Gods of Rust and Ruin

  Gods of Rust and Ruin

  Azalea Ellis

  Copyright © 2017 by Azalea Ellis

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Seladore Publishing

  Contents

  Book Description

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Interlude 1

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Interlude 2

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Interlude 3

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Interlude 4

  Chapter 43

  Also by Azalea Ellis

  About the Author

  Book Description

  Blurb:

  My name is Eve Redding. They call me the godkiller.

  I was dying. Slowly being destroyed by the power I had worked so hard to obtain. My team and I were trapped within NIX’s web of lies and manipulation, and even my allies couldn’t be trusted.

  Deep below, the alien called out to me like a beacon, and I decided to forge an alliance. As they say, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

  Gods of Rust and Ruin is the second book in the Seeds of Chaos dystopian science fiction series. Fans of The Hunger Games, Red Rising, and Ready Player One will likely enjoy this series.

  If you enjoy this book, please take the time to leave a review on Amazon or Goodreads.

  Want to get an email when my next book is released, or when I’m running book giveaways and contests? Sign up here: http://bit.ly/SeedsofChaosNewsletter

  To Jared. For I am with you.

  Chapter 1

  No one but Night, with tears on her dark face, watches beside me.

  — Edna St. Vincent Millay

  I sat up abruptly, choking on my own blood. I jerked out of the little cot tucked into the side of the wall and spat the liquid onto the floor in a dark splatter. The heavy iron taste in my mouth added to the terror of the nightmare I’d been yanked from. My claws slipped out and I sliced through the empty darkness, lashing out at a nonexistent enemy.

  A second of flailing later, I got control of myself. I was alone. The only enemy attacking me was also the thing keeping me alive, now that I lived within NIX’s compound. The Seed of Chaos made me powerful enough to be valuable, while literally eating away at me from the inside.

  I gagged and coughed, trying to staunch the blood flow with one hand while fumbling for the backpack shoved underneath my mattress with the other. The only light in the room came from the small diodes of a couple of sleeping electronics, but it was enough for my augmented eyes to see. I pulled out a small pouch and fumbled for one of the large, marble-like Seeds within. “I wish I was more Resilient,” I mouthed almost soundlessly, pressing it to my neck. I was long past flinching at the pinprick. I sighed in relief as the Seed injected its contents into me and took hold, stopping the bleeding.

  Birch, my little monster-cat companion, woke, either from the noise I’d made or the smell of my blood dripping everywhere. He let out his scratchy little meow, the sound lilting upward at the end in an obvious question. He hadn’t yet displayed the ability of his late mother to share thoughts through touch, but he was far from stupid.

  “I had to take a Seed,” I muttered to him, my voice low in case something was listening. “I was bleeding again, but I’m okay now.”

  Birch bumped me with his head and licked at the blood on my forearm with his prickly tongue.

  I withdrew my arm before his tongue accidentally removed the top layer of my skin, and moved to the shower in the tiny bathroom stall. I was the only one of my teammates with private quarters. The others were sleeping in a small barracks-like room across the hall from me, stacked two bunks high. I’d glanced at their room the night before, and then promptly passed out from exhaustion onto my own private little cot.

  Behind me, Birch grumbled and moved to licking up my blood from the cold hard floor. He had an excessive and disturbing penchant for raw meat and blood. Especially my blood.

  I turned on the water at a temperature most kindly described as “scalding” and let it wash away the sticky red residue, along with the lingering creepy feeling from my nightmare. I’d been waking up with nightmares, from nightmares, for a while. But they were getting worse than ever before, and I rarely went a night without them.

  Sometimes, it was the monsters of a Trial coming for me, ready to rip me apart and dance with my entrails. Sometimes, it was the last time I saw my team member China, as the light went out of her eyes and she died. And sometimes, the nightmare had no form. It was the creeping mass of decay and putrefaction devouring everything in its path. A shudder, a feeling, a smell.

  When I exited the shower, Birch had finished cleaning all the blood from the floor. My sheets and pillowcase still glistened with the dark liquid, but luckily, they were black. I took them back into the shower with me and cleaned the synthetic material as best I could. No one would know what had happened.

  Birch called to me from the doorway to the shower, his meow still scratchy from sleep.

  “It’s getting worse,” I murmured.

  The cub padded past the open shower door and under the spray of water, then licked my knee and peered up at me with his green human eyes. Water splashed down on him and his translucent second eyelids closed sideways for protection. He spread his downy wings to better catch the warm water. “I’m afraid,” I whispered, knowing that he couldn’t reveal my secret, and the rushing water would cover any other surveillance that might have slipped through my search. “The Seeds aren’t working for as long as they used to.”

