A Hero Rising Read Online Free Page B

sweeping through him, making everyone else disappear. And he remembered the lights breaking into shards with her powers, scaring away Razornecks so they could escape.
    He’d saved her life, and she’d saved his in return. A bond thicker than anything he could ever imagine. She was special, and he hated how he had to use her abilities to help his people, to further his own cause. It was only when his cause became her own, and he realized she’d be safer on that ship than on Earth, that he allowed destiny to take its course, a course that would ultimately usher her away from him.
    He emerged into the smog of day and peered up to see if the Expedition had taken off, but the pollution was too thick to spot anything in the sky. He jumped into the nearest open window and climbed until the stairs took him to the first working elevator. At this point, he didn’t dare look at the time.
    The elevator couldn’t move quickly enough for him. He pressed her floor and watched as the numbers accumulated and he entered the levels for the New York branch of the Telepathic Institute of New England, or TINE. Usually the doors were heavily guarded, but Mestasis had won seats on the Expedition for everyone at TINE, so the corridor leading to her room was as silent as a city after a nuke attack.
    The door to her room lay open, and he ran in shouting her name. All cabinets, all walls were stripped bare. He ran to the room where he’d woken up that morning. Empty.
    He ran his hands over the silken sheets. A black hole formed in his chest, sucking his breath away. Mestasis was gone. Maybe it was better he’d left when he did, because he wasn’t sure he could have let her go if he had the chance again.
    An explosion pounded in his gut, shaking the walls around him. Was it the assassination attempt, or had the Expedition just take off?
    James ran to the elevator and slammed the roof button over and over until his palm hurt. The panel beeped and the doors parted. A female voice chimed: You’ve reached level seventy-eight.
    TINE’s building wasn’t the tallest skyscraper in New York, but it was high enough to break through the smog. Smoke blackened the sky in the north end, the plumes spreading like a mushroom cloud over the city. The attack must have happened hours ago. Which meant he’d heard the engines of the Expedition . Sure enough, an orange and gray streak stained the sky above the pluming black clouds. James ran along the length of the roof, shouting Mestasis’s name.
    The ship resembled a reverse meteor, rising from the horizon into the russet-stained sky. Meteors destroyed life, but this flaming ball carried life with it. Thousands of people rode to a paradise planet, transporting the hope of a renewed civilization. James watched the arc with steady eyes, reluctant to look away.
    Mestasis .
    He whispered her name like a prayer uttered before sleep. His heart ached and he wondered if it would stop beating altogether as the chord binding their souls stretched farther and farther apart.
    I’ll never see her again.
    The finality of the thought filled him with dread, yet he knew he’d made the best decision for both of them. Of all his concerns, the most prevalent was her safety, and she would live longer and more comfortably on that ship than anyone here on Earth.
    His finger rose to the sky, tracing the arc to touch the Expedition one last time. The ship had grown so small; he could cover it with the tip of his finger, the finger that had trailed circles on her neck only hours ago.
    It’s best this way.
    If Thadious Legacy’s DNA tests had granted James a ticket, he’d never have been able to live with himself, knowing he left everyone “not deemed suitable” behind to die on a planet with a one-way ticket to hell. He shouldn’t have grown so attached to Mestasis, but she’d caught him off guard from the first day he saw her in the lower levels, wearing her pristine uniform of the Telepathic Institute of New England, risking