Alex stepped off the mag-train in a station very different from the abandoned, hidden base he’d left behind. Likely nowhere near what it must have been during its heyday of military industrialization, Fort Nevada was nonetheless busy. The lights shone permanently, and the air cycled continuously, as all of the students at Fort Nevada took a turn in the power stations.
Alex strode across the metal platform and then down the short staircase. He exchanged a brief greeting with a young agent whose hands were deep inside a metal-plated control panel. Down here at the train level, a handful of Ward School graduated agents worked maintenance and inspected the lines and wires.
Both students and agents were required to have the knowledge and ability to maintain the infrastructure of civilization. They expected the young, highly powered Wards that came through be infused with a sense of responsibility not only to what was left of society, but also to themselves. Sparks should no longer be tools in the hands of others, and part of claiming the role they deserved meant ensuring Sparks weren’t rendered obsolete.
As Alex made his way toward the elevators, the duty officer appeared at his shoulder.
“Good evening, sir.”
The duty officer was a serious-faced young man whom Alex didn’t recognize. Once upon a time, Alex knew them all. Now he spent the majority of each year in Azcon.
“Good evening.” Tired and hungry, he kept moving.
The officer stayed apace next to him.
“I have a report for Councilor Five. I’ll be in the mess until he’s available.”
The officer nodded his understanding and peeled off, heading for his desk. He’d send a messenger up to Thomas’s offices. When Thomas wanted him, they’d send someone down to the mess to bring him up.
This was standard procedure on the nights when Alex came in unexpectedly via the train. The Council had long-since regretfully written off the tunnels and the trains, sealing off access points. Thomas had made reopening them for possible use against the Council a priority. It had taken decades to refurbish the mag-trains and the western tunnels, but it had been worth it. They still pushed east through tunnels they’d found and followed, exploring to see how far the old secret network had gone. The trains made everything easier, especially getting in to discuss critical new information.
Alex rode the elevator to the eighteenth floor and crossed the hall to the wide-open cafeteria. Out of consideration for those who worked the overnight shift, the cafeteria remained open twenty-four hours a day. At this hour, the hall remained uncrowded and hushed but brightly lit.
He picked up a tray and cruised through the empty line, choosing foods not available in Azcon. Every zone sent quarterly support to the Ward School, participating in the care and feeding of their future Council Agents as they trained. The Ward School always had goods you couldn’t get in every zone. Alex added two rolls to his tray and debated taking another.
Bread was hard to come by in Azcon, as the Councilor chose to trade the Zone’s valuable honey and pecans for other items. Wheat wasn’t a priority for Councilor Three when his people could make do with mesquite flour. A terrible decision. The flatbreads made with the mesquite flour alternative never cooked right—the center stayed wet and mushy like pudding.
Alex sat, tore off a hunk of a wheat roll, and dipped it into the gravy. When he pulled off a bite with his teeth, he savored the chewy pull of the bread. A long sigh of pleasure slipped free.
A young man sitting a table away turned his attention from the maps and papers spread in front of him to Alex. He had dark, kinky hair cut close to his skull. His narrow dark eyes were crinkled at the edges in laughter while the rest of his long face spoke of bemused interest. He looked to be about twenty-four years old, so likely in or near his final year.
Alex raised his brows.
Caught, the young man dropped his head for a moment as he laughed wryly. “I apologize, sir.” He gestured with his chin to Alex’s half-empty plate. “I guess it’s been awhile, sir?”
Alex glanced down at his plate. He’d been appreciating his meal at great speed. He shook his fork at the young man with mock severity. “Just wait until you’ve been out in the world enjoying regional delicacies. We’ll see how much you look forward to reporting home so you can have some real food.”
The young man barked a laugh. “Yes, sir. With all due respect to my instructors, I cannot wait, sir.”
Alex smiled, remembering his own impatience. He nodded. “I know. I remember.” He swallowed down another bite. “What’s your name?”
He straightened in his seat when he answered. “Senior Ward Jackson Lee. First Class.”
