Authors: K.M. Ruiz
Lucas was definitely Nathan's son, and Nathan never did anything by halves.
The Warhounds came out of the main tunnel into a wide underground space that was like a minicity, all steel-gray metal and walled-off habitation, the whine of generators cutting through the sounds of human life. Straight down the center of that huge space, the size of an old stadium, was an empty maglev platform, the line of it lit brighter than anywhere else.
The unregistered humans with the most corrupted genetics called Bunker East home. It was closest to the deadzone that took up half of New York State. Even with shielding against radiation, the people here were never going to scrape their DNA clean. They were never going to escape what their ancestors had left for them.
Kristen moved away from Samantha to the railing that separated the crowd from a short fall to certain death on the maglev tracks below. She leaned over that point of separation to look down at the maglev platform, the tracks and the humans waiting there for a train that wasn't going to arrive anytime soon.
“Bet they'd all taste so good,” she said around her smile.
Jin Li clamped a hand on her shoulder and pulled her back into the group. “Start walking, girl. You've got a bigger target to find.”
The bioware that lined her skinsuit flickered a warning, which she ignored. Kristen didn't care about the prison she wore, just about her chance at survival that she could taste beyond her shields.
Samantha curled her fingers around the back of Kristen's neck and squeezed down warningly. “We're not here for them.”
“Of
course
not, Sammy-girl,” Kristen drawled as she reached up and squeezed Samantha's fingers tighter around her own throat.
Even down here, the world wasn't much different from the one above: still a mess of people, of poverty, of the dying looking to forget. Hologrids rolled adverts over every conceivable surface, interrupted here and there by the government's curfew reminder. They weren't enough of a distraction.
Samantha felt it when Kristen started to engage her empathy, Kristen's power bleeding through her shields. It weighed down the mental grid in a way few other powers could, because a mental dysfunction was hard to correct and even harder to hide. Samantha had her own shields wrapped around Kristen's mind, forcing the other girl to work beneath a veneer of human static, but the shields just barely held and their cover didn't last.
They made it to one of the lower levels of Bunker East at the same moment as the Strykers. It didn't really matter to Samantha how they were found out as a telekinetic blow leveled everyone flat between the Warhounds and the team of Strykers coming at them, just that they were.
The attack hit hard against the telekinetic shield that surrounded the Warhounds, and Samantha reached out to pull Kristen up against the wall, trying to make them less of a target. Grabbing her gun, Samantha fired on the Strykers, the two Warhound telekinetics letting her attack get through. The bullets never hit their target. She didn't expect them to.
Kristen, go,
Samantha ordered even as she dropped her shields.
A hole opened up on the mental grid, pulling everyone into the manic swirl of insanity that was Kristen. The mental grid buckled beneath the Class III strength made all the more dangerous by her insanity. It washed over human and psion minds alike. The only reason that her power didn't begin to eat through everyone immediately was the solid telepathic shield that slid between Kristen and her next meal.
“Not
fair,
” Kristen spat out, dragging herself to her feet to glare at her oldest brother, where he leaned up against the railing, standing between them and the Strykers and the quickly scattering humans.
The security feed,
Samantha sent out on a broad 'path.
Shut it down!
Whether or not their hackers obeyed her in time, she would never know. Lucas wasn't bothering to hide his identity. She could have killed him for that callous thoughtlessness.
“I hear you've been looking for me,” Lucas said, his voice barely audible above the screaming and the sharp, shrill sound of the alarm as people ran for a safety that couldn't be guaranteed.
Tension snaked through everyone on both sides of the fight, Lucas the line no one could cross. He knew it, they knew it, and the smile he gave his sisters was both condescending and cruel.
Kristen offered her own in return as she slid her power up against his shields. “Oh, I've missed your games. Nathan's not happy, but come play with me anyway.”
“What else is new?” Lucas said as he raised a hand at the Strykers.
The Strykers amassing behind him were bowled over by a line of telekinesis that cut through their defenses hard enough to break bones. Lucas wasn't there for the Strykers. He was there for the Warhounds, for his sisters. The Strykers were just a complication he had dragged here because he needed the distraction. He'd had two years to perfect how to play the role of bait, and getting people to follow him had never been difficult. Digging into three of the Strykers' minds, he broke their shielding and altered their way of thinking, a quick and dirty mindwipe that would leave them unable to differentiate between their teammates and the enemy.
Then he let them go, let them attack humans and psions alike, because even Lucas needed backup sometimes. The results were bloody, but he couldn't regret the deaths of civilians down here, not when the rest of the world needed saving.
Samantha fell into merge with the two telekinetics, their strength together enough to counteract most of what Lucas could possibly throw at them. Maybe. She briefly regretted leaving Gideon behind, so used to her twin fighting alongside her.
The roar of energy darts rained down from above with sudden brutality, smashing into telekinetic shields and ricocheting every which way without finding a single target. Quads, military soldiers. They'd drawn the attention of the government, and that was never a good thing.
Don't worry,
Lucas said into her mind.
The humans here won't remember us at all.
Liar,
Samantha said.
His laughter echoed in her mind, the psi link thin enough and precise enough that she knew they were the only two tied together in it.
I never lied about saving you.
The world shifted, crumbling at the edges of her vision as Lucas's telepathy roared through the mental grid, slicing through everyone's thoughts with a ferocity Samantha could barely counter. She dug in with her own telepathy, slamming her shields up high and tight around her mind, around Jin Li's, around the two telekinetics who lashed out with their combined power at where Lucas stood. She left Kristen alone. Kristen was more than capable of taking care of herself.
The railing Lucas was leaning on cracked, the metal shearing off in large chunks. He lurched backward, catching himself before the spot he'd been resting against fell off onto the maglev platform below.
