Vanishing Rain (Blue Spectrum Chronicles Book 2) Read online

  That’s when I became emotional, thinking of my mom, the time I spent in jail. I was panting, breathing like a rabid animal. I had bottled up a mountain of feelings and Troll had somehow managed to push me over the edge of that high cliff.

  By now Troll had his pants off, and I couldn’t help but notice that he didn’t have any underwear on. I didn’t know where to look, darting my eyes around nervously.

  He slipped into the jumpsuit then busted up laughing. I couldn’t understand how he could laugh after all the time in the tunnel, after getting the “charge” so many times. Maybe getting zapped with electricity had made him a bit nuts.

  The jumpsuit fit him perfectly, except the legs were a little long. He reached down to roll up the pants legs on them, and there was just something so boyish and innocent about what he was doing, something so much like Snow would do that I just burst into tears.

  Troll popped his head up, a look of terror on his face. He narrowed his blue eyes, steely and hard. Then, as if a warm wind blew through the tunnel, he was by my side, patting me on the back tenderly.

  “It’s okay. It will be okay.” He consoled. Then he pulled me into an embrace, and at first it felt all wrong. The only boy who had ever held me was Orion, and his huge arms always made me feel safe. But it was those very arms, that very body and totally perfect face that had gotten me into the trouble I was in.

  I relaxed into Troll’s arms, just let myself melt into him. His arms were stronger than what they seemed, and he wrapped them tightly around me. I sobbed into Garment’s carefully crafted jumpsuit, housed by Troll’s slim shoulders. Just cried and cried until I was empty inside.

  When I stopped, Troll leaned back from me and tenderly wiped the last teardrop off of my cheek. Nothing happened like when Orion touched me. There were no sparks, no fireworks. My heart didn’t race and I didn’t get that fuzzy bumbling feeling in my stomach.

  But there was something there. Something warm and friendly. Something solid.

  I sniffed, then wiped my snotty nose on the arm of my jumpsuit. Troll leaned over and gently kissed me lightly on the cheek.

  “It’s gonna to be okay. I promise it will,” he whispered as he brushed my short hair back from my forehead. “I promise,” he repeated, as if I were a small child asking for ice cream or a toy.

  I peered into his blue eyes and nodded. I couldn’t seem to find any words to make any of it normal or right. Something was tugging at me and I was pushing it away as fast as I could.

  But I answered him agreeably.

  “Yeah. It will be. I just know it will,” I told him, casting my eyes downward so he couldn’t tell that I was lying.

  Chapter 34

  Friends

  Troll picked up my pack and placed it over his shoulders then reached for my hand. I willingly let him have it. It felt odd in my own hand, much smaller than Orion’s, dry with thick calluses. “Come, on, Pup,” he called to the dog. I had almost forgotten about her.

  “Do you think she’ll make it?” I questioned, twisting my head around to find her, guilt creeping into the center of my chest.

  With wobbly legs, the pup stood. Several gashes were bleeding on her grubby body, but they didn’t seem to be life threatening. She shook herself and then stumbled toward us, positioning herself directly between Troll and me. I reached down and patted her head, and on the opposite side, Troll was doing the same. She seemed to know that she belonged between us, her limp tail swinging back and forth.

  We walked in silence for quite a while. I was happy to put the smelly mutant behind us and the pup seemed to be keeping up with minimal effort. That pleased me for some reason. I felt like a proud mother and wanted to boast of her accomplishments. I smiled, turning toward Troll, ready to brag about the pup.

  But before I had a chance to speak, Troll’s voice captivated me. His head was turned down, as if he was embarrassed and words rolled off his tongue, a true confession. “My real name is Poppy.”

  I let out a little laugh.

  “Thanks,” he sarcastically commented, rolling his eyes. But he took a deep breath and continued. “I was always in trouble, the smallest guy in class with a faggot name.”

  “It’s not so bad,” I told him. I furrowed my brow. “Why Troll?”

