She couldn’t bear the darkness any longer. She had to run. Kai was nowhere in sight. She rounded a bend and smacked hard into a muscular arm. It snaked around her, covering her mouth and pulling her into the shadows. She fought like a crazy person, elbows aiming for soft targets.
“Shh! Stop fighting me. I’m trying to help you.”
The voice in her ear was familiar and brought back an instant memory of stolen peaches. She stopped struggling and his arms relaxed. The moment they did, she swung around and rammed her fists into his chest. “You’re a traitor! Get away from me!”
Elden coughed at the impact to his chest. “There’s a trap and Kai and your precious OS kids have walked straight into it. Stop fighting me.”
Cold fear ran through Evazee. “How do you know?” A shockwave of panic washed through her, and she didn’t wait for his answer. “We have to get them out. They should never have come. They’re not meant to be involved in this mess.”
“You have to trust me. Now is not the time.” He held a finger against her lips.
Evazee’s skin crawled. Between letting her be marked and abandoning the other guys, she didn’t trust Elden as far as she could throw him.
“I can read your eyes, Zee, and I understand. But I don’t think you have any other choice right now. Your marking got you in the door. Think about that for a moment.”
“Touché. But it doesn’t excuse what you did.” She was torn. Her thoughts and feelings were a tangled mess, a ball of thread left at the mercy of a bored cat. She wouldn’t figure it all out right now. She shut down that train of thought and flicked her fingers at the darkness ahead. “What is out there?”
Elden met her eyes for the first time since grabbing her. “Let’s just say, it’s not safe. Not safe at all. Kai is out there, we have to try find him.” He held her hand in his and together they walked into the darkness, following the faint glow of the line at their feet.
~*~
Shasta towered over Kai with his arms folded as if mulling over his options. His phone beeped once and he took the call. He listened without blinking, a slight lift in his eyebrows the only indication that he was hearing what the other person had to say.
Kai watched the subtle play of emotions on Shasta’s face.
Roland eased himself between Kai and Shasta.
Shasta ended the call and rubbed his hands together. “I needed some volunteers and what do you know? They came to me. If the universe is giving you a sign like that, you’re on the right track. Don’t you agree?” He chuckled at his own joke. He flicked his head towards Roland. “Take him to the amphitheatre. I’ll be along shortly.”
“The amphitheatre? But we’re not at that stage yet. Our deadline is still weeks away.”
“I decided to speed things up a bit. Don’t question it, just do what I tell you.” Shasta didn’t hang around to make sure that Roland did his bidding. He walked off into the dark in the direction of the Crux.
Kai watched the conflict play across Roland’s face. If he spoke carefully, he might just be able to get through to this man. Harmless question first. “What is the amphitheatre?”
Roland didn’t answer, but the fine sheen of sweat across his forehead spoke volumes.
Kai patted his shoulder, and Roland roused as if he’d just woken from a nightmare.
“What?”
“The amphitheatre. What is it?”
“You’ll see for yourself soon enough. Please don’t resist. I don’t want to have to restrain you.”
“But he’s bullying you. You’re the expert, and he should be listening. Not doing his own thing in your area of specialty. Surely?”
Roland hunched as he walked, looking sinister by the glowing green light that lit their path. His shoulders bunched tightly as brown stained his cheeks.
The sand was hot enough for Kai to feel it through the soles of his sneakers. Temperatures dropped rapidly in the desert at night but this place was different. The midnight dark dome of sky curved away from where he stood and for the first time. Kai realized there were no stars. Under different circumstances, his mom would have loved taking this walk.
“Why did you do it? Why did you abandon me?”
Roland kept his gaze down and stayed silent long enough for Kai to think he hadn’t heard the question. “That’s not what happened.”
“From my side, that’s exactly what happened. You dumped me at St Greg’s and left. Never to be seen again. Who does that with their own child?”
“What you could do scared me. You were a baby, and you had healing powers. That’s terrifying. It’s not like you’d been to Bible school or had any proper training. You just did it. That’s not how it works.” He shook his head. “I found a school where you’d be safe, and I offered my services as a researcher, hoping that I’d find a cure. All I wanted was for you to be normal so that I could fetch you and go back home.”
“You abandoned TrisTessa.”
“I tried to go home, but she wouldn’t have anything to do with me. She threatened to get the police involved, and that would have been an enormous mistake. I tried to make her see sense. I wouldn’t tell her where you were, I just told her that you were in good hands, but she wouldn’t believe me. Sometimes I know what’s best for my family. This was one of them.”
Kai stopped walking and stared at the man. He wore a green turban of brokenness around his head. The glow was so large, that it looked like his neck might snap. “You are completely deceived.”
~*~
“Here it is.”
Evazee squinted into the blackness. The moment they’d stepped off the end of the green line, it had faded away to nothing, plunging them into deeper darkness.
“I don’t see anything. Are you sure?”
He led her over a sandy rise and down the other side. At the bottom of the mini-hill steps disappeared deeper into a tunnel under the sand. As they followed the short flight down, Evazee could see light glowing from below. It grew brighter as they got lower. The stairs bent to the left at the bottom. Evazee nearly tripped over her feet from shock.
