"No," we both manage to say.
"Excellent," he says, watching the readout from the lie detector.
"I get an A plus for not being an unwed pregnant teenager?" I say. "Wow. Maybe I like the New Order after all."
He completely ignores me. "Now let's get down to some very important business. On a scale of one to five, with five being the most, how would you characterize the efficacy of your parents' instructions to you vis-a-vis harnessing your… abilities?"
"What are you talking about?" I demand. "As you said, let's get down to business. Tell us when our parents are due to be executed! Are they being held here?"
"Ms. Allgood," he says. Ms. Allgood? Never in my life…"I'm afraid I am the only one permitted to ask questions here."
"News flash, mister. I'm not big on following rules!"
Whit nudges me as if he's signaling I should settle down. Since when is he going all Golden Boy again? We're Resistance leaders, aren't we?
The interrogator clears his throat. "We know your parents trained you. And we know they imparted to you certain, uh, highly sensitive pieces of information and/or equipment having to do with the scientifically proven energy forces that you both possess by dint of your genetic makeup."
"Are you talking about magic?" I ask. Whit frowns. Mute Golden Boy.
Mr. Interrogator looks extremely alarmed. "Shhh! Take my word and do not use that term in this building-or anywhere! You're living very dangerously."
Perfect invitation for me to get punchy. I'm practically singing at this point: "Magic, magic, magic, magic, ma -"
The Repressed One finally explodes. He's up and grabbing us by our collars, my shirt in one hand and, surprisingly, that of my Mute Golden Boy brother in the other.
"You make me ill!" he practically spits.
He looks at Whit. "You, with all your potential, and look what you do! Nothing! Sitting here like a mannequin! And your dynacompetent sister, here-why, she possesses a power so amazing, so devastating, so -"
There's a sharp noise as the automatic dead bolt on the room's door clicks open.
"Ah," says our interrogator, suddenly whiter than a pickled egg. "Said too much, did I?" he whispers to himself. "Oh!" he manages to squeal as somebody steps softly into the room behind us and the temperature drops, oh, maybe fifty degrees.
And just like that the interrogator turns into a medium-size rubber tree in a large terra-cotta container. Somebody has just made him into the quintessential potted plant.
And I have a good guess who.
Chapter 45
Wisty
INSTANTLY, IT'S AS IF someone's quadrupled the gravitational force in this place, and the energy's leaking out of me. I can't even sit up straight anymore. He has these electrifying Technicolor eyes-you've never seen anything like them. They'd be, like, model gorgeous if he wasn't so evil. As it stands, they're like an instant barf inducer. I'm queasy. But Whit's still locked into his weirdly placid state.
The One Who Is The One steps around the table, sliding our former interrogator's pot into a corner of the room with one foot.
"He'll need some watering," he says to nobody in particular, and then smiles silkily. "Or not."
The One waves at the far end of the room and transforms what had been a featureless white wall into floor-to-ceiling windows. He can turn a man into a plant. He can fly. He can vaporize children. I guess turning a wall into windows with a panoramic fiftieth-floor view must be a walk in the park.
"Now," he says, eyes briefly pulsing red but then turning a charismatic blue-a shade you might see on some touched-up face in a magazine ad (that is, if they made magazine ads for Pure Evil).
"Come," he invites as if we're old friends. He gestures at the picture windows. "Have a look."
"Um," says Whit, "we're kind of hooked up -"
But all the polygraph wires are now gone, like they'd been particularly unlikely figments of our imaginations.
The One beckons gently. "I think you'll enjoy this," he says. I'm shaking now. The One seems to "enjoy" nothing except torture and death. What's up his sleeve? And what's up with my brother, for that matter?
Whit gets out of his chair and walks over to The One like an obedient child.
"S'all right, Wisty, come on." Does he have some intel I don't? Last I heard him say more than a few words, he was bouncing off the van walls with rage.
But I don't want to be sitting over here alone. "For lack of anything better to do," I say begrudgingly, "okay. Let's have a look."
"Why the impudence?" The One asks. "You do know I don't intend to kill you." He puts his creepy, long arms around our shoulders and leads us to the windows. Strangely, his touch feels totally warm, even a little reassuring.
"Will you look at that?" he asks almost wistfully. "Do you see how the sky and the mountains there seem to be joined? Almost seem to be one?"
We gaze out across the city, the foggy street and building lights twinkling through the gloom. The clouds on the horizon are a sinister purple that does kind of merge with the snowless mountains beyond the valley.
"Do you have any idea how much work it took to make this perfect evening?"
I start shaking again. It's as if he's a cat playing with mice. He just said he wasn't going to kill us, but is he about to anyway? In any case he's definitely going to put some serious hurt on us.
"I bet you're wondering what I mean by that," he goes on. "A terrific high-pressure zone had been screaming down across the northern plains and would have brought torrential downpours tonight. Possibly even hailstorms."
We look at him blankly.
"So I stopped it."
Now I get it, and what he's done is pretty mind-blowing actually.
He raises his arms to point at a cloud on the horizon, and with the most casual of gestures, he steers it in over the city. Now he's making a spinning gesture with his other hand, and the cloud rotates. And now he's guiding in another massive cloud, and another, and another… Soon there's an enormous swirling, lightning-streaked vortex circling over the entire city.
As it churns and intensifies, the winds start rattling the windows. My ears pop as the pressure in the room drains. Does he plan to have us sucked up into the black core of the vortex? Is that tonight's plan? The rain is crashing down in iron-colored curtains. The building is groaning on its foundation. Is he going to vacuum the entire city off the face of the Earth?
But then he snaps his fingers, and the storm moves in reverse. The spiral turns backward and de-intensifies, and then the clouds retreat to their original stations in the sky.
"Now, you try, Wisteria," he says.
Chapter 46
Wisty
"WHAT?" I'M CAUGHT off guard-completely flabbergasted. Then it gets even weirder. Suddenly it's as if I'm at my piano lessons again, and he's Mr. John Masterson, my sweet-as-pie teacher, encouraging me to believe in myself. Say what?
"You have more than enough power to do it. Just tell the energy what it should do, and let it out. You saw what I did. Give your power that same image, and let it go. I have every confidence in you and your wonderful Gift."
He's out of his mind. Turning people into animals is, I admit, pretty cool, but it's, like, finite. Graspable. I can't wrap my mind around the sky, the wind, clouds, hurricanes-that's big-time.
"I can't do that," I whisper.
"Now, Wisteria," he says, a tone of threat creeping into his recently soothing voice.
I close my eyes and try to remember exactly how the clouds raced in over the city, how they joined together and began to swirl like an upside-down, ink-filled toilet flushing in the sky, the lights of the city twinkling below and almost disappearing as the rain whipped down. I let the tune of Mrs. Highsmith's song work as a soundtrack as I imagine it all playing before me… Can I actually do this? More important, do I want to? How can I live, and be the same person, with so much power?