Ossified State (Chronicles of the Wraith Book 2) Read online

  Ossified State

  S C Green

  Lindsey R Loucks

  Contents

  1. Raine

  2. Raine

  3. Sydney

  4. Raine

  5. Sydney

  6. Raine

  7. Sydney

  8. Raine

  9. Sydney

  10. Raine

  11. Sydney

  12. Raine

  13. Sydney

  14. Raine

  15. Sydney

  16. Raine

  17. May

  18. Sydney

  19. Raine

  20. Sydney

  21. Raine

  22. May

  About the Authors

  The Sunken

  Sail

  The Man in Black

  The Grave Winner

  1

  Raine

  On a blustery Wednesday night, same as every night, I stared out the window of the monitoring station at the cloudy grey dome jutting from the landscape. Behind my head, the particle meter beeped steadily like a hospital monitor signalling the regular beat of a heart.

  Did my daughter’s heart still beat inside the dome? I didn’t know.

  But I longed to know. The pain of not knowing clawed at my stomach, gnawing at my insides like a parasite that could never be sated. The last time I’d seen May, she was seven years old, a hurricane of black-haired energy. If she were still alive, she would be seventeen, nearly eighteen, a full-grown adult with her own ideas about the world, ideas she would have formed without me.

  A hand clasped my shoulder. “You okay, Raine?” It was Jack, my fellow engineer.

  I realised I’d been sitting back in my chair for several minutes, holding my head in my hand, and my face probably held a disturbed expression. That would likely explain the concern in his kind eyes.

  Jack and I had been living in the desert and monitoring the dome for the past five years, ever since I’d been dismissed from the Reaper Institute’s breeding programme for “incompatible eggs.” I was lucky to be there at all. By all rights, I should have been back in captivity with the rest of the Reapers, being shot full of drugs so I forgot what I was. But surprisingly, my years of dedicated service to the Institute had paid off. They’d been happy to shunt me off to this forgotten corner of the world, and had even made it clear that if I agreed to play by their rules, I could one day return to a more prestigious post.

  “You’re so talented, Raine,” Arnold Wu, my old boss from the Post-Mortem Laboratory, would say. “You’re wasting your mind on the dome. It’s a dead zone, a failed experiment.”

  That failed experiment was my family. The government had cheated me out of them ten years ago, and if they thought I’d forgotten them, they were deadly mistaken.

  For the first year of my stay on the station, Arnold had sent letters outlining positions in the New Vegas offices, roles he offered to recommend me for. He begged me not to throw away opportunities that, as a Reaper and given my past behaviour, I shouldn’t have even had.

  I refused every promotion, threw every professional development opportunity away unread. Eventually, Arnold stopped asking and left me alone to live out my days on the edge of the dome, stuck in an endless cycle of guilt and hope. Jack stayed, too. He had his own reasons for wanting to exist outside of the world.

  He bent down beside me, taking my hand in his. The gesture was meant to be comforting, but it made my stomach turn. He and I lived in such close quarters in the monitoring station, we knew every detail of the other’s life, and he knew how I hated to be touched. Every brush of my body against his felt like a betrayal to Alain. Jack and I had our own intimacy, a bond forged by our collective loneliness. But it could never be more than that, not when my real family still waited behind that grey wall outside, so close, and yet, so very very far.

  “Are you thinking about her again?” Jack’s green eyes locked with mine as he entwined our fingers, his mouth set in a concerned line.

  Tall and well-built, with sandy coloured hair and a smooth, earnest face, Jack looked every part the star quarterback he’d been in his college days. But that was before government work, before he discovered how cruel the world could be. Now, crow's feet crinkled around his eyes, and I rarely saw that charming smile anymore.

  I nodded. “It’s her eighteenth birthday on Saturday,” I whispered. Pain squeezed my chest, pushing the air out of my lungs.

  “I’m sure Alain is doing something really fun with her.”

