I Am Titanium (Pax Black Book 1) (17 page)

“He seems to have been involved in an incident just before then—”

Julie slapped the folder irritably against the bedrail. “I don’t want to hear about it. I don’t care what happened. It’s the girl’s fault. Doubtless she’s the one who led him into this.”

“She’s listed as missing,” said Dr. Villers as he slipped the folder out of her hand. “They think she’s dead. But there she is, flying in the middle of a cloud of smoke. And Pax. They say he
jumped
on top of that building, and it’s ten stories. And those test results—”

“It’s impossible, all of it.”

Dr. Villers stretched upright as if to work some of the kinks out of his back and tapped the folder against his knee. “Look, Julie. I have some friends who are looking into this.”

“Friends. What kind of friends?”

“Military friends. Defense research. DARPA.”

Her hand clutched the blankets. If she’d had anything heavier than a plastic mug in reach, she would have hurled it at him. Her heart monitor beeped, and she took a couple of deep breaths with her head twisted toward the far wall. “What did you give them?”

“Nothing. Yet. They came to me.”

“If you give them a single data point, I’ll have your ass off the program and out on the street.”

He shook his head. “Julie. They had the data already.”

“How? Unless you—or someone else from this hospital—gave the information to them?”

“They’re already in the computer system. We’re legally required to provide them a back door into all our databases. You know that.”

Oh, God.
Her head swam. She hadn’t known. All the confidential case files… notes… all the research…

For years she’d been raging against the knowledge that she hadn’t made enough progress on researching Pax’s condition. Now she was horrified by how
much
she’d accomplished.

Deleting all her files would just alert them that she knew.

At least she’d been so busy handling the routine paperwork and less acute cases—compared to Pax, they were
all
less acute—that she hadn’t had time to write up her latest suspicions.

She had no idea how to
cure
her son’s disease. But she had a suspicion of how to trigger it. How to trigger
any
autoimmune attack. The results would be expressed differently in each victim, due to genetic differences in cellular response. And, if she was correct, she could also accelerate the progress and severity of the attack.

The government didn’t have her suspicions. But it had all the data leading up to that point. It’d take a genius to come to the same realization as she had—but she’d heard the government had a few of those. Including, apparently, Dr. Villers.

“So they have all the data already. What do they want?”

“They want to talk to you. About that girl. About Pax.”

“When?”

“As soon as you’re ready. They’re in the ward’s waiting room.”

Better to get it over with; better to get all the data before she decided how to respond. “Send them in.”

Dr. Villers stood, holding the manila folder along his side. Julie couldn’t keep her eyes off it.

“I’ll be back later. Tomorrow.”

Julie pushed the swing-table out of the way and straightened out her blankets, running her fingers through her hair and trying to keep her wedding band from falling off.

As Dr. Villers passed the trashcan, he dropped the folder inside with a
swish
.

Scarlett stared down at the near-solid smoke trapped inside the net of negative energy. It reminded her of the time when she’d been to one of Jamie McIntyre’s parties. A cute senior Scarlett was making out with had led her up to a room with his hands over her eyes. She’d opened them to darkness and what she could only remember now as three sets of glowing red eyes. She remembered being held down and a hand forced over her mouth. Struggling. Then bright lights, a snide laugh, and a girl saying, “Don’t let me disturb you, boys.” But once the lights were on, they’d let her go, let her run away.

The thing in the smoke looked like her. Opened its dark mouth and screamed and kicked and tossed its head and jabbed with its elbows and pleaded like her. Suffered like her.

A moment ago, it had
been
her.

So what the fuck happened?

The black, smoky form shuddered and relaxed. Then it started struggling and screaming again. She couldn’t be sure. But she thought it was acting out that memory. Over and over again. A copy of a moment of hell. The only bright spots were the burning tears that smeared and dripped out of her eyes and down her nose, splattering on the blank white floor of the
pacha
before disappearing in bursts of steam.

Something—someone had made a copy good enough to fool Lana. And tossed her, invisibly, out of the prison inside her mind.

Who? Why?

She’d watched Pax trying to attack her. Lana dodging him. Pax breaking down. Weeping over everyone she’d killed. It was over. No doubt in her mind at all. Everything they’d had was gone.

I’m alone.

I’m some kind of impossible, dangerous being, with no fucking idea what to do next.

And alone.

She knew all that Lana had done. Scarlett had watched Lana fly up to the Arctic and burrow down into the ice. Pax had been lying on his back in the ice, staring upward. Lana had pulled off his burnt clothes—the ones Scarlett had given him—and thrown them out onto the ice. They were warm enough that they had stuck to the top layer of powder, turning into flapping gray snowdrifts.

Lana had fucked him, long and hard until her flames died down. She’d built the dome around him and flown away, sealing it behind her. Scarlett had let her, hadn’t been able to stop her.

Instead, Scarlett floated in the air, a being without a body, without any corporeal form. All she could do was watch Pax, naked and perfect, lying on the ice. He wasn’t breathing. His skin was metallic and white. A god. A statue. Hairless, no finger – or toenails, unwrinkled, without creases under his ears or under his chin. Elbows, knees, fingertips, balls as smooth as glass.

