Falling (7 page)

Jack doesn’t seem as willing to hold back as I am. He bends down to kiss me, and when he does, I don’t stop him. I need this. I need to feel it. To know that it’s real. His lips meet mine, and for several long seconds I’m caught up in the moment, caught up in just kissing Jack back until I can’t do anything else.

When we pull apart, I’m actually out of breath from it. “Jack…I thought…I thought you were…”

“Dead,” Jack says. “I know. I’m sorry. For a moment or two there,
I
thought I was.”

“So how did you escape?” I ask. It hardly seems possible that Jack could have gotten away from the situation we left him in.

Jack shakes his head. “It’s a long story. One I promise I’ll tell you someday, but right now-”

“Now we have to get out of here!” Lionel’s voice booms from behind us all. He’s still carrying his machine gun, slung over his back in a way that doesn’t really fit with the rest of him. He has to have run from the helicopter to have gotten here this quickly. “Or had you forgotten the Others? They will be sending more people out here when they can’t get anyone to answer their communications.” He glances over to Jack, giving the other man a brief nod of acknowledgement. “Good to see you back, boy. I knew you had it in you.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Lionel shakes his head. “This is a tough business all round.”

I look at the bodies lying in the cave, Faders and Others both. Tough doesn’t begin to cover it. The last few days have been brutal, deadly. Senseless. Why do the Others need to hunt me like this? Why do they feel they have to risk so many lives? What is it about me that threatens them so much they would rather see carnage like this than just let me live my life?

“Anyway,” Lionel says, “we need to go.”

Annette, who is currently trying to put pressure on the wound in her side, looks from Lionel to the glowing rock. “What are we going to do about that?” she asks. “Are we taking it with us, or leaving it, or what?”

Jack steps close to it, kneeling beside it. “We need to be careful,” he says. “This is a source of intense energy.”

He points to one of the closest bodies to the rock. It could be one of the Others, or it could be one of the Faders. It’s hard to tell. Unlike the bodies cut down by bullets, this one is charred and blackened, burned almost beyond recognition. I know what Jack’s implying. This body looks just like the ones of the Others I have killed with the energy inside me. It’s the same. Powerfully, dangerously the same.

Whatever this rock is, it has to do with what I am. With what both Jack and I are.

Lionel understands too, because he moves to stare at the rock. “This has a connection to Celes here, I take it?”

I can only nod. “It’s the same effect I get when...” I can’t finish that.

“Yes,” Lionel says. “I have seen the reports. Not to mention the footage in the archives. So, this is where the signal came from. I imagine you must be disappointed.”

“Disappointed?”

“That it isn’t from a person.” Lionel looks at the rock a little more closely, though he’s careful not to touch it.

I hadn’t thought about that, but I nod. “A little. But this is still… it’s still something.”

“It is indeed. We will need to study it further. Though we will have to be careful.” He looks at the burned up figure. “I imagine, since they were here first, that this was one of the Others. It would have been the first person to touch the rock. After that, they would have stayed around, trying to work out how to deal with it, and that would have been when we arrived.”

“So they were here before we came, following the same signal,” Grayson says. “It wasn’t a set up. No one knew the Underground would show up.”

“Exactly,” Jack replies. “And since they didn’t expect anyone, they’ll think it’s just the rock when the bodies turn out to be completely burned up or buried in an avalanche.”

Lancaster smiles and puts an arm around Jack. “Always one step ahead, Jack. Still the same Jack, but better. I have enough explosives in the helicopter.”

Jack looks over at me, and I can see the love there. It’s intense, a heat almost as great as the one coming from the rock, and I can feel heat rising in me in answer to it. Literal heat, of the kind I’ve used to kill people. I look away quickly. It’s true then, what Grayson implied back when he was asking why I only burned people up around Jack. Jack’s my trigger. My feelings for him help to spark this power. And they have grown so much.

“I’m better now because I have a reason to be,” Jack says. He moves over to me. Right now, I’m not sure that’s such a good idea, but it seems he isn’t planning to kiss me again right away. I don’t know whether to be disappointed or not by that.

“Celes,” Jack says. “We know that your power doesn’t cause you any harm. You’re connected to this rock, so you should be able to handle it safely. I think you’re the only one who can.”

“What if you’re wrong?” Grayson asks, but he’s too late.

I’ve already bent to pick up the rock. It’s warm, but it’s a pleasant warmth, like holding another body to me as I lift it into my arms. It’s big enough that I have to cradle it two handed.

“Do you have any idea how dangerous that was?” Grayson demands.

I shake my head. “It’s fine, Grayson.
I’m
fine.”

And then it happens. The rock flares. It flares so bright that for a moment I think it is incinerating me. I think that my last moment will have been spent arguing with Grayson, and that in less than a second, I’ll be another charred corpse on the floor of the cave. I feel the energy pouring into me; more and more, until it feels like I’ll burst with it.

Then, just as quickly as the rock flared up, it stops.

“Did you see that?” Annette asks.

“You just absorbed it,” Jack says. He sounds almost as shocked as the female Fader.

