Unseen

Chapter 3

The woman kept turning invisible.

Yvette stood in the doorway to the fourth-floor bedroom and watched the spectacle. The woman was small, scrawny, young—maybe even younger than Yvette herself. One second, she was huddled on the sumptuous gold sheets of the bed, knees hold her chest. The next, she was gone.

Just... gone. Yvette could see the stack of pillows behind her, as if the room were empty. Some part of her brain told her it had to be an optical illusion, but no illusion was that good.

"It's real," she murmured to herself. "The Enhanced are real."

If she had believed in any gods, she would have been thanking every one of them for Reynold Bishop right now.

The woman kept flickering in and out. In and out. There again. Gone again. There again. Gone again.

The flickering had to be a nervous reaction. Or maybe a lingering effect of the sedative. Her personal doctor, whom Reynold had brought in on the plan, had warned her it would take a few hours to wear off fully.

Dr. Whorton had looked disapproving of the plan too. But Yvette didn't care. She wasn't the one fighting for her survival. However things shook out in the Couvillion syndicate, she would be all right.

She wasn't the one who stood to lose everything.

The woman was still wearing her shoes. They were black and sturdy and military-looking, and were undoubtedly smearing mud all over the thousand-dollars sheets. That was the kind of thing her father would have given her an hour-long lecture on. As if he had any room to talk about the value of money, considering all the inefficiencies she had found in his books after his death.

The woman flickered back into existence. Yvette cleared her throat. The woman kept her head buried against her knees. She gave no sign that she knew Yvette was there.

Yvette took a step into the room. Like every bedroom in the Couvillion mansion, it was as big as some small houses. The houses of the school friends she had never been allowed to visit—You're not part of their world, Yvette. You're meant for greater things. Her father was still in her head, enforcing his will from beyond the grave.

The bedroom was set up for guests, but as far as Yvette knew, the bed had never been slept in. Her father wasn't the type to invite people to stay the night. Too afraid of a knife in the back. And rightfully so.

The walls were the same gold as the sheets. A thick, lush maroon carpet turned the floor as soft as goosedown. The wood of the bed frame was tinted a dark red. The room stank of money and blood.

If this were Yvette's room, she thought she would fill it with lavenders and light blue-grays, like a smudgy watercolor, like a rainy morning.

Maybe she could. Why not? It was hers now. The whole house was.

She didn't know what to do with that thought, so she pushed it aside for later. She took another step toward the bed. Her feet sank into the thick carpet until she thought it might pull her under.

"My name is Yvette Couvillion," she said to the woman, who had disappeared again. "There's no need to be afraid. You're not a prisoner anymore."

The woman flickered into existence again. She raised her head long enough to give Yvette the wary look of an animal caught in a trap. Her eyes were a piercing gray. She would have looked right at home in that smudgy watercolor room. In this room, an embodiment of her father's self-image just like the rest of the house, she only looked small and scared.

She looked nothing like the living weapon she was.

It was Reynold who had told her about the Psi Enhancement Research Initiative. The government program that had come into existence to in response to. Their human weapons with superhuman powers. Their breeding programs to develop operatives with stronger and stronger abilities.