“All right,” I whisper. “I’ll help you.”
Flynn beckons me closer and we kneel together on the blinding white floor. He shows me the nearly invisible seam in the floor and the faint outline of a human hand—a scanner, meant to unlock the control panel beneath.
“It merely requires a hand,” he tells me. “Anyone’s hand; a deft way of keeping us, we who cannot touch anything. We’ve tried to lead others here before, but our keeper seems to take pleasure in our failures.”
“Lead others…” But before I can ask, realization courses through me. “The will-o’-the-wisps.” The locals were right. The wisps were leading them somewhere.
“The others tried for years,” the whisper continues. “But when I realized that what I wanted was different, I—I was afraid.”
I search the lax features for some sign of that fear and find none, from this creature with no way to express itself. “Afraid of what?”
“Of dying alone.” The whisper, behind Flynn’s face, meets my eyes. “Of dying without meeting you.”
I gaze back, my heart thumping with grief—for me, for Flynn, for this lost creature huddled inside him. Before I can speak, a ripple runs through Flynn’s features, making me jump.
“You must hurry,” the whisper gasps. “The others will not stay quiet for long; I cannot hold them.”
I gulp back a sob and fit my hand to the indentation, trying not to flinch at the tingle of current that courses through me in response. The scanner beeps and flashes green, causing a section of the floor to rise upward, up and up, until there’s an eight-foot column of circuitry and wires towering over me. Destroy this and the whispers die.
I can feel the whole thing humming with power, so strong it sets my teeth on edge, makes my hair lift as though a lightning bolt were about to strike. It won’t be hard to overload it all, with that much power coursing through it.
Flynn staggers, but catches himself before he can fall. His voice is a rasp, but for now, he has control. “When it is done, you must go and stop what is happening outside.”
“Outside?”
“Your people, his people; this prison has become a battlefield.”
The bottom falls out of my stomach. We knew the Fianna were close behind us when we found the facility, but the military must have been tracking us too. Two armies, converging; there’ll be a battle raging above, fueled by deaths that mean nothing, no chance of realizing they should all be on the same side against a sadistic madman worlds away. It’ll be a bloodbath.
This creature, who claims it cannot understand death—its compassion has robbed me of breath. With that realization comes another, and I swallow hard. “It was you,” I whisper. “You took me over the night of the massacre, not the others. You brought me there to the caves.”
“This vessel—this person—his pain is yours; you share it the way my kind shares everything. You would grieve for those deaths as he would. But I brought you there too late to stop it.”
I was there to save them. Even through its anger and its pain, this creature whose kindred sent my friends mad one by one had tried to save Flynn grief.
The whisper waits patiently until I look back up, then speaks. “I have answered your questions. Will you grant me something in return?”
“What is it?” My voice cracks.
“May I…touch you?”
I blink, eyes snapping up to meet his. “Uh—excuse me?”
“We cannot experience physical sensation in our world, and in this universe we have been always alone.” Flynn’s face looks so young.
I swallow. “Okay. Okay, sure.”
Flynn’s hand slides forward, reaching for mine. I let him take it, his fingertips grazing my skin as he turns my hand over. His knuckle brushes across my palm—his eyes are fixed on our hands, wonder transforming his features.
“In our world,” he whispers, “we are always together, completely, utterly. We are all a part of each other.” He exhales slowly, his breath puffing warm and gentle across our hands. “But it means we never know how precious it is to be able to do this, to be apart and then come together.” He weaves his fingers through mine.
I half expected his hand to be clammy, or to tingle to the touch. But his skin is warm, and familiar, and our fingers interlock as though our hands were designed to do it.
A droplet splashes onto the back of my hand, and my gaze snaps up. Flynn’s eyes are wet, and as I watch, another tear slips free and tracks halfway down his cheek before dropping away. “Thank you,” he whispers. “Jubilee Chase, I wish—”
His voice cuts out abruptly as his fingers tighten convulsively around mine. His eyes snap back up. This time I can see the panic there, an almost-human desperation reaching out through those blank, black eyes.
I cannot hold off the others forever.
“Wait!” I cry, my heart pounding with sudden fear. “Just—just hold on. Please, there has to be a way to…”
To save you.
There’s only a flicker of grief—of true despair—on his features before blankness sweeps across them. The change in Flynn, inhabited by my November ghost, had been so gradual that I almost hadn’t noticed how unlike the other whispers he was. But this coldness, this blankness—it calls up an answering chill from the pit of my stomach. My November ghost is gone.
It takes the Flynn-thing only seconds to focus on my face, a jolt running through me. I left the gun on the floor; it rests between us, and he sees it too. The instant I move, he will too—I’ll only have one shot.