The amphitheatre was just that—a huge, hi-tech underground arena, with the seating area blocked off from the open space in the middle by what looked like one-way glass.
Elden led Evazee away from the door, and they crouched down behind a wall. They huddled there, trying to be invisible in the hollowed out, empty venue.
Evazee’s foot started to cramp. She eased her weight off, overbalanced, and fell. She caught herself.
Something in her back pocket poked her. The scroll she’d picked up from the dry riverbed. She slipped her hand into her pocket to take it out. No longer a scroll, now it was a small book. A Bible. She opened it to where someone had slipped in a bookmark. A single paragraph was highlighted:
“Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.”
One of her favourite verses. She hadn’t thought about it in a long time.
Elden seemed distracted by what was going on down on the floor of the amphitheatre, people were leading in and being separated into groups. But he must have noticed because he turned back and asked, “What have you got there?”
Evazee quickly closed the book and slipped it back into her back pocket. “Nothing. Just a book.” She stared ahead, wishing he’d focus on something else. As much as Elden seemed like the old Elden she remembered, she couldn’t bring herself to trust him. Sure, the branding on the back of her neck had bought her entrance into this place, but he couldn’t have known that she’d need it. It was all too convenient. She sat with adrenalin pumping through her veins, waiting for him to betray her again.
Rivers of living water will flow from your innermost being. She could do with some of that right now.
Jesus, help.
~*~
Kai was seeing spots from staring at the glowing green lines in the sand—the only light in the deep darkness of the desert. The lines stopped abruptly, and Roland led him past two st
airways going down into the sand and came to stop at a third.
“I have to get back. This is your entrance to the amphitheatre. Head straight on down, and there’ll be people to help you.” Roland was twitchy, an ant on a hot plate.
“Can you at least give me a clue what happens here?”
“It’s a simulation, just on a bigger scale than what you’re used to. You’ve been through them at the OS. Just keep your wits about you, and you’ll be fine.”
“I was never in a sim. I was trapped in the spiritual realm. If I died there, there’d be no regeneration, no resetting of my mind and moving on.” He passed a hand across his face. Trying to get through to Roland was like trying to speak clearly with one’s cheeks full of marshmallows—it just didn’t work. “I can see why TrisTessa was frustrated with you. You won’t hear anything that doesn’t fit with the messed-up picture in your head.”
Roland winced. “You’ve got this. Go do what you came here to do. Now get down there. I’ve got things I need to get back to.”
Kai took the stairs two at a time, just to get away from Roland. A single narrow passage led away from the staircase, and Kai kept walking. The buzz of conversation grew louder as he walked. The passage was dimly lit but better than the absolute darkness of the desert. It opened out onto a holding room full of people. It didn’t take much to pick out Ruaan. He stood head and shoulders above the rest. Zap was next to him, but all Kai could see of him was the top of his head bobbing up and down. In between them stood a swaying sea of OS kids.
Kai began to push his way through to get to his friends. As he walked, he checked the necks of those he passed. Most of them seemed to have found their amulets and were wearing them happily.
He managed to push through to his friends. Bree stood with her arms crossed just behind Zap, thunder on her face.
“Guys! What are you doing here? You should be on your way back home. What happened?”
Zap’s shoulders sagged. “We came so close to making it out. They stopped us at the last gate.”
31
A door opened at the far side of the arena. People started leading in, and Evazee squinted to see if it was anyone she knew. It was hard to tell from such a distance, but she could swear she saw Kai’s black mop of hair. She tilted her head, blinked a couple of times. It was definitely Kai. Ruaan and Zap were with him. They were huddled together, furiously discussing something. Zap’s hands were flying as if he swatted bugs, and Ruaan and Kai shook their heads.
She poked Elden with her elbow. “What is going on here?”
Elden’s jaw clenched. “Human trials. The latest batch of serum is supposedly ready to go live. This is where the testing happens.”
“Supposedly?”
Elden avoided her eyes. “I overheard a conversation. The scientist working on the serum asked for another three months at least. The powers that be aren’t prepared to wait.”
Evazee could read between the lines. She knew exactly what he was getting at. “We have to stop it.”
Elden grabbed her arms and pulled her towards him until he was right up in her face. “Listen to me. Going down there will do no good. You cannot stop this. You can’t change anything or fix it.”
“I refuse to sit here and watch my friends be poisoned. That might work for you, but it doesn’t work for me.”
~*~
“Stop flapping your arms. You’ll hit something.” Ruaan swatted Zap’s hand away from his face.
“We can’t stay here. I don’t like this setup at all. We need to make a run for it before it’s too late.” Zap was obviously freaking out.
Kai checked the door they’d come through. It was shut tight. He knew it was locked because he’d tried to open it the second it swung shut behind them all. There wouldn’t be any getting out that way. As far as he could tell, that was the only door into the strange dome-thing they were trapped in. It was like being stuck in a bubble. The walls stretched from sand, to high overhead, then back down into sand again, in a smooth surface criss-crossed with veins of light that glowed enough to light the cavernous space. Kai imagined being in a fish’s belly would feel like this.
