Steel Lily ARC
Page 13
The thought made my stomach hurt. What if it was all a ruse? Was that really my mother? Maybe I wanted them so bad that I was willing to trick myself into believing something that wasn’t real.
Maybe they were a hologram, just like outside the walls of the Academy.
My hand rustled through my pocket and found the thin plastic key card. With a swipe, the scanner beeped and beckoned me into the room.
Alice, Sari, and two boys I hadn’t seen before sat in the living room. Alice waved me over to them. “Took you long enough to get here! We’ve got company.”
The first boy had buzzed black hair and eyes so dark they were almost black, too. He wore a sleeveless blue shirt that showed off his sunburned, muscular arms. He rested his hands behind his head and the muscles in his arms rippled in effect. Alice couldn’t take her eyes off him.
“This is Will,” she said, then pointed to the other boy, “and that’s Chase.”
Chase was Will’s opposite. His platinum blonde hair was long and almost white. It was pulled back into a low ponytail at the base of his head, and I was jealous of how smooth it was. My frizzy hair would never lay flat. His eyes were green and his slender face was cheery.
“Hi there,” he said, with a hint of an accent. “We came to see the newcomers. Some day, huh?”
“Yeah, some day,” I waved half-heartedly. “Look, Alice, I need to turn in.”
Alice nodded. “No problem, we’ll keep these guys entertained, won’t we Sari?”
Sari smiled and stood. “We can do that,” She walked my way and turned to Alice. “We need you for a second, though. Do you mind, guys? Call of nature and what not.”
Will laughed. “Why do girls always go to the bathroom in packs? It’s not like anything is going to attack you in there.”
“But you never know when you might have toilet paper stuck to your shoe,” Alice said reasonably, “or worse, tucked in the back of your pants. Or what if it’s that time of the month and—”
Will waved his hand. “Stop. Stop right there. No more information needed.”
Sari and I laughed, and Alice seemed proud of herself. Alice shut the door behind her as we filed into the cavernous bathroom. “I hope you two have a really good reason for me to ruin my chances with Will. Female talk always makes guys stop the conversation, and it’ll be a miracle if I can get it back on track.”
“Will’s forgiving; he’ll put the conversation back on track for you,” Sari said. “And it’ll be a fast track, if you get where I’m going.”
Alice blushed.
Sari walked quickly over to the shower. She turned both showerheads on full blast and immediately the room began to fog. “You can never be too careful,” she said, “Cameras are everywhere, so we make it as hard as possible for Riggs to know what we’re talking about. Now tell me what happened.”
Riggs’s words echoed in my mind. “Riggs told me I’d made a rookie mistake by looking at the cameras.”
Sari’s eyes widened. “Did he see us?”
“No, I looked at them later. I didn’t think he noticed, but he called me on it as I left.”
Alice sat down on the floor, cross-legged, and put her hands on her chin. It reminded me of all the times she’d asked me for gossip in Dome Four. “Tell us everything.”
As I filled them in, their eyes widened and narrowed, brightened and darkened according to where I was in the story. They were a loyal, captive audience. When I finished, Sari let out a low growl. “Riggs has your parents here? Where was I on that one? I’m losing my touch.”
I looked at her, stupefied. She smiled and hugged me tightly. “I got recruited to be part of this merry band of miscreants because I got myself into trouble in my dome for knowing too much.”
“What’d you do?”
“I got information. Lots of it. On people who would rather not have their information out there.” She smiled mischievously. “I’m good with computers. Too good. When I started blackmailing people in Dome Nine, my parents had had enough. They called a juvenile detention center. I got kicked out of there when someone let me get a hold of a computer, and I pulled every skeleton out of the closet that I could find on that place. Suddenly they didn’t want me around.” Her laugh was light, as though she was remembering a fond memory.
“So you’re a spy? And where’s Dome Nine?”
“Sort of, but not the kind that sneaks around. I’m a hacker. I can find anyone, anywhere, at any time. I’m the eyes and ears of this place. I dig around in people’s lives to find out what they’re hiding, and Riggs uses it against other domes. That’s how he keeps them from bombing this place with everything they’ve got. And Dome Nine, by the way, is in what’s left of Florida. Have you heard of it? I can show you a map.” She put her hand on my knee, concern etched in the words she spoke. “What happened with your family, anyway? Why are you here? You don’t seem to be the type to be overly delinquent.”
“I wasn’t. I stood out and Riggs noticed.”
“So what’s your gift? Mind reading? Shooting lasers out of your fingers?”
“She was the most powerful steam Elementalist in Dome Four.” Alice chirped, excited to put her two cents into the conversation.
I sighed. “Riggs thinks I can do more than that. He thinks I can create elements.”
Sari eyed me carefully. “Can you?”
“I’d never tried before today.”
“And it didn’t go well?”
The hard pounding behind my ears reminded me of how it went. “Not at all. I ended up giving myself a migraine.”
