by Pam Godwin
“I’m great.” Her smile seemed genuine, especially as she looked back at Michio, further twisting the pang in my chest.
A length of blue cotton wrapped around her slim frame and head, leaving only her doll-like features exposed. I cringed, recalling how the Drone made me wear something similar on Malta. He preferred women covered the way Elaine was now, which suggested he was here, even though I couldn’t sense his oily presence.
The thin fabric flowed around the hillock of her abdomen, her hand smoothing over the bump. The gesture crushed me with memories of my own pregnancies, but amid the sorrow was a bright spark of happiness.
Cured women could become pregnant.
How large had the population of cured nymphs in Arkendale grown? How many women were spreading across the country right now, curing and recovering and making babies? Hundreds? Thousands? Certainly more than I’d ever thought possible, which made everything I’d been through so fucking worth it.
No matter what happened to me, whether I escaped this cage or rotted in a grave at the bottom of the canyon, the future of humanity had a fighting chance.
But on the heels of my excitement came the worry of so many unanswered questions. What about the prophecy? Were evolving mutations still a threat? Was the nymph virus still in the air? Would babies inhale it with their first breaths and die?
Before I could stop myself, my thoughts spiraled into memory, until all I could see was Annie and Aaron lying together in bed. Their bodies frail and fighting for life. The light draining from their eyes. Their hearts slowing. Stopping.
The terrible pain in my chest scorched through my body. I braced against it, forcing the burn to harden into frigid steel.
Maybe the virus was long gone. But what if the babies were born as something other than human? Like an evolved species? Something more dangerous than the creatures already prowling the planet?
Michio opened the door and unfolded his tall frame from the truck. Elaine’s hands twitched at her sides, as if trying to decide whether she should touch him or not.
My own hands flexed against the cage. She’d always showed interest in him. Clearly, that hadn’t changed. Her exuberance in running out here hadn’t been one of surprise. She’d been expecting him. Missing him.
My heart thumped heavily. How long had they been together? Had he left me that night in Georgia and run straight to her? Who was the father of her child?
I hadn’t seen her in what? Four…five months? Michio had been gone at least four months. Given the size of her belly, she was well into her second trimester. The father could’ve been Tallis, one of the Lakota brothers, or someone she’d fucked on the way here. Or Michio.
Except Michio was infertile. Or a liar. Didn’t matter. Maybe he was shooting blanks, maybe his emotions were broken, but none of that meant his dick didn’t work. And he’d been painfully clear about wanting a child. Even if that child wasn’t biologically his.
The driver stepped out of the truck and strode toward the rear. Michio joined him, and together they began to remove the chains. They weren’t unlocking my cage. They were freeing it from the truck.
My stomach hardened as I narrowed my eyes at Elaine. “Why are you running around freely? Where the fuck is the Drone?”
“Evie,” she said in a scolding tone. “Don’t be rude.”
“Rude?” I slammed a hand against the wire wall. “I’ve been locked in a crate for two fucking weeks, Elaine. We’re way past rude. Who’s the father?”
Her eyes tracked Michio, clinging to him with way too much desperation. When he didn’t return her stare, she lowered it to her sandaled feet. “Tallis or Naalnish. I’m not sure.”
Both gone. Their tender smiles and protective demeanors flashed through my head. My hands fell at my sides, and my lungs struggled to fill. Both men would’ve made incredible fathers.
My thoughts hurdled to my own protectors. “Michio took me from Jesse and Roark. Why would he do that?”
Michio didn’t twitch at the sound of his name, his hands moving fluidly as he unlocked the chains.
I dropped my forehead against the side of the cage, promised myself Jesse and Roark were alive and coming for me, and gave Elaine firm eye-contact. “What happened to Michio?”
She lifted her chin, fire flaring in her brown eyes. “It’s for his own good.”
“What is for his own good?”
She rested her hand on her belly. “Us.”
