Out Of The Ashes (The Ending Series, #3) (8 page)

“Yep.” I moved
across the trampled grass to stand in front of him. “And if anyone can, he’s
the one who can help you figure out how to do the electrotherapy thing safely
and effectively
and
learn how to control that whole zapping people
thing.” I looked up, met Carlos’s eyes, and waited.

A second.

Three.

Twenty.

Carlos pressed
his lips into a flat line, inhaled deeply, and nodded. “Fine. Okay. Yeah, I’ll
do it.”

“You will?” I
said, doing a really poor job of hiding my surprise. Jason’s stubbornness had
been rubbing off on Carlos in a really unfortunate way.

Carlos looked at
the ground. “Yeah, but…not yet. I mean, I want to get a little better at all
this first, and…can we
not
tell Jason?” He met my eyes briefly, then
looked away. “It’s just that he hates Gabe, and I don’t want him to, like,
think I’m betraying him or something.”

My stomach flip-flopped,
making me feel a little ill. “Uh…yeah. Sure. Why not?”
What’s the harm in
one more secret, anyway?

I ignored the
part of me that whispered,
You mean, what’s the harm in one more
lie
?

“We can help,
too,” Mase said as he stepped out from between two of the carts, little more
than a hulking shadow.

I yelped and
jumped at least a foot off the ground. “Jesus, Mase!”

“Sorry.” Mase
ducked his head as he moved closer. Camille followed close behind him, her own
slender, shadowed form half his size. They stopped a yard or so away from
Carlos and me. “I knew you had first watch tonight, and we wanted—”

Camille hit his
arm with the back of her hand.

Scowling, Mase
corrected himself. “
I
wanted to tell you something
Camille
told me
earlier.”

My eyebrows rose
as my gaze slipped from Mase’s hard, dark features to Camille’s pale, elfin
face. She wouldn’t meet my eyes. I glanced down at the small dry-erase board
she was clutching to her chest. It was another of the items we’d taken from Colorado
Trails Lodge. Camille still wasn’t “speaking” much, but it seemed that Mase had
managed to get her writing during the hours they’d spent driving a cart
together earlier today.

I returned my
attention to Mase.

“Dr. Wesley is a
liar.”

I frowned and
glanced at Carlos, who shrugged before pulling himself back up onto the wagon. I
refocused on Mase. “About…?”

“She loves him.”

I cocked my head
the side. “I’m sorry, Mase, I’m not following…”

“Father—General
Herodson. She loves him.”

My mouth fell
open. “That’s not…” I started to shake my head. “That’s not possible.” She’d
gone out of her way to save me by making the neutralizer and attuning it to my
blood—twice. And Zoe…Dr. Wesley had shown up before Clara—the General’s shiny
new toy—could do more harm to Zoe than simply wiping away her memories. Dr.
Wesley had been leading the anti-Herodson rebellion by supplying neutralizer to
a trusted few, including Gabe and, before he’d been killed and made into a Re-gen,
Mase. She
hated
General Herodson.

Except…she hadn’t
really done anything to stop him, and she had an Ability that could tear the
foundation of his power, his mind-control Ability, right out from under his
feet. She was even stronger than Jason and could probably nullify every damn
Ability in the Colony all at the same time. So why hadn’t she? Why didn’t she
do it after the Virus—the gene therapy—destroyed the world as we knew it and
the General could no longer keep tabs on Dr. Wesley’s family, could no longer
hold their well-being over her head as additional motivation to behave?

“Before Camille
died,” Mase said, “she overheard a conversation between Dr. Wesley and someone
else.” Mase’s dark gray eyes were wide, imploring. He looked from me to
Camille. “Show her what you showed me.”

I, too, looked at
Camille.

Slowly, she
pulled the small whiteboard away from her chest and turned it around so I could
see the words, bubbly and slanted to the left.

Mase pointed to
the board. “That’s what Camille heard the doctor say.”

The board said:
“
I won’t leave…won’t abandon him. I love
him too much.
”

My mouth was
filled with sand. With cotton. With bile. I closed my eyes, took deep breaths,
and somehow managed to convince myself not to lash out at Camille. It wasn’t her
fault that Dr. Wesley was an even worse human being than I’d originally
thought…though I
did
wish Camille had spoken up earlier, so to speak.

I was now certain
of two things: I could never, ever tell Jason the truth about his mom, and I
couldn’t trust anything
that woman
had written in her letter to me, not
to mention whatever else she’d included in the “care package” wrapped in a
manila envelope she’d left with mind-wiped Zoe in Colorado Springs.

I opened my eyes,
swallowing my rage.

