Aporia (Young Adult Paranormal Romance) (Wisteria Series)

by Leyton, Bisi

  Wisteria noticed she was on an outdoor staircase.

  The three headed up to the roof, to the France 2 News helicopter they’d flown there in. In front of the helicopter was a soldier with her gun pointed straight at them.

  “I have them, Janice. No one is infected,” Coles called to her, and then took the Boris Bear from Wisteria. “For Beck?”

  “Yeah.” Wisteria nodded, out of breath.

  “You think risking your life for that was smart?” Coles, who was the head of security at Smythe, wasn’t a particularly sentimental man. “Did you at least get all the books?”

  “Yep,” she replied.

  Two men got out of the helicopter. They’d been part of the group that had come to the warehouse. There should’ve been two more, Ferris Kinsey and Gareth Hubbard. In fact, this was Gareth’s first assignment as a tracker. Technically, they weren’t tracking the infected, but rather scavenging for supplies.

  The trackers, like Wisteria and Garfield, were supposed to monitor the infected, collect samples of the infection for the scientists on the Isle of Smythe, and do their best to keep the numbers of infected around the Isle of Smythe under control.

  The soldiers used to do the lethal jobs, like going into overrun communities and trying to push the infected back. Now, the line between what the trackers did and what the soldiers did had long since blurred.

  “Where are Gareth and Ferris?” Wisteria asked.

  “They didn’t make it,” Janice replied. “We should take off now.”

  Wisteria still felt sad about losing people, even Gareth, who she couldn’t stand. Part of her wished she could shut it off, like Coles and the others. They seemed to be able to accept the risk; each time they left the fortified Isle of Smythe, there was a risk someone would never come back. They moved on, as if Gareth and Ferris were fictional characters who were killed off in a Chad Pearson graphic novel.

  “Are you okay?” Garfield asked when she got into the aircraft.

  “I’ll be fine once we’ve taken off.”

  “Did you get all the books?” Coles asked when they were airborne.

  “All nineteen.” Opening her backpack, she showed them several of the textbooks. “I’ve got twelve and he’s got seven.”

  “You’re letting her do all the heavy lifting?” Janice teased.

  “No, my books were much bigger,” Garfield protested, lifting out a black book that had to be at least four inches thick.

  Coles shook his head, laughing.

  “Wisteria, you’re not helping your girlfriend by doing all the heavy lifting,” another soldier jeered.

  “He’s not my girlfriend.” Wisteria hated the way the trackers and soldiers took to ribbing on Garfield, calling him a girl and other prissy things. It reminded her of the way the people in town had treated her for years.

  “Please Janice. You’re only saying that because I still won’t go out with you.” Garfield gave it as good as he got it from these guys. After being a tracker for over two years, he knew he’d already earned their respect.

  She paused while she also realized the jokes and teasing helped them cope with the loss of Ferris and Gareth. “What about the other books? How did we do?” Wisteria asked Coles.

  “We did okay. We got forty of the fifty-three they wanted.” Her stepfather nodded.

  Getting the textbooks were part of Smythe’s Future-Proof Plan. The scientists had started training select teenagers, twenty-somethings, and anyone else who they thought had talent. The hope was to train the next generation of brilliant minds, a task that could take anywhere from seven to twenty years.

  A handful of the scientists had become catatonic two years ago and a few of them had died. This had motivated the great minds of Smythe to start the Future-Proof Plan.

  One of those who didn’t survive had been Dr. Tom Hindle, the father of Wisteria’s boyfriend, of sorts, and the most senior scientist on the island. Her heart stung thinking about Tom. It was her fault he’d died.

  Almost two years ago, several empirics from The Family infiltrated the Isle of Smythe looking for something. While she’d known ahead of time, she hadn’t warned the town. Bach, the love of her teenage life, had assured her he’d take care of it. Stupidly, she’d trusted him until she figured out he was only interested in protecting her and didn’t care about the other humans on the island. That was when she’d tried to get help, but no one believed her. Eventually, she’d tried to stop The Family herself.

