Charged

by G. P. Ching

  I blast the divider, but the power spreads and fizzles harmlessly.

  “Don’t even try it, sweetheart. It’s got drainer technology and the door won’t open from anywhere but up here.”

  The spark within me does not like this. A dark, burning force awakens within me. I can’t deny the urge to survive. It’s an instinct, a force of nature.

  Brady presses a button on the dash and the engine grinds to life. My heart pounds and my mind whirls like a swarm of angry bees. I cannot go back to Konrad. I envision him peeling my skin from my body, not letting me die until he extracts every ounce of suffering I am capable of. A bead of sweat gathers at my hairline. Someone is screaming. The low moan of a dying animal.

  Korwin shakes me and I realize I am the source of the noise. Brady drives toward the grid. I can’t go back. This isn’t happening.

  I grab Korwin’s hand and slap the floor.

  “Uh-oh,” David says, retreating to the rear of the van and tugging Laura and Jonas along with him. Korwin follows my lead as I pour energy into the van. Only, instead of concentrating on propelling it forward, I command it to reverse. I ask the atoms of the grid to use their force to push us away. The axles grind as the engine battles with itself and the smell of burning oil fills my nostrils.

  Korwin nods at me, his eyes filled with blue light. The inside of the divider peels from the heat coming off us.

  “What are you doing?” Brady yells.

  The van stops. The screeching sound of the tires spinning in their stationary ruts is an anthem to our freedom. I pour on the power, grunting with the effort. Ultimately the engine can’t take the heat, and it stalls where we are.

  “Stupid little…” Brady explodes out of the cab, face red, and walks around the front of the vehicle, pulling a scrambler from his hip. The side door slides open.

  Without thought of consequence, I nail him with a blast of electricity, fully expecting to burn his heart from his chest. Instead, his muscled frame absorbs the blast, blue ribbons meshing over his over-pumped muscles before absorbing under his skin. I stare at him in disbelief.

  “I told you I was working for Konrad, and the doctor doesn’t take any chances.”

  Of course. Brady is as strong and fast as he is because he’s had the serum too, just like the Alpha Eight. And just like David, he’s immune to my firepower.

  “Come on, chickee. I got a call in to Konrad to come pick us up. We might as well make good use of the time.” He beckons me with his right hand. Korwin pushes in front of me, ready to do whatever it takes to protect me. David and Laura are at our flank, but with their electroscurvy weakening them, I don’t suspect they’ll be much help. Still, David taught me all I need to know about Alpha sparks. Even more than Korwin knows. And this one is mine.

  I grab Korwin by the bloodied shirt and yank him back. “He’s mine,” I say.

  “Lydia…”

  “No,” I announce. “He. Is. Mine.”

  I step in front of Korwin and face off against Brady. The man finds the whole exchange amusing. He thinks I’m a joke.

  “Are you going to fight me, Lydia?” he says, laughing.

  I hold out my right hand and urge him to attack by beckoning him with my upturned fingers. He obliges, rushing me, with no consideration to my petite size or my gender. In a way, it is a blessing. His full-on assault gives me a reason to suspend my usually merciful disposition.

  He hits me. I catch his wrist as it rebounds off my jaw. And then I pull, not with my weight but with my power. I draw the blue juice from his body mercilessly, gulping down hot dregs of energy. He groans and falls to his knees.

  “You didn’t know I could do that, did you? Alphas can’t pull energy from other Alphas, but Betas can. I’m going to pull every drop from you until there is nothing left to charge your foul black heart.”

  Bloody sores break out across his arms and up his chin to his hairline. “No,” he mumbles.

  “Don’t feel bad. Konrad never understood I could do this. He never tested this because, really, he never expected me to attack someone like me. David didn’t expect it, but he never shared because he hated Konrad.”

  Brady’s eyes roll back in his head and foamy saliva bubbles out of the corner of his mouth. I don’t lay off. Instead, I draw harder on the tap of power at my fingertips. The wolf is beside me again, hunched over Brady, growling and showing teeth.

