Chapter Twenty-Five

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Dave curled up beside the winged-female in a warm patch of sunlight. No one else could see her, a situation Dave found very confusing. He watched his pack's new puppy and the older female bustling around the den. They did this every day, getting in the water-fall and disguising their scent and then putting on different pieces of flat fur. Then the new puppy would pat him and vocalize and they would leave. Dave thought they must be out hunting for food. They sometimes smelled like food when they came back, but didn't bring any back to the den, so maybe they were bad at it.

The winged-woman always moaned when the puppy left. She was very sick; Dave could tell. (He had tried to bring her some grass the last time the older female took him outside, but she pulled it out of his mouth.) She never moved from that spot on the floor and the others walked through her when they crossed the den. Dave tried to lick her, but his tongue went through her like she was made of air. Maybe she was. It might explain why her mind couldn't talk to his. He had thought she was the same kind of creature as the winged-man, but now he wasn't so sure.

She sighed, and Dave knew she was unhappy. He laid his head beside her and whined, all that he could offer her in the way of comfort. Everybody seemed unhappy lately. The winged-man hadn't come home from hunting and now the female was gone too. He liked the new puppy and she played with him often, but he missed the winged-man, the only one smart enough to know how to talk, and he missed the female. She was the only one who could find that itchy spot beneath his collar and her scent had come to mean "comfort" in his mind.

The winged-woman said his name-word and Dave wagged his tail. She smiled at him softly and then reached out her hand to pet him, but it passed through him. Dave gave her credit for trying, anyway and wiggled over to her for a snuggle. It wasn't quite as satisfying as curling up to a warm peoplebody, but she seemed to appreciate it.

And then she was gone. Where had she gone? Dave jumped to his feet and turned in a circle, but she wasn't there. Had he lost her, like he'd lost his ball? He let out a mournful whimper. He hoped the winged-man wasn't upset at Dave for losing her. He trotted around the den, looking for her, peering under the furniture and even stood up on his hind legs to peek onto the water-fall. He sat down and gave his problem some thought. The winged-man had helped Dave find his ball when he lost it, so maybe he could help find the winged-woman, too.

Bella stared, open-mouthed, at the vehicle that waited for them outside the small town where they had parked their cars. Phoenix sat on top of it, his mouth stretched in a wide grin of pride. "What do ya think?"

"What the fuck is it?" Bella asked.

It looked like a tank had been put on wheels, eight wheels to be precise.

"This, my dear, is a Stryker ICV, courtesy of the U.S. military. It can go sixty miles per hour and has a range of over 300 miles." Phoenix hopped down to the ground level. He patted the vehicle's sides. "Armored, relatively quiet ... it's perfect for this mission."

"You don't think anyone will notice it?" Jasper asked. "It's huge."

"Hopefully, the cover of night will protect us, and well, if they do, that's what the armor is for. It used to have a machine gun up here on top. Damn shame the army takes that shit off before they sell them as surplus."

"Where did you get it?" Bella asked.

"Friend of mine has a whacko-survivalist-conspiracy-theorist-paramilitary compound not too far from here. Place is a goddam fortress. Come on, everybody pile in. Good news is that they put a bitchin' stereo system in this bastard."

He pulled down the tailgate in the back. They had to crouch to get inside. Two benches ran along the sides of the vehicle. Jenks lifted up the seats and stashed his arsenal beneath, keeping only the handguns he wore on holsters at his sides. It had been these guns which were the "supplies" Amun had been waiting for. They had been delivered to their suite in Vegas in long dress boxes, wrapped in pretty lavender tissue paper. The people downstairs must have thought Bella was ordering an entire new wardrobe based on the number of boxes that were hauled up to their room.

There were holes with dangling wires where pieces of electronics had been removed. "Uh, don't touch anything," Forks said from the front passenger seat. "We're really not sure what some of those buttons do."

