“Exactly what I thought,” Rayna said as she took in my expression. “We can do surgery on the eardrum to repair it, but I’m afraid your hearing won’t be restored. It’s either that, or we let it heal on its own, but that can take weeks and leave your inner ear open for infection. I’ll let that be up to you. I am putting you on antibiotics already so that could very well lessen the risk.”
I remembered the surgery I’d had in the compound where they took the biopsies for their tests and shook my head. The imagery of the caked blood at the corner of my eye was a glaring reminder that I had already been under the knife with unpleasant results.
“No, no surgery,” I refused.
“But Mila, you heard what she…” my mother insisted.
I shot her a look and her mouth closed. “No. I just can’t, Mom. I need you to understand that I am not going under the knife ever again. Not if I can help it.”
A look of horror crossed over her features and tears filled her eyes as they flicked from Ryder behind me to Julius beside her, still leaning against the wall beside the door. She covered her mouth and stifled a sob.
“Oh God,” she muttered into her hand. Without warning, she lunged at the door, pulled it open, and rushed out of the room like it was on fire.
“Don’t tell me you all are clueless about exactly what happened in that place,” Julius said as he took a step away from the wall and crossed his arms over his broad chest. When Rayna didn’t answer him and continued to look at the wound on my arm, he insisted, “You guys know, don’t you? You have to know.”
Rayna stood up but didn’t take her eyes off me. “We know plenty. We don’t know everything, no. But we hope, with your help, we can put a stop to all of it. Whatever they did to you in that place will be stopped. I can promise you that.” She straightened, her back as straight as a pin, and took a deep breath. “I am going to check the stitches in your scalp now.”
She leaned forward, but I stopped her with a look. “How can you promise that?”
“We have a plan, Mila. Just trust in that,” she stated, but that wasn’t good enough for me.
“You have a plan?”
She turned to look at the back of my head where my scalp was stitched together. Her fingers lightly touched my broken flesh, causing a slight twinge.
“Yes.”
“And what is the plan?”
“It’s not fully laid out yet…” Her face was pinched in irritation and anger.
“Are you kidding me?”
They wanted me angry to kill King, so they were going to see angry. And they would see if they truly wanted someone with so much vengeance in their heart on their side of this war. Maybe I could just drop out and do this on my own, and the rest could come along if they wanted. I knew Cato’s vision had its particular players, but I was so close to being beyond finished with all of this it didn’t matter to me.
“Mila,” Gaia and Ryder chided at the same time.
Rayna’s touch became a little firmer, and pain ricocheted through my scalp and skull.
“What?” I turned and looked at them both, each pair of eyes greeting me with frustration at my insistence. “I have risked my life to get here. I was taken from my home in the middle of the night. Watched as they dragged my friend,” I pointed at Julius, “out of my apartment while I was helpless to do anything. Useless. I will not go in half-cocked so you all better have one Hell of a plan for me to continue with this game.”
“I’m with her,” Julius stated.
Rayna continued her examination while the words sunk in, and I meant every single one of them.
Chapter
THREE
All of us sat in a small conference room, each one of us taking a seat around an oblong table. Every chair faced a frosted glass screen at the front, one of the few computer systems I had ever seen with a screen that wasn’t completely clear. I didn’t much care about the difference in technology at that point. I cared about revenge and saving whatever was left of the new world I had come to know amongst those just like me. Those that were taken and then set free only to fight in a war we hadn’t known was coming to begin with.
Caius sat across from me, biting his fingernails with an unfocused look in his eyes. Julius sat beside him, his eyes focused intently on the table top, not daring to look up at anyone for some reason I couldn’t fathom. Maybe it was fear or uncertainty. A lot had changed and would only continue to do so now that we had come to our home among the Fallen Paradigm.
Ryder sat beside me, his hand clasped firmly in mine so hard it felt as if the bones in it would break, but I refused to let go. My mother stood before us with her hands on her hips and a look of authority on her face. All the others had not come into the conference room. They already had the information that we were about to be given. Even though I was certain Ryder and Caius were already well informed, they came with us regardless.
The room was bright, fluorescent light bouncing off of the light blue walls and back in my direction, causing me to have to squint past the barrage of light. We were directed to black leather chairs when we had entered the room, the cushion within the leather casing so comfortable my exhausted body relaxed into it without hesitation. My muscles eased at even just the thought of comfort. The white carpet on the floor was still immaculate despite the mud that I knew was caked on the bottom of our boots.
I watched my mother take in our appearances. We were all a mess, and I wanted a shower, but would be forced to wait until I was fully aware of the situation at hand. What we were about to learn would span the entire one hundred years prior to that moment, as well as anything we would need to know for our future survival going up against King and his band of men.