  He hesitated, blushing again. “It sounded tough, you know, better than a fucking flower. I couldn’t wait to change my name.” He smiled one of those toothless grins at me. His eyes crinkled when he smiled and I noticed for the first time that his face was somewhat handsome. His nose was a bit hawkish and his cheekbones were high. “What’s your real name?” he asked.

  “Vanish,” I told him with a wicked laugh. He shoved me playfully with his shoulder. “Right.”

  I smiled at him. There was something about him that was endearing. “Okay. Rain. My real name is Rain.”

  Troll dropped his jaw. “As in the weather crest?” He paused a moment. “The weather crest.”

  I laughed again. “Yes. The weather crest.”

  “What Province?”

  “A,” I answered. “How about you?”

  “H. Stupid plain old H.” He stopped walking for a minute and twisted his face toward mine. I quit walking as well, stopping next to him, and the pup dropped to the ground, apparently happy for the rest.

  Troll’s eyes were serious, dark blue specks of cobalt spattered about like stars in the night, so much like Orion’s that I did a double take. “Gods, I’m sorry for swearing like that. I could tell you were high born, but shit…or sorry shoot, I had no idea.”

  “Stop it. That person is gone. I’m Vanish now.” I thought for a minute, Troll’s raspy hand still in mine. Orion was high born as well. That hadn’t panned out too well for me. I had never put much emphasis on the high born part of my family, probably because it came from my mom’s side, and I preferred tuning out almost anything related to her. Out of habit, my eyes moved to my left hand, but my family crest ring was gone, left at Garment’s for safe keeping. “Flowers aren’t so bad,” I told Troll.

  He grunted. “Yeah, if you’re a girl.”

  “You’re definitely not a girl.”

  His head twisted my way, a crooked grin and piercing blue eyes digging into me. “Glad you noticed.” He raised his eyebrows and stared at me for a minute, his head cocked to the side. I smiled at him easily.

  Troll and I started walking again, and the pup joined in. I peered down at her. If she wasn’t so dirty, she would probably be mostly white. I promised myself that I would give her a bath the first chance I had.

  White. Like a lily. Dove loved lilies, would have them delivered every week and displayed about the apartment. Troll’s real name was Poppy. A white flower. For a white dog whose eyes reminded me of Dove.

  “I’ve got it!” I exclaimed.

  Troll stopped. “What?” He was obviously confused.

  “A name for the dog.”

  He didn’t answer, just raising his eyebrows in question.

  “Lily.” I firmly announced. “I want to name her Lily.”

  Troll scrunched up his face, as if he had eaten something bitter. “Like the flower?”

  “Yes,” I insisted. “Like the flower.”

  He huffed. “That’s a gay name.”

  “Well, what would you name her?”

  “Something better than a flower. Fuck.”

  I cracked up laughing at him. “Lily it is, then.”

  Troll was trying to keep a grin from spreading over his face. “Okay. Lily. And sorry about swearing.”

  “It’s okay.” I squeezed his hand.

  “Come on Lily,” Troll called. Lily picked her filthy, bloody body up and kept pace with us as we plodded along in silence, the dripping of water beating down the subway walls like a slow summer rain.

  “It’s getting wet,” I stated.

  “Yeah, the closer to the Asters we get, the wetter it will be.”

  “I thought the Asters was just some desolate desert, that water was the biggest problem for the Exil
es.”

  Troll talked almost in a monotone, as if he was giving a class lecture. “It used to be that way. Even when I first became keeper of the gate, it wasn’t this wet. ”

  “What’s happening to it?” I remembered Orion’s description of Province K, and it was quite different.

  “Don’t know.”

  I sighed. “What are we going to do when we get there?” I asked him.

  It took him a while to answer. “Run like hell,” he said. “Run like we’ve never run before.

  Chapter 35

  Killings

  I thought about what Troll had told me, about running, and it didn’t make sense. But then again, not much of what he told me about the Asters made sense.

  “Hey, Troll?”

  “Yeah?” He stopped then, reached into the pack for some water. “Thirsty?” he asked, handing me a bottle of water. I took the bottle and carefully tipped it back, tasting the sweet liquid as it trickled down my throat then handed it back to Troll. Lily was licking from a pool of water on the floor, her tongue lapping contentedly.

