Rebels Rising (Dark Rebels, #1) (7 page)

“That leaves me out, I guess.”

“Yes, you have to eat to sustain your Powers. We don’t. We do have to eat, and we do convert our calories to energy like every living creature, but our Powers are not based on that energy. They are based on brain function rather than biological function. We were built that way. Naturals, even adepts and telepaths and empaths and what have you, need to eat after they use their Powers, otherwise they get weak.”

“All this is so freaking weird.” Krista sighed.

“Yeah, try growing up in a lab. That’s weird.” Blake said.

His shoulders slumped, and he got up and walked to the grimy windows. He pressed his face to one and held a hand up, reaching for the thin sunlight that filtered through the buildup of dirt on the glass. He looked so lonely. His wings shot out of his back, black and stunning in their beauty, and folded around him.

Tawny saw Krista move to get up, and her small hand shot out and gripped her wrist. She shook her head in a small warning, and Connor stood and went to his twin. They stood there, not speaking. Connor’s fingers moved to the tiny hollow between Blake’s wings and stroked there; slowly, Blake’s wings retracted, and he straightened and held his head high.

“I’m taking a nap,” he announced in a thick voice. “Wake me up when it starts to get dark.”

Blake had feelings under that slick and arrogant exterior. Who knew? Krista could feel her emotions growing more complicated by the second, and she tried to stop them. The last thing on earth she needed was to fall for Blake. He was the kind who would let her fall, and do nothing to save her from the hurt of the collision.

She just knew it.

T
he lab was outside the city. They had to jump the turnstiles at the train station, and Krista was terrified doing it. What if they got caught by some transit cop or something? They weren’t, though, and when the train doors slid closed she slumped into a seat, sighing loudly.

The car was crowded, but they had managed to find seats together. Connor and Tawny sat facing Blake and Krista, and none of them spoke. They were all nervous, and it showed. Tawny tapped her fingers on her legs, Blake stared out the windows, moving restlessly in his seat, and Connor wore a blank expression that did not disguise the uneasiness in his eyes.

That feeling was back in Krista’s stomach, that sense that something was wrong. She closed her eyes, trying to gather her thoughts.

Everything is wrong, she rationalized. I am in some crazy race for my life against a government agency I never heard of. I hooked up with mutants, or at least I think they are mutants, and I have been eating really bad food and sleeping on a hard floor for days. No wonder I feel so off.

She knew, deep down, that was not the whole of it, but she did not know what else it could be. Outside the windows of the train, the city flashed past, then began to slowly turn to the suburbs. Small villages huddled near the train stations, and people stood out on the platforms, their eyes fixed on the distances beyond the trains moving past them.

They looked so lonely out there, so frail. The lights from the houses and stations seemed to flicker and gutter; they were like candles in a strong wind, one that would eventually wipe out their flame. The darkness grew more sinister, shadowing the hills and the houses, making everything look trivial and impermanent.

The clacking of the train’s wheels grew louder. Her head nodded toward her chest, and she closed her eyes. Her body relaxed.

The dark covered the houses, the hills, the businesses. The lights blew out like candles that could no longer withstand the wind. A long, low wail rose up from outside the train; she pressed her face against the glass of the window, her breath leaving a frosted vapor there.

She saw the people on the tracks as they were consumed by the darkness, one woman—a beautiful woman with long black hair and a pretty red skirt—fell into the path of the train, her screams rising above the howling of the wind before they were cut off by the endless clatter of the steel wheels.

Krista screamed and beat against the glass. Her hands went through it, sending sharp shards of glass flying out into the darkness beyond the train. Her hands bled red and her fingernails cracked and broke off as she grabbed the frame of the window, trying to leap from the train, trying to save the people out there, but arms held her back.

She turned to see Blake, his face set in grim lines. “Leave them,” he said.

“No!”

A figure walked down the aisles. It was Noite, and her head hung at a weird angle, her shirt was stained with blood, and her tongue hung thick and purple from her blue lips. “You let me die,” she said, and then her face changed, taking on a thousand different shapes. She became the woman who had fallen under the train, Blake, Tawny, Steven, even Janine, and a whole host of people Krista had never seen before.

