Wild-born (37 page)

“Kill yourself and I’ll think about it,” said Dr. Denman, vigorously wiping his right hand on his pants to remove Alia’s blood.

“Never thought a little blood would scare a doctor,” I taunted. “But then again, you’re not just any doctor.”

“You have no idea.”

“Oh, but I do,” I said, looking deep into his eyes, because I finally did know. “You’re a graviton!”

Dr. Denman froze. Then his thin pursed lips curled almost imperceptibly as his hawk-like eyes glared back at me. “Well, well, discovered at last,” he said. “That’s right, psionic, I am a graviton, and a fair hider too.”

“What are you doing here, Doctor?” I asked quietly. “What are you doing at this facility?”

“What am I doing?!” roared Dr. Denman, his wrinkled old face contorting with rage. “I’m trying to find a cure to this insanity! People aren’t supposed to be able to do these things!”

“You killed Dr. Kellogg!”

“He was in my way,” said Dr. Denman, taking a step forward, “just like you are now. I am going to continue my work. You, psionic, cannot be a part of it anymore.”

“Three minutes to auto-destruct,” said the computer.

I knew Dr. Denman meant to kill me. There was no way for him to return to his work if I was alive, knowing he was psionic. Alia would have to die too.

I dropped the knife. Alia still had her arms around me, so I pulled her off and forced her down onto the floor. Then I turned to face Dr. Denman.

“You can’t win, Doctor,” I said as matter-of-factly as I could. “I won’t let you touch me this time.”

Dr. Denman’s eyes glinted maliciously as he replied, “I didn’t have to touch the ceiling when I killed Kellogg.”

I tried to extend my arms toward him, but suddenly they became so heavy I couldn’t lift them at all. My whole body was being pulled downwards. The weight wasn’t just on top of me. The weight was in me. It was me. I felt like I was drowning in thick mud, barely able to move.

I had lost. Even if I could concentrate, there was no way to blast him at this distance without stretching my arms toward him, but by now I could barely tell my arms from the rest of my stone-like body. I fell to my knees and my vision started to become hazy.

Something white darted in front of me. I inhaled a huge gulp of air, and my vision cleared instantly. I looked at Dr. Denman, who was struggling with—Alia! He hit her hard across the face, sending her flying. Dr. Denman’s face was streaked with Alia’s blood where she had wiped it on him.

It wasn’t enough to drain him completely. It wasn’t enough to drain him much at all.

But it was enough.

Even as he refocused his power on me, I forced both of my arms up and blasted him hard. He was hurled backward, slammed into one of the whirring machines and slid down its side, his body limp. His power was completely broken, and I could stand again.

“A-yi!” Alia cried loudly, and an instant later she was in my arms, hugging me tightly.

“Two minutes to auto-destruct,” said the mechanical voice.

I picked Alia up and carried her over to Dr. Denman, who was still faintly breathing. He was just knocked out. For a fleeting instant, I felt like blasting the life out of him, but there was enough of Cindy in me by now not to act on that kind of impulse. Besides, I knew that Dr. Denman, along with Alia and me, would be dead in just under two minutes anyway, and I had something much more important to do.

Setting Alia down, I quickly searched Dr. Denman’s pockets and found his little white remote control. It was identical to the one Dr. Kellogg showed me on my first day here. I pushed 4-6-U, and Alia’s control bands snapped open, falling to the floor. I threw the remote control into the air and blasted it into tiny pieces.

Then I helped wipe the blood off of Alia’s neck and fingers, and the cuts on her neck disappeared before my eyes. I heard her quiet voice in my head say,
“I knew you’d come, Addy.”

I took her hand and led her away from Dr. Denman. We walked back toward the elevator. The cage door was still open, but there was no point in getting on. The computer announced, “One minute to auto-destruct.”

Alia squeezed my hand tighter. I looked at her sadly, wondering if there really was an afterlife and whether I would see her there. This would probably have been the moment to say something deeply profound, but nothing came to mind.

“I’m sorry I was so late,” I said.

“It’s okay,”
said Alia as she smiled and hugged me again.

