by Lynn Vroman
“I can’t… Just, please…”
“But–”
“Please.” My voice didn’t sound like mine. Too hollow, to soft.
Jake breathed in, closed his eyes, and nodded. “Okay, but…fine.”
I found Farren again. “Take me out of here.”
“But Wilma hasn’t–”
“I need to leave.” Tears blurred his face, and my numb coating cracked.
He nodded, his eyes sad, but he’d never pity me. God, I loved him for that. “You got this, kid. You got this.”
I finished off the bottle and handed it to Belva. She accepted with a smile, and whispered, “Farren told me. He’ll come around, Lena. Remember, you’re his goddess.”
No, he’d never see Old Lena as anything else but a saint. In his eyes, at that moment, I was the enemy. In my eyes, so was he. “Whether he does or doesn’t isn’t what we need to worry about now.” I stood, going to Farren. “Please, let’s go.”
Mom came over and hugged me, Belva and Jake right behind her. “Be careful, baby.”
I held her tight before turning to hug the others. Jake had a hard time letting go. “I’ll be okay.”
He tucked my head under his chin, next to his heart. “Don’t get hurt.” His voice always so strong, sounded as delicate as paper.
“I’ll do my best.”
“Do better than that.”
“Deal.” I went to Farren. “Ready?”
“One second.” To everyone’s surprise, he stalked toward Belva. Without saying anything, he cupped her face and kissed her. She laced her hands through his hair with a sob. When he pulled away, he said, “When this is over…”
Belva smiled, her eyes shining. “I’ll be right here.”
“Good.” He turned back to me. “Let’s do this.”
His red face and Belva’s surprised joy made my hurt a little easier to bear. But when Farren held my waist, I glanced at the stairs. The pain reignited.
He wasn’t there.
WARZONE
We landed in chaos.
Crying echoed behind closed doors. Screaming followed, so loud it imbedded itself into my soul, and then silence. Death cries.
The streets were strewn with ash and rotting garbage, the smell of corruption enough to make our eyes water. So different from the Empyrean that once resembled heaven and smelled like fresh bread.
The bounce and sway of the town mixed with the stench now caused motion sickness. Stale granola torpedoed from my stomach to my throat, leaving my mouth and landing on a heap of bloody sheets. My foot slipped on the edge of the sodden fabric, and the sheets pulled back to reveal bodies. At least three people, with only parts from others, were stacked on top of each other. The body partially hidden underneath all the others belonged to a kid, no more than five or six.
The hell grew worse farther down the street. Beyond that heap were at least thirty more stacks of blood-covered sheets. Heaves attacked my stomach, no longer able to release anything else. “My God.”
Farren picked me up, the knees of my jeans now wet with the blood from innocent people. “Be strong, kid. Don’t look at them. Look at me.”
His face, pale and drawn, became my focus. I kept my eyes glued to his while he carried me into an alleyway. Seconds later, voices penetrated the muffled cries, the cobblestone streets echoing with loud boots stomping in uniform. Part of me wanted to leave Farren’s arms and confront the murdering bastards. A very small part. Fear, a feeling so foreign in the last few months, tore at my insides. A scream formed in my throat, and I had to slap a palm over my mouth and bite down to keep it inside. Metallic blood drenched my tongue.
Farren set me down, careful not to make any noise, after the boots faded down the next street. We stayed there, not moving. Barely breathing. Those boots implanted in my memory, promising nightmares. Only when they disappeared completely did I take my bloody palm away from my mouth. I swiped my lips with the edge of my T-shirt, hand throbbing. Adrenaline rushing through my shaky body made the blood coming from my bite pump out faster.
Farren gasped and took off his shirt, wrapping it around my hand. “Keep pressure on it.”
My eyes traveled nowhere but his face, afraid of what else I might discover. “Wh-what’s going on?”