“What does that even mean?” I gnashed my teeth, seething the words. “What happened to his mind, Elaine?”
Michio shifted toward the last tether, his movements emotionless, his body a wooden shell. She stepped into his path, halting him with her palms on his bare chest.
I tried to wrangle back my anger, but it powered through, trembling my body and poisoning my blood. “Get the fuck away from him.”
The western horizon cast shafts of orange hues across her complexion, her eyes glowing in the dim light. Tendrils of shiny, black hair fell from her headscarf and framed her face as she stared up at him with doe eyes.
She was all soft curves and slim lines, feminine and well-groomed, so much prettier and healthier than I was. She knew it, too, sliding her body closer to his as she swayed those goddamned hips.
Stretching on tiptoes, she cupped the back of his head, raked her fingers through his hair, and kissed him, long and hard. His mouth remained slack yet pliable as her tongue flicked over his lips, her belly rocking against his unmoving frame.
Rolling heat slammed through my gut, my neck and jaw stiffening with rage.
She was lucky I was caged, because I wanted to kill her. Right fucking now. And maybe him, too, even as I knew he wasn’t himself and wouldn’t have chosen this. But I was so insanely angry I couldn’t think clearly. Why wasn’t he fighting whatever was harnessing his mind?
He might not have kissed her back, but he didn’t turn away either. He didn’t punch her in the ribs. Didn’t shove her in a cage. He just stood there, hands at his sides, and let her slobber all over his mouth. What else had he let her do for the past four months?
I felt sick, abandoned, replaced. As irrational as those feelings were, they were very, very real. Jealousy surged from the dark, blood-thirsty corner of my soul. I tried to shove it back by reminding myself I’d shared my heart and my body with two other men.
But that was different. I hadn’t left Michio for Jesse and Roark. He left me. I didn’t rip him away from his protectors, lock him in a cage, beat the shit out of him, ignore his pleas, and force him to watch an ungrateful asshole lick and suck on my lips.
She stepped back, hand on her belly, rubbing it with a contented sigh.
I lowered to my butt, refusing to give her the screaming, jealous fit she was likely anticipating. “You’re fucked up. You know that, right? Pawing a man like that who clearly doesn’t have control of his own mind? Are you raping him, too?”
A muscle jumped in her jaw, her eyes flicking to Michio. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Michio grabbed the back of my cage, and with screech of metal on metal, he dragged it to the tailgate. The steel tray beneath me ground against my aching joints, and I adjusted my weight, balancing on both knees.
Elaine turned, sashaying back to the concrete structure and the elevator waiting within.
On the opposite side of the road, the calm water of the Colorado River stretched along the bluffs of the canyon and pressed against the dam. I didn’t know how the intake towers pumped the water and carried it to the other side, but the churn of the turbines rumbled somewhere beneath the elevator, generating hydroelectric power at the bottom of the canyon.
Michio and the blond driver lifted my cage, hefting it up their chests, and carried me toward the elevator shaft. The structure sat at the precipice of the dam, and from my lifted position, I could see around it and down the backside of the dam wall. We must’ve been a hundred stories in the air.
Vertigo hit me with a wave of light-headed, stom
ach-dropping dizziness, souring my insides and shivering my skin, and it was in that moment that I knew. This was the harbinger. The fated cliff.
Dread swelled in the back of my throat. My hands slicked with sweat.
I contemplated the long fall to termination, or freedom, depending on how I looked at it, and wondered when the omen would shove me over. I could see it coming, felt it thrashing through my veins. “I’m going to die here.”
“Don’t be so dramatic,” Elaine said from the threshold of the elevator.
She stepped to the rear of the lift as Michio and Blondie carried me in. The tray beneath me tilted with the cage, knocking me to my hip and punishing the bruises already there. I gripped the sides to steady myself, but when they dropped me on the floor, my face slammed against the wire wall.
Elaine smirked, her gaze glued to Michio. What a delusional bitch. Michio was clearly not himself, yet she looked at him as if the world’s most sought-out bachelor had consciously chosen her to be his queen.
