Indestructible (Indestructible Trilogy Book 1) (8 page)

“So…” I try to wrap my head around it. “So they’re not from this world at all, but they live here now?”

He nods. “They created a bridge when the divide opened. We managed to close it, but too late.

There must be a hundred thousand of them still roaming the earth, and the aftershocks from the first energy blast are still happening now.”

“But that’s what makes people… different, right? The energy blasts?”

Another nod. “Yes. On the fiends’ world, the blasts have destroyed all life apart from the fiends. They’re immune. The energy blasts we experience here are an aftereffect of the bridge forming, and there doesn’t seem to be a way to stop them. But they also awaken genes in people who have the potential to become Pyros. The…”

“…survivors,” I finish. “Right?”

His expression turns sad, pensive. “I wish it didn’t have to be that way, but yes. We try to find them before the fiends do.”

“You weren’t looking for me, were you?” I’m still wondering why there was such a big group out there, even the non-fighters, when you’d think it would attract the fiends.

“No, but we’re glad we found you.”

“And I’m… a Pyro.” The word tastes foreign, like it belongs to someone else. Someone who can do the impossible.

Someone who can kill the fiends. Save people.

“It’s a little melodramatic,” says Murray. “I confess I can’t remember who came up with the term, but it stuck.”

“Because of the fire?” Here, in the heart of a volcano, I can believe it really happened. I really fought the fiends.

He nods. “You’ll learn more about adapting to other weapons in training, but the ability to call the fire is the reason for our name.”

And the reason I’m alive. “Training?”

“We have a system,” he says. “If you want to join missions, there are levels of training you’ll have to complete first. Val’s in charge of training new recruits at the moment, but I’ll ask Nolan to help out if it’ll make you more comfortable having someone you know.”

“I don’t mind either way,” I say. “Honestly. But I guess you’re assuming I’ll say yes?”

“Was that a bit presumptuous? I apologise. Like I said, it’s up to you.”

“You say there’s no going back?”

“I think…” He pauses. “If you wanted to leave, we could take you to the nearest town. But joining will give you a purpose other than survival. We can fight them. Whether it’s genetic or evolutionary survival, we’re designed to kill the fiends. I could hazard a guess that it’s what you want, right?”

I can leave. Go to that town, with the barbed-wire fences, and live. Like Lissa would want me to. Like Randy and the others would.

The image of that fire bursting from my hand nudges its way back into my head. Who am I kidding? I can’t walk away now. Not now I have the chance to fight the creatures that killed my sister, that destroyed my world.

I find myself nodding. “Yes,” I say. “I’m joining.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

I’m expecting to have to take a vow to lay down my life for Queen and country or something like that, but instead Murray shows me to a room where several other teenagers—three boys, four girls—sit or lie on narrow beds, talking or reading. All of them gawk at me when I come in, the conversation dying down.
Crap.
I can almost hear their thoughts as they take in my appearance, except Elle, who smiles at me.

So they have mixed dorms here. I wish I had my own room, because I know I’ll be reliving the energy blast in my dreams. I don’t want to wake them up with my screaming.

“This is Leah,” says Murray. “She’s new here. Be nice, okay?” To me, he says, “There’s a bathroom through that door at the back. The laundry cupboard there should have a change of clothes. We’ll need to measure you for uniform tomorrow.”

And he disappears, leaving me alone with seven curious-eyed teenagers. I haven’t been around people my own age in so long, my throat dries up, and I haven’t a clue what to say.

I settle for, “Hi, I’m Leah.”

The others rattle off their names so fast I can’t take them in.

A dark-skinned girl of around my age, possibly named Poppy, asks, “What’s happened to your hair?”

Well, that was fast.

“Close encounter with an energy blast,” I say.

Cue impressed faces.

“You serious?” says a guy with dreadlocks in a Scottish accent. I
think
he said his name was Tyler.

I nod, walking to the laundry cupboard. It’s filled with identical white shirts and grey tracksuit bottoms. The pyjamas are grey, too. In fact, that’s what everyone in the room is wearing. I grab a pair, aware of seven pairs of eyes on my back the whole while. I ignore the prickling self-consciousness and go into the bathroom.

A real bathroom, with real running water. I can’t help myself. I make for the shower, after checking the door is bolted behind me. It’s nothing as fancy as the shower in the house, but I don’t care. I start the water running and sigh as it soothes my sunburnt skin.

I want to stay there, under the water, the sound cutting off the outside world, but underneath, I can hear conversation coming from the room, and I’m conscious that there’s only one bathroom for eight of us. I turn off the shower and dry myself quickly, pulling on the pyjamas. They’ve even been ironed and folded. I shake my head at the thought that civilisation disappeared so quickly in the outside world, along with personal hygiene. The clean smell is both familiar and discomfiting. I don’t linger by the mirror, but hope fervently that my hair grows back soon. In my old life, I was never the self-conscious type, but being thrown back into something resembling my old school is disconcerting to say the least.

All heads turn in my direction when I come out the room. I sigh, figuring I’d better get used to it until the next newbie comes along.

I’m here for a reason, anyway. To learn to kill the fiends.

There’s one free bed. It has a small wooden chest of drawers beside it, but I don’t have any possessions to unpack. I sit, drawing my knees up to my chest, waiting for someone to break the silence. I’m not about to start a conversation with everyone looking at me like I returned from the dead.

“Is it true you killed two fiends?” The boy with dreadlocks again.

I shake my head. “No.” Then I wonder why I’m being honest. Do I want to make friends here? These people are supposed to be fighters, training to battle the fiends. I don’t know about the mortality rate, but it can’t be good. We might be super-powered, but we’re not invincible.

