Embers & Ice (Rouge) Read online

  Jenny ignored his comment. “Then you’re in a bit of a pickle, aren’t you?”

  “I’m aware of that, thank you. That’s why I need your help.”

  “So you freeze me and kidnap me and keep me locked in your lab? Why not just tap on my classroom door at school and ask for a favor?”

  “Sometimes I… overdramatized a situation just to avoid conversation. I blame my powers.”

  “Why isn’t Hunter nearly as insane then?”

  The room fell instantly colder than usual, and Jenny knew that it was Joshua’s doing. Her heart sank.

  “That’s precisely what I’m trying to figure out,” he said through his teeth.

  “Well–” She tried to be brave and avoid eye contact at the same time. “I think I might have an idea as to why Hunter was stronger than you.”

  “What is it?” he asked eagerly, taking the other chair and placing it opposite her.

  Jenny bit her lip. “Would you make me another coffee first?”

  Eyeing her suspiciously, Joshua took the empty mug. “You’re sure you want another? Your pupils are very dilated.”

  “For your information, I’m trying to stay warm. I’m not a tea person and it’s not exactly balmy in here.”

  Joshua’s face dropped. “I… I’m sorry, I wasn’t aware… my body temperature is naturally cold, so…”

  He fumbled around with the air switch by the door and for a moment, Jenny’s heart softened. As much as she knew this man was insane and very awkward and malicious enough to fake hers and Eli’s deaths just to prove how protective he was of Hunter, she had already seen his softer side. It was naïve and somewhat gentle. She was so interested in how this man functioned, that at times she forgot he had put her to sleep and was holding her prisoner in his tiny laboratory, and that he had the power to manipulate ice.

  As much as their powers fascinated her, Jenny was sure she was getting herself into deep trouble. She was, after all, just a physics teacher. She may have braved the science years ago, but that all went away when the laboratories in Sweden were destroyed and all traces of Feucotetanus were lost. Apparently that was Joshua’s doing. Was this her second chance to change the name of science, or should she turn away from it for real this time?

  Jenny already knew the answer. She was there for a reason, she was alive for a reason, and she was whole and healthy for a reason. Before the fire, before all of this began, Jenny had nothing. She was a teacher living in a rented apartment with her cat, a dull future stretching ahead of her. Most of all, she was alone and felt there was something missing in her life.

  And suddenly the fire happened. She believed her life was at its end. She thought her sickness would kill her. She was blessed to have Hunter, even in her final week, and she was satisfied with what she discovered, willing to let go and move on to… whatever else was out there. But then Joshua came for her on that cold night in the hospital wing and everything changed. She had a sort of… out-of-body experience while in her deep sleep. And when she awoke, she felt like a changed person. A new person.

  Joshua returned with another cup of coffee, his expression young and hopeful. He truly believed she had the answer. Of course, Jenny knew nothing about this volcanic substance, nor was she as gifted scientifically as Joshua. But he and Hunter were completely different. Joshua had developed great skill with his powers, but Hunter’s will was stronger and Joshua didn’t know why. He believed she was fuelled by rage, but it was clearly something else. Something with pure strength.

  But he doesn’t see it, she thought, sipping her coffee as Joshua answered his phone to someone named Barry. He can’t understand the key ingredient, the very thing that pulled Hunter away from the dark side and gave her the courage to walk away.

  The thing that is alien in itself to Joshua: Love.

  “Barry, I’m sorry, I’m swamped with work at the moment,” he said and hung the phone up abruptly before turning to her. “So, you were going to share your views?”

  Jenny clasped her hands together firmly. “Joshua I think there are more important things to focus on. Like whether Eli will wake up soon.”

  Joshua ran a hand through his hair. “I’m worried about the kid. He should have woken up first. I’m trying to move along with the process but it’s taking longer than I expected.”

  “Well Hunter needs to know he’s okay. She can’t live like this believing he’s dead.”

  Shoulders slumped, Joshua shook his head. “I have no idea where Hunter is.”

  For the first time that night, Jenny’s stomach dropped. “What do you mean?”

