He stared at his own hands as if they’d turned into snarling lions. “What…no, that’s not possible,” he said in a mild Australian accent.
“That was awesome.” Kyle wandered over as pale as a glue stick, grinning with wonder as he reached out to touch Sampson’s still-glowing palm. The doc lurched away at the last second, but not before I caught the tattoos glowing vibrant blue beneath his skin. And they hadn’t even touched.
Oh yeah, we had a strong match. I’d never seen such a profound reaction, especially since it didn’t appear they’d meant to blend their storms. I couldn’t imagine either of them would find that with anyone else in the Machine. For some reason, I thought conduit pairs would be male-female, but clearly not. That might be tricky one if either one of them were homophobes.
Asher had once told me the connection was more intimate than sex. If my conduit turned out to be a woman—not that I had anything against that—I’d probably feel a little weird about it, being as straight as a pin.
Could I eventually warm up to Caine that way, if we were even a match? It couldn’t have been a strong one, unless he possessed some stellar ability to hide every scrap of Machine mojo he had to keep me from feeling it when he’d hugged me. The Brit was completely adorable with that sexy accent and playful in ways Asher would never be. Still, I couldn’t swallow the idea of getting closer to him without wanting to crawl into a corner and bawl my eyes out.
Asher. Oh, crap. Where had he been during the show? I found him a few feet away beating at Caine’s arms as well as a band of Machine energy that held him back—just like the one Baku had used against him, only this one came from Caine. Probably so Asher wouldn’t intervene before we could lure out our Medic. Caine finally released him, spreading his arms wide as he stepped back. Once free, Asher flattened Thor with a right hook, and the sentinel went down hard. I held my breath until Caine groaned and sat up, laughing as he rubbed his jaw.
Asher’s focus burned me, and his body shook. One glance at his horrified expression, and my heart dropped about ten stories and went splat. I’d scared him. Badly. And pissed him off even worse than he had been.
I started toward him, but he marched out the door and slammed it behind him. Caine gave me a victorious smile and sauntered out before I could tell him off for almost killing me. Fight dirty, he’d said. He wasn’t messing around.
“I’m not a doctor,” Sampson said to his hands. “I couldn’t save him. I tried, but I…I couldn’t.”
Oh, man. “Who couldn’t you save?” I asked.
“I can’t heal anyone.” He looked up, tears rimming his light lashes. There was something kind in those sad eyes, and I imagined he had a few ghosts of his own. “You can’t ask me to do that.”
“But you can. I was in trouble, and you saved me. Thank you.” I touched his shoulder, but he flinched back, and I didn’t follow. “Just take some time. This is your gift.”
Most of the faces in the room had gone ashen. Probably wondering what superpower would come blasting out of them next. Me, too.
Kyle sat on the floor a few feet away hugging his knees, rocking. Even more color had drained out of him, his freckles standing out like tiny dots of blood on his face.
“Do you think maybe you can do to Kyle what you did to me?” I asked Sampson.
Rolling up to his feet, Kyle shoved his finger at the doc, almost toppling over as he said, “Don’t touch me. I’m not gay.” And then stalked off. Sampson stared for a minute before rushing after him.
That conversation wasn’t going to go well.
“Maybe she did something to Sampson,” Kat said to the others huddled around as she strutted toward us in her ridiculous boots and clingy black pants.
I raised a brow at her. “Even if I did do something, which I didn’t, how can having a powerful Medic be bad? I think you’re just afraid you have no talents of your own, and that you’re only a jaded bully with delusions of grandeur.”
Her blank stare suggested she hadn’t thought out her barb, and the starch slowly went out of her. Wetness lined her lashes as she marched off, her white-blond ponytail swinging behind her. WTH? In what reality had I landed where I could make the ice princess cry? I shouldn’t have cared, but my bleeding heart reared its head and tore me a new one.
My sensitive, logical side told me she was as much a part of the Machine as I was whether I liked it or not. I had no idea what wound I’d stuck my finger into, but it was a deep, festering one judging by her reaction. Yet another item to add to my seemingly endless to-do list.
