Countercurrent

by Jessica Gunn

  I vaguely heard shouts and screams—Sarah’s as well as other’s—but thankfully, none neared. Stay out of this, I willed them. Please. Run! The last thing I needed, the one thing I couldn’t handle, was for Sarah and Logan to get caught up in this mess.

  The White City soldier who’d thrown me through the ceiling—Tubby, I dubbed him—stalked towards me. “You’re becoming too much of a nuisance to keep alive.”

  “You… all… keep… saying that,” I ground out when my attacker let the grip around my neck loosen. Guessed they wanted something from me. Information. My heart stopped. The Waterstar map in my head? “Yet here… I am…”

  Tubby scoffed. He wanted to kill me. The intensity of the moment roared in his eyes, boiled my blood. He absolutely wanted me dead and the only thing—only possible thing—keeping that from happening must have been the General’s order. And yet back on the station, he hadn’t seemed too concerned with my wellbeing.

  “Doesn’t mean I can’t kill them to get you to cooperate,” he said as he turned and fired a green ball of energy toward the small party of people. Someone dragged Sarah out of the way, but I cried out anyway.

  “Stop!” I shouted. “Just stop it! What do you want?”

  Tubby turned back to me, a feral look overcoming his features. Drool slipped out of the corner of his mouth. “You. General Allen doesn’t care how.”

  I pulled up my legs and kicked him square in the chest with all I had in me. He flew backwards into a nearby tree trunk. I flipped the other soldier over me and, before he could recover, I stomped down on his sternum. A crack resounded and he stayed down.

  Tubby roared and charged. I met him halfway. We traded blows, dancing around each other in a fury so intense, I could barely make sense of it. All that registered was the super soldier part of me taking full control, meeting his blows, deflecting them, and handing out my own. Most even connected. But I stepped wrong, saw it happening a millisecond before it occurred, and couldn’t dodge a sweep that knocked me off my feet.

  Air whooshed out of my lungs, my ribs cracking more on the hard landing. “Fucking hell.” These guys were strong. Stronger than me, for sure, especially alone.

  Tubby pulled me up by the front of my uniform and raised his hand. Energy crackled between his fingers, a green livewire wrapping around and around. I gulped. We didn’t know much about the powers people had in the White City. Teleportation, sure. Strength, why not? But everything else? A mystery. Except what’d happened back on Atlas. It was as if my life had been drained right out of me.

  My gaze skipped between his hand and his face, watching as the energy zapped closer and closer. I beat on his arm with my fists, tried to undo the grip he had on my uniform, even tried to wriggle out of the clothing, but nothing worked. The closer his hand got, the weaker I felt. Fatigue swept over me, starting in my eyes, my limbs, my fingers, right down until even my thoughts slowed. My vision blurred, even as I tried to smack his hand away from me. Narrowing, narrowing down into nothing.

  I thought I heard the sound of a gun cocking, but I had none and neither did they. Hallucination, my mind offered. The last visions of a dying person.

  Dying. Death.

  Had it finally caught up to me?

  The pull of my teleportation power fluttered above the fatigue, skipping along the horizons of my consciousness, teasing me. I reached out to it across the bridge between us. My fingers weren’t long enough, but only by inches. I closed my eyes. Focused my thoughts onto one thing: safety. Whatever form that might take right now, whomever it brought me to—god willing, hopefully Trevor—anything to get me the hell out of his soldier’s vise grip on my life.

  CRACK.

  The soldier’s body jerked. His hand loosened. I dropped, solid dead weight, to the ground.

  “Get the fuck away from her!”

  The gun cocked again. CRACK.

  The soldier fell beside me, blood seeping out of his mouth. I followed the blood down to a hole in his chest.

  Sarah screamed. My vision cleared, colors and full images reappearing, and I searched for the source of the wound. Who had saved me this time?

  Trevor. Please...

  Logan stood in front of Sarah, the other partygoers having disappeared. He had his father’s shotgun in hand, which he cocked a third time.

  “Get out of here,” I croaked.

  God bless his aim, but he shouldn’t have still been here. Why hadn’t he just run with the others?

