CASSIE
Jason suddenly stopped running. Panting, I gave him a wide-eyed stare. “We have to keep going.” I tried to pull him toward the smattering of trees in front of us.
“I am the most powerful being on this planet and I’m running. What am I doing? I’m done.” He shook his head.
Unease flooded me. “Jason, whatever you’re thinking, it’s probably not good.”
“How long do you think we can run before exhaustion wins?”
I didn’t know about him, but I was about five minutes past that already. “We don’t have a choice.”
“Wrong.” He started retracing our steps and I chased after him, latching on to his arm.
“You can’t fight the entire agency. If you take out these agents, the entire department will come after you.”
Shaking off my hand, he ran into the clearing and spread his arms out. “Give it your best shot!”
The agents opened fire. Jason held his arms out in front of him and his energy leaped from the palm of his hands rising to shield him from head to toe. A hail of bullets hit his energy and dissipated like smoke vapors.
I covered my mouth with my hand as chills raked my body. From where I was, I could see the terror on the agents’ faces, their desperation to hold Jason at bay. He was terrifying and magnificent. Beautiful and dark. Gentle and dangerous.
When the agents scrambled to reload, Jason said, “You will eventually run out of ammunition. I can wait you out and what I did to these bullets, I can do to your body. Who wants to go first?”
Looking at each other, the agents backed up, and Jason walked toward them, his power still shielding him. “Tell the Ragespawn posing as Sam Grant that I’ll be at the cliffs where I rescued Micah tomorrow. He needs to come alone. Go!”
The agents turned after a few seconds and ran to the SUV. When we were alone, Jason collapsed, sprawling onto the ground.
I knelt beside him. “Watching what you can do is frightening.” How would he react to me once he knew what I’d done?
He turned his head, locking his gaze with mine, holding me captive by the churning depths of his eyes. “Seeing what you can do is frightening, too.”
“Me?”
He took my hand and turned it over so the palm faced up. He tapped the center with one finger. “My heart is here. You have the power to crush it.”
“I hope that never happens,” I said. I couldn’t betray him. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself. But if I didn’t betray him, there was also a price.
Not wanting to dwell on how everything would change once Jason hated me, I changed the subject. “When you meet the creature at the cliffs he won’t come alone.”
“I know. The creature and his crew will be at the cliffs, and since I didn’t give them a time, they’ll show up early and stay late. In the meantime, we’ll be inside the agency looking for a way to clear your name.”
“You want to walk into the agency,” I said slowly.
He eased up onto his elbows. “There has to be proof there that the Ragespawn isn’t your father. If we can get that, we can turn this whole thing around. Make the world see you were framed by an alien posing as your father.”
“What about you? How will that help you? Some of the agents have seen you use your power.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
He squinted up at the sky as the afternoon blue suddenly darkened with storm clouds. “We need to get out of this area. The agents will call it in and others will arrive soon.” He clambered to his feet, his breath escaping on a slow hiss. When he took a step, his face screwed into a mask of pain.
Wrapping one arm around his waist, I said, “Lean on me.”
“I don’t know what’s going on. I feel shaky.”
“We haven’t eaten much lately, and if your power uses energy from what you eat, then maybe you’re experiencing low sugar? Or maybe absorbing my injuries was too much.”
He shook his head. “I think I need to rest.”
The clouds ruptured, dumping a hard rain on us. I always loved walking in the rain but that was when it was gentle, not this wash-me-into-a-gully kind. Sweeping my soggy hair away from my face, I surveyed the area. A worn sign advertising a hotel six miles ahead was on the side of the road heading out of town. Jason noticed me looking and said, “If the agents are going to do a sweep, it’ll be one of the first places they’ll look.”
“There’s an old summer campground a couple of miles east of here. It’s closed down now, and the land is overgrown with weeds and junk from when people used to party. Almost everyone has forgotten about the place, but it does have a caretaker’s cabin,” I said.
“Your secret party lair?”
I shook my head. “Sydney told me about it.” Mentioning my best friend created a pang in the center of my chest and my throat tightened. I missed her. I missed my mom. I missed everything in the before, but I didn’t regret knowing or loving Jason, even though after I did what I planned to do, our relationship would be over.
When we arrived at the camp, it was clear no one had been around for a while. The door to the caretaker’s cabin was half covered by a spider web. Jason wiped the web aside with a stroke of his hand and bracing his shoulder, forced the door open.
A crappy looking bed sat against one wall behind a long table with a broken chair propped against it. One of the windows was coated in thick dust while the other one was missing part of the glass.
Jason arched his eyebrows. “Droppings in front of the windows means there are mice or other animals in here.”
