Power Divided (The Evolutionaries Book 1) Read online

  I used to think Lily must have believed her father’s job extended to her, and ever since that balcony incident, without a reason I ever understood, she became my shield, my protector, and my best friend. From childish bullies to this, she proved her loyalty to me without fail.

  “Lily is your friend, and like she said, there is hope.”

  “But she wasn’t there. She didn’t see all the blood. How can anyone survive that?” I cringed, not knowing what to do. My mind suddenly refused to allow my thoughts to stray too close to the vivid images of my father. As much as I loved and trusted Lily, I knew this time she was wrong.

  Just then, the crest of Amera carved into the wall caught my gaze. I stood staring at the nine rays beaming like the sun: each ray sliced in half, one side representing the King’s Court of each realm, the other half representing the Queen’s Court, stretching from the center circle that was the core of Amera, the Elder Council.

  My fingers traced the ray that symbolized Neyr. There was no line between the two courts since my parents were married. The thought of there being a line symbolizing another king made me sick. A dry heave coiled my body into a ball when the reality suddenly struck me that with every floor that passed, I grew farther away from the horror but closer to the truth. No matter what happened now, no matter where I ended up, this was no longer my home.

  When the doors opened, I expected the entire lobby to be filled with the royal guard. But as I stepped out, there was no one. Not even the sentries who were usually posted near the lifts on every other level.

  Lily. I realized. She was a general’s daughter, but how long could she keep me hidden? They were probably searching for me now. I worried what might happen to her when they found out she lied, but fear of hurting anyone else spurred me on.

  Numbly, I made my way through the halls of my family’s private ground floor entrance that was rarely used. When I reached the gate, I vaguely heard the scanners recognize me. As soon as the doors unlocked, I pushed through and burst out into the lower forest. The humid air at ground level enveloped me, making my clothes and hair stick to my skin. I stumbled several clumsy paces when my legs failed me, and I fell to the ground. Rolling onto my back, I stared up at the tower that had been my home. Chrysler was one of the seven towers of oak, steel, and time, at the center of the city. These hybrid towers rose above the treetops of a massive, ancient lower forest. The entire city was connected by a network of bridgeways. The lowest level of bridges and byways a dozen stories up were only used by the occasional maintenance crew or guard shift changes. It made the use of the ground level here in the city almost unheard of. Even still, I knew they would search everywhere. I didn’t have long, but oxygen struggled to reach my lungs, just like the sunlight struggled to reach the forest floor.

  As I lay there shaking, trying to catch my breath, I thought, “What am I doing? Do I really want to run?”

  My inner voice didn’t answer.

  The deafening silence of the forest surrounded me, only the sounds of my ragged breath and erratic heartbeat were out of place. I gazed up at the city far above and sucked in a deep breath at how beautiful the light was filtering through the canopy of trees. I laid there trying to take it all in, unsure if I would ever see it again. Fresh tears sprang from my eyes.

  My mind drifted to a beautiful autumn day when my father took the afternoon off from the demands of the realm just to take me on a picnic. We lay there on a blanket of newly fallen leaves for hours and watched the forest shimmer with life. He would tell me ancient stories from the time of civilization before. No matter how many stories he told, I never grew tired of hearing them.

  “Hattan City is the perfect example of our ancestor’s tenacity, nature’s consummate dominion over the earth, and humankind’s spirit to find beauty and life even when things are at their darkest. Our ancestors endured thousands of years of dark and cold in the colonies, but they survived. And when the earth warmed again, they explored, discovered, and began again, just so you, my little petal, could be here now,” my father explained. His eyes had crinkled in a proud grin, making me believe anything was possible.

  “Papa, I am so sorry,” I cried as his face melted from my mind and bells suddenly began to ring through the treetops. I tried frantically to hold onto the image of his gentle smile until it was gone, and the erratic movements on the bridges were all I could see.

