I studied his profile, thinking I should probably say something comforting or wise or Grams-like. Nothing. I couldn’t think of a single thing to say. I touched my hand to the silver medallion hanging around my neck; it had belonged to Grams, and I was hoping to draw on some of her maternal wisdom through it. Nope; no such luck.
Carlos shrugged, still not looking at me. “But then I—” He met my eyes for the briefest moment and laughed a soft, humorless laugh. “It was like I could hear my sister yelling at me, telling me I was being stupid, that it was okay to be scared, but not to let it rule me, you know?”
It was the first time he’d ever mentioned a sister, but it wasn’t a surprise that he’d never mentioned her before. Not many of my companions spent much time talking about the people they’d lost, myself included. Talking about it made it seem that much more real, that much fresher; it made us really acknowledge the fact that we would never see any of them again. Because of Zo and Jason’s mom…
“So I started practicing again. Turning stuff on, sending out small EM pulses, and, well…” Carlos turned his moon-shadowed eyes on me, looking at me fully for the first time since joining me on the wagon’s bench seat. “If I show you something, will you keep it a secret? I just—I don’t want everyone to know yet.” He smiled and shook his head and, for once, looked like the teen boy he was. “I’m not that good at it…yet.”
I swallowed, searching his eyes for some clue of what he was about to share with me. Finally, I nodded.
“Hold out your hand?”
I frowned, and hurt filled his eyes.
“You don’t trust me?”
My heart felt like it dropped into my stomach. “No—I mean, yes, of course I trust you. I’d trust you with my life,” I said in a rush. I held out my hand, palm up, and forced a smile that I hoped offered him some reassurance. “Please. Show me.”
Relief filled Carlos’s shadowed eyes, and he returned my smile with a tentative one of his own. “Don’t move, okay?” When I nodded, he extended his hand, holding his palm directly over mine. “I found a physics textbook and have been reading up on electromagnetic fields and charges and Faraday’s Law, and how—” He laughed and shook his head. “You don’t care about that stuff.”
But he was wrong. I did care about “that stuff.” I cared that he was actively seeking out information that might help him explore his Ability. Electromagnetic fields, charges, and something called “Faraday’s Law” sounded like fairly ambitious research topics, especially for a sixteen-year-old. He should talk to Gabe…
“That stuff I read got me thinking,” Carlos continued. “And I tried some different things, and…well, I came up with this.” He paused, and when he spoke again, his voice was nearly a whisper. “Ready?”
Again, I nodded.
He took a deep breath, and a gentle tingling sensation spread over my palm. It felt odd—a little itchy, but not unpleasant. Gradually, almost like I was dipping my hand into hot water slowly enough to allow my skin to grow accustomed to the temperature, the tingling sensation spread, climbing around to the back of my hand and up to my wrist and higher. When it reached my shoulder and just started to extend onto my torso, I drew in a shaky breath. “What—what is this?”
“Does it feel okay?” he asked, his eyes searching my face. “It doesn’t hurt, does it?”
“No, no,” I said, laughing a little. “It’s just, um, I don’t even know. It’s almost fuzzy…sort of. Does that sound right?”
The tightness around Carlos’s eyes relaxed, and he nodded. The tingling sensation started spreading down my torso and up my neck much faster.
“I got the idea from you, actually.” A quick smile flashed across his face before it retreated under his increasingly tense mask of concentration. “I thought, maybe if I could control it enough, we could do our own version of that electrotherapy stuff you mentioned, but without the torture part.” His eyebrows drew together as the tingling reached my opposite arm and my thighs. “You know, so like, a lot slower and with less electricity and stuff, but still enough to make our Abilities stronger…?”
I had to stifle my first instinct at hearing him mention electrotherapy, which was to shudder and pull away. “I—” I took a deep breath. “I think that’s an excellent idea. I bet Gabe would love to hel—”
“No.” Carlos retracted his hand, and the tingling sensation evaporated immediately. “Not him. We can’t trust him, not after what he did to you.”