  Sirens blared in the distance. Shit, shit, shit.

  Sarah let out another scream as a hand wrapped around my leg and started dragging me. I pushed myself off the ground, kicking at the hand. The other White City soldier, the one with the cracked sternum. I thought I’d killed him!

  I kept kicking until his loose hold on me dropped completely, then rounded on him, trading blows until I hopped onto his back and wrapped my arm around his neck. I glanced over my shoulder and gave Logan a look he better have freaking translated. Turn Sarah away. NOW.

  He did and I snapped the soldier’s neck. We dropped, but I managed to stay upright. Deep breaths. Solid, deep breaths worked their way into my lungs. Then back out again.

  In. Out.

  My body shook in heavy fits. Blood poured from the wound on my side now, pain throbbing through my chest.

  My gaze darted around Logan’s yard, searching for more White City soldiers. For General Allen. For Trevor, who wasn’t here, even though I’d teleported here in distress.

  Whack-a-Mole. The thought rushed back to me. Right. I’d thought of playing the arcade cabinets at Logan’s birthday party.

  Logan.

  My gaze met his, but I dropped before uttering a single word. I must have blacked out because the next thing I knew, Logan was beside me, a hand under my head. Sarah’s face danced above mine.

  Logan threw his shirt over his head and balled it up, placing against on my side. “Hold this,” he ordered Sarah. “Keep the pressure on. Don’t you dare move it.” His eyes searched mine, though I barely kept them open. “Stay with me Chelsea. I just got Caden back. I won’t lose you.”

  “Don’t… plan on it,” I moaned, then I cringed because talking hurt too much.

  My in-ear headset blared to life. I still had it on. “Chelsea? Chelsea Danning, are you still with us?”

  “She might not have gotten off Atlas in time.”

  “She’s still alive. I can feel it.” That last voice belonged to Weyland.

  I lifted a hand to respond, but Logan shoved it down. “Stop moving. Help is on the way. What the hell just happened in my backyard?”

  “No—no help,” I pushed past my lips. “No 911.”

  “Are you serious?” Sarah asked, pressing harder on my side. My ribs screamed in protest. “You’re bleeding the hell out in Logan’s backyard!”

  Their voices—and the static from the radio—assaulted my head. Too much. Too much noise and talking and—

  “Chelsea?” the radio asked again.

  They thought I was dead. That must have meant Atlas had been destroyed—or nearly so. Maybe the evacuated crew hadn’t made it out, either.

  “Headset,” I whispered to Logan. “You need to respond.” They think I’m dead, they think I’m dead. “I’m not dead!” I shouted, though Weyland and the others couldn’t hear me. Not without pressing the TALK button first. If only Logan would let me move my damn hands!

  “What?” Sarah asked. Her gaze roamed my face, then up to my hair. “Oh. Oh! Is it the military?”

  “Military?” Logan asked.

  Sarah nodded. “You know she worked for the Navy. Something must have happened.”

  “Well, no shit,” Logan spat.

  Sirens screeched closer. They must be right down the road.

  Sarah gingerly slipped her fingers under the headset and removed it, as though she were afraid my skull was broken. Was it? Everything had grown so damn fuzzy and painful that it could very well be true.

  “Talk,” I gritted out. “Let me.
”

  Shaking her head, she put on the headset and pressed the TALK button. “Hello?” A pause. Surprise flashed across Sarah’s face. “Hey, you sound familiar.” Another pause. “Yes, it’s her sister. No, she’s—These guys were fighting her, Logan killed one. She killed the other. Dude, she’s hurt really bad.”

  A long silence filled the space between her responses. I looked up at the night sky. Sobs broke out. Everything, every part of my body, throbbed with pain and fatigue. Blood loss. The fall of adrenaline.

  Logan smoothed a hand over my face. “I can hear the ambulance. They’ve just pulled up.”

  “Others?” I asked.

  “Inside. I shoved them into the house when things got bad. I can’t promise they won’t talk, but—”

  Sarah pointed a finger at Logan. “Yes, I’ll keep everyone at the house. There was a party. She—they all just appeared. She’s bleeding out. Help is on the way, but she—Yes, the closest hospital. Yes. Yeah, I’ll do that. Okay.”