  I sat up when the horns blew. My eyes squeezed shut, and my shoulders shook as desperation spread through my veins. “Those are for me.” It was time to choose. Run or face what I had done. If he is gone, I began to think, but a guttural scream broke through my heart. “No!” I sobbed, not able to face the finality of that thought.

  I wasn’t sure when I made my choice. I didn’t even remember standing up, but branches from brush and young trees whipped wildly, slapping me in the face as I found myself running. I made my way past an old, abandoned hub and found the unused path that Lily and I had discovered three summers past.

  This trail had been the perfect way for Lily and me to get away from tower life and explore without the prying eyes of the court, the council, and the relentless gossip writers. Never in my wildest thoughts would I have guessed I would use it to escape my home as a killer.

  The roots and overgrowth tripped me nearly every step of the way, but I trampled on, my whole body burning as I fought for every inch. Eventually, the forest thinned, and the light of the open sky nearly blinded me as I slid to a stop. My hands gripped my thighs as I bent over sucking in deep breaths of air. Nausea waved over me with every inhale until my entire body trembled. The reality I had been running away from had finally caught up to me.

  I was at the edge of everything I knew. Behind me was my beloved forest city, my home, my family. Before me was the Fifth River, the cut of water dividing the landscape between civilization and the treacherous mountains on the other side, it was of an ancient chain of rivers that had raged and frozen over the history of the ages. It was the water that fed our forest and the realm beyond the city. These waters flowed from the frozen lands of the Cana Realm in the north. Though I have never seen it with my own eyes, the Great Lake where the river began was said to be as wide as Neyr itself. But here the Region Two Dam choked the water back to only fifty feet from bank to bank.

  I brushed stray tangles of brown curls from my face as I looked down into the water below. A glint of light from my bracelet pulled my attention to the jewels on my wrist. The amethyst buttons had been chosen to match the color of my eyes; the exact shade of lavender I shared with my father. Gems set in platinum had been hand created by the best artisans in Exa, the realm to the south. Everyone in the Nine Realms of Amera had one—a citizen’s bracelet.

  More than just jewelry or a sign of status, it was embedded with a micro tech system that was everyone’s link to society, connecting them to their homes, work, and families. Mine declared me a princess of Amera. The only one of Neyr. What would it declare me as now?

  My fingers traced the flowers and vines perfectly crafted, frozen in the metal. I had been elated on my tenth birthday when I opened the box and saw it for the first time. It symbolized I had been moving in the right direction. That despite everything, this was proof I could one day be equal to any other Ameran. Even if my abilities were not what everyone had expected, it symbolized hope. Today, I was supposed to exchange my compulsory bracelet with the last one I would ever need.

  The one declaring I had made it.

  Years of relentless practice and study had boiled down to these last tests. My parents had thought I was ready, and their faith made me believe I was. But we were all so unbelievably wrong.

  The insanity of this new reality bubbled inside me as my gaze focused across the ravine at the Wild Steel Mountains. From my bedroom window, they were like gray slashes of paint, a mistake at the edge of a perfect landscape. Ugly and unnatural yet harmless. But standing just feet away, I truly understood why even after half a millennium from the time our ancestors resettled t
his area, the council today deemed the entire mountain range still too dangerous to explore. One wrong step could cause a cave in, an avalanche, or I could simply just fall through a weak spot in the earth.

  The unnatural pallor of the soil was interrupted by sparse and scattered trees, every one of them twisted and deformed and showing only a hint of green. The mountains themselves were a strange combination of rolling hills that crashed into eruptions of out of place columns, the decaying remains of what were once buildings, a few almost as tall as the Chrysler. This was another part of the ancient city that Hattan had been built upon and lived in limbo. Broken and beaten by time, yet not completely erased by thousands of frozen years.

  I shivered. This was a graveyard for the civilization which came before. The final place for those who had not won the lottery for the colonies and faced the unstoppable age of ice that had lasted for 13,000 years. This was a place for the doomed.

