The Bloom Series Box Set: Bloom & Fade

by A. P. Kensey

  Still, it burned inside her. Hot flames engulfed her body—flames which she meant to use against Bastian for lying to her about the cure and for ripping her away from everything she loved.

  “You knew he destroyed it,” she said. Her voice was not her own. “You knew it the whole time, and you let me believe it.” She stalked toward Bastian, her feet burning against the concrete floor.

  Suddenly Roku was there, standing between them.

  “You did not come here just for the cure,” he said. “You came here because I showed you the pain of others, not just your own. It is happening everywhere, Haven. You are not alone in your loss. Neither am I.”

  “You!” she hissed. “You lied, too.”

  “Yes,” said Roku, holding up his hands. “Because I have hope that it can be remade. Alistair will know how to recreate the cure and—”

  “It will be too late for them!” shouted Haven.

  “Remember what I showed you,” said Roku. “They are not the only ones who suffer.”

  Sadness overwhelmed Haven. The blue flame covering her body flickered but did not disappear. She remembered the dream Roku shared with her—remembered how he lost his family, as she had lost most of hers. She wanted to be back with Colton and Noah and the others more than anything. Her soul reached out across the desert, crying out for her home.

  The last blue flame flickered against her palms and she closed her fists to snuff it out. She looked up at Bastian.

  “Tell me why you did it.”

  He walked toward her cautiously, watching her hands. “We needed your help,” he said. “You could have stayed back there at the Dome and maybe had a fighting chance against Kamiko, but she was never the bigger threat. That’s obvious now, after seeing all of this.” He gestured to the nearby machinery. “If there was never a cure to begin with, than you staying back at the Dome was pointless. You would have gotten a lot of them killed or even yourself. This way,” he said, putting a hand to his chest, “this way we have a chance to stop Alistair before it’s too late. I lied to you. I feel terrible about that but it had to be done. It needed to be done. People don’t think practically when they’re too preoccupied with—”

  “With what?” interrupted Haven.

  “With love.”

  She looked away as her cheeks flushed.

  “We have to be practical if we want to succeed,” continued Bastian. “I don’t expect you to forgive me, but I also don’t expect you to quit. If you do—well, look around you. This is not just the end of our kind we’re talking about anymore. Alistair is going to wipe out the entire planet.”

  She wanted to lash out at him, to hurt him worse than she had been hurt herself. The urge passed like a wave over her, and then was gone, leaving only a deep, empty sadness in its wake.

  Love.

  She had thought about the word before, but had never said it aloud. She was elated and terrified to find that the word was inextricably linked to the thought of Colton. The past year with him had been better than any other time in her life, but in a different way, as if she was a new person when he was around.

  “What do you say?” asked Bastian. “Will you stick with us?”

  Before she could answer, the door to the storage room banged open and guards poured into the main warehouse, each one carrying a heavy automatic rifle. A man in a long coat walked among them, staying out of the way as the guards advanced across the room toward Haven and the others. It was the thin man from the airport, the one who had brought down Haven’s plane.

  “I thought you took care of him!” she said.

  “So did I,” said Bastian.

  “Get down!” shouted Marius. He grabbed Haven’s shoulders and pushed her roughly behind a machine. She tripped over a protruding pipe and hit the ground hard on her shoulder, then crawled next to the machine for cover.

  Gunfire lit up the room.

  28

  A soldier came into the water processing room an hour after Adsen began his work. He demanded proof that there was progress and stood with his rifle in hand, finger on the trigger. Adsen handed the soldier a thin manila folder and pushed him back out the door. The folder contained scanned microscopic images of petri dishes, in which Adsen had been experimenting with bacterial cultures. He had explained each step of the process in detail as he went along, but Colton was lost between his own anger and thoughts of escape.

  After the soldier left, Colton went to the door and looked out at the dome room through the grimy glass window. Kamiko stood in the center of the room atop the rubble from the collapsed ceiling fan. She stared down into the heart of the shattered fire pit as if the embers were ablaze. Colton thought she could be considered beautiful, if only she hadn’t tried to destroy everything he loved. She turned and looked right at him.

  He walked away from the window and joined Adsen in front of his colorful chemical set. Liquids gurgled and boiled in beakers over open flames, and a thick substance oozed down through a plastic tube and glopped noisily into a collection tray on the table. A thermometer protruded from the mixture and the temperature read two-hundred degrees Fahrenheit.

  “You’re really going to do it, then,” said Colton. “Finish Fade.”

  “I said I was, didn’t I?”

  “I thought you were going to stall for time so Dormer and I could work out some kind of escape plan.”

  “The only way back is forward,” said Adsen cryptically. He picked up a vial filled with black liquid and flicked the bottom. The liquid shimmered and turned blue, then he poured it into the container of muck below the plastic feeder tube. The mixture hissed and gave off faint grey smoke. “A trick is most effective when it has an element of truth,” he added. “My work will be your proof that we want to be obedient, complacent—docile.” He flashed Colton a quick smile.

  “It looks like you’re making progress.”

  Adsen shrugged.

  “And if we fail,” said Colton, “then Kamiko has the completed virus.”

