The Bloom Series Box Set: Bloom & Fade (16 page)

“
Absolutely,” said
Colton.

“
One-hundred percent,”
said Reece.

Alistair nodded. “Very good. Reece,
you probably won’t be too interested in this part of the building,
but it is where you, Colton, will be spending most of your time.
Welcome to level nine—the training room.”

There were no windows on that level.
The walls of the room were gridded with steel bars which crossed
over steel plates that had been secured in place with massive
bolts.

Alistair pressed one of the many
buttons in a black wall panel as soon as they stepped out of the
elevator. With a soft mechanical hum, a large metal sphere lowered
slowly from the ceiling and hung suspended over the floor in the
middle of the room.

Colton stepped forward
hesitantly.

Alistair waited behind him. “Think of
it as breathing,” he said. “Except that you are the lung and the
energy around you is air. The goal is to see how long you can hold
it in before releasing it. Your ability is a muscle, in a sense,
and exercise will only make it stronger.”

“
Hey Colton, you’re a
lung!” said Reece. He leaned against the wall near the elevator and
crossed his arms. “How long are you guys going to be doing this
stuff?”

“
As long as it takes,”
said Alistair.

Reece clapped his hands and rubbed
them together. “In that case, you kids have fun. I’m gonna go find
Shelly.” He gave Colton a thumbs-up as the elevator doors
closed.

“
Your friend is a
little…
different
,” said Alistair.

Colton frowned thoughtfully. “I can’t
really argue with that.”

He turned back to the
sphere.

Alistair explained that the sphere he
chose was one of many, each one designed to produce a different
kind of energy. The one he lowered from the ceiling emitted what
Alistair called one of the simpler energies: heat.

Colton wiped sweat from his forehead
as he stepped closer to the sphere. It was about ten feet in
diameter and the surface was brushed instead of polished. His
reflection appeared as if he were looking at himself through a
dirty window and was distorted from the heat fog being generated
from within.

A large pipe made from the same
material as the sphere ran out of its top and into the panel in the
ceiling from which the sphere had lowered.

“
Concentrate,” said
Alistair. “Let’s keep it simple and try something you already know.
When you feel like you can’t hold in the energy, release it as you
did when you fell from the plane.”

“
When I was pushed, you
mean?”

Alistair smiled. “Exactly.”

Colton closed his eyes and imagined
the battery inside his chest. It filled quickly, shaking with the
energy he was absorbing. The warmth surged through his body until
it filled him completely. He could feel it putting pressure on the
inside of his skin, searching for a way to escape. He clenched his
fists tightly and tried to force the energy back toward his
core.

It was too much.

Colton released the energy as a
pressure blast, just as he did right before he hit the ground in
the desert. Alistair was pushed back a step from the force of the
impact and the sphere rocked gently in the air.

“
Not bad,” said Alistair.
“A little shorter than I was expecting, but you’re still
new.”

“
Will I get better?”
Colton was disappointed—he had been able to contain the life energy
of an apple for half an hour.

“
Oh, yes,” said Alistair.
“You can already contain more energy than most of the other people
here. If we can get you to
hold
that energy, you will be very
powerful.”

“
But I still need a
Source, right? The other half of the equation.”

Alistair sighed. “Yes. But Colton, I
wouldn’t get your hopes up. Most of us never find our
Source.”

“
Do you have one?” asked
Colton.

Alistair nodded. “Long ago.” He looked
over to the wall as he remembered. “The power we felt
together…indescribable. This…” he said, waving at the sphere and
the building, “…all of this pales in comparison.”

Colton saw regret and anger in his
eyes.

The anger faded as Alistair looked at
him and smiled. “If you are ever so lucky, Colton, don’t squander
your time together. If your Source is anywhere near as strong as
you, the two of you could flatten mountains and drain
oceans.”

He turned around and walked toward the
elevator.

“
What now?” asked
Colton.

“
Practice!” said Alistair
without looking back. He stepped into the elevator. “It makes
perfect, after all.”

The doors closed and Colton turned
back to the sphere.

“
Alright,” he said. “Here
we go.”

21

H
aven awoke to the sound of a loud metal
CLANG
. Her eyelids snapped open and
she sat up quickly. She was on an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar
room.

CLANG
.

The noise came from the other side of
the only door in her small room. The bed she had been sleeping on
was more of a flimsy cot; springs creaked loudly as Haven slowly
stood from the stained, inch-thick mattress. As soon as she was on
her feet, her stomach growled with hunger.

She looked down.

Her clothes were not her own, yet they
fit just as well—if not better—than many of the pieces in her own
wardrobe. She plucked at the soft fabric of her faded black t-shirt
and brushed a piece of fuzz from her white-washed jeans. She looked
down over her back and raised her eyebrows appreciatively at how
she looked. Someone had even put socks and shoes on her
feet—low-rise canvas kicks with white soles that barely made a
noise when she tapped them against the floor. The image of a
hospital flashed through her memory and she thought she had been
wearing loose blue clothing, as if she were about to have an
operation. The thought of someone changing her while she slept made
her shudder.

Haven suddenly remembered the
glow-in-the-dark star she had pulled from the ruins of her home.
She checked both of her pockets—it was gone. She had carried that
star with her every day since she found it in the ashes. It must
have been left behind with her clothes at the medical facility.
Deep sadness poured over her when she realized that all she had
left of Noah was the hope that she would see him again.

