Page 27 of Light the Fire
Shaking out my fist and the ache that sprinted up my arm from my fingers, I scowled at him. “Why are you being such an asshole to her?”
He scoffed and tugged his shirt back on over his head, then his pants. “She’s been living in a sheltered little bubble. She needs to learn that not everyone isnice.”
“So you’re going to be the one to teach her that? You’re being a dick just to be a dick?”
He shrugged, but something glimmered in his eyes, something … wild and barely reined-in? I cocked my head at him, but a moment later it was gone.
“Sure, her escape helped us escape, but now she’s just a liability. We worked too damn hard, killed too many people to let her naiveite steal our hard-earned freedom. I’m not going back, not to any compound, not for anything. I’ll put a bullet in my head before I fucking do.”
“And you know what that means if you do,” I said plainly.
He knew. I didn’t have to say it out loud.
It was the same reason why none of us had defected. If one of us defected, we all had to defect. Because if one of us died, we all died. Every commander we’d ever had, had made certain of that. It strengthened our bond. Our connection and our willingness to protect our brother and return back to the compound. They started implanting them shortly after they tortured and killed Chance.
“Just be fucking nice. She’s been through a lot, too. We don’t know what kind of shit Moord put her through.”
The look Zane gave me said he didn’t believe for a second that she’d experienced anything but a cushy life in an ivory tower with champagne and caviar at her beck and call.
“If Moord has been with her since her training began, then you can bet she’s been tortured even if it was just to test her limits and see how fast she could heal,” Rix said, joining us and helping me with the sail. “We’ve never had a more sadistic commander at the compound than that fucker, and you know they’d want to learn the full capabilities of a triple-threat hybrid, so they would push her as hard as they could. Same reason why they upped our torture when they started dosing us with her blood. To see how much we could handle.”
Zane and I both grunted in agreement. We thought Commander Unte had been a psychopath, based on the way he tortured Chance, but he’d been a fluffy bunny with compassion for days compared with Moord. And Haina had been raised by the man. It was a wonder she wasn’t a cold, lifeless robotic psychopath. It had to be the Theta strain keeping her human. Most Kappas and Sigmas had damaged frontal lobes rendering many of them psychopaths, but Thetas, Lambdas and Amlins still had empathy and guilt.
But I could tell that Haina wasn’t a psychopath. Based on the way she’d reacted to seeing Rix covered in blood, even though it wasn’t his, I could tell she had a heart and a soul, despite how hard Moord had tried to break both of them.
I shuddered at the thought of what he’d probably put her through over the years, of all that she’d endured.
We got the sail up, and with the stored energy from the solar battery, we had the sailboat moving out into open water in no time, continuing to hug the shore and the shadows. Unlike last night, when the sky had been clear and the full moon out and bright, guiding our travels, there was cloud coverage tonight, and it allowed us to keep our anonymity better. We still had the cloaking device on, of course, which also helped, but that didn’t mean we were totally safe. We only knew a fraction of the technology the compounds used—even me. So who knew if they had drones or other machines that could penetrate the cloaking device Neffers had left for Haina? I added taking apart the device to my to-do list. I didn’t want to increase our vulnerability by turning it off in order to get a better look at the interior, but if I could increase its radius and stabilize it better, then it would give us greater coverage and allow us to travel during the day without the risk of being detected.
We weren’t foolish enough to believe that after blowing up the compound and killing everyone on the beach that we were home free. Other compounds and commanders would be alerted. The president would be alerted, and they’d start hunting for us. Haina was too valuable of a commodity to just allow her to disappear.
A triple-threat hybrid source and a Hellcat. She was like the Hope Diamond.
Everyone would be after her, and it was up to us to protect her until she could better protect herself.
Zane was at the helm, steering the boat, while Rix, with a rifle in his hand, was on the bow keeping watch.
I jerked my chin at each of them before climbing down below deck.
Haina was back on the bed, flat on her back and staring straight up at the ceiling.
I climbed onto the bed, propped my head on my hand, and turned to face her. “What’s going on?”
She shook her head and blinked a few times. “You tell me. This is not at all how things were supposed to go.” Her sigh hit my cheek as she turned to face me. “I mean, I’m glad you guys all escaped, too. Nobody deserves to be kept against their will. But…”
“But you have no idea what lies ahead now that Neffers is probably dead and you don’t know if you can trust us.”
She nodded and sighed again. “Yeah. I mean, how wouldyoufeel right now if you were me? Raised your entire life practically in solitude, by an unhinged sadist, then you escape and end up traveling with three guys who get doped up on your blood in order to be super soldiers.” She shot me a side-eye. “I mean, I’m free. I should be spinning around in a circle with my arms open wide letting the wind ruffle my hair, but—”
“Then do that,” I said with a huffed laugh. “Go stand on the bow, spin around,carefully, and be free.”
Her own chuckle was breathy and sweet as she rolled back over to stare at the ceiling. “I’m not really free, and we all know it.”
Yeah, we all did.
“You’re freer than you were yesterday. Than you were two days ago.”
“Yeah, I guess. But I just feel…”