by E. J. Mellow
“You’re a madman!” Dev leaps from the guard’s grasp only to be held at bay again by another. He backward head-butts the Vigil and surges forward, but before his fingers can so much as graze Cato’s black pressed uniform, he screams in anguish and drops to his knees.
“Dev!” I dive to his side. “What are you doing to him?!” I cry out, glaring at Cato, who merely arcs an icy brow as he stares at Dev. My Dev, who moans in pain, his eyes squeezed shut. Switching to the sight of energy, I catch the cord of Cato’s power hooked into Dev’s chest, controlling whatever illusion of torment he has pinned to him. Letting out a growl, I lash out with a strand of my own, severing the connection, and Dev droops in relief in my arms.
“Well done.” Cato regards me with a look of approval, and it takes all my efforts not to throw my energy back at him. With an audible grunt, Dev allows me to help him stand.
“Enough of this.” Elena steps forward. “We did not agree to this plan to make enemies of each other.” Her razor-sharp eyes rest on Cato, who huffs and looks away.
“Molly.” She gracefully comes to me, her blue gaze uncharacteristically gentle. “I know this seems unfair and a bit manipulative—”
“Because it is.”
“But,” she continues, “we had no other choice but to present it to you this way. You wouldn’t have agreed otherwise.”
“And I still don’t agree!” The Navitas in me jumps with my rage, growing dangerously restless to retaliate.
“Yes, but here we are nonetheless, and if you want to put a stop to it, I suggest you go help Aurora before it’s too late. Unless”—she looks at me meaningfully—“you think she deserves to die for her actions.”
“Of course I don’t.” I gasp in a shocked whisper, horrified she would even think such a thing. Despite Aurora’s lashings of hate when I met her in the prison—blaming me for Aaron and wishing I had never come here, that I never came back—I know those words came from a dark and twisted place, one provoked by whatever sickness of negativity her brother transferred to her.
“Then I suggest you act now.”
A girl’s scream echoes around the stadium.
With a burst of energy, I fly down and land in front of the lunging Metus. Their laboring steps rumble like a stampede as they charge toward Aurora, her frightened form pressed against the far wall. A thick titanium barrier wraps the circumference of the field, its surface too flat to climb, its height too tall, leaving any who enter without a way out, an animal trapped. Upon reaching the pit, I realize two things. One, these beasts are much taller and wider than any I have come across before, their dripping acid skin more red than the usual orange, and I wonder if these are a new breed of nightmares. The thought momentarily terrifies me, for I have no idea what sort of deadly abilities to expect. The second thing is that the crowd is reacting to my presence as if they are watching some game, and either their favorite or most hated player has just entered the ring. Shouts of excitement and support mix with insults and boos. It makes me sick, but I have no time to react, for the three beasts quickly approach.
With a deep inhale, I reach into the Dreamer vest strapped across me, pulling at the energy stored within, and with my mind prickling, raise my palms and pump out a blaze of Navitas straight into them. The arm of the nightmare in the middle gets shot off, causing that Metus to stumble before pitching forward. The other two swerve, eluding the shot. I start to backpedal as I attack again, posting myself between Aurora and the monsters, but they realize my plan and split off. I curse and force myself to hover just off the ground to gain leverage on their new locations—the armless Metus in front, two on either side of me. Raising a wall of sand to the left, I attempt to hold off one while I take care of the others, but before I get too far, I sense a presence behind me, and I spin just as I hear Aurora’s scream of rage and watch her body hurling my way. I quickly float back, but she snags my leg, collapsing us both to the ground. Sand and mud ooze between my fingers as I try pushing myself up, but Aurora jumps on top of me, forcing me back.
“What the hell!” I yell and wrestle her away. “I’m trying to save your ass!”
“I hate you!” she screams as I try pinning her down. I grunt as her fist knocks against my jaw.
Holding it with my hand, I gaze down at her in shock. She pants like a rabid animal as I straddle her waist, no lucidness in her green gaze. She tries to punch me again, but I grab her fist, slamming it into the ground.
