When it was over, the Sparks fell, collapsed from the pain to the heated floor of the platform. Council employees scooted forward, lifting them and moving them inside to spend their hour in recovery before heading back to family, job, or school. It was an efficient system, a machine that ran smoothly so long as the cogs were well-oiled by obedient citizens.
She blinked the memory away. “This is a safe place. Nobody but me makes the rules. I like it here just fine.”
“Are you sure about that?” His tone dropped as he leaned in and smiled, voice turning low and persuasive. His proximity, coupled with her awareness of their chemistry, set off alarm bells in her head. “I’m a man in a position to be good to the right woman.”
Heat flooded her face, but it wasn’t embarrassment. It was anger. The man was a head and half taller than her tiny self, so more than six feet tall. He was older, perhaps early thirties, and dark, with olive skin and black hair trimmed close to his head. He moved with a sinuous grace that reminded her of how long it had been since she’d made her way back to find a boy in the city. The whole package was wrapped in a perfectly preserved, black, relic-silk shirt.
Everything about him screamed C-notes and sex. He expected her to believe he was this interested in her—a skinny, short, reclusive Spark? Oh, she wouldn’t deny the sexual spark between them. As far as the physical? Her dark red hair and blue-green eyes were unusual, but so were the galaxies of dark freckles spinning across her skin. And she was fragrant today. The damn water heater she’d scavenged and dragged across the desert was broken again—it never worked more than a week or two before it burned out every circuit she attached to it.
In spite of her self-conscious anger, she could feel the pull as her body tried to respond to Reyes’s lure, heat swirling low and slow in her belly. It pissed her off even more. Plus, a bit of chemistry between strangers didn’t explain this level of attention. Whatever he wanted, it wasn’t her.
Please don’t be stupid enough that you came out here to prey on me. It wouldn’t go the way they planned.
“I’m not the right woman.” She stood, keeping the stool between her and the man in front of her. “And I’m not interested.”
She shook her head. It wasn’t just figurative alarms going off in her head. She could hear the Dust at the back of her mind, a sibilance, not quite a whisper. The Dust liked to help. Lena let it. Reyes spoke again, a pleasant drone she ignored. She focused on the images the Dust flashed in her mind.
Six intruders made their way across the desert, moving through the blanket of Dust and sand. They encircled her home in pairs. Teams of two? Council agents.
And two more were here inside with her. The Council had found her. Her father hadn’t been wrong.
Rage ticked her eyelid. With every step the agents took across the desert, everything she had built went up like so much tinder. Unlike the mid-range Sparks who tried to flee the Council, she could keep them from dragging her back to be a power plant slave. All she had to do was everything her parents had warned her against. She’d have to reveal her true abilities.
She focused on the Dust within their bodies.
Wake up, little friends. Wake up. I have work for you. Listen….
Reyes stopped speaking the moment she went still. He exchanged a look with Lucas before looking back at her. It was all the time she needed.
Lungs and muscles. Lungs and muscles. No breath. No movement.
She could see the shift behind his eyes as he realized he had underestimated her, and then he gasped. His windpipe and lungs constricted then he grabbed at his chest. His muscles locked.
Beside him, Lucas made a wet, wheezing sound as he toppled to the floor, body rigid.
She stepped away from behind the stool and moved sideways across the room.
“Your friends are coming.” She had no idea why she spoke. “I’m sorry it hurts, but you should have left me alone. I wasn’t bothering anyone.” Lena didn’t even know if he could hear her.
Reyes’s face purpled and veins stood out in his neck and forehead. He shouldn’t still be standing.
She hated that she felt guilty. “The Dust will stop once I’m gone. If you make it, don’t look for me. I won’t hold back next time.”
Chapter 2
She ducked into her room, silently ordering the Dust covering her escape route to wake. Alarms shrieked in her head. She’d cut it too close. Lena pushed the wooden bed frame out of the way and wiggled on hands and knees toward the corner. She’d have to come back later for her things, after the agents were gone.
A heavy thump sounded behind her. Reyes wasn’t going to make it.
She hesitated, then snarled at herself for giving a damn about the agent who’d masqueraded as a new client and invaded her home. She slid headfirst, arms extended, into the hole the Dust opened for her.
It was his own fault, anyway.
He had no way to know you could hit back.