"I can’t say that I do," Parker replied. "You were candid with me. I respect that. But you violated everything the Alliance stands for…"
"I am loyal to the Alliance."
"I didn’t question it," he said. "You changed fate with your actions. I was in command, and there was a reason I was in command. My years of experience are greater than yours, and my emotional state was more on the level. You were still panged by the guilt of turning Mars over to the wolves of the MSA."
"I did it to help the Alliance."
"If you hadn’t have done it, we wouldn’t have found the Megacruiser, we wouldn’t have taken it to space, and I wouldn’t have killed Jan." Before she was able to counter, he jabbed his fingers toward her and shouted. "I didn’t stick around for a reason. The Megacruiser wasn’t supposed to be found, and you changed fate by controlling my decisions."
"Fate happened as it did. You can’t change it. If your fate was for me to influence you, that is that. Don’t push an argument that I violated some temporal law."
"The fate of Mars isn’t changed by you. I make choices because of my experiences, and you went inside my mind and did the opposite because it suited your desires. I wouldn’t have turned the hovercar around."
"It was done, and our fate lies at the top of the Majestic Tower. Do you still wish to proceed?"
"I don’t have a choice."
"Don’t say that," she said, moving into the elevator. She crossed her arms.
After a moment of silence, she tilted her head. "Seth is heading toward Gwen, with anger, frustration, hostility in his mind. He is enraged."
Parker slammed the button to floor 100 on the access panel with the side of his fist. "Sounds like you found the right mind."
"Parker," Chloe said with some force. "Remember, he is still my husband."
"Oh, I remember that too well," he said, keeping his gaze up, looking at the digital numbers flick upward toward 100.
There was silence in the elevator car for the rest of the way up. The ding signaled their arrival on the top floor of the Majestic Tower.
Chloe’s stomach dropped. Nausea bubbled up into her throat. She swallowed it down. The knowledge that Seth was approaching was eating her from the inside out like a parasite. He was close.
The doors parted, and she took a step off the elevator. Parker stepped close behind, but he wasn’t off the elevator yet. She intentionally blocked him from stepping completely off. A sense of danger gripped her mind.
Seth was near.
She reached out with her mind, probing the corridors to her left and to her right. He wasn’t down either of them. He must be coming down the central corridor, and he was alone. There were few minds on this level, if any. Seth’s presence overwhelmed her, so she wasn’t completely sure.
Parker stepped close behind her. She felt his breath—short, quick, and panicked—against the back of her neck.
Intentionally, she slowed her breathing, trying to use some of the calming techniques. They weren’t working. They never had for her. Her heart began to pound faster, and her mind clouded as she felt him approach.
With difficulty, she held her mind back from probing too hard. She didn’t want him alerted. His approach was enough. His emotions jumped around too much for her to pinpoint his exact mood; but she knew it the instant she saw him. There was no need to press him.
The musky odor of sweat filled the air. Seconds felt like days.
Suddenly, she saw him. He rounded the corner, stopped his fevered walk, and held still for a heartbeat.
To Chloe, the handsome man she loved stood before her: the squared jawline, the staggering presence, the muscular body, and chestnut-brown hair cut sharply. But his emerald eyes looked at her differently. The fierce winds of Mars had blown away the gentleness of his gaze, which was now hard and cragged; she cared nothing for it. His eyes told everything of his desire to rule the MSA and Mars.
They stood there for only a moment.
And as she looked at him, her motives and her loyalties to the Alliance and her daughter became formless, vague, and meaningless. Now, with him so close, she would do anything to be with him. That word anything hung in her mind.
No, she scolded herself. She would do anything to save her daughter.
His gaze pierced her, creating further conflict within her.
Chagrined, defeated, she had no resistance to him. But she knew she had crossed the line she was terrified to cross. Seth controlled her again. Her love for him was too great. Without a great strength, she couldn’t resist his love. She didn’t have it in her. She gained her strength from him, thus making it easy for him to corrupt her.
