Destroyed Read online

  Destroyed

  Madeline Dyer

  Contents

  Destroyed

  Praise for the Untamed Series

  Also by Madeline Dyer

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  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

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Preview

  Ten Years Earlier

  “An epic conclusion to one of the most exceptional dystopian series of this decade. Brilliantly plotted and complex, Destroyed is a powerful finale that will break many a reader’s heart.”

  S.E. Anderson, author of Starstruck

  * * *

  “Madeline Dyer writes with swift, focused confidence that immerses you in Sev’s world. The tension between the Enhanced and the Untamed is fascinating, and I kept thinking about them long after I finished reading.”

  Sarah Mensinga, author of Currently

  * * *

  “A fantastic dystopian tale. Highly recommended for fans of strong heroines and intriguing sci-fi worlds.”

  Pintip Dunn, New York Times bestselling author of the Forget Tomorrow series

  * * *

  “A YA Mad Max—thrilling and deep, with richly drawn characters and spot-on pacing. […] Dyer’s Untamed series is a must-read for dystopian fans.”

  T.A. Maclagan, author of They Call Me Alexandra Gastone

  * * *

  “Fascinating and intriguing.”

  A Drop of Ink Reviews

  * * *

  “Dyer is as much a poet as a dystopian scribe.”

  Marissa Kennerson, author of The Family

  * * *

  “Strong writing and well-rounded characters.”

  Heidi Sinnett, author and librarian

  * * *

  “While Dyer provides all the elements you’re looking for in an action-packed dystopian adventure, I also found her message about women and their rights to be very timely. Fragmented and Dyer both have layers that are worth exploring.”

  Kimberly Sabatini, author of Touching the Surface

  * * *

  “A kick-butt story with amazing characters and outstanding world building.”

  Readcommendations

  * * *

  “Highly recommended.”

  Dr. Jessie Voigts, WanderingEducators.com

  * * *

  “Dyer writes with an urgency and a rhythm that compels you to turn the page.”

  Sue Wyshynski, author of The Butterfly Code series

  * * *

  “Untamed is a fantastic dystopian survival story, filled with twists.”

  The Literature Hub

  * * *

  “Readers who enjoy dystopian novels would enjoy this book.”

  The Story Sanctuary

  * * *

  “An intriguing saga.”

  Tracy Clark, author of The Light Key Trilogy & Mirage

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.

  * * *

  Destroyed

  Copyright © 2018 Madeline Dyer

  All rights reserved.

  * * *

  Madeline Dyer asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  * * *

  First edition, November 2018

  Published by Ineja Press

  * * *

  Edited by Michelle Dunbar

  Cover & Interior Design by We Got You Covered Book Design

  * * *

  Print ISBN: 978-0-9957191-8-7

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-9957191-9-4

  * * *

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, distributed, stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval systems, in any forms or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, without the express written permission of the author, except for the purpose of a review which may quote brief passages.

  * * *

  The author can be contacted via email at [email protected] or through her website www.MadelineDyer.co.uk

  For my readers

  “We need to stop, Sev.” Corin’s voice is raspy, raw, and his hand closes around mine. Grime streaks across the right side of his face, makes his stubble look darker. His eyes are grim, but focused.

  I shake my head before I realize I’m going to. We can’t stop, I can feel it. It’s the power inside me—it has to be—the Sarr legacy rising up, taking control, because it’s trying to help, to guide me, and I feel like I know it. Know it well. Like I’ve always been waiting for it. It’s part of me—and it shouldn’t be. It should feel new, unknown, strange.

  It doesn’t.

  I point at the horizon, at the fast-spreading flames. “That’s going to reach us if we stop.”

  But it might anyway, I know that. I curse and look at the sky, but all I see is the strange yellow-gray light, the heavy dust in the air, the ragged debris as it dances in gusts, swirling round and round. No spirits are visible—and something tells me they’re not here at all, not even in their weaker, invisible forms. But we need them again, we need to move. They brought us to safety before, took us away from the flames, but the world is still breaking, and fire is greedy. Patches, growing and growing, taking the world, orange tongues waiting. My fire.

