32. Kren
The electric blue and white bolts of the shock rifles struck me full in the chest and knocked me to the floor. My teeth chattered and clenched so hard I must have chipped at least one tooth.
“Kill him!” the Supervisor said. “Kill him!”
“No!” Ivy screamed. “Kren! No!”
It was the sight of Ivy struggling and the look on her face that caught my attention. There was no escaping shock fire once it had hold of you. Everyone knew that. They called it Riding the Lightning and there was nothing you could do but hold on and hope it didn’t last too long.
“Too long” meant different things to different species. Sometimes it was five minutes before their heart exploded. Others were more susceptible to electricity and keeled over after less than ten seconds.
I didn’t know what my limit was but I did know I wouldn’t survive it. At least I got to look at Ivy one last time. I got to see her before I checked out. It was better than a hammer to the head, that was for sure.
The Supervisor yelled and hissed in pain. He pulled Ivy back. Her lips and teeth were stained red with the Supervisor’s blood. She must have bitten him.
That’s my girl.
The Supervisor pulled his arm back to strike her across the cheek.
“You stupid bitch!”
Smack!
The Supervisor wasn’t a strong man, but the blow was enough to knock Ivy to the floor.
She hit the deck but was up in an instant.
Rushing toward me.
Toward the shock rifles’ fire.
If she touched me, she would be fried in an instant.
Human bodies were not built like the neb. They were weaker, softer, and their hearts would give out a lot sooner.
Time slowed to a crawl.
The Supervisor, realizing too late what was about to happen, ran after Ivy to grab her and yank her back. He was too slow off the mark and wouldn’t reach her in time.
He turned his head to the guards and opened his mouth to yell the command for them to stop firing, but by the time the order registered with their slow brains, Ivy would be cooked.
Ivy sank toward me, hope and fear crowded on her face in a mixed bundle of confusion.
And love. Absolute and total love for me.
Not that I ever doubted it.
I tugged at that golden light inside me, that light that had saved my life countless times. I scrabbled at it now, to fall at my knees before it, not to save my life, but to save hers.
My human.
She didn’t deserve to die here. I didn’t want her to have any part in the plans the Supervisor had for her either but they had to be better than death.
Anything was better than that.
Almost anything.
That light buried deep in my chest was powerful and blinding. I wrapped it in my arms and held it where my heart belonged. I couldn’t let Ivy’s light flicker out. Definitely not in front of me.
I seized that ball of heavenly light and used every fiber of anger and hate and fear I had at my disposal and fed it into that flickering flame. I focused it on the blue lightning bolts that stripped the skin from my body and burnt me alive.
The blue light flickered but didn’t reduce in ampage or direction. I gave it everything I had, all my years of expertise and practice…
And it didn’t alter a stitch.
I was empty. I had no more hate in me, the hate the scientist had taught me to use whenever I tried to brandish my ability for the first time, only now it was depleted and I had nothing left, nothing but desperation…
But no. There was something else.
Love.
Endless fields of love that filled every inch of my body and mind and beyond. There was an endless supply of it, but love could never fuel my ability.
Could it?
I had been raised on a diet of anger and hate and there had been no time for love. Not at Ikmal prison.
It didn’t exist, not until I met Ivy. And then there had been nothing but love.
I held on tight and a filament of it kissed the golden light in my chest and touched that blue-white lightning bolt. It shivered far more than it had with all my hate thrown at it.
And still, Ivy fell toward me. My skin turned red raw and angry, and the Supervisor was hot on her heels as he completed his order:
“Don’t shoot!”
I had nothing else to lose because losing Ivy was the same as losing everything.
I slammed my entire sense of love for Ivy into that burning furnace of intense blue and it was like lighting kindle with a spark. It caught and ignited and bloomed with the intensity of an exploding star.
The electrical bolts reversed their trajectory, slamming back into the shock rifles. It was too much for them. They whined angrily before they exploded, eviscerating the guards and burning them from existence. Their triggers spasmed and sent stray bolts to one side—into the glass cabinet and the armor inside.
Ivy dropped to her knees and completed her long journey to my side. She pressed her hands to me.
“No!” I bellowed.
But the electric charge was no longer on me. I wasn’t dangerous for her to touch.
She grabbed me and planted a kiss on my lips. I kissed her back.
She’d never tasted so good.
“I love you!” Ivy said. “I love you, I love you, I love you!”
“I love you too.”
“There’s something I need to tell you, something you need to know—”
The Supervisor yanked Ivy off me and pressed a device to her neck.
“Yes, yes, yes. It’s all very lovey-dovey. But if you don’t mind, we’re not hanging around here. The guards will come and they will finish off what the others failed to do. Nothing has changed.”
He backed away, toward the padded room where they’d been keeping Ivy.
“We’re going to wait in this room for the guards to arrive now, thank you very much. I think you and your girl have made quite enough of a disturbance today.”
I struggled onto my feet.
“Ah-ah,” the Supervisor said, pressing that device harder into Ivy’s neck. “If I pull this trigger with a whole bunch of nothing in the canister, you’ll have to watch your girl and your baby die.”
That made me blink.
“Baby?”
Tears rolled down Ivy’s cheeks.
It was true. It was what she wanted to tell me a moment ago. She was pregnant and… was that what this whole plan was about from the beginning? To have my child?
“Why?” I said. “Why my baby?”
“Because you were a failure and you didn’t have any special abilities. At least, that’s what I thought. Now I can see you’re much more powerful than I ever expected. You and your species. Your stories were only half true. Your species don’t only have one ability, they have them all! They adopt the powers of others around them! I should have seen this before but every time you performed your ability, our machines mistook it as coming from the original alien! This is just what I was looking for. A way to complete my work.”
He was a foot from entering the padded room now, and then there would be no chance of getting Ivy out of there.