She stomped out of the dining room. Krista was unable to do anything more than stare around at the people gathered there and say, “They killed a boy.”
“A Beta. It happens daily. The machine is not known for pity. They used to be less brutal with the Betas, but since they have the new models in production, they have begun to phase them out.”
“You are talking about people.” Krista did not want to look at Laurie, but she had to. The girl had died to show her that terrible horror at Luke; she owed it to her to see what she had sacrificed. “And what new model? And I thought you said we could not Connect, so what the hell was that?”
“That was us Connecting and showing you something. I do not have time to explain that right now, but I will eventually,” Steven said. “You saw the new model.”
The lump in her throat was huge. “It’s me, isn’t it? They are cloning me.”
“They are trying to. They must have had a breakthrough to order you to be killed. Maybe it is too late already,” Blake said.
“Too late for what?”
“To save any of us.” He got up and his wings burst from his back, shredding the tee shirt as they did so. She could see the magnificent cut of his abs, the stack of his ribs, and the golden glow of his skin through the torn fabric. It was unfair that he was so sexy. There was something inherently wrong with thinking a guy with such a bad attitude was cute. Not to mention he had wings and was a killer.
She was a killer too. That thought sent her spiraling back into a depression that might have taken hold if there had not been a loud crash from outside.
“Shit, they are here already,” Blake said. “Grab your stuff— it is time to blow this place. Everyone meet at the staircase!”
People ran. Not sure where to go or what to do, Krista sprinted behind Tawny. An explosion sounded from somewhere, and the aftershock lifted Krista off her feet and tossed her into an outcropping of rock. She yelped in pain as her ribs and belly met solid granite.
“That’s gonna leave a mark,” she muttered, and set off after Tawny again.
The staircase was mobbed. People stood about and Noite slumped on the stairs, her hair a shade of black and her eyes still red and leaking tears. She stood when Krista approached and said, “Hurry up, wonder girl, do your thing before we all die in here.”
“Do what thing?” Even as she spoke she felt it, that tight gathering in her body.
“Everybody out!” Blake roared, and they surged toward the door with Krista in the lead.
She did not mean to be the first one out, would not have chosen to be if asked, but it was not up to her. That Power that was surging up inside her decided it, and when her feet hit the doorway, she stared in horror at the scene before her.
Helicopters cruised the air before her, Second Adams rushed toward them with guns drawn and their flat eyes narrowed, and there were other...things out there. One of them looked something like a dragon!
The Power flew out of her, careened into the helicopter nearest her. It exploded into flame, and she saw Blake and Connor soaring into the sky while a tiger ran past her, grabbing the arm of a Second Adam and ripping it away like it was nothing.
Screams and blood were everywhere, but she did not have time for that to register. There was something she needed to do, something she needed to remember...
“This place is back in the world.” That was not quite right, but right enough. She knew what she meant even if she did not know how to explain it. Another helicopter crashed toward the ground with greasy black smoke billowing up from its broken tailpiece. “They found us because it came back to this world.”
Blake grabbed a Second Adam by the throat and swung him high in the air, just to drop him off the cliff and into the sea below. More swarmed over the cliffs, and Krista felt another pulse of that Power leaving her body.
A flash of white light obliterated the battle; she landed on her back with small rocks and pebbles digging into her skin. Her breath was slammed from her lungs, and her eyes closed as pain lanced through her brain.
“It’s a Seeker!”
The shout snapped her out of the daze that was threatening to white out her thoughts. She did not know what that meant, but it did not sound good. She staggered to her feet to see a woman hovering above the ground, her long white hair floating around her pale face and blue electricity crackling from her fingertips.
There was a jagged streak of lightning that crashed down from the dark sky and struck the Seeker, knocking her over the cliff edge, but not for long; she spun away from the water and headed back up, flying far too close to Blake and Connor.
“Get away from them!” Krista screamed, and another jolt of Power flew out of her body and hit the Seeker.
“Stop wasting your Power and time and do it!” Noite yelled.
“Do what?”
She knew, though. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and held her hands out and up toward the sky. There was a rending, grinding sound, and the house and the other rebels were all sucked back into a dark chasm. The force of the suction knocked Krista off her feet, and she grabbed at Tawny’s leonine paw as she slid past on her belly, howling madly.
The Seeker flipped over a flying tree, and Blake and Connor soared higher, then dived below the roiling clouds that had gathered. There was a long, wide tunnel made of dark clouds spinning in all directions and the terrible, deafening wind, and Krista tried to scream, but her voice was lost in the noise, drowned by the howling of that bitter wind.
She could not control it! She did not even know what it was! Connor’s arms wrapped around her and she shuddered, torn between terror and exhilaration. “Stop,” he whispered into her ear, and she heard him.
Everything settled, stopped. The world stopped moving, but the tunnel clouds did not. The wind died down, and all around her, people began to stand up and check to see where and how badly they were wounded.
“Where are we?” Krista asked. Her head ached, and her mouth was so dry her lips felt cracked and raw.
