The Darkest Legacy by Alexandra Bracken
Agent Cooper didn’t have to worry. There would be no crying. No emotional mess to mop up. Half the poison these people churned out with their signs, their radio shows, on their news programs was lies, and the rest of it was nonsensical. Freak was an old insult—sometimes you heard a nasty word so often it lost its fangs. That, or I guess your skin eventually could grow too strong, too thick to cut. My heart didn’t bruise the way it used to—they were way too late to get in that particular blow.
I swallowed the thickness in my throat, squeezing the phone’s case in my hand.
If they’re human…
I cleared my throat again, looking out my window. The group of protestors was thinner on the ground, but growing in number again as we left the construction zone. “Everyone’s entitled to stupidity, but they really abuse the privilege, don’t they?”
Mel gave a weak laugh at that, reaching over to smooth back a strand of my hair that had come loose from its twist.
“Still, better call it in,” Agent Cooper said, taking his hand off the wheel to nudge Agent Martinez. “It’s not a direct threat, but they need to know they’re one step away from taking it too far.”
“Agreed,” Agent Martinez said. “We need to start documenting everything, no matter how small. Build a case.”
“Actually,” Mel cut in, now reaching back to adjust the pins she’d used to help secure her locs into a bun, “it’s probably best not to give that fire any air. It’s what they want—we shut them down and they’ll jump on a narrative about us violating their right to free speech. Our job is to tell the truth about the Psi, and the polls show that we’ve been hitting that ball out of the park. The people are on our side.”
That was a small comfort, but it did help. Sometimes it felt like I was talking to everyone and no one at the same time. I never saw the words leaving my mouth reflected on the audience’s faces, good or bad. They just absorbed them. Whether or not they internalized them was another question.
I glanced down at my phone again.
No response.
“I should tell you before we get to the venue,” Mel said, turning more fully toward me. A bead of sweat rolled down her cheek, glinting on her dark skin. She reached down to adjust the air-conditioning vent toward her. “I received an e-mail from Interim President Cruz’s chief of staff this morning saying that they’re going to be sending along some new language for your speech. I’m not sure when it’s going to come in, so I might need to add it directly to the teleprompter.”
I didn’t care if my sigh sounded petulant. They had to realize how annoying it was.
“Aren’t they done tweaking it yet?” I hated not having time to practice new material and straighten out my delivery. “What kind of new language is it anyway?”
Mel slid her laptop back into her satchel. The battered leather case tried to spit up a few of the overstuffed folders inside it to make room. “Just some finessed points, from the sound of it. I know you could recite the speech backward and half-asleep at this point, but just keep an eye on the teleprompter.”
I’d repeated different versions of the same speech a hundred times, in a hundred places, about the nature of fear, and how the Psi had reentered society with only a few ripples. But the added responsibility was a good sign that they trusted me more and more. Maybe they’d even add dates and use me again in the fall, for the big election.
“All right,” I said. “But—”
It was the suddenness of the movement that caught my eye, more than the woman herself. She pulled away from the cluster of sign-wavers and bullhorn-shouters lined up along the shoulder to our left. Long, stringy gray hair, a faded floral shirt, a blue scrap of fabric decorated with white stars tied to her bone-white arm. She could have been anyone’s grandmother—if it hadn’t been for the flaming bottle she clutched in her hand.
I knew we were speeding, that there was no way it could be happening, but time has a way of bending around you when it wants you to see something.
The seconds slowed, ticking in time to each of her running steps. Her lips pulled back, deepening the stark lines of her face as she held the bottle high over her head and flung it toward the SUV, shouting something I couldn’t hear.
The small firebomb hit the cement and billowed up with a loud, sucking gasp. It flared as it devoured the traces of oil and chemicals on the highway, blasting my window with enough heat and pressure for it to crack with a high, suffering whine.
My seat belt locked against my chest as our car swerved sharply to the right. I craned my neck, watching the road blaze with a wall of red and gold.
“You guys okay?” Agent Cooper bit out, slamming his foot onto the gas. Mel and I were both thrown back against our seats again. I reached out with one hand, gripping the door to steady myself.
Up ahead, one of the cop cars swerved and blared its sirens. The crowd of protestors scattered into the nearby woods and fields like the cowards they were.
“Holy shit” was Mel’s response.
Fury stormed through me, twisting my insides, clawing at them. I shook with useless adrenaline. That woman—she could have hurt another protestor, Mel, the agents, or one of the police officers. Killed them.
Heat writhed inside me, giving form to my fury. A sharp chemical smell burned the inside of my nose.
It would be so easy to get out of the car and find that woman. Grab her by the hair, throw her to the ground, pin her there until one of the officers caught up with us. So easy.
The charge from the car’s battery seethed nearby, waiting. You think that’s enough to scare me? You think I haven’t had people try to kill me before?
Plenty had tried. A few had come close. I wasn’t prey anymore, and I wouldn’t let anyone turn me into it again, least of all an elderly woman dabbling in a bit of bomb-making with her unpleasant friends.
A single cooling word got through my scorching thoughts.
Don’t.
