CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO - SADIE
“What’s all the fucking yelling about?” Thomas yells as he descends the stairs.
“Oh, there he is,” Uzi snarls. “Did you have fun fucking my little Sadie?”
Thomas laughs, but I have this deep, sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. This is wrong. Everything about this is wrong. Thomas has no idea what Uzi can do. He has no idea—
“I thought we had a deal, Uzi?” Thomas says.
“Yeah, your friends here,” Lincoln says, nodding at Thomas as he walks up to them. His friend Case positions himself on the other side. They are a team. And they are powerful. But I’m so fucking scared for them. “They’ve overstayed their welcome. I’m gonna have to ask you to leave.”
“Get Sadie,” Cyan says. “And we’ll be on our way.”
“No,” Thomas says. “Sadie stays. But the three of you, you’re leaving. Right now.”
“Not without her,” Cyan says. “I’m not leaving my sister in the hands of you freaks. Who knows what you’ll do to her.”
“That’s funny coming from you, Cyan. Do you really think we don’t know who you are? What you did to her?” He nods at Iziah, who has not said a word. And, come to think of it, he hasn’t said a word since we got here. “And him?”
Cyan and Uzi both look at each other.
And then a message flashes across my field of vision. It’s fast. Barely a blink and it’s gone. I don’t even get a look at the letters. Was that from Thomas? Sullivan? Is he trying to warn me about something?
Pain shoots through my head. Pressure, so severe I feel like I might explode. I fall to my knees, holding my head like this is the only way I can keep my brain intact.
Downstairs everything is pushed. Case and Lincoln go flying backwards. Lulu and Molly are slammed against the fireplace and slump to the floor.
But Thomas is still standing. He sends one back towards Uzi and Cyan and gives them a little taste of their own medicine.
Iziah is the only one of them who takes the hit. He crashes into a window and disappears from sight. God. Thomas threw him like a rag doll. Iziah didn’t even try to defend himself.
Why didn’t he react? Uzi and Cyan must have some kind of control over him.
Uzi and Cyan raise their arms, like they are magicians, wielding power. How? How are they doing this without me and Iziah? Two mentalists? Linked? Not possible. It can’t be—
But it is. Because they push the next mind blast towards Thomas and send him flying.
Then—little robots appear. From every corner of the room. From every doorway. They emerge from their secret hiding places like a swarm. Some have pincer claws, some are flying around Uzi and Cyan’s heads. They crawl all over them, making Cyan scream, her hands desperate to try to swat them off her clothes.
Sheila, I realize.
But that’s when I notice Uzi. He’s not fighting—he’s laughing. They are crawling all over him like ants. “That’s all you got, Alphas? Really? Robots?”
Case and Lincoln are getting to their feet. “No,” Lincoln says. “That’s not all we’ve got.” He raises his cannon arm, aims at Cyan, and shoots her.
I gasp, my hand over my heart. My sister! That’s all I can think as her body explodes into millions of shards. She shatters. Like glass.
What the fuck is happening?
I feel her for a moment. Inside my head. Memories go flashing by. Her whole life runs out like a movie in super-fast-forward. She’s reaching… looking for…
Shit.
Oh, shit.
Thomas stands up, a smirky grin on his face. “Finally,” he says. “Finally.” Only this time he cackles with laughter. It’s the most diabolical sound I’ve ever heard.
And it’s not Thomas.
It’s not Sullivan either.
It’s Cyan.
She’s not in my head, she’s in his.
I take my attention back to Uzi, that evil laugh filling the room until it echoes. “You did it!” he yells. But who he’s yelling to, I’m not sure.
Not me.
Not Thomas.
And not even Cyan.
He’s talking to Lincoln Wade. Who aims his cannon arm at Uzi now. But Uzi pushes him back with another mind blast. Lincoln smashes into a wall and sinks down, momentarily stunned.
The little robots are all over Uzi, but he ignores them as he walks up to Lincoln. “That’s all I wanted, Bike Boy. How do you kill someone who can’t be killed?” Uzi laughs as he grabs Lincoln’s collar and pulls him up to his feet. “You get an Alpha.” Suddenly every squirming robot on Uzi’s body goes still. Then they drop off, like someone… turned them off.
Good God. He was the one who stopped the train back in the tunnel! He can control mechanical things with his mind.
“We need you, Linc,” Uzi says, right into Lincoln’s face. “So Cyan could die and slip right into Thomas’s mind to take over. If you think two mentalists linked together are powerful, just wait till you see what we can do with three.”
He throws Lincoln down on the floor with the most powerful mind blast I’ve ever seen. It makes a crater in the floor so deep Lincoln’s body disappears into a dark hole.
And then Uzi looks right at me.