting invisible clay.

  “What’s she doing? Is she using her Shine? What if she gets caught? Harriet, you should stop that.”

  Harriet ignored her. “Beverly is still trying to call you.”

  “How do you know?”

  Harriet stared straight ahead, her hands flapping. “Dr. Cootie’s talking to her. Beverly says she wants to make sure you’re okay. She says she worries about you.” Harriet’s voice remained flat, but she spoke as if there were no doubt about a word she said.

  “And you can somehow hear the call?”

  “She wants to make sure you remembered to bring your pads. She says it’s your time of—”

  “Mohandas H Gandhi!�
� She felt her face flush. She hadn’t meant to swear. But that was not a first-day topic. “You shouldn’t be…eavesdropping. Or whatever it is you do.”

  “She intercepts wireless transmissions,” Twinge explained. “Texts, phone calls, email, stims, books, even video. In her head.”

  “How?”

  “No one has the slightest idea.”

  “That’s creepy. I mean—” She reached out toward Harriet. “Nothing personal. Can you read my email?”

  “Easily.”

  “I use a password.”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “That’s kinda privacy invading.”

  “Don’t we know it,” Twinge said. “They say she’s somewhere on the autistic spectrum, so don’t expect her to be Miss Warmth. She reports data, but she doesn’t really get it, especially if it has to do with, like, normal human emotions. Or humor. Or sarcasm. Or deception. Or, you know, any of the things that separate humans from robots.” Twinge walked to the mirror over the dresser and stared at herself. “Am I getting a unibrow?”

  She was startled by the change of topic. “I think you’re gorgeous.”

  “Uh oh,” Dream said. “Sounds like someone’s in the wrong room.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means you got the big infodump on us,” Twinge said. “Time to spill about yourself. What’s your Shine?”

  “I’d rather not talk about it.”

  “You’re gonna have to. If not here, then in therapy. First you have to admit you have a problem that you’re powerless against, yadda, yadda, yadda.”

  “I’m not even sure what my Shine is anymore. I thought I did. But after what happened in Seattle—”

  Twinge gasped. “Oh my Gandhi. You’re her!”

  Dream went bug-eyed. “Wow. Didn’t see that plot twist coming.”

  “You’re the little girl who turned the world upside-down,” Twinge said. “You’re the reason we’re here!”

  She clenched her eyes shut. She knew this would happen. Now they were certain to hate her. “It’s not my fault. I don’t know what went wrong. I didn’t mean for it to happen.”

  “But it sure did, girl.” Twinge whistled. “I guess they’re gonna have to stop treating me like I’m the big twisted sister. You make me look harmless by comparison. Look, whatever it is you do, don’t do it here, okay? I don’t want to die in a pile of rubble.”

  “I was just trying to help this little girl…”

  Dream gave her a long look. “And you brought down a city?”

  She felt the tears returning but she fought them back. They already hated her. Crying would make them think she was pathetic. “Yeah,” she answered quietly, once she had her voice under control. “Kinda. Has—Has anything like that ever happened to any of you?”

  “No,” Twinge said. “Never. And it better not happen here. They are super-strict on Shine in this joint. They’re watching us constantly. If they catch you doing a Shine, they’ll come down hard.”

  “Harriet’s doing…whatever it is she does.”

  “Harriet’s Harriet. You’re the girl who burned all the books at Amazon and left Microsoft homeless. They will cut you no slack. None.”

  “Are you trying to scare me?”

  “We’re all scared. Don’t you get what this place is really about, sister? They’re Transforming Our Light, all right. They’re burying it under a basket till they can snuff it out.” Twinge turned back to her laundry. “So now you understand the real reason we’re upset about Perfume disappearing. It’s not that we’re such big-hearted people. It’s that we’re afraid we’ll be next.”

  7

  “I do not have time!”

  Dr. Coutant’s assistant, Joseph, tucked his chin. All at once, the muscle-bound man looked like a puppy dog. “I’m sorry. He insists.”

  “Does he understand everything I’m dealing with right now?”

  Joseph remained equal parts embarrassed and insistent. “I know. But—”

  “He insists. End of story.” She threw her tablet down on the desk, grabbed her lab coat, and headed toward the door.

  She knew there were about a thousand other matters she should be dealing with. The Perfume situation. Monitoring Aura. Everything going on overseas. But when Dr. Simon Estes demanded your presence—end of discussion. At least as far as Estes was concerned. He had the ear of the powers that be. The ones who, among other things, paid the bills here at TYL.

  He’d bought her soul, lock, stock and barrel, a good long while ago.

  And to be fair, she needed him. For now. So she had to focus on the endgame. What really mattered. Some things were more important to her than all the others combined.

