Pulse Point

by Colleen Nelson

  I felt a surge of anger and tried to squash it. “Kellan was a hero,” I said. “He died for the City.”

  Raf sneered. “That’s what you were told. There’s a lot you don’t know.”

  “About Kellan?”

  “About what it takes to be an overseer.” He narrowed his eyes in a challenge. “About doing what the City needs you to. Kellan let his feelings affect his work. He couldn’t be trusted. We gave him a choice. The Prims or the City.”

  I shook my head, not believing him. “He fell from the conductor. Citizens saw it happen.”

  “Yes. An ‘accident.’” Raf didn’t bother to hide his real meaning.

  “You killed him?”

  “It had to be done.” I waited for a flash of regret, but all I saw was triumph. “He thought holding the Prims captive was cruel. He wanted us to release them. Kellan turned out to be a traitor to the City.”

  “You’re lying. This is another trick.” A hot pulse of anger rolled through me. I fought to keep it at bay. I needed to stay clear-headed.

  He smirked, “Kellan wasn’t a hero. He was weak. Just like you.”

  I ran at him. I didn’t care that he had a knife or was stronger than me. None of it mattered when I threw my full weight against him. With a shout of surprise and a groan, he hit the rock. The knife clattered out of his hand. I reached for it, but he grabbed me in a headlock. His arm squeezed my windpipe. I was choking and gasping, blackness crept into the corners of my eyes. One arm loosened as he reached the knife. I spun out of his grip. Free, but weaponless.

  “Don’t make the same mistake Kellan did. This is your chance to prove yourself. A Prim’s life isn’t worth a Citizen’s.”

  “She’s not a Prim,” I fired back angrily.

  “She’s a half-breed. Useful, yes, but not an equal.”

  Through Raf’s words, I heard Tar’s voice, her whispered plans filling him with hope for power. Kellan had seen through them and been killed for it. I’d stupidly volunteered to be a pawn in her game of manipulation. My naivety was no match for Tar’s wickedness. Or Raf’s.

  From the corner of my eye, I saw a movement in the bushes. “Raf,” I said, dropping my voice to a whisper. “They’re here.” His eyes widened and he turned to look. In that second, I kicked him between the legs and he went down, moaning in pain and grabbing himself. The knife clanged against the rock.

  I picked up the knife. I should kill him. It’s what he did to Kellan. He got to his feet and raised his hands in defeat. I moved closer to him, the knife’s point aimed at his throat. There was no mistaking my intent. He walked backwards, keeping one eye on me and one on the edge of the boulder.

  “You’re not yourself,” he said. “You’re untethered, the surges are controlling you. Put the knife down so we can talk about this. I wasn’t going to hurt you. I was never going to hurt you. I needed you to know the truth.”

  He was desperate now that I had the upper hand. “You killed him. You’d kill me too, if you could.” Had that been Tar’s order? The real reason she let me leave the City with him? My stomach rolled at the thought. I concentrated on keeping the knife steady as another surge hit me.

  “Before you do something you’ll regret, you need to know something. It’s not just us that are outside. Tar was going to release a team of overseers every forty-eight hours until Kaia was found. If it’s not us who find her, someone else will.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “You’re trying to trick me.”

  He shook his head. “And when they find out what you’ve done to me, your days are numbered.”

  My breath came in fast bursts.

  “It’s for the good of the City, Lev.” His tongue dripped with sarcasm and a hot flush rose up my neck. It spilled into my head with a roar.

  I lunged at him. He took a step backwards, dodging the knife, but misjudged his footing. His arms windmilled in an effort to right himself. I was close enough to save him, like he’d done for me last night.

  But I didn’t reach out, instead I gave him a swift kick to his kneecap. A second later, he had tumbled over the side of the rock, falling from such a height that when he landed, it was in a motionless heap on the ground.

  I stared in shock at Raf’s body. One leg stuck out at an odd angle, the bone probably broken. I started to sweat. Remorse coursed through me, hot and sticky, it glued itself to my throat and made it hard to swallow. “Raf!”

