The Bloom Series Box Set: Bloom & Fade (55 page)

The first rows of the grid were filled
with dead trees—those that had been siphoned of life so Haven and
others could be healed. Farther down the line were the living
trees, their healthy branches blooming with vibrant leaves, their
trunks a pleasant brown.

At the far edge of the grid, the grass
turned slightly upward in a long, rising hill. Colton stood atop
the hill and looked down at the teardrop pond at the bottom of the
other side. An old willow tree stood guard at one end of the pond,
its wispy green branches trailing softly over the surface of clear
water, moving slightly in the artificial wind pushed out through
vents high in the ceiling. Dormer sat there, next to Elena’s grave,
watching small, blue lights dance across the pond. He held up a
hand in greeting and Colton walked down the hill toward
him.

“
What do you think?” asked
Dormer, nodding toward the lights. “She’s pretty good.”

Colton sat next to him on the grass.
“Haven made those?”

Dormer nodded. “Elena never got the
chance to show her how to do it, but she figured it out. They’re
still confined to the pond, though. Elena’s used to go to the trees
and live on the branches. It was like a forest filled with blue
fireflies.”

“
I remember,” said Colton.
He recalled the times with Haven at the pond when he offered
endless suggestions on how to create the blue lights, knowing that
almost all of his ideas were ridiculous. He came up with most of
them just to make her laugh.

Colton had only seen the lights once,
right before Elena died. When she passed, they had faded with her.
Elena’s grave was a simple, unmarked stone next to the base of the
tree. A single yellow flower was laid across the top of the grassy
mound before the stone.

“
What are clear cells?”
asked Colton.

Dormer turned his head slowly to look
at him. “And here I thought we were having a moment.”

“
Adsen mentioned them in
passing,” said Colton. “He said it had something to do with the way
Fade affects us.”

“
Sources and Conduits have
an additional active set of cells in their bloodstream,” said
Dormer. “You know about white cells and red cells, all of
that.”

“
Yes.”

“
Well, we also have what
Adsen calls clear cells. He thinks everyone has them, but they’re
active in some and vestigial in others.”

“
Like your
appendix?”

“
Correct. In ‘normal’
people—for lack of a better term—these clear cells serve no
purpose. But in people like
us
, they exist solely to transmit
the energy that Sources produce and Conduits absorb. They are
simply microscopic pathways that funnel our energy throughout our
bodies. Fade works by mutating those clear cells and tricking the
body into thinking they are foreign bodies. Our immune system
assumes we’ve been invaded by a parasite and fights back. Except
when a white cell attacks, the mutated clear cell absorbs it and
splits into two infected cells. After this happens enough times,
bingo, you’re done.”

“
Do the clear cells
produce Source energy?”

“
No, they are only the
tunnels through which it travels.”

“
So where does the energy
come from?
Something
has to be making it.”

“
You’re right,” said
Dormer. “Something does. But we don’t know what. It’s kind of a
mystery. Some say it’s spiritual—that it’s Mother Nature herself or
some equivalent deity who is granting our abilities and altering
our DNA so we can manipulate such powerful energies.”

“
What do
you
think?”

“
I don’t think it matters
how we got our abilities. I think it just matters what we do with
them.”

“
That’s kind of a cop-out,
isn’t it?”

Dormer smiled. “Perhaps.”

They sat there in silence, looking at
the blue lights dance across the pond.

“
Listen,” said Colton.
“Not to shatter the calm or anything, but—”

“
We need to get started,”
interrupted Dormer. “I know. I was just…preparing
myself.”

“
Adsen is moving too
quickly on the virus,” said Colton. “I tried to tell him to slow
down, but he sent me away.”

“
He is not the same man
who was taken into that medical facility,” said Dormer. He stared
blankly into the middle of the pond. “The time he spent in there…it
changed him. He’s more distant. Hollow.” He shook his head and
pulled out a roll of papers from his coat. He unrolled them on the
grass and smoothed out the corners. “How long did Kamiko give him
to finish the virus?”

“
Ten hours. That was
almost two hours ago.”

“
And he’s already nearly
finished?”

“
Seems so,
yes.”

“
Right.” Dormer frowned at
the Dome schematics and riffled through the pages.

“
What is it?” asked
Colton.

“
It seems our timeline for
action might be a bit shorter than we thought.”

“
How much
shorter?”

“
There’s a shift change in
ten minutes,” said Dormer. “All but two of the soldiers will be in
the same area at the same time. It will be another twelve hours
before it happens again.”

Colton nodded. “Then we’d better get
moving.”

29

B
ullets ricocheted off metal and hit the floor near Haven’s
head, spitting up mortar explosions of dust and concrete. She
screamed and squeezed her body into a fetal position. Roku and
Bastian lay on the floor a few feet away, their backs pressed to a
brick-shaped machine. Bullets thunked into the metal on the other
side. Steam hissed from a burst pipe overhead.

The gunfire ceased. Haven heard the
soft footsteps of boots on concrete and, somewhere in the distance,
liquid gurgling onto the floor from a pierced container. She closed
her eyes and focused on the glowing blue star in her mind. It was
distant and weak. She clenched her jaws together until she felt
like her teeth would shatter, but there was no way to summon her
power. The taxing output in the storage room earlier had completely
worn her out.

She heard a sharp
CRACK
of metal against
armor, then a grunt as one of the guards dropped to the ground. The
gunfire flared up again, although it was aimed at another part of
the room.

“
Let’s
go
!” she shouted at Roku and
Bastian.