After everyone was inside, Phoenix shut the tailgate and came around front to jump into the driver's seat. "Brace yourself, Effie," he said and started the engine. They took off with a lurch. Bella was thrown from her seat and landed on Quil, her face in his lap. He blushed and stammered as Bella mumbled an apology and sat up.

"Hit the stereo!" Phoenix commanded, and Justin Beiber blared from of the speakers. Alarmed, Phoenix mashed at the buttons until it was silenced. "Uh, someone must have, um, left a CD in the player or something."

"It's not a CD," Forks said. "It's from the MP3 player. Your MP3 player."

"Shut up, asshole. That ain't mine."

Forks turned it over. "It has your name written on it."

"Fuck you. If you don't shut your yap, I'll tell everyone I saw you in line for the Twilight premiere."

"I was on a date, fuckhead."

"Bullshit. You didn't have no girl with you."

"If you don't shut up, I'll tell everyone how you cried when we watched The Lion King."

"Dude, we were eight!"

"I'd rather listen to music than you two guys bickering," Bella called.

"Yeah, music ... Ah, here we go."

Let the bodies hit the floor,
Let the bodies hit the floor...

"That's more like it," Jenks said.

Bella sat back and watched the men play air guitar and bash on imaginary drums. Esme looked like she wished she could climb out and ride on top. Alice, on the other hand, cheerfully joined in the rocking-out, dancing in her seat while Collin grinned in approval. Convinced they were occupied, Bella let herself sink into thoughts of Edward.

She was tormented by visions of what they could be doing to him to try to get him to tell them where Bella and the rest of the escapees were. Tell them, Edward, she thought. Tell them everything. Whatever they want, just so they don't hurt you.It made sense now why Jenks had been so secretive about where the other Gifted were going after they split up. You couldn't give up information you didn't have.

Tears welled in her eyes and she hastily wiped them away before anyone could notice. She looked up and saw Amun watching her and she glared at him, hoping he'd look away and give her at least a modicum of privacy. He moved from his bench across to hers and sat down in the narrow gap between Jenks and Bella. Jenks grunted indignantly at being crowded and shuffled over a few inches.

He leaned over close to her so he wouldn't have to yell. "Bella, you can't occupy your thoughts with these dark imaginings," he said quietly, his lips only inches fro her ear. "Instead, think on what you'll do to anyone who has harmed him. Your anger gives you more power."

"Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate, and hate leads to the Dark Side," Bella quoted.

Amun smirked. "Perhaps, but it's not your side of sweetness and light that's going to get your angel back."

He was right; it wasn't. She was going to have to become Dark Bella again, floating in her ball of lightning ... She closed her eyes against a sudden surge of nausea. She still hadn't fully come to terms with all that she had done that night and now she was going to have to do it again.

"Deep breaths," Amun counseled.

"Are you reading my mind?" she demanded.

"I can't help it," he confessed. "I love listening to your thought processes. They're so deliciously muddled."

Could Edward still hear her? she wondered. She hoped so. She hoped he could feel how much she loved him and know that she was coming for him, would do anything it took to get him back.

Phoenix was using the steering wheel and dash as a drum kit during Enter Sandman by Metallica, and in one of those can't-believe-it-happened-outside-of-a-movie moments, the moment that James Hetfield sang "Boom!" they slammed into a sand dune. The music fell silent.

Everyone in the back was now in a pile on the floor in the front. There were groans, yelps and curses.

"What in the blue fuck just happened!" Jenks shouted from somewhere on the bottom of the pile.

Phoenix moaned and rubbed his head. He had a knot on his forehead crowned by a cut that was sending a trickle of blood down toward his eye. "Hit something," he muttered.

"Well, no fucking shit you hit something. What did you hit?"

Phoenix looked out the windshield. "It's big, amorphous in shape, and appears to be comprised of sand. I'm guessing it's a big-ass pile of sand, Boss."