  But it had been too late. The Family had found who they wanted--Jason Webb--and left with him. Jason was a half-human, half-Famila man who worked as a vet and local pastor. He’d also been Bach’s half-brother.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” Garfield asked as they flew over the deserted countryside.

  “I’m getting a little motion sickness.” She hadn’t thought about Bach in months and she hadn’t spoken about him to anyone in over a year. Breaking up with him had been like pulling out her own teeth and doing it the way she had gutted her. Heartlessly, she’d made sure he hated everything about her, and she’d never be able to forget the look of pure hatred in eyes when she’d closed the door in his face for the last time.

  For weeks, she’d cried herself to sleep. She had dreams of him for a long time while remembering his green, penetrating gaze and that dazzling smile which always made her heart pound whenever she saw it. She knew in her heart that they were somehow meant to be together. She eventually found forcing him from her thoughts was the best way get past the hurt and allowed her to concentrate on other things.

  What she did was despicable and it disgusted her, but she had to lose him that way or he would’ve died. She’d never let that happen to him. A tear escaped from her eye and she wiped it away before anyone would see.

  “You sure you’re okay?” Garfield asked again.

  Forcing a smile, she let out fake chuckle and nodded. “I’m trying not to throw up.”

  Garfield frowned and she wasn’t sure if he believed her.

  The helicopter dipped a little and some of the soldiers chuckled at some joke they were all snickering about.

  Wisteria ignored their banter while recalling how she’d fallen into a deep depression after Bach left. Or should she say, after she drove him away. It took Coles, of all people, to snap her out of it. He offered to let her be a tracker again. Then, with her best friend Garfield by her side, she became too busy to mope around anymore.

  Hours later, the helicopter landed in a parking lot in front of the tracker center.

  Silently, Wisteria dropped her books off at the tracker station and headed home.

  “Still thinking about him?” Garfield walked up behind her.

  “No—no”, “she stammered.

  “You’re going to have to face him some time.”

  If she’d had a lighter complexion, Garfield would’ve seen her face go red. “I’m not going to talk to you about him!” She continued moving.

  They had an agreement--he never asked about what happened with Bach and she didn’t talk about him.

  “What is it now, you’re eighty-sixth fight with Steven? Remember, he wants to have a baby and you told him to have another one with Poppy?”

  She realized that Garfield was talking about someone else. “Oh.” She’d forgotten she still had to deal with Steven Hindle, her eighteen-year-old boyfriend…of sorts.

  Wisteria had had the biggest crush on Steven for years until Bach showed up, then her feelings for him oscillated between indifference and revulsion. The reason she went out with him recently was because she just wanted to be around someone. Steven hadn’t really matured in all the years she’s known him. He was an arrogant teen when she met him and now he’d grown into a self-obsessed jerk who only wanted to be with Wisteria to score or to make his current girlfriend jealous. He didn’t care how many people knew who he was sleeping with or how many girls he was stringing along.

  She guessed this recent change for the worse had a lot to do with the death of his fath
er last summer.

  “And I’m proud of you for telling him to go to hell.” Garfield brought her back to reality. “I can’t believe he asked you that.”

  “We’ve got to repopulate the earth somehow, and there aren’t that many options.”

  Steven had graciously suggested getting Wisteria pregnant. His logic was that the birth rate on the island was very low and in ten years, they’d be at a crisis level. There was some truth to what Steven had said; she’d heard Coles raise a similar point with her mother when they argued about having more children. He wanted to grow the family. Her mother point-blank refused and told Coles to get a girlfriend if he wanted more babies. Now in her forties, her mother insisted she was too old for any more children.

  “But with Steven? Wisteria, if it comes down to that? I’ll father your child.”

