by A. P. Kensey
They were to go after him as a group, but they wanted to wait another day to prepare. Haven felt guilty about letting Lee go in the first place, and so she decided to take the situation into her own hands.
She didn’t say goodbye to Colton, as much as she had wanted to. His dark, too-shaggy hair had been sticking out of the top of his sleeping bag when Haven snuck past his room and out of the complex. She paused briefly, debating whether or not to invite him to go with her, but she knew the best place for him was at the Dome. He had become an integral part of the group, as had she, so she thought it was best that one of them remain behind.
Besides, thought Haven as she pulled herself up onto a horizontal beam, this was supposed to be easy.
The beam reached out over the side of the building and extended a few feet into the air. A sudden drop of twenty-five stories was the only thing between the steel and the concrete parking lot far below.
Lee stood at the very edge of the beam, facing Haven. The little girl stood in front of him, her eyes open wide. He kept his hands firmly on her shoulders as Haven walked slowly toward him.
“I wouldn’t do that,” he said.
He squeezed the girl’s shoulders and her face turned pale. He was leeching her vitality—her very life force. His cheeks flushed red and his eyes sparkled with new life.
Haven was forced to stand ten feet away from them on the beam, helpless. She meant to find out the reason why he was suddenly back in the mix—why he had chosen now of all times to reappear—but with each passing moment, she held out less and less hope that he would talk.
Now that they were close, Haven could tell that something was wrong with him. As soon as the flush of fresh blood left his cheeks, an odd paleness sank into his skin. The whites of his eyes darkened and black veins crept up his neck from beneath the collar of his shirt.
Lee coughed and shook his head violently, then he laughed.
“This was supposed to be an even match,” he said. His Australian accent was thick with anger. “But look at me. Soon I’ll be useless.” He squeezed the little girl harshly. “Just like her and the rest of the sheep down there.” His eyes glazed over and for a moment Haven thought he fell asleep standing up. Haven took a step forward, then his eyes snapped open and she stopped. Lee glared at her suspiciously. “I thought the other guy was going to come after me. Dormer.”
Haven risked taking another small step forward.
“Is that why you killed those people?” she asked. “You wanted Dormer to come and find you?”
Lee shook his head. “That was just a bonus to pay him back for what he did to Dane. I needed to kill those people.”
As he spoke, the skin of his face turned grey. He gasped and pulled the little girl close. All color left her skin and her eyes rolled up as Lee drained more life from her small body.
“Stop it!” shouted Haven. The harsh blue flames that preceded a violent outburst flared from her skin and raced up and down her body.
“I needed to do it,” said Lee, but he was no longer talking to Haven. Whatever sickness affected him was rapidly accelerating. The little girl’s life energy was no longer enough to maintain his own health. “Look at me,” he said. “What a waste. I’m lucky my abilities lasted as long as they did. With most people they disappear right away. Go figure.”
“I’ll jump after you,” said Haven. “You’re not getting away.”
He tried to smile but could not. “I know.”
With a gentle push from Lee, the little girl fell off the steel beam.
“No!” screamed Haven. She lunged for the girl and caught her by the wrist. The weight of her body pulled Haven off the beam. She slipped over the side and wrapped her arm around the beam at the last possible moment. The combined weight of them both almost ripped Haven’s arm free as they dangled high above the city. She groaned as she fought to keep her shoulder from popping out of its socket.
“Nice catch,” said Lee.
He closed his eyes and fell backward off the beam.
Haven watched his body fall toward the ground. She turned away at the moment of impact and saw that the little girl was looking up at her calmly. A groan of exertion quickly turned to a scream of pain as Haven lifted the little girl up onto the beam. She clung to it and reached down to grab Haven’s collar with one hand, her small fingers—ineffective but comforting—clutching to save her rescuer. Haven pulled herself up, kicking at the air until she was able to swing her body onto the beam. The little girl hugged her close as Haven lay on her back, looking up at the clear blue sky above Chicago.
“You’re safe now,” said Haven as she gently rubbed the girl’s back. “You’re safe.”
4
BOOOM!
The large ceiling fan exploded into pieces.
“Look out!” shouted Marius. He grabbed Corva and pulled her to the side just as one of the massive fan blades pierced her chair and stabbed into the concrete floor. The metal hissed from the heat of the explosion.
BOOOM!
Fire belched down through the hole in the ceiling and licked into the dome. Huge chunks of dirt and concrete fell from above, crushing equipment and tables. Large cracks split the walls near the peak.
“What are they doing?!” shouted Corva.
Colton looked around the room. Dormer was on the second tier, crouched next to the bed of his injured brother, Adsen. He watched the ceiling anxiously. Micah and Noah ran out of the training room, their eyes wide.
Noah said something but the sound of his voice was lost in noise as the ceiling fan housing popped out and crashed to the middle of the dome floor. The stone fire pit in the center of the room shattered under the weight of the huge metal box.
“Get back!” shouted Colton, waving at the two boys.
They stared up at the widening hole in the ceiling until finally Micah grabbed Noah’s sleeve and pulled him back into the training room.
