Quake (22 page)

Dylan pulled up short before he reached Jade, because Wade and Clara were blocking his way. Faith had some but not all of her strength back, and she knew Dylan had to be feeling the same way. They weren't strong enough to stop them both, not yet.

Hotspur's voice boomed through the corridor. “Kill the girl. She's outworn her usefulness. The sequence has begun.”

“Clara, don't!” Faith yelled. “I'll get back in my cell. Just let her go!”

“Too late for that now,” Clara said. Faith could see her face in a full bloom of black satisfaction even from faraway, down a crumbling hallway:
Oh, how I've wanted to hurt you, Faith Daniels. And killing this girl is going to hurt you more than anything else I can think of.

Dylan tried to break through Wade and Clara, but he wasn't strong enough to do it, and in that moment Jade moved gut-wrenchingly fast to one side, hitting the wall with deadly force. Her head snapped sideways and connected with stone, and then Clara was throwing her in the other direction, slamming Jade again. Back and forth, five times in the space of a few seconds, and then Jade fell to the ground like a sack of rocks.

“Now you know how it feels,” Clara said, and Faith couldn't be sure who she was talking to. Either way, there was no reason left to hold back. The only reason there had ever been was lying dead on the ground. Rage totally consumed Faith, but she had learned over time and through many regrets not to let her anger overshadow reason. She was seasoned now; she was a different person than she had been. The Quinns had taken her parents, her best friend, and her protectors. Now they'd taken an innocent girl.

“That's enough,” Faith said, barely loud enough for Clara to hear. “You've taken enough.”

Clara looked past Dylan and smiled down the crumbling corridor. “I'm just getting started.”

Faith felt herself being moved back toward her cell and pushed hard against the power of Clara's mind. Wade dove into Dylan, knocking him down as the two of them tumbled on the floor. Neither one of them would let go of the other as they struggled, using their minds to slam each other from wall to wall, closer and closer to where Faith stood.

“I see what he's doing,” Hawk said, and Faith heard his voice as if from a faraway hilltop, echoing into her ears. She held herself free of the cell, pushing back against Clara.

“I understand how this is going to happen,” Hawk's voice continued. There was a pause then, a pregnant moment of wondering, and then a sad release of all that Faith had fought for when the voice returned. “I can slow him down, but I can't stop him. It's too late.”

Faith couldn't see Jade's body any longer. Dust and debris were everywhere and the ceiling continued to quake as though it might cave in at any moment and put an end to them all. She watched as Dylan failed to overcome Wade's immense strength. Wade had pushed Dylan nearly all the way back to his cell, and now he hurled him into the wet concrete pooling on the floor in front of Faith. Dylan slid, screaming as the one thing that could get through his second pulse washed over him. It must have felt like molten lava, Faith thought. It must have burned.

She had a sudden burst of energy and thought about how she should use it before acting. Faith didn't just act, she thought about the options before her.

The gun. The gun had to go.

Faith hurled herself down the hall with everything she had, releasing herself from Clara's power. She rammed into Wade's head like a battering ram, knocking him off his feet, and there stood Clara, reaching instinctively for the gun. Faith thought of Clara's hand and forced it toward the wall as the gun came up. She pounded Clara's hand into the wall over and over and the gun went off once, then twice, sending titanium bullets ricocheting down the hall.

Clara righted herself, taking control as Faith began to feel her power waning.

“One shot left,” Clara said, standing with all the supremacy she commanded. She pinned Faith to the wall with her mind, holding her there as the gun barrel came up between her eyes. She was, possibly, the most dangerous girl on earth, and she carried it well. Faith looked into her face and thought even the scars she'd inflicted on Clara had made her more beautiful, more in command than ever before. A warrior, that's what she was. Confident beyond all reason.

This is going to be your downfall
, Faith said to herself. Her expression was confident, not fearful. She was every bit the warrior Clara was.
This is going to be your undoing. You think you're unkillable, but you're not.

Faith looked back toward Wade and Dylan and saw that Wade was holding Dylan down in the mire of liquid rock, waiting for the end. She thought but did not say
I love you, Dylan Gilmore. I never left you, not for one second
, and then she turned back to Clara.

“Now would be best,” Faith said, surprising even herself with the resolve and volume in her voice.

Clara looked at her inquisitively, a half smile on her face.

“Yes, I agree,” she said, putting pressure on the trigger of the gun. “Now
would
be best.”

Faith gazed into Clara's eyes and almost felt sorry for what her enemy had become. “I'm not talking to you.”

Clara's head tilted sideways in a way that Faith had seen before. She was catching on to something that wasn't quite right.
If not me, then who are you talking to?

But it was too late.

In that moment the gun suddenly turned on Clara, pointed into her own face, and fired. And while the titanium bullet didn't pass through her second pulse, it did knock her onto her back, the gun flying out of her hand. As soon as the gun was free it skittered down the corridor, toward a figure who was moving out of the rubble. The figure picked up the gun with her mind, opened the chamber, and saw that all the bullets were gone.

Faith felt the full force of her power return, but she didn't use it, not yet.

She let her pulse simmer and grow as Jade came into view.

“Are you okay?” Jade asked.

“Yeah, I'm okay. Are you?” Faith asked.

But Faith already knew the answer. Meredith hadn't been a second pulse, but she'd had a knack for giving birth to them. First Dylan, then Jade.

Jade was no single-pulse girl. She was a second pulse and always had been. It was a secret given to her by her mother, her secret of secrets, the one thing she could tell no one until the time was right.

