Free The Shimmers in the Night by Lydia Millet

persisted.
    Her throat was so parched it felt like it was going to crack, so she was immensely grateful when Mr. Sabin handed her a glass of water. It was a goblet, in fact, an old cut-crystal one, and heavy in her hand as she tipped it up and drained it. The water wasn’t cold, but it did taste clean.
    â€œInformation about what’s happening to the world and why,” said Mrs. Omotoso gravely. “Information not only about the history of civilization, but about its future.”
    Cara gazed around her, letting the water sink into her dry throat. She let her head fall back so that she could see the paintings on the domed ceiling through particles of dust that were drifting lazily in the light. There were high windows beneath the dome, but that didn’t quite explain the way light filtered through…. Now that she had some time to study the dome, she saw it wasn’t much like the Sistine Chapel after all. At least, not like the only part of the Sistine Chapel she remembered from art class, which was two naked men with fingers touching. (Or maybe one of them wasn’t naked; possibly God had worn a pink robe….) Anyway, it wasn’t like that, really; it was more of a scene of animals, all kinds of animals in a garden.
    â€œJax said he found a source,” she said finally, when her throat felt better. “In my mother’s research. Of carbon gases going into the ocean? He said he thought knowing about it was putting him in danger. Except—well, he thought the danger was from you guys. But is that why Roger poisoned him?”
    â€œPart of it,” nodded Mrs. Omotoso. “What your mother and then Jax discovered is definitely something the enemy wants to keep hidden. We know what it is; we just didn’t know exactly where. Your mother found out where”
    â€œIs she—is she going to be OK? I mean—if she’s a prisoner, what will they do to her?”
    Mrs. Omotoso and Mr. Sabin exchanged glances again.
    â€œYour mother is a kind of hostage,” said Mr. Sabin finally. “That’s what we believe.”
    â€œA hostage?” asked Cara. “But then—are there demands, or whatever? Isn’t that what they do with hostages?”
    â€œWe know what they want,” said Mrs. Omotoso. “They’re holding her to stop her protecting someone else. Someone they haven’t been able to take directly yet but did manage to hurt; someone whose potential command of knowledge makes him into a weapon. They tried to bring him over once this summer, and now they’re trying again.”
    â€œWe’re fairly sure,” said Mr. Sabin, “that more than your mother, Jax is the one they really want.”

    She woke up and thought two things: first, she’d forgotten about the swim meet, forgotten about her phone, forgotten Hayley and Mrs. M and her responsibilities and regular life.
    Second, she must have passed out.
    She wasn’t the type to do that; she’d never fainted in her life, but then they’d said something about the bad guys wanting her little brother, and then a slow slide and…nothing. And now here she was.
    Here was a dim, quiet room, in one of two twin beds with fringed canopies hanging over them; a few feet away, in the other bed, was someone else. She raised herself on her elbows to look. Jax.
    The pale-green coverlet over him rose and fell minutely; he seemed to be sleeping. She fell back and then propped herself up, plumping the pillows behind her head. Clearly she was still in the old part of the building, because the walls were covered with paintings hanging close together in golden, scalloped frames. There was no way this was part of the modern shell that housed the outer, more public rooms of the Institute.
    It was almost, she realized, as if the building she’d seen from the street—the gray, boxlike office building with the large, square numbers of its street address—had been built