  He moaned and tried to roll over but cried out in pain and reached for his leg. Movement behind a tree caught my eye. A beast, crouched low, growled, then crept closer.

  “Raf!” I cried, though I knew it was pointless. Hearing my scream made the beast jump into action. It darted to Raf. “No! Please, no!” In a flash, it went at him, biting and ripping. Tearing his suit and digging into his exposed flesh. Raf’s shrieks echoed off the rock.

  I pulled my knees up to my chest, squeezed my eyes shut and covered my ears. Rocking on the boulder, I tried to shut out Raf’s screams. My stomach heaved as I thought about what the beast was doing to him. I curled up on the rock, shivering, wishing for it to end. Finally, it was silent except for the sound of the beast gnawing and licking the flesh off Raf’s bones.

  Were there others lying in wait? Why had this one come alone? Raf had said they were intelligent and protective. A chilling thought ran up my spine. Were the beasts vengeful too? Had this one attacked in revenge for the one Raf had killed?

  The beast looked over, twisting its mangy head. The long pink tongue lapped its snout clean of Raf’s remains, as if to say, “I’m done here.” With a yawn, it stretched its back, threw me one more look and loped into the forest.

  Kaia

  Raina and I had been sitting on the cot in her shelter reliving our lives for hours. Candles, long tapers of wax, had shrunk to nubs, dripping puddles of wax on the floor.

  She wanted to know everything and my mouth had gone dry from the telling. Mae’s balancing had been the hardest to explain. She’d held herself as if she was breaking apart, rocking gently for all that had been lost.

  “What about Sy?” she asked, tentative, wiping her eyes with the heel of her hand. I frowned. Mixed-up feelings for him swirled in my head. I didn’t know which ones would break free first. “Is he still alive?” she asked.

  I nodded. “It was his idea for me to leave. I thought he was coming too,” my voice broke. “He said to tell you he was sorry. And that he wished he was as brave as you.”

  “Oh, Sy,” she said, her voice heavy with regret. “He bought you time,” she said gently. “If your escape had been noticed,” her voice trailed off. “He’s always protected you.” Her eyes, so much like Mae’s it was unnerving, searched mine for understanding.

  I shook my head. “Protected me? He sent me to die out here.” I looked at my knee. Raina had spread a lumpy paste on the wound and wrapped it with a bandage. The shock of finding Raina alive had kept my feelings of bitterness at bay, but now they surged forward. “I never should have trusted Sy.”

  “You aren’t going to die, Kaia.”

  “But Akrum said—”

  “He didn’t know you were my daughter.”

  Hearing her use the word ‘daughter’ made the breath catch in my throat. Raina reached out a tentative hand and shuffled closer to me on the cot.

  “I asked for you as soon as I got here. But no one knew who you were.”

  Raina shook her head. “I’m called Mara here. I was worried overseers would come after me so I lied. I told the Prims my mate and I had left with our daughter, but only I had survived.”

  “And Sepp?”

  Raina, Mara, I corrected myself, raised her eyebrows in surprise. “How did you—?”

  “I met him. So it’s true? That defective—”

  “We don’t use that word here,” she cut me off, repeating Gideon’s sentiments. She took my hands in hers. They wer
e warm and strong. “He’s blind,” she said matter-of-factly. “He has been since birth. You’ve lived in the City and this will be hard for you to understand, but when I discovered he’d be born blind, I couldn’t terminate the pregnancy. I made a choice.”

  “You knew he was like that before you left? You abandoned me for a defective?” I gaped at her. I pulled my hands back and shifted away from her.

  “No! I made a choice to leave with both my children. You were supposed to follow. You and Sy. I thought we’d all be together. I never expected—” she broke off. “Sixteen years I’ve waited for you!”

  “Why didn’t you terminate the embryo? The tests would have shown something was wrong. You were still young, you could have carried another. What was so special about that one?”

  Mara gave me a sad smile. “I have so many things to tell you,” she sighed.

  “Sy’s healthy too, there was no reason—”

  “He’s not Sy’s child.”

  Her words silenced me.

