The Energy Room Read online

Infinite whiteness was all that surrounded me, but it lacked the feeling of constraint associated with the walls of The Facility. It was warm and welcoming, almost shielding in nature. I was home.

  My entire being was engulfed by the comfort of an over-sized blue chair. If I could do nothing but stay in that one spot for the rest of my life, I would have been content. Stemming out from me in a circle were five other chairs, each one a different color of the rainbow. All of the others were empty, except for the yellow one two seats to my right. A pair of fiery, copper eyes gazed at me from behind a thick book, locks of straight, dark hair falling around them.

  “What are you doing here?” Nadia asked nervously, setting her book on her lap. I looked around for a moment, trying to steady myself.

  “I passed out,” I said, cradling my head in my hands. It was so comforting to see my bare wrists without any sign of hindering shackles.

  “Are you… are you okay?” Nadia asked, placing her book in her chair as she stood to move closer to me.

  Nadia was a beautiful girl, and her voice had the unique ability to turn your innards into gooey mush. Her flawless, dusky skin made her eyes seem as though they might burst out of her face and engulf the room in flames. She was truly one of my oldest friends, and one of my only connections to the outside world. Unfortunately, she had been in a coma since she was very young, which was why she was in the Room during the middle of the day; she was always in the Room.

  The Energy Room was where our minds went when we were unconscious, at least that’s how we understood it. There were six of us, and we had been going to the Room for as long as any of us could remember. It was our true home, and our true family. The Room gave us everything we needed when we were there, everything we were deprived of on the outside.

  After being together every night of our lives for nearly eighteen years, we knew all there was to know about each other, yet we knew very little of ourselves. We were all born on the same day of the same year; we were all adopted; and we were all able to do things that normal people shouldn’t have been able to do. While the Room was able to provide us with the knowledge of nearly any subject we could ever crave to learn, it was unable to tell us anything of who we were. That, or we simply hadn’t been asking the correct questions.

  All of the information The Facility had been after for the last seventeen years existed in a room that they could never access. If William ever found out that the secrets he desired were so close, yet so far… he would be more furious than a particularly disgruntled cat in an ugly holiday sweater.

  “I’m fine,” I said quietly, rubbing my eyes as I remembered the stabbing pain that had riddled them just moments before. I checked frantically, finding no apparent wound anywhere on my head. With a sigh of relief, I found that I hadn’t been shot. What had caused the pain, then? I didn’t know enough about medical stuff to be sure, but the hypochondria in me suggested that I had developed a brain tumor or, even more likely, there was a parasite living in my head.

  Nadia reached her hand out to me questioningly. I nodded, and met her hand with mine. I watched calmly as her coppery eyes clouded over, allowing her to experience the recent events that had led to my unexpected visit to the Room.

  There was only silence for a moment, as Nadia’s eyes cleared and she withdrew her hand. We stared at each other, both pondering the happenings of my day.

  “Is he—” she began reluctantly.

  “I don’t know.” I cut her off, already knowing she would ask about Al.

  “What would that mean?” Nadia questioned, retreating to her yellow chair, “If he was?”

  I gazed blankly at the beautiful girl a couple seats away from me. The girl who, as far as any of us had been concerned, was one of only six of our kind. We had all been so sure that we were the only ones.

  “Nothing,” I said softly. “It wouldn’t mean anything, because he’s not.”

  Nadia sighed with frustration. When she was four years old, she had been in the car accident that resulted in her coma. Since then, she had spent nearly every moment of her life in the Room. There had been a few instances when she faded back into reality, each time only long enough to see her adoptive mother sitting by her side. We assumed that her body was still showing brain activity, and that was why nobody had pulled the plug on her. While our room was comforting, and provided us with nearly anything we could ever hope for, Nadia was stuck, like someone who had gotten onto the wrong side of the mafia and ended up at the bottom of a river, feet hopelessly secured in concrete blocks. Her only human connections fading in and out on a daily basis was far more agonizing than any test or procedure that had been performed on me at The Facility. We all felt alone on the outside, but Nadia was truly isolated. Proof of others like us in the outside world would have given her some faith that she wouldn’t spend the rest of her life confined to the unending canvas of the Room.

  “You’re fading,” Nadia announced, having been staring at me the entire time.

  I looked at my hands to find that they were, indeed, translucent. I was coming to in the real world, and being forced to leave the room.

  “We’ll talk about it tonight,” I promised.

  A moment later, I opened my eyes to see Eddie’s worried, but ecstatic, face a few inches from mine. Whatever he had used to bring me back into consciousness left a horrible, metallic smell in my nostrils. I sat up slowly, grasping at the large bump where my head had aggressively introduced itself to the metal walkway.

  “Wow. Ow.” I was irritated, and somewhat amused, by the size of the bump.

  “How do you feel?” Eddie asked, wrapping a blanket around me.

  “Like I almost froze to death, then knocked myself out on a metal walkway,” I exclaimed, waving my hands around in a failed attempt to shoo away the people who had gathered around me.

