Chosen Ones Read online

  “There are always supranormal occurrences here and there,” Cho said. “But they seem to be happening closer and closer together, and they’re becoming more numerous.”

  “Do you . . .” Albie swallowed so hard Sloane could see his Adam’s apple forcing its way down. “Do you think the Dark One is back or something? Is that why you asked us to come here?”

  Sloane felt a burning in her chest, and she wasn’t sure if it was the same thing causing the tingling in her arms or if it was just run-of-the-mill terror. She couldn’t sit still anymore—she got up, stepped around her chair.

  “What is it?” Cho said.

  “Can’t a gal do a good, old-fashioned pace back and forth without getting questioned?” Sloane replied.

  Henderson chuckled a little and said, “No, we don’t think it’s the Dark One. We haven’t seen any evidence of his return—there are no actors present at any of these incidents, see? No one wielding magic—but magic is happening anyway. It seems to us . . . well, the prevailing theory in ARIS, anyway, is that it’s like a malfunctioning radio. It’s creepy when it starts playing music out of nowhere, but it doesn’t mean anything sinister.”

  “You’re saying that our planet is like a malfunctioning radio,” Matt said, “and that doesn’t alarm you?”

  “Obviously it alarms us,” Cho said. “But I’ll take the source of Earth’s magic being busted or . . . whatever this is . . . over the Dark One any day.”

  Sloane was moving, now without meaning to, toward the double doors across the room. Her body was burning, and as she drew closer, she smelled something sulfurous and chemical and familiar. Her hands had smelled that way after she did magic.

  With the artifact.

  The Needle of Koschei.

  She hadn’t known when she went with a crew of ARIS agents to the middle of the Pacific Ocean how much the Needle would cost her. In the end, she had been so desperate to get rid of it that she had chewed it out of her own hand.

  The others had gone quiet. Or maybe she just couldn’t hear them over the pulse in her ears. She didn’t try the handles of the doors, just pressed both palms against them and drew a long, slow breath.

  She felt Matt standing behind her. She didn’t need to look to know it was him; she knew the shape of him, the heat of him. How close he dared to stand, so their arms were almost touching. And not because they were dating—no, engaged, she reminded herself—but because that’s how Matt was: not afraid to get close to anyone.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “You don’t feel it?” she said.

  “It feels weird in here, but no more than usual for a Drain site,” Matt said. “Why? What do you feel?”

  Sloane stared at the scar on the back of her right hand. A web of thick tissue, paler than the rest of her skin. “It’s been bothering me since we got here. They made something new,” she said. “And it’s through these doors. Somewhere.”

  “Okay,” Matt said, touching her shoulder. “Okay, let’s go sit down and ask them about it.”

  Sloane nodded. On some level, she recognized that she would feel embarrassed later. But for now, she just let Matt take her hand and lead her back to the table. Henderson, Cho, Albie, and Ines were still sitting there, looking confused.

  “Well, I guess that’s as good a segue as any,” Henderson said, scratching at his beard. “Uh—since these incidents have been increasing in frequency, we’ve stepped up certain programs we were already working on. It seems important to understand what exactly magic is and how to use it, so—we’ve developed a device that we believe channels magic. You reacting to it that way, Sloane, is actually really encouraging.”

  “You haven’t tested it?” Ines said.

  “Not yet,” Cho said. “We were hoping you might agree to help us. You are, after all, the only people we are aware of who have successfully wielded magic before. You’re less likely to cause a catastrophe.”

  Sloane tasted copper. She wished she had kept the empty potato-chip bag with her.

  “Did you go for a wand?” Ines said. “Or, like, an orb? Or is it a giant hammer? Please say it’s a giant hammer.”

  “No,” Sloane said.

  “Yeah, you’re right, it’s the government, so it’s probably a boring box,” Ines said.

  “No,” Sloane said. “No, we aren’t going to help you test your fucking weapon.”

  “Slo,” Matt said. “Just because it uses magic doesn’t mean it’s a weapon.”

  Cho sat down in the chair across from Sloane and folded her hands on the table. Her fingers were thick at the knuckle, and callused. Sloane had heard her say, once, that she liked rock climbing.