“I do not know. It is a place you created,” Connor said.
“I did what?”
The edge of the cliff dropped off into nothingness. There were no stars, no sky, only the tunnel and its whipping clouds. She was hungry, hungrier than she had ever been in her life. She was shaking with weakness and hunger, and she slumped to the earth below her feet.
“Take this.” Something hovered over her mouth— it was his arm, and blood dripped from it. She wanted to refuse, her stomach clenched like a fist. Her throat knotted shut, but at the first tangy drops of iron rich blood on her tongue, she gasped and began to lick greedily at his flesh.
Energy ran into her veins, her cells, and she sat up. Her vision was still slightly blurry and her head still ached, but the worst of her hunger was gone. “What is this place?”
“It is like the house: it sits on the outside of the known dimension, just out of reach. It took all of us to cloak the house in invisibility and to send it out of that dimension for short amounts of time. None of us could have done this.” Blake kicked a rock over the edge. It rattled as it rolled away, and they all listened intently, but it never fell.
“How did I do it?”
“You wanted it.”
Holy crap! Could she make things happen just because she wanted them to? Steven spoke then. “It is not a gift, it is responsibility, and nothing is ever free.”
“Not even for a Natural?” Krista did not have to ask what the price was for Betas; she had seen it with her own eyes.
“Not even for a Natural, not for anyone or anything.”
“Okay, how do I get us back out of here?”
“You don’t, not for a while. We need to regroup, and you need to rest.” Steven jerked his head to one side. “Connor, I need you and Blake with me.”
Krista sat back down and stared morosely at the edge of the cliff as everyone drifted away. “I’ll just be here keeping us rolling along in space, no problem, don’t mind me,” she muttered.
“Connor gave you a blood gift.”
She looked up at Noite. “I know it looked gross— it kind of was, but I think he had to.”
“I know he had to. Just a warning, don’t fall in love with either of them. Don’t fall in love with anyone; all it does is get you hurt.”
“I’m sorry about Laurie.”
“Yeah, never fall in love with a Beta either; they are seriously frail. They drop like flies, truth be told.” Beneath the harsh words there was pain: hot, hard, and real.
“They shouldn’t have to die like that.”
“No shit. So, you really are as powerful as they thought and hoped you would be, good for you. Maybe you are more like your dad than they thought.”
“My dad?” Krista grabbed the hem of Noite’s baggy skater pants. “What does that mean, what do you know about my dad?”
There was screech in the wind, a soured whiff of something, and both girls turned their heads toward the cliff edge. The faint, hoarse cry came again, and Noite shuddered. “Stop,” she hissed, “I can read your mind from here. Be quiet!”
“I am not saying anything!”
“It’s your thoughts! They can hear them even if they can’t find this exact place. If you don’t cloak them they will find us!”
She did not know how to cloak her thoughts, especially now that Noite had mentioned her father. Who was her father? How was she like him? Had he been a Natural too, was this stuff hereditary?
“Oh no!” Noite shoved her face down into a pile of rocks and lifted her hands to her own face and hair. Krista rolled over just in time to see the Seeker rise up over the cliff edge, her pallid face glowing in the swirling darkness and her arms reaching out to Noite, who still wore her own clothes but Krista’s face and hair.
Noite screamed as she was grabbed and yanked off the edge. There was a breaking, crackling sound and then...nothing. The Seeker was gone, and so was Noite.
Chapter 3
“I’m sorry.”
Krista looked at the faces ringing around her, and fear began at the base of her neck and shot down her spine. Would they kill her now? She could not blame them, she had managed to get two people killed...
“We don’t know that Noite is dead,” Steven said.
She blushed. “How did that...Seeker thing...even know how to get here?”
“Seekers are Naturals. They are stronger than even the strongest Prime because their talents are inborn. They can sense other Naturals, and, to some extent, Primes and Betas.”
“So they work for DARK?”
“Yes, voluntarily.” Blake said grimly.
“What? Why would they do that?”
Connor stood at the edge, staring down at the abyss. “In Nazi Germany people who had friends who were Jewish made the decision to turn their backs, to be part of the killing machine rather than get caught in its teeth.
“That happens every day, everywhere. Decent people enable criminals to keep their own safe, or themselves. They close their eyes and bow their heads to the yoke.”
“Gee,” Krista said in as sarcastic a voice as she could muster, “You talk like you are a hundred years old.”
“Close, but not quite.”
“Huh?”
“Never mind. We have to get Noite back.”
“It’s too late.” Blake’s face held no expression. His high cheekbones looked sharp enough to cut the skin of his face.
“You don’t know that!”
“By now she is in the machine. They discovered she was not you as soon as she got yanked back.”
“Then why haven’t they come back?”
“They probably killed the Seeker for her mistake, and Steven is throwing a block now because your thoughts are too loud. You need to learn to control them.”
“That’s what they tell me,” she muttered, and Blake gave her a lopsided grin that made her heart cramp. How could he be such a giant nozzle and still be so hot? That question seemed to be one she was going to be asking herself a lot.