“No! I wanted to come after you, but they held me back!”

“You could have done it yourself.”

Krista sat bolt upright. Sweat slicked her face and ran down her back, and she could smell its stench: acrid and sharp, coming from her armpits. Her hearing tuned up, and she heard the coughing of an infant at the other end of the train, the whisper of a page turning in a glossy magazine, and she could smell something, something so foul that it made her throat burn with vomit she could not hold back.

She bent her head between her knees and a thin line of acid-filled liquid spilled form her lips, landed on the floor. Tawny said, “Gross. No more pie for you.”

She sank back into her seat, miserable and still sick feeling. Her eyes ached and her throat was raw. Something was wrong, terribly and undeniably wrong. The train shuddered to a halt. A woman across the aisle gave her a filthy look, and Krista knew, knew, that the woman thought she was drunk. That she was just another reckless teenager with a lack of common sense and manners. She wanted to say something to the contrary, but it was all she could do to lurch up out of the seat and down to the doors.

Was Noite dead? Had she let her die? That weight settled on her shoulders, heavy and unrelenting. She knew she had killed Laurie, even if she had no say in the matter, and the thought of the suffering Noite had to go through at the hands of the doctors (
they call them Creators
) made her want to throw up all over again.

Creators? Where had that thought come from? Had she heard someone use that word? She did not know. The air outside the train tasted of burnt exhaust and metal. The sky was filled with tiny pricks of white light, stars that were burning high above their heads.

They walked through a mostly deserted town. The few lights that burned in the windows were bright, and they often had to duck around corners. They passed a diner, and the smell of fried eggs and bacon made Krista’s mouth fill with saliva, despite the sick feeling in her belly. Cars passed them, and they wound up walking down a long two-lane highway as the moon began to rise.

A building rose up from the flat landscape. Its walls looked sheer and dangerous, and its windows were all blank and dark. A guard gate stood in front of it, but it was empty.

“How are we going to get in?”

“It’s abandoned. It has been for years,” Blake said. He looked down at the ground, and the moonlight illuminated one half of his face, the curve of his jaw and cheek, and Krista’s heart gave a painful thud.

“How do you know?”

“We just do,” Connor said. His face was taut with something that looked too much like fear for Krista’s comfort. Something was going on here, she knew it—but what?

“How much good can it do us if it is empty?”

“If they sense Power here, they will just assume it is a remnant, or that one of the Creators escaped and came back here because they had nowhere else to go and decided to work a little while they could.”

“They might assume it is a Prime come home too,” Tawny said, “in which case we are fucked. So let’s do this as fast as we possibly can, please.”

Their feet crunched over gravel. The sounds that gravel made were uncannily like the sound of small bones crunching, and Krista shivered. The building showed its age up close: the walls had bad spots in the stone, mold grew in the cracks, and some of the windows had been broken out and never boarded over or replaced.

There was a smell, faint and old, of antiseptic and blood when they entered the first hallway. Krista stood, confused, but the other three moved with purpose, and she followed them. They descended a long set of stairs, traveled down a labyrinth of hallways and corridors that branched and bloomed like malignant trees.

The walls held small control panels, most broken and rusted, and the floors gave off a dull sheen and a muted thud-click as their heels struck it. Nobody spoke. The windows of the offices were broken. Krista could see overturned desks and some rusted out filing cabinets and shattered chairs in some of them. A goose-necked lamp hung from the broken glass in a door that bore the letters Dr. E  n  Link  er.

A shiver stole down her back. Their shadows bobbed against the walls as Blake turned on the flashlight he had stolen earlier that day. Those shadows looked grotesque and strange, demon-like, even.

The smell got stronger. They turned a corner and found a pile of charred papers and equipment. The words “Here There Be Monsters” had been scrawled on one wall in blood gone dark maroon. Flakes of the blood had come away, and so parts of the words had faded but were still legible, and they made Krista want to run away as fast as she could.

“What happened here? Where is everyone?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Connor said, his hand lying on her arm in a reassuring gesture that made her feel no easier. “They are gone and have been for a long time.”

