Alpha

by Jus Accardo

  How much worse than being forced to stay with this sicko could it be? “What exactly are your terms?”

  “You won’t try to leave. I’ll give you free rein. Come and go as you please—as long as you continue to hold up your end of the deal and meet my conditions.” He came a step closer, his entire demeanor one of menace and fury. “You stop treating me as though I’m a monster, and when I talk to you, you will have a civil conversation with me. I don’t care if we chat about nuclear war or the price of tea in China. You will also eat one meal with me every day.”

  I snorted. Eat with him? He was still holding out hope that I could be swayed. That he could convince me, and not some other version of Ava, that he was the boy of my dreams, like the world’s most twisted case of Stockholm syndrome.

  Still, I could work with it. I only needed a little time. “So, I have to help you find another me and stroke your ego or you’ll, what, kill me? Do I understand that right?”

  He clutched his chest and shot me a look of mock horror. If it hadn’t been for the fact that I knew him—better than I wanted to—it would have been funny. “You absolutely do not have that right, Sera. You have to help me find another you and stroke my ego or I’ll make it my life’s mission to kill G.”

  Chapter Four

  G

  Thankfully Cade hadn’t wanted to wait until morning to leave. He’d gotten a few hours of sleep, then announced he was ready to skip after Dylan and Sera if I was—which I had been. I’d been ready to go the moment we’d gotten there. Staying in one place too long made me antsy.

  Cade glanced down at his wrist one last time before yanking the sleeve of his coat over his forearm to hide the fading blue glow. “Well, we’re on the right Earth. Dylan’s PATH line is green, so that means they’re here, but no way to tell where, exactly.”

  “Then the obvious move is to start looking.”

  “Yeah.” He took a step forward and stopped. “But that’s not going to get us anywhere.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Did he think standing on the sidewalk and waiting for them to walk past us was a feasible plan? What the hell kind of logic was that?

  “Think about it.” He had that look again; I’d seen it a few times now, the expression he got when he thought he had it all figured out. “We’re just skipping from place to place, following their frequency and hoping that it puts us in their general vicinity. When it doesn’t—which is more times than not—we’re just wandering around aimlessly in hopes that we’ll get lucky.”

  “Yeah,” I responded through clenched teeth. “And it would have worked last time if Yancy hadn’t been there.” That was the first real break we’d gotten. We landed close to visual distance. We’d had them in our sights, and still they’d slipped through our fingers.

  “That’s my point exactly. We’ve been at this for what, almost a month now? And that was the first time we got a lucky break.”

  “You call that a lucky break?” The guy was insane.

  He rolled his eyes. “Lucky as in we didn’t have to turn the town upside down looking for them. Dylan is smart. He knows how to hide. If he doesn’t want to be found, it’s like looking for a hair in a vat of pudding.”

  “A hair… What?”

  “Oh. Yeah. Sorry. Expression on my world. Basically means—”

  “Hard to find. Yeah. I get it. So? What’s your point?”

  “My point is, we need to change tactics. What we’re doing isn’t working.”

  “We can agree there.” We needed a new plan—but what? Our options were limited. “Ideas?”

  He leaned back against the brick building and tugged at the leather cuff on his wrist. Kori had given it to him a week ago…something about colors and infinity. “Was hoping you’d have one.”

  I scanned the area. This version of Wells was dreary. The sky was dark and clouded, and as far as I could tell, it wasn’t the most fertile land. The area was void of foliage; even the grass was scant. We’d ended up in an alley, beside a tall brick building. I pushed off the wall and stalked to the corner. When I peered around the side, it was more of the same, all impossibly tall brick buildings with wickedly pointed roofs. Several cars passed on the road, but aside from that, there wasn’t much activity. “Well, they’re here somewhere.”