Tawny interjected, “I think it was one of the new Breeds of Seeker.”
“That’s all we need,” Blake snorted.
“What’s a new Breed?”
“They can sense Power being used instead of just people with it. You can see why DARK takes them on. They can track down Naturals, and anyone using Power they can sense, or at least the new ones can, but I thought they were not operable yet.”
“I guess they rushed production,” Steven said.
“I don’t care how or why or anything else,” Krista interrupted. “It’s my fault, and I am going to go get her back.”
Blake shook his head, “You are going to get us all killed. She stays where she is.”
“That is bullshit!”
“That is life. Noite knew the risks.”
Stony faces stared back at her aghast one. They could not be serious! They were just going to let their friend die off down there, held in thrall to the machine! “You people are sick.”
“We are not people, and neither are you, not really.” Tawny said.
Krista stomped off, but there was really nowhere to go. The wind cut off everything from sight, but it could not disguise the darkness at the rim of things. She ended up sitting up on a pile of rocks. Her face hurt, and when she wiped it with her hand, there was blood on her fingers and palms.
Her whole body was scratched and bruised and cut in one way or another. Her shorts were filthy, her socks were dirty, and she had the overwhelming urge to just put her head in her hands and cry until she could not cry anymore.
“I know it sounds really mean.”
She turned her head to look at Tawny. “Mean? It is downright heinous.”
“You have to understand: this is not a game. If you screw up, you can get us all killed.”
“So that is a good enough reason to just let her die down there?”
“No, it isn’t, but that is the only reason we need to leave her there.”
“Wow, thanks for being a friend.”
“Like I said, you don’t understand.”
“You’re right, I don’t. Did they breed asshole into you in that lab? Are you all sociopaths or something? Did being born in a test tube make you so selfish that you don’t care about anything or anyone else?”
Venting her anger did nothing to help cool it. Tawny just tucked her slim fingers into her jeans pockets and kicked a booted foot into the dry dirt, sending puffs of it up toward her face.
“Did you know that when you grow up in a test tube, as you put it, you can see and hear everything going on around you?”
“No.”
“It’s true. We floated in that solution day after day, watching them cut up others, and kill them with their experiments, always knowing one day it would be our turn. I used to watch the others watching it happen, and I used to wonder why I could not cry like some of them did.
“Later I found out I did not have any tear ducts. They did not think they were important anymore, or maybe they were planning a different set of tests for my series, or whatever. I could not cry, but I wanted to, and you know who did cry?”
“Who?”
“I did. Or at least Tawny 1 did.”
“Tawny 1?”
“You didn’t think it was just you, did you? They made clones of all of us. I don’t know when I was made the first time, I just know that somewhere, at some time, there was a little girl who got stolen from her family, split apart, and turned into raw material for the scientists. Call her Tawny 1.”
Krista closed her eyes, squeezing them so tightly it hurt. What had that been like, watching others being medically tortured, knowing you would be next? What had it been like to know that one day there would be a better model, one that would make sure you no longer even had that small existence? No matter how awful and terrifying it was—it was still existence.
Would she have fought back or given up? Her heart ached for Tawny, but she knew that Tawny did not need or want her pity. “I thought you said
Primes were created, not born.”
“We are. But when they open you, you share—for a moment—a Connection, with your Giver, even if they are dead, and most Givers are long dead and have been for years.”
“Giver?”
“The one whose life becomes the blueprint for your own. I saw that girl; she did not really look like me, but she could cry, and she did. It did not do her any good. It never did any of them any good.”
“Why would they steal children to build clones?”
“They had to have a tree to graft onto. They had not learned how to grow from utero back then.”
“Back then?”
Tawny shrugged. “This has been going on for a very long time. When it started, they thought that the new millennium would bring spaceships taking people back and forth to work, and domes covering the cities. I know that sounds absurd now, all things considered, but when it started it was the Ice Age people were afraid of, not global warming.”
A thought occurred to Krista. If she were a Natural, why had they opened her? To harvest her DNA, maybe? There something more sinister there, something more than what she could see. She kept silent, some inner voice warning her not to ask that question—because to do so would be dangerous in the extreme.
The wind stopped. The clouds dispersed. Everything took on a heavy, pregnant pause. Neither of them spoke. Blake swooped over them, his strong winds flapping in the dead air. “Take us back!” He called down to Krista. “We need to get somewhere safe.”
“Is there such a thing?”
His grin made butterflies fill her stomach. Noite’s words came back to her... Just a warning, don’t fall in love with either of them. Don’t fall in love with anyone; all it does is get you hurt.
“No, but we are going anyway.” He dipped lower, so low his wings drifted across her cheeks and mouth. They were soft and yet stiff. They felt like tiny kisses. Her belly went weak and loose once again. What would it be like to be kissed by Blake?
Or Connor?
Really, Connor was a better choice; he was a heck of a lot nicer...
Rebels Rising (Dark Rebels, #1) Page 4