“Do it,” he interjected, never once looking at me as he stared at those that were pursuing us.
I turned back to the window knowing that, even though I had just been ordered to kill, it was the only way we could make it to the wall and then over to Kiawah Island where I would indeed meet fate. Without a second thought, I focused on the craft and pulled at the energy lingering just underneath the surface, feeling it explode in a swirl in my belly and flooding out into the rest of my body. At first, I wasn’t certain where to send the power, but then the engine popped into mind. I placed my hand on the window and pushed it outward, but couldn’t lock onto the engine, or the inside of the plane for that matter.
“Damn it, I can’t get inside it,” I shrieked.
“Just focus,” Ryder said right next to my ear as Julius continued to cheer me on, whispering my name besides me like a cheerleader.
I decided, if I couldn’t get into the engine, I’d grab the whole thing and bring it down. I expanded my power as best I could, letting the power guide me as it enveloped the metal canister, causing it to shudder mid-air. A rivulet of warmth ran from my nose and down my upper lip, bottom lip, and chin. Blood. I let all control go, knowing my body knew what to do better than I did. That fine-tuned control would come later, I was sure. With an audible snap, a bubble around it shimmered, and the plane shook again. Pooling all of my focus and determination into it, I pulled it in the opposite direction I had seen Ajax take. The craft moved along with my thoughts, following exactly the same path until it smashed into the ground in an explosion that rocked the ground beneath us.
As silence fell over us, the energy I had sent out came back to me in a rush, pushing all breath from my lungs and I sputtered and coughed. Wiping the blood from my face with my palm, Ryder pulled me into his chest and cradled me as if I were broken.
ChapteR
TWENTY
Ryder hugged me to his broad chest as we drove, the smell of dirt and gunpowder had penetrated his clothes and was so strong I had to turn my head to the side to avoid suffocating. Everyone was silent as I watched Jameson navigate the Humvee, taking us as far away from the chaos that was King’s Forge and toward Kiawah Island where I would come to meet those my mother deemed worthy of the Paradigm’s purpose. And he was calm as his ebony hands turned the steering wheel, pulling out from the back road we had been on and onto a paved government road. Julius was at my back, a soothing hand sitting just below my shoulder blade in an attempt to calm me after leaving all those in that small town to fend for themselves.
“We left them there. All of them,” I said, my voice filling the silence like someone had opened the floodgates.
“The Paradigm will take care of them,” Caius said from the front seat, not even bothering to look back at me to reassure me. At that point, words were empty to me. I wanted proof.
“And you now this, how?” I asked as I pulled away from Ryder and leaned toward the front seats, placing my elbows on my knees in the cramped space. This put me nearly touching Doctor Devi’s back as she sat in the tiny space between the two large men.
He finally turned around to look at me, his blue eyes penetrating mine with his steely gaze. It almost made me want to shrink back in the seat and cower, but I wasn’t that girl anymore. I wasn’t a sniveling coward that couldn’t take care of herself. And the transformation into a real powerhouse wasn’t complete just yet, either.
“Because we are the Paradigm, Mila, and we take care of our own. And those that live in King’s Forge are ‘our own’ and we never leave a man behind,” Caius nearly shouted through gritted teeth.
“Really? What happened in the forest? Is that your version of that rule?” I snapped at him, the snide comment leaving my lips before I had a chance to stop them. I shook my head. “Does King know about the underground compound there?”
“More than likely. How could he not? If he attacked the Forge, then he has to know, right?” Julius turned in his seat to face the front, watching Caius carefully as I leaned back in between the men.
I crossed my arms over my chest and waited for the answer. Caius opened his mouth to speak, but was cut off by Adelaide.
“I’m certain that he does. He doesn’t act without absolute proof of something first. So, he has to know that the Paradigm had something brewing underneath the Forge. I’m even sure he is thinking that it was a ballsy move on their part. I mean, right under his nose like that? What was Horatia thinking?”
