Raven: The Young Adult World of Genetically Modified Teens and the Elite (Swann Book 6)

by Ryan Schow

  I cross my arms, defiant, steadfast. I don’t like being told what to do. Not by some girl who wants to take me out of this world I’m just starting to understand.

  “No.”

  She hits the steering wheel so hard her little palm bends the wheel. Jesus! She then takes a deep, calming breath and—without looking at me—says, “Fine. Suit yourself.”

  From a small velvet satchel sitting in the map pocket of the driver’s side door, she takes out a marble sized gelatin-skinned ball with glowing blue bands inside. They are almost neon looking the way they glow in the desert darkness. She pops it into her mouth, swallows.

  A moment later her eyes go blank, like her soul is gone and she’s the shell of something left behind. She then turns to me, the life back in her eyes and says, “This isn’t how you wanted it. Just remember I tried to do what you asked.”

  “The way I wanted what?” I ask.

  “You’re such a pain in the ass,” she says. Then she snaps out of existence, followed by a wet, sucking sound and a reverberating concussion that goes off like a mini bomb inside the car. The windshield spider cracks and the force of her disappearance in the closed space punches me like a body shot and an uppercut at the same time.

  Everything slows for a second as things in my body bruise. My nose feels socked so hard it wants to bleed.

  “Oh my God,” I whisper, wide eyed, dazed. A niggle of blood rolls from my nose, thick, one trail trying to leak from each nostril. I touch my upper lip, bring back a tiny dollop of blood on my fingers.

  “So I guess it’s true,” I whisper.

  Time travel.

  But I already knew that. Still, knowing isn’t always the same as accepting.

  4

  The punch of rain tempers to a light sprinkle. For awhile, I feel like the only living thing in the desert. The night is so quiet it actually hurts my ears. A few cars roar by, and some trucks; even a handful of desert critters skitter across the road and into the night. No one stops. The animals don’t care. It’s just me. I’m just sitting here, trying to absorb what happened.

  My God, did that really happen?

  The cracked windshield won’t let me believe otherwise. My bloody nose, that’s the proof I needed. I was caught in what?—some sort of time displacement field?

  The dull pain still radiates in my head. In my body.

  Would that have killed a normal person?

  And then, in that very second, April reappears in the car with a loud pop that whiplashes my head sideways into the window so hard it shatters the glass. At the same time, something human—rather something humanish—crashes hard onto the hood, rocking the whole car, almost caving it in if not for the motor beneath it.

  The body on the hood, it looks mangled. Like tossed garbage.

  “What the hell?” I say, grabbing my head where it broke the window. Angry, frightened eyes turn on April. But April isn’t April. She’s a ravaged, beat-to-shit version of herself. Shot in the face through the cheek, red flesh ribboned out the backside of her jaw and smoking.

  One of her eyes is completely red and her clothes are smoked and splattered all over with gore. She looks like she’s been through a war.

  “Are you alright?” I ask. It’s a stupid question, to which she nods her head, slowly. No, she’s not alright.

  There are two fist-sized blood stains in the stomach of her light grey tank top. She’s been shot multiple times. Looking into her eyes, pain rides electric through her every expression. She is not like me. She won’t heal. My eyes return to the body on the hood.

  I squint to see through the rain-spattered windshield. The body is a girl, I think. Rather it was a girl. She’s lying in a fetal position, her back to us. One of her legs is gone at the knee, cut off, I think. And her right arm is gone completely at the shoulder.

  This is nothing compared to the back of her head. All kinds of tubes and wires snake out of her hair, stuck somehow, to what?—the back of her head? Like she was unplugged in a hurry when April…took her?

  Is that what happened?

  “Flashlight,” April says, pointing with a weak finger to the glovebox. The life in her eyes is waning. Her once powerful aura consumes less and less of the Dodge. Inside the glovebox is an industrial sized flashlight with a bright xenon beam. I thumb the ON switch, aim its powerful beam at the windshield. At the girl. Whatever wasted thing I imagined, the illuminated version of her is vastly worse.

  The shape she’s in, my God!—my heart is absolutely breaking for her!

  I kick open the door car, moving through the safety glass like it’s no biggie, get out to the girl. I lean on the hood, my eyes catching everything, my mind processing the unending signs of abuse.

  Her leg is gone at the knee. A clean cut. On the knee is a circular steel plate fixed to the bone, but by what means I can’t tell. I wipe the rain from my eyes, push wet hair out of my face. On the ravaged girl’s shoulder socket, where her arm was ripped off, or taken, is another circular metal plate, also firmly in place despite having no obvious means of attachment. Looking closer, it’s clear these aren’t new injuries. This abuse isn’t fresh.

