Indestructible (Indestructible Trilogy Book 1) (13 page)

I fold my arms, my heart racing.
Am I even different from people here?
“And what does it mean, being Transcendent?”

“Well, I don’t know. I wasn’t in Murray’s inner circle when the last one was here. It’s been years,” she adds hastily. “Murray’s been searching for so long. Of course he keeps an eye on new recruits seeing as there are so few of you. It doesn’t mean you
are
Transcendent, only that there’s a chance.”

“Right.” That’s entirely too little information for my liking. The
last
one? What happened to him, or her?

“I’ll talk to him,” says Val. “See if I can get him to disclose more information. I don’t like how he keeps people in the dark any more than you do.”

“Okay,” I say. “I’m not keen on the idea that Nolan’s apparently been sent to keep an eye on me. I thought he was just training me.”

“Nolan?” She shakes her head. “That guy’s slippery as an eel.”

“Huh?” That doesn’t sound like Nolan. But then again, do I really know anyone here? No one trusts me enough to tell me the truth. Even about my powers.

“Tell you what,” she says. “I’ll see if I can take over as your teacher. Get you started on weapons training. The quicker you get through that, the more likely it is Murray will trust you. Even get you on a mission.”

Her expression is open. Not hiding anything. I feel the coil of tension in my chest unknot slightly. Maybe I have found someone I can confide in.

“Thanks,” I say, and I mean it.

***

I dream of fire.

I
am
fire. My hands blaze, my body’s haloed in light. The world around is tinged red, from sky down to earth. The ground soaked in blood. A battlefield. It looks unreal, like a child’s painting, all block colours and sharp lines. A scene half-familiar, half-not. Because I recognise the line cutting the world in two, even though I’ve never seen it up close.

The divide.

And Cas stands next to it. Hand held out, palm first, like a warning. Somehow, though I’m at a distance, I can see a pattern carved into the underside of his wrist, dripping blood.

“Don’t come near me.”

“It’s too late.” The voice isn’t mine, though it’s female. “He got both of us.” The words come out of my mouth with no connection to my thoughts. It’s like I’m watching a film play out before me.

I hold out my own arm. With a thrill of horror, I see my own arm’s been carved up to the elbow, with red, tattoo-like lines that seem to pulse before my eyes.

He’s still there, but I can’t look directly at him any longer. The fire’s too bright.

I chance it anyway. The image burns onto my eyelids. Cas, edged with fire. He starts to speak again but everything blurs, and I’m awake.

***

Despite the worry about fiends lurking just outside the doors, I quickly settle into a routine. Every day brings new training exercises and challenges. I already know the principles of self-defence—I took lessons in taekwondo and karate until I was fourteen—but Val goes over the basics again, explaining that she’s still convincing Murray to train me with weapons. I also have theory lessons with an older guy called George, and meditation. Apparently the focus will help me access the fire, though I’m ahead with that already. In the first fight with the fiends, my hands went ablaze by themselves, like my body acted on its own. But the last time, I moved in tune with my newly developed reflexes. In control. Apparently the unexpected field training gave me an edge. I just wish it meant people took me seriously and didn’t treat me like a five-year-old.

I’m not stupid. I know rules are there for a reason. But if there’s something odd about my powers, I deserve to know what it is.

One morning, Elle tips me off that Murray’s teaching a class on genetics that day. Even though I’ve not been to any non-combat-related classes since I came, there’s nothing preventing me from listening in on one. Elle’s glad to have someone to sit next to at the back of the room; she finds it embarrassing that her father’s teaching the class and hopes he won’t pick her to answer questions.

It’s the first time I’ve seen him all week, and I barely concentrate on the first half of his lecture, not that I have any paper to make notes on, anyway. Elle offers to lend me some, but I end up doodling on it.

I snap back to attention when I realise he’s just said my name.

“…and as Leah knows, the fire can activate in an urgent situation, even though she was unaware that she was one of us.”

A few people turn and look at me.

“There could be many more people like her out there. We certainly can’t rule it out. So to answer your question, there may very well be other missions further afield.”

I guess someone must have asked if we’re going to get to leave any time soon. I’ve been wondering the same thing. Not that I’d trade this relative safety for a night in the open with the fiends prowling around, but the lack of news has made me antsy, given me an urge to fight that hitting a punch bag can’t satisfy. I want to feel like I did when I kicked that fiend off the cliff. Powerful. In control. If I can save just one person from the fiends…

“What about us?” I ask Murray. “Will we get to take part in missions?”

“Were you listening, Leah?” He shakes his head slightly. “You will, if you pass next week’s tests. But you haven’t been here that long, so we might need to leave it a little longer.”

“But I want to—”

“You can’t throw your life away, Leah,” he says. “I know you’re used to acting first, thinking later, but we’ve learned the hard way that risks can get us killed. If it wasn’t for the attack last week, we wouldn’t even be considering it. But you’ll get your chance.”

Everyone’s staring at me again. A flush creeps up my neck.

Murray returns to talking about genetics. I try to pay attention this time, since I know it’s relevant to figuring out why I am like this. I’m glad to be alive, of course, but part of me can’t help but wonder. Why me? Why was I saved? Because of
genetics?

Stop it,
I tell myself. Randy calls this survivor’s guilt—been there, done that.

If I really want to fight back and protect the other humans still out there, I need to find a way to get myself on a mission.

***

I carry on with training exercises, waiting for my chance. Val’s tight-lipped about whether she managed to get through to Murray or not, but I enjoy training with her all the same. She’s only a few years older than me, but I feel like I have more in common with her than I do with the people my age. Perhaps because she led most of the first missions after the world ended, so she saw first-hand what it was like out there just after the fiends came.

