The MORE Trilogy

by T. M. Franklin

  Ava’s face fell, a new round of tears sparkling in her eyes. “I do trust you. Please . . . please don’t think that.”

  “You know what else I remember from that day at the park?”

  “What?” she whispered.

  “I remember saying we’d face this together.” His voice caught, and he swallowed down a flood of emotion. “How can we do that if we’re not honest with each other?”

  “I—” She reached out, her fingers barely touching his, and her pain twisted with his own. Her sorrow and regret pulsed within his chest. “I’m so sorry, Caleb. I should have told you. I should have trusted you.”

  He pulled her close, wrapping his arms tightly around her as she sobbed against his chest, mumbling, “I’m sorry,” over and over again.

  He hushed her and pressed kisses into her hair. “It’s okay. It’s okay. We’ll figure it out.”

  “How?” she asked through her sniffles.

  But Caleb didn’t have an answer, so he just held her close until her crying stopped and the light faded around them.

  It was fully dark by the time Ava and Caleb emerged from the forest, hand in hand. She knew they hadn’t resolved everything, but at least they’d cleared the air. Ava had truly believed she was doing the right thing, protecting Caleb, but hadn’t fully realized how her actions, her lies, might affect him. When she’d found him in the woods, she felt the pain and betrayal pouring off him in waves.

  She hated that she’d been the one to put it there.

  Exhausted, they made their way to Caleb’s house. He’d paused briefly to text Tiernan and let him know they were calling it a night. She couldn’t blame him. The Protector was probably the only one who wouldn’t ask endless questions, and neither one of them was up for that at the moment. There was so much to do, but they’d need rest to face what lay ahead. And Ava needed this time with Caleb to try to repair the damage she’d done.

  They didn’t even make it to the bedroom, collapsing on Caleb’s sofa and falling into a dead sleep, wrapped up in a blanket and each other.

  Ava rose with the dawn and dragged Caleb with her. They cleaned up and headed for the Council Arena, stopping briefly along the way for coffee and breakfast sandwiches. Madeleine and Gideon met them in the Protection Bureau’s lab, a place Ava was quite familiar with after her own testing as a suspected Half-Breed. The Council leader and rebel Guardian stood stiffly on opposite sides of an exam table as the Race physician and his assistant bustled about readying their equipment.

  “Where’s Tiernan?” Caleb asked as he shrugged out of his coat and hung it on a hook by the door.

  “He and Andreas are debriefing Evan,” Madeleine replied, “as well as trying to get a better read on Sophie and Isaiah’s location.” At his questioning look, she added, “No luck yet.”

  “Ms. Michaels?” The doctor smiled, and she realized it was the same man who had conducted some of her other tests. “Are you ready to get started?”

  “I didn’t realize we’d have an audience.”

  “We won’t be doing or discussing anything too personal,” he replied. “But if you’d prefer—” He gestured as though he was going to open the door and usher everybody out, but Ava waved a hand in dismissal.

  “No, it’s fine,” she said as she slipped off her coat and hopped up on the table. “What’s the plan?”

  He rolled over a low cart carrying some kind of scanner and pulled a small tool out of a clip on the side. When Ava flinched, he held it up so she could examine it. “It’s noninvasive,” he assured her.

  She laughed. “Well, that’s good. I’d rather not have my head dissected.”

  “No, nothing like that. I just need to touch it to your forehead,” he murmured, running the cool metal across her skin as he adjusted some dials.

  Ava gasped as a three-dimensional rendering of her brain appeared in the air above the scanner. “We didn’t do that before.”

  The doctor grinned. “Well, not where you could see it anyway.” He fiddled with the knobs some more and the green and blue lines came into sharper focus.

  “What exactly are you looking for?” Ava asked.

  He held up a finger and pressed another button.

  A second brain appeared next to Ava’s, but where the outlines and definition on hers were clear and precise, the second brain appeared almost blurry in places.

