Ridley moved to sit—and realized then what she’d missed while listening so intently to Lilah and her father’s conversation: her arms were strapped to the bed. She tried to move her legs, but her ankles were secured too. She also appeared to be dressed in one of those attractive hospital gowns.
Though she knew it was probably useless, she pushed her magic to the surface of her skin. It glowed weakly, but wouldn’t rise any further than that. She was too weak, too sick. Her stomach threatened to turn itself inside out, and the room seemed to spin around her.
A woman was in the room now, injecting something into the IV bag. Ridley struggled and screamed, but it was pointless. Her surroundings began to blur as her head became unbearably heavy, until slowly, slowly everything … was … gone.
19
The next time Ridley woke, the harsh lighting was gone. The fluorescent bulb above her head was off, and dim light illuminated the room from somewhere behind her head. No one was arguing nearby. There wasn’t much sound at all except for her breathing and something that may have been the faint whirring of machinery.
Trying not to move too much—she didn’t want to alert anyone that she was awake—she shifted her fingers. Then her feet. Yep, still strapped down. Still attached to an IV bag. That sucked. Aside from it being a violation of her freedom, she also badly wanted to stretch out her stiff, aching body.
She breathed through the urge to vomit—a feeling that was almost a constant state of being for her these days—as everything she’d overheard earlier spun repeatedly through her mind, shocking her again and again.
Alastair Davenport had manufactured his own elementals. This was the experimentation he was doing. Well, among other unpleasant things, no doubt. But this—this was insane. Never in her wildest imaginings would Ridley have come up with this. He was giving people magic—and they were dying because of it. Lilah was going to die because of it, she remembered with an icy jolt.
Lilah was the one who’d found Ridley burning the panels. It was Lilah’s face that had come to mind when Ridley tried to figure out who was attacking her. She’d dismissed it instantly, and yet she’d been right. Lilah had elemental magic. And now she was going to die.
With a confusing mix of emotions jostling for her attention, Ridley couldn’t figure out how she felt about that. It certainly wasn’t a good feeling. The other feeling that wasn’t a particularly good one was the feeling that surfaced when she realized that Lilah, who’d been in possession of elemental magic for little more than a day, had overpowered her, a supposedly super powerful elemental heir. How had that happened? Had Saoirse and Nathan been wrong about her?
She cast her mind back to exactly what had happened above the city’s arxium panels. No … It probably wasn’t that they were wrong. It was Ridley’s fear of earth—the element Lilah had wrapped around her to snuff out Ridley’s flames—plus pure surprise that had given Lilah an advantage. Of all the threats Ridley might have expected to face above Lumina City, another elemental was not one of them. Lilah was not one of them. Perhaps if Ridley had had another few moments to get over her shock—and to get over her suffocating fear of being momentarily trapped inside a piece of earth—she could have thrown off Lilah’s magic and escaped.
Or perhaps Lilah was also super powerful because her man-made magic came from Ridley. If that were so, maybe it would keep her alive. Unlike everyone else who’d gone after Ridley’s elemental friends. By now they were probably either dead or about to die.
As for those elemental friends … how many had survived? It seemed silly to think that people who were as invisible as air couldn’t whisk themselves away to safety. They had magic and gas masks. They were all but invincible. But if they were taken by surprise as Ridley was … if they ended up in human form, even if only for a few moments … they could be shot or knocked unconscious or hurt.
And what about Dad? He was inside the city walls, nowhere near any of the elementals. And there had barely been any falling arxium to worry about, so there was no reason for him to have used a conjuration in public and landed himself in jail. He’s fine, Ridley told herself. I’m sure he’s fine.
Like a pinball, her thoughts zigzagged every which way, striking each major revelation from the past few days and bouncing immediately to the next.
Archer’s betrayal.
An orchestrated Cataclysm.
A father who wasn’t her father.
A best friend who couldn’t be there for her.
Manufactured elementals.
Yellow magic.
A failed revolution.
Yellow magic. Her mind circled back to this detail again and again. So small, but so … unnatural. Magic was supposed to be blue. It had only ever been blue.
A recent memory surfaced of Ridley hastily sitting up on the couch in her home as magic warned her someone was coming. Now that she thought about it, a flickering yellow light had illuminated the near darkness in the moments before she was knocked out. It wasn’t a detail she’d considered before, but now she realized it probably came from one of these unnatural elementals.
Her brain continued cycling endlessly through everything that had happened, exhausting her, bringing her closer and closer to despair. Was this how it would end? She would die as part of some secret, illegal experiment. Dad would never know what happened. Elementals would never free the world from all its arxium. The Shadow Society would remain in control of everything.
She was roused from her fog of depressing thoughts by the sound of a door opening. Was it Alastair Davenport, back to interrogate her again? Someone in a lab coat, ready to stick more needles into her? She squinted as the door swung shut behind her visitor and the lock clicked. He was young, dressed in a button-up shirt and jeans. He flipped a switch. Bright light pierced Ridley’s eyes. She squeezed them shut, then blinked a few times.
“Ah, good morning, good morning,” the man said. “You are awake.” His voice was bright, energetic, and slightly accented. Ridley lifted her head to get a better look at him.
“Are you the guy people keep referring to as ‘Doc’?”
“I am, yes.”
Ridley’s eyes narrowed as they traveled over him. He was lean, tanned, and entirely too good-looking for someone who spent their days carrying out evil experiments on innocent people strapped to hospital beds. “Where are we?”
“Well, thanks to you,” he said as he crossed the room, rubbing his hands together, “we are no longer out in the wastelands in the state-of-the-art facility Mr. Davenport promised me when I came to work for him.”
“You mean that crappy building I burned to the ground?”
Doc paused. “He warned me you would be difficult to work with. Fortunately, I like a challenge.” Indeed, the smile he fixed on Ridley suggested he was genuinely enjoying their interaction so far.
“So … we’re in the city somewhere?”
“All I will say is that it’s fortunate we have a small backup facility, and it’s fortunate I kept duplicates of many of the samples I’ve taken and serum versions I’ve been working on over the past few years. As for specifics … well, no, I won’t be confirming exactly where we are.”