  “Thank you for being so generous, Garfield.” She gaped at him. “I can’t believe you! You think you’re wonderful now, because you wore Amanda down and she agreed to be with you?” Waving her hands in his face, she stormed off. She was unsure if she should be insulted or amused. There were fleeting moments when she’d considered Garfield, but he meant too much to her as a friend.

  “Wisteria, stop.” He grabbed her arms and turned her around. “I never asked because Coles would kill me, but you’re totally at the top of my baby-momma list if you want. I’ll work it out with Amanda somehow.”

  “So, you’ll have like—two families? Mine and Amanda’s?” She smirked.

  “No, no, I mean . . ./g” He seemed to try and dig himself out of this very weird hole. “Amanda is . . .? How did we even get to this topic?”

  “You were talking about my fight with Steven.” She didn’t understand why Steven thought she’d seriously consider such a bizarre request in the first place. They hadn’t been seeing each other for very long. Sure, they almost got together the week Bach left, but each time she tried to let herself get close to Steven, she would end up vomiting. She guessed it was a side effect of the Mosroc bond she’d shared with Bach.

  Recently, she hadn’t found Steven--or any other guy--that repulsive, and had hinted to him that she could see herself one day starting a family with someone on the island.

  Steven must’ve taken that to mean she wanted start the baby-making immediately, and with him, which had been the source of their fight.

  “Just because Poppy, Hailey, Zola, and Lexie are having kids doesn’t mean I need to have a child now. So please, you can keep your charity, because when I want to start a family it’s going to be with someone I like, and not because I’m trying to help with repopulation. We’re not animals.”

  “Steven is an animal.”

  “You’re never going to like him, are you?” She playfully wrapped an arm around his waist.

  “He still calls me rat boy. Rat boy! Boy? The shrimp is lucky I don’t break his neck.” Garfield, who’d finally stopped growing, stood five foot nine, a good three or four inches taller than Steven.

  Wisteria, on the other hand, had stopped growing when she was fourteen and was five foot two. When they’d first met, he'd been inches taller than her, but now like everyone else, Garfield towered over her.

  “Why are you back with him anyway?” Garfield continued complaining as they walked.

  “Maybe because it's what I deserve.”

  “You can’t keep beating yourself up about what happened to his dad. If Charles didn’t believe Coles--who’d told him about The Family months before--there was no way he was going to believe you,” Garfield reminded her. “Tom Hindle was always going to be a target, because he was the head of research or something.”

  “How’s Amanda?”

  “Don’t change the subject! Stop beating yourself up. You’re a good person.”

  “Don’t call me that. Only self-deluded idiots call themselves ‘good people.’ And they do that to talk themselves out of feeling guilty for all the crap they’ve done,” she hissed.

  “So you’re saying there are no good people.”

  “Garfield, I’m saying that believing I’m a good person doesn’t magically make me one. I’m not that naïve.”

  *****

  “Happy birthday, Beck.” Wisteria shook the Boris Bear in front of Beck Andrew Oluwaseyi Coles the next morning. She’d wanted to be the first to give him his present.

  Beck was named after Andrew McDowell and Rebecca O’Leary, two trackers who were friends of Coles and her mother. They’d died trying to rescue Wisteria and David.

  Laughing, he shook the large box and tossed it across the room. Instead of opening the present, he decided to yank her hair hard. “Wee-wee,” he said, in an attempt to say Wisteria.

  “Stop it, Beck.” She tried to pull her hair out of his little fingers.

  “Wee-wee,” he called to her as he laughed and tugged harder.

  “Come on, Beck. Let go of Wisty’s hair.” Finally, she pried her braids out of his grip, but then he started to cry.

  “What are you doing, Wisty?” David Kuti, her seventeen-year-old brother, came in.

  Immediately, Beck stopped crying and started to toddle toward his big brother.

  “Beck is just a baby.” David had a particular fondness for Beck since discovering his girlfriend Poppy had become pregnant by another guy.

  “Giving him his birthday present, but then he tried to beat me up,” she replied.

  “Well, it looks like he was winning,” David teased.

