Rebels Rising (Dark Rebels, #1) (8 page)

“I am taking the stairs back up,” she said to the darkness.

The other tubes crashed down. She could see her friends being jounced around in them, and when they fell out they all looked as bad as she felt, a little fact that made her spitefully glad for a second.

“Someone should have told her how to control the speed,” Tawny said between coughs.

“Yeah, that would have been nice. I thought I had busted my leg,” Krista said.

“Come on,” Blake said. “We have little time left. I did not know the Remnants here were so awake.”

“What the hell is a Remnant?” Krista asked, but nobody answered.

***

T
he room they wound up in was small and airless, but it led to a larger room shaped like a dome. The larger room took Krista’s breath away. There was something about that room, something dark and malevolent, that made her so scared her legs shook and her body went rigid.

The computers had once stood in the middle; the stands they had set upon were empty and dusty. There was a thin and dank green mildew on the base of the chair that sat in the center, and the hospital bed was covered in sheets that still held rusty stains, and the stirrups had been broken at some point.

The bed made her heart drop like lead. Her nausea came back in spiraling waves, and Blake pinched her, hard. “Ouch! What the hell is wrong with you?”

“Pay attention.” His dark eyes were unreadable.

“To what?”

“To your thoughts. Keep them quiet. Just concentrate on the bed and tell me what you see.”

She did not want to see that bed. It was awful, and something really bad had happened there, something bad was about to happen—she could feel it, and she was terrified. She focused on the bed, her mouth dry, and to her shock, a figure appeared in it, a woman with long blonde hair, a woman with a small dimple in her right cheek, just like the dimple in Krista’s cheek.

“Mom?” Her voice broke.

The figure evaporated. The room faded in and out, and her eyes strained to see through the fog that gathered in the corners, crept across the bed and the floor. There were faces in that fog, people walking down a road, and trains running on tracks that cut across green hills. The people and things coalesced, changed, and became guns firing, dogs barking, and children screaming. The visions were terrible, and Krista flailed out with her fists as a man in a uniform came too close to her, his fingers reaching toward her face.

She turned, and everyone was gone but her. She was alone in a dark wood. The jingle of bells sounded, and she stood there, frozen to the spot. It was dark, but not night. The trees were vast, and their limbs hung over everything, blocking out the sun. The watery sunlight that did come through was pale, and the patchy bits of sky she could see were the same color as slate.

The bells grew louder. They were accompanied by a stamping sound and the sound of wheels sliding on slick grass. She ducked behind a giant tree, her eyes scanning the woods. There was a nicker, and a horse appeared, pulling a colorful wagon. An old woman sat on its seat, her hair covered by a bright scarf.

Before Krista could make any sense of that, it was gone, and she was back in the lab. Blake spoke again. “Make that go.”

Her gaze followed his finger. There was a broken machine sitting there, not far from the bed. She focused on it, and it kicked on with a buzzing hum that hurt her head. It droned and whined, and Connor made a low noise deep down in his throat.

The machine broke in half, its sides splitting open and crisping to black. “What did you do that for?” Tawny asked.

“I...I didn’t, did I?” Had she?

Blake shrugged. “It does not matter. We only needed to see if you could break it.”

“Why?”

“This was the prototype for the machine at Luke. If you can kill this one, maybe you can actually kill the other one.”

“So was this a test?”

“No, the test is whether or not you can get us out of here without the Remnants killing us.”

“Okay, tell me right now, what is this Remnant you speak of?” She had meant it to be funny, but what Connor said was far from humorous. “It’s the leftovers from the time when this place was awake.

“Power never really disappears, even when the people who possess it die. If the people are bad, and the Power is bad, then it does bad things. This place is filled with that kind of Power. We call that the Remnants, and they can kill you.”

“Oh gee, thanks for telling me that before we walked into this place! No wonder I’ve been so nervous!”

Tawny asked, “What do you mean, you’ve been so nervous?”

“I don’t know. I just...on the train I had a weird dream, and then I had this odd, bad feeling all night. If I had known that there was bad stuff here I could have relaxed. Well, maybe not, but at least I would not have been so freaked out, wondering...”

