Claimed: Faction 3: The Isa Fae Collection

by Heather Hambel Curley

  “I’m pretty sure they’re all dry by now.” I glanced at the roads around us. Nothing. It wasn’t actually surprising, since most people abandoned gasoline power vehicles for horses, mules, and the occasional solar powered car. Even electric cars seemed a thing of the past, something people only used before the Division. I hadn’t seen a moving vehicle in…Jesus, it had probably been three months or more. Some rich guy in Distant, stopping through on his way to find a better place.

  Fuck that. There was no better place, everything was gone. Everything that mattered, anyway.

  I cold tell my sister was looking at me. Her round face and big, expressive eyes were fixed on mine. She said, “Can’t you feel him?”

  “What—feel him?” I stomped on the clutch a little too hard. The car jerked so hard that I thought we’d stall, but at the last moment, it popped into third gear. “Soleil, look, I am not in the mood for your shit.”

  “It’s not shit. You’ve felt him before, right? Not physically, I mean…like, inside you. In your soul.”

  I didn’t have to look at her. I knew she was staring at me. And knowing her, it was the innocent, genuinely perplexed kind of question she’d posed without realizing how deeply it cut. No, I didn’t feel Vaughn. My soul didn’t soar for him; I couldn’t sit in the dark at our fucking homestead and reach out with my mind to him, to know he was okay or if he was thinking about me. Changes are, he wasn’t.

  He’d fled Distant because he was smart. I didn’t know which direction he’d gone or if he’d made it out before the bomb hit. Nothing in my body or soul or the energy that pricked my hands felt him—not now, not ever.

  And that hurt.

  I glanced in the rearview mirror, more out of old habit than actually with the concern someone might be coming up behind us. We the only car on a four lane highway. “I don’t want to talk about Vaughn anymore.”

  “If your can’t, that’s okay. Everyone’s gifts are different.”

  I held up my hand to silence her. “Soleil. Seriously. Just shut your mouth.”

  She grunted and slouched down in her seat, crossing her arms over her chest. The few seconds of silence as she kept to herself were a real treat, but then, she started up again. She said, “I feel Pa. And Mom.”

  “Go ahead, pat yourself on the shoulder for me.”

  “I feel something else, too.”

  “Have another pat, on me.” I reached over and patted her leg. “Good talk.”

  “No, Wren, I feel something. Something isn’t right.” She bolted up in her seat, pressing her face as close to the windshield as she could without smacking her nose off the glass. “Wren. You have to stop the car.”

  “If I shut this car off, I cannot promise you it will start up again. That’s the tricky thing with batteries, sometimes you can shock the shit out of them and it’s just not enough.”

  She threw herself at me. The seatbelt stopped her, snapping her back, and held her while she screamed. “Stop the car!”

  I downshifted and put on my blinker—habit again—and guided the car to the side of the road. “Goddamn it, what is your problem?”

  “A bomb.” She grabbed onto my forearm, digging her nails into my skin until they drew blood. “It’s almost here.”

  Six

  I slammed my foot down on the brake, pumping my other foot on the clutch while I downshifted to keep the engine from blowing up on me. Once we’d slowed down enough, I threw the emergency brake. The wheels shrieked and the engine squealed; the rpm indicator plummeted to zero.

  My hand shook so hard, I could barely get my seatbelt off.

  Soleil ducked down next to me, pressing the button with her finger. “We have to get off the road!”

  With one movement, I ripped the seatbelt away from my body and shoved against the door. It popped open—I didn’t bother to close it or disconnect the battery wires. Fuck that, let the engine blow now. I focused on a copse of tree, the edge of the woods, just off the side of highway.

  Run.

  My mind was numb. Another bomb. It was already here—why? Why was this happening again? We’d already been through enough, through the first wave of deaths during the Division, to the second wave from starvation and wounds that didn’t heal…to that third wave, when the radiation sickness started to set in.

  Run.

  I pounded my feet into the ground beneath me, trying to lengthen my stride to I could cover more distance. This was what happened before: this was the bombing between the Western State and Regent’s Block. Annihilation, devastation, downfall. It started like this, on a nice breezy summer day. No one saw it coming.

