Darkhaven

I found Zenna sitting at a picnic bench next to the West Beach Surf Club, listlessly picking at chips and gravy with a plastic fork. I climbed onto the bench next to her, plopping down as I lost my balance. My butt cheek landed on something hard – the disk from the Taskforce was still in my back pocket. I took it out and put it on the table so I could sit comfortably. ‘Hey, girl.’

‘Hey.’ Zenna’s voice was bleak, like all the life had been sucked out of it.

‘What’s wrong?’

She heaved a sigh and flicked a fallen chip off the bench onto the grass. An opportunistic seagull pecked it up.

‘Zenna?’ I asked softly.

Her face scrunched like she was about to cry. ‘I’m not going to graduate.’

‘What?’

‘I flunked my English test. Now I’m going to fail the unit and I won’t get the internship if I don’t pass high school this year.’

‘What, like, literally failed?’

‘Forty per cent.’

‘Well, the marks still count. That’s only a small difference to make up in the final exam, right?’

‘I’ll be lucky if I even get fifty on the exam, and I’ll never scrape sixty.’ She tossed another morsel out to the gathering seagulls. They squabbled and consumed it before it even hit the ground.

‘The exam has more weighting, you wouldn’t need sixty. I thought you were going okay with English this year.’ Last year, after Zenna had nearly failed first semester, her parents had arranged a tutor for her. She had pulled things together by the end of the year.

Now she shrugged. ‘I just can’t do it.’

‘You can,’ I urged, stealing a chip before the whole lot went to the birds.

‘That’s easy for you to say. You’ve always been smart.’ The words stung a little, until she continued, voice lowered to a miserable whisper. ‘I think I’m a mistake. God, or whatever it is, made a mistake with me.’

My hand was halfway back to the chips. I redirected it to her shoulder. ‘You are not a mistake. You have amazing talent. Besides, God or whatever has nothing to do with it.’

‘So I’m an evolutionary failure.’

I went for the chips. ‘More like an adaptation that will go on to be something totally new and brilliant.’

Her lips almost twitched into a smile. ‘So a mutation, then.’

I giggled. ‘If you like. Maybe you’re at the wrong school.’

‘Mutant school.’ She smiled wanly. ‘Sounds about right. What’s been going on with you lately? I’ve been trying to find you to talk for ages, and you’re never around.’

It was my turn to shrug, although the accusation felt unfair. She’d bailed on me often enough, and for every message she answered there were three she didn’t. ‘Just study. I’m worried about passing too.’

‘Yeah right. When have you ever been worried about studying? You can’t lie to me, Gabs. I know you’re hiding something.’

She was right. Although Cecelia was my oldest and closest friend, Zenna had a knack for seeing straight through me. I was so tired of lying. I yearned to tell someone about what I was going through, someone who wasn’t involved in all this crap, someone who just cared for me and not what I could offer the organisation. I closed my eyes for a moment, sinking into my quiet place, testing the feeling. Was it safe to tell her? And then the question hit, the question so obvious and stupid that it had never occurred to me to ask in all my training with Liam. How would I know? What if I didn’t? Fear shot through me as I recalled being in the stairwell a few hours earlier. I’d used my intuition. I’d made the wrong call. Because I didn’t know.

And just like that, it turned off. The calm place that helped me know what to do, what people around me were feeling, how to react, was gone. My intuition vanished, leaving me adrift. I scrambled internally after it, but I couldn’t find it. There was no calm place, just a tumultuous sea of ragged thoughts and jumbled emotions.

‘Gabs? Are you okay?’

I turned blindly towards the sound before registering that I could still physically see, even if I could no longer sense anything intuitively. I stared at Zenna. ‘I’m not the same,’ I whispered.

‘I know that much. What’s happened, Gabby?’

Her voice was soft, gentle, yet firm, like it could handle what was happening. I didn’t need intuition to know that even if I could tell Cecelia, she was too busy and under too much stress to take it right now. I couldn’t implicate Alex in something that his brother had been hiding for years. I couldn’t trust Dad, not completely. I wasn’t ready to be vulnerable with Keraun. And everyone at Darkhaven was on the wrong side of the looking-glass. They hadn’t tried to live in the real world with this. Zenna’s voice, concern cracking around the edges, broke through my front. ‘I was struck by lightning. About a month ago, I guess.’

Zenna gasped. ‘What? How are you, you know…’

‘Alive?’

She nodded. ‘Isn’t that supposed to kill you?’

Flamebeard’s lesson popped into my head. ‘Apparently not, but that’s not the point. Something happened. When I was a baby, my mum put me in an experiment that means when I get struck by lightning, I get all this enhancement. Long life, super-fast healing, stuff like that.’

Zenna’s eyes widened. ‘So you’re, like, superhuman?’

I shifted. ‘I guess so.’

‘Wow.’