“Stop! Aurora, I’m trying to help!”
“I don’t want your help!” she screeches before she starts to buck like a creature possessed, because that’s exactly what she is—possessed.
“God damn it,” I ground out. Not only do I have to get rid of the Metus, but I also have to hold off this crazy bitch without hurting her. As if sensing my frustration, a storm of red enters my periphery.
Without thinking about it, I call upon my energy, using it to flick Aurora up and wrap her in a cocoon of blue-white, momentarily holding her suspended high in the air and out of the way. She wails and spits out curses, as her arms are jammed tightly by her side. I care little about her screams though, as I find myself flattening onto the ground and rolling away as three fireballs slam into the spot I just stood.
“All right, guys,” I say as the four of us circle each other. “It’s just us now, so let’s get this over with quick.”
As if understanding, the armless one runs at me, but I instantly stomp one foot, sending a ripple through the ground. The impact flips it onto its back, and taking advantage of its shocked state, I jump to hover directly above it, launching a burst of Navitas straight into its chest. With little more than a cut-off scream of pain, its entirety is enveloped with light and bursts apart. Calling up a quick wall of energy, I shield myself from the backsplash. With my mind edging on a migraine, manipulating and using my power so fast, I take a deep breath to calm the adrenaline swooshing through my veins.
The crowd hasn’t stopped their roars and cheers, and I wish they would shut up. Don’t they understand what’s at stake here? A life! And one of their own! But they don’t get any of that, gorging themselves on the show. It’s infuriating. Almost as infuriating as the two monsters running at me. As I prepare to send forth more globs of deadly energy, I realize too late that they aren’t actually charging—they’re using the momentum to hoist one on top of the other in order to reach Aurora’s floating form.
“NO!” I shout just as I sprint forward, snaking out a whip of Navitas to cut off the bottom monster’s legs. They both fall, but not before the beast on top reaches out with talon-laden fingers to grasp one of Aurora’s ankles.
Her head snaps back with a blood-curdling scream, the audience’s collective shrieks of horror a distant layer as I watch the lava of the Metus slowly working up Aurora’s leg.
“NO!” I shout again. NO! NO! NO!
Switching to the sight of energy, I lash out with everything I’ve got, sending blue-white waves of my power toward the creatures. But as my knife-tipped bands burst straight through their chests, their wails of anguish on the wind, I feel no relief. Instead, I’m hit with a wall of confusion. No dark sludge fills their bodies like it normally would. Instead, I merely find a shadow of it. As if the blackness swimming in them is a ghost of what it really should be.
What are these things?
I have little room to think further on it, before their skin cracks and fissures with the overpowering Navitas filling them, and in the next second they explode, bits of red goop smacking into the dirt with a hiss.
Without losing a beat, I pull the still-screaming Aurora from her hovering state and lay her on a clean patch of ground. Keeping her arms securely at her sides with tendrils of my energy, I lift the cocoon and, while still in the sight, survey the damage. Her veins remain filled with the black and blue-white strand mixture, her life essence contaminated, while the lava from the Metus slowly crawls up her leg, just as it did with Tim. But this…this feels and looks much different. Like the smok
e of evil I saw in the other Metus tonight, and after a moment more of watching it, the way it curls and inches forward but not actually connecting with the energy under Aurora’s skin, not turning it the inky blackness of the monster it came from… By the stars, they aren’t real. These Metus were simulations, like in the engineers’ lab. The world bends with my disbelief, and I place a steadying hand on the ground as I peer up into the tiny box set into the stadium’s wall, where I know Cato is watching, where all the elders are.
They tricked me.
They used my emotions, the fact that I care for Aurora, to win whatever game they’re playing with the citizens of Terra. A clap of lightning flashes overhead, illuminating the stadium as my anger explodes. The onlookers gasp in terror and shock. But I don’t care. I can’t see past my own frustration and exhaustion, and the only thing that pulls me from it is the small whimper by my knees, and I look down to find Aurora staring up at me. In a rare gap in time, her green gaze is clear, lucid, a hint of the girl still somewhere inside. And in this moment I decide that if anything is to come out of this, it will be what I control. What I know is a real attempt to save a friend, not merely a spectacle to win over a people who have lost their way along with the humans of Earth.