  Not even my perfect sister or my second sighted mother.

  Run.

  I ducked down beneath low-hanging branches, scraping my back against a large, partially dead oak tree. It teetered off balance and stumbled, taking too many seconds to try and right myself. No! I couldn’t stop—I couldn’t bounce off a tree and expect to get far enough away.

  Soleil screamed behind me. “It’s coming! I can feel it, I can feel the pilot’s pulse. I can hear him talking over his radio— “

  She squawked and abruptly stopped; one moment she was next to me, the next she was gone from sight.

  I slowed down and doubled back. All I wanted was to keep moving, to force my feet to propel me forward and away from what was about to happen. Stupid Soleil. This is how it was all going to end: incinerated into vapor because I had to stop and go back for The Favorite Child.

  She was sprawled out on the ground, her back arched enough so that she was craning up to look at me. “Wren!” Her hand darted out, she reached for me.

  And then she looked away. She turned as I ran to her, and looked in her leftmost direction. Her expression changed.

  I skidded to a stop next to her, nearly bowling myself over, and yanked her up by the arm. “Now is not the fucking time to get distracted. Move.”

  “No, wait!” She tugged me back, nodding into the woods. “Do you see it?”

  “They’re coming, Soleil.”

  She latched onto my arm and said, “You have to trust me.”

  No—no, I didn’t trust her. This was bullshit. We needed to be as far away from where we were standing as we could get. Leaving the car was probably stupid, I saw that now, but the bomb was coming. We were out of time.

  Tears trickled down her face. She knew. “Please. I can save us.”

  There was no point in arguing. The dull hum of a plane was audible; death was only a breath away. “Go.”

  She bolted.

  I ran after her, dipping and dodging low hanging branches and bounding over gnarled, twisted roots poking out of the dirt. Don’t fall. Don’t trip. My ears were straining for more sounds from above. Would the plane get louder? Would we hear the bomb hit or would it just be over? Done?

  The ground unexpectedly cut away and I jumped, bracing my legs to leap over a dry creek bed. I landed hard. It was a partial stop, a stumble forward and my left ankle rolled. I didn’t even fall or trip. There was just my joint weakening and giving out, then a loud snap.

  I flailed my arms outward to keep my balance and half-hopped, half ran, to catch up to my sister. Pain rippled through my ankle, the center most spot being the worst and gradually searing out through the rest of my foot and lower leg. I couldn’t stop running. I had to keep going—I had to outrun death.

  And then I saw it.

  Hidden in the side of a rocky hill was a small opening, a partially boarded up door. Soleil dropped to her knees and was squeezing underneath the lowest barrier. I followed suit, the wood scraping down my spine as I crawled in.

  I held my hands out. “Lux!”

  Light shined out from my palms, brightening the narrow tunnel. There were train tracks below our feet, leading further back into the cave.

  I caught myself. This wasn’t a cave, it was a mine.

  Soleil ran further into the cavern. She was picking up loose rocks and dumping them onto the ground, moving them around with her foot
. Shaping something.

  “These are the old Panworks silver mines.” I guided a rock towards my sister. “Men died here.”

  “We’re about to die here, too.” She threw a few more stones to the ground and then motioned me into the circle with her.

  I stepped into the center.

  She started mumbling, her eyes rolling up into her skull until all I could see were the whites of the orbs. I couldn’t understand what she was saying, but she faced the entrance to the mine, holding her palms outward, and chanted, then abruptly made a quarter turn. Her voice never wavered.

  The light radiating from my hands shifted. It turned from a pure, white light to a hazy, blue tone. My fingers were burning, I could feel energy sizzling through my veins and to my core. Something was building.

  Something inside me I’d never felt before was taking over.

  But then outside, everything melted away into white hot radiance. Within a matter of seconds, I could hear a strange, groaning sound all around us; everything was immediately drained out by the sound of screaming. Me, my sister, it didn’t matter.

