Darkening Chaos: Book Three of The Destroyer Trilogy (33 page)

Braden
pulls me against him more tightly, and asks, “Libby, what were they doing to
the Ciphers?”

Shaking
off the horrible feeling that memory left is impossible as I call it back up. I
try to ignore the sickening emotions as I tell Braden about what I saw. It
doesn’t work very well, because I still feel like throwing up when I finish.
That Cipher’s dead eyes haunt me every time I think about them.

“I
don’t understand. What actually happened to him?” Braden asked.

“I
don’t know, but a creature like that … Braden, they could take over the entire
world. They could kill whoever they wanted, enslave everyone else. The
Guardians would have complete control of everyone and everything.” It’s a
thought that floors me, but figuring out how they made the creature has to
outweigh my fear right now.

The
idea that anyone would ever invade his protected memories like I did would
never occur to Drake beforehand since it’s never been done before, but I swear
he kept himself out of the circle just to keep me from figuring out what was
going on. I had hoped so badly that he would be able to explain this to me. Now,
I’m going to have to figure it out on my own. Braden’s hand drifts up and down
my arm absently as he thinks. Despite the mountain perched to fall on me, I
smile. I don’t have to do anything alone.

“My
best guess,” I say, interrupting Braden’s thoughts, “is that they found some
way of getting around having to perform an Inquest on the Ciphers. We already
know every Cipher has the same six talents, so if they could unlock them in
some way, it wouldn’t be surprising for them to have the same ones.”

“Could
anyone really do that, Libby? You’re the most powerful person on earth, and not
even you could pull off something like that.” He stares at me thoughtfully, his
gaze fixed on the three sets of diktats ringing my arm. “Could you?”

I
turn my hand over, not wanting to think about what the last set cost me. “I
don’t think I could ever do what they did, Braden. I couldn’t feel the
individual powers or what they were doing, but I could definitely sense how
much power was being used. Even with the extra diktats I have now, I still
don’t think I could do it. There was one person there for every talent they put
in the Cipher, and they were obviously the most powerful practitioners they
could get their hands on.”

“Okay,
but you only have the diktats of three people. What if you had six complete
sets? Do you think you could do it then?” he asks.

“I
… I don’t know. Are you wanting me to try what they did?” I cringe at the very
idea.

“No,”
Braden says quickly.

“I
don’t even get what you’re asking, Braden. There was only one person for each
talent, not six for each one. Why would I need six of each talent? To do what
they did, wouldn’t I only need to be as powerful in each talent as they were? I
may not be there yet, because I’m not eighteen, but once my powers are fully
unlocked I will be. I still don’t think I could do it, even then. It was creepy
how much power was flowing through that room.”

Braden
nods encouragingly. “Too much power, right? You said it felt like it was going
to crush you. No one person should have that much power. So what if it wasn’t just
one person’s power. What if they were combining their power, buffering each
other until their power was six times what it should be?”

“You
can’t combine power,” I argue. “It’s impossible.”

“Quite
the statement coming from you,” he snorts.

I
brush off his comment, and say, “Braden, seriously, there’s no way for two
people to combine their power outside of being Companions. And you can’t be
Companions with more than one person. Certainly not with
six
other
people.”

“Well,
which is more impossible, Libby, that six people found a way to combine their
power, or that six people on this planet are more powerful than you? Neither
one is supposed to be true, but obviously one of them is.” He waits for my
answer, but I don’t know what to say. He’s right. One or the other is true.

“They
must have combined their power,” I say quietly.

I
say it not only because I don’t want to imagine the possibility of people being
more powerful than I am, but because prophecies, legends, historical writings,
all of them declare me to be the absolute most powerful. Not a single mention
of the impossibility of combining power has ever come up. In fact, it’s another
one of those things we’re taught from the time we’re little as an absolute
truth, like the Destroyer being something to fear, but never do I remember any
proof of the claim. We’re told it’s impossible, so we never try. I have to
admit I should know better than that.

“Even
if we’re right,” Braden says, “that still leaves us with the problem of what
they did to the Cipher.”

My
list of impossible things to either do or figure out just keeps getting longer.
I play the memory in my mind again, searching for any hints or ideas. Nothing
particular really strikes me, but as I watch I think about Celia of all things.
Remembering when I attempted, and failed, to perform an Inquest on her suddenly
sparks an idea in me.

“I
could feel Celia’s talents, but I couldn’t unlock them,” I say, mostly to
myself. Talking my ideas out helps me organize them. Braden must recognize this
because he doesn’t say anything.

“I
knew what talents she had, and where they were centered inside of her, but I
couldn’t do anything to unlock them. If the Guardians really do know how to
combine power, maybe they know how to find a Cipher’s talent without Perception.
You now, like one person’s Concealment can go in and find the other person’s
Concealment. Maybe that’s why they need someone from every talent. If they can
do that, maybe they can touch the source of the talent and combine with it, or
draw it out in some way, without actually unlocking it. That would be so much
stress on a Cipher’s body and mind. It could be why he turned into a virtual
zombie.”

I
turn my attention back to Braden. “What do you think?”

“It
makes sense,” he says. He’s quiet for a moment as he thinks. When he looks back
over at me, he has a considering expression on his face. “After my dad and
brother died, I had a really hard time for a while. Every night I had
nightmares. I was terrified of Sihirs coming and taking me away. Not the real
Sihirs I know exist now, but the ones in the stories, the zombie kind that
carry off little children. My foster parents tried. They gave me a night light
and told me I was safe. They just figured it was an effect of everything I’d
been through and said the nightmares would go away after a while.”

“Did
they?” I ask.