My mother’s eyelids were puffy and her eyes were tired, the once bright blue dimmed to a dull hue of what it once had been. After hearing just a fraction of what we were subjected to, one of those things being surgery, she had left the examination room and sobbed at the realization that she could have possibly stopped my abduction. At least, that was my guess. There was a portion of me that wanted to comfort her and tell her that there was nothing anyone could have done to stop what happened to us, but there was a small fraction that knew it was a lie. As was most of what I had been told growing up which I had a feeling was a lot more than I was being led to believe. Of course, nothing was certain anymore. Not even what had been written in our history books.
“Lights, dim,” my mother commanded to no one in particular.
The lights above us decreased in their intensity, no longer blinding but tolerable, still illuminating the room enough so we could see.
I had never known this luxury, even in the compound. This led me to believe that somehow the Fallen Paradigm had more money and resources than our own government. I shook the thought away. That wasn’t possible. Not even a little.
My mother moved to the computer screen at the front that took up nearly the entire wall in the two hundred square foot room and tapped on it softly, the screen coming to life with an electronic hum. As I watched her, her movements and expressions further proved that she wasn’t the same woman I had grown up with. She was different, but I couldn’t tell if it was because she put on a different mask when she was around us, or if something had truly changed her. I was willing to bet I’d never know. She had her moments of emotional transparency but, most of the time since the compound, she was hard, cold, and relentless.
An image of a world before the wall, the beach along the East Coast vibrant and beautiful, emerged onto the screen. Nothing like what I had seen once I had crossed it. Granted, it was still beautiful, but the sterile gray of the wall stole so much beauty from the surroundings we weren’t meant to see ever again. She picked up a small device and moved away from the screen, coming to stand at the head of the table behind us to stare at the projected image and not obstruct our view. I glanced at her. Her e
yes shimmered with unshed tears, but her expression was cold otherwise. It caused me to shiver. I looked away from her and at the screen, hoping the mother that raised me was still in there somewhere, hidden behind the mask of the leader she had to become. That she chose to become.
“Be prepared to sit for a while. There is a lot to go over, and I do not plan on giving anyone a break until I am finished. Is that clear?”
Yes, she had changed.
Each of us looked around at one another, green eyes meeting another pair of greens, then a pair of blues, and a pair of steel grays. The suspicion and anxiety that seemed to have formed a permanent pit in my stomach relieved me of my appetite. If anything, I felt a near constant urge to vomit and to hit something. Both of which I avoided by turning my mind into a blank slate. Everyone nodded. Her eyes met mine and averted quickly as she took a deep and steadying breath.
“All right, then,” she breathed. “As you can see, this is the world before the Wall was erected. This was a time where the world was ravaged by war. The United States made the executive decision that the cost of war, as well as the loss of life and the way of life, was worth protecting, so they built a wall and cut the country off from the rest of the world. This was at the time of your great-great grandfather, Mila.”
All eyes turned to me. My cheeks flushed, I looked down at my hands in my lap and attempted to keep from looking up and at everyone in the room. My anxiety peaked, but I swallowed it down, not wanting to shake headquarters and cause it to come crashing down around us because I couldn’t control my emotions.
“He was a revolutionary and helped those that couldn’t help themselves. That was until he was murdered for his beliefs.” She paused long enough to press a button on her remote. The image changed to a damaged shoreline, nothing like what I had seen. This was desolate and cold and gray. “After the Wall went up and this country cut itself off from the rest of the world, our involvement in war of any kind ceased, but the rest of the world continued to fight one another. Despite that, we remained at peace for nearly one hundred years, all issues the country faced before disappearing. Some of them being illegal immigration, drug smuggling, and sex trafficking moving across the borders.”
The room was still as she spoke, not even the sound of any climate control system moving through the air as we sat and listened to my mother speak about the days before we were even born. Before she was even born.
My mind raced, and sweat beaded across my hairline and ran down my back. I shifted in my chair, the topic of discussion making me highly uncomfortable, but it was all something I needed to hear. We had been taught the bare minimum in school, never once hearing about a rebellion of any kind at the time of the raising of the Wall. All we were told was that peace overtook the land and, even though punishments for crimes were strict and brutal, they never reached outside of the facilities where these punishments were given. Not even once. That was what didn’t sit right with me at that moment. The silence concerning the rebels at the time. The name of my great-great grandfather had never surfaced up until that point. The man was a ghost as far as I was concerned.
I sucked in a breath to prepare myself for the answer once my lips parted and the words came out. “Why was this kept quiet?”
All attention averted to me again, but this time I didn’t shy away from it. I welcomed it because I was certain that everyone else wondered the same thing. Not only had our government kept this silent for nearly one hundred years, but so had my mother. The same person I assumed never lied to me about anything. My mother’s eyes snapped to me and underneath the cold exterior she attempted to hold onto, there was a flicker of guilt and surprise at my question. She had to have known it was coming. If not from me, someone else would have brought it up. Or had we been beaten down so far by our submission to our government that we no longer knew how to speak up for ourselves, to ask the important questions? Fear no longer held a place in my heart aside from the highs and lows of my reactions to what had happened to me, to us, but terror at the sight of King no longer lived there.
“Mom?” I pushed when she made no move to answer me.