  The light was getting brighter and, around us, the air was getting hotter. My skin scorched in the dry, volatile atmosphere and every particle of dust, every flick of rock flaking down from overhead bit into my skin like stab wounds. I choked. Breathing was impossible between the heat and the billowing debris—agony bubbled up out my lungs and ripped through my flesh. Breathing hurt. Existing was brutal.

  Soleil crumpled to the ground and covered her head with her arms. I could see her mouth moving, I knew she was shouting out the rest of the circle spell, but the sound never reached my ears. The rumble of the detonation, the misery in my brain from the pounding and pressure; it was unbearable.

  I wanted to die. I wanted it to be over.

  I collapsed on the ground next to my sister and held my hands up, palms flat against the air. My brain was steaming back and forth, continuously getting hung up when it came to the question of survival. Run? Hide? Neither had worked. Every choice we’d made today was wrong.

  Focusing every last bit of energy in my body, I felt a surge gathering in my hands. It burst out like a vortex: strong and focused. My body was thrust backwards and I fell, slamming to the ground so hard that the wind jolted from my lungs. I tried to suck in breath, but my chest wouldn’t inflate. Air seemed to stay trapped in my throat.

  But the crushing heat seemed to abate, slowly at first, but enough so I didn’t feel like I was about to be incinerated.

  The light streaming in from the outside dissipated. It was like it was cooling: the white glow ticked down to orange and then red, finally fading into blue. And then, it was dark.

  I squeezed my eyes shut and then opened them again. No…it wasn’t dark. It was daylight outside, just as it was before the bomb hit—my eyes were just scorched from the light. Sucking in a sharp breath, my hands snapped downward. The energy flow was gone.

  Soleil shifted beside me. “I think it’s over.”

  “Maybe we’re dead.” I blinked my eyes several times, trying to force them to water. My head was still pounding. The pain radiated down my temples and across the back of my skull. It was getting stronger.

  I heard a train whistle.

  Soleil obviously didn’t; she crawled into an upright position and was looking over her hastily built stone circle. “The circle spell worked. Well, sort of, but we’re alive. At least, I’m pretty sure we are.”

  “And I’m pretty sure this is what my own personal hell would look like.” I hoisted myself onto my knees and immediately winced, flopping back down on my ass. Shit. My ankle was already swollen to the side of a ripe avocado. The tumble I’d taken as we ran—that snap I’d heard—did more damage than I thought. The pain was focused on the nubby bone jutting out on the side. “Great.”

  “How did you do that?”

  “It goes without saying, Soleil, that I’m as graceful as an ox. You don’t need to rub it in.”

  “I’m not.” She pressed the pads of her fingers against my ankle. It took every particle of restraint in my system to not haul off and punch her. “It’s tender.”

  “Yes. Yes, thank you for that diagnosis. I’m pretty sure it’s broken; I heard it snap when I tripped.”

  She shrugged. “It’s no big deal.”

  I opened my mouth to compare talking to her with talking to a tree stump, but I never got the words out. She was already jabbing her fingers into my skin, mumbling and murmuring a string of words I couldn’t comprehend. She was either speaking too fast or speaking a different language. It was likely both; as she spoke, a tugging sensation rippled down my ankle. It tingled and shifted, it trickled down like water dripping off a stone ledge.

  The swelling drew in on itself and, gradually, the blueish purple bruise melted away. My ankle looked normal. The pain was gone.

  She brushed off her hands and stood, swiping her hands across the backs of her legs to sweep off any remaining dirt and dust. “It landed close, maybe half a mile from here.”

  “So, not on Distant.” I flexed my ankle back and forth—she’d completely healed it. “We made it a few miles outside city lines. If they weren’t aiming for the town, then what in the world were they trying to hit? There’s nothing here. No people, shit, the government is long gone and was at least thirty miles to the west.

  Soleil’s face drained of color. She almost looked sickly, rather than her normal porcelain doll-like complexion. “They were aiming for us.”

  “What?” I rolled my eyes. “Soleil, no. Nobody knows where the Lodge is and nobody cares that we were in Distant today. There are pockets of survivors out there. We both know that. But they aren’t coming here.”

