She bent her head between her knees and a thin line of acid-filled liquid spilled form her lips, landed on the floor. Tawny said, “Gross. No more pie for you.”
She sank back into her seat, miserable and still sick feeling. Her eyes ached and her throat was raw. Something was wrong, terribly and undeniably wrong. The train shuddered to a halt. A woman across the aisle gave her a filthy look, and Krista knew, knew, that the woman thought she was drunk. That she was just another reckless teenager with a lack of common sense and manners. She wanted to say something to the contrary, but it was all she could do to lurch up out of the seat and down to the doors.
Was Noite dead? Had she let her die? That weight settled on her shoulders, heavy and unrelenting. She knew she had killed Laurie, even if she had no say in the matter, and the thought of the suffering Noite had to go through at the hands of the doctors (they call them Creators) made her want to throw up all over again.
Creators? Where had that thought come from? Had she heard someone use that word? She did not know. The air outside the train tasted of burnt exhaust and metal. The sky was filled with tiny pricks of white light, stars that were burning high above their heads.
They walked through a mostly deserted town. The few lights that burned in the windows were bright, and they often had to duck around corners. They passed a diner, and the smell of fried eggs and bacon made Krista’s mouth fill with saliva, despite the sick feeling in her belly. Cars passed them, and they wound up walking down a long two-lane highway as the moon began to rise.
A building rose up from the flat landscape. Its walls looked sheer and dangerous, and its windows were all blank and dark. A guard gate stood in front of it, but it was empty.
“How are we going to get in?”
“It’s abandoned. It has been for years,” Blake said. He looked down at the ground, and the moonlight illuminated one half of his face, the curve of his jaw and cheek, and Krista’s heart gave a painful thud.
“How do you know?”
“We just do,” Connor said. His face was taut with something that looked too much like fear for Krista’s comfort. Something was going on here, she knew it—but what?
“How much good can it do us if it is empty?”
“If they sense Power here, they will just assume it is a remnant, or that one of the Creators escaped and came back here because they had nowhere else to go and decided to work a little while they could.”
“They might assume it is a Prime come home too,” Tawny said, “in which case we are fucked. So let’s do this as fast as we possibly can, please.”
Their feet crunched over gravel. The sounds that gravel made were uncannily like the sound of small bones crunching, and Krista shivered. The building showed its age up close: the walls had bad spots in the stone, mold grew in the cracks, and some of the windows had been broken out and never boarded over or replaced.
There was a smell, faint and old, of antiseptic and blood when they entered the first hallway. Krista stood, confused, but the other three moved with purpose, and she followed them. They descended a long set of stairs, traveled down a labyrinth of hallways and corridors that branched and bloomed like malignant trees.
The walls held small control panels, most broken and rusted, and the floors gave off a dull sheen and a muted thud-click as their heels struck it. Nobody spoke. The windows of the offices were broken. Krista could see overturned desks and some rusted out filing cabinets and shattered chairs in some of them. A goose-necked lamp hung from the broken glass in a door that bore the letters Dr. E n Link er.
A shiver stole down her back. Their shadows bobbed against the walls as Blake turned on the flashlight he had stolen earlier that day. Those shadows looked grotesque and strange, demon-like, even.
The smell got stronger. They turned a corner and found a pile of charred papers and equipment. The words “Here There Be Monsters” had been scrawled on one wall in blood gone dark maroon. Flakes of the blood had come away, and so parts of the words had faded but were still legible, and they made Krista want to run away as fast as she could.
“What happened here? Where is everyone?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Connor said, his hand lying on her arm in a reassuring gesture that made her feel no easier. “They are gone and have been for a long time.”
“You are full of crap. It matters a heck of a lot.”
Tawny said, “Stop arguing. The last thing you want to do here is argue. The Remnants can hear you, and feel you too.”
