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  Faded Flare

  Climatic Climacteric, Book Two

  L.B. Carter

  Copyright © 2018 L.B. Carter

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 9781726692465

  This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the express written permission of the author L.B. Carter, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Edited by Dawn Yacovetta

  Cover design by L.B. Carter

  Cover art by Matt Howard, Alla Biriuchkova, Michael Held, Guido Jensen, and Louis Maniquet

  BOOKS BY L.B. CARTER

  The Climatic Climacteric Series

  (Upper YA/NA Soft Sci-Fi Natural Disaster Adventure)

  Silent Siren

  Faded Flare

  Arid Alarm—Coming Soon

  The Loan Soul Series

  (Dark Urban Fantasy)

  One Loan Soul—Coming Soon

  Stand-Alone Novels

  (Suspense/Thriller)

  Fish(y) out of Water—Coming Soon

  To read a FREE sample of each book, get exclusive stories, learn about upcoming releases and sales, and enter monthly giveaways, subscribe to L.B. Carter’s Newsletter at www.LBCarter.com

  DEDICATION

  For my family, all of whom burn in my heart

  And for all those whose lives have been disrupted by forest fires

  Chapter One

  "Tag, you're it."

  The sing-song voice sounded more appropriate from her little sister several years prior than it did coming out of the copper-coated lips of the statuesque face staring down at her. Frankly, it was hard to tell if the slightly parted lips even moved on the frozen face of the mannequin-like ballerina, posed with arms curled as though hugging a beach ball, one foot balancing on the worn milk crate, the other on her knee in a poor approximation of a static pirouette. Coated in paint, from the bun balanced on her tilted head to the gaudy foil-like tutu spread around her thin hips, the ballerina looked just like a life-size music box doll.

  What some of the people who’d dropped coins on the cobblestones at her feet didn’t know was that she was …essentially. It was an android.

  The full-size models were being tested in the jobs least likely to be visually obvious. The public needed to ease into the idea; most were fearful of a ‘robot take-over’—that they might become the servants.

  Maybe that wasn’t a bad thing.

  Regardless, they were primitive still. Something capable of mutinying was years off, as far as technological progress went, no matter how the media phrased the Institute’s advances for the biggest splash.

  Not that her research wasn’t complex—hadn’t been complex.

  It wasn’t really her research anymore. And any plans for a literal splash with any of the models had been dashed along with Henley Bickford’s career aspirations, and life as she knew it, less than a week ago.

  If not for the sudden dilation of pupils, the ballerina might have been a superb street performer, triggered to dance at regular intervals only when the performance was watched. However, the words weren’t hers. The ballerina was oblivious to what had just escaped her mouth. BTI was in complete control, zooming the cameras in on Henley’s face.

  "Gotcha," a deep voice taunted from behind like this was a game between children. It seemed like it, facing a juggling green-wigged clown, his wide, red, smiling mouth and happy, diamond-bordered eyes an eerie contrast to the veiled threat.

  “Peekaboo!" The bag-pipe player on the unicycle with the pipe clenched between his teeth simultaneously blew bubbles bigger than his head into the air while wheeling back and forth on the cobblestones, teetering his arms for balance.

  It was a feat of engineering, admittedly.

  Henley involuntarily jerked back into the ballerina. Proving that it could indeed be triggered to move and had the poise of whom she impersonated, the doll barely wobbled before shifting to both feet on her pedestal, toes pointed apart, maintaining character.

  The clown ambled over in an awkward gait that was accepted as part of his act, the grin pulling disconcertingly at his make-up. His balls continued their aerial cycle with precision.

  "All right, miss?" A man from the clown’s audience followed, the concern that distorted his paint-free face less severe, more curious.

  She didn’t want his attention either. A deep, hollow feeling, combined with alarm, darted like panicked fish through her veins and prevented her from responding. This man couldn’t help; he was making the situation worse. More of the clown’s audience drifted over as if they’d found a new street performer to entertain them.

  Her supervisors were clearly entertained, watching through the eyes of their—her—creations.

  She shut her eyes against the worried gazes. Three weren’t genuine—a programmed response—while the others—the human response—needed to be diverted. They would be collateral damage if they got between. And the one person who should be concerned, Buster Acton, had run off.

  They hadn’t really had an established friendship before, more of a regular acquaintance in the waiting room of their respective weekly mentor meetings. However, their agreement to coordinate an escape from that hell-hole of a so-called institution of higher learning lent the understanding that they would assist each other throughout the entire process, not just in getting off-campus. They each had their reasons for breaking out, but that was cold even for the Bus.

  Honestly, it had surprised her that he was capable of running at all. That said, the loner had already astounded her when they’d met, as planned, in the dead of night with another student who brought her research experiment along.

  Henley could understand the unwillingness to leave all that work behind. Truthfully, she had taken a prototype of her own project with her, too.

  Feeling the ballerina’s shins move against her back in warning, Henley spun on her heel, whipping the kind man in the face with long mousy-blond hair, darted under the ballerina’s grasping arms, and sprinted across the cobblestones.