“Relax, son. And ease off the ‘sirs’.” He sopped up the last of the gravy with the last of the bread.
“Yes, sir.”
He snorted. “Uh huh. I remember that, too.” He pushed his plate away and sighed in pleasure again. “Senior, First Class, huh? You’re almost done.” Alex glanced at the maps and papers spread across the table. “Working on your out routes?”
In addition to the official graduation requirements set by the Council of Nine, he and Thomas imposed another final project. All Senior Wards had to create and defend three routes out of every Zone, including food and water resources, analysis of the local topography, and how local flora and fauna could be used as tools or weapons. If the panel of evaluating agents deemed more than two of the routes the Ward presented unviable, the Ward got scrubbed and repeated the year, regardless of his talent as a Spark. No graduation. No assignment as a Council Agent out in the world.
Jackson rubbed the top of his head with both hands as he looked down at the maps and nodded. “Yes, sir. I present tomorrow, sir.”
“I don’t need to tell you to take it seriously, but take it seriously. It’s not just your ticket out of here, but it may save your ass someday.” Reyes’s own out route project had been unofficial, done to relieve the tedium of their last months at a Ward School still controlled by the Council of Nine. Now, the Council only thought they were in control of the critical school, tasked with training the strongest of the Sparks into the Council’s elite Senior Agents. It was very much a mistaken belief.
Jackson’s face lit up. “Yes, sir!” The prospect of seeing enough action that his ass might need saving clearly excited him.
Alex remembered that, too. He grinned, in spite of himself. It still was.
The muffled sound of boots on flooring approached from behind him. He turned. A lower ranked Fort Nevada security officer greeted him with a crisp nod and started pulling to attention.
Alex waved him down. “Is he ready for me?”
“Yes, Councilor Five is ready to see you now, Agent Reyes. If you’ll follow me?”
Alex nodded. He winked at Jackson Lee as he rounded the table to follow the man out. “Good luck, Senior Ward Lee. Make sure you cover your ass from every possible angle, and you’ll be fine.”
He dumped his plate and utensils in the appropriate alcove and followed the security officer out. Instead of continuing straight onto the elevator as they left the cafeteria, the officer turned right and led him into the warren of hallways on the eighteenth level.
Before they got there, he figured out they were heading to the gym, a path he remembered well from his years at the Ward School. Most of the time he’d spent there had been in the company of the man waiting for him. Their brilliant leader had once been an eighty pound weakling who came to the school late, at age thirteen instead of five. He had been the strongest Spark at the school, for sure, but as physically unimpressive as a young man could be. Alex, whose favorite part of every year had always been the six months spent boxing, was already bigger, stronger, and faster than the other boys of their class. He had seen Thomas’s potential. He’d defended him. Then he’d taken him under his wing and trained him.
The wiry, leanly muscled man currently hitting his gloved hands in rapid succession against one of the sand-filled canvas bags in the corner had clearly taken that training to heart.
Alex strolled across the gym, his gaze darting over the Councilor to check his form, but he had nothing to critique. His friend was a weakling no more. He wasn’t an underdog anymore, either.
Somewhere along the line, their relationship had shifted. As they’d become friends, they’d become equals, then partners, with Thomas running their nascent empire and Alex handling the expansion of it in the field. Their roles fit their gifts. It was the best way to achieve the goals they’d hammered out together as young men.
The Councilor’s familiar pale eyes were small over a hawkish nose, and the old scar where he’d cut away the slaver’s brand was a flat, shiny patch under his right eye. His piercing gaze flicked out. “Alex.” It was all the greeting he’d get.
“Thom.” Amused, Alex mimicked his friend and partner.
Thomas’s lips turned up on one side. “So?” He grunted, fists still pounding the bag.
“Sooooo…” Alex dragged out the word. “Remember your theory about how the strongest Sparks, if left to their own devices and totally untrained, will come up with new ways to do things? Will even make themselves stronger? Kind of like…oh yeah, kind of like you?”
