Gretchen calculated all the various permutations at play. It wasn’t like Meredith to blow it like this, but it was spectacularly pleasing to think of having gotten the best of her.
“Either way, we need to move fast,” Gretchen said. “The enemy is among us; that’s a risk. If Clooger knows where we are, so does Meredith. And who’s to say they haven’t found another second? It’s not probable, but it is possible.”
Andre didn’t agree with the reasoning, but he liked the direction in which this was going.
“So we move things up. We go day after tomorrow.”
“Whatever gets us out of this hellhole fastest. I’m in,” Wade said from the doorway.
Gretchen turned to her son and felt he deserved a reward for all his patience and hard work.
“Let’s show Dylan what a real training session looks like.”
Chapter 10
Wanna Play Asteroids?
Dylan stood alone in the middle of the prison awaiting instructions. While he lingered there, wondering if the training would include being attacked from behind, he thought about the previous hour or so. Fending off Clara’s advances might not have been the wisest move, but given the circumstances, he hadn’t had a lot of options. Clara had been cooped up with her mom, her dad, her brother, and a bunch of way-too-old single pulses for more than a hundred days. She was, to put it mildly, in need of some affection. He could have at least humored her for a day or two, and he might have been able to do it, but Clara was always aggressive when the mood struck her. He knew they had the same dad, but she had no clue; and this had turned the private space of cell block D into an awkward place for Dylan pretty fast. Clara had pushed him into the cell and asked, in her most seductive tone, How about I lock us in here and turn out the lights?
There was a limit to Dylan’s acting skills, and the demands had quickly outstripped his abilities. His lame response had been that he was tired and wanted to be alone. That was when she’d pinned him against the wall of the cell, her chest against his, and whispered things into his ear that were strictly taboo between a brother and a sister.
“I’m still with Faith,” he’d blurted out, a pronouncement he regretted a split second later. Whatever advantage might have been gained from controlling Clara’s feelings had been lost in an instant.
Clara had backed off slowly, as if a cowboy had roped her around the shoulders and begun gently pulling against her will. “Then what are you doing here?”
“She’s not involved in this, not anymore. But we’re together.”
“And here I thought she was dead,” Clara had said, a mean tone in her voice as she backed up into the hall outside. “I should have thrown that rock a little harder, I guess.”
“You’re not attractive when you talk like that.”
Dylan had managed to dig himself into a deep hole in a hurry.
“Whatever you say, Dylan Gilmore. I’m going to expel all this pent-up energy one way or another,” Clara had said, engaging the lock system and staring at him from the hall with those steely eyes of hers. “You had your chance.”
Now that he was waiting alone in the training yard, all he could think about was whether he was going to survive the afternoon. He’d been too cautious to press his sound ring and speak inside the cell; there had been too much risk of being heard by some surveillance system to keep pressing into the sound ring. He imagined that the whole cell block was bugged and wired up to monitors—had to be. And then Wade had retrieved him, escorted him out into the light of day behind concrete walls, and left him there.
The sky over zeroed cities and towns was always filled with circling birds. Crows and vultures flew with free rein over everything they saw, the natural order of things having taken over in the outside world. It made him wonder if it had been like that a thousand years ago, before so many millions of people showed up. A black crow, big and cawing angrily, landed on the prison wall. It looked out over the edge where Dylan couldn’t see and flew off as if something were coming that threatened to end its life if it had stayed where it was.
“Dylan, get ready.” It was Hawk, talking into his sound ring. He was seeing something Dylan wasn’t. “They’ve got some new tricks up their sleeves.”
As Hawk said this, something started coming into view over the wall. It was still far-off, but whatever it was loomed large enough that Dylan could see it from a hundred yards off. He hadn’t been told not to move, so he floated up in the air on the power of his thoughts for a better look.
“Is that a—?” Dylan started to say. Hawk hadn’t heard him, but he finished Dylan’s thought just the same.
“You’ve got three train cars headed your way from the east side. West side, three more.”
