Flood Rising (Jenna Flood #1)

She rolled over and was surprised to find the dish intact. Smoke rolled up over the sides, collecting beneath the hanger’s high ceiling. With a groan of metal, the dish tilted a few degrees. Nine stories below, the concrete base, struck by a missile, succumbed to the weight of the hundred-ton dish. It heeled over, lazily at first, but gravity pulled it faster with each passing second.

When the dish reached a forty-five degree angle, Jenna slid to a stop against a fallen receiver support beam. A moment later, Jarrod rolled to a stop, just feet away. She steeled herself for an attack, but when he looked at her, he said, “We can stop it!”

The antenna continued to fall. She didn’t reply.

“I can’t do it alone!” he shouted.

“We could both die,” she suggested.

He stared at her, no doubt weighing her sincerity. “Without you, they don’t stand a chance.”

He was manipulating her. She knew it. He knew it. But he was also right. To stop the other clones and a third world war, she had to survive this mess, and that meant working with Jarrod...so that they could try killing each other again once they reached the ground.

“Tell me what to do,” she said.

He pointed his hands down, toward the dish. “Just focus on the dish. See it slowing. There’s no way we can stop it completely. It’s too heavy. But we can slow it down.” He closed his eyes and ground his teeth. The structure shuddered, mashed against an unseen force, but it continued to fall.

Jenna closed her eyes and did as instructed. She immediately felt the dish’s weight pulling against her. It was agonizing, like muscles in her mind were being stretched and snapped.

She screamed.

And the dish slowed.

We’re doing it, she thought, and she opened her eyes.

That was when she saw the third missile and shouted.

Jarrod’s eyes snapped open. He saw the missile,too. “No!” He reached out a hand, deflecting the missile to detonate in the desert, but he lost control of the dish in the process. The strain became to much for Jenna to bear alone, and she lost her psychokinetic grip.

With a groan of rending metal, the dish plummeted. Jarrod fell from view. Jenna clung to the support beam as long as she could, but momentum pulled her free and flung her away. The world became a blurry spiral, and then, in a snap, became nothing.





63



6:32 p.m.



“Jenna?”

The voice called to her out of the blackness.

“A few more minutes,” she murmured.

That’s all I need. I’ll sleep for a few more minutes. Then I’ll get up.

But unconsciousness had already released her back into the world of the living. Her eyelids fluttered open just in time to see a familiar shape kneel beside her.

“Jenna.” Noah sounded very concerned, and as she pondered possible reasons for this, the memory of the collapsing dish replayed in her head, but the final impact however was a blank spot in her memory.

She opened her eyes and couldn’t make sense of what she saw. Destruction lay all around her and above her, but a ten foot circle around her remained unscathed. It was as though the dish had slammed into a spherical force field, wrapping its hundred ton metal form around it. What happened?

She hurt, all over, but she decided that was a good sign. Serious injuries would have left her numb with shock. She tried to sit up.

“Lie still,” Noah told her, his voice soothing but still somehow ominous.

How bad is it? She wondered, and she decided that, sensible or not, she was going to get up. Noah didn’t try to stop her, and that, she decided, was probably a good sign, too.

As soon as she was partially upright, the world spun. There were two Noahs kneeling in front of her, and behind them, the flat desert landscape appeared strangely broken, like two transparent pictures imperfectly arranged on a desktop. Other than that, things looked pretty normal. After a few moments, the two images came together and she could see clearly again.

That was when she saw him at the edge of the untouched sphere of land.

A dark wave of grief crashed over Jenna, threatening to drag her back into unconsciousness. Jarrod—a part of Jarrod—lay a few feet away. When the edge of the dish had impacted the ground, it had sliced through his torso like a guillotine. He lay there, staring up, his too-familiar face frozen in a rictus of horror. The rest of him was buried in the rubble.

He tried to kill me, she thought. I should be glad he’s dead. But instead, it felt like a piece of her had been torn away.

Noah’s arms enfolded her. “It’s okay, Jenna. It’s over. You’re safe.”

Over? She shook her head, making no effort to hold back the tears. “No. I failed. I couldn’t stop him in time.”

“Shhh. Don’t worry about that now. You did what you could. You did more than anyone had the right to ask you to do. And I’m proud of you.”

Jenna was surprised by how much that mattered to her. Yet, she didn’t deserve his pride. When the chance to act had come, she had balked, torn between doing what she knew to be right—what Noah had raised her to believe in—and a preprogrammed sense of loyalty to a family she didn’t know.