Glow (13 page)

My heart stops. Timid betrayed me, again. I look over at Junie, whose eyes swell with tears. She didn’t know, either. Timid, such a little girl, and so swayed and easily manipulated by people.

“So, if Lukas doesn’t know you’re here, he won’t resist. He’ll do what we ask of him, blindly and numb. For the greater good.”

I swallow, hard, and look at everyone around the laboratory. They’re ready to fight. There’s no way Layla and Ernie can think we will just follow their orders.

“You don’t know everything about Lukas and me. We’re more powerful than you know,” I challenge her. She doesn’t know that we’re Rainbow Children. She doesn’t know our plan to lead The Light. ”If something happens to me, and Lukas gets weak again, you’ll lose your power source.”

“You’re focusing on the wrong thing. If you’d calm down I could explain. He never lost his Light before he met you Lucy.
You
are the
hitch!
” Layla drives the words into my heart like the bullet wound in Reagan’s chest. Sharp and lethal.

I step away from Lukas, feeling warped and contaminating. Minutes ago I felt so strong, but maybe she’s right. Maybe I’m the reason Lukas has grown weak.

I make him weak, and he makes me strong. Two people can’t work together if they are breaking one another down the same time they are building one another up. We will collapse.

“I should … I have to….” I stop. My words are lost. I look around the laboratory, desperate for help, desperate for someone to raise their hands and yell for this madness to stop. But everyone is silent and still.

We outnumber Reagan’s men, and Layla and Ernie, Benjamin. We don’t have to walk away. I won’t walk away.

“Tell me what you did to knock him out,” I say, attempting to steady my voice, but knowing how close I am to shaky ground.

“We aren’t telling you. You’ll have to take our word for it, it’s for everyone’s protection,” Benjamin tells me. He’s an old man, huddled up in this lab all his life, forgetting the world, even the desolate one we know. He doesn’t realize how my friends and I are no longer operating in a world where threats and control are the currency.

  Junie’s eyes dart around the room, her purple energy on high alert. She knows something.

“Why don’t you hook Lukas up and test your machine,” Junie says, staring at his limp body on the floor. “I mean, why not? Maybe it will be the perfect solution. We will all get what we want. An energy source. That’s what you’re willing to lose your son over right, Layla? Right, Ernie?”

“Junie, don’t let--” I start. But Charlie pulls me back. He shakes his head, cutting me off, realizing Junie has a plan.

“We aren’t just looking for any energy source. We are looking for a way to….” Ernie stops.

“Ernie, let’s just try it and see if it works,” Layla says. With the help of Benjamin and Reagan, they drag Lukas across the room until he’s in the center disk on the floor. Benjamin pulls a lever, which drops the cage around Lukas sealing him inside the circular cell.

Lukas’s light pulses stronger, pushing itself out in a vast ray of white. It’s working. Hundreds of wires surround the top of the device Lukas is in and they instantly fill with his energy. Tiny streams of energy flow into the translucent wires; it’s incredible, watching this machine pull from Lukas whatever divine power dwells within him.

“Well done! Well done, indeed!” Layla kisses Ernie on the cheek, and hugs Benjamin. Their obsession comes through their euphoria, and they don’t hold back their celebration. They have decimated their son, their grandchild. Yet they grin liked crazed fools.

It’s as though the day the world ended all the adults who were left to run it became insane. The Councilmen, the Humblemen, my family, Lukas’s and Charlie’s family. Reagan.

They’re so desperate to return to what was, they can’t see that they are destroying what is.

“Lucy, look.” Basil points to where Lukas lay and I gasp, her voice breaking in terror. “That’s what I was telling you about, Lucy. That is what happened before.”

Lukas’s light shifts color, growing a murky yellow with a wash of brown. The color haze is thick as morning fog while it’s usually clear as day.

“What the hell is this?” Ernie shouts. “Benjamin, fix it, maybe we are pushing him to fast. Maybe he needs more time to warm up.”

But I know what they did.

I run out of the barn and head straight for the house, needing to find what they did to make this happen to Lukas. They must have used something to fill Lukas with darkness so he’d be a blank slate like Hana. They just underestimated what could happen when Lukas was under this kind of stress.

His body can’t handle it.

I push open the front door and walk into the kitchen. Everything looks the same as before, dirty plates from lunch are stacked on the table, half-full cups of water making rings on the wooden tabletop. Walking into the living room, I notice several radios lying on the table, and lying next to them is a device that has a shape similar to a handgun, but there isn’t a trigger. Thinking the small black button on the side of the handle opens or unlocks the device I press it.

A piercing darkness consumes me and I press the button again hoping to reverse whatever is happening, but the more I press it, the worse the darkness grows. I drop it to the ground where it rattles against the hardwood.

“Stop it!” I scream into the air, but no one answers. Dropping to my knees I search for it so I can press the button again and reverse whatever is happening. But I can’t find it. I can’t see anything, the darkness overwhelms me and my breathing becomes heavy, labored, and I want to tear my eyes out. It came over me instantaneously; it’s impossible to understand the working of such a small device.

“Lucy, it’s okay. It’s okay.” I hear Hana’s voice in the distance as she shakes me by my arms. She’s calm whereas I’m a wreck, heavy tears streak my face and I feel myself fading out of consciousness.

“Hana, I can’t see I’m sca….” And then my eyes roll back and I can hear her, but can’t see her or feel her. I fade away.

38.

Charlie

Timid runs in the barn, manic, screaming her head off for Junie.

“What?” Junie says, trying to understand. All of us trying to understand.

“It’s Lucy. In the house. Lucy’s like … like Lukas.”

I jump up before anyone can say another word, running towards the house. On my way out of the barn I shout to Colton, “Don’t leave Lukas alone. Whatever you do, protect him.”