“You never said you had a premonition!” Blake shouted.

“What’s a premonition?”

“Think! What were you afraid of?”

“I saw...I didn’t know exactly. I mean, it was nothing specific.” She was stuttering, but there was nothing she could do about it.

“We have to get out of here.” Tawny spun in a circle, her hair flying out around her small and pale face. “Guys, we need to get the hell out of here right now.”

Krista’s voice quivered, “Is it a Remnant?”

“It’s a lot of Remnants,” Connor said.

Tawny shifted, her skin turned to golden fur, and she ran, her body morphing as she went. A bright light struck her, her green-hazel eyes glinted, and her hands hit the floor as great paws. Connor’s wings shot out from his back, and Blake spun around, his hands hooking into talons.

They were all ready for battle, but Krista was not. There was something coming—something that was worse than anything any of them could imagine, and she had known it and said nothing. They were all going to die, and it was her fault.

The Remnants looked like ghosts, at first. They were insubstantial and wraith-like; they hung on the air, and they seemed to be too fragile to cause any real harm. Then they solidified and hardened.

The banks of empty machinery flew at Krista’s head. She ducked low just in time to keep her head on her shoulders. Her mouth was dry, and fear made her heartbeat accelerate until she could see the skin on her chest fluttering and expanding with each tick tock of her heart.

The Creators had made these Remnants. Some of them had belonged to bad people to start with, others had come from people gone mad with pain and terror, and others had simply grown wild after their bodies were taken away.

Pity lanced through Krista. Some of the Remnants dripped with pain, others with rage or grief, and the emotions were overwhelming her. She wanted to simply fall to her knees and weep for what had been done in that room.

She could see it all: the experiments, the torture, the people herded in and tested until they were broken and bloody and begging for a merciful death. No wonder their Power stayed there, trapped in that space.

Her mind locked down, and she stared at one Remnant, a hollow-eyed man with the grin of a barracuda. He had been a bad man, she knew it, she felt it. His Power had been stripped from him by men worse than he was, but they had not known how to cage that Power, not then, and so it was free within these walls.

Blake was fighting a screaming wind. It caught him up and tossed him from wall to wall like a rag doll. Connor was trying to free Tawny from the grip of what looked like a woman with three breasts.

Revulsion and horror replaced pity. No matter what had been done to these people when they were alive, they were no longer alive now, and only their twisted and crazed Powers remained behind.

She pictured a jar, wide-mouthed and with a clamping lid, like the ones her mother used to can the vegetables from their garden in, and then she shoved that Remnant into it.

His face became the face of a demon: distended, enraged, and ugly, as he was sucked along the vortex she had created and into the jar. The lid snapped shut, and the jar settled neatly on the floor of the lab. The Remnant howled and beat his fists against the jar’s sides but to no avail; he was trapped.

Not thinking, only acting, Krista shaped more jars. One by one, she caught the Remnants and left them in the jars lining the floor. They looked like evil fireflies, and she shuddered. Blake said, “Hey, that is actually kind of cool.”

Disgusted and saddened, Krista looked toward one wall. She strained, her head pounding with the beginnings of a headache, and the wall opened, brick and mortar falling in a shower. One brick bounced along the floor, sending dust and debris up in its wake.

The jars slid into the wall, and the bricks slid back into place. A blissful silence descended. Connor was the first to speak. “Nobody has ever been able to capture a Remnant.”

“You don’t have to sound all awed and stuff,” Tawny snapped from a face that still held long glistening teeth before her muzzle became an actual jaw and mouth.

Tawny liked Connor! Krista knew that right then, and she also knew that Tawny could be a bad enemy, especially if she thought Krista was stealing the guy she obviously wanted as her boyfriend.

I need to cool it with him, she thought. Not that there is anything there, not really. Her gaze slid back to Blake. He was not looking at any of them. He was staring down at the floor, and his wings were beating softly, sending small bursts of air through the room, stirring her hair and cooling her skin.

