Spark Rising (27 page)

“Is that you?” Fascination laced Rose’s question. “Are you doing that?” The girls were behind her, aware in a way none of the men of Fort Nevada had ever been.

Jackson turned. He flinched away from the man for only a second, glancing over the guard’s shoulder to the cluster of girls across the plain with Lena at their center and an agent hovering behind. Jackson shook his head, grim, and slipped across the short distance between them to finish the man himself.

He was angry. But Alex was alive to snap at him, as he was doing now.

The two men caught up with them before they’d reached the skeletons of the buildings. None of the adults mentioned what had happened out on the plain. Once they reached the scant cover of the ruined buildings, Alex stopped to crouch down.

“Okay, ladies. We’re going down to a safe place, but there’s scary stuff along the way. I need you to wear these blindfolds over your eyes, so you won’t be scared. And we’ll all hold hands as we go down. Once we’re clear, we’ll uncover you, okay?”

He reached into his pack and pulled out his blanket, flipping out a knife and cutting the blanket into strips. He called each girl to him and gently tied a strip of blanket around her eyes. When he finished with each, he set her next to the previous one and placed their small hands together until he had a chain of quiet little girls and two nervous teens sitting around him with clasped hands and blindfolds on their heads.

He took up the wide cloth and folded it double. He looked up then, his face set and uncompromising. He gestured for Rose to come closer.

She hung back, not trusting him. “I’m not a frightened little girl.”

“You want to come with us, fine. But you’re coming blind, or you’re never leaving. And I don’t mean just downstairs like the girls, either. You’ll keep it on all the way to the fort.” The tension in his voice told them he was dead serious. He cocked a finger at Rose.

Lena nodded, though she didn’t understand why he was being so hard on the Neo-Barb. She
was
a strong power, just like the rest of them. Most Council citizens had prejudices against Neo-Barbs based on fear and misunderstanding, and Lena had to imagine that the agents who’d have to be on guard against them would be no different. She’d somehow expected better of Alex, though. The suspicion left her disappointed.

“It’s okay, Rose.” The least she could do would be soothe the woman’s understandable offense and anger. It would take time they didn’t have for Lena to try to convince Alex he was being a fool. “As soon as we get to safety, an hour at the most, it’ll come off. I promise.”

Rose straightened her shoulders, her distrustful gaze moving between them.

“Rose,” Lena told her, “As soon as I saw you all, I promised you your freedom. You didn’t know it. But I did. I promise you this now. I’m not going to let anything happen to you. And in spite of how he seems, neither is Alex.”

He raised the strip. “Now or never. I’m not putting everyone else at risk for you.”

Rose leaned in and allowed him to fasten it snugly around her head. It fit over the entire top of her head, from the tip of her nose to the back of her head. He double-checked it for gaps.

Relief flowed through Lena. She took a deep breath and reached to take Rose’s hand.

Satisfied, Alex stood. He swung the blindfolded Marissa back up into his arms and took another little hand in his. The other girls held tight to each other as Alex led them along by the hand of his first small companion. “All right, soldiers. Now we march.”

Chapter 22

It bothered Lena that Rose sat back in her seat on the train, shoulders back, lips squeezed tightly. Her white-tipped fingers compressed the armrest of her chair, despite Lena’s attempts to make her comfortable. Lena understood, though. Rose was more cooperative than Lena would have been had Alex tied a blanket around her head. Even if she was almost angry enough to rip the seat arms off.

Rose would have none of Lena’s concern, so Lena decided to minister to the younger girls, instead. She couldn’t do much for their psychological wounds. She couldn’t even fix her own, after all. But the cuts and welts? The infected blistering? Those she could heal.

The girls huddled together. Alex had removed the blindfolds from all but Rose as they stepped on the train, and they tracked Lena’s movements as she returned from checking on Rose. Two of them, little brunettes who looked to be the same age, sat together on one chair, their arms wrapped tight around each other and heads touching as they warily watched Alex, Jackson, Herrons, and the other agent instead. The others also huddled close together in adjacent seats. One, a dark-skinned girl with hollow eyes, sat apart, unmoving.

And Marissa, the smallest of them, had scooted all the way back in a chair that seemed to swallow her small body. The backs of her ankles barely tipped over the edge of the seat.

She’d start with Marissa.

She knelt in front of Marissa’s seat. “How are you doing, Marissa?” she asked, and winced internally.
What a stupid question.

The little girl shrank back against the chair.

“Remember when I said I could help your neck feel better?”

Marissa seemed to consider the question. She nodded.

“Can I do it now?”

Lena received another hesitant nod.

“Can you scoot forward a little?”

The little girl moved slightly forward. Lena smiled and gently pulled her a little closer. Marissa stiffened. Lena turned as the dusty hand of one of the teenagers reached past her to rub Marissa’s shoulder with reassuring fingertips.

A pair of dark, steady doe-eyes met Lena’s. Like Jackson, the teen girl’s caramel-colored skin and full lips spoke of a multicultural heritage. Under the matted hair, dust, scratches, and sharp angles of hunger, Lena could see she’d be beautiful. Now she was wary.