BOOOM!
All of the concrete surrounding the peak of the dome broke away. A few large chunks of dirt fell from the edges of the ragged hole, allowing sunlight to penetrate the dome. A bright shaft of yellow light shot down and illuminated a wide circle in the middle of the floor, highlighting the crushed fire pit and the broken fan housing.
A man’s head peered over the edge of the hole, silhouetted against the light. The outline of several more heads appeared next to the first.
Marius growled and raised a closed fist at the ceiling.
“I teach them to poke their heads in here.”
Corva pushed his arm down to his side. “Don’t! You’ll bring down the whole roof.”
“It’s already down!” he bellowed.
“I think they’re leaving,” said Colton.
The silhouetted heads slowly disappeared from the opening high above. A moment later, a distant booooom rocked the walls of the Dome.
“Sounds like they’re collapsing the garage,” said Corva.
“We will be trapped,” said Marius.
Colton heard huge chunks of rock crashing down on equipment in the garage, crunching metal and grinding against the smooth walls.
A long minute of silence followed and Colton stood slowly, brushing a layer of dust from his face and looking up at the gaping hole in the dome ceiling. A metal cube the size of a microwave fell through the hole. The shiny box spun down like a thrown die cube and hit the concrete floor on one flat side with a hollow thooooommmm.
Marius stood and walked toward the cube but Corva grabbed his arm and pulled him back. He yanked his arm away in protest but stopped when one side of the cube popped off with a loud hiss and clattered to the floor. White steam poured from the opening. Thin strips of glowing orange lights were barely visible within.
“What are those?” asked Colton.
The steam cleared and he saw that the cube was filled with small silver spheres, each one the size of a baseball and encircled with a thin strip of orange light. The orange lights pulsed slowly and the spheres started to hum.
“We must go,” said Marius.
He helped Corva to her feet just as one of the spheres flew out of the box and slapped against his back. Marius cursed in Russian and grabbed at the skin between his shoulder blades where the sphere was pressing against him, but he couldn’t reach it. Corva spun him around and grabbed the sphere. She pulled it away from his skin and Marius screamed—a three-inch needle protruded from the sphere and was covered with Marius’s blood.
Clear liquid dripped from the end of the needle.
“It injected something into him,” said Corva.
“Run!” shouted Colton.
The rest of the spheres hummed loudly. They hovered slowly in the air above the metal cube. The strip of orange light on the spheres pulsed so rapidly that it became a solid strip. Dust on the floor beneath some of the lower spheres moved outward from their built-in propulsion systems.
Colton pushed Marius and Corva toward the dormitory hallway next to the Grove entrance—they might be able to make it to one of the apartment rooms and seal the door behind them. He turned back to look at the training room. Two spheres hit the swinging door and pushed it open slowly, their orange strips of light glowing brightly as their tiny engines struggled with exertion. Colton wanted to stop and go back for Noah and Micah but Marius grabbed his shoulder.
“Something is wrong,” he said as they ran. “I try to make the flame, but cannot.”
He held up his hands and clenched his fists—usually covered in bright orange flame when there was trouble—but there was no fire, just a faint orange glow on his palms.
Colton stopped when they reached the dormitory hallway and turned to face several rapidly approaching spheres. He focused on the space directly in front of him and waited to detect the electrical fields of the spheres as they approached. If he was lucky, he could drain them of power before they got too close.
He wasn’t lucky.
The closest sphere shot toward him in a blur and smacked into his chest. Colton reached down to swat it away and the needle broke off in his skin. The orange light in the sphere dimmed as the lifeless ball of metal rolled away on the floor. Colton pinched the tiny edge of needle protruding from the center of his chest and slowly pulled out three inches of thin steel.
Another sphere flew past him before he could swat it down and turned the corner of the hallway. A moment later, Corva screamed.
Colton looked up at the second tier of the dome and saw that the spheres were circling over the cots that lined the inner wall. Dormer was crouched under one of the flimsy beds with his brother Adsen beside him.
One of the patients stood and tried to run but as soon as he moved a sphere shot toward him and slapped into his neck. The man screamed and fell to the ground.
Dormer stood and held out an open palm toward the rest of the floating spheres, trying to use his formidable Conduit power to drain them of energy, just as Colton had done—but they were too fast. The strip of orange light encircling their centers glowed intensely and streaked trails through the air as the spheres sought out and burrowed against the remaining inhabitants of the Dome.
Before he knew what hit him, Dormer lowered his arm and looked behind his left shoulder at one of the humming spheres. He pulled it slowly away from his skin and threw away the long needle that had stuck into his back.
Colton stepped to the side as Marius and Corva walked back from the dormitories.
“It takes your ability,” she said to Colton. “We’re useless.”
Colton reached out and grasped for any kind of energy he could find. He tried for the heat from the lights around the room and even for some electrical current coursing through the wires buried in the dome walls, but he could draw only a fraction of what was available.
A loud crackle of blue electricity echoed through the hole in the ceiling.
“Now what?” asked Marius.