  “This is your brain,” he said, pointing to Ava’s, then the second one. “This is your brain on a psychic block.” He laughed but sobered when he saw nobody else joined in. The doctor cleared his throat as he focused back on the images. “This is a rendering of Evan Davis’ brain,” he explained, as he picked up a pen and started to point out the blurry sections. “These areas, I believe, are where the psychic block remains intact.”

  “Wow,” Ava murmured. “I pictured it like more of—I don’t know—a wall, I guess?”

  “That’s understandable,” he replied. “But it’s actually more of a dampening field, for lack of a better term. It muffles the gifts, like stuffing cotton in your ears. Much stronger, of course.”

  “So can you lift it?” Madeleine asked, stepping forward to examine Evan’s rendering a little more closely.

  “I believe so,” the doctor replied. “As you can see, there are areas where it’s already weakened, others where it’s collapsed completely. I’m not certain if that’s a flaw or by design. It’s possible Borré, or whoever actually put the blocks in place, always intended them to remain intact for a limited time.”

  “That makes sense,” Caleb mused. “If what we suspect is true, and the removal of the block instills these symptoms that only Borré can alleviate—”

  “It follows that the blocks are designed to fail, eventually,” the doctor said, “forcing the patient to return to him. It’s like calling his children home. Rather ingenious”—he caught Ava’s black look—“in a sociopathic madman kind of way, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  Flustered, the doctor reached into a drawer and withdrew a syringe. “If I might take a blood sample?”

  Ava held out her arm and looked away as he drew the blood.

  He squeezed a few drops into another machine and tapped at the screen for a few minutes, eyes glued to the output until he nodded emphatically. “It’s as we thought.”

  “What is?” Ava jumped down off the table and joined the little group as they clustered around the computer screen. She recognized the double helix formation of DNA, slowly rotating on the screen. Four actually, lined up side by side.

  “This is yours,” the doctor replied, pointing to the first image. “These are Sophie’s, Isaiah’s, and Evan’s. As we expected, the common DNA markers indicate you are all siblings. Of course, Isaiah and Sophie show more commonalities since they share a mother as well as a father. These pairs”—he pointed to the bottom of the spiral—“are what we look for in verifying Half-Breeds. In this case, they indicate full Race blood, as you know. But the composition of this pair”—he pointed to the center of Sophie’s double-helix—“is common to all four of you, but not to other Race.” He faced Ava, watching and apparently waiting for that to sink in.

  “Are you saying,” Ava said slowly, “that that’s what makes us the Twelve?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying,” he replied. “But there’s more.” He tapped at the screen and it fluctuated, morphing into four horizontal rows consisting of dotted lines with dots and dashes of varying widths. “Look at this,” he said, running the tip of a pen down the rows. “You see this gap here?”

  Ava looked closer, and sure enough, there was an identical gap in each of the four rows. “What does that mean?”

  He tapped his pen on the screen once as he spoke. “I think this is what’s causing your symptoms. I believe lowering the block itself isn’t the problem, but when your Race gifts are released, so is this.”

  Ava swallowed, feeling lightheaded. “And what exactly is ‘this’? What does it do?”

  “Essentially, it�
�s a timer,” he said.

  “Timer? What’s that supposed to mean?” Caleb asked.

  “It means he’s put us on a countdown,” Ava said numbly. “That’s why the symptoms have been getting worse.”

  “A countdown? To what?”

  Ava feared she already knew, but she looked to the doctor for confirmation. For condemnation.

  “I’m afraid the deterioration is cumulative,” he said quietly. “If it’s not stopped—”

  “I’ll die.”

  “Eventually, yes.”

  “Well, you have to do something.” Caleb said, fists clenched at his sides. “Surely there’s a treatment.”

  “I can help alleviate the symptoms, slow the advance, as I believe the Guardian healer has been doing,” the doctor replied. “We’ll continue searching for an answer, of course.”

  “Of course we will,” Madeleine said briskly. “I want your best on this, Doctor.”

  “Yes. That goes without saying,” he replied. “But I have to warn you. Without knowing exactly how Borré created this, it could take us months, years even, to find an answer.”