  But that’s not the true horror.

  The true horror is on the back of her head. Delicately, because I can’t tell if she’s alive or dead, or if the trauma will cause her too much pain, I peel back thickets of ratty hair. The minute I see what’s inside, I step backwards, lose my footing on the soft shoulder of the road and fall ass first on the ground.

  Deep down, the whimpering in me starts. A sort of involuntary emotional tempering to something I’ve never seen before. I’m destroyed inside, aching, but not for me…for her. That thing on the hood. I get to my feet, use my mind to slide her across the hood. She gets to me; I put my hands on her, feel her body beneath my touch. She’s human, I’m thinking.

  Not a dog.

  Not a rabbit in a lab!

  If I could hug her right now for what she has endured, for what she has survived, I would. Unconsciously, I try to crawl her, but it’s like being in a rock concert where instead of one band playing on stage, ten bands are playing at once. I drag myself out of her head, and fast.

  Inside the car, April’s eyes are bobbing closed. Is this it for her? Is she going to die? A quick mental bump off her tells me she’s close. My eyes return to the girl.

  Inside the hollowed cavity of her skull are all kinds of tiny robot bugs crawling over the dissected parts of her brain, like spiders, or ants, or millipedes. Lifting up her hair is like lifting up a river rock and seeing an ecosystem of insects scurrying about.

  They skitter sharp and metallic over the rugged terrain of the half-eaten shell of the girl’s brain. Inserted into various folds are wires and tubes, each of which lay in tangles on the hood of the black Challenger. I see all these things and I hold a vision of them flying out of her—all the wires and tubes, all the grotesque steel spiders—and then I fling them into the night. Beneath me I feel the body breathe a sigh of relief.

  Movement in the car makes me look up.

  April opens the door, staggers out, makes it as far as the other side of the hood, along the highway, before leaning on it for support. The rain isn’t gone, but it isn’t heavy either. The air feels misted. Wet without being watery.

  “Did the best I could to get her out,” she says. “You could’ve done better, but you were scared. Stubborn.” Blood is draining from her ears and nostrils now, leaking down the front of her already ruined tank top, leaking down the sides of her neck.

  “What are those things covering her ears?” I ask. Screwed into the girl’s head, stuck in her ears like ear buds on an iPod, are two metallic beads. Whatever they are, they have been in her ears a long time. Her hair and skin have grown around it. “Are those…headphones?”

  I can hear sounds coming from them; it’s a loud clashing of noise.

  “Yes,” April says, her teeth stained red. A flap of half-blown off skin hangs off her face closer to her ear. She’s not healing. The t
hings dripping from the exit wound, they are far more dense than rain water. “Special headphones, powered by her body…screwed into her skull.”

  April swallows hard, winces against the pain, her body finally heaving out a sigh of resignation. Her will to continue is a barely turned on light, a nearly burned out bulb. I can already feel her letting go. Accepting her fate.

  “It’s been years,” April says. “All that music in her head…played too loud…multiple bands from different genres…all playing at once…chaos in her ears. It’s how they…how they took her mind.”

  “Who is she?”

  She leans forward on the hood, rests on her elbows, forehead on the soft metal. Her body looks ready to collapse. Like she won’t be able to hold on much longer.

  When no words leave April’s mouth, I use my power to gently elevate and turn the body before me. What I see first is another metal plate covering her right eye like a large patch. It is rough edged and rusted, sucked up tight to the cheekbone and the eye orbital and looking not the least bit comfortable. Oh, the poor thing. By the time I’ve turned her far enough around to face me, her other eye is looking right at me. The color is unmistakable: amethyst.

  The true horror of what’s happening unfolds in that singular space of time and suddenly, what I thought I knew about reality—what I accepted as truth—turns out to be mere splinters of a truth too large for me to grasp. A truth far too appalling for me to comprehend. My reality, it has officially been blown wide open.

  Where before there were definable limits on the laws of the universe, now there are only possibilities. Infinite equations. Time travel isn’t only possible, it’s real. Other worlds, parallel universes, unlimited access to all of it…it’s my mind expanding the same way astronomers talk about an expanding universe. If what I fear is true, and I’m pretty sure it is, there are now two of me in this time. Not two replicated bodies. Two actual me’s occupying the same time. I’m a carbon copy of the original and my soul is now a plus one.

  “Is that…?”

  Jesus Christ, I can’t even say it!

  “You should’ve come with me,” April mumbles into the hood.

  “That’s me?”

  She lifts her head, tries to look at me. “In about eight hundred years, yes.”

  Breathing becomes impossible. My legs fight me. In my head, worlds collide, the earth is flat, two plus two equals nine and Einstein is a fat headed louse. Nothing makes sense. Not unless I let it. But how do you get your head around this?

