Brink: A Dystopian Sci-Fi Novel (Rogue Spark Book 2) Read online

  Most of her mom’s suitors had been jerks, but this one’s eyes were bloodshot and wild. Dangerous.

  She took a step inside, half-turned, and said, “I gotta go meet my friend.”

  He grabbed her arm and yanked her into the apartment. Throwing her to the floor, he slammed the door shut.

  The fall surprised Lucy, and her small shoulder bag was thrown beneath her as she fell. She hoped her latest painting and art supplies weren’t damaged.

  “Your mom and I are having a little party here, ain’t we, sweetie?” He went over to her mother, who was lying on the couch, completely out of it. He started slapping her face to try and rouse her.

  His attention on her mother, Lucy raised herself to her knees and scrambled into a corner near their round dining table, holding her bag in front of her as a kind of protection.

  On the coffee table, several kinds of drugs and paraphernalia were spread. Now the man rested on one end of the table and started slapping her mom even harder, saying, “Wake up, wake up!” He was hurting Vera.

  “Hey.” Lucy managed to rise and approach him. She decided it would be better to take a gentler tone, maybe reason with him. “She gets this way sometimes. I’m sure she’s fine. Just sleeping. You can’t wake her, I’ve tried.”

  The man grunted. “Is that so? We were having fun until a little while ago. She took a big hit.” He checked his biocuff. “Ugh, I gotta go.” He scanned the floor. “Where’re my shoes?”

  Lucy glanced around the room, searching the floor. She spied a pair of men’s black boots near the door. She said nothing, just grabbed them and placed them near the man. After he put them on, he glanced at the table and grabbed a small plastic bag of a green drug, stuffing it into his pants pocket. Then he smiled, tossed the bag on the table. “A parting gift.”

  After buttoning the rest of his shirt and throwing on his coat, he made for the door near Lucy. After pausing, he said, “Do we have an agreement?”

  Lucy’s stomach sank. “What?”

  In one sudden motion, he lunged toward her, taking her by surprise. He pushed his body against her, slamming her into the wall.

  “I said, do we have an agreement?” His hot, caustic breath stank of stale cigarettes and booze. “I wasn’t here. You didn’t see me. You won’t ever breathe a word of this to a soul. That’s the agreement.”

  He clutched her throat, pressing her head against the wall. She gasped for air and managed to squeak out a “yes” before he slowly eased off.

  She slid down the wall and raised her knees to her chest, trying to become as small as possible.

  He peered down at her, laughing as he sauntered down the hallway.

  Closing the door, she locked it securely, and leaned against it. Adrenaline coursed through her body, and she shook all over.

  She rushed to the couch to check on her mother. Vera didn’t appear to be breathing, and vomit covered the side of her face. She turned her mother’s head to prevent her from choking.

  Grabbing her phone, Lucy texted Paul:

  Need your help. Urgent!

  Know the old conservatory on North Pond?

  Need you 2 go get lady who lives there. Medic. Bring her to my place.

  Matter of life and death.

  Hurry!

  Thirteen

  Ida awoke to the sound of loud banging on her front door. She was exhausted from everything—the shooting in the square, the events at the TV station, even the drive home last night in the rain. Too much on her mind.

  And now, someone pounded on her door. Who the hell is this joker? She roused herself, threw on a dry tee-shirt, and put her leather jacket on.

  She opened the door and nearly fell over when she saw the teenager from the square. The one she had healed. How had he found me?

  Paul had started to speak, but after recognizing her, his mouth hung open.

  “Holy shit, it’s you,” Ida said, breaking the silence.

  “You!” he said.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” Ida looked around behind him to make sure he was alone, then pulled him inside and shut the door. “I told you to forget about the other day. That meant never, ever seeing you again.”

  He was flustered. “I, I didn’t know it was you. Honest to God.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “Lucy told me to come here and find you. She’s in trouble.” He pushed his biocuff with her text message toward Ida to read.

  “Lucy? You mean the girl who hangs around here with long brown hair? The painter?”