  With a shaky breath, I realized it would be the only place no one would search for me.

  A garbled laugh escaped, and I knew I had finally gone mad. I turned back for one last glance at the forest that had been home, pulled the bracelet from my wrist and let it fall to the ground before blowing a kiss on the wind. Without another thought, I turned and jumped.

  “No!” I heard my inner voice scream just as my body plunged into the icy water.

  The thing about being underwater is, no matter how hard you try all sense of time and direction can be washed away in a blink.

  When my head resurfaced, my arms flailed, searching for anything to hold onto, but the water was all I could grasp. A new kind of panic crept into my heart. I had no idea how far the rapids had taken me, and my legs that had been on fire from running through the forest were now blocks of ice.

  Frigid water pummeled my face, and clarity surfaced through the chaos. “This was not one of my finer plans.”

  “No, it is not,” my inner voice cracked with anger. I had never heard him angry before, and it was as shocking as the water was cold. “You have to get out of the water, Violet!”

  “Thanks for the advice.”

  “What were you thinking?” he seethed, making my head hurt.

  “Don’t you already know?”

  My body fought to keep contact with the air above me while it raged war with my brain and aching heart that wanted to give up and let the water take me under. Fatigue came faster than the shoreline trickling past me. Dizzy and numb in too many places, I had to choose to reach for the shore or let the water win.

  A crack of thunder rattled in the distance.

  “Thorns,” I cursed looking skyward. Though the sky still had patches of blue, I could make out the edge of a storm drifting toward me. Just as my father had no time to react, I was equally unprepared when I saw it. I should have taken a deep breath, but instead, I screamed.

  “Flash flood!” I heard my inner voice yell just as a wall of water slammed into me, filling my mouth. The river had won the battle, taking my choices as it pulled me under.

  Darkness surrounded me. Strangely, there was no raging river, no pain in my body. “I am dead.” It was the only explanation that made sense.

  “Dead? You are not dead,” my inner voice startled me. He sounded frantic, the opposite of the usual calm, quirky friend I knew. “But you will be if you don’t snap out of this!”

  “Where are we?” I couldn’t see anything. Not my hands, legs, or any part of my body for that matter. It was if I was in a bubble of black ink of nothingness. I should have been scared, but I wasn’t. It was almost peaceful. “How are you still here? I always imagined death would be a cure for insanity.”

  “Violet, we can argue my reality some other time. Right now, you have to wake up!”

  Ignoring him, I asked, “Do you remember when this thing, you and me first started? I can’t. It’s like you’ve always been there. Before I could walk or even talk. Holly berries, I’m talking to myself about why I talk to myself. I am crazy.”

  “Violet, you are not crazy.” Impatience edged his words, and if it had been physically possible, I would have laughed out loud.

  “Hmph. You do realize, just hearing your voice, a boy’s voice I might add, is proof to the contrary? And as a figment of my imagination, aren’t you supposed to believe what I want you to?”

  “If you believe my existence is proof you’re crazy, would you really want me to?” Before I could answer, the tone of his voice changed, going from anxious to desperate when he begged, “Violet, please wake up.”

  “I have to say this before it’s too late. I’ve spent years feeling torn riding the line of sanity because you existed. But I don’t regret any of it. I’ve always been grateful for your friendship. I know you aren’t real, at least not outside my head, but here, at the end of it all, I just want to say that whatever the reason why I hear your voice, I’m glad I do. I honestly can’t picture my life without you. You have always been there when I needed someone. I guess it makes sense you’re here at the end.”

  “Violet. Please, if that’s true, don’t give up now,” his voice quaked with fear.

  “What’s the point? There’s nothing left for me,” I cringed as the memory of the morning resurfaced, and my deadly piercing blunder flashed in my mind.

  “Violet, you don’t have much time,” his voice cracked when my head began to ache, morphing into a sensation that was like needles exploding outward from my bones through my skin.

