The Phoenix Read online

  Poor thing, the real-estate agent thought again. She wondered whether the profits from selling the Praeger ranch would make her new client’s life better or worse, and she couldn’t quite shake the depressing feeling that it was probably the latter. Ella’s problems, Helen Martindale rightly suspected, weren’t the kind that you could fix with a check.

  It did feel hard coming back to the valley, but not because Mimi had gone. Right now Ella was still too angry with her grandmother to allow in any other feelings. No, what was hard was the fact that she was still in limbo, with no idea what the next chapter of her life would look like. Stupidly, she’d put off her job search until she heard back from ‘the man’, who’d promised he’d be in touch again within a few days. It was now nine days since his unannounced visit to Ella’s apartment, and she’d heard nothing from him since.

  Not that she had the remotest intention of joining his ‘group’ or attending whatever nonsensical ‘training’ it was that he had in mind for her. But she’d been looking forward to delivering that defiant message in person. And, if she was honest, simply to seeing him again. Although she didn’t like to admit it, the man’s random appearances in Ella’s life provided a thrill that was only partly connected to the tantalizing clues he offered about her parents.

  But now he was entirely absent, leaving Ella to return to Paradise Valley feeling even more hopeless and deflated than she had at the funeral. Thankfully, so far, Ella hadn’t run into any of her old high-school classmates/tormentors. That would really be the icing on the—

  ‘Well I never! If it ain’t Miss Ella! Ella Praeger, as I live and breathe!’

  If it had happened to someone else, it would have been funny.

  Danny Bleeker, blond, blue-eyed Danny, star pitcher on the Paradise High baseball team and bane of Ella’s life from tenth grade right through to her senior year, was bounding across the street to greet her like an overexcited puppy.

  ‘How the hell are you, Ella Praeger?’ She wasn’t the most adept at reading these social interactions, but the strange thing was, he seemed genuinely pleased to see her, smiling broadly and placing both hands on Ella’s shoulders, as if she were a long-lost cousin or cherished old friend. He looked the same, although possibly his dark blue mechanic’s overalls gave him a slightly more mature look than he’d had back in High School. ‘I thought it’d be a cold day in hell before you showed up back in town again. Things didn’t work out in San Francisco?’

  ‘My grandmother died,’ said Ella, with her usual directness.

  ‘Sorry to hear that,’ said Danny.

  ‘I’m selling her land.’

  Danny Bleeker whistled. ‘That must be worth a pretty penny. So you’re rich now, huh? Or you will be. Well that’s great. Good for you.’

  Just at that moment a deafeningly loud babble of voices, like a hundred crossed wires, exploded in Ella’s head like a burst speaker. She clapped both hands over her ears and doubled over, wincing in pain.

  ‘What is it?’ Danny asked, instinctively wrapping an arm around her. ‘What just happened?’

  Ella froze, waiting for the shrieking voices to recede – they usually did within a few seconds – before wriggling out from beneath his arm. ‘Nothing. Only a headache.’

  ‘You still get those?’ he sounded concerned. ‘You know you should really see a doctor. That shit’s been going on for years. D’you remember in Miss Haelstrom’s class, you—’

  ‘Danny?’ Ella asked.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Why are you acting nice?’

  He laughed loudly. ‘I’m not acting! I am nice.’

  ‘No,’ said Ella, sincerely. ‘You aren’t. You are a cruel and spiteful person.’

  He frowned, seeming genuinely taken aback.

  ‘Hey, look, I know I was a bit of an ass in school.’

  ‘You were horrific.’

  ‘I’ll admit I was kind of full of myself back then. But, you know, I was a kid. I was seventeen!’

  ‘Everyone in twelfth grade is seventeen,’ Ella pointed out, unsure why he’d brought up what seemed to her an irrelevant statement of fact.

  ‘What I mean is—’

  ‘You told people we’d had intercourse.’

  Danny blushed. ‘Did I? I don’t remember that.’

  ‘You said I’d begged you to have relations with me. “Begged”. That was the word you used.’

  Danny held up his hands in a ‘mea culpa’ gesture. ‘Jeesh, OK. Wow. Well I don’t know what to say. I was a jerk and I’m sorry. But it’s ancient history, isn’t it? I’m married now,’ he brightened. ‘You remember Beth Harvey?’

