Tears prickle in the corners of my eyes. What am I going to do? How am I going to get out of here? Mona’s words come back to me as clear as a bell. “You move through the world with confidence, power, and the ability to handle anything.” And strangely enough, as I let her words echo in my brain, I feel a large portion of my worry and fear dissolve away. I may be wrapped around the base of a tree inside an industrial-sized plant pot in what is possibly a foreign sector while hiding from literally hundreds of sex traffickers, but I’m not going to lose my mind.
I assume I’m in a foreign sector because no one is speaking English, the only official language in my region. But the timeline doesn’t make sense. My sector is nowhere near any inter-regional border.
I’m wearing the same clothes I was in at the meditation studio, and – not to be gross, but – my clothes are still clean. There have been no accidents, and I feel no uncomfortable pressure in my bladder. It’s like no time has passed at all.
I hold as still as possible in my hiding spot because though I don’t hear the thundering footfalls of hundreds of people pursuing me anymore, people do move past occasionally. I hear their scuffing feet; their voices speaking in that language I don’t understand.
My earlobe begins to itch. I squeeze my eyes shut as tightly as possible and will myself not to move a muscle. The itch turns to a burn as the voices get louder, pass by me, then fade away down the hall. My plant-based hiding spot is still undetected. Gingerly, I touch my ear and I’m surprised by the unfamiliar feel of a round metal ball in my earlobe. My ear is pierced, of course, in case I ever need to be tagged, but usually I have a tattered piece of silk threaded through it to keep it open. That silk is gone, replace with this piece of metal.
And now I relive the moment in which Mona put the dot of oil on my forehead. Mona lingered several moments, bent over, fiddling with my head. Mona removed my scrap of silk and replaced it with this tag when she tapped me with the oil! Fingers trembling, I try to hold the ball of the earring in my thumb and forefinger and then flick off the back with my pinkie, but it won’t come off. Awkwardly, I reach my left hand at a crazy angle inside the pot and I hold on to the front of the stud while my right hand works the back. It’s got a screw-on backing. I untwist it, pull it out of my ear, and let it drop into the base of the pot. It makes the faintest ‘tink’ sound, but there’s no way anyone heard that.
I feel a little better immediately. She can’t track me, but what does it matter whether or not the tag is in my ear if I don’t get away from it? I can’t hide here forever. I have to come out sometime and attempt an escape because if I don’t, Mona’s tag will lead them right to me. And what will happen then? Will they simply kill me for being too much trouble? Or force me back into whatever slavery scenario they’d intended for me? And I’ve still got Clarissa to think of. How am I going to find her and help her if I’m recaptured myself?
It’s time for me to emerge from hiding. I have to find a way out of this place. Maybe I can pretend to be a gray servant. Maybe they’ll never connect me with their missing – and certainly quite expensive – sex slave.
I bite my lip. It’s so hard to picture Mona selling me to traffickers. She’s a Minder, able to insert herself into the thoughts of others. But when she did, she soothed me. She made me feel better about myself. She straightened my neural pathways, gave me a good dusting off, and told me I mattered. Why on Earth would she do that if she was just going to sell me off? It makes no sense.
I can think about all that later. After I escape. Leaving the metal tag in the bottom of the plant pot, I unfold my body and painfully lift myself out of the pot and into the deserted hallway. My right leg has fallen asleep and I barely manage to stifle a gasp when I bring my foot down on the hard marble floor as pins and needles shoot through it.
My knee collapses and I fall heavily. From far off in the distance, what sounds like an entire army gulps a lungful of air, then bellows that one word again. “Almutatafil!”
I pull myself upright, and, my leg still asleep, I tear blindly down the hallway, no idea where I’m going.
It’s just like before, corner after corner connecting hallway after endless hallway. This isn’t working. Making a snap decision, I throw open the next door I pass and dart into the room. Two men and two women dressed in colorful robes sit at some sort of conference table, a large map spread before them. They all whirl around at my entrance.
