Toxic Heart by Theo Lawrence Read Free Book Online Page B

a …
    Helmet.
    “Safety first, dude,” he says, tossing me the helmet. I put it on and climb onto the bike in front of him, adjusting my barely-there dress so that I’m as covered up as possible and digging my sparkling sandals into the sides of the motorcycle. There’s only one seat, so I’m pretty much in his lap. I think back to the first time I met him, when he gave me a lift from Java River after Hunter saved my life. How scared I was of him, of mystics in general. How little I knew about my history with Hunter, thanks to my stolen memories.
    So much has changed.
    And yet Turk hasn’t. I remember that night at Java River, when Hunter told me I should stay in the Aeries where I belong. He was only trying to protect me—I know that now—but Turk was kind to me from the start.
    Unlike the other men in my life, Turk doesn’t want to use me. He only wants to help. And at the moment, that’s pretty damn comforting.
    “Time for us to go,” Turk says, reaching around me to grab the handlebars. He guns the engine, and we leap back into the painting.

The first thing I notice is the stench.
    We’re going so fast I have to close my eyes so I won’t scream. It’s like I’m being sucked through a vacuum; there’s pressure on either side of me, then an audible
pop!
    Suddenly, the pressure is gone. “You can open your eyes now,” Turk says. I feel us slowing down to a more normal speed.
    I follow his instructions. The motorcycle descends and lands easily on one of the streets of the Depths. Any lethargy from the injections is gone. I’m completely, incredibly awake.
    In some ways the Depths are exactly as I remember them: dark, hot, dirty. Manhattan’s streets are flooded by soupy brown water, which broke up the island’s foundation and formed canals between the century-old buildings. It’s been this way since before I was born. The air is heavy and smells sour, musty, like the back of an old closet.
    The sun is up now. Gondoliers idle in clusters by the waterways, waiting in their small, agile boats for passengers, while people hurry over the canals on the raised walkways, moving from building to decrepit building.
    This part of Manhattan is bleaker now than when it was when I first saw it, just a few weeks ago. It was never nice—with its broken shop windows, façades covered with swirls of graffiti—but it was never this devastated. Gone are the brightly colored shirts that used to hang on clotheslines outside the apartment buildings to dry in the hot, salty air. There are no children running alongside the canals, teetering dangerously on the edges as they peel oranges and stuff bits of bread into their mouths, yelling
Wait up!
to their friends.
    As we travel through the bottom reaches of Manhattan, toward I-don’t-know-where, I realize exactly how much has changed. The buildings here were always grimy, the cobblestones were always broken beyond repair, but there was still an overwhelming sense of
life
.
    Now all I see is death.
    Tiny shops have been decimated, pillars of rubble and rock left in their place. Entire buildings have crumbled and fallen into the canals, and certain streets are blocked off by piles of debris.
    A few girls whiz past us on rusty-looking bicycles—the only real form of transportation that can squeeze through the narrow alleyways of the Depths.
    Except, of course, for a souped-up mystic motorcycle.
    “Miss it?” Turk asks as he maneuvers over the narrow stone bridges and along twisting streets. I glance over my shoulder: tiny green flames of mystic energy buzz out from the chrome exhaust pipes behind us.
    “Yes,” I say, and I mean it. The Depths are where I met Hunter. I feel more at home here than I would back in the Aeries with my parents. “Where are we going?”
    “Even though we use paintings as loopholes,” Turk explains, referring to the indirect route we’re taking, “there aren’t any direct connections to rebel hideouts from the Aeries.”
    A mystic