Page 167 of Sparktopia
So I play it cool on the way home. “Wanna get some coffee?”
Clara thinks about this, but declines. “Nah. It was such a nice evening. I’m already wound up enough. I just want to go to bed.” She looks up at me, smiling. She’s got her hand around my arm again, like she’s never walked a city in her life without an escort. And hell, maybe she hasn’t. Because clearly, she is a dinner-party kind of woman. She’s been talking about her night since we left. She loves the girls and if we were gonna be in this city on Monday, I guarantee Janice would be her new best friend.
But we will not be in Tau City on Monday.
We’re getting the fuck out of here tomorrow.
I just can’t tip off Clara—not until we’re inside the tower, at least. Because everyone outside the ruin is tracked and monitored. Especially through the phones in our pockets.
I can’t throw them away, not yet. Not until we’re in the tower, because the cameras are watching and I’d bet my life that Stayn is up, right now, in some secret room in his massive house, watching us walk home. Looking for any sign that I might run.
“You didn’t have a good time?”
I look down at Clara. “What? Sure I did.”
“Well, you’re super distracted. What did you talk about with the men while I was chatting up the women?”
“Oh…” I blow out a breath. “Nothing much. Boring work. But not my work, so really boring work.”
“You have a meeting on Monday, though?”
I want to end this conversation and I’m trying to think up some kind of plausible way that won’t arouse suspicion when Clara suddenly stops and gasps out loud.
“What? What’s wrong?”
She lets out a breath, then looks around. “We just came back inside.”
That’s when I realize she’s right. We just entered the Ruin District. In other words, we just entered the spark. “Clara? Look at me.”
She tilts her head up, but I can see the panic in her eyes. I can almost see the blue, as well. Maybe I’m just imagining it, because I know that she wasn’t ready for the extra spark and now she’s feeling a little bit full.
It used to affect me that way too, though I never lit up blue from it.
And that’s exactly what she’s about to do.
Stayn—or someone, at least—is still watching. Probably leaning into the screen to get a better look at what’s going onright now. And if I don’t do something fast, they’re about to get an eyeful.
Clara is panicking. She knows this is bad. There are hundreds of people out here around the tower and if she explodes with light, everything changes.
And not in a good way.
I grab her and then I kiss her. And when my mouth touches her, all her extra blue spark starts spilling into me. It’s cold at first. Ice cold. But then, as the kiss continues and she relaxes with the realization that it’s going to be OK, it turns warm.
And then it’s pouring into me faster, and faster, and faster until I explode…
Except I don’t explode.
I float up, and up, and up. And it’s not me doing all this floating, but the augments inside me. Because when I look down, there I am. Standing just inside the Ruin District kissing up-city Clara Birch in front of the whole city.
But… it’s notmycity.
It’shers.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
It’s my first kiss—not ever, of course, but my very first kiss that is not Finn. And it does not disappoint. I realize that he only did it to ease the build-up of spark inside me so I didn’t literally explode with it in front of the whole city.
But it feels way too good to care why he did it.