  “How did you know about the mutant? You know, its weakness in the skull?”

  He tipped back the water bottle and guzzled most of it down. I bristled, remembering Pan’s caution to be careful with water. “Hey, save some of that,” I bossed him.

  He twisted the lid back on and placed it cautiously in my pack. “I’ve been on both ends of this tunnel for so long it feels like a lifetime.” He let out a huge puff of air and it swirled around the stagnant, dank tunnel. His breath was surprisingly it sweet. “I would just sit by the hour, sometimes by the day and watch what went on out there.” He pointed in the direction we had been heading. “I could hear them talk sometimes and I would just listen. Once I saw a mutant…saw some big guy fighting with it. He finally just head butted it and it went down.” Troll’s lips curved up, ever the slightest then. “I just made that up, the part about the weakness in the skulls.”

  I shot him a nasty look. “What else did you make up?”

  “I’m not sure if I really made that up or just put two and two together.” He grinned widely, one of those toothy happy smiles. “So technically, I deduced it, which isn’t really making it up.”

  After Troll had learned about my family crest, he had been using more proper grammar, had stopped swearing so much. “In case you didn’t notice, I was trying to impress you.”

  “Yeah, I noticed.” I thought for a minute, remembering the alligator jerky Troll had offered me when I first met him.

  I glanced over at him suspiciously. “That alligator jerky you gave me, how did you know what it was? If you’ve never really been to the Asters?” I still wasn’t sure if Troll’s stories were adding up to the truth, if I should believe everything he had been telling me. Some of it seemed a bit far-fetched.

  “I deduced that as well,” Troll told me in a most proper voice.

  “How?” I prodded.

  He laughed good-naturedly. “I saw some guys kill an alligator once, when I was by the end of the tunnel. The next time I got food, it was this smoky stuff. I figured it was alligator meat. You know, jerky.”

  “I’ve never had it before, have never even heard of it.”

  “You probably had good rations in Province A.”

  I laughed out loud, almost snorting. “Yeah, too good I guess. I was always getting cut back because my weight would climb too high.”

  Troll raised his eyebrows up and down suggestively. “You look pretty fine to me.”

  “You’ve just been trapped in a tunnel alone for too long. Any girl would look fine to you.

  “Not so,” he argued.

  We bantered back and forth, and I asked him endless questions about Province H. It turned out that I was right about the net just spewing propaganda at us. The people in Province H were practically starving. According to Troll, the lower you got in the alphabet sequence, the worse it was.

  “But Orion came from Province J,” I told him. “He never said anything about starving.”

  “Orion? The father?”

  “Yes.” A lump formed in my throat just thinking about Orion.

  “Another high born?” Troll asked. I nodded in agreement, not really wanting to talk about Orion with Troll.

  “Wouldn’t starve a high born, would they?”

  I sighed, deep pockets of air escaping my body as if they had been jailed inside of me for years. Orion hadn’t really ever talked much about Province J. Then I started thinking about all I didn’t know about Orion. It seemed that I was getting to know Troll better in a matter of hours than I ever knew Orion.

  “Do you have the same percentage of S.L.A.G.s there?” I asked him, thinking of my brother, Ice, who, as far as I knew, was still missing.

  “I suppose so. There are a lot of them born.”

  I stopped walking. It was almost raining in the tunnel by then, and my short hair was damp. For once I was glad not to have to bother with my long hair.

  I was shocked, thinking about another province that allowed S.L.A.G. babies to be born. I thought the mandates were for all of the provinces. “The girls don’t take the Shot?” I asked, confused.

  He answered with his head down, staring at his tattered boots and patting Lily’s head. “Some do. The ones who can afford it.”

  “Do they stuff the Spectrum Reds in the wall, you know in tubes?”

  Troll twisted his face into a scowl. “What are you talking about?” he asked, incredulous. “There are no tubes or walls to stick the S.L.A.G.s into.” He swallowed as if something bitter was on his tongue.

  “They kill ‘em as soon as they’re born.

  Chapter 36

  Waiting

  “They what?” I screeched.

