Teek Read online

  Why was she looking for him in the dream?

  Zack said that those drugs did more than disable her teek, they interfered with everything. Maybe even some psychic process in her own head. Maybe the reason Chuck faded away that last time was because that’s when the anti-psychic drug kicked in for the first time.

  As she toweled herself off, she knew what Chuck was trying to say with these nightmares.

  It is time. This is the only time.

  She stood in front of the sink and looked at the faucet. And, like a limb numb from lack of use, she could feel her teek reach out. The sense was much fuzzier than she was used to, and much fainter. It was as if she was drunk and much too far away. But her teek was there, and it brushed through the metallic lattice that was the substance of the faucet.

  She tried to tie it to part of the faucet, and it was like groping through ethereal mud. The effort built a pressure behind her forehead that felt as if it must burst through the skin.

  Her own hand reached for the faucet, her fingers touching it lightly as she felt her teek move it, letting the water into the sink.

  Allison smiled.

  That was it. The drug only lasted so long. By this time in the morning, the dose they had given her was beginning to wear off. That was what Chuck had been saying. Suddenly, Allison felt as if freedom might really be in her reach.

  She let her teek sink back into her head. They were going to be testing her today, and she was going to see Macy. The closer she came to escaping this place, the less she could afford letting the little gray men behind the cameras realize what she was thinking.

  But it was very hard not to smile as she brushed her teeth.

  ◆◆◆

  When the nurse gave her the little yellow pill, Allison’s teek clamped onto it with a throbbing death-grip. As the nurse checked her mouth, Allison held the pill in an agonizing stasis, hovering in her throat feeling as if it would strangle her. When the nurse left, she pulled it back into her mouth.

  When she dressed, she spit it into her hand as she pulled a shirt over her head, the cameras none the wiser.

  1:45 PM

  Allison lay on a table with growing impatience as a doctor attached wires to her forehead, her arms, and just about everywhere else. They were going to test her teek, and despite the indignity of being strapped down and told to perform on demand, she wanted to let loose her newly-freed talent. It wanted to be used. She felt the same curiosity about the limits of her teek, the same need to find the limits that had prompted all of her own experiments.

  She was also curious about what exactly they wanted her to do. The room they’d placed her in was cramped with examination equipment. The green-tagged lab technicians barely had room to maneuver around her.

  “Now just listen to the instructions over the speaker,” the tech to the left told her as he attached the wires from her body to boxes lined against the walls. “If you feel any discomfort, say so and we can abort the test.”

  Come on, let’s get started…

  The tech to her right had rolled up her sleeve and was swabbing her arm. “When we set up the drip, there may be a slight feeling of euphoria. That’s normal.”

  Allison nodded, though she felt the first twinges of fear. If this was to counterbalance the effects of the yellow pill they’d been feeding her, what would it do to her when she wasn’t drugged at all? Their little pill was still safely in her pocket, gathering lint.

  She felt the pressure of the intravenous needle sliding into the vein in her arm. Instead of a bag, the tube leading to the needle led off to another machine. The tech taped it in place.

  “There we are,” he said. “You’ll be ready in about five minutes.” He looked across her at the tech with the wires, and they nodded at each other. They both walked out of the room, leaving her to stare across at a blank wall made of acoustical tile.

  Great, what if I have to go to the bathroom?

  At least now she had some idea why they said she shouldn’t eat or drink anything today. She lay there for long minutes, until it felt that the table had dropped away from beneath her, leaving her floating.

  “Hello, Miss Boyle,” came a voice from an invisible speaker. “Please relax, while I explain the testing apparatus.”

  “Relax,” Allison whispered to herself, “I’m flying.”

  In front of her, the wall she faced began withdrawing into the ceiling. Behind it was a glass partition that appeared to be a foot thick. The window looked out on blackness. As the man spoke to her, spotlights came on in the room beyond.

  “The machine you see was built for industrial use, so you needn’t worry about damaging it.”

  The thing spot-lit in the next room looked industrial. Four threaded columns emerged from a square metal base that was four feet on a side. The columns were taller than Allison was, and each was thicker than her arm. At the top of the machine, the columns screwed into a metal housing, and between the base and that upper housing, each column supported an arm that angled in toward the center of the framework. The four arms all reached in to hold one corner of a silvery metal plate. The plate was a foot square and mounted so that it faced her.

  “This machine was originally designed for testing alloy samples to destruction. We’ve modified it to measure the stresses on the sample. Each of those arms can measure forces in three dimensions up to…”

  There was a partially imagined whisper in her ear, “Hiya, sweetcakes.”

  Allison blinked and turned her head, which wasn’t a good idea. The stuff dripping into her arm made her light-headed.

  “Miss me?”

  Allison closed her eyes to make Chuck’s voice go away. But instead, she was greeted by the Euclid Heights High School now familiar from her nightmares. The sight was as vivid as the room where she was strapped to a table. The voice from the speaker leaked in here.

  “—tension and compression as well as movement in space. The sample we want you to work with is a plain carbon steel—”

  Even as she heard the speaker’s voice, she could taste the dead air and cobwebs in the abandoned science wing. In her mind she walked down a corridor lit only by dagger shafts of sunlight prying through the cracks in the window boards.

