The Bloom Series Box Set: Bloom & Fade

by A. P. Kensey

  He patted the trunk and moved to the center of the temple.

  There were several rows of broken benches to one side—white marble that had been meticulously carved with the faces of old gods. All but a faint bump of the statues’ noses had survived centuries of erosion. Nathaniel imagined a priest standing in the middle of the temple thousands of years ago, addressing a crowd of eager students. Teachers of science, mathematics, and philosophy—some of the most brilliant minds of the ancient world had lived and died under Greek rule. Their whole empire had been only a small fraction of the world, yet to them it was everything. It left them free to explore the mind and countless other subjects—to advance medicine and art to unparalleled heights.

  The temple had been plundered during the Peloponnesian War, shortly before the fall of ancient Greece. Steel bars were ripped from the hearts of the pillars and most of the marble was carried off and integrated into other buildings. The Greeks had been helpless to stop their culture from dying.

  Nathaniel wanted to believe that, for the first time in history, a society possessed the capability of defending itself from extinction. Perhaps with help, his brothers and sisters did not have to die. He would go to them one last time. Just once, he wanted his actions to have a positive and lasting impact on the future.

  White flames licked up his arms and cascaded over his body. The air inside the temple bent around him as he used his energy to manipulate his surroundings. He closed his eyes and reached halfway around the world—reached out to his fallen sister and to all the others who were about to fall.

  One last time, he thought.

  In a single flash of blinding white light, Nathaniel was gone.

  1

  Haven lost track of the young man she was chasing, so instead she followed the screams of a child. A girl, no more than seven or eight, had been pulled from her mother’s arms while Haven ran after Lee through a grocery store in downtown Chicago. In his mad scramble for escape, Lee grabbed up the girl with the hope that Haven wouldn’t vaporize him if he held an innocent hostage.

  Of course she wouldn’t—but now Haven not only had to catch Lee and find out why he had suddenly come out of hiding to commit murder, she also had to play it safe so the little girl didn’t get hurt in the inevitable crossfire.

  Lee had run from the grocery store and into the heart of the downtown area, leading Haven on a frantic chase through the crowded streets. She stopped apologizing to everyone after Lee shoved aside the fifth person—after it became obvious things were going to get a whole lot worse before they got better. Instead, she focused on running him down. He was fast, even with a screaming little girl tucked firmly under his arm.

  People turned at the commotion and some even shouted at Lee to stop, but none of them stuck out a foot to trip him. At one point he quickly looked back and the smirk of amusement on his face angered Haven beyond belief. It was all she could do to keep the boiling energy inside her from ripping Lee to shreds.

  No public displays of her ability unless it was absolutely necessary—that had been the agreement she and everyone else living in the Dome had made once things settled down almost a year ago. Life or death necessary. They couldn’t risk being followed back to their sanctuary of the Dome, especially not while they still housed the sick and wounded patients from Bernam’s medical facility. And besides, it was thought that no less than two national governments were aware of the powers available to a small amount of the population. There were rumors that special units had been sanctioned to detain and question anyone who showed the slightest hints of an ability.

  Haven cursed her promise to play it safe as she reached out for the tail of Lee’s coat and grasped at air. He spun to the side and ran down a narrow alley, then turned the corner at the end before Haven made it halfway. When she emerged at the other side he was already sprinting to the doors of a half-finished skyscraper on the far end of an empty parking lot. Plastic sheeting flapped in the wind all the way up the side of the building, covering gaping holes meant for walls and windows.

  Lee ducked inside as Haven ran across the pavement.

  Two-thirds of the way up the outside of the building, the firm grid-work of future offices gave way to a skeleton of steel beams that reached toward the sky like the spikes of a crown. Haven knew she needed to catch up with Lee before he climbed too high—otherwise, with one false step, he could kill himself and the little girl as well.

  On the plus side, they would probably be alone in the building, so her promise not to use her ability quickly became obsolete—as long as she didn’t hurt the little girl. Haven ran up the set of stairs and through the doors to the building. She allowed the blooming heat within her chest to manifest into the dormant blue flames—the lighter, harmless waves of fire that preceded the more deadly focused blasts of energy. Dancing fire sheathed her body and flowed over her skin like liquid.

  Her vision filled with electric blue light as she ran for the nearest set of stairs. Pieces of construction equipment lay scattered everywhere and the elevator shaft was open and empty—not even the cables had been installed.

  The heat inside of her chest pulsed throughout her body, straining for release. The prolonged retention of the incredible power she wielded had been her main focus over the past year, when there was hardly anything else to do but train and hone her ability until she could perfectly manipulate her energy output.

  There had been some time with Colton, as well.

  Haven pushed him from her mind as she ran up the stairs, counting levels as she went. The railing disappeared after the fifth floor and the stairs dead-ended after the seventh—there was only an empty shaft above her leading all the way to the top of the building.

