One (One Universe)

down the hallway along with hundreds of others Hub visitors.
    About 40 feet down, right before the second security check, hangs a gilt frame with a painted portrait of a boy, about Michael and Max’s age. I drift over to look at it, bringing Elias along with me.
    A name plate beneath it reads, “Charlie Fisk. Inspiring us to make the world a better place.” I run my finger over the letters, repeating the words under my breath, trying to grasp at why they’re so familiar.
    I look up at Elias. “Fisk?”
    He nods. “President Fisk’s son. He would have been in his mid-twenties by now. Died when he was a kid, about our age. Some fast-moving cancer.”
    “What was his Super?” I wonder out loud, then feel guilty for being so morbidly curious.
    Elias shrugs. “They, uh…they say they never knew. Hadn’t manifested by the time he got sick.”
    I quickly do the math of years in my head. “Would have been late.”
    Elias shrugs. “I don’t know. Maybe they force the kids too quickly now. Especially with the Supers’ classes starting earlier… I don’t know. You want your kid to fit in, I guess. They never said it, but I think my mom didn’t want that for me. She never cared if I was Super. Just Dad.”
    We stand there, staring at the portrait, ignoring the rush of bodies behind us. I squeeze Elias’s hand so he knows I heard what he said. So he knows I care.
    He clears his throat and says, “That’s the slogan. The one they’ve been using ever since Fisk was elected. Fifteen years now. He thinks… Dad says he wants to be more than just a biotech service for the Supers. He wants to make the whole world better.”
    “Cure cancer,” I say.
    Elias nods. For a second, I stare at the portrait of Charlie, his dark hair and evergreen eyes so alive. I wonder if Fisk wants to cure anything else. I wonder if curing cancer made him think about curing people like me, too.
     
    After a cuff scan and a facial-recognition identity verification, we stand in another huge, cavernous white room turned into a maze of tables, vendors, and info booths.
    “What do you want to do first?” Elias asks. I think he has gotten even more excited now that he sees my eyes roving and body itching to check everything out. “There’s a demonstration, we can watch some other kids test their powers against their parents,’ um, I think there are some lectures…” He taps through the schedule on his cuff.
    “I think I really want to stay here. Is that weird?”
    “Wanting to hang with the biotech reps all afternoon?” He wrinkles his nose, still smiling. “Yes, it is weird. But I should have known.”
    “Yeah, you should have,” I say, punching him on the arm. The twins barrel over toward us, pushing through the crowd to greet Elias.
    “I’ll drag these clowns around while you check everything out,” he says.
    “They’re twice the trouble,” I tell him and give the twins a warning look, my eyebrows in the air.
    “You think I don’t know? I grew up with twin Supersibs, too. Conniving ones. These guys are cake.” He slings a long arm around each of their necks, putting them in a lock, and both of them protest, laughing.
    They walk off, and Elias yells over his shoulder, “Meet you back here at two, okay?”
    I shake my head at the three of them, smiling. The boys’ dark curly heads bob up and down next to Elias, and they look up at him like they’ve just won the freaking lottery. Boys. They’ll probably find some incredible underground basketball court and waste a whole afternoon at the Symposium doing that.
    After an hour of browsing the booths, stuffing flash drives full of information and other swag into my bag, and buying a t-shirt — magenta with an illustration of a drum set the artist has turned into an lab for liquid solutions, with every drum bubbling and half-filled with bright color — I realize that Elias has never really been to the Hub, just like me. So how does he know his way around here so well?
     
    Finally, Elias and the boys find me. It takes everything I have not to stretch up and kiss Elias — I almost never wear heels, and I’m even closer to his face now — but there are too many people here. The boys decide to go to some static electricity demonstration, and I drag Elias to a lecture I’ve been eyeing on the schedule all morning titled, “New Horizons: Malleability of the Gene Structure and Real-Life Improvements for Gifted Individuals.”
    The word “improvements” catches my eye.