Outlaw Read online

  But what if that had all been an act to get here? What if he’d used me as cover?

  I stopped and stared at the cracked wall, and the faded tapestry hanging there.

  Had Alex set me up to get at Sanctuary? I couldn’t believe it. That would mean that everything he had told me on our journey had been a lie.

  I wouldn’t believe that.

  The next morning, I got up, ate the breakfast waiting for me, then left before anybody could come for me. I had to find Alex. Make sure he was okay.

  But I got lost. The underground city was a warren of little streets crisscrossed by wider streets, all on different levels, with those frigging winding stairs. I went down and back up a dozen times, peering into the spaces between them and the stone walls, trying to see if I could find Alex. I didn’t.

  So, there I was, wandering in that warren, my mouth dry, stinking with sweat, when I came down another set of stairs and my skin began tingling, the thousand needles against my flesh bit.

  Another Empowered was here. I crept down the stairs to a little plaza.

  Ella waited there, arms crossed, facing me.

  I froze.

  It was her. She wasn’t in costume. No mask. She wore a skirt, and a blouse, like the Persian women I’d seen in Tehran wear. Her hair was loose.

  “Ella,” I said. I wanted to hug her.

  But I stayed where I was, like she was a deer that could bolt at any moment.

  “Mathilda, Loris says you said you wanted to stay.”

  I nodded.

  “Don’t lie to me.” She spoke in a low, dangerous voice. She sounded like me when I was pissed.

  I took a step toward her. “Ella, I just want you to be safe.”

  “You are with Support,” she said.

  “I was. They think I’m dead now.”

  Her expression turned scornful. “Why should I believe you?

  “What’s happened to you?” I asked her.

  “You asked me that before. This place and the Fellowship happened to me.”

  “But you never used to be this angry,” I said.

  Her scorn deepened. “You are one to talk, Mat. You don’t have a monopoly on anger.”

  “I see that. But you can’t stay here. None of you can.”

  She laughed sarcastically. “Oh, so Mat knows best?”

  “No, but everyone need to leave. Now.”

  She lifted her chin, and the muscles in her face tightened. Was that what I looked like when I was angry?

  Just like that, it hit me. This moment might be the only chance. I’d have to find Keisha afterwards, and Alex, and then figure out where the node, gate to the fairy road was. I could apologize to her later.

  I sent my power into the stone, searching for a way down to the earth beneath. There were cracks in the stone for me to reach the soil.

  “Listen, the so-called good guys are going to find this place, and when they do, everyone here is going to be killed or captured. And the place will be shut down for good.” My power reached the soil, and I grew ivy, ordering the vines to worm their way up to us.

  “You don’t know anything,” Ella spat, her face twisted in disgust. “You went to prison because you were selfish.”

  “I went to prison because I didn’t want to be a prisoner in one of those damn blue jumpsuits.”

  The vines snaked up through the earth, branching out.

  “That wasn’t the only choice.” She swept her arms wide, gesturing at the ancient buildings around us. “You could have been part of something greater!”

  My chest tightened. “I was, damn you, and look at where it got me.”

  The vines rose up, entangling her in an instant.

  “You bitch!” she snapped. “You care only about yourself.”

  The vines bound her arms to her sides, and forced her to her knees.

  “I care about you!”

  “What next?” She managed to shake her head. “You didn’t think this through, did, you?”

  A fist smacked into the side of my head, and my vision filled with sparks. Pain mushroomed through my head. I whirled around. A costumed version of Ella stood there, in the mask she loved to give her projections, the grey form-fitting catsuit, and the black boots. The projection grinned at me, did a backflip, kicking at me with her right leg. I managed to just dodge the attack, leaning away. I sent more vines from the ground, entangling her left leg. Projection Ella staggered, reached down, and pried open the vines, but I sent more over her arms, and commanded the vines to tighten until the projection was squatting down, face pressed against the stone.

