Children of Evolution (The Gateway Series Book 2) (2 page)

No sooner had that thought processed than a bright flare tore in the air in front of Gideon. Unlike the other he’d seen, this one didn’t strike in the middle of a building but in empty space a few meters off the ground, giving him an unobstructed view of the source.
 

The flash dissipated almost instantly, leaving nothing but a purple afterimage in Gideon’s eyes, but it lasted long enough for him to see a red-tinted desert landscape through the hole in the air.
 

He knew that landscape. Even though he’d walked it only once, he would never forget it.
 

The bursts weren’t random blasts of energy. They were openings, gateways to the alien planet, but gateways with nothing to control or contain them. Gateways without the Gateway.
 

Other pieces of the puzzle started falling into place and Gideon’s mind raced with possible scenarios. Waves like this one could account for much of the destruction he’d witnessed in visions of the future years beyond this night, which meant he might have just seen the very vehicle of humanity’s destruction, one of the many crucial elements his visions usually denied him. If only he could trust what he saw here. If only this were one of the visions instead of a dream.

Another rift formed above him, this time cutting into the building on his right. A blue flash vaporized a wide swath of the building as the rift cut into the electrical lines, and the top three floors started to topple into the void with a growing roar of crushing brick and shearing steel.

Gideon instinctively threw up a hand to shield himself, but the dust swirled around him, pulling him away from the scene, or pulling it from him. He stared at his hand as he lowered it. His right hand. His human right hand. It shouldn’t be human. It hadn’t been human since the Event, not even in his dreams. Even his subconscious had long since given up hope that he could be whole again. The right side of his body should have been the creature’s—lean, powerful, the skin hardened into a glossy black carapace—just like it was in the waking world.
 

Gideon knew of only one place where his body appeared the way it had before the Event, and that realization chilled him to his core.

This was no dream.
 

Gideon rarely felt fear anymore. Since the day he first realized the visions he saw when he switched places with the creature's mind were Earth's future, he'd lived with an ever-present simmer of dread that made the wilder, shorter lived varieties of fear seem redundant and trivial. But the cold flash in his gut that was even now creeping out through his limbs could only be naked fear.
 

His fear wasn't for himself. Here he was untouchable, even more so than in a dream. Here he was a watcher as ethereal as the cool eddies blowing around and through him. His fear was for the people in the physical world, the people at the mercy of his half-alien body now fully under the control of the predatory consciousness that belonged in this realm.

He was afraid because he hadn't planned this trip to the other side. He hadn't sealed himself safely in the vault, as he always did at the base. He hadn't chained his body down under armed guard, as he had every time he'd come here since he'd first discovered what the creature was capable of doing. He'd taken none of his usual precautions because he'd had no intention of trading places with the creature tonight. He wasn't even at the base. He was on the top floor of a gutted office complex in the Seattle free zone, where he'd been squatting for days, ghosting among the lowest levels of society by night, feeling nearly as isolated and dissociated from his own world as he did from this one.
 

To his shame, he took some small comfort from the fact that his body was far from anyone he cared about. At least they weren't the ones the creature was hunting while he was away. Those few people, at least, were safe from him.

Hardening his mind, Gideon pushed both fear and relief from his consciousness and prepared to step away from the vision and back into his body. The creature's will was no match for Gideon's—it never had been. To resume control, he had but to step back through the door in the darkest recess of his mind that separated him from the creature.
 

He blocked the continuing destruction and swirling clouds from his awareness, cleared his thoughts of the crashes and screams, and focused his will on opening the door.
 

But nothing happened.

Nikki

Nikki stood at the edge of the ledge, her arms spread wide, her eyes closed as the chilly March wind cut through her clothes and whipped at her hair. If she blocked out everything else around her, she could almost convince herself she was flying again—really flying.
 

