Lost Energy (20 page)

He wasn't there.

WARZONE

W
e landed in chaos.

Crying echoed behind closed doors. Screaming
followed, so loud it imbedded itself into my soul, and then silence. Death
cries.

The streets were strewn with ash
and rotting garbage, the smell of corruption enough to make our eyes water. So
different from the Empyrean that once resembled heaven and smelled like fresh
bread.

The bounce and sway of the town
mixed with the stench now caused motion sickness. Stale granola torpedoed from
my stomach to my throat, leaving my mouth and landing on a heap of bloody
sheets. My foot slipped on the edge of the sodden fabric, and the sheets pulled
back to reveal bodies. At least three people, with only parts from others, were
stacked on top of each other. The body partially hidden underneath all the
others belonged to a kid, no more than five or six.

The hell grew worse farther down
the street. Beyond that heap were at least thirty more stacks of blood-covered
sheets. Heaves attacked my stomach, no longer able to release anything else. "My
God."

Farren picked me up, the knees of my
jeans now wet with the blood from innocent people. "Be strong, kid. Don't
look at them. Look at me."

His face, pale and drawn, became my
focus. I kept my eyes glued to his while he carried me into an alleyway.
Seconds later, voices penetrated the muffled cries, the cobblestone streets
echoing with loud boots stomping in uniform. Part of me wanted to leave Farren's
arms and confront the murdering bastards. A very small part. Fear, a feeling so
foreign in the last few months, tore at my insides. A scream formed in my
throat, and I had to slap a palm over my mouth and bite down to keep it inside.
Metallic blood drenched my tongue.

Farren set me down, careful not to
make any noise, after the boots faded down the next street. We stayed there,
not moving. Barely breathing. Those boots implanted in my memory, promising
nightmares. Only when they disappeared completely did I take my bloody palm
away from my mouth. I swiped my lips with the edge of my T-shirt, hand
throbbing. Adrenaline rushing through my shaky body made the blood coming from
my bite pump out faster.

Farren gasped and took off his
shirt, wrapping it around my hand. "Keep pressure on it."

My eyes traveled nowhere but his
face, afraid of what else I might discover. "Wh-what's going on?"

Farren held the shirt to my hand
himself when I refused to, his grip so tight my fingers felt like they would
pop off. "Exemplian martial law. Anyone on the streets will be shot dead.
No tasers. Straight-up mercury bullets, right to the head, chest...wherever. Traps
the energy. Guides come around and collect the bullets, take them back to
Exemplar. "

"Th-there's children…"

"Anyone, Lena. They'll kill
anyone."

I pulled my hand from his grasp and
held it close to my chest. This beautiful place, turned to ruin. "What
will they do next?"

I didn't expect an answer, but
Farren gave one. "They'll start going into the houses, killing until
Teenesee sacrifices herself."

"No." All these lives… I
would gladly take their place. "What if she gives herself up?"

Farren stuck his head out before
taking the hand I didn't mangle. "They'll kill them all anyway. This–
this
is an extermination."

A woman's scream, the same scream
that blasted the air minutes before, ripped through the vacant street, followed
by an infant's cry. I slipped away from Farren and raced to the source.

"Lena! Wait!"

His yelled whisper fueled my legs,
pushing them forward. I had to know. I had to make sure. When I reached the
house, I peered in the window to find a mother bundling her child. The woman
was all alone and had given birth on a dirty floor, the baby's umbilical cord
still connecting the two.

There was no choice. None.

Farren came up beside me, his face
now white as glue.

"We need to help her."

He shook his head, urging me away
from the window. "We can't do anything. All we can do is stick to the
plan. If we win…" He looked into the window. "Only if we win can we
help her."

I shoved by him and pushed on the
door. "Bullshit." Damn thing wouldn't budge. A rattling door was all
my shoulder checking accomplished.

The woman screamed, though softly, as
if she hadn't the energy left to even do that.

I tried again. Nothing. "Help
me."

"Lena…"

"Help me, goddamnit!" All
that mattered was the woman and her newborn child. "That baby isn't going
to end up under a bloody sheet. Not while I'm alive."

He grabbed my elbow with one hand
and covered my mouth with the other. "Which won't be long if you don't
shut the hell up."

The woman's terrified whimpering
created a whirlwind of anxiety, the beginning of a panic attack. Convincing
Farren to help her wouldn't work if hysteria took over my better judgment. Even
when footsteps approached, triggering fight or flight, flight really wanting to
win, I closed my eyes and breathed in deep. On the exhale, I opened them and
took his hand from my mouth. "Please, Farren. Don't let them die."

He tore his gaze from mine to
inspect the footsteps coming closer. Shaking his head, he pushed me aside, and with
little effort, jarred the door open. The woman's cries grew more persistent as
I raced to her, her baby clutched tighter in her weak arms. Blood covered the
floor around her.

"Shh…I'm here to help." I
reached for the baby, and she cringed holding her bundle closer.

Rapid sentences flew from her lips,
mostly coming out as warbled, incoherent yelps.

"I'm sorry… I don't speak
Empyrean. Um…Desis? Do you understand?

Her words, still undecipherable,
sounded like pleas.

I turned to Farren, who stood by
the door, holding it shut. "You speak Empyrean?"