I ignored the blatant insult toward my mother and turned to look at Julius. His muscles tensed as if still ready for battle, sweat across his forehead and top lip from the rush of adrenaline. Dirt and what looked like grease covered his skin. The front of his black shirt was soaked in something I knew all too well. Someone’s blood. I had seen it far too many times not to know the look of it when soaked in cloth.
“Are you okay?” I probed.
He jumped as if I had startled him and turned to look at me, his beautiful gray eyes filled to the brim with tears that threatened to spill over.
“What?”
I pointed to the blood on his shirt and repeated, “Are you okay?”
He looked down, and his eyes widened like he hadn’t realized it was there and, I hadn’t noticed before, but his hands were covered in it too, and it was beginning to turn that disgusting brown color.
“Oh my God. Ummm…” he stammered, “yeah, this isn’t mine. There was a little girl who had been separated from her mom. I tried to help her, but I was too late. She was shot and…” his words fell away, leaving us to fill in the blanks. We knew all too well what happened next. That little girl, who Julius had attempted to save from death, had fallen into its eager grasp at the hands of King’s forces. I watched as he wiped his palms on his black pants, trying to wipe it away and, when he couldn’t, he began to panic.
I reached out to him, but he jerked away and continued his obsessive rubbing, knowing full well the blood was entirely too dry to rid himself of it without some help.
“Give me some water,” I said, not pointing the demand to anyone in particular. When no one said anything I glanced at the faces turned toward me, each one stunned into silence and inaction. Even Ryder wasn’t sure what to do. “Now!”
Jameson jumped at my outburst and Caius moved into action, reaching down in front of him to what I could only assume was a pack of supplies that had been tucked away inside the vehicle waiting for us. I put my hand out, and he placed an opaque, blue plastic bottle in my hand. Images flashed through my mind as I stared at the same color I had seen glowing, bouncing off of clean, sterile walls in the compound. I shook them away and turned back to Julius, who was now crying as he rubbed his palm along the thigh of his cargo pants.
“Shhh, it’s okay,” I whispered in an attempt to soothe his guilt. I opened the bottle and took his hand, turning it over and pouring the water on his skin. Without hesitation, I used my thumb to rub the dried blood away in the very center of his palm, leaving a clean circle of flesh behind. “See? We can get it off. That’s better, right?”
He didn’t reply, only stared at the clean patch of flesh amongst all of the violence and blood. Julius, my dear friend I had known my entire life, was breaking right in front of me, and I wasn’t sure what else to do besides attempt to wash him clean. There wasn’t much I could do about the dirt all over him, but I could at least remove the blood from his hands, even if it were only in a literal sense.
Without looking away from him, I asked, “Anything in there I can use to get this off?” My eyes scanned the blood-soaked t-shirt he was wearing, and my heart skipped a beat in sadness. “And a new shirt?”
No one answered, the only sounds in the vehicle were Caius rustling through the large pack and Ryder at my back, pressed against it as he watched me intently. The heat coming from his body was almost distracting, but I forced myself to focus on my friend who was fallin
g apart right in front of me. It was bad enough that he was forever tainted by the experiences of the last few weeks or so, but he didn’t deserve to crumble into a million tiny pieces like this. He didn’t deserve to witness the violence and the destruction even though he knew full well what he was getting into when he agreed to escape the compound with the rest of us, leaving his brother behind. Leaving the traitor behind. I still couldn’t forgive Nero and probably never would, but the wound was much deeper for Julius than it was for me. Or any of the rest of us for that matter.
“Here you go,” Caius whispered as he handed a clean black shirt and a microfiber towel to me.
I looked at the soft, yellow towel in my hands for a few seconds. It was the size of a dish towel and as bright as the sun and would definitely work to clean up the water and the blood.
I held the towel up and looked at Caius then and exclaimed, “They really did think of everything.”
“Like he said, we take care of our own. And, while it may not mean much to some, a microfiber towel is a Godsend,” Ryder muttered as he pressed into my back, his heart beating erratically against my spine.
