"I'm OK, are you all right?" I asked between the siren blares, scanning Max for any visible signs of injury.
"Fine, I'm fine—come on!" he said, nodding to a searchlight that was heading right for us. We started running, and I pulled in my wings because there was no room to extend them between the buildings we were weaving through.
I could hear the Sweeper droids exchanging communication codes even though none of them were in view. Everything was louder, clearer, and quickly getting closer.
"We can't stay out in the open like this," I said, finding a series of buildings across the street. One of them looked like a restaurant, or maybe a club. "That place, see where everyone is going in with the big gilded door?"
"You can see the door details from here?" Max said.
"Long story, come on!"
We walked as casually as we could across the street, and I fit myself under Max's arm so it would look even more normal. We filtered into the crowd of people making their way through the door and quickly slipped into a table near the back.
"Shit, they're in here too," Max said through his teeth as he and I both spotted the hovering metallic discs floating from table to table.
"No, wait. Those aren't Sweepers. Watch." I nodded to the one hovering over a table about twenty feet from us as it lowered a pitcher of beer. The arms retracted inside and reappeared with four glasses, one for each person at the table. "It's a waiter," I said, amazed. "Those are all waiters."
Feed display holograms hovered in every corner of the room, some of them showing sports matches and others showing the same woman being followed around by reporters with the caption, Frankie Mason, CPC Researcher, Back from the Dead scrolling at the bottom of the display.
A bunch of shouting from down at the bar pulled my attention away from the feed. A woman got up and threw a drink in a man's face, then stormed out. He got up to follow her, but his friends held him back, laughing and pushing napkins at him. Half his face flashed the same ghostly-boned monstrosity with bared fangs and glowing red eyes that I'd seen on the streets in The Grind.
"Halsey, what's wrong?" Max asked, gripping my hand. I turned to him quickly, trying to shake the image from my mind.
"The man down there, the one who just got a face full of beer... He has Red Fever, Max."
"How do you know that? The lady is the one who got aggressive."
"He did something to provoke her," I said, scanning the room to see if there was anyone else in here with demonic half faces glowing inside them.
There weren't, fortunately. Just all different shades of colors, some bright, some muted. Those with darker colors gathered around the ones who glowed in bright pinks and greens, some of whom brightened even more, while others faded until they moved away from the newly gathered crowds.
I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to imagine the water washing over them, but when I opened my eyes again, the colors were all still there.
"Halsey, you need to talk to me here," Max said. "What is happening?"
Chapter Thirty-Two
I was about to start explaining what I could to Max when one of the waiter droids hovered over to us. It looked like a floating plate with metallic arms holding two glasses of water underneath it. The arms extended, lowering the glasses to the table.
"Hello, Maxwell Barrett" it said in a friendly female voice as it scanned a light over Max's face. "Welcome to Ivy's. Welcome to The Citadel Academy." The waiter droid's green light moved over my face, and I froze while it seemed to be thinking. "Hello...Unregistered. To be served, I will need your guest clearance code. Please press your thumb into the imprint disc on the table in front of you."
Max and I got up at the same time, and I pushed back the prickles running up my arms. "Um, we're good. We're actually late for something else. Thanks anyway," Max babbled to the hovering droid.
We moved quickly toward the door but were forced to stop and turn around when four live patrols walked through with a Sweeper droid in their wake.
"Shit!" I said under my breath as they split up and aimed their handheld scanners at everyone they passed.
The Sweeper droid sent a massive wave of light over the entire room, and Max rushed in front of me, moving me quickly into the corner of the shadowy wall.
"Don't punch me when I do this,” he said, moving close to me and slipping his hand into my hair. Before I knew it, a wave of heat rushed through my chest and forced my wings to bump the wall behind me, which pushed me into him. Max blinked at me in surprise, but then tightened his arm around my waist and quickly pressed his lips to mine. It only lasted a few seconds before I broke away from him, afraid my wings would expand beyond the initial fold if I didn’t get control of my sudden deluge of emotion. Seemingly confused, he frantically searched my face until he glanced over my shoulder at the tops of my wings. "Oh my god. OK, I'm sorry. I wouldn’t have done that, but I thought you'd read my queue and—"
"It’s OK, it's my fault—wait, what?" I said, noticing my hands were still pressed to his chest. I let them drop and imagined the water pushing through my fingertips, then felt my wings slowly receding. Max looked over his shoulder. The live patrols were walking toward the bar, and the Sweeper droid had just hovered down the first set of steps toward the main dining area.
"It's going to scan again," I said, taking his hand and leading us quickly back out the front door.
My head was spinning, but I didn’t have time to process anything that had just happened between Max and me as a Sweeper droid hovered on the curb across the street. Another was rotating a few blocks away to the left, and yet another a few blocks away to the right. There was no way we could go in any direction without one of them seeing us. Somewhere above, I heard whining sound of a small motor, and when I searched the shadows of the building, cameras were panning over the sidewalks. Even if I flew straight into the air with Max, the Sweeper droids' lasers would cut us down.
"There's nowhere to go," he said, apparently observing the same thing. We moved back into the front of the restaurant where a crowd of people had gathered, all trying to get out the door.
