Then I really start to sob. His lips murmur across the soft flesh of my ear, and he drops tiny kisses on my face, tilts my head back to kiss my forehead, my eyelids, my soaked cheek. Then he pulls me back against his body, cradling me in his arms as the storm inside me takes over and rages.
…
As Margot’s final spark of life ebbed out of her, I’d done what I needed to survive. I’d switched it off, whatever that thin, fragile string was that had bound us our whole lives. But I needed it. I had always needed it to feel whole. And now, when I miss my sister so much it feels like I’ll die, I need it all the more.
It’s just this thought that has me searching the seams for that other sense until I feel it flicker back to life. Then the cord opens fully, and the sensation floods me, as though a dam has broken. She’s not there—there’s nothing, no one, on the other end.
But strangely, I’m not alone, either. Something is happening.
It’s as if all at once a switch has been flipped and a machine hums suddenly to life inside of me. The sensation is so odd that my tears abruptly halt. I pull back to look at Jared.
My face is soaked with tears. His shirt is soaked, too. We both look like a storm has rocked us. But it’s what’s going on inside of me that worries me the most. “What’s happening to me?”
22
Jared holds the door open, his hand resting on the small of my back as we make our way into the lab. I can hear the hum of machines, the small swooshing sound of particle separators.
Doc Raines looks like she’s gained some years back since the last time I’d seen her, after she’d sewn me up. With her tight curls bouncing in a high ponytail, her body clad in a long white lab coat, she resembles a child playing dress up. She looks up at us as we come together, her eyes owlish with the high-powered ocular device that allows her to see things less than ordinary.
And as usual, she gets straight to the point. “What are you doing here, Lucy?”
“I need you to put me through Protocols.”
A deep V appears on the doc’s forehead as she frowns. “I was just packing up, as a matter of fact. There’s no more need for Protocols, is there?”
“Doc Raines.” My voice is short with rising panic. “I need you to run the Protocols again.”
“Why?”
“You said our blood creates True Born Talismans.”
“Yes, I said that. When properly combined,” she emphasizes.
“So our blood can trigger True Born mutations. Which means we can keep people from catching sick.”
“Yes, but Lucy, Margot is gone. That dream is over.”
“How does it work?”
“Lucy, really.” Doc Raines clucks and turns away, ready to dismiss me.
My best ice-princess voice roars from my mouth. “Tell me!”
I’d had time to think as Jared and Mohawk escorted me back to the van. Time to contemplate those seconds when Father Wes had brought his knife down on first Margot, then me.
Lock and key.
That’s what has been rolling around in my mind. An accelerant and an anchor, the doctor had told us—that’s what our genetic codes were. Yet linked, tagged to each other. And when the two puzzles merge, True Born mutations are triggered.
I pull my cold hand out from under Jared’s warm one. My fingertips trace lightly over the thin smile of a scar.
“Kira said it healed too quickly,” I say.
Doc Raines stares at me as though I’m a stranger. She glances at Jared, apparently satisfied by his continued silence and stony face that I’m not to be dismissed as a crazy person. She turns and places her hands demurely in her lap. Staring at my neck thoughtfully, she motions to us.
“All right then, pull up a stool and get cozy.”
…
The sky is turning when I wake. From a purple-black bruise it lightens, almost imperceptibly, to a medium gray. Soon it will be as white as a winding sheet. I don’t have to turn to know Jared is there, asleep in the chair across the room. I’ve come to learn that he’s attuned to my every movement. When I open my eyes, so does he.
“You’re awake.” Still half asleep, he raises his arms in a satisfied feline stretch. His red T-shirt with crude white lips below Kiss Me, I’m Available!, lifts with his movements, revealing the rippling muscles of his belly.
“You’re still here.” I’m grumbling, but it’s half-hearted at best.
Jared Price hasn’t left my side since we visited Grayguard.
“Yep.” He gives me a sleepy smile. I snort and pull myself from the warmth of my bed to go over to the window. From here, so high above the streets and roofs of Dominion, everything below is the size of crawling ants. Everything, that is, except the Prayer Tree.
