by TS Ward
The sound building in my chest came out in angry breaths forced through clenched teeth.
“Do not fight me.” His hands were always everywhere, and now they found a hold on both of my shoulders. “I do everything for you. I protect you. I love you, all of you, even with Beckett blood, even as a Sceptre. I don’t think less of you for that like they do. I have been there for you always, always, always there for you. You are still alive because of the things I do for you and all you do in return is disrespect me. You’ve barely met that soldier and you’ve known me since we were kids and all you’ve done is show him the kindness that I deserve.”
He writhed with jealousy over nothing.
I knew the words would prick his skin and light a fire with the ember underneath, but I choked them out anyway. “You get what you give.”
“I brought you back to life,” he hissed.
His hands of burning iron slammed me against the glass hard enough that it shattered into thousands of tiny diamonds, showering down to the sandy floor of the hall below. It was loud and there was more panic in me for the sound than there was for the pain that spiked through my skull.
I grabbed his shirt as he held me over the edge as that Mercurian rage boiled in his reddening face.
“They’ll wake up,” I breathed, “James, please, they… they’ll know you’re here and I’m trying to get Rabbit to talk to me and he won’t if he knows this is happening. Please. Go, before they wake up.”
He was still for a moment.
A muscle twitched in his jaw and he adjusted his grip, pulling a whimper out of me as he nearly let me fall. I breathed out in relief when he pulled me up again, but then he held me in a tight hug against his heaving chest and I couldn’t draw the breath back in.
His hand brushed the glass from my hair and jacket and the other gripped the back of my neck as he whispered into my ear. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to hurt you. I just—I love you, and you’re breaking my heart. I can’t stand that you’re not mine. How about… how about an offer? You care about the kid, clearly, obviously, as you should. You love him more than anything, don’t you?”
I squeezed my eyes shut. My hands pressed between our chests ran lines over his ribs. “Don’t. Don’t, please, leave him alone.”
“It’s the easiest way, Soren,” he murmured. “Your father wants him, so it’s him instead of the entire city. He’s protecting them with his sacrifice, the way you protected him. You’ll have until you get home to decide—and don’t just do it because you think it will protect him. I’ll give him to Astra if you aren’t sincere. If you say yes, if you marry me, if you just accept that you’re the Genesis, you’ll see him whenever you feel like. They won’t touch him.”
He let go, sank back onto his heels, and grabbed my jacket. I watched him slip that stupid ring into my pocket, shaking and hurting. He kissed my forehead and stood up, returned to the Lumen with a confident sway in his step.
My hands ran over the places where I was sure my skin had already turned red and purple, damp from the lingering warmth of his touch. They searched the back of my head and shoulders for damage from the glass.
I was tender and sore, but a cold anger filled me in the wake of James Carson.
I was never going to be his, and he was never going to lay a single hand on Percy or I would take this knife—I have Jack’s knife for fuck’s sake—and I would cut that hand off.
I could have used that knife, tucked into my belt, but the memory of it fled my mind as fast as any strength I had to use against him. I was weak when it came to him and I didn’t know why.
I didn’t know why, and I hated it.
I hated every second of it.
17
An old store on the same floor was packed with exercise equipment that looked like it was used often.
It was empty now, and the punching bags creaked against their chains with every punch and kick I landed. I threw everything I had into it, breathed in rage filled exhalations, ditched my jacket and boots to see the bruises he left, to feel the impact wholly.
Every blow was an imaginary strike against Mercury cursed with the title of Pluto. Every single one was an image of that white-toothed smile accompanied by the smell of leather burnt by a static shock.
“You know, it’s kind of scary how good you are at beating that thing up. Don’t you think the poor thing’s had enough?”
Jack’s voice startled me and I stumbled to a halt. He stood and watched, his arms crossed over his chest as he leaned against the frame of the door.
His eyes fell to his knife that rested on top of my jacket. “Can I get that back, please?”
I looked down at the fox-shaped bone handle and the shine of a well-kept blade. A blush flooded my cheeks.
“Yeah. Sorry. Heard something.”
“What could scare you into needing a knife? You’re a Sceptre,” he mused.
He moved slowly and cautiously into the room, as if I was a frightened wild animal that might lash out at the wrong move. He paused halfway across the floor.
“It’s—it was a gift. From someone who… who isn’t around, anymore. It means a lot to me.”
I bit my tongue and nodded, moved to pick it up carefully by the blade. I held it out to him and held my breath as he took it and set it back into place at his hip. My eyes drifted back to my jacket and that gold ring that Mercury left in the pocket.
The soldier cast a sideways glance at me. “Everything okay?”
I nodded slowly. “Yep.”
“Are you sure? You’re a little… sparky.” He gestured vaguely at me. His eyes traced the empty space around me.
I blinked.
The air was thick with static that smelled like nickel, a soft blue glow that lit the room around me like an ocean of bioluminescent algae.
Every movement I made popped sparks from my clothes to dance like hail over the ground.
I stepped further from him and breathed it all in, a deep inhale to focus on the fuzziness that coated me like a second skin. The static hadn’t been so radiant for a while, it hadn’t filled the air around me, electrifying, having ridden in on the scaly back of anger.