“Help me!” I cry, but the looks of shock and abhorrence that cross their faces in quick succession tell me I’m not going to get any assistance from this quarter.
Instead, the woman dressed in a dandelion yellow robe places her fingertips on her temples, screws up her face, and chews on her lips as she obviously thinks hard. Oh my god, she’s a Minder too, like Mona. I feel her in my thoughts, screaming words at me that I’m sure are orders, but I can’t follow them because I don’t understand her language. Not that I’d do whatever she’s telling me to do anyway. She looks like she wants to murder me.
Abruptly, I feel her exit my brain, but her fingers are still on her temple and her lips move soundlessly. She’s calling me into the horde, I’m sure of it.
None of these people are going to help me, but it also appears they won’t approach me, either. Security guards, they’re not. Throwing caution to the wind, I dash past them to a set of French doors. I throw the doors open to a hot blast of air, like opening the oven door during a cure cycle at the factory. I dart through, and I’m on a balcony. I race to the edge and pull up so fast, it’s like I’m being jerked from behind with a chain. A wave of dizziness overtakes me. This is no second-story balcony, not even close. I’m at least a hundred feet up.
Swallowing hard, I look again. There’s nothing to break my fall if I jump. Tall palm trees grow proudly out of the sandy ground, but they’re way too far away for me to try to reach, even if I had a running start. A tile skirt surrounds the whole building. I will shatter into a million pieces if I fall onto that.
Then one of the palm trees moves.
No… It’s not the tree moving. It’s a man dressed in brown camouflage, and he’s stepped away from the tree trunk that he had completely blended into. He’s looking up at me. He cups his hands around his mouth. “Jump, you idiot!” he yells up at me.
I swallow hard. Jump? Is he insane?
Behind me, I hear thundering footsteps. The horde has arrived. I throw a panicked glance over my shoulder and I see their glittering eyes as they rush at me like an angry wave.
“Jump!” the man yells again. “You’re outside the shielding!”
I don’t know what he means by that last part, but as far as jumping, I realize I have no choice. I throw my leg over the waist-high balcony.
“What are you doing?” the man screams at me from below.
I have just enough time to toss him an angry look before I leap away from the building, escaping the thin, grasping fingers of the lead runner by a hair’s breadth…only to fall to my doom.
I plummet for half a second, then I smack into an object with a heavy thud, but it’s not the ground. Before I can open my eyes, I feel something wrap tightly around me, and then, for the second time in what feels like an hour, everything goes black.
When I open my eyes, I let out a startled yelp and throw my hands over my face in fear and shock. It’s the guy from behind the palm tree, the one who yelled at me to jump. And now it’s his rough fingers that close around my upper arm. “Let go of me,” I yell.
“Keep your voice down,” he hisses. “I don’t know how far away we are yet.”
So he speaks English, unlike anybody else in the building I just leapt from. But wait. Why am I not dead right now? Because I collided with something. Not something…someone. This guy caught me. Why, I don’t know. But he did, so maybe I can reason with him. He looks sensible, his glass-green eyes don’t have any sort of psychotic shine, in fact, he’s actually pretty good looking with his dirty blond hair and strong chin. I cover my face with my hands before h
e can get a very good look at me. “Please let me go,” I beg, my voice muffled through my hands. “I don’t know who your boss is, or anything about his army or whatever that was. But I promise if you let me go, I won’t tell anyone. I wouldn’t even know what to tell them.”
He doesn’t say anything, and I scissor my fingers open just a bit so he can see the desperation in my eyes. “Please.”
His eyes widen and his nostrils flare. His mouth drops open not once but twice. He snaps it shut both times before finally letting out a strangled sentence. “You think I’m one of them?”
He relaxes his grip on me and his hand falls to his side. Our eyes lock together for a moment and I’m unable to decipher the expression behind his green gaze. I take a slow, shallow, completely unconfrontational breath. I drop my hands, ball my fists, whirl around, and take off running.
I haven’t gone more than five steps before I slam right back into the same stupid guy again. This time, he grabs my wrist. “Are you a twin?” I say stupidly. This guy is identical to the one I just ran away from.
