Secret Worlds (450 page)

Reyes smiled lazily. “One of those who uses ‘relo’ to remind herself what a big, bad place she managed to escape.” He wandered closer, his casual tone belied by dark eyes that held her own. Intense Reyes was back with a vengeance. “C’mon. It’s Azcon. It’s not a relocation center anymore. It’s a city. It has been for more than a hundred years. It’s a safe place, a good life, for everyone who lives there. You should come back.”

Of course,
he
thought so. He was one of the wealthy who lived in charged comfort.

What do you know about what life is really like for the people who make your life comfortable, you big jerk?

Most Sparks didn’t live in charged extravagance. They used as little electricity as possible, because they knew someone like them had paid the price for it in pain. Each week, every Spark in every city took their scheduled turn on the grounding platforms or risked overloading their brains and stroking out. The huge open-air stages were built above the cities, for the safety of the unpowered, so the Sparks could discharge the feedback energy that accumulated within their bodies.

It was hard for Lena to believe now, but when she had been very small, she’d thought the groundings on the platform were beautiful. The crash of the lightning discharge was scary, sure, but the constant flashes of light made the days sparkle and chased the dark from the night.

And then she’d gone for her first grounding. She had been four, and had started working with a Spark tutor often enough that she’d built up her own feedback. She clutched her mother’s hand, staring at her brother’s profile as he climbed up to the platform ahead of her. He was sweating as they climbed the open, winding stairs, despite the chilled winter air on their cheeks. Those in line before them went first, removing clothes, standing shivering on the platform for a moment before being encased in blinding electric light. Their bodies were rigid, corded with agony, and the crash wasn’t merely loud up that close. It deafened Lena, froze her in place while the vibrations shook through the platform to her bare feet and up her small body.

When it was over, the Sparks fell, collapsed from the pain to the heated floor of the platform. Council employees scooted forward, lifting them and moving them inside to spend their hour in recovery before heading back to family, job, or school. It was an efficient system, a machine that ran smoothly so long as the cogs were well-oiled by obedient citizens.

She blinked the memory away. “This is a safe place. Nobody but me makes the rules. I like it here just fine.”

“Are you sure about that?” His tone dropped as he leaned in and smiled, voice turning low and persuasive. His proximity, coupled with her awareness of their chemistry, set off alarm bells in her head. “I’m a man in a position to be good to the right woman.”

Heat flooded her face, but it wasn’t embarrassment. It was anger. The man was a head and half taller than her tiny self, so more than six feet tall. He was older, perhaps early thirties, and dark, with olive skin and black hair trimmed close to his head. He moved with a sinuous grace that reminded her of how long it had been since she’d made her way back to find a boy in the city. The whole package was wrapped in a perfectly preserved, black, relic-silk shirt.

Everything about him screamed C-notes and sex. He expected her to believe he was this interested in
her—
a
skinny, short, reclusive Spark? Oh, she wouldn’t deny the sexual spark between them. As far as the physical? Her dark red hair and blue-green eyes were unusual, but so were the galaxies of dark freckles spinning across her skin. And she was
fragrant
today. The damn water heater she’d scavenged and dragged across the desert was broken again—it never worked more than a week or two before it burned out every circuit she attached to it.

In spite of her self-conscious anger, she could feel the pull as her body tried to respond to Reyes’s lure, heat swirling low and slow in her belly. It pissed her off even more. Plus, a bit of chemistry between strangers didn’t explain this level of attention. Whatever he wanted, it wasn’t her.

Please don’t be stupid enough that you came out here to prey on me.
It wouldn’t go the way they planned.

“I’m not the right woman.” She stood, keeping the stool between her and the man in front of her. “And I’m not interested.”

She shook her head. It wasn’t just figurative alarms going off in her head. She could hear the Dust at the back of her mind, a sibilance, not quite a whisper. The Dust liked to help. Lena let it. Reyes spoke again, a pleasant drone she ignored. She focused on the images the Dust flashed in her mind.