He nodded without looking at me,
concentrating on the window.

"Tell her we're here to help."

His attention left the window long
enough to give her the message, the language as beautiful as the world used to
be. When he finished speaking, the woman, not much older than me, let go of her
child with one hand and grabbed the front of my T-shirt. She said something
else, sounding more hopeful, relieved.

"Yes, please," I held a
finger to my lips, "shhh…"

She smiled, though it did nothing
to help put color in her face, her lips white. Footsteps grew louder until we
could hear voices mixed in. They were close, right outside the door. Farren,
tense and still as stone, stayed hidden in the shadows by the door, his
attention never leaving the men and women outside, who laughed and joked. Slowly,
I reached for a blanket lying on the other side of the woman and covered
myself, leaving an opening large enough to keep an eye on the window. When the
mother gave me a confused glare, I held a finger to my lips again and shook my
head.

Static filled my head, like white
noise. The invasion grew thick, clouding everything but the desire to leave the
blanket and run outside. I knew better. Attraction wasn't always healthy. I
learned that after Zander. No, there were Guides outside. A lot of them. I clenched
my jaw, concentrating on keeping my butt planted on the wooden floor. Magnetism
sucked.

As the Protectors and their Guides
moved away from the window, the baby let out a high-pitched mewling cry. I
scooted farther into the corner, trying to blend with the furniture right
before two of the bastards peered through the window. The doorknob creaked,
Farren's grip tightening, though his face remained stoic, ready to fight. One
Protector, a woman, grinned when she spotted the baby, crying and fussing in the
mother's arms. She lifted her gun and tapped it on the windowpane, acting as if
she pulled the trigger. The mother cried. No tears came, only the sounds. Her
body had no more fluid left, dehydration already having a firm grip.

Fear no longer sat in my gut.
Hatred, black and heavy, made my fingertips tingle. I'd only ever wanted to
kill another human being once in my life, and what I felt for Casimir didn't
even compare to the desire I had to gouge the Protector's eyes out before
crushing her windpipe. Hatred overwhelmed all my senses. I could smell it,
acidic and rotten.

The Protector laughed when the
mother passed out and signaled her partner to move on. Farren and I stayed
still for a while longer, even though there was a good possibility the mother
lay dead with a crying infant in her hands. When the static disappeared, I shot
Farren a questioning look. "They didn't feel us."

He came over. "With all their
static, ours would've gone unnoticed."

Good enough answer for me. I rushed
to the woman's side, checking for a pulse. "She's alive, barely."

Finding a pulse ran the extent of my
medical knowledge. Farren kneeled down beside her, thankfully knowing more. "Check
the kitchen for water, a medical kit, clean blankets…"

He rattled off other things, and I
sped around the small one-floor home finding everything he asked for. As soon
as I found the medical kit hiding under the bathroom sink, I rushed over to
him, two carafes of water bunched in my sore hand.

Farren ripped open the metal box and
pulled out foreign supplies, most glowing the same color green as those rocks
the farmers threw at the Protectors during the initial attack. He unsheathed a
large syringe and tapped on the inside of the woman's elbow before plunging the
bright liquid into her vein. Her eyes burst open, panic making the whites
bright. Farren reassured her with lyrical words I wished I understood.

As she calmed, he held a hand out. "Water."

I jammed a carafe in his palm, my
concern switching to the quiet infant. Farren must've been reading my mind
because as the woman drank, amazingly having enough strength to hold the water
herself, he motioned for me to squat down beside him. "We have to cut the
cord."

"What do I need to do?"

He said something else to the woman
who released her hold on the child, misery coloring her still pale cheeks. The
baby, blue and not breathing, landed in my outstretched hands. I ground my
teeth in an effort to keep the horror from my face and a moan from my lips.

After a quick examination of the
baby, Farren went to work clamping the cord before using a tiny laser to cut
through it. Taking another syringe filled with the same green liquid, and after
spending a little more time finding a delicate vein in the child's leg, he
pushed the plunger in. In no time, the baby's complexion turned pink and a
lusty cry followed. Music. The sound was music, plain and simple.

I pulled the blankets back a little
more and smiled through tears before handing the child to her mother. "It's
a girl."

When Farren repeated my words in
Empyrean, the woman smiled, her deep brown eyes glistening. She wasted no more
time and unbuttoned her blouse to give her daughter access to food. In seconds,
the baby quieted all but for the suckling while she ate her first meal.

I wiped the tears off my cheeks,
the pain in my hand now letting me know it was there, making me wince. "A
miracle."

Farren sat back, a deep sigh escaping
his lips, sweat shining on his forehead. "Yeah, kid. The best kind of
them."

I sat beside him, trying not to
gawk at the woman as she cooed and sang to her child. "What was that
stuff?"

"Don't really know. Empyrean
magic?" He brushed the hair away from his eyes. "Same shit that keeps
Exemplian bodies young and healthy. Main ingredient, at least."

"Serious?"

He snorted. "Why do you think
this dimension is–damn–
was
so perfect? Exemplar needed to keep it
fertile."

Winston's revelation came back to
me; he called it Empyrean magic too. "This is where they get the power to help
generate people like…like us, too, right?"

Farren gave a sidelong glance and
shrugged. "It'd make sense."