Entanglement (YA Dystopian Romance) - By Dan Rix Page 0,40
in the empty seat next to Clive. The applause trailed off.
“A quick demonstration—” Casler boomed, and he produced two vials from the pocket of his cloak, a bottle of red dye, and an eyedropper. Each vial was half-full of a clear liquid. Then he hoisted a blowtorch onto the podium, crumpling Dravin’s notes.
“May I have a volunteer?”
A palpable excitement rippled through the crowd as Casler picked his volunteer from a dozen hands—a man in the seat in front of Aaron—and handed him one of the vials.
“Hold that up so everyone can see,” said Casler.
Aaron leaned forward, as the man held up a four-inch long glass vial exactly like the one Clive had brought to the beach. A chill fluttered down his spine.
Casler stepped back to the podium and held up his own vial. It was open at the top like a test tube. “Mr. Lilian, is that vial sealed?”
“Yep.”
“So there’s no way for anything to get out?”
“I’m wondering how stuff got in,” he muttered.
Laughter trickled nearby, but Aaron’s body had gone rail stiff. He was sitting directly behind Amber’s father—whose cloak, he noticed, was just as decorated as Casler’s.
Casler grinned. “Excellent. Now watch closely.”
He filled the eyedropper with red dye and held it over his own open vial. Before he released it, he peered stoically at his audience. “You are about to witness something spectacular—”
Then he squeezed the dye into his vial, and Aaron heard gasps, mutters.
“Mr. Lilian, hold that up so everyone can see.”
Red dye swirled inside the vial in Mr. Lilian’s hand, the same dye in Casler’s vial.
Casler didn’t wait for the chatter to stop. He lit the blowtorch and propped the open vial in the blue flame. The crowd waited anxiously. Half a minute later, the liquid boiled. The liquid in Mr. Lilian’s hand bubbled also.
In two minutes, the liquid in Casler’s vial had boiled away completely.
And the vial in Mr. Lilian’s hand was also empty.
Casler smiled and collected the vial back from him.
“When I put dye in one, it colored both. When one boiled away, they both disappeared—why?” He chuckled. “Because the molecules of both vials exist in a state of quantum entanglement.”
The audience sat in dumb silence. Casler paced the stage. “But the demonstration was merely an analogy. I’m sure you’ve guessed what for—”
He peered around at them all. “The clairvoyant channel. Only instead of test tubes, you have living, breathing human beings. Instead of clear water, you have clairvoyance. Drop ink into a man, and his half will feel it.”
“Dr. Selavio—” A hostile voice drawled from the corner. Dravin. “What do you suppose the halves feel if their clairvoyance boils away, as you demonstrated here?”
Casler held out his hand to silence the hisses. “A human being is not an open test tube,” he said.
“Right. I suppose you’d have to cut a hole in one first,” said Dravin.
“Nor are they made out of glass, Father.”
“But you do have to cut a hole,” said Dravin. “Am I mistaken?”
“Just poorly read,” said Casler. “As I announced at Monday’s press conference, I aim to seal the hole created by half death, not the other way around.” Casler beamed at them, despite their somber expressions. And then he stared straight at Aaron. “In fact, I’ve sealed a boy who should have died—a boy who had no half.”
The mutters trailed off.
“For eighteen years, his condition has been kept a secret, but now he sits in this very room. Now he will come before us.”
Aaron wasn’t sure he’d heard him right.
Casler scanned the wide-eyed and quiet audience. “I invited him tonight, although—” Casler looked in Aaron’s direction again and chuckled. “I wasn’t entirely sure he would come.”
Sweat prickled on Aaron’s face.
“On March 30th, eighteen years ago,” said Casler, louder now. “I severed this boy’s channel, sealed the leak—and saved him from half death.”
Aaron watched in horror as his life unraveled before his eyes. The article. He should have known tonight was a trap, that he would be exhibited before the Brotherhood as Casler’s twisted science experiment, as the boy without a half. An anomaly of the living world. There were a dozen seats between him and freedom—too many. They’d stop him.
Once again, Casler scanned his audience and stopped at Aaron, still beaming, full of pride. Others were turning in their seats, trying to get a look at him. “And now,” he said, “let’s have him come forward—”
Next to Aaron, Clive tensed. He was going to hold him if he ran. It was an ambush.