The Reflective Dissent, page 8




Rough encounter. Beth smiles. Meeting a reanimated human is more than a “rough encounter” in her mind, but she doesn't comment.
Beth surveys the land, seeing the same decaying remnants of turn-of-the-last-century brick architecture that remain in the valley of the Kent Quadrant. Before the farms that grew this world's food for this quadrant were cut short. She spies the exact alley where the zombie ran full tilt in their direction.
Beth briefly wonders what became of him. Raising her eyes, she can just make out the hidden port where the Reflectivesʼ locator is held.
Jeb takes her hand, and she feels the heat of his anticipatory leap tingling between their touch. He glances at her briefly, and Beth gives the barest nod. They jump without a word. The distance is so small that the sting of the leap is only a brief bite before they land at a precariously hung fire escape that suffers from disuse.
Metallic spray paint has haphazardly been overlaid on the original sooty onyx finish.
Jeb tracked the point of reflection and Beth lent him her signature, the same process for any jump, long or short. When they became corporal then solid again, they reappeared almost instantly beside the rotting bars that once held sturdy ladders for escape in case of fire. An archaic practice.
Feels good to jump, Beth thinks before a shrill whistle reaches her ears.
“A little warning, daughter,” Gunnar calls from below them.
Beth gives him a stiff hand signal to go back into hiding. His shoulders slump, and he trudges his big form over and repositions behind the dumpster. Bloodlings do not like to skulk in camouflage. It’s a proud race and not one for hiding.
The beings of Three do not yet use their garbage as fuel, so there is a perfect spot where the Bloodlings can stay until she and Jeb can sort this mess.
Beth shakes her head. Three is primitive in many ways. However, the Threes are not primitive in the ways of weapons. For all their technology, they pollute their world, though Beth has foreknowledge of when that will stop. And she remembers the directive of The Cause they've already transgressed. Twelfth: Disturb not the continuum.
She frowns. There have been many directives she and Jeb have needed to break. Lives were at stake. Sometimes their own.
Jeb runs his hands along the brick, his brows meeting. “Can't remember... there!” he says with a triumphant flash of teeth. A fine crack, seen only if sought, appears beside where the locator sphere would be. Beth had been able to make out the location but not the exact position. The port is meant to be nearly seamless so as to avoid detection by the people of this world.
Beth hands her ceramic dagger to Jeb. “See if you can't pry it open.” Without a sister locator, the port does not open automatically.
Jeb glances at her, taking the stout blade by the hilt. “Let us hope I don't inadvertently drop the one sphere we have.”
They exchange a look of dread.
Beth looks at the alleyway below them and can just make out her father, Jacky, Slade, and Maddie crouching behind the huge refuse container. They'd discussed making themselves as scarce as possible when they reached the area where the locator was. Their group doesn't need to be out on display. Slade and Gunnar look exactly like what they are here on Three—aliens.
Three is a paranoid world. Paranormal talents were discovered by geneticist Kyle Hart, and subsequently the genetic markers were tampered with by the brilliant but insane Zondorae brothers. Those realities have softened the public consciousness toward all things strange and unusual—but Three is not ready for Bloodling with their giant, almost seven-foot-tall bodies and gray-skinned flesh. With fangs.
No, they reluctantly agreed to stay hidden until they could secure a smooth exit from this world.
Jeb works diligently on the cracked side, inching the blade back and forth, trying to gently pry the port open so they can grab the sphere. Normally, they would have the mate. Two Reflectives would use their own sphere, which in turn would hone in on the stationary one always housed in a port on a jumping sector, and sensing its twin, the port would smoothly open.
Unfortunately, neither of them had their sphere because of Ryan.
Taking the locating sphere from its port is not illegal per se, but it means any Reflective tasked with jumping to this quadrant would need to find another quadrant with a locator. They're deliberately widely spaced.
Jeb finally meets success, but the port opens in jerky movements instead of the smoothness of a normal opening coaxed by its mated sphere. Instead of the small lever that houses the sphere gliding open, it spits apart and sends the sphere rocketing out like an expelled seed pit.