Remy stared after her and then at me. I shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine,” I said.
He squeezed my now-healed shoulder, exhaling hard. “What Sampson do like a miracle. Why you suppose he freak out?”
“It sounded like he tried to save someone he loved, and he couldn’t. Maybe he was a premed student in his former life or something. Caine said our gifts are born out of our darkest fears, so it makes sense that Sampson would get healing. What do you think yours might be?”
Remy shook his head. “Don’ know yet. May it’s keeping the peace.” His tired grin bunched up his cheeks. “You want me talk to Asher? He probably pretty mad after the scare you give him.”
“If you think he’ll listen, but first tell me why Sophia ran from me earlier.” As the Outfitter, color and design were her talents. Maybe that was her gift, so she’d be seen in a world where she felt invisible?
A nerve twitched in his temple, and he took on that unsettling stillness Asher often used when trying to control his temper. “I order her talk to you about what happen in the chamber durin’ her induction. She know if you find her alone, she have to talk.”
“So my best friend is going to avoid me like the plague when I need her most. Awesome.”
A heavy sigh leaked out of him as he drew me away from the crowd talking in hushed whispers while they glanced at me. Awkward. “May I wrong,” Remy said. “May you should leave this alone. She been through ’nuff, and this may stir up feelings she don’ get.”
Ohhhh, crap. “You’re not talking about within the Machine. You’re talking about before, the life you erased from her memory. Did somebody…you know…hurt her?” My fists curled up.
He stood there for a while before opening his mouth again. “Her fadda snatch her away when she small to hurt his wife. She grow up afraid, hide in cupboards and under beds. If he can’ find her, he can’ beat on her. Still, he find her lots. Almost kill her. If he alive now, I’da kill him myself.” Remy gritted his teeth and bent down to face me. “Nobody ever touch her again if she don’ want them to, you dig?”
I nodded, backing up. “Yeah, Remy. I dig, totally. You know I’d never do anything to hurt her. If not you, though, who will be her conduit?” I waved that comment off when the tendons in his neck stood out under his skin. “Um…can I please ask one more thing before I let this wildcat crawl back into the bag?” At his reluctant nod, I asked, “I’m wondering how she’s still affected by a past she doesn’t remember. If you erased that horrible existence, shouldn’t she have had a fresh start here?” I wanted to know for myself as much as her, so I could find a way to deal with my memory flashes.
“Thing happen to us all the time. Some roll off like water from the skin. Other thing soak in, crawl deep into the soul, and leave a mark there, like an echo that stay always. Her mind don’ remember, but her soul do. She don’ know why she suddenly feel scared, but she still feel it, and it still scare her bone-deep. Once she try to kill herself, it get so bad. Even now that I not afraid touch will hurt her, I won’ dare hold her when she lose it in case I set her off worse.”
I remembered something she’d said about leaving the facility only once in the last decade. Probably because Remy had carted her off to the hospital. Grief and fury took turns punching me in the heart.
“Her fadda sick, like so many. No help for those sick in the mind, so he took out his rage the only way he know how. And still I hate him. Don’ know how to fix the w
orld, Addy. May you the key to more than closing up the rifts and fixing the Machine. Even if they don’ do us in, we slowly killing ourselves.”
“Please don’t put so much faith in me.” Considering whether I really should drop the whole Remy/Sophia thing, I said, “You know her better than anyone what might trigger her fears. I’ll talk to her, but it’s your arms she needs around her when she’s ready, your voice whispering to her that she’s safe and cared for, that you’ll never leave her.”
A thrill ran up my spine. Arms around me. His shadow face blotting out the world. My heart sprinting in my chest. “I will never leave you.”
But you did leave me. Who are you?
“Addy?” Remy shook me gently back to reality. “Why you tearing up?”