  “Oh, good.” Eddie smiled, patting me on the shoulder.

  As Eddie stood up, I noticed his shoes were missing. I furrowed my eyebrows in confusion, wondering why he would have taken his shoes off. My question was answered soon enough, when he bent over at the end of the walkway to pry his frozen shoes from the frosty metal. At that point, I realized I was still freezing, half covered in icicles, and various parts of my skin were an unhealthy shade of blueish-purple.

  One of the nice medic fellows checked the bump on the back of my head, and assured me that I would be alright.

  “You might want to take care of that frostbite, though,” the other medic said indifferently, pointing at my feet.

  I cringed as it was brought to my attention that about fifty-percent of my toes were a nasty, blackish color. I poked one of them lightly, but felt nothing. Wiggling was out of the question. Those little piggies would not be going wee-wee-wee anywhere, not in their current state.

  I placed my hands an inch or so above my feet, and closed my eyes. A white ball of light dropped from my palms, encircling my toes, as I envisioned my body healing itself. I opened my eyes, watching the toes slowly return to their normal, pale color, nodding in satisfaction as I wiggled them wildly.

  Even though everyone had cleared to leave me sit alone on the warming walkway, I felt eyes piercing the back of my head. I discreetly looked around the room, until my gaze was met by those arctic, blue peepers. Al’s face was still void of emotion, but I could sense that his mind was racing. I watched intently, as Eddie whispered something inaudible into the young psychologist’s ear. Al nodded, and followed one of the security guards out of the room, into the elevator, and out of sight. I wondered if what he had seen was too shocking, if he had decided to turn down the job. I wondered if he would leave. I wondered if they would let him leave.

  “Angie, good work!” Eddie exclaimed, dragging me out of the little space in my mind that only contained worry. “Really, it was extraordinary.”

  “Thanks.” I smiled weakly.

  The frozen towers were planted sturdily in the solid ice of the water tank. They surrounded me like a beautiful, diamond castle, if diamonds could
melt in a room where the thermostat had been turned up to about 90 degrees. It would be a lie to say that I wasn’t proud of myself.

  Ice had always been my downfall. I could create a devastating tornado with nothing but a draft. I could turn the flame of a candle into a wildfire. I could start a monsoon with a cup of water, but the most progress I had ever made with ice was frosting over some lemonade at a Village cookout. Rather, I could do all these things when the employees of The Facility thought it was appropriate. I frowned at the green lights that had returned to my Electro-Cuffs

  Once upon a time, when I was about twelve years old, I got feisty and tried to flood William’s office in a pathetic attempt at escape. That was when the Electro-Cuffs were brought into the picture. All of the information that had been collected from every test ever done on me was uploaded to a server linked to the shackles. Small changes in my body chemistry allowed them to determine, without delay, the exact moment I began to use my abilities. The response was a painful electric shock, severe enough to deter me from ever getting too frisky again. Of course, there were ‘minor malfunctions’ when the Electro-Cuffs were first developed. ‘Malfunctions’ like accidentally electrocuting everyone in the swimming pool on the fourteenth floor. Fortunately, those issues were resolved rather quickly. When the Electro-Cuffs were developed was also when they implemented the intricate security system; cameras in nearly every corner, microphones and speaker systems in every room. I hadn’t been able to really talk to Eric for almost six years.

  Coincidentally, that was about the same time William became extremely busy and stopped overseeing my lab-runs. If he needed to converse with/at me, the communication almost always took place over the speaker system. I thought it was wildly amusing that the old man who was in charge of the entire Facility, was apparently frightened of a twelve-year-old girl.

  “I’ll see you at dinner tonight?” Eddie asked, once again pulling me out of my own mind.

  “Of course. Do you, er… do you happen to know if Al will be there?” I inquired, forcing myself to my feet.

  “I’m not sure. He went off to talk to William, but I don’t know if he’s decided whether or not he will stay,” Eddie replied, a glint of empathy shining in his eyes as he smiled.

  I nodded in understanding and started toward the glass door, still clutching the blanket around my shoulders.

  “Oh, Angie… would you mind? Emmy will kill me if she finds out I’ve ruined another pair.” Eddie stopped me, holding up his dripping shoes in a questioning manner.

  I snickered, and took the damp shoes into my hands. Eddie nodded to an older man at one of the computers, who was responsible for turning my Electro-Cuffs on and off on that particular day. After the red lights returned to my wrists, I closed my eyes with a grin. The water streamed off of the shoes like tiny rivers bending through a leather forest. It splashed onto the floor, as if a minuscule rain shower had developed beneath them. Eddie bowed in thanks as I handed back the bone-dry loafers, the little, green light appearing back on my wrists with an omnipotent flicker.

  “See you tonight, Eddie,” I said, making my way out of the lab, and finally back up to my small apartment, where I thought over every detail that had managed to cram itself into half a day.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Sweet Dreams, Angela Dawson