  “Yes, Lucy!” Paul could hardly contain himself. “We gotta get over there.”

  Ida read the text again, her brow furrowed. “Let’s go.” She pulled on her boots, and they went outside. Paul started to jog down the path, and Ida hopped on her bike. “Jump on the back. You’re my navigator.”

  By the time Ida and Paul burst into the apartment, Lucy had been sobbing after losing Vera’s pulse entirely.

  Ida pushed Lucy out of the way to examine her mother. She turned the unconscious woman’s head slowly from side to side and then checked for a pulse.

  “We don’t have much time. There’s still some life force in her, but I can’t guarantee anything.”

  Lucy glanced between Paul and Ida.

  Paul took her hand. “It’s her. This is the lady who saved me when I got shot.”

  Lucy’s eyes grew wide.

  “Hot towels—get me a few hot towels. She’ll be cold when she comes to.” Ida pulled off her gloves, ripped opened Vera’s shirt, and placed her hands on her chest. “And shut the door, for chrissakes.”

  The two teenagers did as they’d been told. As if in a dream, Lucy watched as Ida tended to Vera.

  Why had she summoned her in the first place? Ida had said she was a medic in the war, so she knew Ida would be able to help somehow.

  Several minutes passed. Outside, they heard a siren and a few distant car horns. Inside the small apartment, Paul clasped his hands in prayer, muttering to himself. Lucy stood frozen in place.

  Ida pulled away from Vera’s chest. She rested on her knees for a few minutes, hands on her thighs. Sweaty and tired, she took a hot towel and wiped off her own face.

  “What’s happening?” asked Paul.

  Ida shook her head, rose, and backed a few feet away.

  Lucy slowly crossed the few steps to her mother’s side. She took one arm that hung limply off the edge of the couch and placed it at her side. Kneeling beside Vera, she listened to her chest.

  “What’s wrong?” Paul pleaded with Ida. His voice had gone a pitch higher. “She’s supposed to be healed now. When you touch her, right?”

  “It’s supposed to work, but…” Ida said softly.

  Lucy began to sob.

  Across from the couch, a tall bookshelf contained knick-knacks and Lucy’s paintings from over the years. Hidden between a framed photo of Lucy and Vera, next to a stack of books, a tiny camera captured the events unfolding in the small living room.

  “Time for me to go,” said Ida. “There’s nothing I can do for her.” She pulled her jacket and gloves on and started for the apartment door.

  “Wait!” Ida had grabbed the doorknob when Lucy jumped up from her seated position next to her lifeless mother. “Please! Try again, will you?” Lucy tugged the back of Ida’s jacket.

  Ida turned around, her face grim. She said gently, “I’ve done all I can. I’m so sorry for your loss.”

  “No!” Lucy’s quick reprimand startled Ida. “I refuse to accept that answer, soldier! You were a soldier, were you not?”

  Ida hesitated. “Yes,” she said.

  “I have no reason to, but—” Lucy glanced at Paul. “I believe you guys.” She took Ida’s gloved hands in hers. “I believe in you. Please help my mother. Try again?”

  Exhausted, Ida wanted nothing more than to bolt from the stuffy apartment, climb on her bike, and let the cool wind cut through her bones as she roamed the streets.

  Ida’s power didn�
��t always work. If the victims were too far gone—if they had passed over to the other side—Ida couldn’t help. She wasn’t a miracle worker who could raise people from the dead.

  This was the curse of her gift. If she arrived late to the scene, she couldn’t save the lives of those sick and injured who desperately needed her. So many casualties over the years in the war, perhaps hundreds or thousands. For every life she managed to save, there were ten she didn’t. The many dead souls weighed on her and crushed her with guilt.

  But something compelled her to try again, this time. Lucy loved her mother and would be devastated by her loss. But what else could she do? Ida had felt the icy vacancy in the woman’s body. The woman felt gone.

  Lucy’s grip on her hands tightened.

  Ida straightened, locked her arms. She met Lucy’s gaze. “I’ll try.”

