Lissa stayed in the room three more days, until the curving earthen walls became their own torture. She wanted to walk around in the sunshine again. She was sick of living like a bat underground.

She’d been left to herself mostly. The bandages had come off yesterday. Food came to her like clockwork. Gideon made sure she had books and magazines, and even an iPod with a list of her favorite songs. Each time he came to the room he asked her if she had any more questions and if she was ready to meet the others in what he called ‘The City’. Each time she said no.

She spent most of her time trying to come to grips with what had happened to her over the past week, of alternately trying to remember her last moments with her parents and to forget them.

She was angry at them for not telling her what she was. She felt that it was the greatest betrayal possible, to keep secrets about someone’s own self, but at the same time she knew they had been doing what they thought was right.

Once or twice, Lissa tried to summon that blue light, to lift something using only her mind. She never even noticed a change. She thought maybe she was too aware of the camera on the ceiling, of who might be watching her.

Now, she threw back the covers and went to stand below the camera. “I know you’re there,” she called. “I’m ready to come out.”

Within minutes a young woman arrived with clothes draped over her arm. She was the most beautiful girl Lissa could imagine. Tall and willowy with smooth, milky skin and blond hair that rippled down her back like titanium in the sunshine. Her eyes were also gray, and on her wrist was another shining mark.

“I’m Gabrielle,” she said. “Gideon’s sister.”

“I thought as much. It’s nice to meet you.” Lissa held out her hand and took Gabrielle’s cool slender fingers in her own. The girls smiled instantly liking each other.

“Your head must be spinning,” Gabrielle said.

“It is a little bit. Every time I think I’ve got a handle on things I go out of control again.”

“I’m sorry about your parents.”

“Me too.”

Gabrielle laid the clean clothes across a chair. “I’ll step out and let you get dressed.” The door slid shut with a cold hiss and Lissa took off the clothes she had been wearing and pulled on the strange clothes, tunic-like things in a dove gray color.

She studied herself in the mirror propped on a table, noticing that she was pale, as though all the years in the New Mexico desert had been eradicated in just a few days. She brushed her black hair until it snapped and crackled. Then she approached the door hesitantly looking for a button of some sort. It slid open as she approached. She stepped out into a corridor where Gabrielle waited and the door slid shut. “I could have walked out at any time, couldn’t I?”

Gabrielle nodded. “But I think you were smart to stay put and sort things out.” She gestured in the direction they were to go and Lissa fell into step beside her. All of the corridors were carved out of the ground but lit brightly with halogen lights.

“There are three levels, four if you count the utility tunnels,” Gabrielle explained as they walked. “The one we’re in houses the hospital and laboratories. The others have apartments, meeting rooms, and a common area for eating.”

“It’s a giant rabbit warren,” Lissa remarked. “How many people live here?”

“Right now about five hundred, but we can hold many more.”

“Wow. Five hundred people living underground.”

“Yes, it’s incredible.” Gabrielle led them up to a large metal door with a key pad embedded in the wall next to it, totally strange and out of place in the earth. “We’re very secure here. Each section is only accessible with a different code, and those change frequently. You have to have clearance to get on this wing. I forgot to mention that we also have the holding cells in the same level as the hospital.”

“For what, like prisoners?”

“Yes, although we haven’t had any yet.”

Lissa watched the lights flash on the key code panel, lurid red and blue and then a steady green before the door slid open and they stepped into an elevator. “How old is the city?”

“The oldest part is hundreds of years old.”

“But--”

“You’ll learn more later. I don’t want to overwhelm you now.” Gideon’s words. Lissa hated to break it to them but she was already way more than overwhelmed.

Gabrielle was talking again, continuing her bizarre tour. “In this section we have the dining halls, kitchen, and living quarters. Rooms are supposed to be shared except by the higher ups, but since we aren’t full you’ll have one to yourself, and you’ll pretty much have your pick.”

