Darkhaven

‘You weren’t supposed to actually shoot her! What happened to blanks?′ Stephen’s furious voice jolted me back to consciousness.

‘What happened to preparing her for the real world?’ Donovan, cavalier. A wave of loathing surged through me, washing out the pain that suffused my chest. I opened my eyes to find myself lying on a blanket on the ground, Keraun hovering in the distance, a crease between his brown eyes. I took a tentative breath. Both lungs worked. The pain receded moment by moment as bone, muscle, fascia and skin realigned and knitted together. My jumper was wet with blood, and I shivered. Nearby, the finish-line flag flapped in the breeze, slapping against the pole with irregular clangs. I squinted into the blue sky, tried to talk and croaked like a frog.

Stephen appeared at my side, muttering about guns being the most unnecessary invention on the planet and peering at me, grey eyes full of concern. ‘Are you okay? How do you feel?’

‘Okay,’ I said, pushing myself up to sit. Physically, at least, I was okay, except for a pounding ache in my ribs like a bruise to the bones. I took another breath, appreciating how good it felt to have both lungs back, even with pain lancing my side. I rose to my feet, swaying but managing to stay upright.

‘She’s fine. We needed to test her heal speed.’ Donovan shoved my shoulder, pretending to be playful, but I could feel the aggression underneath.

‘Leave me alone,’ I growled. Well, it sounded growly in my head.

Donovan laughed as she buckled her helmet. ‘See you Tuesday.’ She mounted the monstrous motorbike, gunned the engine and vanished in a flagrant spray of dirt. I groaned and sagged against the side of the Rex. My adrenaline drained away, taking the last of my body heat and most of my anger with it, although I still seethed over Donovan and her awful test.

‘How was it then?’ I asked through chattering teeth. ‘My heal speed.’

Stephen perched on the passenger seat with a laptop balanced on his knee. He looked up, then set the computer aside, shucked off his hoodie and handed it to me, goosebumps dimpling his forearms. ‘You’ll get faster.’

I took the jumper, but my shirt was still covered in blood, so I didn’t put it on. ‘I thought I was supposed to be, like, superhuman,’ I grumped. ‘All this is so hard.’

Stephen ran his fingers through his hair. ‘Do you have any idea what we’re asking you to do with these challenges? They’re well beyond what I’d expect a new Eventer to manage, but we need to know where you’re at for the Taskforce mission.’

‘And I failed.’ I glared at the flag, still twenty metres away from where I’d pulled up. My gaze caught Keraun’s. He leaned against the Rex’s bonnet, his posture stiff.

‘It was a benchmark test. Your stats on here’ – Stephen indicated software that had, unbeknown to me, been analysing my driving – ‘are quite good. I’m sorry about your getting shot, that wasn’t part of the plan.’

‘Not your plan,’ I muttered.

‘Donovan has her own way. She means well. You,’ he said, climbing out of the Rex and turning to Keraun, ‘were also not part of the plan. What are you doing here?’

I bristled. Keraun showing up uninvited was my concern – if I wanted to be concerned. ‘He’s with me.’

Stephen eyed Keraun with suspicion, then flashed me a questioning glance. ‘I thought we talked about this.’

I shrugged, stifling a gasp as my ribs screeched, but I wasn’t about to explain my choice of friends. If that’s what Keraun and I were.

‘I’ll go,’ Keraun said, breaking the silence.

‘Do you need a lift somewhere?’ Stephen asked. My intuition flared – Stephen was partly genuine in his offer, because he was Stephen, but he was also fishing to find out how Keraun had got here in the first place.

A thin smile twisted Keraun’s lips. ‘Nah, I’m good, thanks. See you, Gabby.’ Without waiting for a reply, or another loaded question from Stephen, he turned around and loped away, back down the gravel road. It looked like walking, but he covered ground awfully quickly.

Stephen turned his back so I could strip out of my cold, bloody clothes and don the hoodie. I simmered over Donovan and her rubbish training and now Stephen’s open dislike of the one person who had helped me out. Stephen squeezed my arm as we climbed back into the Corolla. ‘I’m just looking out for you,’ he said. ‘I don’t know who Keraun is, but he’s not your average teenager.’

I grunted. There was no arguing with that.

***

I expected to be driven home, but apparently we had one more thing to do today. Stephen took an unusual route, refusing to answer my questions until we pulled up on the side of the road in a leafy suburb. The building we were in front of looked like a house, except for a sign out the front: Wattle View Hospice. A wattle tree in full yellow bloom took up most of the front yard, and I could smell its perfume even with the car windows up.

‘Don’t worry, we’re not going in.’ Stephen reached into the back seat, produced three manila folders and handed them to me. They had little labels on the tabs: #1.1, #1.6 and #1.14.

‘What are these?’

Stephen’s eyes were filled with regret. ‘The files that convinced Catherine to stay.’

‘And now you think I’ll be convinced too.’ The paper was heavier in my hands than it should be. I didn’t want to look.

Stephen sighed. ‘No, it’s just for your information. Full disclosure, remember?’

I opened the top one, #1.1. A photograph was paperclipped to the inside of the file. It was one of those horrendous school photographs, but this kid actually looked cute instead of awkward, which was all I’d ever managed. He was about eight years old, with brown hair gelled into spikes, a freckled nose and a broad, dimpled smile. The sky-blue school polo shirt complemented his light blue eyes.

