Forgotten (Reject High: A Young Adult Science Fiction Series Book 3) (18 page)

“I’ve been looking for this for a long time,” he said, tossing our necklaces into the wind. “The Collective hid it from me. I tortured every last one of them and they still wouldn’t tell.”

I shuddered thinking what he could have done to them and how difficult it must have been not to cave in and tell him. The aquamarine was underneath a factory and then inside of a nuclear reactor. He had no idea to search in those places? Was there a connection?

He continued. “Nostalgic, here. Strategic. Enough rads to hide the high proton signature. Didn’t think a slave farmhand would be smart enough to figure that out.”

No. We’ve been exposed.

“Both of you are going to die long, painful deaths,” he smirked. King unlatched the satchel on his shoulder and held it in his hands. “Not unlike your mother, Jason, and your father, Rhapsody.”

I wanted to rip the teeth out of his mouth, except the migraine raging through my temples was incredible. Rhapsody cradled her head between her palms. We fell to our knees in agony. Through my squinted eyes, I saw King pluck three aquamarines from the source and drop them into vials of blood. I couldn’t tell what happened after that, other than he shook them up, downed one, and put the spare ones back in the satchel.

Crap. He might be immortal now.

He hefted the aquamarine onto his shoulder with his other arm. He’d abandon us here and we’d wither away from radiation poisoning. “Isn’t this ironic?” he said with a note of sarcasm. “I’m leaving you, the way you left me in the desert. Sorry, but no morganite to…”

“Kill us already and stop talking!” Rhapsody clutched at her stomach. Foam formed at her mouth. She looked at me with crazed eyes, like she expected me to do something.

I spat onto the ground.
What does she want me to do? I’m powerless and dying.

She crawled at his feet and climbed up to his calf. “Do it,” she pleaded with him. “Do it. You don’t need morganite. That’s my desire.”

King shook her loose. “Funny. You sound just like Cherish did.”

He kicked Rhapsody over the edge of the cooling tower, as if she were a pebble. She fell into the pit of darkness, screaming.

I’d been angry in my life, but it was nothing compared to the rage I was experiencing.

We’d become like every other person the Collective had killed since 1869 – a casualty of their main objectives, whatever they were. Welker spoke to me about Friedrich Nietzsche’s “will to power.” World domination was King’s will to power, his reason for doing what he did. And after all this time he’d have it.

Her screams echoing in my ears, I rose and leveled King with the hardest punch I’d ever thrown. My hand didn’t break. It didn’t even hurt. His mesh pouch landed at my feet. King was gone. I couldn’t even see him. The radiation sickness was gone. I felt better. He could fly like I could so he’d be back to finish the job. When he did, I’d stop him.

With King’s bag in my hand, I dove into the cooling tower, soaring much faster than Rhapsody. She flipped and twisted going down. Positioning myself beneath her body, I steadied her motions and continued downward, gradually slowing our descent. A sudden stop would snap her spine but there wasn’t much real estate left between us and the tower’s sealed- over bottom. I put on the brakes a little harder and her limp body didn’t respond.

We touched down on the cooling tower floor. I laid her down on it, careful to make sure her back, head, and legs were supported. Taking a deep breath, I unzipped her body suit, reached inside it, and felt around her left breast. Her skin was warm. My hand trembled so much, I couldn’t tell if she had a heartbeat. I switched hands.

No, she didn’t. Nothing. Her body didn’t move.

You can’t be dead.

I held my hand underneath her nose, over her open mouth. She wasn’t breathing. I tried CPR, doing everything I’d seen done on television – tilting her head back, pinching her nose, breathing out into her mouth for a few seconds and pumping her heart. She didn’t breathe.

It wasn’t working.
You can’t be dead
.

I cursed King for killing my girlfriend. Now he had the aquamarine and Debra. He needed my blood, so he wouldn’t kill her before he siphoned off all my blood. Courtney never said she had talked to King. Couldn’t she have been guessing at his motives? Or had she seen the future? I wasn’t sure.

What would he do now that he was immortal? How long would it take? Was it permanent?
I had so many questions. The only thing Courtney ever said about how this would end was, “It’ll all work out.” BS. It wasn’t working out now. Rhapsody wasn’t breathing.

I swiped my glove underneath my running nose. Pacing back and forth, I thought it out. I couldn’t let him get too much of a lead heading west. That meant leaving Rhapsody here, dead, alone, and in a deactivated nuclear reactor. I couldn’t do that. She’d never have left me. I’d take her with me.

Breaking down into a sobbing fit, I hovered over her body. “I’m sorry,” I said to her as my tears dropped onto her face. “It’s all my fault. I’m so sorry…God, I’m so sorry.”

