by Lane, Styna
Chapter Twenty-Five
Crunch
“Are you certain you want us to leave you here?” Lily asked, slamming the van door behind Emmy and Kayla. “If you give us some time, we can help make arrangements—”
“You have done enough,” Emmy said coolly. “We’ll be fine.”
Kayla looked around with wide eyes, taking in the civilization that was Waterville. Lily had said it would be too dangerous to leave them somewhere in Freedom, that William’s men could be anywhere. But Emmy insisted on remaining close, hoping she would be able to find her son.
Lily nodded calmly, before reaching into her pocket with a gloved hand and retrieving a roll of money. Emmy eyed her outstretched palm with concern.
“Please take it. You’re going to need something to get you started,” she said, trying to sound as comforting as possible.
Emmy took a cautious step back as Lily moved toward her.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Lily muttered, forcefully grabbing Emmy’s hand and shoving the wad of cash into it, before retreating back to the driver’s seat of the van.
The others had remained in their seats. There was no reason for them to say goodbye. They didn’t know Emmy. They hadn’t been raised in her home. Which was why my heart shuddered and ached when she stepped away from me, as I tried to give her a farewell hug.
“Don’t touch me,” she whispered, “please.”
I bit my lip, nodding as I tried to ignore the tears that were determined to make their presence known. I held my breath as I opened the door behind me, and returned to the van. Perhaps it was because my vision was slightly blurred, but upon my last glance into the deep blue depths of Emmy’s eyes, I saw something I had never noticed before; the tiniest flecks of gray. Had I never looked closely enough at her? How could I have not noticed the eyes of the woman who raised me? Maybe it was just a glare from the hazy-sunlight.
“Did you know that Abigail knew William?” Lakin asked from the back seat, after we had been southbound for nearly an hour.
Lily sighed, giving me the smallest startle as she removed one hand from the steering wheel to pinch the bridge of her nose. “Yes.”
“Why didn’t you tell us?” he asked.
“Would it have made a difference? We already told you that Slate met your parents in Maine.”
“What if she was working with him?” he said accusingly.
“She wasn’t.”
“How do you know? You said Violets could put a block—”
“We’ve known Abigail for many years,” Lily snapped. “If she’d been working against us, don’t you think something would have happened before now?”
Silence fell over the back seat. Lakin had to know that Lily was right. I hadn’t quite trusted the old woman when we’d first met her, but on what had I based that distrust? She’d seemed kind enough. Lonely, but kind. The Elementums had been her only friends for who-knows-how-many years. Surely, she wouldn’t have betrayed them.
In the quiet, my mind began to wander. Soon, my generation would be whole. We would find the last piece of our puzzle, and we would be complete. Strong, and complete. My brother would have his bond, and we would have our—
Crunch.
Furrowing my eyebrows, I spun around in my seat. Another crackling sound came from the floor behind the back row, then another, and another.
“What is that?” I questioned nervously, fully expecting the floor of the van to fall out at any moment.
To my great relief, a bag of pretzels popped into view above the last seat, held up by Joseph’s hand from the floor.
“Want some?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said as my stomach rumbled. Lakin and I shouldn’t have skipped out on those sandwiches and salads.
Very much against the idea of unbuckling my seatbelt as we sped down the highway at eighty-eight miles per hour, I reached my hand as far back as I could. Joseph crawled over seats and bodies, apologizing after elbowing Mattie in the chest, and handed me the bag.
“Where’d you even get these?” I asked, grimacing as I shoved a handful of stale pretzels into my mouth.
“There were on the floor,” he said, kneeling between Lily and myself.
I gagged, spitting pretzels that were probably older than I was out the window.
“Are you crazy?” I asked, shoving the bag back into his hand.
“No,” he said. “Just hungry.”
The moment my skin touched his, my eyes clouded over.
“Where are you taking me?!” Nadia shouted. I could feel her weak ankles dragging along the cold tile of the hospital floor.
