Forgotten (Reject High: A Young Adult Science Fiction Series Book 3) (17 page)

Courtney used our help to get to our feet. She limped over to Camuto, whose breathing grew ragged and shallow. Her bottom lip stiffened. She reached her hand out. Camuto stopped all movement and stared into the distance. She was gone. I didn’t cry. More than anything, I felt I owed her a debt. She had defended me against Hughes, shown gratitude to me for saving her life. Turns out, I had only extended it for a few months.

Courtney closed Camuto’s eyelids. She leaned against me. Rhapsody snatched their belongings and made us disappear in time to escape police detection. Then, I levitated us all to the platform, which had been cordoned off with yellow and black police tape and wooden barricades. Esteban and Sasha had cleared out. The three of us did the same, carefully stepping around the crowds, up the stairs and out the front doors.

A block down and over on South Clinton Street, we became visible and stopped to rest under a bus stop booth. I texted Sasha our location. They’d have to walk it unless Esteban knew his way around Chicago.

I turned off the glow of my suit and reactivated the cloaking feature. We looked like two normal teenagers with a senior citizen. Each time she, Camuto or Hughes had been without heliodor, they had irreversibly aged.

It seemed her wounds were mending, though. Her bushy blonde hair had deep streaks of silver in it. She leaned against the booth’s wall. “Amauri,” she sighed, wincing. “Couldn’t you have put yourself first, for once?”

“What happened in there?” Rhapsody asked her. “It looked like a snuff film.”

Courtney slipped the heliodor I’d given her into her left breast pocket. “David ran out of Jason’s blood.” She sucked air between her gritted teeth. “He’s moving the deadline to noon. Drop off is in Traveller. They said you’d know where. His people thought you were on the train. When you weren’t, he called a different play.”

I cursed loudly enough to attract the attention of the commuters walking by, which was saying something. Horns blared and cars motored loudly through the intersection. “I’m supposed to get from here to Harrisburg and to Mexico in
six hours?”

“It’s possible,” she said, drawing lines on the palm of her bloodied glove. “Straight lines. Hit supersonic speed, you can get to Three Mile Island in an hour, Orizaba in three. The provenance aquamarine is in an abandoned concrete and steel reactor unit. You’ll know it when you see it.”

I rubbed my temples. The walls were closing in on me. This must be what Sasha’s claustrophobia felt like – the pressure of losing the space you’re used to operating within. I thought of Mom’s last words to me, that I had a purpose to fulfill. Was this it? Saving lives when some psychopath wanted to go on a killing spree ‘cause he felt like it?

Courtney must have read my body language. “The suit in your bag is for her. It’s pressurized for low depths. She’ll ghost you there, inside and out. Trade it and save Debra.”

Rhapsody posed the question that was on my mind. “Why’d you change your mind?”

I wanted to know more, too. "And if we go, what’s to stop him from pulling another stunt like this while we’re on the clock?”
Her suit in my bag?
That brought a few things together for me. Courtney had just admitted to packing Rhapsody a radiation suit in my bag. Our backpacks were built to withstand supersonic speeds – not Esteban’s or even Sasha’s. So she knew we’d end up staying together.

Then I remembered the train transfers in Chicago and Pittsburgh, the way we would never have made a midnight Monday deadline. Camuto had said “It’s handled.” Why would she say that? We never needed the transfers in the first place. King attempted to murder a trainload of people in morning rush hour to make it that way.

“You gave me morganite,” I said to myself. “Taylor’s aquamarine…you told me how to use it. You knew about my mom, what I would do with it. You knew all of this would happen!”

Courtney’s eyes watered. “No,” she said just above a whisper. “Not everything.”

Camuto and Courtney had been friends for more than a century. Her death was significant, unfortunate – it had gone unpredicted. She’d said that before, that she couldn’t predict everything. Who knows? If she had told us everything, things might have gone worse. I had a bad habit of doing things to screw up good plans. And I never would have gotten to say goodbye.

I’d never seen Courtney cry before. She did it without shame now. Since her blood covered her gloves, wiping her face wasn’t an option.

“You didn’t know about Amauri?” Rhapsody asked her.

The morning sun shining through the bus stop overhang shed light on how much Courtney had aged since we’d first met. Then, I had thought she was about forty and in good shape. Today, her looks had withered to those of a fit seventy-year-old woman.

“No,” she said. “Knowing about a death…you second guess, anticipate the worst about everything.”

On the surface, having the ability to predict future events sounded like a pretty cool power to have. I had to leave for Three Mile Island soon.
Should I ask her what was coming?
She had said before that it would all work out.
Work out for us or the Collective?
From Hughes’ viewpoint, as long as nobody got immortality out of the deal, it was a win. To me, the body count couldn’t be disregarded as collateral damage.
Lives aren’t just numbers.

