The Darkest Legacy

I PARKED THE CAR ALONGSIDE a cracked driveway, staring up at the small house at the end of it. My head was heavy and ached with the need to sleep, but my heart had been galloping since we crossed the Georgia state line.

“Here,” Roman said, passing me a water bottle. I took it gratefully, chugging until it was gone.

Priyanka squinted at the structure through the darkness. “Wow, what a super-fun murder house. Can’t wait to go in.”

Roman slid the rest of the way across the backseat, rolling down the window. “No movement inside. No lights.”

The white cottage-style house appeared bigger on second glance. The left half of it had been built into the hill’s natural curve, adding a lower story to the home. Over the years, wildlife had crept up on the property. The trees in the backyard were overgrown and threatening to topple onto the roof.

“I’m glad we came,” I said. “Even if this is a dead end, at least we can rule it out.”

I hadn’t put enough hope into this to feel truly disappointed if that ended up being the case. The idea of Ruby living in a place like this only filled me with more dread.

“Let’s go have a quick look and be on our way,” Priyanka said. She reached into the backpack at her feet for one of the flashlights, prompting me to pull the other one out from the seat pocket.

The night was alive with a symphony of cicadas and moaning power lines. Heavy cables stretched over the front yard. As I passed beneath them, sound became sensation. Every nerve in my body lit up with awareness of the electricity around me. The streetlamp, another house’s garage door, and something…something inside the house.

My footsteps stilled. Priyanka swept her flashlight’s beam over the front of the house. Roman clicked off the safety on his gun.

An object moved at the edge of my vision. I switched on my flashlight, searching for the small wind chime I’d thought I’d seen hanging at the slumped edge of the porch.

I hadn’t imagined it. The wind chime glinted as the beam’s glow passed over it. A breeze swept up from behind us, making it shiver out light notes, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from that small piece of glass. The one shaped like a crescent moon.

“Zu, wait!” Priyanka called. She lunged, catching the back of my shirt. “Slow down. You don’t know what, let alone who, is inside.”

“I think it’s her,” I said, breathless. “There’s a power source inside, something electronic….”

“This place could be rigged to explode,” Roman said. “The door could be on some kind of trigger.”

“Okay, I wasn’t thinking that,” Priyanka said. “Thanks for the mental image, though.”

He reached over us, grabbing one of the boards nailed over the front windows. The rusted nail keeping it in place slid free with one strong pull. Roman peered through the window, angling his body just enough to keep from giving anyone inside a target to shoot at.

“It’s clear,” he said, moving in front of the window to pry another board loose.

“There’s some kind of machine in there,” I told them. “The feeling is faint, but…it’s almost like it’s not fully on or off?”

“That’s not exactly reassuring.” Priyanka turned toward the door, raising her booted foot. “One way to find out.”

She kicked it open, splintering the door from where it had been locked into its frame.

“Every time someone says that, it’s bad news,” I said, taking in a steadying breath.

“Well, we didn’t blow up just now,” Priyanka said, dropping an arm over my shoulder as we stepped inside. “How bad can it be?”

The house was devoid of furniture. Even the cabinets in the kitchen had been stripped of their doors. As far as I could tell, the only thing inside the house was a freestanding server rack, complete with a monitor. It was the source of the low voltage I had felt outside.

Roman circled the server rack, kicking at its cord. It was still plugged into the wall, but the system had clearly idled. “Is it malfunctioning? It doesn’t seem to be on.”

“There was probably an outage and it just needs to be rebooted,” Priyanka said. “Want me to do the honors?”

I wiped my finger along the monitor, slashing through the thick dust. No one had been here recently. Certainly not Ruby. But if she’d sent us here, I wanted to know why. “Yeah. Turn it on. Let’s see what information she felt was too dangerous to keep at Haven.”

Priyanka passed her flashlight to me, cracking her knuckles. “I’ve been dying to get my hands on an Arclight four hundred. This one is a few years old, but it’s the sweet, sweet rose of secure servers. You’ve got to have careful hands to avoid its thorns.”

Priyanka hummed as she went down the row of machines on the rack, pushing buttons. The change in the flow of electricity was immediate, stroking my senses as the machines warmed up and began to whir. There was a small keyboard drawer just beneath the monitor. She tested a few of the keys.

“Leaving it here where anyone could break in and steal it seems like a big risk,” Roman said slowly. “You said they had a solid security and tech setup at Haven, including a server, right?”

“It just seems…careless. She wouldn’t be able to stop anyone from taking it,” Roman continued. “It’s not a close enough drive for her to intervene if someone tried.”