“No,
not until I told my grandpa about them when we met in the spirit world.”

“What
did he do that made them go away?”

“It
wasn’t anything he did, but what he said,” Braden explains. “He told me that
dreams came from some grain of reality. He was a psychiatrist before his
illness made him bedridden, so we talked for a while about how my dreams of the
Sihirs taking me probably stemmed from losing my dad and brother and feeling
like I was alone and afraid of losing anyone else. I was pretty young, so I
didn’t really understand most of what he said, but what he told me about dreams
coming from reality really struck me. I asked him whether Sihirs were real. His
answer surprised me. He said just like dreams came from reality, most stories
come from truth. I suppose it should have scared me even more to think that
Sihirs might be real, but for some reason it made me feel better. I felt that
if they were real, I could fight them. If they were just dreams chasing me
around at night, there was nothing I could do to stop them.”

Not
that I don’t love learning more about Braden, but I have to ask. “Um, what does
this have to do with changing Ciphers?”

Braden
laughs. “Sorry, I guess I didn’t connect the two very well. I think what my
grandpa said is more true than he knew. Stories do come from truth. Milo’s mom
told you the real Sihirs were the thing Saia turned into when they killed her
with her spirit still out of her body. What if she was wrong? What if the real
Sihirs
are
the ones from the stories, soulless bodies too powerful to
stop, bent on mayhem and destruction?”

“That
amount of power would wreak havoc on a person’s spirit,” I say. “The
Spiritualist could even help the process along, suppressing the spirit until it
couldn’t even interact with the body anymore. The Cipher would still be alive,
but have no identity or free will. He would be a mindless slave with incredible
power.”

“Who
knows how many of these things the Guardians have created. They could have an
entire army of them, Libby,” Braden says.

I’ve
never been a big fan of zombie movies. Lance is, though. Growing up with him,
I’ve seen dozens of them, from
Night of the Living Dead
to
Twenty
Eight Days Later
and
Zombieland
. It’s pretty universal knowledge
that cutting a zombies head off will kill them … again. None of the movie
zombies had six talents, though. What I will have to face won’t be lumbering
hunks of flesh too stupid to even open a door. These will be strong and fast,
intelligent enough to hunt, but programmed to kill me. They will be much more
powerful than any other foe I’ve faced. How do I fight something like that?

Our
conversation moves on as we think and talk about how to beat the zombie
Ciphers. Ideas and suggestions bounce around us, some good and some dismissed
as soon as they’re spoken. As scary as this new threat is, at least I was able
to find out about it. We can prepare ourselves. I’ve still got time. But as we
sit and try to come up with a plan, my original fear about the prophecy nags at
me. The explanation seems too simple. I have to be missing something.

Chapter
26

Faith

Jen’s blog report is
snapped up in an instant, locally, but the story really only breaks when
President Howe himself holds a news conference about it. He, of course, doesn’t
bother to explain everything that led up to me “intervening” with Drake. All he
does is paint a picture of a Guardian breaking under the pressures of his
duties and basically losing his mind. I come off as some kind of creepy scavenger
picking up desperate, unstable pieces of society.

Too
bad for President Howe that his people aren’t the fastest workers in the world.
It takes him two days to work up his speech. In that time, my Ciphers were
already mobilized by Lance and Braden to contact everyone they could and
explain what really happened with Drake. They encouraged their friends to pass
it on to as many people as would listen. By the time Howe stepped up to his
microphone Sunday night, half the world already knew the real version of what
happened, or most of it anyway.

The
only thing that still remains a secret is what happened to Drake after I took
him. For the next few weeks, we maintained the rumor that he joined us, which is
true, but don’t reveal the fact that he died right after I stole his talents.
The Ciphers and friends in the training house are the only ones who know that.
Of those thirty-something people, only Braden, Lance, Celia, and I attended his
funeral. The Monday after I woke back up we took his body into the mountains after
school and buried it near the cabin where Audrey died. I would have liked to
have buried him next to her, but I had no idea where that might be. None of us
really said anything. I didn’t know what the others were thinking as we walked
away from his grave, but I left hoping he was able to find Audrey again.

In
the weeks since President Howe’s press conference, everyone has been on
heightened alert. I broke the truce regardless of what the public believes. The
whole world thinks they know what happened. Howe knows the truth. I have no
doubt about that. He has reason upon reason for me to be expelled, imprisoned,
killed even, but nobody comes. No angry, pitchfork-waving mobs, no Guardians or
Seekers, either. Everything stays eerily quiet. Everyone in the general public must
either support me or be too scared to face me. I doubt that’s true for the
Guardians and Seekers.

After
weeks of looking over my shoulder, I realize that maybe our careful lie worked
better than I thought. We start listening even more carefully to rumors
circulating through the Guardians and realize that Howe has been scouring
everywhere for Drake, trying to find him and kill him, and when he comes up
empty he starts to believe what Jen wrote . Drake’s disappearance doesn’t
convince Howe that I have Drake, but it makes him wonder, makes him too scared
to make a move. It’s a small victory I know won’t last long, but it’s one I
plan to make good use of.

Howe’s
fear is a strange thing, but Milo’s behavior is just as odd. He knew better
than to drag his criticism of me bringing Braden on the raid into a full out
fight that night, but as soon as I was out of bed he threw it in my face again.
I refused to apologize, and even lost my temper completely and slapped him
after reminding him of his own mistakes. Maybe Celia wouldn’t have been able to
do anything given how fast the toxin worked, but neither of us can know that
for sure. Ever since that fight, he’s been making himself scarce. Celia worries
about him and what he might be doing. So do I.