Bloom Read online

  The faint outline of a wide door appeared in the wall next to the panel and darkened as the large, thick piece of metal swung silently inward, sweeping in a wide arc to reveal a long hallway that stretched away from the dome. The heavy door was about as wide as a car and Haven realized that was how the black sedan had been brought into the facility.

  She walked down the long hallway after Marius and Elena; Corva followed close behind. Caged light bulbs protruded from the ceiling every twenty feet, casting bright circles of light onto the dull grey floor and walls. Haven turned to look back and Corva gave a slight nod and a comforting smile.

  The hallway led to a single, massive elevator with a heavy black door that Marius slid to the side with a grunt. After they were all inside, he pulled the door back into place and pressed the only button on the small panel set into the wall.

  The elevator rattled softly as it ascended.

  Haven looked down at her clothes and couldn’t help but feel that something was missing. Corva had tossed her a beige jacket that fit well enough, but could have gone down an inch farther at the waist. She felt naked somehow, and she realized it was because her hands were empty.

  Corva held the same strange machine gun that Marius had used in the car during Haven’s rescue from the medical center. The body of the weapon was chromed metal; the two pistol-grips—one at the back of the gun and the other halfway down the sleek, elongated barrel—were covered with a black rubberized material. The gun hung from a worn green strap looped over Corva’s shoulder.

  Neither Marius nor Elena carried any kind of weapon that Haven could see. She assumed that they didn’t need one since they could make their own energy, but from what Marius had told her in the training room, it sounded like even a Source could not maintain constant output. Any conflict would need to be resolved quickly or they would have to resort to regular weapons.

  Haven opened and closed her hands, knowing that having some kind of weapon would have made her feel more confident. She was only supposed to stay by the car, but she forced herself to believe that if she got the chance to hurt the people who killed her parents, then—

  Then what?

  What would I do? thought Haven. She remembered the red flames that consumed her house and the cracking and crunching of wood as it exploded and collapsed. The fire danced in her eyes and she felt Kayla’s arms around her, holding her back from the fire.

  Kayla.

  A wave of sadness swept over Haven and she felt like a small child curled up in a ball in the corner of a massive, empty room. She longed to be back in school—a desire which surprised her more than she would have expected—and for things to be like they were before the night of the fire. She had felt betrayed by Kayla after her parents’ funeral. The truth was that thinking of Kayla and Jason being together hurt deeply, even though Haven knew he was a worthless jerk.

  She tried to think what she would have done if their roles were reversed and she had been in Kayla’s position. Haven hoped she would have put their friendship before anything else and told Jason to take a hike.

  As the elevator slowly ascended, Haven wondered how anything in her life could ever be like it was before the night of that stupid party.

  Was going back to school still an option after all she had learned? Could she go back to math class and pretend that blue fire didn’t occasionally burst from her skin? After the event in the cafeteria, she definitely couldn’t go back to George Walker High School. She would have to move to a new state or even a new country to get away from the memory of that freak show.

  There was also the dark thought that the people who took Noah wouldn’t let her live a normal life ever again. They would find her wherever she went, no matter how far away she ran and no matter how careful she was to cover her tracks.

  None of it mattered if she couldn’t save Noah. She focused all of her thoughts on him and pushed everything else into the background.

  The elevator stopped with a bounce and Marius pulled open the heavy door.

  “Top floor,” he said. “Housewares, lady’s shoes, and dune buggies. Ha!” He slapped his belly and smiled at his own joke as he walked out of the elevator.

  Two black dune buggies with fat black tires and welded roll cages sat parked in the middle of a wide garage. The ceiling was only a couple feet above Haven’s head and she reached up to touch it as she stepped out of the elevator. A wide, roll-up door was the only other exit to the room.

  Marius hopped into the closest dune buggy and pulled on a dusty pair of goggles. Elena grabbed one of the roll cage bars on the passenger’s side and slowly climbed into the vehicle.

  Corva touched Haven’s shoulder as she walked to the second buggy. “You’re with me,” she said.

  Haven followed her to the other buggy and pulled herself up and over the fused passenger door. A thin cloud of dust plumed up from the cracked vinyl seat when she sat down. She coughed and waved a hand in front of her face.

  Corva sat in the driver’s seat and handed Haven a pair of goggles. “Get used to it,” she said. “It only gets worse.”

  Marius fired up his buggy’s engine and idled toward the roll-up door. Corva turned a rusted key in the ignition and the second buggy shook to life with an ear-piercing growl. Haven pulled on her goggles as Corva followed the other buggy across the garage.

  The wide door rolled up slowly to reveal a rectangle of night. Haven saw nothing but a dark desert reaching far into the distance and a dusty, half-paved road curving off to the side.

  Marius gained speed—Corva right behind—and drove out of the garage onto the sand, ignoring the road. Haven turned back as the buggies sped away from the garage—the door was a wide slit in the bottom of a small mountain. Bright moonlight from above revealed smooth, jutting rocks all the way to the mountain’s bald, jagged peak. The entire dome must have been under the mountain or just off to the side; Haven looked around on the ground for the opening at the top of the dome but saw nothing but small bushes and an occasional cactus.