  “Esther and Taras are really struggling.” Corin tugs on my arm, then turns his head, braces himself against an angry gust of wind. “We have to stop.”

  “We can’t.” The ragged wind snatches my words away, carries them, rips them into shreds that fall into the flames.

  Long, dry wind-swept grass slaps against my bare legs. Fire will easily spread through it, and, for a second, I think it’s happening now—flames taking my legs, my skin smoldering, peeling, the stench of burning flesh hanging in the air. It doesn’t stop, because nothing is damp here—not even the air, even though we’re so close to the sea. The waves are just over the edge of the cliff on my right, but they’re untouchable.

  I jolt, separate myself from t
he nightmare, and look behind me, feel my hand brush against the bottom of my shirt, where dried blood has hardened the fabric. Taras is a few feet behind Corin and I. His left arm is tied in a makeshift sling. His face looks older, his skin more leathery, worn, accentuated by the eerie light, as if he’s aged twenty years in the last few hours, since the—

  I snap that thought off and force myself to look at Esther, behind him, but her features are nearly indistinguishable in the murky grayness. I can just make out her shape—her pregnant form. Jana’s next to her, sort of hovering as she tries to help her, though she doesn’t touch her. The dog? Where’s the dog?

  I turn, catch my foot on a ridge in the dry ground, and stumble. Corin’s hand shoots out and catches me. Then I see the terrier, feel my heart lighten a bit.

  Taras stops next to us, panting, then leans forward, braces his right hand against his knee. His twisted posture makes him look like he’s going to fall over in the next gust of wind.

  “How long do we keep going?” Jana shouts. Her voice is like an arrow weaving through chaos, death, and unheard words.

  Words.

  I inhale sharply. There are words around us—words I can’t access, but something in me can. And it knows, and it urges me forward. I’m walking again, and I cannot slow down, because something is calling to me. No. Calling to a Sarr inside me. And the Sarr is responding, and I’m both here and not, and it doesn’t feel bad.

  “Sev?”

  “No! Wait! It’s not—”

  They all shout after me, but the power in me pushes me forward. Heat floods my body, energy sweeping through me, reversing the numbness in my feet.

  The skin on my face tingles with adrenaline.

  We’re close. Close to whatever it is.

  The connection—it’s strong. I feel it. A sense of familiarity, of knowing. Energy pushes outward from my core, until it’s at the forefront of my being—this other person, guiding me and my powers.

  It’s okay, the Sarr says. She’s not my mother, but she feels like her, and I don’t know whether that helps or not. But I give in to her, let her guide me completely—and it’s a relief because the night is coming fast, darker than I remembered one ever being—darker in the way it climbs inside you. But everything’s changed now. The world has changed. The Dream Land’s gone. Nothing works as it did. Nothing feels right. It is the Last Night, the final stage of the War of Humanity. A night that will encompass many, achieve much.

  Above, the sky changes until it’s a swarming mass of moving soot, dust, and black matter. Things that look like little winged creatures flutter, but when I look closely, I see them for what they are: tatters of the old worlds, the barriers, skin, blood. Nothing alive lives up there now. Nothing real.

  Even the spirits have gone.

  My brother…gone.

  The clifftop gets barer, less grass as I run—I’m running. Barren earth scarcely covers the rocks, and the rocks themselves get bigger, flatter, redder. A rock formation stands to the right, clawing up at the sky, holding secrets and darkness and lives.

  The wind howls. I shut my eyes, and I see the stone inside the rock formation—it’s just suddenly there, in my head. I jolt, a pulling sensation inside me, and the Sarr lady whispers again that it’s okay. My fingertips buzz with energy as I stare at the rock formation.

  Time seems to stop.

  “Is that a cave?”

  Corin’s voice jolts me, and I turn, find him closer than expected. He’s not looking at me; his gaze hovers above my head. I don’t know why that annoys me, why I feel irritation at his lack of attention on me.

  “I think so,” Esther says, stopping, breathing hard. She leans forward ever so slightly, one hand under her pregnant stomach, the other one bracing her lower back as she pants.

  I try not to look at her, because she shouldn’t be that pregnant and it makes my own body feel too heavy, slimy, looking at her. I catch her gaze as she lifts her head. Her eyes are haunted.

