The room opens to a massive underground facility. The seventeen-thousand square feet hold a gruesome tale of torture, pain, and death.
Bodies are everywhere - body parts rather. Blood has painted every surface I can see, and the burn of uranium isn’t anywhere in the air. This was done by a gifted or one fucking strong son of a bitch.
The dead, glazed-over eyes seem to hold scars from their final visions. In all my years serving the United, I’ve never even heard about something this gory, not even from my mother. These bodies have been gashed in half, ripped apart, sliced in pieces, and there are hundreds of people who were massacred in this enormous underground secret.
Weapons are unused - guns still strapped to torsos or legs. What could have done this? Who would be strong enough to take down this many without allowing someone to draw their weapons?
My mother might be this strong, but I’m not sure even she could accomplish this much without letting someone get a shot off. Could there be another child of an emergent that managed to survive past puberty? Could there be another child from a mother like mine whose powers weren’t blocked? Could I have been capable of something this hellacious if my mother hadn’t interfered?
Chills consume me as a daunting reality comes to light. If I was strong enough to fold my brother’s body by accident at the age of nine, I could have grown strong enough to do something like this. I’m almost thankful now that she did stop me from turning this strong.
“What the hell could have done this?” Melania gasps out.
She turns her head away, but I turn back and walk into the chamber of gore.
“Aria, don’t,” Jase softly counters, his hand sliding over mine.
“I need to look for something to see if I can find out what or who did this. We’ll also need to know where the people-” or person “- who did this went next or came from.”
His lips tighten, his eyes wishing they had a way to spare me this horror, but instead, he joins me at my side.
“I’m not letting you do this alone.”
“You should. There is a lot of hybrid blood in here. If it gets in your mouth by accident, you could-”
“I’ll be fine,” he interrupts.
I pull off my mask and hand it to him.
“You’re not coming with me unless you put that on,” I argue, and his eyes look into mine with such a different gaze than I’ve seen yet.
I suppose he’s surprised at the fact I’m ordering someone around who outranks me. I’m not letting him risk his life unnecessarily. I can deal with the hellacious stench, I can’t deal with the possibility of him dying to spare myself some discomfort.
He smirks, and he takes the mask from me appreciatively.
“Does that mean you might actually care about me a little more than you let on?” he says, his voice muffled by the mask.
You idiot. I’m damn near close to being in love with you, not that you give a fuck.
"Just let me know if you see anything," I mumble, avoiding his question.
Suddenly I feel his hand holding mine, his grip almost too tight. I feel his desire to pull me into his arms almost burning against me.
My empathic abilities always fuck with my head, but I usually confuse someone else's emotion with mine, making it hard to cipher if I feel something myself, or if I'm feeling what they feel. But I can tell this is his desire, though it matches my own.
I release his hand instantly, wiping away the charged connection. I wish I knew how he did these things to me so I could do them to him too. Maybe then he’d be as into me as I am him.
I kneel down in front of one body, and I fight back the bile rising to my throat, its bitter taste making me all the sicker. The flesh is torn away from a body as if it was damn near filleted. The muscle has been shredded, and I swear it looks like teeth have been here.
Something ripped this hybrid apart and fed on it. Please don’t let this thing be like me.
“What’d you find?” Jase asks, startling me out of my panic.
I just shake my head and walk away. The others who are strong enough to brave the horrendous scene start falling in behind us, and I walk away from Jase to steady my inner panic attack.
There’s nothing stronger than my mother. That has always given me solace in the world full of fear. Now, I’ve seen there is something stronger, much stronger, and so ungodly vicious. Whatever this thing is, it’s merciless.
If my mom finds out about it, she’ll go after it alone to keep us safe. If she finds out, she’ll die for nothing because she won’t be strong enough to beat it.