The smoldering fire blazed for a day and a night before the Lasters finally put it out. If there was any permanent damage done to the tree, I can’t see it from here. I run a finger across the almost nonexistent line at my neck, just above where Ali’s coin necklace sits. I pull on the coin, feeling the familiar spark nip my fingertips. To, think, not so long ago I would have done anything to have the necklace removed. Now that Ali’s gone, I wouldn’t part with it even if I did know how to get it off. It’s all I have to remember my friend. And he was right after all, I think with bitterness. It did save me.
What else had he told me about the necklace? The thought of forgetting something so important depresses me. Two hands, brawny and strong, appear on either side of my body at the window frame. I slowly turn, coming face-to-face with a pair of inhuman cat eyes peering out from under a shag of sunlight hair.
“What do you think you’re doing?” I say imperiously. I want to cross my arms, but he hasn’t left enough room between our bodies to let that happen. I become keenly aware of the heat rising from his flesh.
As though he’s read my mind, he gives me a slow, sensual smile. “What does it look like I’m doing, Princess?”
“Getting in my way,” I grind out.
“Oh?” Jared cocks his head mockingly. “Am I in your way, Your Highness?”
“You know you are.”
“Good,” he says. His tongue licks his bottom lip sensually before he kisses me with desperate intensity. His hands tense on the window frame. He places one, then the other broad hand on my back, pulling me closer. I can’t think as my fingers automatically come to rest on his shoulders, fists curling in his T-shirt.
Jared nibbles at my bottom lip, causing me to shiver from head to toes with desire. I open my eyes to look at him. He regards me through half-lidded eyes with frank hunger. It’s this, this intimacy that is so great, and far too important to me, that has me wanting to run scared.
“Lucy.” He sighs.
“Jared,” I warn. His lips find my ear, trace down the sensitive skin of my neck until they hit my collarbone. He nips at the tender tendon in the space beside my shoulder, and I nearly jump out of my skin. Frissons of heat and ice dance through my body. I am suddenly, electrically alive.
For a moment my traitorous body wants to give in. I feel the surrender washing over me, an automatic reaction. My body hugs closer to his, my hips fitting tightly against his powerful thighs.
But then I think of Margot. My other half, who is dead instead of me. I push myself away, panting and shaking. Jared looks as bewildered as I feel.
“Are you okay? What’s going on?”
He doesn’t know, doesn’t understand. I feel dead, like I’m trapped in the ground with Margot, drowning in betrayals. And I don’t want Jared there with me. Jared is sunshine and heat. Cinnamon and forest. Green and gold and indigo. He’s more alive than anyone I’ve ever known. And I can’t sully him with the way I feel. I won’t.
It’s his tone, a hair shy of imperious, that gives me the fuel I need. “What’s going on? What’s going on is that you’re hot and cold with me. One minute you’re telling me we can’t get close and the next you’re holding my hand in the lab and kissing me. Make up your mind, Jared.”
“I have
made up my mind.” His eyes are smoky, a hue I’ve never seen before. The seriousness of his words, the quiet magic of them, bespells me. “You’re right, Lu. I can’t say I blame you for saying that. I know I’ve been an idiot, that I’ve been making about as much sense as a postage stamp. I’ve only ever wanted to protect you, and then I go and bungle it up because I want you so badly. I know I’ve hurt you. And I’m sorry. I need to explain…When you were captured everything became clear. Nothing else matters but you. You and me. Everything else—Storm, duty. None of that matters anymore. Not to me.”
But I can’t listen. If I listen, my resolve might crack. He needs to be away from me. With that, my mind whirls, machinelike, until it fastens on the most hurtful thing I can think of.
“St-Storm…” I stumble on the words, knowing what a betrayal they are. “Storm asked me to marry him.”
Jared hisses. He cups his ear and leans over with a savage look. “What did you say? I can’t have heard that right.”
For a moment, before I lower my gaze to the floor with cheeks hot to the touch, I catch sight of Jared’s face. He’s ashen, with a look I’d more associate with someone who’s been kicked in the gut. All the light and sparkle drains from his eyes. I put a fist to my stomach, feeling sick.