  Haven kicked open the unfinished door that led to the seventh floor and almost fell to her death. She reached out for a support beam overhead as her forward momentum carried her off the ledge of the doorway and into empty space. She swung out over nothingness, the ground seven floors below, her fingertips barely grasping the support beam. Her legs swung back to the doorway and to the flat ledge near the stairwell, but she was too eager and kicked out too early. Her left hand slipped off the support beam and her feet missed the ledge. She swung back out, barely hanging on to the support beam with one hand. Haven focused on getting ready for the return swing. If she could aim it just right, she might be able to get enough momentum to launch herself back onto the seventh floor landing. Her momentum carried her back toward the ledge, and Haven twisted her body to face the landing. She extended her legs and kicked out for the ledge. Her toes touched the very edge of the concrete slab.

  The fingertips of her right hand slipped off the support beam and Haven fell. She was already falling at an angle from the momentum of her swing and landed halfway on the sixth floor platform, right at the edge of the stairwell. She hit the platform on her elbows, her stomach scraping against the rough concrete floor and her legs kicking in the air below the ledge.

  Lee laughed at her from above.

  She craned her neck to look up—he was climbing the steel grid-work easily, even with the little girl draped over his shoulder. She was too exhausted or too scared to move. Haven wondered why Lee hadn’t used his Conduit power on the child. Perhaps he had, and that was the reason she no longer screamed—he had drained and transferred her life energy to the point where she could not fight back.

  Images of Haven’s burning house flashed through her mind—nightmarish memories of red flame from the night Lee and his twin brother Dane had set fire to her home. The fire had consumed the house as well as her parents. Haven thought it had taken her little brother Noah as well, but he had been kidnapped. She almost lost everything on one terrible night.

  Haven grit her teeth and slowly pulled herself up over the ledge. She swung one leg up and then the other, then rolled onto her back, panting. Lee balanced easily as he walked the length of a long steel beam several stories up and jumped onto a small platform. He peered down over the ledge, grinning, and winked at H
aven.

  She clenched her jaw as refreshing blue fire crawled over her skin, then continued her climb up the building, after Lee.

  2

  The arrival of the survivors from Bernam’s torturous medical facility had necessitated a number of changes to the interior of the Dome compound, turning it into a different place than the cold, underground warehouse Colton Ross remembered when he first stepped through the door a year ago.

  A second-story tier had been added to half of the main dome room—a platform fifteen feet off the ground that ran a half-circle along the inner wall and acted as an additional floor for bunks and storage. The platform started above the door to the water processing room and ran clockwise around the dome, over the dormitory hallway and Grove doors. A barred railing had been securely bolted to the edge. The platform was only ten feet wide—anything more would have resulted in the need for too many supporting pillars. The curvature of the dome was not too severe that low to the floor, and there was only a slight inward bent to the walls next to the bunks.

  The addition of the new platform was not all that had changed. The general feeling of the place had somewhat warmed over as well. There was more carpeting in the livable spaces instead of the ubiquitous concrete that coated everything else. Practical lighting had been installed all over the main dome room—standing lamps and wall sconces—to make it seem less like a cavern and more like a communal gathering room. The mirrors that bounced light to the floor from the peak of the ceiling had been replaced with long light panels—rectangular strips of soft tube lights set into the concrete so their surfaces were flush with the wall.

  Most of the survivors from the medical facility had departed after they healed, setting out into the world with the hope of finding some small piece of their former lives. Some had been Bernam’s prisoners for years. Colton held out little hope that they would be able to adapt to their new world. The long-term residents of the Dome—Marius, Corva, and the others—had made it plain to those departing that they were welcome back any time. The rest they left unsaid—that it was likely there was nothing for them out there besides confusion and disappointment. They had no jobs, and most of the older survivors were without family, having been deprived of loved ones just like Haven and many more who had been unfortunate enough to meet Bernam and Alistair.

  Colton stood in the training room off the main dome room, leaning back against the wall near the door, and watched with no small amount of amusement as the two youngest residents of the Dome, Noah and Micah, sparred with broomsticks. There was no set rhythm to the young boys’ movements—no defining pattern that Colton could pick out from the loud cracks of stick against stick.

  The boys would stop and formulate a plan for the next few swings—you go this way, I’ll go this way—and then execute their movements with the concentration of incompetent yet serious stage actors.

  Still, thought Colton, they’re having fun.

  The two boys had become quick friends after Noah’s arrival at the Dome last year. Micah had already been living there for a time without the company of someone close to his age. When Noah was saved from the medical facility by his older sister, Haven, and taken to the Dome, the boys had barely needed to be introduced before they were off and running.

  Haven.

  Colton’s heart tightened at the thought of her. He had wanted to follow her to Chicago the morning she left the Dome to hunt for Lee, but Marius and Corva had persuaded him otherwise. They said the outcome of the encounter would be decided long before he got there, and it would be unwise to leave the Dome unguarded. Colton pointed out that everyone was going to leave anyway before Haven ducked out early. Their reply was that Haven could more than handle the situation on her own, having grown into her abilities nicely over the past few months. They had initially planned to go mostly for support, but if Haven didn’t think she needed any, then so be it. Since she had decided to pursue Lee on her own, the rest of them could stay at the Dome and look after the remaining survivors.

