Rush (32 page)

“That fast?” It isn’t a question. More an expression of horror. “What happens when they get here?

“They destroy.”

I shiver, imagining it. Just last night I saw a trailer on TV for a new video game. It starts with children playing in the sunshine, heads tipping up one by one as a massive dark shadow moves across the sky. Then flames, cries, destruction. The alien ships come and fire on Earth. Everything burns. Everyone dies. I shake my head to clear the image. I need to focus on the here and now. But it won’t clear. It lingers and morphs and I see a world burning. Not my world.
Theirs
. They’re showing me the truth of the Drau invasion. They’re showing me the destruction of their world, pushing horrific images through my thoughts.

It’s far worse than anything I could have imagined.

Panting, I press my fists to my forehead, trying to make the images stop, trying to make the death cries fall silent. The heat of the flames sears me. My heart pounds as I watch my ancestors herded into pens. They look like humans, all different shapes and sizes, their cries of fear and pain the same as human cries of fear and pain. They’re killed. Cut into manageable-sized portions. My whole body trembles. My lungs scream but the air is too hot and filled with choking ash. I almost fall. Jackson catches my elbow, holding me upright. At his touch, the pain and horror don’t disappear, but they ease enough that I can draw a breath.

“Enough.” The word slices through the room, through my thoughts, through the screams, slick as steel. Jackson’s voice, barking an order.

And the Committee obeys.

The images, the noise, the terror . . . they all stop, like someone pulled a plug and the projector went dark.

I just stand there, my heart beating so hard it feels like it’s jumping into my throat. “You said the Earth will be no more? The world? The whole world? Like that? Like what they did to you?”

“The whole world,” the Committee agrees. “Like that.”

I must make a sound, or maybe I sway on my feet, because Jackson’s there, shoulder to shoulder with me, his arm looping around my waist, offering silent support. I don’t look at him. I don’t dare. I need to keep it together, keep my emotions locked down. I should step away, rely only on myself. But I can’t manage to do it. Instead, I lean on him and keep asking questions, like they haven’t just told me the date the world ends.

“The thousand points. Is that truth or rumor? If we get a thousand points, do we get to go free?” Would I want to go free? Or would I want to keep fighting?

“No one on this planet will be free until the Drau threat is neutralized.”

I’m breathing too fast, my chest tight, shoulders tense. “Truth or rumor?” I ask again.

There’s a hesitation. A split second of silence that’s barely enough for me to notice. But I do notice it and I notice Jackson’s fists clenched at his sides.

“Truth,” the Committee says. “For most.”

“But not all?” Or none. Are they lying to me? Why pause if they’re not lying?

“Those at the heads of the teams may not leave. They are too few in number and too essential to the scheme.”

The heads of the teams. Jackson. I turn and stare at him. I remember sharp and clear how he told me there’s only one way out for him. Death? No. I can’t bear the thought of Jackson dead.

“They may not leave when they get a thousand points, but can they ever leave?” I pause. “Has anyone ever left? Has anyone reached the thousand points?”

“Enough,” Jackson says again, his tone completely different. He sounds . . . resigned, and infinitely sad. He drops his hand from my waist and steps away from me. I feel that wall between us again, the one he builds brick by brick. He’s done it with remarkable speed this time, never giving me a chance to knock out even a single block.

He looks up at the Committee and says, “Go.”

And to my astonishment, they do. One second, we’re surrounded by shadowy, dark figures, and then we’re alone in the massive echoing coliseum. The air is too still. The lights too dim. The shadows touch us, creeping across Jackson’s determined features.

“I need to do this. Just once,” he says, his voice soft, his gaze holding mine. “Just once.”

“Do what?” I ask, and something in his eyes makes my breath catch.

WE’RE SEPARATED BY ONLY A SMALL SPACE, AND THEN WE aren’t because Jackson steps closer, so close that the faint citrus scent his shaving cream left on his skin lures me. So close that I have to tip my head back to meet his gaze.