"Where were all the patrols few months ago, huh?" Someone shouted. "Could have used you and your tin cans when we had a Feral ripping people in half in here! But no, you show up during the playoffs!”
"Halls, you said you change into an eagle," Max said, gripping my shoulders. "Do it. I have my chip, so they won't stop me. I'll keep looking for Eve, but you have to get out of here."
I'd never completely shifted into the eagle, and there was no margin of error now. It had to be immediate.
"I don't think I can," I said, my mind racing with everything around us and everything that had just happened a few minutes ago. "I've never done it before. The closest I came was..." I trailed off, remembering the beach and the ridges that rose in my arms. I didn't want Max to see me like that. "It just wouldn't work."
"OK, well you have to try again. I'm going to get the attention of these droids. The cameras aren't equipped with lasers, so just go duck between these two buildings after you see the droids following me and change, all right?"
"No! The Sweepers do have lasers. And tasers. You saw them upload Jen's Miranda rights. I’m not letting you risk that.“
"Halsey, damn it... That was in The Grind. I have a Citadel chip now, they won't do that to me. Please, go!” He darted through the crowd of people and started running toward the droid across the street before I could get out another word. "Help! There's a Feral in there!" he shouted, and as soon as the droid started to move toward him, he ran up the street. The Sweeper droid to the right followed him too, but he was fast and had already made it to the droid a few blocks up. All three of the droids surrounded him as he waved his hands in the air and ranted like a lunatic.
I darted between the buildings and just let the panic shoot through me. I didn't try to route it or slow it down. I just let it come. My wings extended first, and then my arms began to ridge. Gold and brown feathers covered my hands, shoulders, an
d throat as my nose and lips began to tingle.
And then it all stopped.
“Come on!” I tried to yell, but it came out as a screech.
The prickling sensation that had moved over my legs had stopped, and I wondered if maybe I needed to be in motion. I flew to the rooftop, but still, the shift would go no farther. I tried to yell out again, but again, it just came out as a deafening screech.
It wasn't working. I knelt on the cold cement and tried one more time. I tried to call back the anger I felt when Leo left me at the edge of the tear, which made me feel like my blood was on fire. Even still, nothing else changed. I replayed Max's kiss in my mind, which I hadn’t really stop replaying, so I was sure this would trigger the rest of my shift. Another wave of heat actually did rush through me again remembering the feeling of his hand in my hair, on my cheek, the look in his eyes right before his arm wrapped tightly around my waist. I was so distracted by my obsession with getting out of The Grind, with leaving everything about it behind, that I hadn’t really understood what was happening with the one person who meant the most to me.
Even the crippling regret that washed over me wasn't enough to trigger the rest of my shift, nor was the building anger and frustration I felt as a result.
I closed my eyes and started to push the shift away, but stopped when I heard the police radio chatter in the distance. I'd heard it play a thousand times at home with my Aunt Alice, but now I could hear it from the live patrol radios and Sweeper units scattered all over The Citadel interior.
"Crisis Management code fourteen eleven, attention Sweeper units: we have a report of an incident at Ivy's Pub. Live patrols on site, precautionary medical transport en route.”
Crisis Management? That meant Eve would be coming to Ivy’s… Max did it! I ran to the edge of the roof, but he and the three Sweeper droids that were just hovering around him were gone. I touched my temple to queue him, but nothing would connect.
All the breath left my lungs. The network inside The Citadel never went down. Shops would close. People would be locked out of their homes. Everything in their infrastructure except their front gate depended on it.
I tried to listen for more of the police chatter, but even that had fallen silent. People were now scattering through the street, piling into cars and driving away, but I still didn't see Max. Had he been taken to the police station? Did the Sweeper droids just leave him there while they went back into Ivy's?
I tried again to queue him, but again, the signal wouldn't connect. This had to be Bryce’s handiwork. And that meant Leo and the others were here, behind the wall.
"Hey, kid!" a man called behind me. I turned and saw a dark-haired man with his arm in a sling and a blonde woman coming over the edge of the roof toward me. They only got a few steps off the ladder before they both stop in their tracks. "Whoa..." The man said when my wings extended again, and the light around him shifted from bright red to gray. He held out his hand to me and turned to the woman. "She didn't say anything about a flying kid. I’d have distinctly remembered the words flying kid.”
"Halsey…” the woman said, a yellow-orange color flashing briefly in her eyes before it spread around her. She came into the light, and I recognized her from the news report at Ivy’s.
"You're that CPC researcher on the feeds…” I said, getting to my feet. I touched my temple again to see if maybe those would load, but they didn’t.
"That's right. My name is Frankie," she said, taking a step toward me with a hand extended to the man next to her. "This is Jack. Eve tracked your queue after you called, and then killed the network when we found you. We came to take you to her… Will you come with us?“
The man she called Jack shook his head and muttered to himself as he turned to go back to the fire escape. “This is terrifying with one arm by the way,” he added. “Why do they come to the roof? We just got off a roof."
We didn’t go back to Ivy’s like I thought we would. Instead, Frankie drove us away from The Citadel.