  The girl’s face lit up. She raced to the side of the couch and perched, holding her breath.

  Ida removed her jacket and gloves again, placing them on the small round table. She approached the couch and knelt. This time, she placed a hand on Vera’s chest and one on her forehead. She closed her eyes and concentrated. Ida could feel a warm, pulsing energy flowing through her fingers into the lifeless body.

  Stronger than before, she felt a cold, almost freezing sensation emanating from Vera’s body. She felt a few more short bursts of cold, almost like tiny lightning bolts hitting her arms and running up into her body.

  She was treading new territory, having never used her touch for so long before. In the war, time was never on her side, as the bodies piled up. Now, the cold streaming back was a fight from Vera’s body to stay dead.

  It felt to Ida as though hours had passed, but she suspected it was mere minutes. She felt sorry for Lucy to lose her mother when she was so young. Ida knew how it felt. She’d been orphaned for as long as she knew and forced to live on the streets.

  Would the girl be better off without her mother? Ida pushed the thought away. Lucy would no doubt end up homeless or caught up in an indifferent orphan system. If Lucy wasn’t giving up, neither was she.

  She found a small warmth inside the body—the very last of Vera’s life force near her heart. Ida concentrated all her pulsing, healing energy there. Slowly, she felt the warmth grow and spread through the body.

  On the couch, Vera’s body twitched. A nearly invisible shudder. If Lucy hadn’t been observing closely, she would have missed it.

  A desperate inhalation of breath sounded from Vera. She gasped for air as if surfacing from a long time underwater. Her search for air caused the upper part of her body to rise from the couch. Ida gently pushed her shoulders down. “Easy now.”

  Lucy’s face contorted. “Mama!” She held onto one of Vera’s shoulders and wrapped her other arm under her head. Tears streamed down her face.

  Vera coughed, the air filling her lungs again. Pale and cold, she started shivering.

  “Get those hot towels, Paul.” Ida wasted no time placing hot towels along Vera’s chest and legs, then covering her with two more blankets. “She’ll be cold tonight. Better tomorrow,” said Ida.

  Paul had a huge smile on his face. “I knew it,” he shouted. “Lucy, I told you to believe me.”

  Ida stared at them. She was spent. Beyond exhausted. And now that her secret was out, she feared the teens would talk. She would have to leave the city. Her body shook. She put her gloves on and said slowly, “This never happened.” She turned and left the apartment, vowing to sleep and start packing in the morning.

  Meanwhile, the small bookshelf camera streamed its video to another location in Spark City, near downtown where the junkie who’d been in Lucy’s apartment smiled and shook his head in disbelief at what he'd just witnessed.

  The footage would fetch a high price, and he knew exactly who would buy it.

  Fourteen

  Singlet and J-Man lingered in a basement hallway. Between them, Nancy Brown rested on a small metal chair, hunched over.

  They were deep in the bowels of Vance’s factory. Above, they could hear the churning of machines at work. Each thump and clack above them signaled progress as more cybernetic police took shape.

  Vance and his people were the only humans in the entire factory. Proud of his fully automated factories, they required no human intervention.

  In the room on the other side of the wall, Vance lay supine on a long metal table that had been draped with white sheets. Unlike the hallway and the rest of the basement, the room was spotless. The day before, he’d ordered a robot cleaning crew to scrub it from top to bottom, telling them, “Make it shine so I can see my reflection.”

  He wasn’t a doctor, but he knew it must be clean because his flesh—his insides—would be exposed. Hygiene was critical to his survival, lest he get an infection. An infection might be his downfall, might worsen the terminal disease he already had.

  What did the doctors know anyway? Vance didn’t have a single doctor he trusted anymore. They’d said his blood was tainted, defective. His body was failing to produce white blood cells on its own. That much they had all agreed on.

  But their recommendations on how to treat his mystery illness were all over the place.

  One doctor recommended a complete blood transfusion. Failed. Singlet made sure the man’s death had been painful and involved a slow, agonizing loss of blood.

