"I don't remember anything that happened before Hawthorn."
"Nothing?" I could tell she didn't really believe me before now. I felt the idea sink into her and she didn't fight it. "When Stone came calling, mom thought it was the best thing for all of us. She thought Stone could help fix you. Stone paid her over a hundred grand to take you for a while. She thought we’d get you back after they had the research they needed, but then I developed my powers and Stone and the facility went off the grid and she was right back where she started, but less one daughter.” She looked away. “It drove her crazy,” she added quietly.
I bit my lip.
“When did she…”
“She swallowed a bottle of antidepressants on your sixteenth birthday.”
My heart sank.
Mia lowered her head. “Yep.”
I reached out to her. “Mia—”
She pulled away from me, wrapping her arms around herself. “Don’t, Liv. It’s not like you could help it. I just wanted you to know a little bit about why I can’t just let it go.”
I sighed. “I guess I’d kind of hate me too.”
She looked over at me with a bemused look.
“Ugh! You make me feel like such a bitch sometimes.” She sighed. “You’re so damn nice.”
“You’d rather I was mean to you?” I laughed.
“It would make being mad at you a hell of a lot easier,” she grumbled.
I paused, and then said, “you tried to burn my arm off, you bitch.”
She arched a brow then scoffed. “You left me as a kid and drove our mother to suicide.”
“You burned my best friend.”
“You choked me out with your powers.”
“You stole my boyfriend.”
“Jason was never my boyfriend, Liv. That’s not to say I didn’t try.”
After a brief pause, we suddenly dissolved into giggles. Nothing we were talking about was funny and I knew she still resented me, but at least for the moment, we had called a truce. Maybe there was hope for us yet.
After our laughter subsided, I carefully reached out and took her hand. Her eyes snapped up to mine, wide like the proverbial deer caught in headlights.
“I’m sorry,” I said quietly. “I’m sorry that I never came back for you like I promised. If there had been any way for me to remember, I would have come running.”
I wasn’t sure how she was going to react. She looked down at our joined hands. After a moment, she squeezed back lightly. “Thank you,” she said.
The moment passed and her smile faded as her gaze slipped behind me. “I think the guys are back.” She dropped my hand.
Glitch and Cash came jogging back to us, slightly out of breath.
“We found a way around,” Cash breathed, his hands on his knees. “Everyone is gone.”
“Yeah,” Glitch said. “You’d think this place would be on lockdown, but it's wide open.”
“You didn't see anyone?” I asked.
Cash shook his head. “Not a single person. No sign of the Jason or the others, either.”
Mia frowned, concerned. “There’s no way they aren’t here yet. Jason was planning on a strike at midnight. It’s already two o’clock.”
“Then we don’t have time to waste,” I said. “Let’s go.”
Chapter Twenty Three
We walked slowly toward what appeared to be the main entrance of the facility. There were exterior lights mounted all along the outside walls, but none of them were working. The sliver of moon provided little to no light, and my nerves were so jittery that I could hardly focus my empathy to feel if anyone else was around. It was too dark, too quiet and too easy.
The door to the main entrance was cracked open. There was no sign of forced entry. It just looked like someone forgot to lock up. Glitch made the initial assessment. He pressed his back stealthily against the wall and slowly pulled the door open further, then poked his head inside to take a look.
There was no movement, no sign of life and no alarms sounded except the ones singing in my bones.
"Clear," Glitch affirmed and slipped inside.
Cash, Mia and I followed him in. The foyer of the building was a tight space, but it had extra tall ceilings and looked immaculate. It was made of dark gray marble with a sleek cherry wood reception area and water feature that ran down the back wall like a waterfall. Dead center was a huge, gaudy sculpture that looked like a twisted column of fire hardened into a solid piece of metal. It had been knocked over. Pieces of it had broken off and scattered across the marble floors.
"Which way?" Glitch asked, circling the sculpture and motioning to the two corridors that broke off from the reception area.