I thought about Cindy, and how she’d never see Alia or me again. I thought about Ralph, who had once tried to goad me into killing him, and realized I still hadn’t figured that man out. I thought about Cat, who would live out her life as an Angel slave, perhaps someday having psionic powers of her own. I thought about Dr. Kellogg, who had died upstairs. “Get out, Adrian,” he had said. “You don’t belong here anyway.”

But I did belong here. Mark knew it, and so did Cindy. I belonged with Alia. Here and now, that really was everything that mattered, and while that might be a far cry from living happily ever after, it was the very best I could ask for at such short notice.

“Addy, will it hurt us when we die?”

“No,” I heard myself say as I held Alia closer, feeling her small heart beating rapidly against mine. “No, Ali, it won’t hurt.”

I wasn’t counting the seconds, but I knew we had less than a handful left. I took one final deep breath, and closed my eyes.

C
hapter 18: Nightmare

“Auto-destruct sequence malfunction. System disconnect,” said the flat computer voice.

“Addy?”

I slowly opened my eyes. What had happened?

“Boom,” said a cold voice in the distance.

Leaning heavily against the giant boiler, Dr. Denman was eyeing us malevolently.

“First thing I did when I got down here was disconnect the bomb,” he said with a smirk. “When you lead a life like mine, you tend not to leave very much to chance.”

But even as he said that, I thought I heard a distant howling sound deep below my feet, and the next instant, everything was moving.

It wasn’t just vibrating anymore. The whole cavern was starting to twist as if it was made of rubber. All three of us were thrown to the floor. The tremor got worse and worse. I tried levitating myself off the floor, but this time the air was pulsing too, and I was rocked back and forth in midair, quickly losing my concentration. I could hardly believe that the machines and the elevator hadn’t broken into a billion pieces, but everything was still intact.

What was this power that Nightmare had? I had destroyed the remote control, which meant Dr. Denman couldn’t shock Nightmare awake even if he could somehow get down to the holding chamber below.

It didn’t matter. If the elevator still worked, then now was our only chance. Alia and I were far closer to it than Dr. Denman, and he wouldn’t be able to focus his power on us.

Stumbling over and over, I half-ran, half-crawled to the elevator, dragging Alia along with me. Alia was no longer just a helpless little girl, though. Sometimes she was pulling me.

We got into the elevator. I couldn’t stand up, so I telekinetically pushed the “up” button. The door slid closed, and even though we were vibrating enough to knock a building down, the elevator crawled upwards.

The shaking was lesser on Level 10. We scrambled through the corridors to the main elevator, expecting at any moment to meet more doctors or guards. I froze once when I saw the wall-mounted automatic guns next to the elevator. They had been shut off when I was here earlier, but there was no way to know if it was still safe until we stepped in front of them.

They didn’t fire. I pushed the button next to the elevator, and the doors slid open at once. Ralph must have sent the car back down after he had reached Level 2.

The shaking was getting worse here now, and the structure was no longer unaffected by it. The walls bent inwards, then outwards. The whole facility was twisting in on itself.

The elevator doors closed, and we were rising. It might have only been half a minute, but as I watched the elevator walls start to buckle, expecting the cable to break and send us plunging to our deaths at any moment, it was as agonizing as the time I spent being tortured by the Wolf.

The doors finally slid open and we ran out of the elevator. There was an enormous, solid metal gate in front of us, but it was half open and we sprinted through, again feeling the floor start to shake. What was happening below us?

I looked around. There were passages leading every which way. Level 2 was bigger than I expected.

“Addy, this way!”

Alia was tugging on my hand. Had she been awake when she was brought in? There were dead bodies lying around here too, but we took little notice as we ran, Alia pulling me along as fast as she could. Two corridors and a flight of stairs later, we were in what looked a bit like the reception hall of a big hospital. This was Level 1, which was still underground. Where was the exit?

“Over here!”
said Alia as she pulled me through a large doorway.

I looked around at the room we had entered. It was a medium-size circular space with no furniture and no other exits.

“This is a dead end, Ali,” I said, wondering if perhaps we were going to die here after all.

Alia let go of my hand and pushed one of three small buttons on the wall. I felt the entire room start to rise up like an elevator. A few seconds later, a soft breeze blew in through the doorway from which we had entered, bringing with it the heavenly scent of clean, cool night air.