Farren held the shirt to my hand himself when I refused to, his grip so tight my fingers felt like they would pop off. “Exemplian martial law. Anyone on the streets will be shot dead. No tasers. Straight-up mercury bullets, right to the head, chest…wherever. Traps the energy. Guides come around and collect the bullets, take them back to Exemplar. “
“Th-there’s children…”
“Anyone, Lena. They’ll kill anyone.”
I pulled my hand from his grasp and held it close to my chest. This beautiful place, turned to ruin. “What will they do next?”
I didn’t expect an answer, but Farren gave one. “They’ll start going into the houses, killing until Teenesee sacrifices herself.”
“No.” All these lives… I would gladly take their place. “What if she gives herself up?”
Farren stuck his head out before taking the hand I didn’t mangle. “They’ll kill them all anyway. This–this is an extermination.”
A woman’s scream, the same scream that blasted the air minutes before, ripped through the vacant street, followed by an infant’s cry. I slipped away from Farren and raced to the source.
“Lena! Wait!”
His yelled whisper fueled my legs, pushing them forward. I had to know. I had to make sure. When I reached the house, I peered in the window to find a mother bundling her child. The woman was all alone and had given birth on a dirty floor, the baby’s umbilical cord still connecting the two.
There was no choice. None.
Farren came up beside me, his face now white as glue.
“We need to help her.”
He shook his head, urging me away from the window. “We can’t do anything. All we can do is stick to the plan. If we win…” He looked into the window. “Only if we win can we help her.”
I shoved by him and pushed on the door. “Bullshit.” Damn thing wouldn’t budge. A rattling door was all my shoulder checking accomplished.
The woman screamed, though softly, as if she hadn’t the energy left to even do that.
I tried again. Nothing. “Help me.”
“Lena…”
“Help me, goddamnit!” All that mattered was the woman and her newborn child. “That baby isn’t going to end up under a bloody sheet. Not while I’m alive.”
He grabbed my elbow with one hand and covered my mouth with the other. “Which won’t be long if you don’t shut the hell up.”
The woman’s terrified whimpering created a whirlwind of anxiety, the beginning of a panic attack. Convincing Farren to help her wouldn’t work if hysteria took over my better judgment. Even when footsteps approached, triggering fight or flight, flight really wanting to win, I closed my eyes and breathed in deep. On the exhale, I opened them and took his hand from my mouth. “Please, Farren. Don’t let them die.”
He tore his gaze from mine to inspect the footsteps coming closer. Shaking his head, he pushed me aside, and with little effort, jarred the door open. The woman’s cries grew more persistent as I raced to her, her baby clutched tighter in her weak arms. Blood covered the floor around her.
“Shh…I’m here to help.” I reached for the baby, and she cringed holding her bundle closer.
Rapid sentences flew from her lips, mostly coming out as warbled, incoherent yelps.
“I’m sorry… I don’t speak Empyrean. Um…Desis? Do you understand?
Her words, still undecipherable, sounded like pleas.
I turned to Farren, who stood by the door, holding it shut. “You speak Empyrean?”
He nodded without looking at me, concentrating on the window.
“Tell her we’re here to help.”
His attention left the window long enough to give her the message, the language as beautiful as the world
used to be. When he finished speaking, the woman, not much older than me, let go of her child with one hand and grabbed the front of my T-shirt. She said something else, sounding more hopeful, relieved.
“Yes, please,” I held a finger to my lips, “shhh…”
She smiled, though it did nothing to help put color in her face, her lips white. Footsteps grew louder until we could hear voices mixed in. They were close, right outside the door. Farren, tense and still as stone, stayed hidden in the shadows by the door, his attention never leaving the men and women outside, who laughed and joked. Slowly, I reached for a blanket lying on the other side of the woman and covered myself, leaving an opening large enough to keep an eye on the window. When the mother gave me a confused glare, I held a finger to my lips again and shook my head.
Static filled my head, like white noise. The invasion grew thick, clouding everything but the desire to leave the blanket and run outside. I knew better. Attraction wasn’t always healthy. I learned that after Zander. No, there were Guides outside. A lot of them. I clenched my jaw, concentrating on keeping my butt planted on the wooden floor. Magnetism sucked.
