The Scorned (The Permutation Archives Book 3)

by Kindra Sowder

  She leaned forward in her seat, her nose nearly touching the headrest, and took a deep breath. Her hands rung together for a moment as the gears in her mind turned over and over trying to think of a way to explain what we had just witnessed.

  “Do you really want to know, Mila?” she asked.

  My jaw dropped in shock at the question. How could she even consider that I wouldn’t want the answers? Especially when it seemed like John Baker had been sent to kill me, injuring those that got in his way. My dear lifelong friend sat in the backseat now with his hands so mutilated and broken that I had no idea if he’d ever use them again. Jameson’s jaw hung awkwardly, and he was in obvious agony. I was bleeding, and my entire body ached from the impact of each hit I received at John’s hands.

  “All right.” She cleared her throat and rolled her neck, the vertebrae popping as she did so. “After I was removed from The Harvest project I was placed to work within Fuji-O’Hara’s Invincible Heart Project.”

  “And what’s that?” I asked. I was attempting to push her explanation along a little bit faster because my impatience was growing so quickly I felt I could snap at any moment.

  “Please, Mila, let me start from the beginning, okay?”

  She was frustrated, tired, and scared, so I understood her crassness with me. That didn’t mean my usual sense of patience would return. When I didn’t say anything, she continued, never once looking up at any of us. Sky-blues lost focus and stared right past me toward the oncoming horizon.

  “The Invincible Heart Project was started by Doctor David Newton and Fuji-O’Hara Industries after he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He was attempting to create something that could cure his illness, but it became so much more than just that. It became something that could keep him from the brink of death, replacing damaged cells caused by a large range of illnesses or injuries, cancer included. By the time I was removed from that project, just like with the Harvest, Doctor Newton had moved into stage four cancer,” my mother explained while she looked into the far-off distance before us.

  “And what about this John Baker character? Who exactly is he?” I asked to draw her attention back to me instead of whatever images her mind seemed to be conjuring up at the recollections.

  Her blue eyes flicked to my green ones, and she replied, “John Baker is the result of years and years of work. Each person injected with nanites developed a queen that lives in the heart muscle. This made them so much harder for the nanite’s programming to fully control the mind of the patient. After so long of working with the nanites to fix this issue, it seems they found a way to do so with others, but this man seems like he has a Queen. I can’t be one-hundred percent certain, but there was a slight shift behind his eyes that made it seem like their original nanite program might be failing.”

  “So, that means?” Ryder hissed through the obvious pain in his ribs, his hand wrapping around himself and holding his side.

  “It means that maybe, just maybe, John Baker could really be on our side of the war.”

  Chapter

  NINE

  I stood just inside the medical wing and watched medical staff move in and out of rooms, pens scribbling on charts and equipment exchanging hands. Looking to my left, I stared into the room where Ryder slept. His bare chest rose and fell, his abdomen bound with bandages to bind his ribs as best as possible. He had broken three ribs on one side and two on the other. The room next to him was occupied by Julius whose hands were nearly shattered. I looked down at the floor at my feet and listened to the machines. The machines in the room to my right measured Jameson’s heartbeat and respiration. His jaw had been broken, his mouth having to be wired shut. Famke hadn’t left his side since we crossed the wall.

  I felt as if this was something I could have avoided. Not just by letting John Baker kill me or take me wherever I would be useful to King, effectively ending my involvement in the war, but by never stepping foot outside the compound to begin with.

  Closing my eyes, I took a deep breath in and held it.

  “They’ll be okay, Mila. That I can assure you.”

  The voice of Doctor Devi from King’s Forge greeted me, but, when I looked up, Doctor Aserov was also at her side. I could see Gaia and Rayna moving around in the background, but focused on the two women in front of me. Doctor Aserov was the picture of professionalism again just as she had been before, white lab coat over deep blue dress and glasses covering her brown eyes. Not to mention, her hair was pulled up in a very tidy bun.

  Doctor Devi looked as she always had. White coat over black slacks and a white shirt like when I first met her. Her dark hair brushed her shoulders, and her olive skin seemed pale somehow like the recent events had weighed on her heavily.

  “How do we know for sure? Isn’t this treatment experimental?” I asked.

  “Well,” Doctor Aserov began, “yes, but we have had a lot of success within the Fallen Paradigm using this serum to heal extreme injury over the last few weeks. Especially when it comes to bone fractures. As a matter of fact, it’s the injury we see the most here.”

  “Famke has seen her fair share while training the new arrivals to control their gifts. When it comes to the skirmishes, there is just no way to know how far things will go,” Doctor Devi went on to explain.

  “So, is that your way of telling me that this will work? Or that it does most of the time?” I questioned skeptically.

  “Uh…” Doctor Devi stammered.

  Doctor Aserov placed a reassuring hand on the woman’s shoulder and shot me a square look of disapproval. “She is saying that it will work. We have used it to treat countless others here within the Fallen Paradigm and has been a success. You know, your mother helped create it in the beginning before she got too busy with the resistance to continue. Our scientists worked on it from then on and Ryder, Jameson, and Julius should be healed within a few hours. They’ll be as good as new.”

