Children of Genesis (The Gateway Series Book 1)

by Toby Minton

  Michael

  Michael knew “engineer’s mind” didn’t mean he’d magically be able to fix the tablet without any training or experience, but he sat cross-legged on his bed staring at the guts of the crushed device anyway.

  He’d carefully removed the broken glass and then taken the rest apart, fanning all the pieces out on the blanket in front of him, but he had no clue what to do next. The cracked green board with its maze of gold lines, wires, chips, and connectors didn’t make sense to his mind like the generator engine had.

  He could just tell Kate what had happened and ask her to download the book onto a new tablet, but she was still pretty angry with him for asking her to keep lying to Nikki, for asking everyone to keep lying to her. Kate didn’t think it was right for them to continue telling Nikki they had com problems when Kate had solved them almost two weeks ago.

  But she didn’t know Nikki like Michael did. The only thing keeping Nikki there was her promise to stay until the com issues were sorted. The minute she learned they were fixed, she’d be out the door, and Michael would have to follow.

  He just wasn’t ready to leave. There was so much more to learn here, so much they still didn’t know about Savior and his plans for them. Not to mention, for the first time in their lives, he and Nikki had a safe place to sleep, steady meals, and people who actually seemed to care about them. And, of course, there was Kate.

  Michael didn’t know where he and Kate were headed, but the thought of leaving her twisted him up inside. He wanted to be near her, and he wanted her to get along with Nikki. That was the main reason he couldn’t tell Kate that Nikki had smashed the tablet. She already had plenty of reasons to dislike Nikki. After three weeks of dealing with his sister’s deteriorating attitude, everyone had reasons. The last thing he wanted was to give Kate’s opinion of Nikki another tick in the con column. He really needed them to get along.

  Thinking about Kate and Nikki made the broken board with its maze of lines and wires a lot less intimidating. He was pretty sure he’d master electronic engineering before he figured out how to manage a romantic relationship.

  He’d never liked a girl like this before. There’d never really been time or room in his life for anyone besides Nikki. He’d just had too much to worry about trying to keep them both safe and fed.

  Nikki had managed to have her share of crushes and flings, and maybe that was part of why Michael never had. Her first, with Anella, had grown out of friendship. Michael had watched it happen, had felt echoes of Nikki’s feelings through their link. He’d thought Anella was a cute girl, but when Nikki looked at her, when he felt the pulse of what she felt through the link, Anella had radiated beauty. He’d shared Nikki’s happiness as their relationship progressed. He’d felt the warmth and comfort Anella brought his sister—something he hadn’t felt from Nikki since Chicago. Unfortunately, he also shared her pain when disease swept through the San Diego free zone and took Anella away. The pain he’d felt through Nikki had devastated him as well.

  Michael had always seemed to feel things a little more than his sister, almost like she was missing a layer of her softer emotions. After she lost Anella, she walled off whatever was left. Even though she had a number of relationships after San Diego—all with guys, like wisecracking Brian outside L.A., or Seth in Texas, who was every inch an urban Viking—Michael never again felt the same kind of emotion from Nikki that he’d felt when she’d looked at Anella.

  After a while, Michael even forgot what that kind of love felt like. But he never forgot the pain that had followed it. Fear of that pain had kept him away from every girl he’d been even slightly interested in. Until now.

  When he’d met Kate, the walls he used to keep women at bay just hadn’t gone up quickly enough. Or if they had, she’d walked right through them. Just thinking of her now brought a smile he felt all over.

  Michael’s awareness of Nikki winked out, taking his smile with it. He was through his door and halfway down the hall to Nikki’s room before he processed the futility of checking her room. If he couldn’t feel her, she wasn’t there. She wasn’t anywhere in the bunker or on the grounds above. If he couldn’t feel her, she was gone.

  He threw the lever and swung open her door anyway, his eyes going straight to the open locker. Her bag was gone, but most of her clothes and the few personal items she owned were lying in a heap where she’d dumped them out. She’d taken only a few select items, including both pairs of shoes. If he knew Nikki, that meant one pair for sneaking, the other to change into once she was in the clear.