So on bended knee, I block out the world around me, dim it to shadows, as I call upon all the Dreamers of my past. Help me, I whisper. Help me heal her. And like winks in space, I sense each one pop into this plane, the plane where energy and memory collide, where essence is power and the rest of life moves slow. Riki is beside me, always the closest of them, the most real to me, and I briefly close my eyes in a sense of relief as I feel her hand upon my shoulder, and I know what I must do.
Unstrapping my vest, I throw it to the ground. For this I will need the purest of pure, what lives in me, what rests in my heart.
Watching Aurora’s gaze slowly slipping back into her feral state, her mouth curving into a snarl as she regards me above her, I act quick, and with a thump to my back, as if someone slapped me, a cloud of myself bursts forward, of smoke. It’s not me, but it is…a specter of my power… And this Molly drapes herself over Aurora and seeps in. I feel myself dive into her bloodstream, coursing along every one of her cells, running the length of the complicated woven black thread that hooks into the white, and like medicine attacking a virus, I coat every inch. I’m no longer human, but trillions of cells split apart, created for only one thing—to erase the darkness. I have no idea how long we search and connect to the sickness, how long it takes to find every last centimeter of hate that’s nuzzled deep within Aurora’s heart, but when we do, it’s like there’s a click in our souls, and we know. I ask my past Dreamers to lend me their power, pour it into me. And they do. We join until we are as bright as a burning star, orbiting wisps of hope and love and forgiveness. And then we eradicate it in one fell swoop, a flash of white that burns through the dark.
Slowly everything recedes back into place. My predecessors leave me, my sight returning to normal, along with the arena and row upon row of spectators.
I sag, out of breath, out of everything. With both my hands on the ground, my head pounds with a ringing. A ringing of the world gone quiet, finally, the only sound the labored pants of the person by my side. I turn my head to Aurora holding her chest, her eyes wide as they stare up into the sky, her skin slowly gaining its usual honey color that had been sucked from it for so long. Her brother had stolen her, but he’s no longer here to contaminate her, no longer haunting her thoughts.
“Molly,” Aurora croaks out.
“Yes.” I scoot to her side. “It’s me.”
She blinks, and as her gaze finds mine, her lip trembles.
“Shh,” I say, reaching for her hand. “You’re okay. You’re okay now.”
“I’m so sorry,” she whispers. “Aaron…I did it. It was me.”
“Shh, I know.” I stroke back the damp hair plastered across her forehead. “I know, and it’s okay.”
But she just shakes her head and keeps mumbling. “It was me. I did it. Molly, I’m so sorry. I did it.”
Her words go on and on, her confession seeping out of her. So I wait until she empties, left only with her sobs as I pull her into my arms.
— 35 —
Nothing matters.
Nothing but my rage.
With the last ounce of my strength, I fly Aurora back to the private box where the elders and Dev wait for me, the applause of the citizens below a backdrop to whatever it was they saw when I healed one of their own.
Depositing Aurora in Dev’s arms, the only person I truly trust to handle her in this moment, I turn away from his imploring gaze. He wants me to go to him as well, needs me to, but in my current mental state, I have no use for soft words and gentle touches. I don’t want consolation. I want to yell and scream and set this whole place on fire. But even more than that, I want to be alone. I feel dirty and used and manipulated. And I know until I can rid these feelings, I don’t trust myself around anyone I care for. I don’t want to have to regret the things I’d end up saying, doing, or not doing.
The Vigil guards close in around the elders as I approach, and they are right to. I’m not sure I even trust myself in this moment. Elena half smiles as Cato opens his mouth to speak, but I cut them off.
“I know they were simulations,” I say, my voice rumbling with rage. “The Metus—they weren’t real.”
“Of course not,” Cato says.
