Firestorm Page 10

  "Nome. One of the new ones," Aiden said so quietly I could hardly make out his words.

  "Another," Celine said.

  "Another," Aiden said.

  Silence elapsed, and my teeth ground together without my realizing. I didn't like all this quietness, this non-action. Not with the two people I loved outside the walls.

  “I like that rule,” I said, breaking the quiet in the pub.

  “Say, shouldn’t it be ‘Celine’s Pub’ now?” Aiden asked her.

  “Doesn’t have the same ring,” Celine said, still distracted by her cleaning. She bent behind the bar, her voice echoing up. “Plus, we’d have to change the sign. More work.”

  “It’s good of you to honor your mom like that,” Aiden said.

  Celine popped up. “Best way to honor an alcoholic? Keep a pub running in their name in perpetuity.”

  I snorted into my mug. Aiden looked pale.

  When I’d left, Celine had been fifteen. Now she was in full bloom—and I didn’t just mean her looks, though she certainly had become a raven stunner. I meant her wryness. Her view of the world.

  The rag in her hand sailed from one end of the counter to the other like a final flourish, and she said: “I’ll be in the back. You lovebirds go at it.”

  I raised a finger. “We’re not—”

  But she’d already gone, leaving Aiden and me alone. The last thing I wanted was to be alone with him.

  I proceeded staring into my mug, my own reflection a haggard, swaying approximation of a woman called Darcy West.

  “She’s cute,” Aiden murmured.

  I glanced up; he meant Celine. “You should ask her on a date.”

  “She’s betrothed. Has been for two years.”

  I rolled my eyes. I felt wrung out, numb from the night's events. “That old practice still a thing?”

  Aiden paused, like my words had struck him. “The elders want us procreating.” He’d regained his humor, his sense of levity. “I guess they’re afraid we won’t get down to it without their oversight.”

  “Nothing like eight middle-aged know-it-alls looking over your shoulder to make you feel amorous.”

  Here was where Aiden might have laughed and said, “Leave it to them.” Or, “How’s about some peeping geriatric with your lovemaking?”

  But he said nothing. I eyed him in my periphery, found him studying both his hands set around his mug.

  The betrothal ring was gone.

  “Darcy…” he began.

  I shook my head, and my reflection in the mug jostled almost to shards. “Aiden, please. Not right now.”

  He turned toward me on the stool. “Don’t I deserve to know what happened to you?”

  I sighed. “My sister was taken by a silver. Can it wait?”

  “Fine. Then how about you tell me why Ehren Lightsmith came to me saying a blonde woman—who he described looking remarkably like you—attacked him in the control room beneath the city?”

  I let a soft hiss through my teeth. “When?”

  “Right before the silver attack. He came into the guard tower with a lump at his right temple.”

  My eyes met his. I found unbearable, almost undeserved softness there. He would protect me from the repercussions of that assault, if he could. I just needed to allow him to.

  I needed to tell him the truth.

  “Aiden, that man you saw on the wall. The one who chased the silver...”

  He leaned one elbow on the counter, fully engaged. “Who was he?”

  I lowered my voice so Celine couldn't hear me. “I created him.”

  He blinked a beat too long, and his blue-green eyes came open at the same time as his lips parted with uncertainty. “You…”

  “I’m a geneticist. Or at least, I was. I worked in an underground facility created by the old government before the world went to shit.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “Did I ever shit you when we were kids?”

  “No, but maybe you learned how to while you were gone to wherever you went for the past five years.”

  “I’m…better at it now, for sure. But I promise I’m not lying to you, Aiden. The man you saw on the wall was engineered in the facility I’ve been working in for the past five years.”

  “So you went to work in a secret underground lab,” he said. “No goodbye? No note?”

  “I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone I was leaving. I gave up everything—my identity, my life.”

  “We were betrothed.”

  “Because the elders required it.”

  Aiden went still, and then he turned back to his drink.

  I bit my cheek, wishing I hadn’t spoken so quickly. I could have delivered that particular line with a lot more diplomacy.

  I reached out, touched his shoulder. A vast plane of hard muscle sat under my hand; since when had Aiden become so strong? He’d always been the lanky one, the light runner.

  “I’m sorry I left without a word. I didn’t have a choice.”

  He shrugged, and my hand fell away. “That’s not important right now. I should know better than to ask. What is important is that your sister’s missing, and there’s a genetically engineered….what?”

  “Soldier.”

  “A genetically engineered soldier from your facility chasing after her. You brought him up here?”

  “I helped him escape.”

  He eyed me without turning his face from his drink. “Why?”

  “He was going to be killed. And we need him to protect us—to save us from the silvers.”

  “How’s he going to do that?”

  “He’s designed to fight them, Aiden, in so many ways that we’re incapable of. He’s immune to the worst of their infection, for one thing.”

  “Why was he going to be killed if you designed him to help us?”

  I threaded my hands around the mug. “It’s a long, long story. Basically, he was an aberration, but a good one.”

  “Is he dangerous?”

  “Yes, and also no. Not to us—not to Beacon. I mean, he’s out there right now trying to rescue my sister, whom he’s only met once.” My voice went thick, and I lowered my face against the fizzing sensation behind my nose and eyes.