  He spread his arms out. “Yeah. Somewhere. As in, anywhere within a half mile. We just talked about this. It’s not work—”

  “Don’t.” A growl rose in the back of my throat. What Cade said was 100 percent logical. This wasn’t working. We weren’t going to find Sera this way. Beating feet was just a waste of time and energy. But a larger, more dominant part of my brain heard, Give up. Pack it in. I can’t be bothered. We’ll never find her… “I get it. This isn’t a big deal for you anymore. You have your girl back. If this bastard slips through your fingers, no harm, right?”

  His expression darkened, and I saw the fight in his eyes, a brewing war between keeping his cool and lashing out at me. He might have been the most held-together of the group, but right from day one it’d been obvious that Cade Granger was sporting some serious anger-baggage. “You’re way off base, man. And I think if you step back and take a deep breath, you’ll realize that.”

  You’ll realize that…

  …

  “He’s in rare form tonight, eh?” the guy latched on to my right side said. He snickered. I thought I heard the guy on my left laugh, too. It was hard to tell through all the screaming.

  I thrashed and flailed against their grip. “I’m going to fucking kill you! You hear me?”

  “He’s— Hold him tighter, Paul!”

  I let out a roar and yanked as hard as I could. Paul, the asshole on my right, let go for a second. “Guy is a goddamned lunatic!” he said with a grunt.

  They wrestled me into the elevator, then off, and down the hall. I fought like a demon every step of the way. And by the time they managed to drag me back to my cage, I’d given them a split lip, what was sure to be multiple facial bruises, and, if I had to guess, several broken fingers.

  The bodily damage and looks of pure hatred should have satisfied me, but when they slammed the door closed and latched the cell, I found that I was still wound up. Still hungry for more.

  It was like this, sometimes, when I returned “home” from a day in the lab. The anger was so potent, so unquenchable, that I felt like I could break the world apart. It was like a pressure inside me. One that, if not released, would rip me to shreds.

  I inhaled, then let it out in the form of a yell. The sound reverberated in the small space and echoed down the corridor.

  “That’s not going to help, you know…”

  I ignored the sound of her voice and slammed one fist against the wall and then the other. Right. Left. Right. Left.

  “Try taking a deep breath,” she tried again. “Close your eyes, count to twenty.”

  I threw my body at the bars and gripped until I lost the feeling in both hands. “Count? You really think fucking counting is going to fix this?”

  “It will save your sanity,” she said. As usual, she hadn’t been bothered by my tone. She was never dissuaded, this girl. Never gave up. “You’re better than this, G. You have a disease. Cora? She infected you with something, and you need to fight it.”

  Her sentiment was nice, but it wasn’t true. Not 100 percent. Yes, Cora had warped me, but she’d only made what was already there darker and more volatile. If I were a grenade with the pin slipping out before coming to Infinity, then I was now a nuclear bomb with someone’s twitching finger hovering right above the red button.

  “Trust me, G. The sooner you get a handle on this, the less they’ll be able to provoke you. Just take a breath and think about it. You’ll realize I’m right.”

  …

  It took a while, but in my darkest moments, Sera’s whole spiel had worked. Not because of the counting or the breathing or any of that crap—but because of her. Because I knew Sera was there, only a few feet away. Because I heard her vo
ice. Because I didn’t want to let go of it…

  But Sera wasn’t here right now.

  I let out an enraged howl and launched myself at Cade. For some reason he looked surprised—which made me wonder if he was an idiot. I’d been warning him about this for weeks. Had been telling him that a snap like this was inevitable.

  We collided with a jarring crash, and I took us to the ground. But Cade wasn’t a pushover. The guy knew how to throw down. I swung, then he did. We traded blows, and even through the haze of red clouding my brain, I knew he was trying more to restrain than harm me. That was fine because in the back of my mind, I was desperately trying to do the same thing.

  “You have to chill, man.” He latched on to my left wrist and pinned it to the ground just as I struck out hard with my right. The blow caught him across the bottom chunk of his chin, but he took it like a trouper, remaining mostly upright. “This isn’t doing Sera any good!”

  At the mention of her name, my entire body went rigid.

  He took it as a sign that he’d gotten through to me and loosened his hold.

  It was the wrong thing to do.