“Somewhere you belong,” a stern voice said from ahead.
My throat swelled at the glimpse of slicked back hair, before I opened my eyes back in the safety of the van. Joseph stared at me with surprise. It wasn’t long before I realized all eyes in the van were on me, except for Lily’s, thankfully. Lakin crowded in next to Joseph, trying to get a better look at me.
“We have to turn around,” I whispered, barely able to get out a sound.
Lily didn’t question me. She nodded, and pulled off at the first chance she got.
“What’s going on?” Joseph asked.
“William has Nadia,” I said, leaning my head onto the cool glass of the window. “He’s taking her to The Facility.”
Sounds of panic and protest filled the back seat, but I remained quiet in my little corner of the van. I knew that panicking wouldn’t help the situation at all. I knew that we had to do what needed to be done. But, mostly, I knew that this would be the second time I would return to The Facility, when I’d thought I had left that god-forsaken place behind me for good.
Lily parked the van at the post office, not far from the charred store that doubled as the entrance to The Facility. Freedom was less than a buzzing town, but she insisted that Jason, Mattie, and Patrick hide us from view, until we were back in the prison I had hoped I would never see again.
Darkness. I was growing to hate the darkness more than anything that could have been hiding within it. But we were alone. Migrating down the floors of The Facility, it was obvious that William and his men had returned since our last visit. They had started a few repairs, and the puddles of dried blood had been cleaned.
We didn’t venture any further down than the tenth floor, but the lack of decaying-stench suggested that the bodies had been removed. In their place, a musky, smoky smell that struck me like a flail in the gut; I recognized it from the day of Eddie’s funeral. The scent of the incinerator infected the entire building, like some sort of morbid restaurant that cooked up bits of human in the basement.
Lakin squeezed my hand tightly as we passed by the open doors of the empty apartments—the prisons in which my entire generation would have lived, had William gotten his hands on them.
“He’s here,” Lily whispered anxiously, “I can feel him.”
Before we really understood what was happening, she took off in a race down the hallway, stopping only once she’d reached the door across from my old apartment. With a teary-eyed gasp, Lily burst through the door.
“Lily!” Patrick half-shouted, worriedly following after her, but stopping in the doorway.
Once the rest of us had finally caught up, a wave of emotions flooded over me. Pain, guilt, rage. Al lay still on a medical table in the middle of the apartment, Electro-Cuffs secured around his wrists, and wires leading from gadgets to his temples. An IV plunged into a vein in his arm, most likely keeping him sedated. My insides twisted and churned as I stared at him, lying motionless on the table with tubes hooked up to him, and bright, green lights glowing from his wrists. A few tears fell from Lily’s eyes as she lowered herself over his chest, shaking him to see if he would wake. Although he was not dead, I couldn’t help but imagine if he had been; another casualty left in William’s wake.
Snagging a pair of unused Electro-Cuffs and a controller from a table next to Al’s motionless body, nobody noticed as I slipped out of the room. With f
ire in my eyes, I made my way to the third flood. William had hurt too many of people I loved.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Revenge
I waited in the shadows of his office, sure that the first thing he’d do upon his return would be to slurp back a whiskey with giddy delight at his success of capturing Nadia. I knew him all too well, but I hadn’t expected him to be alone.
I watched as he let the stopper of the decorative bottle fall to the bar with a thud, clinking the rim onto a short glass, then raising the auburn liquid to his chapped lips. His eyes met mine through the mirror behind the bar, but he kept his composure as he turned to face me.
“I knew you would come back. I must say, though, I find it impressive that you beat me here,” he said with a smirk.
I stepped out of the shadows, teeth grinding as the cold in my fingertips became nearly unbearable.