  Haven had stolen Dormer’s black sedan from the garage to get her from the Dome to the airport. Colton had no idea how she afforded the ticket unless someone else paid for it—the cost of gas and airfare were the only things keeping him from following her. Money didn’t exactly grow on trees, even in the Dome.

  Crack-CRACK! went the broomsticks in rapid succession.

  “Ow!” shouted Noah. He dropped his stick and sucked on one of his knuckles, cradling his injured hand with the other. He looked at the red skin on the back of his fingers and smiled. “It’s okay.”

  Micah smiled with relief. He picked up Noah’s broomstick and handed it back to him.

  “You’re getting better,” said Colton as he walked over. It was only half-true. The boys were becoming more accurate with their swings and timing, but their improvisation and follow-through was lacking. Colton himself was no expert, but Marius had been teaching him a thing or two about close-quarters combat in the quiet year since the destruction of the medical facility.

  “Micah,” said Colton, “you need to keep your feet farther apart. Slide your left foot closer to your opponent.” Colton knelt down and pushed Micah’s heel until his foot slid forward. “That way if you take a hit you won’t fall over. Noah, you need to move your body in response to your opponent’s swings. Don’t keep your back so rigid or else an impact will hurt much more. If he swings at your midsection, you need to be able to twist to the side to help absorb the blow if you can’t block it entirely.”

  “When’s Haven coming back?” asked Noah. He scratched at the center of his chest. Colton knew there was a vicious scar running down the middle of his ribcage from where Bernam had operated during one of his cruel experiments.

  “Soon,” said Colton.

  “Do you think she’s okay?”

  “I hope so.”

  The swinging door to the training room opened quickly and Marius appeared. He pointed at Colton.

  “You,” he said in his thick Russian accent. “Come.” He pointed at Noah and Micah. “You and you, keep practicing. Marius could hear your clumsy fighting all the way in Russia.”

  “You weren’t in Russia, Marius,” said Noah. “You were standing right outside the door! We saw you!”

  Colton smiled as he walked past Marius into the dome room.

  “Maybe so,” said Marius to the boys. “But still you must practice. It makes perfect, after all.”

  As the door swung closed, Noah said, “He always says that.”

  Colton followed Marius to a cluttered section of the dome room floor. Tall racks of machine parts and tables topped with electronics were all crammed near one section of the wall. Corva, Marius’s wife, sat at the only computer terminal in the entire compound. There were no connections to the outside world from inside the Dome besides a single radio scanner. The risk of being discovered was too great to keep cell phones and other connective devices in the compound.

  The glow from the computer screen flickered on Corva’s face and turned her neck-length white hair to a dull yellow. “Look at this,” she said as Colton and Marius walked over. She turned the screen toward them and punched a few keys on the keyboard.

  A window popped up in the middle of the screen that showed a security camera view of the only entrance to the Dome. It was a wide roll-up door sunk into the base of a rocky mountain above the complex. The door led to a garage and then to an elevator. The elevator ran down a wide shaft and ended in a long hallway which fed directly into the Dome.

  A group of men in black combat gear and face-masks slowly walked around the garage door and on the mountain above it. Each carried some type of heavy assault rifle.

  “How did they find us?” asked Colton.

  “We would have to ask them,” said Marius.

  “I wonder why they don’t blast the door,” said Corva.

  Marius frowned. “Maybe they are not trying to get inside.”

  The group of men moved away from the garage door and walked out of the camera’s
range.

  “Can you follow them?” asked Colton.

  Corva punched a few keys and the image on the screen cycled through several more angles, all pointed down at the front door.

  “That’s all I have,” she said.

  Colton slowly looked up the smooth, concrete walls of the dome room, past the bunks on the second tier, and at the large fan spinning slowly at the very peak. An unsettling thought occurred to him as he stared at its giant, rotating blades.

  “Where’s Dormer?” he asked.

  “Why?” asked Corva. “What do you—”

  BOOOOM!

  A loud explosion rocked the ceiling of the dome. The large fan broke out of its setting and hung by a thick bundle of cable a few feet below the ceiling.

  Marius pointed up as the fan swung from its cables and said, “They definitely try to get inside!”

  3

  Haven climbed quickly, using the steel beams of the unfinished building like the rungs of a giant ladder.

  The wind grew stronger as she climbed, ripping at her clothes and whipping her brown, red-streaked hair into her face. The beams became so scarce near the top of the building that soon she had to climb a vertical beam by using rough-cut holes in the center as hand-grips. The sharp edges of the holes cut into her palms as she climbed.

  Lee had disappeared right after his brother was killed in the assault on Bernam’s medical facility last year. Haven and a group of people like her had gone to the facility to save Noah after she found out they were using him for experimentation. She found him along with other victims of Bernam’s mad plan to turn himself into a hybrid—a Nova. Haven assumed her friend Dormer had killed both Dane and his brother Lee during the attack—the severity of Lee’s wounds would have suggested no other outcome—but, like the cockroach he was, Lee had survived.

  Now he was running loose in Chicago, and had already killed at least five people. The police were baffled at the way the victims were murdered—drained of life until their skin turned black and their eyes shriveled to the size of raisins. The crew back at the Dome had immediately recognized Lee’s pattern of chaos and murder.