“I haven’t given him my answer. Yet.” I back down from saying the worst: that I’ll likely have to say yes. Marrying Storm is really not a choice—Jared and I both know it’s the sensible thing for me to do. And it’s the perfect excuse to get Jared to walk away. But I can’t. “I-I need to think about it.”
I refuse to meet Jared’s eyes as the remainder of my heart cracks in two. I don’t look back as I walk away, shaking. Leaving him behind.
Because if I do, he’ll see I don’t want to.
23
“Going to be a hell of a Fluxer,” Kira says from the front seat. She leans her head over to look out the window of the van. Beside me, looking like royalty, Storm doesn’t comment. In his black mourning suit, a pair of gray gloves as soft as anything on his lap, he could be king of Dominion’s Upper Circle. Instead, he peers out the opposite window at the blank, unlit windows of the streets with a thoughtful expression.
The sky is as surreal as the day. It’s lit gold and lime, a combination I’ve never seen before and too much like Jared’s eyes. It’s far too gorgeous to be the day I bury my sister.
Our caravan tracks over the rubble of a dying city. We pass a barricade where a small, tidy pile of bodies is stacked, likely waiting for the Rovers. On the top is a corpse so small and thin I can’t bear to look.
…
“What do you think it will be like?” Margot had once whispered to me, snuggled up in one of our childhood canopy beds.
“What?”
“You know. When the Plague… What comes after.”
“You take my hand and we wander in a vast blue city together,” I’d told my twin with a smile.
I’d earned a crack of a laugh for that. “Why blue?”
“Picture,” I say, invoking one of our oldest games. “The color of the sky the way it’s supposed to be, a moment before the sun sets. That’s where we’ll be, Margot. Together.”
…
I reckon I lied to my sister about death. But now I wonder: what is she experiencing? Is she in there somehow, a part of her tucked away inside me?
It’s a crazy thought. Still, the flat awareness of something changing inside me has jumped to life since Jared and Mohawk and I visited the school. If anything, it’s been intensifying as the days trudge on, gathering like its own storm cloud. At times I’ve been too warm, as though I’m coming down with a fever. At other times I’ve felt occupied, yet there’s not that pulsing, unique awareness that was Margot.
…
I’d tried to describe it to Doc Raines as she’d plucked and scraped at me with her instruments the day before.
“Imagine growing a person inside you, only he or she doesn’t have a mind.”
Doc Raines stared hard at me, her lips turning down in a frown. “That’s unnerving.”
“N-No,” I quickly cut in. “No, it’s like…knowing you’re not alone. I don’t feel so lonely now.”
Doc Raines finished drawing a final pint of blood. She sighed and wiped a stray wisp of curl away from her forehead. Her gloved hand rested on my shoulder and pressed hard on the pinpricks from the needle before giving me a tight smile that didn’t reach her eyes.
“That’s all that matters, then.”
…
Like a butterfly, that secret life, the one I associate with Margot, flutters awake inside me as we pass Heaven Square. A bunch of Lasters ring the Tree, some on their knees. I watch as a girl, maybe a year or two younger than me, painfully thin in her cotton gown, hangs a picture of someone she’s lost.
I hadn’t been aware that I was leaning over Storm’s lap until he throws an arm around me. I tense but try to relax into his solid, electric warmth. He wants to comfort me, I tell myself. But I’m very glad that Jared is in the other car. No matter what I’ve told him, my heart feels the traitor.
“What is it, Lucy?” his deep voice rumbles.
“Nothing.” I shake my head. “Just thinking about the Prayer Tree. It grew back after the fire?”
Storm strokes a hand down his chin as he considers his answer. “Almost overnight. Whoever engineered those nanotech bombs knew what they were doing.”
“You think it was the same people who engineered our DNA. Margot’s and mine.” It’s not a question; it’s a statement.
Storm’s hand tightens around my shoulder, squeezing slightly for comfort. But his palm tingles with power barely leashed.
“That is a likely scenario at this point, yes.”
