Created (Talented Saga) (7 page)

“Thanks,” she mumbled.

I eased into a sitting position, my legs beginning to throb and my fingers burning with Cadence’s pain. Even with the narcotics, she was extremely uncomfortable. Mostly they made her not care so much. I bit the inside of my bottom lip to keep the torment out of my expression. Hers was a bearable pain, at least.

“I hear you found Randy,” she continued, her voice a little stronger now. “Is he … okay?”

“A little thin, but otherwise appears to be okay,” I said honestly. Besides the malnourishment, I was pretty sure Randy was physically fine. Mentally, I couldn’t even imagine the extent of the damage. He’d been locked away for six years. His crime had been a serious one, as far as TOXIC was concerned anyhow. Helping a Coalition woman escape prison had landed him a one-way ticket to Tramblewood – the same prison where he’d been a guard. That Coalition woman had been Penny’s mother, Crane’s sister.

“Better than you,” I added as Cadence fought the tears causing her dark irises to swim.

“Mr. Crane says he’s on his way to a Coalition safe house.” I was shocked at how easily she’d adjusted to Crane’s presence. I’d actually forgotten he was in the tent until she’d said his name. I turned to find him standing quietly in the doorway.

“I want to go, too. When I’m healthy,” Cadence continued, drawing my attention back to her.

“Of course,” I promised without asking Crane; although, I doubted he’d mind.

“Visiting hours are over. Ms. Choi needs her rest,” a stern female voice said from behind me.

I glanced back. Now standing next to Crane was a short, pudgy woman. She wore her dark red hair in a severe bun at the nape of her neck. It pulled at the skin around her hairline, making her cat-like eyes appear even more feline.

“I’ll sleep here, in one of the empty cots,” I replied. I wanted to stay with Cadence. I needed to do something, feel useful. I was no medic; my minimal first-aid training was limited to bandaging scrapes and, in a pinch, suturing wounds. Erik’s level of injury was beyond me. Cadence’s was not. Shouldering Cadence’s pain might even distract me, or tire me out enough to actually fall asleep.

“This is a medical tent,” the nurse replied. Her tone suggested my request was ridiculous.

“Please, let her stay,” Cadence sniffed next to me.

While the tears and sniffling were byproducts of the overwhelming relief she felt about her brother, Nurse Crotchety didn’t know that. The emotional display smoothed the woman’s puckered lips.

“There’s no harm in it,” Crane said, turning what could only be explained as charm on the nurse. “The beds aren’t being used.”

The nurse smiled up at Crane with enough sugar to make my teeth hurt, then glared at me. “I suppose we can make an exception this once. But no talking. Ms. Choi needs to rest if she is going to get better.”

“Thank you,” I told her in as polite a tone as I could manage.

“Would you mind finding Ms. Lyons some clean clothes?” Crane asked the nurse in that same charming tone.

That was when I realized I was still wearing my suit and it was covered in dirt, dust, and blood. Gross.

“Of course, sir.” The nurse patted her bun as she crossed to a small chest of plastic drawers in one corner. Her back was to me, so I couldn’t see what she was doing. But when she
turned around, she held a pair of clean green scrubs in her hands. I happily took the clothes, but decided it was best to wait until Cadence and I were alone to strip.

“I’ll be back to check on you in a little while, dear,” the nurse told Cadence.

“Night, ladies,” Crane said.

The electric lights lining the tent’s ceiling buzzed loudly then made a popping noise, which was followed by darkness. I made quick work of shedding the filthy suit and replacing it with the scrubs. Not only were the clothes clean, they smelled like sunshine as if they’d been hung on a line outside to dry. They probably had been, I realized. While there was electricity here, I doubted it was wasted on such trivial machines as clothes dryers. Not when they needed to power medical equipment. Gatlinburg was definitely one of the rural-live-off-the-land stations.

A shower would have been welcome, and much needed just then, but the new clothes made me feel refreshed. At least I wouldn’t wake up with the remnants of the mission clinging to me.

