Page 32 of Shadowblood Souls: The Complete Series

Twenty-Two

Zian

A ndreas sighs and frowns down at the console he’d been prodding. “I still can’t even get the screens to turn on. Any luck over there?”

On the other side of the room, I shake my head and glower at the buttons in front of me as if I can intimidate them into functioning. “The power’s on from the generator. The door opened. There’s got to be some way to get the rest of the system going.”

My gaze slides down from the waist-height controls area across the smooth base of the console that stands it on the floor, where most of the electronic workings must be hidden. “Maybe there’s something inside that needs to be fiddled with. I’ll check if I can make out the problem.”

As I plant myself on the floor so I don’t have to crane my neck, Dominic peeks into the room.

“Still nothing,” Andreas tells him before he has to ask, and lets out a rough breath. “Man. How long do you figure they kept us in this building before we moved to the first one we remember?”

“It couldn’t have been many years,” Dominic points out in his typical contemplative way. “If we were here when we were much older than three, we’d definitely remember the move.”

“I wonder why they moved us,” I murmur, as much to myself as to the other guys. It’s hard to pay attention to their conversation while I focus in on the console wall in front of me.

With a faint fizzing sensation in my eye sockets, I direct my vision through the thin plastic surface to the nest of cables and circuit boards I find behind it. Sliding my gaze across those features feels like dragging my eyes through mud rather than air.

My eyeballs are already kind of tired from scanning so much of the ground overhead. Hopefully I can figure this problem out fast.

My attention homes in on a cluster of cables off to one side. The coating around the wires has melted together into a lump.

The connection there must be broken. Maybe if I cut out the melted part and twist the wires back together, that will get the juice flowing through the system properly.

It can’t be that hard, right? Just match up the wires by the color of their coatings. A toddler could handle that.

“I think I might see how to fix it,” I say, glancing up for a second, and realize I’m alone in the room. The other guys must have gone off to investigate more of the building.

They probably either told me they were leaving and I was too zoned out to hear, or they didn’t want to interrupt my concentration. No big deal. I’ll patch things up and call them back in once I’ve saved the day.

Or the computer system, or whatever.

I can’t see any proper way to open up the base of the console, but I can take care of that easily enough. With a few well-placed smacks of the side of my hand, I create a rectangle of cracks in the plastic and then snap out the chunk I’ve outlined.

The fused ball of wiring is right in front of me. Scissors would be nice, but my hands will work just fine for that too.

It doesn’t even take that much of my strength to snap the cables at either end of the mess. I chuck the melted ball into the far corner of the room and get to work peeling back the coating so I can twist the wire ends together.

A couple of sparks shoot from one of the wires and zap my fingers.

“Shit,” I sputter, smacking them against my thigh to stop the stinging.

“Are you okay?”

My head jerks around. Riva’s standing in the doorway, the color back in her cheeks—a welcome sight after she got so sickly pale for a minute when we first trooped in here.

I don’t welcome an audience now, though, especially when the first part of the show was me looking like an idiot.

“I’m good,” I mutter. “It’d take more than a little wire to hurt me.”

Riva walks over and crouches a few feet away from where I’m sitting to consider the severed cables. “I could probably hook them up faster.” She waggles her slim fingers. “One of the few benefits of being tiny.”

She’s poised that close to me, her coolly sweet scent wafting into my nose. All at once, a whole lot of me wants to tell her that even if it would still make total sense for me to call her “Shrimp” like I always used to, she’s absolutely perfect exactly the way she is.

The perfect size for tucking into my arms and carrying to safety. The perfect size for shielding if danger descends on us.

But I’m not supposed to be worrying about her safety. We still don’t know for sure that she isn’t going to put the rest of us in danger.

The guys are the ones who stuck with me. She’s the one who left.

My irrational impulses need to remember that.

“It means there’s less of you to spread out a zap, so you might get totally fried,” I retort. “I’m managing.”

She doesn’t argue, just watches as I attach a couple more wires. “You figure getting those connected will be enough to get the full console running?”

“Not sure yet, but it seemed worth a try.”

Riva hums in apparent agreement. “It’d be pretty amazing to get into the records they’ll have stored in that thing. If they didn’t wipe the hard drive before they left.”

Somehow I hadn’t even considered that possibility, I was so intent on simply getting the damn thing up and running. I scowl more at myself than her and push onward, grasping the next cable.

I’ve come this far, and there are only a couple of wires left. We have to at least check.

Who knows how many answers could be hiding behind those blank screens?

The last cable gives me another zap as I connect it, hard enough that I shake my hand and let out a few more curses. So I’m already irritable when I stand up and poke at the controls on the console.

Nothing happens. The screens stay dark, taunting me for my useless work.

I glare at them, a growl slipping from my lips. The skin along my neck and shoulders prickles with fur itching to spring free.

This whole thing is garbage. I might as well smash the console all for the good it’ll do us.

Riva’s even voice breaks through my rush of frustration. “Technology never works the way you want it to when you want it to, does it?” She wrinkles her nose at the controls. “I think artificial intelligence already exists, and it thinks it’s fun to mock us.”

Hearing her echo my annoyance takes the wind out of my own anger. I swipe my hand across my mouth. “Yeah.”

Bashing it up would only be satisfying for a few moments while I’m letting out the rage. After, I’d feel rotten about it.

It’d make me even more like the monster the guardians turned me into.

Did this Engel woman intend for my weird powers to emerge so blatantly and physically once I got older? Did she have any idea how I’d turn out?

What was the point of any of this?