  “So don’t fail.”

  “Don’t finish the virus.”

  Adsen sighed and his whole body sagged from exhaustion. “You need to leave. Right now. It’s my work. I need to finish it alone. And besides, the less you know, the better.”

  “The less I know,” repeated Colton, shaking his head. “This isn’t the best time for secrets, Adsen. It’s probably the worst time imaginable.” He thought for a moment. “What if we destroyed all the equipment?” He pointed to the labyrinthine chemistry set. On the table next to it, glowing computer monitors flashed with complex molecular diagrams and lines of indecipherable equations.

  “Then we’re finished,” said Adsen. “This work is the only reason any of us are still alive. Honestly, Colton, I expected a little more practicality from you.”

  Colton wanted to flip the table over and shout, “How’s that for practicality?!” but he knew Adsen was right. He hated him for trying to finish Fade. He felt betrayed and alone. Going willingly toward the destruction of everything he loved went against the grain of Colton’s very soul—yet what choice did he have? Both paths were lined with razor-sharp knives and would cut him regardless. He just had to trust that he chose the right one.

  “Don’t just stand there with your mouth open,” said Adsen. “It’s time for you to leave. I don’t want you here for the rest of the process. Find Dormer, he’ll know what to do.” Adsen waved Colton away and paid him no more attention.

  Kamiko was gone when Colton walked into the dome room. Morning light filtered through the open hole at the top of the ceiling. It came down as a solid shaft to illuminate the spot in the rubble where Kamiko had been standing. Colton walked to it and stood looking up at the ceiling, squinting into the light. He followed the long ladder that ran down the wall to the floor. Two soldiers stood at the ladder’s base, watching him.

  “Where’s Dormer?” he asked. His voice carried easily across the vast, empty room. At first, Colton thought they would ignore him. A moment later, one of them raise
d a finger from the grip of his rifle and pointed at the entrance to the Grove. Colton flipped him the bird and walked away.

  The entrance to the Grove was directly across the dome room from the garage entrance. Colton pushed open the swinging doors and stepped onto soft grass. The air within the Grove was clear and cool, and it cut through the fog in Colton’s mind like a knife. The pressure that had been mounting at the front of his skull faded away.

  He coughed into his sleeve and swayed on his feet. His right hand shook uncontrollably and Colton squeezed it into a tight fist. As he did, thick, black veins bulged on the back of his hand, pulsing with his heartbeat. The virus was affecting him more with each passing hour.

  The Grove was contained in a rectangular, high-ceilinged room that burrowed farther out from the main dome than any other part of the underground complex. Colton looked up at the halogen lamp burning brightly in the ceiling—a fake sun that added a touch of realism to the indoor field.

  He walked through the grid of ancient trees. They had been transplanted at the time of the Dome’s construction from the Old Home, the place where his kind had lived and been safe for decades. Elena told Haven about it—and about its destruction by the very people who had once called it their sanctuary.

  He placed his palm against the trunk of a blackened, withered tree as he passed, remembering it was the tree that gave its life to save Haven’s. She had been brought there after grave injury and laid below its branches while Dormer healed her wounds. The once-verdant green of the tree’s foliage had browned and crumbled at Dormer’s touch as he drained its life and transferred it to Haven.

  The first rows of the grid were filled with dead trees—those that had been siphoned of life so Haven and others could be healed. Farther down the line were the living trees, their healthy branches blooming with vibrant leaves, their trunks a pleasant brown.

  At the far edge of the grid, the grass turned slightly upward in a long, rising hill. Colton stood atop the hill and looked down at the teardrop pond at the bottom of the other side. An old willow tree stood guard at one end of the pond, its wispy green branches trailing softly over the surface of clear water, moving slightly in the artificial wind pushed out through vents high in the ceiling. Dormer sat there, next to Elena’s grave, watching small, blue lights dance across the pond. He held up a hand in greeting and Colton walked down the hill toward him.

  “What do you think?” asked Dormer, nodding toward the lights. “She’s pretty good.”

  Colton sat next to him on the grass. “Haven made those?”

  Dormer nodded. “Elena never got the chance to show her how to do it, but she figured it out. They’re still confined to the pond, though. Elena’s used to go to the trees and live on the branches. It was like a forest filled with blue fireflies.”

  “I remember,” said Colton. He recalled the times with Haven at the pond when he offered endless suggestions on how to create the blue lights, knowing that almost all of his ideas were ridiculous. He came up with most of them just to make her laugh.

  Colton had only seen the lights once, right before Elena died. When she passed, they had faded with her. Elena’s grave was a simple, unmarked stone next to the base of the tree. A single yellow flower was laid across the top of the grassy mound before the stone.

  “What are clear cells?” asked Colton.

  Dormer turned his head slowly to look at him. “And here I thought we were having a moment.”

  “Adsen mentioned them in passing,” said Colton. “He said it had something to do with the way Fade affects us.”

  “Sources and Conduits have an additional active set of cells in their bloodstream,” said Dormer. “You know about white cells and red cells, all of that.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, we also have what Adsen calls clear cells. He thinks everyone has them, but they’re active in some and vestigial in others.”