Camille’s pale
gray eyes were locked on mine, and she reached out to take my hand in hers and
give it a squeeze. She let go of my hand and wiped the words off the dry-erase
board with the sleeve of her sweatshirt. Hastily, she scrawled,
“
I trusted her, too.
”
She met
my eyes, then continued writing.
“
And she betrayed
me.
”
Her gaze flicked to Mase, filling with an
overabundance of pain.
“
She promised me that everything would be
okay. She promised to look out for him.
”
Camille
wiped her words away again.
“
SHE LIED.
”

I inhaled and
exhaled slowly, then sent a sidelong glance over my shoulder at Carlos. He was
watching the woods beyond the field.

“Do you know who
she is…I mean, who she
really
is?” I met both Re-gens’ eyes.

Camille wrote on
her board, and when she showed her words to me, my heart seemed to plummet into
my stomach.
“
Jason and Zoe’s mom.
”

As I kept an eye
on Carlos, I swiped my fingers over the words, doing a half-assed job of
erasing them. At least they were no longer easily comprehensible. When I looked
at Mase again, he nodded.

“
How
do
you know?”

“
She told me before I died,
”
Camille wrote.
“
She said she was
sorry for her part in my mom getting sick and dying
”
—Camille snorted, and her letters became sharper
—
“
not that she told me
what
her part was.
”
She met my eyes, and I could relate to the hatred shining in
their silvery depths.
“
And she told me she did it to keep her
kids, Zoe and Jason, safe.
”

“And apparently
because she’s in fucking love with General Douchebag,” I muttered.

Mase grunted.

I met both sets
of eerily gray eyes again. “You can’t tell anyone.” I raised my eyebrows to
emphasize how serious I was. “I mean it—
no one
.”

They both nodded,
no hint of reluctance.

Inhaling deeply,
I sighed. “Thanks for telling me. I needed to hear this…it’ll help me figure
some stuff out.”

Mase nodded, and
Camille’s lips curved into a humorless smile.

I rubbed my hands
together and turned to Carlos. “Right, so…about electrotherapy…”

7

ZOE

MARCH 29, 1AE

San Juan National Forest, Colorado

“Whoops!” Sarah chirped.

Wringing out the last of the wet
laundry I’d just scrubbed clean, I glanced over at her. With one hand braced on
the slim trunk of a pine tree, Sarah began to slowly lower herself down to
collect the t-shirt she’d dropped on the newly sprouted grass lining the retention
pond’s bank.

“Sarah!” I jumped up from my
crouched position at the pond’s shore, letting one of Harper’s shirts fall back
into the water, and rushed over to her. “I’ll get it,” I said. I wiped the
water trickling down my bare arms onto my pants and helped Sarah straighten
back up before bending down to pick up the shirt myself.

After shaking the loose debris
off, I draped the shirt beside the rest of the freshly-washed clothing that
hung over a nylon rope we’d strung between two sturdy pines. “The last thing I
need is you toppling over on my watch,” I said, only half joking.

Sarah flashed me a halfhearted
smile. “Thanks, Zoe.” One of her hands automatically found her belly, while the
other went back to straightening the clothes hanging on the line to dry in the
early morning sunshine.

Returning to Harper’s water-soaked
shirt, I wrung it out once more and shook the wrinkles loose. “Here ya go,” I
said, handing it up to Sarah with an insuppressible yawn. I’d been trying to
ignore my encroaching sleepiness since I’d woken. “Sorry,” I said, shaking
thoughts of sleep from my brain.

“Not sleeping well, Zoe?” Sarah
asked as she draped Harper’s shirt over an exposed portion of the line.

I yawned again. “No, not really.”

Sarah glanced down at me, her brow
furrowed. It was an uncommon expression for her. She was always so…bubbly. “Why
not? Is everything okay?” She turned—more like hobbled—to face me. Her
expression was intent as she brushed her hands off on her ankle-length skirt.

“I’m fine,” I said, waving her
concern away. “I just had a…strange dream last night.” Leaning down to avoid
eye contact, I collected the liquid soap and scrub brush I’d been using for the
last hour. “I had a hard time falling back asleep is all.”

That wasn’t all, actually.
Thinking about the dream had more than kept me up, and it had been smoldering
in the back of my mind since the sun had come up.

“What sort of dream?” Sarah asked,
her head cocked to the side as she rubbed her hands over her belly. She looked
like a bohemian princess, with her dark curls falling messily around her face.

One vivid image after another from
my dream flashed before my mind’s eye. I shrugged and rinsed my hands off in
the creek, trying to avoid her seeing my beet-red face. “Just a random dream.”

Gathering my cleaning supplies, I
dropped them into a canvas bag and looked up, freezing immediately.