  Another physician prescribed a diet and supplements heavy in iron. No go. That doctor fell from his high-rise apartment’s balcony one night.

  Others gave him various medications that all resulted in no change to his condition.

  He flew in experts from other cities. He spared no expense in searching for a cure. But they had nothing new to offer. He even tried using leeches he had shipped in from a forest in the Amazon. For an entire week, he had a nurse apply leeches to his body. All for nothing.

  The test results were always the same. His white blood cells were shrinking in number, and Vance was dying. Any infection could kill him. Worse, if he lost enough cells, before long his body would attack his own cells, mistaking them for a foreign infection.

  They warned him the first area of his body to start failing would be his extremities—toes, fingers, and then the paralysis would spread slowly up the lengths of his arms and legs. He wished they’d been wrong, but lately he’d been in agony, barely sleeping at night.

  The visit prior to killing him, Dr. Acre had said he would need to amputate both legs. His right arm too, maybe.

  Vance could not, would not, live the life of a cripple.

  He searched in vain for any alternatives, and in the end, Vance found his own solution. Just like every other success in his life, he made it happen on his own.

  He ordered medical robots from Japan, and checked their programming himself to be sure there were no glitches.

  And now they operated.

  This time, Vance had been secretive, not allowing even his men inside.

  Opera music, his favorite, blared in the operating room, partly to hide the drilling and buzzing sounds. He’d told Singlet and J-Man under no circumstances should they or anyone enter unless the door was opened by him or a robot.

  As Vance lay in a semi-conscious state under the influence of a strong pain inhibitor, he wondered about Nancy. Had she thought of escaping? Though meek, she was clever. He admired her quiet strength. She did as told and was turning out to be an exceptional assistant.

  If she was planning an escape, it was useless. Usually he killed his victims right away, but he’d kept Nancy around. She served a purpose.

  Unlike the time with the nurse, Nancy really did remind him of his mother. They bore a physical resemblance.

  Vance’s men were smarter and stronger than Nancy. They had weapons. Unless she could distract or catch them off guard, her chances were hopeless.

  She would wind up dead eventually.

  How long? Vance wasn’t sure.

  After two hours dozing in and out of consciousness, Vance finally woke. He stared blankly
at the ceiling as he lay on the operating table. The recessed lights above had been filtered, so as not to blind him with their fluorescence. Smart thinking. He’d planned everything perfectly for the operation.

  Or so he’d thought.

  He hadn’t anticipated the question from the medibot. A chance to save one of his arms. The robot had analyzed blood and tissue from various parts of his body. Both legs and his entire right arm needed to go, but his left—the one with the cybernetic hand and forearm—showed signs of healthier white blood cells.

  Why hadn’t he sought out these medibots in the first place? Their precision far exceeded that of the inept human doctors he’d dealt with.

  And now he could keep one arm—well, part of an arm. Maybe he wouldn’t entirely be a freak of nature.

  And yet he was becoming something better—something beyond human. Like his robot police, he would be resilient, strong—better than human.

  “Take the whole left arm,” he said.

  Hours later, a droid summoned Nancy from the hallway outside the operating room.

  Inside the room, Vance lingered on the operating table, his back to the door. All instruments had been cleaned and put away as if an operation had never happened.

  As Nancy entered, she stepped a few feet into the room and halted. At the sound of her footsteps, he smiled to himself, anticipating her reaction. A white sheet draped over his shoulders shielded his body from view.

  Vance turned to the side so she could see his profile. “Nancy, my dear.” He cleared his throat. “It’s a glorious day, don’t you think?”

  She waited.

  “Nancy,” Vance said in a calm, soothing voice. “You’re so quiet. I feel as though I’m talking to a wall.”

  Nothing. Getting her to react was like pulling teeth. Maybe that’s why he kept her around. She was a challenge. He said, “Stay where you are. I want to show you something.” He continued to hold the sheet around his body, as if he’d just emerged from a swimming pool and was protecting his body from the cold.