She shook her head, and her gaze dropped to the table top.
“Our government did not want to look weak. After the Wall had been built, we were already living under a dictatorship. Our leader did not want to look weak in any way, so he wiped it from our history, but there are some that have held onto this history for these hundred years and that, as well as our familial involvement, led to the Fallen Paradigm’s knowledge of it.”
“Sounds about right,” Julius said.
I saw the acceptance of the explanation in his face, but I wanted more. Being on the receiving end of lie after lie had made me greedy for the truth. I was going to get it in this room or walk and do what I needed to on my own to make our world safe. Not just for me, but for those like me that had been exploited during this entire event. If not before. Also, for my sister who had already been ravaged by our circumstances.
Shaking my head, I fought the urge to believe it all. I pushed past it knowing that this wasn’t all there was because it had never been that way. Something else always lingered under the surface.
“No.”
“No what, Mila? You heard what she said,” Caius started, but I glared at him. He fell quiet within seconds and leaned back in his chair.
“I guess I could’ve worded that better. What I want to know is, why didn’t you tell me before now? Before all of this?”
A low whistle came from Julius and Ryder leaned forward, placing a hand on my back in a comforting and supportive gesture. But I saw the fear in his eyes that I wouldn’t take whatever new information there was well.
My mother barely reacted as she pressed the button on the remote again, moving to the next image. I turned to look at it. There was a part of me that knew it was important somehow. The photo projected onto the screen nearly took my breath away as I stared into bright green eyes of a man that looked so much like me I would’ve fallen over if I weren’t already sitting down. His hair was dark and brushed his shoulders. It framed a strong jaw and a face that reminded me so much of my own, that face turned up to look at someone in reverence instead of the fear I had been used to on so many faces as of late.
“This is him.”
I tore my stare away from the image and looked at her. She looked nothing like him, but that didn’t change what I needed to know.
“My question still stands, Mom,” I said with a firm tone. I was not about to back down. Not anymore. Before I was subservient and submissive, but so many things had changed since then.
“I wanted to protect you and your sister. I wanted…”
I stood and slammed my fist onto the table in one quick motion. The outburst startled everyone in the room and each pair of eyes focused on me with shock.
“I’ve had enough. Stop trying to protect me. It hasn’t done any good up to this point, Mom, and I’m so tired of all the bullshit.”
“Mila,” Julius started as he began to stand.
My attention shot to him with such heat that I felt it flare deep within my gut.
“Don’t.” I pointed at him. “Everyone needs to stop protecting her from me, her own daughter. I am done.” I turned to her as I leaned over the table, both hands now on the slick surface of the table as my palms began to sweat with frustration. “What I said in the forest is still true. If you continue to hide things from me and lie to me and beat around the bush, I will walk. I will do this on my own. I don’t need you or the Fallen Paradigm. So, this stops. You will be honest and up front with me whether you want to be or not.”
The room went still, the silence deafening as I continued to stare at my mother. Her blue eyes finally met mine. I saw the resistance within them and an unwillingness to tell me certain things, but I meant what I said. I would walk. The recognition of my insistence was the
re under the surface.
Each pair of eyes turned to my mother, all of them filled with questions. I was willing to bet they were the same questions I had. I had thought Ryder was privy to more information than most, but it was evident that wasn’t the case. He had been here much longer than anyone else in the room beside my mother who had started the entire thing. Now it was snowballing because of my involvement, moving a lot faster than she seemingly had anticipated. I didn’t care because, the quicker this was over and King was taking a dirt nap, the quicker I could live my life without being afraid. My mental health was being affected because of the man, and I wanted it to be over. I wanted to have better control over my ability. To be able to use it without letting it control me, instead of the other way around. That was how I had won so many battles up until that point. Now there was a battle of wills happening within this room, and I was confident I would come out on top.
Because they needed me. Because I had all the power they needed to end this, whatever King’s plan was for me in the end. The visions Cato had shared with me didn’t tell me what his end game was, but I was certain it was coming. I could feel it.
“Mom, please,” I nearly begged as I stood there and looked into sky blue eyes. The same ones my sister had. “I just want this to be over. Not just for me, but for everyone. Especially Gaia. I don’t want her to have to continue to live in a world where she is always afraid. So, please. Help me make that possible.”
Tears welled up in her eyes, threatening to spill over if she didn’t hold them wide open as she stared at me. I could tell, from those very tears, that this battle between the two of us was about to end. I was relieved. It flooded my system as I watched her close her eyes in submission.
“Okay,” she relented.
I sat back down, taking my place beside Ryder, and nearly falling into the chair with relief. Ryder’s hand grazed my own and, when I looked at him, he smiled feebly. It was as if he knew how I felt and what I was going through and it made me happy that someone did. Julius and Caius were experiencing the same things, but never once in the same respect. They didn’t have to continuously push against their own mother at every turn even though she recognized that me having the knowledge could only help us all.
The Scorned (The Permutation Archives Book 3) Page 3