Forgotten (Reject High: A Young Adult Science Fiction Series Book 3) (11 page)

She hesitated to acknowledge my statement one way or another.

“You said you wanted me to come here and be tested,” I said, recalling yesterday’s events. “I said no, and then you gave me this necklace because you owed me your life.”

“Yes. That’s what I said.”

I remembered the pink prisms I’d crushed and how they had altered my memory and behavior. “All BS. You gave me morganite and I took it. That was part of your plan, too, wasn’t it? You wanted me to do something on it. The same thing that happened to Cherish?”

She waved her hands in a slow-down motion. “No, nothing like that. Jason. It’s like this. You take one path or…”

“Bringing my mother back. You saw that, too!” The pitch of my voice was higher than it needed to be. My eyelids started twitching. I could almost taste the anger and adrenaline flowing through my body. “The hospital fire, you, Taylor. We’re puppets to you, to Hughes and Camuto. You knew it all and they’re in on it. You knew…” “…Jason, calm do…”

“Don’t interrupt me!” I bellowed. “You knew I would end up here all along.”

Real fear registered in Courtney’s face. “Calm down, Jason. You’re about to rage…”

I raised my foot and stomped a divot into the concrete floor. The foundation of the room shook with a tremor. The provenance crystals rattled in their settings, like gigantic chandeliers in a metal case. Courtney balanced on her left leg to keep from falling.

Darkness crept along the corners of my vision. Unable to stop it, I closed my eyes and blacked out.

When I regained consciousness, I was lying flat on the frigid concrete floor, a golden force field tightly enveloping me. Camuto and Courtney strained in keeping it closed. Hughes yelled something at both of them. The hazy cloud in my brain kept me from hearing exactly what he said. I still had my powers, but they had contained me during my rage blackout, to keep me from reducing the compound to rubble and potentially killing them all.

Out of breath herself, Courtney cast the shield with her left hand and offered me her right to help me up. I rolled to the side and managed to stand without assistance.

“I’m good now,” I said, brushing myself off.

Camuto stared at me as if I had three heads. Hughes had the same look of fear on his face that Courtney had however long ago. Did I flash a new power? What did I miss?

“Why are you all looking at me like that?”

Courtney spoke for the trio. “Nothing.”

That’s not what she wanted to say to me. The question on all of their minds was: how did I do that? “How did I do what?” I asked them.

They exchanged glances. “Why did you ask that? Nobody said anything,” Camuto said.

I scratched my head. I swore that they did. Did I read their thoughts? Weren’t they too powerful for that? Everything in the room was intact, except for the small hole I made with my foot. The provenance crystals were in place. The only thing that changed is Courtney and I were no longer alone. And Camuto was perspiring like she ran a half marathon to get here.

I motioned to Camuto and Courtney. “At ease. I don’t get blackouts back-to-back.”

Initially, they kept the shield at full power. Then, they lowered it to nothing. Both of them heaved and sighed with exhaustion. Wait a second. Why didn’t they just take away my powers? Without them, my healing injuries would have kept me at bay.

Courtney gasped and dropped to one knee. “This is why I didn’t tell you before, why Sasha and the others don’t know. You think I’m a human fortune cookie and I’m not.” The muscles in my jawline tensed. “Is she ever wrong?” I asked her friends. “No,” Hughes answered gravely.

Good. That saved the guesswork out of her predictions. “Debra. Go.” Hands on hips, she exhaled and shook her head. “Jason, it’s better…”

“You owe me!” I screamed at her. “I could’ve let all of you and half the world die.” “Guilt trips don’t work on us!” Hughes shouted back with venom. “We’ve dealt with things you can’t even fathom. People die. Lives are lost. When you start calling shots, you’ll understand. Stop wasting time with little details.”

“My stepmom’s life isn’t a ‘little detail.’ He was talking about something she’d foreseen. “What do you know about her?”

“Debra is going to die, Jason,” Courtney said. “Nothing you do in the next two days will prevent that from ever happening.”

My mind raced. Did she mean my stepmom would eventually die from natural causes even if I saved her today? Or was she saying King would kill her, no matter what I did to stop him? I shouldn’t try to save her? Is that what this was all about? “Watch me,” I said, turning to Hughes. “I know where the aquamarine is.”

