Chapter 13

Angie

As an older sister I never liked my younger siblings following me around. Unlike my brother Benjamin, who thought nothing of catering to our every whim, I preferred the company of my friends, and of course the potential opportunity to hang out with the boys. At seventeen I thought I was cool, sexy, and terribly alluring to the opposite sex.

After the canisters fell, I banished all males from my radar. All but Jake. Even in death, Jake still found a way to tag along after me.

MINUTES LATER

Jake was back. Actually he’d never really left, I’d just forcibly confined him behind my barriers.

Up until a few days ago I’d thought that I was the only one that Jake was in contact with. That I was the only Sky that had the ability to communication with the dead from the Far Beyond.

I’d always hoped that this ability had not extended to my brother Jam, since we’d been in the tunnels together when the canisters fell. We shared the same unfortunate effects of accelerated ageing, so I wasn’t too sure. But Jam never showed any evidence that our younger brother, Jake, dead as he was, spoke to him. Nor had Emmalee. Until now.

Stevron’s words came back to haunt me. ‘Jake opened the portal for Em today. Did he do the same for Jam?’

I didn’t want to accept the possibility of the overt truth of his words. I could only hope that Em’s near death experience had been the reason that Jake had made himself known to her. If not, I didn’t like the implications. As for Jam? I’d been keeping a close eye on him since the Prayers attack. So far, Jake didn’t seem to have any further contact with Jam.

I was thankful for that because the Far Beyond wasn’t something I wanted any of my siblings to see. At least not the parts that I’d been exposed too.

Right now, Jake’s insistence was hammering at my already tender brain tissue. The throbbing, where the rifle’s butt had slammed against my temple, still ached fiercely. I was holding firm against my brother. For how much longer I could hold him off, I hadn’t a clue.

In the truck’s cab I was jammed up against Stevron. He was driving the moving truck at a breakneck speed. Char Twiller, sitting way too close on the other side of me, was holding a pistol in his hand. The barrel pointed at my head. I could feel the cold metal of the rounded end bounce against my ear every time Stevron hit a bump. The rifle that did the damage to my skull rested next to Char’s leg by the truck’s door handle.

How I wanted to get to that rifle. I needed to get to that rifle. If only I could distract-

Jake’s voice echoed louder. His persistence in his attempts to slip beyond my wall was maddening. It wouldn’t be long before he found a crack in my defences. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to reinforce any jagged rips that suddenly appeared in my barriers.

The barriers held. Time to give Jake a little shove.

Jake resisted my push. Sloughed it off as if he was brushing a feather from his shoulder. I pushed harder.

Jake stood strong. Stronger than I’d ever experienced him. He wasn’t going anywhere and it was becoming difficult to maintain the force to push him out of my head. I thought I had almost succeeded when a piercing pain seared through my brain.

‘Talk, talk, talk to him,’ my brother commanded. His voice was loud as it boomed within the confines of my head. ‘Char, Char, Char, has the answers. Though, though, though, his clues will be slim. You’ll, you’ll, you’ll have to decipher what matters.’

I ignored Jake. What mattered was I needed to get control of the situation. And fast.

The moving truck roared down the highway. We were travelling so fast that my best guess was that we must have put at least twenty to thirty miles between us and what was left of our base camp.

I wondered how everyone in the back of the truck was doing. Was Em okay? Had Jam’s wounds started to bleed again? Was the child scared?

And what about the child? Why had Stevron insisted on bringing her? There must have been at least forty other girl’s ranging in the same age, who had been brought into camp. Why choose this particular one? What was so special about her?

Stevron hit another crack in the rutted asphalt. The vehicle lurched to the right. I felt the pistol Char held graze against my ear as I bounced forward. My eyes snapped opened.

The light from the truck’s headlights cutting through the night didn’t offer me any indication of where we were going. There were no highway signs, no directional markers, and even the moon wasn’t offering me enough light to see the terrain on either sides of the road.

And why was Char Twiller with us now? I couldn’t stop the ensuing questions from ricocheting around in my head. Had Jonah Barks instinctively known that I would run? That my gut reaction to his probing questions would be to whisk Em and Jam out of camp and to safety? I didn’t know. I had too many questions and no answers.

Jake banged at my resistance. ‘You’re, you’re, you’re wasting time. For, for, for someone who’s in a bind. Why, why, why should I care? How, how, how you all fare.’

I closed my eyes again and gritted my teeth. The tiniest signs of another panic attack prickled at the edge of my nerve endings. I had to stop worrying about Em and Jam. I had to concentrate on something else.

Besides, Jake was right. I was wasting time.

I felt Stevron’s right leg stiffen as he rubbed his thigh against my knee. Sitting so close to him it was no wonder that he was picking up on my agitation. Could he tell that my brother Jake was once more threatening to tear down my barriers? That they were almost nonexistent. I opened my eyes and turned my head to glance at him.

“Eyes forward,” Char commanded.

©Legend of the Sapphyre Wings by Janet Merritt