We stepped out.

Dawn was still a long way off, but the night was clear and the moonlight softly illuminated the grassy field where we found ourselves. It was Derrick’s dream field, though the grass here was green and not as tall. There was not a single house, streetlamp, or anything manmade giving off light in any direction as far as the eye could see. The entrance room quietly descended back into the earth, leaving us in the middle of nowhere.

The ground started to quiver slightly. Nightmare was still down there. I grabbed Alia’s left hand, hoping to run far from Nightmare’s power. The direction didn’t matter on an open plain. We just had to get going.

I heard Alia shout in my head,
“Addy! Look!”

I followed Alia’s pointing finger with my eyes, at first mistaking the light in the sky for a bright star. As I looked closer, however, I realized that it was a massive military helicopter. It wasn’t a gunship, but I figured a transport like that out here could only mean a pack of Wolves.

“Come on, Ali!” I shouted, frantically tugging on her arm, but she resisted.

“It’s Cindy!”

The ground was really starting to shake now, and the soft earth felt like it was liquefying beneath our feet. The helicopter swooped low, bearing down on us at full tilt. I could see the people in the cockpit now too. In addition to two helmeted pilots, there was a figure crouched between them and looking out at us. Even at this distance, I could easily make out her long silvery hair shining in the moonlight.

As the helicopter hovered overhead with its side door open, I levitated Alia aboard, and then propelled myself into the cabin too.

I couldn’t make everyone out in the dim cabin light, but there must have been at least a dozen people including Mr. Koontz and Janice, whose white clothes I could easily identify. I saw another familiar face grinning at me: Mark Parnell.

Mark slid the cabin door shut, and I felt the helicopter lurch forward. Ralph, who was piloting the huge transport, flew us in a wide half-circle around the site.

Pressing my nose to the cabin window, I watched in stunned horror as the ground below us quickly became a churning vortex of mud and slime, swirling deeper in on itself until only a dark gaping hole was left in the ground. I half-expected Nightmare to appear out of the abyss, but that didn’t happen. To this day, I don’t know anything more about Nightmare than I’ve already said, though I still have nightmares about him sometimes.

Turning my face away from the scene below, I saw Cindy. She was holding Alia and looking at me in the gentle way I had so sorely missed, her eyes quiet and understanding.

I opened my mouth, but the words failed me.

What do you say to someone who risked everything to save your life? “Thank you”? What do you say to someone whose love you rejected in selfish arrogance? “I’m sorry”? What do you say to someone who can forgive your betrayal in a heartbeat? What do you say to someone like Cynthia Gifford?

As I stared down at the cabin floor, unable to put into words all that I felt and all that I wanted to say to her, I felt her arms around me. Cindy may well have been a delver reading my mind, because she whispered softly, “Don’t say anything, Adrian. Don’t say anything.”

C
hapter 19: The Long Road Ahead

As dawn broke over the hazy, violet horizon, Ralph set the helicopter down next to our getaway car, which was parked in a little forest clearing near a deserted, backcountry road. Cindy could hide us from other psionics even in the air, but the government would probably notice a stolen military helicopter in the daytime sky. Our getaway car, however, turned out to be a psychedelically patterned bright yellow minibus that reminded me of Cat’s crazy pillow. The only way in which it didn’t stand out was that it couldn’t fly.

Mark drove, and Cindy introduced me to the team that saved us. The Guardians’ leader was not Ralph, but a lean and muscular man in his late forties named Travis Baker, and he was a healer like Alia. Once Cindy had finished with the introductions, Mr. Baker nodded to her, and she seemed to know what she was expected to say.

“Adrian, you know I could never have gotten you out of there by myself,” Cindy began carefully, and I guessed what this was leading to.

“If you mean that I have to join the Guardians...” I said, but Mr. Baker lifted a hand to stop me.

Shaking his head, the Guardian leader said lightly, “Oh, you don’t have to join us, Adrian. Not at all.” He threw a side-long glance at Ralph and chuckled. “In fact, I doubt very much we could take you by force even if we wanted to.”