The guy gives me a disgruntled look, a small line appearing between his green eyes. “You’re clearly just as resistant to the idea as I am,” he whispers, “but I’m here to rescue you.”
9
Marston
The drab gray of Heidi’s disguise does nothing to hide the fire snapping behind her eyes. But she refuses to speak to me, just tries to twist her wrist from my grip. “I’m here to rescue you,” I repeat. “So stop making me Jump around chasing you. I’ll run out of charge.”
She gives me a confused look. “You’re a Jumper? I…I don’t understand.”
I squeeze her wrist. “Do you want to get out of here or not?”
“If you’re a Jumper, why would you help me?”
I lower my voice to a guttural growl. “How about we talk specifics after we put a thousand miles between us and The Citadel? For now, just know that Mona sent me.”
“Mona…sent you? She got me into this mess in the first place.” Now Heidi’s pretty features slide from stunned to pissed, and I’m dumbfounded. I can’t believe she’s standing here arguing with me in the middle of enemy territory.
“This is insane,” I hiss at her. “You damn near started a war showing up here. I don’t know how you know Mona or what her involvement is in this, but don’t try and blame her for your bad choices. You need help getting out of your sticky situation without being seen? Come with me now. You want to get bagged and tagged when the masses catch up? Fine. Stay right here.”
Heidi’s expression has been growing increasingly horrified, and I’m glad. What was she thinking Jumping inside The Citadel? Who was she trying to impress? What did she think she could accomplish with a stunt like this? Of course, no one has ever done it before – no one has ever figured out a way to breach the shielding – but I’m not here to hand out accolades or learn her tricks. I’m here to extract her and return her to my aunt.
“Yes, I want to escape, but my friend Clarissa is here somewhere and I don’t feel right leaving without her. She’s in the same danger as me.”
“They told me you flew solo.”
“No, we were together; they must have taken her too.”
“No one took you or your friend,” I say through gritted teeth. “This is on you and you alone. Your friend’s not here and we shouldn’t be, either.”
I’ve figured out what’s going on here. This girl is book-learner novitiate. She’s obviously never seen the inside of a practical training facility or she would have crossed my radar before now. Which means she’s one of the elite, one of those ivory tower Lumens who think they can just do whatever they want because Mommy and Daddy will be there to smooth all their mistakes away. Well, this is too huge. She cold-Jumped into the middle of The Citadel, somehow on Mona’s watch.
Mona must be losing her mind. Of course she is, to loop Darius into the whole thing. God, what a gigantic mess.
Somewhere nearby, probably over the next rise in the sand, I hear The Citadel war cry. They’re coming.
Heidi’s looking at me with panicked eyes. We didn’t Jump far from The Citadel, not with the overthrow from their shielding hampering me, and my midair launch point. I feel around inside myself, testing my reserves. Dammit. All that mini-hopping I did just now to corner her depleted what little charge I’d stored up after the three Jumps I had to take to get here. I don’t have enough juice to pull us both out of here. I will soon, but not yet.
But I bet she does. She just doesn’t know how to access it properly. The books don’t teach that. There’s one way to draw it out of her, and I don’t have time to explain. “Come here,” I snap.
“What?”
In a flash, I wrap my arms around her. My left hand holds her stable at the small of her back. I snake my right hand under her leg and hike it up so that her knee rests on my hip. This could be her first Partner-Jump, I have no idea, and I don’t want to wind up pulling her torso a hundred miles farther forward than her legs.
But a half second later, when I press my lips to hers to draw out her charge, some animal instinct inside myself takes over, and instead of just pulling from her charge reservoir like I would anyone else, I turn it into a kiss. And she doesn’t fight me. She melts into my body, and for an instant, I forget that what I’m doing is tactical.
In that split second, the horde crests the sandhill. They see us. They really see us, with their eyeballs. This can’t be passed off as a vision, or a mass hallucination, though I’m sure my order will try. They rush toward us, the lead Watcher extends his arms, grasping, reaching, his long, thin fingers scrabbling.