It had been quiet for so long, as if it wasn’t a part of me, and even now it drifted in undulating little storms of blue-lightning-jellyfish that didn’t quite want to cooperate.
Jack laughed and reached out a hand. A soft smile crossed his face when the smallest shock reached back. “It’s alright, you don’t have to… How do you control it? If that’s how it works, what do you do to… to hold onto it, to keep it inside?”
Close your eyes, and breathe, and focus on the pain—
“Is Percy okay?”
He looked over his shoulder. “Still asleep. Fitz has an eye on him. Ellie’s coming to watch him, remember?”
I nodded, and then, “Why are they the only two kids here?”
He blinked. “Because the Empire takes them. For the program. Why else?”
“Was I supposed to know that?” I bit back at his tone, and then shook my head. “Sorry. No wonder everyone looks at me like they do.”
“It was two years ago, on the pilgrimage here,” he said softly. “All of them except Tiger.”
“And Arden in her place.”
I sat down, crossed my legs, and planted my palms against my knees. Deep breaths drew pins and needles into my chest and I exhaled them out.
Closing my eyes let me focus the most.
In the darkness behind my eyelids, I felt, I saw, the electric blue currents that brushed the air, more than what was already visible. A sharp static cloud filled the room like fog, heaviest around me, and snaked around Jack as he moved to sit in front of me in teal colours that glowed bright.
Wires in the floor connected the rest of the building like a grid, holding the potential but lacking the power to light this place up as bright as the sun. More wires dipped into underground tubes, connected to the rest of Warren.
There was a hint of power in the distance, in t
he garden, and above us a strange humming cloud I couldn’t quite identify.
A different kind of electric current was in Jack.
Neural pathways glowed softly. His nervous system blinked like stars in a night sky. It was the same thing in me, too, but it was harder to find and control, slippery under my own grasp.
I held my hands out to him, eyes still closed.
A soft spark traveled down my arms and danced between our fingertips for a moment before it found a soft path and shot up his arms.
He laughed at the tingle of it and rested his hands on mine. Soft, but steady.
Humans had circuitry. It wasn’t like the Lumen, not straightforward in a grid like the wires in a building, the way cities were hives with ninety-degree angles.
It was a complicated mess of feeling and emotion and physical control in a bundle of tangled up string, a maze in the strangest of ways. There were so many odd paths that picking the right one was hard, and the little shocks of stimulation were surveyors that built the map.
“Soren?” Jack murmured.
I let the tips of my fingers trace the place where his pulse leapt against his skin. “Think of a happy memory. First one that comes to mind.”
“Happy?” He asked, and I felt the electric jolt through a bundle of neurons somewhere in his mind. I cast a line to catch the fish and let it settle into a relay between his palm and mine. “Okay. Got it. What now?”
“Just hold on to it,” I whispered.
Breathing in brought those pins and needles to every part of me.
I was electric fire.
Breathing in brought those tiny blue lights that shot along his skin and up mine. It tickled. It felt… familiar. But still foreign.
There was a moment of static, like a bad radio signal, but then the antenna was fixed and I melted in rich velvet colours of blue and navy and violet.
A sky full of stars reflected on still water. A cold chill raised goosebumps on skin. A girl wrapped in a black coat.
She stared out at the lake and the sky that was doubled on it and tripled in the shine of her eyes—sharp blue eyes, that turned to look at him with a smile that rounded flushed cheeks.
You aren’t looking at the stars, Jack. You have to learn where your home is in this universe.
I already know.
“What are you doing?” Jack tore his hands away, goosebumps on his skin and his voice panicked and breathy. “That—you just—what the hell was that? What did you do?”
I pulled my knees up and wrapped my arms around my legs. I didn’t look at him. I didn’t say the words I wanted to say. I’m sorry. I don’t usually see it. Arden never said it felt so real.
No, what I wanted to say was something else.
That girl, was that me?
Younger, softer.
He sat there. He didn’t do anything. He didn’t say anything. He just looked at me in shock and fear, like I had done the worst thing either of us could have possibly thought of.
I shook, thinking of the image of that girl with the Beckett blue eyes and the smile on her face—how could that be me?
Jack ran his hands through his hair and shook his head. “That was real. That was real, Soren, so please, explain it. Explain, because I can’t understand a single thing that you can do and that… that was… that was like it was happening.”
“I don’t know.” I pressed the heels of my hands to my eyes and took in a shuddered breath. My words came out fast. “The… the nervous system uses electrical impulses, and the brain—it just—Arden and I used to do that, to calm us both down, to get this out of my system but… she never said it felt real.”
“Could you…did you see that?” His voice was a paled rasp.
Memories could be fabricated and influenced. That’s what I told myself. Maybe it wasn’t me, maybe it was someone else, maybe his mind just stitched an image of me where there wasn’t one—planted.
I moved my hands from my eyes. “It was supposed to be a happy memory. What was it?”
“Doesn’t matter.” He shook his head and changed the topic in the thick of it, stood up, and dusted himself off. “We have a rebel leader to talk to. Come on, Sparky.”