“I don’t know how you survived, Leah,” she says to me one day. “Mentally, I mean. You saw things that would have broken most people, and Pyros are no more emotionally capable than ordinary humans are.”

Yeah, Cas proves that much.

I just shrug. What is there to say? I survived at first because I had Lissa, and then, well, it was easier pretending there was a reason to live than giving in. Every day I lived was a kick back against the fiends.

“Hey, I’m not knocking humans,” she says, misinterpreting my silence as being insulted on behalf of non-Pyros. “If anything, I’m kind of glad we have feelings like normal people do. It makes us less like the fiends.”

I appreciate it when she says things like that. So, slowly, I start to open up to her. Share anecdotes, even. After one training session, I have her in hysterics relating some of the things that happened at school. Val left school at fourteen after her parents died and came to train with the Pyros, so she’s interested to hear about it.

“I guess it was kind of like a boarding school, our old headquarters,” she says. “Except there weren’t really any classes based on age, more on ability. I was one of the strongest Pyros, so I was pushed through to training when I was sixteen. Well, I chose to. I didn’t like school much. I preferred hitting things.” She smiles.

“Old headquarters?”

“There used to be two,” Val explains. “I started out at the other one. Still pretty isolated, but it was closer to a normal town so we used to get to visit there sometimes.”

“Who ran that place then?” I ask. “Were there a lot of you?”

“More than there are now.” Her face falls, and I feel bad for asking. “So many died two years ago. Including most of the other senior staff—there were originally three leaders, including Murray. Others were wounded. Some died afterwards, when we transferred to this headquarters.”

“So Pyros can get injured?” Stupid question. The fiend in the woods would have killed me if not for Cas. “I mean, if energy blasts don’t affect us like they do ordinary people, then why can other things hurt us?”

“Honestly? I don’t know,” says Val. “It’s part of Murray’s research actually. Something in our blood, in our genes, protects us from energy blasts and from the worst of the fiends’ attacks, but we’re not invulnerable to anything else. We can still get shot, stabbed, even fall over and break bones. I wish we knew more.”

So do I.

The missions start up the next week, and I watch the others leave the caves and come back a few days later. None of the novices. Cas’s on almost every mission, the first to volunteer according to Elle.

I’m still trying to puzzle him out, mostly because he seems to be at the centre of the weird things I’ve observed. For one thing, whenever he
is
actually here, he’s always hanging about Murray’s office, looking like he doesn’t particularly want to be there. Maybe it’s because I spent so long with Randy’s group that I felt I knew everything about each of us, but I still can’t get used to being around a bunch of total strangers, despite all their efforts to welcome me. Most of them came to live here almost immediately after the first attacks. They were recruited in stages from around the country. They saw the horrors, but didn’t have to spend two years surviving alone in the wilderness. Or, like Elle, they’ve barely been outside. This certainly applies to the older members of the group. There’s a complicated family tree linking Murray’s family to some of the others, apparently. Elle’s mother died giving birth to her, which explains why she’s so close to her dad. And why she didn’t inherit the Pyro gene: her mother wasn’t one of them.

“I never knew her, so I don’t miss her,” she says, one day as we’re walking to the training hall “But I used wonder what it would be like growing up in a normal family. But that was before…”

Before normal became terror, I guess.

“So was it just you here, growing up? Who lived here before?”

“Me, my dad, a bunch of other scientists. Most of the older Pyros, and Cas.”

“So he grew up here, too?”

“Kinda.” She doesn’t meet my eyes for some reason. We’re almost at the training hall by now, and I lose my chance to carry on questioning her when Cas himself walks past.

“Murray wants you,” he says to Elle, curtly. He doesn’t acknowledge me.
Lovely to see you, too.

“Okay,” says Elle. “I’ll see you later?”

“Sure,” I reply, and enter the training hall by myself.

No sooner do I enter than Val waves me over. “I think you’re ready for weapons training,” she says.

My heart leaps. At last. “Really?” I say, trying to keep a straight face.

“Yep. So… you have a choice to make. There’s no shortage of swords, knives and the like, or you can go for something more unusual. Or just use your fists, if you prefer.

“Quick question,” I say. “Shouldn’t the fire melt the weapons? And how do they not break when they hit a fiend? Those things are pretty solid.”

“I was getting to that,” says Val, amusement flickering in her eyes. Maybe I was a bit over-enthusiastic at the prospect of getting to use the weapons. But the image of Cas slashing at the fiends with his knife jumps to the forefront of my mind. I want to be able to fight like that.

Val takes me into a small room where they keep the weapons. They’re more… elaborate than I imagined, though I suppose I never got a close look at Cas’s blade. The rows of daggers remind me of a museum display I once saw, of ceremonial daggers from a forgotten time. The carved hilts are all slightly different. Some are small enough to be pocket-knives, the type street gangs in urban areas might have carried.

I look at them all, trying to imagine what each would feel like in my hand, whirling through the air, slicing through the fiends’ rock-hard skin.

“Take your pick. I’ll be training you in all of them. You’ll be having one-to-one training sessions twice a week. It’s proven to be the best way to teach it, so we can give each individual the best training we can.”

She stands back to let me choose. I reach out hesitantly, run my fingers over blade handles, and eventually pick a dagger with a gold Celtic design on the hilt.

“You want to try out the athame? Okay. We’ll alternate over different sessions so you can try everything out. You have a sharp eye, so I think you’d be suited to throwing knives—not that it’s usually a good idea in a one-on-one fight, but it’d be good for you to practise with targets before you start hitting things.”

To my annoyance, she takes the dagger away from me and gives me a handful of small throwing-knives instead.