Indestructible (Indestructible Trilogy Book 1) (24 page)

Even Jared won’t kill me. Or Cas, presumably. But the others? He’d blow them into oblivion to get to us. Why we’re so important to him, I don’t know. But I have a bad feeling it’s not an altruistic mission, or even to put us at the head of his army. He didn’t strike me as the soldierly type, and the idea of another army running around just doesn’t add up. Not out here, in this lifeless wilderness.

It’s like being back to square one, the day I first met Cas and Nolan. Now Cas is the last thing I have left.

He’s right, so I follow his lead off the path, making for the hills—and hopefully, somewhere to shelter. Though that’s probably too much to hope for.

Another cry echoes around us. It sounds closer. Cas swears under his breath.

Then the ground starts shaking.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The earth shifts. I feel the motion in my feet, travelling up my body. A world-rocking tremor that knocks me sideways into Cas. He grabs my arm to steady me, and I start at the unexpected rush of heat. His hand’s suddenly wrenched away, almost sending me sprawling.

“What—?”

“Are you doing that?” he asks, indicating the rocking ground

“
Me?
Of course not.”

But that’s what the shaking’s like—the prelude to an energy blast. Like the very earth is alive beneath my feet, shuddering and groaning and tearing itself apart. Even my newfound sense of balance isn’t enough. Nothing to brace myself against, apart from Cas.

And he’s sliding away. This is more than an energy blast. For one thing, there’s no tell-tale bright flare of light, no smell of burning. For another, cracks are appearing in the ground.

The earth really is breaking apart.

I jump over another crack as the ground splits beneath me. The line zigzags across the ground, cutting a deep trench in the earth. My feet stumble on the edge, and I move back, grabbing the nearest support—Cas’s hand.

Heat. I gasp as light flares around me. Around both of us. Cas’s wide eyes meet mine, and he tries to pull away, but our hands are locked together. Fire flickers across my hand, to his, and back again. The trembling earth rocks us both, yet I can’t let go.

The temperature rises in the air. I can feel the power beneath the surface, but I push it down. My hand clenches tighter around Cas’s, and he grips mine back. The disbelief on his face tells me he has no more control than I do.

The smell of burning rises, strong and insistent. Smoke rises from our clasped hands as the skin turns red and the flames jump higher, higher.

“What are you doing?”

Cas’s words sound like they’re coming from a mile away, beyond the shaking earth and splitting ground. I hold onto his hand, the only stable thing left in the world, and the power rushes to the surface again, overwhelming.

Another crack in the earth, right beneath my feet. I stumble back as the split widens—and the connection breaks. My hand slides out of Cas’s as we’re flung apart. My back hits the ground, knocking the breath out of me. Pain shoots up my arm, so intense that I scream.

Images flash before my eyes, some of places I recognise, some I don’t. The base. Murray’s office. The training hall, the lava pit—scenes pass by too fast for me to focus on any one of them.

Something heavy smacks into me, like solid rock. I gasp, but no sound comes out. I’m looking through someone else’s eyes. And they’re face to face with a fiend.

I stop breathing. The brutish, ugly creature towers over me, a growl slipping through its teeth. Bigger than I’m used to. Whoever I am, they’re shorter than me.

I dodge a punch and retaliate with a swipe of my own, but my hands are small, clumsy. I have no weapon.

Chains dig into my ankles. My surroundings become clearer. A cage. I’m in a metal-barred cage. Sheer panic overwhelms me.

The monster lumbers forwards, and this time, it doesn’t miss. Its blow strikes me across the face. Pain explodes behind my eyes.

The world becomes pain. A red haze blurs the fiend as it delivers the killing blow.

Dead.

Except I’m still alive. Barely, hanging onto some painful fragment of life, but alive.

Oh God… the pain…

My world’s shrunk to my own mind, this tiny corner of sanity. I bury myself in it, as if I can turn my back. But the fog’s slowly clearing, the pain’s receding. Voices sound in my ears, fading in and out like a badly tuned radio.

“He’s waking up.”

“Has he Transcended?”

“Perhaps… almost ready…”

“Give it another minute.” I know that voice. Jared.
What the hell is happening? Why can’t I get out?
Who
am
I?

“Are you sure? We don’t want a repeat of…” The words blur together.

“How else are we to get results?” Jared sounds angry, accusing.

My eyes flicker open.

“Cas. Cas, can you hear me?”

I don’t recognise the other voice. But I’m Cas. I’m reliving something from his past.

The shock jolts me back to reality. I gasp, disoriented, as the world spins. I’m not on the ground anymore but in the air.

Hell, Cas is carrying me.

My mind spins. What did I just see? Was that really Cas’s past? He was an artificial soldier, but did Jared really…?

The wind rushes over me as he runs, dodging the cracks appearing in the ground. I twist my head to look up at him.

“You can put me down.” My voice comes out shakily.

Cas nearly drops me as he navigates around another crack in the earth. But the trembles have slowed down since I passed out. The world no longer feels like it’s breaking apart, despite the new cracks in the ground.

But I feel like I’m breaking on the inside.

Something happened when we touched. Somehow, I relived part of his life, through his eyes. But why? How’s something like that even possible?

That
pain…

No human could endure it. Even a Pyro. And he was only a child.

Now I understand what the experiments were for. To make a regular Pyro Transcendent, they created one who could withstand anything, couldn’t die even when bleeding out on the floor. Who could heal from near-death. I can’t look at him. My mind’s a whirlwind of confusion, memories that aren’t mine tangled up with my own thoughts.

A final blast shakes the earth, and I stumble over the edge of a muddy hill. I land on my back with a gasp, the stars winking above me in the endless sky. A thud tells me Cas’s landed beside me.

