The Bloom Series Box Set: Bloom & Fade (22 page)

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

E
lena 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.