I poured more water over Julius’s hands and began to wipe the blood and the dirt away, the towel turning from its bright and sunny yellow to a dingy and filthy crimson tinged brown. Within a few minutes, the gore was gone, and the skin of his hands was squeaky clean, leaving only the shirt and the flesh beneath it to contend with. Without me having to ask, he removed the shirt and handed it to me. I made a move to pour some water over his chest, the lifeblood still bright crimson because he had been sweating, keeping it in its liquid state. He was well-built. Always had been. Six pack abs and well-defined pecs moved under his slightly golden skin, flexing as he reached out toward me.
“I can do it, Mila,” he snapped anger seeping into his words. He snatched the bottle and towel from my hands.
“Julius, I was just trying to he—”
“Don’t,” he interjected, glaring at me as he began to quickly clean himself up.
I sat there and stared at the shirt in my hands, attempting not to take his outburst personally. It had nothing to do with me. He just needed to have his moment of panic and grief and work through it on his own.
All the while, eyes were on us, watching the exchange and trying not to get in the middle of things they shouldn’t. And I felt the pang of Ryder’s jealousy, but we could contend with that later. This was definitely not the time to talk about the fact that he was becoming jealous over absolutely nothing. Julius had always been just a friend, and nothing more. And I was certain it had been completely obvious up to this point. I ignored it and when Julius’s hand came back into view, I looked up at him. He passed the now closed bottle and disgusting towel to Caius up front who rolled down the window and threw the towel and soiled shirt out. It swiftly fluttered past the window and disappeared behind us, taking the physical evidence of the little girl’s death with it.
Julius didn’t take the clean shirt from me. Instead, he intertwined his fingers with mine through the fabric and looked deep into my eyes, his face stained with tears that had marked their way through the grime that covered him. And not a single word had to pass between us for me to know that he was thankful and was sorry for acting like he had just a moment ago. Then the moment passed as he took the shirt and pulled it over his head to cover his torso. It was black, just like the one he had just removed. Clean and fresh, the smell of detergent wafting through the air as it moved in from the outside. And just like that, Julius closed himself off, his face turning into a mask within seconds of the fabric covering his vulnerable flesh. Kind of like it had hidden his moment of vulnerability altogether. His jaw clenched and unclenched as I watched him.
“So, when is the first checkpoint?” he asked, his tone flat as if he felt nothing at all. And it was at that moment I felt him pulling away from me and hiding within himself, to internalize the emotional agony.
Sighing inwardly, I leaned against Ryder and crossed my arms over my chest, letting the water that was still on my hands soak into the shirt. I no longer cared because I was a disgusting mess either way.
“I’d say at least another seventy-five miles or so. Then there is one more another five miles from the wall. We will leave the Humvee at least half a mile from the wall itself and trek the rest of the way until we reach the rendezvous where we’ll be taken across and to Kiawah,” Jameson explained. There was still so much that hadn’t been answered about how we would get across the wall, so I assumed they had something in place. Or at least I hoped.
“And we get across the wall, how?” I asked, skeptical.
The wall was made out of solid steel and concrete and, as far as I knew, nothing and no one had ever been able to get through it. Over it, sure, but the government had alerts that would stop any aerial attacks once any aircraft made its way into United States airspace. All of this was the reason we hadn’t been a part of any war for the last one-hundred years when any other country in the world was fighting one another.
“Ah, that’s classified. Sorry,” Jameson apologized, his brown eyes meeting mine in the rearview mirror.
I turned around and looked through the back window of the Humvee, hoping to see Ajax following us again having distracted our enemy just long enough. I could imagine his blond hair peeking out of the shadows of the inside of the vehicle as I watched, but the road was empty except for the ruins of the plane I had crashed.
“So, is there a reason Ajax was riding all by himself and turned into bait, basically? Or do you guys hate him, or something?” I asked, only half joking.
