The Sinister Shadows by Sian Webster (books to read in your 20s .TXT) 📕

“No.” I say. “Not yet.”

I move her hands from her sides and place them firmly over her ears, before doing the same myself. Then the bang fills the camp, echoing off the night’s curtain of darkness. Calliope stares at me, her eyes wide. Terrified.

I shrug. “No time for subtlety now, come on.”

No longer bothering the be quiet, we run through the front door. Three guards are on the floor, their skin blackened between the red welts from the explosion, as they lay victim to my homemade bomb. I pull Calliope through the foyer quickly, hoping to protect any innocence she still has. I stop in my tracks as we reach what should be Eli’s cell. My brows furrow together as the boy who should be my brother turns to face me.

Li Yun sits in the cell instead.

My breathing becomes panicked. “You…You’re not really here. I don’t even know you yet!” I insist.

Yun shrugs. “I’m here as part of your subconscious, silly girl. I’m not in control of your dreams.”

I nod. “You’re right.” I gasp. “This is a dream. I’m in control.”

He raises a fine eyebrow. “Are you?” He clicks his fingers. Beside me, Calliope disappears.

A scream escapes from my throat. “What did you do? Why are you doing this?!”I ask, hysterical.

A smirk appears on his face. “I got bored of her.” He says. “She’s a little quiet, don’t you think?”

I narrow my eyes. “Just give me Eli back. I didn’t ask you to be here.”

Yun throws a ring of keys in the air and catches them. I reach for where the set I stole from the guard should be, and they’re gone. The scientist before me repeats this action once, twice, three times. Teasing me.

“Oh, Codi, I can’t do that.” His smirk grows wider.

“Why?!” I yell. “Why are you doing this to me?!”

He walks up to the bars and grips my throat tightly, his breath assaulting my face. “I. Never. Lose.”

* * *

I jumped awake to the sound of my door opening and closing, the dream swirling through my brain. It had been the perfectly accurate memory – until Yun. I sat up, rubbing my eyes and running my fingers through my hair, as I met Will’s eyes across the room.

“Will?” I asked, my heart thudding in my chest.

“Yep,” he smirked, popping the ‘p’, “I told you I’d come to see you, remember? Found a pattern yet?”

I sighed and shook my head, reaching over to my bedside table for a hair tie before throwing the blonde ringlets into a rough pony tail, hoping they didn’t look as damp and sweaty as they felt. “It’s a hard one.” I told him, walking over to the Projection desk and turning it on, the blue and red images flickering to life. “It’s almost like it doesn’t exist. But it has to.”

He knelt down on the carpet beside my chair, his eyes scanning the pages I had open. “There’s not a rule like, this person is really popular in school so they’re going to end up dating someone who is also really popular in school?” He joked.

I scoffed. “Unfortunately not.”

“God damn.” He let himself fall backwards do he was lying on the floor. “Singh and the rest of the New York scientists already have a semi-functioning prototype, and we can’t even find a pattern in our data.”

“They don’t have data.” I reminded him. “And if their invention is so easy to make, I doubt it will save the human race. That is, after all, the whole point of this.”

“I’m gonna sabotage their damn contact lenses, I swear to god.” He muttered.

“Hey!” I chastised. “Don’t be the bad guy they think you are.”

He sat up and shrugged. “Maybe I am the bad guy.”

“You’re not.” I snapped, holding his gaze intently.

He didn’t speak, but his gaze mirrored mine. He was arguing me without words. His gaze dropped, following my body the whole way down the ground. His eyes had barely been stationed on the carpet when they flicked back up again and he was kneeling beside me chair once more, his eyes wide. “You’re hurt.”

He reached out and trailed his fingers across the base of my throat, goose bumps rising on my arms at the ever so slight contact. I forced myself to flinch away. I pushed the roller chair back, spinning away from him before rising from the chair and finding my back to the wall of my room. “It’s nothing.” I said sharply.

Will dragged himself from the floor, his shoulders stiff. “It’s obviously not. If it was nothing you wouldn’t have reacted like that.” He took a step towards me. “Who did it?”

“I did it to myself!” I insisted. “I forgot to take my necklace off before I blow-dried my hair. It heated up and burnt me.” I lied randomly.

He raised his eyebrows. “I’ve never seen you wear a necklace, Codi.” He paused. “It was Yun wasn’t it?”

My eyes dropped to the floor.

“The bastard.” Will muttered under his breath. His eyes flicked around the room then back to me. “Were you even going to tell me?”

I shrugged. “I didn’t think you needed to know. Besides, I’m fine, I—”

“And what if you hadn’t been fine, Codi? He tried to strangle you!” Will’s voice was shaking as he tried to stop his volume from increasing.

“Well, he wasn’t exactly strangling, strangling me, but—”

“That’s beside the point!” His control snapped as he flung his arms in the air in frustration. He was across the room and leaning over me in a heartbeat, one of his hands bracing himself on the wall above my head. He was tensing so much his veins were bulging from his biceps. “He could’ve killed you, Codi!”

“Yet, here I am.” I snapped, meeting his eyes, glare for glare. “I’m not as weak as you think I am!”

His shoulders slumped and his hand fell from the wall, his eyes on the floor. “I don’t think that you’re weak,” he said softly, not meeting my eyes, “I just feel… protective of you.”

“You don’t need to feel protective of me.” I insisted. “You’re not my brother, and you’re not my boyfriend, and I can handle myself just fine.”

I regretted the words as soon as they scrambled from my mouth. They hung in the air around us, a pair of scissors threatening to destroy the small thread of whatever bond we had forged between us in those past weeks.

“Right.” He muttered, his voice clipped – guarded. “I… I’ll see you later then.” He said, shuffling his feet on the carpet. “Good luck with finding a pattern in the research.”

All I could do was nod in response as he almost flew to the other side of the room and out of the door. I was surprised that he didn’t slam it – I knew I would have, had someone just said something like that to me.

Will had hardly been gone ten seconds before my knees gave out beneath me and I sank to the floor, haunted with thoughts that I had lost the first person to make me smile since before the War.

That I had lost the one person who seemed to understand.

Publication Date: 04-06-2015

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