  “This pregnancy was part of a special project. When the Scientists built the City, it was a short-term solution. One generation, two at most, would be housed under the dome. But after decades, it was obvious the longer we stayed in the City, the harder it would be to leave. How could a people who had only known life in the City survive outside? That was the question I was working on. We needed to study the Prims and see if there was something different about them, some kind of genetic mutation that made it possible for them to survive outside. So many people had died before, during the droughts and floods, what if there was something special about the Prims that had allowed them to survive all those disasters too?”

  “Survival of the fittest,” I whispered under my breath. We’d learned about it in school. It helped explain the need for balancing and the genetic testing of embryos.

  Mara nodded. “We needed to find ways to make Citizens stronger. We called it Genetic Intertwining. A Prim’s DNA was extracted and used to fertilize the egg.”

  Sepp was part-Prim? I blinked, making sense of it. My hand flew to my mouth. “The two hunters! The ones the City captured. Ezekiel was telling the truth!”

  Mara’s face darkened. “Yes. I was Project Leader, so it only seemed right that I should be the first carrier.” Her face twisted with guilt. “I wished I’d known the impact of that decision.”

  “You kept them as prisoners?” I couldn’t imagine this woman, my mother, involved in such a sinister plan. I’d thought the Prims were the ones to be feared, but Gideon, Akrum and Ezekiel were right: it wasn’t them. It was us.

  Fresh tears fell down Mara’s cheeks. “You can’t tell anyone here, Kaia. If they knew,” she broke off and shook her head. “They think I was forced to take part in the project, the same as the Prims.”

  “You lied so they’d take you in,” I whispered. “What would they do if they knew the truth?”

  She shook her head, her chin quivered. “I don’t want to think about it.”

  My chest tightened at her words. “But it was all a waste. The experiment failed. Sepp’s a defec—blind.”

  “It didn’t fail,” Raina said with a shake of her head.

  I stared at her, my breath caught in my throat. I knew what she was going to say before the words left her lips.

  “Sepp wasn’t the first attempt. You were.”

  Lev

  I’d drunk both canteens dry trying to decide what to do. Guilt over Raf’s death raged in me. I wanted to believe it was outside that had turned me into a monster. A murderer.

  The hormone surges left me weak. I couldn’t think straight. One minute I was tearful with remorse, and the next angry at Raf for threatening me. In lucid moments, I knew I couldn’t stay on the rock forever, no matter how much I wanted to. I needed a plan. I needed to find Kaia. And I needed more water.

  Picking up the canteens, I slung them both over my shoulder and rummaged through Raf’s pack to find extra food. I had enough now to last for days. I held the knife in my hands and shimmied down the slanted trunk on all fours, alert for the beasts.

  Every time we’d seen the beasts, it had been by the stream. I couldn’t risk another encounter with them. I didn’t stop to fill my canteen, but moved further into the forest. Maybe Kaia had made the same choice and that was why we hadn’t found any evidence of her.

  Or maybe the Prims found her? Or the beasts?

  I tried not to think about either of those things as I hiked the pack up on my back and got swallowed up by trees.

  The sun had risen higher in the sky when my boot squelched into the ground. Not too far away, a waterhole was hidden in the trees. It wasn’t tumbling over rocks, like the stream, but sludgy and still.

  Had Raf said something about not drinking from stagnant pools of water? I didn’t care. It was water and I was thirsty. More than thirsty. My mouth felt like the parched valley floor before the storm came. I couldn’t be bothered with filling the canteen. I put my chin right down to the water and splashed handfuls into my mouth. After I’d drunk so much I thought my stomach would burst, I let the water gurgle into the canteen. My head was clear. Without Raf, I didn’t have competing ideas. I could focus on finding Kaia and making sure she was safe. And then, together, we’d decide what to do.

  An unfamiliar odour carried on the wind. Not the woodsy smell of damp trees I’d grown accustomed to, but something warm and heavy. Raf had told me about fire, how it had been used before for heating and cooking. He’d never built one, but the Prims used them. They didn’t have energy sources like we did in the City. Was this the smell of smoke he’d told me about? I lifted my head, breathing it in. The breeze shifted and the scent was gone.

