The Bloom Series Box Set: Bloom & Fade (36 page)

Haven kicked open the unfinished door
that led to the seventh floor and almost fell to her death. She
reached out for a support beam overhead as her forward momentum
carried her off the ledge of the doorway and into empty space. She
swung out over nothingness, the ground seven floors below, her
fingertips barely grasping the support beam. Her legs swung back to
the doorway and to the flat ledge near the stairwell, but she was
too eager and kicked out too early. Her left hand slipped off the
support beam and her feet missed the ledge. She swung back out,
barely hanging on to the support beam with one hand. Haven focused
on getting ready for the return swing. If she could aim it just
right, she might be able to get enough momentum to launch herself
back onto the seventh floor landing. Her momentum carried her back
toward the ledge, and Haven twisted her body to face the landing.
She extended her legs and kicked out for the ledge. Her toes
touched the very edge of the concrete slab.

The fingertips of her right hand
slipped off the support beam and Haven fell. She was already
falling at an angle from the momentum of her swing and landed
halfway on the sixth floor platform, right at the edge of the
stairwell. She hit the platform on her elbows, her stomach scraping
against the rough concrete floor and her legs kicking in the air
below the ledge.

Lee laughed at her from
above.

She craned her neck to look up—he was
climbing the steel grid-work easily, even with the little girl
draped over his shoulder. She was too exhausted or too scared to
move. Haven wondered why Lee hadn’t used his Conduit power on the
child. Perhaps he had, and that was the reason she no longer
screamed—he had drained and transferred her life energy to the
point where she could not fight back.

Images of Haven’s burning house
flashed through her mind—nightmarish memories of red flame from the
night Lee and his twin brother Dane had set fire to her home. The
fire had consumed the house as well as her parents. Haven thought
it had taken her little brother Noah as well, but he had been
kidnapped. She almost lost everything on one terrible
night.

Haven grit her teeth and slowly pulled
herself up over the ledge. She swung one leg up and then the other,
then rolled onto her back, panting. Lee balanced easily as he
walked the length of a long steel beam several stories up and
jumped onto a small platform. He peered down over the ledge,
grinning, and winked at Haven.

She clenched her jaw as refreshing
blue fire crawled over her skin, then continued her climb up the
building, after Lee.

2

T
he arrival of the survivors from Bernam’s torturous medical
facility had necessitated a number of changes to the interior of
the Dome compound, turning it into a different place than the cold,
underground warehouse Colton Ross remembered when he first stepped
through the door a year ago.

A second-story tier had been added to
half of the main dome room—a platform fifteen feet off the ground
that ran a half-circle along the inner wall and acted as an
additional floor for bunks and storage. The platform started above
the door to the water processing room and ran clockwise around the
dome, over the dormitory hallway and Grove doors. A barred railing
had been securely bolted to the edge. The platform was only ten
feet wide—anything more would have resulted in the need for too
many supporting pillars. The curvature of the dome was not too
severe that low to the floor, and there was only a slight inward
bent to the walls next to the bunks.

The addition of the new platform was
not all that had changed. The general feeling of the place had
somewhat warmed over as well. There was more carpeting in the
livable spaces instead of the ubiquitous concrete that coated
everything else. Practical lighting had been installed all over the
main dome room—standing lamps and wall sconces—to make it seem less
like a cavern and more like a communal gathering room. The mirrors
that bounced light to the floor from the peak of the ceiling had
been replaced with long light panels—rectangular strips of soft
tube lights set into the concrete so their surfaces were flush with
the wall.

Most of the survivors from the medical
facility had departed after they healed, setting out into the world
with the hope of finding some small piece of their former lives.
Some had been Bernam’s prisoners for years. Colton held out little
hope that they would be able to adapt to their new world. The
long-term residents of the Dome—Marius, Corva, and the others—had
made it plain to those departing that they were welcome back any
time. The rest they left unsaid—that it was likely there was
nothing for them out there besides confusion and disappointment.
They had no jobs, and most of the older survivors were without
family, having been deprived of loved ones just like Haven and many
more who had been unfortunate enough to meet Bernam and
Alistair.

Colton stood in the training room off
the main dome room, leaning back against the wall near the door,
and watched with no small amount of amusement as the two youngest
residents of the Dome, Noah and Micah, sparred with broomsticks.
There was no set rhythm to the young boys’ movements—no defining
pattern that Colton could pick out from the loud cracks of stick
against stick.

The boys would stop and formulate a
plan for the next few swings—you go this way, I’ll go this way—and
then execute their movements with the concentration of incompetent
yet serious stage actors.

Still,
thought Colton,
they’re having
fun
.

The two boys had become quick friends
after Noah’s arrival at the Dome last year. Micah had already been
living there for a time without the company of someone close to his
age. When Noah was saved from the medical facility by his older
sister, Haven, and taken to the Dome, the boys had barely needed to
be introduced before they were off and running.

Haven.

Colton’s heart tightened at the
thought of her. He had wanted to follow her to Chicago the morning
she left the Dome to hunt for Lee, but Marius and Corva had
persuaded him otherwise. They said the outcome of the encounter
would be decided long before he got there, and it would be unwise
to leave the Dome unguarded. Colton pointed out that everyone was
going to leave anyway before Haven ducked out early. Their reply
was that Haven could more than handle the situation on her own,
having grown into her abilities nicely over the past few months.
They had initially planned to go mostly for support, but if Haven
didn’t think she needed any, then so be it. Since she had decided
to pursue Lee on her own, the rest of them could stay at the Dome
and look after the remaining survivors.