Alexandria’s face crept into her mind. She turned her head to the side.
A combat between her love and her conscience raged. Her knees weakened. "No!" she screamed. "Get out of my head!"
For Alexandria, she had to fight him.
Alone. Without the influence or the crutches her mind needed from Seth to curb the fears that ravaged her heart.
Parker stirred behind her. A premonition of dread surged within her. He had to leave, or Seth would destroy him—or worse, she would betray him.
She looked back toward Seth as he jerked his arm up. His gun was aimed at Parker.
Chloe followed along his vision. He was bending time, but she pushed against it, overcoming his immense power. Her mental abilities outweighed his physical ones. In an instant of normal time, she pivoted her foot around, slammed her shoulder into Parker’s chest, sent him sprawling to the floor, slammed the button for level one, pressed the close button, and finally, slipped back through the doorway and into the corridor with Seth.
Time came back to normal. The bullet hit the elevator but caused no harm.
"Chloe!" Parker yelled, but he was too late. The door closed in front of him, and he was on his way back down.
She and Seth were alone.
Seth saw her standing in front of him, and a bitter taste pooled under his tongue. His muscles were frozen, and he couldn’t wrestle them into movement. He wanted to hug Chloe, he wanted to grab her and wring her by the neck, he wanted to tell her everything great that was happening, but mostly he wanted her gone until this was over. He wished her away.
But she remained.
There was the girl he had loved painfully through the turmoil of his life. For years, he had protected her from the nightmares of her past. He sought the paradise she so conveniently ignored and denied. And now, she had brought the person he hated most in the solar system. A man who had been a friend, and who at the first opportunity seeded Chloe with lies—the kind of betrayal for which there is only one answer.
Hatred glossed over his eyes. He raised his pistol unsteadily, fighting the urge to lower it. He wanted Parker McCloud dead. He pulled the trigger.
Bang!
Ping!
Seth was stupefied, shocked by what had happened. Time remained the same; no slowing, no blurred vision. He didn’t get to enjoy the slow death of Parker McCloud as the bullet burrowed its way into his skull. It was a clear miss by him.
He looked back at Chloe and understood. It was a blur, but Chloe had managed to slam Parker to the floor, close the elevator door, and save him from certain death.
She did it. She used his power, stifling him.
"Stop!" she said, running down the corridor toward him.
He stopped. Didn’t she see what she had done to him? With her around, he was mortal. He had to get away from her to kill Gwen and to complete his plan to take over the planet.
"Get away from me!" he shouted. "I have to do this by myself."
He looked behind him, saw the emergency door release, and slammed his fists against it.
The claxon roared above her. Chloe had seen Seth pound the wall beside him, probably trying to stop her someway.
Then from above, she saw the door closing. It rushed downward, attempting to cut her off from him. She sprinted toward the door. She knew instantly she wasn’t going to make it stand
ing up. She slid feet first toward the ever-shrinking opening.
She attempted to bend time in her favor, but nothing happened. Perhaps it was because of her panicked state, or more likely, her inability to enter Seth’s mind and take the ability he had used moments before. He subdued each of her attempts with pangs of anger and contempt.
Just before her foot slammed against it, the door closed. She twisted her body to save her ankle from a break, thumping helplessly against the solid metal.
Seth had evaded her.
She screamed. She had lost him.
Pounding and pounding her fists against the doorway, she knew she wouldn’t reach Seth before he crossed the landing pad to kill Gwen Arwell. She sensed his plan. She knew what he wanted to do now.
She knew it would fail.
Parker heard a horrific wail from above him. He scrambled to his feet.
"That was Chloe," he muttered.
What was Seth doing to her? He cursed at his inability to stop Seth. It could only mean more trouble for him and Mars.
He pried open the emergency panel and yanked back on the control lever.
The elevator car jerked to a sudden halt, sending him wobbling to his side before he braced himself against the side rail.