  “Lydia,” Korwin says. “You’ll kill him.”

  But the wolf within stands beside me, raging and wild. It is louder than Korwin and it knows the truth. I can’t let Brady live. He’s a risk, a loose cannon that I can’t trust the Liberty Party to contain. With one last draw, I pull the dregs of his energy from his body. The life leaves his eyes, and he flops to the dirt near my feet without even a twitch.

  32

  “Why?” Korwin’s eyes drift from Brady’s body to me as if he can’t fathom why I killed him.

  “He never would have stopped,” I said, shaking my head. The wolf pants over Brady’s body. She’s in my head. No one else can see her. But she’s there, celebrating the kill.

  “We could have taken him hostage. Used him for questioning.”

  “He couldn’t be trusted. No way could we risk taking him to the reactor. He might’ve had a tracker implanted.”

  “We could have bound and gagged him and left him somewhere.”

  “Why, so that the Greens could pick him up and regain a weapon? If he were a rifle, would you leave him on the side of the road?”

  “No, but that’s different.”

  “Different how?”

  “Brady was a human being.”

  “Hardly.” I narrow my eyes. There’s a tightness in my chest I don’t want to think about. I can’t meet Korwin’s eyes. I know I’ll find disappointment and I just can’t go there right now, not when I’m entirely sure I’ve done the right thing.

  David hobbles up behind me and places a hand on my shoulder. “No. Lydia had to do it. Brady wouldn’t have hesitated to kill every last one of us. It was kill or be killed.”

  I’m not sure if David’s support of what I’ve done makes it better or worse. David is a trained killer. He is a liar. I don’t want to make David proud or do what David would do. Still, in this case, he is right. I do believe Brady was a terminal threat. I had to do what I did.

  “We’re on borrowed time,” I say. “Brady sent for backup. We’ve got to get out of here.”

  Korwin takes a step closer and points at Brady’s body. “Don’t act like this was easy for you.”

  “Easy is exactly what it was,” I snap. “The hard thing will be facing Konrad again if we don’t get out of here.”

  “If Brady was telling the truth and Konrad’s still alive,” Laura says, “the day will come when we have to face him. Considering he now knows we are in the Outlands, most likely sooner than later.” The sores on her body have spread and every word she speaks makes her flinch.

  A groan comes from the van. Jonas. Still bound and gagged within, he stirs in his fight for consciousness.

  “Can we get the van running again?” I ask.

  David strides toward the cab as he answers. “Probably overloaded the operator’s app. I should be able to reboot the kernel and bring it back online.”

  “Whatever that is,” I say. “Couldn’t you have fed something about mechanics and computing into my head with the Nanomem?”

  He laughs through the open window and raises an eyebrow. “I only had six weeks.”

  With a flip of his hand he pops open the dash. His fingers fly across a keyboard under the touchscreen. There is still so much about this world I don’t understand.

  “Can you teach me? When we get back?” I yell.

  David smiles without looking away from the screen. “Of course,” he says. “Does that mean you’re going to be around for a while?”

  Korwin squints at me, his hands on his hips. The distance between us feels strange, and I’m taken back to the Red Dog kennel when I couldn’t fe
el our connection because he was guarding against it, just like he is now. “You’ve decided to stay? On your own, without talking to me?”

  The engine growls to life and Laura climbs into the van. “There’s no place else to go,” I say.

  “We can return to Hemlock Hollow. We’ll take our discipline from the Ordnung. We can go home,” he says.

  “Hemlock Hollow is no place for someone who doesn’t believe in God.”

  “I do believe. I see that now—”

  “I wasn’t talking about you.”

  Korwin locks eyes with me over Brady’s body.

  “Now, you two. We’ve got to go!” Laura calls. I turn and bound into the van. I’m relieved when Korwin follows.

