He’s got a weapon aimed at me; he must have had it hidden underneath the console. I should have been watching, I should have tied him up. I should have had Flynn…I choke, unable to focus on the man’s gun. All I can see is Flynn, half-curled against the console, trying to fight the whispers.
“Fine!” I snap at Carmody, lifting my hands. “Arrest me, shoot me, I don’t care. Just let me help him—” I take a step toward Flynn, but Carmody thumbs the switch on the side of the gun. Its whine as it charges rings in my ears, and I stop again.
“You can’t help him,” replies Carmody, sparing only a glance for Flynn before pinning his gaze back on me. “He’s already gone.”
I open my mouth, trying to find words to deny what he’s said. But before I can, Flynn’s moving. He’s quick, so quick my eyes can barely follow him. He slips behind Carmody, grabbing his arm and jerking it up. The gun fires; not a Gleidel, this one leaves a smoking hole in the ceiling and sends plastene shards raining down onto the floor. Before I can take a step to help him, Flynn’s other hand wraps around the back of Carmody’s neck and slams his head down into the console with a sickening crack. He doesn’t pause, but slams the researcher down again, and again, and again, until blood coats the controls and I cry out, still rooted to the spot.
Flynn, only his profile visible to me, releases the dead man and lets the body slump to the floor.
It’s all happened in the space of a few heartbeats, so quickly I haven’t drawn breath. Spots swimming in front of my eyes, I gasp for air. “F-Flynn?”
It takes an eternity for him to turn around, in which I imagine him a thousand times with his usual smile, his cocky air, the depth of his green eyes. He’ll be standing there as though nothing has changed; he’ll tell me he learned self-defense from me; he’ll turn around and look at me and he’ll be whole.
But instead he stands a few feet away, his face empty, the green eyes seared into my memory gone. In their place is nothing more than black glass, reflecting my own face back at me.
“No,” he says in a calm, collected voice. There are flecks of Carmody’s blood on his neck and chin. “Not anymore.”
I stand there, unable to move, unable to breathe as he stoops, collecting the gun from Carmody’s lax hand. He inspects it, not bothering to keep an eye on me. When he looks up, there’s nothing in his face but blank serenity.
“It was supposed to be me,” I whisper.
“We need you,” says the thing in Flynn’s mind. “We feel you are the better choice.”
My legs tremble—with anger, with fear, with exhaustion—and I reach out for the wall for support. “What does LaRoux want with me?”
The Flynn-thing regards me flatly. “You are speaking of the one who binds us?” His head tilts slowly to one side, in a mockery of thoughtful interest, until it stops at an odd, unnatural angle. “We are not acting under his orders anymore.”
My throat tangles with a brief, insane flicker of hope at those words—but then my heart plummets as the barrel of the gun swings over to point at me.
“We are not acting under anyone’s orders anymore. We have seen what humanity is: beyond salvage.” There’s no violence, no hatred in his voice; the calm there is more terrifying than if he came at me screaming and spewing threats. He gestures with the gun toward the door, nudging Carmody’s body aside with one foot to clear his path. “And you will be the one to set us free.”
My hand closes on empty space as it reaches automatically for the gun that isn’t there anymore. I take a step back toward the door, not taking my eyes off of Flynn. Off of what used to be Flynn.
Don’t think, don’t crumble. Just keep moving.
“You don’t understand,” I say as his eyes follow me. “We want to stop LaRoux too. We’re not like him.”
“You are all like him.”
I grasp for the handle behind me, but don’t turn it yet. The creature keeps his distance, too smart to come close enough for me to think about wresting the gun from him. Flynn, I could probably disarm and disable. But after seeing what he did to Carmody…No human can move that fast.
“Lilac said you helped them,” I murmur, shooting a quick glance at the hallway through the window in the door. It’s empty, as it was before.
Flynn’s blank expression doesn’t shift. “We know this one you speak of. She was with us in the darkness for a time.”
With us? But I seize on that recognition, speaking quickly, trying to moderate my voice the way Flynn would. If only he were here, with his passion and his diplomacy; I’m only good for fighting. “Then you know her. You know she’s not like her father. Neither am I—neither is Flynn.” My voice chokes on his name.
“All patterns of data contain anomalies.” Flynn halts, though the gun doesn’t move. “Continue walking.”
I ignore his order. “Why lead us here?” I think of the light in the swamp, the green glow that looked so much like the November ghost in my dimmest memories. “Why not just force the scientists, force LaRoux, to let you go?”
“Our keeper never comes near enough for us to take him. These others, he has operated upon and made it difficult for us to inhabit their minds with any precision.” Flynn nudges Carmody’s body again, this time to roll him over onto his stomach. Beneath the mess of blood and hair, just below his ear, is a tiny scar, too straight and precise to have been from an accident.