Sarah’s hands were on her hips,
her eyebrows raised as she waited for an explanation.

She obviously wasn’t going to let
it go, so I cleared my throat. “I’ll tell you, but don’t…”

“Don’t what?” she asked
skeptically.

“Just don’t judge me, okay? And
don’t say anything to anyone. It’s sort of embarrassing.” I dropped the bag of
supplies into the empty wheelbarrow we’d used to carry the bags of dirty
laundry down to the pond. “I had a dream about Jake last night…an”—I
swallowed—“
intimate
dream. It left me a little…distracted.”

Sarah burst into laughter. “Is
that all? Well, that doesn’t seem so bad. I probably wouldn’t have gotten any
sleep either.”

My body warmed and tingled as I
remembered the sensation of Jake’s lips trailing down my neck and the heat of
his touch as his fingertips drew a line between my breasts. I couldn’t help but
look down at my chest, remembering…it was like I could still feel his hot
breath against my skin.

“That good, huh?” I heard her say.
“Zoe?” I glanced at Sarah to find a huge smile engulfing her face. “You’re
thinking about him right now, aren’t you?”

“No,” I said in exasperation. “Of
course not.”

“Liar!” She giggled, but when she
saw my mortification, she took a few steps closer and placed her hands on my
shoulders. “What’s wrong with thinking about him? You’re together… it’s normal,
don’t you think?”

My head was shaking before I could
stop it. “We
were
together, Sarah. It’s different now. Besides, I don’t
remember any of it…it’s like he was with someone else, you know?”

Sarah’s mouth quirked at the
corner, and she stared at me, sympathetic. “You don’t want to be with Jake
anymore?”

“It’s not that, I just—we haven’t
been together, we haven’t even held hands really. Thinking about us doing more
than that is…daunting.”

“But why? It’s Ja—because you
don’t remember him. Sorry, I keep forgetting.” She waved her ignorance away. “I
blame it on the pregnancy. It’s like my brain doesn’t have room for any more
information or something.”

I picked a rogue leaf from one of
her flyaway curls. “It’s not that he scares me. I mean…I’m petrified around
him, but that’s only because I’m completely clueless about what to do…how to
act. He thinks about
her
when he’s around me. At least, from what I can feel.
He’s really difficult for me to read.” Putting my hands on my hips, I let my
head fall back and exhaled my frustration. “I feel so stupid.”

Jake’s uncertainty around me and
his apparent fear of what I might rediscover made it clear enough that there
were some intense, private moments to be seen, and a part of me was secretly
grateful he’d been keeping his distance. The pressure to be
that
Zoe
made it difficult to just go with the flow and let things happen.

“You’re just curious and nervous,
Zoe. That seems normal.” A knowing smile filled her face, and her eyebrows
lifted before she winked. “Just give it some more time.”

I appreciated her attempt to
lighten the mood, but her teasing wasn’t helping. I buried my face in my hands,
trying to gather my thoughts. “As it is, it’s hard trying to be someone I don’t
remember ever being on a daily basis. I mean, I’m not complaining. I know worse
could’ve happened, but…”

“But what?”

“It’s like there are
expectations…expectations I can’t possibly live up to. What if being with me is
like being with someone else? The last thing I want is to finally work up the
nerve to kiss him, or let him kiss me, only to learn he wishes I was someone
else. I might be a shit kisser now.” I groaned, leaning against one of the
trees. “I don’t think I’m ready for that sort of rejection yet.”

“But it’s you, Zoe. It’s not just
some other woman; it’s you. You have to remember that.”

“Easier said than done,” I
grumbled. “I just feel bad for putting him through this…”

“It’s
only
been a week. Do
you know how long it took you guys just to say a few cordial words to each
other in the beginning?”

I shook my head.

She tapped her index finger on her
lips. “I don’t either, actually, but it was a while,” she said. “Look, Jake
cares about you…a lot. It’s obvious.
You
can even
feel
it, can’t
you?” She nudged my shoulder. “He knows you’re different; we all do. Neither
Jake—nor anyone else, for that matter—expects you to be the same as you were
before.”

I knew that wasn’t true—only
moments ago, Sarah herself admitted to forgetting I wasn’t the old me, to
expecting me to
react
like
the old me—but I kept my observations
to myself.

“Maybe you just need to give it a
little bit more time.”

Knowing she was right, that
regardless of the pressure I felt, at least some of it was only in my head, I
smiled. “Yeah, you’re probably right. Thanks, Sarah.”

She nudged my shoulder again.
“Alright, let’s get back to camp. I’m ravenous.”

