‹ Prequel: Chasing Imagination
Sequel: Martyr's Run

Hurricane Heart

Not the End

Hurricane

‘Arjan!’ I wanted to run to him, but something, most likely Scarrus lying on his front and yelling out in pain in between us, stopped me.

Arjan took several steps forward so that he was fully out of the heavy shadows and within speaking range. Before we did anything, however, I strode forward purposefully. Scarrus was getting over the worst of the shock—the aim had not been Arjan’s best, but good enough to make contact. Already, though, the Soulless was scrabbling around, fingernails scraping at the concrete, reaching for his gun.

I kicked it away; swinging my leg so that the gun clattered in my direction and behind me. Then I stepped back, allowing Scarrus to stand again, though this time unarmed and powerless. He turned, looking first at me and my gun, then at Arjan, then back to me. He knew that things weren’t looking too good for him.

‘Now, Scarrus,’ I said purposefully, stepping just a little closer, ‘this is when you tell me everything.’

Somewhere close by, a gun went off, the loudest I’d heard since being this side of the bridge. It was followed by multiple others, slicing through the night.

I had to bury any fear I felt; do what I was so notoriously good at and get rid of all emotion until I wanted it back again.

So why was it suddenly so hard to do that?

‘What do you want me to tell you?’ Scarrus persisted. ‘I assumed you’d know by now.’

‘I do,’ I replied, and it was no lie. ‘At least, I think I do. But what I really want to know is: are dreams really the only reason you want Arjan? Because everything else; all those dreams about how to have a revolution that he was having only came after I saved him and took him away.’ It was dangerous letting on about all of this, but maybe that was the key. Once the Soulless knew that I knew what they knew about Arjan, they also knew that I had the power to tell everyone else; that I might have already done so.

Fear was going to save Arjan.

Fear would get us out of here alive.

‘To begin with, it was,’ Scarrus said, and once again I was genuinely surprised at how open he was being. ‘We wanted to target the people we believed were most susceptible to the power of the Dreamers, and Arjan seemed to be the trophy prize. But like you said, since he’s been with you, he’s become even more powerful. He’s proven that revolution for the Dreamers is possible. So what can we do now but try and stop you?’

It had already dawned on me earlier tonight that if what I suspected was true, I was in as much danger as Arjan. If I knew the secret, every Soulless in the world would have a bullet with my name on it.

But maybe I didn’t care about that.

‘So what are you going to do about it?’ I challenged.

‘We’re going to hunt you down,’ Scarrus said, his tone threatening. But already I could feel the fire burning inside me. Heat warmed my soul, and flames licked at my mind. We were going to stop this. It was going to end tonight.

‘We won’t stop,’ he said, ‘how hard can it be to shoot two people? After all, the Dreamers know that Arjan has to die. You know that Arjan has to die. It’s the only way to stop this; the only way for us to confirm that the secret won’t be spread.’

Crap. So that was another thing that Arjan was going to find out about himself from someone other than me.

‘Die?’ Arjan repeated from behind Scarrus, who turned to face him. Our eyes met across the distance.

I shook my head.

‘You’re going to kill me?’ His question was not directed at Scarrus, but at me, and he sounded accusing.

‘No.’ My tone was definite. It was strong. It was powerful. It was that of a Hurricane. ‘No Arjan.’

‘You know it’s the only way for this to end,’ Scarrus jeered, turning back to me. His eyes were alight. Within mine was both fire and bloodlust.

‘No, Scarrus,’ I said, and I could feel the power growing. I wouldn’t let Arjan die. I wouldn’t let myself die. What else happened, I was uncertain about, but if we survived, we could change the world.

‘No,’ I repeated. ‘Because there’s something else that, close-minded as you Soulless are, you overlooked. Before I knew what the secret was, I assumed it would be an asset to the Soulless; something Arjan had that you could utilise. Only now do I realise that what Arjan has is, in fact, an asset to the Dreamers, and a hindrance to all of you. You don’t want to use him to fight a war; you want to destroy him before we can use him. And now that that’s changed, everything changes.’