  I look away, at the rocks—the cave.

  Go in there.

  The voice is a compulsion inside me. The voice is me now—me, long ago—hard and knowing. Safe and beautiful, holding onto the guiding memories.

  A safe place.

  “Sev, wait—I thought we were following the cliff-edge?” Corin’s voice hovers behind me, follows me.

  Were we? I can’t think. My head doesn’t feel right. Everything is slow and distant and numb, but everything happens too quickly.

  My feet move mechanically, my stained tennis shoes blurring. Jana’s saying something, but her words are bright colors in a fog that doesn’t make sense—yet hearing her makes me feel safer. Just being around her and Taras makes me calmer. I am finally safe with other Untamed Seers.

  The terrier’s shrill barks wrap inside the howling wind, urging on the coming storm.

  Energy pounds through me, and I can’t contain it. I sprint the final distance to the cave, a thrumming sensation inside me, around me, everywhere. And then I’m inside and—

  My breath catches in my throat as I see it. A giant rock face, marbled stone, with drawings on. Memories etched into permanence.

  The Living Rock, the power inside me says.

  I step closer and my fingers dance over its rough face, and I feel the life within each etching, the pathways, the futures people had, long ago. The people who lived here made these designs. But infusing my life through touch makes them my pathways snaking across the fabric of time in circles that should not exist. A network of possible futures, interconnected, a journey transferred to a new line, a new place, by a simple decision.

  If I drag my hand across the rock, it’ll ripple more. New possibilities. Always new directions, new lives.

  I don’t drag my hand across it. Some things are not supposed to be disturbed.

  The wall holds more images than just the lives, and I step to my left, focus on a new image. It’s only a few darkened lines on the rock, but they come alive in my mind, growing and growing, flashing: an army of spirits, of Lost Souls.

  Below them, Untamed call, lifting their arms. The spirits drop, and high-pitched whistling fills the air. There is a badness settling in, but the spirits and Untamed work together, and new, wonderful lives emerge, protected, safe.

  The message is clear. It’s what we’ve got to do. Work with the Lost Souls. A way to get our numbers up, battle the Enhanced. That’s why the Sarr lady led me here—so we could know.

  “Cave art,” Corin says.

  “Like the Zharat’s.”

  I turn on Esther, heat filling my blood. “No. It’s nothing like the Zharat’s drawings.”

  And it isn’t, not in the slightest. Theirs was about power and the Gods, sacred places, keeping women in their place. This art isn’t. This is pure and forgotten, life embedded inside it.

  Corin frowns. The light somehow accentuates the faint scars on the left side of his face, the ones he got from a wildcat attack when he was younger. “Sev, are you okay? You’re acting a little…strange.”

  I ignore him, don’t know how to answer that question. What does he expect? My mother just died, the Dream Land was destroyed, fire has overtaken much of this world, and I’m being guided forward by power—by my ancestors—inside me.

  All the loss, the death, the destruction is my fault, and it’s changing me. I can feel it. Or maybe it’s the power in me, all the Sarrs. Change is inevitable.

  “The Living Rock.”

  Taras’s voice makes me jump. He’s in here too. Jana and the dog are the only ones still outside.

  “Empyrean twins. Look.” Taras steps closer, points at one of the other drawings: two babies, deftly drawn with minimal lines, lives interconnected, dependent. “They are rare births—dangerous—but their births are fixed at certain points in time. They cannot be changed or avoided. But the twins themselves: two lives that cannot be unconnected. One of fire, one of ash.” He looks at me. “Do you feel it?”

  “Feel what?”

  “The danger.”<
br />
  Corin looks at Taras, then me. “It’s not safe here?”

  “This is an Origin Cave, a birthplace of a Divine One. Each Origin Cave holds a Living Rock that embodies the lives and journeys of previous Untamed. The power in here means it is now one of the only safe places,” Taras says. He rubs at the skin around his mouth. It looks sore, raw. “I have only been to one before, and I recognize the energies. The danger is outside. The danger is the world, unsettled.”

  Unsettled, yes. That’s the word. I taste it, feel it bloom on my tongue. That’s what everything is. That’s why everything feels strange, unreal.