"Aw, fuck," Jenks groaned. "Goddam it, Ben, get your ass out of my face."

"Sorry," Ben muttered.

It took time to untangle themselves. Alice, who had fortunately landed at the top, chirped. "It's like a game of Twister went tragically wrong."

Amun had landed on top of Bella and he was using his knees and elbows to keep the weight of the pile off of her. "Fancy meeting you like this," he said with one of his wicked grins. His eyes went to her lips.

"Try it and I'll send you through the roof," Bella warned.

Amun smirked. "Can't blame a guy for his thoughts."

"Everyone all right? Anyone dead?" Jenks called.

Quil grunted as an elbow accidentally hit him in the gut. "Are you expecting a dead person to reply?"

"Fuck you, Flamer," Jenks retorted.

"The birth of a new nickname," Collin decreed.

"Anyone who calls me that gets set on fire. Fair warning has been given."

The back of the truck was at an incline, so it was a little difficult reaching the tailgate. Jenks and Collin wrestled with it and dropped it open. Jasper took Bella's hands and helped her up and over the gate. Everyone climbed out and stared at the front of the Stryker, its hood half-buried in a sand dune.

"What the fuck, Phoenix? Did you not see the giant goddam mountain of sand in front of you?"

"I thought we could drive over it," Phoenix said sheepishly.

"Jesus Christ," Jenks muttered. He pulled out a pirated GPS device and checked their location. "We're only a mile from the mountain. We'll hoof it from here. Phoenix, you get a fuckin' shovel and you dig the fuckin' truck out, got it?"

"I didn't bring a shovel, Jenks!" Phoenix said.

Jenks cupped his hands. "Look, Nature's shovel." He smacked Phoenix upside the head. "Moron. I'm sure you can find something in here which will function as a shovel. Use your goddam imagination. Jesus!"

He jumped back up inside the truck and reappeared moments later with his arms full of rifles. He passed them out like Halloween candy and went back for more.

Amun held a handgun out to Bella. "You'll want this."

She shook her head. "I don't need a gun."

"Take it," he urged. "Just in case. What would you do if the bastards captured you?"

Bella remembered the promise she'd wrung out of Edward at the restaurant. She'd made him promise that he'd kill her before he'd let her be recaptured. A horrible, ugly thing to make a man who loved you swear to, but she had done it. And she had meant it. She still did. She'd far rather die than be in one of those facilities again. She took the gun silently and stuck it in the back of her jeans, and pulled the hem of her shirt over it.

"I want you to know, I'd do it for you, too," he said. Bella didn't know what to say, but she was grateful for it.

Jenks reappeared with large canteen bags. "I know this'll be fuckin' heavy guys, but you gotta carry it with us. If we walk back in the daylight, we're going to need water and a fuckload of it.

"For Christ's sake, Jenks, we're only a fuckin' mile away," Collin protested.

"Famous last words," Jenks said darkly. "Ain't smart to walk around in the desert without it. We could get lost. We could get pinned down. You never know what might happen. So, carry the fuckin' water and shut the fuck up about it, pretty please?"

Collin grumbled but he took the bag and everyone else did as well, except for Bella, Alice and Esme. For once, Bella appreciated sexism when Jenks deemed the bags too heavy for the women to carry. He, Collin and Amun each took an extra one "for the ladies", as Jenks put it. Radios were distributed, not enough for everyone, unfortunately, but Bella figured it was one less thing she'd have to worry about losing or breaking.

Jenks chose part of the crew to stay behind to assist with the dig-out. Jasper opted to stay with this group and Bella understood why. Though he wanted to support her and assist her, Jasper was no killer. Bella didn't want to force him to change that, either.

The rest of them started off into the darkness. Bella watched the ground beneath her feet carefully. Snakes, scorpions, cacti ... there were many bitey-pokey things in the desert and for a clumsy person, it was a very painful accident waiting to happen. Well, at least Amun wouldn't object to picking cactus needles out of her ass. Behind her, she heard him laugh.

