Steel Lily ARC (18 page)

The pounding in my head returned, but then it happened.

The mist continued to rise but instead of disappearing, it thickened, roiling and coming to rest like clouds overhead. Xander gasped.

The room grew cold. Crystalline formations crept over the small escape window, and the clouds billowed overhead. Tiny white particles dropped from them and landed in my hands. They were perfect little stars of different shapes and sizes and as soon as they landed on my hand, they melted away.

Xander’s eyes widened when a flake landed on his book. “How in the—” he started, looking delighted as he reached a hand upward. “You’re making snow!”

Jaxon peered around the corner, trying not to look too interested. “How could anyone make snow…” he trailed off as he took in the sight. “My God, there’s snow in here!”

I’d never seen smiles that big. Xander took off his night robe and wrapped his book gently in the cashmere fabric of his night robe to protect it from the flakes. He and Jaxon raised their hands to the ceiling to touch the cloud. Their hands ghosted through the cool wisps and both men looked thrilled.

Jaxon scooped a handful of snow off the tile floor and molded it into a ball. He tossed it to Xander, who laughed and held it up to examine it like a particularly interesting specimen.

Jaxon looked at me, wonder filling his grey-blue eyes that always commanded my attention. “You never told me what you were capable of.”

Excitement filled my stomach. “I don’t know what I’m capable of. Riggs tried to get me to create elements today to see how far he could push me. Xander had coffee sitting beside him and I decided I’d try to manipulate the steam differently than I had before. You know, to see if I could use the element that was already there.”

“This is amazing,” Xander mused to himself. “It’s no mystery why you’re here. You could manipulate the power of all the domes running on steam, which is over half of them.” Xander looked at me with a mix of curiosity and excitement. “Can you do more? What else have you tried?”

My head was pounding because of the snowflake stunt. “Well, I’ve only tried what Riggs had me do today, and those didn’t work out so well,”
and I nearly passed out
, I thought, but didn’t add. “Riggs wants me to create elements, but so far I’ve only manipulated what was in front of me.”

I glanced between Xander and Jaxon, excited and proud of my accomplishment. When Jaxon met my eyes a second time, he looked away.

“He’s going to use her as leverage,” he whispered. His fists clenched and unclenched as he watched the snow fall to the ground. “I’ve brought him the most formidable asset he could ever have.”

Xander took the small step toward him and put a hand on Jaxon’s shoulder. “Jax, it’s okay — ”

Jaxon slapped Xander’s hand away with more force than necessary and turned on his heel. His voice filled the small room and resonated in my bones, even as he retreated. “No it isn’t! I want to end his reign of tyranny, not contribute to it!”

I heard the door of the office slam. The moment my focus shifted, the cloud melted away to steam. Slush covered the wooden floor, darkening the boards. I wrapped my arms around my body, suddenly cold.

Xander sighed and brushed his arms free of the now melted snowflakes. “Don’t mind him. No one knew what you were capable of. He was doing his job when he brought you here.”

I huffed in indignation. Jaxon’s sudden disappearance left an almost tangible emptiness in the room. It was like the life had been sucked out of the room with his vacancy. I thought about Xander’s comment. “If he’s so against his dad, then why’d he bring me here? Why would he do his
job
, as you call it?”

“Because Riggs is still his father and no matter what, part of him wants to have his father in his life.”

“So you’re saying he can hate his father and still want to please him?”

Xander nodded as he shrugged past me. “Exactly.”

“That doesn’t make any sense at all.”

I followed him out of his little man-cave. He laughed as he crossed his room to check on Legs. “For it not making sense, you caught onto it awful quick. Either way, it doesn’t have to make sense. It’s a family thing. Most people will do anything for their loved ones. It’s manipulation at its finest when someone is forced to choose between doing something they’d rather not, or abandon family.”

Something stirred in the pit of my stomach. I’d been on my own for so long, I didn’t really remember what having a family was like. Sure, I still had memories—early ones—but there was no part of me that would want to make my dad happy if he was a power-hungry, ego-tripping nutcase.

I watched as Xander checked on Legs’s vitals, running his fingers lightly over the nearly translucent skin on Legs’s remaining wrist.

