“At least let’s be honest with one another,” he prompted. “I’m not trying to upset you, Camellia. I really want to get to know you and maybe get a few answers to questions I’ve had about myself.”
Camellia regarded him in silence while that slight breeze ruffled her hair and the pink blossoms touched her face as if to soothe her. “How much do you know about Whitney’s experiments?”
Jonas sighed and shoved his fingers through his hair. “We all agreed to strengthen our psychic abilities. Everyone in the GhostWalker program volunteered. We thought it was a good thing. We had a chance to prevent other soldiers from getting killed in combat. I tested fairly high in quite a number of areas. On Team One, there were several of us who did. I think Whitney was very excited about that. He convinced us he knew what he was doing. Unfortunately, he didn’t.”
“You look like you’re a capable soldier to me,” she answered.
“In the beginning, we were mostly a mess.” Jonas was strictly honest. “Whitney did more than enhance our psychic abilities. He messed with our genetic coding without saying a word to any of us. He removed the filters to our brains. Some of us needed anchors to draw the energy away from us, or we got brain bleeds. Because we were unaware of the new genetics that made us more aggressive, faster and able to do things we couldn’t do before, we made mistakes that hurt others.” He looked down at his hands. “Not just hurt others. People were killed. Our team was separated and locked up. There were a couple of factions that took an unhealthy interest in us. One was trying to murder us and the other trying to study us.”
“Whitney would want to continue his experiments,” Camellia said.
He nodded. “Ryland, along with Whitney’s daughter, Lily, helped us escape. Ryland runs our team and is married to Lily now. Lily taught us exercises to develop shields in our brains in order to be able to be around other people for short periods of time without an anchor. It felt like a long road learning what we were and what we could do. We’re still learning. Mostly, we learned we could only count on each other to survive.”
Jonas kept his eyes on her face the entire time he gave her the truth. He didn’t tell her the hell they’d all been in—separated, knowing they were under a death sentence, afraid to go to sleep, knowing others were being murdered and unable to help one another. She’d been in a similar situation most of her life, imprisoned by Whitney, having to stand by while he tortured the other girls, unable to aid them.
Camellia shook her head and then looked down at her hands. “It’s so terrible to feel helpless. I didn’t know, for a very long time, if I had anything to contribute to my sisters. I’ve always been a strong telepath, but my healing abilities didn’t show up until my late teens, and then they weren’t strong. I had to really work at drawing that talent out. Or at least, I thought I was working at it. I didn’t want Whitney to know I had that gift, so I would try little experiments when I was alone in my room.”
Jonas frowned. “Such as?” He knew he wasn’t going to like what she did.
She sent him a little grin. The smile put a gleam in the blue of her eyes. “I’d cut myself, not deep, just a little slice, then try to close it. At first I had to make it look like I fell and hurt myself because I was lousy at healing. Eventually, I got good enough to heal the skin so there wasn’t a single mark.”
He not only saw it; he felt that she was pleased with herself. This time the ripple in his veins was a heat that flowed like slow molasses, making him so aware of her, he could barely breathe. There was no pointing out to her that it wasn’t the best way to test her skills, not when she looked back on a terrible time in her life and yet somehow had a good memory.
“You’re happy because you outwitted Whitney.”
“He always believes he’s superior to everyone, the smartest man in the room. I will give him his due: he is brilliant, and when it comes to science and scientific discovery, he’s ages ahead of his time. But that brilliance also leads him to underestimate others, and that will ultimately be his downfall. I don’t know what happened to make him believe women are so inferior and incapable of genuine intelligence, but even as children, the twelve of us were often able to conceal things from him. As we got older, we became very good at it.”
Jonas nodded his understanding. “We realized almost immediately that we couldn’t let him or anyone else know what we could do. Like your talents, ours keep developing and growing stronger. We don’t want them documented. There’s a faction in the government that fears us. They send us on what basically amounts to suicide missions. Whitney does his best to throw challenges at us. Now that some of the men and women on the teams have children, Whitney does everything he can to get his hands on the kids.”
Camellia looked appalled. “You can’t let him.”
“That’s why we’re building a stronghold here. Team Three has one in San Francisco and Team Four in Louisiana.”
She lifted her chin, her eyes clear as they met his, but her fingers twisted together in her lap. He could tell she was emotional, not only because the branches of the Middlemist Red dipped close to her but because he felt it in the way his body reacted.
“Lily married one of your teammates, Ryland? Is she happy? Lily was always wonderful. I know some of the others thought of her as a traitor, but she couldn’t help the way Whitney treated her. He filled her full of lies.”
“It was very difficult for her to learn the truth about him,” Jonas said, trying to be careful. “She was really thrown when she discovered what he’d done to all of you and so many other girls. You weren’t the only ones he experimented on. But yes, she’s very happy now. She’s very loved by not only Ryland but all the teams. They have a son, Daniel. He’s quite the handful.”
Her eyes lit up. “I can imagine. I’m so glad she found a place where she’s protected from Whitney. What about Iris? We called her Flame. He kept giving her cancer. Over and over, he’d make her so sick we all thought she would die. She wanted to die. He hated her because he couldn’t break her spirit.”
“She’s cancer-free at the moment and married to a member of our team. Lily somehow found a way to put her cancer in remission. She and Gator are very happy together. I can tell you, he absolutely adores her.”
Camellia pressed the heel of her hand to her forehead for a moment and nodded. “You have no idea how happy that makes me. She suffered so much, Jonas. Whitney was a monster all the time, but when he detested one of us, he was worse than a monster; he was pure evil. There was another girl. She was tiny, like a little fairy. So much younger than the rest of us. He named her Jonquille. We all doted on her. Her body was like a magnet for electricity, and he wanted her to use it to attract lightning. He would put us in a meadow, and she was to direct a lightning strike to a target or he would instruct his soldiers to shoot one of us. Can you imagine a little child having that kind of pressure put on her? She couldn’t direct lightning that way. He made her feel so useless. He told her she was nothing all the time. Such a failure to him and to all of us. I detested him for that. He would lock her in her room because everyone was afraid of her. She might be able to kill them if she touched them with all that electricity in her body.”