  She dropped the headset and stared down at me. “They said they’ll send someone to the hospital to debrief you and pick you up. Nowhere else is safe right now, and—something about them not being able to find you if you’re in a crowd like that.”

  Right. Until the freaking hospital checked me in and put the records out there.

  EMTs ran across the lawn, stretcher in tow. Sarah kept rambling and Logan kept trying to soothe me, but my vision darkened again, my body growing weak.

  I gave into the world of pain, of not knowing what’d happened to my friends. My ship. My Trevor. I surrendered to the blackness of whatever was coming next.

  Chapter Four

  CHELSEA

  A steady beeping registered first, blinking in and out of the blackness of my mind. A dull, throbbing ache followed. Light behind my eyelids. Shuffling. Mumbling—no, whispered pleas.

  “Please, Chelsea,” someone said. “Just wake up. Tell me what’s going on. They won’t. They…” The heavy voice faded off, as if they’d choked on their next words.

  I forced my eyelids to slide open and was immediately blinded by fluorescents overhead. I fought past it and turned my head toward the voice. “Hey.”

  Logan lifted his head. Worry had etched deep lines into his face, drawn down his lips. His eyes were glassy with tears I knew he’d never shed. His eyes lit up when he saw me, and he reached for my hand, sliding his fingers between mine. “Hey.”

  I squeezed his hand. “Sorry.”

  “For what?” he asked.

  I wanted to chuckle but even starting the action sent ripples of pain tearing through my side. Ribs, broken. Side sliced open. Oh god—there’d been so much blood. “For ruining your party.”

  He shook his head and squeezed my hand with both of his. “No ruining. You actually might have made it the party of a decade. Even got to use Dad’s shotgun. He’s gonna be ripping pissed.”

  “More pissed than when he finds out you shot it at somebody?” I cringed as the words left my lips, as Logan’s face fell. “Dammit. I shouldn’t have—Logan…” I knew what it felt like to kill someone for the first time. I’d shot Thompson under nearly the same circumstances.

  The White City.

  “Oh god—Atlas.”

  Logan’s eyebrows scrunched together. “Atlas what? You kept saying that as the EMTs treated you. Atlas this, Trevor that.”

  I chewed on my cheek. I shouldn’t have said anything, but I’d been so out of it, so consumed by everything. “Please forget I said that name.”

  “Was it in Pearl?” he asked. “It’s been all over the news. They said a research experiment caught fire and exploded, but the Internet tells a different story.”

  “Fantastic,” I groaned.

  “The Navy’s doing a good job of covering up whatever it was. Chelsea, they told me you were working on something classified. Made a huge deal about making sure I stayed with you until someone came to get you. You’re not supposed to leave the hospital.”

  I took a quick stock of every ache and pain. “Don’t think that’s happening anytime soon anyway.” Even with my quick-healing abilities. A flash of memory zipped through my mind. Of my strength dwindling. Of my inability to teleport. Of my life draining from me. Did I even still have powers? What had they done to me?

  So fast I doubted Logan even felt it, I brushed my thumb over his finger, searching for the feel of the water in his body, in his blood. This was the most low-key way I could think of to test if my powers still worked.

  Nothing. I couldn’t feel a single drop.

  Are you there? I called to the super soldier part of me. She didn’t rise to answer. I closed my eyes and thought of SeaSat5 and not even the pull of my teleportation power appeared.

  Half a dozen emotions ranging from frustration to anger and grief tore through me. “What happened?”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to ask you,” Logan said. “They nearly killed you, Chelsea.” His voice broke and tears shone in my best friend’s eyes.

  I lifted a hand to his cheek. “I’m okay.” Unlike the rest of Atlas’s crew. Who knew how many had gotten out alive? “I’m sorry you had to use your dad’s shotgun.”

  “You couldn’t take them alone.”

  He might have scared me and the others more than my attackers. Others. I ripped my hands out of his. “Sarah. Is she okay? Where is she?” I moved to sit up and got partway there, but a combination of Logan’s steadying hand on my chest and pain tearing open my ribs made me stop.

