TERRA (The Elements Series Book 2)

by Tracy Korn

  Ellis suddenly shakes his head and holds out a hand like he's trying to stop someone from advancing.

  "Are you saying that we're going to port-carnate our own atoms into the virtuo-cine network? Not our hologram with the port-cloud atom overlays?" he asks, narrowing his eyes as he leans back against the side wall with Avis, who clasps his hands behind his neck.

  "These won't be your typical virtuo-cines," Azeris grins. "15 percent!" he says, then types onto his screen, and the tall, metal walls of the cubes at the front of the room slide into the floor.

  CHAPTER 53

  Transcending

  The metal walls of the cubes in the front of the room disappear into the floor to reveal two clear enclosures that are the same size as the original cubes. Arwyn is standing in one of them with her hands pressed to the wall that faces us, her long, light brown hair falling half-braided over her shoulder. Her silver jumpsuit is like Liam's, but hers is singed at the cuffs. Arco's breath catches, and he pushes to his feet.

  "Arco…" she says, but I can barely hear her muffled voice.

  "Open the door!" he shouts, knocking over the chair of the seated console station. It clatters to the floor as he crosses to his sister and presses his palms to hers through the wall.

  "Can't. The transfer already started," Azeris says from behind one of the pillar consoles along the back wall of the room's upper level. "She'll die if you open it now," he adds, which makes the blood run out of Arco's face.

  "You got so tall…" Arwyn says as tears stream over her high, delicate cheekbones, her wide, hazel eyes just like Arco's closing tightly and opening again to blink back her tears. Arco clears his throat, and it feels like my chest is being compressed on all sides.

  Can you hear me? A voice says from all around me, and then I realize it's in my head. I instinctively turn to Lyden in the other cube enclosure. His eyes are clear and blue like his younger brothers', but his hair isn't blond with dark roots like Liam's and Liddick's. It's brown and shaggy like Dell's, and the veins in his forearms stand out as he clenches his hands into fists and holds them against the wall that separates him from the rest of us. Jazwyn, listen, he thinks again, and I nod, stunned that he can talk to me telepathically.

  You're a Hybrid too? A Reader and a Coder? I ask.

  Yes, listen to me. I lost Liddick. I was leading him here through the Woods, talking to him like this, but then I lost the connection. It could have been because they started the port-carnate transfer, but it could be that—

  I know what Lyden wants to say, but I won't hear it. I won't even let him think it.

  You said you lost the connection in the Woods? Then he made it over the Chasm. I knew he didn't fall…I swallow hard, then try to concentrate on Liddick again. The NET resonates against my chest, but I still can't see or hear him. Why doesn't this stupid thing work!? I shout in my head, then turn around to find Vox, who is already on her way to me. I reach into my dive suit and pull out the NET, then extend it to her.

  "I can't—" she says out loud, shaking her head as her burgundy eyebrows dart upward.

  "You made me see you, and you could see me out there," I interrupt. "Make him see you. Find him. You're Vishan, it must only work for you," I say too loudly, but she just shakes her head again.

  "I don't know how it worked—I told you," she says, shoving the NET back at me. I try to protest, but she doesn't give me a chance. "Look, you showed up in my neural channel when you were in trouble. You found me. We've been over this," she insists.

  "So why can't I find him?" I ask, then hear Azeris from the back of the room.

  "Closing in on 20 percent DNA transfer!" he calls, reading the floating screen in front of him.

  "Bridge integrity?" my father asks, climbing the stairs to Liam and looking down at his screen.

  "It's good. They're on course," Liam answers.

  Jazwyn, Lyden thinks again, and I turn back around. I don't have a lot of time. Listen, I don't believe Liddick is gone. Maybe we lost the connection because he's blocked—because he saw something out there, heard something in the Woods. The wind can get inside your head…I know because I coded it to do exactly that. If he's lost, you have to show him where to go.

  "We're at 30 percent!" Azeris calls out as Liam types as fast as he can.