  I roared and struck out, putting everything I had into the strike. I didn’t see Cade or the alley. I didn’t hear him still trying to talk me down. I didn’t smell the dumpster only several feet away and stinking to high hell.

  I saw Cora. I smelled mothballs and bleach. I heard Sera screaming and crying and calling my name. I saw a battlefield full of bloody corpses and hands stained with fading life…

  My fist struck his face, and he went sprawling backward.

  …

  If it weren’t for the slight rise and fall of his chest, I’d have figured I’d killed him. But Cade was alive and as well as one could be after getting knocked out cold in a grimy alley.

  I’d hauled him around the back corner of the building and propped him up against the wall in the cleanest spot I could find, then I settled across from him to wait. And think.

  It was more self-loathing than thought, my brain hashing out all the fuzzy details now that I’d come down off the serum high. Serum. That’s what Cora had called it. The thick, almost gel-like black substance she’d force-fed me once a week for six months. The highlight of the Alpha program. The project was something she’d worked on for the government of her world. They wanted the perfect soldier. Stronger, faster, with total obedience and less emotion.

  Obviously, they’d failed—in more ways than one.

  Cade groaned and forced open his eyes. Well, eye. The left one was swollen shut. Along with that, his bottom lip was split, and there was already a deep bluish-purple bruise blooming across the entire right side of his face. “Least you didn’t kill me…”

  The apology I wanted to offer died before I could push it past my lips.

  “Do you feel better now?” he prodded, struggling to move into a more upright position.

  I raked a hand through my hair and exhaled. “No.” I dropped my gaze, but I still felt his eyes on me.

  “What did they do to you?”

  I didn’t want him to give a shit about what had happened to me. I didn’t need his sympathy or concern. Then again, I had kicked the crap out of him. I owed him at least some small explanation. “Like I said before, I’m not sure exactly how it works. I was part of an experimental program called Alpha.” I had no intention of getting into all the gory specifics, but a little bit of information wouldn’t hurt. It wasn’t like he could do anything with it. “They gave me something—a drug. But it needed to be triggered. Activated. After that, Cora was always pushing me. Trying to get me to break.”

  “Break how?”

  “Lose control. She pushed my buttons, tried to bust through my pain threshold—anything that might cause me to lose it and lash out. That’s what’s supposed to activate the serum.”

  “Lash out?” There was a spark of understanding in his eyes, of sympathy. It made me sick. “Like you just did with me?”

  “Not even close.” I bit back the urge to tell him to screw off. “That was me holding back.”

  He snorted. “Remind me to stay on your good side.”

  It wasn’t possible, since I was sure I didn’t have a good side, but I didn’t say anything. “Think you can stand? We should try looking for them. At the very least, get the hell out of this alley. Sitting here makes us look suspicious.”

  I climbed to my feet and held out my hand to help him up. He hesitated for a tense moment before accepting.

  We walked for a while in silence. This world was one of the weirder ones I’d seen. The men were all dressed like circus attractions—obnoxiously bright colors and outlandish styles—while the women all wore drab, lifeless clothing. Several passersby gave us horrified looks. I guessed it was Cade’s red T-shirt and worn combat boots, and my ragged sneakers and bleach-stained shirt. The fact that he looked like he’d gone ten rounds with a meat grinder probably didn’t help, either.

  Cade laughed. “Man, am I glad Noah isn’t here.”

  “Not a fan of fancy duds?”

  “All this side-eye?” Cade gave a friendly nod to an elderly man dressed in a bright purple suit as he passed. The man grimaced and sped up his shuffle. “He’d be shooting his mouth off like crazy. Probably get us into a boatload of shit.”

  His words were heavy, but his tone was light as a feather. “Seems like you’d be better off without the guy.”

  We stepped off the curb and made our way across the street. The clothing wasn’t the only weird thing about this place. The roads were paved on either side, but the middle four feet or so was a series of bars embedded into the pavement. There were six total and they ran parallel, spaced about a foot apart. “Noah? God, no. We—” The moment Cade’s foot touched the bars, there was a loud snap. “Shit.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  He jerked to the right, then to the left, and cursed again. “My foot is caught.”

