Eternity Crux (3 page)

The ‘closet’ was really more like a small room, large enough to perform procedures when necessary. The lack of windows made it ideal for avoiding prying eyes—the kind that required you to get your medical procedures in a closet, rather than a hospital—but again, it was no help for our current predicament.

Despite the obvious, Sayer stalked the room, shoving aside machinery and shelving units like there might be some secret exit behind one of them. There wasn’t.

“Son of a—” Whirling around, he sought something else to lash out at, sending metal instruments clattering across the floor and a machine smashing to bits that popped and sparked its way into oblivion.

I wasn’t in any shape to stop him, but I reached out anyway. Fingers twisting in the soft cotton of his shirt, I stepped into him. So close that I could feel the way his entire body shook with rage.

“Say, you’ve got to hold it together.” My hand rose and fell along with his chest. “Please. I need you to hold it together right now. I can’t do this on my own.”

“Aura.” His fingers folded around mine, pressing my hand hard enough against his chest that I could feel his pulse racing beneath my palm. “This is all my fault. I should have listened to you. When you told me to let it go, let someone else deal with it . . . You were right.”

“I was a coward.” Curling my fingers through his, I met his turbulent gaze. “
You
were right. They need to be stopped.”

“But we haven’t stopped anyone. All I’ve done is gotten you hunted, hurt, and now . . . Now, I’ve gotten you killed.” His fingers combed through my wild hair, palm settling against my cheek.

The warmth of his skin on mine fueled the swirl of emotion whipping to full frenzy inside me. Without thinking, I turned my face to nuzzle his hand and pressed a kiss into his palm. If my brain had been firing on all cylinders, it might have felt like a strange thing to do, but it didn’t. It felt right to me. And it must have felt right to Sayer, too, because the next thing I knew his arms slid around me, hauling me into him as close as he could get me. It wasn’t close enough. If I could have, I would have burrowed beneath his skin and become part of him.

“Auralia.” All he said was my name, but in that one utterance I heard it all. The fear, the desperation, the apology. The . . . love?

“Collect the prisoners!” Galen’s voice rang through our private moment, shattering it like a sledgehammer to glass.

Sayer pulled away, heading for the desk. Hiding wasn’t going to do us a whole heck of a lot of good, but that didn’t seem to be what he had in mind. Tearing off a sheet of paper from one of Ballard’s many journals, he started scribbling, while I craned my neck to see what could possibly be important enough that he’d feel the need to jot it down
now.

“I’m going to make it right, Aura. I’m going to make it all right.”

I didn’t know what he was talking about and when he swept me into his arms, I didn’t care. His lips covered mine, stealing my breath away as the door flew open and we were torn apart. Sayer was ripped from my grasp and I was left stumbling from the closet, dazed and confused.

“Aura . . .” Sayer took a measuring look at me and, seemingly satisfied with what he saw, nodded to himself. “
Run!
”

Before I could even process what was happening, Sayer had swiped the taser from one of the officer’s belts and the other was flopping around on the floor like a ragdoll.

“Hey!” The first officer grabbed a hold of Sayer’s arm, wrenching the device from his hand, but it was too late for his friend. He was out cold on the carpet.

“Run, Aura!” Sayer struggled with the officer, occupying him, buying me time.

I didn’t want to. Leaving him behind was the hardest thing I’d ever had to do, but it did neither if us any good for me to stay. So I hoisted myself out the window, dropped to the ground below. How I managed it, I’ll never know. My arms and legs shook, my head swam, my knees nearly buckled, but something kicked in. Adrenaline? Survival instincts? Utter stubbornness, maybe, but
something
fueled my stride as I ran. And I ran. Not abandoning him—
never
abandoning him—but living to fight another day. To fight for Sayer.

><><><><

The wooden floorboards were warped and entirely dislodged in places. Some kind of funky, florescent mold that could
not
be healthy climbed a good three feet up the walls. I gagged on the dank, musty stench permeating the air. Sandbags that obviously failed to do their job during the last flood season lined the walls. The dilapidated home was in bad enough condition that it had been abandoned for some time, making it the perfect place to catch my breath while I waited for my vision to go back to normal, my body to stop vibrating, and the feeling to return to my extremities.

I’d barely found my way into what may have once been a bedroom, but now sat empty and derelict, when my knees sagged. The dirt-coated floor came up to meet me like a fast rising tide and I flinched on impact. I lay there like a sad sack of potatoes, completely incapable of moving another inch.

Time was marked only by the bright moon creeping across the small window. I lingered in that place between sleep and wakefulness, barely conscious of its passing, until the banging and creaking of rotted wood demanded my focused attention.

“Auralia? Auralia, are you in here?”

My head perked up and I scanned the dim room. “Ballard?”

He appeared in the doorway, his oversized build filling the frame and I choked on my relief.

“Oh, dear.” He hustled over to my side, grabbing a sandbag on his way and positioning it beneath my head.

“How did you find me?”

“I saw you climb out the window. I was outside when the officers arrived. I didn’t know what to do, so I hid. Then I followed you. You moved faster than I imagined you could. It’s taken me this long to catch up with you. I’m not exactly in shape, but neither are you. You must rest. Your body isn’t capable of withstanding this kind of abuse.”

He didn’t need to tell me. I’d been hearing it from every bone, muscle, and tendon from the minute I’d jumped out that window. How I ever convinced my legs to run is beyond me, but they did. They carried me all the way here. All the way to safety. All the way away from Sayer. And now they’d called it quits in no uncertain terms.

“They took him.” A sob built on a volatile combination of grief, exhaustion, and desperation tore from my chest. “We have to he-help him. We h-have to he-he-help Sayer!”

“Alright, calm down. You’re getting yourself worked up. We can talk more about this in the morning.”