“I think she was trying to make sure that someone would know about this place,” Roman said simply. “In the event she couldn’t get to it herself.”

“Ah!” Priyanka let out a happy little noise. “I don’t need to reboot at all—the plug for the second server came loose. Here we go.”

Priyanka beamed as the screen switched on with an electronic beep. The difference in the flow of power to the devices was immediate; a sudden surge erupted from the nearby outlet, flowing through the veins of wiring like blood.

Giving Priyanka a worried glance, Roman moved back toward the window and took up post there, keeping watch of the street. “Something about this doesn’t feel right. I’m going to check the perimeter of the house, make sure there’s nothing going on.”

By the time I looked back to acknowledge what he’d said, Roman was already outside.

The keys clacked like machine-gun fire. In the darkness of the house, the computer screen cast Priyanka in an eerie green glow.

“Anything?” I asked, coming to stand beside her. The endless scrolling code was meaningless to me.

She chewed on her lower lip. “I need another minute. The security on this system is—”

UPLOADING…

FILE TRANSFER UNKNOWN USER

UPLOAD COMPLETE

ARCHIVE 1 DELETED

UPLOAD COMPLETE

ARCHIVE 2 DELETED

“Shit,” Priyanka said. “Someone is downloading and deleting the material off the server.”

UPLOAD COMPLETE

ARCHIVE 3 DELETED

UPLOAD COMPLETE

ARCHIVE 4 DELETED

“No, don’t unplug it, it could corrupt the data,” Priyanka said. “Just—Oh, screw it. Let’s go, you skiddie.”

Her hands moved from the keyboard to the monitor. She gripped it tightly, closing her eyes.

They flashed open again, just as the screen exploded with more lines of green code. Letters and numbers flew across the screen, flickering between the upload status and a list of encrypted files.

UPLOAD COMPLETE

ARCHIVE 5 DELETED

“Priya? Priyanka!” As I reached for her, a static bolt jumped between my finger and her shoulder. I bit my tongue at the snap of pain, but she didn’t so much as flinch. Her eyes were wide open, her pupils the size of pins. They tracked back and forth frantically, as if she were caught in a REM cycle.

UPLOAD COMPLETE

ARCHIVE 6 DELETED

When I connected with a circuit, I’d always imagined myself dissolving into a million particles of light and energy. I knew it was impossible, that I hadn’t actually become the electricity, but reason could tell you one thing while instinct told you another. Watching Priyanka now, her body as stiff as the server’s rack, all I could think of was a plug slipping into an outlet.

The screen pulsed with files, images, code, flittering across the screen too quickly for my mind to grasp what I was actually seeing. Priyanka’s eyes rolled back into her skull, still sliding back and forth as if she were scanning lines of material faster than any human could.

UPLOAD PAUSED

UPLOADING…

UPLOAD PAUSED

UPLOADING…

The door shut behind me. I whirled around in time to see Roman’s face fall as he took in the sight of her.

He shot across the room, coming just short of touching her as Priyanka’s whole body began to vibrate. I couldn’t tell where the power source to the servers began and Priyanka ended. Roman snapped his fingers in front of her face. “Damn you, Priya, let up!”

“No, don’t do that!” Roman barked. “It’ll send her into shock. I need—I need you to go into the car. The trunk. There are two bottles, one’s labeled metoprolol and the other haloperidol. I need one syringe.”

The flood of information on the screen matched the tremors working through her, the flickering of her eyes, the rattling of the devices on the rack. Distantly, I was aware of the sharp trill of the servers, the smell of smoke and melting plastic.

Roman set his shoulders back, taking in a deep, steadying breath. His hand hovered over her arm, but didn’t touch her. “Take the gun off me and hold on to it.”

“You’re going to be all right,” he said—not to Priyanka, but to me. “Please. Get the metoprolol and haloperidol.”

As Roman finally grabbed on to Priyanka, the lines of his body went painfully rigid.

He jerked, swaying slightly on his feet. His eyes snapped shut, but I could see them moving beneath the lids, that same trancelike state.

“I’m going to kill you both,” I muttered. “Just as soon as I wake up from this hallucination.”

That was the explanation I clung to. It could be that I was still in the car, still asleep, and this was…what had Chubs called it? Sleep paralysis, where your mind is awake enough to feel terrorized by your nightmares, but your body is locked in a prison of unconsciousness, unable to react or fend off the monsters.