I stood next to Glitch and tried to send out feelers for the others. My empathy was picking up on emotions coming from both corridors that led to opposite sides of the facility. None of them seemed familiar at such a distance, so I picked the most potent.
"Right," I said.
Cash slid his hand into mine and we made our way into the right corridor. Glitch and Mia took point while Cash and I brought up the rear. That way, Mia's fire could protect our front and my telekinesis had our backs.
“I don’t like this,” I whispered as we passed empty offices and file rooms.
“Yeah. Where is everyone? This is supposed to be ACT, isn't it? Where are all the big bad scary agents and secret squirrel stuff? Looks more like a sad, abandoned building waiting for Halloween so it can at least be a Spirit store for a couple of months.”
“They knew we were coming,” Cash said.
Mia swore under her breath and I felt her anxiety spike.
Cash caught my eyes and said what we were all thinking, “Devereaux.”
The deeper into the facility we went, the more uneasy I felt and the more emotions I sensed scrambling my brain. They weren't right. It felt like dozens of splintered minds and strained, twisted bodies. My skin started to crawl and and my bones began to ache with a dull pain that only got sharper the closer I got to the source of it.
"We need to leave," I said, suddenly feeling the edge of nervousness turn into a surge of panic that swelled inside of me.
Mia turned sharply and hissed, “we can’t just turn back now. What are you afraid of? Between the four of us, we can take on anything in this place!” She looked over at Cash and her mouth quirked. “Well, at least between the three of us.”
Cash scowled at her, but that was exactly what I was worried about. Whatever we were walking into was bigger than the four of us could handle, and Cash was practically defenseless against the mass of Anomaly energy I felt up ahead.
“Guys, come here! You have to see this!” Glitch called out in a quiet rasp. He was already down the hall, poking his head out from a doorway. His expression was both awed and horrified. I felt his spine buzzing with chills. Mia followed quickly after him, but I pulled Cash back toward me. I stared into his eyes, unable to find the words I needed to convince him to leave.
“Look, I know you’re worried that I’m a liability,” Cash said, taking my hands and squeezing them inside of his. His skin was warm and he felt nervous and afraid, but more than any of that, I felt this determination settle inside of him. It helped center me.
"Cash, that’s not like that. We can't handle this. Whatever is in here is unstable, and volatile. We can't do this."
Cash rested his forehead against mine. "Breathe, okay?"
I took in a deep breath and felt it rattle through me, passing through my lungs until I felt Cash's calm envelop me.
"We are going to be fine," he said evenly. His voice pushed through me and I felt it take hold of my mind and push out everything else I'd been feeling.
"I may not be superman, but I'm not exactly an invalid, either."
"I know. I just-"
"Shhh, listen. If anything happens, I swear to you I will run out of here faster than Glitch. I hate to admit it, but Mia is right. With your telekinesis, Glitch's speed and her fire power, we're pretty intimidati
ng. That doesn't mean we bust in looking for a fight. We can sneak around this place undetected and get your friends out, but not if you're freaking out."
I opened my eyes and caught his steady gaze.
"I'm okay," I said.
"Good." His lips brushed against my forehead.
“This really isn't the time for all that." Mia came back around the corner. "You should probably come see what Glitch found.”
Cash's hand slipped back into mine, pulling me forward.
We rounded the corner behind Mia to find Glitch standing in the middle of a dimly lit hallway, staring at a wall of windows. It wasn't until we got closer that I noticed the hallway was actually a long line of eight-by-eight cells.
They weren't empty.
“What the hell is this?” Cash whispered, his words faded and slipped away from him.
Everything I felt leading up to this hall made sense. Each cell contained a person. Men and women were confined behind thick glass, half naked and hooked up to monitoring equipment. At the end of the hall of cells was a control panel that looked like it still had power.
"There must be a backup generator running these halls," Cash said, studying the lights and mechanical locks on the cells.
