Chapter 34
KAYE
Smoke billows black and thick through the air, clouding the already limited air with toxins.
The fire spreads fast, further progressed by the shattering of glass receptacles carrying goodness only knows what in them.
Whatever Cooper needed to conduct his experiments.
The real problem is the pressurized oxygen and hydrogen cans on the far end of the hall.
They’re far from the flame now, but it won’t take long to reach it.
I look to where my brother fell, expecting him to be watching the scene fold out before us, but he’s gone. “Cooper?”
Only the hot crackle of flames answers.
I race to Zane’s side, fighting to cover both our mouths as a thick cloud of smoke billows over us. The power in my palms has subsided, but I still feel that current coursing through my veins ready and waiting for use.
I snatch the screwdriver from the tray and pry at the metal bonds holding Zane’s form in place.
The material holds firm, the heat building up around us doing nothing to soften the material.
I hazard a glance behind me, to the mouth of fire licking the walls there, and know this will never work in time.
Zane’s eyes rove my face, his expression filled with emotions I can’t begin to name.
“Do you trust me?” I ask him.
“With every cell and fiber in my being.”
I wish I could say the same. “Don’t move.”
The power concentrates into my hands again, and though I hold a significant portion of it back, it’s still more than enough.
The metal quickly crumbles under my grip, the material destabilized.
My fingers grasp the last binding holding him in place.
A blow knocks me aside, my ribs lighting up with pain like lightning cracking my bones.
“Kaye!” Zane screams.
I clutch my ribs, legs folding up to protect me on the ground as I choke on smoke and tears to catch my breath. Cooper looms over me, hammer clenched in his reddened, blistering fist.
“I’m always cleaning up your messes,” he spits into my face. “‘Protect Kitty.’ ‘Kitty didn’t mean to hurt you.’ ‘Share with Kitty.’ Why? All those times I protected you, and just this once you could have protected me.”
Tears burn at the base of my eyelids. “I’d give anything to protect you, Coop. Anything but this. Not at the cost of my soul.”
“All I hear is that you don’t care.”
I swallow around the pain. “Then you aren’t listening.”
BOOM.
The ground shakes around us. Cracks form in the foundations. If we caved in right now I still couldn’t be more happy to hear that sound.
BOOM.
“What the hell is that?” Cooper clutches the hammer to his chest even more tightly.
The tightness in my ribs eases, the abundance of power redirecting to begin the process of healing the broken bones there.
The still twinge heavily when I bend to the calf of my boot, feeling around for the secret compartment, and the tracker, hidden there.
I present it to him with grim satisfaction.
“You may only have invited me, but there are other ways into these tunnels, Cooper. And my friends are very determined.”
Everything shakes around us with the final explosion, rumbling like an earthquake. God, if they haven’t at least gotten through the largest of the blocked tunnels… My attention locks on the cannisters again and the impending explosion creeping ever closer.
“Friends?” I can’t tell if it’s from the smoke or adrenaline or something else altogether, but Cooper’s voice shakes. “Those pathetic pissants at the cathedral, too scared of their own shadows to claim their power? This is exactly what I’d like to make of your so-called friends, Kitty.”
Cooper fishes a thin, black remote from the pocket of his lab coat. I grab for it, but Cooper is quicker. He thrashes wildly with the hammer and I barely dodge the sharp end in my bicep.
There’s an audible click as all around us doors open.
A swell of nausea rises as the most foul smell I’ve ever encountered assaults my senses.
Like hot, rotting garbage and human excrement rolled together to create the dirtiest, moldiest shit-sandwich on the planet.
It’s so strong that the putrescence of the smoke has no chance against it.
Shit. What if whatever new fumes are riding the air are flammable?
We can’t risk yet another explosive in this powder-keg.
The first haunted face peers through the crack in the door with fever-bright eyes. More and more doorways fill with similar sights until all but maybe ten doorways remain empty. Then the first brave souls step into the smoke.
Their faces are gaunt, the skin hanging grotesquely off their bones.
Their bodies are little more than sheathed skeletons, whatever muscle mass they processed eaten away by Rose and whatever variants Cooper has been giving them.
Clothed in little more than rags and carrying more of that mind-penetrating stench, they look like monsters from some horrible urban legend. Cryptids.
“Kill the man,” Cooper commands. “Bring my sister to me by any means necessary—Any. Means. The first to do so will receive an extra injection per day, permanently.”
Hunger lights in their eyes, burning hotter than the fire behind us. Fuck. These people will literally eat us to get what they crave.
When I look back at him, Cooper’s gone, disappeared into the flames and smoke again. He’s still somewhere around here, though. I feel it. His ‘patients’ are here, his research. And me.
I sever the last bond holding Zane in place and pull him to his feet beside me.
His face is so full of emotion, it hurts to look at him.
I don’t feel the relief he feels. The love.
I can’t. So I turn away and face the haggard foes circling around us instead, sending a silent prayer up to the heavens that this deathtrap doesn’t detonate before we can get the hell out of here.
Zane is warm and solid behind me. His left hand hangs beside my right and, pushing aside a flash of fear and panic, I entangle our fingers. His power snakes into me immediately, like a python slithering toward warmth.
I am flush with power, mine and his, so when I feel that thread crawling into my veins I send one of my own.
Zane’s fingers slacken at the unfamiliar sensation, so I wrap mine all the tighter until I feel myself enfolded in his pulse, pounding that ancient course through his heart.
Until our power entwines, mine pinning his in place in an unbreakable connection.
His back stiffens behind me, every muscle going rigid as he fights against my hold. “What are you doing?”
“Relax.” I try to mimic the voice that echoes in my head, there one moment, then lost in the forgotten abyss before appearing again. It is calm, controlled. I envy it. “Stop fighting the hold.”