  The Seed of Chaos grew continually stronger, as Behelaino had warned me it would. I just hadn’t thought it would happen this fast. Every time I was forced to use it, it grew stronger, but being able to display it was the only thing keeping me—and the team—safe.

  The meditation technique Adam had taught me helped control Chaos, too, but I could only do so much without more Seeds. A lot more. Without them or some other way to heal myself, the outcome was obvious. I had wanted to keep my condition a secret, but I would need to reveal it to Sam, and hope that he could help me until I could find a way to fix myself.

  “I’m dying, Birch,” I whispered with terrible certainty, the words no more than a breath on the air.

  Chapter 2

  I buried my past under a sheet of old earth, and hoped it would not rise up to follow me again.

  — Ilium Troia

  “I’m going to have to find another way to fix this,” I said, voice hardening as an angry determination pushed back the fear. The words came easily enough, bu
t I had no idea how to actually do anything about the black Seed eating away at me.

  I exited the shower, turned on the lights to my room and sat on the floor, ignoring the water still beaded on my skin and slicking my hair down. Fear pounded through my bloodstream, gurgling in my stomach and weakening my muscles. When Birch crawled onto my lap, I laid my hand on his side, letting his heartbeat center me.

  I breathed out and started my meditation exercises. The sun wouldn’t rise for a while, so I had time. I closed my eyes and breathed in deep, until I could feel the oxygen swirling in the deepest parts of my lungs, spreading into my blood. From there, it wasn’t so hard to sense the tiny particles of Chaos.

  I forced them into my mental room of serenity, and put their writhing darkness in my box of silence, locked inside the chest of stillness. By its very nature, Chaos hated being confined so and wrestled with me to escape. But if there is one thing I can be sure of in myself, it is my will of iron. I do not back down.

  I stayed in my meditative state even after I was finished cleansing my body, letting my heightened Perception swirl around me. I could feel Birch’s little heart beating within his body, hear the electricity thrumming through the walls, and sense the cold air blowing through the vents woven into the compound.

  Desperate curiosity sparked within me again. I’d agreed to join NIX for two reasons. Partially, to gain their “protection” for myself and my team. And partially because of the alien down below. Maybe, we could have threatened NIX into compliance after breaking the Shortcut and escaped to live in peace, but when I had seen the alien, that had no longer been an option for me. Not until the urge inside me that I didn’t even understand had been sated, at least.

  The night before, I’d searched my quarters for monitoring devices. I found many, some of them hidden more cleverly than others. I’d destroyed them, of course. Beyond that, I’d been too exhausted to even brush my teeth before falling into bed. I hadn’t had the time or the energy to learn much about NIX, or the thing it was holding far below, in the bowels of the mountain. Now I did.

  I sent my awareness outward through the air, leaving my room though the vent in the ceiling. It was more difficult to force my awareness to travel through substances I wasn’t in physical contact with, and as I pushed farther from my body, even moving at all got exponentially harder. So I let my mind travel through the vents and hallways and spaces where air traveled unimpeded. I sensed Players as I went, an aura of sorts thrumming around them even as they slept.

  Occasionally, I passed a bright spark of power that wasn’t asleep. A couple roamed the halls, or the cafeteria, and farther down a group of them had gathered in a large room along the way, but my Perception of details aside from the Seed glow was hazy at that distance, and I couldn’t tell what they were doing.

  I slipped past, straining to hold my concentration together. Downward, level after level, until something pinged on the edges of my alertness. I ignored it. I was used to gaining levels by that point. I’d check my stats later. I strained, but I couldn’t keep hold of that strange extra-sensory Perception at such distances. It snapped, fraying like mist through a shredder, and I found myself fully back in my room, my head throbbing fiercely along with my heartbeat.

  I dressed in the bodysuit NIX provided for its Players, wearing my blood-powered armored vest underneath it. I ignored the boots, because my feet were too strangely shaped nowadays to fit into them, and the skin there was tough. I wove my damp hair into a tight braid and checked the whites of my eyes in the bathroom mirror. I’d disabled its monitoring function the night before. The blood vessels in my sclera were still red and irritated, and patches of rusty brown showed where they’d broken and bled, which made the ice-blue of my irises stand out more. It looked better than the disturbing bloody color the whites of my eyes had been the day before, after I’d used too much Chaos.

  Before leaving the room, I pulled up my Attributes Window to see what had happened during my mental foray into the carved-out depths of the mountain.

