After Flux (The Flux Series Book 2)

by Marissa Farrar

  “Kit?”

  Hunter’s voice made me jump. Kit jerked, too, his head snapping in our direction.

  “Oh, hey,” he said, getting to his feet, surprisingly graceful for a man of his size.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Thinking.”

  “About last night?”

  “In part.” Out of the blue, he said, “I’ve been studying up on my father.”

  I snatched a breath. “You have?”

  He nodded. “I’ve been going through all the latest media on him—public appearances, latest projects, charity work.” He said the last two words with malice, as though he couldn’t believe someone like Philip Middleton was capable of such a thing as charity. “So,” he continued, “it would seem my esteemed father is going back to his old ways.”

  I frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “He’s leaving technology behind and going back to science.”

  “You mean he’s messing around with genetics,” said Hunter.

  Kit nodded. “That’s exactly what I’m saying. I don’t know if our abilities coming to the surface has restored his interest, or if it was always going on, but this is what he’s doing now.” Kit reached into his back pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. He handed it to me. I unfolded it, and Hunter peered over my shoulder to read with me. The light in here was dim, but my eyes quickly adjusted. Kit had given me a newspaper article he must have printed from the internet. It showed his father shaking hands with another man I didn’t recognize. I read the headline.

  Myriad Group to Bring Hundreds of New Jobs to Research Facility in Los Angeles.

  Controversial facility sparks fears of designer babies. While altering the DNA of human sperm, eggs, or embryos—a process known as germline editing—could easily become a possibility some time in the future, the Myriad Group are looking to bring the future to today with their new laboratory. Currently, germline editing is considered ethical if it is to remove genetic diseases which lead to a greatly shortened lifespan, but is not allowed for enhancement, such as altering a person’s muscle mass, or how they look physically...

  I looked up from the paper. “So, he’s set up a new research facility?”

  Kit nodded and took the piece of paper from my hands. I glanced at Hunter, and he slipped his arm around my waist.

  “Yes, but we know he isn’t new to all of this. I think this a cover-up for what he’s really doing.”

  “Which is?”

  “Experimenting on us, or hoping to when he gets his hands on us.”

  “You said other members of the Kin had gone missing before I arrived.” Kit nodded, and I continued. “You think your father might have taken them?”

  “I think it’s possible.”

  “And you think he might have them at this facility.”

  “I don’t know, but I intend to find out.”

  “How?”

  “By confronting him. I want to find out if he knows who is responsible for the bombings as well.”

  Hunter frowned. “What you’re talking about doing is going to be extremely dangerous, Kit. If he wants more of us to experiment on, you’re talking about walking right into his hands.”

  Kit’s expression grew rigid again. “You’re talking as though my father and his men are the only dangerous ones!” He smacked his hand against the hard, stone wall. “We’re the ones with the powers, God-dammit! We’re the ones who can move things with our minds, or blow things up just by thinking about it. He should be frightened of us, not the other way around!”

  “Hey, Kit, it’s okay,” I said, reaching out to touch his arm, hoping to calm him, but he shook me off. “The reason we’re cautious”—I made sure not to use the word scared—“is that they’re heavily armed, when we’re not. Yes, we might have powers, but we will die from a gunshot wound, just like any other person.”

  He locked me in his gaze, his eye color indistinguishable in the poor light. “You might not.”

  Hunter’s arm around my waist tightened. “What are you saying, Kit?”

  “Just that we don’t know what Ari is capable of yet.”

  “You’re not using her to get to your father.” His tone was glacial, and I glanced up at his face to see it had turned to stone.

  Kit’s eyes narrowed. “She’s part of the Kin now, Hunter. We’re a group. We work as one.”

  I lifted both hands. “Umm, hang on a minute. I get to decide what I do and don’t do, not you two.” Both men looked at me expectantly. Was I supposed to make a decision now? “So, what are we talking about, exactly? Running experiments to find out if I am incapable of getting hurt?”

  I remembered Hunter first mentioning this to me back at my house, and how later, in the bathroom, I’d held a razor blade between my fingers, wondering what would happen if I tried to press it into my skin.

  “I don’t like the sound of this,” said Hunter. “What if you actually do get hurt? How are we supposed to deal with that?”

  “We deal with it,” I said, though my stomach churned with nerves. I didn’t want to get hurt, definitely not deliberately.

  Hunter stared at me, drilling into me with his dark eyes. “You can’t be seriously considering this?”

  “I think I have to, don’t I? If I can do something to stop Philip Middleton trying to hunt us down, and experiment on us, if I can even find out who’s been bombing the city, then I have a moral obligation to do everything I can.”

  “Not this,” he said. “Being part of the Kin is about protecting each other, not putting one of us out to be injured or even killed.”

  “It isn’t just about being part of the Kin for me, Hunter. Someone murdered my sister and countless others. What if it happens again, and I knew I could have done something about it but didn’t because I was too scared?”

  “But you’re not the only one who has to go. The rest of us can step up, too. I won’t have you taking on everything, even if you do have the ability to resist getting hurt.”