  “You heard me.”

  It took me a while to process what he said. “You don’t have any living S.L.A.G.s in Province H?”

  “Nope.” He narrowed his eyes. “Do you?”

  “Gods, yes. We all have to work in the Clinic to take care of them.”

  “Holy fuck, you can’t be serious,” he choked out. Then, “I’m sorry about the swearing.”

  “It’s okay.” I leaned closer to him. “What about the older S.L.A.G.s?”

  “Don’t have any.”

  “Do you think they….”

  “Yeah, they killed ‘em. Euthanasia, they called it.”

  I had to sit down. I was having a difficult time breathing, thinking about all of the S.L.A.G. bodies in the walls of the Clinic in Province A. How I had four siblings living in the Clinic who would have been killed if they had been born in a different Province. Then I thought about Ben, how I always wondered if living in a tube would be worse than dying. Blush’s face popped into my head just then, how someone killed her baby and it didn’t even have S.L.A.G. I hadn’t even asked her what Province she was from. Who knew, it might have been Province H.

  I put my face in my hands. “They’re horrible.” I took a deep breath, remembering a similar discussion with Orion. “They’re murderers of the worst kind.” Lily padded over to me and sat down beside me, sharing the same expression that I must have had.

  Troll plopped down on the other side of me and pulled my hand into his, nestling it safely in his lap. He squeezed it against his stomach, and I could feel his sinewy muscles move as he breathed in and out.

  As the rain drizzled down on us, I began to shiver, and Troll wrapped his arm protectively around my shoulder and pulled me closer to him. He tipped his head over and we nestled together. Lily on my left. Troll on my right. Three stray dogs in an abandoned subway station. Eventually we must have dozed off.

  At some point I awoke and groggily opened my eyes, almost forgetting where I was.

  Troll was already awake. “We gotta get you outa here. You’ll get sick and that’s not good for the baby.” He sighed. “I wish we hadn’t fallen asleep.”

  I had wondered why he was always so concerned about the baby, and then I remembered the comment he made about his S.L.A.G. s
ibs, how they were killed. The thought of it pulled my stomach into knots.

  “Okay.” I agreed through chattering teeth.

  “It’s dark out now.”

  “So?”

  “We’ll have to wait till morning.”

  “Why? Wouldn’t it make more sense to just go now?”

  “No. We’ll have to find a band that will accept us, hopefully the Red Spectrum Band.” He raked his hand through his hair. “Can’t do it in the dark.” Troll sighed, as if he had put a lot of thought into it. He probably had. “The reds are the meanest, but if you get into their band, you have life protection. The Blue Spectrum Band isn’t as violent, but they are always getting attacked. Mostly by the Red Spectrum Band.”

  “Are there only two bands in the Asters?”

  “Far as I can tell. That’s all I’ve seen from the tunnel. But who knows? There might be more that I haven’t seen.”

  I nodded, wondering what I was getting myself into.

  “We’ll leave in the morning, once it’s light. They’ll have to see our finger necklaces in order to accept us.”

  “Okay.” I bit my lower lip wondering what the next day might hold, so glad that I had Troll with me that I wanted to reach up and kiss him. Instead I just grinned at him, still shivering.

  “I’m glad I met you, Troll.”

  He smiled, his eyes sparkling like blue sunshine in the dark tunnel.

  “Me too. Only you.” His comment was innocent enough, but it stabbed a knife in my heart, reminding me of one of my earliest conversations with Orion. The one where he told me he was falling for me and that he thought about me all day long. I wondered if he was still thinking of me. Or if he was even alive.

  Troll dug around in my pack and pulled out another jumpsuit, wrapping me tightly up in it. Then we both snuggled together with Lily, waiting for morning to come.

  Chapter 37

  Run

  It was the longest night of my life. I kept hearing screeches and shouts from the other side of the tunnel. I would drift off to sleep and then someone would be yelling, terrifying shouts that crippled my entire body. Lily would growl or bark, and that sent goose bumps up my spine. I would look out into the distance only to see fires, bright flames popping up from far away, red tailed furnaces that trailed smoke up into the air.