‘No,’ Scarrus said, but it was a defeated sort of ‘no.’ It was desperate. He was losing hope. ‘What use is he to you anyway? You know full well that you can start a revolution if that’s what you want. You don’t need some boy’s dreams to tell you that.’

‘Maybe,’ I mused, ‘so why did you want him? I’ll tell you why: you wanted the ones whom you feared becoming Dreamers. And there must be a reason that you feared them becoming Dreamers; a reason such as Arjan’s big ideas, completely subconscious, and so bloody brilliant. And maybe you wanted to use him to get close to us; get information about us whilst you were working on destroying his dreams. Clever, I admit: killing two birds with one stone. But it’s too late. He’s ours now. And the secret is out. Arjan dreams. He dreams of revolution and freedom and war.’

‘If we were to take him now, he would be able to tell us a hell of a lot about you,’ Scarrus challenged desperately.

‘Oh really?’ I retorted. ‘Well, I tell you something now: he knows even less about me than you do.’ I looked over his shoulder towards Arjan, who met my gaze. ‘That’s why I couldn’t tell you anything, Arjan,’ I said, and I was suddenly apologising for everything I had done to him all in one go. This was it. This was the moment of reckoning. ‘I gave you no explanations, I told you no codes to our bases, I didn’t let you hold a proper gun.’ Now I looked back to Scarrus. There was fear on his face. ‘I didn’t even tell him my name.’

Suddenly, it was all falling into place. Scarrus wanted Arjan, but now it was too late. Arjan had told me his secret, though he did not know that was what it was at the time. And now the Soulless wanted me.

Because Arjan telling me his dreams had unlocked an invisible and unwritten destiny.

I was going to lead the revolution.

Until we won this entire war, I was going to be hunted. But right now, that didn’t seem to matter so much. After all, there was no change there. The Soulless had always enjoyed hunting Hurricane.

‘You see, there’s one other thing that you didn’t count on, Scarrus,’ I continued. The fire was in full flow. I was enjoying this way too much. ‘What you wanted from Arjan was an idea: the most powerful force known to the human mind. But Arjan passed on that idea to me. And now you have no clue just how many people I have passed on the idea to. You can’t stop it now, Scarrus; none of you can. An idea is a silent, invisible force. It is not an object that can be stolen or a fire that can be put out. Once it has been given to a person, it is with them forever more, and nothing can take it from them, but they can in turn give it to as many people as they wish, spreading it right across the world. Of course, your pathetic little Soulless minds never counted on that, now, did they?’

Scarrus had been rendered silent momentarily.

That was as good as a win.

‘But how many have you told?’ he asked.

Of course, I hadn’t told anyone. In fact, I had adamantly refused to, and now I realised that that was potentially a very stupid mistake, but it didn’t matter, because Scarrus didn’t know that, and until he did, we had time.

‘Many,’ I said vaguely, ‘and I can tell so many more. Every Berlin Dreamer can know. And it doesn’t have to stop there. Every Dreamer in Europe—every Dreamer in the world can find out. There’s no end to the power of an idea, Scarrus.’

I just had to hope that my passion overrode any anxiety I felt at lying to him.

Scarrus’s eyes widened. His hair was whipped about and his hands trembled, staring at me, gazing with eyes so full of the power of infinite possibilities of imagination that he was so unused to. He was ready to explode.

My voice lowered to a whisper.

‘And that’s why, just tonight, I’m not going to kill you,’ I finished, lowering my gun. This time, I did not shout, but my tone was so threatening and murderous that he shuddered, fear rippling up his skin, eyes widening. ‘But I want you to run, Scarrus. I want you to run scared. I want you to run and tell every one of your people the truth—that the Dreamers know, and that even more of them will know soon enough.’ I took a step closer. ‘I want you to tell them that you have lost.’

I had won; for now at least. Imagination and emotion—both of them entwined—the two things that turned a human being into a real person—worked together in an infinitely powerful storm; a hurricane whirling through my mind.