Six intruders made their way across the desert, moving through the blanket of Dust and sand. They encircled her home in pairs. Teams of two? Council agents.

And two more were here inside with her. The Council had found her. Her father hadn’t been wrong.

Rage ticked her eyelid. With every step the agents took across the desert, everything she had built went up like so much tinder. Unlike the mid-range Sparks who tried to flee the Council, she could keep them from dragging her back to be a power plant slave. All she had to do was everything her parents had warned her against. She’d have to reveal her true abilities.

She focused on the Dust within their bodies.

Wake up, little friends. Wake up. I have work for you. Listen….

Reyes stopped speaking the moment she went still. He exchanged a look with Lucas before looking back at her. It was all the time she needed.

Lungs and muscles. Lungs and muscles. No breath. No movement.

She could see the shift behind his eyes as he realized he had underestimated her, and then he gasped. His windpipe and lungs constricted then he grabbed at his chest. His muscles locked.

Beside him, Lucas made a wet, wheezing sound as he toppled to the floor, body rigid.

She stepped away from behind the stool and moved sideways across the room.

“Your friends are coming.” She had no idea why she spoke. “I’m sorry it hurts, but you should have left me alone. I wasn’t bothering anyone.” Lena didn’t even know if he could hear her.

Reyes’s face purpled and veins stood out in his neck and forehead. He shouldn’t still be standing.

She hated that she felt guilty. “The Dust will stop once I’m gone. If you make it, don’t look for me. I won’t hold back next time.”

She ducked into her room, silently ordering the Dust covering her escape route to wake. Alarms shrieked in her head. She’d cut it too close. Lena pushed the wooden bed frame out of the way and wiggled on hands and knees toward the corner. She’d have to come back later for her things, after the agents were gone.

A heavy thump sounded behind her. Reyes wasn’t going to make it.

She hesitated, then snarled at herself for giving a damn about the agent who’d masqueraded as a new client and invaded her home. She slid headfirst, arms extended, into the hole the Dust opened for her.

It was his own fault, anyway.

He had no way to know you could hit back.

She growled at herself. Simple rule. People who don’t want to get hit shouldn’t go looking for trouble.

The Dust left after the Great Disaster was everywhere, including in food, water, and air and the people who ate, drank, and breathed it. They didn’t know what it was, but other Sparks used it as a catalyst to help spark, or flame, or charge objects. She had played with the Dust every day as a child, during those long hours spent alone, locked away for her own safety. The Dust was alive, and it liked the attention she gave it. It would pretty much do whatever she wanted, including keeping her escape route safe.

She wiggled forward, urging her body down the slope. As soon as her feet cleared the opening behind her, the Dust resealed the floor. They’d see that the bed had been moved, but the floor would be nothing more than what you’d expect to see in a former gas station: worn, ancient, and coated with Dust.

She slid down the smooth tube for about fifteen sloped feet. When she reached the bottom, she pulled herself up onto her elbows, placing her hands flat against the walls.

“Glow,” she breathed, visualizing the dim light she wanted the Dust to make for her.

The tube lit up around her. Running footsteps thumped across the floors behind her. Voices shouted about men down. The bed groaned as it was pulled to the middle of the room.

She didn’t wait for them to start pounding on the floor. The Dust would keep the floor knit together for a long time, and when forced, would collapse the head of the tunnel behind her. Still, she scooted, elbow crawling through the tube as fast as she could.

Her tunnel ran two hundred and fifty feet diagonally away from the house to end in a hidden exit on the side of a dried streambed. She couldn’t hear anything from behind her now; her own breath rasping in and out of her throat eclipsed every other sound. She had no idea how far she’d come, or how far she still had to go.

Don’t panic. Don’t panic. Don’t panic.

The silent chant did little good. The memory of her father’s warning echoed in her head.

She had been five on her first day of Testing Year. Her father had come into the room as her mother finished braiding her hair. He’d squatted in front of her, somber, voice soft but emphatic. As a girl, she’d mistaken his fear for anger.