“Leah, move!”

When I just lie there, he grabs me roughly by the arm and pulls me back, under an overhang. Instinctively, I hold onto him as the last bone-shaking tremor rocks the world. But that’s not why I’m trembling.

I lean back against him, still shaking. He doesn’t push me away, and neither of us speaks. Seconds pass, turning to minutes, as we watch, waiting to see if the land’s going to split open, if the tremors are going to come back.

Finally, he shifts position. I can feel him looking at me, as though waiting for me to speak first. I turn my head to face him and unexpectedly find his face so close to mine, we almost touch.

“Is it over?” My voice is hoarse.

“I don’t know.”

“That wasn’t another energy blast, right?”

“I don’t think so. But it wasn’t natural.”

“The fiends,” I say. But those aren’t the monsters I’m thinking of.

“Could have been. Or it might have been someone else.”

“Not Jared?” I think of the man in my vision. Who the hell would do that to a child? What kind of monsters are these people?

And we’re delivering ourselves into their hands.

“Jared never learns his lesson. Even after every mistake he’s made, he still believes he can beat the fiends if he gets us onto his side.”

In light of what I just saw, I can believe it.

“I don’t understand him,” I whisper. “He…” My voice chokes up. How can I tell Cas what I just saw? I don’t even know how it happened.

“Welcome to the club,” says Cas. “If you’d been here two years ago, you’d know. His stupidity was what drew the fiends out—made them launch an all-out attack on humans—in the first place. If he hadn’t provoked them, they might have gone crawling back into the divide. We won the first fight, you know. It was only when we lost the Transcendent that things got really bad.” He stops, abruptly.

“Jared said…” I hesitate, not sure if I want to know the answer. “Did the last Transcendent destroy the world?”

“We were manipulated,” says Cas, through clenched teeth. “By Jared, of course. He turned on us during the fight, when she was supposed to close the bridge. He killed her before it fully closed, and her powers set off the first energy blast.” Cas’s tone never wavers, but bright anger gleams in his eyes.

Murray said she never harmed anyone intentionally. She didn’t do it on purpose.

But that means…

“He manipulated both of us.” Cas’s voice is tight. “Just like he’s doing to the two of us. I don’t know if he has a plan, but either those earthquakes are his, or they’re coming from the other side.”

“From… the fiends’ world?”

He nods. “The invasion. Jared’s been in hiding for two years. He must be making a play for a reason. He always did have a more in-depth understanding of the fiends than Murray did.”

Given what I just saw in Cas’s memories, I believe it. My mouth is dry, my hands still trembling.
How can he still live with the Pyros like this?
But he was created to be one. He’s known no other life.

“So Jared expects the invasion to happen… now. And that’s why he needs us.” I’m voicing the obvious aloud, but I can’t stand to listen to my own thoughts any longer.

“Their leaders must be coming back. It’s the only way.”

I glance sideways at him. “Their leaders? Who?” My mind conjures up an image of monstrous super-fiends. “Murray mentioned a name—the Fiordans.”

“They’re shape-changers,” says Cas. “After the last invasion, they were stranded back in the fiends’ world, leaving half their army over here on
our
world. Any of us Pyros can take down a fiend, even an army. But their leaders… no one but a Transcendent would stand a chance against them.”

I stare.
“That’s
my purpose? Not—not to close the breach, or…”

Cas’s eyes narrow. “Purpose? You can do whatever the hell you want. Kill the fiends, stop the Fiordans, even run away.”

“I’m not running,” I say. “But are we walking into a trap?”

“We’ve come too far to go back now,” he says.

I nod. We can’t go back anyway, not if we want to save Elle. Not to mention whoever else has those marks from Jared.
He’s twisted. We have to stop him.

“How much further?”

“I don’t know. I hope we aren’t too far from the divide, but it’s hard to tell.”

“I’m not all that keen to go back that way,” I say. “Those tremors came from the divide.”

The thought of the last world-wide earthquakes splitting the earth open, fiends swarming the streets, fills my head. We only got away so easily because we’re Pyros. What happened to the normal people, camps like the one I used to live in? Did they think the end of the world was happening again?

The ground above us shakes. I start upright, thinking the tremors have begun again—but it’s only the overhang that’s shaking, as though something heavy has landed above us.

It keeps shaking. Soil rains down. A familiar screeching sound chills me to the bone.

There’s a fiend standing above us.

I roll out from under the cliff, with Cas on my heels, and we turn to face our enemy.
Hell.
There’s more than one of them. Three ugly, brutish fiends face us. They knew we were there.

My hand flies to my dagger, and I pull it out the sheath, fire flaring up my arm. The power makes my body rock, and I remember losing control when Cas and I touched. I can’t afford that to happen again.

The fiends jump at us. I dodge, rolling on the ground again, as Cas catches one with the edge of his blade. Another lands beside me, and I leap to my feet, slashing with my dagger. I miss, but the fiery edge glides along the fiend’s arm, and it hisses at me.

Heat rises as I strike its other arm with the side of my hand. The fire consumes me, and I throw myself into the fight gladly, giving into the rush of power. The fiend shrieks as I slash it across the leg, leaving a deep burn in its rock-like skin. It staggers back, swiping with its meaty hand, but I catch its hand in mine. The size difference is ridiculous, but fire rushes to my palm immediately. The fiend screams again, pulling its blistering hand from my grip.

A heavy weight slams into me from the side, and I stagger back. Its partner’s arrived. I feint a couple of times, caught between two fiends, stalling while I work out a strategy. My fist flies out. I know I’ve telegraphed my attack when the fiend dodges, but it gives me time to get into position to attack its partner.