“I do.” The pace of his hits slowed as he listened, but not the force. “You found one?”
“Oh, yeah.”
Thomas’s quirked lips grew into a smile. “How strong is he?”
Alex waited a beat, drawing out the moment. He’d only get to do this once. “She is the brightest thing I’ve ever seen. Her bloom was so bright it hurt to look at it, and she was still fully functional.”
His friend stilled, one hand poised for a blow that didn’t fall. “She?”
Alex could almost hear the click as the final piece of Thomas’s grand plan fell neatly into place, making the largest, most theoretical of his ideas a reality.
His arms fell to his sides. He turned to Alex. “Tell me.”
“Do you remember Three’s Senior Councilor Aide, name of Gracey?” Alex asked. “Caught being curious about things he had no need to know? She’s his daughter.”
Thomas frowned his disagreement with a slight shake of his head. Unlike Alex, who had to use mnemonic devices to keep track of information, Thomas could flip through memories like file folders. “Gracey had a daughter and a son. The daughter’s just a mid-level. Like all girls.” His voice was disappointed.
Natural women and men had a roughly twenty-five percent chance of parenting a powered child. Add in a powered father, and the rate rose to fifty-fifty, but the children were always mid-level strength or lower. Powered women always produced Spark children. However, mid-level powered woman had an almost thirty percent chance of producing the coveted highly powered Spark, although those children were always male; with a highly-powered father, the rate rose to almost fifty percent.
The official story said every female born with power was naturally limited to mid-level or lower. Thus far, the records supported the story. At some point, it was widely believed, a hiccup in nature would produce highly powered girls. Since female Sparks bred true, they would produce only high-powered children. If one of these theoretical females produced children with a high-powered male, the possibilities for their children, and for the future of Sparks, were limitless.
There were communities—Neo-barb run—that patched together hydroelectric power or made do with windmills built from scavenged materials. But the Council had invested in humans they could control since the beginning. Their obsession with finding any such girls had been growing over the last half-century, a response to fear of hypothetical children strong enough to resist the growing restraints on Sparks. If they lost control, they lost power—literally and figuratively.
Thomas, of course, was obsessed for the same reason. The girls were the key to the long-range goals of Fort Nevada’s move toward revolution. He saw the children born of such high-powered women as the future of free Sparks.
He believed the Council was spiriting away girls as they were found to be highly powered, before even their parents were fully aware of the magnitude of their difference. They hadn’t been able to discover to where or by whom yet—the occurrences were too unpredictable. Now they’d found one that had escaped that fate.
“He had another daughter. He faked her death. He hid her away, which may explain his varied interests.” Alex took a breath. “After his death, as soon as she was old enough, she left the city. She’s been living on the edge of tribal lands and working as a black market Spark. That’s how we found her. We heard rumors and put ourselves on her schedule so we could bring her in.” His voice turned mocking. “Can’t have any Sparks not pulling their weight for the good of the Council, now can we?” He shook his head. “Imagine my surprise when we pulled up and she had a corona around her like the sun at full eclipse. Like I said, it hurt to look at her.
“It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” he said. Emotion tightened his throat, and he swallowed to clear it. It had been beautiful, but still. Clearly, Thomas’s obsession had wormed into his psyche and latched onto Lena. He crossed his arms and continued. “And it was only the beginning.”
Thomas was still now, utterly focused on his friend. Alex recognized the excitement bubbling beneath the surface. But that surface? Calm.
“One of the disappeared girls,” Thomas said. “How old?”
“Twenty-four. Young enough, and old enough. Tiny thing. Big green eyes. Coated in freckles. Not pretty, exactly, not that it matters, but stunning in her own way.” He frowned. What did that have to do with anything? He barked a laugh as he focused on what mattered—the personality they’d have to work around to get her to join them. Just because he admired her ballsiness didn’t mean he couldn’t recognize that her strength would make things harder. “She’s a tough little pain in the ass.”
Thomas took a deep breath. “Please tell me you’ve brought her here?”