Pulse racing, I stand perfectly still as he reaches up to pull the covered elastic from my ponytail. He takes his time, leaving me plenty of opportunity to stop him, to step away. My hair slides down over my shoulders. My breath stops as he takes a thick handful and drags his fingers through to the ends, then lowers his face so his nose traces up the side of my neck to my ear.

“You smell like strawberries,” he whispers.

“Shampoo.” I barely have enough breath for even that single word. All my senses are filled with him, the feel of his chest against mine, his lips on my skin, the beat of his heart thundering in time with my own.

My breathing turns ragged. I’m grateful for the solid weight of his forearm pressing against my lower back, drawing me closer, holding me up because my legs feel like noodles, my head spinning.

He drags his mouth over the angle of my jaw, my cheek, to my lips.

Fire bursts inside me. My lips part under his. Coming up on my toes, I fist my hands in his hair and kiss him back, sharing the flames that lick at my soul. I breathe as he breathes, liquid heat in my veins.

He kisses me like I am water and he is parched. Like I am air and he is drowning. He kisses me like he is dying and I am his lifeline. He is gentle and rough, taking and giving. In that moment, his kiss is all I know, all I ever want to know.

I come up higher on my toes and my lips cling to his as he pulls away. I’m left shaken and out of my element. I’ve never been kissed like that. I never imagined such a kiss existed.

I stare at him, stunned. We’re both breathless. His pupils are dark and dilated, surrounded only by a thin rim of iridescent gray.

“What was that?” I whisper. I’m cold without his body next to mine. I feel cheated that he’s stepped away from me.

“My one chance,” he says with a hint of his dark smile.

“For what?”

“To kiss you. To live the moment I’ve been wanting since the first second I laid eyes on you.”

I’m shaken to the core. He’s wanted to kiss me all along? Like that?

“Why didn’t you?” I ask, thinking of all the times I thought he would kiss me, all the times I wanted him to. All the times he pulled back, stepped away, leaving me disappointed.

“I didn’t want to hurt you.”

I laugh softly. “Trust me. That didn’t hurt.”

He drags his fingers back through the shaggy layers of his hair in a totally un-Jackson-like gesture.

“But what I’m going to tell you now will, and I swear to you, I’m sorry for that, Miki.” He takes a deep breath and turns away. “You’re here because of me.” His tone is flat. He doesn’t look at me, doesn’t touch me now. I feel the absence like a blow to the gut.

“Because of you?” I wrap my arms around myself, my lips still tingling from his kiss, my heart growing wary. “Explain.”

“I was first pulled when I was twelve.” He spins to face me, his expression icy and cold, and
false
. He’s in agony, suffering, I can see it beneath his carefully cultivated veneer.

Images assault me. Bright lights. A truck. The scream of metal on metal. The scent of blood in my nose, the taste metallic and salty on my tongue.

And then I’m broken. Like I was broken in my nightmare about the car accident. Pinned in place.

Dying.

Such pain, in my body, in my heart.

Not mine. Jackson’s. Jackson’s pain.

In a snap the images vanish.

“That nightmare you had,” he says, turning away once more. “It was mine.”

I frown, but I’m not exactly surprised. If anything, I’m more surprised by the fact that what he’s saying actually makes sense to me. As if somewhere inside, I knew it all along.

“I saw your nightmare? That night, I dreamed what you dreamed. Did you send it to me on purpose?”

He shakes his head, his posture stiff, his back toward me. I wish he would face me. I wish he would close the yawning distance between us and put his arms around me. “I was thinking of you before I fell asleep. I must have held you in my thoughts and sent you my dreams without meaning to.”

“Has that happened to you before?”

Again, he shakes his head. “Not that I know of. Only with you.”