I jerked back and wiped away the few drops that had escaped my lashes. “Nothing, I…I think I have a few of those soul-echoes you were talking about. Something totally mundane will happen, and I’ll suddenly be sucked into…not a lot of images, but more feeling like you said. Emotion, like my body remembers feeling something even though I don’t. I think I’m seeing someone I left behind in my mortal life, because he’s always in the shadows, just out of reach. I miss him even though I don’t remember him. Okay, that made no sense, but I don’t know how to explain it.”
Remy stared down at me, his half-tattooed face blank.
“What is it?” I asked. “Do you feel things like that too?”
“No, jus’ remember something I gotta do. Head high, Addy.” He lumbered toward the exit.
With no idea what that was all about, and with so much going on, I shut down my mental chaos and went in search of Kyle, Sophia, Izan, and the hardest of all I’d leave for last: Asher. This was turning out to be the longest day ever, and the sun had barely made it over the horizon.
Chapter Nineteen
When I failed to find Sophia, I headed toward the wardrobe room to change out of my sweaty clothes. I wasn’t avoiding my date with Asher or the Aztec boy in the mirror. Really.
Voices drew me beyond the door that led to the barracks, to the one that would take me to the gun range. I stopped outside of the steel panel, eased it open farther, and peered inside. Whoever was inside had gone deep into the room beyond the shooting alleys, and I could barely make out the words.
“You don’t understand, I can’t do this anymore.” Asher, his voice shaking with…what was it, rage? Fear?
“Then don’,” Remy said. “May time to admit you wrong, brah.”
My rib cage seemed too small for my organs, squeezing tighter as I wondered if they were talking about me. Remy thought Asher was wrong about me? Oh God, were they finally realizing I didn’t have the stuff to be a good Architect?
Asher laughed without humor. “I wish I could put her back where she came from, forget she ever existed, and go back to when life made sense. Izan made a mistake bringing her here. This is about to get really ugly, and she’s standing on the front line. Why couldn’t he have chosen someone like Kat, made of venom and steel?”
Remy’s voice boomed beyond the door before something crashed, and their voices moved deeper into the room. I held my stomach—someone must have stuck a knife in it while I’d been stunned, because it hurt like a bitch.
Asher wanted someone like Kat as the Architect. Made of venom and steel instead of a weak, cowardly country girl. Where had I gone wrong? I’d only been in the Machine for a matter of months, already done what I’d have never thought possible before that. I was just one person, and I wasn’t sitting around on my ass, I was out there every night, trying to unravel the giant puzzle of the Machine while hunting. What did he want from me?
I couldn’t hear them anymore when I turned and zombie-walked back to my room, aware of the earthquake of heartache waiting for a quiet place to shatter me. When I made it through my door, I shut it quietly and stood there surrounded by the gray walls of my life.
Maybe he was right about me, that I needed to be more like Kat. My bleeding heart, as he often called it, had just collapsed in on itself anyway. Maybe I needed to rip it out of my chest altogether, and the cycle wouldn’t end in blood this time around. Caine wanted to be by my side, so I had no more need for Asher. We were so done.
The pages beckoned to me, and if not for Iris and Kyle needing a little recovery time, and still faced with the task of convincing them to work with their conduits—if Iris even knew the identity of hers—I’d have rounded them up and hit the road. Sampson and Kyle were the only definite pair I knew of, other than Remy and Sophia. I’d give my geek and B&E expert an hour, no more.
The adrenaline in me needed something to do so I wouldn’t unload it on Asher’s head by way of my foot. Until I could hunt, I’d make myself useful and read the new pages we’d found.
I tucked the tapestry under one arm, grabbed the pot, pinned the sarcophagus under my other arm, and went to Sophia’s room. Might as well knock off two items on my to-do list at once. Efficiency at its best.
I knocked with my foot since my hands were overflowing. The steel panel creaked open. I half expected her to slam it in my face the instant her pale blue eyes fell over me, but instead she threw it open, her lips parted. “Oh bugger, what happened to you? I mean more than…you know, Izan and the wraith king and stuff.”
So someone had told her about that already. Word traveled fast. “Nothing,” I said, hearing the icy detachment in my own voice. “I could use your help with the artifacts if you have time.”