Haven had stolen Dormer’s black sedan
from the garage to get her from the Dome to the airport. Colton had
no idea how she afforded the ticket unless someone else paid for
it—the cost of gas and airfare were the only things keeping him
from following her. Money didn’t exactly grow on trees, even in the
Dome.

Crack-CRACK!
went the broomsticks in rapid
succession.

“
Ow!” shouted Noah. He
dropped his stick and sucked on one of his knuckles, cradling his
injured hand with the other. He looked at the red skin on the back
of his fingers and smiled. “It’s okay.”

Micah smiled with relief. He picked up
Noah’s broomstick and handed it back to him.

“
You’re getting better,”
said Colton as he walked over. It was only half-true. The boys were
becoming more accurate with their swings and timing, but their
improvisation and follow-through was lacking. Colton himself was no
expert, but Marius had been teaching him a thing or two about
close-quarters combat in the quiet year since the destruction of
the medical facility.

“
Micah,” said Colton, “you
need to keep your feet farther apart. Slide your left foot closer
to your opponent.” Colton knelt down and pushed Micah’s heel until
his foot slid forward. “That way if you take a hit you won’t fall
over. Noah, you need to move your body in response to your
opponent’s swings. Don’t keep your back so rigid or else an impact
will hurt much more. If he swings at your midsection, you need to
be able to twist to the side to help absorb the blow if you can’t
block it entirely.”

“
When’s Haven coming
back?” asked Noah. He scratched at the center of his chest. Colton
knew there was a vicious scar running down the middle of his
ribcage from where Bernam had operated during one of his cruel
experiments.

“
Soon,” said
Colton.

“
Do you think she’s
okay?”

“
I hope so.”

The swinging door to the training room
opened quickly and Marius appeared. He pointed at
Colton.

“
You,” he said in his
thick Russian accent. “Come.” He pointed at Noah and Micah. “You
and you, keep practicing. Marius could hear your clumsy fighting
all the way in Russia.”

“
You weren’t in Russia,
Marius,” said Noah. “You were standing right outside the door! We
saw you!”

Colton smiled as he walked past Marius
into the dome room.

“
Maybe so,” said Marius to
the boys. “But still you must practice. It makes perfect, after
all.”

As the door swung closed,
Noah said, “He
always
says that.”

Colton followed Marius to a cluttered
section of the dome room floor. Tall racks of machine parts and
tables topped with electronics were all crammed near one section of
the wall. Corva, Marius’s wife, sat at the only computer terminal
in the entire compound. There were no connections to the outside
world from inside the Dome besides a single radio scanner. The risk
of being discovered was too great to keep cell phones and other
connective devices in the compound.

The glow from the computer screen
flickered on Corva’s face and turned her neck-length white hair to
a dull yellow. “Look at this,” she said as Colton and Marius walked
over. She turned the screen toward them and punched a few keys on
the keyboard.

A window popped up in the middle of
the screen that showed a security camera view of the only entrance
to the Dome. It was a wide roll-up door sunk into the base of a
rocky mountain above the complex. The door led to a garage and then
to an elevator. The elevator ran down a wide shaft and ended in a
long hallway which fed directly into the Dome.

A group of men in black combat gear
and face-masks slowly walked around the garage door and on the
mountain above it. Each carried some type of heavy assault
rifle.

“
How did they find us?”
asked Colton.

“
We would have to ask
them,” said Marius.

“
I wonder why they don’t
blast the door,” said Corva.

Marius frowned. “Maybe they are not
trying to get inside.”

The group of men moved away from the
garage door and walked out of the camera’s range.

“
Can you follow them?”
asked Colton.

Corva punched a few keys and the image
on the screen cycled through several more angles, all pointed down
at the front door.

“
That’s all I have,” she
said.

Colton slowly looked up the smooth,
concrete walls of the dome room, past the bunks on the second tier,
and at the large fan spinning slowly at the very peak. An
unsettling thought occurred to him as he stared at its giant,
rotating blades.

“
Where’s Dormer?” he
asked.

“
Why?” asked Corva. “What
do you—”

BOOOOM!

A loud explosion rocked the ceiling of
the dome. The large fan broke out of its setting and hung by a
thick bundle of cable a few feet below the ceiling.

Marius pointed up as the fan swung
from its cables and said, “They definitely try to get
inside!”

3

H
aven climbed quickly, using the steel beams of the unfinished
building like the rungs of a giant ladder.

The wind grew stronger as she climbed,
ripping at her clothes and whipping her brown, red-streaked hair
into her face. The beams became so scarce near the top of the
building that soon she had to climb a vertical beam by using
rough-cut holes in the center as hand-grips. The sharp edges of the
holes cut into her palms as she climbed.

Lee had disappeared right after his
brother was killed in the assault on Bernam’s medical facility last
year. Haven and a group of people like her had gone to the facility
to save Noah after she found out they were using him for
experimentation. She found him along with other victims of Bernam’s
mad plan to turn himself into a hybrid—a Nova. Haven assumed her
friend Dormer had killed both Dane and his brother Lee during the
attack—the severity of Lee’s wounds would have suggested no other
outcome—but, like the cockroach he was, Lee had
survived.

Now he was running loose in Chicago,
and had already killed at least five people. The police were
baffled at the way the victims were murdered—drained of life until
their skin turned black and their eyes shriveled to the size of
raisins. The crew back at the Dome had immediately recognized Lee’s
pattern of chaos and murder.