“And now, right now, you put your memories of the accident in my head.” He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t need to. I knew he could do that even before I met him, that very first day when I heard him calling my name in my mind. I gather my thoughts, sorting them before I speak. “Your eyes are Drau. And you have their ability to”—I pause, searching for the right words—“to be telepathic, like them. That’s how you were going to question the Drau on our last mission. That’s how you could speak in my head.”

“Yes.”

“When you spoke to me that first day, you told me,
Miki! Now!
. . . to save Janice’s sister.” I tip my head to the side. “What would you have done if I hadn’t heard you? If I hadn’t run?”

He turns his head and looks at me over his shoulder.

“You would have saved her yourself,” I say, confident of that.

He looks away, like he doesn’t want to acknowledge the truth. Like he sees himself as some sort of monster.

“Who was the girl in the dream, the one with the green eyes?” I ask, very soft. Because I think I already know, and my heart breaks for him.

“Lizzie was my sister.”

I remember so many things in a sudden, painful rush: Jackson’s hesitation when I asked if he was an only child. His guarded reply when I asked him if he could do what the Drau did, taking electricity through human eyes. The way he drove, so carefully, obeying all the rules, hands in perfect position on the wheel. The way I woke up from the nightmare, certain that I had killed Lizzie . . . no . . . that was Jackson’s certainty. . . .

Lifting my head, I find him in the dimness, standing far away from me, still as stone. Brittle stone. If I go to him, if I touch him, he’ll shatter.

I saw it in him right from the start. I kept thinking that Jackson knew something about pain, that he understood my loss. But knowing the truth only makes me wish I’d been wrong. Better that he not know.

“I’m sorry, Jackson.” I know from experience that those words don’t help, but it’s been bred into us to say them when someone dies.

Jackson paces another dozen steps away. I don’t like that he feels the need to put even more distance between us. He thinks I’ll hate him, that I’ll turn from him. Nothing he’s telling me would make me do that, yet that’s where he thinks these revelations will take us.

Images and words spin through my thoughts, memories of the nightmare and things Jackson said at different times since the moment we met. Things I said. All out of context, but when they come together, they make me wary. More than wary. My stomach knots with dread.

“The shells we terminated,” I say. “I didn’t just imagine they looked like you, did I? I convinced myself I was seeing things, but I wasn’t. Those shells were cloned from Lizzie’s DNA.”

“Yes.”

I close my eyes, lost in the horror of what that must have been like for him, terminating bodies that looked like his dead sister. “How many times have you had to do that?”

“That was the third batch I know of that they made from her DNA.”

I shake my head. “But the accident . . . I don’t understand. If she died in the car accident, how did the Drau get her?”

He makes a sharp, cutting gesture. Then he starts to speak, low and fast. “I was dying, impaled by three metal shards, pinned to the seat, bleeding everywhere. I think my legs were crushed. I know I couldn’t feel them. Lizzie was hurt. Maybe dying. I don’t know. I’ll never know. She was part of the game. I wasn’t. She kept talking about how she needed to hang on until she got pulled. That she’d make them pull me, too.

“I thought she meant we needed to hang on until paramedics came and got us out, but she was talking about the game. She figured the game would heal us both. I don’t think she really thought about what would happen after that.

“I was in and out of consciousness. At some point, we got pulled. We were healed. And I was twelve years old and part of a game I couldn’t understand. They left us on the same team. Lizzie watched my ass.” He huffs a sharp exhalation out through his nose and shakes his head. “First time out, I was stupid. Cocky. I was a kid. I thought I was invincible.

“My con went orangey red. We were nowhere near finishing the mission, nowhere near getting pulled. I wasn’t going to make it through.” He swallows, then keeps going, talking even faster. “Lizzie knew I wouldn’t make it, so she came up with this genius plan. She stared in my eyes and told me to take what I needed. To make like a Drau and suck some life out of her. Enough that I’d survive. Enough to change the color on my con. She said it was like boosting a car battery. That I just needed a little juice to get me through.” His voice breaks, but he keeps going as my heart shatters for him. “She said we were a team. That one of us wouldn’t go back without the other.”