Page 5

ARIA

For over two hours, I’ve been out here with my knees curled up to my chest, my tears falling in rapid succession, and my body shaking from my sobs. I feel as though someone just ripped my heart out, and it’s no one’s fault but my own.

I knew this was coming. I knew it the second I felt their connection. It was so strong and undeniable, suffocating me with the inescapable truth that I tried to contest. My punishment is this—seeing Jase go to the woman he was meant to be with.

I’m the only person in the world to have ever been able to truly deny their counter. Not even my mother could deny hers—not that she really wanted to. In fact, I’m the first and only hybrid to ever not want her counter. My hope of Jase loving me enough to deny his was a fool’s quest from the beginning.

In a world full of freaks, I’m still the biggest freak of them all.

It’s not love in our world—a hybrid has no choice. It’s an inescapable, predestined fate, and we’re nothing more than destiny’s science experiments. Now I’m with no one, because I can’t love Kellan. What’s the point in even trying?

I’m miles away from the compound, sitting on a hillside that overlooks a canyon. I want to fall, to drop, to make it all go away. But I know I can’t. Even with my emotions heightened to the nth degree, I can’t do that to my family again.

“Aria,” a familiar voice calls, and I sniffle while turning to see the friendly face full of sympathy.

“How’d you find me?” I ask weakly, hiccupping out a sob.

A frown mars his gentle face as he comes to sit down beside me. Together, we sit silently and stare out at the canyon.

“It wasn’t easy,” he says after a minute. “Everyone’s looking for you, though, so you had to be found eventually. Are you okay? I heard what happened. You knew it was coming. Counters are hard to deny. It’s amazing you’ve denied yours for this long. At least now you don’t have to fight it.”

If he thinks he’s making me feel better, he’s crazy. “I don’t want Kellan. I don’t want anything right now. Except solitude. Could you leave me alone, please? And don’t tell them where I am. I just need some time to myself.”

He pats my leg and then reaches inside his jacket to pull out a flask. “It’s whiskey. Looks like you could use more than I have, but I’ll give you all I’ve got.”

I smile gratefully, though it probably looks as forced as it feels. Taking the flask from him, I mutter my thanks and then turn it up. The burn is stronger than usual, and I lap it up, swallowing it down as I lie back, feeling tired—too tired to hold my eyes open.

I succumb quickly to the beautiful sleep that claims me, and pray for peace within my dreams. My nightmares can’t compare to my reality, so anything is better than living with my eyes open.

JASE

“Where the hell is my daughter?” Araya barks as she bursts into the room.

I don’t even answer as I study the surveillance footage that I’ve been watching for hours. Somewhere on here there has to be a small clue as to where she went.

“Answer me now, Jason!” she yells.

“Don’t you think I’d answer you if I fucking knew,” I growl. “Facial recognition didn’t find her. Someone has tampered with it, further proving this was an attack. Kellan and Simone are trying to fix it, and I’m watching the footage frame by frame to try to find her. I think she avoided the fucking cameras after she ran away.”

“So the girl pretended to be your counter and then she tried to blood rape you. But you think it was all to attack Aria?” she asks in disbelief, her worry overtaking her anger.

Brazen walks in and puts his arm around Araya, trying to comfort her as she works to hold it together.

“I know it was. I finally got to read the bitch’s fucking mind. It was barely a glimpse, but I saw the scorpion tattoos in her mind, and I felt the peace she had when envisioning them. I promised Aria I would try to keep you from getting involved, but right now, she’s all I’m worried about. If we don’t find her soon, they could get to her first. I can’t lose her.”

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.

“God, no,” Kellan says, turning and gazing at something in shock.

I push past them all, not seeing any-damn-thing, until my heart flips me the bird and tries to expire. Dark hair is splayed across the ground, a small, delicate body is resting in a sleeping position, beautiful eyes are closed, and there’s no heartbeat coming from the still girl on the ground.

Slowly, I approach as my heartbeat thuds in my ears, my mind screaming for me not to get any closer, but still, my heavy feet trudge on until I reach her. Tears ravage my cheeks as the sobs rip free, and I drop to her side.

Her cheeks are still red from the tears she cried—the ones she shed because of me—and her body is limp, meaning this has been recent. She’s just sleeping, though. She’s not dead.

“Wake up, baby,” I whisper, my voice too muffled by my emotions to fully understand my words as I wrap my arms around her and pull her to be closer.

Once her head is nestled into the crook of my neck, and her body is encased by my arms, I start rocking her. My tears fall harder when she doesn’t respond, and I block out Araya as she repeats no over and over, her words becoming an almost hollow shrill.

“Please wake up,” I whisper, pretending as though her skin isn’t ice cold. She’s just sleeping. She’s not dead. She’s not gone. She’s just tired.

“Oh dear God,” a voice whispers as several stomping feet become noticeable. Vaguely, I can hear the chaos of the minds behind me, letting me know Captain Fricks just followed us with an army. He was prepared to fight someone, but he doesn’t have to. Aria is here. She just has to wake up.

“Baby, you have to wake up,” I say more urgently, the panic in my chest expanding and becoming painful as it presses down with the force of ten hybrids.

“Jase,” Mel murmurs, but she finishes her words with her mind. “ She’s gone.”

“No,” I say through the emotions choking me, objecting to her mind’s words.

A roar behind me tells me Rex is losing it, but I don’t turn around as my sister wrestles with him to take the olophine. Aria isn’t gone. He’s overreacting. She’s about to wake up, and then I can explain everything. Then she and I can get married tonight. No more waiting.

No more waiting ever again. I’ll never waste a minute with her. She just has to wake up and let me prove it.

“You have to wake up,” I murmur even as her body grows colder. “We have to plan our wedding. Our eternity.”

Simone comes to stand behind me, tears covering her face as her mind says the same thing everyone else thinks. But she’s wrong. They’re all wrong.

I try to read Aria’s mind, desperate to find out why she’s not waking up, but nothing is there. I can always hear her thoughts unless she manages to block me out. She’s the only person I’ve never been able to tune out.

As my breaths grow harder, I pull her to me, kissing her soft lips and ignoring their chill. My rocking grows more consistent, and I ignore the jab at my shoulder, pretending as though my sister hasn’t just stabbed me with a uranium dipped needle and injected me with the burning medicine I don’t need.

I won’t go savage. There’s no reason. She’s going to wake up. We still have an eternity together. She’s not ready to die.

“You bastard!” Rex barks as he rips me away from the girl I love.

The first crunching punch he delivers to my face doesn’t even hurt, and I don’t shield myself from the next five punches either. I just lie there, letting him swing his fists rapidly and enduring the punishment.

“Rex! Stop!” Mel screams, diving onto him and pushing him away.

But I don’t move. My world crashes down around me as reality tears through me like a searing knife without mercy. My eternity is gone, taken by my own weakness to fight when she needed me to the most. She did this because of me.

“It looks like she poisoned herself,” Captain Fricks says, his voice almost an echo as my head spins viciously, making the nausea worse.

The sky parts for Araya’s wrath when she loses her sanity against her usual restraint. Monstrous threads of storms start spiraling out of control, and all I can think is how much I hope she takes her anger out on me and kills me first.

“Captain Fricks, can you send for a burial squad?” Simone asks in a rasp whisper. “I can’t stand seeing her like this anymore.”

“Of course,” he says gently. He hugs her to him as she stands and weeps.

I crawl up to my knees, and I lay my head on Aria’s still chest that lacks the heartbeat she needs. I can’t go on without her, so death has to find me and show me mercy.