“It’s okay, Marissa,” the girl said, her voice trying for confident but veering into false bravado. “She wants to help us.”

Lena nodded. “Right. That’s right…” Her voice faded. She’d forgotten the girl’s name.

“Phoebe.” Her tone said she wasn’t surprised her name had been forgotten.

“I’m sorry,” Lena murmured. She turned back to Marissa, acutely aware now that they were all attuned to her actions. “Phoebe is right, Marissa. I want to help. Will you let me?”

The little girl didn’t answer, but she scooted forward a little more.

Lena might have started to believe she couldn’t speak if she hadn’t told Lena her name back at the Snake River. She raised her hands and settled them on the little girl’s neck.

Marissa’s body trembled as she fought not to pull away.

Anger spiked again at the jailers who had put the collars around these girls and at the Council who had ordered it. She added it to her list of acts requiring vengeance.

“It’s going to get warm,” she told Marissa, “but it shouldn’t hurt. I’m going to tell the Dust where to go and how to fix your cuts. It will burn the infection away and knit your skin back together.”

“Using your mind?” The little girl finally spoke. Her voice remained as faint and hoarse as it had been at the riverside.

Lena nodded. “Yep. Like you can do?” She guessed.

The girl frowned. She darted another look at Phoebe. “We’re not allowed.”

“You are now.” Lena was matter-of-fact and firm. “And I’m going to teach you.” She smiled. Then she focused, taking a breath and pushing out with the exhale. As she worked with the Dust, she could feel Marissa’s mind poking at it, too, tentative and furtive.

She eased back. “Okay, Marissa. Now it’s your turn.”

Marissa frowned again.

“I could feel you,” she whispered to the small girl, winking. “Did you understand what I was doing? Would you like to try? There’s one blister left.”

Marissa took a little breath. She gave Lena a searching look, then reached up and hooked her small fingers around Lena’s hand. She squeezed tight and another breath hiccupped in.

Lena felt when she let go of her fear and reached out. Not only could she feel the girl’s mind, stronger than any sense she got from the men, but she recognized the way her eyes glazed as she pushed away from herself and out to the Dust. Marissa was doing it.

Moments later, Marissa’s face brightened as she popped back into her own mind. “I did it?” She breathed the question.

Lena could hear relief and happiness in her own laughter. “You did it!”

“Just like that?” Jackson asked from the front of the train.

Lena nodded. “Just like that.” She snapped her fingers for emphasis, and then leaned in and stage-whispered, “Don’t mind him. He’s a little jealous. It took him two weeks to learn to heal.” She looked in Alex’s direction from the corner of her eyes, the smile playing over her lips answered by his own, “And
he
hasn’t learned to do it well, at all.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Jackson said, but he smiled again, finally.

Alex guffawed, but his gaze was intent. She could feel his warmth and pride from across the car. It felt good.

Marissa tittered. The small sound seemed to surprise even her. She bit her lip to contain her broad, proud smile.

Lena ran a hand over the hair of her first precocious pupil and grinned. She turned to the other girls. “Can anybody else do that yet?” Lena asked them.

Rose’s blindfolded face turned toward them as she listened intently. Heads shook.

The teenager next to Phoebe cleared her throat. A redhead with hair that shone a brilliant shade of orange, she didn’t share Lena’s freckles. Her pale skin was mottled and peeling from sunburn. “I think I might be able to now?”

“Okay.” Lena patted Marissa’s hand and stood. She crossed to the redhead. “Mmmm….” The girl’s name started with “M”.

“Marin,” Rose supplied from beside her. The woman had risen and crossed to stand beside Lena with her blindfold still in place. She reached out with a searching hand for the arm of Marin’s chair. When she found it, she crouched low, like Lena had before. “I’d like to try,” she told Lena brusquely, “so do I have to see to do this?”

“I don’t know,” Lena told her. “But there’s only one way to find out.”

She knelt beside her. The rest of the girls scooted to the edge of their seats, peering around Lena and Rose, stretching to see.

“So, I just—” Rose stopped, at a loss.

“Breathe. And when you’re ready, push your thoughts out to the Dust with your breath. I like to take it easy, a nice long exhale so I can reach out. But instead of feeling the space for the charge I’m going to leave in an object, I feel for the energy inside. The Dust in a body is warm and it…kind of pulses. Once I feel it, I show it what I want.”

“Show it?” Rose was doubtful. “Like, pictures?”

“Pictures, if I don’t have the words. Words, if I don’t have the pictures.” She smiled and put a reassuring hand on Rose’s shoulder. “The Dust
wants
to help us. It was made to talk to us. It’ll meet you halfway, I promise.” She glanced up and over Marin’s shoulders at Alex, watchful and silent.

Rose thought for a moment. “Like…with a new machine? I might not have seen it before, but it’s like my mind can sink down into it. And then I can see how it works.”