Beth hops to the rail, balances for a split second on the balls of her feet, then leaps.
“Beth!” Jeb bellows.
Beth tracks the sphere midair. Of course, if the cylindrical honing device lands while she uses it to jump, she dies. Even she cannot heal the damage from a five-story fall.
Her body heats, coalescing into weighted molecules of singular purpose as she hits the perfectly prepared medium for Reflectives to jump.
Beth also watches the ground draw closer as her body and the sphere collide.
She immediately seeks reflection. Nothing.
The grains within the asphalt become visible as the ground appears to hurtle toward her.
With bone-jarring pain, she feels something snatch the sphere out of the air, and her along with it, causing her to separate harshly from the reflection.
Beth becomes solid again, groaning.
Slade holds her. It was he who severed her from her reflection.
“You were falling,” he says somewhat breathlessly. Not from being out of shape. His eyes are anxious. Slade was worried.
Beth nods, breathing through the agony. It feels as though a part of her body has been amputated. She spares an assessing glance at the ground a meter beneath her and decides the sickening pain is worth the price. “That sometimes happens in a jump.”
Gunnar's face appears beside Slade. His expression is ferocious, his lips pulled back from fully extended fangs. “That was not funny.”
Beth swallows twice before she can speak, plucking the sphere away from Slade. Holding it high in the air, she feels when Jeb uses the surface to appear.
And a nanosecond later, he does.
“If it shattered, we would have lost our easy way to One. Now Gunnar doesn't have to.” Beth coughs, and blood coats the inside of her mouth like metallic slime.
She assesses. Internal bleeding. Cracked ribs. Dislocated shoulder.
Rough descent. Maybe inertia is good for the moment. Beth looks over at Gunnar from the cradle of Slade's arms. “I did what I must.”
“Beth,” Jeb says, running a finger over her forehead, “you could have died.”
Jeb looks shaken. A rare thing for him.
Beth keeps her eyes on her partner. A male that wants so much more from her. She clenches her jaw. “We're Reflective. It's the nature of our role.” Her hand moves to her side.
She's suddenly embarrassed. “Slade, set me down.”
He does, and Beth bites her lip. Jacky won't be the only one using the jump to heal.
“I scent your injuries.” Slade scowls, his hand hovering beside her elbow.
Gunnar and Jeb scowl as well.
Beth hobbles away from the males.
Jeb's face twists, and she can clearly see what it costs him not to go to her.
She did what she had to do. Beth will heal. But as Jacky would say, she feels like ass.
Maddie approaches and slides an arm around Beth's waist. “I'll help. Lean on me.” She gives the men a look of chastisement.
Beth appreciates that, as she doesn't have the energy to spare them the same regard.
“Here, Jeb,” Beth says, handing the sphere to him.
He takes it gingerly. Their fingers touch, and a tingle goes through her like an electrical shock, and she groans. The charged sensation feels good—and bad. A sphere between two Reflectives is a powerful conduit of energy.
“ʼKay, let's get going,” Jacky says. His skin is ashen, and he's trembling.
“Halt!”
They turn. Beth pivots too fast, sucking an inhale from the pain the movement cost her, the shoulder Slade yanked out of the socket throbs like a rotten tooth.
And there at the end of the alley is a Three lawman.
Principle help them, of all the terrible fortune.
“What is that?” Gunnar asks in a hiss.
“Cops,” Jacky says then looks at Merrick. “Jump our asses out of here. They get a load of the fang parade and we're toast. They'll interrogate us until I'm legal to drink.”
Beth would laugh if she could breathe through it. She spits a wad of phlegm-coated blood. It splatters the asphalt, resembling a gory snail. Beth needs this jump. Badly. She cradles her arm.
Slade and Jeb look at what she expunged, then her.
“How bad?” Jeb asks. His expression is neutral, which tells Beth how worried he is.
“Not good,” she replies honestly. “Can't you tell?”
“Police! Hold your position.” The voice is closer, and Beth glances at the striding lawman.