“They won’t try to kill us and I’m not afraid of animals,” I said, pushing a finger against the ratty blanket covering the mattress. When something moved, I shrieked, and leaped backward, yanking the blanket with me. A tennis ball fell off the bed and bounced a few times before rolling beneath the table.
“Not being afraid doesn’t extend to tennis balls?” He grinned. Soaking wet, with streaks of dirt on his clothes, he still looked too good to be true.
My conscience prickled. “Sneaking into town will be easier if we do it under the cover of darkness. We should try to sleep now.”
“Good idea. Once we’ve rested a couple of hours, we’ll find a way to town and hide close to the agency.”
I stripped down to my underclothes, glad that the weather hadn’t yet turned cold, and crawled onto the mattress. Hoping I wouldn’t catch something that would make me itch, I hauled the blanket with me and scooted until my back nearly touched the wall. A mental image of what my last moments of life would be like if my plan failed flashed into my mind’s eye. While I assumed I wouldn’t see death coming, what if I witnessed the death of my mom or Sydney before I died?
When I shivered at the thought, Jason sat on the bed for a second, then stretched out beside me. Facing me, he opened his arms, and I went into them, pressing my head against his chest. The steady beat of his heart under my ear comforted me.
“Trust me to figure something out,” he whispered.
I didn’t answer because I had nothing to say. Exhaustion weighed on me, but I was too keyed up to sleep.
He caught my hand in his, and kissed the tips of my fingers. “There has to be a way.”
I had to bite the inside of my jaw to keep from saying anything about my plan. I would have trusted him if he would have told me the truth sooner. But how could I trust him now knowing all he cared about was getting himself and his family off the planet?
JASON
I drifted in and out of sleep for a few hours. When I woke, the cabin was pitch black. I guessed it was about three in the morning judging from the way the moon shone through the window by the bed.
“Have you slept?” I asked Cassie when I turned over and looked at her.
“No, I couldn’t.”
I didn’t like the sad note to her voice. “Why not?” “I’ve been thinking about the Earth.” Her voice sounded funny, like she was holding back tears. I rose up on one arm and looked down at her, waiting for her to go on. I kept my gaze on hers, watching the play of moonlight across her face. A sense of unease filled me.
“The tectonic plates are basically responsible for the earthquakes, right?”
“Right,” I said. “The power of the Void as it expands is what’s forcing the movement and destabilizing the Earth’s core.”
“Then we need to harness that power instead of letting it cause damage.”
I frowned, trying to keep my frustration at bay. “You want to force the power from the Void to seal the Earth’s core.”
“Exactly.” She looked at me.
“To do that, you’d need a power force that your world doesn’t have,” I said.
“But yours does. Or at least the Tazavorn has.”
I leaped out of the bed. She had no idea what the Void was capable of doing to anyone who messed with it. “You want to use me…to use my family.”
She sat and reached for my hand. “Yes, I came up with a plan. I wasn’t sure it would work, but after taking the time to think about it—”
“No. You could kill my family.”
Blinking, she let go of my hand. “Their leaving will essentially kill mine. Once the spaceship fires up, it’ll start a chain reaction that will push the Earth to the brink. Within minutes, it’ll implode.”
“Cassie, getting dangerously close to the opening of the Void to fire our combined power into it is too risky. Trust me to come up with something.”
Frustrated, she finger-combed her hair, then let her hands rest on her legs. “You know that your family has the power to help and you know that they’ll never willingly do that.” Leaning forward, she reached for my hand. “We can find another way for you and your family to get home. But for now, all you have to do is help—”
“The rock in the Void is a living organism. If it comes under attack, it will defend itself. It sends out shock waves and if the wave hits me or my family while we’re fighting it, it could target our life force and we’d die.”
She swept her hand up to indicate the markings the outcasting had left on my body. By now, they’d already covered my arms up to the elbows. “The family that tossed you aside.”
I ignored the dig. “You have to believe in me, okay?”
“I did believe in you and you kept the truth from me. What if I trust you and we wait and then it’s too late? I can’t sit around. I have to do something.” Cassie swung her legs over the side of the bed, and reached for her still wet clothes.
I probably shouldn’t have, but I was tired, hungry, and more than a little angry at the situation. I scoffed, and said sarcastically, “You’re going to single-handedly save the your planet?”
Her shoes squeaked when she thrust her feet into them and marched to the door. Hand on the knob, her shoulders radiated tension. “Not by myself. If the aliens on my planet would cooperate, then there’s a chance.”
“My family isn’t going to help.”
“They will if they don’t have a choice.”
“You think a human girl is strong enough to make a handful of aliens do what you want them to do?”
She jerked open the door and half turned toward me. “A human girl can learn a lot about aliens when her father spent his life hunting them.” Her smile held a world of sadness, and then she left, slamming the door behind her.