The cot mattress proved to be as thin as it looked and as soft as cardboard. Bedsprings poked into my back as I tried to make myself comfortable. My sense of time was out of whack from traveling across so many time zones and back in such a short time period. No light peeked through the split between the tent flaps, so I guessed sunrise was a ways off.

A thousand questions swirled in my mind, all fighting their way to my mouth. I wanted to ask Cadence about what happened when they went for Erik’s parents, and how he’d been captured in the first place. I wanted to know how she and Henri had escaped from TOXIC while Erik had been captured, and then become separated from Erik’s father and brothers. I wanted to know what life at this station was like, because it was very different from the ones I’d seen. Here, the Station Manager seemed to know and like Crane. The D.C. Station Manager, Adam, hadn’t known Crane at all. He didn’t believe TOXIC’s party line about Crane and the Coalition hating Talents and wanting to end our existence, but he hadn’t seemed to trust him either. Yet both stations had the same goal. Maybe Crane’s actual involvement with the Underground movement was a need-to-know type of thing.

I asked her nothing. She was exhausted, and bombarding her with questions seemed mean. Her defenses were down and I could easily read her mind. So, I knew the medical staff here had a limited supply of painkillers, and after the first couple of days she’d begun to refuse medication except at night to sleep. Now all she received on a regular basis were anti-infection injections. I breathed in more of her suffering.

“You don’t have to do this for me,” Cadence whispered. Her words came out garbled, and she was close to drifting off into dreamland.

“Just until you can fall asleep,” I replied.

In a weird way, her pain comforted me. Weaving so much of Cadence’s mind with my own made me feel less alone. For those blissful minutes, her problems seemed to trump mine. Tomorrow’s to-do list consisted of sitting up and eating without assistance. She worried about Randy and whether he was really okay as I’d promised. She regretted that he’d been so close and she hadn’t been able to see him. A part of her was grateful for that too, though. Cadence hated the idea of wearing plastic and gauze for their first encounter since she’d provided the testimony that had damned her brother to Tramblewood. She worried he hated her for that testimony.

“Thanks, Talia.”
Cadence’s voice was in my head this time. She didn’t have enough energy to speak the words aloud, but knew that thinking the message was just as good.
“For everything.”

Moments later, my hold on her mind began to wane before disappearing completely. I stretched my kinked limbs and let the buzz of mosquitoes serve as a lullaby.

Smoke fills my nostrils, burning my throat and searing my lungs. My eyes begin to sting, and heat crawls over my arms and legs like thousands of fire ants. I want to scream, but the sound sticks in my throat, unable to push past the knot blocking the passageway like hair in a drainpipe. When I pry my eyes open, I discover all the color has been washed from the world. Either that or I’ve gone blind to it. Gray. Everything is gray. I blink my eyes, but nothing changes. The cots and dressers are blobs of darker gray in a sea of gray.

The air is so thick that I think it will take a machete to cut my way through. A throbbing in my head makes it feel too big, and when I try to stand, my equilibrium is off. The room feels like it’s tilting, but I can’t be sure since I am lost in the strange gray clouds. Instinctively I drop to the ground. My knees slam into the packed earth and I wince. Disorientation soon gives way to horror when I realize that I am not only colorblind, but deaf, too. I am surrounded by complete silence. I scream. In my head, the shrieks could crack glass, but in reality they don’t penetrate the blanket of smoke that is now smothering me.

I shot upright in the hospital bed, instantly aware that the nightmare was not entirely in my head. The hospital tent was hazy, as if a giant gray cloud had drifted inside and swallowed us in its thick embrace. Only, the air was sizzling like we were too close to the sun. Frantically, I stumbled over the side of the bed and felt my way to Cadence. I shook my head to clear the cobwebs that blocked my eardrums. When I did, I heard terrified screams from somewhere close by. The earth began to quake and I fell, catching myself at the last second before slamming into the railing of Cadence’s bed.

“Cadence?” I whispered. “Cadence, wake up!” I didn’t want to shake her if I didn’t have to.

“Talia?” she asked. “What’s going on?” Her was voice was groggy with sleep.

