The Bloom Series Box Set: Bloom & Fade

by A. P. Kensey

  “Wait,” said Colton weakly. “Don’t go.” He reached out but their blurry figures faded away into the brightening sunlight.

  Colton closed his eyes and tried not to think about the pain that covered his entire body. Far above, through the hole in the side of the building, Haven screamed.

  41

  A section of the floor fell away beneath Haven’s feet as she jumped to the side. The edges of the hole glowed with white plasma.

  Alistair cackled from across the room.

  Haven was trying to keep the pillars between them as she moved closer to the machine. Her only hope was that Alistair would bring the whole place to the ground before he realized what was happening.

  “You’re alone!” he shouted. “What a noble sacrifice you’ve made! Pointless, but noble. Even if your friends survived the fall, I’ll find them.”

  Haven ran from one pillar to the next and caught a quick glimpse of Alistair. His eyes glowed solid white. Wavy, ghost-like strands of energy floated up from his body like the tentacles of an upside-down jellyfish.

  “Your little brother was the key,” he said. “Did you know that?”

  Haven pictured Noah in the chair at the medical center. She remembered the scar on his small chest.

  “Very strong, your brother,” continued Alistair. “At least he will be some day. Normally Bernam couldn’t find anyone until they were at least your age, but little Noah was different. If only Bernam could have sensed you as well, we could’ve gotten two for one!”

  He laughed and shot a beam of energy through the pillar behind Haven. It crumbled to the floor as she ran to the next one.

  The ceiling above her head groaned and cracked. A small piece of black tile fell to the floor and shattered.

  “Ah, I see,” said Alistair. “Very clever. It was Bernam’s stupid idea to leave these floors open like this. I much prefer a smaller, cozier place.”

  Haven looked at the machine.

  Most of the metal boxes that fed the tubes were similar—polished chrome with no decoration. There was one piece of equipment in the back that was different. Small wires ran out of the wall and connected to the outside of that particular piece. It was a lot less polished than the rest of the machine—more utilitarian in nature.

  Haven made that her target and hoped she could project her energy more than a few feet.

  She forced herself to picture the blue sphere of plasma in the vast field of nothing. She channeled the energy to her core and down to her hands. Warmth flowed over her entire body and silent blue flames skittered across her arms. Floating in the air on either side of her were the tips of her energy wings—they fanned out from her back and lit up the entire room.

  Haven stepped out from behind the pillar and held up her hand toward the piece of machinery near the wall. Blue plasma spiraled from her hand and smacked into the wall, above her mark. She dropped her aim and hit the target, moving the stream of energy over the machine until the blue light faded from her vision and she breathed out, exhausted. Her energy wings slowly receded into her back and disappeared.

  The machine groaned and one of the tubes burst, sending a steady stream of gas into the air.

  Alistair looked at Haven and whistled in appreciation.

  “Now that was impressive,” he said. “You don’t see wings like that every day.” He walked to the middle of the room and inspected the machine thoughtfully. Then he shrugged. “Well, you tried. Mind if I help?” Thick streams of white plasma shot from his palms and melted a piece machinery next to the one Haven had targeted. The tubes connecting that piece to the rest of the machine exploded in a chain reaction that consumed half the room. Fire licked up the walls and crawled across the ceiling. “There we are,” said Alistair. “Can’t have just anybody popping in to use it, now can we?” He walked forward slowly, with his hands slightly raised to show that he meant no harm. “I don’t suppose you’d be interested in joining me?” he asked. “I’m really going places.”

  The blue energy flared up around her.

  He cocked his head to the side and the ghost-like tendrils floating up from his body shot across the room and burrowed into Haven’s skin.

  “No,” he said. “I thought not. Pity.”

  The tendrils lifted her from the ground and spun her in the air slowly. She screamed as the burning strands moved over her skin.

  Alistair walked in a wide circle around her, tapping on his chin thoughtfully. More strands of energy grew from his skin and extended toward Haven and burrowed into her body.

  “You know,” he said, “I might be able to make you obey me. There’s really no way to know my limits until I test them. The brain is controlled by electrical impulses, after all. That’s what makes it so easy to shut off. Who knows? Maybe mind control isn’t so far-fetched. You can be my first test subject.” He grinned. “What do you say?”

  The piece of equipment at the back of the machine squealed and split down the side. Blue and white light flowed over the tubes and crackled against the outsides of the metal boxes. One of the boxes exploded, sending jagged pieces of thin metal in all directions.

  The explosion rocked the entire building and the tendrils of white energy coming out of Alistair quickly pulled back into his skin. Haven smacked into the floor and rolled behind a fallen pillar just as another box exploded.

  A piece of metal shaped like a saw blade spun through the air and slammed into Alistair’s chest.

  He looked down at the protruding blade in confusion and stumbled backward on his feet.

  Haven ran for the big hole in the wall, and for the sunlight beyond.

  Alistair screamed.

  His body was consumed in white energy. It exploded outward like a series of pulsing underwater detonations—spheres of burning light shot out from his core and stopped, only to be overtaken by a larger, more powerful barrier of white plasma.