‘This isn’t the end, Hurricane,’ Scarrus said, his eyes bitter, his tone resentful. ‘No way is this the end.’

‘I know that,’ I said, my voice almost casual. ‘I never expected anything else. But for now; for tonight, we have won. You don’t need Arjan anymore. You don’t even need me. You wanted to stop him from passing on his idea to us, but you failed. The only way for you to succeed now is for you to capture every Dreamer in Berlin, and by the time you’ve done that, the idea will have long since spread far, far beyond Germany’s borders. The power of imagination is so much more than you can comprehend.’

Scarrus’s eyes met mine one final time.

‘This isn’t over.’

And then, just like that, he practically evanesced away into the darkness, melting into the night, becoming one with the heavy shadows underneath the bridge and beyond, where he so perfectly belonged.

He was gone.

The sound of guns paused; whether permanently or temporarily, I didn’t know or care. Scarrus would find them. I knew, for sure, that this time he was well and truly scared.

So there was nothing for it.

I ran to Arjan.

He ran towards me.

He threw his arms around me, and I threw mine, a little more cautiously, around him. He leant down, and our lips touched, so tentative, then opening a little, and then the passion raged.

We broke apart.

‘Sonja,’ I said. ‘My name’s Sonja.’ My heart lurched and my throat tightened with emotion, but it felt as if a great weight had been lifted from my heavily burdened heart.

‘Sonja,’ he repeated, eyes alive with shock, but also happiness. He was so happy; so overjoyed; not just because of the simple fact that we had won, but that we were here, intertwined within each other, and that I had told him this secret of all secrets. My name was truly the single word that I could have said to make him trust me eternally. We both knew the endless number of doors that this opened.

Our lips touched again.

Over the bridge, in the spaces between the tall, black tower blocks, the streetlights dancing iridescently off of their highly polished surfaces, the inky black sky was turning to a deep, sapphire blue. The most distant horizon was alight with a sliver of gold that danced in the shadows, turning them inside out, a negative twilight, rushing away the darkness and bringing on the day: a new dawn, a new beginning for us all.

‘He’ll be back, won’t he?’ Arjan confirmed sceptically as the two of us finally broke apart.

‘Of course,’ I agreed. ‘He’s Scarrus. He’s the Soulless. And it won’t be easy. In fact, it’s gonna get a hell of a lot harder.’

‘But this time, I can work with you, right Hurricane...Sonja?’ he said. ‘Hurricane Sonja; that sounds...powerful.’

‘It does,’ I agreed, laughing a musical, bell-like sound that rung through the night. ‘But you’ve got to admit; we didn’t do too badly. Six hours ago, I knew almost beyond doubt that the only way out for you was death. Now, it’s very much life. Life always prevails; life will save the Dreamers.’

‘So what do we do now?' he asked. 'Are we going back to the base?’

I shook my head. ‘Not yet. The Master’s gonna kill me if I go back now! I think we should give him a chance to cool off. But we can start work straight away. There’s no hanging around in war.’

‘War’ was the best word that I had used to describe our situation all night. We were at war now; well and truly. There had been too many signs and not enough taking notice of them. But that would all change now. Things were changing both within the Dreamers and within my own heart. And we were going to embrace them all and act upon them to greet this oncoming darkness with open arms, and create the best war that the world had ever seen.
♠ ♠ ♠
'Running away from the night
Running away from the night
Running away from the light
Run away to save your life.'

- Hurricane, 30 Seconds to Mars


Ohmygod ohmygod it's finished! This is a really freaky feeling for me!

Book Three will be posted tomorrow. Or maybe the day after. And I really hope that this ending kind of lived up to expectations, and that book three will be as good as Hurricane Heart. Although, HH will always be my favourite. Arjan and Hurricane will be back soon, but not for a while yet. And Amy and Casper will be back soon-ish too. But I won't give any more clues than that.

And thank you so much for reading this. Seriously. I've received some amazing comments on this story, and it's made it so much more worthwhile.