It was so dark that the top of the mountain seemed to blend in with the overcast sky. It was a shame. Bella had heard that the view of the stars in the desert was amazing. They crept ever closer. She began to make out the shapes of buildings. None had lights on inside and Bella started to feel hopeful that the Yucca Mountain site had been basically abandoned.

Then they heard voices. Jenks gestured to them quickly and they turned off their flashlights. Slowly, they crept toward the buildings. "I smell hamburgers," Collin whispered.

Bella sniffed. She did too. They reached a Quonset hut on the edge of the compound and peeked around. They saw two uniformed guards standing over a grill, poking at the hissing meat.

"Billy, I really think they're done," one of them said.

"Last time you said that, we took 'em all in and Carl was pissed when he cut into one of 'em and found a red center. You remember that?"

Even in the low light, Bella could see the intertwined "TP", the Theta Project's logo, on their uniform shirts.

"Yeah, but I'd rather have to put 'em back on than have 'em all tough and dried out."

So there were at least three of them. They watched as one of the men scooped the hamburgers up onto a plate and walked across the grounds. Big plate. More than three, surely, unless one of them had an appetite like a bear. Jenks held up a hand for them to stay put, pointed at himself and then at his eyes. They all nodded. Crouched low, he inched his way across the compound yard toward the hut where the guards had gone. Bella looked at the vast tunnel entrance before them. A set of rails led inside, and a chain-link fence covered the mouth. Piece of cake, she thought.

The door opened and Jenks dove under the stairs to hide. One of the guards clomped down the steps and went toward the tunnel entrance, bearing a plate of hamburgers and carrying two sodas and a bag of chips in his other hand. Two more down in the tunnel, then. Could there really only be a total of five?

He opened the lock on the gate and went inside. Bella waved to Jenks, who had crawled out from under the stairs and pointed at herself and then the entrance. He shook his head. Bella ignored him. She darted forward and Amun grabbed her arm. She glared at him. "I'm coming with you," he whispered.

"No."

"Yes."

She rolled her eyes. Fine. She tiptoed through the compound yard to the gate at the mouth of the tunnel. Her heart was pounding so loudly that she thought it would surely echo off the stone walls. They followed the tracks, stepping on the wood ties to make the least amount of noise. They saw the bobbing of the guard's flashlight beam disappear around a bend. They followed, as closely as they dared. Around the corner and in front of them was a glass door. They both ducked back quickly before anyone saw them.

Bella's heart sank. Through the opening, she saw an office, just like an office that could be seen in any corporation, divided into cubicles, people busily typing, filing, answering phones under fluorescent light panels... The guard stopped at one of the desks and sat down on a chair he took from an unused desk. He and the woman seated there began to share the hamburgers and chips, smiling at each other in a way that told any observers that they were a young couple in love.

"Why the fuck would they have an office operating in the middle of the night?" Amun muttered.

"We can't do this," Bella said. Her knees shook and she lowered herself carefully to the floor. She was not going to kill a bunch of secretaries.

"The fuck we can't," Amun spat. He knelt behind her and grabbed her arm. "Would you feel the same way about the secretaries who typed up the death lists at the concentration camps?"

"Good God, Amun, it's not nearly the same thing! You can't even compare the two."

"Really? They steal you away from your families and then when they're done with you, they toss you into the snow to shoot you. The only fucking difference is the scale."

Bella's mind flashed to that chimney and how she thought that would be her final destination.

"What this tells us is that it's a far larger organization than we thought. That means more people than we imagined are suffering the way you suffered, the way my Victoria suffered. And I, for one, am saying no."

He switched the safety off on his rifle, stood and marched over to the glass door. With one kick, he shattered it. Bella heard screams and the crashes of furniture as people jumped from their desks, knocked over chairs ... and then gunfire and more screams. Bella pressed her hands over her ears.