  Aiden’s warm hand landed on my forearm. He squeezed. “I believe you, Darcy. And I’ll help you however I can.”

  I couldn’t hold back the tears anymore. I’d already cried into his chest once this evening, so this time I just raised my face and looked at him and nodded my head.

  I was about to thank him when a jangling sounded through the cracked window of Moll’s Pub. This wasn't the silver alarm. This was different.

  Someone was at the gates of Beacon.

  Blaze. Zara.

  I stood, the stool nearly toppling behind me. “It’s them.” I crossed to the window, stared into the sky. Beacon’s lights shone as bright as ever; morning was still at least an hour off.

  That jangling was one of the most familiar noises of my life. I’d heard it almost daily until the age of twenty-two. It meant someone was here—someone human.

  It was a safe noise, like a present. I’d always thought of it as a surprise, and back when I was confined to the schoolhouse, I remembered running with the other children to the windows to see.

  I crossed straight to the batwings of the pub, passed through them and down the steps.

  Aiden followed, striding up to my side.

  “It’s got to be them,” I said. Past the hanging tree and at the other side of the outpost, several of the guards were preparing to open the outer gates. It was a multi-step process: outer gates, a holding area, and then the inner gates.

  Those barriers kept anyone unwanted from getting straight in.

  “It could be,” Aiden murmured. He didn’t sound quite as sure as I did. “Or it could be the frontier guard.”

  “At this time?” I said. I’d nearly broken into a run, and Aiden had no trouble keeping step with me. The closer I got, the clearer my view.

  The o
uter gates were opening now, their metal chains clinking as they separated. But only the guards on the scaffolding could see what entered the holding area, since the inner gates were made of completely opaque sheets of metal.

  I glanced up at the nearest patrol. They stood in a cluster, their crossbows still at their sides. One pointed, said something to the guard next to her. Which meant whatever was out there wasn’t any sort of threat.

  We came to the far side of the square, and I heard one of the gate guards call, “Subject in holding area.”

  One subject. Just one person. One.

  A thin noise rose up and over the gate—a sort of mewling. “What is that?” I asked Aiden. “Do you hear it?”

  Aiden squinted, as though that could help him hear it better. “Sounds like crying.”

  “Gate patrol dropping down for preliminary inspection,” the gate guard announced, and three of the guards disappeared into the holding area.

  Aiden and I approached the city ground patrol stationed a few yards from the main gates. “What is it?” I asked the woman, whose brown eyes flicked over me and then to Aiden.

  “Tell her,” Aiden said.

  “It’s a human, I heard,” the guardian said. This one looked about seventeen—were they all this young nowadays? What had happened to the older members of the Guardians’ Guild? “They found a human outside.”

  “When? Who? What gender?” I asked in rapid-fire, trying to keep the edge from my voice. The guardian eyed me again, and I took a deep breath. “Please.”

  “Not sure,” she said, her gaze returning to the proceedings. The inner gate shook as the gears initiated. “But we’re about to find out.”

  So this person had passed the preliminary inspection, which meant they were deemed harmless enough to enter.

  I started forward, but Aiden and the female guard both caught me. “No civilians past this point,” Aiden whispered.

  So we stood together as the inner gates started their slow journey open, two wide doors angling inward toward us. It felt like an eternity before they opened wide enough to see inside, to reveal this single subject. This one human.

  I gasped. Right at the center, there she was. Two of the guards helped her limp in as she cried in that helpless way we’d heard before. Her head was angled down, her red hair flowing into her face.

  “Who is that?” Aiden said.

  “A Scarlet,” I breathed.

  As though she’d heard me—she probably had, I realized—her head lifted, and one green eye met mine through the curtain of her hair.

  “Who the hell is Scarlet?” Aiden said.

  Twelve

  Saturday, May 10, 2053

  3:15 a.m.

  Blaze

  He lay on the earth in human form, my claw marks all over his chest like tattoos. Blood dripped from the bite wounds at his neck, but they were only superficial.

  Whoever he was, he wouldn't die by my hand.

  I dropped onto my back a few feet away, the two of us sucking in air. I hadn’t gotten it as bad as him, but I still felt the exhaustion of it all: running and running, the fighting, shifting for the first time into my silver form.

  But turning back into a human hadn’t been nearly as challenging as getting into silver form. That was, after all, my body’s natural way of being. Human. I was human.

  Both of us were.

  “I never imagined it would be this beautiful,” he murmured into the night.

  Over us, the sky hung luminous and endless. “Me either,” I said.

  “How did you do it, 8024?”

  So he knew my number. He knew exactly who I was. “Do what?” I asked.

  I heard him exhale slowly. “You didn’t get past the first week of training. You didn’t even pass the seduction module. I’ve been a Gale for six months. I spent 382 hours training in silver form.”

  I turned my face toward him. “The same way I do everything: sheer force of will,” I said, still breathing hard. “Plus, I don’t have the option to die. Not yet. Not here.”

  He didn’t answer, but I heard his breathing slowing. He was regaining his strength.