  The roof collapsed behind Haven as she ran toward the wall. Chunks of concrete crashed all around her as she passed crumbling pillars.

  She felt the heat on her back—felt it burning into her skin.

  She looked behind her as she ran. Alistair stood in front of the machine, arms outstretched, head cast upward in a perpetual scream. His body was a black silhouette in a piercing center of white light.

  The machine exploded.

  Fire blossomed out from the base of the platform and swallowed Alistair’s body. Before he disappeared into the flames, he lowered his head and looked directly at Haven, his eyes burning pools of white light.

  Haven reached the hole in the wall and jumped.

  The barrier of white plasma slammed into her back and pushed her far out over the parking lot. She spun head over heels, catching glimpses of the orange sky, the black asphalt, and the collapsing building.

  Soon all she saw was the desert rushing up to her face.

  At the last second, someone dove to the ground beneath her.

  It was Dormer.

  She stopped falling an inch away from his body and hung in the air. He moved to the side and she fell lightly into his outstretched arms.

  Dormer helped her up and dusted off her shoulders. He smiled.

  “We were just coming up to get you,” he said. “You made it.”

  “So did you.” She coughed again. Her throat was bone dry—it felt like she could drink a gallon of water.

  An explosion of flame belched out of the building through the hole in the sixth floor. The fire crawled up toward the roof, shattering every window along its path.

  “You found your brother?” asked Haven.

  Dormer nodded. “He’ll be fine after a while. He’s with the other patients at the medical facility. Most of them are still asleep.”

  “What will happen to them?”

  “Hopefully Micah cleared some space at The Dome. They can stay with us as long as they’d like, but I expect most will want to get back to their lives. We can talk more about that later. Right now someone wants to see you.”

  He led H
aven to the parking lot, where a group of people were gathered. Colton stood a few feet away, watching the black building collapse on itself. He winced in pain and touched the side of his ribcage. Marius and Corva sat on the ground next to each other, smiling up at the setting sun. Their wounds were healed over but dark bruises still covered much of their arms and faces.

  “I’ll get them fixed up properly back at the Grove,” said Dormer. “Ah, here we are.”

  Haven turned as her little brother jumped into her arms.

  “Noah!” she said. She closed her eyes and hugged him harder than she ever had before.

  He leaned back and kissed her on the nose, then rested his head on her shoulder. Haven smiled as tears rolled down her cheeks.

  “He’s strong,” said Dormer. “But it will take a while to fully heal.”

  “Thank you,” whispered Haven. “Thank you for keeping him safe.”

  Dormer smiled and walked away. He knelt down next to Marius and tried to inspect his healed wounds, but Marius half-heartedly swatted him away.

  Haven stood next to Colton as a big piece of the roof collapsed down through the top few floors of the building. It slipped over the wall and fell onto the parking lot with a loud crunch. The ground shook as a huge explosion blew out every remaining window, sending a million shards of glass spinning into the air. Bright rays from the setting sun glinted off the glass, turning it into a falling sheet of glimmering light.

  A bigger burst of orange flames erupted through the hole in the sixth floor and consumed the top half of the building.

  “What happened to your friend?” asked Haven. She rubbed Noah’s back as the building burned.

  “He’s gone,” said Colton.

  “With the girl?”

  He nodded. “He never really had a chance. He just…he just grabbed at the first thing that he thought would make him special.”

  “We all do that in our own way.”

  Colton shook his head. “We lost so much.”

  Haven looked into his eyes and smiled. “We’ll get it back.”

  She kissed Noah’s forehead and turned away from the building to join the others.

  EPILOGUE

  Night fell on the desert, bringing with it a sudden chill that cooled the hissing ruins of the black building. The structure had completely collapsed into itself and sunk partially into the ground. Smoke rose from a shallow crater lined with the protruding edges of blackened steel crossbeams.

  The parking lot surrounding the building was charred all the way to its edges. The fire had burned so hot that the sand near the asphalt turned to glass.

  With a loud scrape of steel on steel, one of the crossbeams jutting up from the ruins shifted to the side. The chunk of roofing it had been supporting fell deeper into the crater and cracked in half over a giant chrome sphere—one of many from the training room that dotted the remains of the building.

  From a shadowed spot next to the base of the shifting crossbeam, a burnt hand reached up toward the sky. Cloth had melted into the skin of the arm and fused with crisp, red-black flesh.

  Alistair’s hand gripped the crossbeam and he pulled himself up from the ruins.

  He screamed to the night sky, his breath fogging out in a slow cloud. He reached up to touch his face—the skin over his cheeks felt like thin paper and sizzled under his fingertips.

  His hair was gone—his scalp peeled away to reveal his blackened skull. He let out a small whimper as he stood next to the fallen building and looked down at his charred body.

  Alistair’s whimper turned to quiet sobbing as he nurtured the violent thoughts in his mind—he turned them over and over again until they gave him strength. White light flickered in the cracks of his burnt skin and his eyes glowed brighter until they became two brilliant white stars in a sea of night.