It became obvious to me that as long as the provenance crystals existed, blood would be shed over them. It’d be naïve to think differently. Nothing we did could prevent the crystals from causing violence and world-ending problems, could it? I made up in my mind what had to be done. King would die. Whoever came after him would eventually die. And this would all end.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

i improvise

Sasha and Esteban joined us beneath the cover of the bus stop booth. Rhapsody caught a whiff of the faint scent of cigarette smoke and longed for the smoldering butt on the ground. She was nervous, all right.

I told them about Camuto, about King moving the deadline and the basic outline of my plan. We’d retrieve the provenance aquamarine and trade it for Debra’s life. I left out the part where I’d kill him. Better to just do it than make it a talking point.

“Something’s off,” Rhapsody said. “If he’s out of your blood, he’ll want more. Right?”

I shrugged. “What’s the big deal? I’ll give it to him if it saves Debra.”

Sasha agreed with Rhapsody for maybe the third time ever. “He’s not the Red Cross, Jason. Who’s to say he’ll stop at a pint?”

She was right. He’d drain me like a vampire. I’d be trading my life for my stepmom’s and let a maniac loose on the planet. He could kill her anyway. Selby would be out there, too, recklessly slaying people like he had at the cemetery. Debra couldn’t die either.
How do you weigh the value of one life over millions? If you’re the Collective, you don’t.
They’d tell me to sit back and let King wring out all the murders he could before cashing in his chips. I don’t think they knew about Selby and what he had become.

There had to be a better way.

I walked out of the booth and focused on breathing slowly to straighten out my thoughts. I couldn’t do it their way and lose another mother. My way required help, help I wasn’t sure Courtney would hand over to me. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Sasha walking up to me.

“What are you thinking?” she asked me. “I can help.”

“There’s only one way out of this I can think of, and I don’t know how to do it alone.”

“That’s because you can’t. We’re a
team.”

“We have to destroy them.”

“The provenance crystals?” Her eyes brightened with an idea, though I doubted she thought I’d kill King. “You’ve never been to the second floor of the compound, have you?”

I remembered the night Hughes and I drunk scotch on the floor, surrounded by massive pieces of equipment. There, he’d told me extra-long life meant a shift in thinking, about laws, right and wrong. “The one with all of the jet airplanes?” I asked.

She let out a snicker. “It’s atmospheric equipment. The company line is that the HAARP compound studied the ionosphere. Conspiracy theorists say it influenced the ionosphere.”

Influenced the ionosphere? I was confused. “So what does that mean?”

“Carrington was natural, but the other solar storms, they could’ve caused them. And if they caused them, couldn’t we use the equipment to do the same thing?”

My eyes bulged. The nausea and pain, cell phones-turned-bombs, a month-long coma –the idea of doing that again didn’t excite me. “What, put them in another pit I have to face plant on?”

Her eyes shifted back and forth while she did mental calculations. “I don’t think so. Last time, they were full of prisms, now the stones are dormant. Courtney packed King’s journal for me. I don’t understand it all, but two nights ago I stayed up and read it, made some notes. An overload of high proton radiation could destroy them.”

I hesitated.
Should this be put to a group vote?
“Let’s do it.”

“I’ll brief Esteban. Call me when you get the aquamarine. We’ll handle the rest.”

I hadn’t thought about trusting her this much since before she ran off with Selby.

Sasha surprised me with a hug. “Bye Jason,” she said. “Remember, make sure I keep living.”

I scanned her thoughts for the details I wanted, the ones she didn’t have time to tell me. All I got was the provenance crystals lying above ground and a bunch of scientific lingo and calculations. What other options did we have besides dying or letting Debra die?

“All right,” I said.

We returned to the group. I could tell by my girlfriend’s shifty body movements that she didn’t appreciate seeing me hugging my ex. Sasha and I were friends. She’d have to get over it.

“New plan,” I announced. “Rhapsody and I go to Three Mile Island. Courtney, Esteban and Sasha head back to the compound. We’re destroying the provenance crystals.”

Courtney acted surprised.
“That’s
the plan? You want to overload the crystals?”

“Yes,” Sasha said, equally as shocked. “The equipment has the capabilities, right?”

“It’s a theory,” is all Courtney said.

Our old principal’s words echoed in my mind. No theory becomes truth without a test.

Once Rhapsody changed into her radiation suit, we left for Three Mile Island. This time while we were airborne I looked behind us. It was hard to distinguish shapes at supersonic speed. They could be birds, fast-moving blobs, or aircraft that was tracking our sonic boom. Easing up on the speed would play with our arrival time. We didn’t have a lot left to play with. Whatever they were, they eased off. By that time we were close to the nuclear power plant.

Slowing down enough to see, I spotted Three Mile Island surrounded by a river.