  Michael knew what that meant. He knew exactly where she was going.

  He bolted from the room toward the command center and almost ran over Elias coming around the corner. The older man’s hand snapping up to catch Michael by the chest was all the stopped a collision.

  “Looks like you were right,” Elias said as Michael took a step back. “Your sister tried to leave a few minutes ago.”

  “She didn’t just try,” Michael said, tension clipping his words. “She succeeded. We need to go after her.”

  He’d warned Elias and Gideon earlier that Nikki was about to snap. He’d told them to keep a close watch the next few nights for when she tried to bolt. If only they’d listened.

  “Michael,” Elias barked in a voice that had no doubt stopped soldiers in their tracks. Even so, it was the hand still pressed against Michael’s chest that kept him from running off toward the hangar. “She’s fine. Padre was on watch. He caught her.”

  “No. She’s gone. I don’t feel her.”

  Elias kept his expression neutral, but the look in his gray eyes softened. “You were right about her being at a breaking point. Padre came to me with the same concern this morning. He suggested he take her on a patrol run on the skimmer to let her blow off some steam.”

  Michael opened his mouth to argue, but as usual the logical part of his brain shut down his anger before it could get a foothold. As much as he hated being separated from Nikki, he knew keeping her trapped was riskier than letting her have some space.

  “Keeping her locked down would only make her worse,” Elias said, reinforcing Michael’s thoughts. “She’ll be fine, Michael. Padre knows what he’s doing. He’ll take care of her. They won’t be gone long—a couple hours at most.”

  “A couple of hours,” Michael said, taking a breath and trying to relax the overdeveloped worry muscles he could feel tightening at the back of his neck. “Do you have any idea how much trouble Nikki can cause in a couple of hours?”

  A smile twitched the corners of Elias’s mouth. “A rough idea.” He moved his hand to Michael’s shoulder and gave him a reassuring squeeze. “You’re not going to rest while they’re out. You’re too much like me—I can tell. I never rest when one of my people is out of pocket.”

  Michael looked up into Elias’s eyes, seeing a fond sort of pride. “What do you do to pass the time?”

  Elias smiled fully then, the wrinkles around his eyes deepening. He turned, his hand staying on Michael’s shoulder to urge him along, and headed down the hall. “You know how to cook, Michael?”

  “Cook?” Michael asked. He’d expected Elias to take him to the command center to study maps, trace Padre’s expected route, monitor com channels. “Uh, no. Not really.”

  “I’m no chef myself,” Elias said. “But my father taught me a few things every man should be able to cook. Like omelets.”

  “Omelets?” Michael repeated, his eyes drifting to the hall to the command center as they passed it. When he looked back, Elias was watching him with a smile Michael couldn’t read.

  “For starters. Once you master that, we’ll move on to something more involved, like drop cornbread. But we need more than a patrol run to tackle that one.”

  Michael followed along listening to Elias explain the basics of omelets, which ended up being surprisingly involved and distracting. But the knots forming between his shoulders weren’t fooled. Even with most of his mind engaged with keeping an omelet intac
t while he flipped it and switching from bottom to top heat at just the right time, part of him was still worried about Nikki. He didn’t share Elias’s confidence that everything would be fine. He was sure Padre was a fine soldier. In fact, the man had proven once already that he could keep an injured Nikki safe against ridiculous odds. But he was dealing with a healthy and bored Nikki this time around.

  The man had no idea what he was up against.

  Chapter 26

  Nikki

  Nikki howled a laugh as the skimmer streaked down the face of another steep, forested drop leaving her stomach far behind. Sam extended the air cushion with a twist of his left hand and revved the accelerator with his right as they raced toward the ground, expertly shifting from heart-stopping fall to heart-racing slalom as he wove around the wide trees in the dim light of the thin moon.