  Jack’s voice caught on the name of Alain, my … I wasn’t even sure what I would call him. Was he my ex? We’d been partners – a modern term I hated, but we’d never got around to getting married. But we hadn’t been together in ten years. I didn’t even know if he was still alive. For all I knew, he’d been turned into a wraith himself. A ghost of the past. It was what he was to me – he lived on in my mind and in my heart, frozen in time, unable to tell me to move on.

  Alain and I had a pretty toxic relationship. We fought with fire and fucked with intensity. He did everything with intensity. That was part of what I loved about him and part of what I hated.

  The ache in my chest contracted again. I removed my hand from Jack’s, pulled my knees to my chest, and hugged them, hoping to gain some comfort from the gesture.

  “I just wish—” I began.

  A huge flash of light from the window interrupted my thought.

  “What the hell was that?” I jumped from my chair, my heart vaulting into my throat.

  “I didn’t see.” Jack spun around. He gasped as he took in the strange sight in front of us.

  The bright light had come from the dome. That grey skin was supposed to be impenetrable. Nothing – not even the undead – could pass through it. For the ten years I’d been staring at it, I’d never once seen it change colour or do anything out of the ordinary. That flash had been so intense that red splotches now floated in front of my eyes.

  The longer I stared, the more I thought I saw a change in the dome. A different light throbbed inside--a warm, hazy aura that seemed to come from within the structure itself. I squinted at it. Shapes moved, fluctuations of light dancing across its surface. But they were too faint to tell exactly what they were.

  “Shit,” Jack breathed. His hand sought mine. “Lacey.”

  For once I didn’t resist his touch. I wrapped my fingers through his and squeezed. Lacey was his twin sister, trapped inside the dome.

  “May,” I whispered, my insides sinking to my toes. My daughter was inside there too. And Alain. Were they all okay? What just happened?

  Behind us, the beeping particle meter stopped.

  That didn’t make any sense. The beeping was connected to a single transmitting machine the government had left inside the dome. The console was designed to withstand a nuclear explosion. It measured the energy particles emitted by the wraith. As long as it beeped, it meant the wraith were still alive. In the five years I’d worked on the station, that machine had never altered its pattern, never slowed down, nor sped up. But now it was silent as death.

  Either the wraith were gone or … or … I didn’t even want to think about that.

  Jack scrambled over to the wall of monitors above his desk and typed frantically on the keyboard. “This is crazy,” he murmured.

  I straddled the chair beside him, grabbed the second keyboard, and started pulling up all the monitoring info on the dome. There wasn’t much. The government didn’t really care about what was inside the dome. They’d left behind no other way to monitor it. All we could really measure was the field directly around the dome.

 
A huge spike appeared in the air pressure, light readings, and EMP readings from a few minutes ago. We were lucky our station was shielded from EMP, or we’d have been left in the dark. But the blast definitely occurred, and it definitely seemed to have originated from inside the dome.

  “I’m calling it in,” Jack said, reaching for the phone.

  “Wait.” My skin grew both hot and cold as his hand hovered over the receiver. “The wraith are gone, Jack. That’s what the readings suggest. Maybe we should think about this.”

  “What’s there to think about? If we tell Arnold, he’ll get a team down here as soon as possible to confirm. If we’re lucky, we might get the dome opened up by tonight—”

  “Or they could nuke it.” That word in my mouth tasted like bile. “And us.”

  Jack dropped his hand in his lap, his face twisted with indecision. We’d discussed this before, of course, but in his excitement, he must’ve forgotten.

  “It makes sense,” I added. “The only reason they contained the city in the first place was to prevent the wraith from escaping before they knew how to stop them. If nukes could kill the wraith they would have done it already. They still don’t know how to stop them, and they have no idea what else has been going on beyond that dome. For all they know, that flash we just saw was nuclear, and if the dome came down, this area would be flooded with radiation. They’ll never open the dome, of that I’m certain.”