He’d placed his wide hands on either side of her round, freckled face, the girlish mirror of his own, and told her, “You
must
remember, Magdalena. Remind yourself every day, every moment that you must not do well. The Council has been watching for a girl like you. You
must
fail, or they will take you away from us and we will never, ever see you again.”

She’d looked at her mother, who leaned against the closed bedroom door to keep out her brother and sister. No one was allowed to know she was different, not even them.

Her father had gently tugged one braid to pull her attention back to him. “We love you, Magdalena. Please remember.”

She’d nodded, terrified.

She was terrified again. She’d gotten so used to being authentically herself here in the desert that she’d forgotten how to hide, just as she had only days after starting her Testing Year. She’d wanted to win. Now, as then, she had to disappear.

Her elbow hit solid wall—the end of her tunnel. She slapped her shaking hand against the hatch, and it fell away into its component Dust and whispered down to the dry, orange earth of the stream bed three feet below. Lena clawed at the edge, pulling her way out.

Sudden sunlight blinded her. She tumbled face-first to the ground. Her head shrieked at her to stop, listen, and watch for agents. She didn’t. She ran as soon as she gathered her feet under her.

The Pueblo of Santo Domingo offered shelter only four miles away. The arroyo she’d chosen as her escape route cut shallow through the red earth by the seasonal rains. The edge wasn’t above her head, but scrubby juniper and mesquite trees were thick around the edges. She hoped it would be enough to protect her from any eyes searching her out.

Less than two days after she had staked her claim on the gas station, the Kewa had appeared. They’d known she was a Spark, of course, just as they’d known she had moved into the abandoned station. Natives could spot the energy bloom practicing Sparks gave off like a heat signature. They were happy to barter in exchange for charges that didn’t come from a Council Spark. Over time, they’d come to trust each other. Now, they would be her safe haven.

The agents wouldn’t pursue her into occupied Kewa territory. As a friend of the Nations, she could only be taken if there were no tribal witnesses. The Council of Nine had long since begged peace with the Native Nations.

Her feet pounded on the arroyo bottom, carrying her closer to sanctuary. Every impact sent a spike up her spine and into her head, a reminder of how close she was to burn out. She risked a pause to turn back, looking for signs of pursuit. The twisted trees protected her from discovery, but they limited her vision. And she couldn’t hear anything over the sound of her own heartbeat and panting breath. She turned back from the direction of home to run on.

Movement flickered through the branches to her side.

Lena snapped her head around, breath caught in her throat. A young agent paced through the desert a hundred yards away. His head swung as he searched for her. She bent at the knees, intending to sink below the arroyo edge. Her movement caught his attention. Their gazes locked.

She spun and exploded up the shallow arroyo wall behind her. The compacted sand crumbled beneath her scrabbling fingers and feet. When she made the top, she clawed through the tearing thorns of the scrubby trees and bushes to reach the desert on the other side. She flew then, running flat out, desperate. He crashed through the brush only moments later as he made it down and then up the arroyo again. His footsteps pounded behind her as the ground rose ahead.

A drop-off loomed on the other side, leading down to the remnants of a cracked and pitted caliche road. A quarter mile to the west and just across the road, Santo Domingo rose from the desert.

Except the sound of breath sawing loud in her ears wasn’t only her own. He caught her at the crest of the rise, yanking at her shirt to pull her back. The momentum of her leap pulled him down with her, and they tumbled together down the steep, eroded, red sand.

She hit the hard caliche, and her breath exploded out of her. Even as she gasped, she rolled to her side. She’d pull herself across the road if she had to. His hand caught her ankle, fingers like an iron band, and he dragged her back toward himself. She tried to pull away, her fingertips clawing in vain at the dry top of the road.

She flipped and looked down her body. He held tight to her ankle, pinning it to the road as he reached for a weapon at his side with his other hand. A gun? Or a Taser?

She kicked out with her free foot, desperate and vicious. Her heel made contact with his nose, and she was free. She rolled back over, scrambling to her knees and then her feet. If she could catch her breath, she could run the last stretch to safety.