I Am Titanium (Pax Black Book 1) (15 page)

Scarlett tried not to look at the rest. Failed.

Jamie’s whole right arm had been ripped off. The bones in her shoulder stuck out like they’d been stretched. Her ribcage was smashed into a slope. Something had slammed into her at an angle and slid off sideways. Trails of blood led away from her… and to a massive pit in the floor. The floor. Something had smashed through the floor.

Scarlett had been
lying
on top of Jamie. Dreaming that Jamie’s body was an uncomfortable mattress.

Scarlett jerked her hand back away from
the meat
. Her stomach wanted to heave, but she shut it off. It wasn’t a real stomach anyway.

I did this.

No. The negative energy had done it.

Except it hadn’t. The negative energy didn’t use fire.
She
used fire. But she hadn’t been awake. She couldn’t have killed them all in her sleep, could she?

I did this.

She watched the smoke dissipate. She wanted to turn away but couldn’t. She had to see. Had to see what she’d done. She stood up. The floor tilted a little, and she had to take a step backward. But she had to be standing when she saw this.

The inside of the school was a… it was…

It was the aftermath of an action movie.

I did this
.

The smoke spiraled out of the air. After a second she could see all the way through the roof to the sky. The walls were broken in, bricks scattered like a Lego set kicked to pieces by an angry toddler. Fires were burning all over the place. Sparks and ash fluttered up and down in the hot air, black snow mixed with fireflies, swirling around her. The air inside the ruined building was a slow, thick whirlwind. The air above her shimmered from the heat distortion. Wires dangled and spat out sparks and smoke. A computer desk teetered from the floor above her, one of the wheels missing.

And the bodies. Everywhere. Charred, twisted, shattered, dripping, shoved-aside bodies. Now that she was paying attention, she couldn’t seem to get the sound of moaning out of her ears. She wasn’t sure whether she was making that up or not. She wasn’t sure how
anybody
human could have survived what she’d done.

I did this.

Greasy-haired Matt? Gone. Mr. Vogel? Gone. The Bitch Queens and their court of football players? History. That blonde from computer class? She had
no
future now.

I did this.

Whatever it was they’d deserved, it wasn’t this.

Shouting. It wasn’t just ambulance and fire and cop sirens coming down the street now. It was shouting, echoing around inside the building. It sounded organized. Full of orders. Movement in the rubble, then a sudden spear of daylight. She had to get out of here.

Before Pax saw her.

Now she knew what samurai felt like when they committed
seppuku
, when they took their knives to their guts to cut out their intestines. Shame had settled in her gut, and she would have given
anything
to be able to slice herself open and let it come tumbling out in wet, stinking, black coils.

But she couldn’t. Couldn’t afford to let out the fire again.

Ever.

She gathered the heat around her. The least she could do was get the fuck out of here. Make the emergency workers’ jobs that much easier, not having to search for bodies in an inferno.

Slowly, with the ash and sparks still circling around her, Scarlett floated up on the hot air. It was a magical moment, if you ignored the bodies, and the shouting, and the smell of barbecue. She wanted to cry but couldn’t. She was too ashamed. She didn’t deserve to cry.

As her feet left the chunk of floor she’d been standing on, it tipped a little, lost its balance, and in one big grinding, crunching swoop, slid off the steel girder it was sitting on and crashed into the basement. Jamie, stuck to the tile, slid with it. Still dead with her eyes rolled back in her head.

The rescue workers were calling to each other. “What was that?” “Don’t know!” “Found one!” “Live one?” “Nope.” Hoses were being dragged in. Water gushed and sprayed and threw up rainbows.

Scarlett looked upward before she could see anybody else, blinking hard and trying not to run into pieces of broken wall.
Jamie’s should be the last human face I ever see. That’s what I deserve.

The heat and smoke carried her upward.

Pax jumped on top of an office building and skidded to a stop among the thickly whirring fans and A/C units. The cement slabs under his shoes squeaked like he was in a cartoon. His hoodie gaped open down to the skin where the stake had punctured it, but at least his jeans were in okay condition.