This was his home. She did not want to know that, but she did. He had grown up right down the hall in a room filled with sterile tubes; those tubes had been filled with some stinking, salty solution, and he had grown in one, floated there in the artificial tides of the liquid meant to mimic amniotic fluids.

But what had the Creators been birthing?

There was more here than met the eye, and she knew it.

“Let’s get the hell out of here. This place gives me the creeps,” Blake finally said. When he raised his head, Krista thought she saw tears in his dark eyes, but before she could know for sure he had looked away from her and asked, “Now how the hell do we get out without the tubes? Genius here busted ‘em on the way in.”

“Nobody told me we would have to ride them out!” Krista snapped, all her warmth towards him forgotten. “How did you get out of here the first time?”

Tawny asked, “You know?”

“Yes.” Krista did not even bother trying to dissemble.

“How?”

“I can sort of feel you in here, not like the Remnants but...it’s like seeing a faded picture of someone on a wall somewhere.”

Tawny said, “You are way stronger than we thought. I never knew anyone had that sight. I never knew they put that into the coding.”

“Wait, what coding? I’m a Natural.” Krista pointed out.

“There is nothing natural about you,” Tawny replied.

“You know what? I have had about enough of all this crap. Nobody is leaving here until somebody tells me who I am, or what.”

“See ya,”Blake said, heading for the door. Bricks flew and the door vanished. Blake shrugged and aimed for the ceiling, but his wings folded inward and vanished. He landed on his ass on the floor, a stunned look on his face. Connor let out a low whistle, and Tawny took a big step back from Krista.

“Give him back his wings,” Connor said.

“Tell me who I am.”

“Give me my wings you...you...”Blake’s face was red with rage.

“Oh look, now you are just some guy. No wings—whatever. You can go on about your life like everyone else,” Krista said. She knew she was being cruel, beyond cruel, but she did not care; she was angry, and she wanted answers.

“
Can
you give them back?” Tawny asked.

Krista did not know, and remorse overcame her anger. What if she had just stripped him of his wings forever? “Tell me.”

“Is this how far you are willing to go?” Blake asked as he advanced toward her. “Tell me something: how are you going to help us if you are too busy being pissed off to see past yourself?”

“Tell me!”

Her scream echoed off the walls. More bricks broke loose, the bed collapsed, and dust puffed up in dry white clouds. Krista’s emotions were jagged, wild, and out of control. She slammed Blake with power, and his wings came back, blacker and bigger than ever. He took flight and came in behind her.

His strong arms wrapped around her waist, and he yanked her off her feet. Her boots dangled toward the floor, and she shrieked and beat at his hands, but they only knotted more tightly—so tightly her ribs ached. “Let me go!”

“Fine.” He dropped her. The floor came up to meet her, and she closed her eyes, bracing for the impact that never came.

“Cool,” Tawny said.

Krista opened her eyes. She was prone, her entire body a bare inch or two above the floor, hovering there. “How do I get down?”

“Beats me.” Blake said, landing near her. “I never knew anyone who was wingless to fly, except Tawny, and when she flies she shifts to birds or whatever, so she does have wings. I guess that really does not count.”

“She’s not exactly flying,” Connor pointed out.

“No, wait. What about that guy that could control wind? He flew sometimes.”

Tawny snorted, “Yeah if you call getting tossed around by hurricane force winds flying.”

“He didn’t really have a lot of control over the wind,” Blake said.

Krista was beginning to feel ridiculous. A bead of sweat dripped down her nose and splattered into the floor, leaving a round stain. “Could you help me, please?”

“Help yourself,” Blake said snidely.

The concrete was as hard as she imagined it would be. When she got to her feet, the other three were laughing. “You got dirt in your hair,” Tawny said.

“And on your knees,” Blake added.

“I’m glad you guys find this so hysterical.”

“Come on, test over—let’s get out of here.”

“All this was a test?” Krista was livid, and it showed, but Blake ruffled her hair with one hand and her anger began to dissipate. She wished he would kiss her, just grab her and hug her tightly and kiss her long and deep...her face went red. Could
he
read her thoughts?