The Bloom Series Box Set: Bloom & Fade (11 page)

“
Who are you
fighting?”

“
Ourselves. Every Conduit
needs a Source—someone to supply the energy that will be used. A
Source has the ability to create their own energy. The most
powerful Source can harness something called Phoenix energy—a label
whose meaning will be made obvious to you in time. There are far
fewer Sources than there Conduits, making them somewhat of a rare
breed among rare breeds. The main issue is that there are those who
would rather keep their abilities to themselves and use them to
hurt the innocent.”

“
Is that why you’re
fighting them?”

Bernam scoffed. “One of many reasons.
They have joined together to kidnap unprotected Sources and Cons
for cruel experimentation. You are lucky that I found you before
they did.”

15

H
aven opened her eyes and blinked against the harsh white
light coming from the ceiling. It flooded her vision and stabbed
into her brain like a dull knife. She tried to hold up her arm to
block the light but was unable to lift it from the hard surface on
which she lay.

She squinted down at her body as the
room started to come into focus. She was on her back atop a hard
metal table and her arms and legs were pinned down with thick
plastic straps wrapped around her wrists and ankles. She wore a
loose, blue cotton shirt and matching pants, much like the scrubs
her mother would wear to work at the hospital. Thin wires ran out
of a hole in the floor and up to the table. The multicolored wires
burrowed into the backs of her hands and the skin of her arms all
the way up to her shoulders.

Haven tried to scream for help, but a
thick plastic strip ran over her mouth, sealing it closed. She
struggled violently to break free from her bindings, thrashing back
and forth on the table and pounding her arms and legs against the
metal.

Her vision started to go black as the
pain in her head worsened. She closed her eyes and stopped moving
as she fought a wave of dizziness that swirled inside her head as
if she were on a violent rollercoaster. Haven tilted her head to
let her wild hair fall to the side, then slowly opened her eyes and
looked around the room.

The glaring light in the ceiling
emanated from a single, round fixture which hung down like some
bizarre chandelier. It had a square outline but a domed top and the
element was covered with a thin metal mesh, like a cage.

The table upon which Haven lay was the
only piece of furniture in the room. It was a single metal slab
supported by four square metal legs that were bolted into the hard
polished floor. The walls were dull white—the same as the
ceiling—with no decoration of any kind. The only window was a small
square of tinted glass set into the tall metal door in the wall
past her feet.

She waited for what seemed like hours,
drifting in and out of consciousness between fits of struggling.
Every time she tried to escape, her body became weaker and weaker,
until eventually the only thing she could do was lay on the table,
breathing in quick gasps like a caged, frightened
animal.

Later that day—or that week, or month;
she had no way of knowing—they came for her.

The door opened slowly, hissing loudly
on pneumatic pistons. She strained against her bindings to raise
her head and look. The wires in her arms pulled painfully at her
skin when she tried to sit up. As the door swung farther on its
hinges, she saw that it was incredibly thick—at least a foot of
solid metal from front to back, with two massive, rectangular
sliding bolts in the center.

The door hit the inside
wall with a deep, ominous
thoooommmm
, and two men wearing
full-body protective suits walked into the room. The suits were
made of white, flimsy plastic and encased their bodies from head to
toe. Tinted face shields kept Haven from seeing who they
were.

One of the men walked over to the
table and knelt down by the wires that ran up from the floor. The
other stood next to Haven and pulled the wires out of her arms, one
at a time. Each time he pulled one out, he left behind a tiny bead
of rising blood. The man under the table was feeding the wires into
the floor as his partner removed them from Haven’s skin.

When all the wires had been yanked
from her arms and hands, the men left the room. The door remained
open, and Haven would have tried once more to escape her bindings
if only she weren’t so weak. She rested her head back on the table
as tears ran from the outside corners of her eyes.

The sound of wheels rolling across the
floor echoed through the open doorway. It grew louder until the men
reappeared, pushing a cart that looked like a smaller version of
the table in the room.

They worked quickly, unstrapping her
left leg and securing it to the moveable table before unstrapping
her right leg. They freed both of her arms and shifted her body
onto the cart. She made muffled noises through the plastic strip
covering her mouth as she tried to ask them what they were going to
do to her. Her eyes blinked slowly as she fought to stay awake. The
dizziness returned and her eyelids fluttered rapidly.

After they got her settled onto the
cart, the men slipped her hands through the new plastic bindings
and tightened them around her wrists. Haven lifted her head, but
one of the men placed his hand on it and gently pushed it back down
to the table.

They wheeled the cart out through the
doorway and down a long, bright hallway. Tall metal doors—just like
the one leading to her room—lined both sides of the hall. Haven
couldn’t see past the tinted windows to find out what was
inside.

The men pushed her cart through two
large swinging doors at the end of the hallway and into a large,
dark room. At the back of that room was a smaller door which led to
an even smaller room; barely big enough for her cart and the two
men to move around it.

They stopped the cart in the middle of
the small room and clicked the wheels into four locking grips on
the floor. One of the men wheeled over a small cart loaded with all
kinds of monitoring equipment while the other swabbed her forearm
with a wet cotton ball. He set aside the cotton and picked up a
needle attached to a long, clear tube. The tube ran up to a bag of
clear liquid hanging over Haven’s cart.

He held her arm down firmly while he
inserted the needle into her arm. A burst of bright red blood shot
up into the clear tube, then flowed back into her skin. She wanted
to reach for the needle with her other arm as soon as the man let
go but was too weak to do anything more than twitch her
wrist.