  33

  Light turns to dark as David pulls into the garage at the back of the reactor. The big doors rumble closed and a sea of blue uniforms approaches the van. An alarm sounds and lights blink above us. Code blue—garage, a robotic voice repeats. When the van door slides back, Dr. Stone pushes his way to the front.

  “I need two,” he eyes David behind the dash, slumped in his seat, “three stretchers. Stat.”

  Laura is down too. In hindsight, we shouldn’t have let David drive. We’re lucky to be alive. David’s electroscurvy could have sent us barreling into a tree.

  Men and women in blue tunics rush from a set of double doors near the back, ushering white padded stretchers to Charlie’s side. They carefully load Jonas first, then Laura before retrieving David from the cab.

  “Can you walk?” Charlie asks us. He’s climbed inside the van and has a hand on my back.

  “Yes. We’re fine.”

  “You’re covered in blood,” he says matter-of-factly.

  “Yes—” My breath catches in my throat as I look down at myself. My face and hands go cold and my head swims.

  “We’ve healed ourselves,” Korwin says. “We’re fine.”

  Charlie takes a moment to squeeze my fingers and rub my back. “You may be healed, but you most certainly are not fine.” Turning to his helpers in blue, he says, “Help them to the infirmary and get them cleaned up. I want a scan on both for internal injuries.” He gently coaxes me from the van and the hands of strangers guide me inside.

  Washed, dressed, and scanned, I end up in a recovery room in the infirmary where a harried nurse tells me I need to wait for Dr. Stone. Moments later, they bring in Korwin and seat him next to me. It feels like a long time before he says anything.

  “Why did you kill Brady?” he asks.

  “To save our lives,” I say incredulously.

  “You could have incapacitated him. You didn’t have to be cruel.”

  “No? I think that’s exactly how I need to be. Were you even there? We almost died in Konrad’s lab. Konrad won’t stop. He will never stop until he’s dead or we are.”

  “I was there, Lydia. I felt the pain, and may I remind you that it was my second visit to Konrad’s lab? But a long time ago, a beautiful woman taught me that there were more important things than living forever. She taught me I had a soul and a God. She taught me that this world wasn’t nearly as important as the next.”

  “A fact that didn’t seem to occur to you when you were beating another man in the Red Dog ring,” I say through my teeth. “Yes, it seems both of us have made compromises in our morality, doesn’t it?”

  He hangs his head.

  “I am done playing the part of the victim. I am done turning the other cheek. I choose to stay and fight. What do you choose?”

  For a long time, Korwin says nothing. “I saw my parents, Lydia. I was dead, and I saw them. This… life, this isn’t all there is.” He licks his bottom lip. “There was a time I chose to leave. Maybe that’s what got us into this mess. Had I stayed in Hemlock Hollow and took my punishment, faced the bishop’s decision, maybe we wouldn’t be here now.”

  “Or maybe we would. That flasher wasn’t going to destroy itself.” I picture the doll burning in my yard again. Would it have mattered if there were two dolls, one in a dress and one in suspenders? No. The Ordnung would have never accepted who we are. Never.

  “If we’ve learned anything,” Korwin reaches for my hand, “it is that we have to stay together. We are safer and stronger together. I won’t leave this time. Not without you.”

  I scoot my chair closer. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  He makes a throaty whimper of relief and closes the space between us to lean his forehead against mine. Our glow warms the room until a nurse comes to usher me away.

  Epilogue

  When Amish women marry, they don’t wear white dresses. White is reserved for our deaths to symbolize the purity we hope to have when we come before our Maker. Wedding dresses are typically blue and in the normal style so that we can wear them again after marriage. Blue is plain and hard working. Blue is the color of the day-to-day struggle.

  With this thought in mind, I don my new uniform. It is also blue. Hard-working blue. Long-term commitment blue. The jacket has silver buttons and a navy armband embroidered with a circle of five white stars. This is the Liberty Party’s symbol. The uniform is stretchy and formfitting, and the material is temperature controlled, which is good because for some reason the rooms in the reactor are always kept cold. I’ve been issued another pair of heavy black boots, and I pull them on over navy socks that cover my calves.