As I bent down to collect the
folding chair Sarah had been using for her frequent breaks, I noticed a full
linen bag resting up against the side of the large rock we’d been using to
place the folded stacks of clean clothes that had been drying overnight. “Um,
Sarah?”

“Hmm?” I looked over to see her
wiping water from her mouth, an empty plastic bottle in her hand. “God, I love
this stuff,” she breathed. “What’s up?”

“How many bags of laundry did we
have to do this morning?”

Sarah squinted, and I could tell she
was mentally counting. “Three—oh, crap.” She took a step toward me and peered
over to the other side of the rock. “Crap. I knew that seemed to go by way too
fast.” As if it were trained to do so, her stomach rumbled.

“Go back to camp,” I said on a
heavy exhale. “I’ll finish up here.”

“Are you sure?”

I dumped the contents of the
half-filled bag onto the ground. “It’s fine. Go ahead. I wouldn’t want you to
starve or anything.”

Sarah smiled gratefully. “Are you
sure you won’t be mad?”

I nodded and snagged my bag of
gathered supplies out of the wheelbarrow. “I got this.”

“Alright, Zoe. Thank you. I owe
you big-time.”

“Yeah you do,” I muttered
playfully, dropping the bag by the water’s edge. “Just leave me one of those
chocolate bars I saw stashed in your secret hiding place.”

Sarah’s mouth dropped open, and
her eyes widened. “How did you…”

Resisting a grin, I pretended to
zip my mouth shut. “Just leave me a bite, would ya?”

“Alright,” she grumbled and headed
back to camp.

I crouched down to separate the
dirty shirts and socks. Although it wasn’t the most luxurious job in the world,
it was a necessary task and something I could do without feeling inadequate, so
I happily washed the laundry with Sarah when needed. It felt good to
contribute, even in the smallest way. Plus, it gave me time to think.

I diligently scrubbed one shirt
and then another until I was finished and they were rinsed, then I moved on to
the socks. Most of the time, I was around people and unable to block their invading
memories and emotions; no matter how hard I tried, I’d yet to figure out how to
stop sensing them.

Although I initially thought it
was exciting and useful to gain insight into the minds of the people I was
surrounded by, it quickly grew bothersome. Like Dani, now
I
had to hold
onto the knowledge that my mom loved the General—the man we were practically
running for our lives to get away from. It was just one more item to add to the
list of things Jason didn’t know. Plus none of my companions liked having to
worry about what I was gleaning from their minds, and some even avoided me
outright. Cleaning the laundry was somewhat therapeutic, and it enabled me to
have time away from the others to collect my
own
thoughts.

Hearing muffled conversation
through the sparse trees beyond the pond, I glanced over my shoulder just in
time to see Sam and Tavis emerge through a small copse of trees.

“Zoe!” Sam waved at me. He held up
a string of rabbits attached to a tether. “We caught dinner!”

“Nice!” I called back, submerging
someone’s socks into the water before squirting a blob of liquid laundry soap
onto them and working the fabric clean. “You mean we won’t starve?”

“Not today,” Tavis answered as
they sauntered over. “Oh, good, you’re cleaning my socks. I’m running low.”

I stopped mid-scrub. “Oh, they’re
yours? In that case…” I pretended to toss them into the center of the pond.

“Such a comedian,” he said.

Sam started toward camp. “You
coming, Tavis?”

Tavis shook his head. “I better
stay here and protect my socks.” He grinned at me.

“Alright,” Sam said. With a sigh,
he trudged away, rabbit tether in hand.

For a few moments, only the sound
of the scrub brush against the cotton socks and the trickling of water as Tavis
rinsed off his hands filled the morning.

As I wrung the water from the last
sock, an unexpected ripple broke at the pond’s edge, splashing me. “Jesus,
Tavis. Do you have to wash your hands so enthusiastically?” I glared over to
find him crouched and picking at something on the ground.

He looked at me. “What?”

“Nothing,” I said, shaking my
head. I needed a nap to rest my addled brain.

Eventually, Tavis wandered over to
me and stared out at the cloudless sky. “The weather here is funny,” he said.
“I’m used to the seasons at home. It should be getting colder, not warmer. I like
it, though. I’m not much of a winter kind of guy.”

“Really?” I said. I hadn’t thought
much about it. “I think I like the cold. I especially like the mornings.
Everything seems fresh and new. There’s something about the crisp water, too;
it’s refreshing. Sort of awakens my senses a little.”

Tavis made a noncommittal noise.

“Hang these up on the line for me,
would you?” I waited until Tavis turned to face me and tossed each balled-up
sock at him consecutively, laughing as he juggled to catch them all without
dropping any.