Read Online Rebels Rising (Dark Rebels, #1) by Caitlin Falls - Free Book Online Page A

through a mostly deserted town. The few lights that burned in the windows were bright, and they often had to duck around corners. They passed a diner, and the smell of fried eggs and bacon made Krista’s mouth fill with saliva, despite the sick feeling in her belly. Cars passed them, and they wound up walking down a long two-lane highway as the moon began to rise.
    A building rose up from the flat landscape. Its walls looked sheer and dangerous, and its windows were all blank and dark. A guard gate stood in front of it, but it was empty.
    “How are we going to get in?”
    “It’s abandoned. It has been for years,” Blake said. He looked down at the ground, and the moonlight illuminated one half of his face, the curve of his jaw and cheek, and Krista’s heart gave a painful thud.
    “How do you know?”
    “We just do,” Connor said. His face was taut with something that looked too much like fear for Krista’s comfort. Something was going on here, she knew it—but what?
    “How much good can it do us if it is empty?”
    “If they sense Power here, they will just assume it is a remnant, or that one of the Creators escaped and came back here because they had nowhere else to go and decided to work a little while they could.”
    “They might assume it is a Prime come home too,” Tawny said, “in which case we are fucked. So let’s do this as fast as we possibly can, please.”
    Their feet crunched over gravel. The sounds that gravel made were uncannily like the sound of small bones crunching, and Krista shivered. The building showed its age up close: the walls had bad spots in the stone, mold grew in the cracks, and some of the windows had been broken out and never boarded over or replaced.
    There was a smell, faint and old, of antiseptic and blood when they entered the first hallway. Krista stood, confused, but the other three moved with purpose, and she followed them. They descended a long set of stairs, traveled down a labyrinth of hallways and corridors that branched and bloomed like malignant trees.
    The walls held small control panels, most broken and rusted, and the floors gave off a dull sheen and a muted thud-click as their heels struck it. Nobody spoke. The windows of the offices were broken. Krista could see overturned desks and some rusted out filing cabinets and shattered chairs in some of them. A goose-necked lamp hung from the broken glass in a door that bore the letters Dr. E  n  Link  er.
    A shiver stole down her back. Their shadows bobbed against the walls as Blake turned on the flashlight he had stolen earlier that day. Those shadows looked grotesque and strange, demon-like, even.
    The smell got stronger. They turned a corner and found a pile of charred papers and equipment. The words “Here There Be Monsters” had been scrawled on one wall in blood gone dark maroon. Flakes of the blood had come away, and so parts of the words had faded but were still legible, and they made Krista want to run away as fast as she could.
    “What happened here? Where is everyone?”
    “It doesn’t matter,” Connor said, his hand lying on her arm in a reassuring gesture that made her feel no easier. “They are gone and have been for a long time.”
    “You are full of crap. It matters a heck of a lot.”
    Tawny said, “Stop arguing. The last thing you want to do here is argue. The Remnants can hear you, and feel you too.”
    The Remnants? That confused Krista so much she shut up, even though she wanted to say a few other things. Her fear was growing in leaps and bounds. Her every instinct was urging her to run as fast as she could and take the others with her. The hairs on the back of her neck stood up, and her breath came in hard, sharp gasps.
    They entered a low-ceilinged room with a strange contraption at one end. Connor asked Blake, “You think it still works?”
    “She can make it work.” Blake’s voice was harsh. He grabbed Krista by one arm and yanked her to where he stood. His dark eyes bored into