The Bloom Series Box Set: Bloom & Fade (60 page)

“
Fascinating,” said Adsen.
He wrote quickly on his notepad.

Colton’s vision cleared and he took a
deep, long breath. “I feel like I can breathe for the first time in
my life!” The air was more light and fresh than the air in the
Grove had ever been. Colton felt new strength filling out his
muscles, making him whole again.

“
Excellent!” said
Adsen.

The strange sensations left Colton as
soon as they had found him and he stood there, his mind as calm and
serene as the Grove pond, seeing very clearly what needed to be
done. He reached out and took every syringe. He found a small black
duffel bag under the table, emptied its contents, and put in the
syringes.

“
Wait!” said Adsen. “We
need more time to see if it’s permanent!”

Colton held out his arms. The black
veins that ran like snakes under his skin were already
fading.

“
That could mean
anything,” said Adsen. “We have to be sure.”

“
Run more tests, then,”
said Colton. “But run them after I’m finished. And wake up your
brother. We’re gonna need him.”

36

H
aven stared straight ahead as she walked across the desert.
The sun reflected too brightly off the ground and it burned too
brightly in the sky, so she kept her focus on the wavering horizon,
across the miles of cracked earth and rock and through the
shimmering heat. Several times she thought she glimpsed a distant
vehicle, only to see the dark splotch on the horizon fade away like
vapor.

The others marched silently, lost in
their own thoughts. Bastian and Haven walked side by side a few
feet apart as they picked their way over loose shale and around
prickly-pear cactus. Bastian had said they could eat it if they
really had to, but it would be a lot easier if they could boil the
spines and fry the cactus meat first. Haven said they may as well
find a way to cook sand for all the trouble it took to prepare one
small chunk of cactus.

Marius walked behind them and had been
slowing down over time. Haven glanced back occasionally, but every
time she did, Marius waved her away impatiently. His face was slick
with sweat and the black veins had crept up from his neckline to
cover the sides of his face.

They had been walking for
four hours without a drop of water. With the amount of sweat they
were each shedding, it wouldn’t be much longer before they all
collapsed and died out in the middle of nowhere. Roku would come
back—
if
he came
back—to find three dried-out corpses.

Haven tried not to think about never
seeing Colton again. Every time he entered her thoughts, it felt
like he was pulling her back to him.

“
Look,” said Bastian,
pointing to the horizon.

A black shimmer appeared between the
distant outline of two low mountains. Haven squinted and shielded
her eyes, watching intently. She expected the mirage to waver and
fade away, just like the others, but instead it grew larger. A
cloud of dust rose slowly into the air behind what was most
definitely a shiny black vehicle.

“
I really hope that’s
him,” said Bastian.

They stopped walking and waited as the
vehicle drew closer. The noise of the engine carried across the
flat ground; a loud growl that reached their ears long before the
vehicle came to a skidding halt in front of them. Roku sat behind
the wheel of a four-wheel-drive Jeep with no doors or roof. A
roll-cage offered the only protection.

“
Best I could find on such
short notice,” he said.

Bastian whooped and jumped into the
passenger’s seat. He leaned over and kissed Roku on the cheek. Roku
pushed him away, disgusted, and wiped his face. Bastian hardly
noticed; he was too busy messing with the air conditioner
controls.

Haven waited behind Marius as he
slowly climbed into the back seat, ready to help just in case he
was too weak to boost himself up. He made it on his own. Haven
grabbed the roll-cage bar and pulled herself up next to
him.

“
Good job, Roku,” she
said. She reached forward and squeezed his shoulder. He smiled at
her in the rear-view mirror.

“
You couldn’t find one
with a roof?” asked Bastian. He had the air conditioner cranked up
full blast and put his face right up to the vent.

Roku looked at him, frowning, then put
the Jeep into gear and made a U-turn.

Bastian hadn’t stopped smiling since
he got in the car. “I thought that was the end, my friend. I
thought we were done for.”

Roku picked up speed and followed his
own tracks back toward Billings. He reached down near his feet and
brought out three bottles of water. Haven took hers and drank all
of the water in several long gulps.

“
How long did it take you
to reach us?” she shouted.

“
Thirty minutes,” said
Roku.

Sand and small rocks shot up from the
back tires as Roku sped over the desert. Looking ahead, Haven saw
the glimmering lines of a city.

“
Where’d you get the
Jeep?” asked Bastian.

“
You really want to
know?”

Bastian looked at the dashboard, then
opened the glove box. It was empty. “This thing’s brand new! Did
you steal this right off the lot? Take it for a test drive and
never bring it back?”

Roku shook his head and Bastian’s
smile faded. “Tell me you didn’t buy this Jeep.”

“
You paid for this thing?”
asked Haven, leaning forward. “How?”

Bastian’s mouth hung open in
disbelief. “Come on, man! We’re down to our last bit of
cash!”

“
I didn’t want to steal
it,” said Roku. He gripped the wheel tightly and pressed down on
the accelerator.

“
He didn’t want to steal
it,” said Bastian to no one in particular, shaking his head. “Of
course he didn’t. Always the Boy Scout. Captain Morality. Well, I
hope they do refunds. And what happened to the roof?!”

“
It would have taken too
long to attach,” said Roku.

“
How did you guys get so
much money?” asked Haven.

Roku and Bastian exchanged a quick
glance, and Roku nodded. Bastian turned around in the passenger’s
seat. Marius was slouched down next to Haven with his arms crossed,
asleep, an empty water bottle gripped tightly in hand. His head
bounced lightly as the Jeep rode across the bumpy
ground.

“
You remember I told you
about Helix Scientific?” asked Bastian. “We spoke about it briefly
at the airport.”