As the Protectors and their Guides moved away from the window, the baby let out a high-pitched mewling cry. I scooted farther into the corner, trying to blend with the furniture right before two of the bastards peered through the window. The doorknob creaked, Farren’s grip tightening, though his face remained stoic, ready to fight. One Protector, a woman, grinned when she spotted the baby, crying and fussing in the mother’s arms. She lifted her gun and tapped it on the windowpane, acting as if she pulled the trigger. The mother cried. No tears came, only the sounds. Her body had no more fluid left, dehydration already having a firm grip.
Fear no longer sat in my gut. Hatred, black and heavy, made my fingertips tingle. I’d only ever wanted to kill another human being once in my life, and what I felt for Casimir didn’t even compare to the desire I had to gouge the Protector’s eyes out before crushing her windpipe. Hatred overwhelmed all my senses. I could smell it, acidic and rotten.
The Protector laughed when the mother passed out and signaled her partner to move on. Farren and I stayed still for a while longer, even though there was a good possibility the mother lay dead with a crying infant in her hands. When the static disappeared, I shot Farren a questioning look. “They didn’t feel us.”
He came over. “With all their static, ours would’ve gone unnoticed.”
Good enough answer for me. I rushed to the woman’s side, checking for a pulse. “She’s alive, barely.”
Finding a pulse ran the extent of my medical knowledge. Farren kneeled down beside her, thankfully knowing more. “Check the kitchen for water, a medical kit, clean blankets…”
He rattled off other things, and I sped around the small one-floor home finding everything he asked for. As soon as I found the medical kit hiding under the bathroom sink, I rushed over to him, two carafes of water bunched in my sore hand.
Farren ripped open the metal box and pulled out foreign supplies, most glowing the same color green as those rocks the farmers threw at the Protectors during the initial attack. He unsheathed a large syringe and tapped on the inside of the woman’s elbow before plunging the bright liquid into her vein. Her eyes burst open, panic making the whites bright. Farren reassured her with lyrical words I wished I understood.
As she calmed, he held a hand out. “Water.”
I jammed a carafe in his palm, my concern switching to the quiet infant. Farren must’ve been reading my mind because as the woman drank, amazingly having enough strength to hold the water herself, he motioned for me to squat down beside him. “We have to cut the cord.”
“What do I need to do?”
He said something else to the woman who released her hold on the child, misery coloring her still pale cheeks. The baby, blue and not breathing, landed in my outstretched hands. I ground my teeth in an effort to keep the horror from my face and a moan from my lips.
After a quick examination of the baby, Farren went to work clamping the cord before using a tiny laser to cut through it. Taking another syringe filled with the same green liquid, and after spending a little more time finding a delicate vein in the child’s leg, he pushed the plunger in. In no time, the baby’s complexion turned pink and a lusty cry followed. Music. The sound was music, plain and simple.
I pulled the blankets back a little more and smiled through tears before handing the child to her mother. “It’s a girl.”
When Farren repeated my words in Empyrean, the woman smiled, her deep brown eyes glistening. She wasted no more time and unbuttoned her blouse to give her daughter access to food. In seconds, the baby quieted all but for the suckling while she ate her first meal.
I wiped the tears off my cheeks, the pain in my hand now letting me know it was there, making me wince. “A miracle.”
Farren sat back, a deep sigh escaping his lips, sweat shining on his forehead. “Yeah, kid. The best kind of them.”
I sat beside him, trying not to gawk at the woman as she cooed and sang to her child. “What was that stuff?”
“Don’t really know. Empyrean magic?” He brushed the hair away from his eyes. “Same shit that keeps Exemplian bodies young and healthy. Main ingredient, at least.”
“Serious?”
He snorted. “Why do you think this dimension is–damn–was so perfect? Exemplar needed to keep it fertile.”