  Somewhere, in the distance a beast howled. A long, mournful cry that made my skin prickle.

  ⌓

  I must have walked for hours. Everything looked the same. Wiping sweat from my brow, I tried to focus. Trees swayed and floated in front of me, multiplying into two and then four. I stumbled back to the stream by accident. The threat of beasts wasn’t as great as my need for water. Was it being untethered that made my stomach churn? Or the sounds of the beast feasting on Raf that echoed in my head? I stumbled to the stream and dipped my empty canteen in the water.

  A crashing in the forest on the other side of the stream made me jump. The beasts are coming, a voice echoed in my head. I dashed behind some trees, tucking myself out of sight. Even if they couldn’t see me, they could smell me. I heard the beasts sniff the air. They looked to where I hid, yellow eyes glowing in the murky forest light. One growled, baring its fangs, and I crouched lower. It can see you. My heart pounded against my ribs.

  A howl deeper in the forest made them both turn and lope away. I stayed where I was, too scared to move.

  Kaia

  All I could see was a pinprick of light. Raina, who was now Mara, hovered over me.

  “Kaia?” From somewhere far away, her voice echoed. “Kaia?”

  I ignored it as thoughts hammered in my head.

  I am part-Prim.

  I was abandoned for a defective.

  I should never have left the City.

  Mara grasped my shoulders, forcing me to turn towards her, but I jerked away. “Don’t!” I said. A jolt of anger surprised me. “Don’t touch me.” I glared at her. “I came to find you. I thought—” And then I realized since leaving the City, all I’d thought about was surviving and getting to the Prims. I’d never considered what would happen next.

  “I thought you’d be someone else.” It was clear then, who I’d been looking for. I’d left the City to find Mae. But Mara wasn’t Mae. Mae would never have deserted me. Not for a defective.

  A look of pain crossed Mara’s face. “I know it must be hard finding out the truth.”

  I frowned at her, my emotions dangerously close to the surface. “My whole life was a lie! Sy knew and never told me.” My voic
e dropped, “Did Mae?”

  Mara opened her mouth to explain, but I didn’t let her.

  “Do you know I’ve spent my life studying Sy, looking for some resemblance between us.” Tears welled in my eyes. “When I should have been in the underland, trying to find a Prim!” A wave of distaste rose in me. “And you!” I rounded on her, anger and hurt spilling out of me. “You left me to save him? A half-breed defective?”

  “No, Kaia.” She shook her head, her face pinched and determined. “I left to save you. By the time I realized Sy wasn’t coming, I had no choice. I had to get to the Mountain. Do you know what they would have done to me if they’d realized I’d tried to leave?”

  I sat staring at her, trying to make sense of what she told me. I wanted it to be true, to believe that she’d never meant to leave me in the City. Never meant to choose an unborn defective over me. But I was reeling, falling into darkness again, the revelations too shocking to comprehend.

  “Not a day has gone by in sixteen years that I haven’t looked out to the valley and thought of you. I knew, one day, you would come.” Mara pressed on. “If I could have gone back to get you, I would have.”

  The sharp edge of distrust cut through me like a knife. I wanted to run and hide until I could sort my feelings out, but I had nowhere to go. I’d risked everything to escape to the Mountain. Had I made a mistake? The tears in my eyes overflowed, clinging to lashes and then rolling down my cheeks.

  Mara inched closer on the cot. The salt of my tears mingled with the musky scent of her. She reached out to stroke my cheek, her finger pausing at the implants by my ear. Small lumps under the skin that connected the pulse point to my brain and marked me as a Citizen. “I promise, I’ll never let you go again, Kaia,” she whispered.

  I wanted so badly to believe her, my heart ached. “I need to sleep,” I croaked and shifted my head away from her touch.

  Mara nodded. “I have to leave for a while. There are people I need to check on. I’ll be back soon. Get some rest,” she murmured. She took a basket of supplies and let the door thud shut behind her.