The Remnants? That confused Krista so much she shut up, even though she wanted to say a few other things. Her fear was growing in leaps and bounds. Her every instinct was urging her to run as fast as she could and take the others with her. The hairs on the back of her neck stood up, and her breath came in hard, sharp gasps.
They entered a low-ceilinged room with a strange contraption at one end. Connor asked Blake, “You think it still works?”
“She can make it work.” Blake’s voice was harsh. He grabbed Krista by one arm and yanked her to where he stood. His dark eyes bored into her blue ones. “You are going to start that machine, and we are going to go down to the testing room.”
She tried to free her arm, and his fingers tightened cruelly around her flesh. She cried out in pain, and Connor said his twin’s name in a voice that held a trace of fear. Blake’s wings sprouted and he gritted his teeth, forcing them back into his shoulders. The tendons in his neck stood out, and a large vein pulsed along his forehead as he battled his own body until his wings vanished once more.
Krista knew that he could do that, she had seen it before, but she had never known until then how painful it was. No wonder he preferred to find something to cover them instead.
“I don’t know how to start it.”
“Yes, you do.” Tawny said, “and you have to start it, otherwise we might all end up trapped here for the rest of our lives.”
“Whoa, wait a minute,” she flipped her hands up. “I did not sign on for all this, okay? I never agreed to be the last great hope or whatever it is you think I am. I sure as hell never agreed to get us out of here. You guys got us in here, you know.”
“Stop being a whiner.” Blake turned her toward the machine. “Start the damned thing.”
Anger exploded inside of her. She was mad at Blake for hurting her, mad at all of them for making her come here, mad at the crazy dream she had had that had made her feel sick. She was pissed off because her whole life was turned upside down and broken, and all she wanted to do was go back to Luke and sit in her classes and do her work and have some pizza with her best friend.
There was an awful screeching and groaning. It tore at her ears, and she screamed, clapping her hands to the sides of her head, but there was no protection to be had from that noise. Her eardrums swelled painfully, and she sank to her knees. More of that anger rose up, and the machine began to hum, lights flickered and died, reminding her of her dream. There was a ripping sound, and long tubes began to protrude from the concrete floor. They looked like the canisters she saw in the bank’s drive-through lines, only these were tall and wide enough for a human to fit into them, and she laughed hysterically. “Press the call button, please,” she muttered, and more of the tubes burst through the floor, sending concrete tumbling and causing the floor to vibrate like a large bell below her knees.
The ceiling began to lower, and more lights blinked and went out. An old and destroyed computer monitor blinked and faded, blinked and faded, then fell into the rubble, strewing the floor with a dull crash.
“Hurry up!” Tawny shouted. “The Remnants are waking up!”
What the heck was a Remnant? The answer teased at her brain; she knew, she just could not remember. They hauled her to her feet, dragged her across the floor, and tossed her into a tube. It spun madly, and she screamed, grabbing at the slick sides of it as it whirled her down and below the floor.
She shot through a tunnel at ultra- fast speeds. Her eyes squeezed shut as her stomach lurche
d and protested. The sharp turns slammed her into the sides of the tube, and once, her chin connected so hard her teeth clicked together on her tongue, bringing the tang of blood to her mouth.
“Let me out!” she howled, clawing at the sides, and the tube stopped so abruptly she was hurled back toward the ceiling of the thing, and then she fell in a crumpled heap at the bottom.
Everything hurt. She thought maybe her leg was broken, and her right hip ached like someone had kicked her in it, hard. She knew she should get up, but she could not. All she could do was lie there staring at the tube’s patterned ceiling and trying to breathe.
The door of the thing slid open with a wheeze that she did not like at all. Desperate and afraid she would get trapped in it forever if she did not move, she gathered her courage and strength and rolled out onto the tiles of the floor. The tube went dark and still, the door banged shut, then locked with a solid click that made her nearly hyperventilate with fear.
“I am taking the stairs back up,” she said to the darkness.