  Kit stepped in. “I was never suggesting that Ari do this alone. I’m harder to hurt, too, and I’m more than happy to put myself on the line. I can do this by myself, but we’re more likely to get answers out of my father if there are more of us. Ari is powerful. If that power translates over to her ability to not get hurt, she could be immortal, for all we know. If we have someone like her on our side, we should make use of her.”

  “She’s not a weapon to use,” Hunter snapped back.

  Kit held his gaze. “What if she is, though? Yes, we can do things to help protect her, but if she can walk right in there without any fear of getting hurt, that puts us on a whole new level.”

  “And if we’re wrong? If we think she’s indestructible, and we’re wrong, are you going to live with that, Kit? Are you going to take the blame for us losing her?”

  “We’ll do everything we can to protect her.”

  “No. Just by asking her to do this, you’re no longer protecting her.”

  “Stop!” I moved between the two guys, placing my hands against their chests. “I’m not a child. I don’t need protecting. I’ll do whatever the hell I decide, and no one needs take the blame for anything if it all goes horribly wrong. Just make sure my dad is okay if something does happen to me. I don’t know how he’ll cope if he loses me as well.”

  Hunter covered my hand on his chest with his own, pressing it closer, right above his heart. “Ari, if you won’t step back from this for yourself, do it for your dad.”

  I snatched my hand away. “Don’t try to emotionally blackmail me, Hunter.”

  “I’m not. I’m trying to make you see that there are others who will be hurt if you are.”

  I knew he had a point, but I couldn’t hide from this. I couldn’t let Middleton continue doing whatever messed up stuff he was into.

  “I love my dad, but he wouldn’t want more people to get hurt if he could do something to stop it. You know what he’s going to say if I even mention any of this to
him. He’s going to tell us we should contact the authorities and let them deal with it.”

  Uncomfortable silence fell among us. We all knew calling the authorities wasn’t going to work. It would mean explaining what we were and what we could do, and that would either get us locked up in a mental institute or a research laboratory, which was exactly what we were trying to avoid.

  “Do whatever you have to do, then, Ari,” Hunter said, stepping away from me, “but don’t ask me to just stand around and watch you get hurt.” He shook his head and walked away, leaving the star room and slipping back out into the corridor.

  “Hunter!” I started after him, but Kit caught my arm.

  “Give him some space. Hunter will stew on it for a bit, but then he’ll see it’s the right thing to do.”

  Feeling torn, I held back and let my boyfriend go.

  Chapter Eight

  “So,” I said, turning back to Kit, though my heart twisted inside my chest at watching Hunter walk away. “What do we need to do first?”

  He lifted his eyebrows. “You sure?”

  I nodded. “I don’t think I have any choice. Not really.”

  “Yes, you do, Ari. I’m sorry if I’ve made you feel that way.”

  “You didn’t make me feel that way. It’s just how it is. We need to do everything we can to stop the killings and make everyone safe again.”

  He huffed air out through his nose, and folded his arms. “I’m not sure we’ve ever been safe. It’s just an illusion, isn’t it? Our mothers thought they were safe when they were pregnant and went to their doctors asking for help with their sickness. Instead, they ended up taking something that changed their babies and eventually killed them.”

  “But you think we can make a difference by confronting your father?”

  He shook his head. “I wish I could tell you yes. I wish I could say that we’ll face up to him, tell him everything he’s doing is wrong, and that he needs to help us stop whoever is doing the bombing, too, and that it will all stop and we can go back to living normal lives, but I doubt that’s ever going to happen.”

  I cocked an eyebrow. “You think we’ll go back to normal lives?”

  He gave a small laugh. “Okay, maybe that part was an overreach. Seriously, though, I can’t even say for sure that confronting my father will do any good, but it’s the only thing I can think of we can do to take action rather than hide down here until someone catches up with us.”

  “It’s the right thing to do, Kit.”

  “I hope so.”

  I hesitated for a moment then said, “What about what happened last night? You think it was one of our own?”

  “I don’t want to, but I don’t think anyone else came down here.”

  “Will it be safe for us to leave the others unsupervised while we go off on some crazy mission?” I was thinking about my dad, mainly. Perhaps it was selfish, but I didn’t want to go off and leave him in the middle of a mess.

  Kit put both of his hands over his face and rubbed the pressure points on his temple. “I have no idea. But I reckon if we take the new guy with us, it will solve some of the problems.”

  “You think he did it?”

  “If it wasn’t him, it was someone who doesn’t like him being here.”

  “Like someone didn’t like me being here when I first arrived?”

  He chewed his lower lip. “Maybe.”

  “Can’t Dixie use some of her abilities and figure out who’s responsible?”

  “It’s breaking the rule, Ari. We’re not supposed to use our abilities on each other, remember?”

  “But surely there have to be some exceptions.”

  “No. It’s a slippery slope to start on.”

  “You know, there’s one possibility we haven’t considered.”

  An eyebrow lifted. “Which is?”

  “That someone else was here and did that to the console. Someone who isn’t a part of the Kin.”

  Kit shook his head. “No, we’d have known.”

  “Would we? How?”

  “No one else knows about this place, and why would they do that, anyway?”