‘I’ve been working with a team who find people like me – the other kids who were in the experiment – and train us. Sort of. Stephen can talk to animals telepathically. Liam is clairvoyant. I saw Donovan get run over by a car and just get up and walk away. And she’s crazy strong.’

Zenna’s eyes kindled. ‘Strong like … super strong? Like, lift-up-a-car strong?’

‘Fish it out of a dam and throw it over her head like it’s a handbag.’ I’d seen her do it. I’d have been amazed if I hadn’t been in the car.

‘That would be awesome.’ I could see Zenna’s mind working at about a million miles an hour, melancholy forgotten.

‘You can’t use Donovan for your film project. Actually, yes, yes you can. Take her away. If I never see her again, that would be great.’

‘What else can you do?’

I told her everything. I told her about the casino, the rally drive and my advancing intuition. My chest lightened tenfold just talking about Donovan’s torture sessions. I choked up as I explained how I’d screwed up at the Taskforce, taking the wrong door and getting caught and not noticing that I’d lost the tracking bracelet. To cover my emotion, I told her about playing poker with Liam.

‘That sounds fun,’ she remarked.

‘You’d be rubbish at poker,’ I said. Zenna’s face was a picture book of her feelings.

She pouted. ‘I might not be.’

‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter because it’s gone. My intuition. I screwed up. I’m basically a human with a keen sense of smell who has no idea what to do with her much-extended life.’

‘Well, look on the bright side,’ she said. ‘At least you have a lot longer to figure it out.’ Then she stabbed me, hard, with her plastic fork.

‘Ow! What are you doing?’ I pulled my arm away, rubbing at the red marks on my skin. The fork was bent in half.

‘Testing your healing thing. Apparently you have iron skin now.’

‘It’s a plastic fork. It folds up at the sight of a cooked potato. Are you some kind of sadist?’

‘No, more a masochist,’ she replied, shadows deepening in her eyes. ‘Sorry.’

‘Yeah.’ The marks were gone, but I was still miffed. ‘Do you really need proof?’

‘Would it bother you if I said yes?’

I considered, then stuck with candid honesty. ‘A bit, but I understand.’

‘I believe that you’re telling the truth.’

‘But you think I’m a crazy person?’

A frown darkened her face. ‘If anyone is crazy around here, it’s me. But I guess I just can’t reconcile it in my mind.’

‘That makes sense. Really. I would struggle to believe this if I hadn’t experienced it first hand.’ And also met a lightning god in the same month. But I’d left Keraun out of my narrative. I was too churned up about him, and besides, an alien god was a level of unreality that no one could be expected to believe.

‘What are you going to do?’ Zenna asked, interrupting my personal Keraun tangent.

‘About what?’

‘Donovan. She’s abusing you, Gabby. You don’t need that.’

‘I don’t know.’

We were quiet for a while. Absentmindedly, I picked up the disk and toyed with it, turning it over in my hands. Zenna reached out to take it.

‘What’s that?’

‘I don’t know. Some sort of backup disk, I think. I stole it from the Taskforce.’

Zenna lifted it out of my fingers and examined the holographic side. ‘It’s a holofoil,’ she said, peering at it from different angles.

‘A holo-what?’

‘Holofoil. Difficult to copy.’ She kept inspecting it. ‘But it’s unusual. The pattern almost looks familiar. Like a cipher,’ she said, handing it back.

My phone rang. I sighed, contemplating throwing it in the ocean. But I couldn’t put this off forever. I answered it. ‘Hey Stephen.’

‘Where are you? Are you safe?’

‘I’m fine, I’m at the surf club.’

‘The West Beach Surf Club?’

‘Yeah. I’m okay. I’m with a friend.’

‘I’m five minutes away. Wait there.’

Stephen hung up. I’d forgotten, what with the wine, Keraun’s confusing yellow stare and Zenna’s latest crisis, that Stephen must have tracked me to the Taskforce dead zone, then been redirected when Sean took my bracelet. He had no idea if I had found Luci, or made it out, or been captured. I shuddered as I thought of how close I’d come to being locked back in an interrogation cell.

Then I had another awful thought. I was still wearing the bracelet. Darkhaven had heard everything. Including my confession to Zenna. I gripped her arm.

‘Go back to school.’ My voice was urgent. I tried to keep the panic out of it. Zenna looked offended.

‘What? Bugger that.’

‘Just get out of here. They’re coming.’

‘Who’s coming?’

‘Stephen and Donovan. I’m not supposed to tell anyone.’

She scowled. ‘Don’t you trust me?’

‘Of course I do, it’s just…’ I hadn’t told her about the memory modification. I hadn’t wanted to scare her.

‘Never mind,’ she said, collecting her bag and scooping up the chip box. ‘I’m not good enough to be part of your superhuman life.’