I forced myself to release my hold on the door. I clenched and unclenched that hand, trying to work out the tension still there. That would be exactly what they wanted. Get a reaction, prove that we’re all monsters only waiting for the right moment to break out of our cages.
She’s not worth it. None of them are.
She wouldn’t be the last one to try to hurt me. I accepted that, and was grateful for the protection we all had now. There was no room for ghosts in my life, whether they were living or dead. Ruby used to say that we’d earned our memories, but we didn’t owe them anything beyond their keeping. I guess she’d know better than most.
We were moving forward, and the past was best left to its darkness. Its ashes.
“It’s all right,” I said, when I trusted my voice to be calm. “It’s okay.”
“That was the definition of not okay,” Mel said, her tone brittle.
“I think you have your direct threat,” Agent Cooper said to his partner, never taking his eyes off the road.
I flipped my phone over from where I had pressed it against my leg, ignoring the pulse pounding at my temples. Even with its rubber case, the screen flickered as a single lance of electricity crawled out of my finger and danced over it. I dropped it back onto my lap, silently praying for the phone to turn itself back on.
Damn. I hadn’t done that in such a long time.
Finally, after another agonizing second, the screen flashed back up again. I swallowed against the dryness in my throat, opening the same text thread as before. My message was still there, still waiting for a response.
“About ten minutes now,” Agent Cooper said. “We’re almost there.”
The phone buzzed in my hand, making me jump. Finally—
I glanced down, fingers flying over the screen to input my password. The thread opened.
COULDN’T GET AWAY. SORRY. NEXT TIME?
“Hey, everything okay?” Mel asked, resting a hand on my arm. Her eyes were soft, searching. I had the stupidest urge to lean my head against her shoulder and shut my eyes, shut out the world
She must have seen it in my face, because she quickly added, “Should we move the event? Even delaying it a few hours might help. I almost went into cardiac arrest, so I can only imagine what that just did to you.”
The smile I plastered onto my face was so wide, it actually ached. “No, I’m all right. Really. No delay necessary. Besides, if we push back this one, we might hit traffic and miss the Japanese embassy event.”
The embassy was reopening their Japan Information and Culture Center and had asked me to do the honor of introducing a documentary film by a fellow Japanese American Psi, Kenji Ota. To say I was excited was an understatement; I’d only met Kenji once in passing, but for weeks now I’d been looking forward to having the chance to connect with someone who’d come from a similar background and experienced the same things I had.
“Can we go through today’s schedule?” I asked. “Make sure I have it down?”
Mel squeezed my wrist reassuringly. “You’re amazing. I don’t know how you stay so strong in the face of all this. I meant what I said, though. I can ask about moving the event.”
I shook my head, my heart skipping at the thought. The second President Cruz’s director of communications suspected I couldn’t handle the stress of this job, I’d be taken off it. “There’s no need. I promise.”
“All right,” Mel said, looking just a little relieved. This would have been a nightmare for her to reschedule. She reached into her bag and pulled out a folder with the day’s date and began to run through our itinerary, matching hours to actions.
I dropped the phone back into my own bag, trying to find something to ward off the pressure building in my chest. It pushed at my ribs like it could split me open and reveal the raw mess inside.
Maybe I should have responded? Or would I have just bothered him more?
“Nine thirty a.m., the dean will introduce you….”
Next time? I was tempted to take the phone back out and reread Chubs’s message, just to make sure I hadn’t imagined it. My mind couldn’t stop whispering those two words, wouldn’t let go of that question mark—that one small symbol that had never existed between any of us before.
ONCE UPON A TIME, I went months without saying a word. More than a year, in fact.
It happened by accident at first—or not by accident, exactly. I still struggled to explain it, to justify why I silenced myself. It was as if the barbed wire that surrounded the rehabilitation camp had cut me so deeply the night we escaped, all the words in me had just bled out. I’d been so empty under my skin. So cold. Weak enough for shock to spill in and take over.
The truth is, some things go beyond words: The sound of gunshots thundering through the night. Blood staining the backs of thin uniforms. Kids facedown, slowly buried by the snow falling from the dark sky. The feeling of being strangled by your own hope in that second it escaped the fencing and left you behind to die.
The next few days I was just…tired. Unsure. Questions would come at me, and I would nod. Shake my head. It took so much energy. I was afraid of picking the wrong words out of the messy darkness inside my head. Scared to say something the others, the boys who had saved me, wouldn’t like.
Every second we spent driving in the van, I could see it: I would tell them I was hungry or cold or hurt, and they would decide I was a problem, just like my parents once had. The boys would leave me behind somewhere just as quickly as they had decided to take me with them that night we’d escaped.
But they didn’t. And, pretty soon after, I realized that they wouldn’t. But by then, it felt more comfortable to pick up that ratty notebook we shared and carefully choose my words. I could spell out the exact response I wanted, no mistakes. I could choose when I wanted to say something. I could have that much control over my life.
