The Inadequate Experiments, Sian Webster [whitelam books txt] 📗

yelling somewhere in the house. “God dammit,” they said, a little quieter, before, “Oliver!”

Just as I blocked out the voice, two sets of heavy footsteps thundered up the stairs and the door to the bedroom burst open.

“Oliver!”

I looked up from my book and met the eyes of the intruder. Blue. Shining. Excited.

Calliope blinked. “You’re not Oliver,”

“I daresay I’m not,” I mumbled.

The younger girl stepped into the room, moving around the double bed to sit on the side across from me, leaving David to stand awkwardly in the doorway. “So, you’re still here, then?” She reached up and tucked a lock of brown waves behind her right ear, revealing the true extent of the swirling scar on her neck and arm for a fraction of a second, before she removed her hand and the hair fell exactly where it had been before.

I nodded. “I don’t really have anywhere else to go.”

She raised her eyebrows. “You could always go home,”

I shook my head. “It’s not my home anymore. All that’s there is a man who isn’t my father, and two fourteen year old girls who are hardly even my sisters. I don’t even know if they’d want me back. I’m an abomination.”

“They miss you, Sera.” Calliope insisted, ignoring my comment about being an abomination; I hadn’t realised at the time, but that was insulting to the both of us, not just me. “They want you to go home.”

I shrugged. “I don’t know if I can face going home quite yet.”

Her face softened, and she reached out to pat my knee. “I’m sure Mum won’t mind you sticking around. I think she likes you more than she likes me. Not that that’s a surprise, but still. I think she wouldn’t want you leaving if you weren’t comfortable with it. You need a Mum right now. She’s willing to fill that place for you.”

“I’m sure she’ll protest me sticking around forever, though.” I pointed out. “At this rate, I don’t think I’ll ever be ready to go home.”

Calliope’s face changed from soft to unreadable. It was a face she pulled quite often – I had noticed it more since I had been staying there. It was the same way she looked at things she couldn’t understand, like experiments or machines she pulled apart. It wasn’t quite intrigued or confused or worried, but something in between. “How are the headaches?” She asked, her voice dropping low as if they were a secret, despite David’s knowledge of the problem.

I shrugged, closing the book and putting it beside me on the window seat. “Mainly in the morning when I wake up. They’re still painful as hell, but they fade after about half an hour.”

She took a deep breath. “You do know what the headaches are, right?” She asked slowly. “Considering you’re not being pumped with their drugs anymore, I mean.”

“A boy.” I told her, because it was all I knew.

She said a word. A name. But as she said the word, it was if she was speaking in a different language. My brain couldn’t process it. As she spoke, I saw the numbers on her Watch (which were purple once more) flicker on and off. I knew she would be concerned if I told her there was more wrong with my brain than she already knew, so I just nodded, my eyes trained on the carpet.

What about the voice in your head?  

I flinched as she spoke into my mind. I don’t hear him much anymore. I can feel him in my head sometimes, like he wants to talk to me, but eventually he disappears again.

Her eyebrows furrowed. Do the headaches start when he’s in your head?

A little, yes. I imagine they would be worse if he actually spoke.

In the doorway, David raised his eyebrows. “Are you two doing that thing?”

Calliope and I turned to look at him in sync, our facial expressions mirroring each other’s.

The boy slipped his hands into his pockets. “I’m gonna take that as a yes,”

I turned back to Calliope. Do you have any idea who he is?

A slight idea. She replied.

I thought back to the day when she showed me the security footage from the Compound. Is… is it Cooper?

Don’t. Stop thinking about that. She chastised me.

“Why?” It took me a while to realise I had spoken aloud.

Calliope sighed. “Just… trust me, okay? You don’t want to think about him. Like I said the other week, he’s gone. No need to worry.”

I nodded.

She blinked then, her brain switching from caring to business. “Oliver. Do you know where he is?”

“You could try the library,” I suggested. “Or the kitchen. Josh was complaining he was hungry earlier and wouldn’t stop coming in here because he’s not allowed to use the knives himself. Or maybe even the backyard. Josh was pretty intent on playing soccer too, despite the fact that we’re in the middle of a thunder storm right now.”

“Damn twelve year olds.” Calliope grumbled. “Everyone is so embarrassing when they’re twelve. All that year does is bring future embarrassment to everyone. We should find a way to like, mature people past twelve, thirteen and maybe even fourteen, so they don’t have to go through all that embarrassment when they look back on their lives.”

“Probably not possible.” David interjected from the door.

Calliope swirled around to face him. “Of course it’s possible! If the Scientists can create Sera from a single gamete and then insert an artificial chromosome into her gene pool that makes her more susceptible to people’s thoughts and whatever else she can do—” she stopped, turning around to face me, “—which, if you’re staying, we should definitely find out what exactly it is that you can do—” she span to face David once more, “—then of course I can find a way to hack into the growth sector of the brain and just speed up the maturity levels so you skip twelve and thirteen altogether!”