My lips still pressed against Heidi’s, I squeeze my eyes shut, take a sharp breath in, tug her even more tightly into my embrace, and blindly yank us out of there.
10
The Studio
“She’s probably dead.”
“Darius…” Mona’s voice holds a warning, but also a deep exhaustion.
“Face facts. It took Marston three Jumps with five-minute recharge periods after his first and second Jumps. Her GPS locater tag hasn’t registered movement in nearly twenty minutes.”
“There’s been movement,” Mona argues.
“Negligible wobbles within the margin of recalculation errors. She was probably eliminated the instant she arrived inside The Citadel. I can still Cancel this whole thing.”
“You said you had a two-hour window.”
“Yes.”
“Then why are you so eager to scramble the girl’s brains when you have nearly an hour to spare?”
Darius glares at her over a sip of his rooibos tea. “I don’t like loose ends.”
“We’ll wait for Marston’s call. You made an agreement.”
“Marston should have reported in by now.”
“My nephew is careful and meticulous. He’ll report in when the situation has been handled completely, and when it’s safe to do so.”
Darius snorts, and a glug of tea sloshes out of his cup.
“What?”
“Careful and meticulous? Are you sure we’re discussing the same person?”
Mona presses her lips into a thin, colorless line. “I don’t appreciate your humor.”
Darius’s eyes are hard and glassy. “I’m not making a joke.”
Mona picks up the tea kettle and slams it on the hot plate with a clatter. “No Cancelers.”
Darius takes a neat sip of tea and sets his cup in the saucer. “For now.” His eyes drift around the room. He pulls a navy blue knit cap from a deep pocket and settles it over his man-bun. “In the meantime, we need to neutralize the academic out there. She sure kicked a hornet’s nest.” He jerks his thumb over his shoulder toward the meditation studio, where Clarissa has been waiting.
Mona nods. “I dipped into her mind a moment ago. She’s a haughty one. Quite irritated that we’ve shut her out of the decision-making process when this is her thesis project.”
Darius rolls his eyes. “I don’t think sh
e understands the larger issue at play here.”
“Oh, she understands. She doesn’t care. She has a dissertation to write.” Mona’s voice rises sarcastically.
“Can you scrub this whole incident from her mind?”
Mona arches an eyebrow. “Oh, so you’ll Cancel the poor little gray girl who is literally the innocent victim in this scenario, but you’ll authorize a Minder-wipe on the other? Nice.”
“Clarissa is one of us. The gray girl isn’t. You know the rules.”
Little wrinkles form at the edges of Mona’s mouth. “Yes, I can wipe her. She’ll resist it. I may be down for a few weeks afterward.”
“Weeks?” Darius’s voice is incredulous.
“Maybe. She’s quite snitty.”
He sighs. “Great. I can’t believe the resource expenditure on this catastrophe, and we’re just getting started. We’d better get this underway.”
They both rise, exit the office, and approach Clarissa, who stares at them stony-eyed with her arms crossed over her chest. “Can I go now?” she says in a tight, controlled tone when they’re face to face.
“Not quite yet,” Mona says in a soothing, gentle voice. “We’d like to ask you a few more questions.” She presses the thumb and forefinger of her right hand together and rubs lightly.
Clarissa’s eyes glaze over for a moment, then she shakes her head violently. “Get out of my brain, witch,” she snarls.
“Oh, Clarissa,” Mona says, her voice remaining level and smooth. “Let’s not get off on the wrong foot.”
Darius silently circles Clarissa, taking post behind her.
Clarissa swivels and glares daggers at Darius. “Don’t you dare,” she hisses through clenched teeth. “Do you have any idea who I am?”
Mona narrows her eyes, but they pop open as a woman’s face crystallizes in Clarissa’s frontal cortex and Mona sees her too. A braided headdress with a sparkling emerald sits above the woman’s shaved eyebrows and hard slate eyes.
Destination Unknown (Lumen Academy Book 1) Page 5