That earned another frown. “Carlos…” I reached over and touched his wrist. “Ouch!” As soon as our skin made contact, electricity shocked my fingertips, numbing my hand almost instantly.
Carlos leapt off the wagon, stumbling as he landed on the ground. “I’m sorry!” He spun around and stared up at me, his eyes opened too wide. “Shit, Dani, I’m so sorry!”
“Carlos—”
“You can’t touch me when I’ve been doing stuff like that. I forgot to tell you—Jesus fucking—I could’ve killed you!”
Shaking out my arm, I laughed, aiming for nonchalant, but hitting nervous perfectly. “No worries. Just killed the nerves in my hand for a few seconds.” I held up my hand and wiggled my fingers. “It’s already going away.”
Carlos didn’t look the least bit reassured. “I’m sorry. I should’ve warned you.” He hit his forehead with the heel of his hand several times. “I wasn’t thinking. It was stupid. I—”
“It’s fine, really,” I said as I moved to the end of the bench seat and hopped down. I took two steps toward him and offered a tight-lipped smile. “It’s better than fine, really.” Pausing, I looked into his haunted eyes. “This could be a game-changer down the road. If we can use this to increase our Abilities…” As I trailed off, I shook my head. I wasn’t exactly looking forward to the undefined period of having a nonfunctioning Ability that resulted from electrotherapy while my invigorated synapses settled back down, but there was no denying how badly we needed to be as strong, as capable, and as dangerous as we could possibly be. And, a tiny voice said in the back of my mind, maybe this could fix my broken Ability…
Carlos’s brow furrowed, uncertainty and hope clear on his face. “You think this could work the same as the electroshock stuff they did to you?”
I took a deep breath, exhaling slowly. “I do,” I said with a nod. “But I really think you should talk to Gabe about—” I held up my hand, cutting off Carlos’s protests as soon as he opened his mouth. “He knows more about this kind of thing than anyone else. He’s experienced it—firsthand—just like me, and he’s a freaking genius. If you want your non-torture version of electrotherapy to work, he’s your best bet.”
Carlos’s gaze shifted to some point low and off to the side. “I’ll think about it.”
“Hey,” I said, and without thinking, I reached for his arm. “Maybe—”
He backpedaled out of reach so quickly that I flinched.
“I’m sorry.” I held my hand up. “That was stupid. My fault, okay?”
Carlos stared at me with wide, horrified eyes. “You can’t do that shit around me, Dani. If you—if I—I could—”
“Kill me, I know.” I sighed, frustrated with myself for upsetting him. He’d already been through so much—too much for most people to experience and be able to keep going. And now he had one more problem to deal with—worrying about whether or not he might accidentally electrocute the rest of us if we touched him at an inopportune time. There was only one person who could help him with his new problem. I placed my hand on my hip and straightened my spine. “Do you have any clue what his job was?”
Carlos raised his eyebrows. “Huh?”
“Gabe—back at the Colony. Do you know what his job was?” I repeated.
Carlos kicked a small rock. “No.”
“He was in charge of Ability research.”
“He was?” Carlos looked up, interest flitting over his features.
“Yep.” I moved across the trampled grass to stand in front of him. “And if anyone c
an, he’s the one who can help you figure out how to do the electrotherapy thing safely and effectively and learn how to control that whole zapping people thing.” I looked up, met Carlos’s eyes, and waited.
A second.
Three.
Twenty.
Carlos pressed his lips into a flat line, inhaled deeply, and nodded. “Fine. Okay. Yeah, I’ll do it.”
“You will?” I said, doing a really poor job of hiding my surprise. Jason’s stubbornness had been rubbing off on Carlos in a really unfortunate way.
Carlos looked at the ground. “Yeah, but…not yet. I mean, I want to get a little better at all this first, and…can we not tell Jason?” He met my eyes briefly, then looked away. “It’s just that he hates Gabe, and I don’t want him to, like, think I’m betraying him or something.”
My stomach flip-flopped, making me feel a little ill. “Uh…yeah. Sure. Why not?” What’s the harm in one more secret, anyway?