  “Don’t you see that no matter what I do, my life is already over? Nothing will ever be the same,” I gritted through this new agony. I just wanted it to end, all of it, the guilt, the pain...

  “Please wake up!” he repeated, sounding so sincere that I wondered what dark corner of my mind believed I deserved a second chance.

  “This is the only way never to hurt anyone ever again.”

  “If you die now, you can never do anything to make things right. I can’t promise you a future without regret. But I do know with no future, you can do nothing, ever. This only adds more pain, more grief. Death is final,” he pleaded.

  “Don’t you think I know that,” I cried, remembering my father’s broken body. “But how could I ever deserve to live after what I did?”

  “I am sorry, Violet.” Then, as if a knife cut straight through me, pain beyond anything I could have ever imagined spread like fire down my spine to my fingers and toes.

  Suddenly, the quiet darkness dissolved back into torrid rapids swirling and pulling me in every direction. Debris in the water hurtled past me while my limbs moved with purpose as if they had a mind of their own. My body rose, and the water brightened until I broke through the barrier between water and air.

  I coughed up muddy water, and my lungs filled greedily with oxygen. Somehow, I had not drowned. I wasn’t dead, and for a fleeting moment, I was glad.

  I spun around, searching for the shore. Rain began falling as if the sky had turned the faucet on to full, but before I could swing one stroke, the force of the current caught me again, pulling me under and flipping me end over end.

  In what felt like seconds my entire being burned from too much spent air trapped within my skin. As the last of my oxygen escaped my lips, I crashed into solid rock.

  To my utter confusion, instead of mouthfuls of water, I sucked in gulps of air. My vision cleared, and I realized the force of the current had smashed me against the boulders like a rag doll, but it had also pushed me up far enough for my head to break free of the river.

  Searching desperately for something to hold onto, my shins rammed into a ledge of rock, and I managed to find purchase, my foot gripping enough to hoist myself up. I forced my fingers into any crack in the rock face I could find, and after a short battle with the rapids, I found a moment of reprieve, holding on as relief swept over me.

  The undulating current rocked me enough to know this respite wasn’t going to last. I could smell the earth from the shore, but there was ten feet of vicious water between the shoreline and me. I tightened m
y grip on the rock, and hope bloomed in my chest when I spotted roots from a nearby tree trailing into the river just on the other side of a boulder. I stretched from toes to fingertips toward them, but the roots were just out of reach. The water relentlessly pushed and pulled me back and forth, as if it was consciously trying to pry my hands off the boulder.

  “You need to get out of the water,” my voice of reason suggested, sounding as exhausted as I felt.

  “Always one to state the obvious. I was beginning to think you were sulking in your dark corner to leave me on this rock all alone.”

  “I’m here.”

  “That’s it? No pearls of wisdom? Pep talk? Strategic planning?”

  He was quiet for a beat, then answered, “You are not alone.”

  “Ha!” I laughed out loud. “Most sane people would argue that fact.” I felt my shoulders shake, unsure if I was about to laugh or cry. Thunder growled overhead. “The storm is getting worse.” My teeth were chattering, the adrenaline rush wearing off and the cold seeped through my skin and muscles into my very bones.

  “You have to get out of the water,” he repeated.

  “Captain Obvious strikes again. I know that, but at the moment I’m out of ideas, although I’m open to suggestions.”

  “You have to use your abilities.”

  Every muscle of my body went rigid as visions of my father pinned to the ground in ruins filled my mind. I closed my eyes. “I can’t.”

  “You have to try.” His voice was no longer angry. Instead, he sounded tired, yet patient.

  “After what I’ve done, that’s the last thing I should do.” Dread filled me. If using my gifts was the only way to save myself, then I was as good as dead.

  The sound of water surrounded me; would this be the last thing I ever heard? It was beautiful compared to my mother’s pleas that were surely my father’s last. Was he still alive? What was the last thing he saw? Did he know what a coward I was, that I ran? I felt my insides burn as if I had swallowed acid.