Lionel looks at me closely, then at the rock. “Hmm… it appears to have been rendered inert. I think you are correct, Jack. I think Celes here has absorbed the energy of the rock, though I for one won’t be touching it until we have run a lot more tests. Would you mind carrying it back to the helicopter, Celes?”

I do it, depositing the rock in a box in the back where no one can touch it accidentally. It’s close enough that I can watch it, imagine it in there. Jack comes to sit alongside me as we take off, his hand over mine.

“Can you imagine it, Jack?” I ask, unable to keep the excitement out of my voice. “This rock is part of where we came from. It has to be. It’s a link to that.”

“It’s…Lionel will study it. My father will, too, once we get him away from the others. This is potentially a very important find.”

“Assuming that there’s anything left of it,” I say, as the helicopter pulls its way up into the air.

“Even then. Then we’ll find out more about you, me, and the planet we’re meant to be from. Don’t worry, Celes.”

Jack kisses my temple, tracing his fingers along my chin and tilting it up so that I’m looking deep into his eyes. “I thought I’d never see you again, Celes, and that thought alone was the scariest thought I’ve ever had. The thought of getting killed was nothing compared to that.” Jack closes his eyes and looks down. It’s the rawest I’ve seen of emotions on his face. “I don’t ever want to experience that again, Celes. I love you too much to risk that again. Even when I got here, near to the rock, all I could think of then was you. You’re everything to me.”

I know how he feels, because I feel the same way. Yet right then, in the helicopter, I can’t tell him. Grayson is only a few feet away. Or he was. I see that he has gone to the other side of the helicopter, where he’s helping Annette to keep pressure on her wound. The bleeding seems to have stopped. She’s been lucky. And Grayson… Grayson is obviously avoiding me.

Have I hurt him that much with this, or is he just being considerate? Is he just making it easy for me to be here with Jack by leaving us as alone as he can in such a confined space? I don’t know. He’s always been so understanding, yet that very understanding is enough to make me feel a little guilty about Jack. When Jack touches my face again, I know I can’t just kiss him. Not here. Not like this. Back in the cave was enough. Instead, I try to find a way to distract Jack.

“How is Sebastian?” I ask him. “He didn’t get away?”

Jack looks like I’ve just slapped him. Maybe he wasn’t expecting me to shoot down his attempts to get close to me so thoroughly, or maybe it’s the mention of his father. Whichever one it is, it’s enough to make his expression slide back to that coolly professional one he has down so well.

“The Others have him, but he was well when I left. Richard, his old colleague, wants him to work for them.”

“But he won’t do that, will he?” I ask.

Jack shakes his head. “Not willingly. Which means that they’ll either have to find ways to put pressure on him to do it, or they’ll have to give up.”

Putting pressure on him doesn’t sound pleasant. “And if they give up, what happens then?” I ask. “They don’t just let him go, presumably.”

Jack shakes his head. “They’d kill him. But we have time. They won’t do that until they’ve exhausted every way of getting to the information about the memory extractors.”

“We can’t let him stay there, though.”

“No,” Jack says, “which is why we’re going to break him free as soon as we get back.”

NINE

I
t takes us a while to fly back to Location Two. With the rock successfully recovered, there isn’t the rush that there was getting there. We’re able to take things slowly, even stopping long enough for Annette to get medical attention. We make it back as night is falling, landing quietly outside the old house and going in to meet the Faders there.

Their mood is somber, but then, they have just lost almost ten of their colleagues in one mission. What would it be like if I lost ten of my friends in one day? If they were walking around, laughing and joking one moment and then dead the next. And this is all because of what I am. They must hate me.

Jack seems to get what I’m feeling, because he puts an arm around me.

“It’s what they signed on for, Celes,” he says. “Everyone who becomes a Fader knows the risks, and accepts them.”

“Even you, Jack?” I ask. “Would you have been a Fader if it weren’t for your father, I mean?”

Jack nods. “I would. This isn’t just about my father for me. There’s who I am.
What
I am. There’s what happened to my mother, too. And what we do here is important. I’m convinced of that. Especially after being assigned to protect you. If the Underground didn’t exist, the Others would be free to kill you, and that... I don’t want to think about that.”

Jack takes me to a bedroom in the base, where he says I can rest, and leaves, though he seems reluctant to do so. “I have to go and talk to the others about the rescue mission,” he says. “Try to get some rest.”

I do, drifting into fitful sleep. I’m woken a little while later by a hand shaking my shoulder. It’s Annette, the Fader who came with us to Switzerland. She’s wearing a top that leaves her midriff bare, under an open dark shirt. That exposes a set of bandages on her side to the open air.

“Does that hurt?” I ask, sitting up.

“Only a little. Jack sent me to fetch you. We’re meeting to discuss the rescue, and Lionel wants you in on it. Well… no, he wants
Jack
in on it, and Jack won’t leave you alone, so it looks like you’re coming. Come on.”

Annette leads the way, not down, but up into the main house, into an elegant drawing room where Lionel, Grayson and Jack are already sitting on ancient looking armchairs, talking.