The Bloom Series Box Set: Bloom & Fade (58 page)

“
We destroyed the Fade
processing plant. That’s something. It means no one else is going
to be infected.”

“
Ha!” he said. “What you
think, a man like Alistair isn’t going to have another place just
like it somewhere? Or maybe he already shipped a hundred million
needles out into the world to infect entire countries! Only way to
stop it is to stop
him
, and he’s already killed most of us. They are all back at
the Dome, dying slowly, while we drive through this desert and
waste more time.”

He suddenly slammed on the brakes and
the truck slid sideways over the sand. It came to a rocking stop,
then Marius cut the engine and hopped quickly out of the
cab.

“
Marius…” said Haven. She
had a bad feeling about what he might do.

“
You!” shouted Marius as
he walked around to the back of the truck.

“
Me?” asked Bastian. His
eyes were bleary from his brief nap.

“
You.”

Marius grabbed his collar with both
hands. He pulled Bastian off the truck bed and slammed him against
the hard ground. He growled and pulled Bastian to his feet, then
stuck his snarling face so close to Bastian’s that their noses
touched. Then he lifted Bastian up into the air. Black veins
throbbed in Marius’s neck. His bloodshot eyes studied Bastian as if
he couldn’t understand why such a person existed in the first
place.

“
What—what are you doing?”
asked Bastian.

Marius yelled and threw him as far as
he could. Bastian hit the sand on his side and rolled to a stop
against a large rock. Roku hopped easily from the bed of the truck
and Marius turned on him and pointed a finger in his
face.

“
This does not concern
you,” said Marius. “Let him be a man and fight his own
fight.”

Roku’s face hardened, but he stayed by
the truck. A few feet away, Bastian coughed sand back onto the
desert ground. “I know you’re angry,” he said between coughs,
“but—”

But he couldn’t finish. Marius stood
over him and grabbed the back of his belt. He shoved Bastian
forward and kicked him in the stomach. Yellow flame sputtered and
died in Bastian’s hands as he held his side. He was unable to
control his energy and small sparks of light shot out from his skin
like tiny fireworks.

His breath returned and he took a
long, gasping lungful. Haven ran up and grabbed Marius’s arm as he
pulled it back for a punch.

“
Stop it!” she shouted.
Marius turned and scowled at her.

“
It’s alright,” said
Bastian weakly. He lay on the ground on his side, his breath
pushing sand away from his face. He looked at Haven. “It’s
alright.”

She slowly let go of Marius’s arm and
stepped away. Roku stood next to her, watching.

Marius pulled his leg back for another
kick. Right before it connected, a yellow bubble of energy swelled
out from Bastian’s hands and burst. Marius flew back ten feet and
landed hard on his shoulder. Bastian scrambled to his feet and
stood there, half bent over from pain, panting to catch his
breath.

Marius got to his feet slowly, his
eyes fixed on his target.

“
What do you want me to
say?” asked Bastian. “That I’m sorry? Because I am. I’m sorry I
took you away from your wife. I’m sorry she’s sick.”

Marius walked toward him, his heavy
shoes leaving deep impressions in the sand. He looked like a bull
in a slow-motion charge.

“
But that didn’t change
what we had to do,” said Bastian. Marius was just a foot away when
another bubble of yellow energy popped in his face. The second
burst hit him like a sledgehammer and slammed him down to the
ground. He lay there, groaning, holding his head as if it were made
of glass.

“
I have a lot to atone
for,” said Bastian, panting heavily. He wavered on his feet and
bent forward to put his hands on his knees for support. “But to pay
for it out here would be pointless, especially considering the road
ahead.”

Marius kicked Bastian’s ankle, hard.
Bastian screamed and lifted his foot off the ground. Marius kicked
his other leg out from beneath him and Bastian hit the ground on
his back. Marius rolled to him and sat up, then swung his leg over
Bastian’s torso to straddle his chest. He pulled back his fist,
ready to strike, but stopped.

Bastian fought for air, gasping like a
fish on dry land, as Marius’s fist hovered over his head. The
energy seemed to leave Marius all at once and he slumped to the
side. He crawled away on his hands and knees, coughing, then
collapsed in the sand and wept.

Roku knelt down next to Bastian and
helped him sit up.

“
I’m okay,” said Bastian.
His voice was weak and strained, as if he had been screaming for
days. “Thank you.”

“
I did nothing,” said
Roku.

Haven walked over and sat next to
Marius. He lay face-down on the hot ground, his tears forming small
patches of mud where they fell. He coughed and spat black blood
onto the ground.

“
Is getting worse,” he
said.

Haven put a hand on his back and let
some of her energy flow out through her palm, into his spine. He
stopped quivering and relaxed.

“
We’ve all lost someone,”
said Haven. “Some more than others. But Corva is not gone yet. As
long as she’s alive, you still have hope.”

Marius pushed away from the ground and
sat up. One side of his face was covered in a thin layer of sand,
like half-finished clown makeup, and Haven was unable to control
the giggle that slipped out. She slapped her hands to her mouth to
stifle the rest.

“
Marius is no good at this
kind of thing,” he said. “He is best at simple things, like
punching and revenge. It hurts somewhere deep inside to think about
losing her. It hurts more than anything in the world.”

Haven smiled at him. “So let’s get you
back home, okay?”

He sniffed and wiped his face with his
sleeve. “Okay.”

She helped him to his feet and they
walked back to the truck. Roku boosted Bastian up onto the bed and
climbed up after him.

“
Are we going to make it?”
asked Roku.

Haven looked at Marius and he nodded
as he got into the driver’s seat.

“
I think so,” she
said.