  I nodded and sighed. “Yet another thing I didn’t know about until today.” Shaking my head, I ran my hand through my hair in frustration and snapped, “Where is she?”

  “She’s just down the hall,” Doctor Devi replied with a shocked tone.

  “Okay.” I began to walk around the women but stopped in my tracks when I heard the next words.

  “But Mila, she’s briefing the others,” Doctor Aserov clarified. “Maybe it can wait?”

  My shoulders slumped in defeat, but, when I watched the hustle and bustle of the medical team in the hallway, I spotted a blonde head of hair that I would know anywhere. The same one I had grown up with as it moved across the hall from one room to an open door just across from it.

  “Gaia?” I almost yelled down the hallway.

  Startled with wide blue eyes, she turned to me with a clipboard clutched in her arms in a white-knuckled grip. Her eyes darted around at the others around us as silence spread like a plague over every living thing there with only the beeping of machines making any noise. Gaia’s eyes settled on me and filled instantly with worry.

  “Yes, Mila?”

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “But I have patients,” she muttered as she made a move to point around her at the rooms in her charge.

  “It won’t be long.”

  There was an edge of anger to my voice that I barely recognized. The more I learned about my mother that I hadn’t known prior, the more the anger grew into a living, breathing thing that could swallow me whole if I didn’t do something to stop it before it wrapped me in its vengeful claws.

  She placed the clipboard in the plastic tray by the door to her next patient’s room gingerly and began to follow me. With satisfaction, I turned away and skirted around both women who looked at me with disapproval. I shot a heated gaze at both of them and continued, making my way to the conference room just outside the double doors of the medical wing.

&
nbsp; Once I pushed through the double doors, I crossed the threshold into the conference room and folded my arms over my chest after taking a few brazen steps inside. The room was empty except for a long wooden table and some chairs, reminding me of the conference room where I learned that this entire thing was much larger than just me.

  “What is this about, Mila?” my beautiful sister asked as she softly shut the door behind her.

  I heard her muffled footsteps move toward me. The question caused me to fume with rage, and I whirled toward her, heat flaring in my face as blood rushed up to my cheeks. Her gaze focused on me and fear flickered slightly behind it, but resistance replaced it quickly.

  “How much has she been hiding from me? And, please, tell me the truth.”

  I watched as the question registered in her awareness. There was no change in her stance or facial expression.

  “Of course, she is. She even hides things from me when she feels I don’t need to know right at that moment. Mom times her explanations. Mom knows when certain information should be shared and when it shouldn’t.” Gaia acted as if this was nothing new. Something that shouldn’t shock me in the slightest, but that only made me even more livid.

  “Are you taking her side? If so, go ahead and tell me now because all of this is pissing me off,” I nearly shouted as I looked into the sky-blue eyes of my sister.

  She stood before me, her long blonde hair now covering a portion of her face as she ran her hand through it in irritation.

  “That’s not what I’m saying,” Gaia replied. “I’m saying that …”

  “Maybe I should’ve just stayed away. Maybe, when given the chance, I should’ve just taken off and done this on my own. There would be fewer secrets that way,” I interrupted, barely hearing the words she spoke.

  “Mila,” she muttered.

  I ignored her, sitting in one of the black mesh chairs and putting my face in my hands with an irritated groan. A warm hand came to rest on my shoulder, and I felt her kneel in front of me.

  “Mila,” she repeated.

  I dropped my hands into my lap and turned my face up to look at her. My face was hot with anger, and I felt as if bugs were crawling over my flesh. The energy inside of me was begging to be free, to turn my loving sister into a pile of bones and skin on the floor at my feet, but I resisted it.

  “Mom has her reasons, you know. She doesn’t do anything without thinking about the pros and the cons first. She’s always been that way.”

  “That’s not an excuse, Gaia, and you know it.”

  She shrugged and sighed, “Maybe not, but that’s the way it is. A lot has changed since you were taken by King and even more is going to change. Even more drastic after all of this is over,” she said. “We’re fighting to make the world a better place, right?”

  “I think you’re missing part of the point,” I snapped.

  She stood up and turned away from me, walking a few steps toward the far wall in an attempt to not to have to make eye contact with me at all.

  “And what is that?” she sniffed.

  I stood up and took a bold step in her direction, letting the rage I felt fill me until it was in danger of boiling over. I knew I shouldn’t get too angry or the power would become difficult to control. I had seen what it could do. In the forest, while everyone slept, it caused the Earth to shake beneath us until Ryder helped me gain control over it.

  “Look at me, Gaia.”

  When she didn’t turn around and only seemed to be staring a hole into the floor in front of her, my anger only grew. Most wouldn’t understand how enraged this entire situation made me. Not only had I been taken from my home, experimented on, tested, forced to kill, and chased down for what I possessed, but secrets had been kept from me. So many that could’ve made a difference in the entire circumstance since the beginning. The information about the Fallen Paradigm, about my father, about my family history, and about John Baker could’ve changed everything.