  Finished, I stand and turn from side to side in front of the mirror. My hair is long and loose, still slightly wet from my shower, and I push it behind my shoulders to get a good look at myself. I’ve lost weight since the last time I indulged myself with a long look in the mirror, and my muscles appear hard under the clingy material. It’s my eyes that have changed the most. The green has closed off and dulled. They look hard, even to me.

  A knock on the door demands my attention. I use my fingerprint to unlock the Biolock. “Korwi—”

  David stares back at me. “Sorry. No.” Three days of rest and extra injections have done him good. He almost looks healthy again.

  I back up and welcome him into the room. “Your skin looks better,” I say.

  “Completely healed, although I’m still having phantom pain in my joints. Charlie isn’t sure why.”

  “It’s just a matter of time. You were pretty bad off.”

  “Speak for yourself. I heard you have some lasting damage.”

  I hold up my right hand. It’s still bandaged. “The tool Konrad used didn’t just cut, it burned. He broke all the bones in my hand. When Korwin healed me, the bones weren’t aligned.” I rub my thumb over my bandaged palm. “Charlie had to break them again to set them properly.”

  “Sounds painful.”

  “He offered morphine but…” I shake my head.

  “You didn’t want to risk the seizures.”

  I nod. “It’ll be as good as new in a couple of days. Thank you for coming for us, for risking your life for me.”

  He sighs. “It was Laura’s idea. The Liberty Party would have come for you eventually, but Laura wouldn’t wait. Insisted we do the special op ourselves. Reminded me a lot of the day you went after Korwin. Like mother, like daughter.”

  I cringe at the mother/daughter description. I still hardly know Laura. “I’m grateful she came when she did. Konrad would have killed us.”

  “Yes. Odd, don’t you think, that Konrad would kill his favorite guinea pigs? Betas. Almost unbelievable that he would give up specimens like yourselves so easily.”

  “I thought the same thing. He said he couldn’t trust us anymore and that we were useless to him.”

  “Hmm.” David’s brow furrows and he couples his hands behind his back. “I need to ask you something. It’s important, and I’m afraid it can’t wait.”

  I take a deep breath and blow it out slowly. David does not call something important without cause. “Go ahead.”

  “When we recovered the Tomahawk and helmet, the backpack I gave you wasn’t with it.”

  “No. I kept it with me until the very end. Konrad took
it.”

  “Had you visited Stuart Manor before your arrest?”

  “Yes. We were caught inside the manor. He’d been waiting for us, like he knew we’d come.”

  David’s face pales. “And Maxwell’s experiments?”

  “Konrad took those too. He said he’d been trying to get into the safe for weeks.” I scrunch my forehead together as I think about the incident. “Strange that Brady was able to break into the manor but not into the safe.”

  “Brady used to work for the Liberty Party. He was able to hack compound security because he developed the program and built in a Liberty Party fail-safe. But Maxwell didn’t trust anyone with his most prized experiments. He developed his own security for the safe. He was prepared for the contents to be lost forever if he died. Perhaps he hoped it would be.”

  “It wasn’t lost. And we didn’t have to use Maxwell’s blood. We used Korwin’s.”

  David’s eyebrows shoot upward. “I had no idea.”

  “We had them in our hands.”

  He closes his eyes. “What did the specimens look like?”

  “Six metal vials, like the blood you gave me. Frozen solid. They had Korwin’s name on the side. Do you know what they were?”

  “I do.”

  I stare at him expectantly. “Well?”

  “What happened to the specimens?”

  “Konrad took them before he scrambled and tortured us. What were they, David? You’re ghost white. You’re scaring me.”

  “The vials contained Korwin’s genetic material,” he says toward the wall, as if he can’t stand to say it to my face.

  I shake my head.

  “His reproductive genetic material,” David explains. “Enough to father several dozen children, I suspect.”