Dylan turned swiftly and saw what Hawk was seeing from his vantage point on the faraway rolling hills. Wade was standing on top of the closest car with three men lined up behind him.
“They’ve figured out how to combine powers,” Clooger said. He was obviously watching, too. “No way one pulse could lift something that big.”
“Hey, Dylan!”
Dylan whirled around at the sound of the voice and saw that the other bank of three train cars had moved in much faster than he’d imagined. Three more single pulses stood on top of the short train, one each to a car. Clara was standing in one of the open doorways waving a metal pole in her hand. The end held a ball of concrete, which gave it the appearance of a huge lollipop or a tetherball pole ripped from the ground.
All the single pulses from both trains flew up in the air at once, taking up positions around the edge of the prison wall. These were trained soldiers and mercenaries, guys with combat training who had no interest in rules or regulations. They lived for this stuff.
“How are you doing that?” Dylan yelled at Clara.
“What, you mean this?”
Clara leaped from the doorway, and the train car began spinning around like a colossal whirligig flung into the sky. It was a ferocious mess of sounds—crashes and thuds and bending steel—with that strange sense of things moving in slow motion, like an elephant or a giraffe loping across a desert. But there was no doubt—this train was seriously moving.
“Come on out here,” Clara shouted. “Better if we don’t destroy the place.”
Wade was pushing forward at Dylan’s back with his own set of cars, forcing him to move out over the open field that lay between the prison and the hillside. The single pulses followed along on both sides of Dylan. They were ghostlike, emotionless and focused, moving like shadows out into the open of the field in uncannily slow motion.
“I don’t like where this is going, Dylan.”
Faith was on the sound ring now. It felt good to know she was watching from some hidden place far up in the woods outside the prison, that she was almost close enough to touch. A sense of athlete’s pride welled up in his chest and he moved, liquid and fast, out past the edge of the prison. He couldn’t deny wanting to impress Faith. Why not show her what he could really do? The trains didn’t scare him, and Faith would love it if he could get in a few choice shots on Clara Quinn.
They want to train? Let’s train.
Dylan took control of the pole in Clara’s hand, whipping the concrete bottom into her head and sending her crashing into a train car. She careened wildly through the air and let go of the weapon, which Dylan fired through the air like a rocket. It brushed past his face and headed for Wade. Dylan controlled it like a heat-seeking missile, matching every move Wade made; but it missed its mark when Wade darted at the last second and instead slammed into the line of trains, sparks, and concrete blasting away like a Fourth of July firework.
“Dylan, be careful out there,” Hawk said. He and the rest of Dylan’s team were using high-powered binoculars, zeroed in on the action from a higher vantage point a few miles away. “Even with you distracting them, they’re keeping a hundred tons of metal up in the air.”
Clara’s three train cars halted abruptly in a line across the sky. The cars face
d Dylan where he hovered thirty feet up in the sky. Wade’s line had done the same behind him. Dylan was flanked in on both sides, and the remaining two directions were lined with three single pulses each.
“She’s back, watch out,” Clooger said.
There were doors on both sides of the middle car in Clara’s line, and the door on the back ground open. The metal sliding door on Dylan’s side was already open, so he saw Clara drift in, that steely look of determination he’d come to know so well on her face. She lifted her arms, and the tops of the other two train cars exploded up in the air, flying like oblong dinner plates across the sky and skidding into the field. She had a wicked smile on her face, as if she was about to share something that was going to be an awful lot of fun.
Dylan heard a sound from behind, where Wade had done the same thing—the tops of those trains had blown off as well.
“I have a bad feeling about this, Dylan,” Faith said into Dylan’s sound ring. “Get out of there!”
All six single pulses flew straight back, as if dragons or monsters were about to emerge from the train cars and they didn’t want to be anywhere near the carnage that was about to take place. The train cars faltered, as if unseen ground beneath them had started to give way, and then they steadied again. Out of the tops of Clara’s train cars there came a hailstorm of boulders, slabs of concrete, chunks of cinder blocks. Rocks as big as garbage cans and blocks as small as toasters all flew in Dylan’s direction at once. Wave after wave, an ocean of stone, coming in from both sides.