“What is your plan now, then, Angela?” he asked, rounding the long table to have a seat in the largest chair at the end. As he leaned back, the glint of a gun-handle, identical to the ones we’d seen at Joseph’s house, shone in the dim, flickering light. “I see. You haven’t worked that part out yet. How typical of you to let your emotions—”
I didn’t let him finish his sentence. A torrent of vivid blue light sprang from my palm, shattering the glass in his hand. His eyes widened as he observed the bloody shards protruding from his fingers. I had never seen fear in William’s face, before. The feeling was gratifying.
“I see your abilities have advanced,” he said, returning to his cold, stern-self as he plucked slivers of glass from his skin.
“You could say that,” I said, barely above a whisper, as I circled the table, dropping the Electro-Cuffs in front of him.
I kept my eyes trained on William’s face, as he tended to his hand. Finally, he leaned back in his seat to meet my gaze. After a long period of silence, the glimmer in his eyes faded as he swiftly reached for the gun inside his jacket. But his last chance to overpower me failed him. Another torrent of blue light, and the gun was encased in ice, bound to his hand in frigid pain. He growled as he lunged from his seat, swinging wildly at me. Years of one-sided fights, with opponents typically restrained and helpless, had rendered him entirely useless in a fair battle. Or maybe age had simply gotten the best of him.
I dodged to the side, landing an icy blow to his head as he passed me. With a morbid thud, his body fell to the floor, landing at just the right angle to crush his nose. I smiled at the thought that, maybe, karma was on my side, before kneeling down to check for a pulse. Apparently, years of watching old action movies had taught me nothing.
William’s eyes popped open. With his free hand, he grabbed at my wrist, then thwapped me in the head with the icy-club his other hand had become. I yowled in pain as I slid across the dusty floor, pulling my shaking hand from my forehead to find a blood-soaked palm.
“Will you never learn?” he spat, wiping the gush of red from his face as he stumbled to his feet. “Your kind just doesn’t have what it takes to get the job done.”
My eyes widened as he pulled a second gun from the band of his pants. This time, it wasn’t the type of weapon meant to disable my kind, but a real gun—shiny, black, and ominous. I clamped my eyes shut as he pulled back the hammer and squeezed the trigger, but no shot ever rang. Instead, when I opened my eyes, William lay motionless on the floor at my feet, a trail of frost leading from his temple all the way down to his chest.
Lakin helped me up, a blue glow fading from the stone around his neck. We embraced each other frantically, before a mumbled groan made its way from William’s throat. I yanked the spare Electro-Cuffs from the table, securing them around his limp wrists and locking them together in the same way the guards had done on the night of my escape. I kicked the gun across the floor, and Lakin helped me heave him into a chair. I used my jacket to tie his torso back, just in time for his eyes to flutter open. He blinked at us in confusion, before a sinister grin spread across his face.
“You must be Lakin,” he said through his bloodied smile. “You’re scrawnier than I had imagined.”
Through a bout of emotion-riddled rage, I back-handed William across the face, a spray of blood landing on the table.
“Angie, don’t,” Lakin whispered in protest, moving to pull me away.
“Listen to your boyfriend, Angela.” The amusement in William’s voice only made me more livid.
Biting the inside of my lip to keep from exploding with wrath, I retrieved the controller for the Electro-Cuffs from my pants pocket. William’s demeanor changed in an instant, from certain and mocking to frightened and regretful.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said, voice cracking a bit as he tried to sound strict. “You don’t even know how to use that.”
“You’re right,” I sighed with false defeat, rolling the device over in my palm. “But there are only so many buttons.”
Red, green, and purple. It was a simple design, and I had been a prisoner of the Electro-Cuffs for long enough that I had a pretty good idea of how they worked. Green. The little lights on William’s cuffs, which had previously been in red stand-by mode, shone emerald. His brows lowered and his eyes grew wide as my thumb lingered over the purple.
My eyes remained fixed as painful volts coursed throughout William’s body. He shuttered and twitched in his chair as he screamed for an end. Lakin had to look away, until I finally released the button.
