True Storm

by L. E. Sterling

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Why?”

  “Because. Because he’d never—”

  The sound of footsteps cuts off her answer, not in the hallway outside the room but on the elusive sound system. Westfall’s familiar voice carries over the air. “…I told him not to take too much. We could accidentally kill them. I told him you’d be here to assess—”

  But it is the accompanying voice that has the skin on the back of my neck skittering.

  “Gather more genetic samples and then we’ll see,” the cold, clipped voice orders. “We’ll take no chances until we’re certain that we can manufacture it. And we need a little more time to study our little human guinea pig.”

  “Of course.” I can practically hear Father Wes bowing and scraping.

  Margot mouths the word I cannot bear to think, the man whose life consists of people bowing and scraping to him. I picture the man: the tight line of his shoulders. The hands, strong and squeezing the life out of a pair of black leather gloves.

  Father?

  19

  Bright spots flicker past my eyes like the lights when the power is about to go out. The room goes silent, save the sound of Margot’s ragged breathing and my own shallow pull of air. I feel as though I’ve been sucker punched.

  I reckon we both have, my sister and I.

  The idea that the secret partner was Resnikov, somehow miraculously survived from the destruction of his factory, has crossed my mind a time or two. Perhaps it was someone from the Upper Circle, I’d thought. Senator Kain was a suspect on my list.

  But this—this betrayal cuts so deep that for a moment I think it will kill me.

  Tears track down Margot’s face. I can feel her retreating, the stabbing wound too deadly.

  What of our mother—does she know about this? Is she in on it as well?

  But even as I ask the question, I sift back through the evidence and piece together an awful story.

  Mother at our Reveal, telling us that she’s sorry.

  Resnikov’s old scientist, with his tale of two girls born from a cocktail in a test tube.

  Margot and I still don’t quite know what we are, let alone who. Yet the most important question of all presses us with urgency. What does our father intend to do to us?

  …

  “Wh-What do we do when they come back?” My sister’s words bring me to my senses. Because of course, she’s right. They will be back.

  Anger rattles my already shaky bones, makes me flush hot and cold. My teeth chatter in my jaw until it feels like I’m grinding glass. And still we sit there. Dead ducks.

  Margot’s hushed voice cuts through the red fog of anger. “They’ll kill us.”

  I shake my head. “No, he’d never.”

  “Yes. Yes, Lucy. You need to face this.” Margot’s bottom lip quivers with upset.

  But how can I? How do I accept that my own father is behind our kidnapping? Desperately, I call to mind my True Born, his eyes bright and clear, cutting through the storm of my confusion. Think, Lu. Be smart.

  “He said ‘human guinea pig.’”

  “What?” Margot’s voice carries low in the room.

  “Not us. A. Singular. Human guinea pig. He wasn’t talking about us.”

  Margot nods. “They’re testing it on someone. Maybe…Leo?”

  I wince at the hopeful tone of her voice. “No.” I shake my head. “Can’t be. He wasn’t sick.”

  Margot cocks her head, staring at me like a pretty bird. But I’m right—and she knows I recognize the scent of approaching death. There’s been only one person who’d been sick lately, and then not.

  Only one person who’s evaded death’s sure hand.

  Theodore Nash.

  The clang of the door interrupts my train of thought. In walks Brother Noah with another of the Watchers, face smeared with red, carrying a tray with drink and syringes and tubing. Noah bends down to swab my arm; I swear I can see a glint of pity in his eyes. And behind him, like a flag, the glowing red obscenity of two circles, conjoined.

  …

  It’s worse this time. I wake bathed in throbbing, intense pain. Behind my eyes the black-red rain falls, mixing with my tears. And the world beneath me turns first crimson, then a luscious green, as though each inch of Dominion has been seeded with the magic bombs that transform into prayer trees.

  But something is missing. Something is vanished. And when I turn and understand who it is that’s missing, a howling grief takes hold of me, more desperate and terrible than anything I’ve ever felt in my life—

  The coin around my neck jangles as my head snaps up. We’re not alone.