He shuddered and was about to start a roll call when the lights shut off. Thick darkness swallowed up the room in an instant. A single beam of light flicked on from across the room. By the faint light, he could clearly see that there were no longer any walls surrounding them. They were out in the desert under the glow of a rising moon.
“Do you think the bubble popped?” Zap asked.
Kai swiveled around, trying to see everything all at once. “Looks like it did. This breeze is refreshing. Should we go see what’s over the hill?” He raised his voice, loud enough to be heard over the chatter. “Light would be better than the darkness.”
Ruaan was turning in circles, craning his neck. “We aren’t being guarded. We should make a run for it.”
“You might be right. Could it be this easy? Zap, what do you think?” Kai’s heart was pounding.
Zap clucked his tongue. “Have I not been saying this all along?”
“True. But if they know that their bubble popped, they’ll probably send someone to fix it.” Kai grimaced. “There’s probably someone on the way already.”
“All the more reason to get a move on.” Ruaan spoke as if Kai had half a brain.
“So we run?” Kai looked at the other two. Their heads were nodding in time with each other.
Kai waved to all the others to come closer. “Everybody, we are going to make a run for it. Buddy-up, aim for the light. Let’s go.”
~*~
The lights went out in the arena below. The dome was built to allow those on the outside to see what was going on. It must be a live video feed onto the surface of the dome as the images seemed to shift, zooming in and out. One of the close-up shots showed Runt, Peta, and Paintbrush huddling together. Runt clutched her bag to her chest, protecting her kittens. Zulu was there too, but he seemed smaller than before, folded in on himself.
Evazee shoved the back of her hand in her mouth to stop herself yelling out. So they’d been caught too.
Elden slipped an arm around her and moved in close. “Don’t move. Shasta is close enough to see us.” He pointed to a control booth situated a stone’s throw away from where they were hiding.
Shasta was presiding over the events below with a dark gleam in his eye. He held a joystick in his hand and every time he moved, he changed what they were seeing on the outside of the dome. A wide shot of the whole group running up a dune. With a click, the image zoomed in on one girl.
Shasta stood up, breathed deep and closed his eyes. Evazee watched in horror as the girl he’d zoomed in on grabbed her amulet. Her eyes rolled back in her head, and she stopped running. A stone in the path of a living stream of humans.
Shasta shifted his focus to the next victim and the same thing happened. He was manipulating them through their amulets.
Evazee had to stop him.
Elden grabbed her hand and held on so hard, his fingers made white marks in her skin.
Evazee fought him. “I can’t just sit here and watch this happen. I have to help them.” She was whispering through clenched teeth.
Elden shifted his weight and his arms locked around her like a safety bar on a rollercoaster. “Too soon, just wait.”
Hot tears ran as she struggled against him. More and more of the OS kids were giving in to Shasta’s compulsion through their amulets. Less of them were moving. “What is wrong with you? I know you are working for Shasta. I trusted you. I was a fool. So tell me, how deep does this double agent thing actually go?”
Elden grew still. His arms stayed around her, but his chin dropped and he shut his eyes. “If you must know, I haven’t been completely honest.”
~*~
Kai ran with a spark of hope. The desert sand sucked at his feet, and it didn’t take long for his thighs to burn with the effort of running. He slowed down to check on the others, but they were gone. He spun around, but he
was alone. Nothing stirred in the deep dark all around him.
This can’t be happening. Tau, what’s going on?
A wisp of mist drifted past him, and he wanted to shout his lungs out, but he didn’t dare make a noise. He willed his heart to slow, focusing on every noise coming from around him. The silence made his ears sing.
Then the voices started.
~*~
Evazee crouched, paralyzed. Elden had just admitted to everything she’d been suspecting all along. She wanted to remove herself from his arms, get as far away as possible. But she couldn’t move. Now was not the time.
She focussed on the screen, her heart in her throat as she watched her friends buckle under the onslaught. It played out across the surface of the dome; the reality of where they were and the forces unleashed against them. Serum pumped into the dome like heavy fog, and with it, Shasta’s influence over them grew.
In a moment, she knew. This was no simulation. The fabric separating the physical world and the spiritual had been shredded in this place. Her friends were at the mercy of a cruel dictator who was interested only in their submission. And this was only the start. From here it would spread. This confusion and isolation. The dominion and control. It would grow, multiply like cancer.
Elden shook as he held her, his arms like vice grips.
Evazee inhaled deeply. As she breathed out, she shut her eyes and turned her focus inwards. She was empty, bereft, and broken. Then her focus slipped upwards. She cringed at the thought of bringing all this nothing to the feet of God, but He was the only one who could help. If she could see His face now, what would she find? Disgust? Disappointment? Her heart poured out through her lips in a silent prayer. Not for me, Jesus, but for them. They need You. You are our only hope. The warmth on her skin took her breath away. She kept her eyes shut tight, too scared to look.
“Psst! Up here.”
She knew this voice. Curiosity won and she opened her eyes.
Jesus sat on the top of the dome with His legs crossed and His feet bare. She’d never actually seen Him like this before, but her heart knew it was Him. Her Jesus, the one Kai called Tau.
Cadence Page 23