  “Jesus, Chelsea. Stop!” he said. “She’s fine. Everyone’s fine. But you broke a few ribs and—all that blood, it was from some kind of stab wound. The doctors said it looked like you got rebar or something slammed into you.”

  I breathed past the sharp pain. In. Out. “Accurate.” A pause. “I think. I don’t remember.”

  Everything from the fight in engineering onwards was a total blur. I recalled Weyland being there. Fighting something like six or seven White City soldiers. Almost dying. But that was it. I must have destroyed the Link Piece system as planned, then teleported out on nothing more than survival instinct. How the White City soldiers followed me to Logan’s backyard, I hadn’t the faintest idea.

  Unless they could sense the time-travel path? That was how my teleportation power worked. It wasn’t so much of disappearing and reappearing at a desired location, but traveling across space-time to a specific location in the current time-place, but out of sync by a few seconds.

  “How even—?”

  “Stop,” I said, cutting him off. “I can’t tell you, Logan. You know that. Who did you talk to?”

  He reached behind him and pulled my headset out of a bag hanging on his chair beside my hospital bed. “Major Pike? He said to stay with you and to leave your sister at home. Something about her being a target.”

  My teeth gnashed together. “General Allen.”

  Logan’s eyes met mine. “Do I need to worry?”

  I shook my head. “No. But you might need to take Sarah on a really long road trip. Get her out of here.” But that’d do no good. The General probably had eyes everywhere, and I knew, I just knew, that if he actually intended to hurt Sarah, he’d have done it already, long before I’d discovered my birth parents.

  “I’ll do whatever you need me to,” Logan said. “Just please fill in some of these blanks for me. You appeared out of nowhere, losing blood big time, and fought these crazy dudes—and I had to fire Dad’s shotgun to help you out with that. Then I’m on a radio with an Army Major with a stick up his ass, telling me to get you to the closest hospital and keep you here. To keep Sarah away. To do everything and not be told anything.” His eyes rounded as his fingers sought out mine again. “Please, Chelsea.”

  My pulse quickened. Breaths came short under his intense stare.

  He deserves to know. And so did Sarah.

  But one question kept boomeranging to the forefront of my thoughts. What happened to Trevor?

  “Did Pike mention anything about Trev
or?” I asked him.

  Logan started, blinking back the wetness in his eyes. “W-What?”

  “Trevor,” I repeated. “Did he say if Trevor’s alive?”

  Logan’s eyebrows pulled together. “No. I’m sorry. Is he—?”

  My heart plummeted through my chest to the floor. “I don’t know.” God, I didn’t know. And with my powers gone, so too was any chance I could just teleport to him, to find him.

  I looked at Logan, who easily bore the weight of every secret I’d ever shared, like any older brother might for his sister. He wasn’t related to me, but he’d taken care of me at the worst of times.

  I wanted Trevor. I wanted to find him, to know he was okay. To be able to tell him about these soldiers and how they’d almost gotten me and my closest friends back home. How they’d almost gotten Sarah and Logan. But I couldn’t.

  The weight of everything overwhelmed me. My eyes welled with tears as I flexed my hands, searching for water that wouldn’t come. Couldn’t come.

  Then I told Logan everything—about the night I’d met Trevor, about teleporting to SeaSat5. About the hijacking and my powers and the war. About TAO. About everything we’d accomplished and how everything had fallen apart within minutes. It poured out of my mouth. I couldn’t stop it. Didn’t want to. I spilled my past and my heart, and then waited for Logan’s face to become anything other than deadpan. For him to call me crazy or to stand up and walk out of the room without responding. Anything. Any reaction at all.

  Long moments passed before he finally pulled air into his lungs and turned his gaze away from me. “Does Sarah know?”

  I closed my eyes and swallowed a ball of guilt. “No. I haven’t had a chance to tell her about my parents, and I didn’t know how to tell her about the rest.”

  “I can’t believe the band’s never questioned how you can just be at practice or the shows,” he said, then looked back to me. “Or how I never have before. I just assumed there was a private jet involved for some reason. We all did.” He sighed heavily and sank back into his chair.

  At least he wasn’t running away screaming.