  Sitting in front of us is Westfall, his arms draped around the back of a wooden chair. Wood. I thought only Upper Circlers could afford wooden chairs.

  The stubble on his cheeks has grown into a short, curly beard patched with white and gray. Lines divide the flesh on his cheeks. He looks old and sick and tired. His trousers are thin blue cotton, of the cheaper variety. The pattern of his shirt, over his heart, is a colorful explosion, making it look as though he’s been shot and is bleeding a rainbow. He looks us over. First one, then the other, a mad sheen to his eyes. Behind him, Brother Noah stands with his arms crossed. He gazes down at us inscrutably. A scuffling noise in the hall behind us alerts us to the fact that they are not alone.

  Three feet from me, too far away to touch, Margot sits straight-backed, legs crossed at the ankle. Like she’s at an Upper Circle social.

  “Did you know there are ten pints of blood in a human?” He doesn’t seem to expect a reply as he continues. “Girls, there are a few things we should talk about before we get down to business.” Father Wes turns his attention back to me, eyes hovering at my neck. His gaze makes my skin crawl. “Where did you get that coin?” he asks with genuine curiosity.

  When I don’t answer, he tells me, “I could beat it out of you. Beat your sister until you tell me.”

  I smile a mouthful of knives. “How about we play a game? You tell me something, then I tell you something?”

  Father Wes tips his head back and laughs, a deep belly laugh. “You think you’re in a position to bargain, little girl?”

  “I think you’re not going to harm us until you get what you want.”

  “And what do you think we want, Little Fox?”

  I stay silent as Father Wes rubs his knuckles on the back of the chair. They’re raw, chapped and covered with scabs. Hands that look as though they’ve seen several hard winters. Now I notice them: spots on his face. Tiny scabs near his ear, one sitting above his right eye, blemishes that the beard can’t hide. Recognition washes over me. A familiar feeling curls like a rotten flower in my belly.

  Father Wes has the Plague, that little voice inside me insists.

  “I reckon you’re looking for Plague Cure.” I eye him meaningfully. “And you think it’s inside us somehow.”

  Margot shoots me a death dagger, but she doesn’t know. She doesn’t know what I know. Father Wes considers me anew.

  “And how do you figure that?” He draws the words out slowly as he reaches around and fiddles with something at his back.

  I shrug. “I’m a clever little Fox.”

  His grin freezes me. “And so you are.” The preacher man lifts his eyes to the ceiling. “Noah, collect the blood.”

  Noah steps forward, his face a blank. He bends low, does his best not to prick too hard as he shoves the needle in, draws the blood. It’s when he pulls a breath that I realize he’s genuinely not happy with what he’s been asked to do.

  “It’s okay,” I whisper to him.

  His head snaps back, and he stares at me, his face an unreadable mask. I nod slightly, letting him know I understand, though why I should be so kind to him is beyond me.

  Father Wes hasn’t noticed. He’s still talking, and I catch only his last words. “…girls, there’s something you ought to know. We intend to make the world anew, and you’re going to help us. Do you know how import
ant that makes you?”

  But I’ve had enough of the preacher men and their grand schemes. All I want right now is answers. “Did you arrange to have Margot kidnapped at the clinic?”

  That stops him cold. “What did you say?”

  “Last year, before you appeared at our school. The clinic?”

  For once the preacher man is without words. He stares at me, jaw and eyes hardening into a stubborn set. “What are you talking about?” he grumbles.

  “Surely you had your eyes on us. Surely your young boy knew Margot had been taken. He came with another big man to get me.”

  It’s then that I notice it. He tries to hide it, but I see it in the throbbing vein in his jaw, the twitch of his little finger. “Yes. Of course,” he says. But his words are wooden, automatic. Then I know for sure.

  Someone betrayed him. Someone very good at politics. Someone like—

  I’ve only begun to process the thought when Noah finishes draining me of a pint of my blood. He makes a production of it as he turns to Margot. I wince as a new needle goes into her arm, the pain crawling through my own.

  And then we all freeze as a voice ghosts over the intercom.