Sari scrunched her face. “Seems odd he’d assume you could do that.” She pointed to three fat candles sitting on the stairs by the whirlpool. “Can you make those light up?”
“Maybe. I couldn’t earlier today.”
“Have you ever done anything elemental like that? Ever?”
My thoughts trailed back to two days ago in class when I’d made my blob of a teapot cool. “Actually, yeah, the day Riggs came to the dome.”
Sari’s eyes widened. “What’d you do?”
“Cooled a blob of steel. I didn’t know that’s what I was doing. Creating, I mean.”
Sari laughed. “Well, do whatever it was you did then, I guess. It can’t hurt to try.”
I focused on the candles and thought of the warm fire in the library. The way the flames danced. The way the fire consumed everything in its path.
All of a sudden it felt like my body was on fire.
I crumpled to the floor in pain. It was like a fire was lit in my stomach, then coursed through my limbs. My head felt like it was about to explode. I bit down on my bottom lip to stop from screaming.
Sari and Alice were at my side in an instant. Alice grabbed my hand. “Avery! Oh my God, Avery! Stop!”
“I — I don’t know how! It feels like I’m on fire!”
“Then think of water!”
As if on cue, the flames that licked my insides were gone the moment I thought of water. I uncurled my limbs and laid flat on my back. A small sheen of sweat covered my brow, and I felt clammy.
Sari was as pale as a ghost. “Oh my God, Avery. I’m so sorry. What happened?”
I willed myself to bring the world around me back into focus. “I don’t know.”
“Never do that again,” Alice said fervently. “Promise me you’ll never try that again.”
“I have to,” I said as I pulled myself into a sitting position. “That’s how I’ll see my parents.”
Sari’s brow furrowed in concern. “It’s a bad idea to trust anyone here, Avery. Especially anything that Riggs has promised you. What I found out today…”
I grasped the opportunity to turn the conversation in a different direction. “What’d you find out?”
She sat down by the candles I tried to light and twisted the wicks between her fingers. “You were gone and Alice was flirting with the guys, so I poked around with some encrypted files I haven’t been able to crack. I managed to get into one.”
“So what are you saying? That this Academy is like a military boarding school for the Resistance? The war is over, Sari.”
Her face was somber. “Do you really think the war is over after today? Don’t be that naïve, Avery. The war’s never been over. This place…I bet it’s ground zero for the Resistance. They want us to be their army. They still want to have one government.”
“You can’t know that for sure.”
“All the information makes me think it’s true,” she argued. “You tell me why Riggs would be combing the domes for people with abilities and bringing them back here. Building up defenses to keep people out. Having cameras all over the place to keep tabs on us.”
“I don’t get it,” Alice said, shaking her head. “Mr. Riggs seems nice to me.”
Sari sighed. “There are times that Riggs is nice, but he comes off like a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to me. Some days he treats us like family, and others he acts like we’re dogs. I can’t figure out what changes his moods. I need to find the cause.”
“And since I’m Traditional,” Alice piped, “it means I have plenty of time to poke around in places I shouldn’t be.” She smiled brightly. “It’ll be like being home again!”
I shook my head at the thought of Alice’s gossip hounding. “He seemed perfectly fine this evening, except for the whole perform-for-parental-information bit he pulled. I wonder if he’s crazy?”
“No one could be that crazy and run an Academy like this. The weapons he has in place to keep people out…” Sari shuddered.
“Are they his weapons? Do you know he made them?”
“He had me program them.”
I nodded. No matter what Riggs had been in the past, his allegiances laid firmly on the side of the Resistance now.
“Avery, you need your rest. Go get some sleep. Alice, go fix your transgressions with Will.” Sari said with a smile as she stood and turned off the showers. In the time we’d been in here, fog had covered the mirrors and filled the room. The boys probably wondered if we had disappeared.
Alice groaned. “I don’t know if I want the track to be fixed if Will’s that kind of guy.”
“You were all for flirting with him,” Sari said dubiously. “What, all talk and no action?”
I laughed. “Alice enjoys the chase. You’ve ruined her plans.”
“Witchy woman,” Sari teased.
Alice turned and raised clawed fingers with a smile. “And don’t you forget it!”
Sari went into maternal mode and led me to my room. She fixed the duvet on my bed, turned down the sheets, and went to fluff the pillow as she winked at me. “It’s been forever since someone showed up I actually liked talking to. Thanks for not being weird.”
I laughed. “That’s my goal every morning. Make it through the day without being too weird.”
She returned to her work and let out a little gasp of surprise. When she pulled her hand out from under the pillow, a necklace was in her hand, accompanied by a folded note. “Did you put this here?”
“No, I haven’t been in here since this morning.”
“Huh,” was all she said. She passed me the note but examined the necklace. “This is gorgeous, Avery.”
I turned the parchment over in my hands. It ancient feeling, almost like papyrus. I unfolded the note to find an elegant script and a simple, one-sentence message.
I thought this would remind you of home.
Sari held out her hand expectantly and swapped items with me. She was right; the necklace was gorgeous.