Wade's jaw dropped open as he watched Jade coming closer, and Dylan had his moment. He kicked Wade hard to the right, rolling sideways and lifting himself into the air. Faith and Jade put all their combined energy into hurling Clara across the hall and into the titanium cell. The door slammed shut and locked in place.

“Hawk!” Faith yelled. Her voice had to make it through the small hole in the door and up to the speaker. “Override the locking mechanism and keep my cell closed. Now!”

“Done,” Hawk said a split second later.

Wow
, Faith thought.
He's really good.

“Someone needs to shut this thing down and fast,” Hawk said. “I'm laying virus cable as fast as I can, but the system Hotspur put in place is reactive. It's hellbent on electrocuting the Western State and everyone in it. I can only hold this thing back so long!”

Faith looked at Dylan as he wiped away as much of the wet concrete as he could.

“I'm fine; it's him I'm worried about,” Dylan said. He was looking at the same person everyone else was: Wade Quinn. Wade was glancing back and forth between all three people in the hall with a concerned look on his face. He got up off the floor and Jade lifted her arm. Wade's head bashed into the wall like a tetherball and he registered fury.

“Get in the cell, Wade,” Dylan said. “Either that or we're going to make you get in the cell. Your call.”

Wade wasn't the type to back down in a fight, even one he knew he couldn't win, so he went a little crazy. He put everything he had into punching and kicking his way out of the corridor, but it didn't take long for three second pulses to throw him into the cell Dylan had been in and secure the door. Humiliated, Wade screamed and threw himself against the walls, but these were cells made for people who had the pulse. Wade Quinn wasn't going anywhere once Hawk was in control of the door.

“You're a little trickster,” Dylan said to Jade, flashing a smile full of teeth even as Faith knew he must be hurting.

“Mom told me not to tell anyone. Not ever. She said I'd know when to use it.”

Dylan pulled her into a hug and winced. “Good old Mom. She knew what she was doing, I guess.”

“Your arms are burned,” Jade said. “They got through.”

Dylan wiped a hand across his forearm and saw the red stain of having been breached. The burns ran all up and down his arms. “Battle scars. It was about time I got a few.”

Jade smiled up at him, and they both looked at Faith.

“I think you two should stay here and make sure our newly minted prisoners don't escape,” Faith said, a new kind of command in her voice. It was the voice of a leader, not a person fueled only by anger. She looked down the hall. “I need to do this alone.”

Jade wasn't about to question Faith on this one, and Dylan was weakened more than he was letting on. It was true, they needed to keep two of them outside the cells—it was too risky to do anything less. Hotspur was a single pulse. There would be no weapon he could throw at Faith that could kill her, and he would be unprotected.

“Are you sure you can handle this alone?” Dylan asked. His voice didn't have the usual strength and his movements were still choppy and slow. He needed time to recover.

“You get your strength back,” Faith said, backing up toward the far end of the underground prison. “I'll deal with Hotspur Chance.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

Faith found three doors and checked them all as she moved down a narrow corridor lined with pipes and cords. The first two doors revealed rooms of machinery and boxes and looked to her like places that had once been occupied by computer programmers. The last door had been locked, but that was easily dealt with. Faith was at her full strength again. She backed up twenty feet, curled into a cannonball, and flew into it. The door exploded open as if the lock was made of toothpicks.

She knew something was wrong the moment she got her bearings and stood in the control room where Hotspur Chance was working. There was little doubt Hotspur knew what was going on. He was a master of surveillance and there were cameras everywhere.

It was immediately apparent that a genius was at work. Or was it twenty of them? This was the quandary that faced Faith as she looked around and saw not one but many Hotspur Chances working at various input stations around the circular room. All of them turned at once, an identical rueful smile on their many faces.

“You broke down my door,” they all said. Twenty Hotspurs smiled. “And you've imprisoned my children.” They waved their hands into the air. “Ahhh, it's all right. They have been a disappointment to me. Some discipline might do them good.”

The twenty-odd Hotspur Chances turned away and went back to what they were doing.
Electrograms?
Faith thought.

“I've got just a little more work to do here, and then we can talk. You can even kill me once I'm through. If you can find me.”

Faith walked to the first Hotspur she saw and ran a hand through its head. Her hand cut through the image as if was moving through dusty sunlight.
One of them is real; the rest are not
. She slammed a hard fist down on the workstation and expected sparks to fly, but the station was also a holographic mirage, her hand slicing through air.

“Frustrating, isn't it?” Hotspur said. His voice reverberated strangely, twenty voices on top of one another in precise unison. Three Hotspurs and their workstations vanished, then reappeared in the center of the circular room. “I'd like to help you, but I can't. I'm busy cutting through the last of Hawk's viruses. He's quite brilliant. More than I bargained for, to be fair. But he is about to fall. They all fall in the end. They are all a mere shadow of the master.”

Faith moved from Hotspur to Hotspur, slicing her fists through five of them. They vanished and reappeared in different places. It was disorienting and frustrating.

“Did it cross your mind,” they all asked at once, twenty guns being lifted off twenty desks, “that possibly Clara wouldn't be the only one with a weapon that could put an end to you?”

Faith stopped in her tracks and realized her mistake. She turned for the door and thought of running, but what good would running do? If she didn't at least try to stop this catastrophe from taking place, she would live in endless regret of how close she'd been to stopping a madman and of giving up in the face of bad odds.