  "Still on course—the bridge is holding!" Liam says, then shifts his attention to Lyden. "Hang on! You're almost there. Is Liddick past the Chasm? Why isn't he here yet?" he asks. Lyden tries to answer loudly enough to be heard through the enclosure wall, but I can feel that he's not strong enough now. He meets my eyes, and I know I'll have to explain what he said about Liddick. "It's OK, just be still…too much of your base has transferred. We'll meet you on the other side of the bridge, all right? Calyx will be there when you arrive. Hang on!" Liam says as Lyden slides to his knees, then leans against the side of the wall.

  "Arco, you have to back up…your sister is all right, but she has to stay perfectly still," my father says, and Arco reluctantly backs away from Arwyn's cube.

  "Where's Liddick?" Liam asks, crossing to Azeris as my father takes over his console.

  "I don't know. I can't get into his neural channel," Azeris says. "It's still offline."

  "How can it still be offline? Lyden tracked him crossing the Chas—" Liam stops abruptly, and the hollow in my chest opens again at his dawning fear.

  "No! He's coming!" I yell, feeling the crushing doubt all around me pressing into my lungs again. "Lyden just said he lost the connection in the Woods. He didn't fall into the Chasm, Liam. He's just…lost."

  "Then I'm going to find him," Liam says, taking a step toward the door panel that leads out of the room.

  "Stop and think!" my father calls to him without looking up from his hovering screen. "You won't make it to the drop floor entrance before they find you, let alone into the Woods. Guards will be flooding the passages as soon as they crack the seize code I put on the doors, which won't be long now," he adds.

  "50 percent!" Azeris shouts. "Get everyone into position!"

  "They're disappearing!" Arco lunges toward Arwyn's cube, but Jax catches him.

  "They're transferring—it's normal. Both of you get back before that current surges!" Azeris calls.

  "I can't just leave him out there!" Liam shouts to my father, and in this minute he both looks and sounds exactly like Liddick.

  "He's come this far, and he beat the Chasm. He's navigated enough virtuo-cines and their alpha channels to know how to handle any of the anomalies out there. He'll make it, son," my father says, lowering his voice and raising his eyes to meet Liam's.

  "We're at 70 percent!" Azeris says as my dad punches something else into his console, then grips the sides of it when Liam starts to protest again.

  "Listen to me, I just preloaded our hop, but it's still going to take about 30 minutes to initiate," he says, then gestures to the cube enclosures at the front of the room. "When they complete their transfer, I need everyone locked inside those hubs right away so no one can stop us. Get everyone in position, all right? We will find Liddick, I promise," he says.

  Liam nods after a second as the muscles in his jaw jump and twitch. He takes a deep breath and pushes his hands through his hair just like Liddick does when he's frustrated, pulling the blond back from his forehead to reveal the same dark roots.

  He blows out a breath and makes his way to the lower level with the rest of us, but as he does, the buzzing in my ears starts again. At the same time, the metal bars of the NET in my hand start to resonate, then pull at my fingers like they're somehow magnetized. My heart starts to pound as I scan for Vox to see what this means, but then I freeze in my skin when the door to the room slides open.

  ***

  "Jack Ripley! I've always said you were more trouble than you were worth," Styx says, stroking his pointed black beard just like he did in my Gaia interview. He glides halfway down the wide steps of the room's entryway, the edges of his lab coat flying away from his white military uniform. Two of the s
ix guards in black with him drag my father away from the pillar console along the back wall while two other guards in white remain at his sides. He waves a hand casually at Azeris before taking a seat on one of the long, flat stations that arcs into the wall on the far side of the steps. Azeris quickly types something onto the hovering screen of his console, then blows out a breath just before two of the guards in black grab him too.

  "They transferred into the hub across the hall and broke the seize code. I just locked everything down again—the codes on the rest of the doors are still in tact!" Azeris calls to my father as I shove the NET back into my dive suit, then feel Liam grip my upper arm. He pulls me under the console where I'm standing, and I see Vox already crouched in front of us near the aisle.

  "It has to end, Eros," my father says as the guards in black drag him down a few of the stairs to Mr. Styx. Jax starts to advance from behind a seated station across from us, but Arco holds him back.