Winston’s revelation came back to me; he called it Empyrean magic too. “This is where they get the power to help generate people like…like us, too, right?”
Farren gave a sidelong glance and shrugged. “It’d make sense.”
“So…why haven’t they tried to take it over before?”
“Teenesee’s energy is what makes the land so powerful. That’d be my only theory.” He slouched against the edge of a small sofa after pulling a picture off the end table sitting next to it.
“Then why would they attack her now?”
He handed me the picture, a frown marring his handsome face. “I guess they’re willing to risk taking the strong energy from her people and ship it back to Exemplar. Those Guides you felt? They were in energy form, collecting the dead from inside the bullets.”
Shock swirled inside my head. I glanced down at the picture of the woman still pregnant standing beside a man who had an arm securing her waist and a hand on her swollen stomach. Both wore matching bands on their left ring fingers, the same band the woman wore still. Exemplar was willing to risk it because I broke the rules. This…massacre was my fault. I swallowed. “What do you think happened to him?”
He closed his eyes. “She said he’s under the blanket out front. Tried to find some food. They shot as soon as the door closed behind him.”
My fingers tightened on the picture, the pressure reopening my wound. Tremors attacked my limbs. That hate in my gut churning like hot tar. “I’m gonna kill them all.”
Farren shook his head, his eyes still closed, as he crossed his arms over his chest. “Isn’t that what you decided to hate about the old you? Black and white, kid, isn’t the best way of seeing things.”
I wanted to argue, punch him in the head. Cry and sob. Damn. He was right–I wasn’t any different from the woman I accused Tarek of…of…double damn.
A lot to make up for–if I lived long enough.
I set the picture on the couch and moved to curl up beside Farren. “I’ll fix things.”
His big chest heaved with a sigh. “You’re not the only one who fucked up, Lena. He needs to explain some shit, too.”
That helped the guilt.
It didn’t cure the desire to kill each and every one of those murdering bastards, though. Chalk that up on the something-to-work-on list. “I need to talk to Wilma.”
“Soon, kid.”
Man, I missed her at that moment, missed her with every breath in my body. Tough love always made me feel ten times better. Who knew being called a dumbass would have such positive results? I waved a ha
nd at the mother and child. “We have to take them with us.”
He stayed silent.
“Farren?”
He squeezed my shoulder. “I know. We’ll give her a day or two to gain some more strength, and then find a way to get to Teenesee.”
I closed my eyes, exhaustion promising sweet oblivion. “Farren?”
“What now?”
“You think we have a shot? I mean, do you really think we can take the dimension back?”
“Absolutely.” There wasn’t any hesitation.
His confidence was liquid gold, melting away all my fear and hardening my courage. “Me too.” I glanced over his chest to find our new wards sleeping peacefully, though still covered in the sticky blood. “We need to clean them up.”
“Later. Sleep now.”
“But–”
“Later.”
“No, not later. Now.” I shrugged from his arm, and went to find some towels in the back bedroom. Without disturbing the duo, I sopped up the blood with the thick towels and went to fill the carafes with more water. The result wasn’t exactly sanitary, but better. Taking some blankets from the couch, I covered them, tucking the edges around the woman’s thin body.
After snuggling up to Farren again, I pulled another blanket over us. He smiled, his eyes closed. “You’re all right, kid.”
I dug my chin into his chest a little. “Thanks for the help.”
His chest rumbled as he swatted my chin off him. “Welcome. Now, sleep.”
No problem.
CASUALTIES
They know you’re here.
Wilma’s warning boomed inside my brain, pulling me out of a deep sleep. I jumped up, and fell, my legs not as awake as everything else. I elbowed Farren who snapped to attention and made it to his feet in under five seconds.
“What? What is it?”
He didn’t wait for an answer and stomped to the window, touching the bottom right corner. The glass turned black, but didn’t obstruct our view of what went on outside, which was nada. Definitely a good thing. He scanned the street anyway, craning his neck and pressing on the sill to get a better look farther down. “Well? You planning on answering me?”