The thin black corded leather and silver clasps were simple. It was the pendant that made the necklace extraordinary. Nestled between golden glass beads sat the insides of an old watch. Its gears and cogs ticking perfectly to time, I watched them move. Tick, tick, tick. The top layer of larger cogs were silver, but underneath lay smaller brass and copper counterparts. It was held together by metal wire that had been smelted into place.
I trembled as I looked at the piece of jewelry. My father had worn a timepiece that I kept on my dresser back home. The comforting tick always made it easier to go to bed. My eyes filled with tears.
I turned the pendant over and my stomach lurched. The carved initials of my father, J.P., were etched into the back of the golden watch. This was my father’s watch.
It was beautiful.
It terrified me.
I hadn’t brought this with me. Someone had been in my home. Someone here. I could think of only two people. Riggs and Jaxon. Neither struck me as the type of people to give a gift simply for the sake of being nice.
“Who do you think it’s from?” I asked Sari as she folded the piece of paper back to its original state.
“I’m not sure,” she said. “But whoever it was must be very interested in getting on your good side, and I don’t know if that’s a good or a bad thing.”
Feeling the weight of the timepiece in my hand gave me hope. Having a tangible reminder of home made me feel better about being in Dome Three, even if the person giving the gift might be Riggs. The cogs also reminded me of something that occurred to me when I saw Riggs’s mechanical arm sitting stationary in the library.
I stood up quickly and swayed from the rush of blood to my head.
Sari was standing beside me the next instant. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“You said you controlled the cameras,” I said as I thought through my idea.
“Yeah, so?”
“So would you be able to keep me off the radar if I went to check on Legs?”
“I could manage that. Stick to the shadows to make it easier on me.”
“Easy enough.”
Sari shook her head. “You’d think so, but Riggs never makes anything easy. Get there and get back before anything bad happens.”
She made it sound like it was a matter of when something bad happened, not if.
Always reassuring.
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
Sari talked to me as I dug in my closet for dark-colored clothing. I felt like we were planning a burglary, not a visit to Legs. “I wouldn’t tell Alice. Not about this.”
I glanced back at her, surprised. “Why? I tell her everything.”
“Because some people are better off not being liable. The less she knows, the less she can get in trouble for if things go south.”
I digested her words. “A lot of your information is guesswork. Sure, you think Riggs has Resistance beliefs, but you also said he was part of the Alliance at one point. And Alice won’t let a guy change her, no matter what,” I added defensively. Alice would never betray me; that I was sure of. “Maybe Riggs is misunderstood, you know?”
“Would you consider blowing your friend’s arm off misunderstood?”
I flinched at the reminder of Legs. He had gotten himself in so much trouble because of me. I turned to leave to check on him, but Sari put a hand on my shoulder. “Look, Riggs isn’t necessarily all bad. What I know is that the guy is a zealot for what he believes in.”
“And what is it that he believes in?”
“I haven’t gotten into all the files yet, but from what I’ve found, I think he believes that the Resistance—the ones that caused the war, that caused us to live like this—” she gestured out the dark skylight to the fake twinkling stars in the sky, “should rise again.”
A visceral shudder ran through my body. I rubbed my upper arms to keep the goose bumps at bay. “I don’t know much about the war,” I admitted, “Our history class started d
iscussing it the day Jaxon came for me. Do you know what happened?”
Sari looked as though she was warring with herself.
I waved my hand. “You don’t have to tell me anything if you’re uncomfortable.”
“You deserve to know,” she said with a fierceness that I hadn’t seen before. She took a breath and started again. “You deserve to know. Most of the histories are in the library in the restricted area. Riggs allows us to read them for courses, but he never sides with either agenda in public. In private, though…” she trailed off.
“In private he’s an asshat,” finished Jaxon, who stood in the doorway, his hands balled into fists. The vein on the side of his head was visible and his jaw was clenched. If he bit down any harder, I was afraid he’d break his teeth. “And that would be why allowing him to corral the best and brightest together in this little ant farm could make things very, very bad. He’s a man with power, means, and an agenda. Now come on, I’ll take you to go see your homicidal friend.”
***
The glow of the gaslights threw shadows in front of us as we slunk down the hall, careful to stay in the dark.
Inside, I was seething. Jaxon had no right to eavesdrop on my personal conversations. “How long were you listening to Sari and me?”
“Long enough to hear you wanted to go see Legs, so we’re going to see him. Now be quiet.” Jaxon said in a bored tone as he reached inside a niche and found the cord for the electric candles. He yanked it and threw the hallway into darkness. A moment later he intertwined his fingers with mine in the darkened corridor.
Electricity sizzled in my fingertips where I touched his smooth skin. Why was he holding my hand? Why was I allowing him to? I followed him in the darkness and hoped we wouldn’t run into a wall, all the while wishing the darkness would go on a little longer. He kept running his thumb along the back of mine, and it gave me butterflies.
Damn it, if he wasn’t such an ass, I might have been willing to admit I liked him.