Mind Storm (35 page)

Lucas, you fucking bastard,
he thought muzzily through the pain.
You never said anything about this.

“Shh, shh,” that girl whispered as her fingers touched his forehead, stroking over his hot skin.

With every motion of her fingers, she wiped away the pain.

His brain ceased to acknowledge the agony that existed from his elbows on down in each arm, the sudden absence of it leaving him light-headed and queasy. The pain in his face faded until it was just a distant ache that was hard to breathe through. Quinton's brown eyes snapped open and he stared up in shock at the smiling teenager who knelt beside him, a psion who could only be an empath after that little show of power.

“Promises to keep, Stryker,” she cooed at him. “Promises, promises.”

“Wha—?” The word came out messy, garbled. Spitting blood, coughing to get air into his lungs, Quinton tried again, concentrating on what he was saying so that he could be understood, even with a broken face. “What?”

“You aren't the only person Lucas needs,” Samantha said as she dragged herself into the nearest seat. “Kristen, get him up.”

Instinctively, Quinton jerked away from that crazy empath's touch, wishing for the first time in a long while that he had even a sliver of 'path-oriented power in his genes. The knowing look in Kristen's gleaming dark blue eyes told him that his fear hadn't gone unnoticed. Still, for such a small girl, she had a lot of strength; enough to help Quinton get his feet back underneath him. Once vertical, Quinton shrugged her off, stepping away from her grasping, clinging hands.

“Kristen,” Samantha said sharply.

“You're no fun, Sammy-girl,” Kristen complained as she stepped over Gideon's still body and back to her sister's side.

“Is he dead?” Quinton asked carefully after a few seconds.

“No.” Samantha sounded as if the word hurt her. “I don't have enough strength left in me to kill him.”

Maybe she did, maybe she didn't. Maybe her reluctance was due to the nine months they floated together in an artificial womb and the eighteen years since that they had stood side by side beneath Nathan's judging eyes. It didn't matter. This was where her loyalty ended—with Gideon still breathing.

Quinton leaned against the other chair, staring at Lucas's sisters while blood dripped down onto the floor from his fingers and his face. “What are you doing?”

“What you couldn't,” Samantha explained as she worked her way through the power plant's control system using access codes instead of a hack. “I stripped everything we'd need to bring this place back online out of the minds of the engineers and scientists before killing them.”

“You do it on Lucas's order?”

“It doesn't matter.”

“The hell it doesn't. Why isn't he here?”

“Because he and that other telepath are busy holding off what's left of the Strykers and Warhounds that are still on the field. We've got maybe five minutes, if we're lucky, to lock in the codes before the military reaches this place.”

“Jin Li went after Threnody.”

“I know. They both have their parts to play.”

“What do you mean?” Quinton demanded, jerking himself up straight again. “You're not going to try and help her?”

Samantha didn't look away from the vidscreen. “I can bring this plant online, but it's going to take time to generate the amount of electricity Lucas needs to reach where it has to go. Threnody's an electrokinetic. So is Jin Li. There is a derecho storm raging outside. Do the math, Stryker.”

Quinton didn't need to. He was already staggering out of the control room on shaky legs, heart pounding in his chest as he raced against time, knowing it was already too late even as the first hint of sound started to come from the machines around him.

The power plant was starting to come online again.

[
THIRTY-TWO
]

AUGUST 2379
BUFFALO, USA

There was a service door—locked, of course—that she had to fry before she could shove it open. It took all her strength against the crushing weight of the wind to move it. Threnody stood in the doorway, braced against the fury of the storm while acid rain lashed her body.

The transformer and transmission lines weren't housed in a separate building. They were outside, maybe twenty meters from the door and farther than that from the cooling tower. Located in the back, far from where the Strykers and the Warhounds were fighting Lucas and Kerr, they were cold, most of the city running off strained backup generators during the storm. Even if they weren't running at full power, they were still capable of transmuting electricity, of carrying it forward.

“I must be losing my mind,” Threnody muttered under her breath as she stepped out into the storm.

Getting soaked wasn't new. The ground between the main building and the tall transmission towers was covered in cement, rain flooding the place. It sloshed over her boots, making it slippery to walk, much less run, as she made her way to the bulky transformer.

After the Border Wars, when many of America's and the rest of the world's electrical grids had been destroyed, rebuilding them had been a top priority for the survivors. They were limited, though, built specifically to support small pockets of survivors and expanding no farther than that. The government had controlled the output of electricity back then and still did now, because controlling the resources that everyone needed kept the population in check.

A wire fence surrounded the transformer block, more for safety than to keep anyone out, but it was still a restricted space. The door was locked, the mechanism easy to fry to gain entrance. Shoving the door open as wide as she could, Threnody stumbled toward her goal.

The transformer block was a three-phase system, with heavy wires pulled taut between the transformer and the transmission tower that they fed into. Even with the light coming from the single spotlight focused on the area inside the fence, it was almost impossible to see where those transmission lines disappeared to in the storm.

Swiping water out of her eyes, blinking against the sting it left behind, Threnody maneuvered her way back around the transformer block to the front, running through her options. Walking around that last corner, she came face-to-face with Jin Li. Threnody jerked back out of instinct, her feet nearly sliding out from beneath her. Jin Li followed her with electricity sparking in long arcs between his fingers.

“Your partner's being torn to pieces by Gideon,” Jin Li shouted over the noise of the storm as Threnody twisted around the corner.

“He knew the risks,” Threnody yelled back. “We all did.”

“Those risks are gonna get you dead, girl.”

Jin Li lunged forward, aiming his fist at her face. Threnody ducked, twisting her body against his attack and the wind. Her hand hit the ground for balance as she lashed out with a sharp kick to Jin Li's knee that he avoided by jumping out of reach. Threnody hauled herself back to a standing position, sliding her feet farther apart for balance as she tapped into her power.