They're Theta Project. They're evil. Oh, God, no they're not, they're just people with a job and a mortgage and two-point-five kids. But they have to know. They have to know what those files say. They have to know what's going on at the facilities. Does that make them as guilty as Jacob?

"Bella! What the fuck are you doing?" Jenks barked.

She looked up at him through a shimmer of tears and his face softened. "Come on, honey." He held out his hand and she took it. He drew her to her feet.

"There!" someone shouted. Bella threw up a shield and it was the only thing that saved their lives as the guards running down the hall toward them began to fire. Jenks shoved Bella into the short entryway where the glass doors had once stood. "Drop the shield," he commanded. She did and the sound of his rifle in the small space was deafening. Bella pressed her palms even harder against her ears. "Got 'em," Jenks announced cheerfully.

"Bella! Bella!" Alice shouted.

"Here," Bella called. She peeked around the edge and saw the rest of the group trotting down the slope toward them. Alice threw herself down on the ground beside Bella and grabbed her in a hug. "I saw," she said. "In a moment, three guards are going to come out of the hallway in the office next to the soda machines and Amun is going to shoot them."

She'd barely finished saying it before the shots rang out.

"They're back," Bella said, more a statement than a question.

"They're back," Alice confirmed. She stood. "Come on, Bella. We've got to get moving."

They walked through the office. Bella refused to look down and, of course, she tripped over the first obstacle in her path. She fell on her hands and knees next to a corpse of a woman not much older than she was. The top of her head was gone. Bella scrambled back, her gorge rising and the heel of her hand landed on the cooling arm of another body. She grabbed a trash can and retched. She hadn't eaten much in the last few days, so there was little to come up, but her stomach didn't seem to believe that and enthusiastically pushed to expel everything. A hand appeared in front of her face holding a cone-shaped cup of water. She sipped it. Her stomach considered the matter and decided to allow it, so she drank some more.

Amun walked over to a desk and picked up a woman's purse from the floor. He dumped out the contents and sorted through them, then opened the desk drawer. He found what he wanted and brought them to Bella. Breath mints.

"Thanks," she said in a wry tone.

"It's not for your breath, it's for your stomach," he said. "Mint helps soothe nausea."

He glanced over at Alice. "Which way?" he asked her.

She pointed to the hallway between the soda machines. Jenks stopped and bought a Pepsi, which he offered to the rest of the group before popping it open and taking a huge swill of it. Like a goddam commercial, Bella thought. "After a hard day's killing, nothing refreshes you like an ice-cold Pepsi."

Amun chuckled. Bella glared at him. She was used to Edward hearing her internal monologue, but it was disconcerting to know that her mind was an open book to Amun as well. And she was pretty sure he wouldn't stop if she asked him politely.

"Probably not," he agreed.

Bella popped a couple of the dead woman's mints into her mouth. He was right. They did help. She held onto his arm as he navigated the rest of the way through the room so that she didn't fall. At the entrance to the hall, she let go and fell back to walk beside Alice.

"Do we find Edward here?" she asked. Alice's expression changed as she watched whatever it was she saw in her mind when these visions came over her. Then she shook her head. "I can't see his future or yours. I see us leaving the facility, and he's not with us."

Bella's small hopes were dashed. She told herself she hadn't expected him to be here anyway, but still, a tiny hope had blossomed when she saw that this facility was larger than they had expected.

At the bottom of the slope, a hallway extended to the left and right. "Split up," Amun said. Jenks nodded. He took Collin and Quil and they headed down the hall, guns drawn, walking softly, though the whole place had to know they were here. Bella saw a camera and crushed it with her power.

They came to a door and Amun kicked in the door and held his handguns straight out in front of him as he entered the dark room. Bella pawed the wall for a light switch and finally found it. Alice and Esme followed her inside, clutching at each other. Neither of them belonged her, Bella thought. Alice had a gun but Bella was pretty sure she wouldn't use it.