Worked up?
Darn right I was getting worked up. Ballard may not have particularly liked Sayer, but he’d always respected that I did. “No. We’ll talk about it now.”

“You want to help him? Because if you don’t get some rest and heal, you won’t be in any shape to help anyone.”

He had a fair point. It didn’t make the idea of napping while Sayer was trapped in Galen’s vile clutches any easier to stomach, though. My mind raced with a million terrible things that could be happening to him right that moment. It was too much. I hadn’t cried since I was a child, but tears pricked my eyes and slide under closed eyelids to trickle paths down my cheeks.

“Hush now, Auralia. Just rest. Things won’t seem so bad in the morning.”

I didn’t know how he could be so foolish, but I let my mind drift, certain that things wouldn’t seem so bad while unconscious.

><><><><

“Aura? Aura!” Sayer came barging into Ballard’s exam room at the hospital, where I happened to be delivering him lunch during his break.

“Sayer? What are you doing here?”

“We have to go. We have to get out of here. Now.” His steady gaze latched onto mine. “They know.”

My heart sank like a hydrogen fusion coil in a puddle of T2O.

“Who knows what? Where are you going?” Ballard bustled around his desk, abandoning the uneaten pastrami on rye.

I’d hoped to keep him out of this mess, but it was about to blow up in all of our faces. “The Legion is corrupt. We’ve been gathering evidence against them for months in an attempt to expose it.”

“But that’s over now.” Defeat colored Sayer’s words. “They’re on to us. We have to run.”

“What about the file?” We couldn’t take it with us. They’d never stop hunting us.

“I took care of it.” He didn’t elaborate, but I sincerely hoped it meant he’d tossed it in the incinerator. It was a painful loss, but better than letting the Legion get a look at the sheer amount of info locked away in both our heads. Somehow I doubted they’d stay attached to the rest of our bodies for much longer after that.

“You did this!” Ballard’s face turned an unnatural shade of maroon that I was altogether unsure was healthy. “You dragged her into this. Auralia would never be so stupid as to—”

“It doesn’t matter. What’s done is done. And Sayer’s right. If they know what we’ve been up to, we need to get out of here now or we’re as good as dead.”

Ballard’s intense coloring faded with his rage, morphing into something much more somber. “My girl.”

He hadn’t called me that since I was little. It twisted something inside of me and made what had to come next that much harder. “I’m sorry. I’ll miss you.”

“And I, you. You—” Ballard turned a bitter stare on Sayer. “You protect my girl. You keep her safe. You got her into this mess, you get her out of it.”

“Yes, sir.” Sayer’s gaze dropped to the floor as his jaw worked overtime.

“Say—” I didn’t really know what I was planning to say, but when a commotion broke out down the hall it became a moot point. “It’s time.”

><><><><

Sun seeped through the filthy, cracked window panes. My head seemed to have taken on a constant dull ache, rather than the stabbing pains I’d been enjoying oh-so-much. And the rest of my body appeared to be cooperating. How nice to have full use of my limbs again.

Shaking them out, I stretched my back and neck, grateful when the room didn’t dissolve into a blur of color and light.

“Auralia, you’re awake. How are you feeling, my dear?” Ballard sat on the dusty floor, day-old, rumpled clothing hanging haphazardly from his body. Despite my attempts to protect him, we’d dragged him as deep into this mess as the rest of us. He’d already lost his home, all of his possessions, his job. And who knew what the Legion would do with him if they caught him harboring a fugitive. My guess . . . Nothing pretty.

“I’m alright. How long was I asleep?”

“Just overnight. The sun came up less than an hour ago. It’s still early.”

Not early enough. Galen had Sayer for at least eight hours. Eight hours with Galen could feel like an eternity. I had no idea what they were doing to him. If he even still lived. “I have to find Sayer.”

“Auralia, he’s been taken to the Legion. I know you care for the boy, but—”

“No buts. I have to find him.”

“The Legion isn’t the type of place you simply enter and exit at will. You won’t make it through the front door before they have you in restraints, and then his sacrifice will be for nothing.”

The truth sucked.

“I have to do some—” I jammed my hands in my pockets and closed my right fist around a small piece of paper tucked inside. A piece of paper I didn’t remember putting there.

‘
You were never a coward. You’re the bravest person I know. It’s up to you now.’
was scribbled across the lined paper in Sayer’s nearly indecipherable chicken scratch, along with a series of letters and numbers.

“What is that?”

“A message. From Sayer. He doesn’t want me to rescue him, he wants me to expose the Legion.”

“That boy. Let me see that.” Ballard swiped the paper from my hand, turning it over to examine it.

Good luck. I’d worked side-by-side with him every day for three years and I still couldn’t make out half the stuff he wrote in his reports.

“What’s all this?” He poked at the code at the bottom of the page and I snatched it back before he could tear it.

“I don’t know, but I’m guessing it has to do with where he stashed that file.”

“I thought he got rid of it.”

“So did I.” I guess Sayer wasn’t as ready to give up on our mission as he’d let me believe.

“Nevertheless, I don’t know what he expected you to get from this nonsense. Or what he expected you to do with it. Hasn’t that boy caused you enough trouble?”

“For the last time, Ballard, this isn’t his fault. He was trying to do the right thing. We both were.” We were security officers, entrusted with enforcing the law, protecting people. We were doing our job. “And I’m going to finish it. I’m going to find that file and watch their whole system come crumbling down.”

“Auralia, be reasonable. You don’t even know where to begin looking for it.”

Be reasonable?
It was like he didn’t know me at all. “Then I’d better get started.”

Sitting in the frail light, watching dust motes dance on sunbeams, I ran my mind over and over the code Sayer had given me, ordering and reordering them like they could be some kind of anagram. But it contained both letters and numbers, and meant a whole lot of nothing as far as I could tell.