  Somehow she could still be strapped to a table somewhere at Prometheus, and be here kicking dust, garbage, and old leaves. She was tempted to open her eyes and end the vision.

  Chuck’s voice came from one of the labs she passed. “Sense of euphoria, huh?”

  Allison turned to see Chuck leaning in the doorway of Mr. Franklin’s classroom. “It’s the drug,” Allison said.

  “Bingo,” Chuck said. He waved her into the lab, “Come in here before that guy stops droning.”

  Allison could still hear the voice from outside, “—monitoring pulse rate, electrical activity in the brain—”

  She cautiously followed Chuck into the lab room. The room was swathed in darkness and cobwebs, and things skittered around in the corners. The blackboard had collapsed at an angle. On the floor, between it and the teacher’s desk, was a mummified corpse. Allison stopped, staring at it.

  “Oh jeez,” Chuck said, “That guy’d be harmless even if he was real.” He kicked the body with a steel-toed boot and was rewarded with a billowing cloud of dust.

  Allison winced. “Did you choose this place?”

  Chuck looked at her and shook his head. “You think I like being trapped here?” He shoved the body out of the way with his boot and said, “At least they ain’t warm and squishy.”

  “They?”

  “Come on, take a seat. We ain’t got but a few minutes before you’re supposed to perform.”

  There was one unbroken seat available. When she sat, she saw that Chuck had out some of Mr. Franklin’s physics apparatus. He had a slide projector out, pointed at the blank spot on the wall where the blackboard had fallen away.

  “First off,” Chuck said, “you got to get off of that pill. But you knew that.”

  Allison nodded, she had
already figured out how.

  “Things you don’t know— I was one of Stone’s kids. Telepathy. Saw in other folk’s heads.”

  “My God.”

  “Believe me, sweetcakes. He had nothing to do with it. Was thing numero uno that fucked up my excuse for a life.” He paced in front of the slide projector, framing his face in the light. Chuck looked a little odd, as if he was a double exposure, something that was more a projection than actually there.

  “You’re fading,” Allison said.

  “You noticed,” Chuck said. “But, I said we don’t have time, and it’s taking what I got left to talk while you’re conscious.” The shadow on the wall behind him began graying out. He looked at his hand and said, “Fuck. Quickly, three things—

  “One, you got to get out of here now. I still occasionally hear things on the melon pipeline, all hell’s going to break out soon, once that redhead figures out Stone’s found his Change.”

  Allison stood. “What do you mean—?”

  Chuck held up his hand, she could see through it now. “No time. The more I keep up with this, the less it’s me. And I got two more things. This place, the high school, it isn’t imaginary.”

  She was still standing, and as she watched, Chuck seemed to lose his individuality. He wasn’t just fading, but he was taking on the same gray cast as the rest of the school around them. His voice even seemed to be losing its character.

  “What do you mean?” Allison said.

  “It’s all the same thing,” said ghost Chuck. “Telepathy, telekinesis, precognition… It’s all from the same place. This is Euclid Heights High in a decade or so.”

  “How?”

  He shook his head. “No time. I’m losing it—” Quickly, he arranged dusty glassware around on the table. He fiddled with an electronic device connected to a threadbare speaker. He pointed the speaker at the glassware. “This is your idea I found, but I need to pull your attention to it before the shit hits the fan.”

  He flipped the switches on the device, and the room was filled by an irritating high-frequency hum. He angled the speaker slightly, and dust billowed up from the desk. Motes scrambled in the beam from the slide projector, seemingly passing through Chuck’s body as if he wasn’t fully there anymore.

  Chuck began tuning the dial on the box. Allison saw his mouth moving, as if in explanation, but she couldn’t hear his words over the rising tone from the device. The sound was painful, like an ice pick in her ear.

  Then, suddenly the glassware in front of the speaker shattered.

  Chuck turned off the device, and the sound faded. He said something inaudible.

  “I can’t hear you,” Allison whispered. At first she thought the noise had deafened her. But she heard her own voice perfectly well, and from another world, she heard the voice from another speaker, “—await the final checks while the technicians calibrate their equipment. Then we can begin the tests—”

  Chuck looked at her. He had lost almost all definition, becoming little more than a shadow, a thickening in the air. One of his hands brushed the control to the slide projector. A slide fell into place, replacing the white glow with a picture of a suspension bridge. The photo had caught the central span in the midst of bucking like a bronco.

  Allison knew the picture. She had seen a film of it in Mr. Franklin’s Physics class, in this same room. It was the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Puget Sound. She remembered watching the bridge shake itself apart in what the film’s narrator described as a “mild gale.”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  Chuck wasn’t there to answer. It was as if he had dissolved underneath the projection.

  “…we’re ready Miss Boyle.”

  ◆◆◆

  Allison opened her eyes and rejoined the real world. After that waking dream, it was disorienting to realize she was still strapped down here. Allison felt confused, torn between wondering what happened with Chuck and wondering what he was trying to say to her. The floating feeling had gripped her with redoubled force, and parts of her body seemed impossibly far away.