  "Oh, but it's just begun!" Styx says, extending both hands out to Arwyn and Lyden, who are slumped motionless against the walls of their cube enclosures at the front of the room. "After all, these two are perfect thanks to you. The first candidates no longer to be limited by water, by pressure, or by heat. The cold and the atmosphere of Phase Three are all that stand in the way of us being able to transcend our environment…and oh look, they're on their way there now! I hope you understand why we didn't ask for your consult with the expedited transport. You have a history of…complicating things," Styx adds.

  "Transcending the elements is not worth this price! There are other options! How much blood is on your hands already? Yours and Rheen's?"

  "You give us too much credit, Jack. This is bigger than transcending the elements. This is bigger than all of us. It's the future, and unfortunately, you are the past," Styx adds with a shrug, then looks over his shoulder directly at Jax. "So good to see you again, Mr. Ripley," he says, still smiling at Jax as he angles his head to the remaining guards in black. "Take him."

  CHAPTER 54

  The Connection

  I start to shout as the guards in black uniforms advance on Jax, but Vox covers my mouth, and Liam catches my arm before I can get all the way to my feet.

  "Listen, listen!" Liam says. "Light will flood those cube hubs any minute. When it does, we have about 10 seconds before Lyden and Arwyn finish transferring. When the light stops, the queue will start. You need to get inside then, understand?" he says, looking first to Vox, then to me. "Don't close the doors until everyone is in—your dad wrote chaser code that will lock them once they're shut, then camouflage the bridge coordinates so no one can follow us to Calyx, our contact in Admin City, all right?" he adds before nodding at us. "Get ready to shield your eyes. I'll start funneling the others to you when the light goes out." He nods once more, then crawls to the outside aisle and up to the back wall where guards are holding Azeris.

  You can take your hand off my mouth now, I think, pushing Vox's arm away when I realize she's still holding onto me.

  Then stop trying to use it to get yourself killed, she answers, but I can't say anything else before a tidal wave of light starts at the back of the room and rolls forward.

  "Sir, there seems to be a problem with the trajectory!" the guard at one of the pillar consoles says. A second later, the cubes next to us fade into the blinding light.

  We start to head for the cube doors when we can see again, but Jax and Arco put their hands in the air as a guard behind each of them holds a white baton to their backs, just waiting for them to move. I stop, then see Liam typing something onto the hovering screen of a pillar console along the back wall. Almost immediately, all the guards except the ones in white uniforms standing with Mr. Styx collapse into motionless heaps.

  "DNA clone strand B-17, goodnight!" Liam says with a satisfied laugh, then waves us into the cube enclosures. "Go! Get in!"

  "Jazz, hurry!" Arco shouts as Vox grabs my shoulder.

  "Time to go," she says, but I pull out of her grip when one of the guards in white shocks my father with a baton, making him drop to his knees. I race up the stairs to him.

  "Jazwyn, no!" Liam yells, but I'm already too close.

  "Bring her to the labs!" Styx shouts to the white-uniformed guards, and my father coughs violently when the one who shocked him grabs my hair and holds the baton to my throat.

  "My pleasure," the other guard in white says as she pushes back her beret, then sneers as only one other person I know can.

  "Sarin?" I say, barely recognizing our classmate from Seaboard North, ranked number seven out of our top ten. She looks down her long, broomstick nose at me with eyes that are now a strange shade of lavender instead of brown like before, and her normally olive skin seems lighter too. When she smiles, even her teeth have been changed to look just like Dez's and Tieg's solid, bioengineered white bar, but there's no mistaking the shiny black hair tied back so tightly I'm not sure how she can blink.

  "Don't struggle, Jazwyn, and you won't get hurt," the guard behind me says. I turn my head just enough to see pieces of choppy blonde hair and a cold, unnaturally blue gaze under the beret of Quinn Stallwart, who was ranked fifth in our class from Seaboard North.

  "Quinn? But…why?" I whisper.

  "What did you think would happen when the long-term clones you made of yourselves back at Gaia expired after a few days, Jazwyn? You were all so careless. It was illogical to side with you when Ms. Rheen approached us," she says with almost no facial expression at all, and I'm stunned at how robotic she sounds, even for her.