“
The company Roku used to
work for,” said Haven. “I remember.”

“
Yeah, well, let’s just
say he didn’t exactly see eye to eye at the time of his, um,
departure
. He stole a
couple of company credit cards on his last day and cashed them
out.”

“
I thought you didn’t like
stealing,” said Haven to Roku. He looked at her in the rear-view
mirror but remained silent.

“
Stealing from a company
like Helix is different than ripping off a car salesman,” said
Bastian.

“
What makes them so
bad?”

Bastian shrugged. “Just the fact that
they’re tagging and cataloguing every Source and Conduit they can
find.”

“
Why?”

“
Because we’re easier to
control if they can herd us like sheep.”

The Jeep hit a shallow divot in the
ground and sand flew up over the windshield to sting Haven’s face.
She rubbed it from her eyes and said, “No one at the Dome ever told
me anything about them.”

“
They probably didn’t know
the company existed,” said Bastian. “It’s a private group, funded
anonymously, with no clear purpose other than tagging Sources and
Cons. Sounds harmless enough, right? Especially with that
‘Scientific’ at the end of their name. Roku spent a year undercover
with them and never found out anything more than that. Even
internally, they keep a tight lid on all of their operations. But I
have a theory.”

“
Well, let’s hear it,”
said Haven.

Bastian smiled. “You won’t believe
me.”

“
After what I’ve seen?
Give me a break.”

“
I think it’s Bernam’s
company.”

“
Bernam’s dead. I watched
Alistair kill him.”

Bastian nodded. “And yet Helix
Scientific still exists. Which means control of the company has
passed to someone else.”

“
Alistair?”

“
Maybe.”

“
Seems a little small in
scale for his tastes.”

“
Perhaps,” said Bastian.
“But tagging and cataloguing our kind would make it very easy to
track us down if, say for example, he wanted to inject each of us
with Fade. Anyway, Helix isn’t a major player yet, but we need to
watch them closely.”

“
Are most of the employees
normal people?”

Bastian smiled. “‘Normal’?

“
You know what I mean. Not
Sources or Cons.”

“
Yes. All of the upper
management, anyway. They use people like Roku to do the hunting and
collecting.”

“
Sounds to me like all the
money belongs to Roku.”

“
What money?”

“
The money he took from
Helix. Sounds like he can buy a Jeep with it if he wants
to.”

Bastian laughed. “I guess you’re
right.”

“
So,” said Haven. “All
that time he worked for Helix, you were working for
Alistair?”

Bastian’s face changed and he looked
away. Haven didn’t think he was going to answer. He looked down at
his open palms as if he were ashamed of himself.

“
I got myself into a
little bit of trouble,” he said at last. “Before I met old Rock-You
here, I was a bit of a grifter. A small-time scam-artist, you could
say.”

“
Why doesn’t that surprise
me?” asked Haven. She meant it as a joke but Bastian didn’t
smile.

“
There are people out
there you don’t know about, Haven,” he said. “Sources and Cons who
aren’t like us. They’re rotten, all the way to the core, no better
than common street thugs. They form gangs and roam the streets of
major cities, preying on easy targets—stealing and hurting those
who can’t defend themselves.”

“
You were one of them,”
said Haven.

Bastian shook his head. “No. But my
brother was. After my mother left us and ran off with her new
boyfriend, my brother started taking drugs—heavy junk, none of that
kiddy weekender fluff. He got in deep with a local drug lord. Turns
out this guy’s a Con, and he uses his ability on my brother to
teach him a lesson. Only afterward, my brother doesn’t wake
up.”

Roku looked over at Bastian and Haven
could tell by the look on his face that he had never heard the
story.

Bastian spoke as if in a trance, his
eyes wide and unblinking. “So I go pay the drug lord a visit. His
name was Frank. Funny, right? A drug lord named Frank. Anyway, he
can tell what I am before I get within twenty feet of him, and he
wants to order his boys to spray me with bullets, but by then it’s
too late. I’m lit up like the sun, wading through them like
nothing. And then it was over. It was just me, standing there,
alone.”

“
What did you do after it
was done?” asked Haven.

“
The only thing I
could
do. I ran. And I
didn’t stop until Alistair found me and told me that I should come
work for Bernam. He paid for everything and he made my problems go
away.”

“
He recruited Colton as
well,” said Haven. “He bailed him out of prison.”

Bastian nodded. “I have a feeling he
had people like us all over the world. Little seeds he was hoping
to cultivate into great big trees for his army. Alistair was my
main contact. I only met Bernam once, right after I joined up. The
funny thing is that I never really did anything at all for them.
They told me to live my life and they would call me when they
needed me. Then one day, the call finally came, and the first thing
they wanted me to do was burn down someone’s house in Arizona. I
didn’t go, obviously, and I spent my time running from them until
Alistair finally caught me a year ago. They injected me with Fade,
and then the cure. Bernam died right after that and Alistair
disappeared. That’s when I met Roku, and the two of us have been
quite the activists ever since.” He smiled and slapped Roku hard in
the shoulder. “Ain’t that right?”

Haven sat in the back seat, stunned.
“Scottsdale?” she asked weakly. Her voice sounded far away, as if
it came from another person.

“
I’m sorry?” said
Bastian.

She swallowed hard. “Scottsdale,
Arizona? Is that where they wanted you to go?”

“
Yes,” said Bastian,
looking at her with surprise. “How did you know?”

Roku reached over and punched him in
the arm.

“
Ow!” said Bastian.
“What’d you hit me for?”

Roku nodded at Haven.

“
Oh,” said Bastian
quietly. “Haven, I’m sorry. I didn’t put the two pieces
together.”