He should keep going. Every second counted. He had to save people. Fix all of this.

But he couldn’t. He couldn’t process what he was seeing.

Scarlett’s school had been blown to bits; he got that. The shattered, burning, red brick walls were all over the sidewalk and streets in massive chunks. The windows on the buildings all over the street were broken, and every few seconds one of the safety-glass panes would fall out with a wet, slushy snowplow kind of sound. The street was packed with emergency vehicles that streaked everything around them with red and blue lights. Buildings, shattered glass, terrified faces. The arriving vehicles started vomiting people in uniform even before they came to a full stop. Blue, white, black, gray streaked with yellow. Hard hats. Gas masks. White paper filter masks. Long hoses.

Tendrils of negative energy, waving and spinning in the air, as if writhing in pain.

TV cameras on people’s shoulders. Crowds with cell phones raised, taking video and stills. People running toward the emergency because they thought they could help and getting in the way of the actual emergency workers. He saw a firefighter punch a guy in the face, knocking him backward into the arms of a waiting cop.

But that wasn’t the weird part.

The weird part was that huge, impenetrably thick, black clouds of smoke were pouring
into
the building. Instead of, you know, out of it. Sure, a huge cloud of smoke was floating away from the building, but no more was coming out, and the stuff closest to the building was being drawn back in, like it was getting sucked up with a straw. A news helicopter was flying around the building in circles, trying to get some footage, bobbing up and down from the billows of smoke and heat.

The fuck was going on?

Something rose out of the building. Clouds—swirling, storm-like, black clouds. They were clustered in a ball around a solid, darker mass in the center. An octopus of clouds. The smoke was still streaming toward the building, but now the streams and clouds of black smoke were rolling toward the center of the clouds instead of down into the building. Something in the center was trying to hide.

A helicopter circled above the building, trying to shine lights down into it. The lights shone behind the cloud and the inside of the dark mass lit up for a moment.

The dark shape within the clouds was a five-pointed starfish with one stunted limb. A human body.

Scarlett.

He’d already known it had to be her. Had to be. But he hadn’t wanted to believe it.

The light shifted, and the inside of the clouds went dark again, became just another freak mass of cloud. But he knew what he was looking at now. He could see the form within the form. One of her arms moved and a long, thin wave of cloud rippled out toward the helicopter like a whip. As the end of it brushed against the bottom of the helicopter, a gust of wind sent the helicopter skidding backward, away from the tendril of black cloud. Something heavy fell out of the helicopter—people screamed—it smashed on the sidewalk. A heavy camera, that was all.

He could hear Scarlett sobbing, could hear her screaming at the helicopter to get away. Not giving a fuck about the people inside. Only caring about getting the
bad people away from her.

Not understanding she was the bad person now.

He could pick out her face. Black, made of smoke. About as far from human as it could get. Blank, black eyes. Swirling hair. Open mouth, spewing out smoke. A few sparks in the center of her mouth, almost overwhelmed by the smoke. But for the most part, she was negative energy in the form of smoke.

She’d killed everyone in the building. Probably. Maybe one or two were left.

Maybe it had been an accident. Maybe it had been Lana’s fault, driving things so far out of control that…

It didn’t matter.

Scarlett gestured with both hands, pressing downward, and a wall of smoke dropped out of her cloud, covering everything on ground level. Smoke ran down the streets like a flood, covering up the ground floor of all the buildings nearby. People stood on their balconies and pointed at the smoke and screamed.
Get inside, you idiots
. From under the smoke the megaphones shouted orders, then coughing, then screams.

Then nothing.

Pax knew, no matter what was happening and no matter why, Scarlett had to be stopped before she could do anything else.

He had to take her down.

Chapter 10

T
he nurse’s aide rolled Julie over to her office in a wheelchair with one wheel that tended to shimmy as it rolled over the carpeting in the office area of the hospital. The door was open.
Who’d been in there?
Had she even remembered to close the door when she’d gone running after Pax… yesterday? She tried to tell whether the papers on top of her cheap, gray modular desk had been moved, but she couldn’t. Definitely more had been added, though.