  “Get all your men to the entrance. I don’t think they’ll storm us, but I’d rather not take the chance. And for pity’s sake be sure to get rid of that damned preacher when you exit,” says the man with the cold, clipped syllables of our father’s voice.

  Nash’s dry tones float close before softening out of range. “He could still be helpful. His people control the city.”

  “But you’ll be controlling all the food out there in nowhere land. All that magically abundant food. And Plague Cure. He’s a complication we won’t need.”

  We sit a frozen tableau in the tiny dungeon. Noah’s hand on the needle, just pressing into Margot’s arm. His increasingly uneven breathing. The mad look to Father Wes, standing now behind a halo of red circles.

  In the end, it’s he who breaks the silence with a grin that turns my remaining blood cold. “Noah, leave off the needle,” he drawls.

  “Father.” Noah obediently drops the needle on the small collections tray. As he steps back, the acolyte bows his head. But I can see the way he watches us under his lashes.

  “Seems I have some housekeeping to do,” Wes says after an eternity of silence. “Seems some people don’t believe in my quest. But you know what?” He bends low over me. I can see each and every pore on his face, the gray-streaked stubble around his chin. Up close, the scabs are bitter and seeping. On my face, his breath is fetid, the smell of a sick man. “You know what, Miss Fox? I think all our suffering is at an end.” The words, so soft and utterly menacing, spike up and down my spine.

  A sudden crash sounds through the building. The ceiling booms, the walls shake. Dust trickles down from a seam in the low ceiling. Father Wes raises his eyes upward. “Looks like the cavalry has arrived,” he says to no one in particular. “Noah, time for you to leave.”

  Noah steps forward. “But Father—”

  Wes turns his head as he lumbers over to my sister. “I told you to leave. If you manage to stay alive, find me. The True Borns are here.”

  It’s too dangerous, I think, even as my heart leaps at the news. What if they’re hurt—what if Jared is hurt? Margot and I share a frantic look as Father Wes berates his man and orders him out of the room.

  Margot whispers, “Love you true, Lu.” Time only for those four words to be uttered, barely a sentence, before Wes’s body drops a shadow across her beautiful, pale, tear-stained face.

  Time stands still as something leaps, bright and shiny, in Father Wes’s hand. Excruciating pain lances me through and through and keeps going. Crimson sprays everywhere, draping me in the fine spray of my sister’s blood. I can’t catch my breath. My heart hammers horror in my chest as I try to take gulps of air and find nothing. Nothing.

  And then I feel it letting go, that thing inside me. The shimmering line between my sister and me as her eyes dull.

  I am dying, I suddenly realize. No.

  I feel my sister dying.

  …

  Father Wes leaves Margot slumped and bleeding in her prison chair and turns to me. “Your father thought to double-cross me? There’s nothing so pure as the light of the almighty,” he cries, triumphant. There’s a knife in his hands. A hunting knife. A knife for hunting little girls, still sopping with my sister’s blood.

  He presses the knife to my neck and slices before it catches on something. He can’t get it through, so he lifts the blade from my neck and tries to chew into me anew. But the grooves of his knife have stuck fast.

  Warm trickles of blood flash hot. A shout. Then a flash and a bang and smoke. Father Wes abandons his knife and steps back and away.

  Jared, I think as I sink into an endless black. Jared, please save Margot, I think desperately as I hear a rattling gurgle and know in my bones that behind me now lay two more corpses for Dominion’s coffins. Father Wes and Noah have been killed.

  “Jared.” My voice is nothing but a gurgle as I choke on my own blood. “Margot.”

  I catch sight of a living nightmare, primal rage twisting an inhuman face into a death mask. He’s got something in his hands, and it isn’t until I blink once, twice, freeing my eyes from blood, that I realize it’s a head.

  It’s Father Wes’s head, the eyes dull and open in terror.

  Jared screams, and the room stops. Jared’s beast nose twitches and the awful scream tears at me again. I reckon he can smell our fear, the galloping arrival of our deaths. Because in that instant I know, I know, that I, too, am hurtling into death.