She nodded, frowning. “Yeah, sure. Here, give me some of that.” Taking the tapestry and the pot from my armful, she said, “Um…where do you want to go?”
“Anywhere but here.” Some place quiet that wasn’t gray and depressing to call home, in the woods maybe. I touched her arm and called the Shift, unsure where it might take us with such a vague idea in my head.
Layers of false reality piled up around us. An endless ocean that reached across the entire horizon. A forest with black, gnarled trees covering rolling hills. We stopped. But where?
Airy silence pressed around me wherever we’d landed, an open space by the hollow quality and gentle breeze that lifted a few stray hairs and shifted them across my arm.
Empty and eerily calm, I blinked to clear the lingering shadows from my eyes and stared at what appeared to be a craftsman-style house. Off-white walls met with a cathedral ceiling that peaked far above my head, crisscrossed with wooden beams. The open kitchen smelled of bleach and sparkled as if it had recently been cleaned. I ignored the mental flashes of food steaming on the granite, and the warmth in my belly when I caught a glimpse of a lake sparkling like diamonds through the giant window in the great room.
My heart seemed to think I’d come home, and I agreed. The reason for that wasn’t important; it was just another ghost I needed to let die.
I didn’t question the instinct that took me to the hall beside the open-concept kitchen, along its length to a wooden door. Inside, I found a library full of old tomes arranged neatly on wall-to-wall shelves.
Sophia pattered in behind me. “Why do I feel like I’ve been here before?”
So it wasn’t only me. Which meant I’d been here after induction, not before, so why couldn’t I remember it?
“Because we probably have been.” I set the artifacts on a table and sat down, turning the heavy sarcophagus over in my hands while I tried to shake the roaring crowd of questions demanding answers about the house.
Squinting at me, Sophia lowered into the chair across from me. More déjà vu. We’d done this before, right in this spot. “Addison, did something happen? It’s like…I don’t know…like nobody’s home in you.”
I kept my focus on the lid I needed to pry open. “Nothing happened but what was inevitable. Let’s find the pages, okay?”
“Oh. Okay. I’m sorry I’ve been avoiding you, if that’s why you’re so upset.”
“I’m not upset.” Huh. If I didn’t know I was lying, even I’d have believed me.
She turned her attenti
on to the tapestry. “Yeah, okay. I’ll get this page out of here. I’ll try not to wreck it.” Hurt colored her tone and kicked me in the teeth.
I fought with the lid, and when I couldn’t get it off, or stand the tension clogging up the air any longer, I shot out of my seat. “I’m not mad at you.” Covering my face with my hands, I waited until my voice flattened out before dropping them back to my sides. “I think Asher and Remy have succeeded in shattering my rose-colored glasses, that’s all. And it’s funny, because this knot in my chest seems as familiar as this house, like maybe I’ve always been unwanted even before I came to the Machine.” Except I still needed to bond with someone, which seemed impossible at the moment.
Sophia got up and rounded the table. “Who do you think doesn’t want you with us? Other than the Colonel and Taka and that hag Kat, I mean.”
“It doesn’t matter. Now, I need to get something to pry the lid off of this piece of junk, so I can free the pages and see if there’s anything that will help me start the Machine.”
“I hope you know that I want you with us,” she insisted before I made it out of the room. “But I’m terrified, and I don’t even know why.”
I stopped, closing my eyes at the pain ringing out of her delicate voice. “You asked Remy to take the memories of your mortal life away,” I said, “but I think that was a mistake. Someone hurt you who should have been your protector. If you could remember that, you might be able to understand why thinking about getting close to Remy terrifies you. The profound things in our lives, whether bad or good, are what shape us into what we need to be. If we can’t remember them, all they do is haunt us.”
A small sound drew me around. Hands clamped over her mouth, Sophia stared at me with wet eyes, her body trembling. I wrapped my arms around her. “You once told me I was stronger than I thought, and so are you. Whatever happened between you and Remy in the chamber, it’s okay and just between you and him. If it isn’t a fate worse than death to do it again, you need to try for me. For the Machine.”
Midnight Dawn Page 16