  “She hasn’t come back to the apartment.”

  “Well have you looked somewhere else?”

  “Of course I have! You don’t think I care about her whereabouts, especially with the state she’s in?”

  “Uh, can you blame her?” Jenny raised an eyebrow. “You did just kill the love of her life.”

  “He’s not dead,” said Joshua stubbornly.

  “You can’t be sure of that Joshua. Cryonics is a dangerous science to mess with. Have you considered how lucky it was that I turned out fine, that I didn’t suffer fractures from thermal stress or even permanent brain damage? It was a miracle I even woke up. You need to bring him out of it before the coma falls through. He’s on the brink of death.”

  Joshua pursed his lips, too obstinate to argue.

  “Where else could she be?”

  “I know a place, but I’m terrified to think of it.”

  “You’re talking about this ICE Institution? The one the Agents work for?”

  Joshua nodded, and his silence made her skin prickle.

  “How would you know if they’ve taken her? Has she contacted you at all?”

  There was a moment in which Jenny swore she saw Joshua’s eyes tear up. But of course, he didn’t show her. “I will set up a proper bed for you and check on the kid,” he said. “I’m hoping he’ll wake up in the next few days, and he’ll need you there to comfort him.”

  Joshua punched in the code to the door and stiffly marched back into the living room, leaving her alone again in the laboratory. Jenny glanced back at the freezer door and sighed. If only she could get a message to Hunter, to tell her that Eli wasn’t dead. She could come home and explain everything to Joshua, and he would let her go and they would live happily together again and…

  And she would go back to being a lonely girl with nothing to live for.

  Jenny sipped her bitter coffee and stared at the wall across from the desk where the photos of Hunter and her mother were pinned. She wandered to the door and then to her right, where the giant glass tank hummed dully, filled with plants and the very volcanic substance Joshua was so puzzled about. Her research on Feucotetanus was only half of what information was needed to complete Hunter’s formula, and suddenly all those years felt like a complete waste, as though she were hiking up a small hill only to come to a gigantic mountain soon after.

  That stone is not of this world, he’d said. Of course, that was why Hunter could produce fire from within her body and why she reacted with deadly flames to whatever emotion she was feeling. But was it really alien? Was that even possible? Or was this rock, this ‘Ravenadium’, from somewhere else?

  Jenny didn’t know, but she wanted to find out. And the only way she could uncover the truth was to investigate the stone’s origin. It would be just like her research on the drug, only now it was a paired project… with a madman harboring an evil personality as well as super-human abilities.

  Sighing and taking another large gulp of the hot coffee clasped in her hands, Jenny tried to relax in her chair and think on the bright side.

  Well, came the same voice from before. At least you don’t have to teach ignorant teenagers any longer.

  “Good enough,” she muttered with a happy smile.

  NINE

  Hunter was escorted directly from the laboratory to the bathroom upstairs. She desperately needed a shower and actually started looking forward to i
t, until she was taken through an iron door into a long room with tiled floors, slimy mold and a single bench running down the center. Along the walls were shower heads with taps spaced at intervals above grime-stained mirrors. There were drains everywhere and soap scrubs hanging from chains for washing. Hunter presumed the water – like the rest of the juvenile prison – would be cold.

  When she turned back to the two Men in White who were guarding the door, they shoved a dirty towel, fresh jumpsuit and shoes into her arms.

  “This is the bathroom?”

  One of them tried to hold back a smile. The other just rolled his eyes. “Does this look like a five star hotel, Princess?”

  She shut her mouth instantly. They chuckled and stepped aside as someone else squeezed between them as they shut the door.

  “You get used to it,” said the girl with the brown hair Hunter knew as Jet’s girlfriend. Having forgotten her name, she merely gawked by the doorway.

  “I’m Mikayla, by the way.” She was already unzipping her jumpsuit.

  Hunter avoided looking at the naked girl as she shoved her dirty clothes down and turned on a shower head.

  “Where are you from?” asked Mikayla.