The aide, a gray-haired Puerto Rican woman not much taller than Julie, wheeled her in, kicked up the foot pedals, locked the brakes, and helped lift her the two steps to her black leather executive office chair. Julie was dressed in a hospital gown, with her own beige bathrobe and slippers from home—Pax had brought them the morning he had visited. She landed on her rump with a puff of air from the chair and a groan from the bottom of her diaphragm.

Not straining myself
, she’d thought fiercely through the pain in her sternum.
Being bored was more of a strain than taking two steps. This is relaxing.

“You all right?” the aide asked.

“Fine,” Julie said through gritted teeth.

The aide flashed a fake smile at Julie. “You want help getting back, you call my pager. Four, three, three, seven. If you’re still here after I get off shift, the number will go to my replacement. You remember the number?”

“Four, three, three, seven.”

The woman, whose massive arms waggled past the sleeves of her teal scrub top, grabbed a whiteboard marker and wrote on the corner of Julie’s whiteboard. 4337. “You get in pain, you won’t remember it. So I wrote it down.”

No matter how hard Julie stared at the back of the woman’s head, her thick, twisted-up brown hair refused to catch fire.

“Thanks,” Julie said.
Now get out, get out, get out…

The woman nodded and left with excruciating slowness, pulling the door almost, but not quite, closed behind her. Julie sighed, the air whistling past her clenched teeth. It wasn’t worth it to call the woman back just to
shut the fucking door properly
. She had a stack of insurance forms to fill out. An improperly filled-out insurance form could mean the difference between life and death for a patient…

Someone rolled their knuckles against the door, making it twitch inward.

“Who is it?” Julie’s fingernails scraped against the top pages of the report in front of her, creasing them.
And what the fuck do you want?

The fake wood door swung open.

Dr. Villers, handsome in a daytime-TV kind of way, dark-skinned and not from India but she’d be damned if she could remember where, knocked again against the open door of Julie’s office. And then cleared his throat. And tapped on the doorframe with his fingernails. He was here to tell her off for being out of bed.

“Yes?” she snapped.

“Julie,” he said, “I want to discuss this chart with you.”

“I’m
not
going back to bed. I’m just doing paperwork. Not straining myself.”

He frowned at her. “You know the risks you’re taking by being up and about.”

“I’ll go back to bed as soon as I have the papers I need,” she said. A lie. She’d be here until they dragged her off. She might have an hour before they found her, and she didn’t intend to waste it.

Dr. Villers waved his hand, his long fingers brushing her words aside. “Have you seen the chart? Not yours. Pax’s.”

She shook her head. She hadn’t had the chance. This was the first time they’d allowed her to be anywhere other than her hospital room and much as she wanted to know more about what happened to Pax, she had too much to do. He was fine. After years of being sick.
How
he was fine and
why
he was fine were questions she’d hidden away for the moment. Today, she’d made it to her desk, and that had been a victory.

“The readings are impossible, Julie. Incredible. As if they’d been written in by someone who knew nothing about medicine.”

She held out her hand and flipped open the manila folder, riffling through the pages below.

Average heart rate: 307 beats per minute

Maximum heart rate: 600 beats per minute

The heart rates of a
hummingbird
.

Oxygen levels: 6 percent

Impossible.

Temperature went from 150 degrees Fahrenheit to 69 degrees Fahrenheit and stayed there for a full minute before zeroing out as the machine rebooted.

Dr. Villers was right. These results were insane.

“Something wrong with the equipment?” she asked, as casually as she could.

“No,” he said. “I’ve calibrated all of it again. Nothing unusual.”

“I wonder…” she said.

The image of Pax’s dead body, leaking silver-white fluid, flashed in front of her eyes.
It’s just my imagination.
He had had a heart attack; that was all.

“You should call him back in for more tests,” Dr. Villers said.