  My body protested as I pushed myself up to a seat. "Who are you? I know you're a Gale."

  We met eyes in the night. I might have been looking into a mirror. “Just come back easy, 8024.”

  “Sorry—there’s not a chance of that. I’ve got a woman to rescue and a human outpost to protect. Which is, you know, what we’re designed to do.”

  His eyes narrowed. “You attacked a Scarlet, killed a Gale, kidnapped a scientist. You’re not exactly helping humans.”

  “Kidnapped? So that’s how they got you up here with so much fight in you.”

  “Didn’t you?”

  I got to a crouch, touching the claw marks on my chest. Not too deep. “Darcy West made the choice to leave the facility. She brought me out of cryostasis, got us out of that place. It was her decision.”

  He shook his head. “That’s a lie.”

  “I don’t have time to change your mind,” I said, rising to my full height. “But if you’re going to make me fight you again, let’s get it over with.”

  He stared up at me. “I can’t let you go.”

  “So come with me,” I said. “Help me. Do what you’re meant to do, and save this woman’s life. She’s a deputy captain of the guard in Beacon—they need people like her.”

  I extended a hand to him, palm open.

  He studied my hand, and then my face. He didn’t take my hand. "Do you remember me?" he asked.

  I stared hard at him, studying his features. There was something about the way he spoke, about the intonations of his voice.

  “You helped me back in the facility, when you escorted me to cryostasis,” I said. “That’s why you volunteered to come after me, isn’t it, 7950?"

  The ghost of a smile touched his lips. He shrugged. “Mostly I wanted to see the sky. It wouldn’t have hurt to bring back an anomalous killer in the process.”

  I didn’t lower my hand. “Help me bring her back alive, and I’ll let you have another go at me.”

  He reached out, took my hand. I pulled him up, and we stood face to face. “I’ll hold you to that."

  “I hope you will. You’re a damned good opponent.”

  Shifting back into silver form was easier the second time, especially with 7950’s guidance. Within minutes we were running, with me at the fore.

  Zara’s scent flowed back to me like a visible thing. It helped that humans smelled not just edible, but delicious. I didn’t want her in the way I wanted Darcy—I would never want another woman like that—but in a scarier, more instinctual way.

  She was food. Nourishment.

  A whisper floated through the air so faintly it might have been one of my own thoughts. But it wasn’t my inner voice—it was 7950’s, I realized.

  "Let yourself out," the whisper said.

  I sensed him alongside me, his massive form stretching as all four legs worked in synchrony. He passed me with ease, and I realized he meant that I should let my stride lengthen.

  So I did. I consciously unwound my mind from thinking of myself as human—as bipedal—and allowed myself to inhabit my silver body.

  I focused on the four legs I ran on, the way my paws hit the earth. With every step my claws sunk in, giving me extra leverage, and I allowed them to stretch farther.

  Soon I came alongside 7950, and I heard another whisper: "Good. Soon we may be able to really run."

  So he was a smartass like me. Figured; we were both the same model, after all, both made from the same base components.

  My silver eyes found the moon in the sky. It had been hours since I’d left Beacon, and I sensed we’d run about two dozen miles. But Zara’s scent was still strong, and we were closing the distance.

  Except I was scenting something else, too. Not human or creature, but natural, of the earth. It hit my nose with a tingle. I knew this scent.

  "8024," the whisper came, "Something’s ahead. It�
��s big."

  As we ran, I stared hard into the night. A black border had appeared, its top serrated and jagged. Where the moonlight hit, it looked almost like—

  No. They were supposed to be gone. All gone.

  But we had gotten close enough that I couldn’t mistake it for anything else.

  Together we came to the edge of it, and the two of us slid to a halt. It felt almost wrong to break this boundary, to enter this natural place.

  The word entered my mind with solemn certainty: Forest. We had come to a forest.

  "The earth is supposed to be barren," 7950 whispered into my mind.

  A response formed in my mind: "Looks like the facility was wrong about more than just me." And I knew 7950 had heard me when his red eyes shifted in my direction.

  Despite my pithiness—I was learning about my own tendency to make jokes when I felt uncomfortable—I didn’t know what to say. Trees, forest—those things were supposed to have been eradicated.

  The dream returned to me as 7950 and I stepped past the treeline, our paws touching the grass covering the forest floor. It felt soft, giving, and if I wasn’t chasing a silver, I would have shifted back into my human form just to touch it all with my fingertips.

  The cabin had been in a forest. It was wintertime, the snow blanketing the trees. When I cast my face up, the night sky appeared fractured through the tall pine canopy.

  Just as it did now. Except the pine trees here weren’t white with snowfall—they were green. This was a warmer time of year, maybe late spring or summer. I had learned about the seasons, about their changes.

  7950 started into a jog, paused when I didn’t follow. "Are you coming?" he whispered.

  I had turned northward, was staring into the depths of the forest. How far did it go? If I followed it, would I come to a cabin? And if I came to that cabin, what would I find there?

  I turned back to 7950, inclined my head. "Right with you," I returned, and the two of us started off between the tree trunks. As we ran, the forest floor felt pillowy, like nothing I’d experienced, and I had a strange, pleasant thought.