  Ella didn’t, but Danny pulled a photograph out of the breast pocket of his overalls and pressed it into her hand. It showed an ordinary-looking dark-haired girl, whom Ella may or may not have seen before, with two fat, bald babies, one perched on each hip.

  ‘Those’re our twins,’ Danny said proudly. ‘Nate and Charlie. You got kids?’

  ‘No!’ Flustered, Ella looked around for a means of escape that wouldn’t involve either pushing past Danny or turning on her heel and running.

  ‘Married?’

  She shook her head vehemently. But no matter what Ella did, or said, Danny just kept smiling, like some sort of madman. Why was he asking her these questions? Why was he even talking to her? She liked him better when he was a bully. At least then she knew where she stood. What did one say to a ‘nice’ Danny Bleeker?

  ‘I get it,’ he nodded, his eyes blazing with the well-intentioned but utterly vacant expression of someone who categorically did not get it. ‘You’re all about your career. Right? Well, I guess you always were real smart. Underneath the crazy,’ he added, but it was said affectionately. ‘You went to Cal, didn’t you? So what’d you end up as? Doctor? Lawyer? No? Don’t tell me: Rocket scientist!’ he laughed. ‘You work for Elon Musk or somethin’?’

  ‘No,’ said Ella. ‘I used to be a statistician but I got fired. Officially it was because I took too much time off, but actually it was because I declined sexual relations with my boss. He was extremely unattractive,’ she added by way of explanation. ‘I have to go back to my hotel now. Goodbye.’

  Danny Bleeker turned and scratched his head as he watched his old classmate speed-walk away from him towards the rundown Double Tree, the only hotel in town. Watching Ella Praeger leave was always a pleasure. She still had a great ass. But if anything, the years since school seemed to have made her even weirder. Danny had wanted to sleep with her so bad back then. All his taunting and cruelty had been a clumsy attempt at flirtation, an effort to get Ella’s attention. But with hindsight he reckoned he’d had a lucky escape.

  Back in her bland hotel room, Ella lay back on the ugly brown bed and closed her eyes. She was mentally bracing for more voices to ambush her. So far this trip she’d had two debilitating ‘episodes’ while out on Main Street, and a string of more minor ones here in the hotel, as if a radio were hidden somewhere in her bedroom, crackling out static as its signal veered between two stations.

  Since the man had left her apartment, apparently for good, Ella had had ample time to ponder the outlandish theory he’d given her to explain away her symptoms.

  ‘The voices are real. They’re electronic transmissions, of varying types. You were genetically modified before birth to be able to both detect and unscramble them. It’s a unique ability.’

  Her longing for an answer to the debilitating condition made her want to believe him. But even the most cursory of reality checks made that hard to do. Genetically modified before birth? Come on. Was that even possible? Ella’s brief Google search suggested it was not, any more than exposure to gamma radiation could turn you into a giant green brute, or a spider bite could imbue you with web-spinning hands. Clearly the man, whoever he was, was deliberately playing on her weaknesses, telling her something she wanted to hear in order to win her trust, to draw her into the clutches of ‘The Group’. He’d successfully latched onto Ella’s twin Achilles heels – her th
irst for knowledge about her parents, and her desperate search for a cure to her crippling headaches; a way to stop the voices that babbled at her day and night – cruelly using both to try to manipulate her. Was his disappearing act now yet more manipulation, Ella wondered? If so, it was working.

  But why? That was the question. What did he want from her? What did he hope to gain?

  Those were the questions that haunted Ella, night after night, along with all the ‘hows’. How did he know so much about her symptoms? She’d told no one about the voices that plagued her, not a living soul. If her parents had been brainwashed by whatever cult it was that the man belonged to, and if they really were genetic scientists, then his explanation for the white noise in her head seemed at least possible, even if it was outlandish. Genetically modified. It wasn’t exactly comforting, but it was an answer of sorts. A place to start, even if it posed as many problems as it solved.

  Reaching into her pocket as she lay on the bed, Ella coiled her fingers around the USB stick that the man had given her. She still hadn’t looked at the contents. Some combination of fear and defiance held her back, narrowly outweighing curiosity.