Junie is by my side as we rush through the back door. Hana sits with Lucy’s limp head in her lap, dumbfounded and ghost-like, as though Lucy’s life is in her hands and she doesn’t know what to do, looking every bit the child she is.

“I came down the stairs when I heard her screaming. And she had dropped this.” Hana gingerly points to a piece of technology I’ve seen before. One I’ve never seen in action, but know what its purpose is. My parents took it with them the night they were to be executed.

Without Lukas’s charging power, it never worked here. But they must have had Lukas touch it when they brought him into the house. They tricked him into using his own power against him.

I knew it was a messed up idea to come back here. My parents lost my trust the moment I saw their fervor in getting Lucy into their machine. I should have given it a better fight to force Lukas to believe the truth Lucy and I already discovered.

The truth that my parents are as wicked as the rest of the people at The Light.

“Do you know how it works, Charlie?” Junie asks.

“Yeah. I thought it needed to be pressed against her forehead, between her eyes to work, but no way would she have done that. Maybe since she has so much energy in her, it malfunctioned. It’s a compressed stunner that gives electroshock treatment. I know, it sounds complicated, but basically it’s a volt of electroshock therapy that causes the person it’s used on to go into a state of unconsciousness, where they would see black. Ultimate darkness.”

“Don’t touch it, Hana.” Basil has walked in the house, holding out her hands, away from the stunner in Hana’s hand.

“I know, Basil … I know.” Hana starts crying, scared the same way Timid was when she ran to us in the barn. “I saw Lucy try to press it hoping to turn it off, again and again before she dropped it. She must have shocked herself five times at least.”

“Shit. Charlie, this is what The Light did to me, and it made me seriously nutso. Like, I was a crazy person. They did it to Hana too … I don’t know how many others.”

“Okay, but what do we do now? How did you get out of the stun?” I ask.

“I became immune to the treatment and they stopped giving them to me. But they gave them to me for two weeks, solid. Like, all day long.”

“Who gave them to you?”

“Mostly the Vessel who ran the Rehab Center, at Refuge Two. Her name was Care, I think. But there were some Humblemen, too.”

“How do you reverse it?”

“I have no idea.”

“We have to go there, go and find out the antidote. Right?”

“I don’t think it works that way, Charlie. They gave the treatments to me too, and I only got out because Lucy healed me with her touch.” Hana-Grace trembles at her own words, her memories probably flooding over her.

This is such bullshit, all of it. My parents, The Light. And now Lucy and Lukas are basically brain dead. 

“We can’t go to the Refuge, Charlie. Think about it. How would we even get there without Lukas’s energy propelling us?” Basil has a point.

“We’ll take them with us. If they are on the boat, their energy will still work. Lukas can still release it even if he isn’t conscious. We can fight like we said we would, find a cure, and bring them back. Back to life.”

“But his light is all weirded out right now. It loses its strength when it becomes distorted.”

“We have no other choice, we have to at least try. And we have to go,
now
.”

39.

Lukas

I can’t speak or see. I can’t move my arms or my head. My entire body pulses with light, but it feels all-wrong.

Everything is wrong.

Panic overwhelms me and even though I can’t seem to cry, all I want to do is break down and sob.

I am not myself. I feel trapped in a cage and want to get out. I want to claw my way free, but I cannot move.

Then my body is lifted, but I don’t know by whom, or by what.

I want to scream.

I want to repent.

I want to die.

40.

Lucy

I’m floating, my body is no longer my own, I am detached; yet remain tethered to this earth.

I want to fly towards the sky, and rest on the sun. Soak in the rays as they spread through my skin.

My body is lifted and carried somewhere and I my heart is carried away, too.

I am not afraid.

I am not alone.

I am alive.

41.

Charlie

We make a stretcher inside the laboratory, big enough for two people to lie on. It’s the best place to find the makeshift supplies we need. Colton leads the crew, directing us what to do.

I gladly take his orders, not wanting to be the one in charge.

Duke and Jax round up all of Reagan’s men, and my parents and grandfather. I don’t want to turn my head. I don’t want to look in their eyes, because I want to punch them. Or worse.

“What do we do with them? We can’t just leave them to their own devices. They’ll do something dangerous,” Junie asks me, looking at the group we’ve deemed our enemies.

“I don’t know, Junie,” I say scratching my head, ready to move on. “Ask your brother. I’m not the guy in charge. I’m just along for the ride.”

“Whatever, Charlie,” Junie says, rolling her eyes with a disgusted grunt. “Grow up and commit, okay? Enough of this lone-ranger bullshit. Between dealing you and Colton, I’m gonna lose my shit. It’s time to be a man. We need you, even if Lucy doesn’t want you.”

Her words are calculated. Junie doesn’t say things to make people happy. She says what she thinks is true. 

“Now is seriously not the time,” I tell her flatly, too pissed to be mad, too bitter to take her words to heart. “Don’t you need to help your boyfriend or something?”

I watch as Colton, Duke, Jax, and Basil lift the bodies of the two bearers of light, Lukas and Lucy, onto the stretcher.

It’s time to go.

I take a slow look back at my parents, one last time. I have no reason to ever see them again. They betrayed me the moment they chose science over family. Progress over humanity. Lukas over me. Light over Lukas.

Mom screams at Dad I can’t decipher, and Grandpa stands frozen in time. Reagan, the manipulative ass, punches the air with his fisted hands, hoping to intimidate our cowboys. I want to strangle him; not just for sending me away when I became a threat to his power, and then Jax, when he was threatened once more. No, I want to strangle him for being like my parents.

I want to strangle them all for choosing themselves, over the rest of us.