Rebels Rising (Dark Rebels, #1) (3 page)

They were twins, identical other than the color of their wings. Inanely she said, “You’ve got wings.”

“Well, just state the obvious why don’t you.” White Wings snapped.

Black Wings smiled at her, and Krista’s heart stopped. He was so cute! They both were, but the other one was a nozzle. “Ignore Blake, he’s had a hard day. I’m Connor.”

“I’m Krista. I dreamed about this place, only there was a house up there on the cliffs.”

“I told you so,” Connor said smugly.

Blake just scowled.

“Look again,” Connor invited. Krista did, and there the house sat, just as it had appeared in her dream.

“Where are we?”

“Nowhere, or everywhere, depending on how you view the universe.” Connor said. “Come on, let’s go.”

The twins flapped their wings, sending long ripples of air all around her. They flew up the cliff’s face and stood there, looking down. “Come on!” Blake yelled, a challenge in his voice.

“Are you nuts? There is no way up!” There wasn’t. The face of the cliff was sheer and without any type of handholds. There was no way to approach the house from the back, either. To get there she would have to fly. She gave her shoulder a stealthy squeeze, but no wing protruded from it.

She heard a helicopter approaching fast from the direction of the college. She froze in place. Would she be better off striking out on her own, running for her life? The people in the helicopter were obviously looking for her, and they were probably armed to the teeth. In the house she would be a sitting duck.

She looked up at that house and blinked. It had vanished completely. Blake yelled down at her, “Get up here or die down there! It is your choice!”

“You could have taken me!”

“No, to be one of us you have to get here on your own. It’s the Law of the Order.”

“Order, what order? Am I joining a cult?”

The helicopter’s wings beat harder at the air, she could feel the rank currents on her skin. Her over aware senses told her she was about to be in a lot of trouble if she did not get out of sight, and quickly.

She ran at the cliff, grabbing desperately at the black granite with her fingers. She clung there, a few inches above the ground, her feet swinging. With a grunt of effort she pulled up, wedging the fingers of her right hand into a tiny crack that someone without her vision would have missed.

Inch by painful inch, she climbed that cliff. Blood dripped from her cracked fingertips, and her face struck a rock so hard that her chin leaked blood as well. She was hot and dizzy, the fear and adrenaline that the sound of the blades beating against the air brought to her kept her going when she would have given up and slid to the ground, too fatigued to go on.

Her eyes rose above the level of the plateau, and Connor grinned at her. His smile was contagious and she smiled back, then slipped almost off the entire cliff. She screamed out a curse and kicked her feet, scrabbling against the falling stones and shale until she got a grip and pulled herself over the lip.

“Thanks for the rescue,” she said in as snarky a tone as possible.

“You are welcome,” Blake said. “Turn around.”

She did, and a shriek came from her mouth. The helicopter was right in front of them. Her hair whipped madly across her face, the air battered her body, and she stumbled back a step, her hands splaying out for support.

“Do it!” Blake yelled.

“Do what?” Krista screamed.

“Break them.”

The words fell from a great distance, and she stared at him. She knew exactly what he meant, even though she was sure she had never heard those words before. She turned back to the helicopter, grit and small stones rattling and spinning on the drafts. Some hit her flesh, leaving pocks that welled with blood on her arms and legs.

The people in the helicopter were looking around, and Krista understood that they could not see her. The house, or something, was protecting the three of them from the people in the machine...but that would not last.

She could sense it, whatever it was. It was like a web—a great shining web— but whatever had spun it was getting tired. She stepped forward, close enough to see the faces of the people in the chopper, and her mouth fell open. Gym Nut was not dead after all; he was in the passenger seat without a scratch on him, and he was looking right at her.

He gesticulated and she stopped thinking, stopped trying to sort it all out. A rush of something filled her entire body, exploded out of her, and hung on the air for a split second before slamming into the chopper.

The blades stopped spinning. The guns trained on her, and the twins spun backwards. The pilot screamed; she heard his cry, a long, thin, high-pitched wail, and Gym Nut tried to grab onto the bar that was at the side of the door. She knew he wanted to swing out of the chopper and hurl his body toward the cliff in a last ditch attempt, but that did not happen. The chopper went dead in the air, and then it fell to the earth.