David held up his hands in surrender. “Okay, okay! If you say so!”

“I do say so!” Calliope snapped back playfully. She then turned to face me again. “You just give me a yell if you need anything, okay?”

“I will,” I muttered, picking up the book as Calliope pranced from the room in pursuit of her brother, David traipsing awkwardly behind her.

I opened the book once more, trying to read again, but the letters were still floating off the page and dancing before my eyes. Rather than just throwing it over my knees and onto the bed of the window seat like before, I found myself hurling the precious hardback at the wall opposite me, just as Oliver reappeared.

My Soul Mate opened the door and flinched, jerking to the side and forcing the door open with a bang as it collided with the wall beside it, the book narrowly missing his head and flying out into the corridor. He watched the book land on the floor outside the room before turning back to me, his eyes wide, just as mine were. My hands were pressed over my mouth, my back straight. We looked at each other wide-eyed for what felt like hours.

“What have I done this time?” He said, only half joking. “I’ve pissed you off before, I know, but I’ve never had a book thrown at my head.”

I managed to pull my hands down from my mouth and drop them into my lap before I dragged myself from the window seat. I stumbled almost blindly across the room to where he stood and pulled him close, embracing him tightly. He stood frozen for a minute before I felt his muscles relax and he wrapped his arms around me.

“So,” he muttered into my hair after a while, “not mad at me?”

I shook my head against his shoulder. “Just frustrated with myself, I guess.”

He pulled back, his hands sliding down the bare skin of my arms. “Why? What’s wrong?”

I sighed. “What do you think?”

For the millionth time in the last fortnight, he looked down and muttered, “I’m so sorry, Sera.” But you can’t save everyone. He never said the last half of the sentence, but it always hung in the air like a dark cloud.

My eyes travelled to the book out in the hallway and his gaze followed mine. “I still can’t focus on it.”

His hand travelled up from my arm to my forehead as he brushed a stray lock of hair out of my face, tucking it behind my ear. “I know you don’t want to hear it,” he muttered, “because I know I hate people saying it to me, but to some degree, I guess it’s true. It’ll get better, Sera. I’ll do anything to make sure it will.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Anything?”

He flashed me a smirk. “Even do a naked rain dance atop a volcano before diving in and sacrificing myself to Satan.”

For the first time in days, I laughed. The sound was colourful and melodic, even to my ears. But it was also alien; an echo, a replica, of my mother’s laughter that chimed through the house when I was younger. I kept the smile brought by the laughter plastered on my face to make Oliver feel a little better. “I don’t think that will be necessary, but I’m sure Hollywood would love to get that on video – or at least, the naked rain dance part, anyway.”

“Hollywood can’t touch what they can’t afford.” He winked, pulling me backwards to lie down on his bed with him.

“But they can afford you.” I pointed out. “How else would you have been in any movies?”

Oliver stroked his non-existent beard with one hand, and my hair with the other. “Well, for this year only, they can’t afford me. I’m getting educated this year – I need to be able to read all those big fancy words in their ridiculous scripts, don’t I?” The bed shook with his laughter. “Besides, if they think I’m leaving you alone just to film a thirty-second scene in Cambodia or something stupid like that, they are severely mistaken.”

I took a deep breath. “Do you ever wonder what would happen if everyone knew?”

The hand in my hair stopped moving. “If everyone knew what?”

“If everyone knew what happened in the Compound. If everyone knew I’m an abomination. If everyone knew we went and got our Watches reset.”  I listed.

Oliver bolted upright, looking down at me with a worried expression. “You’re not an abomination, Sera,” he insisted, “please don’t say that.”

I shrugged. “I shouldn’t exist. I’m… I’m like a machine.”

He took each of my hands into his, pulling me up into a sitting position. “I honestly don’t know what I’d do if you didn’t exist.” He said admittedly. “Before we met, I was so close to—” he broke off, his eyes travelling to his arm where he had his own scar, travelling from the crook of his elbow to his wrist, and shook his head. “What I’m trying to say is, there are people who need you, Sera. I’m one of them. Stacy and Shaunee, Thomas – they are too. You have helped so many people without even noticing it. You helped Calliope come back down to earth; she’s so much more… positive when you’re around. I think it helps that you’re like her. You helped Matt believe he was worthy of a name, helped him believe in himself. You’re helping me. Constantly. Just by being here. After what they did at the Compound… I can’t thank you enough, Sera. Believe me, love, you’re anything but an abomination.”

I nodded. “Still… what if everyone knew about all that?”

Oliver sighed. “I doubt everything would be as peaceful as it is. People would certainly panic about what actually happens behind the Scientists’ closed doors. Unfortunately, I imagine people would have a lot of horrible things to say about you, both for the fact that you’re an Untouchable, and the fact that we got our Watches reset. But, you see, this is why they’re secrets. Why we don’t tell anybody.”

“Secrets have a cost.” I pointed out.

He met my eyes. “The