Whatever this was, this connection to the machines, it wasn’t psionic. But, no, that wasn’t right, either—it could be psionic. That term encapsulated anything related to unnatural powers of the mind. It just wasn’t like anything I’d ever seen.

The machines whined pitifully, power choking their internal circuit boards. Every sound in the room aside from our breathing was unnatural. Clicking, pulsing, whirring, beeping.

I shook myself out of the daze and ran for the door. Grass and mud splattered against my ankles as I crossed the lawn and fumbled with the trunk’s latch. Roman had left the car unlocked, which struck me as a careless move for someone who otherwise thought of nearly everything when it came to our safety.

I tore open the drugstore bags, picking through the boxes of medicine and food until I found the bottles I needed. One, the metoprolol, was in pill form and the other, haloperidol, was in liquid form.

The syringe—that’s why I needed it. I found a box of them and dumped them out, clutching a handful. Neither of the boxes had instructions on how to administer them.

“Of course not, because it’s supposed to be done by a fucking doctor,” I muttered. “What the hell—?”

A sudden spark of power shot across my senses, burning through every other thought. My adrenaline kicked in as I straightened, searching for the source. Distant, but coming nearer. Three…four…five…six sparks. Low-grade power like…

I pressed the medicine to my chest and bolted for the house, shoving the door open with my shoulder. My feet slid across the dusty floor, coming to a dead stop.

The bottles and syringes tumbled from my arms as I reached back and pulled out the gun I’d taken from Roman.

Lana hovered beside Roman and Priyanka, staring at them through the curtain of her wild hair. She hadn’t touched them; she hadn’t seemed to have done anything to them. Yet.

The girl didn’t move. She only looked at me with that thousand-yard stare. “Where’s her medicine?”

The sparks were close now, just on the other side of the house. Another extraction team.

As soon as that thought registered, another came right on its heels: I still had my power.

My gaze shot back to Priyanka. She was trembling harder now, as if it were taking every last bit of strength she had to hold on.

“That’s right, Pri. Figured it out, have you?” The girl was fixated on Roman’s and Priyanka’s stiff forms, watching through heavy-lidded eyes as they worked. Then, like puppets whose strings had been cut, they collapsed to the floor, still writhing. Lana ignored me, ignored the gun, and went for the medicine.

I fired a shot at the ground beside her, stopping her. Outside, the team of soldiers that had come to support her was gathering. I only had seconds before they stormed the house.

My gaze fixed on the other girl. Lana’s presence alone wasn’t what caused the suppression. She must have had to will it to happen, just like the rest of us. And right now, I was still free of it.

My silver thread of power wove through each of the sparks outside. I seized control of the batteries on their comm units and urged the electricity forward, tugging until I heard the soldiers begin to shout in agony.

A few of the soldiers were still alive; I heard them groaning in pain. The first attack hadn’t been enough to erase the threat they posed. Not completely. The thread found another, bigger power source. The AC unit idling outside.

Lana looked up slowly, her eyes narrowing, and I seized that one last opportunity.

The explosion from the unit knocked us both off our feet, sending the gun sailing out of my hand. My vision blacked out as my head cracked against the ground.

When I came to, Lana had pushed herself up off the floor. She staggered to her feet, pressing a hand against a cut on her forehead. The back wall of the house was on fire. Tendrils of it raced along the floors and ceiling, pouring more smoke into the room.

She dropped down onto her knees beside the liquid medicine, clutching one of the syringes in her fist. She jabbed the needle into the open bottle and filled it with surprising care, eyeing the measurement.

Roman groaned from the ground, his legs curling in pain. He didn’t seem aware of his sister or the explosion. There was no world outside of whatever agony was scorching him from the inside out.

Lana crawled toward Priyanka, the syringe in her hand. I dove for her, tackling her back to the ground.

The lance of pain that skidded across my brain still caught me by surprise as Lana switched off my powers. Her elbow knocked me back. That same horrible rush of hot pins ran down my back, leaving a jagged, gaping emptiness, as if my abilities had been physically torn out from under my skin.

“She needs her medicine!” Lana growled at me. “I’m trying to help her!”

“You don’t even know,” Lana taunted, her voice turning singsong. “You don’t even know! Aw, did you think they were your friends? Did they tell you some sad story about how very awful their lives have been?”

“They told me enough,” I said, as we circled each other. Lana licked her lips, obviously relishing this. “They told me about the Psion Ring.”

Her face screwed up. “The Psion Ring? What are you talking about? We were raised by Gregory Mercer—you’ve heard of him, haven’t you? I can see it in your face.”

