The Bloom Series Box Set: Bloom & Fade (48 page)

Bastian twisted in his seat and was
able to move slightly, but he was still trapped.

“
Almost got it,” he
said.

Roku brought his fist back again, and
with another sharp yell, struck the exposed metal hull. It crumpled
at the point of impact. His fist sank deep into the middle,
crunching it as if he were punching a cardboard box.

Bastian scrambled away from the
instrument panel and fell to the floor, panting heavily. Roku sat
next to him, eyes closed, sweat dripping from his face. Bastian
laughed and slapped him on the shoulder, but Roku did not
respond.

“
Is he okay?” asked
Haven.

“
He will be,” said
Bastian. He ran his hands over his own legs, checking for injuries.
“Takes a while to recover from something like that, especially if
you two weren’t ‘meant for each other’, as I like to say. And from
the looks of the dose you gave him, I wouldn’t be surprised if he
was a bit dazed for another month!” He stood up and gave her a
quick hug. “Thank you,” he said, and left the chopper.

Haven knelt down next to Roku and
rested her hand on his shoulder. He barely opened his eyes and
looked at her. She smiled at him and he blinked heavily. Haven
followed Bastian outside. He stood next to Marius, looking into the
distance.

“
You’re lucky you are not
more injured,” Marius said to Bastian. “Marius can only do cuts
now. Easy to cauterize. But severed limbs is not so
good.”

“
Nice to have a someone
around who can handle a patch job, anyway,” said Bastian. He
slapped Marius on the back and stood next to him,
grinning.

“
Why so happy?” asked
Marius.

“
Just glad to be alive.
Not sure how much longer it will last, but it’s good for now, at
least.”

“
Where are we?” asked
Haven.

“
Two hundred miles east of
Dome,” said Marius. “North of Billings, if Marius read his map
correctly.”

“
That’s right,” said
Bastian. “Middle of blessed nowhere. Ever notice that’s where all
the bad guys like to do business? Why couldn’t they own a factory
in Paris or Fiji, you know? It had to be a desert in
Montana.”

“
We should get moving,”
said Haven. “If there was a tracking device in the chopper, they’ll
know where we crashed.”

“
I bet they know anyway,”
said Marius. “It was remote control that shut down the chopper.
There was nothing Marius could do.”

“
They cut the engine from
way back at the Dome?” asked Haven.

“
Is the only possibility,”
said Marius. “We had plenty of fuel. Equipment in the chopper was
good.”

“
I’ll get Roku,” said
Haven, and turned to walk back to the helicopter.

“
Give him another minute,”
said Bastian. “He’ll need his strength for what’s
ahead.”

Haven looked at the horizon. A cold
wind blew across the desert and chilled her skin. A light haze of
steam rose from her body as the warmth from her fire evaporated.
“What’s ahead?” she asked.

“
Nothing good. Nothing
good at all.”

20

C
olton awoke on the floor of Marius and Corva’s dormitory
cell. The room was shaped like a giant pill, with rusty metal walls
and a submarine door. His cheek peeled off the cold metal floor as
he sat up and looked around. Corva slept on her own bed next to the
extra cots that had been shoved into the room after Kamiko’s
occupation. The medical center refugees were all unconscious on the
extra cots, twitching feverishly. Privacy was a thing of the past
in the Dome. Soldiers were stationed everywhere, even outside the
bathrooms. None of the inhabitants could ever really be
alone.

Colton stood hesitantly, with a hand
hovering over his broken rib, waiting for the pain to return. It
never did. He stood up and stretched his back, then swung his arms
back and forth. He took a deep breath—no pain. Someone must have
healed him while he slept. Colton lifted his shirt and looked at
the skin over his ribs. A large purple bruise covered his entire
right side, but it didn’t hurt when he pushed it hard. He felt
along his ribs beneath his skin—perfectly intact.