  A blow hit me in the small of my back, and I fell onto the ground. I rolled over. Another Ella, identical to the last. The projection did a drop kick at my chest. I couldn’t roll away in time, and the boot smashed at the spot right below my rib cage. I groaned, and the air whooshed out of my lungs.

  My vision blurred. I sent more vines swarming at the new Ella projection. These were blackberry ones, with massive thorns.

  The projection leapt out of the way.

  I needed to switch tactics. The projections seemed to possess all the attributes of an idealized Ella. I wondered if they also had the weaknesses Ella had.

  I reached with my power into the blackberry vines, and saw the strands of the plant’s essence. I altered them, urging the plant to change, to change the thorns into nettles that carried a paralytic agent. With my power, I ordered a vine to grow lightning fast in an arc, over and around the second apparition, lashing at her exposed face below the mask with a vine bristling with nettles. The vine raked the apparition’s face. Her face went scarlet. She stiffened and fell.

  It had worked. I pushed myself up.

  “You only care about yourself!” Ella said. “You also don’t see the truth!”

  “I want to take care of you and the rest of our family.”

  “We’re all part of something greater.”

  I didn’t care about that. I just wanted her safe.

  “Leave,” Ella said. “We don’t want you here!”

  “I’m not leaving without you.” I stepped closer. I’d have to break the vines from their roots, after making them constrict tighter to bind her.

  “This is going to hurt a little bit, I think,” I said. I took a deep breath.

  “It’s not going to hurt me at all, because I’m not here,” Ella said. “You haven’t found me, you’ve found my projections, and I want them back.”

  The two costumed apparitions had vanished, leaving tangles of vines.

  “Goodbye,” Ella said, and winked out, leaving a third tangle of vines.

  She’d fooled me. I’d been an idiot, and made my kidnapping play too soon. She’d tell Loris and I’d be booted out of Sanctuary, probably by the front door. I’d be gone when SAVAK and the Hero Council swooped down.

  I had doomed Ella, Keisha, Alex, everyone, because I’d let my anger rule me. Again.

  I went back to my apartment. Still no sign of Alex. I sat in a chair and stared at the worn tapestry, waiting for the knock on the door, telling me that I was about to be kicked out of Sanctuary.

  When the knock finally came I jumped out of my chair. Pulled open the door.

  Christianne watched me solemnly. She held a clay bowl filled with paste and bits of some kind of green fruit.

  “Your lunch,” she said.

  I took it from her.

  “Why did you bring it?” I asked.

  “Everyone needs to eat. Loris told me to tell you, you must decide what to do next.”

  “Has anyone seen Alex?”

  “No. Loris believes he is still here. Doctor Ling saw him. She said he had some food poisoning. He decided to explore.”

  “Loris let him do that?” I asked. I couldn’t believe it.

  Christianne looked at me sadly. Clearly she thought I was a thick-skulled idiot. “Loris knows what is best. She says your companion is fine, so, he is fine.”

  “I’d like to see him.” I couldn’t tell if she lied to me,
but I’d keep worrying about Alex until I saw him for myself.

  “That is up to Mister Alex.” She left me standing there, trying to figure out if that were true.

  I followed Christianne, but lost her in the maze of streets. I asked a few people I met if they had seen Alex, but they all said they didn’t know who that was. I returned to our apartment. All I could do was hope he’d return soon.

  I didn’t want to eat, but ravenous hunger filled me after I’d closed the door, and I ended up wolfing down the paste and the fruit Christianne had left. The fruit was sour, and tasted like melon and kiwi combined.

  I put the empty bowl down and sat back in the chair to think about what I was going to do now. Humiliation dragged at me. I’d tried to kidnap my own sister. Ella. The sweet twin, who was here because she cared about other people. I’d lost Alex.

  She said I cared only about me, but I wanted her safe. I had screwed up when I was sixteen, and left her, Ava and Ruth in the lurch. I’d been trying to make up for that ever since.

  I’d been trying to do the right thing, but I’d been blind to how Ella felt, how Ruth felt, how Ava felt. I only cared about how I felt.