“Move, Dylan!” Faith yelled.
Dylan imagined she was having an almost impossible time staying put. He had to escape fast or she’d break cover and come to his rescue. He rolled into a ball, grabbing his sound ring as he did—“Don’t you dare come out here. I love you. And I got this.” Dylan began spinning around, a whirling globe of energy, forcing his every thought into deflecting the storm heading his way.
Debris bounced off Dylan, flying in every direction. From Hawk’s vantage point it looked as if someone had dropped a bag of a thousand marbles onto a kitchen floor. Rocks were flying everywhere, and the blast zone was getting wider and wider. Dylan came out of his rolling, ball-of-thunder move and expertly dodged everything coming his way. But Clara and Wade kept firing, and they kept moving the trains in closer and closer, narrowing the playing field foot by foot. One of the train cars in Wade’s line suddenly lost its footing, drawing the other two down with it into a crashing blast of dirt and metal.
Dylan took his first damage, a recliner-sized rock landing squarely on his back, which sent him flying toward Clara. He dodged and parried oncoming objects, catching a glimpse of Clara, who had taken up another weapon: a chain with a block of concrete for a tip. She was swinging it in a circle over her head, her target flying out of control in her direction.
“No way,” Faith said.
“Faith, don’t!” Clooger said.
Clara let the chain go, watched the ball of concrete fly toward its mark, and didn’t sense what was happening around her. Her aim, as usual, was true, but she never saw the resulting blow that sent Dylan into the dirt below. The train cars wrapped around Clara like an accordion, enveloping her in metal.
Faith put every ounce of energy she had into those three train cars. She couldn’t hold it aloft, but she could sure as hell give it one good throw. The cars flew through the storm of debris, rocks ricocheting in every direction, and carried Clara along for the ride. When the train cars hit the prison wall, the sound was like a bomb going off. A giant swath of wall broke free, breaking into a thousand pieces.
By the time Clara cleared herself from the mess, the field had gone quiet. All but one of the objects that had been thrown had fallen to earth, including Dylan. Wade held the last one aloft—a table-sized slab of thick concrete—a few feet off Dylan’s body.
“I can’t let this happen,” Faith said. “I can’t.”
“Faith—” Clooger tried to stop her, but he didn’t need to. Dylan hit that slab of stone with the power of his mind so hard and so fast it carried Wade a hundred yards up into the sky. The slab turned sharply, flipping Wade over, and dived for the ground.
“Don’t do it, Dylan,” Clooger said. “You’ll only make him angrier.”
Dylan couldn’t help himself. He’d taken some damage, could feel the bruises forming on his arms and back already. They’d wanted to finish him, and Andre hadn’t stopped them. He watched Wade trying to scramble out from under the sheet of stone as it neared the ground below. He was a fly caught under a swatter, about to be smashed.
The slab abruptly flew to the right, which made it look like a broken Frisbee spinning out of control, and Wade slowed down from about a thousand miles an hour to three hundred before slamming into the ground. The dust plumed fifty feet in every direction, and when it settled, Wade was already wobbling to his feet. He walked two or three steps, fell to his knees, and toppled over like a bag of potatoes.
Dylan gazed off into the hills, searching for signs of life.
“Sorry, pal. Couldn’t let you hurt him any worse than that,” Clooger said. He’d broken his own rule and used a pulse to slow down the slab. “Here comes trouble. Better get focused.”
Gretchen had arrived on the scene. She’d flown in, landed, and was using one of her feet to roll Wade over on his back.
“Get up,” she said.
She looked at the demolished wall of the prison and shook her head. When Dylan and Clara arrived at the same time from different directions, she didn’t bother looking at either of them. Wade sat up and spit the dirt out of his mouth.