‘I bet he had to beat the girls away,’ I commented to fill the silence. Stephen didn’t reply. I felt silly for saying it.

The next page was some kind of transcript, but most of it was blacked out. At the top were handwritten initials: T.J. The rest of his name was redacted. So was his date of birth, parental details, address … the only other readable information was an army enlistment number. At the bottom of the page was an authorisation for ‘Subject 1.1’ and a signature dated for November 1999 – the year I was born. I turned the page over. The next was a memo, stating that Subject 1.1 was commencing with the application of the Praegressus program. More redaction. A series of reports followed, all dated between November 1999 and January 2000, noting things like “no adverse effects”, “program retention successful”, and other words that didn’t make sense without the surrounding context. There wasn’t a single name on any of these. The final page had no black lines. I read it, feeling even more the callousness of my comment.

FILE CLOSURE REPORT

Date: 20 July 2002

Reference: Subject #1.1 – T. Johnston, age 9

Subject Status: Deceased

Comments: T.J. experienced his Event on the morning of 19 July 2002. Donovan and May pursued unsuccessfully. He was not recovered.

The report was signed by Stephen May. I closed the file and toyed with the edges of it. Eventually, Stephen spoke.

‘We’d lost three Eventers already, without even knowing their names. It was just too hard, trying to be everywhere whenever there was storm activity, so Donovan snuck into the Taskforce and managed to retrieve some files. As you can see, there’s not much in them. We pieced together the data, and we found the boy. We were so close.’ He paused, twisting his hands in his lap. ‘The Taskforce got to him first. They killed him and made it look like a lightning-induced cardiac arrest.’

Sensing that the worst wasn’t over, I opened the #1.6 file: Charlotte Sulley. Her Event report was dated 2010, age 19. There was no redacted Taskforce information, just pages of medical or psychological words I didn’t understand. Donovan had signed this one.

‘We found her first, but she was nineteen and she didn’t want to leave her fiancé to stay with us. So we let her go.’

‘What, no memory loss, or deactivation or whatever?’

Stephen shook his head. ‘She was the first who had a choice, and, like you, we felt that was important. But Donovan and I, and Liam by then, we were supported through our transitions. We didn’t have the pressures of the outside world to the same degree, and we didn’t realise.’

I nodded as I understood. ‘She couldn’t cope with the sensory overload. So why didn’t she come back?’

‘She didn’t want to. She said she could get by, and by then she was pretty angry – rightfully so, I know – and she didn’t want anything to do with us. But it got worse. She had a genetic disorder prior to her Event that affected her hearing and vision, so when that corrected and everything enhanced, the transformation was too much. After that, we set the policy that we gave you. Stay and transform, or deactivate and forget. Peter’s Event was a couple of years later. He chose to forget. We keep an eye on him. He’s doing fine.’

Peter was Subject #1.14. His file didn’t have a closure report, just a cursory log of his Event, and some basic medical information – where he worked, who his GP was, details of a stint in hospital for an allergic reaction to seafood.

I closed Peter’s file. ‘What happened to Charlotte?’

Stephen waved at the building we were parked next to. ‘We tried the antiserum, but it was too late. The memory adjustment worked, so she has no memory of what happened to her, but we couldn’t reverse the Praegressus. She lives in a home now.’

I gazed past the wattle tree. The hospice building had no windows, the better to keep sound and light out, I supposed. Charlotte would be sitting inside, her enhanced senses driving her mad, with no idea why.

Stephen’s voice was pained. ‘She spends most of her days under varying levels of sedation to cope with the overload and anxiety she doesn’t understand.’

‘For the rest of her life,’ I said softly.

‘The rest of her greatly extended life.’

The suburb was silent except for the warbling of a magpie outside, singing happily in the winter sunshine.

‘How does the lightning strike so many of us? It seems unlikely.’

Stephen nodded. ‘The lightning provides the energy for the genetic changes to happen all at once; without it, the program takes weeks of painful electrotherapy to fully activate. We thought the lightning trigger would be more efficient, and we developed a way to make all Praegressus subjects susceptible to lightning strikes. Luci was the wizard behind it, I’m still not entirely sure how it’s possible, but a Praegressus candidate generates larger negative streamers around them in a charged field.’

I nodded, even though I wasn’t entirely sure how that worked. ‘Why? Why do all this?’

Stephen implored me with his eyes. ‘I didn’t use myself as a test subject because I wanted to be superhuman and live forever. I did it because there was no way I was risking it on other people without knowing the effects. Only after we developed a successful program did we even consider expanding, and Donovan and I thought we were using military personnel. Consenting adults. Jan set up the test group. By the time we found out who was in it, it was already done.’

‘So my mother didn’t volunteer me for the program?’

Stephen’s eyes muddled with tears. ‘I don’t believe so.’

‘But why do it at all? Genetic experimentation?’

‘To save the human race. The brief we were given by the military initially was that they had intelligence of a new type of biowarfare, a virus that could genetically modify entire populations and make them infertile, or deformed, or worse. We needed a defence, one where human DNA could be made to express perfectly despite external influences. Of course all that turned out to be a lie and what they really wanted was a superior soldier. But I still believe it’s important. This is our evolution. Humans that can survive on low-nutrient food or thrive in wider environmental conditions? Humans that aren’t subject to genetic or degenerative diseases? And if it turns out we have magic…’ He took a deep breath and expelled it, fogging the windscreen in front of him. ‘It’s still how we’re going to save the human race.’

I was silent all the way home.