“Yes! Exactly.” Lena smiled. The smile faded when she remembered Rose wouldn’t see it because of the blindfold. “I push out and into it. You sink down and settle in.” She looked around at the girls. “Anyone else?”

One of the two hugging brunettes glanced at the other. “We see it as a reflection, like a mirror, and we …recognize it. But we’ve never talked to it.”

Lena noted the tiny trio of moles like a constellation on the right cheek of one and the left of the other. They were twins, no more than twelve or thirteen years old. Had they first learned to recognize the Dust in each other?

Rose nodded again. She reached her hands out to Marin, searching without seeing.

Marin took Rose’s hands and guided them up toward her neck. “I want to try, too,” the girl reminded Rose.

Rose nodded again. Rose’s fingers skimmed Marin’s neck in a touch both feather-light and thorough. When she was sure she’d found all of the broken skin, her fingers stilled. Her breathing didn’t shift.

Somehow Lena knew when Rose sank down, just as she felt the Neo-barb woman struggle.

“Rose,” Lena reassured her, “she’s just a machine. A living machine. And so is the Dust.”

The other woman hesitated. She began again. Marin’s skin knit together, healthy skin rippling across the wounds.

“Leave some for me!” Marin demanded.

Rose withdrew, both mentally and physically. Her hands dropped to her lap, and she took a shaky breath.

“Did she do it?” Alex’s gaze was sharp on the Neo-barb woman.

Rose’s chin lifted. “She did,” she told him with pride. She stood in one smooth, fluid motion and moved back to her seat. Even blind, she found it without stumbling.

“And so is Marin,” Lena reported, focused on the girl in front of her. Patience was not Marin’s strong suit, but healing was.

Marin healed the wounds on her own neck and moved on to her face and arms. Her sun-reddened, cracking, blistered skin smoothed. It became pink and shiny and then faded to her natural creamy paleness.

Phoebe made a low note of amazement deep in her throat. “Help me, Marin.” She tugged on Marin’s arm. “I can’t figure it out.”

Marin turned to her, and the two girls started working together. After a moment, she made it clear she not only understood how to do it, but she excelled at sharing how to do it, as well.

Lena settled back onto her heels and looked around. The twins had already turned to face each other, whispering and nodding in excitement. All four of the men watched with bemused expressions.

Their base camp agent, whose name Lena had never learned, looked a little shell-shocked. He asked Alex, “Is it supposed to be that easy for us, too?”

Jackson shook his head in small back and forth movements, chin tucked in his palm, elbow on his armrest as the girls easily practiced the skill he’d sweated and lost sleep over to master.

Alex chuckled. “No, I’m pretty sure they’re special.”

I’m not alone. Not ever again.

The dark place inside Lena felt warm and honeyed with pride for the damaged, amazing, fast-learning girls, and she felt a little generous. “Not necessarily special,” she told them with a light shrug of one shoulder. “Just different.”

“No,” Alex replied, his voice soft as his gaze moved over her face. “You’re definitely special.”

Wh—?

Lena ducked her head, heat flaring across her cheeks and through her chest. She could feel her wide grin as she turned again to her girls.

Marissa had pulled her legs up to her chest and rocked, one dirty thumb tucked into her mouth.

Lena reclaimed her focus and scanned the girls. She’d forgotten the quiet, dark girl with hollow eyes who couldn’t be more than nine. She was overly thin with the coltish legs of a girl making the slow segue into womanhood but the still-round cheeks of childhood. She sat alone. The sense of loneliness radiating off of her miserable little person, though, had more to it than simply sitting alone. Lena searched her memory for the girl’s name. Hania.

She crossed the four steps to her. “Your turn,” she told the girl. She dipped down to squat before Hania and touched the girl’s arm with her fingertips.

Hania shook her head solemnly. Her irises were as black as her pupils, making her eyes seem both bottomless and full of grief.

“She can’t get better,” she said. “I shouldn’t get better, either.”

Lena glanced around. “Everyone’s getting better, Hania.”

Hania shook her head again.

“Lydie was her match.” The twin who spoke, either Constance or Charity, held tight to her sister’s hand.

A knot twisted in Lena’s stomach. “Her match?”

Rose turned her head toward them, her blindfolded face eerie with the streak of tunnel lights behind her. “They paired off girls they found,” she explained, her voice flat. “I don’t know why, or why we matched. The girls say we weren’t alone. They got rid of any who didn’t fit well, with each other, or with these girls. Supposed to be the same age, same power. Lydie was Hania’s match. They did everything together. The exercises. The….” She stopped and swallowed. “Everything. For however long they were there before you came.”

Her heart wanted to beat its way out of Lena’s chest. “You don’t have a match,” she pointed out.

Rose’s lips curved up in a dark smile below the blindfold. The movement held neither warmth nor mirth. “They talked about finding my other half,” she said. “Some girl in the desert. But she got away. Did they mean you? They were saying there’ll be hell to pay at the Council Meet this year.” Her next words were sing-song and malicious, although the malice wasn’t directed at Lena. “Someone’s in trouble.”