“Two injured first pulses,” Gretchen said. “Useless to us now. Happy?”
“Hey, you’re the one who told us to turn up the heat on this guy,” Wade said. He stood, brushed off his pants, glared at Dylan.
“I didn’t authorize you to put our help in harm’s way,” Gretchen snapped. “It’s always the same with you two, going rogue—it’s exhausting.”
“They’re useless anyway,” Clara said. “Just get rid of them already.”
“Not an option,” Gretchen said. “We’ll be holding up a lot more than a few train cars. Then you won’t think they’re so useless. You think you’re the only ones who matter, so irreplaceable.”
“Interesting that Dylan could have finished you off,” Gretchen said, staring at Wade as if he really didn’t measure up. “You’re not as indestructible as you let on.”
Whoa. This was shaky ground. Dylan knew both Wade’s and Clara’s second-pulse weakness, and they knew his. Both sides had been exploiting those weaknesses throughout the training session.
Clara stepped closer, staring down at Gretchen from her lofty six-foot-two height. She had that reckless look in her eye. This girl was about to do something monumentally stupid.
“How about we bring out the hoses for our next training session? Do some real damage.”
Gretchen flashed a look at Dylan that lasted a split second and was gone. There! Right there! Dylan thought. Something was revealed that should not have been.
“Lay off, Clara,” Wade said, giving her a look that revealed all too much. Mixed company, what the hell are you doing?
“This training session is over,” Gretchen said. She glared at Dylan. “Take him back to the cell, then come to Andre’s office. We’ve got things to discuss. I’ll have the single pulses sweep the field of debris.”
Gretchen drifted up in the air, staring bullets at Clara before turning her attention to the gun turret in the prison yard. Dylan turned that way, too, and saw the shadow of a man—Andre—and wondered how many puppet strings his dad was pulling on.
Once Gretchen was gone, Clara shot Dylan a smile with a raised eyebrow. She’d told him something valuable there and wanted him to know it. But why?
Dylan’s curiosity was seriously piqued. He was also wondering if he’d bruised a rib that ran beneath his right arm. He hated it when his second pulse was breached. It was the only time he felt vulnerable.
The thought crossed his mind that it had been exactly the kind of situation that could end him for good.
An hour later Clara and Wade finally knew the plan.
There were days, many of them, when Clara wondered if she would be kept in the dark forever, lost in a haze of training and curiosity that would simply go on into eternity. Hadn’t the secrets been there, in one form or another, her entire life? Always more training, never being told what it was all for or when it would all end. It had long felt like her purgatory, or worse, her hell, with only two people who could unlock the gates and set her free: Andre or Gretchen. Maybe that was why, when she was finally told what the plan was, it worked like a lever on a great machine in her Intel mind, setting a series of thoughts in motion.
It was possible that some of what Andre and Gretchen had told her was a lie, but it had felt like the truth. They’d brought her and Wade into the warden’s office, sat them down, and spilled the beans. They took great pleasure in the unfolding of their long preparation, the surprising details, the essential agenda. Wade had responded in the expected way: whooping like a linebacker set loose on a quarterback. Let’s do this thing! But like all good Intels, Clara had calculated everything as if the plan itself was laid out flat on a table like a diagram, each naked element examined under the brutal power of her mind.
At long last Clara had been given the details for which she’d been waiting. Now it was just a matter of using them to her fullest advantage.
She saw herself as setting a series of bombs that would go off at different times and locations. The first of these involved Gretchen, who she hated almost as much as Faith Daniels. Clara felt, rightfully so, that her mother had never cared about her. Not from the moment Clara had been born. Gretchen had only ever seen Clara as competition, someone to be molded and, ultimately, ruled over. Knowing this was true at the very core of her being made it a lot easier to reveal Gretchen’s weakness to Dylan. Now that she knew the entire plan, the next order of business was pitting her two most hated enemies against each other. She’d wondered how this was going to be possible until her twin brother unexpectedly provided the solution.