“I should,” she agreed. “I wanted to see how things were going at the apartment anyway. Make sure he eats lunch.”

Dr. Villers smiled. It wasn’t a real smile, just a quick flash of lips and teeth.
Like a shark
,
she thought.

She nodded to him and dialed her apartment. There was no answer.

Julie wasn’t surprised. Pax was healthy for the first time since he was a child. He wouldn’t be staying around in the apartment. It was—she glanced out the window, not really seeing anything other than the blue sky—a beautiful day.

He was looking at her, looking right at her. No, no, no! This couldn’t be happening, couldn’t—

Terkun’shuks’pai leaned back on his knees, settling his weight over his feet. The
pacha
around him was a molten mass of swirling paint; it was as though it were half a dream, melting from being brought too close to the waking realms. He had simply been too distracted to maintain it properly.

With painstaking care, he began to repair it. First, he repaired his robes, layering the silk and folding it carefully. After a moment of consideration, however, he changed them until they were no longer silk robes—the dress of a nobleman—but the hakama and haori jacket of a warrior. Formal clothing, still, and without armor. The crests were of a many-rayed sun, but centerless, the rays leading only to the dark silk of the jacket. He did not yet feel it appropriate to give himself weapons.

Next, he smoothed the rice mats on the floor, giving them texture, weaving and twisting the thin threads between the stalks of rice. He gave them the smell of harvested wheat, of cotton thread, of dust, of the slightest amount of oil and sweat from human skin. He had no need of hurry: it was done. Not the entirety of his plan, but the first, most vital step. Now he could focus more on the externalities; the major part of his work would take care of itself. Now was the time for the delicate details he enjoyed so well.

The golden, wooden walls regained their grain, now seeming as if they had been burnished over the years with wax until they shone. The paper screens on the paneled doors diffused the brighter light coming in from outside. Shadows rippled across the paper. Memories. Illusions. Leaves.

The
pacha
outside the room reformed, too. Slowly. The leaves turned from flat, unsubtle green paint to a shimmering, translucent loveliness, each leaf having its own delicate array of hues. Insects crawled on the undersides of leaves, chewing, biting, laying eggs. A breeze rippled across the leaves, and the sun—his new sun—broke through the clouds and dappled the forest below the mountain in the lovely valley.

The sun throbbed, and a shadow covered it. Not a cloud crossed the sky—he hadn’t remade them yet. The sun threw down blistering heat, briefly—and then black smoke rolled down the valley, covering the forest.

It had, of course, already begun. While he was toying with his illusions inside the
pacha
, the children had already been putting his plans into effect, swelling his sun, feeding it.

He hoped they weren’t finding the burden too difficult to bear.

—and the look on his face, he knew, he knew she’d killed everyone, he’d never believe it wasn’t her fault, he had this look on his face like he wanted her dead, he couldn’t see this couldn’t see it can’t be happening—

The ball of smoke with Scarlett in the middle rose higher in the sky and drifted toward the East River, bobbing like a black, tentacled balloon of death. She was getting the fuck out of here. Good. He didn’t want to have to try to take her down over the city. She’d do too much damage.

The only problem was that the smoke along the ground was coming with her, creeping along the streets toward the citizens standing around and gawking in its path.

At the last second—too late—they started to run. The smoke swept over them, and fresh screams rose up. Behind her, she left eerily silent streets, empty streets. A few cop cars and ambulances remained, but the bodies were gone, as if they had never existed, and the emergency lights had all gone still. The leaves had been stripped off the few trees, and the ground-floor shops were all dark. People huddled on rooftops or looked over balconies. That was all.

He had to fix Scarlett. Stop her. Maybe even kill her.

And, he realized, he had to do it here.

He couldn’t afford to think of her as his only friend. He could only afford to think about the people he might save.

Pax crouched down, feeling his shoes grit on the tarpaper rooftop tiles under him. He should probably change into some kind of superhero outfit to protect his identity, but he didn’t have time.

Got his balance.