They nodded and followed her to a
section of the room behind the guards. All of their attention was
focused on a large metal bin on wheels. The guards fired nonstop at
the metal bin, their bullets pinging harmlessly off its surface.
The bin rolled toward them, slowly at first, then it picked up
speed as it sped across the floor. Haven smiled when she saw
Marius’s dirty black boots beneath the bin, pushing it from
behind.

The guards backed up slowly, still
firing. Haven turned to Bastian. “I need some time to
recharge.”

“
You two go find the main
supply of Fade,” said Roku. “Marius and I can handle
this.”

Bastian took her hand and tried to
pull her away. She yanked her hand back and looked at
Roku.

“
Go,” he said, before she
could talk him out of it. “Come and get us before the place
explodes, okay?”

She hesitated a moment longer. “Okay,”
she said finally.

Bastian was already moving, crouching
low to the ground as he hurried across the room. Haven caught up
and stayed close, checking over her shoulder as they moved. She saw
the guards and Marius, but no sign of the thin man.

Bastian led her on a winding path
through the machines. Haven looked up at the ceiling and saw that
they were following a massive cluster of pipes that ran toward one
wall of the room.

A man in a white lab coat peeked his
head around the corner of a container as Haven and Bastian passed.
He opened his mouth to say something but ran away screaming after
Bastian blasted the top of his head with a quick burst of yellow
fire. Haven wrinkled her nose in disgust at the smell of burnt
hair.

They reached the far wall where the
pipes in the ceiling terminated.

“
Over there,” said
Bastian, pointing along the wall. A metal door with a black keypad
in place of a doorknob was set into the thick wall a few feet away.
Bastian’s shoulders sank in defeat when he saw the keypad. “Now
what?”

“
Melt it off, dummy!” said
Haven.

He put a hand over the keypad and a
strong yellow glow flared from his palm. A second later, the
plastic was a bubbling stream of molten goo that ran down the
surface of the door. Bastian pushed against the door and it swung
open with ease.

“
Huh,” he said, then went
into the next room. After a long glance at the distance
muzzle-flashes where Roku and Marius fought the guards, Haven
followed after him.

An enormous vat was in the middle of
the room; a giant white tank with a huge window in its side that
revealed a deep sea of thick, clear liquid. A woman wearing a
sealed chemical biohazard suit stood on a small metal platform that
reached out over the tank. She held a long wire that dipped down
into the vat. After a few moments, she pulled up the wire and read
a measurement from a small black box attached to the
end.

Several more workers buzzed around the
tank, tweaking machinery connected to the circular wall. Others sat
at computer workstations that were shielded by thick sheets of
Plexiglas. All of the workers wore full biohazard suits. They
stopped what they were doing when Bastian stepped away from the
door and walked toward the vat. He was lit up like the Olympic
torch.

“
Don’t anybody move,” he
said, loud and clear, looking at each of the workers. One of the
men turned to run and a stream of yellow plasma licked out from
Bastian’s arm and hit him in the leg. The man yelled in pain and
lay on the ground, peeling away strips of melting suit before it
burned into his skin. “Probably hard of hearing,” said Bastian to
the other workers. They didn’t laugh.

“
Everybody up,” said
Haven. She walked over to the row of workstations and pulled people
out of their seats. Their crinkling body suits made it difficult
for them to move quickly, like low-budget astronauts trapped in
zero gravity. Quick, scared breaths fogged the insides of their
flimsy masks. Haven herded them all next to the tank. She pointed
to a cluster of pipes running out of the vat and up to the ceiling.
“Which one of these is flammable?”

Bastian looked at her with confusion,
then he realized what she meant to do and smiled wolfishly. “Yeah,”
he said, taking a step forward and letting his fire reach out for
the workers. They took a frightened step backward and bumped into
the vat. “Speak up if you don’t wanna be cooked alive in your
suits!”

The woman on the platform over the
tank said, “That one,” and pointed to a fat pipe separate from the
others. It ran up to the ceiling as well, but criss-crossed around
and through the others on its circuitous route to the
wall.

“
Don’t lie to me,” said
Haven, putting as much acid into her threat as she could. “I’m
already at my limit for the day.”

The woman shook her head. “I’m not. I
know what we’re making.” She looked relieved as she pointed at the
pipe again.

“
Run,” said Haven, turning
to the workers. “Go on, get out of here!”

Bastian reached out for them with
yellow fire but the workers scrambled out of the exit before his
energy touched them. The woman on the platform slid down a metal
ladder over the side of the vat and ran past without looking
back.

“
What’d you let ‘em go
for?” asked Bastian. “They deserve to be in here when this place
turns inside out.”

Haven ignored him. She went to the fat
pipe and found the point where it was attached to the vat. She
pulled just enough energy from inside of her to shear the pipe from
its setting; with one quick explosion of blue plasma, its circular
opening hung loose against the vat wall. Clear brown liquid sloshed
within.

“
Here,” she said, pulling
the pipe as far from the vat as she could. The thick metal tube
groaned in protest as she strained to make enough room for
Bastian’s hand. “Light it up.”

“
With pleasure,” he
said.

30

H
aven wondered how Bastian drew on his power. For her it was
the blue star, burning bright in her mind’s eye. Marius had told
her his method was to imagine his hands swelling with orange fire
until it became too much to contain.

Fresh yellow flame shot out from
Bastian’s arms—and then vanished. He looked down at his hands,
confused.

“
What’s wrong?” asked
Haven. “Why did you stop?”

“
I didn’t!” said Bastian.
He tried again, and only managed to produced tiny puffs of yellow
fire, like an empty lighter being sparked repeatedly.