As they walked through, people passed them going in both directions, eyeing her curiously. She was sure they knew who she was. “Are your parents here?”

Gabrielle stopped and laid her hand on Lissa’s arm. “We have that much in common,” she said. “We’re both orphans.”

“What happened to them?”

A real pain, a blistering grief, darkened Gabrielle’s features. “They were killed, because of me and Gideon, and what we can do.”

And what she could do too supposedly. A black guilt rose up in Lissa. She had thought her parents died because of their experiments, but now it looked like they had died because of her.

“Don’t blame yourself.” Gabrielle said. “You couldn’t have known. It was out of your hands before you were even born.” Gabrielle seemed to have read her thoughts.

“Can you read minds?”

“Sometimes. But this time I don’t have to. I just understand.”

The next level had wider corridors, but still no windows. Lissa felt more claustrophobic now than she had in the hospital ward, maybe because she could sense the surface nearby.

“Why is the city underground?”

“Well it’s cooler for one, and two, because we’re hiding. The elders that built this place anticipated that someday there would be the capability of seeing things from above the earth’s surface, so they took precautions.”

“How did they know that?” The weight of the earth above her head, the weight of the things she had already been told, made Lissa feel like she couldn’t breathe.

“They knew a lot of things. The Guardians will tell you more.”

“The Guardians?”

Gabrielle did not answer, but continued her tour monologue as though Lissa hadn’t spoken at all. “We’re only down about twenty feet here. If you go right down this corridor it will lead you to a hallway that goes straight to the surface. It’s guarded at all times. This way is the briefing room. It’s where everything important takes place, meetings, tactical plans, everything. Down there are the IT rooms, hundreds of computers that monitor everything going on in here and out in the world. We’ll save that for another time though. Gideon’s waiting.”

The briefing room was the size of a small amphitheater with stationary benches that ringed three fourths of the room. At the back of the room was a raised platform and in the center several tables were set up in a casual arrangement. Gideon sat at one of these tables with two other men. At the other table sat three adults, two men and a woman, overly serious people, easily her parents’ age.

Lissa smiled tentatively at Gideon and sat down next to him. Among all these strangers he suddenly seemed like a long lost friend.

Two of the adults at the table looked at each other and sighed, overwhelmed perhaps by having teenagers to watch over. The woman shuffled some papers and cleared her throat. “Welcome, Lissa. I’m Maggie Osborn, one of the fifty Guardians here in the city. On my right is Aaron and on my left is Dr. Michael Godfrey. I assume that Gideon and Gabrielle have caught you up to speed on certain things, including the abilities that are hosted by the Lux Marker.”

Lissa nodded, suddenly wishing she could go back to the hospital ward and block this all out.

“We were all saddened by the loss of your parents. They were good people, excellent scientists.” The doctor laid a hand on her arm and Maggie shifted direction. “Gideon tells us that your abilities are dormant, is this correct?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“We know very little about your powers and frankly we do not even know if they can be teased out again. It may be that without use they diminish or the gene is turned off, so to speak, because the body assumes they are unneeded. The scientists here manipulated your DNA using...very old knowledge, and were unsure of exactly what the results would be.”

Lissa felt that she had to find her voice soon or it would be lost forever. “Old knowledge, like what?”

“Gideon will explain in more detail when he takes you for training.” Maggie said. “We highly suggested that this training take place here in the city where you are safest, but Gideon has insisted that you need to be isolated and in peace in order to develop your talents. Because of his exemplary record we are approving his request.”

“I’m sorry to disappoint all of you,” Lissa said, “But you need to find someone else. I’m not capable of this.”

Maggie spoke again. “Gideon believes you are capable.” She closed her folder and nodded to Gideon. “You have one month and if you cannot produce a result all may be lost.”

Lissa glanced at Gideon who smiled at her. That smile, full of liquid peace was suddenly getting on her nerves. “Excuse me, but why? Why do I even need these abilities or whatever they are? Haven’t they caused enough trouble already? Isn’t it safer if I just leave them... turned off?’