  He wants me to look at it, thought Ella, which is exactly why I mustn’t. Doing what he wants, letting him set the agenda. That would be handing him the upper hand on a plate.

  The man clearly saw her as naïve. As malleable, a sheep to be led. Ella intended to show him just how wrong he was. But how could she show him if he disappeared on her? What if he never came back, and this stick was the only clue to the truth about her condition?

  Her fingers traced the grooves in the metal, warm now from the heat of her hand and slightly clammy with sweat. Pulling the USB stick from her pocket she stood up and placed it on the desk, next to her computer. The voices hadn’t come back, yet. All was quiet, in the room and in Ella’s head. She locked the door.

  If I plug it in now, no one will know that I looked at it. No one but me.

  He can’t manipulate me unless I let him.

  She plugged the device into her laptop and waited for something to appear.

  Nothing happened.

  Ella clicked on ‘file’ and searched in ‘contents’. It was blank. The stick was completely empty.

  ‘Bastard!’ she said aloud. Was this his idea of a joke? Anger welled up inside her. She wanted to hit something, break something, hurt something – ideally him.

  But then something strange started happening to her screen. First, it went black. Then it flashed brightly back to life, Ella’s desktop popping back up with its neatly arranged files and programs seeming to oscillate and shimmer, like signs in a heat haze. Finally, to Ella’s astonishment, then horror, her applications began disappearing, popping like balloons in front of her eyes, one by one.

  What the …?

  At the bottom of her screen, a counter had popped up, showing the ‘used’ memory levels dropping slowly at first: 225GB … 200GB … 160GB … then very, very rapidly indeed, 8GB … 1GB … 470MB.

  The stick was wiping her drive! The man wasn’t giving her information – he was stealing information! Ella yanked the device out of her USB drive, but it was too late. With a dying flicker, like an old man’s last wheezy breath, her screen faded to black.

  Shaking, furious at herself for her own stupidity, Ella sat mute, staring at the nothingness in front of her. After a few seconds her computer gave a crackle, the same white noise she often heard in her head, only this was external, real. Then a face appeared. It was a man’s face, half in shadow, and it was immobile at first, a freeze-frame on an old-fashioned video. Another crackle and it – he – began to move, leaning forwards out of the shadows, gazing into the camera.

  Ella gripped the side of the desk. No. It can’t be.

  ‘My darling Ella.’ Clearing his throat, William Praeger started to speak. ‘If you are watching this, then you already know I have left this world. I can’t be with you any more, and for that, my darling, I am so very sorry.’

  ‘Dad!’ Ella gasped, fighting for breath. That voice! Ella hadn’t heard it for twenty-two years. Had completely forgotten it, in fact – or so she’d thought until now, as it assailed her like an old friend, enchanting and intoxicating, conjuring up lost love like a cruel yet beautiful magic spell. Instinctively she reached out and touched the screen, as if her fingers could somehow connect with him, transport her back into the past. But of course they didn’t.

  ‘You will have been contacted by someone from The Group. And I am sure that will have left you confused, and maybe even frightened. Please, don’t be.’

  He looked so young, early thirties at most, and was wearing a white T-shirt and a string of beads around his neck. His hair was long, like a hippie’s or a surfer’s, and he was also deeply tanned, none of which tallied with Ella’s few, snatched memories of him. But his mannerisms, his movements, his smile; all of those were the same. She watched, transfixed, hanging off his every word.

  ‘Your destiny, like your mother’s and mine, has always been intertwined with The Group and its work. Our work. I know it may not feel like it right now. But that destiny is also a privilege, perhaps the greatest privilege a person can have. You were born to do good, Ella. To do good in ways that other people might not understand.

  ‘It’s not an easy path. There is evil in this world, Ella; evil of a pitch and intensity that most people can’t imagine. Sadly, those few who can see it usually choose not to act. They put their heads in the sand. They wish it away. Unfortunately, this often includes our own government.’