The problem was that I kept choosing silence. Over and over again, I let myself fall into the safety of its depths. Painful things could stay buried, never needing to be understood or talked through. The past wouldn’t come back to hurt me if I never spoke of it. The memory of snow and blood and screams couldn’t rise up and bury me in its freezing pressure, its dark. I wouldn’t need to admit to being scared or hungry or exhausted and worry the others. My silence became a kind of shield.
Something I could use to protect myself.
Something I could hide behind.
That was years ago now. I became known to the world for what I had said, not as the silent little girl with the shaved head and oversize gloves. I appeared on television screens and in front of crowds. She became a ghost, abandoned in the memories I no longer wanted to remember.
Words still seemed to sit a little heavier in my mouth than they did for other people. It was all too easy to slip back into those comfortable depths inside me, where there was quiet. Especially on days like that one, with the last lick of adrenaline making me antsy to move on to the next event.
I couldn’t focus on any one thing, no matter how hard I tried. The two dozen rows of people in front of us became an indistinct haze of color and small, shifting movements. I lost the thread of whatever Penn State’s steely-haired dean of admissions was saying, the same way I struggled to keep up with the campus tour he’d given us earlier. Now even his dark skin and blue seersucker suit were smearing at the edge of my vision.
I tapped one high heel down, brought the other up, tapped that down, brought the other up, working off the lingering buzz of nerves from the car ride in. I closed my eyes against the warm sunlight, but opened them again just as quickly when I only found the image of the old woman’s snarling face there.
The air wept with moisture, so thick with late-summer heat it gave the sky a silky coating. My thick hair rebelled, swelling against the hold of the bobby pins, just at the edge of slipping out of its careful style. A drop of sweat rolled down the ridges of my spine, gluing my blouse to my skin.
Mel gripped my arm, her nails digging into me. I came back to myself all at once, pushing up onto my feet and letting the world open around me again.
The scattered applause wasn’t even loud enough to echo back off the columns of the large building behind us, the one the dean had called Old Main. Not a good sign when it came to their interest level, but I could win them over. Being a freak meant that people were more than willing to stare at you for a while.
I stepped through the shadow cast by Old Main’s clock tower. Setting my shoulders back, I licked my teeth to make sure there was no lipstick on them and lifted my hand in a wave.
The dean stepped away from the podium, which rested on top of a temporary platform that had been built out over the steps that led down to the grassy seating area. He swept his hands toward it as I approached, inviting me forward with an encouraging smile I forced myself to return.
I didn’t need encouragement. This was my job.
The meager applause was lost again, this time to the music that poured through the speakers on either side of the bottom step down on the grass—some kind of fight song, I guessed. While I waited for the words to load on the teleprompter, I cast a quick glance around the audience, making sure to avoid looking directly into the fleet of news cameras positioned off to the right of the stairs.
“Good afternoon,” I said, my hands grasping the lip of the podium. I hated the way my voice sounded as it blasted out of speakers—like a little girl’s. “It’s an honor to be here with you today. Thank you, Dean Harrison, for giving me the opportunity to address your incredible new class and inviting me to celebrate the reopening of your illustrious university.”
I sincerely doubted there had been any invitations involved—Mel pitched all of these events based on population models and where she thought we would get the most media play. She always seemed to know just the right way to threaten someone to get a No magically transformed into an enthusiastic Yes.
Every speech was carefully altered at its beginning and end to fit the venue. These slight adjustments were the only variations in the usual routine. My
Parents and other family members filled the very back rows. Farther in were the men and women a decade past what you might expect from typical college freshmen. All of them were trying to recover the educations they’d been forced to abandon when the majority of universities had gone bankrupt at the height of the Psi panic.
Then there were those my age, even a little younger. They sat behind the reporters, their thumb-size buttons visible on their shirts, as they were meant to be at all times. Many green buttons, fewer blues, and even fewer yellow ones like my own. And, scattered between them all, white.
I glanced down at the podium, pausing in my speech for a quick breath. Blank. The word slipped through my mind, as unwelcome as it was ugly. These were the ones who had elected—or had parents who had elected for them—to get the “cure” procedure. Specifically, the ones who had received surgical implants to halt and effectively neuter their brain’s access to the abilities they acquired when they survived IAAN.
“We truly are the lucky ones,” I continued. “We have survived the trials that the last decade has brought to our country, and they have united us in ways that no one could have predicted. Of course, we have all made sacrifices. We have struggled. And from that, we have learned much—including how to trust one another again, and how to believe in the future of this nation.”
There was a loud, sharp cough from the far left end of the front row. It was just pointed enough to draw my gaze as I took a quick sip from the sweating water glass that had been left for me.
Two teenagers sat just behind the police officer standing watch over the left side of the audience. One, a girl with brown skin, glowing in her yellow silk sundress, had stretched her long legs out in front of her. They were crossed at the ankles, just above her strappy sandals. Her head had lolled to the side, her long ponytail of curly black hair spilling over her shoulder. The metallic-rimmed cat’s-eye glasses had dipped down the bridge of her nose, revealing more of her features: full brows and high, slanted cheekbones. She also had what I assumed were beautiful, wide eyes, but there was no way to really confirm it, given that I’d apparently talked her right into a nice nap.