One (One Universe)

He leans in, lowers his voice again. “On your own.”
    My lower lip trembles. Mom pulls me in for a hug, and my whole body stiffens. Mom never hugs me.
    She presses me to her, her wiry arms so much stronger than I ever would have expected, and I can’t pull away. She pushes her face into the hair hanging by my ear and whispers, “The two of you can fly?”
    I nod the slightest bit.
    “Fast?” she whispers.
    I nod again. I hope, with Elias under, it’s true.
    She loosens her grip. Steps away. “President Fisk. We want to get this over with. I’ll put him under myself.”
    I let forth something between a whimper and a yell and fall on Elias. Mom bends over me, digging her fingernails into my upper arms so hard it sends streaks of pain down my back.
    “It’ll happen quickly,” she says, her voice so low only I can hear it. “When he wakes, you two get out of here.”
    I summon all I have in me — my love for the boys and Elias, my desire to protect my friends and get us all the hell out of here — to trust her.
     
    Mom moves to a small stainless steel tray on a table nearby and stabs a needle into one vial of clear liquid after another, lifting, peering at it in the light, tapping the air bubbles out.
    Dad walks in and sees me holding Elias’s hand, crosses over to me, and wraps his arm around my shoulders. He tries to pull me away, but he couldn’t get me away from Elias with a crowbar. Especially not right now.
    Mom looks right at Dad, back to me for a second, and then back at him again with determined eyes. She holds up the needle-tipped syringe and quickly nods, the movement so slight that no one else would notice it. Mom injects it into the port. Dad draws back from me, his eyes slightly wet, his mouth set in a hard line. I’ve seen that face before. He’s steeling himself. Saying goodbye.
    A row of ten, a dozen, no, fifteen people in scrubs and white coats, just like my parents, has lined up along the wall. But they don’t stand like nurses. They stand rigid, shoulders squared, muscles tensed. Like soldiers. That and the way they react to Fisk’s every move as he paces the room — checking the girls’ monitors, watching Mom mix the stuff in the needle, walking too close to Michael and Max — says it all. They’re security, ready to jump on me the second I — we — try to run.
    Besides that, there’s nowhere to run. The testing arena crawls with security, dotted with obstacles we could never really sprint around, and every section of the building locks down if we try to go somewhere we don’t belong. Which, I imagine, is everywhere by this point. We’re stuck.
    But Mom didn’t tell me to run. She asked me if I could fly.
    That roof. All the doors have been locked down, but maybe that roof hasn’t. Besides, that thing opens directly to the sky. What kind of security could really be on it — bomber jets?
    I feel a shortness of breath, high in my chest, paralyzing my shoulders.
    We don’t get out unless we fly. If we fly, they won’t get what they want — hooking us up to monitors and injecting solutions to watch the transference — but they will want us even more. Enough to hunt us down. And between Nora and Lia in sensory deprivation fluid and the boys getting prepped for spinal taps, I know there’s nothing Fisk won’t do to figure us out.
    Which means if we fly out of here, we can’t stop flying. Ever.
    I glance over at my brothers one more time. Mom leans over and brushes Michael’s dark curls from his forehead, kissing him there.
    Like Fisk is reading my mind, he croons, “Show us that we’ve done something useful here, Merrin. Show us we’re on the right track. Let us send your brothers home.”
    He reaches a hand out to me, touching my arm, trying to draw me away from Elias. I fling my arm out and he steps away, still smiling that same stupid smile. I want to kill him.
    “You’re not touching me ever again.”
    “Oh, we’ll have to if you want us to stop testing them. And you’ll have to do it willingly. But if you won’t… The secret to why you displayed transference all those years ago could lie in their genes. We think it does. We’ve gotten so close. The only thing we can’t do is make Ones into Supers. But we will. When you show us exactly how that works.”
    There’s no way he’s going to grab Elias and me, and just let the boys go. Not when he can keep them for whatever freaky side experiments he has going on.
    “Prove to me that figuring out