Confident everything was stable, he moved under the escape hatch in the ceiling. With a short jump, he punched the hinged panel upward and opened it to the shaft above him.
Setting his feet, he grabbed the side of the car for balance, and with a simple jump straight up, he swung his hands in line with the exit hole and grabbed the edges of the hole. The jerking motion downward jostled his grip, but he held with immense effort.
As he precariously hung, his muscles burned like acid injected into his arm. With a surge, doing a reverse chin-up, he pulled his body through the opening and with a final heave and a kick of his boots, he managed to slink his way through the hole to the top of the elevator car.
To his left, a service ladder ran the length of the shaft. He hurried onto it and moved upward, but in the time it took him to realize what had happened and for the shriek of Chloe to clear his wavering mind, he was at least forty stories down—a ten- minute climb with fresh arms and legs. His aching arms and legs throbbed, remembering the travel and the turmoil of the last day as well as the chin-up that had about burned both of his arms off moments ago. He paused to rub his cramped biceps.
Then he thought of Chloe and knew he had to push himself for the thousandth time in the last two years. He hurried upward.
By the time he arrived at the top on floor 100, he was too late. Both Chloe and Seth were gone. The emergency door down the central corridor was sealed.
The tramping of boots sounded to his right.
He turned, listening to the movement. They were regular, and there were many of them, about six or seven pairs. MSA soldiers were coming. He hastened to the hallway to the left.
Coming to the end of the hallway, he hesitated as he saw two doors. One was marked "energy room"—which meant it connected with most of the upper portion of the tower, and it would give him good lateral movement on this floor. The other door was marked "elevator service"—which he thought might give him an opportunity to move higher up on the tower, toward Gwen’s apartment and her private landing pad. If Seth had taken Chloe. or if Chloe was chasing Seth, he needed to get to Gwen.
He was through the elevator service door to his right and ran until he reached the outer walls of the tower. He pressed himself against the glass facing, peering down at the menacing distance under his feet.
Jinx, I am in the Majestic Tower, he thought. I am within the heart of everything evil on Mars.
He didn’t stop to ponder the relevance of his being in the one place where the evils of the Martian Supremacy Authority had been schemed, maneuvered, and commanded, or how he was trying to stop the one person, the only person, who could stop Seth from destroying everyone on the planet. He just wanted to get to Chloe and stop her from destroying herself. He realized, having seen Seth for only a moment, how she was going to convince Seth to care for Alexandria. There was only one sacrifice left to make.
He ran along a gangway. The cling-clang of his boots echoed down the chambers of the elevator shafts below. The entire garrison of soldiers was alerted to his presence.
Finally, after searching the entire outside of the tower’s top, he found an access ladder leading upward. He jumped, reached his hands out, grabbed onto the rungs, and swung his body onto the ladder.
He was up to the top of it in five heaves.
Opening the hatch, he was surprised and overjoyed. He had stumbled upon the access port to Gwen Arwell’s office.
Chapter 41
The torrential wind pulled at her hood, trickling down to the small of her back. Gwen shivered.
The Majestic Tower’s landing pad was perched some three hundred meters above the surface, a lofty twenty stories above the next highest tower, Titan. It overlooked the entire Zephyria region. Defining the edge, warning lights danced along the pad around and behind her space yacht, Porpoise.
Her guards signaled she was safe. She nodded and headed toward the yacht.
She knew her safety within the colony of Zephyria and especially the Majestic Tower was compromised. Samantha had penetrated too deep within her inner circle for her to move around the colony any more, which to a degree saddened her. This was her father’s colony. He was the reason for many of the magnificent structures: the main dome, the gardens, and the Majestic Tower. He guided the colony into its most prosperous time, he formed the two governments and the MSA, and he was the reason everyone was so happy under her leadership.