  “New York,” she replied, adjusting the icy temperature and shivering beside the flow. She kept imagining she was standing on a damp forest floor, green moss getting stuck between her toes. Don’t think about it, don’t think about it.

  “I knew you were a New Yorker. My mom lives there with my stepdad.”

  Hunter slipped under the chilly flow and gasped. Only her skin was cool; the inside of her body burned with raging fire. The water stopped her feeling so dizzy.

  After her consultation with Dr. Wolfe, Hunter was lightheaded and an air of fear still swept through her bones. But the rest of the session wasn’t as bad as she expected. He took at least three pints of blood and went over her body with a strange torch device that scanned her skin. What he was looking for, she had no idea. He worked in silence. She tried not to let her head be smothered with fears and thoughts of Joshua lying on the same bed.

  “Is that your natural hair color?”

  Hunter stared across the room at Mikayla as she scrubbed her legs with the moldy stick. Her initial impression of the girl was bitchy-cheerleader-with-a-dick-boyfriend. Those were the girls she despised. But maybe she’d rushed into it. Mikayla was obviously making an effort to get to know her.

  “Yeah. It comes with the powers,” Hunter replied.

  “Right. Your fire.”

  Hunter pushed her wet hair out of her eyes and swallowed disgusting sewer water when her mouth dropped open. She remembered the way Jet hinted at her power that morning before she broke his nose. Was there some kind of announcement at breakfast before I arrived? “How’d you know?”

  “Comes with my powers,” she smirked. “I absorb other people’s abilities and render them powerless, so I can sense what people do. They don’t have bracelets like that for me. My power isn’t that much of a threat.”

  “It’s still a power.”

  Mikayla snorted. “Well until I figure out how to steal people’s powers and use them myself, it’s pretty much pointless.”

  Hunter looked away from the girl and pretended to scrub dirt from the bottom of her feet. The look of desire in her eyes like a thirst for power reminded her of Joshua’s psycho moment in the warehouse. Hunter already knew that some abilities have the power to really mess with people’s heads, and Mikayla was becoming one of those victims. What would happen if she could someday take other powers?

  For the first time since she arrived at ICE, Hunter started wondering how it was that the other kids actually had abilities. Her powers were an occurrence of chance, a complete accident that would never happen again. So how did all the other kids have such a variety of abilities? She would have to make a mental note to ask Dr. Wolfe in her consultation tomorrow. If she could form a sentence that didn’t end with a nasty curse.

  “So anyway, have you met anyone else besides Barbie and Shifty the Sloth?”

  “Who?”

  “You know, the fat guy you were sitting with at lunch and his anorexic friend?”

  “I’m sorry, who are you calling anorexic?”

  Mikayla smiled and ran her soapy hand over her shoulder. “Just wait, Fire Girl. You may have some meat left on you, but a month in this place and you’ll be a skeleton too.”

  Swallowing, Hunter tried to act like that didn’t scare her. “If you’re all skeletons, why is Zac so… pudgy?”

  “He’s a Shape-shifter. When they brought him in, that was what he looked like. He’ll stay that way till they take off his bracelet.”

  Mikayla ran her fingers through her wet hair and switched off the shower. As she dried herself, Hunter found her mind wandering to the others in the breakfast hall.

  “What about your boyfriend then? What’s his deal?”

  “Jet?” She threw her a cheeky grin. “I knew him in the outside world. We started dating in high school, then two years ago the Agents found us. Now we’re locked in this prison and it’s driving him crazy. He’s always starting fights, especially with Marcus. I’m pretty sure he’ll be in the Orb any day now.”

  “The what?”

  Mikayla’s grin widened. “You haven’t heard about the Orb?”

  I’m not sure I want to know, Hunter thought and shook her head.

  “There’s two places you’re sent for bad behavior here. The first is Solitary, where you’re locked in an empty room like a madman for forty-eight hours with no food or anything. They wrap you in a strait jacket just for kicks.”

  Hunter shivered under the cold flow from her shower.