  Ava nodded, numb and out of tears. “And that will be too late, won’t it?”

  “At the rate your symptoms are advancing, I’m afraid so.”

  Caleb took her hand and squeezed it, gentle but firm. “It won’t come to that,” he said.

  Ava took a deep breath. “Well, there’s no use focusing on that right now, is there?” she asked. “You’ll keep looking for an answer—not only for me, but for Sophie and the others as well. They don’t have any symptoms yet, but if what you’re saying is right, it’s only a matter of time.” Her voice caught.

  “Ava—”

  “I’m fine, Caleb,” she said. Realizing how short she sounded, she turned and placed her palm along his cheek as she looked into his troubled eyes. “I promise you, this is not really news to me. I’ve kind of suspected it all along. But there’s nothing to be done right now other than what we’re already doing.”

  He held her gaze for a long moment then leaned in to kiss her softly. “All right.”

  “What about tracking the other Twelve?” she asked, breaking the tension in the room.

  “Well, at least there I have some good news,” he said. “It will be simple enough to cross-check our medical database for the Twelve markers. It’ll take some time, but it’s definitely possible.”

  Madeleine cleared her throat, and Ava thought she spotted a sparkle of tears in the woman’s eyes. “Bring everyone in,” she said briskly. “I want teams working around the clock, both on finding the Twelve, and finding a treatment for them once we do. Work with Kwon and Andreas to coordinate. I want—” Her cell phone buzzed, drawing a soft curse, and she excused herself to leave the room and answer the phone.

  They’d just resumed examining the medical data when she burst back in.

  “Ava, I think you need to come with me,” she said.

  “What is it?” Caleb asked, taking her hand as they left the room with Gideon trailing after them.

  “Katherine’s here.”

  “Katherine?” Ava quickened her steps as they walked through the surveillance room and down a hall. “What does that have to do with me?”

  “She’s not alone,” Madeleine replied as she unlocked the door to a small conference room and held it open.

  Sure enough, Katherine stood inside, and next to her, a familiar figure—tall, blond, and beautiful. It took Ava a moment to reconcile seeing someone from her old life in this strange part of her new one.

  “Lucy?”

  “Ava!” Her voice broke as she raced forward to grab her in a tight hug. “Are you all right?”

  “W-what are you doing here?” Ava turned wide eyes on Katherine.

  The Protector threw up her hands. “She came to me and said she had to find you. That it was an emergency.”

  “You told me,” Lucy said, “if anything strange happened. If I needed help, I should find her.”

  “Lucy, what’s happened?” Panic kicked up her pulse as Ava gripped her friend’s shoulders. “What’s going on?”

  “It’s your parents, Ava,” she said, gasping through tears. “They’ve been kidnapped.”

  Ava felt her knees buckle, and the floor rose to meet her, cold and hard against her palms as she tried to hold on, her nails scraping on the tile. She was hazily aware of things breaking around her—glass cracking, chairs toppling—although she couldn’t be sure with the panic coursing through her.

  “Ava, breathe. Please . . . you’ve got to calm down. Breathe.”

  Am I not breathing?

  No, there was no air. She couldn’t draw any in. Something was tightening around her chest, holding her tight.

  “Come on, Ava,” a voice called to her from a distance, warm fingers trailing down her face. “You have to breathe. Listen to the sound of my voice.”

  She blinked, the fuzzy colors before her gaining clarity, forming a familiar face. “Caleb?”

  “That’s right. Now, breathe with me. Come on, you can do it. Nice and slow. In . . . and out.”

  She matched her breaths to his, slow and steady, in and out, and the blackness at the edge of her vision withdrew as her gift settled. She lifted a trembling hand to lay it over his on her face, seeking his warmth, his power flowing through her to ease her pain. “Caleb?”

  “It’s all right. We’re going to find them. They’re going to be fine.”

  She nodded and took another shaky breath, then another, until she felt steady enough to get to her feet. She noticed the shards of glass and broken furniture littering the floor. “Sorry,” she whispered.