No one deserved to go through what Legs had today. His head lolled to the side and his eyes struggled to open as he fought to wake up. His lips turned upward into a weak smile as he watched Xander work.

“I take it you haven’t sewed my arm back on, doc?”

“I’m afraid I practice medicine, not miracles,” Xander said with a gentle smile. He squeezed the bag that once held my blood between his fingers. “Almost full up, I’d guess. You still look quite peaked.”

“That’s the best compliment I’ve gotten today.”

I laughed, and Legs’s eyes crossed the room to me. They widened in surprise, then a smile of recognition lit his features. “Who’s the hot nurse?”

“She’s not a nurse,” Xander said while he rummaged in one of his many drawers that lined the small room, “She’s one of the three people who made sure you survived your adventure today. Avery donated her blood to your cause.”

Legs laughed. “I know who she is, doc. That’s Pike. She’s always making me rescue her. Today was business as usual.”

I shook my head. “I think it was me saving you today, by the looks of it.”

“We could call it even for today, but you’d still owe me.”

Legs. If he could be this upbeat after losing an arm, I needed to make sure he was around if there was ever another apocalypse. He could find the upside for sure. “You’re right. I’m always one behind you.”

“Always.”

Silence filled the room as Xander continued to rummage through drawers. I glanced at the stump of the arm that was left for Legs and felt a pang of guilt.

There had to be some way I could help him. Some way to give him something in return for what he’d lost.

Then it hit me.

Rigg’s mechanical arm.

I gathered the courage to ask Xander the question that was burning in my mind.

“Do you know that arm contraption that Mr. Riggs has? The one he wore when he came to meet me?”

“Yes,” Xander said as he redressed Legs’s wounds. A tight bandage wound around the crook of Legs’s arm where the IV had once been filling him with my blood. “Why do you ask?”

“Well, how does it operate? When he wore it, it seemed as though it worked independently of any levers or pulleys. Like it could—”

“Read his mind?” Xander finished for me.

“Well, yeah.”

“That’s because it can. Will created the mechanical portion of the arm, but Sari set up the electronics and I put the wires where they needed to be.”

“You put wires…in him?”

“Exactly,” Xander said, as though it was common. “He slips the mechanical arm over his real one and plugs the wires into the top of his shoulder that I inserted there—” he motioned to the top of his shoulder, where the rotator cuff ended and the arm began, “and those go directly into the portion of the brain that controls motion. He thinks, and the arm responds as it normally would. It’s a very powerful device. He has twenty times the crushing power in that hand than a crocodile’s jaws.”

The comparison was lost on me because I’d never seen a crocodile or it’s power, but I assumed it was a lot since Xander’s voice sounded impressed. I nodded and tried to look like I knew what he was talking about. He smiled and ushered me back to his cubbyhole. His fingertips slid across spines of books in all stages of life; some looked as though they’d never been touched, while others looked like they may fall apart if moved. His hand stopped and he pulled what looked like a textbook off the shelf.

He rifled through the pages and tapped the page he came to twice as he handed over the book. “Here. This is the creature I’m talking about.”

So he had seen through my noncommittal nod. I’d have to work on getting better at hiding my facial expressions. I looked at the beast on the page. It looked like the dinosaurs my Early Sciences professor had shown the class. “Wow. He’s a nasty one.”

“Indeed. And Riggs’s mechanical arm is capable of doing more damage than this magnificent animal’s jaws.”

I looked up at Xander and blurted out my nonsensical idea. “Do you think we could have another one crafted? Or steal Riggs’s?”

His eyes took on a knowing look. “I see where you’re going with this, and it’s an admirable idea, but believe me when I tell you that it’s nothing short of signing your own death certificate. That thing is Riggs’s pride and joy. There’s no way he’ll let anyone make a copy of it. How would you even come up with an excuse to create another one?” He mimicked my voice. “Excuse me, Mr. Riggs, but could I borrow your mechanical arm, so I could make another to give to an insurgent that’s currently residing right under your nose?”

I chewed the inside of my lip while I tried to come up with a better excuse. “Well what if someone said they needed to repair it, then we gave it to Legs?”