  Ella’s stomach lurched. She loved her father, and over his long years of absence had come to idolize him, and her mother too. Yet on this recording, William Praeger sounded like every other brainwashed cult member she’d ever seen on TV, ranting on about conspiracy theories and corrupt governments and how only ‘The Group’ understands the truth.

  ‘Ella, you are blessed with unique gifts. You are the product of love, but also of science. Your brain can function in ways that nobody else’s can. The Group will explain everything to you when the time is right. Right now, we don’t know exactly how far those gifts will take you, or what their potential will be. But your mother and I know that you will use them for good. We believe in you, Ella. We love you.’

  Silent tears streamed down Ella’s face. She wanted to climb into the screen and hug him, and kiss him … and then yell at him and shake him till his head hurt as much as hers did. How could he do this to her? Her own father! His so-called ‘gifts’ had condemned her to an existence of daily misery! To headaches, and paranoia, and a loneliness the depths of which he couldn’t possibly understand. How dare he and her mother play God with her life, trying out their experimental genetic bullshit on their own child? Or any other innocent human being, for that matter.

  ‘Stay true to yourself, my darling,’ William went on. ‘Trust in The Group and try to be patient. What you don’t understand now, you will eventually, believe me.’ Her father’s eyes welled up with tears then, and Ella could see the effort he was making to contain his emotion. ‘Above all, please Ella, never forget how much your mother and I have loved you. Give your grandmother a kiss for me. Goodbye, my precious Ella Mae.’

  There was another final hiss of sound, and Ella’s screen went blank a final time.

  ‘No.’ Ella whispered under her breath. ‘No, no, no, no, no!’ That couldn’t be it? He hadn’t told her anything about her mother. Where was she? Why wasn’t she in the video?

  Desperately she plugged the stick back in, trying everything to bring the footage back up again, to rewind. But it was nowhere. Gone, wiped, just like the man said it would be.

  Nooo. Ella stood up, pulling at her hair in frustration that bordered on panic. There had to be more! It was bad enough that her mom was missing from Mimi’s box of letters and cards. But why wasn’t she on this footage? Why wasn’t she here on Ella’s screen, sitting next to her father, offering her own explanations, saying her own goodbyes? Hadn’t Rachel Praeger car
ed about her daughter at all? Had Ella been nothing more than an experiment to her, a sacrificial offering to the all-powerful ‘Group’?

  Ella was starting to hate this Group. Who were these people, to mess with people’s lives, to separate parents from their children, then return years later and ‘claim’ those children as their own?

  Slamming her laptop shut, Ella tossed it angrily onto the bed. It was useless now, ruined, its hard drive hopelessly corrupted. Like my life, Ella reflected bitterly. She paced the room like a trapped animal, feeling at once exhausted and yet full of restless energy. She had an overwhelming urge to know, to understand. And yet it seemed the more she did know, the more tantalizing nuggets of information were drip-fed into her life, the more maddened with uncertainty and curiosity she became. Was she really even a person at all, a human being with a soul and an identity of her own? Was she her parents’ daughter, or their science project? With each new blow she could feel her self-esteem crumbling. But like an addiction, Ella’s need to understand drove her, even though she knew that it could destroy her too.

  Seeing and hearing her father had been exquisite joy and yet, at the same time, agonizing torture. Because of all the things he hadn’t said. Because he was here, but then he was gone. And because he hadn’t said sorry.

  He owed Ella an apology for so many things. But mostly for never coming back.

  Ella ran a bath and climbed into it, making the water as hot as she could stand. She watched as her skin reddened like lobster flesh, willing the unpleasant, burning sensation to drown out her emotional anguish. It didn’t.

  You have two choices, she told herself, steam rising up and enveloping her in a thick, heady cloud. You can sink. Or you can swim.

  You can control your own life. Or be controlled.

  The footage she’d just watched had confirmed the man’s story about her scientific origins. Her mother and father really had tried to program her, like a computer. So she could be useful to ‘The Group’. Seriously. George Orwell couldn’t have made this stuff up. Ella’s parents had believed they had the right to control not just her mind and her body, but all her future decisions as well. Her ‘destiny’, as Ella’s father had put it. Clearly the Praegers had been brainwashed by ‘The Group’. And now, from beyond the grave, they wanted to send Ella off to be brainwashed too.