  One in particular.

  She walked to the stables, took the hidden stairs down and opened his door without knocking. She’d been against letting Estes have a satellite lab here, but as usual, he insisted. And got his way. Best to be near the data stream, he said.

  She opened her mouth to give the scientist a piece of her mind—but never got a chance.

  “Do you know what a Faraday cage is?” Dr. Estes asked, without looking up from his work.

  “Something you use to imprison Shines?”

  He grunted, which was his version of a chuckle. Why would she expect courtesy from him? She thought he was around sixty but he looked about a hundred-and-twelve. She forgave the rat’s nest hair, as she suspected he thought it made him look more like Einstein, thus making him seem smarter. “Not as such. Didn’t you take physics in school?”

  “Yes. But I made a point of forgetting every word of it the day after they issued my diploma. I chose applied psychiatry because I was more interested in people than particles. So what do you do with a Faraday cage?”

  “You use it to absorb electromagnetic energy.”

  “So? Shines don’t emit EMPs.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  She thought a moment. She’d never heard anyone suggest it. Did this mean Shines used some form of electronic telepathy? Directed brain waves? Disturbed gravitonic fields? “Are you saying Shine ability relates to EM?”

  “Mechanical EM, no.” Estes fiddled with his watch, pulling images up on his tablet faster than she could register. “But could there be such a thing as a biological EMP? One that somehow affects, disrupts, or destroys the normal human electromagnetic field? And if so, could we learn to scan for it, so we could detect Shine manifestations?”

  “That would be more efficient than the cameras and listening devices we have scattered around this so-called rehab. Is it possible?”

  “We all emit EM pulses, you know. Some much stronger than others.”

  “Is that what causes Shine? EMPs?”

  “I didn’t say that. But it’s an interesting idea, don’t you think?”

  She sighed, since she couldn’t shoot him in the head. “Is Shine genetic?”

  “My dear Dr. Coutant—everything is genetic, when you get down to it.”

  “Apparently not Shine ability. They don’t get it from Shine parents, because there aren’t any Shine parents.”

  “So far as we know.”

  “Nor is there any evidence of lateral genetic transmission.”

  “Which doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. It just means we haven’t detected it yet. We don’t know how to look. We don’t even know what branch of scientists should be investigating this. We don’t—”

  “I get the idea, Dr. Estes. And this has been a busy day that is far from over. We discovered that one of the patients is—”

  “I know all about that.”

  He did? How? Somewhere beneath the gray hair and the thick glasses and the absent-minded professor persona, there was a calculating brain that never ceased to surprise her. Or terrify her.

  “And let me tell you,” he continued, “that pales in comparison to the reason I’ve called you here. We have our marching orders. Certain events that I probably do not need to detail have forced everyone to escalate their timetables.
I’ve been given the go-ahead.”

  “For what?”

  “Phase Five.”

  Coutant felt as if someone sucked the air out of her lungs. It was really happening, then. Everything she had feared for so long. She wasn’t ready.

  Estes pushed his glasses up his nose. “I think this cage can be modified to detect, restrict, and possibly even absorb Shine energy. If my data is correct, it will be a great technological step forward.”

  “Because we’ll be able to control them.”

  Estes’s lids hung low over his eyes. “Because we’ll be able to drain them dry till they’re dead.”

  She tried to control the trembling in her hands. She was supposed to be the cool calculating scientist, the objective observer, a role she’d never been good at faking.

  She averted her eyes, glancing at the papers spread across Simon’s desk. Mostly computer printouts of data logs and endless DNA streams.

  “Have you unlocked the Shine genome?”

  “As if that were anything.” Estes made a snorting sound. “Did you know the entire human genome can be copied and stored on a 2-gig flash drive? It’s no different for these Shines. In fact, I can record the genotype of every confirmed Shine in less space than the simplest tablet app consumes. But printing it out isn’t the same as understanding it. Or duplicating it.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “We’ve been charged with devising a defense strategy. An anti-Shine approach. Did you think that was going to be some secret formula? An immunization? A Shine emergency broadcast system?” His expression was something irritatingly close to a smirk. “Then you haven’t thought very hard about who we’re working for.”

  “They said—”

  “Doesn’t matter what they said. There’s only one thing they want. Which is why I called you here. We need to kick this project into high gear. Perfume is a problem? Fine, give her to me. And anyone else who won’t be missed. So we can deliver what they want before it’s too late to help.”

  “And that would be…a defensive strategy?”

  “Don’t make me laugh.” Estes looked at her as if she were the dumbest Ph.D. on the face of the earth. “They don’t want a shield. They want a weapon.”