Winds of Change Page 8

  “Great,” Jake said. “Now we just have to wait for Jeremy to work his magic.”

  Literally.

  “Any updates from him?”

  “No. He’s cloistered in the PC lab and hasn’t come out for hours. When he gets like this, it’s better to stay out of the way. As soon as he has something, he’ll let me know.”

  “Got it.” Connor paused, then added, “Well, Angela’s yelling at me that dinner’s about to hit the table, so I’d better go. Just call when you hear something. Even if it’s the middle of the night.”

  Actually, a midnight raid would probably be a good idea. Even though the government facility where Addie had been hidden away was under video surveillance, there would probably be a lot fewer people out and about in the dark watches of the night.

  “I will,” Jake said. “Have a good evening…and thanks.”

  “No problem. Hang in there — we’ll get this sorted out.”

  Connor ended the call there, and Jake got up from his chair and slipped his phone into his pocket. As soon as he was back inside, he sent a hopeful glance in the direction of the PC lab’s door, but it was still closed.

  A sigh escaped his lips. He knew he shouldn’t have been hoping for much right then, but….

  With a shake of his head, he got his phone back out. Time to order that pizza.

  8

  Maybe it was the remnants of the knock-out drugs in my system, or maybe it was simply that I’d just lived through a very long, very strange day, but I actually slept far better in my luxurious prison than I’d thought I would. I’d spent a good chunk of the afternoon with the rest of the test subjects, but we were all sent to our individual suites for dinner and whatever entertainment we wanted to use to fill up the rest of the evening. Why Dr. Richards and her staff saw the need to separate us when we’d already spent hours and hours together, I didn’t know. Some kind of psychological torture? I wouldn’t put it past them, although the arrangement could have simply been for logistical reasons. People came and went over the course of the afternoon, depending on whether they had any “tests” scheduled with one of the three doctors assigned to Project Daedalus, and so having us all share a cafeteria-style meal might have been impractical.

  Whatever the reason, I had to sit by myself and eat a simple meal of grilled chicken breast, rice, and steamed vegetables on my own, and I had no choice but to maintain that solitary state when I relocated to the sofa and watched several back-to-back episodes of The Mandalorian on TV before I decided I was tired enough to crash. And crash I did, so hard that when I woke up, I had to lie in bed and blink at the smooth white ceiling overhead for a few seconds before I remembered I wasn’t in the little house I’d rented in Riverton, but buried underground in a place that hardly anyone even knew existed.

  A digital clock sat on the bedside table. The readout told me it was a little after seven, meaning I’d slept for nearly nine hours. However, I didn’t feel particularly rested, but rather keyed up, nervous, my brain already racing with possibilities about what Dr. Richards and her team had planned for me that day.

  Since there wasn’t much I could do about their schemes, I resolved to take care of myself as best I could and worry about Michelle Richards when the time came.

  At least I wouldn’t have to deal with Randall Lenz.

  Despite getting nine hours of sleep, I really could have used some coffee that morning, or even some strong tea. But the only thing available was herb tea, so I heated water in the microwave and made a cup of Lemon Zinger. The cupboard had been stocked with multiple varieties of instant oatmeal, seeming to indicate that I was on my own for breakfast. While the tea was steeping, I made myself some cinnamon and spice oatmeal, and after I was done with my breakfast, I went ahead and took a shower. All of my toiletries from the house in Riverton had been transferred to the suite, so, while I didn’t have to worry about using unfamiliar shampoo or moisturizer, I still couldn’t quite prevent myself from getting creeped out at the thought of Agent Lenz and his team efficiently looting my house while I lay there, unconscious. Or had they spirited me out right away, and gone back later to fetch my things?

  Hard to say, and I doubted the man in question intended to give me any straight answers about what had actually happened that night.