  “How the hell did you—” A metallic squeal filled the air. In the distance, some kind of vehicle barreled down the center of the road.

  Cade dropped to the ground and yanked at his boot laces. But the more he tugged at them, the more knotted they became. He cursed and tried to shove me aside. “Get away!”

  I ignored him and went to work trying to pry his boot from between the two bars. Somehow, he’d managed to wedge his toe beneath one of them, and when they’d moved, they’d locked it in place.

  Cade grabbed a handful of my shirt and shoved me away from him. “Go!” The car-train-whatever the hell it was trucked closer by the second.

  My hair whipped from the breeze stirred by the oncoming vehicle. I pulled harder against his boot. “Not gonna happen.”

  Chapter Five

  Sera

  Dylan had been laughing on and off for the last hour. Maybe he found my expression amusing. I imagined it was somewhere between fury and horror. Or maybe it was the fact that, once again, he had me between a rock and an impossible place. Completely at his mercy and a slave to his demands.

  Of all the things he’d said, all the things he’d done, his threat about G had to be the most despicable. “You’re a sick shit…”

  “I’m sick because I’m covering my ass?” He shook his head. “Nope. That’s called smart. It’s called survival.”

  “Fine,” I snapped. If there was the smallest chance that he could take G out, then what choice did I have? “Terms accepted.”

  He looked pleased. “Good. Then how about we grab a bite? The food on that last world was horrible.”

  My first instinct was to tell him exactly where he could go to grab a bite, but I caught myself just in time. The food had been bad. Bland and colorless, it had tasted like cardboard and smelled like roadkill. My stomach still churned when I thought about it. Civil. I had to be civil. Fists curled tight and jaw clenched, I said, “Sure.” Hopefully the food was better than the clothing on this world.

  “See? Was that so hard?” He laughed and made a point of bumping into a tall man in a flo
rescent pink shirt and neon orange jeans as he passed, then nodded a silent apology. Obviously when you tallied up all the bad things Dylan had done during his rampage, picking pockets wasn’t even in the top ten, but it still made me hate him just a little bit more. “What are you in the mood for?”

  “Don’t care.” Getting off the street might not be the worst idea. We hadn’t seen that many people, but the ones we had encountered seemed horrified by the sight of us. For all I knew, it was a crime or something to dress the way we were. It wasn’t as noticeable with me. I wore dark jeans and a gray hoodie. But since the men here all wore clothes in every color of the rainbow, Dylan stood out like a sore thumb.

  And I was hungry, so…

  He huffed, but his annoyance was fake. He was over the moon. Knowing him, he saw it as once again getting his way. But he was in for a rude surprise. I had no intention of hitching myself, or any other version of me, onto his brand of crazy. I could play the game for a while. Wait for my chance, then jump.

  Pointing to a smaller brick building across the street, he said, “How about there? Looks Italian. You’ve always been a sucker for Italian food.”

  I didn’t bother correcting him. There was really no point. And really, the truth was, I had no idea if I liked Italian food. We hadn’t exactly gotten five-star cuisine during our stint at Infinity. I found that when he started meshing his Ava and me together, he entered into a delusional cloud.

  We pushed through the door of the restaurant and were promptly seated at a small table in the back right corner of the room. The place was empty, and soft jazz music drifted through the dining room.

  Seconds after our butts hit the chairs, there was a waiter standing beside the table. He was tall, with dark hair and eyes and a lopsided grin, and wore a bright red shirt with orange fringe across the front. “Something to drink?”

  Dylan beamed up at the guy. “I’ll have water. My lady here will, as well.”

  I glared at him through a wall of my hair, and when the waiter nodded and stepped away, I leaned forward on the table. The silverware sat a few inches to my left, and I had to force myself not to grab the butter knife and impale him with it. “Maybe I didn’t want water. Maybe I wanted a soda.”