I sat on the ground with no intention of moving with him. “Maybe I saw it. What then?”
He hesitated.
“I think if it didn’t matter you wouldn’t be so scared to let me know. And maybe I should have explained it first but I didn’t think I would have to for something happy. I didn’t think a happy memory was such a secret. I wouldn’t be afraid to share mine, if I had one.” I crossed my arms over my chest and met his eyes.
“It’s not about that,” he said, “It’s the fact that it’s… invasive.”
Invasive. Like a bug, like a poison, like a monster. I nodded, throat tight. “Sorry. I forget sometimes.”
He came back and knelt on the ground in front of me, his arm lazed over a knee. “It’s okay, just… it’s one thing to remember something, but to live it again, when you don’t even… just give me a little warning next time, alright?”
“Yeah. Yeah.” I agreed easily, but my mind ran over that brief image a thousand times a second.
James was jealous of the soldier, the soldier who was certain that he knew me more than I thought, and I couldn’t stop the thought from crossing my mind that it was the way he knew me.
Was that the familiarity?
“Come on,” he held his hand out. “Let’s go.”
18
Moon Rabbit lounged on a tattered old sofa chair, one leg kicked up over the arm of it.
Tufts of cotton stuffing poked out in various places where the rips hadn’t been stitched or patched and the fabric of it was dirtied. It was orange stained from being out in the garden where the desert cascaded down on the wind. He watched me as he took a bite of a peach.
People gathered around the edge of the square.
Their eyes made my heart thunder with the way that they bored into my hood and tried to see underneath it, tried to peel back the thin veil to see the face of the monster on the other side.
I stood alone before the man.
Clear the way, he told them with a wave of his hand, and every single one of them moved to the edge of the square surrounding the fountain. They found places to stand and sit between the planters, on the broken skyscrapers on the edge of the green stretch.
Tiger stood tall on a platform, an old microphone wired to crackling speakers before her. She surveyed the crowd as silence fell over them, waited with her lips pressed tight as the sun cascaded down on her brown skin.
“We had a plan,” Moon Rabbit finally signed, the speakers booming through the towers.
His granddaughter’s voice was gentle yet burned with conviction, as if she already knew what he was going to say. He looked around at his people as his hands moved.
“We had hope. Didn’t we?”
The small hairs on my skin stood straight up with the chorus that echoed back in eerie waves. We did! We had hope!
Their eagerness to respond set me on edge. It was the unity of it, because I knew what he did when he had a voice. I knew what those dark eyes could coax out of someone. If the Empire thought that cutting out this man’s tongue was enough to castrate his ability, they were horribly mistaken.
He was still hypnotic.
It only served to make a more vindictive enemy of him.
“Yes, we had a plan and hope. When we were visited by two soldiers on their way to the Embassy, searching for fuel and spare parts in what they must have assumed was an ancient city forgotten to time, we were wary. When those two soldiers were claimed by one of our own, our wariness shrank. When those two soldiers shared news of a weapon in possession of the Empire, we were filled with hope, not fear.”
The man met my eyes when he said it, and the slight lift to his chin told me he saw the shock sink into me. Jack and Fitz told him.
“A weapon in the hands of the Empire would be wielded against us like poison to rats. And a
weapon of such power in the hands of the people would erase the tyrants from the throne!”
A cheer erupted around the square, and my stomach tried to crawl up my throat.
Erase the tyrants from the throne. To usurp the Empire from my father, from Roam—the Empress hiding in this desert wasteland—from me, from Pilot, from Percy, hell, even Astra—the thought of it was dizzying. The thought of them wanting to murder my family made my whole body shake.
Rabbit raised a hand, and when silence fell again, he lowered it. He was in control from his chair, seated dramatically, decorated in his shiny metals and beads.
“Then, the same man, one of our own, who claimed these soldiers as his family, asked us for a favour. The favour was to bring home his granddaughter. A granddaughter who was taken four years ago, shortly before my own daughter. The man in question, he’s a good man, an old friend of mine. All of you can agree. He has helped us countless times, he has ferried refugees across the Wastes, he has shared with us a playful young boy who has become fast friends with my own granddaughter.”
I tried to search out Pucks in the crowd without moving a muscle.
“The soldiers were sent to the Embassy, their vehicle fixed and fuelled. Behind them, we sent our own people. The soldiers were to take the weapon, as it was already their job to transport it for the Empire. Our people were to take the Embassy, to rescue our children taken from us, to return a granddaughter and a daughter to Pucks’ family, to find my own girl. There was some success,” Rabbit waved a hand toward me, sank his teeth into his peach as he waited for the cheer to erupt and fade again. “There has been loss.”
Silence settled around the garden, except for the growling of the generators. It was strange to hear, for all the people here, bowing their heads. They were the families of the ones lost, the friends, the neighbours.
“My daughter was taken to the Embassy where she trained alongside and became friends with the girl you see before you. She was murdered at the hands of those animals, but before she died, she wrote a letter for her friend to pass on. And her friend kept it a secret until late last night, when she found her way into my tent to share it with me, honouring Arden’s wishes through to the end. For that, I am thankful.”