Page 13 of Awakened Gifts
My voice cracks, but I take a steadying breath, still watching the footage and praying for some sort of clue.
“Not a fucking thing,” Rex growls as he walks in.
I don’t bother turning to look at him. He’s blaming me for all of this. I blame me. All I had to do was take Aria’s blood and I might have been able to fight the blood fuck urge. Her blood could have healed me the way mine healed her. But I was too weak to reach her. My body fought against me, and before I knew it, I was in the room with that bitch, knowing I couldn’t do anything about it. It took all my strength to draw my weapon and deny the urge for long enough to kill her.
“You can’t even see her a little bit?” Araya asks. “Why? You can always see her in trouble.”
“It’s possible she’s asleep. Whenever she sleeps, I can’t get a read on her,” he says with forced conviction.
My breath stops as his true thoughts—his honest fears—enter my mind, and I pause the tape to turn and glare at him.
“She’s not fucking dead! She wouldn’t kill herself.”
Araya drops to her knees, and Rex’s eyes soften on his mother. It’s then I see it. Both of them thinking the same thing at once, sharing the memory I’ve never seen before.
Aria slicing her wrists with uranium dipped knives and letting herself bleed out after her first breakup. She didn’t even really care about the guy, but her emotions overwhelmed her. Everyone told me her emotions were driven by her empathic abilities and amplified to a dangerous level where everything hurts more than imaginable. They warned me over and over. I just destroyed her, and now they both think... No. Fuck no!
“She’s not dead!” I yell again, unsure about who I am trying to convince—them or me.
I turn back to the screen just as Kellan’s voice fills the room. “The facial recognition software is fucked. Simone is trying to install a new program, but it’s taking forever.”
“Was it tampered with?” I ask, looking closely at every dark-haired girl on the screen. None of them are her.
“No,” he grumbles. “At least we can’t find anything proving it. It looks like it crashed about a week ago, but no one has had to use it, so it went undetected. The systems here are rarely updated, and programs crashing are a common occurrence.”
My breath leaves me when the image on the screen gives me hope. I can’t see her face, but I know her body better than I know my own.
“Got her,” I whisper, and everyone in the room goes silent.
I shut down my mind so I don’t hear their thoughts, and I follow her through the screens, flipping to the next camera each time. She ran outside directly after she saw me. The cameras have her walking through the gate after flashing her credentials to the guards. The last camera stops just half a mile down the road, and it barely catches her disappearing in a blur as she races toward the canyon.
For a fleeting, horrifying moment, I worry about why she went to the canyon. A fall wouldn’t kill her normally, but that canyon is... I honestly don’t know how deep it is. It was made during the first wars after the virus spread. Bombs were dropped all over, creating massive, deep craters and canyons. And there’s so many uranium deposits down there because of the old war… Any tip at the bottom could be… No. I won’t think about this. I refuse.
“Can you track her from there?” I ask, turning to Kellan.
“I think so. As long as she didn’t cover her trail. As fast as she’s going on that frame, I doubt she covered anything.”
He doesn’t bother with the door, and I follow him to the window. One by one, we all drop, thudding to the ground. Kellan is the first one to the gate, and I let him lead even though I’m faster. He’s the better tracker.
Brazen and Rex lag behind, unable to keep up with the wicked pace, and Mel suddenly appears at my side as Araya runs right behind Kellan.
“Where have you been?” I ask while leaping over a massive trench. She leaps as well, and rolls back to her feet when she messes up her landing.
“I had to grab olophine. Brazen is worried about the mental state of so many hybrids that are this ramped up. I’m faster, so I went. I saw you guys running, and I caught up.”
That makes my blood pump faster. Brazen is worried about what Aria has done as well. Fuck. This can’t be good. So help me, someone will die if they’ve taken her. I’ll die if she has… No. I still won’t let my mind go there.
“Over here!” Kellan yells, running up a hillside. “It’s a thread from the shirt she was wearing,” he says while stumbling to a halt and picking up the thread he has promised us.
Thank God. We’re on the right trail.
He looks up the hillside and sniffs the air. After examining the grass, he starts running again, and we all follow. Each new hill drops us into another valley, and we continue racing over the horrible terrain. Everyone stays in line behind Kellan, and he watches each new scene with a shrewd eye.
Just as we top another hillside, Araya drops to her knees, her mouth unhinged as she stares on at something in disbelief.
Panic consumes me, and I flick on my night vision, trying to see what she has already managed to find.
“No!” I hear Rex scream, dropping beside Araya as he catches up.