Glow (24 page)

76.

Lucy

Integrity writhers in pain at the slightest touch of my hand. My hand that’s healed everyone else, even the worst, like Reagan, won’t heal him. It hurts him; his foggy energy can’t accept the pure light I offer.

“Tell me what the Rainbow Children means,” I ask, my voice steady. The Rainbow Children prophesy is the real reason I agreed to come here with Lukas. It was a truth I could not deny. It is what Lukas and I
are.

“I’ll never speak,” he snarls.

I press my hand harder against him, causing him to seize.

“Ahhhh!” He screams out in pain. I have no pleasure in this. It’s killing me to do this to a man I minutes go considered a grandfather. “It was a legend, an old story in books you could read on energy, light energy. And I wanted it to be true.”

“So you just made it up, put it in your bible, decided it was truth?” I scream, horrified for all the Vessels here who have accepted his lies. Built their lives around them.

“It was for the best. Everyone was happy. I always,” he clutches his heart, gasping as my green light pushes against his murky grey clouds. “I wanted to believe in the power of light energy, and look … it
is
real. The Rainbow Children legend is fact. Look at you!” Integrity grasps his heart.

“You brought us back here, to be your puppets. The Rainbow Children, the prophecy, just things you wrote down … all lies….”

Integrity falls to his knees, collapsing in pain. My light is killing him.

“You poor child, you are just aberrations born in a dead world. This is all for show.” He holds his hands up to the Refuge, the place he’s lived his entire adult life. “And I can die knowing the power was nearly mine.”

He slumps over. The muddled grey energy disappears with his breath.

“Oh, God!” I scream, bending over, falling just like Integrity has. My hand is in pain, as it worked so hard against him. And now he is dead.

“It’s okay, Lucy. It’s okay.” Lukas holds my hand, covering me with his white light. My sobs overwhelm me, the truth overwhelms me.

Overwhelms us all.

Because I came back here, to this Refuge, ready to take on The Light, the responsibility. Once again I’ve allowed myself to walk right into the hands of another who was leading me down a path of lies, deception. Into the hands of a man who was desperate enough for power, that he was willing to take my life from me. To take Lukas’s life from him.

“What now?” I hear Colton ask. And even though things should feel hard, impossible, with what just happened with Integrity, with my plans shattered before me, I’m not walking on shards of glass. I’m walking on fire. The fire inside of me. Not the angry, consuming kind. The kind that ignites. The kind that keeps me alive.

“Now we need to take care of the Councilmen,” I say, knowing exactly what we need to do.

77.

Lukas

We walk out of the Great Room into the daylight. The Councilmen are still staked to the ground where we left them, with some of the cowboys keeping watch, in case anything suspicious starts up again. The Councilmen seem so far removed from me, far from the days and years I spent listening to their directions, their commands for how I was to live my life.

Their lives are in my hands now that Integrity is gone. This entire life was a game, where I was the ultimate pawn. The game is over and they’ve lost.

I wish it felt like I won.

I want to say it’s more shocking then it feels. But really, everything about my life has been out of my control, why should Integrity’s revelation have been any different? Those strong currents of pride I felt earlier in the Haven, were false.

I believed something that wasn’t true. It was all based on the premise that Lucy and I had a higher calling, a bigger purpose. That the Rainbow Children prophesy in Junie’s foolish book was more than just someone’s attempt to make sense of the world.

I feel a fool, but also more like myself than ever. I have always just been a battery, a source for someone else’s power. I wish everything wouldn’t have had to come crashing down to realize just how human I am.

“Lukas, I want to heal them,” Lucy says to me, staring at the men who’ve caused so much destruction.

“No, don’t say that.” I pull back from her, not understanding. If there is one way I’m going to prove once and for all that I’m not anyone’s puppet, it’s right now. I’ll show everyone who I am with a gun and nine bullets.

The Vessel, who let Integrity know the file was missing, walks out of the Refuge with a group of Vessels. Humblemen begin to pour out of the doors behind them. The courtyard overflows and people cover their faces, as they see real sunlight, some for the first time in their lives.

“I don’t think they knew what was out here,” Jax says, swallowing hard, clenching his jaw. The truth in that nauseates and numbs. It’s so wrong.

“These girls really never came outside?” Duke asks.

Agreement shakes her head. I know the truth of it, too. I’ve let this happen. An easy excuse is to say I never knew better, but I did. Somewhere inside I did, because I saw true love between my parents and I’ve always known there was more to life than the rules inside the Refuge.

I was scared and chose to never ask why. Why keep them so sheltered? Why keep them inside? Why not teach them to read, to write, to think?

To love.

The cowboys are outside, and now hundreds of people surround us as we look on at the Councilmen who are oblivious to it all. Whispers of Integrity’s death and The Light being a farce surround us. Lucy looks tormented as to what she wants to say next. I don’t understand why now, of all times, she’d want to give in to the men who have done this. I need to fight back. For once, I need to do more than just blindly turn my head.

“I mean it,” Lucy says firmly, surprising me. “I don’t want to kill anyone. No one else dies. I am sick of it.” Her voice gets louder, and everyone listens to her words. “Integrity revealed the truth about The Light. He founded this religion, he wrote the Sacred Text. It is nothing more than a giant charade.”

Cries go out in the crowd, we’re crushing the people we’ve dedicated ourselves to in the Haven.

“This is bullshit!” Basil screams. “They’re monsters!”

“Lucy.” I take her hand. “It was a farce these men had a role in perpetrating, they should pay!” I instantly feel the divide as people either raise their hands or shirk away.

“Justice can look a lot of different ways,” Lucy says, grabbing my arms, as though urging me to see. Jax nods his head behind her. “It’s not just good and bad, light and dark. It’s more complicated than that.”