  “Solitary is only for the little things like answering back to one of the scientists or refusing to come out of your cell. But for other things, like trying to escape, there’s a far worse punishment. We call it the Orb. It’s an arena blocked by impenetrable glass. A small stadium surrounds it. Anyone who’s done wrong is released from whatever binds their powers inside them and left to fight another person.”

  Hunter’s mouth hung open and cold, bitter water ran into it. What kind of sick place is this?

  “Yeah,” she sighed. “It’s pretty intense. I haven’t seen a real fight since Jet went in there with Fearne.”

  “What happened?”

  “Jet was teasing her about her head brace. It wasn’t even the first time, but she just… snapped. Kind of like you did today.”

  Hunter switched off her tap and didn’t meet Mikayla’s eyes. That didn’t stop her from wincing at the bite in her tone.

  “The fight was relatively clean, anyway. Fearne didn’t look so psychotic in the Orb without her head brace. In fact, she looked happy to have her head clear again. Jet was much the same. I’ve never seen him so blood thirsty. It was messy at first. That scar Fearne has down her cheek was from the fight. That was all it took before she cracked. She turned around and suddenly Jet was shrieking in agony and clutching his head as though his brain was melting.”

  Hunter shuddered. “So she did something to his mind? Is that her power?”

  “Telepathy,” Mikayla nodded. “That girl might look like a pretty little princess, but she’s bonkers. And in the Orb, she turned into a complete monster.”

  “What did she do to him?”

  “She flipped his evil switch,” she said. “Jet’s always been pretty cold-hearted. I just think she brought out his true personality.” Mikayla smiled as though the thought turned her on. Hunter was liking her less by the minute.

  “And what’s Jet’s power?”

  “He’s Telekinetic.”

  “Telekinetic?” Hunter snorted. “Like he can make things float?”

  Mikayla’s face morphed into an ugly scowl in less than a millisecond. “Suddenly I’m wondering why I’m standing here talking to you.”

  She stormed to the door, leaving Hunter with seconds to cover herself before it was flung open.

  “Oh, and Hunter?” Mikayla cal
led. “Jet isn’t the only one you should be scared of. There are things ten times worse in this place. That psycho with the head brace is one of them.” A look of sincere bitterness flashed in her eyes before slipping away in her wicked smile. “See you at lunch.”

  When the door locked and she was alone, dripping and freezing in the empty bathroom, Hunter found she couldn’t get the look on Mikayla’s face out of her mind.

  TEN

  You know you don’t have to sit alone anymore,” said Zac as he slid in beside her at the table in the breakfast hall, his tray stacked with the same steaming gray goo they ate for breakfast. “We’re friends now.”

  Hunter rolled her eyes at him. “Really, I wasn’t aware.”

  “You’re funny,” said Zac, shoving a spoonful of lunch into his mouth. “So what punishment did they give you for your little spat this morning?”

  “I saw Dr. Wolfe.”

  Zac’s eyes went wide. “Ooo. Creepy guy, isn’t he?”

  “That’s an understatement.”

  Chantal sat down beside Zac, her blond hair pulled up high in a twisted knot. She looked exhausted.

  “What happened to you?” asked Zac.

  “Show and tell,” she grumbled.

  “What’d they make you do?”

  “Convince a trained hypnotist to take off his clothes and dance the Macarena with a sheet of glass between us.”

  Hunter’s mouth dropped open. “That’s your power?”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “How did you know you could do… that?” She scooped food onto her fork with no intention of eating it. Her stomach growled against her will.

  “I told my ex-boyfriend to go jump off the Eiffel tower. And…”

  Hunter felt suddenly queasy. “He did?”

  Her jaw ticked. “The Agents caught me soon after I started stealing cars and clothes and going off the rails, but I really wish it was the police instead.”

  “The Agents would get you even if you were in prison, Chantal,” said Zac. “That’s how Marcus got here. He was arrested for stealing computers he wanted to use for a gaming competition, because he’s a Technopath and he’s pretty much a legend in the geek world, or so I’m told. The Agents came to him in prison and offered him a ticket out of his sentence.”