At first glance, it appeared to be a medical facility, perhaps the clinic for the people who worked here, but on closer examination, its true purpose became clear. The stainless steel table had thick metal bands which could be strapped around the "patient" to hold them in place and the instruments were things that hadn't been used by real doctors in over a century. Bella pressed a hand over her mouth and stared in numb horror.

Amun went over to the small stand of files on the counter and quickly rifled through them, throwing to the ground what didn't interest him. Bella watched the papers flutter and they drew her eyes to the corner where something blindingly white was sticking out from under the curtain. Bella frowned and crouched down to pick it up. Her gasp caught Amun's attention. She held up a feather, a beautiful white feather with a pearlescent sheen. She held it to her nose and imagined she could faintly detect his scent.

"Edward's?" he asked.

She nodded. "He was here within the last twenty-four hours," she said.

Amun held up a file. "I think this is his."

Bella was so eager that her words tripped over one another. "What does it say? Does it say where he is? Is he okay?"

Amun's face held deep pity. "We've got his serial number. That's the important part. We should be able to find him on the server more easily."

"What does it say?" Bella insisted. "What are they doing to him?"

"Nothing," Amun said.

"Give it to me," she commanded.

Amun put a hand on her shoulder and she nearly slammed him against the wall, but she refrained. "Bella, there's just some things you don't want to know, all right? We're going to get him back, but there's no use in tormenting yourself in the meantime." He opened a chute on the wall which had a picture of a flame on it and dropped the file inside. "It's gone now," he said. "Incinerated."

"I ought to stuff you down that chute," she hissed.

"Probably, but why don't you wait until you've got your angel back?" He gave her a brief smile and steered her back toward the doorway. He checked the hall before leading them outside and to the next room. The lights were on inside. An office. He went over to the computer and pulled a screwdriver from his pocket. "Unplug this, will you?"

Bella followed the cord to the outlet and tugged it out. And then she saw something odd. The oak paneling above the socket didn't seem to be flush with the rest of the wall. She pressed it and it popped open to reveal a safe. "Amun, can you crack safes?" Bella asked.

He glanced up. "Not quickly enough. Rip the door off it."

She felt like a moron for not thinking of that herself. She concentrated on the line around the door and it fell off at her feet. Inside, there were a pile of CD-ROMS in jewel cases and what looked like a portable hard drive. "Jackpot!" Amun said. He took the items and stuffed them in his back. He had the case off of the CPU tower and now he pulled out the hard drive and stuck that in his bag as well.

They went back out into the hallway and met up with Jenks, Collin and Quil. "Empty," Jenks said.

"Damn," Amun muttered. "I'd hoped it would be close by. You told me the wrong way to go, Alice."

She shook her head. "I saw us come down this way first. And now we go down the hallway to the left."

They went back up to the office area which still stank of gunpowder and blood. Bella tried not to breathe as they passed through the room to the next hallway. But this time, they were in luck. At the bottom, they found a file room and the servers, back against the wall. Amun went to work with his screwdriver. Bella plucked a file out at random and opened it. The first thing she saw were photographs of a young man, front and side views, like a criminal, but over the image a word had been stamped in red ink: TERMINATED. And she was pretty sure they didn't mean he'd been fired.

She flipped through the pages. First, there were those forms that Dr. Snow had filled out on her abilities during the interminable testing phase. The young man, Embry, was a minor talent, a clairvoyant, barely a 5 on the scale. Then there was a medical history of himself and his family members back two generations. Bella puzzled over them for a moment, wondering why they would need this information. It didn't seem they were looking for psychic talent, just general health information. And then the next page answered her questions: serial numbers of sperm samples. And one of the samples had been used, successfully, on another test subject.

Bella dropped the file.

"Bella, what is it?" Esme asked.

It was a long moment before Bella could speak. "It's a breeding program."