  “In order to know how to fix whatever it is that’s broken,” Cho said, “we need to understand how magic works and how it’s used. So we have made a tool—that’s all.”

  “You expect me to believe you developed this thing so you could keep teenage girls from falling into the sky?” Sloane scowled. “You were already making it before you realized something was wrong—you just said that.”

  “We are a branch of the government concerned with scientific advancement—” Cho began.

  “I studied history,” Sloane interrupted, swallowing down the flavor of blood in her mouth. “And I know what motivates the government to invest in scientific advancement. We only have rockets that go into space because you guys were trying to blow up Soviets. This is just another Space Race.”

  “Even if it is a weapon,” Henderson said, “would you rather Russia or China figure it out first, Sloane? And do you think they won’t be racing to harness magic themselves?”

  “I would rather governments stopped playing the who-can-­destroy-­each-other-faster game,” Sloane snapped. She knew by the ringing in her ears that she was panicking.

  “Yeah, well, I’d rather open up a goddamn ice cream shop,” Henderson said. “But we all have to deal with reality.”

  “Countless people have died because of magic,” Matt said. “Right here, in this spot, actually. It’s happened right in front of us. And you want us to be complicit in something that might bring more of that?” He sounded choked. Sloane hadn’t heard him sound that way in a long time. “After what we’ve seen—after what we’ve done?”

  He didn’t know the half of it, Sloane thought. He didn’t know a damn thing about what she had done, and it would stay that way.

  Beside her, Albie was staring at his hands, curled over the edge of the table. His fingers had once been nimble enough to fold the most intricate origami Sloane had ever seen. He had tried to teach her once how to make a crane, and the session had ended in a heap of crumpled paper. But the damage sustained from their time as captives of the Dark One had taken the feeling from his fingertips, so he had given up the hobby. Now those hands were trembling.

  “Albie,” she said.

  He didn’t look at her. “Isn’t it . . .” He cleared his throat. Albie was shorter than average, with thinning blond hair that stuck up in all the wrong places and a hunched posture from the permanent damage done to his spine. He was nobody’s Chosen One, not now and not ever. “Isn’t it important to know how to use it, though?” he said. “So it can’t be used against us again?”

  “Albie,” Matt said. “You can’t mean that.”

  “Don’t give me that Hero Voice,” Albie said, his own voice shaking. “Nobody ever used magic against you—any of you!—the way the Dark One used it against me. Whether it’s a tool or a weapon or a freaking plush toy, I’m not going to sit back and let the rest of the world figure out how to do it to us without us knowing how to do it back. Mutually assured destruction.”

  Sloane reached for words and came up empty. He had a point—she had been kidnapped by the Dark One, too, but he hadn’t done to her what he had done to Albie, hadn’t attacked her body and left her with no feeling in her hands and no way to rejoin the fight.

  He had done something else. Damaged her without so much as touching her.

  “If people die beca
use of your help,” she said finally, her throat aching, “you’ll have to carry that around.”

  “And if people die because I don’t help?” he said, meeting her eyes at last. “Either way, we’ll carry it. We always do.”

  TOP SECRET

  AGENCY FOR THE RESEARCH AND INVESTIGATION OF THE SUPRANORMAL

  MEMORANDUM FOR: ROBERT ROBERTSON

  OFFICER, AGENCY FOR THE RESEARCH AND INVESTIGATION OF THE SUPRANORMAL (ARIS)

  SUBJECT: PROJECT RINGER, SUBJECT 2, DEEP DIVE AFTERMATH

  Dear Officer Robertson,

  Attached is the document we discussed. Sloane and I developed this piece of writing in one of our sessions as part of her ongoing cognitive-behavioral therapy for PTSD. In our exposure-therapy practice, we need to reliably provoke Sloane’s panic so that she can become habituated to the emotions it brings forth. As such, the following exposure is as detailed as Sloane could manage in order to most effectively simulate a re-experiencing of the event, which we refer to as “the Dive.”

  I must remind you to keep this confidential, as providing this to you is a violation of HIPAA. However, given how dire the situation is, I agree that an exception must be made.

  Thank you, and have a pleasant week.

