Entanglement (YA Dystopian Romance) - By Dan Rix Page 0,34
true that you’ve been chosen as the heir to the Juvengamy Brotherhood?”
Aaron felt a hand grab the top of his head and aim it out the door.
“That way,” growled Mr. Lilian, before Aaron could hear the response. More questions he might be able to answer if he accepted Dr. Selavio’s invitation to the Brotherhood’s meeting. Outside, a twilight breeze sliced through his hair.
“Just one last thing,” said Mr. Lilian, before Aaron left, “and this is for your own good, son. My daughter isn’t allowed to date. If you ever go near her again, it’s going to be your ass.”
SIX
3 Days, 19 hours, 56 minutes
Aaron arrived early for his afterschool detention the next day and found Mr. Sanders’s classroom empty, so he sat at a desk. He couldn’t stop thinking about her, about their kiss, and whether their plan to meet up tonight after her parents fell asleep would work. The anticipation made his heart race, but in between the shallow beats, his body revolted.
He knew the stakes. They were both due at the Chamber of Halves in four days, and with the taste of Amber’s lips now etched into his brain, there was no way he could truly be there for his half. Not all of him, at least. Their channel, malleable up until their eighteenth birthday, would congeal with whole chunks missing.
Still, given the scar tissue blocking his channel, he doubted it mattered. If four days with Amber was all he got, she was worth it. Or was she?
Reeling with uncertainty and beginning to feel nauseous, Aaron switched his thoughts to Dr. Selavio and his alleged cure for half death.
If he did possess a cure, he certainly hadn’t cured Emma Mist and Justin Gorski; he’d done just the opposite. Aaron drummed his fingers on the desk, then stood up and paced back and forth along the front of the classroom.
Just the idea of a cure for half death grossed him out. That halves died together was only humane. Continuing on alone after your half died would be pure agony. Yet Aaron had to admit, the “demonstration of the technology” planned for Wednesday aroused in him a certain perverse curiosity.
Would Casler unveil his machine?
Aaron was still pacing when he noticed the door to Mr. Sanders’s office was slightly ajar. The bolt hadn’t latched properly.
He approached the office, hesitated, then tugged the knob. The door swung open—and what he saw inside made his heart lurch.
A human skull, propped up on his teacher’s desk. Its cavernous eyeholes gazed vacantly at the ceiling, swallowing the white blaze of a halogen lamp. A microscope jutted out from one of the eye cavities. Based on the geometry, Aaron estimated that a spot inside the cranium, directly opposite the eyeholes, lay at the microscope’s focal point.
Aaron stepped behind the desk and glanced around, his heart thudding. From out of the vacant eyeholes, the stink of ancient rot curled up his nose and prickled the hairs on his forearms. This picture was wrong. Whatever was down there at the back of the skull, it wasn’t meant to be seen.
He felt a frantic urge to knock the whole setup over and run. Yet his curiosity pushed him closer.
He steadied his breathing, wiped sweat from his clammy forehead, and leaned forward. The instant he pressed his eye to the top of the microscope, the air stirred.
Light filled the eyepiece. An image came into focus, he blinked—
***
“Mr. Harper, what do you think you’re doing?”
Aaron jumped back.
Mr. Sanders stood in the doorway holding a tray of bones. He raised his eyebrows.
“Mr. Sanders, why do you have all these . . . all these . . . ?”
“Bones? I’m putting together a lab activity we can do in class.” He set the tray on his desk. “I read in Scientific American that in old human skulls you can actually see the marks left by clairvoyance.” He nodded to the skull under the microscope. “This one dates back almost seventy-thousand years. Have a look.”
Aaron swallowed and leaned forward. Once again, a faint image crystallized through the lens, and the hairs stood erect on the back of his scalp.
At this scale, the back of the skull appeared coarse, almost terrain-like through the microscope. Peaks of bone rose out of focus. But with eerie precision, the three-dimensional pattern of an iris—an eye—was burned deep into the cranium. Aaron wondered if it was scrutinizing him rather than the other way around. He pulled away from the microscope.
“That’s what you get from thousands of years of clairvoyance