“No, it’s nothing like that. We all just kind of jumped in and drove out of the hangar to get you. Doctor Devi jumped into the Humvee and yelled at us all to get out of King’s Forge. Ajax took that liberty of being bait upon himself,” Ryder explained.
I turned back around and looked at him, those green eyes tired and sad.
“Is my mother alright?” I asked. “Well, was she?”
“Yes, but who knows when we’ll hear something over the radio again. It’s possible even Ajax will hear something before we do. Let’s just do what we can and hope we hear from them before we cross the wall,” Caius said. “All we can do is try to get some rest and get ourselves where we need to go.”
I pressed my hands against my eyes to stop the burning of the tears that were threatening to spill over and betray my sorrow for those at the Forge. They didn’t deserve what we brought to them, and King’s totalitarian hand proved just what he was willing to do to get what he wanted, even if it meant killing an entire town to do it. And it was all because of me. Pity bloomed in my chest then. Pity for myself and pity for those that had to suffer because of me.
“Oh my God,” I sighed into my hands, rubbing my face in an attempt to wipe the look of sadness I knew had to be there. “Maybe I should turn myself in. That’s the only way he’ll stop.”
Jameson slammed his foot on the break, and the breaks squealed, jerking all of us forward. My face would’ve slammed into the back of the seat if it weren’t for my quick reflexes, my hands stopping me just in time to avoid the impact. When I looked up, Jameson turned around, his brown eyes boring into me. If I could have, I would’ve found a way to hid from him, but there was no hiding from the truth of what I felt he was about to say.
“I know this is a lot of pressure. Trust me, we all have our part to play, and we all feel it, but turning yourself in isn’t going to make any of this any better. You have no idea what he plans to do with what he can take from you. And, believe me, he will use it, and he won’t stop until complete and total control is his,” Jameson explained, pointing at me as I hunched against the seat.
“And what does he plan to do to get it?” The question came out in a squeak, so much louder in the silence that surrounded us at that moment.
“You remember the term ‘terroris
t’ you learned in school?”
I nodded as my heart hammered against my ribcage and I attempted to catch my breath.
He turned around, gripped the wheel tightly, and said, “Well, it’s something along those lines.”
With those words, he pressed his foot on the gas, and we began moving again, headed in the direction of something I honestly hoped would save us all from the rule of such a maniacal tyrant. I knew he wanted complete control, and I knew he felt fear was a way to gain that control, but I hadn’t realized world domination was on the list either. But I also had a feeling that there was so much more happening under the surface that I had no clue about.
We also heard about homegrown terrorists, but it was a term we only heard on occasion, only knowing what the word meant enough to fear where the country had come from and not to go back there ever again. And here it was. Creeping on us again even one-hundred years into the future when we had made great strides to become something completely different. And King was trying to undo all of it, but how? How could my power help him?
My mind turned over and over as I sat there and contemplated my next move. Apparently, even if I turned myself in, things would only get worse and result in God knew what. I was tired of the running and the screaming and the pursuit of something I didn’t even fully understand yet. Something inside of me that anyone with extreme greed would kill to take.
“I am so not ready for this,” I whispered, more to myself than anyone.
And a reply came I wasn’t expecting.
“Well, you better get ready,” Caius stated as he turned halfway in the seat to look at me. “Because King won’t stop until you’re at his mercy.”
Chapter
TWENTY-ONE
The first of two checkpoints along the road might have been seventy-five miles along, at least, but it felt like only mere minutes had passed as we sat in silence waiting for a radio transmission from King’s Forge. Nothing came as we rolled to a stop at what I could best describe as an incredibly well-built shack of sorts. Only four walls, a metal roof, and the barest of essentials from what I could tell if something were to happen. But we all knew that there was more to it than we could see from our vantage point inside of the Humvee. The forest stood tall and proud on both sides of the road, being pushed back to keep its wildness from the orderly fashion of the manicured government road, not even a weed or pine needle making its way past the invisible line it somehow knew it couldn’t cross.
The Pursuit (The Permutation Archives Book 2) Page 22