  Her smile was so wide she’d probably swallowed every bug in Washington, but Nikki couldn’t stop smiling and laughing if her life depended on it. She’d been giddy with the rush of flying since they’d streaked out of the hangar and down the first cliff to skim over the low waves of the sound.

  The skimmer made almost no noise, no matter how fast they went. The rush of the wind and her own wild laughter were all Nikki could hear, making it easy for her to imagine she was the one doing the flying, a sensation that left no room for the cold fear she’d felt before when she’d been separated from Michael.

  She wanted this ride to last forever.

  Sam leaned the skimmer to the right, turning out into a thin clearing, and accelerated a little. He looked over his shoulder at Nikki and smiled at her. Nikki knew she looked like an idiot with her gigantic grin, but she didn’t care.

  Sam gave her a questioning nod and eyebrow raise and tipped his head toward the accelerator. She had to be beaming at him as she tightened her arms around his small, tight midsection. He twisted the accelerator all the way back, and they raced down the lane, dark trees towering on either side.

  She was viewing Sam through some heavy duty hero goggles for taking her on this ride tonight. Hooked nose, plain features, smaller stature and all, he was the most beautiful man in the world at that moment.

  Nikki glanced down to see pale pavement streaking past under them. They were over some old coastal road, probably an old artery to one of the many smaller cities that had withered and died in the last few decades. Waist-high grass and trees were growing through the cracks and fissures as nature reclaimed what humanity, or at least the people of Washington, had abandoned.

  They raced down the overgrown road at a speed that sucked the air right out of each laugh, not that Nikki stopped trying. She was still all giggly when Sam finally veered off the road onto a narrower, darker path and wove through the trees to the top of a low bluff overlooking the sound. He eased the skimmer to a stop so they could take in the view, and maybe so Nikki could catch her breath.

  The breath catching went off without a hitch. The view wasn’t too shabby either. Across the dark water she could see the darker outlines of more forested hills on the islands and fingers of land separating the sound from the Pacific. To her left, she could see the distinctive glow on the bottom of the clouds from a big city’s lights.

  “Let’s take a break,” Sam said, shutting down the quiet engine and motioning for Nikki to hop off.

  Nikki swung her leg off the back and stepped clear, feeling the tightness in her arms for the first time. She must have been holding on tighter than she’d realized. She shook her arms and stretched them as Sam dismounted and opened one of the side compartments behind the seat. He fished around for a minute and then rose up and tossed her a canteen. She unscrewed the cap and took a long pull of warmish water, keeping her eyes on the view.

  “Is that Seattle over there?” she asked when she lowered the canteen to take a breath.

  “Yep,” Sam replied, only glancing that way for a second. Even in the semi-dark, she could see his eyes constantly checking their surroundings. They were in the middle of nowhere, and still his first thought was for their safety.

  Nikki smiled, reminded of the better parts of their first meeting—his careful hands, his concern for her modesty, his appreciation of her brilliant sense of humor.

  “How old are you?” she asked.

  Sam’s eyes shifted to hers, or at least she thought they did. He was a good five paces away in the dim light. “Twenty-eight.”

  Ouch. She was expecting late twenties, but hearing it flat out still made the hero goggles slip a bit. He was over ten years older, well outside her acceptable range. If she stuck to her rules, she’d move him to her ineligible list and forever think of him as just a friend.

  Nikki was good at that. Once she decided a guy belonged on the bench instead of the pitch, he stayed there and never gave her heart a moment’s pause again.

  So why did she feel a catch in her gut when she thought of benching Sam?

  Maybe she could make an exception on the age issue this time, if he fit the rest of her parameters. That thought eased the catch and brought her smile back. She decided to consider Sam’s age a verbal warning instead of his first yellow card. He was still in the game.

  “You know what would make this night perfect?” she asked.

  She was pretty sure she saw a hint of panic in Sam’s eyes before he said no. But maybe it was the five paces of darkness throwing off her emotion reading skills, strong as they were.

  “Dancing,” she said.

  Even at five paces, the panic was obvious this time. Uh oh.