  I wanted to crawl into a hole and die.

  I closed my eyes. The food didn’t give me energy. If anything, I felt more exhausted now. I fell into a deep sleep.

  I saw myself standing in a vast, dark space, underground. Bits of rock gleamed and the gleams reflected in a wide pool of water. The walls began to glow, softly green, and I could make out a line of marble statues of people, surrounding a little lake.

  Roots ran through the walls. I went down to the water, and it gleamed. I ran my fingers through it, and even in the vision, power surged through me.

  Suddenly the vision shifted, and I saw the figure in crystal again. It looked like me. The vision shifted back to the Sacred Spring. Vision me stood up, and turned. A marble path led to a huge door of stone, like the one at the entrance to the city.

  The way out of the Sacred Spring.

  But Vision me didn’t head that way. Instead, it turned and went to a crevice in the wall, a crevice where roots had made a gap. The roots pulled Vision me into the crevice and up through a gap in the earth, until I emerged from the crack at the base of the cliff, just below this apartment.

  I woke up with a gasp. I had been given a way to the Sacred Spring, where the answers to the questions I had about myself waited.

  The humiliation eating at me before I’d fallen asleep remained. My anger, it was the cause of so much of my problems. The Sacred Spring could be the way past that.

  I desperately wanted to know that Alex was okay. But how could I find him? If I were to find out the truth behind my vision within a vision, maybe I would find him. It was a thin hope. Everything about this place was twisty.

  I opened the door. It was night. The lamps had come on in the wall alcoves.

  The crack at the base of the cliff was a dark slash. Roots filled the crack, roots from some enormous tree, I thought. The roots were silent, but pulled at me with their presence. They were black as the blackest shadow in my vision.

  I went down the stairs, to the crack in the earth. Faith was not my friend. But for some reason I had faith in the vision. I had to find out.

  I reached with my power into the roots.

  The shadows in the crack stirred and pulled me down into the crevice.

  It was like being carried by a giant mat of roots, silky, soft roots that nonetheless held me firmly. Down I went, squeezed through the narrow space, until I was gently pushed out through a wall, like a baby being born. I stood near the circle of marble statues and the Sacred Spring, just like in my vision. The roots pulled away from me with a rustling sound.

  The air was warm and humid. The statues were covered with green, glowing moss. The spring felt like Mossville, with the same electric, ionized feeling, along with something else. The earth itself.

  The ground made my legs tremble. I couldn’t put it into words, but there was so much solidness, so much power in the rock beneath my feet that it made me wobbly.

  My feet made no sound as I crossed to the statues. Near them the air was thick with a mossy smell, rich and fresh. The walls glowed with a phosphorescent green light.

  My legs trembled. The spring was in a cave, smaller than the giant cavern that held the underground city above me. It was hot now. Like a sauna.

  Sticky hot.

  I stumbled past the statues. Their faces were hidden behind the thick covering of moss.

  On the far side of the spring was the marble door from my vision. Closed.

  Rising from the center of the spring was a dark island, like obsidian, with flecks of green light in it. The water rang with power and promise, calling to me. I couldn’t remember if that was part of my vision or not. It didn’t matter; I was here. There was nowhere else to go. I had to find out. That black little island of obsidian or whatever it was, it sang to me, like the water was a choir and it was the soloist.

  I sat down hard on the ground, but didn’t feel any pain. I struggled to untie my boots. It was like being four again and trying to tie my shoes. I pulled them off at last. My fingers fumbled unbuttoning my shirt and jeans, but I finally managed to peel them off, stripping down to my underwear.

  I stepped into the spring. The shallow water was hot, and clinging, and there were lily pads floating in it. The chorus in my head grew louder, welcoming me. I stepped into deeper water, until my breasts were submerged and I swam in the hot spring to reach the island. The vision I’d had at Bey’s came back to me, clearing as I paddled across the water. The woman in the frozen crystalline waterfall.

  She looked like me.