It’s strange. The panic drains from his voice as the command takes hold. “I don’t understand.”
“I need your power, Zane, as you need mine. I just don’t trust you anymore.”
“Please, Kaye. Don’t do this.”
In my memories, I hear my own pleading cries, begging the same of him, and my resolve hardens.
Cooper’s patients have formed a loose circle around us.
I would have expected them to work together, come up with some kind of strategy to reach us, but I guess that’s the power of addiction.
Nothing else matters but the object of your desire, to the point where you would even line up, weaponless, to face off with two of the strongest superhumans in the city.
I raise my left hand, feel Zane’s shoulder blades shifting as he mirrors the movement behind me, and focus our combined power into one goal.
“Stop,” we order, our voices ringing out in tandem, as one.
The order is bolstered by the thread of serum racing through our veins and amplifying our skills.
They don’t stand a chance. They obey the flow of power even without a direct connection to it.
I don’t know if or how long the instruction will last. I never want these poor people locked up in dungeons like this one again, subjected to a madman’s experiments.
“You never saw us here. You want to leave this place immediately and never return here or anywhere else you might find Cooper Grace ever again. There is nothing left for you here.”
The group doesn’t move immediately. What if it didn’t work? Could I fight them, knowing with as weak and unhealthy as they are that any blow could take their lives?
My relief is palpable as one—then two—then three peel off from the group.
Then more, with such precision that I worry that I might have turned them into mindless zombies.
Did I commit a crime on them worse than the what Zane did to me?
But as I watch them walk away from the flames, one of them looks back.
Her eyes meet mine. She nods before walking away.
It’s a filthy feeling to withdraw that thread holding Zane’s compulsion in place. Worse than guilt. And the worst part is I deserve the shame that stings my throat and brings tears to my eyes, because I don’t regret it. Not one bit.
Zane’s injuries heal as I withdraw. He refuses to look at me. I want to apologize, beg his forgiveness, but those words die unshed in my throat, launched into the wall his betrayal built around my heart.
“Will you make sure they all get out?” I ask instead. I reach into my boot again and pull out another earpiece, warm from my body heat. “Show them the way. Fulton can help you.”
He nods, taking it gingerly. A wince crosses his face as his skin brushes mine. “Be safe.”
Then he’s gone, and I’m alone in that powder-keg of flame with a brother I can’t just leave to die.
“Cooper!” My voice thunders through the roar of fire. Glass shatters in the distance and I brace myself for that to be the last sound I ever hear. That impact never comes.
Instead, I find my brother standing before me, his hammer forgotten somewhere along his travels in favor of an emergency ax.
Overhead, the fluorescent bulbs flicker and die.
The smell of sulfur is so strong I feel like the air itself could ignite at any minute, and yet here we are.
The ax’s red head glints in the red and orange glow around us.
My palms turn golden again as I gather power in them.
“Please don’t make me do this.” My voice catches on the lump forming in my throat.
“You’re doing this, Kaye. Not me,” he snarls. He takes several steps toward me, full of menace and purpose, his shoulders heaving with every step. Dirty white wraps cover the hand I burned earlier. “I brought you here to make us a family again. You—you—did this to us.”
I shake my head. It doesn’t matter what I say, his decision has been made. All that’s left to decide is—
“What happens next?” Cooper asks, as though he can read my mind.
“I don’t know.” I can’t breathe in a way that has nothing to do with the smoke or the fumes and everything to do with the fist gripped around my heart, crushing and pulling with every monstrous act he commits.
I want him to tell me this was all some kind of twisted mistake, that he can clear everything up and turn this all around.
But that was the old Kaye. Whatever she knew to be true is little more than breadcrumbs on a forest floor to me.
Even if they weren’t half eaten and smashed into the bud, the home they lead to no longer exists.
The person though, whoever she was, is worth fighting for.
“Get out of here,” I tell him. “In a couple of minutes, the fire will reach those tanks and all of this will be gone for good. I want this to be done. You, to be done. Leave New Malcolm. Don’t ever look back.”
“And if I don’t?”
I shake my head. “Then we’ll both regret what I have to do, but I promise you this, Cooper—I will do it.”
His weapon lowers. He suddenly looks so young. So lost. The fight drains from him like sand through a sieve. And even if it’s nothing more than a mask, he looks like brother I knew once before.
“You’re really letting me go?” he asks. “Aren’t you worried that I’ll come for you or Zane again?”
A weariness as consuming as time itself settles onto my shoulders like a shroud.
I feel, deep in the marrow of my bones, just how tired I am, like I’ve aged a decade in a day.
Someday, when the people I love are safe and the world is right again, when I’ve grown too sick or old to care, perhaps then I can have the rest I crave.
It may never be with the family I wanted, or the friends.
Or home. But it will be mine. And I’ll fight for it every day until I do.
Whatever he sees when he looks at me, it’s the only answer he’ll get. He ducks his head.
“Don’t trust Zane Maxwell,” he warns, his voice now only barely audible. “There’s a reason why the CCP wanted him to work with me on the Rose project.”
“I can take care of myself.”
He nods, and again it feels as though he’s heard my thoughts.
“I never meant for this to happen,” he says. “Not like this. I know how this looks… what I’ve become. Trust me when I say it’s more complicated than you could imagine. If we only had more time.”
I’ve given him enough time, and I’m done listening.
He turns back only once to look at his laboratory again. I wonder if he’s thinking of the other laboratory he watched burn. I see so much pain in his eyes. No monster is born on its own. Cruelty is born from cruelty, until someone, somewhere, breaks the cycle.
His gaze settles over me, and I’d almost swear I see tracks streaking his cheeks. That’s not possible, of course. I doubt Cooper is even capable of real remorse anymore, if he ever was.
“I love you, Kitty,” he says.