He cursed and tapped his temples with his fingers. “Been poking around in here, huh?”

“I’m going for it,” I said with full confidence, “and trade it for Debra. Are you going to help me or try and stop me?”

A quick glance at the physical conditions of Courtney and Camuto let me know they couldn’t do it. At best, they could slow me down, which might be enough to risk Debra’s life. I’d told them before they’d have to kill me if they wanted to stop me.

“Before you do, you should know that Anna has no vital internal organs,” he said. “No heart, no kidneys, no lungs, no stomach, not even a brain.”

The tests had come back with that? “BS. How is she walking around then? She talks…she acts like a human being. How is that possible?”

“The stone she’s wearing is symbiotic,” Hughes said. “As long as you’re alive, she’s alive, working your organs twice as hard. The more time you’re bound together, the more stressful it will be on you.”

They could be lying, but everything they said made sense. “I’m invincible though, so I’ll be fine. She’ll be fine.”

Camuto chimed in. “The aquamarine taxes your body as long as you’re wearing it to reanimate her. It’s why your vitals are out of whack.”

I intended to keep my mother, whatever this version is called, for as long as possible.

“Say I never take it off and neither does she. What will happen?”

Courtney paused before delivering the answer.

“It will kill both of you.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

a secret is exposed

Nobody said a word to me after Courtney’s announce-ment that I would die unless I laid my mother to rest, which I couldn’t do the first time. I wondered how much time I had left until my brain gave out from the stress or I had a heart attack.

They might know. I didn’t dare to ask.

All three of them called my name. I walked to the door and tried sliding it open. One of them had locked it. Grabbing a handful of metal on each side, I lifted the door off its hinges and chucked it behind me. I heard the scraping as it slid and cracked the concrete. Hughes, Courtney, and Camuto knew enough to move away from a flying door.

I walked the compound in a daze. Esteban had found the television and was watching some show when I passed the living area. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Rhapsody eating at the dining room table. She threw a napkin over her plate and pretended not to notice me. I passed Sasha in the control room, en route to the elevator. She dropped what she was doing and ran to the mesh gate before I closed it.

“Nice of you…to wait for me,” she said out-of-breath. “Gentlemanlike. Really.”

I hadn’t asked for company.

The entryway opened as soon as we hit the surface. The brightness of the mid- afternoon sun temporarily blinded us until our eyes adjusted from the dark compound. I inhaled the fresh air flooded with the scent of grass. The abundant pollen tickled my nose. Warm sun rays bathed our faces. At that moment, the swallowing depths of my death sentence faded. I thought about living and what being alive meant. In my dreams Mom had found me in a field like this. We embraced and it felt like forever had arrived.

Then I’d wake up with a giant hole in my soul.

With her now, however she came to exist, the hole was gone. I felt complete.
Isn’t it better to die complete than to live incomplete
? I wasn’t sure. I hadn’t even lived sixteen years and I’ve already almost died a handful of times.

This wasn’t going to end well for me.

Sasha tapped the ends of my gloved hands with her fingers. Still in shock, I didn’t respond. Most times her touch brought me comfort. Rhapsody’s, too. I was numb. I couldn’t feel anything.

She stayed with me. We stood in silence. My cheeks trembled but no tears came from my eyes. I had to do this my way. Not a drop of Debra’s blood would hit the ground because of me.

Mom would live. My body would have to endure the strain, however heavy it might be. Time in the sunshine and away from the chaos revived my spirit. “Rhapsody.” I said her name loud enough for the sensors to pick up my voice code.

The entryway yawned open and we reentered the compound. Sasha smiled, sensing my renewed purpose. After a quick trip in the elevator later we met everyone, including Mom, in the control room. Clearly, the news of her physical condition had shaken her, but her overall appearance had improved. There was a luster to her hair and brown skin. We didn’t talk. I needed time to process everything and so did she.

They had fitted her with a bodysuit. Which reminded me, I needed a bigger size. The boots had started squeezing my feet and it felt tight in the shoulders. It had somehow shrunken.

I shrugged. “What? I needed some fresh air.”

“You’ve come to a decision then?” Courtney asked me. She drew circles in the air with her finger. “The clock’s running.”

“You don’t already know my answer?”

Courtney wagged her index finger at me. “Told you, I’m not a fortune cookie.”

