The Almost Girl – ebook edition (20 page)

“Don’t look at me!” Caden says as Shae turns the force of her glare on him. “I got punched in the face. And I think she broke up with me.”

The brief flutter of elation I feel at Caden’s words disappears under the heavy weight of reality as Shae herds us toward a green car parked in the lot. Deep down, I know that Caden will probably be a hell of a lot better off with Sadie than with someone like me. Despite letting my guard down in the bathroom, I don’t know the first thing about being anyone’s girlfriend or letting someone get close to me.

“You’re better off without her,” Shae says, catching my attention. “There’s something about her that rubs me the wrong way, like she’s too perfect. I never got why you liked her. She just didn’t seem like your type.”

“And yet you let me date her for a year?”

Shae shrugs. “I only protect you. I don’t smother. If Sadie was your idea of a girlfriend, then that was your choice. Out of curiosity, though, why’d you go out with her?”

Caden flushes, embarrassed at the direct question, but he answers Shae. “Because it was easy. I didn’t have to think about anything. And you’re right, she isn’t my type. I didn’t even know I had a type until recently.”

“So what is it?” Shae asks. She sounds as if she’s only making conversation, but I’m listening very carefully.

“Not her,” Caden says. His glance slips to me, and then falls to my lips before looking away. An immediate response sears through me, but I refuse to think about the kiss and the way it’d made me feel like a live electrical wire. I’d never even kissed anyone before, and now I can’t look at him without my ears flaming or my pulse racing. I hate it. I hate how unpredictable it makes me feel, like I can’t depend on myself anymore, like a part of me is caught up in someone else. It’s unfamiliar and unwelcome territory.

“Where are we going?” I snap gruffly to Shae.

“Somewhere safe.”

I nod to the dirt bike I left parked on the right side of the green car. “I’ll follow you guys.”

Not that I don’t want to go with Shae, but I like having my options open, especially if I need a getaway ride. I also don’t want to be in such close proximity to Caden. He makes me agitated for obvious reasons, and I need to have all my wits about me going into this blind. Shae’s expression remains calm, but she flicks a raised eyebrow in my direction.

After a couple seconds, Shae jumps into the car, and nods for Caden to get in. Instead, he walks over to me sitting on the bike. I tense immediately at his soft touch on my shoulder. “What’s wrong?”

I can feel Shae’s heavy stare through the car window. Sighing, I look Caden full in the face, steeling my voice and my heart. “It never happened, OK? This thing with you and me. It
can’t
happen. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Why? What do you mean?” His voice is wounded, and my eyes fall away from his, unable to bear the pooling hurt there. “I thought–”

“No, you were wrong, Caden. I didn’t feel anything. I was testing to see how far you would go,” I say without inflection. I know the words are like daggers to him, but I don’t care. I have to end it before it grows into something worse, something that could endanger the both of us. So instead, I deaden any emotion inside of me with practiced ease. “I’m sorry you thought it was something more. It wasn’t. I just don’t feel that way about you.”

The pain in his voice is worse than I could imagine. “You were
testing
me? For what? To lead me on? To see me make a fool of myself?”

“Yes.” The word is like a gunshot, but it fulfills its purpose. Caden backs away, his eyes wide and angry. I can feel my betrayal eating away at him. And even though my insides feel like a pulverized mess, I know what I’m doing is right. Maybe in a different time, we could have been more, but not now… not with everything at stake. Wearing Sadie’s dress has made me weak. It has made me just as selfish and as self-indulgent as she is.

“Shae was right, wasn’t she?” he whispers. “I thought she was out of her mind when she called you the ice queen. But you are, aren’t you? You’re heartless, Riven.”

I flinch at his words, but I shrug, nonchalant. “I’ve been called far worse. You’d do best to keep your distance from me, Caden. I’m no good for anyone,” I say quietly. My voice is barely a whisper now. “Shae knows me better than most. I don’t know how to love. Just ask her. She’ll tell you.”

“How would she know anything about you? You just met.”

I stare at him sadly. “Because she’s my sister,” I say, and gun the engine on the bike, pulling away as fast as I can from the shattered look on his face. At the end of the parking lot, I wait, watching as he gets into the car with Shae. He doesn’t even look at me as they drive past, and I’m grateful for that even though it cuts through me like a hot blade.