  "Let her go!" Arco shouts, already halfway to me with Jax, but Quinn tightens her hold on my hair and wedges the baton under my jaw.

  "Stay back!" she yells, stopping them on the stairs.

  What can I move…what can I move…I think, remembering Cal's training lesson in the circle arena at the same time I feel a prickle running down my arms and into my hands…think of it like water, I remember Kesh saying. Before it's too late, I raise my hands high enough so the fire shoots over my shoulders. Quinn must be immune to it like the other guards, but it distracts her long enough for me to grab her wrist as I twist into her, making the baton slip over my shoulder and into hers.

  The last thing I see before the current runs through her and into me is Arco and Jax running up the rest of the stairs, but then I can't help closing my eyes, or at least I think I do, and everything disappears in a flash of white just like earlier. When I'm able to see again, Liddick is standing in a field of fog with a bloody lip and one shoulder of his dive suit burned through.

  "Liddick!" I say out loud, wondering if the NET is finally working.

  "Rip! Are you all right? Are you really there? Is that…Quinn? And Liam! You're at the mountain!"

  "Yes!" I laugh, relieved. "But you have to hurry! We're following Lyden and Arwyn to the bridge!"

  "Rip, wait!" I hear his voice one more time before he fades into the fog, and everything in the port-carnate transfer room returns.

  Quinn is unconscious on the floor next to me, and I catch Sarin moving toward us in the corner of my eye. I only have time to suck in a breath before Vox spins her around, then punches her in the face so hard that she drops to the ground. She's down long enough for Vox to hold a baton against her leg, making her whole body seize until she passes out. Liam grabs Sarin's baton as Jax helps me up.

  "Do you know how long I've wanted to hit her right in that needle nose?" Vox asks as I get to my feet.

  "Are you OK?" Jax looks me up and down, but I don't have time to answer before Liam is in front of me scanning my eyes. He nods.

  "She's fine. Get her in the hub," he says to Vox, then turns abruptly to the back of the room where Azeris has returned to one of the pillar consoles, and Styx is waving a silver baton to keep my dad and Zoe from blocking his path to the door.

  "Stay clear," my father says, holding his stomach with one arm and extending the other in front of Zoe. "You won't get back up if that baton touches you."

  "Can't touch
me if it's on the ground with his hand," she smirks, gripping her machete and advancing on Styx.

  "They broke the seize code on the doors!" Azeris says. "And the preload sequence started—we need to go now, Jack!" he shouts to my dad, who shuffles behind a console and types something, then sighs in relief.

  "All right—Lyden and Arwyn are across the bridge, come on, come on!" my father says after punching a final combination onto his screen. Jax rushes under his arm to help him down the stairs, and we're almost to the cubes when at least a dozen new guards in black start pouring through the door.

  "Zoe—get in that box!" Azeris calls as his console is overwhelmed, but she runs to help him with the influx instead.

  My father stops suddenly just before entering the cube enclosure with us, then pulls the door shut behind Jax and Liam. They both turn abruptly and pound the clear wall as Fraya and Myra hold onto each other behind them.

  "I need to help Azeris shut down those clones—we'll get in the other hub!" my dad says, but Liam and Jax keep yelling and pushing at the door.

  "Jazz!" Arco calls from inside the other cube, and when I turn to face him, Vox is nodding over my shoulder. By the time I follow her eyes to my father, he is already walking me into the enclosure.

  "Get in this hub, Jazwyn. When you come out on the other side of the bridge, our contact will be there waiting for you. Her name is Calyx—she'll help you," he says in a rush, then looks over his shoulder before continuing. "When the light starts, try not to move, all right? Everything will be OK."

  "Wait! You're coming with us—you're hurt! You have to get in with us!" I repeat.

  "Omni-class Nanites…I'll be fine in a minute. Trust me, I designed them," he winks. "We'll follow you soon. I love you so much, Jazwyn," he adds, then kisses my forehead quickly before he starts back up the side aisle, and I know he must be trying to sneak behind one of the pillar consoles like Liam did earlier. I don't have time to protest before I nearly trip over my feet when Vox pulls me through the doorway.