Pax had attacked her. The only person who’d stuck with him, the only one who had a clue what he was going through.

Negative energy surged up her throat. Not a single tentacle of the stuff in view. Why should it be? Pax was perfect, the rest of humanity was hundreds of miles away, and the negative energy had scraped out the astral energy inside her. Scarlett had been hollowed out like a doll. She might as well not exist.

But she did, and she
wanted.
What she wanted, she wasn’t sure
.
All the things she’d fought for, hoped for, dreamed about in her short life were now either impossible or ridiculous.

And Pax.

The more she looked at him, the more repulsed she was.

She saw it over and over again: His face rushing toward her, growing until it almost filled her vision. Forehead in a V of anger and hate. Eyes flat and metallic and accusing and shining hot white from the light of the sun. His hands outstretched, his fingers like claws as they sparkled in the bright light of that celestial orb.

Lana had returned with Scarlett’s body—if she could even call it
her
body anymore. Scarlett listened to Lana’s report, listened to her recommend Scarlett’s death. She had watched Pax stare at Lana, burning a hole in the ice. The way he looked at Lana, he wasn’t thinking about being
her best friend
. And the look Lana had given him. Soft. Filled with pity. And possessiveness. And Lana recommended that Pax be allowed to live.

I had him first, bitch. He’s human! Like me!

Was human. Like me.

“Do we have to destroy Scarlett?” Pax asked. “I mean, isn’t there some way we can get the negative energy out of her?”

“No,” said Lana. “It is too intertwined with her being. And worse, it is using her to learn about astral energy, which could be disastrous.”

“But she’s my…”

Scarlett waited for Pax to say “friend.” But the word didn’t come. Instead he looked sad and scared.

He should be fighting for me!
Scarlett felt her anger growing bigger.
I was there when he was dying, for fuck’s sake. He should be there for me!

Lana looked at Pax with sorrow and pity. She reached out a hand. “You are an honorable young man.” She hesitated. “I am sorry I mocked you earlier.”

“Isn’t there anything I can say? Do?”

“If Scarlett is not destroyed, what happened at the school may happen—no, will happen—again. She must be stopped, and I believe the only way to do that is to destroy her.”

I didn’t do that, bitch,
screamed Scarlett, though no one could hear her.
Not on purpose! And anyway, it was after you, not me!

Lana shook her head. “But remember that mine is not the only report. Terkun’shuks’pai will also be making a report, and that may sway the Council.” She smiled, gently. “For what it is worth, I am sorry.”

Scarlett watched Pax’s face fall, watched Lana’s features grow softer.

The bitch stepped forward and kissed him again. And started fucking him all over again.

It was like watching something off daytime TV. When Scarlett had seen as much as she could take, she wiped invisible tears off her face and stormed across the ice, through the wall, and outside the dome.

A finger had drawn long, shimmering streaks of clouds across the sky. The restless wind dragged shards of snow off the drifts. The flakes sparked green and gold and deep, shadowed purple as it swirled through her.

Her anger and hatred drove her across the snow. How could he do that to her? And why was she surprised? Everybody was only out for himself. All the niceness in people was mostly just fake. No wonder the black tentacles came after people. They were so full of shit they deserved it. The realest, truest, most honest emotions weren’t pure and white, like titanium. They were full of red rage, blue sadness, purple arrogance. Smoking orange hate.

Scarlett raised her hand to brush the wetness off her imaginary face. And felt something in her hand.

Terkun’shuks’pai once more stood on the shore of the island. He had taken corporeal form again, wrapping solid human-like flesh around his spirit. If all had proceeded as planned—and there was no reason why it should not have—the hatchling had followed its instincts to feed until it reached a certain mass and was approaching this island, the nearest shore, to begin the next phase of its life cycle.

Terkun’shuks’pai sifted through the energy of the ocean until he found his creation. It had recently survived an entanglement with a large predator and was wounded, trailing nearly clear, copper-tinged green blood in its wake. He gently stroked its spirit until all its wounds had healed.

He had taken its basic morphology and life cycle from an aqueous planet in another galaxy, one that had survived the extra-dimensional invasion of the black tentacles. The rift had been much smaller, the invasion more tentative. But the species had taken the invasion to heart. After pushing back the invasion and sealing the rift, the species had changed itself: written into its genetic code a kind of allergy to the alien race and then created protected, pressurized eggs that could survive in space—and seeded them across its galaxy.

It had sent its children into the hostility of space to die alone—or, if they encountered traces of the aliens again, to spend their existence at war.

It had been one of those eggs Terkun’shuks’pai had brought to Earth. He had woven in it the spirits of several terrestrial species—squid, octopus, eel, crab—to help it better adapt to the earth’s environment.

In 24 hours, the creature had gone from the size of a small fish to a mountain of flesh. It had even begun making use of the existence of its rival species, man: its soft central mass was covered with bent, warped green plates of corroded bronze that had been pried and bent off several local shipwrecks. Small shards of coral growth had been attached to the plates with thick mucus, and sea moss and fish were already beginning to investigate the new habitat.