  The harbor was the best place to hide. Ironically, the recent storm ravage made it a safer place, at least for Henley. Water—the natural enemy of technology—was a friend at the moment. Though its company would be a minor comfort as Henley Bickford ran for her life.

  ∆∆∆

  They were definitely gone by now, her fellow deserters. Henley had been in charge of foraging for food while the other three ditched their stolen vehicle.

  But now she was cowering at the pier, her butt wedged between two enormous yachts that had been lifted and deposited on the sidewalk after the storm surge a few days previously.

  With a shrug, she opened the bag of stolen popcorn that she’d not dropped when she ran, thanks to her inhumanly tense fist, and Henley began to snack on the salty treat, hoping it would calm her nerves.

  Tossing in a kernel and enjoying the buttery crunch, Henley marveled that, in the last hour, she’d gone from a rule-following, hard-working soon-to-be-graduate to a law-breaking, on-the-lam felon.

  Was it felony? She had signed a contract when she accepted the Institute’s fully-funded offer to perform research in exchange for a degree. She wasn’t sure what degree of law-breaking it was deemed to be, in terms of wrongdoing. Could it be considered quitting? How binding was that contract?

  That said, she had also: two - aided and abetted in the theft of BTI property, or perhaps it was kidnapping since this ‘model’ was biological, three - high-
jacked BTI transportation, and four - left campus with neither authorization nor escort. Stealing popcorn wasn’t quite so bad in comparison. It wasn’t like she had any money on her. She hadn’t been off campus in five years—four years and eleven months, to be exact—and everything at the Institute was inclusive, in return for her brains and diligence.

  Some brains. It had taken four years and eleven months before Henley became aware that ‘with termination at project completion’ had been referring to the signer, not the contract itself.

  With that evidence, it seemed fairly binding.

  Henley hadn’t even realized it on her own; the Bus had pointed out the distinction. Then, he’d provided half of the escape plan. Unhelpfully, that had only been the get-out portion. He hadn’t outlined the get-across-the-country part, which she’d thought at the time would be the less difficult step.

  As it was her first time off campus in four years and eleven months, it was also news to Henley just how pervasive the Institute had become in public life as well; everything was BTI-centric, when you were locked inside their own buildings. Evidently that wasn’t an exaggerated consequence of living at the source.

  All this left Henley stranded only a few blocks away from campus, alone, without her co-felons or transportation.

  Yep, some brains.

  She kicked her numb toes. The water launched in a beautiful arcing trajectory that obscured the view of the expansive horizon for a moment and brought her thoughts back almost seventeen years. The sun glanced off the ripples in blinding sparkles, and she shoved that memory back. Water had been her ally then too. In the distance, wave crests danced in little bursts of white across the expanse of blue mirroring the cotton-candy clouded sky. That stale seaweed and salt smell filled her nose. Smells were such an important part of defining a place. This one reminded her of home. The home she now had no idea how to get to or even if she could, evading all BTI’s tech.

  The water was her friend for the moment. As with all electronics, BTI’s products didn’t mix well with water, which didn’t mix well with sea level rise. But that only held true until BTI replaced her in their lab, coercing another blindly willing soul to finish the project she’d gotten so close to completing.

  Henley’s water-proofing tech had been high priority.

  The next piece of popcorn went down smoothly as she gave another smug little kick to her buddy H2O. The breeze blew her hair across her face, and she brushed it back to stare at the view again.

  It went on as far as she could see, and she began to feel small, insignificant, helpless, the darkness hollowing out her stomach again. How was she going to stop her sister from making the same fateful life decision she did if she couldn’t get across the country to the Pacific Ocean? She was not a day out of the walls, still in the same city, for Pete’s sake, and already they’d traced her.

  The piece of popcorn she angrily tossed was caught in the wind and, trapped in its powerful current, blown back onto the dock beside her.

  A sudden rustle came from behind, and Henley snapped around, tense, flight mode engaged.

  It was just a seagull, standing uncertainly on the cobblestones, head tilted as he eyed the popcorn.

  Artificial things didn’t experience hunger. She relaxed, smiled, and tossed him a kernel.

  He spread his wings and rose, his flight mode more literal, snatching it out of midair gracefully.

  Henley felt something of a strange kindred moment with a piece of cooked corn.

  The gull landed and snapped up the second gift from the damp stones with a gentle grab of the beak and a dramatic head-tipped-back swallow in one gulp. He took a step closer, eager for more, her new companion.

  She pondered her lost friends. Well, they were more like escape partners since the Bus never spoke to any of his peers until he surprised her with his revelation about her impending execution, and he’d been the go-between with Jennifer Tate, who’d been necessary since her mother, Professor Katheryn Tate, was faculty with high clearance, thus awarding them an all-access pass to the exits. Still, Henley hoped BTI didn’t find them, and they were long gone by now.

  That left Henley.

  If Henley had wings, that’d make evading sight much easier and the travel to her mom’s house much faster. Then she might stand a chance of making it… and that meant so would Bromley.