  The cold desert wind whipped her hair in all directions. She grabbed a fistful of locks and stuffed them down into the collar of her jacket. The buggies bounced and slid over small dunes as they moved quickly across the desert. In the distance, Haven saw a bright pinpoint of red fire glowing amidst a sea of yellow and white city lights.

  “There it is!” she said over the noise of the buggy.

  Corva nodded.

  A small walkie-talkie clipped to the dashboard crackled loudly.

  Marius’s voice squawked at them. “You see it?”

  Corva picked up the walkie-talkie and depressed the transmit button. “We see it.”

  The buggy drifted to the side to avoid a large rock. Haven kept one hand firmly on a bar of the roll cage above her head and the other on a handle next to her seat. “Why don’t you guys use cell phones?” she asked over the noise of the buggy.

  “Too easy to track,” said Corva. “They’ve found us before.”

  “Who, Bernam?”

  Corva hesitated. “And others.”

  “Why didn’t Dormer come with us?” asked Haven.

  “He’s still mad at Elena.”

  “For not saving his brother?”

  Corva nodded. “She knew that we only had one chance to get inside the medical center. After that, security would be so tight that going back in would be a suicide mission. We needed to wait in case Bernam found your brother before we could. Elena knew there was a hybrid out there somewhere, and she also knew that we couldn’t afford to let Bernam…well, to let Bernam do what he does to our kind.”

  “But Marius took me by mistake.”

  The buggy in front of them crested a large dune and its wheels left the ground. Marius whooped loudly from the first buggy as the vehicle slammed down and regained traction. The small figure in the passenger’s seat bounced violently from the impact.

  “I know Elena just loved that,” said Corva. She drove safely over the side of the dune and accelerated to catch up to
the other buggy.

  “How are we going to get Noah back?” said Haven. “If security is so tight, how are we going to get inside?”

  Corva shook her head. “I don’t know. But we’ll figure it out. I promise.”

  Ahead, the pinpoints of white and yellow light turned into street lamps and porch lights. The heart of the city of Bozeman, Montana, was still several miles away—a grid of bright lights in the middle of a wide expanse of moonlit desert. Outlying suburbs stretched away from the main hub to form a massive field of varied construction projects.

  An unfinished road reached out from a new housing development and stopped at a lone street lamp. The steady, churning crunch of wheels on sand turned to a low-pitched drone as the buggies left the desert and drove onto pavement.

  The housing development was laid out on a network of wide streets. The buggies passed several houses in different states of construction—from hollow skeletons with flapping insulation to unpainted shells with all of the doors and windows installed. More and more houses were placed closer and closer together until the buggies eventually drove past occupied homes. Dusty cars sat parked on dirty driveways next to unmowed lawns. Bikes rested on their sides in front of dark, open garages.

  A large, two-story home sat on the corner of two intersecting streets. A police car had cut a black line of soil into the grass of the yard and flipped over. It lay upside-down, abandoned, the red and blue lights flashing across the yard onto the face of the large home.

  Corva followed Marius closely as he took sharp corners and steadily approached the red fire.

  “Keep eyes peeled,” he said over the walkie-talkie.

  The dune buggies pulled to a slow stop in front of the first burning house. It had been a flat, one-story home with a tall wooden door which had blown outward during the fire. Huge chunks of roofing lay in smoldering piles in the yard. Haven sat mesmerized as brilliant red flames danced over the collapsed walls of the house. A few streets away, more fires lit the night sky.

  “Where is everyone?” said Corva.

  Haven finally looked away from the burning house. All of the houses that lined the street were dark and silent. “Maybe they left because of the fire,” she said.

  Farther down the road, a fire truck had run into a concrete lamp post and sat empty, the front of the vehicle caved in from the impact. Behind it, two more police cars were parked with their doors open wide, the lights on top of their roofs flicking red, blue, red, blue.

  Marius got out of his dune buggy and slowly approached the house. Elena stood up in her seat and leaned against the roll cage as she watched the flames.

  “There’s no one here,” said Corva. “Marius, we should go.”

  He looked at the red fire, studying it with a furrowed brow. “Yes,” he said. “This is not good.”

  Haven got out of the buggy and stepped closer to the house, once more drawn in by the repulsive beauty of the flames.

  “Let’s go, Haven!” said Corva.

  “It’s the same color,” said Haven, talking to herself.

  A supporting beam within the house popped loudly and the last remaining section of the roof collapsed. Half-burned, half-charred, the house looked exactly like her own home as it burned to the ground.

  The red flames shone brightly in her falling tears.

  “It’s the same color,” she whispered.

  A distant scream tore through the night air.

  “Over there,” said Elena. She pointed a bony finger at the glow of the next fire a few streets away.

  “Haven, come on!” shouted Corva. “Marius!”

  “Okay,” he said.

  He turned from the house and walked over to Haven. As he reached for her, an electric streak of red energy shot through the air and hit the ground at his feet. Soil and burning grass erupted upward as if Marius had stepped on a landmine. The impact launched Haven into the air, spinning her away from Marius. She slammed into the ground and rolled to a stop in the yard, groaning.