“You are full of crap. It matters a heck of a lot.”

Tawny said, “Stop arguing. The last thing you want to do here is argue. The Remnants can hear you, and feel you too.”

The Remnants? That confused Krista so much she shut up, even though she wanted to say a few other things. Her fear was growing in leaps and bounds. Her every instinct was urging her to run as fast as she could and take the others with her. The hairs on the back of her neck stood up, and her breath came in hard, sharp gasps.

They entered a low-ceilinged room with a strange contraption at one end. Connor asked Blake, “You think it still works?”

“She can make it work.” Blake’s voice was harsh. He grabbed Krista by one arm and yanked her to where he stood. His dark eyes bored into her blue ones. “You are going to start that machine, and we are going to go down to the testing room.”

She tried to free her arm, and his fingers tightened cruelly around her flesh. She cried out in pain, and Connor said his twin’s name in a voice that held a trace of fear. Blake’s wings sprouted and he gritted his teeth, forcing them back into his shoulders.  The tendons in his neck stood out, and a large vein pulsed along his forehead as he battled his own body until his wings vanished once more.

Krista knew that he could do that, she had seen it before, but she had never known until then how painful it was. No wonder he preferred to find something to cover them instead.

“I don’t know how to start it.”

“Yes, you do.” Tawny said, “and you have to start it, otherwise we might all end up trapped here for the rest of our lives.”

“Whoa, wait a minute,” she flipped her hands up. “I did not sign on for all this, okay? I never agreed to be the last great hope or whatever it is you think I am. I sure as hell never agreed to get us out of here. You guys got us in here, you know.”

“Stop being a whiner.” Blake turned her toward the machine. “Start the damned thing.”

Anger exploded inside of her. She was mad at Blake for hurting her, mad at all of them for making her come here, mad at the crazy dream she had had that had made her feel sick. She was pissed off because her whole life was turned upside down and broken, and all she wanted to do was go back to Luke and sit in her classes and do her work and have some pizza with her best friend.

There was an awful screeching and groaning. It tore at her ears, and she screamed, clapping her hands to the sides of her head, but there was no protection to be had from that noise. Her eardrums swelled painfully, and she sank to her knees. More of that anger rose up, and the machine began to hum, lights flickered and died, reminding her of her dream. There was a ripping sound, and long tubes began to protrude from the concrete floor. They looked like the canisters she saw in the bank’s drive-through lines, only these were tall and wide enough for a human to fit into them, and she laughed hysterically. “Press the call button, please,” she muttered, and more of the tubes burst through the floor, sending concrete tumbling and causing the floor to vibrate like a large bell below her knees.

The ceiling began to lower, and more lights blinked and went out. An old and destroyed computer monitor blinked and faded, blinked and faded, then fell into the rubble, strewing the floor with a dull crash.

“Hurry up!” Tawny shouted. “The Remnants are waking up!”

What the heck was a Remnant? The answer teased at her brain; she knew, she just could not remember. They hauled her to her feet, dragged her across the floor, and tossed her into a tube. It spun madly, and she screamed, grabbing at the slick sides of it as it whirled her down and below the floor.

She shot through a tunnel at ultra- fast speeds. Her eyes squeezed shut as her stomach lurched and protested. The sharp turns slammed her into the sides of the tube, and once, her chin connected so hard her teeth clicked together on her tongue, bringing the tang of blood to her mouth.

“Let me out!” she howled, clawing at the sides, and the tube stopped so abruptly she was hurled back toward the ceiling of the thing, and then she fell in a crumpled heap at the bottom.

Everything hurt. She thought maybe her leg was broken, and her right hip ached like someone had kicked her in it, hard. She knew she should get up, but she could not. All she could do was lie there staring at the tube’s patterned ceiling and trying to breathe.

The door of the thing slid open with a wheeze that she did not like at all. Desperate and afraid she would get trapped in it forever if she did not move, she gathered her courage and strength and rolled out onto the tiles of the floor. The tube went dark and still, the door banged shut, then locked with a solid click that made her nearly hyperventilate with fear.