  “I can’t feel them anymore.”

  Panic surged around my throat, like heat was rising up from my shoulders and threatening to choke me. “Feel who?”

  “Mom and Pa.”

  She started to run.

  Seven

  “Soleil!” I followed her out of the mine, hoisting my legs over collapsed boulders at the mouth of the cave. She was shorter and had a more petite build than me—she could snake her way through the debris without flinching. That was part of what worried me: as usual, she wasn’t thinking. She was just reacting.

  After a few tentative steps to test my ankle strength, I leapt forward into a run. My sister was just a little ahead, in sight, and I knew I could catch her. I had too; it wasn’t like there was any other choice. There was nothing left of the world around us. Trees were scorched and flattened, while the ground looked like it was blown backwards. The bomb must have been massive.

  I jumped over the battered carcass of an animal; maybe a deer. I wasn’t going to slow down long enough to be sure. “Soleil! Stop!”

  She was a persistent little thing. The ground heaved and lurched where it had shift during the blast, but she didn’t slow. She was mumbling, chanting; she was making herself heard, but not verbally. It was emotionally, it was telepathically. It was a connection I’d never shared with anyone, not even Vaughn.

  I pushed myself harder. The ground beneath my feet gradually changed: it was initially just shifted dirt, but the further we ran, the more churned and overturned it looked. Something was crunching underneath my feet.

  And then my sister stopped running.

  I skidded to a stop, jamming my toes into the ground to trying and keep from crashing into her. “What the hell? Jesus, Soleil—“

  She held her hand up, as if to silence me. The effort was wasted—the moment I saw what she was looking at, I snapped my mouth shut.

  Ahead of us was an open expanse of rubble. Burning shells of collapsed buildings flanked the further most reaches of the pit and, at the rear, the skeletal remains of a steel building smoldered. I remembered it. There had been a glass and steel dome at the top: now all that was left was the web-like, rounded girders. Everything that was somewhat whole burned. Smoke billowed everywhere, steaming up from the blanket of debris carpeting former stree
ts and courtyards; blowing upward like souls to the heavens.

  I knew this place. “Vale.” I said it more to myself than my sister, since I was fairly sure she didn’t remember ever being there. We had—once—when we were small. It was less than a mile from Distant and, though the name meant valley, you only went there if there was a problem. Or, more likely, if you were the problem. It was the hub, the epicenter of all comings and goings (mostly goings from what I’d heard) and the government transportation headquarters.

  I glanced at her. “We shouldn’t be here.”

  She swallowed hard. “What was this place?”

  “This is where the Alliance fell.” I shifted my weight from one hip to the other. “When they tired of negotiating and arguing and pleading their case, this was where the Division started.”

  “But the capital city was destroyed when this all started. Why drop a bomb here?”

  I tightened the red cord around my wrist, pulling it taut until it hurt. The pain grounded me. I said, “Because everything came through here. Food, imported cars, exported livestock and gin. And that building back there? With the dome? That’s where they registered people.”

  She looked at me. I could see the question in her eyes, in the arch of her eyebrow.

  I looked down at the building; I could still remember the white, gold, and green tiles on the floor and the brass sconces on the walls. It smelled bad in there. I only ever recalled smelling that kind of rot in the corridors and great rooms inside, not the smell of death or the smell of shit, but the faint odor of evil. It was like it seeped from the walls. “I was almost five when we went, you were just a baby. Pa got a summons of some kind, to be in that building, in room 708 at nine o’clock sharp. The third Tuesday of the third month. And we went, we bundled up and drove in that old station wagon, do you remember it? With the seat in the rear that faced backwards?”

  She shook her head.

  “It was busy, bustling with people and cars and trains. Everything in that town moved. I don’t remember there being houses or stores or banks. Just people.” That’s why they’d needed Distant: it was an outpost on the edge of the wilderness, but it was also the only place in fifty miles with stores. “We sat in Room 708 for three hours before someone came in. Two officers of some kind, two men. One asked Pa if he knew a man named Atticus Richards.”