  Jack’s eyes widened. “You’re saying we keep this a secret?”

  “I think that’s safest for now.” I glanced back over my shoulder at the dome, the warm light emanating from it a beacon of hope in a desert of darkness.

  May, are you still alive inside?

  “Okay. I agree.” Jack rested his hand on the edge of his keyboard, tapping it absently while he stared at the monitors as if hoping they would approve that decision. “Someone else might’ve seen that blast though. It was pretty bright.”

  “You’re right.” I plugged in a few command lines on the keyboard. “There. That should solve that issue.”

  He snapped his gaze to me. “What did you do?”

  I opened my mouth to reply, but the room shook violently. Jack’s coffee mug bounced off the edge of the desk and shattered on the floor. Warning bells and alarms sounded across our monitors. I grabbed the edge of the desk to keep myself in my chair. From behind us, another bright flash arced across the sky.

  “Raine!” Jack yelled. “What did you do?”

  As quickly as it had come, the shaking and alarms stopped.

  I blew out a slow exhale, then gave Jack a wicked grin. “I detonated one of the charges in the security grid near the eastern base of the dome. That way, if any nearby civilian reports seeing the light, we can chalk it up to the detonator malfunction.”

  Jack grinned back. “Genius.”

  “I know. Now you can call it in to command.”

  Jack closed his hand around the receiver and dialed. “This is Jack Barnes, from station Alpha C. We’ve had a software malfunction, and one of our detonators in the security field has gone off. Can we get a team out here as soon as possible for repairs?” He paused for several moments while the person on the other end answered. “Okay, that’s fine. We don’t mind waiting.” He hung up. “They can’t get someone out here until Monday.”

  I nodded. “That’s perfect.”

  “Why is that perfect?” Jack’s brow furrowed. “With a whole quadrant of the security grid down, anyone could walk up to the dome … Oh, shit.” He leaned back in his chair, his gaze leveled at me. “I know exactly what you’re thinking.”

  “Yes, you do.” I grabbed my coat from the back of my chair. “Are you coming?”

  “Where?”

  “To get Red.”

  “Now?” Jack waved at the monitors. “We can’t leave our post.”

  “Why not? It’s not as if we’re monitoring anything anymore.” I flung my coat over my shoulder, the faintest hint of a smile tugging at the corners of my mouth. “I’ve been waiting ten years for the wraith to die. Now, I’ve got until Monday to get inside that dome and find my daughter. I’m not wasting any more time. My only question is, are you going to help me, or are you going to sit there like a good boy and stare at a blank computer screen all night?”

  Jack blinked and heaved a sigh. He ran his fingers through his sandy hair so it spiked a little on top, and a slow grin tilted his mouth. “Just let me get my laptop.”

  “Thanks, Jack.” I flung open the door.

  A cold blast of air gusted in from outside, but I barely felt a chill. Inside my chest, my heart leapt with the first spark of hope I’d felt in a long time.

  May, I’m coming for you.

  2

  Raine

  The truck bumped along the motorway, the only moving vehicle along a wide stretch of debris and potholes. Jack drove, drumming his fingers nervously on the wheel. A Jethro Tull album played through his battered MP3 player, but neither of us seemed to register it. I sat next to him, staring back at the dome in the side mirror as it receded into the distance. The further away we got, the less the light inside gleamed, until I wondered if I had imagined the whole thing.

  Jack slowed the truck to dodge around a pile of overturned vehicles, the rubber on their tires melted into strange, eldritch shapes. He slammed on the brakes as a mangy dog wandered in front of us, a long, meaty bone clutched in its teeth. I shuddered to think from what creature that bone might have come from.

  The nearest city to the dome, New Vegas, was only eighty miles away, but it would take us a good two hours to navigate our way along the broken motorway. Jack and I hadn’t left the station in three months, and the road was even worse than I remembered. It would be nearly dawn by the time we reached the headquarters.

