by Meg Collett
My eyes fluttered closed. I groaned his name and ground deeper into his finger.
He paused, and I nearly cried. “What—”
“Have you been with anyone else, Sunny?”
My words froze. I was like this, and he was asking that? Did he expect a rational response? “Uh …” I fumbled, trying to think. “Oh! You mean that. This. Yes. I mean, yes. I have—been with someone.”
He growled and slipped another finger inside me. His mouth returned to my breast.
“I met him at med camp,” I choked out. “He was super nerdy, like, way nerdier than me. He had to take out his night guard. It was super awkward because we couldn’t figure out how to get—”
“Stop talking about him.”
“Oh. Right. My bad. I just get talking—”
Hatter cut me off with a kiss, his tongue forcing me to focus. He unbuttoned my jeans and hooked his finger around them and my panties, yanking them down with a grunt. I leaned up against him and wiggled out of my jeans, kicking them off my legs until they came free and flew off to the side.
“Do you think a guard will walk by?” I asked, speaking the words into his mouth.
“Stop thinking about other men.” He shoved down his pants and held himself at my entrance.
I met his eyes, and he watched me as he slid inside. I groaned slowly, matching his speed as he filled me. I stretched around him and everything was him and he held me against him as he moved and his mouth was on mine and he kept saying my name and everything was him and for the first time in weeks the only thing I wanted in the entire world was more of him and I had never seen things clearer and everything was him.
It was like our blood had mingled and our bodies had become one. My heart slowed. The circulation inched along. I swam through the sensation of him inside me, moving and moving. If only we could make a solvent that could slow the saliva’s reaction like this. I thought I could almost feel my blood moving through my veins as Hatter leaned down to kiss me, my name on his lips.
Circulation and blood and solvents and antidotes—there was something there. Something to see. I opened my eyes and stared up at Hatter, but I wasn’t seeing him. I could only see the blood.
“Holy cow!” I smacked my forehead against his in my excitement.
He froze. “Are you okay? Did I—”
“I know what to use in the antidote!”
T E N
Zero
The sea-glass boy had betrayed his friends.
He’d lasted a while, and at one point, I’d grown worried I might kill him before he relinquished. But in the end, he’d broken, as we all did. He told me about the girls and the university and what he knew of the experiments. One word he’d used countless times.
“Commander,” I asked, “what is a halfling?”
I trained my eyes on the crack in the floor in front of my boots. The deep brown stains coating the concrete had long since faded from the butchered carcasses that had hung from the metal hooks suspended above my head. They chimed as the Commander walked through them, his shoulders brushing against the rusted metal and sending them twinkling into their neighbors. The sound would have been nice if not for the smell.
“Why do you ask this?”
I laced my fingers behind my back and pretended someone was holding my hand—an old trick I’d learned when I was little. “The prisoner mentioned it. He said the painless one is a halfling.”
He’d also kept promising me a safe place, but I hadn’t listened. Certain words were dangerous words.
The Commander stopped in front of me. His breath misted the air in front of his mouth. “Will knowing one truth help you avenge a lifetime of lies?”
Yes. “No.”
“Will an answer help you draw your knife surer next time?”
“No.”
“When we left the white place behind, what did you ask me?”
I dug my nails into the palm of my other hand. “For you to help me.”
The Commander’s eyebrow arched, his expression cooling to match the temperature of the room. I knew what he was asking with that gesture, but he was remembering it wrong. I’d only asked for help—to help me escape—and he had. But he remembered more. I didn’t dare tell him he was wrong.
I told him what he wanted to hear. “To help me kill.”
He smiled. “Exactly. You did not ask me for information and answers. Even if I had these things, do you think they would matter?”
“Maybe they would help me find my switch.”
He took hold of a hook at his eye level, fingers gripping the pointed curl, and leaned into it. His muscles flexed against the stained, tattered shirt he wore—the camouflaged sort that many men with sharp salutes and empty eyes had worn in the white place. “Your switch?” he asked. I heard the danger in his voice. “The one you haven’t found in ten years? The one the scientists couldn’t guide you to every day on that cold table with the lights in your eyes and the sharp things in your head?”
I flinched. The shadows curled in the corner of the room stretched toward me, but the lights were too bright in here. “I’m sorry.”
He straightened off the hook and sent it clanging into the others. “No matter that.” He put his hand atop my shoulder and squeezed. “I have your next assignment.”
“Dean?”
“No.” I frowned, but he pretended not to notice. “We’re going to strike the others like him. The ones who stood back while children like you went to the white place.”
“But I was the only one.”
His thumb pressed into the hollow beneath my collarbone. “Are you sure about that?”
Was I? I thought so. But what if there were other white places? Or what if someone arrived after I’d escaped? Or even before. I shook my head. I could never be sure about anything from that time. Most of what I knew the Commander had told me. He’d been privy to the conversations with the people in the white place who wore white coats. They’d spoken openly around him, and the Commander had collected their words like jewels and tucked them away.
“If we take these people down, no more children will go to the white place. That’s what you want, right? You want to end the people who did this to you?”
“I don’t want anyone else to suffer.” It sounded like a clarification, but the Commander paid it no mind.
“Then we must stop the circle of people around Dean Bogrov. We take them down, and we cripple the beast. The disease has spread, Zero, and we must quarantine it. You see?”
I dipped my chin, and he turned away. My eyes darted to his shadow; it almost reached my feet. I could lean forward and almost—
“Zero?”
I jerked my face back to his. He was right in front of me again. How had he moved so fast? “Commander?”