The doors closed with a shuddering sigh, and the elevator descended. The space was large enough to hold twenty people, windowless, and illuminated with electric lights in the ceiling. Humidity clung to my face, and my ears popped as we sank into the canyon.
Elaine tucked her hair beneath the scarf, vanishing the black locks from view. “You’ll love it here.”
I wasn’t going to hold my breath for that.
She drummed her fingers on the ledge of her belly. “The dam is self-sustained. The water generates enough power to serve over a million people. It can run for like ever. Did you know that?”
Did she seriously think I cared?
She chattered on like I wasn’t sitting on the floor in a cage and reeking of unwashed misery. “We have plumbing and electricity. Plenty of food and supplies. It’s safe and—”
“Are there other women roaming around here like you? Or are they all in cages and chained to posts outside the dam?”
She paled, and her mouth pinched in a line, her eyes darting to Michio.
He stood in front of the other guy in the corner of the lift, staring blankly at the wall. God, it hurt to see him like that. I missed him. Missed him so damned much. How was I going to free him? Words hadn’t worked, and considering he didn’t trust me enough to carry me into the elevator without the cage, I doubted I’d get a chance to punch some sense into him.
I looked up at Elaine. “Where’s the Drone? I assume he’s our next stop?”
Her hand twitched against her stomach, her lips rolling between her teeth.
I stiffened. Despite her unkindness, she was still a person, an invaluable woman, who had also once been the sad girl I’d saved in the mountains. What had happened to her? Most often mean people were victims of abuse themselves, right? What if the Drone had harmed her? Broken her?
I climbed to my knees. “Are you afraid of him? Has he hurt you?”
She glanced at Michio, gave a slight shake of her head, and looked away.
The elevator dinged.
I was carried out into a dark, cave-like opening. From there it was a series of metal stairways cut through rock, more elevators, and seemingly miles of inspection tunnels. Interesting how they kept me in the cage. Either they weren’t taking chances with me escaping or they thought I was too weak to walk.
Walking would’ve been a challenge, given the sores on my feet, but my legs were strong enough. I was certain of that.
I continued to badger Elaine with questions, but evidently, she’d left her tongue in the elevator. She trudged along behind us, irritatingly tight-lipped, her gaze glued to the back of Michio’s head.
Dim lights illuminated the archway ceilings, the natural rock walls barely wide-enough to accommodate the width of my cage, and the ground slanted at a steep grade. It felt like I was in a maze, crisscrossing the interior of the dam. But my captors didn’t falter, turning each corner like synchronized puppets, gliding from tunnel to tunnel with Elaine trailing wordlessly behind.
It was cooler down here, with a slight cavernous breeze. The deeper we went, the staler the air became, tinged with an earthy, musty aroma, like limestone and old cement.
The sound of machines clanged in the distance, growing closer and reverberating through my body like aphid threads. A moment later, the final tunnel dropped us into a wide, brightly lit room.
My ears rang against the loud vibration of generators. Eight of them sat in a line, each the size of a yacht, cylindrical in shape, wrapped in metal sheets, and topped with massive steel rotors.
The room stood four-stories high, the concrete walls stretching to steel rafters. Grated overhangs offered walkways along each level, connected by metal stairs, all of which led to countless doors—presumably rooms—and more tunnels.
And aphids.
I’d thought those vibrations in my stomach had been caused by the whir of the turbine blades, but I saw them now, their spiny bodies creeping behind the generators and prowling along the walkways, their clawed hands gripping the railings.
Pupil-less eyes tracked our approach, their hunger pulsing through me in waves, but they remained at the edges of the room and out of our way. The Drone’s pets were always so well-behaved when he was around. Little did he know, I could blow them up with a thought.
“Where is he?” I shouted over the mechanical noise.
Michio and Blondie carried my cage through the open space, and Elaine scurried up beside Michio, her eyes following the nearest aphid about thirty feet away.