I hunker back down on the floor, gritting my teeth against the turmoil inside me. I know I’m more than a monster.

I have to be more than that.

“There could be something else I missed,” I say, peering at the other cables and the panels of circuits.

A couple of the panels look scorched to my untrained eyes, the green surface marred with black and grey smudges like miniature storm clouds. Is that normal wear and tear or a sign that they’ve been fried beyond functioning.

I scoot over to gaze through the unbroken side of the console to get a different example for comparison. The circuit boards on that side look pretty similar, which isn’t helpful.

Which part of the console do we know for sure is working? Whatever connects to the backup generator and the controls for the entrance to the facility.

I move even farther to crouch by the area beneath the spot labeled for the backup generator. There is some circuitry there too, and a cluster of cables that aren’t at all melted.

I stare hard at the circuit boards through the shell enclosing them, but it’s too hard to make out the details when it’s all so dark. Grimacing, I crack open that part of the console as well and let the light spill in.

There. Glancing back and forth between that panel and the other ones I’ve exposed, I can see that the scorched-looking marks aren’t necessarily normal after all.

The circuits for the backup generator don’t appear to have them.

And the details of the little bits and pieces look…

sharper somehow, like the other panels have melted a tiny bit too.

Did the people who worked here fry the rest on purpose to make the system inoperable? Why would they have bothered if there was nothing to see if we got in anyway?

It seems too strange that everything would be significantly damaged except for a couple of key controls that have stayed pristine. They must have been worried there was some kind of data still retrievable inside this thing.

But I don’t think I can unmelt circuits. I sure as hell don’t know how to unscorch them.

I frown at the messed-up panels. “If we could find enough functional circuit boards, ones that look the same, maybe we could swap the panels out…”

“We can’t take anything that’s working with the generator,” Riva reminds me. “Nothing will work if it shuts off.”

Right, of course. I eye the area of the console near the entrance controls, but I don’t think it’s wise to fiddle with those either.

What if the door closes and then we can’t get the circuits hooked up properly to re-open it? Riva can scramble out through the vents, but the rest of us would be stuck.

I suck in a breath, grappling with a fresh surge of frustration.

Okay, so I don’t have the materials here. Think it through, Zee. You have a brain in the middle of all those muscles somewhere, right?

I’m not just the freak that sprouts fangs and fur and hurtles into a fight. I’m not .

I could take the messed-up boards… and bring them to some kind of electronics store. See if they could make a functional copy of them.

A smile darts across my lips. That’s an actual plan. It’d mean having to leave and come back, but totally worth it if we can get access to the computer systems afterward.

We could find out exactly what the guardians did to us when we were just babies. How it all began.

And if we can see how the freakishness started… that might also tell us how we can end it.

High on hope, I reach for the nearest panel without giving myself a chance to second-guess my idea. My fingers grasp around it, feeling for the connection points where it can snap free?—

And another electric jolt, twice as potent as the last one that shocked me, crackles up both my arms simultaneously.

The bolt of electricity sears through my nerves and stabs pain all the way to the roots of my teeth. My body rears back defensively.

In all of a second, fur ripples across my back, fangs gnash in my extending muzzle, and I slam my fist into the circuit board.

It sputters and sizzles, and I roar at it. Only as I catch a shaky breath do I come back to myself, staring at the bashed panel that’s now way more of a mess than when I found it.

The metal bits have fractured. Most of the green board is cracked into little shards. A few of them patter to the floor as I watch.

There’s no way any tech expert is piecing that disaster back together.

My face snaps back into human shape. I stare at the damage I did, panting, my fingers opening and closing at my sides.

Fucking hell. Of all the times to lose my grip on my temper…

But that grip is tenuous even at the best of times. I shouldn’t have even tried.

“It’s okay,” Riva says softly. “Even if we could fix it, they must have wiped all the data too. There might be people like that hacker guy who could dig something out if they got the power on, but none of us know how. And we can’t lug this whole console to a computer expert to ask for help.”

I know that’s all true. And when I glance over at her, braced for her expression, I don’t see the slightest hint of horror in it.

She just saw me partly transform—right in front of her under the beaming lights, not at a distance in the dark like during the fight at the college—and she didn’t cringe away. She’s looking at me like I’m the exact same person I always was.

Fuck, how much do I wish I was that person.

My body starts to lean toward her as if drawn by a magnetic pull. She always understood better than the others, with all that savage strength in her own tiny frame?—

My gaze drops to my hand lifting as if to touch her arm, and an image blazes up through my memory. This hand, clawed and bloodied. A scream ringing in my ears. Blood, so much fucking blood, on me and around me…

I jerk myself away, shoving to my feet in the same motion. “You don’t know anything!”

Riva blinks at me, her body tensing exactly the way I expected it to before. “Zian? I was just trying?—”

My voice tumbles out with a growl woven through it. “Don’t try anything. Just get out of my way. You have no idea what I’m dealing with. All you ever do is grow pretty little claws and pointed ears.”

“I—”

I don’t want to hear a single thing she has to say. “You have no fucking clue how bad—You don’t know anything. So just stay the fuck away from me.”

Because I hurt people, and even after everything, I don’t want to hurt you.

I don’t say that last part out loud. It sticks in the bottom of my throat, but maybe it wouldn’t make any difference anyway.

Riva’s expression twitches. Then she scrambles up and darts out of the room, giving me the space I demanded.

And leaving me feeling like even more of a monster than I did before.

It’s better this way, I tell myself as I slump back to the floor. We’re safer this way.

Both of us.