Maggie looked to Aaron. He was a huge man, tall and wide, the color of a Hershey chocolate bar. His teeth and his tunic were white. He met Lissa’s eyes with a laser-like intent and she suspected he might be the leader here, if they had such a thing.

“Have you heard of Senator Angine?”

“The Washington Senator?”

“Yes. The so-called Senator. Most of the world thinks he is a political upstart, a rich man vying for the presidency. He is after something much greater. World domination.”

Lissa half expected to hear ominous music and someone announcing, First, he will take over the world and then the entire galaxy!

Aaron ignored Lissa’s skeptical look. “He was once a Guardian, but that was not enough for him. He is vastly intelligent and was one of our brightest minds. In fact, he was the one that isolated the Lux Marker and figured out how to manipulate it. He figured out before the rest of us what effects the Lux might have. He has spent decades amassing a fortune, infiltrating the banking system and using it to slowly buy out the governments of the world, the communications systems, the media, essential military leaders. When he has finally reached a level where he is the most powerful man on earth he will simply take over. Everything is almost in place.”

“But how can that happen? I can’t imagine every country in the world will just roll over and give in to him.”

“They will if he has the Lux,” Gideon interjected.

“Why doesn’t he just make more Lux people if he knows how?”

Aaron smiled at her, an echo of Gideon’s, and in it Lissa saw something she didn’t expect, love and admiration, the look a father might give if he were proud. “Well, luckily for us it isn’t that simple. Not just any child will do. He tried that and it failed, with horrible results. No, the child must come from Tesero.”

Lissa rubbed her hand through her hair, something she did when she was stressed and under pressure.

“And where is here exactly?”

“We call ourselves the Tesero,” Aaron said. “This place has no name, and for now, while your mind is unprotected I cannot give you our location. It may be ferreted out of you. This is the place you were born Lissa, and for now you may simply think of it as home. Soon, you will see the whole picture, but even with pieces missing you must understand our urgency, and your importance in this matter.”

“I don’t understand at all, to be honest.”

There was a subdued chuckle around the room at this and Lissa flushed.

Maggie held up her hand calling silence. “You must be trained to use your abilities in order to protect yourself, and then you and Gideon will go out and find the other Lux before Angine does.”

“And once we find them and bring them back here we’ll be safe?”

“Unfortunately, no,” Aaron said. “Angine knew that could possibly happen, and that is why he has developed a master stroke.”

Lissa felt cold in the pit of her stomach. “Which is what?”

“We believe he has a device he can use to alter the weather, create catastrophes. There is already evidence that he has been testing it.”

Lissa wrapped her arms around herself. “The things my parents were working on. They weren’t to fight him. They wanted to know how he did it.”

“Yes.”

Gideon reached across the table and took her hand in his. “They did want to fight him. We all do.”

Everyone looked at Gideon, and he too looked like he wished he were somewhere else. “There’s more you don’t know,” he said.

Lissa was sure she was going to like what he was about to tell her even less than she liked all the rest.

“I’m sorry,” he began. “You deserve to know the whole story.”

Maggie sighed and shook her head. “I don’t think she’s ready yet.”

Lissa’s stomach was churning. “What? What is it?” Her eyes found Gideon’s and held there. “Tell me.”

“Your parents weren’t really your parents.”

This was impossible. She remembered them back to her first memories. She knew them. She loved them. And she missed them so much that this last blow was too much to take. Lissa shook her head. “No. This is insane. Unbelievable.”

Gideon reached for her hand again and she snatched it away. “I won’t do it!” she shouted startled by the sound of her own raised voice in this echoey space. “No matter what you say, you can’t make me!”

She stumbled to her feet and backed away from the table. “You can’t hold me prisoner,” she told them. “I’ll find a way out of here.”

She turned and ran out of the room.