Merrick's lips flatten, his eyes on the encroaching Three. “No, not since...” He doesn't finish, and Beth suddenly realizes the soul mate change has altered what was normal between them before.
The lawman draws nearer, his weapon raised.
“Remind me to put in a protocol that this locator be moved.”
Beth gives Jeb a weak smile. “Duly noted.”
She sags against Maddie and tightens her hold around the taller girl.
“I'll kill him,” Gunnar says.
Beth's eyes shut. Sixth: Take life only in defense of another. “No,” Beth whispers. “Jeb, jump us.”
He turns to her. “I need you for One.”
Oh no. Beth can't offer her skills; she's too weakened. “Gunnar,” Beth says.
“I am here, daughter.”
Beth squeezes her eyes shut. “Take my hand.”
He does.
“I will shoot!”
Beth opens her eyes, sighting in on the lawman. Her vision is ten times that of a Three and more than that of the average Reflective, especially at night, thanks in part to her Bloodling ancestry.
She assesses him instantly. Six feet, Hispanic descent, over forty cycles, moves with precision.
Martial arts training. IQ over one hundred twenty.
Beth knows this male.
“Jeb,” her voice resonates.
Jeb's face whips to hers, and she feels his heat, the heat of the jump, a moment before the first bullet takes Beth in the leg.
Gunnar crouches, Jacky in one arm, Beth's hand held in the other. He hisses as Beth's leg blows apart.
Hollow point ammunition. She feels the hole in the back of her leg and knows it's wide as a dinner plate.
She can't help her scream.
“Beth!” Jeb yells.
Then everything fades, the world narrowing to a pinpoint of the lawman centered in her tunneling vision, the edges gray like dirty lace.
The second bullet follows the first, and Jeb moves before it as he jumps them.
Later, Beth knows that he's saved her life.
In that moment of becoming a jumping ribbon of molecules, she knows only that her partner's been hit by a lethal weapon on Three.
She feels the pocket of jumping power lost like a dropped rope and is too weak to focus.
Beth reaches out to Gunnar on the same wavelength that she would seek another Reflective and finds nothing.
Then a tailwind appears, and with her last remaining bit of strength, she holds on to the only one she senses.
Taking Beth from Three—and somewhere else.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Merrick
Jeb feels the puncture of a bullet as it passes through his body harmlessly, missing Beth by a hair.
Unfortunately, the avoidance maneuver took a great deal of skill to exist in the corporal realm and not jump simultaneously. Staying in that form without jumping is dangerous, an almost stasis limbo state that, if kept too long, can mean death to a Reflective.
Dangerous but necessary. Jeb wasn't sure that Beth could survive two wounds from the type of ammunition that lawman was using. He can hardly bear the feel of her agony as her leg was torn apart.
The type of bullets, those that enter benignly only to make a huge hole on exit, are extremely difficult to survive. Had Beth been human, she'd already be dead.
The avoidance of that second bullet caused Jeb to have to drop that critical signature. The decision was to let the tether of his jump go or lose Beth.
He let it go.
Only for a moment.
Now Jeb's guts drop in his stomach as he spins toward One—assuming that Gunnar can get them there. He lends his power to the jump, and the line pulls taut, tying everyone together in a hard pull of knotted molecules.
The landing is hard, but Jeb's suffered harder. He falls forward and rolls into the drop. Sand works its way into every crack in his clothing and every pore of his skin. He sits back on his knees, spitting the fine sand out like spoiled sugar.
Giving swift attention to his surroundings, Jeb spots the others immediately and rises to his feet. He dusts off his filthy uniform and finally gives up. There's no cleaning dirt layered upon dirt.
He looks for Beth.
Nothing.
His eyes sweep the others quickly.
Principle no! “Where's Beth?” he yells to Gunnar, who is lifting Maddie by the elbow.
He shakes his head. “I had hold of her hand, and then it was as though the jump went wild.”
The jump went wild because Jeb needed to save Beth.
But now she isn't here.
Despair soaks Jeb's guts as a pounding headache settles in for the duration.
“Where is she, hopper?” Slade grates, moving toward Jeb with the grace of a native.