  “Like your appendix?”

  “Correct. In ‘normal’ people—for lack of a better term—these clear cells serve no purpose. But in people like us, they exist solely to transmit the energy that Sources produce and Conduits absorb. They are simply microscopic pathways that funnel our energy throughout our bodies. Fade works by mutating those clear cells and tricking the body into thinking they are foreign bodies. Our immune system assumes we’ve been invaded by a parasite and fights back. Except when a white cell attacks, the mutated clear cell absorbs it and splits into two infected cells. After this happens enough times, bingo, you’re done.”

  “Do the clear cells produce Source energy?”

  “No, they are only the tunnels through which it travels.”

  “So where does the energy come from? Something has to be making it.”

  “You’re right,” said Dormer. “Something does. But we don’t know what. It’s kind of a mystery. Some say it’s spiritual—that it’s Mother Nature herself or some equivalent deity who is granting our abilities and altering our DNA so we can manipulate such powerful energies.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t think it matters how we got our abilities. I think it just matters what we do with them.”

  “That’s kind of a cop-out, isn’t it?”

  Dormer smiled. “Perhaps.”

  They sat there in silence, looking at the blue lights dance across the pond.

  “Listen,” said Colton. “Not to shatter the calm or anything, but—”

  “We need to get started,” interrupted Dormer. “I know. I was just…preparing myself.”

  “Adsen is moving too quickly on the virus,” said Colton. “I tried to tell him to slow down, but he sent me away.”

  “He is not the same man who was taken into that medical facility,” said Dormer. He stared blankly into the middle of the pond. “The time he spent in there…it changed him. He’s more distant. Hollow.” He shook his head and pulled out a roll of papers from his coat. He unrolled them on the grass and smoothed out the corners. “How long did Kamiko give him to finish the virus?”

  “Ten hours. That was almost two hours ago.”

  “And he’s already nearly finished?”

  “Seems so, yes.”

  “Right.” Dormer frowned at the Dome schematics and riffled through the pages.

  “What is it?” asked Colton.

  “It seems our timeline for action might be a bit shorter than we thought.”

  “How much shorter?”

  “There’s a shift change in ten minutes,” said Dormer. “All but two of the soldiers will be in the same area at the same time. It will be another twelve hours before it happens again.”

  Colton nodded. “Then we’d better get moving.”

  29

  Bullets ricocheted off metal and hit the floor near Haven’s head, spitting up mortar explosions of dust and concrete. She screamed and squeezed her body into a fetal position. Roku and Bastian lay on the floor a few feet away, their backs pressed to a brick-shaped machine. Bullets thunked into the metal on the other side. Steam hissed from a burst pipe overhead.

  The gunfire ceased. Haven heard the soft footsteps of boots on concrete and, somewhere in the distance, liquid gurgling onto the floor from a pierced container. She closed her eyes and focused on the glowing blue star in her mind. It was distant and weak. She clenched her jaws together until she felt like her teeth would shatter, but there was no way to summon her power. The taxing output in the storage room earlier had completely worn her out.

  She heard a sharp CRACK of metal against armor, then a grunt as one of the guards dropped to the ground. The gunfire flared up again, although it was aimed at another part of the room.

  “Let’s go!” she shouted at Roku and Bastian.

  They nodded and followed her to a section of the room behind the guards. All of their attention was focused on a large metal bin on wheels. The guards fired nonstop at the metal bin, their bullets pinging harmlessly off its surface. The bin rolled toward them, slowly at first, then it picked up speed as it sped a
cross the floor. Haven smiled when she saw Marius’s dirty black boots beneath the bin, pushing it from behind.

  The guards backed up slowly, still firing. Haven turned to Bastian. “I need some time to recharge.”

  “You two go find the main supply of Fade,” said Roku. “Marius and I can handle this.”

  Bastian took her hand and tried to pull her away. She yanked her hand back and looked at Roku.

  “Go,” he said, before she could talk him out of it. “Come and get us before the place explodes, okay?”

  She hesitated a moment longer. “Okay,” she said finally.

  Bastian was already moving, crouching low to the ground as he hurried across the room. Haven caught up and stayed close, checking over her shoulder as they moved. She saw the guards and Marius, but no sign of the thin man.

  Bastian led her on a winding path through the machines. Haven looked up at the ceiling and saw that they were following a massive cluster of pipes that ran toward one wall of the room.

  A man in a white lab coat peeked his head around the corner of a container as Haven and Bastian passed. He opened his mouth to say something but ran away screaming after Bastian blasted the top of his head with a quick burst of yellow fire. Haven wrinkled her nose in disgust at the smell of burnt hair.

  They reached the far wall where the pipes in the ceiling terminated.

  “Over there,” said Bastian, pointing along the wall. A metal door with a black keypad in place of a doorknob was set into the thick wall a few feet away. Bastian’s shoulders sank in defeat when he saw the keypad. “Now what?”

  “Melt it off, dummy!” said Haven.

  He put a hand over the keypad and a strong yellow glow flared from his palm. A second later, the plastic was a bubbling stream of molten goo that ran down the surface of the door. Bastian pushed against the door and it swung open with ease.