The connection snapped into place. I did know that name. He was on Interpol’s wanted list for weapons trafficking. His had been one of the few crime syndicates to stay afloat and thrive after the United States’ borders had been closed during the Psi epidemic.

Blue Star. Like the tattoo on Priyanka’s wrist. Like the tattoo Lana pushed up her sleeve to show me on her own wrist.

After everything, they’d still lied to me. The only difference was that this time, I’d been stupid enough to believe them.

“Mr. Mercer made us. He cared for us,” Lana said. “My brother and Priyanka let someone else fill their heads with lies. They hurt him when they left, so badly, and I—” Her face hardened with rage. “They’ll need to answer for it. But the punishment won’t be as harsh, now that they’ve decided to come back with me.”

“They don’t want to go back,” I told her, my throat raw from the smoke. “They want to help you get away from…from Mercer.”

“Do they?” Lana asked, her voice too sweet for the dark look on her face. “Why else would they be here, turning on the server and helping Mercer? That little worm wouldn’t give us the actual server location. He would only give us remote access to it after we extracted him from the house.”

Anger, as helpless as it was scalding, poured through me. It was impossible. Clancy’s memory was locked down. How could he remember where he’d left a server in his past life enough to—The rest of her words caught up to me.

Extraction. Clancy had asked Blue Star to get him out of his house. Out of Charleston.

“You don’t believe me,” she said. Reaching into her jacket’s pocket she pulled out a familiar black device. The spare battery. “Tell me, why was Priya carrying the tracker from the drone? Why did she switch it on, if she didn’t want me to come get them?”

I drew in a sharp breath, choking on it. The blood left my head so rapidly it felt as if the floor were tilting up underfoot.

If we keep chasing her, she’ll run farther and faster, Priyanka had said. We have to find a way to get her to come to us.

Oh, Priyanka, I thought, glancing toward her shifting form on the ground. Of all the stupid, desperate things…

“She wasn’t telling you she wanted a pickup,” I told Lana. “She was luring you into a trap. And you fell right into it.”

Lana’s face transformed, hardening with rage. Her top lip peeled back, and it was my only warning before she charged.

The wind rushed out of me as she drove her head into my gut, knocking us both to the ground. I shoved back at her as she hissed and clawed, pinning me, her knees locked tight to my side. I tried kicking her off as her fist slammed into my cheek.

“It was you, wasn’t it?” she screamed into my face. “You’re the one who changed them! You’re the one who took them away!”

Don’t let them get you on your back. Vida’s voice floated through my mind as dark spots clouded my vision. You’ll never be able to get up again.

My nails were broken or gone altogether, but they still left ragged marks across her nose and brow as I raked them across her face.

“I don’t have to bring you back alive,” she told me. “It’d be easier for him if you were gone. It will be easier.”

Her pupils dilated until her irises were nearly gone, and the hate in her expression made my skin feel like it was being flayed off even before the boiling agony filled my skull. It blew apart my last thoughts. My feet drummed on the ground beneath us, my whole body writhing in pain as my vision feathered with black.

At the edge of awareness, I heard the explosive crack of a gunshot and the pressure and pain suddenly eased across my whole body. With the weight off my chest, smoky air rapidly filled my lungs. I gasped and coughed, fighting the phantom hands still squeezing my throat.

Lana stood, staggering back toward the small kitchen. Her palm pressed against her shoulder. But there was no blood; the bullet hadn’t pierced through skin or muscle. There was only a rip in her jacket where the shot had grazed over the leather.

Roman had found the gun I’d lost and had lifted his torso off the ground just enough to get the shot off. I wasn’t sure which one of them looked more stunned by what he’d done. “Lana—wait!”

She turned and vanished through the smoke, and, in an instant, I knew I hadn’t taken out all the soldiers. Two figures, their pale faces burned to a painful, angry red, emerged out of the darkness of the kitchen, charging forward. Roman fired again, downing one of them, but the other already had him in his sights.

An enraged scream filled the house. Priyanka, illuminated by fire, was on her feet now. Every muscle in her body looked strung too tight as she gripped the server rack and hauled it, and all the attached devices, up off the ground as if it weighed nothing. She threw it at the soldier hard enough for it to crack the floor as it fell on top of him.

She charged toward the man, crossing the room faster than I could blink. Shoving the server rack out of her way, she knelt on his chest, clasping her hands together high over her head and slamming them down on his face. Her movements were so erratic and sharp it felt like I was watching a film skip through frames.

She was too fast. Too strong. I could see her pulse beating through her skin, racing harder and harder as she drove her hands down.