She closed his door and
walked around the front of the truck. Marius turned the keys in the
ignition but all that came from the engine was a steady,
slow
wuh-wuh-wuh-wuh
, then silence.

Haven stood in front of
the truck, staring at the front grille. Marius keyed the ignition
again and the chugs came slower and weaker:
wuh…wuh… wuh
.

“
This not good,” said
Marius from behind the wheel.

“
Let me take a look,” said
Roku. He hopped down from the truck bed and joined Haven at the
front as Marius popped the hood. Roku lifted it and a cloud of
acrid smoke rose into the air from the hissing engine.

Haven coughed and waved some of it
away. “I’m guessing that’s a bad sign,” she said.

Roku touched parts of the engine,
pausing for a moment on each one to feel the temperature. He
knocked on a plastic tank bolted to the side panel next to the twin
batteries. It thumped hollowly under his knuckles.

“
Electrical problem?”
asked Marius from the cab.

“
Could be the starter,”
said Roku. The radiator cap sizzled against his fingers as he
unscrewed it. He waved away some of the smoke and peered into the
radiator. “It’s also out of coolant.”

“
We’re screwed,” said
Bastian.

“
Thanks for the
professional assessment,” said Haven. “What can we do?”

“
Unless there’s a tank of
water in the truck and a spare starter,” said Roku,
“nothing.”

Haven turned and looked in the
direction they were heading. Heat shimmered over the miles of hard
ground and crumbled rock between the truck and Billings.

“
Should we go back to the
warehouse?” she asked. “Maybe there’s another truck that wasn’t
damaged.”

Roku shook his head. “We’re closer to
the city than to the building. We have to walk.”

“
It’s still forty miles!”
said Haven. “And we don’t have any water.”

“
I don’t need water,” said
Roku.

Haven looked at him, her hands on her
hips. She suddenly realized she was imitating an aggravated pose
made famous by her mother and quickly dropped her hands to her
side. “What do you mean, you don’t need it?” she asked.

“
With this heat, I can
draw in enough energy so I don’t have to use any of my own. I’m not
sweating.”

Haven had noticed that Roku looked
oddly cool in the burning heat. The rest of them were sweating
bullets.

“
You were sweating earlier
in the warehouse,” she said.

“
I was injured and I
needed to focus all my energy on transferring a memory to
you.”

“
Yeah, cut the guy some
slack,” said Bastian. He hopped off the back of the truck and stood
next to Roku. “You going to do the running thing?”

“
What running thing?”
asked Haven.

“
Roku here is a regular
Flash. He does this thing where he can really book it for short
periods of time, as long as he has enough energy to draw
from.”

“
If I don’t have enough,
it starts draining internally instead of externally. I would be
stealing my own life.” Roku looked up at the sun. “But this should
be more than enough. I’ll get to town and come back with
transportation.”

“
We’ll get as far as we
can on our own,” said Bastian.

Roku nodded and walked away in the
direction of Billings. He took one more look up at the sun and sped
up to a light jog. He picked up speed gradually, until his legs
were moving so fast that Haven could hardly tell them apart. A
plume of dust billowed up behind him as he shrank toward the
horizon.

Haven and the others walked after him.
She held up her hands to shield her eyes from the sun and wished
for a cold bottle of water.

“
How does he do it?” she
asked. “The running thing.”

Bastian shrugged. “Roku can do a lot.
Like the memory piggybacking magic he worked on you when we first
met. He seems to have an understanding of the way his body
interacts with the world on a biological level that no one else can
begin to figure out. I think the running has something to do with
the way his body distributes energy, all the way down to the amount
of blood delivered to his muscles. He can control what parts get
more attention if he really focuses. But he’ll burn out if he
pushes too hard.”

“
How long will it take?”
asked Marius. He trudged forward, staring down at his feet to keep
the sun off his face.

“
Depends on how
resourceful he is in town.”

“
Marius is sorry about
before,” he said suddenly.

“
So am I,” said
Bastian.

They continued on in silence,
following Roku’s path across the hard-packed ground. Haven looked
up at the blinding sun and the desire for water was temporarily
forgotten behind the sincere hope that Noah and Colton were
okay.

34

T
he smell of perfume seeped into Colton’s dreamless sleep like
a thin sheet falling over a bed. It was a smell of spring flowers
and rain, and he knew it belonged to his mother. He called out to
her in his sleep, seeing her for a moment in front of him, smiling.
Just smiling. It said more than her words ever could.

He reached out for her but she was
gone.

He woke up in a small bed in the
corner of a small room. There was a little vanity desk with a
cracked mirror on top, a short dresser with three drawers, and a
single door. Several thick, humming pipes ran along the interior
walls—pipes through which a Conduit could funnel their
uncontrollable energy instead of burning up with it from inside
their own body.

It was his mother’s room.

Colton swung his legs over the side of
the bed and sat up. He put his hand on the pillow in the depression
made by his head and remembered his arrival at the Dome. His mother
had lived in that very room for a time, guarded over and protected
by Elena and the others; kept safe from Bernam, who would have
killed her without hesitation. Colton’s Conduit ability had been
taken by Bernam and given to Reece, a friend who Bernam was
manipulating into an obedient follower. After that, Colton only had
a short time to live. A Source or Con stripped of their ability
will wither and eventually die.

Colton had been on the verge of death
when his mother transferred her own Conduit energy into him. He
tried to give it back to her—knowing it meant her death—but he
didn’t know how. Unlike a Source, a Con can freely give their power
to one who is without either ability. Colton’s mother knew how to
pass her gift on to him, yet he didn’t know how to give it
back.