He shook his head. “She got away—”
“Dammit, Alex! This is important!” His gloved hands shot up to frame his head in anger and disbelief.
“I damn well know how important it is! She took us out. Took. Us. Out.” Alex made sure he had Thomas’s attention. “She can do shit nobody else can do. Not me. Not you.” He took a deep breath and released it in a noisy gust of frustration. “She had some kind of early warning system. Probably Dust. One minute, we were in the middle of a conversation, our guys scheduled to start moving in, and the next, she knew. Who we were, why we were there.” He shook his head.
What came next had been terrifying. Once he’d recovered, he’d felt such a euphoric rush at having found her that he’d had to tamp it down and twist it into rage. “I didn’t even have enough time to react. She just—our lungs stopped working. Our muscles contracted. It was agony. And she had enough control to put us on a fucking timer.”
They had hoped to find a Spark evolved to a dangerous, exquisite extreme. They’d found her, and that presented a danger all its own.
Alex ran his hands through his hair. “She took us out long enough to get out through her escape tunnel. Dust-made. Dust-protected. I found the exit in the side of an arroyo before we cleared out. The damn thing was a good three hundred feet long.” He shook his head again. “She made it to the tribe. I couldn’t do anything at that point.”
“You know where she is?”
Alex nodded.
“Then we’ll go get her. Tonight.”
Alex closed his eyes for a moment. Shit. He’d figured Thomas’s reaction would be strong. But this was on the extreme end.
“No, Thom.”
“Yes! She cannot get away. She belongs with us.”
“We’re not ready to go to war. And that’s what it would be. We have to do this the way we do things. We have to be smart.” Alex stared down into Thomas’s pale eyes, holding onto his calm. One of them had to.
Thomas took two quick steps to stand inches from Alex. “We cannot allow her to disappear. She is—she’s our Eve.”
“I know. And I’m working on it.
” Alex grimaced. “My partner knows he’s onto something big. And as soon as the Council gets wind of this girl, they will scramble everything to ensure she is taken into custody.”
“Then you get to her first, Alex. Because if they get to her first and they can’t figure out how to harness her, they will kill her. And either way, they win. You get to her first. You bring her home to us. I don’t care what you have to do.”
Alex took a long breath. “Decades of work,” he reminded his friend. “Decades. Of my work. And we are so close. Zone Three is primed. I’m not willing to undo that for a girl you didn’t know existed five minutes ago.”
He wasn’t. Was he?
“I knew she should exist. And now that I know she’s real, we will do whatever we have to do to bring her home.”
Arguing would be pointless. Thomas had anticipated this moment for too long. Alex nodded, his mind working angles.
Like this reaction wasn’t exactly what you wanted: an excuse to do whatever it takes to bring in the perfect Spark. The perfect weapon.
“We can have both. I can make it happen.”
“Then do it.” Thomas stepped away, raised his arms to resume his workout. “But remember, she’s our priority now. Once we have her, we have the future.”
5
Lena sat cross-legged on the hard-packed earth floor of the medicine woman’s home. Soft, bright wool pooled before her knees as she worked the yarn and knitting needles above her lap. For the first hours after the agents had driven her away, she’d paced restlessly between the small bluff rising above the arroyos and Santo Domingo to the east, watching agents move in and out of her home.
Finally Gloria, the Kewa woman closest to Lena, had tired of Lena’s temper and sharply told Lena to wait at Gloria’s adobe house. As the afternoon melted into evening, a trio of young women appeared at Gloria’s door. They had gone to Lena’s home to retrieve clothing for her, as well as her knitting and needles.
Her mind worked as her fingers threw the yarn and moved the needles at a furious pace, everything soothing and meditative about the activity gone. She had turned her focus down to her hands, but instead of yarn and needles she saw Reyes and Lucas standing in her doorway and agents darting in and out like wasps. Could she reclaim her home?
Wicked Legends: A Dystopian Paranormal Romance and Urban Fantasy Collection Page 129