The other tubes crashed down. She could see her friends being jounced around in them, and when they fell out they all looked as bad as she felt, a little fact that made her spitefully glad for a second.
“Someone should have told her how to control the speed,” Tawny said between coughs.
“Yeah, that would have been nice. I thought I had busted my leg,” Krista said.
“Come on,” Blake said. “We have little time left. I did not know the Remnants here were so awake.”
“What the hell is a Remnant?” Krista asked, but nobody answered.
***
The room they wound up in was small and airless, but it led to a larger room shaped like a dome. The larger room took Krista’s breath away. There was something about that room, something dark and malevolent, that made her so scared her legs shook and her body went rigid.
The computers had once stood in the middle; the stands they had set upon were empty and dusty. There was a thin and dank green mildew on the base of the chair that sat in the center, and the hospital bed was covered in sheets that still held rusty stains, and the stirrups had been broken at some point.
The bed made her heart drop like lead. Her nausea came back in spiraling waves, and Blake pinched her, hard. “Ouch! What the hell is wrong with you?”
“Pay attention.” His dark eyes were unreadable.
“To what?”
“To your thoughts. Keep them quiet. Just concentrate on the bed and tell me what you see.”
She did not want to see that bed. It was awful, and something really bad had happened there, something bad was about to happen—she could feel it, and she was terrified. She focused on the bed, her mouth dry, and to her shock, a figure appeared in it, a woman with long blonde hair, a woman with a small dimple in her right cheek, just like the dimple in Krista’s cheek.
“Mom?” Her voice broke.
The figure evaporated. The room faded in and out, and her eyes strained to see through the fog that gathered in the corners, crept across the bed and the floor. There were faces in that fog, people walking down a road, and trains running on tracks that cut across green hills. The people and things coalesced, changed, and became guns firing, dogs barking, and children screaming. The visions were terrible, and Krista flailed out with her fists as a man in a uniform came too close to her, his fingers reaching toward her face.
She turned, and everyone was gone but her. She was alone in a dark wood. The jingle of bells sounded, and she stood there, frozen to the spot. It was dark, but not night. The trees were vast, and their limbs hung over everything, blocking out the sun. The watery sunlight that did come through was pale, and the patchy bits of sky she could see were the same color as slate.
The bells grew louder. They were accompanied by a stamping sound and the sound of wheels sliding on slick grass. She ducked behind a giant tree, her eyes scanning the woods. There was a nicker, and a horse appeared, pulling a colorful wagon. An old woman sat on its seat, her hair covered by a bright scarf.
Before Krista could make any sense of that, it was gone, and she was back in the lab. Blake spoke again. “Make that go.”
Her gaze followed his finger. There was a broken machine sitting there, not far from the bed. She focused on it, and it kicked on with a buzzing hum that hurt her head. It droned and whined, and Connor made a low noise deep down in his throat.
The machine broke in half, its sides splitting open and crisping to black. “What did you do that for?” Tawny asked.
“I...I didn’t, did I?” Had she?
Blake shrugged. “It does not matter. We only needed to see if you could break it.”
“Why?”
“This was the prototype for the machine at Luke. If you can kill this one, maybe you can actually kill the other one.”
“So was this a test?”
“No, the test is whether or not you can get us out of here without the Remnants killing us.”
“Okay, tell me right now, what is this Remnant you speak of?” She had meant it to be funny, but what Connor said was far from humorous. “It’s the leftovers from the time when this place was awake.
“Power never really disappears, even when the people who possess it die. If the people are bad, and the Power is bad, then it does bad things. This place is filled with that kind of Power. We call that the Remnants, and they can kill you.”
“Oh gee, thanks for telling me that before we walked into this place! No wonder I’ve been so nervous!”
Tawny asked, “What do you mean, you’ve been so nervous?”
