The Final Showdown - The Moon Trilogy - Book 3

Chapter fifteen:

   There was a split second where the rapid sequence of confusing, impossible events seemed to move at a speed faster than light. Ellie disappeared, as she had that first night, Clarity walked forward to investigate, only to turn back, emptyhanded. That was when time slowed down again; just as Clarity's knees buckled beneath her. It also happened to be the exact moment that Rachel leaped forward to catch the other girl.

   Her face was clenched in pain, and her mouth was open in a silent scream. Rachel reached her a second too late to stop her knees from cracking into the rubble, but she was able to slowly lower the girl into a writing, seizure-like position on the ground.

   At length, she stopped squirming, and just lay there, impossibly still.

   By then, the others had gathered around.

   Rachel was far from the most knowledgeable, so she stepped back and watched in a nail-biting daze as Alex checked her pulse and breathing. She rushed forward again to help in picking the limp girl up, and it was just a short blink of time before they were standing in the middle of the living room in the apartment, the unofficial landing pad for their little missions.

   Scarlett was quickly revealed as the closest thing they had to a doctor, now that Clara was gone, so the golden-haired teleporter was the one to examine Clarity further. She slipped into the position of the head physician immediately, and started barking orders at everyone else to bring her this or that, and to plug in so-and-so. By the end of half an hour, Clarity was hooked up to at least two different monitors. Medical equipment that had been plundered on their numerous Lance-Searches was scattered around the bed they'd placed Clarity on upon their arrival.

   Clarity's vital signs were abnormal, especially considering the fact that she'd been functioning properly and actively not an hour beforehand. Her brain activity had almost come to a stop, and her heart was beating so slowly that she would have been dead had it gone any lower. She'd somehow managed to get herself into a coma.

   The minutes ticked by, and Scarlett continued to buzz around the bed like a wasp on a discarded hotdog, re-checking screens, and re-performing tests she'd already performed several times over.

   Rachel stood by and observed, her mind never leaving the limbo-state that bordered on pure panic. Questions raced through her mind, but none of them were answered or even considered. All of her concentration found itself glued to the comatose girl on the bed, her silver hair splayed out around her head like a sprig of fine, metal wires.

   Her attention flicked momentarily to Scarlett, and consequently, to the hand-held monitor she was now scowling at.

   But something strange caught Rachel's eye before her panic-fueled thoughts turned back to Clarity. Two parallel lines wove their way across the monitor, spiking up, then down. They were in perfect sync, trailing across the screen in an endless dance.

  Rachel couldn't pretend to know jack about medical science, but even she could tell that it was a pair of heart-rate monitors. She also couldn't claim to know the science behind it, but almost everyone with half a brain knew that no two people had the same heartbeats. Everyone was different. Logic would entail that the two lines move differently, but they defied the universe by being the same.

   And Rachel felt a surety in the pit of her gut that these were not just two mirrored graphs of the same heart beating. And it just so happened that they had another person, positioned not twenty feet away, who was also in a rather unexplained coma: August King, infamous telepath and—no doubt—somehow behind all of this.

   Scarlett muttered something, then tapped the screen twice. The image shifted to a more fluid set of parallel graphs, the lines squirming up and down more like worms, rather than lightning.