  He screams in that panther voice. I think he’s calling my name. It rattles me back to my senses, long enough to mouth the words, Save her, before the sparking brilliance of Nolan Storm’s thorny crown swarms into view, and Jared’s blood-soaked hands.

  The world tilts on its axis.

  And me? I slump into nothingness, hand in hand with my sister.

  20

  Screaming. There’s screaming in my head, the sound of a siren’s wail that I can’t make my throat do. And the dull certainty, the silent, empty room inside me.

  Margot.

  So this is what it’s like to be one instead of two.

  The loneliness is more than I can bear. I expect to burst into flames, to be swallowed by the nothingness of death. How can I still be alive? I must be alive, I reckon, because there is an endless ocean of pain. A wail bubbles up, but the pain in my throat is excruciating. It comes out more like a mewl.

  Someone squeezes my hand. My head is frozen in place, but I know by the subtle weight and feel, even before turning my eyes, that it’s Jared. For the longest time he doesn’t say anything, just stares at me with a look so deadly I’m surprised I don’t die again. I must have died, if only for a time.

  I watch the bobble of his Adam’s apple as he swallows. He licks those perfect lips, lips that up until a few days ago I would have watched with keen interest. But now…

  “Don’t try to talk.” He peels back a slick of hair from my face. A frown puckers his forehead. His eyes are hollow sockets tinged the color of a bruise. I notice he looks thinner, less of himself somehow. His cheekbones have grown sharper for some reason other than his own shifting.

  It’s as though I’m seeing him through a distance of a thousand years. He’s so close, but he might as well be on the moon, for all I can touch him, all I can absorb. I am frozen and lifeless, a dead thing. A Laster’s corpse on the side of the road. I pull my hand from his. I just want him to leave me to die, but I can’t get any words out.

  Raising a hand to my throat, I realize why. The bandages are thick. A burning pain accompanies my own swallowed tears. Cautiously, slowly, each inch a bout of torture, I turn onto my side on the bed, away from him and his prying eyes.

  “Lu.” Jared’s voice is tortured, but then he says nothing. He keeps his vigil by my bedside for a long time, silent as a statue, until I hear him slip out the door like a w
hisper.

  But I don’t look. I don’t say a word.

  No one should have to see a grief like this.

  …

  Time has lost all meaning. Someone has pulled the blinds back. In the glass, I spy a spitting electric blue, shimmering and dancing like flames. I don’t want to turn over, but something in Storm’s voice commands me.

  “Lucy, I know you’re awake. Look at me.”

  He says it gently enough, but his tone makes it clear there is no room for debate. I turn far enough to see him where he stands before I float my eyes away. Storm has his hands in the pockets of exquisitely tailored trousers. He pulls them out and places them on the bed, lowering himself into a chair. He says nothing for a long time. It gives me the chance to study him closer.

  This is Nolan Storm in mourning clothes. Black shirt, stiff and buttoned. Black suit, perfectly tailored to his muscled body. But it’s his face I study. There is more stubble across the hollows of his cheeks than I’ve ever seen before. Smudged purple circles rim his eyes, which are haunted and filled with something I’d as soon call war. And then there is his spectral crown. The ends have grown longer, thicker, their jutting protrusions tangling more intricately than before.

  “We need to talk.” He doesn’t move his hands from the bed, where they lay like an open book. He doesn’t try to touch me, for which I’m grateful. I stare at the ceiling, my throat still a raw, throbbing mess, and listen while his words rumble over me. “The Watchers are gone. You’re safe now.”

  He doesn’t understand. Did he see? Does he know?

  His voice gentles even more. “Nothing can fix what was broken…what happened to Margot.” He blinks and closes his eyes momentarily as his crown of bone flares hot white. When he opens his eyes again, it’s as though an alien god has replaced him, as his gunmetal gray eyes roil like the clouds of a Flux storm. “By tomorrow morning the preachers and the Upper Circle will receive identical letters.” And when his lip flips up on one side in a grimace of a smile, I want nothing more than to cower under the covers. “That letter will tell them in no uncertain terms what I will do to Dominion City should anyone rise against me or my people again.”