  His sobbing made the slow turn to insane laughter—it started as a weak cough, then became a mischievous chuckle that shook his body with every sound, and at last built to a deep, cackling rumble of laughter that echoed across the desert.

  Alistair moved away into the night to become one more shadow in a world filled with darkness. His mind was consumed by a single desire.

  Revenge.

  DEDICATION

  For the Teachers.

  Thank you.

  PROLOGUE

  High above the churning waters on the coast of Greece were the ruins of a temple dedicated to the many gods of the old world. Its wide, flat foundation was carved into the rock—a flat slab chiseled out of the towering cliff overlooking the Aegean Sea. There was a time when countless priests and acolytes made the long journey from ancient Thessaly to visit the sacred temple and pay homage to their gods.

  That time had long past, and now only crumbled pillars and a few weather-worn statues remained to remind the temple’s sole occupant how all things diminished with time.

  The temple was at the tip of a sharp outcropping of rock—a knife that jutted out from the mainland toward the heart of the Aegean. Its roof was level with the grass shelf on top of the cliff and melded seamlessly with the field overlooking the sea. Centuries ago, marble stairs led from a sheltered path on the grassy cliff-top, down the sheer cliff wall, and to the front steps of the temple. Years of exposure to the harsh sea winds had eroded the steps into nothing more than crumbling ramps. The natural rock on either side of the temple had been left untouched, effectively shadowing the structure’s existence from all but the passing gulls.

  Over the centuries, trees had crept in around the base of the temple and surrounded it in a cage of brown and green, wiping the monument from the memory of man.

  Nathaniel only found it because he was immortal, and when one was immortal one had the time to search for such things.

  Fallen statues littered the cracked floor of the temple. Aiolus, the keeper of wind, lay next to Poseidon, god of the sea, both of them brought low during the fall of the Greek Empire. Nathaniel stepped over the statues as he walked to the edge of the cliff, then leaned against a crooked pillar and looked out to sea.

  The gulls cried loudly over the waves far below in their search for food. Nathaniel closed his eyes and breathed in the fresh salt air. The warm wind played over his face and shaved scalp, ruffling his collar and flapping the tail of his long coat. He felt nothing on the left side of his face, where a long scar—one of many that covered the dark skin of his entire body—ran from the top of his forehead, over the outside corner of his eye, and down to the bottom of his jaw.

  The nerves had been severed with the cut of a knife after he stole a loaf of bread when he was eleven years old. Nathaniel wondered what a boy who didn’t even speak the language of his new country could possibly know of the difference between right and wrong when his mother lay dying, starved half to death for refusing to work in the fields one more day. The only thing he could think to do was to steal from the very man who fed him.

  Nathaniel had been halfway back to the barn where he and his mother slept, carrying a loaf of warm, fresh-baked bread tucked under his shirt. The screen door to the kitchen slammed open behind him and the wife of his owner screamed at the top of her lungs. Her husband ran out of the house and came at him with a pearl-handled hunting knife to teach Nathaniel that little boys shouldn’t steal from their masters.

  The iris of his left eye was permanently clouded white from the injury; the iris of his right was a deep, clear brown.

  Nathaniel felt his time on Earth slipping away. He grew tired as the days wore on—exhausted in a way he’d never known. He was beginning to understand that his ability was guiding him away from this life, but he did not know where it was taking him. Dark thoughts had plagued his mind for months—thoughts of hopelessness and despair. The truth that nothing he had accomplished made any real difference was driving him slowly insane.

  In his vain attempt to escape that truth, Nathaniel had searched everywhere for the smallest measure of relief. He went back to the village in Kenya where he was born, hoping it would somehow quiet h
is raging mind—but it was not the same as he remembered.

  The whole world had changed.

  The ancient Greek temple was the only place where he had found relative peace. It was his sole sanctuary from the chaos. As Nathaniel stood on the edge of the cliff between the crumbling pillars, he struggled to find that center of peace once more.

  Instead he saw the Earth as if from space. Tiny pinpoints of lights glowed fiercely on the surface, each one representing the beating heart of one of his brothers or sisters. Most of them were spaced very far apart—a handful in Europe, one or two in Africa—but there were several minor clusters of lights, the largest in Australia, America, and Japan.

  Nathaniel was connected to all of them, as if they were extensions of his own body and mind. He did not see details—he didn’t know their names or even what they looked like—but he knew their very essence of being. He knew that, in some way, they were just like him.

  A light blinked out in western Australia and Nathaniel shed a tear for his dead sister.

  The lights had been fading more quickly over the past year. The normal progression for such things was one or two a year. With such a small population to begin with, it was rare for a high volume of deaths in such a short timeframe.

  Usually such casualties signaled the start of something terrible.

  Nathaniel felt warmth between his shoulder blades and leaned away from the pillar. He looked up at the sagging boughs of a nearby olive tree and watched several of the leaves wither and fall. The wind picked them up and carried them out over the sea.

  All things diminish, he thought, except me.

  Nathaniel rested his palm on the trunk of the tree and allowed what he had accidentally taken to flow back through the bark. The boughs of the tree groaned as they lifted up and spread wide once more.