  The seagull had sidled up during her mental crisis and was standing next to her on the edge, pretending to be looking out at the ocean too. Henley held her arm out, and he politely took another single kernel. She ate one with him.

  “Do you think Buster made it?” she asked the gull. “You’re like a drone right, so can you fly up and check?”

  He blinked.

  “Yeah, I doubt you’d see him. Buster is too smart to be seen. Unlike me.”

  The gull and the girl munched another piece each.

  “Not that I know him well enough to know that for sure. I only saw him at our weekly check-ins. His meetings and mine often overlapped. It’s alphabetical,” she explained to a bird. “Acton. Bickford. He’s second in his field. I’m second in mine. That was pretty much the extent of our relationship—sitting in the waiting room next to each other and a girl named Judith Ashby from Math, who’d already gone into her meeting that day.” She shook her head as if in regret, but it was more an effort to shake the recalled shock and fear that had flooded her when she’d read the note he’d passed her.

  She paused her story for a moment, waiting for her heartbeat to return to normal, reminding herself she got out.

  The gull stepped closer and grabbed another bite.

  When she too could swallow the popcorn again, she finished the thought that had been bugging her. “I don’t know how long he’d known about it… It seemed like he’d been planning his coup for a while with how precise it was. Why did he wait so close to the—” She cleared her throat, uncomfortable with the word that had come to mind. “—the end,” she forced out. She stared at the rapidly darkening sea and wondered what his project was about. Had he been that dedicated to finishing it and just needed to save himself at the last possible month?

  Henley glanced at her newest cohort who’d made a pyramid of popcorn in front of him and was working his way through it. The giant bag that was meant to feed all three of them—four? Did that girl they’d helped Jen sneak out eat, unlike Henley’s products? Henley had no idea what beings the genetic biology department concocted.

  Another seagull called out and landed next to the pyramid, trying to nab some.

  No point in saving the popcorn now. Henley tossed a handful and watched as the newcomer dove for it, leaving the first alone with his prize for listening to her lamentation.

  But it was too much, enticing a feeding frenzy as several others approached who’d been circling the harbor, hungry with much of the marine ecosystem dying or migrating to more amenable water temperatures as the ocean heated with the climate. The swarm cried out in joy and greed, dive-bombing her little sanctuary.

  Henley backed further between the boats. She hadn’t meant to call attention to herself. The birds were like an alarm, cawing and swooping around her. Within moments, though, the crowd was gone, save for her original companion.

  She needed to move, to hide more succinctly, in case anyone showed up to investigate what had excited the remaining wildlife in the area. It’d be just her luck if they were BTI scientists, like her. She couldn’t go back the way she’d come.

  Standing, she startled the seagull off, but at this point, without her crew, she was all about saving herself. Henley made her way timidly around the more sea-ward of the two boats and climbed the ladder, landing unsteadily on the listing deck, holding her breath.

  Trepidation stilted her movements like a buggy ’bot. The yacht was nice, almost too nice. There was a chance the rich owners had made a BTI purchase that would pinpoint and leak her new location. The fact that it was a boat wouldn’t help. The rich were both lazy enough and wealthy enough to simply replace any wate
r-shorted tech.

  Taking a deep breath before committing her eighth crime, Henley focused on the cabin door, which popped open after only a quick touch of her hand. Wielding her hand like a taser, she entered, but double luck ensured the room was empty except for a mini fridge, a small bathroom, and a bed. Wishing she could set up the trip wire she’d designed after the first few pranks in the dorms, she instead grabbed the only utensil next to the tiny sink—a fork.

  Then Henley crashed onto the bed, beyond exhausted after their midnight escape.

  It was a waterbed. That decision was irrational for a boat. The constant rocking of the waves would keep it sloshing constantly. The owners must have a great disinclination for seasickness.

  Though Henley’s stomach was already tumbling about what she’d done—add breaking and entering to the list—and what she had yet to do, it didn’t matter. The nausea was a reminder that she was alive. Henley Bickford had escaped ‘termination’. She just had to remain that way while she traversed thousands of miles home with her warning.

  ∆∆∆

  The water was rising. The coral polish on her toes made them look like little seashells, poking up out of the water as it rose. Henley smacked her foot on the surface, making a splat sound. Daddy had said the oceans were rising, too. Was that happening as fast as the hose in her house? Maybe Mama and Henley shouldn’t go to the beach anymore.

  She yawned, still tired.

  “Shoes on, now,” Daddy said, calmly, without looking at her.

  He didn’t have any on. His big feet were even deeper underwater. He was always barefoot when he let Henley stand on his toes to dance, like the penguins on the TV.

  Tom from school had owned a pool at his house. She had gone to his birthday last year. Not this year. He got mean, so she didn’t go over there anymore. This wasn’t like having her own pool.

  Henley wiggled her toes again. The water was cold, and she couldn’t really feel them anymore. She splashed again. Little ripples moved away from her and ran into the waves Daddy’s shins were making.