Oh, hell, Sofia. This is bad.
And it is. The possessed are everywhere. We scale the ruins of buildings, we climb through the rubble and run across the dangerous, open spaces of the streets. Our hands bleed from grabbing at broken edges, our eyes sting from the dust, and our throats burn from the smoke we can’t help but inhale as we work. The sounds the city makes as the ruins settle help to mask the sound of Lilac’s black-eyed, loose-limbed army. There are thousands of them now, and every route we try is blocked.
Tarver is single-minded and unflinching. As dusk begins to fall, I’m afraid of what he might do if we can’t find a way through soon. Eventually, when we stumble across a burst water pipe, I convince him to halt for a few minutes, and we crouch by it in the shadows, drinking from our cupped hands.
He’s the one to break our silence, gazing out at the ruins beyond our temporary shelter. “The whispers saved her, on Elysium. They did it willingly, gave her the last of their energy. Enough to make her real, permanent.”
“That’s an incredible gift.” I don’t know what else to say.
“The ultimate gift,” he agrees, gazing down at his cupped hands, letting the water trickle slowly through his fingers. “In the instant it happened, Lilac said that she was a part of them, for the briefest moment. That they could see her, all of her…all the good, all the bad, and that they felt she was worth saving. This creature is the same species. How could it do such a thing? How could it harbor such hate?”
“Humans are all one species,” I reply. “But we’re all different. Perhaps, under harsh enough circumstances, any of us might be driven to do the unimaginable.”
And there she is—Sofia—appearing in my mind’s eye right on cue, that plas-pistol in her hand. Under the right circumstances, any of us might be driven.…I’m beginning to understand, Dimples. Pity I’m probably not going to live to tell you so.
Tarver pushes to his feet. “We should get moving.”
I rise beside him, my knees and back screaming in protest. “This isn’t working. They’re multiplying by the hour—they’re going to spot us again, and we won’t make it out if they chase us.”
Tarver’s face is grim. “Then we fight.”
I can’t help it—I stare at him, trying to tell if he’s making some wildly inappropriate joke. “There are thousands of them. The best fighter in the world wouldn’t last five minutes, and we don’t even have real weapons. We need another way through.”
“You have an idea?” His voice is rough, his face filthy, but his eyes are burning when he looks across at me.
“We have to go down. Use one of these fissures, one of the old elevator shafts maybe. Get into the undercity, use the cover of the slums and hide in plain sight among the people there. Down there, I can get my hands on more equipment. There’s only so much I can do in my head, and I have to have the calculations finished for this program before we get there.”
“We’ll waste time,” he snaps, and I can see it in every line of his body—he wants to walk straight through the silent armies between us and Lilac, his desperation to get to her driving everything else from his mind.
“You want to get there, or die trying?” I snap my reply, and that gets his attention. “Because if we stay up here, that’s what’s going to happen. We have to go down. We can get close, that way, and hole up until she’s not expecting us anymore. We’ll be ready to climb up into the middle of LaRoux Headquarters by first light. This is what helps Lilac—this is what gives us a chance to reach her. Fighting our way through is impossible. It can’t be done.”
He’s strung taut, hands laced together behind his head as he gazes out over the ruins, knuckles white with the force of his grip. Then he curses, dropping abruptly into a crouch, arms curling around his head. As though he’s trying to physically hold himself together for her.
I dig deep, make my voice hard. “Time’s wasting. Let’s go.”
The others are so focused on the tasks our keeper sets us that they do not sense the rage building on its own, deep in the swamps. They are so focused on the place filled with soldiers that they do not see the madness simmering underneath the shield of rock and mud that conceals the green-eyed boy’s home.
I can see what this madman will do, and it will shatter the green-eyed boy’s heart. I have so little strength that I cannot stop the madman or touch anyone near him. My only hope is to reach out to the girl whose dreams I have shared, whose mind is as familiar to me as anything in this world. She will stop this horror—she must.
It is not until I am watching through her eyes as she stumbles upon the bloody massacre that I understand I am too late. It is her own horror that drives me from her mind once more—the last thing I see through her eyes is the face of the green-eyed boy, full of shock and betrayal and a grief so deep that the pain in the girl’s heart is a torture more painful than any our keeper could have inflicted upon me.
Forgive me.
THE UNDERCITY IS IN CHAOS. Without electricity everything is in shadow, a false midnight blanketing the slums. There are no smells from street food vendors, no music from performers in the distance. The lanterns are dark, strings of them fallen into the streets and crushed underfoot.
But here, the horror of what’s happened to Corinth is all too real.
Everything is coated in a fine layer of debris the size of sand grains, a mix of ash and fragments of cement that crunches underfoot. People have armed themselves against looters with whatever they can find—we pass a young woman gripping a chunk of cement in her hands who watches us with frightened eyes until we turn the corner.
I try to imagine myself as she sees me—a threat, capable of robbing her of her home, or her life.
You’re leading others to Lilac, knowing they’re going to kill her. Doesn’t that make you exactly what she sees?
I shove that voice away, telling myself that it’s because some other idea will come to us, some way around what’s looming ahead, some alternative. Sanjana’s final warning was crystal clear.
We have one shot to stop this.
I’m still shaking from the climb down, bile and adrenaline bitter in my mouth. The elevators to the undercity don’t work without electricity, forcing us to descend via a ladder in the elevator’s maintenance shaft. Many, many times higher than the elevator shaft I climbed with Gideon—and without him next to me, without his harness supporting me. And then I was climbing up, out of danger.
He was right to say that climbing down is much, much worse.
I clear my throat, trying to banish my fears. It ought to be ridiculous that climbing down a ladder still frightened me when only a few kilometers away, an interdimensional being is slowly and methodically destroying the world—but reason plays no part in fear. Maybe it’s just that this is a fear I recognize, a fear I can digest. The other thing—I can’t wrap my mind around it.
It takes hours to cover ground that would take no time at all in the clearer streets above—or would have, before the crash. Jubilee finds a working radio after spotting someone in military gear—turns out he’s not a soldier, but once Jubilee makes it clear she’s not going to arrest him for theft of government property, he lets her send a distress call to Mori to come pick up Sanjana. Mori’s voice crackles and surges, her worry audible, but she promises to find the scientist. It’s clear, even through the distortion, that she’d rather be with us, heading into danger.