  To her surprise, Madeleine ran a soothing hand down her arm. “Nothing to apologize for.”

  “Ava?” Lucy’s eyes were wide, shocked. “What the hell is going on?”

  “I’ll explain it all, I promise,” Ava said, crossing the room to take her friend’s hands. “But I need to know what happened to my parents. Please, Luce. Just tell me what happened.”

  She nodded slowly. “A girl came to me and said I had to bring you a message,” she said. “I told her I didn’t know where you were, but she said I’d have to find a way. She seemed to know that I could find you. I don’t know how she knew when I didn’t even know . . .”

  Ava’s hands grew cold and clammy, the edges of panic tingling in her stomach again.

  “She made me memorize it. Said she had your parents and that if you wanted them back, you had to meet her ‘where you almost met your potential.’ She said I had to get that part exactly right—‘where you almost met your potential.’ What does that even mean, Ava?”

  Her voice drifted away, coming to Ava through a tunnel.

  “This girl, did she tell you her name?” Ava asked. Her vision was fading again, growing dark and hazy around the edges.

  She heard a quiet, “Emma” before a loud crash and a shout, and everything went black.

  Chapter 11

  The sun shone bright white against the clear, pale blue sky, but Elias Borré saw none of it. His mind moved a mile a minute, as it always did, and plans formed and reformed like Play-Doh in the hands of a three-year-old.

  A three-year-old genius.

  Elias lifted his lips in amusement. “Are our guests settling in to their new accommodations?” he asked quietly, not turning away from the window.

  “Yes, Father,” Emma replied. “Mr. and Mrs. Michaels seem to be quite comfortable.”

  “Excellent.” He stroked his chin and frowned at the prickle of a whisker he missed while shaving. “They are to be treated well, Emma. They cared for your sister and kept her safe and protected. That should be rewarded.”

  “Yes, Father.”

  He hummed then turned from the window to face her. “How did it go with the roommate?”

  Emma smiled hesitantly. “She tried to tell me she couldn’t reach Ava, but I knew she was lying. I barely had to push her at all, and she left with Katherine for New Elysia. It all went
exactly as you predicted, Father.”

  He crossed to her and ran a hand over her hair. “Well done, daughter.”

  Emma preened under his praise, arching into the touch like a cat. “Thank you.” She glanced up at him and swallowed. “I think . . . I mean, if you approve, of course, that it would be better if I met with Ava alone.” When his eyes narrowed, she hastened to add, “She’s sure to be upset. Perhaps she’d find me less threatening?”

  “Are you certain you can handle that?” he asked. “Your sister’s powers are formidable.”

  Emma stiffened. “I can calm her down. Reason with her.”

  “Really? After what happened at the Colony?”

  “Please, Father, I can do it. Let me try. I promise. I can do this.”

  “Don’t grovel, Emma. It’s beneath you,” he said, his fingers tightening on her scalp briefly.

  He’d always intended to let her go alone, of course. It was time for her to try to rebuild the relationship she’d destroyed with Ava. Emma would become an ally, someone Ava could trust. It had been his plan all along, before Emma had acted on her own and set things back.

  “Father?” Emma said weakly, and he looked down to see her face contorted in pain.

  Ah, well.

  He hadn’t done it intentionally, but it probably couldn’t hurt to drive the point home a little more before he sent her on her way. He pulled back his gift and her features eased. He leaned down and pressed a kiss to the top of her head. “You’ll go alone,” he said quietly. “And you’ll do exactly as you’re told. Right, daughter?”

  “Yes, Father. You know I will.”

  “It will be difficult to gain her trust again. Are you certain you’re up to the challenge?”

  “I am,” she said quickly. “I can do it.”

  He nodded and patted her cheek. “Remember, use your gift only as a last resort. She can sense it now.”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “Building trust takes time, and a common enemy always helps. Do you understand what I’m saying, Emma?”

  She looked up at him, eyes wide—pale green and black.