A wave of heat flushed through me and my hands began to shake. I went to the panel and saw the separate controls for each hallway. It looked as if this were just one of many throughout the facility.
"Test subject sequence 8B," Glitch read aloud the label for our hallway. He ran a hand through his hair. “These are all Anomalies. They're experimenting on them.”
Cash frowned. “They must have left in a hurry if they left them all behind like this.”
“This is what’s making Jason sick,” Mia said. “He told me they used to have to inject him regularly to produce results, but now…”
“Now, they’re maintaining the powers,” Cash finished for her.
She nodded. “And so is Jason.”
“But these guys are really sick. Look at them. They’re falling apart,” Glitch said, staring at the man in the cell in front of him. The man’s skin peeled away from his body in thick, bloody chunks.
“They’re just farther along than Jason is,” Cash said, sending a chill up my spine and bringing tears to Mia’s eyes. The thought of this being Jason’s fate made my stomach turn.
I stepped closer to the glass and pulled a chart off the wall.
“Richard Hartford,” I read aloud. The chart listed dozens of injections and extractions that poor Richard had been subjected to. ACT had been monitoring his vitals and progress over the last eight months. The notes scrawled along the bottom were a grim synopsis of his time at the facility. “Adaptation: seventy percent. First round of injections showed signs of adapting a foreign ability. Donor: Rivera, Mia.”
I looked over at Mia. She stared at the man within the cell. He was still rolling around on the floor, burning. Her emotions warred and I felt her trying to push them back, trying to swallow them like she always did. Her own flames licked at her fingertips and smoldered. She lifted her burning hand to the glass and held it there.
“After thirteen treatments, subject shows limited immunity to the adapted pyro-kinetic ability,” I continued softly. “Despite the inability to control the outbursts of flames, the subject has been able to reproduce the ability naturally and maintain it. Overall classification: FAILURE. Scheduled for termination.”
Mia was crippled by guilt, anger, and even deeper than that, sadness for the man that had been subjected to her ability but could not control it, and was ultimately being destroyed by it.
I set the chart back on the wall and moved toward Mia, but she flinched away from me and pinned me with a guarded look. Despite the breakthrough we’d had earlier, she still wasn’t about to let me get close.
She smothered her flames and walked away from the subject, wiped away a tear and walked around the corner. I looked to Cash who gave me a nod and a reaffirming look that staying away from her was best for us all.
Maintaining a healthy distance, we followed Mia down another long corridor nearly identical to the last one. We weaved through a labyrinth of glass cells. I was starting to feel sick. The tortured minds of the failed experiments were battering at me, turning my thoughts sluggish. I did my best to steel myself against them, but it was relentless.
Cash made a hushed sound that drew my attention to an open door at the dead end of the hall.
“Maybe that’s the way Jason and the others went,” I whispered. I tried to feel for them, but I was mentally overloaded. There was no hope of me sensing anyone else with all those experiments around.
Glitch and Mia nodded and followed us to the door. I went in first with my telekinesis poised to release at any sign of danger. My power slid around inside of me like an eel, hard to grasp and even harder to control once I thought I had a grip on it.
The room was so dark that I couldn’t immediately tell how big it was. As I searched the wall for a light switch, I was struck by an overwhelming surge of anger. It hit me like a fist to the gut, sucking the air from my lungs. I struggled to hold it back, to distance myself from it, but it was incredibly powerful.
“Liv! What’s wrong?” Cash was at my side, completely unaware that we were not alone.
“Someone’s here,” I groaned and felt my power shoot out of me. It pushed against the door, slamming it shut and knocked a few things off of a wall in the corner.
A series of yellow lights flickered to life. Glitch gasped loudly behind me. I turned to find him holding Cash’s arm for dear life. Cash wiggled out of Glitch’s grasp and readjusted his clothing.
“Sorry,” Glitch muttered, embarrassed.
Mia snorted.