As I follow Shae’s car, my thoughts inexorably return to the kiss. It had been so unexpected and so fiery that even now my chest heats up just from thinking about it. I don’t know what I feel about Caden and whether those feelings are indeed separate from Cale. The thing is that Cale is like a brother to me, but with Caden, there’s something more. I was primed to love him just from knowing Cale, but I’m falling in love with him because he’s Caden. I’m so confused that it’s making me crazy, my thoughts whirling into a blurring jumble in my head. The only thing standing out from everything else is whether I’m being disloyal to Cale.

Because I can’t help but feel like I am betraying him somehow.

Ahead of me, Shae slows down in front of a wide iron gate. I can’t see the house from where we are, but I expect that there is one behind the imposing wall of metal. The gate is attached to a high stone wall, and for a second I wonder what whoever lived in there wanted to keep out. Or in.

There is a small camera on the right side of the gate, and I can feel its eye centered on me. After a couple seconds, the gate slides open. My pulse is racing, but I follow Shae inside onto a long and narrow driveway flanked by slender pine trees. The gates close noiselessly behind us, and the creepy silence of it is unnerving. The thought of an asylum drifts through my head and I shiver. Something isn’t right. I don’t know if it’s nerves or adrenaline, but I’m on edge and my instincts are screaming.

Before I can accelerate to cut in front of Shae to voice my misgivings, we pull up in front of a looming stone house. It’s as forbidding as the iron gate and stone wall surrounding it. Removing my helmet, I dismount and check to make sure all my weapons are in place, just in case. Even if they’re Shae’s friends, I still don’t trust easily. Everyone is an enemy until they prove otherwise.

There’s a person on the stairs in front of the giant double door, and Shae’s shaking hands with him. I follow, intentionally tucking Caden behind me. His feelings toward me are obvious, but I ignore them. His safety is paramount. The person turns, and for a second, my breath halts in my chest as a pair of familiar obsidian eyes freeze my body in its tracks.

“Mrs Taylor?” I say, dumbfounded. “
You’re
the Guardian?”

A tight smile. “Riven,” she says with a nod. “Welcome to my home. Any friend of Shae’s is a friend of ours. Please call me Era.”

Caden’s eyes are as wide as my own, but he remains silent. I hide my own surprise with indifference as I walk past her through the door. Her home is dark on the inside with heavy shutters covering all the windows. My tension mounts a notch, and the hairs on the back of my neck are at stiff attention. It takes everything inside of me not to draw my weapons.

“Drinks? Food? Can I get you anything?” Era asks as we follow her down a few steps into a long hallway that has no windows.

“No, thanks,” Shae says. Caden nods that he didn’t want anything either, and I stay silent. There’s no way I’m eating anything in this house.

Shae and Era are at the front with Caden behind them. I’m bringing up the rear. In the narrow hallway, I feel my instincts kicking in, and not in a good way. I catch up to Caden and squeeze his arm. His eyes meet mine. For a minute, it seems like he’s going to ignore me, but then he falls back alongside me.

“What’s up?”

“Look,” I whisper. “If anything happens, get behind me, OK?”

“Why? What’s wrong?”

I purse my lips and shake my head, any awkwardness between us forgotten for the moment. I pause, checking that Era and Shae are still far enough ahead of us. “Something doesn’t feel right. If Mrs Taylor knew about us, why didn’t she say anything? It doesn’t make sense.”

“Maybe she didn’t know,” he says. I feel his eyes studying me. “I didn’t even know you and Shae were related, remember?”

“Stop,” I hiss at his potshot. “Even if she didn’t know about me, she had to know about
you
. And if she is a Guardian, why wouldn’t Shae have warned her about me?”

There’s a long pause before Caden answers. “I see your point.”

Up ahead, Shae and Era have stopped at a gray metal door at the end of the hallway. It reminds me of the door that June had in her house, the one leading to the secret room in the basement. Only on either side of this door, there are two recessed keypads with LED biometric pads. The lights in the corridor flicker and I frown. Era turns to me with a tight smile.