  But I had to admit I felt a little better with some tea and food inside me, my hair and face and body clean. I didn’t know what the doctor and her team had planned for me, so I dressed simply in a pair of jeans and a dark green V-neck T-shirt, my favorite pair of black flats on my feet.

  Only about five minutes after I was done getting dressed, the door chime sounded. This time, I wasn’t caught quite so off guard, was able to walk calmly over to the door and say, “Dr. Richards?”

  Her voice emerged from the same hidden speaker as the day before. “Good morning, Addie. Are you ready to get started?”

  I really wasn’t, but I guessed that answering in the negative probably wasn’t an option. “Sure.”

  The door opened to reveal Dr. Richards standing outside the hallway, a man probably some ten years younger next to her, with a couple of burly guys who looked like they lifted tractors in their spare time waiting a few paces beyond. Guards, I assumed, so I wouldn’t attempt a jail break.

  “This is Dr. Woodrow,” she said, pointedly leaving out any introductions to the two bodyguards. “He’ll be working with us this morning.”

  “Hi, Addie,” he said, offering me a quick smile. He had light brown hair and bright blue eyes, and his overall demeanor seemed almost too relaxed for this sort of setting. I could much more easily imagine him in a T-shirt and board shorts rather than the blue button-up and tie he wore under his white lab coat.

  For all I knew, Dr. Richards had hired him precisely because she’d wanted someone on her team who would put the test subjects at ease. However, I pushed the notion aside and allowed myself to send him a smile in return. “Hi, Dr. Woodrow.”

  “We’ll be asking some questions, getting some of your history to supplement the physical tests we performed yesterday,” Dr. Richards said then in her brisk, no-nonsense way. “After that, we’ll head up to one of our outdoor areas for some practical tests.”

  Practical tests? I didn’t think I liked the sound of that. Was she really expecting me to produce tornadoes on demand?

  I didn’t ask. No doubt, I’d find out soon enough.

  She gestured for me to come into the hallway, and I did so, trying not to show how reluctant I was. Even though all of the other test subjects had reassured me the day before that the tests of their abilities weren’t a big deal, were even sometimes sort of fun, I didn’t know whether I could entirely believe their assessment. For one thing, none of the others possessed a gift as big and as ferocious as mine. Even though Joanna had shown me how to control it, my magic still held within it the power to cause a great deal of destruction, and I didn’t want it used as a weapon against innocent people.

  The three of us headed to the elevator, then ascended several floors. We emerged on a level that looked just as institutional as the others, although the hallways there were more crowded, had quite a few people going to and fro. Some wore white lab coats, like Dr. Woodrow and Dr. Richards, while others were dressed in corporate-looking attire, the men in dress shirts and ties, the women in slacks and blouses and the occasional skirt. To tell the truth, if I hadn’t known I was in a subterranean government lab, I would have thought I was walking the halls of a medical complex somewhere.

  Dr. Richards led me into a large office furnished with a shiny metal and glass desk and several metal bookcases filled with what appeared to be scientific texts. She sat down behind the desk, while Dr. Woodrow took one of the chairs placed in front of it and then inclined his head toward the other one. The guards remained outside in the hall.

  “Go ahead, take a seat,” he said.

  There wasn’t much for me to do except sit down. The chair’s seat wasn’t very well padded, and I had a feeling it would start to get
downright uncomfortable if I had to perch there for very long. Maybe that was part of the plan.

  Dr. Richards opened up a sleek laptop that sat on her desk. “I just need to get a little bit of your history,” she said, brown eyes narrowing behind her glasses as she began to enter something into the computer. “How old were you when you first began to notice your unusual connection with the weather?”

  I could have lied, but I honestly didn’t know how much data they had on me. Some of the comments Randall Lenz had made previously led me to think they’d been tracking me for some time. Maybe not all the way back to when I was a kid, and yet it didn’t take a genius to realize that the pattern of my life had shifted abruptly in my tenth year. Before then, we’d only lived in two different towns, Truth or Consequences and Tucumcari, both in New Mexico, but as soon as the weather started going haywire around me, my mother and I had moved about twice per year on average, mostly in Utah, with a few forays into the western edges of Colorado and the southeast stretches of Wyoming.