  When the dome was lowered over the city all those years ago, some suburbs continued on as normal, likely thinking the wraith-containment measures to be only temporary. A few small towns and farming hamlets still clung tenaciously to the landscape beyond the suburbs. But without the economic pull of the city, the towns died, their buildings and shops abandoned as the people left their worldly possessions behind and fled in search of work. Eventually, those in the suburbs followed suit, packing up their IKEA furniture, their vintage record players, their kids, and their dogs, and heading toward another suburban paradise outside a city that wasn’t doomed.

  Our station was located at an old radio telescope and monitoring centre in one of the outer suburbs. Every day we sat in the crow’s nest, overlooking the deserted, crumbling remains of what had once been a rich, middle class, white neighbourhood. We called this area we now drove through ‘Dream Desert.’ It was a desert of sorts – a sprawling landscape of scrap and ruin, picked over by coyotes, dogs, and the dregs of humankind, a remnant of the American dream. Beyond the city limits was the actual desert, an empty landscape of sand and rock, majestic and deadly.

  The debris thinned out as we drove further from the dome, passing ghost towns and stacks of refuse. I fingered my Institute ID in my hands, my stomach starting to twist with nerves. I had been waiting for this chance for years, but now that it was finally here, I started to doubt myself. Would we be able to pull this off? Would Red even help us? Was I really ready to betray the Institute – to commit treason – just to get inside the dome?

  My jaw set with determination as May’s and Alain’s faces flashed across my vision. Damn right I was.

  The first glow of morning sun streaked across the horizon, pierced by the spires of the city looming beyond. Violent red light streamed from the gloom, a bleeding sunrise, just like in an old western. We were the outlaws, riding into town for the biggest heist of our lives.

  We hit the main motorway heading into the city. Traffic started to thicken as cars joined us from other routes, heading to and from other cities and towns in the area. It was odd--after so many months of seeing only Jack--to suddenly be surrounded by other people, all cocooned inside their own metal cages. And beyond the long, straig
ht motorway loomed New Vegas, both the state capital and the headquarters for our state’s Reaper Institute offices. It was hard to believe that just beyond the outskirts of New Vegas, another city had fallen. It seemed most people around here had forgotten.

  Traffic slowed as we approached the toll gates. The government liked to monitor movement in and out of New Vegas, so as each car ran over the electronic plates in the road, their location and plate numbers were recorded, and photographs of the drivers and passengers were taken. The authorities could track any car they wanted all over the country. Jack squinted as the camera flashed in his face, then sped up to join the queue of cars waiting at the next light. He’d wanted us to come in some kind of disguise, but I’d vetoed that idea.

  “Disguises are for people who want to get in and out without being recognised,” I’d said. “I want them to know it was me who did this.”

  “Fine.” He’d plugged his phone into the dashboard computer and began furiously punching the screen with his fingers. “But I’m altering our car’s trace. When we go back out through the gates, instead of following us, they’ll be tracing the car right behind us.”

  “Genius, as always.”

  Jack grinned. “I know.”

  We hit the surface streets, and Jack wove in and out of lanes. All around me, horns blared, lights twinkled, and people walked along the pavement with cell phones jammed to their ears. Driving in the city made me feel claustrophobic. The buildings loomed, towering over the motorway like avenues of ancient oaks. The lights behind open blinds in postage stamp-sized windows glared, revealing vignettes of ordinary lives. It was odd, considering I’d spent most of my life happily living and working in an even larger city, to feel so uncomfortable here. But years of living in the Dream Desert with only Jack for company had made me crave silence, slowness, and freedom.

  That, and the cities teemed with ghosts. I could see them now, jostling each other as they floated above the streets, fighting for positions as they lined up for their slot with the next Reaper on duty. To everyone but the Reapers, the ghosts were invisible, which was why their anguished cries went unheard, their pleading went unacknowledged. They had no voice in the government that sought to curtail their one essential service.