“Wait, we’re going back to The Grind?” I asked, worried that Max would still be stuck somewhere with the Sweeper droids.
“Technically,” she said as we turned down the road that led to the docks, which was right in front of The Citadel.
Rusty barrels lined the entrance to the roped off pier, and I really hoped we weren’t going anywhere near the water.
“So, I have this, like, condition with seawater…” I said, asking without really asking if this whole thing was about to go very wrong for me.
“Boats float, kid. Calm your ti—,” Jack started to say, but Frankie backhanded him in the chest, and I swallowed a laugh. Jack sighed. “So, Uriel, huh? He wear the angel dress and everything?”
Now I did let myself laugh. “No, but he does wear flowy pants.”
“Flowy. Pants.” He repeated, then gave Frankie an enthusiastic nod. “She’s quick. I like her.”
“Do you know when the network will come back up? I’m worried about my friend,” I said as we got out of the car and started walking toward one of the bigger boats in port.
“Halsey!” Max said, slipping through the deckhouse door. I ran up the dock steps into his arms, nearly knocking him off his feet. “Eve was at the station when the droids brought me there.”
“You did it,” I whispered.
“Yeah, I did,” he said, laughing as he put me down. “Come on. She’s waiting for you.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Nobody was sitting on the narrow, tan couches or at the small table when we entered the deckhouse, and the wood paneling on the walls made everything feel a little claustrophobic.
I only had enough time to finish this observation when the door at the back of the room opened, and a Mediterranean woman with short, razor-edged hair approached us. A golden light lit her eyes for several seconds before it started to radiate all around her, and I exhaled in relief when I recognized her as Eve Adams. She was dressed in a tailored, but comfortable looking dark pantsuit, and I wondered if she’d come here from work the second she got my message.
“Were you followed?” Eve asked Frankie and Jack, who were standing behind me.
“No, there were a lot of cars coming and going, but the road to the docks was empty,” Frankie said, sitting carefully on one of the tan couches along the wall. I hadn’t noticed before, but she seemed to be holding her side with her arm.
Jack climbed another set of stairs behind us to the helm and started the engine. I must have looked alarmed because Eve smiled at me, her green eyes almost twinkling.
“We’re going somewhere safe.”
“Sorry, this is just too out there, but…” Max said hesitantly. “How can you be Eve? The Garden of Eden Eve?”
She nodded slowly, her small smile widening just a little. “It’s a fairly long story.”
Max narrowed his eyes, then glanced at me. “All right, then what about the name Adams?”
“I never did like to be called Adam’s Eve,” she said, raising a dark eyebrow. “And a surname became necessary after a dozen centuries or so.”
“Centuries,” Max repeated. He and I exchanged incredulous looks, his suggesting he didn’t believe a word she said, and mine no doubt conveying shock now that I was adding up how old she was.
“But I imagine you must be wondering why I sought you out, Halsey,” Eve added as the yacht picked up speed on the open water. She shook her head as she took a seat on the other tan couch and gestured for us to do the same. “Another plague has been sent among humanity. You’ve likely heard it called—”
“Red Fever,” I finished for her. “It killed a girl at our school.”
“It’s not the first attempt the Gnome queen has made to eradicate our kind through disease. She governs the viability of all life on earth.”
“Well, I think a drug from Wu Fong Pharmaceuticals is maybe causing Red Fever,” I offered, careful not to seem like I was directly contradicting the several thousand-year-old alleged mother of humanity, even though
I was.
Frankie leaned forward. “Why do you think that?” she asked, her brows darting together.
I explained about the man in the woods who had tried to give me the colored vials, then about seeing him again at school chatting up Lauren just before everything that happened to her—and me—after that.
“I saw the same spontaneous human combustion happen on the island with Knox,” Frankie said to Eve.
“Knox Ryder? He’s dead?” I asked, my heart instantly hammering.
“No,” Frankie corrected. “There were others infected on a prison island—it’s...involved. How do you know Knox Ryder?” she asked, her wide, blue eyes narrowing at me in suspicion.
I glanced at Eve. “I overheard Ghob and Uriel talking about taking him so he could lift the veil and let the trapped Elementals through to this world. They sent a group of others like me—I mean, but way stronger than me—who can fly and shift into other things.”
Eve smiled. “They will not succeed,” she said with a nod to Frankie before she met my eyes again. “Knox Ryder will not lift the veil. Not now. Not ever.”
Jack stopped the yacht engine, but there was nothing in sight except endless black sea when I looked out the window.
"Where are we?" Max asked, looking behind the curtain near him, too.
"Somewhere safe,“ Eve said as we glided to a stop. Above deck, we were surrounded by trees save for the end of a long inlet behind us, which was lit by intermittent lights on either side. We went down the stairs and were greeted by two older men and women. They were all dressed in richly colored clothes that looked hand-sewn with patches and beadwork. One of the women was very tan with flowing dark hair, streaked with gray, while the other was very pale with long, silver hair. The older, also pale man, had white hair, while the last man was darker and had closely cropped black waves like an old time movie star. A flash of gold lit behind everyone’s eyes and spread all around them, and I knew instinctively that they were going to help us.
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