“Wait,” Esteban held his hand up like we were in class. “What does that mean?”

“Tell you later,” is all she said.

Courtney hadn’t been one hundred percent honest with us about anything. But the fifty percent up front she gave us was much better than the ten percent the others gave. Didn’t seem right, though, to tell her everything. It’s possible she already knew.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve got an answer.”

Flustered, Rhapsody flapped her hands. “Well? What are we doing, then?”

She and the others had a right to know. If they were going to risk their lives, they deserved the truth. What about Courtney? Of all the Collective members we’d encountered so far, she was the closest thing to an ally. I’d treat her like she had treated us – tell her as much truth as it took to get her help and resources with the mission.

The others? Well, there were two things I knew about Amauri Camuto. One, she never smiled. Two, wherever Solomon Hughes went, she’d follow. To get her to buy into what I wanted to do, I had to somehow sway Hughes to our side.

Facing him now, he seemed to be an inch or two shorter than I remembered. “I’m going to save Debra and bring the aquamarine back here. Are you with us, Hughes?”

He didn’t flinch in giving his response. “Not this time. You’re on your own. Cap.”

“Fine.” Rhapsody crossed her arms. “Screw it. What about you, Camuto?”

She always sided with him, except this time. She withheld her answer long enough for him to notice as Hughes started to walk away by himself.

“He got to you,” he said to her over his shoulder.

“He did,” she said with remorse. “It’s why I’m still here.”

According to the looks on my friends’ faces, they were clueless. Ryan Cain had stripped them of their heliodor and I saved them by giving them more.

Hughes crossed his arms. “You’re being emotional.”

Esteban was tired of the subtext. “What are you talking about?”

While they argued, I went into Camuto’s mind. As a little girl, she had been chased by a knife-wielding Asian man. She called him a name over and over again and her tone suggested that she knew him. A woman protected her. The next thought of was a memory of arriving at Ellis Island. She traveled by boat with the same woman, her mother, I guessed, at her side.

I took a chance and entered Hughes’ memories. They were brief, broken flashes. In one he was a young boy, stripped naked and put on display at a slave auction. In another I saw a dark-skinned, thick-haired man silently reaching his shackled hands out toward Hughes from the back of a wagon. Tears in his eyes, young Hughes screamed until his master beat him into silence.

I knew nothing about Courtney. Now wasn’t the time to find out. Their experiences were every bit as bad as advertised. It didn’t excuse their behavior, but it made sense why they were so miserable all of the time. I looked at Mom. Her face dripped with sadness. She must have seen what I saw, since we basically shared a brain.

“Not a day goes by that I don’t think about what my mother did for me.” The angry outburst was the first emotion we’d seen from Camuto besides irritation. “Two months ago, I wanted to die.” She pointed at me. “He wouldn’t let me go.”

Hughes crossed his arms and tapped his foot against the ground.
“And?
Give me a break! You think you owe him anything?”

Mom butted into their conversation. “You, whoever you are, don’t talk to my son like he’s a low class citizen.”

“Me?” He acted offended. “Sorry, I upset you.
Mom.”

I was a clock tick or two away from tossing him through the steel ceiling. “Say one more thing to my mother…”

“And you’ll what,
Captain?”
He rolled his eyes back and forth, which made me want to hit him even more. “It’s all a joke. You think
that
is your mother? She’s a…”

I rabbit punched him mid-sentence so he couldn’t anticipate it and teleport away. Hughes wiped the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand and exercised his jaw. It was a clean punch, which is why my hand hurt and his head was still on his body. He deserved it.

I think it shocked everyone, including Rhapsody, who blew off most of my impulsive outbursts by poking fun at them. She had no smart comments for this one.

“Way across the line, Sol…” Courtney admonished him.

He thrust his arm out as he spoke. “The
truth,
Eris? Truth is over the line?”

“You want truth? There’s no one left!” Camuto yelled back at him. “No one!”

Nobody responded to her, not even Hughes.

“They
have kin. They haven’t had to make the kinds of choices we did.” Camuto straightened her posture.

He huffed. “Give them space and opportunity and they will.”

Sasha held up a finger and rolled her neck. “Who’s he think he’s talking about?”