“I don’t know. I just...on the train I had a weird dream, and then I had this odd, bad feeling all night. If I had known that there was bad stuff here I could have relaxed. Well, maybe not, but at least I would not have been so freaked out, wondering...”
“You never said you had a premonition!” Blake shouted.
“What’s a premonition?”
“Think! What were you afraid of?”
“I saw...I didn’t know exactly. I mean, it was nothing specific.” She was stuttering, but there was nothing she could do about it.
“We have to get out of here.” Tawny spun in a circle, her hair flying out around her small and pale face. “Guys, we need to get the hell out of here right now.”
Krista’s voice quivered, “Is it a Remnant?”
“It’s a lot of Remnants,” Connor said.
Tawny shifted, her skin turned to golden fur, and she ran, her body morphing as she went. A bright light struck her, her green-hazel eyes glinted, and her hands hit the floor as great paws. Connor’s wings shot out from his back, and Blake spun around, his hands hooking into talons.
They were all ready for battle, but Krista was not. There was something coming—something that was worse than anything any of them could imagine, and she had known it and said nothing. They were all going to die, and it was her fault.
The Remnants looked like ghosts, at first. They were insubstantial and wraith-like; they hung on the air, and they seemed to be too fragile to cause any real harm. Then they solidified and hardened.
The banks of empty machinery flew at Krista’s head. She ducked low just in time to keep her head on her shoulders. Her mouth was dry, and fear made her heartbeat accelerate until she could see the skin on her chest fluttering and expanding with each tick tock of her heart.
The Creators had made these Remnants. Some of them had belonged to bad people to start with, others had come from people gone mad with pain and terror, and others had simply grown wild after their bodies were taken away.
Pity lanced through Krista. Some of the Remnants dripped with pain, others with rage or grief, and the emotions were overwhelming her. She wanted to simply fall to her knees and weep for what had been done in that room.
She could see it all: the experiments, the torture, the people herded in and tested until they were broken and bloody and begging for a merciful death. No wonder their Power stayed there, trapped in that space.
Her mind locked down, and she stared at one Remnant, a hollow-eyed man with the grin of a barracuda. He had been a bad man, she knew it, she felt it. His Power had been stripped from him by men worse than he was, but they had not known how to cage that Power, not then, and so it was free within these walls.
Blake was fighting a screaming wind. It caught him up and tossed him from wall to wall like a rag doll. Connor was trying to free Tawny from the grip of what looked like a woman with three breasts.
Revulsion and horror replaced pity. No matter what had been done to these people when they were alive, they were no longer alive now, and only their twisted and crazed Powers remained behind.
She pictured a jar, wide-mouthed and with a clamping lid, like the ones her mother used to can the vegetables from their garden in, and then she shoved that Remnant into it.
His face became the face of a demon: distended, enraged, and ugly, as he was sucked along the vortex she had created and into the jar. The lid snapped shut, and the jar settled neatly on the floor of the lab. The Remnant howled and beat his fists against the jar’s sides but to no avail; he was trapped.
Not thinking, only acting, Krista shaped more jars. One by one, she caught the Remnants and left them in the jars lining the floor. They looked like evil fireflies, and she shuddered. Blake said, “Hey, that is actually kind of cool.”
Disgusted and saddened, Krista looked toward one wall. She strained, her head pounding with the beginnings of a headache, and the wall opened, brick and mortar falling in a shower. One brick bounced along the floor, sending dust and debris up in its wake.
The jars slid into the wall, and the bricks slid back into place. A blissful silence descended. Connor was the first to speak. “Nobody has ever been able to capture a Remnant.”
“You don’t have to sound all awed and stuff,” Tawny snapped from a face that still held long glistening teeth before her muzzle became an actual jaw and mouth.
Tawny liked Connor! Krista knew that right then, and she also knew that Tawny could be a bad enemy, especially if she thought Krista was stealing the guy she obviously wanted as her boyfriend.
Rebels Rising (Dark Rebels, #1) Page 6