I felt him before we reached the next turn, his presence a dark beacon amid the aphid vibrations, chilling and malignant, thrumming with power.
They carried me out of the generator room, through narrow walkways lined with breaker panels, down more tunnels, and stepped into an open doorway.
Elaine held back as they dropped my cage on the concrete floor of an unfurnished room the size of a large office. The blond man slipped out and closed the door. Michio remained beside my metal prison, and Elaine never stepped in. Maybe she couldn’t stomach whatever was about to happen to me. Or perhaps she went to ready her bed for Michio. Neither of those thoughts helped my burgeoning dread.
A mattress lay on the floor, the only furnishing, unless I counted the metal shackles drilled into the concrete wall above it. Fucking great. I wasn’t sure which was worse, the metal box or the waiting chains.
Seven unarmed men stood in a line, six of them wearing the empty expressions I’d come to expect. The seventh man in the center smiled at me, all fangs and onyx eyes.
The Drone’s swarthy face drooped with melted skin, his flamboyant cape wrapping around his shoulders and concealing his wings. “Eveline. How was your trip?”
I had so many questions my throat convulsed with the urgency to spit them all out. But the Drone was all about respect and authority. I’d play along, because eventually he would fill me in on his big plans. He was vainglorious like that.
I leaned against the chain-linked wall and stretched out my legs. “Accommodations were top-notch.” I patted the side of the cage. “You really out did yourself this time.”
He touched his cheek, fingers slithering over the wax-like flesh. “Only the best for the woman who melted my face.”
“How did you survive?”
He unbuttoned the cape at his neck and let it drop to the floor. Dark, twin peaks rose above his head and stretched like webbed arms behind the line of men. Finger bones framed the top of each wing, bending at a joint, similar to the elbow or shoulder. The tip of the joint hooked up and out, shaped like a lethal-looking claw.
The webbed sections were obscure, leathery, and lined with veins, but toward the tops, they hardened, shell-like and smooth. They were a hybrid between a bat and a beetle, which might’ve been strange on a winged animal. But on a human, wings of any variety were enough to make my breath stick in my throat, which of course was the purpose of his little display. Oh, how he loved to intimidate.
The ghastly things folded back in, and the near
est man grabbed the cape from the floor, spreading the black fabric over the wings and hiding them from view.
The Drone’s head tilted. “There was a passageway beneath the overhang. I flew to it, but as you can see, my face skimmed the surface of the lava.”
That close to the lava, there shouldn’t have been anything left. Apparently, he was able to heal, like Michio, but not completely given the disfigurement. Next time I killed him, I needed to remember to rip off his wings first.
He stepped toward the cage and leaned over it. A slippery toxicity oozed from him, infecting the air, burrowing into my skin, and making a shivery home in my pores.
His eyes took me in from head to toe, his expression unreadable beneath the hideous sag of flesh. “I expected you to return to me in much worse shape, Eveline. You suffered harsh conditions, unable to stand for two weeks, yet here you sit, without any assistance. You’re pale but not sick. Weak but still alert. Blistered but not broken. It’s as if you’ve tapped into a hidden, superhuman energy source.”
I molded my expression into one of disbelief despite the wild beat of my pulse. He was right. I should’ve been half-dead. I mean, I was healing like a normal person, slowly and painfully. Blisters covered my knuckles, my muscles and bones ached, and spasms hammered along my spine from slouching for so long. But beneath the bruises and sores, my body hummed with vitality, pushing my mind past the pain and keeping me awake and focused.
What would he do if he knew I was evolving? Hell, what was he going to do regardless? I assumed everyone here had been bitten, and through that venomous bite, brainwashed. Except Elaine. She was just as nasty and ignorant as ever.
I glanced up at Michio and searched his face, finding his gorgeous eyes cold and flat. My heart broke every time I looked at him, my fingernails curling into my palms. “What did you do to him?”