My eyes adjusted to the light. We were in what looked like a small, private office. There was a desk in the center and a huge metal wall with decorative rivets and empty shelves. The cabinets in the office were ransacked and emptied. Papers and traces of shredded documents littered the floor.
Although I couldn’t see anyone, I couldn't shake the rage I felt. It seemed so unfocused and so close.
“They have to be in here somewhere,” I said quietly to myself, my eyes jumping to every corner of the room. My fear escalated as I imagined one of those experiments in the other room adapted to Lexa's power, watching and waiting to strike. The room began to shake as my power trembled in and out of me at the thought.
"Liv?" Cash was at my side. "Liv, focus."
I held my breath and did what he said, but the more I tried to hone in my focus, the more I felt the rage. "They're here somewhere." I looked around and frantically.
“Who?” Cash asked. “The others?”
I shook my head. It didn’t feel like any of them. “No. It's something else.” The shelves were vibrating as my power warped out of me, unchecked.
Glitch paled. “Something?”
"Liv, get a hold of yourself," Mia warned, fear building in her chest, causing sparks to light up in her eyes.
I looked at my sister, then scanned the room again. I closed my eyes and focused harder. This time I didn't try to block out the feelings. I let them consume me. My power swelled one last time before settling on the source. Whatever it was. It was behind that metal wall.
I went to the desk in the center of the room that faced the wall to try and figure out what was behind it. The desk was a stainless steel, high-tech work of art with several buttons and drawers, coded locks and a computer screen inlaid in the steel. There was no keyboard, so I assumed it was touch activated. I placed my finger on the glass screen and it came to life. The buttons on the desk lit up.
“Badass!” Glitch rushed to my side. He surveyed the desk. “This must be Devereaux’s
man cave.”
“What makes you think that?” Cash asked, studying the screen.
“It seems like him. You know? Kind of pompous and flashy. And the plate on the desk has his name on it.” He lifted a gold rectangular plaque and showed it to us, grinning.
<
br /> Cash shot Glitch an eye roll and swung at him playfully.
“Liv,” Mia called my attention back to the wall. “It looks like this slides open.”
She ran her fingertips over a subtle groove in the metal wall, exploring it.
Warily, I nodded. My power snapped tight on its leash. Mia stood beside me, flames at the ready. We were prepared for whatever was on the other side of that wall.
Cash and Glitch grabbed at the groove and pulled. With a soft hiss, a three-inch thick solid steel panel separated from the wall and slid away, revealing another three cylindrical containment units in a shallow recession.
My hands flew to my mouth as I gazed at the three specimens suspended in the tanks of clear, liquid. The injection schedule hanging on the wall was labeled Anomaly Genesis Revised. Mia groaned and Glitch swore. Cash backed away.
The tanks each contained a man. They were incapacitated, without a stitch of clothing on them. Their skin looked rubbery and completely devoid of hair. Their arms and legs were welded to the walls so they couldn’t move. A myriad of wires and tubes were threaded into their chests, arms, and down their throats. Their veins stood out dark blue in the landscape of their pale, graying flesh. Their faces were smooth under the depths of sedation.
“These must be the successful experiments.” In the eerie hush of the room, Mia's voice echoed.
Glitch pulled down another chart off one of the tanks, frowning. “But then why are these guys still marked for termination?”
I looked at the page over his shoulder. He was right. All the notes indicated that this subject wasn’t a failure and yet he still had a termination date.
I had no answer for him. There had to be a reason behind it, but why would they kill off a successful experiment?”
"What are you up to, Devereaux?" Cash asked.
Although there were three men, the first and the third were still, limp and floating in the liquid that had turned gelatinous and toxic. They were already dead. The man in the middle tank, however, was screaming around the tubes in his mouth. Bubbles flew out of his mouth and nose, collecting at the top of the tank in a putrid, yellow foam. He pulled at his restraints but they gave him no leeway.
Collide (Anomaly Book 3) Page 15