Roman crawled forward, snatching up the syringe that Lana had filled. Priyanka was still turning the man’s face into a bloody pulp when he stumbled up behind her and pressed the needle into her neck, jamming down the plunger.

“No!” she howled, swatting at it. “I’m not finished! This isn’t enough!”

Her arm knocked Roman hard enough to send him sliding across the room. He collided with the bottle of pills and snatched it up, struggling to get the lid off.

Priyanka shot to her feet with almost inhuman ease, her eyes too glassy and too bright. There was a predator’s focus to her expression. “Where is she? Where did she go?”

“Stop her!” Roman said, panic ringing in the words. “Don’t let Priya leave!”

The servers still had a lick of power left in their warm bodies. As I passed the rack, I brushed my leg against one of them, catching that slight charge and carrying it forward that last foot of distance to Priyanka.

The snap of faint voltage jumped from my fingers to her skin. She straightened, her eyes wide as it momentarily stunned her. It was just enough time to wrap her up in my arms and pin hers to her side.

Roman pressed the pills into her mouth, holding his palm over it to keep her from spitting them out. Priyanka fought both of us. Her too-fast pulse pounded against my skin as her muscles and ligaments turned to steel.

“You have to swallow them, I’m sorry, I know,” Roman was saying. “Please, take them, just take them—”

I could tell she hadn’t meant to, but she did. Sweat streaked Roman’s face as he pulled his hand back.

“Lana,” she cried, still trying to get away. Her pulse was slowing, though, the strength sapping out of her. “No…. Let me help….Please…I’m…not…”

“A sedative and…” Roman pressed his hand against his head. “And something to keep her from having a stroke.”

“Shit,” he said, pulling Priyanka’s arm around his neck. I retrieved the gun he’d used, then moved to her other side. Her legs had turned to sand beneath her, forcing me to absorb her weight.

“We have to get out of here,” Roman said, blinking rapidly. Sweat dripped from my face. The smoke was making it hard to think, and if we stayed any longer, the roof would fall in on us.

But Roman seemed almost as unsteady as Priyanka. We made slow, staggering progress across the yard. The heat from the fire roared at our backs.

When we reached the car, Roman struggled to open the back door, his hand slipping off the handle like he couldn’t get a grip on it.

“I’ll do it! Just go start the car!” I ordered. It still felt like Lana’s hands were on my neck, choking the words out of me by force.

Roman nodded, stumbling to the front of the car. The engine started just as I had gotten most of Priyanka’s long body through the door. My muscles sang in relief as I laid her in the backseat. I checked her pulse one more time, satisfied to find it slow and steady.

Fury swelled in me again as I threw the front passenger door open and slammed it shut behind me. “She got away.”

He brought both hands down on the steering wheel and swore again, this time in what I assumed was Russian.

“No,” I told him. The emergency vehicle sirens were closer now, maybe only a few streets away. “You don’t get to be angry about this. Just drive!”

Roman didn’t move. He searched the street with a desperation that might have broken my heart in any other circumstance. So I did the only thing I could think of. I pulled the gun on him.

He reached down for the stick shift, moving it out of park. The sedan lurched forward, banking up on the curve before slamming back down onto the road again. The engine revved as he tore onto the next street.

The static was back, pouring through my skull. The lights on the dashboard flickered.

“Tell me what’s going on,” I said, keeping the gun steady. I pressed my back up against the window, putting as much distance between us as I could. In the backseat, Priyanka moaned something insensible. “Tell me about Blue Star—what it has to do with any of this!”

Roman’s eyes blinked rapidly, color draining off his face like ink bleeding from wet paper. One of his fists came up to mash against his temples, beating against it. His breath fluttered in and out of his bloodless lips, which pulled back in obvious agony.

“Stop it,” I whispered. The gun shook in my hand. “Stop it! Stop hurting yourself—”

“Take…” he began. The car lurched right before he straightened it again. “Take…the…wheel….”

I shot across the seat, gripping the wheel. The speedometer climbed up and up and up past eighty, ninety, a hundred. The road came to a dead end at a school under construction just ahead; the headlights skimmed over a yellow banner proudly proclaiming OPENING FOR THE BRIGHTEST MINDS NEXT YEAR!

There wasn’t time to pull him out of the seat. I climbed over him, sitting on his lap and kicking his foot off the gas. The car squealed as I slammed my foot on the brake and spun the wheel to the right until it finally locked.

The car skidded to a stop, but not before bumping the scaffolding surrounding the sign. The banner fluttered down onto the hood of the car.