“It’s nothing; don’t worry. A power surge,” she says, and nods to a white table in the corner. “Please leave any weapons you’re carrying over there.”

“What’s behind that door?” I counter flatly, ignoring her reassurance that does nothing to reassure me one bit. Neither does the command to leave my weapons out here. The muscles in my neck remain as tight as coiled springs. A power surge? What’s in that room that would affect all the power in the house? Some kind of electrical torture chamber? My frown deepens.

Era smiles a smile that goes nowhere near her eyes. But it doesn’t surprise me – she’s a Guardian, and an
active
Guardian at that. They’re chosen for their complete lack of reaction. They make decisions based on logic and reason, and they don’t deviate from the jobs they’re supposed to do.

It’s hard to reconcile the two Mrs Taylors – the teacher at school and the uncompromising Guardian standing in front of me. Without a doubt, I know that she’s a Guardian first and a teacher second. She isn’t my friend – after all, I’d flaunted the Guardian’s cardinal law by defecting to this universe. The only reason she’s giving me the time of day is because she thinks I’m an ally of Shae’s. I wonder just how much Shae has told her about me. Would she have told Era the truth? I take a deep breath to calm my panicked thoughts.

“I mean it. I’m not going in there,” I repeat. “Especially without my weapons.”

“It’s OK, Riven,” Shae says. Then she grasps my arm, and leans in. “You have to trust me. We’ll be safe. Just do as she says.”

I shoot her a scathing look but remove my jacket and harness, tossing my backpack into the corner. Caden does the same. Era nods with satisfaction before she and Shae punch in some kind of simultaneous code on either side of the door and lean in for a retina scan. My unease spirals.

What in hell is behind that door?

As the door swings open on noiseless hinges, I don’t realize I’m gripping Caden’s wrist so tightly that he winces and pulls away. But I can’t even think to apologize. Instead, as pale blue fluorescent light and the nauseatingly familiar smell of formaldehyde rush out to greet me, I’m frozen into immobility.

The room is circular. The floor is metal. There are men in blue head-to-toe suits walking past us with steel trays and tablet computers. There are computer flat-screens everywhere full of trending data that I can’t even begin to process, but I’m guessing that it’s some kind of laboratory. My eyes take in the details, categorizing them in my head and assessing for danger. And there’s a lot of it… that I know for certain.

Caden pushes past me to follow Shae and Era inside, and I do the same only to be assaulted by what awaits me. I forget the men in the blue suits immediately. A row of Vectors stand in circular man-sized specimen tubes strapped vertically to the wall, a handful of them to the right of where I’m standing. My jaw drops to the floor and stays there.

“What
is
this place?” I hear Caden say.

“It’s a research facility,” Shae responds. “Era’s been studying them for years, trying to recreate the parameters to evert as they do.”

“But you have to be dead,” I say automatically.

Era impales me with an unnerving, piercing stare. I hold it this time and raise an uncowed eyebrow. “Not necessarily,” she says. “We can reduce certain things to mimic the state of the Vectors, to put a body at rest if you will.”

Skepticism threads my voice. “No, the bodies have to be dead to withstand eversion from anywhere. Anything less than a zero gravity point will pulverize us.”

A slow smile. “Come now, Riven. Put that physics knowledge of yours to good use,” she says in a patronizing voice that sets my teeth on edge. “Why do you think the Vectors generate so much electricity when they evert?” She waits, and I shrug. I never got into the technicalities with my father. All I knew was that they were dead things that could jump from anywhere and we could not.

Era smiles. “The electrical energy generated by the nanoplasm inside of them acts as a force field to protect the human tissue. Dead or alive, it doesn’t matter. We can increase the electricity inside our neurons to jump as they do.”

“How?”

“We’ve developed a serum,” Era says, her hand gesturing to the men walking around us. “Come, let me show you.”

We follow her past the Vectors, but I can’t help staring at the darkly veined, translucent bodies on display. On close inspection, I can see the outline of their bones as well as the metal wires from the lithia core connecting the spine to the skull. I step closer. Numbers are inked into their skin. One reads 104. The one closest to me twitches, and I almost jump out of my skin.

“Are they active?” I blurt out.