Corva sniffed and shifted on her cot.
Her short, stark-white hair fell over her eyes and she mumbled in
her sleep. Colton walked to the cot and sat on the edge. He pulled
the thin blanket a little higher to cover her shoulders and noticed
the layer of sweat that covered her skin. She was
shivering.

He searched the room and came back
with two more thin blankets, then unfolded both and draped them
over Corva. She sighed weakly and her eyelids fluttered open. Her
pupils were dilated wide, and did not adjust to the light. She
squinted as if it hurt her to keep them open, then turned away to
face the wall.

“
Where is everyone?” she
whispered. Her voice was scratched and weak, as if she had been
screaming for hours. Colton knew that wasn’t the case. He knew she
had been sleeping most of the time since being injected with Fade.
It worked its dark poison on Corva faster than it had on the
others. Black veins crawled up from the base of her neck, reaching
up toward her jaw like the dead branches of a naked
tree.

“
They’re probably getting
something to eat,” said Colton. The dormitory rooms had been ideal
for housing the Dome’s inhabitants. Kamiko and her soldiers could
lock the doors from the outside and keep up to six people in each
room. There was only one exit between the dormitories and the rest
of the Dome: a long hallway that led past the kitchen. It was
guarded at all times by three heavily-armed soldiers.

“
I was having a very nice
talk with Micah and Noah earlier,” said Corva. She coughed and
closed her eyes.

“
How are they holding up?”
asked Colton. He had been concerned for the boys ever since Kamiko
and her soldiers arrived. It took a little getting used to, but
Micah and Noah seemed to be adjusting well to the new circumstances
after their initial sickness wore off—better than most of the
adults, in fact.

“
They are boys,” said
Corva. “To Micah, it is still not very different from a game. But
Noah understands. He misses his sister.” Suddenly her back arched
and she cried out in pain. Her knuckles turned bone-white as she
grabbed at the covers and twisted them until she ripped out a small
patch of cloth. She brought the patch to her mouth and bit down on
it to muffle a scream.

Colton put his hand on her shoulder
and she relaxed a little, breathing heavily. Strands of white hair
clung to her sweaty forehead. She shivered constantly.

“
I miss Marius,” she said
distantly. A moment later, her breathing slowed and she fell
asleep. Colton readjusted the blankets and brushed her hair back
from her forehead.

It was rare for a Source and a Conduit
who were meant for each other—true counterparts—to end up together.
Corva and Marius were lucky in that regard. It saddened Colton to
know that only a tiny fraction of those like him would ever find
the person who could unlock the full potential of their ability.
Those Colton knew who had yet to find their counterparts were not
weak at all, so Colton supposed fulfillment was all a matter of
perspective. Dormer had gone his whole life without finding his
Source and he was the strongest Conduit Colton had ever met, aside
from Bernam. But Bernam had been a Void—the strongest of his
kind.

Now the Void power resided in
Alistair, who murdered Bernam so he could turn himself into a Nova.
Colton stood from Corva’s cot and looked at the survivors from
Bernam’s medical facility. They lay curled up and shivering, black
veins crawling over their skin.

How do you fight back
against such a ruthless enemy?
thought
Colton. The voice in his head that answered was his
mother’s:
Any way you
can
.

He tried to remember what was in his
own dorm cell. It had been cleared of everything he might use to
cause a problem for Kamiko and her lackeys. All he had left was a
stack of wrinkled clothes and some pictures of his mother he had
retrieved from his old house long ago. He had an urge to go back to
his room and flip through them but decided it wasn’t the time for
sadness and regret.

Now he needed to focus.

He went to the door and stood before
it, studying the large, rusted wheel in its center. The wheel was
connected to metal bars that went out to both sides of the door,
sealing it closed. If he spun the wheel, the metal bars would shift
inward a few inches, clearing the welded braces on both sides of
the door.

Colton spun the wheel and was
completely surprised when the door swung inward without any sort of
resistance. He poked his head out into the dark hallway, expecting
one of Kamiko’s soldiers to come running at any second, waving his
rifle at Colton and yelling at him to get back inside.