She had to always be so stubborn and sarcastic, egging King on until he shoved her off the top of the tower. Yeah, dying from radiation poisoning was a terrible way to go for anyone. She could’ve waited, given me a chance to realize my powers were on, active. She had to shoot off her mouth and it cost her life.

I squeezed King’s pouch in my hand, barely remembering that I’d brought it and why.
My blood.
I opened the top and put the two vials in one hand. One of them was cracked and leaking.
Where’s the needle?
He was invulnerable, like I was. Needles would break against his skin. Could drinking it bring her back? He’d put aquamarines in it. I’d seen what the prisms could do firsthand. How would I get it into her bloodstream? The broken one was losing its contents, drop by drop. She wasn’t breathing, so it wasn’t like she could swallow it, right?

I pried the red rubber tops out of both vials and, cocking her head back straight, I slowly poured them into her mouth. To my surprise, the crimson liquid didn’t pool at the back of her throat. It instantly disappeared. This had worked fast on Selby, making him bounce back immediately. The difference was he shot it straight into his vein. Rhapsody would have to digest it and her stomach no longer worked.

I had wanted to give up before, but never this much. With nothing left to lose, I looked up. I realized that’s what Rhapsody was doing. She had been praying.

“God,” I said, staring at the motionless sky. “You might not hear me. I don’t hear you. But I can’t lose anyone else. I can’t.”

My cell phone rang from the inside of my bag. I didn’t see King as a practical joker, so I answered it without looking at the caller ID. “What?” I said.

“Hello to you, too. Good job with the aquamarine. Go faster. Stay low and avoid flying in a straight line. We’re tracking you over Philadelphia. Why aren’t you invisible?”

She stopped talking, anticipating that I’d answer her. A pang of grief hit my stomach.

“What’s happening? How did you pick up the phone if you’re flying?”

For someone as strong as I knew myself to be, I felt incredibly weak and helpless about the situation. “It’s King,” I said, my voice quavering. “Not me. King on the radar. He has the aquamarine.”

Sasha swore and dropped her phone as she passed it to Courtney, whom I heard asking for it. “Where’s Rhapsody?” she asked me.

My chest spasmed. I tried not to cry. I told her the truth. “Dead.”

The fact I’d lost the only thing I was supposed to be fighting for didn’t throw her off one bit. “Give her one of your aquamarines.”

“I can’t.” I shook with my own frustration. “King took them.”

“Then she’s not dead. I’ve seen it, and you heard Solomon. I’m never wrong.”

I looked down at Rhapsody’s unmoving body. Was this Courtney’s idea of a joke? I studied the details of Rhapsody’s face, her round eyes and brushed-back black hair. From there, I stared at her chest. There had been no change in her condition.

“You’re wrong now. She’s not breathing. Stop screwing with my head, Eris!”

She sighed. “Pick her up, get in the air, and follow King. You have to believe.”

Believe what, in myself? In her? In God? “All right,” I said, hanging up.

It made no difference what I had faith in. I wasn’t leaving Rhapsody, no matter what it cost me. I knelt down beside my girlfriend, zipped her suit up and reached behind her head.

Suddenly, her eyes blinked and she grabbed my hands before I could pull her mask down. She scared me so badly that I almost jumped out of the tower without her.

She coughed three times and rolled over on her side, still coughing. “That stuff tastes awful.”

I laughed and cried at the same time. It was the second resurrection of a loved one I’d seen in the past three days. I pulled her to a sitting position and kissed her once on the lips. “It’s not over,” I said. “We have to go.”

Saying nothing, she donned her mask and used me to help her stand. With her at my side, I flew out and went supersonic shortly afterward. Rhapsody pressed her hand at my neck. She must think I still have my prisms. To my amazement, she turned us invisible without them.
How’d she do that?
Had she tapped into my powers? I wasn’t totally sure, just like I wasn’t positive how my blood generated radiation and processed it all at the same time.

We’d traveled far, way farther than I’d ever flown without stopping, even by myself. Rhapsody used our signal and squeezed my arm to land. We stopped along a blue and red highway sign for US Route 90 West, somewhere in the Midwest, I guessed from the elevation and our desolate surroundings. It was midmorning and I couldn’t speak for Rhapsody, but I was totally starving. King would’ve had to stop, too. His powers worked like ours – they keyed off of our adrenaline and burned our energy with continual use. He also was one hundred and fifty years older than we were. Like it or not, he had to eat at regular intervals. So did we.

When we had time we’d discuss the elephants in the room, immortality and what not. As luck would have it, there was a Pudgy Burger across the highway. I never knew they existed east of our state. Despite the fact I’d flown to several different regions of the country, I’d never seen one outside of our town. Traffic was busy, so we had to time our walk across the street just right. While we waited a formation of jets soared overhead. I hoped they weren’t looking for us. I had stayed low, mixed our speed and zig-zagged like before to avoid them.