“And what do you propose we do if we managed to get the arm?” Xander hissed under his breath, his eyes scanning into the other room. He was probably looking for cameras. “What do you want me to do? Attach it to him and hope Riggs doesn’t notice that it’s missing? He’ll turn this place upside down to find it.”

“Then I guess Legs will have to leave after you install it.”

“Where will he go, pray tell? Are you even listening to yourself?”

I
was
listening to myself. The words sounded even more moronic and half-concocted out in the open than they had inside my brain. “I try not to.”

Xander tried not to laugh. “You and Jax are a match made in heaven.”

“Please don’t say that. It doesn’t give me much hope for a future or for heaven, in fact.”

Xander’s throaty chuckle made me smile. He took the book and placed it back in the space it held on the shelf. Without looking at me, he spoke quietly. “Come to me with an intelligent plan, and we’ll talk. Honestly, I think I can find him a good prosthetic in one of the hospital wings if he wants one. For now, let me get him walking on his own two feet without falling over from anemia.”

He hadn’t denied me my idea. I suppose that was a start. I glanced around Xander to Legs, who was watching us intently. “Do you think I could talk to him for a minute?”

Xander looked back at Legs. “How do you feel?”

Legs smiled. “I’m good enough to talk Pike.”

Xander patted my shoulder as he passed and headed to the door. “I’ll come back in a half an hour or so. Will that be enough time?”

“For sure, thank you.” I whispered.

He went on his way, leaving Legs and I looking at one another on opposite ends of the small space.

“Well,” I said awkwardly, “how are you feeling?”

Legs had an impish grin. “Like a million bucks, if a million bucks had one arm, of course.”

“Of course.”

It was the first time I’d really looked at Legs. His face was slender and symmetrical. His brown eyes weren’t mesmerizing like Jaxon’s slate colored ones, but they felt like home. His smile was crooked, and I noticed that he had a little scar under his right eye that I’d never seen when he’d his face covered in our old Dome. I wondered idly if his father had caused it. Part of me wanted to touch his face, just to see if it were real. Jaxon had made me realize how little I really knew about one of the few people I considered a friend. I finally walked over to him. “Why’d you come here?”

“I ordered food for pick-up and took a wrong turn evidently.”

“You know what I mean. Why you?”

Legs laughed, but it wasn’t cheery. “Why does it matter why I came?”

“It matters because you have a little sister at home you need to think about.”

“Don’t tell me what I need to think about,” Legs said angrily as he leaned toward me. The IV jerked in his arm, and he winced. “Pike, you don’t know nearly as much about me as you’d like to think.”

“That’s becoming evident,” I said, deflated. “Jaxon just told me that. I don’t even know your real name.”

This time when he laughed, it seemed genuine. “That’s because I have the lamest name in the world.”

“What is it?”

Legs shook his head. “Nope, not telling you. Sorry.”

“I’ll just get Sari to find it out. She’s a hacker.”

“Who’s Sari? And what’s a hacker?”

I waved him off. “We don’t have time to talk about that stuff right now. What I need to know is why you’re here.”

Legs shrugged. “Because I’m in the military. That’s what the military does; they send people on missions. Mine happened to be to retrieve you.”

“Kind of convenient, since you knew me beforehand.”

Legs blushed. “Well, that was kind of the point. Send me on a death mission to screw me for fraternizing with you.”

“Are you serious?”

“Did you really think they expected me to come back with you? They wanted to punish me. They knew how to do it.”

“And your…your sister?”

“They took her from Dad. She’s in the orphanage now. He finally proved himself to be completely useless,” he said, anger seeping out of every word. “Took him long enough.”

There was nothing to say to that, so I nodded. Legs took my hand in his and pulled me close. “Thanks for the blood. Xander said I would have died without it.”

“Um, no problem,” I said as I pulled away. He smelled of soap and fresh sheets and something else—maybe cologne? He didn’t smell bad, by any means.

“You’ll come back to visit, won’t you?”

I deliberated before responding. “Will you tell me about the Polatzi if I come back?”

“If you can find a way to speak in private, where we can be safe, I’ll give you answers.”

“Then you mean you won’t give me anything, because we’ll never be safe here.”