The Chosen (A Talents novel)

Chapter 9

Chapter 9

For the next week, I did very little. Listened to the radio. Went running. Climbed around the mountains. The silence in the woods was exactly what I needed. Every time I started to get overwhelmed and pulled down by my own thoughts, I went outside and sat under a pine tree, or laid my head against its rough bark. I listened to the wind rustling in the branches and imagined me and Cam sitting in our tree together back at Delcroix. I cried a lot, but I think that was okay. By the end of the week, instead of walking around in a dark fog things were becoming clear.

Things were becoming clear, and I was becoming angry.

Angry that Grandma didn’t know I was safe, and was probably worrying herself to death.

Angry that Anna and Trevor were stuck with the Program, having no idea what had happened to Cam or how Izzy and I had disappeared. Angry that their lives might be in danger, and I had no way to help them.

Angry that Mr. Judan was getting away with everything, that he had the nerve to appear in news stories and speak in a soft, confused voice. “I don’t know what happened. All I can think is that Dancia must have had some kind of mental breakdown. Please, wherever you are, Dancia, give yourself up. There’s no use running. You can’t run away from what you’ve done.”

His vile, persuasive voice twisted my stomach and made me want to hurl the radio through a window. My only consolation lay in the fact that at least in one crucial way, I’d beaten him. I was free, and he must be furious to know it.

I vowed to make him pay. I ran up and down the hills outside camp and thought the whole time about how much I hated him, and how I wanted him to suffer. It wasn’t pretty. I had never been the kind of person to get angry, and even when I did, the anger usually dissolved pretty quickly.

Not this time.

I discovered that there were about twenty people at camp, who hung out in two main groups. Group One I called the Lifers. They had been fighting the Program as long as they could remember, and they looked it. They were a mix of men and women, mostly were middle-aged, a few older. I don’t know exactly what they did, but they would disappear for long periods of time and reappear for meals or to refill large cups of coffee.  There were no other buildings at camp besides the sleeping cabins and the dining hall, at least none that I could see, so I figured they were working underground, or in some kind of hidden facility back in the woods.

No one trusted me completely. They “suggested” that I stay out of certain areas of camp and I was happy to oblige. For one thing, I didn’t want to get Izzy into trouble. I was already worried that Gregori would come down hard on him when he got back, and it would be all my fault.

For another, I had no desire to go snooping around in Irin territory.

At least, not yet.

Group Two I called the Teens. They all had some talent—a skill they called it here—but for whatever reason, had been picked up by the Irin rather than the Program. They weren’t keen on telling me their stories, and I didn’t pry. They made enough nasty jokes about the Program that I figured they all had some reason for where they’d ended up. Frankly, I wasn’t interested in hearing them. I had no idea how to reconcile the good things I’d seen the Program do with all the lousy, horrible things they also seemed capable of. Closing my eyes seemed like the only way to deal with it, at least for now.  

This group didn’t seem to have much to do. Izzy had said they were here because they needed a safe place, but they also reminded me of soldiers waiting for their next mission. They had a tendency to kill time telling war stories—drawn out accounts of things they’d done and seen. Most of it was low level, annoying stuff like wrecking Watchers’ cars or setting off fireworks inside a Program school, though it occurred to me that they might have been censoring themselves for my benefit. A couple of times they veered into something more violent, but stopped mid-sentence when a warning look was directed toward me.