  PLAYER NAME: EVE REDDING

  TITLE: SQUAD LEADER(9)

  CHARACTERISTIC SKILL: SPIRIT OF THE HUNTRESS, TUMBLING FEATHER

  LEVEL: 38UNPLANTED SEEDS: 0

  SKILLS: COMMAND, CHAOS

  STRENGTH: 14

  LIFE: 27

  AGILITY: 21

  GRACE: 18

  INTELLIGENCE: 17

  FOCUS: 17

  BEAUTY: 10

  PHYSIQUE: 12

  MANUAL DEXTERITY: 9

  MENTAL ACUITY: 18

  RESILIENCE: 22

  STAMINA: 19

  PERCEPTION: 20

  For some reason, my out of body awareness didn’t count as a Skill. Maybe because I hadn’t gained it through a specific Skill Bestowal. I didn’t advertise its existence, and anyone who didn’t know and saw me using it just thought I was into meditation. The couple of Seeds Commander Petralka had given me and the others as a joining bonus weren’t noted, either.

  I placed my hand on the pad next to my door, and it slid open onto the slightly curving hallway. One of the barracks doors a few meters down the hall was also open. A Player leaned nonchalantly against the doorway, staring straight at the entrance to my quarters. She held my gaze long enough to make it an obvious challenge, then stepped back and waved her door closed.

  Birch bared his teeth at her closed door.

  I rolled my shoulders to release the tension already building there, and knocked briefly on the door to my team’s room before signaling it to open. I wasn’t going to worry about hostility from the other Players in NIX, since there wasn’t much I could do about it. Hopefully, our display the day before would keep anyone from messing with us directly. If not, maybe we would have to put on another gruesome show with the first people to mess with us.

  Within the room, most of my teammates milled about in various states of undress, some still obviously waking up.

  Birch shot through the open doorway, straight at Adam. He knocked the other boy back onto the low bed behind him, ruffled his wings, let out a scratchy roar, and pranced off.

  Kris, Blaine’s young niece, let out a delighted laugh and bent down, making enticing noises at Birch.

  “Be quiet,” her younger brother grumbled, scrubbing at his face. Gregor’s adorable bushy eyebrows drew down into a scowl like a storm cloud.

  “Why does Birch hate me?” Adam said, throwing his arms out dramatically and ruffling Sam’s pristinely made bed. Which he was still lying on, apparently having given up on the idea of standing back up.

  Zed laughed, leaning down from his bunk above Adam. “Birch doesn’t hate you. He loves you. He loves to torment you.”

  I snickered, drawing Adam’s attention, and was about to add a comment of my own when a flash of blonde caught the corner of my eye. My first thought was that Blaine was combing Sam’s hair. I realized it was China, not Sam. Then I realized it was Chanelle, and her hair had been cut sometime during her stay at NIX. No doubt to make it easier for her captors to care for her. She stared blankly ahead, not seeming to notice the tug of the comb on the boy-short hair of her head, or the people around her. Everything about it was wrong. China’s face, even if it wasn’t really her, shouldn’t be so blank. And she definitely would never have chopped off her princess-hair.

  Any amusement died a cold death.

  Adam’s eyes followed my own, and he sat up, running nimble fingers through the brown mop of curls atop his own head.

  “No luck?” I turned to Sam, who was yanking his covers back into some semblance of neatness.

  He straightened and shook his head. “I can tell something’s wrong with her, or was wrong at some point, but . . . I can’t fix it. Something’s wrong with her brain, I think. But it almost seems as if it’s natural, rather than an injury. Maybe, it’s because whatever it was happened too long ago. I can’t take away scars.” He grimaced and looked away, but not before I caught a glimpse of the shiny wetness in his eyes.

  Jacky hopped down from he
r own top bunk, landing way too lightly for a normal human. She was unrealistically beautiful even with her brown eyes glazed over and her hair a tangled mess from sleeping. I would have bet money that she put more than a few handfuls into Beauty, if I didn’t know better. She clapped Blaine on the shoulder, causing him to drop the comb and wince from the blow. Then she patted Chanelle on the head, gently enough that she probably wouldn’t have cracked an egg. “She’ll get better, Sam,” Jacky croaked sleepily. “We’ll figure out a way.” Then she stumbled to the bathroom, burping loudly and scratching her stomach.

  “Ugh, everyone, please shut the gaping holes of loudness and stinking breath you seem to think are your mouths,” Gregor said, loud and clear, just as the door opened beside me.

  The room quieted for a bit, as we all turned to stare at the child in astonishment.

  “Whoa,” the new arrival said from the doorway. “Brush your own teeth before you start talking!” Bunny turned to me. His rumpled shirt, hair, and the slightly awkward tilt of his mouth belied the directness of his gaze. “Someone’s been having bad dreams,” he murmured mockingly.

  I almost reacted, thinking he was talking about me, when Gregor muttered, “They’re not bad dreams. I’m not an idiot!” and stalked off to the bathroom, the hems of his pajama pants covering his entire feet.