Free Rebels Rising (Dark Rebels, #1) by Caitlin Falls

banged shut, then locked with a solid click that made her nearly hyperventilate with fear.
    “I am taking the stairs back up,” she said to the darkness.
    The other tubes crashed down. She could see her friends being jounced around in them, and when they fell out they all looked as bad as she felt, a little fact that made her spitefully glad for a second.
    “Someone should have told her how to control the speed,” Tawny said between coughs.
    “Yeah, that would have been nice. I thought I had busted my leg,” Krista said.
    “Come on,” Blake said. “We have little time left. I did not know the Remnants here were so awake.”
    “What the hell is a Remnant?” Krista asked, but nobody answered.
    ***
    T he room they wound up in was small and airless, but it led to a larger room shaped like a dome. The larger room took Krista’s breath away. There was something about that room, something dark and malevolent, that made her so scared her legs shook and her body went rigid.
    The computers had once stood in the middle; the stands they had set upon were empty and dusty. There was a thin and dank green mildew on the base of the chair that sat in the center, and the hospital bed was covered in sheets that still held rusty stains, and the stirrups had been broken at some point.
    The bed made her heart drop like lead. Her nausea came back in spiraling waves, and Blake pinched her, hard. “Ouch! What the hell is wrong with you?”
    “Pay attention.” His dark eyes were unreadable.
    “To what?”
    “To your thoughts. Keep them quiet. Just concentrate on the bed and tell me what you see.”
    She did not want to see that bed. It was awful, and something really bad had happened there, something bad was about to happen—she could feel it, and she was terrified. She focused on the bed, her mouth dry, and to her shock, a figure appeared in it, a woman with long blonde hair, a woman with a small dimple in her right cheek, just like the dimple in Krista’s cheek.
    “Mom?” Her voice broke.
    The figure evaporated. The room faded in and out, and her eyes strained to see through the fog that gathered in the corners, crept across the bed and the floor. There were faces in that fog, people walking down a road, and trains running on tracks that cut across green hills. The people and things coalesced, changed, and became guns firing, dogs barking, and children screaming. The visions were terrible, and Krista flailed out with her fists as a man in a uniform came too close to her, his fingers reaching toward her face.
    She turned, and everyone was gone but her. She was alone in a dark wood. The jingle of bells sounded, and she stood there, frozen to the spot. It was dark, but not night. The trees were vast, and their limbs hung over everything, blocking out the sun. The watery sunlight that did come through was pale, and the patchy bits of sky she could see were the same color as slate.
    The bells grew louder. They were accompanied by a stamping sound and the sound of wheels sliding on slick grass. She ducked behind a giant tree, her eyes scanning the woods. There was a nicker, and a horse appeared, pulling a colorful wagon. An old woman sat on its seat, her hair covered by a bright scarf.
    Before Krista could make any sense of that, it was gone, and she was back in the lab. Blake spoke again. “Make that go.”
    Her gaze followed his finger. There was a broken machine sitting there, not far from the bed. She focused on it, and it kicked on with a buzzing hum that hurt her head. It droned and whined, and Connor made a low noise deep down in his throat.
    The machine broke in half, its sides splitting open and crisping to black. “What did you do that for?” Tawny asked.
    “I...I didn’t, did I?” Had she?
    Blake shrugged. “It does not matter. We only needed to see if you could break it.”
    “Why?”
    “This was the prototype for the machine at Luke. If you can kill this one, maybe you can actually kill the other one.”
    “So