Not that humans fare any better.

“Ah. It’s just I heard you talking to Elle. But is it true you fought them off?”

“Yeah,” I say. I don’t mention the part where they almost knocked me through a wall. Really, I haven’t done anything heroic other than get kicked around and almost die. “Have any of you guys fought one for real?”

“No,” says a girl with blond curls and a sullen expression. “They won’t let us go out in the field until we’re qualified. Sucks to be us.”

“You just want to be paired with Cas,” says the dreadlocked boy.

“I do
not,”
the girl protests, flushing. “He bit my head off when I accidentally got in his way during training that one time.”

“And she totally swooned,” says the first girl who spoke to me. Poppy.

“Don’t be stupid.” The girl looks at me. “Never mind that, how’d you burn your face?”

I gape at her. “Uh… I walked outside?” Have these people never left?

“Leave the poor girl alone,” says another guy, about Elle’s age. “We can get the story tomorrow, she looks like she’s about to pass out.”

I
am
tired, but I don’t want to sleep, knowing what nightmares lie in wait. It’s weird being inside, not out in the open under the blood-red sky.

“I’m fine,” I say, stifling a yawn.

“Okay.” The blond girl launches into a long tirade about something, and just like that, I’m forgotten. I lie back in bed, intending to rest my eyes, but almost as soon as my head hits the pillow, I sink into oblivion.

***

The sound of chatter wakes me up. I’m so used to waking up in total silence that for a heartbeat, I think I’m still asleep. Mercifully, I didn’t dream about the fiends or the explosion. Hushed silences and whispers have been my life for so long that the shouts and laughs from the others make my heartbeat kick up like it did when there was danger nearby, and I have to make myself sit up calmly in bed, as though it’s something I do every day.

“Did you sleep well?” Elle asks me, unwittingly drawing everyone’s attention to me again. I sigh inwardly. Better get used to it.

Elle insists on walking me to the mess hall, where meals are served. It makes me look less like a loser for not knowing where things are, but her constant chatter ensures that everyone stares.

“Sorry you’re stuck in the mixed dorm,” she says. “Once we pass the training, we get our own rooms.”

That makes sense. The level of noise constantly takes me by surprise. It hits me like a hammer to the skull when we enter the hall, which is full of tables. Shouts and chatter drum relentlessly in my ears as I walk beside Elle, head held high as though I’m oblivious to the stares.

Really, I’m the one who can’t stop staring. There are so
many
of them—at least a hundred people of all ages, from younger teens to adults.

Then I think of the fiends, and suddenly a hundred seems a tiny number. I entertain a brief fantasy of there being more places like this, but from what I’ve heard so far, it’s unlikely.

The food distracts me. Fresh-baked bread sits in baskets on the tables like it’s not a forgotten commodity in the outside world. Fresh fruit, too.

“Where do you get all this?” I ask Elle.

“We’ve been self-sufficient for years,” she says. “The water comes from reservoirs in the hills, and my dad’s farm takes care of the rest. We have greenhouses on the other side of the hill where we grow fresh fruit and veg.”

“Wow,” I say, simply, as an enticing smell hits my nostrils.

God, there’s even coffee.
I follow the smell over to a table at the front of the room set up like a hotel buffet. In the old world, I’d never have thought the sight of bacon and toast and coffee would ever be as out-of-reach as first-class holidays and winning the lottery. This place, totally self-sufficient, has managed to preserve things that died out in a heartbeat in the outside world.

I try not to let my reaction show, but Elle’s sharp eyes glitter with amusement as I pile my plate high.

“Hungry, right?”

“Yeah, starving.”

‘”You’ll probably be on kitchen duty at some point,” she says. “We have a rota. Louie’s head chef.”

We sit with the rest of our dorm-mates at the table. I don’t join in the conversation, but listen and try to memorise people’s names. Just when I think I have them down, another group of teenagers joins us, and the table becomes unbearably crowded. I give up my attempt to pay attention and let the noise fade into a buzz.

After, Elle gives me a tour. She shows me where the various higher-up Pyros live. I’ve only met Murray so far. There’s a training hall, where I’m supposed to report to Nolan in an hour—apparently, they even have clocks here—and a weapons room.

“But I thought weapons couldn’t harm the fiends.”

“Most can’t,” Elle says, “but ours are special.”

Like Cas’s knife. I haven’t seen him at all, but since there are so many people here, I don’t know why that surprises me. Nolan’s been put in charge of making sure I’m physically able before I get put in training classes with the other novices. They even have school-type classes like Maths and History here, but only for the kids under sixteen. I don’t feel like I’m missing out. Nothing I learned in my four-and-a-half years at secondary school has done me any good in the wilderness.

I’d rather learn to fight.

I took basic self-defence classes when I was younger, but it’s been a while. Life after the world ended has always been about running away, not fighting back. As for weapons, I’ve never handled one. Despite eight-year-old me’s pleading, my parents never caved in and let me take lessons in swordplay. That one was during my anime phase, when it was my lifetime ambition to own a katana.

First, I have to be declared fit to enter training. I’m not keen on being poked and prodded, but Sandra, the doctor, reassures me that my hair will grow back soon, and that I’m in better form than I should be, considering what I’ve been through. Only light bruising on my body hints that I might have been mildly injured, certainly not almost-fatally. But she still insists on taking a blood sample. I stare as my blood flows down a tube into a glass container, thick and dark red. When she’s done, Sandra holds the container up to the light, frowning. Then she takes it into a back room.

Something about the medical bay makes me fidgety and uneasy. Perhaps it’s the clinical smell associated with hospitals. I’m relieved to be given the cue to leave for the training hall.