  Sincerely,

  Dr. Maurene Thomas

  I’m on the ARIS ship. It’s a cold morning. I see the glare of the sun on the water. As I pull the string attached to the zipper of my wetsuit, the fabric tugs in from both sides toward my spine. The mouthpiece tastes like chemicals. My nose feels blocked as I try to breathe only through my mouth.

  All around me are ARIS officers, at first identical in their black scuba gear, but if I look closely I see the swell of Maggie’s hips, or Marie’s long, muscular legs, or the bristle of Dan’s mustache. Their eyes are shielded by the goggles, which is a relief, since they’ve been looking at me skeptically since I met them.

  And they have good reasons. I’m only fifteen. I got my dive certification in a hurry once Bert briefed me on the mission. I’ve only practiced a few times.

  But I’m Chosen, and that means they have to follow my lead. So even though I’m shivering in the cold and squinting into the sun and so scared I want to throw up right into the ocean, I sit on the edge of the boat and slide into the water.

  There’s a rush of cold. I try to stay still. To breathe deep into the regulator. To exhale fully before inhaling, so I don’t hyperventilate. All over me is something tingling and burning. It’s not the sting of salt water on the skin around my eyes; it’s more like feeling coming back to a limb that’s gone to sleep. On the way here I asked the ARIS officers if they felt it too. They didn’t. They don’t. Just me. Is she making it up? I feel them wondering, and I’m wondering too.

  The others are in the water now. Someone tosses me the line that will keep me attached to the boat, and I hook it to my belt, tug at it to make sure it’s secure. All the ARIS officers wait for me to move. They look like aliens in their mirrored masks, polarized so they can see better underwater. The Dive is too deep for a beginner like me, but there’s nothing anyone can do about it. I have to go.

  I think of that Millay poem as I kick my flippers. Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave. I have a flashlight in one hand, held against my side. I swim away from the boat, checking over my shoulder now and then to make sure the others are following me.

  What’s ahead of me is just cloudy blue. Bubbles and particles of sand. The occasional piece of seaweed flopping past. A darker shape develops slowly in front of me, and I know what it is.

  I wasn’t expecting the boat to blend so well into the bottom of the ocean. It’s coated in a fine layer of sand, the same muted blue as the ocean floor. It could have been a stretch of dead coral if not for the sharp bends of the radar aerials and the main mast, with its attached ladder, the rungs still white when I shine my flashlight on them.

  I know this ship, the Sakhalin. I researched it right after the briefing, months ago. A Soviet spy ship, Primor’ye class, built sometime between 1969 and 1971. The Primor’ye-class ships had been converted from large fishing boats, outfitted to gather electronic intelligence and transmit it back to shore. They were not usually made for combat, but the Sakhalin was special. When I swim closer, I shift the beam of light back to the distinct bulges of weapons systems, one of them now wrapped in seaweed.

  The tingling is in my chest now, right behind my sternum. Like heartburn. When I swim closer to the ship, it drops to my belly, right to the middle of me. I keep kicking, moving toward the energy. (I have no choice. I don’t mean that ARIS is forcing me; I mean that whatever it is—the feeling, even though it’s almost painful—won’t let me turn back.)

  Someone tugs on the line attached to me, a signal that I should stop. I don’t. I swim over the deck gun and dodge the bulk of the aft super­structure. As I pass over the smoke funnel, I feel a stab of terror, like I’m going to be sucked into the blackness and disassembled. But I can’t stop swimming.

  I reach the aft mast, and I know I’m in the right place. The burning in my chest turns to a thump. Built in the base of the aft mast is a door fastened by a busted lock. Without thinking much about it, I slam the base of my flashlight into the lock, once, twice, three times. Already worn by time and exposure to water, the lock breaks.

  The little door opens and I turn my beam of light toward it. Inside the mast there’s a small trunk about the size of a toaster, elaborately decorated with gilt and enamel in a pattern of flowers and leaves that reminds me of babushkas and matryoshka dolls. I know I should swim with it to the surface, let the ARIS officers scan it with their equipment to make sure it’s safe. But if I do that, they’ll form a perimeter around it, and I have to be looking at it, holding it, feeling inside me the pounding of its heart.