Fire exploded in the air around him, around the Warhounds, an inferno that scorched the area they were standing in. A Stryker pyrokinetic, because they didn't have a Warhound with that particular power in their current group. Samantha grabbed Kristen by the collar of her skinsuit and dragged her in close when she would have run forward. The girl never did care about her own skin. The telekinetics strengthened their shields and stood their ground. Jin Li took a few steps forward, eyeing Lucas with a feral look on his face.
“Nathan wants you dead,” Jin Li said.
Lucas spread his arms wide; offered up a slick smile. “Go ahead. Try. I'll even let you get close enough to touch me.”
Jin Li wasn't stupid enough to agree to something like that, at least, not alone. Linked to the telekinetics by Samantha's telepathy, Jin Li was teleported within striking range of Lucas, shielded down tight except for his hands as he reached for Lucas's throat. Lucas reacted like any well-trained Warhound wouldâwith exponential force.
The ground he was standing on
cracked,
the air burned as his telekinetic blow slammed Jin Li into and
through
the support wall of the building they were fighting next to. Jin Li survived only because the Warhound telekinetics with them were well-trained in their power. They managed to cushion Jin Li's landing as best they could. Jin Li fell to the ground across from Kristen, half-conscious and bleeding from his nose and mouth, but mostly whole and alive.
Kristen turned her face in Lucas's direction, the smile she gave him stretched to its limits. “Try,” she echoed, then wrapped her power around his mind in ways that not even Nathan could achieve.
The solid, mentally corrosive barrier she erected around her brother skewered his attention for only a few seconds, long enough for Samantha to dig her telepathy into his shields, to scorch her power over his. It was followed, incongruously enough, by two telepathic strikes from the Strykers.
It wasn't a merge. The Strykers didn't know
how
to merge, and Samantha was alone in her attack because no one merged with Kristen and walked away alive. But a Class I, for all his or her strength, still had
limits
. Every psion did. Lucas, forced to battle on three separate fronts, remembered that when his top shield cracked beneath the onslaught, crumbling away.
He could sense Kristen's glee, Samantha's determination, and the Strykers' desire to see them all dead. He could also sense the minds clustered in the maglev train that was kilometers away and getting closer, running on the last dregs of power that could safely be siphoned off the generators as it struggled to make a stop on its schedule. He reached for the Stryker telepath he had altered, giving her a different set of orders this time, letting the woman target the soldiers in that approaching maglev train and the quads already here for him now that most of the Strykers nearby were either dead or incapacitated. The effort of fighting against his orders would probably break her mind. Lucas didn't care, so long as the Stryker had a target that wasn't him.
With a wrench that left his ears ringing, Lucas slid his mind away from the psions who wanted so badly to break him and teleported down to the maglev platform. Quads were rapidly surrounding the area, having long since shoved their way through the fleeing crowd for a better position from which to shoot and kill the enemy. They lined the second platform with only one intent, but Lucas knocked the group of soldiers down and out with a telepathic blow that left half of them catatonic and the other half bleeding their brains out their ears and noses.
Left behind on the walkway, Samantha holstered her gun and shoved herself to her feet.
Cover me,
she snarled at the pair of telekinetics, even as she launched herself over the railing.
It was a three-story drop to the platform below; she landed with telekinetic help. Still shielded, her movements jerky from running in step with someone else's power, Samantha raced toward her brother where he waited on the maglev platform.
Why now?
she sent at him, layering her shields as Nathan had taught her when she was a child, creating a canyon between herself and her older brother on the mental grid. It wouldn't be enough, but she still had to try.
Why ruin everything when we're so
close
to being free of this place?
What if I said this was all just meant to be?
Lucas told her from where he stood, tense and waiting before her.
That it was inevitable?
Nothing's inevitable, you know that.
Samantha skidded to a halt, breathing heavily, feeling the telekinesis forced away.
The alarm was still sounding in Bunker East, the lights still dim along the walls and ceiling and floor. The hologrids were dark, any and all extra energy diverted to the maglev tracks, which were beginning to hum. This far underground, the storm couldn't reach them, but they were building their own where the humans had lived for generations.
What if it is?
Samantha felt the mental grid stretch itself thin and tight against her mind, Lucas's power reaching for something inside her that she never knew she carried. Consciousness. Awareness.
Memories.
Hers and not hers.
No.
She threw up more and more mental shields, but he tore them all down.
I can't do this alone,
Lucas told her, sounding tired. Old. As if he'd lived too long and hadn't died young enough before the bitterness overtook his life when he was only twenty years old.
She didn't feel herself hit the ground, just knew that her skull hit first, then her shoulders. The world spun in a sickening lurch that she felt in her gut, and Samantha choked on her breath the way people choked on water when they drowned. Warm hands pressed the side of her face against the stained metal of the platform that too many feet had walked over, dragging the dirt of the world down to a place where people bled out hope.
“You know what they said when the bombs fell?” Lucas pinned Samantha down against the maglev platform with his physical strength alone, his mind busy tearing hers apart. “Don't fear the end of the world. Fear what comes next.”
She fought him with everything she had, but it wasn't enough. It had never been enough. As the maglev train roared into Bunker East, sliding with a hard, telekinetically anchored
stop
against the platform, Lucas leaned down and whispered into his sister's ear, “
We
are what came next, Sam. And I am so much better than what you could ever hope to be.”
“I'm notâscared of you,” Samantha gasped out as his telepathy curled through her mind and ruined what Nathan had built her into.
She broke; pieces of who she was shearing off, all the scar tissue that she had accumulated over the years justâripped away.
Breathe. I still need you.