It landed in the sea, on the rocks that showed from the high waves. There was a low scream from the metal as it tore. Blake stepped closer to the edge and so did Connor. Krista went with them, although every instinct told her not to.

Gym Nut was trying to climb out of the wrecked chopper. “Is he a freaking cyborg or something?” Krista asked.

“Something,” Blake said and moved his hand across the view. “Burn them, Krista.”

“What?” Had he just said
burn
them? Flames leaped from the chopper, and a howl of almost inhuman pain and fear came from the sand and rocks below. The waves washed in but did not stop the fire. It rose into a glowing ball that lit up the darkening sky.

“Holy cow,” a voice said, and Krista turned to see a small, frail girl with the same complexion as the twins looking at her from behind wire-rimmed glasses. “It’s true then, you really are the Natural they have been waiting for.”

The Natural that they had been waiting for? Who? Natural what? Blake grabbed her arm just before she fainted and she stared up at him, her mouth working although her brain was on a vacation. “You’re cute, but you are an asshole.”

“That’s what they tell me,” he replied.

Everything went black.

K
rista awoke slowly. Disorientation filtered in. Where the hell was she? The ceiling above her head was bright blue, painted with little stars and what looked like a map of the heavens. There was something soft below her, softer than the thin mattress she was used to, and her head ached fiercely.

The room was small, stone and wood, and the furnishings were almost nil. There was the bed she was in: a small thick mattress on the floor that had been piled with blankets and pillows, and a dresser; that was all.

“It takes time to regain your whole Power.”

Krista sat up. The girl with the glasses said, “I’m Tawny. I’m the one who sent you the dreams. Sorry I used a guy’s voice. I was afraid you would ignore a girl.”

“I would never ignore you, Tawny,” another girl said and kissed Tawny’s slender neck.

“Stop it, Noite. This is Noite, by the way.”

“Telepath accidentally bred thanks to a mutant gene that nobody could have predicted," Noite held out a long, slim hand. Rings sparkled from every finger, and her nails had been colored in with black Sharpie. “In other words, I’m a Natural too.”

“Natural what?”

“Natural adept, natural born, natural powered. No engineered genetics in my makeup.”

Krista stared at the black kohl around Noite’s clear blue eyes, and her confusion must have been obvious because Tawny sighed, “Nobody told you yet.”

“Told me what?”

“We did not have time. They had her marked for Extermination.” Connor said from the doorway of the room that she was lying in.

Tawny sighed, and Noite shrugged. “She’s here now.”

Blake came in behind his brother. Both of them had on tanks and thin leather jackets, jeans and heavy black boots. Their wings were out of sight, and Krista blushed when Blake looked at her. “You are a Natural, Krista, maybe the strongest on the planet.”

She laughed at that. “What? Is this a joke? Like, a hazing or something?”

“That is one way to look at it," Noite said.

“They really wiped her mind,” Tawny put in.

“What? What does that mean, they wiped my mind?”

“What’s your last name?” Blake asked.

Krista looked at him, wondering if he was serious. “It’s Lewis.”

“Where did you grow up?”

“In Atlanta.”

“Who were your parents?”

“Rick and Nell.”

“What color was your bedroom?’

Dead silence. That question flummoxed her. She strained to recall that fact but could not. “What does that matter?”

“What color was your mother’s hair?”

Again she had no idea. “I don’t know.”

“What was your high school mascot?”

“I went to Central High School.”

“What was your mascot?”

“I don’t know!”

“There is a lot you don’t know,” Blake said. “You don’t know it because DARK only gave you the thinnest cover life. They thought to turn you like the others, and so they did not bother.”

“This is some weird shit dream.” Krista pinched herself, but all that happened was that a bigger welt appeared over one of the bloody scratches on her upper arm. “You said I’m a Natural, are you...are you all Naturals?”

“No,” Blake said, “Connor and I and Tawny are Primes. There are a few here who are Betas and others who are Naturals.”