Honor runs out of the crowd, falling down at her husband Discernment’s feet, where he is staked. “Don’t kill the man I am Bound to. He didn’t know. We really believed in the prophecy. I
still
want to
believe.
” Honor breaks down at her mate’s feet.

I can’t help but think, at least in some small way, a twinge of understanding. There
is
a possibility these Councilmen didn’t know.

That they were just as blind as the rest of us.

As blind as me.

Lucy takes my hand in hers, “Lukas, remember when I agreed to come back here with you?” Her eyes are fierce, as she bores hers into mine.

“I remember,” I say, because I do. I agreed to her terms because I was scared I’d lose her. “I told you if you came, I would give you whatever you wanted.”

“I want to let them live. If they die, it won’t be by our hands. I don’t want to do to them what I just did to Integrity. It was wrong. And twisted. Light shouldn’t be used like this. This energy, poured into us when the world went dark, wasn’t meant to be used this way.”

“You want to set them free? To hurt more people?”

“We can’t know what they will do, Lukas. We can only give them a chance to do better. I’d give….” She starts crying again and I brush her tears away, hating to see her breaking like this. Wanting to do anything to take away her pain. “I would give my father another chance. After all of this, all the messes that his fear caused me. I would. I would give him a chance to do it right.”

“I will never be as good as you.”

“I’m not good. I am just a girl. A girl who has seen too much. A girl who wants the madness to end. Help me.”

“For you, Lucy, I will do anything.”

“Do it for you, Lukas. Do it because it’s right.”

I swallow, knowing that somehow she still considers me to be better than I really am. She sees the best, believes the best. Believes in me. Maybe it’s time I started believing in myself. 

I turn to the crowd and tell them our decision. I know some people are mad and disappointed. Others cry out relief, because they know death doesn’t lead to life.

And I take Lucy’s face, and I kiss her lips and I hold her tight, pulling her body to mine. She is the thing that is keeping me honest.

Keeping me brave.

Keeping me whole.

78.

Charlie

I run down the landing, towards the boat. I need Perfection to be here, with me. I see her standing over the top deck, holding Hana’s hand.

“Come down, you need to be here for this!” I call out to her.

They turn around and in minutes Perfection and Mom run down the stairs.

“Lucy wants to free the Councilmen, Integrity’s dead. I don’t know what’s gonna happen next. But your Mom will want to see you. She’s alive and well.”

“So there hasn’t been any sort of fight?” Mom asks, confused.

“No. The Councilmen have all been blacked out.”
Like you did to Lukas.
“And Lucy wants to bring them back, and let them live. Lukas will do anything Lucy says at this point.”

“Lucy has too much control over him.” Mom says, shaking her head, running up the hill to the Refuge.

“I don’t think it’s that simple.”

“Nothing is,” Perfection says, taking my hand. “Except you and me.” She kisses me quickly on the lips, and we run after Mom.

Once at the courtyard, I see that Honor has helped produce some of the anti-shock guns that were used on Lucas and Lucy.

“I think we should all take a different Councilman, and the cowboys surround us, with backup. We don’t know what they will do when they wake up. But we need to give them a chance, at least,” Lucy says.

“I get Head Councilman Conviction. I want to see the look in his eye when he sees me holding a gun to his head,” Lukas says.

“It’s an
anti-shock gun
,” Junie says, rolling her eyes.

“I know. It’s the principle of the thing, though,” Lukas says, ignoring her.

Basil takes a gun for Resolve.

And Duke for Rely, Agreement’s mate.

Perfection takes one for her father, Discernment.

Jax, Colton, Junie, Ernie, and Layla take guns for the rest of the Councilmen standing, staked to the ground.

I step back, not wanting to wield anything, for good or bad. This was never my battle in the same way it was for the rest of the people here. I didn’t lose parts of myself to The Light.

I stand next to Lucy knowing she’s like me in this, too. She’s only grown strong from her time here. She’s a different girl then the terrified one I met so many weeks ago. A girl scared to live. Wanting so badly to touch the sun with her fingertips, just to be sure she as alive.

She’s alive now, completely.

“You changed everything, Lucy,” I tell her, knowing the moment she walked out of her compound, she changed the world.

She changed us all.

“I was just at the right place at the wrong time.” She smiles, tucking her short hair behind her ear. She looks ahead at the bright sun, high in the sky.

“I guess I don’t need to wish to rise and fall with the sun do I, Charlie?”

“Nope. You can be yourself wherever you go.”

“It’s scary, isn’t it? Being yourself.”

“It’s scarier not.”

*****

The guns are held the same way they were when Lucy and Lukas were taken out of their blackout. The cowboys surround the Councilmen and they secured their hands tightly behind their back. Restraining them seemed like the safest choice, since the entire fold is standing here, watching this develop.

The group presses the devices against their foreheads, letting out the strong surges that visibly pulse through the Councilmen’s bodies. They writher and shake, and then eyes begin to open.

“Oh thank God,” Lucy whispers. Her forgiveness has no bounds. She runs to Lukas, planting a kiss on his cheek.

Perfection pulls me over to her, and the rest of the group, who have dropped their hands with their grip still on the guns. As if they aren’t sure when they will be needed next.

The Councilmen looked dazed, and sputtered in confusion. They try to grab hold of their bearings, but it’s impossibly hard without the use of their arms of legs.

“Nobleman, you did this?” Head Councilman Conviction asks Lukas, squinting his eyes, trying to understand what has happened to him, to everyone.

“Did what? Live a lie? Play your game? Watch Integrity die?” he asks, unrestrained. “Yes, I did all those things.”

“Why are you suddenly ready to take control?” he asks.

“I have nothing left to lose. That’s the thing. None of us do. Except you.”

And I swear if he had a real gun right now in his hands, he would shoot him.

Luckily, I do.