  “Look at me,” I shouted.

  The large table groaned and then split directly down its center, both sides dropping to the floor with a loud thud. Gaia startled and turned around, her blonde hair flowing in a lovely arch in the small amount of sunlight that filtered into the room. It nearly glittered. Fear surfaced for all of a second before she could reign in the emotion to replace it with something else. Pity. It was bad enough that the man I loved as well as best friend and newest friend were in the medical wing with serious injuries. Now my baby sister pitied me. I wasn’t sure whether it was because of the situation I had found myself in or the track of my life in general. Either way, the look in her eyes made me want to shrink into a ball in the darkness and never come out again. But that would only be too easy and extremely counterproductive if we wanted to live any semblance of a life in the future.

  I took a deep breath in to apologize for my lack of control when emotions were involved, but I was interrupted by the soft click of the door to the room opening. We both turned toward the sound to find twins Rayna and Famke just outside the door. Famke’s hand gripped the knob as they took a hesitant step inside of the room. Famke ignored the split table beside us, but Rayna’s eyes widened in abject horror.

  “Wh…?” we both began.

  “You two need to see something,” Famke interrupted, her military training taking hold. Her gaze locked on me. “Especially you.”

  Without taking a moment to see if Gaia would follow, I moved toward the open door and the women and stated, “Lead the way.”

  I quickly followed the twins to the area that they considered to be a cafeteria, which just happened to hold one of the largest screens in the Fallen Paradigm besides the one located in the control room. From the stiffness of their gait, this was something the entire faction should be made aware of. Rayna’s white lab coat billowed around her while Famke’s military dress contrasted her with complete blackness. Rayna’s hair was perfectly quaffed while Famke’s was up in a swinging ponytail. So many differences between the two, but still so much alike.

  All of us pushed through the swinging doors and were faced with every head turned toward the massive screen that had been lowered to hand from the ceiling just twenty feet above the floor so everyone could easily see it. I stopped just inside of them. Gaia nearly bumped into me as she filed in after me, and stopped at my side with blue eyes intent on the screen itself and nothing else. The voice of the woman on the screen was high-pitched and frightened, but I could tell that she was attempting to hide it.

  “This is Alex Vandercamp of WORG News 22 in Portland. We have a story out of Musgrave that is rather alarming, and even ended with tragedy. Our own Jessica Sowder is on the scene, Jess?”

  “Good morning, Alex, and you’re right this quiet town of Musgrave. Now Musgrave is a quiet mill town just a few miles from Mount. Hood National Forest. It was considered a major boon to the local economy as well as to the environmentalists in the area when the Fuji-O’Hara Industries Building of Science was erected.

  “That building, along with a few others in the area provided much-needed jobs in the local economy. However, many are questioning exactly what they are doing at Fuji-O’Hara when military troops and aircraft were in the area.

  “Now local law enforcement has reported receiving multiple calls reporting gunshots and explosions on the Fuji-O’Hara grounds.”

  “That’s alarming, Jess.”

  “Yes it is, Alex. It gets worse, however. Everett Stewart and his son Dillon, who were out hunting in Mount Hood were shot and killed.

  “I would like to introduce via telephone Sergeant Conrad Drake, who we are told, is second-in-command of the operations going on here in Musgrave. Sergeant Drake, thank you for joining us.”

  “Thank you for having me, Jessica.”

  “Sergeant Drake, can you offer our viewers any information on this tragedy or the e
vents that led to it?”

  “I can offer you what I can, as this is a military matter and there is some information that is classified.

  “The Fallen Paradigm, a terrorist group from the East Coast, has a cell here on the West Coast.”

  “That is quite alarming.”

  “Yes, Jessica, it is. It goes to show that these renegades will stop at nothing to cause dissension among the American people. What I can tell you is that there was an attack on Fuji-O’Hara industries by the Fallen Paradigm.

  “That attack caused the loss of life of some Fuji-O’Hara employees, whose names we will not be releasing to the press until we are able to get in contact with the families first. Aircraft were called in to aid in the apprehension of these terrorists due to weapons they had and their numbers.”

  “Sergeant, do you know the reason why they attacked? If they were after anything?”

  “That is, of course, classified, Jessica. They were tracked going into the forest where the Fuji-O’Hara Industries Science Building borders. We sent a group in there, and I can tell you that Mr. Stewart and his son were being held captive by members of the Fallen Paradigm. Unfortunately, we were unable to rescue the Stewarts before the terrorists executed them.”

  “Oh, my…”

  “Yes, Jessica. However, we were able to capture and eliminate those responsible for the loss of innocent American life.”

  “Are you prepared to release their names to the public?”

  “Yes. Known Fallen Paradigm Members; Donald Rankin, Peter Heller, Pamela Hooper, and Charles Trotter.”

  “Well Sergeant Drake, thank you for your service and protecting us from these terrorists. Do you have a number of how many of their number you are searching for in this recent attack?”