Everyone in the cavernous room stood and looked up as thick strands of piercingly bright, blue lightning shot through the hole in the ceiling and probed the inner wall of the dome. The ends of the lightning strands burned jagged black streaks in the smooth concrete wall as they crawled down toward the floor.
Colton tried to ignore the beauty of the controlled chaos but was mesmerized at the way the lightning arced down through the hole and moved over the surface of the walls—almost like the searching, slow-moving tentacles of a huge octopus.
A young woman appeared at the hole in the ceiling. Her eyes burned with brilliant, dark blue energy. The lightning was coming from her. The strands emanated from a spot between her shoulder blades and arced out in all directions like the long legs of an electric spider. The lightning supported her weight as she lowered herself down to the dome room floor.
Colton immediately thought of Haven, but then he realized that Haven’s blue energy was lighter in color—more like the sky on a perfect day and less like a dark blue neon sign.
The young woman’s feet softly touched the floor and the arcs of lightning slowly retreated from the walls and disappeared into her back. She stood proudly in the center of the dome room, waiting.
Colton took a step forward and her head snapped around to face him. The blue energy faded from her eyes as she fixed him with a cold stare. Her straight, shiny black hair went down to the middle of her back. She was dressed in tight-fitting, black leather pants and a black leather jacket over a loose white shirt.
“You don’t belong here,” said Colton. He walked toward her, not really knowing how to make her leave without the use of his ability.
“That’s not a good idea,” said Dormer from the second floor.
Before Colton could stop, a long arc of lightning erupted from the woman’s back and slammed into his chest like a scorpion’s stinger, pinning him down to the ground. The energy burned into him as if someone were holding a taser to his chest. He convulsed and his fists clenched so tightly he thought the bones in his fingers would snap.
Colton tried to absorb some of the energy, but it was pointless—he either had no control over his ability or his ability had been completely taken from him, just as Corva said.
The blue light vanished from his vision and he lay on the floor, gasping for air. He slowly uncurled his hands and sat up, glaring with malice at the intruder. She returned his stare without emotion, then tilted up her head to address everyone in the Dome.
“My name is Kamiko Masura,” she said with a slight Japanese accent, “and you are all my prisoners.”
5
O’Hare International Airport in Chicago looked like a giant alien crab from above, with eight of the concourses laid out like legs from a fat body which housed all of the parking.
Haven tightened a strap on her backpack as she walked down one of the long legs—Concourse G—on the way to the terminal where her plane would take her back to Montana and back to Colton. She hadn’t realized how much she missed him until she had time to calm down after the incident in downtown Chicago. Seeing Lee brought back a flood of painful memories that she had tried hard to forget over the last few months.
The airport was busy. The long corridor of Concourse G that led to Haven’s terminal was packed with people of all shapes and sizes, wearing everything from tuxedos to pajamas. A woman bumped into Haven as she ran past, mumbling a quick apology but more worried about the row of five kids she was towing behind, each one shorter than the next and each one grasping their siblings’ hands as they hurried to keep up.
Haven moved to the side of the wide hallway and walked next to the wall. It seemed as if no one was paying attention to her unless they almost ran her over, but she still felt like a beacon of weirdness in a sea of normality. Her powerful ability wasn’t visible to anyone just by looking at her, yet she felt so different that it was hard to forget she looked just like everyone else—like the normal teenage girl who would be celebrating her eighteenth birthday tomorrow.
If the Dome had a telephone, she would have called Noah to see how he was doing. Haven felt guilty about leaving him even t
hough she knew he was safer with Colton and the others than he would have been with her. There was also the gnawing guilt that she had broken the promise she made to Elena right before the old woman’s passing—the promise to watch over those with abilities and to keep them safe. The only way for Haven to allay the feelings of guilt was to convince herself that going after Lee had been the right thing to do in order to stop him from hurting anyone else.
Marius, Corva, and Dormer could look after the others, at least until she got back. Besides, Haven wasn’t nearly as strong as Elena told her she would become. She had said that the Phoenix energy would leave Elena and pass on to Haven if she was the next in line to receive it—and if she was “worthy”, whatever that meant.
Apparently, she was not.
There was no change in the year since Elena’s death. It wasn’t easy for Haven to live her life every day knowing that she could suddenly die without warning if the Phoenix power decided she was next. Elena had glossed over that aspect of the transformation—the fact that the next Phoenix had to die in order to receive its power. What terrified Haven the most was the idea that, even if it killed her, the Phoenix energy could pass her over if it found she was the wrong person for the job after all.
The only explanation Haven could think of was that there was someone else out in the world with blue fire like hers—another young woman who was somehow more worthy to receive the gift. It didn’t bother Haven as much as it seemed to bother Dormer. For her, nothing had changed. She never had the Phoenix energy in the first place, so it didn’t really matter if it never came to her at all. For some reason, the idea of the energy passing to someone besides Haven troubled Dormer deeply. He would occasionally ask her if she noticed anything different about her ability, and when she told him no, he would go off alone for hours, pacing and sulking in his workshop.