  “I was ten,” I said. “Around ten and a half.”

  “And how long did it take for you to realize that your emotions were having a direct effect on the weather?”

  Jesus. I didn’t even know how I was supposed to answer that question. It wasn’t as though I suddenly woke up one day and realized that every time I got horribly upset about something, tornadoes appeared from nowhere and hundred-year storms rained down destruction wherever I lived. No, it was more like a gradual, sneaking suspicion, a dread which only gained more power as I saw the growing fear in my mother’s eyes, the hideous worry that something was horribly wrong with her only child.

  “I don’t know for sure,” I said. “My mother and I really didn’t talk about it at first.”

  “And yet she started moving you almost right away.”

  I could only shrug in response to her statement. A few feet away, Dr. Woodrow was listening intently, but unlike Dr. Richards, he wasn’t taking any notes. His expression appeared sympathetic, although I didn’t know whether I could really trust his reactions. They also could have been playing some kind of good cop/bad cop game, although to what end, I had no idea.

  “I think she was scared,” I said. My hands tightened on the knees of my jeans, but I kept my tone steady as I added, “I’d say you could talk to her and find out firsthand what she was thinking…except you can’t do that now, thanks to Randall Lenz.”

  For a long moment, Dr. Richards didn’t reply. She only sat there at her desk, eyes opaque behind the lenses of her glasses. Next to me, Dr. Woodrow shifted uncomfortably in his chair, although he remained quiet, as if he knew better than to say anything before his boss had spoken.

  At last, she said, “That was…unfortunate. I can assure you that Agent Lenz had absolutely no intention of causing any harm to you or your mother.”

  “Maybe he didn’t,” I returned, “but that’s what happened. And, as far as I can tell, it doesn’t seem as if any of you are too concerned about what his supposed ‘accident’ did to my mother, or to my life.”

  “We can discuss compensation at a later date — ” she began, and my eyebrows lifted in disbelief that she would be so callous as to even think that was an appropriate response.

  “What, you’re trying to pay me off for murdering my mother?”

  “It was an accidental discharge,” Dr. Richards said. Her voice was nearly as flat as mine. “The incident has been investigated, and Agent Lenz was found not to be at fault. A tragic accident, of course, but you need to understand that of course he didn’t intend for any of that to happen.”

  He’d said pretty much the same thing to me. And I’d believed him, mostly because I couldn’t see how it was in his best interests to make me hostile toward him from the outset. No, his life would have been much easier if he hadn’t given me any reason not to be cooperative.

  As far as the supposed “investigation” Dr. Richards had mentioned went, I had no idea whether she was telling me the truth or not. True, usually there was some sort of internal review when a federal agent was involved in a deadly shooting, and yet the agency Randall Lenz worked for was so secret, I didn’t know whether they were bound to the same rules as the FBI or your standard police department. It wasn’t as if anyone had asked me, as an eyewitness, for my input on what had happened.

  “Anyway,” the doctor went on, her tone a bit gentler as she seemed to realize I wasn’t going to offer any further protests on the subject, “you moved quite a bit from the time you were ten years old to the time when you ended up in your last home in Kanab, Utah. Can you tell me why things were more stable there?”

  Damn it — I already felt exhausted, and I knew it wasn’t even nine o’clock in the morning yet. I gave a weary shrug and said, “I don’t know. No major upsets, I guess. I was going to the local U of U campus in Kanab and working at the same diner where my mother worked. I had my head down and was just trying to finish my coursework so I could graduate.”

  “But on the afternoon of June fifth, something did upset you,” Dr. Woodrow said, speaking for the first time.