“Torture?” William gasped heavily. “This is not the way of your kind.”
“No,” I agreed, pressing the button again. “It’s the way of yours.”
My eyes brimmed with tears, as I watched the man who had destroyed my past convulse helplessly in his seat. I could cause him only a fraction of the pain that he had subjected my entire kind to, and even then, it was only physical. Had I been able to mirror the emotional ruins he had induced, maybe it would have been enough to satiate my need for revenge… but it could never happen. That kind of destruction required love for something—for anything—and William cared for nothing. He loved nothing. There was nothing that I could take from him to make him feel the loss that my kind was so familiar with.
“Enough,” Lakin whispered, placing a soothing hand on my own.
The controller cracked as it hit the floor, sending a network of splinters through the shiny casing. William’s seizing halted, leaving him a slumped-over heap of skin and bones and suit in his chair. I didn’t know if he was still alive. I didn’t know if I cared.
I disappeared into the comfort and safety of Lakin’s arms. The world didn’t exist, there. Time and life and hurt didn’t exist, there. It was just us, in the unending oblivion of nothingness that people sometimes referred to as love.
“You’re… not… like them… you know,” William rasped through forced, drawn-out breaths. “You will… never be... like them.”
“Maybe not… but you don’t even know what they’re like.” And in that moment, I realized what I could take from him.
Lakin tried to hold me back, but I assured him that I wouldn’t cause any more harm. Not physical harm, at least. William looked up at me with fear, eyelids sagging weakly. I reached out. His cheek felt rough, like leather that someone had taken to with a cheese grater. The years had not treated him kindly.
A gleam of purple flashed from his eyes as I kept my hand firmly against his skin. His jaw dropped into a ghostly, silent scream as he witnessed the magnificence of my kind, and the horrors they’d been subjected to by his. William had based his entire life on the differences between the Elementums and The Destructive Ones. He hated us so, it only made sense that the most efficient method of torture would be to make him as much like us as possible. And as each Violet gene awakened, as the humanity drained from his body… I found my revenge.
But revenge is never without cost. Perhaps it was because I had not yet become accustomed to the new strength of my powers, perhaps it was simply something that needed to happen, or perhaps karma had been angered by
my vengeance; my eyes began to cloud over. As William relived our existence, I relived his—every ghastly and terrifying moment of it. But it flashed through me so quickly, it felt like jumbled bits and pieces of a bad horror movie.
I saw Paula’s torture. I witnessed Emmy being beaten, nearly to death. To my surprise, William had been angered by my escape, not because I had gotten away, but because he had failed in preventing me from leaving. The image stabbed at my heart as he gazed at me in my blue dress, feeling something very similar to pride. A flash of his childhood stung my cheek, as his father slapped him for questioning the purpose of The Facility. When I was young, more resentment for himself when I flooded his office in an attempted escape. Why does she hate me? Why have I failed in gaining her trust? He held me as an infant. He gazed upon my face with an affection he had never felt for my kind. He handed me to Paula, as he wiped spit-up from his shoulder. Every moment of anger was only resentment for his own failure. He despised my kind, yes, but not so much as he despised his own inability to control us.
And then, a flash of Eddie’s face, bloody and marked by varying ages of bruise. My heart raced as William struck him, and beat him, and, eventually… shot him. Moments later, Eddie’s body tumbled to the floor in the rumbles of a violent quake, and I felt William’s lips twitch at the incredible opportunity to break me. I had begun to feel the slightest bit of sympathy, knowing that his actions had been rooted in self-hate, but that sympathy was immediately eradicated in a wave of rage, and hurt, and loathing. The monster he had become may have been a product of his upbringing, but he was a monster none-the-less. And the true monstrosity was that he felt no desire to change.
“What have you done to me?” William snarled as I backed away, tears drenching my cheeks.
“You? You killed Eddie?” My words were barely more than a rustle of leaves on the breeze, as I felt the wall against my back.