Samantha Burns ruined it. She took away everything her father had worked so hard to create because of her greed and her jealousy. And when the Alliance had killed Gwen’s father, Samantha wanted Mars for herself, but Gwen took over instead. Now, she saw how Samantha had guided her in the first few weeks of her reign, pushing and prodding her to do as she wished. Samantha spoke as if Gwen was her leader, but her heart wanted the leadership for herself.
Gwen sighed. She had been too arrogant. She thought she could control her friend because she had been able to do it since their childhood. But as with everything in the MSA, there was a shifting of their relationship when Gwen left for Lunara and Samantha stayed on Mars. Samantha’s work with her father and the rest of the MSA corrupted the sweet innocent girl she had known since school.
Her memories were just that—memories—and if she wanted to move forward with her MSA, Samantha Burns wasn’t her old friend anymore. She was her enemy. She had caused her to kill Seth and had attempted to kill her.
She bit her lip. An unforgivable offense.
The wind howled, slipping around the tower and across the landing pad.
She stopped to catch her balance. She caught herself feeling the weight of Zephyria on top of her. The wind gusted along the tower, creating a horrific wail, as if the people of Zephyria were crying for her help.
She looked up toward the stars to find her father. The night was cloudy, and the reassurance of the stars and the planets and her father was out of reach. She lowered her head. Had she failed?
The wind gusted again, and she pulled the hood tighter against her face, attempting with minimal luck to stop the cold reach of the wind’s hand.
Ahead of her along the surface, the landing pad where she had ordered the death of Seth rested. She held back tears, which up until this point she hadn’t been able to shed for him. She loved him. She had since the day he introduced himself in hangar five on Lunara. For months, she hid it from him, until that fateful day two years ago, where everyone’s life had changed for the worse. Perhaps if that day had never happened, none of this would have. Maybe she would still be on Lunara doing work for her father.
Warmth passed over her. Her father…she felt him beside her. She turned her head, unable to believe it.
He wasn’t there.
But he was here…everything around her was her fa
ther: the colony, the MSA, and herself. Why did the Alliance hate the Arwells?
Bitterness curled her stomach. Had the Arwell family been too insistent in their beliefs? Was Mars better off without them?
Sarah McCloud would be alive but for one thing. She, Gwen, had killed Sarah with the greatest of malice. As she felt Sarah’s blood between her fingers, Gwen felt a reflection of the past two years wash over her like a house of mirrors forcing her image in every direction. She saw a different woman than the one who was forced to go to Lunara. The woman who left for Lunara had the Principles of Man to guide her actions; now she let her father’s doctrine force her to do terrible things. She couldn’t imagine the young woman on Lunara harming even a rat. Sarah was already haunting her, making her tremble as the specters howled through her mind.
She put her face into her hands. If not for her family, no great war would have been waged between the MSA and the Alliance. If her father had left well enough alone, the planet would be on a better course. Her father was the reason for Mars. From the destruction of Aethpis colony to the killing of most of Mars’s bright, promising leaders, there wasn’t a misfortune on Mars that wasn’t his fault. She had inherited his legacy. Her father’s legacy had forced her to kill Seth.
The guard at the gangplank of the yacht called her to move forward.
Suddenly, she didn’t want to leave. She couldn’t run from her father’s legacy because her legacy and his were intertwined, for eternity. The Arwells were a proud family, and they always did what it took to make Mars a better place. Unfortunately, this time, she had to fix her family’s mistake. She had perpetuated the MSA’s attempts at Martian grandeur. When all along, the MSA had been doing the complete opposite. It had been destroying the Martian way of life, throwing out the Principles of Man she had respected so dearly, and replacing it with an idealistic society with unattainable goals.
Suddenly, she knew she had to destroy the MSA.
She craned her neck toward the main dome of Zephyria. She saw it clearly for the first time in years. The fog of deception cleared from her eyes. Her leadership wasn’t supposed to be about forming the people to the ideals of the government. It was the government’s purpose to make sure the people’s individual ideals were upheld.
Lunara: The Original Trilogy Page 101