  “To try to break down our ability to learn what’s happening on the outside or communicate with other people.”

  “We have other computers,” he pointed out.

  “Yes, but they might not know that.”

  He sighed. “This is crazy. No one outside of the Kin knows we’re here.”

  “Your father knows this place exists.”

  “Existed. He thinks it’s been destroyed, remember?”

  “Maybe he figured it was a possibility and sent someone on an excursion.”

  Kit shook his head. “They wouldn’t know how to get in. I created the tunnel in and out of here. My father would have no idea it even existed.”

  I wanted to push him further, remind him of the possibility that someone could have spotted us entering or leaving at some point. After all, we knew his father and others from the Myriad Group had been in San Francisco. But Kit didn’t seem to want to entertain the idea. I didn’t understand. Surely that was better than the thought that one of our own had caused the destruction?

  “We should probably get back,” he said. “People will start wondering where we’ve been. We don’t want to give them any ideas.”

  “Oh, right.” Did he mean Hunter, or did he think others would start thinking there was something going on between Kit and me?

  We left the star room and wandered back to the Cavern.

  “You hungry?” Kit asked me.

  “Yeah, starving” My stomach gurgled audibly in response to his question. It must be coming up to lunch time now, and I’d managed to miss breakfast. As we re-entered the Cavern, I caught others glancing over at us. Had they seen Hunter storm out? Would there be gossip about Kit and me floating around now?

  Dixie came running over. “Hey, there you are. We thought you’d run off on us.”

  I forced a smile. “No chance.”

  She smiled back. “Good.”

  “There’s actually something I need to talk to you about.” I glanced over at Kit, and he gave a slight nod to tell me it was okay.

  Her dark eyes brightened. “You have?”

  “Yeah. We think we might be able to track Middleton down, but before we do, we want to test if Kit’s theory about me not being able to get hurt is right.”

  The curiosity I’d just seen on her face darkened into something else. “You’re talking about deliberately hurting yourself. Why would you want to do that?”

  “Because if we know I can’t be hurt, it won’t matter if he has armed bodyguards around him. I can walk right up to him.”

  “And where is the testing going to lead? What are we going to be doing—throwing you off a cliff? Shooting you in the head? This is crazy, Ari! Where’s it going to end? What if we try shooting you and it kills you?”

  I’d hoped she would be more supportive, but it seemed she was taking the same stance as Hunter.

  “We won’t go that far. I don’t know. We’ve only just talked about it. But we’ll start small, I promise.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t like it, Ari. I assume that’s what Hunter has been stomping around here about.”

  “Yeah.” I reached out and took her hand. “But I need you, Dix. Please. I need my friends. Because what if it’s true and I can’t be hurt? Imagine what I could do to put a stop to all the violence.”

  We locked eyes, and I could see the internal demons she wrestled with. She didn’t want me to try to hurt myself, but she knew I was right.

  “Oh, dammit,” she swore. “Fine, I’ll help.” She pointed a finger in my face. “But don’t think for a minute that I approve, and the second it looks like you’re getting hurt or suffering in any way, we stop.” She looked to Kit. “Got it?”

  He nodded. “Got it.”

  “Would Sledge come?” I asked beseechingly. “Natasha, too?” I wanted people there I trusted.

  “What about Hunter?”
she said.

  “I don’t think he’s talking to me right now.” For some reason, thinking of Hunter turned my mind toward Zane. “Have you seen the new guy? How’s he doing?”

  “He was in the common room with your dad, last I saw. They’re playing chess.”

  I laughed. “Really? My dad has been trying to get me to play chess for years, but he takes so long deciding his move, I lose patience with him. Karina was never interested either.”

  “Well, the two of them looked engrossed about twenty minutes ago.”

  I gave small smile. “That’s good. Hopefully, neither of them will notice me gone.”

  “I was thinking we could go up to Battery Spenser,” Kit said, naming the old fort the Cavern was built beneath. “No one will be there when it starts to get dark.”

  I nodded. “Sounds good. I don’t want anyone asking too many questions. Is there any news on the bombing yet? Anyone taken responsibility?”

  Dixie shook her head. “No, nothing. They’re giving the whole spiel on the news about how they won’t rest until the culprit is found, but it’s just a lot of hot air.”

  “Okay, thanks. I’ll catch up with you guys later, then.”

  We each went our separate ways, for the moment, anyway.

  I was about to go and grab some food when I noticed not everyone had abandoned training for the day. I took a couple of steps back from the training room I’d been about to pass by. Two people were inside, and from the identical shade of their blonde hair, I recognized them as Lisa and Lyle. They were working on one of the easier tasks, simply lifting objects into the air and dropping them again. It was a basic undertaking, something we normally gave to new people, and far beneath what the twins could achieve together. Their presence in the room piqued my curiosity, and I remained back to watch them.

  Part of me envied the twins. It must be nice to know you always had someone else on your side, no matter what. But the other part of me felt bad for them, too. It would be frustrating to always have to rely on someone else, to the point of being smothering, even. But Lisa and Lyle didn’t act as though they were sick of each other. In fact, I got the impression it was everyone else they’d had enough of most of the time, content to be in each other’s company.