  So I open it.

  Settled inside on a bed of black velvet is a silver needle about the length of my palm.

  Koschei’s Needle.

  I read a lot of folktales to prepare for this mission. They say Koschei was a man who couldn’t die. He hid his soul away from his body in a needle and put the needle in an egg, the egg in a duck, the duck in a hare, and the hare in a trunk. Only when a person broke the needle could they take his life.

  I am trembling when I touch it. I think it trembles too.

  And then—horrible pain, a flash of white. The tingling of returned feeling is gone, and in its place, I’m enveloped in flames. Scalding skin peeling away from muscle, muscle cooked away from bone, bone turning into ash, that’s what it feels like. I scream into the regulator mask, and it pulls away from my face, letting in water. I choke and thrash, struggling to grab the line that attaches me to the boat, but my hands won’t work.

  And then it’s like—a pang so deep I feel it in every part of my body, like the sounding of a clock tower at midnight. It feels like wanting something so much you would die to get it, more than craving or longing or desire—I am empty, and more than that, a black hole, so absolutely composed of nothingness that I attract all somethingness to me.

  All around me the water swirls and churns, bubbles so thick they keep me from seeing anything. Pieces break off from the ship and enter the cyclone of water. Black shapes tumble past me—the ARIS officers in their scuba suits. I choke on water as I scream, and I feel like I’m pulling something in, like I’m drawing a breath.

  The next time I open my eyes, I’m staring at the sky. All across it are clouds. I tip forward, water rushing down my back and into the wetsuit. The water that surrounds me isn’t blue; it’s red, dark red. My hand hurts so badly I can’t stand it. I lift it up to look at it. Something hard and straight is buried under my skin like a splinter, right next to one of my tendons. I press against it. It’s Koschei’s Needle.

  Something bobs to the surface next to me. It looks like a piece of plastic at first, but when I pick it up, it’s soft and slippery. I scream, dropping it when I realize it’s skin. All around me are pieces of skin and muscle and bone and viscera.

&nb
sp; Everyone is dead. And I’m alone.

  TOP SECRET

  9

  THEY LEFT ALBIE with Cho so he could try the device. She had promised to get him home when they were finished.

  Sloane had no doubt that the device worked—she would not have felt its presence so strongly if it didn’t. They all had their own way of relating to magic, and hers was with craving, and seeking, and understanding. She knew the device, and the device knew her.

  Albie had been more straightforward in his use of magic. Albie with the Freikugeln—the bullets of German legend that struck their targets without fail—had just been a man with a tool, the same as a hammer or a saw. His artifact had not burrowed under his skin, becoming part of him, the way Koschei’s Needle had done to her. He had simply held the bullets, and though they never did what the legend said they would—none of the artifacts they had collected had—they had allowed him to perform rudimentary magic, lighting fires, making objects float, things like that.

  Ines, Matt, and Sloane walked back down the spoke of the bicycle wheel and around its circumference until they reached Scott in his golf cart. She didn’t feel fear of the device anymore; instead, what she felt was numbness, a separation between body and mind. She knew that time would weld the two together again; she would just have to wait.

  Scott took them out the same way they had come in, weaving a serpentine path through the tents. Hardly a minute into the drive, Sloane spotted the tent with MAKE THINGS RIGHT—BRING HIM BACK on it, and the ringing in her ears intensified. The distance between mind and body that she had maintained since sensing the magical device collapsed suddenly, like hands clapping together. She braced herself on the handrail that was keeping her in her seat and threw herself out of the golf cart to the tune of Ines and Matt crying “Sloane!” in unison.

  She walked past a little altar made of a stump with what looked like a squirrel skeleton wrapped in beads and twine perched atop it, and a tent with a dream catcher hanging in the zipped-shut doorway, likely mass-produced in China and distributed in the Home section of a hipster clothing chain. These people wanted magic, but they had no idea what magic really was; they had never seen the great unraveling of the Drain, the way it had separated all living things into distinct pieces, bone, sinew, blood, and nerve flung apart so you could see the fine details that made up a body, all while said body was still conscious enough to comprehend it.