The sand doesn't slow the giant Bloodling, for he's accustomed to navigating it.
Jeb sees the blow coming and lets it happen.
He deserves it. He didn't save Beth. He let her jump somewhere without him, gravely injured.
Slade's fist plows into Jeb's unprotected jaw, and he flies backward. But years of training don't depart a Reflective because of despondency.
Jeb's hands snap out, catching himself and rolling to his side as Slade advances.
Slade reaches for Jeb, and Jeb catches the Bloodling's forearm, pulling with all his might, and the big male falls forward.
Jeb kicks Slade square in the ass, and he flies forward as Jeb springs to his feet and rounds toward him.
Now it is the Bloodling's turn to spit sand.
They circle each other.
“You fucking clod,” Slade seethes, “you've lost her. Beth cannot be the one you proclaim her to be or you would not have let her go. You lie, hopper.”
“I had no choice, Bloodling!” Jeb shouts in his face. If Slade's hair were not still tied down, the force of Jeb’s voice would have blown it back.
“Hey guys—the fuck?”
Jeb dare not turn toward Jacky, or Slade will brain him. This, he knows.
Jacky moves from behind him and stands between them.
He is no longer a youngling. Again.
“So Jasper's off”—Jacky makes a seesawing motion with his hand— “gallivanting around somewhere with a bigass hole in her leg, bleeding out, while you guys try to pound each other.” Jacky nods, flipping back his longish dark blond bangs. His intense green eyes narrow on the two of them. “Makes perfect sense.”
“Sometimes I hate you,” Slade says, straightening.
Jacky shrugs. “Whatever. Needed to get you two dicks to cool your jets. Beth's somewhere while you guys are thumping your chests and stuff.”
“He's right,” Gunnar acknowledges, giving a thorough perusal to Jacky's altered form.
Maddie circles the two of them. “She was already hurt from when Slade caught her. Now Beth's been shot?”
Jeb plugs his hands on his hips. “Yes. The lawman had fired a second shot, and I had to stay corporal for longer than what is deemed safe so the bullet would not strike—”
“—and also not follow our tail,” Gunnar finishes.
Jeb gives a grim nod. “It's exactly that.” He shoots a rage-filled glance at Slade.
Who glares right back, of course. Though it pleases Jeb that Slade looks positively green from the jump, his skin slicked with sick sweat.
Jeb assesses everyone, ignoring Slade. Maddie and Jacky look whole and well, though Jeb notices Jacky's arm isn't quite right. He walks to the boy.
“Let me look at your arm.”
Jacky lifts it. There's a scar where the break occurred. “A healer would be good.”
Jacky pointedly looks around them. “Yup. Ton of ʼem milling around, I notice.”
Jeb scowls. “Who will jump with me again?”
Gunnar looks at Maddie. “I love my daughter, but there is nothing that can take me from my Kindred Blood.”
“I'm sticking with Mad. You can go off and white knight it, Merrick. You're great at that.”
Jeb's frustration is at an all-time high.
“Truce, Merrick.” Slade interrupts Jeb's glower and reaches out his hand but not before he licks his parched lips.
Beth needs me. And... I need Slade.
Merrick will seek help from whatever source if it sees Beth safe.
Slade is a traitor and a competitor for Beth's affection. Merrick knows this. But deep down, he's certain the Bloodling cares for her. Even if he is not aware of this himself.
Jeb wraps his fingers around the bigger male's hand, and they give one sharp, bone-crunching shake.
He turns to Jacky. “I need something from you.”
At every turn, Jacky is an immature, goading youngling. But his reply nearly brings Jeb to tears. No small feat.
“Anything, bud.”
“Tell Reflective Kennet what has occurred, what I will do. And that upon my return, we'll attempt a rescue of Commander Rachett.”
Jacky whistles low and long, scraping a palm back and forth across his head. “We sorta put Kennet out of his misery so he wouldn't follow Jasper.”
Jeb struggles to remain calm, lifting a filthy hand to wipe sweat from his brow. “Did you kill him?”