  Wisteria was good with Beck, but today the baby was being fussier than normal.

  “You’ve got to be gentler with him,” he suggested. “Let me show you.” David took the Boris Bear box and offered it to Beck.

  Beck smacked the box out of David’s hand and started crying again. Then, the baby reached over and grabbed one of her braids. “Wee-wee.”

  “Interesting technique, David.” Laughing, Wisteria freed herself and went over to pick up the box. “Keep working on it and let me know when it’s done.”

  David laughed. “I’ll do that.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a blond-haired guy walking up to the front door. It was Steven Hindle.

  Someone had left the gate around their home unlocked again.

  “What are you doing home anyway, David? Aren’t you and Ilya meeting up?” She hoped she’d gotten the girl’s name right.

  Ilya was his latest girlfriend. Her brother seemed to be going back and forth between her and Poppy nowadays. There was a time when he was totally into Amanda, but that finally ended when Amanda and Garfield got together.

  “Nah. Ilya is a friend, nothing more than that.”

  “So, you’re seeing Poppy then?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know; I might go see Amanda.”

  “No, David, you can’t be serious. I thought it was over between you and her, like ages ago?”

  “Amanda has really changed, and I think I should give her another chance.”

  “I’m not sure that’s going to work--she’s seeing Garfield.”

  “Rat boy?” David laughed, shaking his head. “He wishes.”

  There was a knock on the door. “Ria?” Steven called from outside.

  She walked over and opened the front door.

  He ran his hands through his long blond hair, his blue eyes squinting down at her.

  “Hi.” She smiled up at him.

  “You got back yesterday and you didn’t come to see me?”

  “Right.” She’d gotten a bit upset with herself after the trip to ShopNile.com. She’d even skipped her engineering classes with Thomas Clarkson. She still felt numb about Gareth dying and realized she should’ve told Steven about it, because they used to be friends. During rough times, she either spent it with her family or all alone. “Yesterday’s trip was really tough on me. I needed some time to process it all.”

  “And, you can’t process your issues with me?”

  “No, I can’t. Isn’t that what I just said?” She could hear herself getting harsh and tried to soften h
er tone. “I’m sorry about Gareth.”

  Steven sat down on the steps in front of the house. “You know I haven’t spoken to him in almost a year. He changed after his brother died. He became mean.”

  “He was always a jerk.” Sitting next to him, Wisteria decided to give him five minutes before sending him on his way.

  “Well, he became a jerk to everyone. He was angry because he thought it was so unfair that his brother died.”

  “You must’ve felt that way when your dad died?”

  Steven shook his head. “Cut the crap, you were supposed to check back with me when you got to town, so we could finish what we were talking about.”

  “You were talking about getting some girls pregnant. I’m okay with that as long as it isn’t me.”

  “I said if you happened to get pregnant it would be fine. Either way, we should have some fun.”

  Something about him made her skin crawl, and she couldn’t understand why she’d decided to date him in the first place. Oh, yeah, she recalled now, she owed him because of his dad, but pity was only going to take him so far.

  “So, Ria?” Steven asked.

  He’d been talking, but she hadn’t been listening.

  “So, if I want to hook up with another girl, you don’t care?” This wasn’t the first time he’d made this threat.

  Wisteria knew a part of her should’ve been upset, but she wasn’t. She couldn’t bring herself to care about him that way. “Do what you have to do.” She got up to return to the house.

  “I tell you I’m going to see another girl and you act like it doesn’t mean anything?”

  “It’s not like I’m your girlfriend. You’re only hanging around because you’ve got something to prove. Or maybe I’m one of the few girls over the age of sixteen you haven’t done it with. You think I’m going to get excited about that?”

  “Who do you think you are, Wisteria? Just because I give you a look or two . . .?”

  As he ranted, Wisteria knew she’d have to calm him down. Even though she didn’t care about him—she wanted to. She wanted to at least know she could feel something for someone, after Bach.