I take a step back at his easy admission. “What?”
“We wouldn’t actually put you at such a risk,” he explains with a near eye roll. “What you do on the battlefield is one thing, but here…” He shakes his head with a scoff. “No, you’re our most valuable asset.”
The low lighting of our box flickers with my fury, and I catch the few Council members shifting uncomfortably in my periphery.
“I want you to listen carefully,” I say with icy slowness. “For I’m only going to say this once, and only once.” My hands curl into fists. “You will never do that to me again. Do you understand? You will never manipulate, lie, or use someone I care for against me. Those are actions of an enemy, and I wouldn’t think you’d want an enemy out of the Dreamer.” I purposefully glance to all the Dreamer repellent bands adorning some of the people in the room, a mocking sneer on my lips. “Especially now that I’ve won the favor of the people.” To prove my point, I step back, bathing myself in the arena lights that creep onto the balcony. The noise grows deafening as I stand in view, and I throw my hand out in a wave as the stadium shakes with the chanting of Dreamer. Dreamer. Dreamer.
Slipping back under the canopy, I level the Council with my most severe glare. “Do we have an understanding?” I make a point to hold Cato’s gaze.
His face is frozen in stone, but a gleam in his green eyes wavers on a challenge and sense of respect. I care little for either.
“Yes,” he says after a moment more of the two of us glaring at one another. “We have an understanding.”
“Good.” My attention bounces from Hector, to Elena, to Odi, past Alex, hesitating on Dev, before returning to Cato. “Now, I’m going to leave, and for the love of Terra, I want to leave alone. I think I’ve earned that much.” And without another word, I pivot and storm out the door. Dev calls my name, but I don’t stop, even as guilt hits me in the gut. I merely break into a half run, desperate for the outside.
“Slow down!” It’s Hectors voice this time, the sound of his feet slapping against the tiled floor to catch up to me. “Mol—”
Me throwing up a wall between us cuts off his next words.
For Terra’s sake, I said alone.
Turning down the last hall in the building, I shove open the doors. The cool night air slaps across my skin, the peace of a quiet night, and I finally take my first real breath. Looking down the darkened side alley, I find the government hover that brought me here idling nearby. Two Vigil guards, who were casually leaning against the building, stand straight when they see me. With barely a g
lance at them, I activate the sliding door and crawl inside, another soldier already siting in the driver’s seat, protective helmet on.
“Take me to…” Oh God, I have nowhere to go. No, that’s not true. Home. That’s what I really want—need. I want to go back to Earth. “Take me to the nearest portal,” I tell the driver just as the other two Vigil guards climb in. With a barely audible whirl, the car turns on and zips through the streets. With my leave, true exhaustion sets in, my body slinking low in my seat, my muscles sore, my throat in desperate need of a glass of water. But I’m even too tired to ask or conjure one up. So I gaze quietly out the window as the scenery passes by, my mind turned off. The occasional pedestrian or bicyclist is seen as we move along the darkened street, but other than that the city is the emptiest I’ve ever seen it. All must have turned out for the big event, and I scoff. I hope they got their money’s worth, because that show won’t have an encore.
Running a hand over my face, I let out a weary sigh, feeling the curious glances of the two guards who sit facing me. I inch closer to the window. I know it’s unfair to run away like this, if that’s even what I’m doing, but I need at least a second to stand under the sun, to share a smile with Becca, a laugh with Rae. If I can get a few moments of that, it will be worth it. I need a few hours—days—of normal, of joy. Even with the violence on Earth, it’s nothing compared to what’s happening here. My chest already feels lighter at the thought. Yes, this is what I need. Then I can come back and fight the next big battle, the next challenge the elders throw at me. I’ll do it all after I can refuel. I only wish Dev could come with me, and I regret not saying good-bye to him.
Catching sight of a long, domed warehouse, its metal siding glimmering under the star-streaked night, I realize we’re in the outer part of the city, heading toward the wall. “Um, guys?” I sit up straighter, bumping knees with the Vigil in front of me. “Where are we going?”