  I nodded, even as my gut clenched at the recollection. The letter from the student aid office…the dark clouds that had formed over our tiny rented house as the anger and worry swirling in me had reached out to the skies and disturbed the air currents there.

  “They denied my student aid,” I said. “I was angry.” And that anger painted a nice big target right on me and my mother….

  Dr. Richards typed something into her laptop. “Understandable. So, that was the first time you were extremely upset during your time in Kanab?”

  “Yes.” Sure, I’d had minor irritations to deal with, but nothing that had caused the level of anger the letter from the student aid office had instigated. I couldn’t even say exactly why I’d been so furious. After all, once I’d calmed down, I realized I had several options to explore, even if none of them were exactly optimal. Problem was, I’d wasted so much time and energy going back and forth with the people in the school’s student aid department that the thought it had all come to nothing in the end was enough to make me blow a gasket.

  “Are you angry with us now?” Dr. Woodrow asked.

  I shifted on my chair to look over at him. His expression showed nothing except lively interest. Mouth curling a bit, I said, “Take me out where I can talk to the weather, and we’ll find out.”

  His jaw clenched slightly, and I thought I saw a flicker of worry in those bright blue eyes.

  “Now, Addie,” Dr. Richards said, her tone just this side of scolding. “There’s no need for that.”

  “I was just making a suggestion,” I replied without blinking.

  Something shifted in her expression, but I couldn’t say exactly what. She obviously had years of practice keeping her thoughts to herself, and I doubted she would allow an amateur like me to see anything more than what she wanted me to see. “A good suggestion, actually,” she said as she shut her laptop, then got to her feet. “I think it’s time to go outside and see what you can do.”

  “Great,” I replied, although inwardly I wasn’t very thrilled at the idea of being put through my paces like some sort of show pony. Besides, I’d intimated to Randall Lenz that I didn’t actually have very much control over my gift. Despite the veiled threat I’d made just a moment earlier, I didn’t want to hurt anyone. On the other hand, I also didn’t want to make it seem as if I knew what I was doing. I’d have to walk a very fine line, and I honestly didn’t even know whether I was up to the task. It wasn’t as though I’d had many opportunities to actually work with my ability. Mostly, I’d done my best to keep it in check and prevent it from causing any further calamities.

  But there didn’t seem to be any way to wriggle out of my current predicament, so I got up from my chair while Dr. Woodrow rose as well, and the three of us left Dr. Richards’ office to head to the elevator once again, burly guards tagging along for the ride. This time, it rose all the way to the surface, once again disg
orging us in an anonymous-looking lobby. However, Dr. Richards didn’t lead me to the same courtyard as before, but instead took me down a long corridor, one that opened on a large grassy field enclosed in a high cinderblock wall. On the other side of the wall, tall trees waved in the wind, their leaves glistening in the bright sunlight. If anything, the air was even warmer than it had been the day before, hot and damp and smelling of grass and something else I couldn’t identify, thick and heavy, moist as the air itself.

  However, all thought of my surroundings quickly vanished as I focused on the tall figure standing off to one side, his dark suit an incongruous note against all that bright green.

  I turned on Dr. Richards, not bothering to hide my irritation. “I thought you said Agent Lenz didn’t work with the test subjects.”

  Just a hint of a smile on her mouth, which was coated in a neutral pinkish-brown lipstick. “No, that’s what our other guests told you. As a rule, they were correct. But he wanted to observe this session.”

  Anger flared in me, sharp and hot. Almost immediately, I could feel the currents in the air pick up, beginning to swirl above us. Had that been their plan — to provoke me with Randall Lenz’s presence, knowing I would react negatively?

  Well, if that was the case, I’d have to make sure I disappointed them.

  At once, I took in a breath and fixed a neutral expression on my face as he approached. The air around me calmed, and I allowed myself a hint of inner satisfaction. I might have been worried and upset…but I hadn’t lost control. So far, it seemed as if Joanna’s teachings were sticking with me.