The men stared down at her through
their black face shields for a long time. Haven could hear them
breathing through some kind of filtration system built into their
suits.

Help
, she wanted to say.
Please help
me
.

The men turned and left the room. Next
to her on a long table were all sorts of shiny, stainless steel
tools: scissors, bone saws, pliers, a small hammer.

Haven found new energy and shouted
into the thick plastic over her mouth.

The door burst open and another man in
a protective suit hurried in. The suit looked as if it had been put
on in a hurry; the helmet sat crookedly and the material on the
man’s arms and legs was all bunched up and wrinkled.

It reminded Haven of Noah in his
pajamas.

The man moved quickly to her cart and
looked down at her. His head was moving and she could hear him
trying to say something from inside his floppy face covering, but
she couldn’t make out the words. After a few more syllables, he
shook his head in frustration and lifted the face mask up over his
head.

“
I am Marius,” he said
with a heavy Russian accent. He had a thick brow that stuck out
over his dark eyes. “They kidnapped you from the hospital after
what happened at school. You are safe now. Well, you will be. In a
few minutes, probably.” He let the mask fall back over his eyes
while he yanked the needle out of her arm. “Sorry,” he said loudly
from behind his mask.

She lifted her restrained arms and he
picked up a serrated blade from the table of tools. He cut through
the thin strips of plastic that connected her bindings to the table
but left the thick cuffs on her forearms with several inches of the
straps attached. He pulled up his mask again when he saw her
glaring at him.

“
Best to leave them on,
for now. In case they see us. Please, there is no time.”

He pulled the mask down
over his face and continued cutting. Soon her legs were free from
the table. She pointed to the plastic covering over her mouth but
he shook his head,
no
. He bent down and unlocked each of the wheels, then pushed
the cart out of the room, whistling softly inside his
helmet.

They went out through the large room
and back into the hallway, down to the other end and through
another set of swinging doors. Marius nodded his bulky head
ponderously at the few people he passed along the way. Not everyone
wore a protective suit; most of them looked like normal doctors or
nurses, roaming the halls of the vast complex and making notations
on small electronic pads. Whenever someone looked at Marius and his
strange cargo for more than a few seconds, he would pick up a
clipboard from the cart and flip through a couple pages until the
nosy observer was out of sight.

Marius stopped in the middle of a
four-way intersection of hallways and pulled back the left sleeve
of his white suit to reveal a crude drawing on his arm. Thick black
lines drawn in permanent marker traced a map over his hairy skin.
His finger followed a long line and stopped at the four-way
intersection on the map. He mumbled to himself and pointed down
each hallway in turn while checking the map on his arm. He finally
settled on a direction and pushed Haven’s cart quickly down another
long, bright corridor.

“
Ah-ha!” he said. He
stopped the cart next to a plain white door and looked down at the
chunky metal keypad next to the handle. Marius pulled off his left
glove and stuck his hand on the keypad. A ball of orange light
burst from his palm and burned through the wall, completely melting
the keypad and everything else in a five-inch radius.

Marius laughed and lightly tapped the
door. It swung open easily.

He pulled off his mask and tossed it
aside. “Okay,” he said. “Now for hard part.”

He lifted Haven from the cart. He set
her down on the floor and draped one of her arms over the back of
his neck to support her as they walked.

The lights in the hallway changed from
bright white to a deep, flashing red. In the distance, an alarm
blared.

“
Well,” said Marius
grimly, “now we are in
real
hurry. They are coming.”

16

T
he plane shuddered as it hit a small patch of
turbulence.

Colton gripped the
armrests of his seat. “How
did
you find me, anyway?” he asked.

Bernam grinned coldly. “Not all of my
abilities will be revealed to you, Mr. Ross. As I was saying, long
before these cruel individuals started their mad crusade, we fought
for the same reason everyone fights: difference of opinion. But I
digress from my main goal, which is to enlighten you about the
state of the dangerous world in which you have been so mercilessly
thrown.” His dark eyes glinted with devotion. “Each one of us is
powerful on our own, Colton, even without a true counterpart. Some
are stronger than others. Some can do no more than sap the energy
from a fresh leaf and use it keep their own fingernails from
turning yellow. The strongest can drain the life from every person
in a room and use that energy to add ten years to their own
existence.

“
We are made this way for
a reason. Unfortunately, nature has only given each of us one half
of a grand equation. It is only when we work together that we can
achieve our full potential. This pairing of Source and Conduit is
called Unity. Together we become something more powerful than we
could ever hope to be on our own.”

“
I’m not quite sure I
understand.”

“
Of course not!” Bernam
chuckled. “You’re still thinking about your job, and your
apartment, and all those other things you left behind. Eventually
all of that will drift into the background, then disappear
entirely. That’s perfectly normal. Consider this more of an
introduction than anything else.”

Colton looked over at the back of
Reece’s chair.

“
Occasionally,” said
Bernam, noticing Colton’s hesitation, “a Source is so powerful that
they will literally burn themselves up from the inside out unless
they have a Conduit capable of harnessing and redirecting the
energy. It is like a wellspring inside of them, and without the
proper outlet…
boom
. That is why it is so important to work together. It is the
way things were meant to be. And
that’s
what I want to change. All of
this fighting is pointless. It keeps us from finding true Unity
with our counterparts. We need to weed out the bad elements and
start over.”