I ignored the part of me that whispered, You mean, what’s the harm in one more lie?
“We can help, too,” Mase said as he stepped out from between two of the carts, little more than a hulking shadow.
I yelped and jumped at least a foot off the ground. “Jesus, Mase!”
“Sorry.” Mase ducked his head as he moved closer. Camille followed close behind him, her own slender, shadowed form half his size. They stopped a yard or so away from Carlos and me. “I knew you had first watch tonight, and we wanted—”
Camille hit his arm with the back of her hand.
Scowling, Mase corrected himself. “I wanted to tell you something Camille told me earlier.”
My eyebrows rose as my gaze slipped from Mase’s hard, dark features to Camille’s pale, elfin face. She wouldn’t meet my eyes. I glanced down at the small dry-erase board she was clutching to her chest. It was another of the items we’d taken from Colorado Trails Lodge. Camille still wasn’t “speaking” much, but it seemed that Mase had managed to get her writing during the hours they’d spent driving a cart together earlier today.
I returned my attention to Mase.
“Dr. Wesley is a liar.”
I frowned and glanced at Carlos, who shrugged before pulling himself back up onto the wagon. I refocused on Mase. “About…?”
“She loves him.”
I cocked my head the side. “I’m sorry, Mase, I’m not following…”
“Father—General Herodson. She loves him.”
My mouth fell open. “That’s not…” I started to shake my head. “That’s not possible.” She’d gone out of her way to save me by making the neutralizer and attuning it to my blood—twice. And Zoe…Dr. Wesley had shown up before Clara—the General’s shiny new toy—could do more harm to Zoe than simply wiping away her memories. Dr. Wesley had been leading the anti-Herodson rebellion by supplying neutralizer to a trusted few, including Gabe and, before he’d been killed and made into a Re-gen, Mase. She hated General Herodson.
Except…she hadn’t really done anything to stop him, and she had an Ability that could tear the foundation of his power, his mind-control Ability, right out from under his feet. She was even stronger than Jason and could probably nullify every damn Ability in the Colony all at the same time. So why hadn’t she? Why didn’t she do it after the Virus—the gene therapy—destroyed the world as we knew it and the General could no longer keep tabs on Dr. Wesley’s family, could no longer hold their well-being over her head as additional motivation to behave?
“Before Camille died,” Mase said, “she overheard a conversation between Dr. Wesley and someone else.” Mase’s dark gray eyes were wide, imploring. He looked from me to Camille. “Show her what you showed me.”
I, too, looked at Camille.
Slowly, she pulled the small whiteboard away from her chest and turned it around so I could see the words, bubbly and slanted to the left.
Mase pointed to the board. “That’s what Camille heard the doctor say.”
The board said: “I won’t leave…won’t abandon him. I love him too much.”
My mouth was filled with sand. With cotton. With bile. I closed my eyes, took deep breaths, and somehow managed to convince myself not to lash out at Camille. It wasn’t her fault that Dr. Wesley was an even worse human being than I’d originally thought…though I did wish Camille had spoken up earlier, so to speak.
I was now certain of two things: I could never, ever tell Jason the truth about his mom, and I couldn’t trust anything that woman had written in her letter to me, not to mention whatever else she’d included in the “care package” wrapped in a manila envelope she’d left with mind-wiped Zoe in Colorado Springs.
I opened my eyes, swallowing my rage.
Camille’s pale gray eyes were locked on mine, and she reached out to take my hand in hers and give it a squeeze. She let go of my hand and wiped the words off the dry-erase board with the sleeve of her sweatshirt. Hastily, she scrawled, “I trusted her, too.” She met my eyes, then continued writing. “And she betrayed me.” Her gaze flicked to Mase, filling with an overabundance of pain. “She promised me that everything would be okay. She promised to look out for him.” Camille wiped her words away again. “SHE LIED.”
I inhaled and exhaled slowly, then sent a sidelong glance over my shoulder at Carlos. He was watching the woods beyond the field.
“Do you know who she is…I mean, who she really is?” I met both Re-gens’ eyes.