I huffed. I was trying to protect her, not shut her out. ‘That’s not fair, Z.’

‘Well, not much is.’ She stalked off.

I watched her go, every muscle tightening as I fought the urge to run after her. But it was safer for her to leave. I unclasped the bracelet and shoved it deep into my back pocket, picked up the disk and walked in the opposite direction, hoping that Stephen would spot me first and Zenna would get away. The last thing I wanted was for her to be more caught up in this than she already was. Guilt stabbed at my heart. I’d been selfish to tell her so much.

I stomped down the street, waiting for Stephen to find me. The crash of waves on the beach became louder, the briny scent of seaweed overpowering, the sunlight reflecting off the footpath too bright as it lanced my pupils. And I had no calm place, no intuition. I couldn’t sense what was going to happen. I had to find a way to make another deal with Stephen. I wasn’t going to abandon my friends and family. I would go back to the Taskforce, find Luci and bring her back, whether she wanted it or not. And take Sean and his stupid threats out of the equation.

Keraun’s face swam into my mind, and my stomach twisted at the thought of breaking my promise to him. But I had no choice.

The pounding walk helped. My muscles loosened as my stamps were replaced by firm footfalls, my stride lengthening and my legs swinging through for each step. I found a tiny grip of control over my senses and felt into my calm place, seeking some feeling. But where before I had been a still pond, into which I could drop a single stone and feel the ripples fan out, indicating what I wanted to know, now I was a roiling ocean, a swirling mass of black doubt. Maybe I’d never had intuition, and it had always been a self-delusion. I shied away, coming back to my external senses. A car was approaching from a block away, and it sounded like the silver Corolla. I heard it slow as it pulled up behind me, but I didn’t stop.

‘Gabby!’ Stephen called over the sound of the engine, still running.

I kept walking.

‘Gabby!’ There was an edge to his voice, but it wasn’t anger. At least, it wasn’t all anger. Worried frustration, perhaps. I slowed to a shuffle, but didn’t turn around. The car pulled up alongside me. ‘Please get in the car,’ Stephen begged.

‘Do I have a choice?’ When there was no answer, I looked across. My heart dropped a few inches when I saw that Stephen’s eyes were slick with tears. Unabashed, he met my gaze.

‘Always,’ he said softly. ‘Is that what you’d like? For me to leave you alone?’

My eyes went hot too. I looked away. ‘I don’t know what I want.’ My stuffy voice betrayed me.

‘How about we go somewhere else? Not Darkhaven.’

Still staring at the silver buckles on my boots, I nodded. My fingers fumbled on the door handle. Stephen leaned over and pushed it open for me. I climbed in.

‘What happened?’ he asked as we drove. It took me a minute to realise he was asking about my expedition into the Taskforce. I gave him a full report, including Sean’s request for me to join them, Luci’s refusal to see me, my bracelet being tampered with and my discoveries on the lower floors. I told him about the children and my theory that they were up to at least a third iteration of the program. Stephen’s lips pressed into a firmer line.

He and Donovan had followed my tracking data up to the block where Sean’s jammer cut the signal, then they’d begun painstakingly surveying every building in the area for signs of the Taskforce. Before they’d found anything, the tracker had reappeared on the map, moving, and they figured I was being taken somewhere else. They’d followed the little dot across the city for over an hour before Liam caught a vision of Sean’s trap for them. Then they heard Dad giving the bracelet back to me on the mic transmitter. By the time they drove all the way back to West Beach, I’d already gone to meet Zenna.

‘I’m sorry about Luci,’ I said, after we’d been driving in silence for a while.

Stephen looked over, eyes pained. ‘No, I’m sorry. I should never have involved you in this.’

‘It was my choice,’ I said stubbornly, fiddling with the hem of my shirt. I wasn’t entirely sure I agreed with my assertion, but stubbornness was all the defence I had against crying.

‘I don’t know if it was. We don’t always take the right path in the work we do. With you – and not just you – we may not have done the right things.’

My stubbornness faded, leaving a wash of confusion and disappointment.

‘I don’t think there was a right thing,’ I whispered. It was more to myself. There wasn’t a right choice to be made. Not about uni, not about whether to become some sort of superhuman outcast, not about confronting my mother, not about Keraun. The pile expanded in my mind, flooding out until my chest went tight and the tears erupted. It started as a flow, then escalated into mortifying sobs. I gasped for breath.

Stephen pulled over, passed me a tissue from the glovebox and rubbed my shoulder. I just managed to get it under control and take a breath when I thought of Cecelia and how crushed she would be if Sean stopped her becoming a doctor. A whole new wave of sobs tumbled over me as I mentally writhed in helplessness. How I’d parted with Alex. Zenna getting dragged into this mess because I wasn’t strong enough to keep it to myself. I stopped trying to fight it. I closed my eyes and curled up in the front seat, letting the storm wash over me.