From somewhere in the room came the
sound of dripping water.

A bowl of dirty water and a folded
cloth sat atop a small table next to the cot. On the floor near the
table was a heavy woolen blanket. Haven picked up the blanket and
held it for a moment as she tried to remember what had happened to
her.

Another memory—she had been taken from
a medical center by a man with a thick Russian accent. No, not
taken—rescued. She remembered the row of vicious tools on a tray
next to her at the center and the way the men in the masks seemed
to regard her with a cruel sense of detachment, as if she were no
more than an animal they were preparing to euthanize.

Wherever she was—wherever she had been
taken after the medical center—she had the distinct feeling she was
safe.

CLANG
.

Haven dropped the blanket on the cot
and walked to the closed door. The floor of the room was gritty
concrete and several old water stains spread in moldy green
half-circles from the base of the walls. The walls themselves were
rusted red metal—Haven felt as if she were in a big metal
lung.

Hanging on the wall next to the door
was a cracked mirror. Haven knew she shouldn’t look but couldn’t
help herself.

She shouldn’t have looked.

Her hair was frizzy in some places and
stuck out wildly everywhere else, as if she had put her finger in a
light socket. She grimaced and tried to pat down some of the more
unruly clumps. Her skin was streaked with something that she hoped
was dirt. Dark circles below her eyes made her look ten years older
than her actual age.

Her eyes were clear, though, as was
her mind.

With a little bit of
makeup and a hair straightener, she would be as good as new.
Well,
almost
as
good.

CLANG
.

Haven twisted the rusty
metal handle and pulled open the heavy door. After she started it
swinging, it moved smoothly on big hinges and bumped into the wall,
sending a hollow metal
GONG
reverberating throughout the room.

She stepped over the small lip at the
bottom of the doorway and walked down a narrow hallway. The hallway
brought her out into a huge, domed room. The walls were grey
concrete cut into curved sections that gently sloped inward as the
ceiling rose higher to the apex far above. A fan turned slowly at
the peak. There were no windows—just large, square mirrors attached
to the walls of the dome. A series of metal rungs had been bolted
to the concrete on one side of the curved wall and formed a ladder
that led up to the fan. Haven shuddered to think about someone
climbing up the inside of the wall. The room was dark except for
several bright work lamps that were aimed at a black car nearby.
The car was parked between two long tool benches lined with greasy
equipment and dirty rags.

A tall, thin man in dirty clothes
picked up a small fastener from one of the benches and held it to a
thin metal plate that covered a small portion of a hole in the side
paneling of the car. He swung a long hammer over his head and down
onto the fastener.

CLANG
.

He reached over to the bench and
grabbed another fastener.

“
I woke you,” he said to
Haven without turning.

She took a few steps toward the car.
“It’s alright,” she said. His face looked vaguely
familiar.

“
I wasn’t
apologizing.”

She remembered that his name was
Dormer. He swung the hammer down.

CLANG
.

“
Corva wants to talk to
you,” he said with a slight nod of his head toward the other side
of the room. He dropped the hammer on the nearest bench and brushed
his hands against his dirty pants as he walked away.

Haven hugged herself, suddenly cold in
the big, open room. She squinted into the shadows on the other side
of the vast dome and saw the dim, green glow of a computer screen.
The screen barely lit the face of a woman as she typed rapidly on a
keyboard.

Haven walked past table after table
full of mechanical parts and electrical components. Reams of paper
sat piled haphazardly on the floor, some as tall as her. When Haven
was still a good distance away, the woman at the computer turned
and smiled. Haven walked closer and stood next to the computer. It
was an old model—the screen was large and boxy, and the wire
running out of the keyboard was thick and spiraled.

“
Don’t mind him,” she
said, nodding toward Dormer. “He’s always grumpy.”

“
What’s wrong with
him?”

“
His brother was taken by
Bernam’s thugs a few months ago. He was a Conduit as
well.”

“
A what?”

The woman smiled. She had
shoulder-length, bright white hair and soft features. Even without
makeup, Haven thought she was really pretty.

“
All in good time,” said
the woman. “My name’s Corva. Do you remember me?”

“
Sort of,” said Haven.
“Everything is still a little fuzzy.”

“
That would be the
narcotics you were given.”

“
You drugged
me?”

Corva laughed easily and Haven had a
hard time not smiling as soon as she realized it was a stupid thing
to say. “No, of course not. The doctors at the center were
preparing to operate on you when Marius barged in.”

“
I remember
Marius.”

“
Yeah, well, he’s kind of
hard to forget.”

“
Where was I? What is this
place?”

“
I know you have
questions, Haven, but they’re not for me to answer. You’ll get them
soon, I promise. For now we need to make sure that you’re doing
okay.”

Haven was about to ask what Corva
meant by “doing okay” when the events of the past few weeks flooded
her mind and the knife that was the memory of her deceased parents
slammed into her chest. She lost the strength in her legs and sat
down heavily in an empty chair next to the computer.

“
Easy there,” said Corva.
She leaned over and put her hands on Haven’s shoulders to steady
her in the chair.

“
I’m sorry,” said Haven.
“I just—my parents—”

She could feel the pressure of tears
behind her eyes.

“
It’s alright,” said
Corva. “A lot has happened in the past few weeks.” She pushed aside
a strand of frizzy hair from Haven’s face and smiled.