Jagged laughter spilled from her mouth. “I’m sorry, my crazy-to-English translator is busted. Could you explain that?”

“Your name is not Krista Lewis. You are not a college student. You would have been if DARK had finally picked up on you. Somehow you were kept hidden from their sight. That is not easy to explain, and I don’t know how, so don’t ask.

“They did finally spot you though. It might have been something simple, someone might have noticed how easy sports and tests were for you, someone might have mentioned the girl who had a knack for something...whatever it was it got their attention, and they took you and brought you to Luke.”

“I think you’re saying Luke is not a college?”

“It’s a secret research program run by a shady and highly secret government agency.”

“DARK,” Krista guessed.

“You got it.” Blake’s dark eyes drilled into hers. ”As soon as they opened you up we felt you, all of us. That is saying something. That kind of Power, it should not even exist, but it does.”

A sick feeling spilled through her, her gut clenched, and she asked, “Opened me up? Why does that sound so heinous?”

“Because it is,” Tawny said. “We’ve all been through it. Be glad you don’t remember, it really sucks.”

“But it also Connects us, some of us. None of us know why some of us get Connected and others don’t. There is a link somehow, and DARK is trying to find that link and harvest it, along with the Powers of the Connecting groups.”

“Wait, you mean there are other groups like this one?”

“Yes, at Luke. They are the ones that are already too far gone to save. They are slaves to the machine.” Noite flipped her pink hair across one golden, tanned shoulder. “DARK is building some kind of super weapon using Naturals and Primes that Connect.”

“But the Connectors there at Luke, so far, have not been powerful enough to run it.” Connor said.

“Could we run it?” Krista had to ask.

“You could run it all by yourself. It was why they took you, only you managed to resist all their efforts to force you into running it. Somehow you beat them. I knew when you were about to become too big a liability for them, and that was when we agreed to start sending you the dreams so you could escape, only you did not listen so well at first. It would have been better if we were Connected, I guess.” Tawny said softly.

It was crazy. It was a nightmare in waking hours. Krista put her head in her hands, letting the red dimness behind her eyelids soothe her while she tried to think. “So we are not Connected?”

Blake said, “No. Connecting with you would be...”

“Death.” Noite finished grimly. “You are too strong. You killed half a dozen others before the scientists down there gave up trying to force the Connection between you and them.”

“Oh great, this just keeps getting better and better. I’m some kind of death ray? Is that what happened to the helicopter?”

“Leave her alone.”

The group parted and Krista openly stared. He was more gorgeous than any man she had ever seen. His skin was the color of pure ivory, his lips were full and curved, his blonde hair fell in a thick sheath over his high forehead, and his body was long and elegant. He looked like a statue, and when he moved toward her she felt a warm tickling at the edges of her thoughts, like a finger running across her mind. It was unpleasant, but still she did not resist, could not.

“Learn how,” Noite said sharply.

Krista turned to her, “What?”

“Learn how to resist. You were just thinking you could not resist Steven’s probing, but you better learn how. He is on our side, but DARK has a metric ton of adepts and telepaths who are not. They will take what they want right out of your head before you even know they were in there.

“Now you are thinking I am crazy, also—earlier you wondered if I’m gay. I am, but I never hit on the straight girls, except for Tawny, but only because it tickles her sense of humor.”

Krista blushed to the roots of her hair. “I never wondered that.”

“Learn to block out your thoughts at all times,” Steven said. “She is giving you good advice. Advice that just might save your life one day.”

“Did so,” Noite added.

“This is just too much to handle. I mean, this morning I was in college and trying to figure out what to have for dinner. Now, I blew up a helicopter, I’m on the run from a gym loving nutjob, oh wait I killed him, and I am in a house that might or might not be here. Okay. No need to freak out, everything is just awesome sauce.”

“Don’t let that guilt last too long. He was a Second Adam.” Steven said.

Krista sensed that Steven was the leader, so she appealed to him. “Could you please make sense? All these things might make sense to all of you, but I have no idea what the terminology is.”