“You,”
he shot back. “You have no…”

Camuto cut him off. “You thought the explosion would kill us all and Jason wouldn’t survive the blast. Without him I’d be dead. So this time,
you’re
on your own.”

His lip was beginning to purple and swell. With the heliodor, the wound wouldn’t last. I could tell by the sagging of his shoulders that Camuto’s betrayal weighed heavy on him. Without his partners, he was alone. In his opinion, King and Welker were depraved and psychotic. Hughes wouldn’t join up with them. Belinda and Vivienne were too hands off with us and Hughes was a total control freak. They would drive him nuts. His one shot at being with anyone was siding with us.

He turned to Courtney and mumbled.
“Et, tu
Eris?”

She nodded yes.

Disgusted, Hughes teleported out in a whisk of golden smoke.

“Good riddance, if you ask me,” Mom said. “Not a people skills bone in his body.”

Sasha sucked her teeth. “At least he won’t be plotting behind our backs, Miss Anna.”

Esteban agreed and said to me under his breath, “Yeah, but will
they?”

It was a good question. We couldn’t go into this mission without knowing all of the facts. Last time it cost us the providence aquamarine. What else had we lost? “We do this, we do it together. No secrets. No matter how bad they are.”

Courtney said “done” a little too quickly for my taste.

We filed in behind her – me at the front with Camuto, Mom at our back, Sasha behind her and Esteban and Rhapsody at the rear. I could hear Mom wondering out loud what Hughes meant when he called her “that". I hope she'd drop it. Too hard to explain.

We passed through the narrow, poorly-lit corridors en route to the living area. When would Courtney say something about her abilities? Hughes had dropped enough hints that even I could have caught onto it. Maybe the others thought he was joking?

“She has foresight,” I blurted out to everyone in the room. “That’s her power.”

Rhapsody gasped. “For real? Do we beat the bad guys? How does all this end?”

“Soon, I promise,” she answered, not breaking stride.

Rhapsody, who had been behind Mom and Sasha, shoved her way next to my shoulder. She spoke directly to me for the first time in hours. “Is she psychic like those chicks on TV?”

“You’re talking to me now?”

Her tone could not have been more sarcastic. “You cheated on me and didn’t man up and tell me how you felt. Be happy you’re walking without a permanent limp.”

How’d she find out? Did Sasha say something or was she guessing?
No time to find out. “Not psychic. She can see future events, but she doesn’t control it.”

We stopped moving at the entrance to the living area. I grabbed Courtney’s shoulder. “Well? You said ‘soon’. How does this all end?”

She pulled the door handle and welcomed us inside. “We win. That’s all I know. The rest is up to us.”

That wasn’t good enough. I wanted details.
Do I survive?
It would be hard for me to consider anything a win if I or Mom died.
What about Sasha and Rhapsody? Do I have to kill King?
I'd considered it.
Will I actually do it this time? Do I ever get to face Selby?
This must be what Courtney meant. I wanted to shake the truth out of her, but she wasn’t a fortune cookie with a ready-made answer. The future wasn’t a paper in her mouth for me to pull out.

Mounted on the living area’s front wall was a large black screen I mistook for a television once. It actually connected to their outside surveillance system. It was how I detected King’s mercenaries before they invaded the compound. After fiddling with it for a half hour and not crushing it in frustration, I could operate it in my sleep.

“What is this place?” Mom asked us.

“An old HAARP facility decommissioned by President Clinton,” Camuto said. “Solomon…” She hesitated after mentioning his name. “He had this conspiracy theory that the work HAARP did in the ionosphere caused the solar storms in the first place.”

“Just a theory, though,” Courtney added. “We never tested it, seeing as solar storms cause chaos worldwide every time they happen. Too risky.”

Camuto approached the far wall and placed her hand in a random spot.
Chink.
A lock popped open and the gray concrete wall collapsed in half, revealing another, larger space. She glanced back at Courtney. “You’re positive about this?”

“It’s time,” she answered.

The passageway was compact, so much so that we had to bend at the waist to walk through it. The hidden doorway closed behind us with a series of clicks and a loud thud. For a moment we stopped in complete darkness. Immediately, my thoughts turned to Sasha. The rushed pattern of breaths behind me let me know her claustrophobia had kicked in. I wanted to go to her, comfort her, but Mom handled it.