  But it wasn’t me. The same black hair. The same eyes, staring out at the world. The face looked like mine, but didn’t. Blood pounded in my ears.

  The little island was warm, cooler than the water, but like a sun-warmed rock. I hauled myself up onto it. The chorus around me changed, deepening until it sounded like I was in an ancient forest of pines, not some underground cave with moss singing in my head.

  The roots in the walls glowed.

  I could have cut the energy with a knife. The air vibrated with that ionic energy Mossville had, only it was stronger here. I was suddenly thirsty, like I’d been in the desert. I reached for the spring with a cupped hand, stopped.

  Don’t be a fool, I told myself. What if it’s got toxic crap in it? What if it’s salty? Whatever. But the thirst wouldn’t let go of me. I licked my lips. The impulse to drink from it pushed me. No.

  The vision, it hung in my mind, more real than the cave I was in. The woman, she was shorter than me, I thought, but looking through the crystalline waterfall, it was so hard to tell. Sprays of crystals—how big were they? Her legs didn’t seem quite as long as mine. But she looked so much like me.

  Thirsting for water began to hurt. Why hadn’t I thought to bring a canteen? Because I hadn’t thought—I’d just acted to find out about the vision that hung maddeningly in my brain. The roots in the rock overhead began glowing more brightly. The fairy road had those same tangled, ancient roots.

  My lips were cracked and my mouth parched. How the hell could that be, down here in the hot, humid sacred spring?

  Screw it. I had to drink.

  I scooped a handful of spring water and drank. It tasted like the water I’d drank above in the city, only warm. I scooped more, drinking, scooping, drinking. It felt like I hadn’t had a drink of water in weeks.

  Finally, I stopped, wiped my mouth. My body was warm, relaxed. I lay back on the rock. The moss, the roots that ran up to the rocky ceiling and below into the earth were bright in my mind, and singing a song of sorrow.

  The vision became clearer.

  The woman’s face came into sharp focus.

  Suddenly, I couldn’t breathe. My heart wanted to burst. The vision was a giant’s foot pressing down on my chest.

  I recognized that face.

  I knew who that woman was.

&
nbsp; My mother.

  Her chest rose and fell. She breathed, slowly. Her eyes weren’t lifeless, her gaze moved back and forth. She was watching something. What I’d thought was a frozen crystalline waterfall was alive. It pulsed with sponge-like glowing things that moved around her, around my mother.

  My mother lived.

  The sponge-like things swarmed around her body, leaving only her face exposed.

  She was a prisoner. Somewhere. I willed the vision to widen, to show me more of the freaking scene. Nothing.

  I stared at my mother, at Mom, at a woman I barely remembered and only recognized so clearly because of the photos that Ruth had of her. The one on the wall in the living room. The one of her with my dad, in Ruth’s bedroom. The album. Never enough photos—Ruth said my mother didn’t like being photographed. I understood, since I didn’t either.

  But her face, it should have looked older, but it didn’t. She looked so much like the woman in the photograph Ruth had on the wall, with the Rocky Mountains behind her, her hair blowing. My father had taken that photo, Ruth told me.

  Mom was twenty-six then. Just a few weeks before she died.

  But she lived now, I was sure of it.

  The vision pulled back and showed my mother—that word thundered in my head—my mom inside that crystalline waterfall that pulsed with life, in a space with marble statues that reminded me of the ones here, and something else, something very modern—power cables snaking across the wall, and things that looked like power cells, next to a dome made of durasteel, with the words, “Reactor One” on it, and a sign that said “Danger, high voltage.”

  Mom’s gaze suddenly met mine, and the world stopped.

  Her eyes were defiant, imploring, but I didn’t know what they implored, only that she looked at me like she wanted me to know something so badly.

  I wanted to shout, what is it, but what good would that have done?

  “I don’t understand,” I whispered.

  What was there to understand, I realized. She was a prisoner.

  I had to free her.

  Save my mother.

  The mother who had been dead all these years.