  “Am I…dead?”

  “Worse.”

  All the science geeks, and almost every single show I’ve ever seen on time travel, except for the brilliant, brilliant film Predestination, says the same matter can’t occupy the same space at the same time. Bullshit.

  It just did.

  “Why did you bring her back to me?” I ask.

  “To fix her,” she says. “But I needed your help. You needed to come with me.”

  “You could have told me we were going to save…me,” I say, staring into the purple eye staring back at me. That gorgeous, ruined eye isn’t moving. It’s not registering anything. I feel like I’m looking into the eye of a coma patient. It’s not blinking. There’s no pupil dilation. No signs of life.

  “Tried to tell you,” she says, each word its own separate burden. “But you are too block headed to listen. You said no.”

  “You could’ve shown me.”

  “My mind has been raped enough over the years. Besides, you would’ve found a way to call it a hoax. Or whatever. It’s what you people of this time do. Ignore facts because…you’re weak, in here,” she says, pointing to her head. “If the truth seems preposterous, you call it a lie. Or a hoax. You label it a conspiracy then dismiss it and…act embarrassed for ever thinking it. That’s how this world went belly-up. How you fucked up your future. My present. The people of this time…you’re all…they’re all sheep.”

  I can see the strain it takes to tell me this. To insult me and my people. She has a point, though. We are not intellectuals as much as we’re parrots. Repeating things everyone else told us because we aren’t smart enough to think of them on our own. Or question them. It’s hard to think, so we do. We reason through the banality of our lives not wanting this world to be more complicated than it already is. Still…

  “That’s a bit harsh,” I say. “Not all of us are sheep.”

  “They’re coming for you,” she says.

  “Who?”

  “The people who run this planet…in my time. Those who control time travel. They’ve sent someone and he’s coming now. For you. For me.”

  “When?”

  She’s pushing herself off the car, trying to stand. Maybe she’ll be okay. Well, with some plastic surgery and a trauma nurse.

  Or not.

  “Almost here,” she mumbles. A pair of lights brighten the horizon, an eighteen wheeler. If it blows by us, its steady gust is likely to put April on her ass, and maybe in the grave.

  “Who are you?” I ask. I know she’s April, and I know she’s a traveler, I just don’t know who she is to me. To the future me, that is.

  She stands on her own, her legs still a little wobbly. Holding my gaze, she looks right at me, death swimming like raw sewage through her eyes. “Girl who saved you,” she says. “You know me as Alice.”

  And then she steps out onto the highway, just in time to get mowed down and obliterated by an eighteen wheeler. At this point, I can’t even breathe anymore. The rig brakes hard, twists sideways and tips. It slides sideways along the edge of the road in an unspeakable cacophony of grating metal.

  Looking at the overturned rig, it means April, who is actually Alice, is dead. This is the nightmare I can’t seem to wake up from. Contemplating these terrifying twists and turns in my life, I can’t believe I used to be Savannah Van Duyn. I almost can’t believe anything anymore. Darkness pulses at the edges of my vision; it closes in on me.

  I feel myself falling…I just don’t remember hitting bottom.

  END OF BOOK VI

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  The saga continues! Keep reading for a brief synopsis of book seven in the Swann Series novels, entitled ABOMINATION, or simply head to your favorite online eBook retailer, purchase the book and begin reading immediately!

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  Book 7 of the Swann Series Novels:

  ABOMINATION

  For all the unknowns that have ever beguiled and confused her, Raven has yet to realize who she really is and where this reckless, paranormal life of hers is heading. When the answer lands squarely on the hood of her car broken, beaten and abused in the Nevada desert, she is left to contemplate every choice she has never made, and every choice she wi
ll make that turn her into the abomination she has become. She will, however, have precious little time for reflection. There is something hunting her, an unimaginable beast with a ruthless agenda the likes of which no human of this time could ever fathom. To find her, though, he’ll have to start with her friends…

  If no one knew you, no one judged you and no one expected anything from you, ever, what decisions would you make? It is in these moments that Raven discovers who she really is, and where her unrelenting ways will take her. Filled with plenty of twists and turns, yet rich in character depth and deeply poignant, ABOMINATION stays true to the series’ original form: fun, sexy, irreverent and downright jaw-dropping. This is the seventh book in the series, and like its predecessors, ABOMINATION pushes the limits of YA fiction. This is not only a smart, sensual, page-turner of a story, it proves to be an unforgettable tale of consequences and redemption, friends and family, forgiveness and the possibility of new beginnings.

  Don’t wait, download your copy of ABOMINATION now!