The burial site is in the old graveyard, exclusively kept for the Upper Circle. This is what the Old World must have been like, I’ve always thought. Whenever Margot and I have been here in the past, it was for the funerals of important people or their children. Here the Lasters haven’t been able to tear down the trees. They rise up like comforting guardians, bending and weeping over their dead. There are too many fresh graves in this part. But as kids, Margot and I wandered through the older sections, wondering over the marble angels and kingly mausoleums. The graves blend in against the white-white air like unburied corpses. The wind whistles in my ears. It’s the only sound I hear, making me feel as though I’ve gone deaf.
Storm leads me to a quiet, shady spot. A tree arching over the plot reminds me of our old canopy beds, the way they nestled us in from overhead. Margot would like that, I think. It’s the kind of decadent touch she’d approve of, though it’s not our family plot. The Fox family plot is on the other side of the graveyard, tucked away in the giant, vaulting mausoleums. We’ll not give our father another victory.
It’s dead quiet. No other mourners have shown up yet. As we round the top of the hill, I spy Jared. His hunter’s eyes train on me, hooking me with raw power. He’s in a black suit that fits his body to perfection. His hair falls in loose curls around his face, but somehow I can still see the sharp slant of his cheekbones. My heart is drowning, but I can’t tear my attention away from him. His hands cross in front of him, feet slightly apart like a proper merc. The line of his back is rigid. I can tell he’s scenting the air for danger. But his lips, drawn into a severe line, soften as I near.
How can that even be? I pull my back straight and my chin up. Too late, I remind myself, even as the ghost of a smile that drifts past his lips distracts me.
I don’t even feel the crackling pulse of Storm’s touch as he leads me to the side of the grave. I’m so distracted by the pummeling grief and the presence of Jared, just behind me, that I barely register the mourners winding their way through the cement- and marble-strewn paths to where I lay my sister.
…
“Lucy?” a familiar voice calls me. I look up, eyes burning. It takes a full moment to recognize a man staring out from what I last knew as a boy’s face.
“Robbie?”
“I grieve your loss.” He rattles off the familiar, expected line. All the same, I can see he means it.
“Look at you. All grown up.” My lips twist in a grimace of a smile as I take him in. My sister’s former beau and son of Colonel Henry Deakins, Robbie is the epitome of the Upper Circle young man: dashing, handsome, rich, and carefree. But he’s not. None of us is.
“You look so much like her today, Lucy.” His eyes well with tears as he touches one of the curls Kira insisted on putting in my hair before we left. A shot sounds from somewhere in the city, but Robbie doesn’t blink. Instead, he looks down at the toes of his expensive, shiny shoes. “I’m sorry we fell out of touch.”
The Fox sisters have been getting the cold shoulder from the Upper Circle for so long now that I’d not even noticed Robbie’s absence. We were at his Reveal party, when he turned eighteen and was declared a Splicer. He was one of the few boys we knew who was at ours. We used to see Robbie every day. At lunch he’d tease Margot just to make her blush. And I suspect he was her partner in crime for skipping class.
But as I stare at the handsome young man who will inherit our Circle, it strikes me that I don’t miss our old set. I don’t miss being one of the crown princesses of the group at all. Somehow it makes the heavy burden of my loss an inch easier to bear.
“Never mind. It’s nice to see you. Thank you for coming. Are your parents here?”
Robbie’s eyes shift uncomfortably as he coughs into his fist. “Ah…no. They couldn’t make it.” A faint stain of embarrassment lights his cheeks.
“Oh. Well. Give them my best,” I tell Robbie woodenly and turn to face the small stream of black-clad bodies.
For every mourner, it seems, there are fifty missing.
…
The line of mourners left to greet me trickles down to a small end. Then only a handful of bodies is left to ring the grave like a necklace: Kira, Mohawk, Jared, and me. Storm has gone a little ways down a path with a business associate. Torch leans his slender body against a tree. Clothed in a gray suit, his thick black hair slicked back, he appears to be wiping away a tear before he turns. The air is thick with unshed rain.
True Storm Page 21