  The man behind the speaker was telling her to use her teek to try and pull the metal plate from the framework. Allison stared at the massive machine, and groped out with her teek—

  She had expected some resistance, but the effects of the “pharmaceutical leash” had all but vanished. Her sense flowed out instantaneously, flipping her world inside out with dizzying rapidity. If they hadn’t strapped her to the table, she would have fallen off.

  If anything, the stuff they had dripping in her arm— the stuff that made the real world float and seem far away— made her teek sense sharper. She could feel more of the matter around her. She could feel the individual grains making up the cinder-blocks in the next room, like solidified foam. The metal of the testing machine was honeycombed with small crystalline structures. She could feel wires, and screws, bolts, washers…

  When she closed her eyes, she felt as if she knew this machine better than she knew anything else in her life.

  Allison smiled, Chuck and Euclid Heights High forgotten for the moment. Her heart raced with the rush of her teek. She clamped her senses around the small test plate with a feeling of exultation. She’d rip it free of its moorings, show them what they were dealing with—

  She pumped all of herself into the effort, when she’d done as much as she’d done to the Jeep, she was barely aware of the twinge it caused in her temples.

  The plate barely seemed to move at all.

  She tried again, in another direction. Still, the plate was held fast by the massive armatures. Frustration slammed her like a fist. These Prometheus people were pulling some cruel hoax on her, only pretending they’d freed her teek. She tried again and again, and it was like pounding her head into the cinder-block walls.

  “Good, good. Now if you could try some other mode of movement—”

  They were playing games with her. They had drugged her so they could laugh at her expense. The drug only made it worse. It hadn’t just freed her teek sense. It seemed to have freed every single emotion she had.

  “— Miss Boyle? Are you all right? We can stop now if you—”

  Allison ignored the voice. She had enough of this. She was gripped with anger and frustration. Some of it was directed at Prometheus, but the vast majority of her raw emotion was focused on that square metal plate that hung, mockingly immobile, in front of her.

  A mild gale could take down the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, why can’t I teek free a chunk of metal?

  With that thought, she dislodged the idea that Chuck had been trying to prod free.

  Vibration.

  It wasn’t the force of the wind that had taken the bridge down, it was the frequency. The wind matched the natural frequency of the bridge, each vibration increasing the amplitude of the shaking.

  That she could do.

  As soon as the idea came to her, she had her teek begin throttling the metal plate. With the shaking of the plate, she felt, with her sharpened teek, the sympathetic vibrations in the machine holding the plate in place. She began a fast, rhythmic shaking. In a way it was just like pushing someone on a swing, you just had to keep pushing a little bit, at the right time, when the swing was moving away from you, and the arc would keep getting longer and longer. That’s what she did. She shook the plate with the vibrations of the machine, reinforcing the shaking, the violence becoming a little worse with each jolt.

  “Miss Boyle, what are you…”

  The voice was interrupted by a noise, a rumbling, almost subsonic, hum that Allison could feel through the table. She could open her eyes now, because what she was doing was becoming easier the more pronounced the shaking became. It was now very easy to feel when to push her teek.

  The rumbling became worse. Looking through the window, the vibration was visible. Allison could see dust dancing across the surfaces of the machine, and the details seemed blurred, as if was all slightly out of focus.

  As she watched, the resonant hum was over
powered by a gunshot-like snap as part of the framework failed catastrophically. A bolt flew from the machine and into the glass partition. The window starred, fracturing her view of one of the massive screw columns toppling away from the machine. The framework collapsed with a sound like a car crash.

  Allison heard the speaker say, “Oh shit.”

  Even though she knew she wasn’t thinking quite straight, Allison smiled.

  3:23 PM

  Jessica sat on one of the benches in the courtyard and felt the world slipping away from her. The character of the staff had changed. She couldn’t get a hold of people. They wouldn’t talk to her. Jessica knew it was Allison. Mr. Stone and Prometheus had found a new toy, and suddenly they didn’t see her as that important.

  Most significant was the fact she sat alone in the courtyard while most of PRI’s population were in classes, or being tested in the medical building. She should have been in the medical building herself, undergoing her own weekly ritual of tests. Jessica had never much liked that part of PRI’s regimen, but it had given her an opportunity to feel her power. She tried not to think that the tests gave her some sense of worth.

  And the Prometheus scientists had bumped her tests for Allison Boyle’s, leaving Jessica sitting alone in a hot, dry courtyard. She had called on everyone she knew in science when she discovered the rescheduling, and no one would respond to her. All she could reach was voice-mail.

  She was glad that the staff was too rushed to schedule anything in place of her tests. No one needed to see her this strung out. It was an effort to keep her talent reigned in. Every time she saw a guard across the courtyard, she felt an urge to unleash everything.

  The 3:30 bell sounded and people began filling the courtyard, passing between buildings. For the first time in a long while, she looked out at the mass of people, PRI’s students, and wondered how many were truly her allies. How many would follow her when the time came?

  The question had a note of urgency to it, now that she felt that the time was coming. With Allison here, the only way Prometheus’ implicit promise to her was ever going to be fulfilled was for her to take it herself.