Utter chaos, this gardening in Cedar Hills.
Greene stood a few feet down the first row, his back to me. The stillness of his body and the way he hardly spoke set my nerves on edge. And I was used to being the cool one.
“Eighty-Nine is one rung north,” he said, turning to face me. “Then go west until you get to Eighty. It’ll be on the left.” He removed his hat and wiped his forehead. “I believe Saffediene is there.”
I nodded, unable to look away from his face. Or his scalp, which was almost blindingly white and utterly hairless. His milky skin couldn’t hold pigment if it tried. His eyes, a strange shade of pink, dared me to say something.
“Who are you?” I asked, wondering how his name had landed in the journal.
“I am a rescuer,” he replied. “Your friend shouldn’t have gone snooping.”
Worry caused a sharp snag in my airway. “Is she okay?”
“Minds had to be tampered with,” he said. “And that takes talent and energy, neither of which we have much of here in Cedar Hills.”
“Is she okay?” I repeated, disturbed by his oh-so-white eyebrows and color-of-cream complexion. And the way he held so deathly still.
“She is waiting for you in Eighty,” he asserted, as if that answered my question. “I must get back to the city center, Zenn Bower.” With that, he snapped his fingers and disappeared without a sound.
I hadn’t seen a ring on his albino fingers, so either Greene Leavitt was tampering with my mind, causing me to think he’d turned invisible, or he had access to tech that didn’t need to be contained in an object to be used.
I chose to go with the tech. Maybe he was like Vi and could control it somehow. I took a deep, cleansing breath and immediately regretted it. Dirt and rot and dung didn’t exactly make breathing pleasant.
Outside Greenhouse Sixty-Four, all was quiet. A wind blew across my face, hot and lazy. I stroked it with two fingers, whispering for it bring me a cooler draft. Wind shouldn’t be hot.
A moment later, the current dragging across my skin turned cold, almost icy. “Perfect,” I murmured. “Now mask any sound I might make.”
With the wind as my ally, I crept toward Greenhouse Eighty.
Jag
25.
I twisted to protect Vi by shielding her with my body and shoved her backward when the screaming started. My ears rang with the sound’s depth of pain, even after it stopped.
A flare of light ignited behind me. I turned to find that Vi was on fire, literally. She’d somehow made her entire hand glow with unnatural flames. I stared at her fist, unable to tear my gaze from her pristine skin that wasn’t really burning.
She marched away from me, leaving me in the dark, stunned. I scrambled to follow and immediately wished I hadn’t when the scent of blood hit me. The terrible, cloying smell told me there was a lot of blood. Vi’s hand-torch illuminated a body, and I had to force myself to take the last few steps to join her.
The body breathed, the chest rising and falling in ragged gasps. The body wore jeans, but its shirt had been clawed to ribbons. Blood seeped from its wounded flesh.
The body twitched, causing a wet squelching sound to shatter the quiet.
I closed my eyes for fear of throwing up when I looked at the face. Or what was left of it.
“Vi,” I said weakly. I doubled over, pressing my eyes closed to block out the sight of all that blood.
“A scout,” she said in a distant tone. “There will be another one. They travel in twos.”
I opened my eyes and straightened as Vi searched the darkness by the light of her freaky burning hand. I thought for a second I might be hallucinating, because this situation was too surreal. Vi didn’t hurt people. She didn’t make them hurt themselves.
In the strange light Vi’s face caught the shadows and trapped them. She looked fierce. Dangerous.
Deadly.
“Violet,” I said, a pleading note in my voice now.
She didn’t spare me a glance, but strode over to our hoverboards. I hadn’t taken three steps when more screaming shattered the darkness.
Vi darted behind a tree, haloing the branches with her mind-induced light. She looked perfectly calm, pressed into the trunk, waiting for the shrieking to stop. I covered my ears until I couldn’t hear anything, and then I approached Vi slowly, as if she were a vicious animal I might spook.
And she was.
She stood so straight it must’ve hurt. Her fist burned. Waves of energy practically poured from her body.
I maintained a healthy distance between us and didn’t look at the body lying a few feet away. I felt certain that if I did, I’d never be able to close my eyes without seeing—
“Violet, please.” I didn’t want to believe that Vi had entered the minds of the scouts and made them kill themselves. But she had, and I knew she had. “Violet?” I asked now.
“He’s already sent a preliminary report,” she said coldly. “Four teams are on their way to this location. We need to leave. Now.” She went to retrieve our boards and backpacks.
Then she tugged gently on my hand, which hung lifelessly at my side. I couldn’t move.
“Come on.” She spoke softly, like she was talking to a child.
I stepped onto my waiting hoverboard, unable to command it to operate.
Didn’t matter. Vi could control the board. She could control anything.
The two dead men lying on the ground were a testament to that.
Nightmares looped through my alert mind. First the one where I was buried in the capsule. The sound of dirt pinging against metaclass="underline" I would never forget that sound. I jerked to attention and listened.
Nothing.
No pebbles landing above me. No hiss as oxygen forced its way into the confined space.
I settled back into the lulling vibrations of my hoverboard and immediately saw Vi use her mind control to torture people. Suddenly I had a horrifying thought.
What if I hadn’t been buried alive? What if the Thinkers had just made me think I was? The way Vi made those two scouts think their own flesh needed to be peeled from their bones?
I closed my eyes against the memories. I couldn’t decide which was worse: being buried alive for real, or the mental violation if I hadn’t.
For the longest time I felt nothing from Vi. She existed inside her own sphere of reality, and I managed to keep breathing in mine. Perhaps I was simply too wrapped up in my own troubles, because the next thing I knew, Vi was sobbing. I couldn’t hear her, but I was aware of her pain as if it were my own. A wave of her grief/regret/guilt/horror flattened me, physically pushing me onto my back on my hoverboard.
I had no idea what to say to make this better. Instead I flew in close to her. She cried into my chest. “Tether,” I whispered, and her board attached to mine. I wrapped my arms around Vi in an effort to protect her from herself.
We touched down when the night breathed out the last of its darkness and the sky held the first hint of day. Vi had used her technopathic abilities to keep the boards flying. She’d stopped crying hours ago, but she hadn’t moved. Hadn’t spoken.
Hadn’t explained.
I drank half a bottle of water from my backpack and made Vi drink the rest. My eyelids felt impossibly heavy, my body still vibrating from riding the hoverboard all night. But I wouldn’t sleep.
I couldn’t. Every time I blinked, I saw that body. And every time I saw that body, I wondered what Vi had made them see to cause them to shred their own skin.