  “I’ve heard about this club near the Seattle ferry wharves,” she pressed on. “Emerald, I think. I know I can get us in.”

  He laughed quietly and looked away. “You and I have very different ideas of perfect.”

  Yellow card number one. The other guys on Nikki’s ineligible bench slid over to make room.

  “OK. Wow me,” she said, not ready to send him packing yet. If she rattled off another interest he didn’t share, it would be game over for him, so she let him take the lead. This wasn’t part of her usual game plan, but she felt Sam deserved a little extra leeway for coming to her rescue—and of course for saving her life that one time. “What’s your perfect night?”

  “Well,” he said, looking out over the water, “this is pretty close.”

  “Really? But we’re not doing anything. There’s no music, no laughter—” His brows rose at that, but she ignored it. “It’s just us out here.”

  He looked at her, but a cloud passing under the moon made his eyes completely unreadable. “I’m a simple man. I like simple things. I talked to you about gardening for an hour, remember?”

  “You mean you weren’t just trying to annoy me?”

  “Well, not just,” he said, the reappearing moonlight revealing his grin before he could smooth it out. “I prefer solitary hobbies. I can’t relax in a crowd—too much to watch. I stay switched on the whole time.”

  “Me too!” Nikki said, her smile and eyes lighting up at the thought of how energized she felt in a surging crowd. “Switched on is exactly how I feel at a rave or a good, sweaty club. Yes. Switched on!”

  “Could be we’re using that term different ways,” Sam said, his dark brow wrinkling.

  Nikki sucked in a breath to argue but ended up letting it out in a heavy sigh. He was right. She was reaching. Yellow card number two was in the ref’s hand, and he was marching straight for Sam. It was hopeless. She and Sam were just too different.

  She let the conversation drop, and Sam was apparently content to let it lie where she left it. They took a seat on the cool grass in front of the skimmer and watched the dark water for a while, listening to the sound of the low waves on the rocks and trees below.

  After mulling on it for a while, Nikki realized why she was trying so hard to make Sam fit her usual mold. She’d spent so much time in captivity she must be starting to identify with her captors. She’d heard about this sort of thing happening. Stockholm syndrome, they called it. That was all this was. Had
to be.

  Still, her realization didn’t make her feel any better about benching Sam. Just thinking about it threatened to bring back all the depression the skimmer ride had shed.

  Well, she wouldn’t let a disease discovered by old Dr. Stockholm, who was probably long dead, keep her from at least being Sam’s friend. They got along really well. Why couldn’t they keep getting along?

  Nikki looked over as Sam drained the last of the canteen and screwed the cap back on. “So what brought you here?” she asked.

  Sam looked over and squinted at her like she was trying to trick him. He looked at the skimmer then back at Nikki, his mouth quirking.

  She giggled and shook her head. “You know what I mean. Why are you with Gideon?”

  “Elias brought me onboard,” he answered after a little pause, looking back out at the water and absently toying with a long blade of grass he plucked. “He and my father worked together when I was growing up. They both worked for Savior, that is.”

  She looked over at him. “Wait. So the Lee that Elias mentioned when he told us that story a few weeks ago, that was your dad? He helped us get away from Savior?”

  Sam nodded, still not looking at Nikki. “From what Elias told me, yes.”

  “Your dad doesn’t talk about it?”

  He shook his head just a little and looked down at the grass in his fingers. “My father didn’t come back from that one.”

  “Oh,” Nikki said. “Crap. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. My father knew what he was doing when he decided to help Elias,” Sam said. He looked over at Nikki. “It was worth it.”

  Way to go, Nikki, she thought, understanding now the touch of sadness in Sam’s eyes when he looked at her sometimes. You sure know how to pee on a party.

  She felt the depression getting a hold on both of them, so she stepped up to head it off.

  “So you’re telling me I owe my life to two generations of Lee men?” she said with a crooked smile. “Geez. What is that, some kind of family tradition? Do you have a kid somewhere you’re training to save my ass in the near future?”