James Patterson - The Gift

“So what do you have to say for yourself, you hideous, low-down louse? ” I place my hands on either side of the laminated instruction card.

Byron looks me in the eye.

“Three!” ERSA announces.

“I promise you, Wisty,” Byron whispers, “everything I’m doing is to protect you, not to hurt you. I swear to you over my dead body. And I will be dead, soon enough. I would even die for you.”

I turn over the card and… No way.

Good afternoon, ma’am. Flame Girl reporting for duty!

Wisty

IT WAS TOO EASY.

The apparatus on the table was a steam turbine hooked up to a generator, and, get this, all I had to do was use magic to heat the thing up to light the bulbs on the table. I lit those bulbs so bright the other kids started yelling at me to turn them down because it was hurting their eyes.

Sore losers.

Not that I blame them-I’d be honked off, too, if I wasn’t going to get any chocolate.

I’m so pumped I don’t even care that Byron’s coming, too. And, I have to admit, his very traitorous presence ticks me off so much it’s easy to light up every single bulb that I walk by on my way out of the Dynasium.

I hardly notice that the “Reward Center” looks like some enormous, dingy corporate call center with carpet-board cubicles all over the place. Sitting at many of them are blissed-out, brown-mouthed children, with enormous platters of chocolate in front of each of them. The kids are covered with wires and weird electro-majiggies that sometimes seem to pulse with a strange blue light.

But, OMG, I can smell the chocolate! Mouth watering. Knees weak. Can’t talk.

“Prisoner Allgood and Informant Swain, please proceed to cubicles 124G and 124H,” says ERSA.

“Follow me,” says Byron. “I’ll show you how to hook up the monitors.”

“Monitors?”

“You need to wear the monitors when you eat the chocolate.”

“Not surprised, I guess, that you’re so skilled in surveillance tech,” I snort. But just between you and me, right now I’d wear an I BYRON T-shirt if it meant I could get some more of that chocolate.

Byron helps me put these little suction-cup things on my forehead and arms. They’re like those electrodes they use on patients in the hospital, only they’re bigger, and the wires are a whole lot thicker.

And then, Oh yeah, here comes an automated cart with two huge platters of chocolate-I’m talking bigger than my head! One has Byron’s name on it, and the other -

I’ve wolfed down at least a quarter pound before I even realize I’ve done it. The stuff tastes that good.

And I’d suck down more except my stomach is starting to protest. I guess there’s a reason people don’t eat candy for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

I take a breath and look around.

Some of the kids have clearly been here awhile and have eaten their entire trays. Most of them are now slumped over. Napping, I guess?

Except maybe that little kid over there-he definitely looks a little green.

And that girl lying on the floor. While I watch, two goons in medical scrubs come in and drag her away.

Byron looks up from his own personal choco-fest and notices my glance.

“Yeah, she probably hasn’t learned her limit yet. They’ll take her to the vomitorium.”

“The vomitorium? ” I ask, not really thinking it through.

“That’s what the students call the place where they pump your stomach.”

“Ah,” I say, vaguely finding that disturbing, but I feel another choco-craving coming on and quickly turn my attention back to my glorious platter. I swear, if they’d had this stuff back in my high school, I would have weighed 250 pounds.

But right then I start to get really tired, and the suction cups on me-it’s as if they’ve gotten very cold. They’re almost burning, the cold stings so much. The wires are glowing an unearthly blue color. And my stomach’s totally knotted.

And I don’t know that I’ve ever been so tired in my whole life. It’s as if these wires are sucking the life out of me…

Byron is giving me a worried look. What’s he saying? Maybe if I just put my head down on the desk for, like, a few seconds, just close my eyes…

Whit

POOR WISTY COULD BARELY sit up and, for two days afterward, had to stay in her bunk, subsisting on water and the soup crackers that I stole from the cafeteria.

But the craziest and scariest part of it was, even in the height of her sickness, she was still craving more chocolate.

My sister was officially an addict.

“I actually fantasized before we got here that it would be like a celebrity-rehab center where I could just do nothing but recover all day,” Wisty confesses to me at one point. “Now that I’m doing it… well, it sucks.”

It’s not easy for a champion athlete and a whip-smart troublemaker who loves the spotlight, but we resolve from here on out to be the most average, unremarkable students in the building.

We’ll do everything asked of us, but no more than that. Nothing that will make us stand out. Anything to keep us from getting any special attention.

It’s nearly impossible to stay under the radar with Crossley and Byron on the premises, since we’d love nothing more than to interrogate the heck out of them. But we quickly figure out that the best strategy is to nod politely and do our work with as much mediocrity as possible.

Our assignments center around the “brilliant efficiency” of the New Order’s world vision. Essays in which we prove that The One Who Is The One is the most powerful visionary in all of human history. Math problems in which we demonstrate that never before have more people been more productive than under the New Order. Science readings in which we learn that magic, art, music, and most of the rest of humanity’s former extracurricular activities were harmful to humankind.

One day our plan to blend in goes up in smoke, though, when Crossley does something really stupid. He’s still peeved at Wisty for not giving him some of her M.

We’re sitting in the cafeteria, eating the usual nutritious but antidelicious porridge, when he throws a piece of chocolate out on the table right in front of her. I figure it must be stolen, since he doesn’t get to the Rewards Center much.

“Want some choc-o-late, Wisty?” he says real slowly, smacking his lips.

My sister looks down at the candy and literally starts to tremble at the temptation. She drops her spoon and grabs the edge of the metal table with both hands.

“Yeah,” Crossley goes on, despite the “I’m going to grind you into burger meat” look I’m giving him. “I won a contest. Guess I didn’t need your help after all. But maybe I could use your help eating my rewards,” he says, pushing the chocolate closer to her. “Or not.” He pops it into his mouth.

Wisty’s shaking. In fact she’s shaking so hard the whole table’s moving around. And now, oh no, not again -

She bursts into flames.

“FINALLY!” SAYS THE ONE Who Is The One triumphantly. “This is what I needed to see.

“Clearly,” he continues, walking away from one of the dozens of video monitors, stroking his chin, “it’s just as I hypothesized. It appears she manifests especially in moments of great duress. Which clearly indicates she has little or no mastery of her Gift.”