Blue electricity wrapped around her fists, a match for the power that sparked around Jin Li's. He grinned at her, face eerily lit by the lightning exploding through the sky above them. Threnody could feel the charge in the air, could feel it in her skin all the way down to her bones. Her body practically hummed with the power that the derecho storm was generating.

Jin Li moved over the slick surface of the ground, one hand stabbing forward. Electricity danced through the air between them, crackling against Threnody's power, over her skin. She returned the gesture with a wide arc of electricity that cut through his attack and slammed into him. Blue sparks lit up the air around them, tiny Vesuvius flares that would have blinded anyone who didn't have their power.

It wasn't often that electrokinetics fought like this, electricity cutting through the air from body to body like lightning did from sky to earth, cloud to cloud. Their power wasn't meant to function like that; they needed a conduit to keep the electricity flowing. The storm above had charged the very air they breathed enough to be that bridge.

This wasn't like Johannesburg. It wasn't even like the Slums. Threnody knew what she was fighting for this time and she couldn't afford to lose. That desperation drove her forward, forcing her inside Jin Li's defenses to take the blows he gave her and pound her own against his body. They used their fists, feet, and knees, the crackling burn of their power, but when it came right down to it, Jin Li was a Class II and she wasn't. He would always have the upper hand, and Threnody still wasn't fully recovered from everything she'd gone through over the past few months.

His foot caught the edge of her knee in a hard kick, knocking her legs out from under her. Threnody grunted as she fell, pain stabbing up her left thigh. Jin Li pinned her to the ground, his weight heavy on her chest, but not as heavy as the hands around her throat. Threnody wrapped her own hands around his wrists, choking against the pressure of his fingers and the bright sparks of his power.

“Lucas was never worth shit,” Jin Li said around gritted teeth, electricity crawling over his face in sharp lines that had no pattern. “You chose the wrong side, Stryker. All that's left for you to do is die.”

Black spots ate into her vision, the brightness fading. She couldn't breathe, lungs burning beneath her ribs and her heart beating so fast that she could feel its speed. Threnody stared up past Jin Li's determined face, at the swirling blackness of the storm, and thought about everyone in the underground hangars, waiting to launch in scavenged shuttles. About the people who would be left behind when the government chose only those they considered worthy to be human enough to leave this world. She thought about Lucas and Aisling, and wondered how that little girl had died, if she had died like this, with the life choked out of her as the world went to hell.

No,
Threnody thought as lightning cut through the sky.

She was a Stryker, a psion. A Class III electrokinetic. Threnody Corwin at your fucking service. But more than that, at the most basic level, she was a living, breathing
battery
with a brain. It's what her power was, it's how her body functioned, charged from the inside out.

She let Jin Li's wrist go, lifting one hand past his head for the sky above them. Electricity sparked dully at her fingertips, the world narrowing to tunnel vision that was all black clouds and white lightning. She could feel the charge in her nerve endings, the way it set her hair standing on end. The smell of ozone as the world got suddenly brighter, a blinding whiteness that exploded through her, running down her arm into her body, through Jin Li's hands, and straight into him.

Jin Li screamed when the bolt of lightning hit them, propelled backward from the harsh shock of a near system overload. Threnody forced herself off the ground. Electricity was jumping between them, flowing over the water-soaked ground and across the metal fence, the transformers,
everything,
flinging back through her and him in a loop that would kill them both soon enough. She wrapped her burning, bleeding hands over Jin Li's shoulders and pushed the momentarily stunned man backward with all her strength until he hit the side of the transformer.

His brown eyes had a blue-white sheen over them when they focused on her. He spoke, but Threnody didn't hear what he said. She doubted he heard her either.

“You're never getting off this planet,” she promised.

Threnody kept her eyes wide-open, the world becoming a flash image in her brain as she sucked up every last bit of electric power into her body and channeled it through Jin Li's, forcing it farther into the transformer behind him. The smell of burning flesh reached her nose; her nerves never noticed the damage. Threnody held on, driving the electricity farther, down coils and wires, through conductors, and into the transmission lines, up into the towers that sparked and popped beneath the sudden heavy load.

The power had no place to go except out.

Threnody pried her fingers off Jin Li long seconds later, the man still connected to the transformer by way of burned and melting flesh, his body still jerking from the electricity that was running through him, killing him by quick degrees. Threnody left all the skin of her fingers and palms on his shoulders, blackened strips peeling off as she collapsed to the ground.

Lying there, in the hot water beneath the storm, with acid rain pelting her body and her heart beating jaggedly in her chest, Threnody let the world fade away.

The electricity she had called down out of the sky still burned through the transformer, funneled with precision through the transmission lines as it scattered to the substations that existed throughout Buffalo. It only took seconds for that power to reach through kilometers of power lines and feed a city starved for energy.

That night, Buffalo lit up as if it were on fire for the first time in decades, in centuries, a brightly glowing sprawl that burned defiantly beneath the storm.

PART EIGHT

DELIVERANCE

 

SESSI`ON DATE
: 2128.07.13

LOCATION
: Institute of Psionics Research

CLEARANCE ID
: Dr. Amy Bennett

SUBJECT
: 2581

FILE NUMBER
: 638

“We know you have the answers,” the doctor says as she picks up a white card from the deck on the table. One side is blank, the other side holds a shape viewable only by the doctor.

“They aren't your answers. Purple star,” Aisling says as the EEG and supporting machines click and whine, spikes reading across the screen. She is kneeling on the chair, attention elsewhere, yellow dress twisted around her legs.

The doctor places the card down and marks something in her notes before picking up another. “Your track record for being right is unmatched.”