There were three cooling towers. One of them was inactive – the one that had melted down when Mom was seven years old. That’s where Camuto and Hughes had buried the aquamarine, in the one without steam coming from it. The area around it had been deserted for decades. We hovered over it at an elevation where we could hear one another and talk.

“You want me to ghost us down through
that?”
Rhapsody asked me. She glanced down into the tower, which from this height looked like a giant black hole.

“Yeah,” I said, half-doubting myself. “Not us,
me.
Can you do it?”

“I don’t even know what’s down there and when to make you solid. I have to go, too.”

I didn’t like the idea of exposing her to any kind of radiation without knowing for sure it was safe for regular human beings. “If you make me solid in a wall, I’ll punch my way out.”

“And collapse the tower on top of you? Our phones won’t work down there, and without me you’ll never find the aquamarine. I’ve got a radiation suit for a reason. If it wasn’t safe people wouldn’t be working here.”

Yeah, but none of them were here, or underground where the meltdown happened.

“Just do it,” she said, activating her suit’s light network while I did the same. “You’ll keep me safe. I have faith in you.”

Like a slow-moving roller coaster, we floated downward. My stomach dropped as we entered the darkness of the tower’s hollow. Our Geiger counter watches clicked in tandem. Were they detecting residual radiation or the aquamarine? I tried not to think about the possibility this trip could infect Rhapsody with radiation poisoning.

Too much of this reminded me of last May, when Selby buried me alive six feet underground. Once we were near the tower’s concrete bottom, Rhapsody turned us visible. No sense wasting energy when she didn’t need to.

We passed the upper grid with vacant spots for radioactive rods, cavities of decades-old debris in the core and former deposits of coolant. The Geiger counters on our wrists clicked faster, one on top of the other. The purplish glow from our armor illuminated our surroundings, giving it the eerie appearance of a supernatural cave. There wasn’t much air to breathe down here. Rhapsody’s suit was equipped with a breathing apparatus, mine was not. I noticed the difference. My lungs burned.

“There,” she said, pointing behind me.

I swiveled around. Lying in a hole underneath a punctured piece of metal was the aquamarine. All of the source crystals had distinct shapes – the weirdest ones were the green emerald, which was a giant “t,” and the goshenite, a large football. This one was almost perfectly round, as wide and thick as a queen-size mattress. I questioned the wisdom of Hughes and Camuto planting this underground, where they knew it would grow prisms. One row had almost completed to maturity.

I grabbed it and Rhapsody turned it intangible so we could ascend. The entire time we’d been searching, I’d kept us levitating, moving forward and backward as we needed.

I tried to fly upward, but nothing happened. “Huh?” My voice sounded warbled. “Jason.” She said my name with a worried tone.

The loss of air had gotten to me. My wooziness turned into a numbness, clouding my brain. Again I commanded my body to go up. We budged maybe a foot.
What am I supposed to be doing? Where are we?
I tried talking, but my voice sounded more unintelligible than before. Looking around, all I saw were rusted metallic fragments of a large piece of machinery and walls of dirt. I held a weighty, glowing blue jewel. It grew heavier until I couldn’t hold it anymore. My arms and legs shook so uncontrollably that I collapsed against a small pocket of dirt.

The next thing I knew, Rhapsody slapped my cheeks to wake me up. When that didn’t work, she looked up and talked in strings of words I didn’t understand. Was she praying or something? She removed her mask. I blacked out.

When I awoke the next time, she was giving me mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. She did it by inhaling air from her mask, taking it off, and breathing it into my mouth.

Her cold lips and the gust of fresh oxygen in my body snapped me to attention. I held the last breath she’d transferred into me and signaled that I was okay enough to move. We put our masks on. I clutched the aquamarine and we flew out, ghosting through the machinery and back into the cooling tower. I hadn’t paid attention to its dimensions going in. This thing had to be at least two football fields high.

Right as we got to its catwalk we came face-to-face with King. He smiled. He’d been expecting us. “Again you do all the heavy lifting for me,” he said.

His tanned, leathery face shimmered in the morning light. He’d forgone his military fatigues for a body suit like ours. Strapped around his waist was a mesh satchel. His ratty mustache was completely gray and his teeth were stained from coffee or dipping tobacco. When I left him, he had looked about forty years younger than he did now. The last time I’d seen him, he was lying on his back in the desert and dying. How had he survived?

He’d taken our powers, so we were quite helpless against anything he wanted to do, including giving us lectures about how superior he was to us. Catching my breath was work. Rhapsody was able-bodied without her prisms but exhausted. He could kill her with his strength, which was equal to mine.

We struggled with him, but he seized the provenance aquamarine and our prisms. The catwalk at the top of the cooling tower was narrow, about the width of a normal sidewalk. Whatever we did, we had to be careful not to tumble over to our deaths.