“I don’t know,” I started to tell her as another explosion rocked the tent. “Can you move?”

“I can try,” Cadence answered timidly.

She was in bad shape, and I didn’t want to risk moving her until I knew for sure that it was necessary. “I’ll be right back,” I told her.

“Hurry,” she pleaded, now sounding panicked.

I ran to the tent flap and thrust my head out. The air out here was at least ten degrees warmer and filled with a curtain of thick, dark fog in every direction except up. The night sky was alive with blinding light, and I had to squint against the harsh glare. People-shaped blobs hurried past the tent without slowing. When my eyes adjusted and some of the fog had dissipated, I noticed the lights above were from hovercrafts. Large black shapes were dropping to earth like avenging angels, spraying liquid fire as they descended.

Several nearby tents were ablaze with blue-green flames. Chemical bombs, my brain registered after a moment. Not good. Immediately survival instinct kicked in and I covered my mouth and noise with my scrub top. The thin fabric was a poor filter for the hazardous smoke, but it was better than nothing.

“Talia!” a man yelled. His voice was muffled – probably by a crude air filter just like mine – but I was pretty sure it was Crane. “Talia!” he screamed again. I spotted him, running
against the flow like a lone salmon swimming upstream. With the two automatic weapons strapped across his chest and the manic expression across his face, Crane looked more like a shark, predatory and out for blood.

“Ian, what’s going on? Are we being attacked? Where’s Erik?” I asked, stupidly. Of course we were being attacked. Gunfire was popping through the air, eliciting more terrified screams from the refugees weaving through the tents. Bomb after bomb rained down from the crafts overhead.

TOXIC had found me.

“We need to go, now!” Crane exclaimed, freeing one of the rifles and offering it to me. “All the critical patients and medical staff have been evacuated. Erik’s already on a transport plane.”

I stared at the gun for a moment too long before accepting it. I was in no shape for another fight.

“What about Cadence?” I demanded, as Crane tried to pull me away from the tent. “We can’t leave her!” Crane looked like he wanted to argue, but I planted my feet and refused to move. She had risked her life for me. She was lying in a hospital bed because of me. There was no way I was leaving her behind.

Crane pushed past me into the tent, and I hurried to follow. He was at Cadence’s bedside, pulling her to her feet by the time I reached him. Cadence looped her injured arm around Crane’s waist and one around my shoulders. I tried to give her a reassuring smile, but my heart was in my throat, and I knew that it wasn’t very convincing.

The three of us stumbled awkwardly out of the recovery tent and began moving way too slowly in the direction that the others were running. We had only made it a couple of yards when Cadence’s nurse and another man joined us. They were wheeling a stretcher. I eyed it dubiously. As a threesome, we weren’t making much progress. But the stretcher was slow and awkward to push over the grass.

“Don’t worry, this’ll protect her,” the nurse said, even as Crane scooped up Cadence and placed her on the stretcher. The instant she was settled, a metal shell sprang up around her prone form, leaving only her head uncovered. “Six inches of titanium,” the nurse added, tapping the top of the shell. And then, the wheels retracted and Cadence was floating.

I nodded mutely, intrigued by contraption.

Bending down to meet Cadence’s eyes, I said, “You’re going to be fine.”

She smiled up at me as best she could as the nurse and her assistant began guiding Cadence away. Crane took hold of my arm and dragged me forward. Together, we wove through tent city until finally reaching a clearing. Twenty yards of chaos separated us from a shallow outcropping of trees, just beyond which sat the escape hoverplanes.

Neither of us broke stride, quickened our pace if anything, as we shot into the clearing. I’d only taken a handful of steps when I heard, “Halt!” screamed behind me. There was no need to turn around to know the command was meant for me. Laser crosshairs pricked the exposed skin at the nape of my neck. Crane’s left boot hooked around my right ankle at the same time the heel of his right hand jabbed me between the shoulder blades. I lurched forward as a bullet whizzed so close to my head it singed a stray curl. Crane caught me before I fell, and was indiscriminately firing over one shoulder as he urged me towards the trees.