Camille wrote on her board, and when she showed her words to me, my heart seemed to plummet into my stomach. “Jason and Zoe’s mom.”
As I kept an eye on Carlos, I swiped my fingers over the words, doing a half-assed job of erasing them. At least they were no longer easily comprehensible. When I looked at Mase again, he nodded.
“How do you know?”
“She told me before I died,” Camille wrote. “She said she was sorry for her part in my mom getting sick and dying”—Camille snorted, and her letters became sharper—“not that she told me what her part was.” She met my eyes, and I could relate to the hatred shining in their silvery depths. “And she told me she did it to keep her kids, Zoe and Jason, safe.”
“And apparently because she’s in fucking love with General Douchebag,” I muttered.
Mase grunted.
I met both sets of eerily gray eyes again. “You can’t tell anyone.” I raised my eyebrows to emphasize how serious I was. “I mean it—no one.”
They both nodded, no hint of reluctance.
Inhaling deeply, I sighed. “Thanks for telling me. I needed to hear this…it’ll help me figure some stuff out.”
Mase nodded, and Camille’s lips curved into a humorless smile.
I rubbed my hands together and turned to Carlos. “Right, so…about electrotherapy…”
7
ZOE
MARCH 29, 1AE
San Juan National Forest, Colorado
“Whoops!” Sarah chirped.
Wringing out the last of the wet laundry I’d just scrubbed clean, I glanced over at her. With one hand braced on the slim trunk of a pine tree, Sarah began to slowly lower herself down to collect the t-shirt she’d dropped on the newly sprouted grass lining the retention pond’s bank.
“Sarah!” I jumped up from my crouched position at the pond’s shore, letting one of Harper’s shirts fall back into the water, and rushed over to her. “I’ll get it,” I said. I wiped the water trickling down my bare arms onto my pants and helped Sarah straighten back up before bending down to pick up the shirt myself.
After shaking the loose debris off, I draped the shirt beside the rest of the freshly-washed clothing that hung over a nylon rope we’d strung between two sturdy pines. “The last thing I need is you toppling over on my watch,” I said, only half joking.
Sarah flashed me a halfhearted smile. “Thanks, Zoe.” One of her hands automatically found her belly, while the other went back to straightening the clothes hanging on the line to dry in the early morning sunshine.
Returning to Harper’s
water-soaked shirt, I wrung it out once more and shook the wrinkles loose. “Here ya go,” I said, handing it up to Sarah with an insuppressible yawn. I’d been trying to ignore my encroaching sleepiness since I’d woken. “Sorry,” I said, shaking thoughts of sleep from my brain.
“Not sleeping well, Zoe?” Sarah asked as she draped Harper’s shirt over an exposed portion of the line.
I yawned again. “No, not really.”
Sarah glanced down at me, her brow furrowed. It was an uncommon expression for her. She was always so…bubbly. “Why not? Is everything okay?” She turned—more like hobbled—to face me. Her expression was intent as she brushed her hands off on her ankle-length skirt.
“I’m fine,” I said, waving her concern away. “I just had a…strange dream last night.” Leaning down to avoid eye contact, I collected the liquid soap and scrub brush I’d been using for the last hour. “I had a hard time falling back asleep is all.”
That wasn’t all, actually. Thinking about the dream had more than kept me up, and it had been smoldering in the back of my mind since the sun had come up.
“What sort of dream?” Sarah asked, her head cocked to the side as she rubbed her hands over her belly. She looked like a bohemian princess, with her dark curls falling messily around her face.
One vivid image after another from my dream flashed before my mind’s eye. I shrugged and rinsed my hands off in the creek, trying to avoid her seeing my beet-red face. “Just a random dream.”
Gathering my cleaning supplies, I dropped them into a canvas bag and looked up, freezing immediately.
Sarah’s hands were on her hips, her eyebrows raised as she waited for an explanation.
She obviously wasn’t going to let it go, so I cleared my throat. “I’ll tell you, but don’t…”
Out Of The Ashes (The Ending Series, #3) Page 7