No one appeared. The hallway was
empty. Colton stepped out of his room and shut the door behind him.
To his right was the end of the hallway and the sealed door to
another dorm cell. To his left, the hallway continued, eventually
passing the kitchen. Directly across the hall from Colton was the
door to another room, and he stepped quietly over to it and rapped
lightly on its metal surface. There was no answer from within, so
he spun the outer wheel and pushed in the door. It made a soft
squeak as it opened. Dormer and Adsen turned quickly to look at
him. The two men visibly relaxed when they saw who it
was.

The dorm cell was laid out exactly as
Marius and Corva’s, with several cots pushed closely together
around the walls. The place had been sanitized: anything that could
be mildly considered as a weapon had been hauled away.

Dormer and Adsen sat in the middle of
the room, hovering conspiratorially over a small wooden table that
was covered with loose papers. At a quick glance, Colton saw
building blueprints and what looked like molecular
diagrams.

“
The doors are unlocked,”
said Colton, unsure of what else to say.

Dormer nodded. “They’re watching the
end of the hall. They don’t seem to mind if we wander around this
area by ourselves. For now.” He looked awkward sitting in such a
short chair next to the table. He was a tall, thin man with
slicked-back hair and a thick Adam’s apple that bobbed up and down
when he spoke. Colton was often reminded of a bird; Dormer blinked
often and moved his head in quick jerks when he was
excited.

Adsen was similar, yet much different.
He sat across the table from his brother and carried the weight of
a man who had endured much pain. Colton knew they were fraternal
twins, yet Adsen looked decades older. His hair was thinning and
the dark circles under his eyes bespoke the months of torture he
endured at Bernam’s medical facility. Still, his eyes were keen and
bright, and Colton saw a deep intelligence when the man turned to
look his way.

“
Please, won’t you join
us?” he asked. His voice had a slight British tone, very proper,
and one that Colton had never before detected in Dormer. He
wondered how much time the brothers had spent apart from each other
as children. Colton found a wooden box crate next to one of the
cots and pulled it over to the table. He sat between the two men
and looked at the papers.

One was a top-down layout of the
entire Dome facility. Little black X marks had been scratched in
various locations, and next to each was a duration of time written
out in minutes, such as “:15” and “:40”.

“
What are those?” asked
Colton.

“
Shift times,” said
Dormer. “The duration a soldier stays in one location.”

“
You’re keeping track of
their movements,” said Colton. Faint pencil lines followed one X to
the other, and he realized that the lines were the exact paths the
soldiers took throughout the Dome. Adsen and Dormer had
meticulously tracked their schedules and movements down to the
precise minute. His hopes sank when he realized the pattern in
their timing. “Some of them only stay in one spot for five
minutes,” he said.

Dormer nodded. “They are infuriatingly
efficient. Probably ex-military.”

“
What are you going to
do?”

Adsen sighed. “We don’t
know. Yet. But we’ve identified the perfect window of five minutes
where we could do
something
.”

“
There are twelve
soldiers,” said Dormer, “plus the evil Queen Bee. Without our
abilities, a proper coup is impossible.”

Adsen smiled. “A little optimism goes
a long way, brother.”

“
You’re one to talk. They
had you locked up in that medical facility for months, draining the
life out of you.”

“
And I never gave up hope
that you would get me out.”

Dormer clenched his teeth and looked
down at the papers. Colton remembered how angry Dormer had been
when Elena and the others in the Dome would only go to the medical
facility after Haven’s brother had been kidnapped. Adsen had rotted
there for months, and Dormer had to endure that knowledge until he
was finally able to go to his rescue.

“
What’s the rest of this
stuff?” asked Colton. He lifted the edge of a sheet of paper and
saw images taken through a microscope that showed bacteria of some
kind. Calculations and long strings of chemical sequences were
scribbled under the images in an unsteady hand.