  Corva screamed, “Marius!” as Haven turned on her side. A smoking crater took up what used to be most of the front yard. Marius lay on the far side of the pit, face down and unmoving.

  28

  Elena got out of the buggy and hurried over to Haven. She knelt down and pulled her up by her shoulders.

  “Come quickly,” she said.

  Someone started whistling.

  It was quiet at first—a melodic song that Haven found disturbingly peaceful—then became louder and was joined by another whistle playing harmony to the first.

  The whistling stopped.

  A pair of identical twins with spiky blond hair stepped out of the shadows next to the burning house, wild grins on their flame-lit faces.

  Elena supported Haven as they hurried back to the buggies. Haven closed her eyes and tried to imagine the blue star in the vast nothingness that she had seen in the training room with Marius. In her mind, the light was a small spark that fluttered and died. She squeezed her eyes closed even harder and tried to force the light to appear—to grow into a powerful energy that she could harness and expel.

  There was nothing.

  She opened her eyes. On the other side of the pit, Corva hoisted Marius to his feet. He groaned in pain as he stared over at the twins menacingly.

  They were young men, perhaps in their early twenties. One of them clapped his hands together and started rubbing them as if he were cold. He put them to his mouth and blew between his palms.

  A beam of thin red light shot out from his hands and hit Corva in the shoulder. She yelled in pain as the impact spun her around and pushed her to the ground.

  Marius bellowed and puffed out his chest. Orange spheres of light snapped out from each of his clenched fists and grew to the size of bowling balls. He slammed his fists together and the spheres merged and exploded toward the twins. They jumped apart as the ball of light tore between them and ripped off the back corner of the next house, sending splinters of wood and side paneling spinning into the air.

  Elena leaned Haven against the side of the nearest dune buggy. Next to the crater, Marius knelt down to help Corva to her feet. She held one of her arms close to her body and a thick sheen of blood covered her shoulder.

  There was movement in the shadows on the other side of the crater.

  “Get inside,” said Elena, pushing Haven to climb into the dune buggy.

  “Look!” said Haven after she sat in the passenger seat. She pointed over at the twins, who were back on their feet and standing side-by-side in front of the burning house. “Marius!” she shouted.

  Marius looked up and saw the twins. With a single motion he scooped up Corva and carried her toward the dune buggies, his thick legs stomping heavily as he ran.

  One of the twins—the Source—rested his hand on the other’s shoulder and closed his eyes. Red light covered his entire body and disappeared into the skin of the Conduit, his brother. The Conduit stood there without urgency and watched Marius run. His skin glowed with a shifting radiance that looked like sunlight reflecting into the surface of a red pond.

  The Con held out one of his arms and opened his palm toward Marius, who had just made it back to the empty dune buggy and lowered Corva so she could stand up.

  Red light formed around the Conduit’s hand and pooled over his palm. The energy seemed on the verge of releasing when a blue spear of light cut through his body and ripped him off his feet. He spun backward into the darkness behind the house and disappeared.

  Elena lowered her arm and breathed out heavily. A thin layer of blue light shimmered across her skin.

  “Lee!” shouted the remaining twin. His face twisted in rage and he raised his fists toward Elena. Red light sputtered weakly from his hands and he screamed in anger. He turned and ran behind the house.

  “Time to go!” shouted Marius.

  He hopped into the driver’s seat of his buggy and Corva lowered herself down next to him with a grimace. Marius cranked the wheel and sped out onto the road, ba
ck in the direction of The Dome.

  Elena moved faster than Haven was expecting as she nimbly climbed into the second buggy and sat behind the wheel. She twisted the key in the ignition and slammed her foot down on the gas pedal, the back tires squealing as the buggy tore down the street.

  Haven turned back to look at the burning house. The twins stepped out of the shadows next to the flames, one of them leaning heavily against the other. They watched the dune buggies drive away and Haven was certain that they were smiling.

  She turned to face forward just as all of the street lamps on both sides of the long street dimmed and went out.

  Marius’s buggy on the road ahead turned into a dim silhouette in the moonlight.

  “Oh no,” said Elena.

  There came the sound of a chest-compressing WHUMP and the first buggy launched sideways into the air, spinning side over side until it slammed upside-down onto the grass just off the street.

  Elena stomped down on the brake pedal and the buggy screeched to a halt in the middle of the road.

  “Get out get out get out!” she said quickly, scrambling to get over her door.

  Haven grabbed onto the roll cage and pulled herself up, then jumped out of the buggy as another deep, muted noise blasted the street. The air around her was sucked away, pulling the breath from her chest. A pressure blast smacked her body as if she were a swatted fly and she was thrown into the air.

  She had a split-second to see her dune buggy drop from the sky and disappear behind a house before she slammed into the grass next to the road. She crawled onto her hands and knees as she fought to breathe—it felt like her chest was in a vise and a plastic bag covered her mouth. Hair clung to the sides of her face and her vision was blurred. Across the dark street, a silhouetted figure stepped away from a lamp post and walked toward her. Behind the silhouette, two other figures appeared, shorter than the first.