She knew what that was like now. She'd done it once. OK, it had been more falling than flying, and she'd been unconscious for half of it, but she'd felt clouds against her bare skin and had no ship, no chute, no gear of any kind holding her back, and she'd lived to tell about it. Not many people could say that.
 

This might be the dumbest idea you've ever had,
Michael said in Nikki's head.
And that's really saying something.

Michael's voice threatened to bring back Nikki's other memories from that day, which sucked the joy right out of her fantasy. She dropped her arms and opened her eyes to the moonlit night. She took in the staggered buildings of the southern Seattle waterfront, the patchwork of lights in the taller buildings from late workers, the buzz and hum of the traffic on the busier streets a block away, the unholy blend of smells from competing restaurants mixing with the salty breeze coming in off the Sound. She drew in the city's ambiance with a couple of big breaths before she tucked a chin-length strand of blue-black hair behind her ear and sat back down on the ledge to resume her stakeout.

"Yeah, well," she said aloud, her gaze dropping to the nightclub entrance across the street three stories below, "nobody asked you."

Actually, you did.

"What?"

You said, "It's gotta work, right?"

"No, I didn't."

Yes, you did.

"Whatever. I was talking to myself," she grumbled.

You realize how that can be confusing, right?

"You realize you're a boob, right?" Nikki shifted her butt on the damp concrete lip of the roof, trying to find a position that wasn't supremely uncomfortable. No such luck. She twisted all the way forward to dangle her legs over the edge and pressed her hands down against the concrete on either side to ease the pressure off her butt bones. Doing so made the pain in her shoulder flare though, which shut Michael up. Ironic, since that pain—courtesy of her fall from a slick fire escape ladder onto a dumpster—was what had brought him out of hiding tonight in the first place.
 

For the millionth time, Nikki wished Michael was still alive, like in-the-flesh alive all the time instead of in-her-head alive on random occasions. And for maybe the thousandth time, that wish came from frustration instead of loneliness.

Michael had always displayed a natural talent for getting on her nerves, the effectiveness of which she'd associated with physical things like his frustrating stares, his disapproving posture, and his occasional stubborn refusal to move when she wanted to do something fun. She'd totally underestimated the annoyance factor of a simple tone and a few poorly timed words, something Michael had turned into an art form since his…since she'd almost lost him.

In fact, now that he was a sporadic voice in her head instead of a constant presence by her side, Michael was somehow more annoying than ever. Granted, Nikki hadn't been her usual tolerant self lately. She'd be the fourth or fifth to admit she wasn't as hard to annoy as she'd once been. She just wasn't the rock of patience and acceptance she used to be. Not surprising, really.

The past four months had been the worst of Nikki's life. She used to pride herself on being strong, independent, tough enough to handle anything life could drop on her, but losing her twin had crippled her, in more ways than one.

Not only had she lost her brother, mostly, but she'd also lost the power they shared, the ability to heal and get stronger with every blow the other suffered. That power had been the root of her boundless bravado, not to mention the main shaping force in her life until now. It was easy to be confident knowing her brother could make her strong enough to wrestle a tank, easy to be brave when she knew her brother could heal any injury she sustained. Losing that power…

The feeling of vulnerability had consumed her at first, kept her curled up in her bunk, which in turn made her feel like a selfish twat, which of course made her want to stay curled up in her bunk. The guilt of missing her power was overwhelming. She hated herself for it. She should have been thinking only of Michael. All she'd lost was a crazy ability. He'd lost his life. For her.

You're doing it again.
His voice broke in on her thoughts.

"No, I'm not. Shut up." The lie was weak, especially voiced to the empty rooftop. He always knew when she was about to spiral toward the dark place she'd been unable to escape that first couple of months after her rescue. He wasn't around in her head all the time, didn't always answer when she called, but every time she started to feel guilty for his death, he showed up to call her on it. Every time. How he always knew when the suffering train was about to hit was a mystery she had yet to solve.

Nik, when I'm in your head like this, I can hear what you're thinking, especially when you do it so loudly.

"Well—stop. It's none of your business what I think."

Even if it's about me?

"Especially, boob. You shouldn't listen to what other people are thinking about you."

You're listening to what I'm thinking.

"Only because you're thinking it out loud."

She enjoyed a nice long pause before he said,
Wow.
 

"Yeah. I win."

The fact that you think so scares me, almost as much as this plan.

Raised voices preceded a man stumbling out of the club below and right into the giant bouncer working the door. Nikki perked up. This could mean it was showtime, that all her hard work had paid off—"hard work" meaning waiting on this roof for an hour. Doing nothing was hands-down the hardest work Nikki could imagine.

The bouncer righted the man with one hand and steered him around a couple of scarf-wrapped ladies on their way in. The man weaved as the ladies passed. He nearly toppled when he tried to turn to check them out, but somehow he kept his feet. The party gods were still smiling on this one.

Maybe not. Maybe they were just laughing at Nikki. This guy looked like yet another harmless false alarm.

After a few unsteady steps up the steep road in front of the club, Captain Stumbly thought better of the climb and reversed course. Going downhill to the parking tower was a lot easier than uphill to the taxi call. Probably not the best city planning for getting drunkards home, but in the planners' defense, this club could have been a factory when the parking tower was built, and no doubt had been a dozen other businesses in the years since.
 

Still, the drunken downhillers were no more danger to the world in their cars than in taxis, unless they were savvy enough to bypass the BAC readers in their rides. From the look of Captain Stumbly, he wouldn't be pulling off that feat tonight even if he did have the know-how and trouser weights to give it a shot. He'd be lucky to make it to the tower before he passed out.

Yep. He was a wash all right. Back to the waiting.

Let's call it, Nikki
. Michael's voice was quieter than before. He was starting to fade out again, to slip back to wherever it was he went inside her head when she couldn't hear him.
I think the universe is telling you this was a bad idea.

"The universe or you?" she mumbled. "Sounds a lot like you."

I feel like I've made my opinion pretty clear.
 

"Yep."

But if you need a rehash—
His voice was barely a whisper.

"Nope, I got it. Plan bad." What she didn't get was why he was so set against it. After all, she was trying to do something right here. She was trying to play hero.

Well, play hero
and
get her powers back. But the good for her shouldn't cancel out the good for the lucky putz she helped in the process. In fact, waiting on a rooftop for an hour and a half to spot someone in trouble surely put her well into the positive in her karma pool.

She didn't feel in the positive though. If anything she felt worse now that she was thinking about why she was up here, but living without her brother and her power was no kind of living. If that was selfish thinking, so be it. She had to get some part of her old life back or she was going to lose her mind. No amount of wishing could bring Michael back, but maybe, just maybe she could kickstart her ability back into action. If she could feel that strength surging through her again, feel the rush of the power tingling through every muscle and nerve, she'd feel at least halfway alive again. And halfway living was better than what she was doing now.

Her plan was simple. She was going back to the beginning, sort of. She was going to recreate the scene from the day she and Michael first felt their ability and realized how it worked. Again, sort of.
 

They'd been in foster home number three at the time, possibly. Nikki remembered only foggy images and snippets of voices and feelings from the earliest years of their life, memories that felt more like pieces of dreams than anything else. That particular foster home, with Miss Sayi, was the first one she could really remember with any clarity. She and Michael had been almost five years old.

Miss Sayi had been like a dream herself, in a way. She'd made them feel like they belonged. She showed them what it felt like to be cared for, to be wanted. She would hold them both in her lap for what felt like hours and talk to them about things Nikki barely understood at the time, or now for that matter, and tell stories that would make them giggle uncontrollably or get completely lost in their imaginations as they put pictures to her warm words. Then she'd rock them and hum in a way that would put them out like lights. Just thinking about her soothing deep voice made Nikki yawn now as she watched a laughing couple leave the club below her.