“You’re worried about your switch?” he guessed.
The words were almost kind, his eyes less empty. He’d been the least empty of everyone in the white place. I had to remember that. Even after the hours I’d spent in his cell, the prisoner’s eyes had never turned empty. In fact, I’d never seen someone so full as they spoke dangerous words of safety. Even as he faded, he’d watched me so intently …
“It would be so much easier with a switch.”
“You came out of the trance the last time, didn’t you?”
The shadows, I’d learned a long time ago, could curl around my brain too. They could hold certain parts in a darkness so deep I couldn’t see or feel anything. But the last time, a sharp pain on the side of my head had dislodged the hold, and I’d seen. I’d felt everything.
“Killing should never be easy, Zero. That’s what the white place wanted. They wanted you to be an unfeeling killer. But the fear switch is more than just a mind trick, isn’t it?” I nodded. “It’s here.” He placed a hand over my heart, and pieces of his black hair fell over his face, covering his eyes. “It’s not your mind that makes you a better killer, but your heart. And you have a killer’s heart, right, Zero?”
“Right.
”
Only I heard the waver in the word, because he smiled. He tapped a hook and sent off another wave of jingling. “Then it’s time to kill.”
As if I knew any other sort of time.
“It’s time, Zero. Go to your dark place …”
E L E V E N
Ollie
The ward was a ghost town. The exhausted nurse haunting it gave me a distracted nod as she pushed through the main room’s swinging door and disappeared. The door slapped back and forth, the sound echoing through the hall.
The light was on in Dean’s room. A good sign. He and I needed to chat.
I opened the door without knocking and strode inside, but I drew up quick. Mr. Abbot was bent over Dean’s bed, whispering fiercely and gesturing wildly. Dean’s face was pale with fear. They both froze when I entered.
Mr. Abbot glared at me. “Haven’t you ever heard of knocking?”
I crossed my arms over my chest, letting my look linger on him until he straightened away from Dean and retreated a couple steps into the corner. The bastard.
“What’s happening?” I asked Dean.
“School business,” Mr. Abbot snapped. “Nothing that concerns you.”
I blinked at Dean and waited. Something was wrong. Bad wrong. I saw it in the squinted strain of his eyes, the deep furrows of his brow, and the tight press of his lips as if he might puke his guts out at any second.
“An attack,” he said, wheezing around the words. Beside him, Mr. Abbot huffed angrily. “On an Original family. They’re dead.”
I dropped my arms. “Who?”
Not Sunny’s family. Please, not that.
“The Bautistas.”
I didn’t recognize the name, but it wasn’t Sunny’s family. I breathed a sigh of relief. “Aswangs?”
“No.” Dean swallowed. His bandaged throat made his head look too large and his mustache preposterous, especially given his sallow skin. “Something else. They weren’t fed on.”
“How then?”
“Their throats were slit.” And then I saw something I’d never seen before: Dean teared up. “Even the children.”
“Zero,” I said. My heart sank. It was silly, given the guards she’d killed when she attacked Dean, but I’d hoped it would end there. Part of me still wanted to save her, but the kids changed things.
“She’s coming after the school,” Mr. Abbot barked. “First Dean, who is the last of his Original family. Now another Original family. It must be stopped at once.”
“Really?” I raised my eyebrows at him. “It should be stopped? How about calling her what she is? A young girl this asshat turned into a monster. No wonder she wants to kill everybody associated with the school. Who could blame her?”
Mr. Abbot scoffed. “This is why you shouldn’t be told these things!” He spun toward Dean and stabbed his finger in my direction. “She is a student! A terrible one at that. She should not be involved in school business.” He lowered his voice. I rolled my eyes. “You don’t know what the families are saying. They agree with me.”
Dean turned his head away from the zealous professor. Mr. Abbot was from the old-school group of people involved in the school Luke’s father had led before he died in the attack. If Dean hadn’t been such a disgusting, waste-of-good-air human being, I would have felt bad for the pressure being put on him, especially after nearly getting his throat slit.
That would put a damper on anyone.
Facing the facts, I recognized that we needed each other. If I’d straight-up taken control of the school, everyone would have left, including the guards. I believed most of the hunters would have stayed with me, but there wouldn’t have been a school left. The families would have revolted. I needed him to play president.
With a sigh, I stepped forward to save him.
Mr. Abbot saw me coming. His eyes widened at the silver knuckles I’d pulled from my leather jacket pocket. At the hiss of the blade, he scampered into the corner, his hands pressed against the concrete walls and his legs spread wide. His nose twitched, and his eyes darted to the door behind me. I kept my steps slow, my thigh-high suede boots clicking over the ground. I stopped in front of him. A prayer separated our bodies. I raised the knuckles’ blade and tapped it ever so slightly against his hideous sports jacket with leather elbow patches. What a douche.
He flinched with every tap. I cocked my head at him. “You see that?” Tap. Flinch. “That right there?” Tap. Flinch. “That fear in your eyes?” I clucked my tongue at him. “The sweat on your upper lip. Gross, by the way. The pounding of your heart and the tremble in your knees. You’re terrified of me. You look at me and you see a killer—a hunter unlike any who’s ever come through this school. Am I right?” When he didn’t answer, I added, “This is where you agree with me.”
I added a touch more pressure to the blade. He yelped.
“Yes! Yes!” he sputtered.
“Ollie,” Dean said from the bed. “Take it easy on him.”
I smiled at Mr. Abbot. “A good hunter is feared by the enemy, but a great hunter terrifies everyone. That’s why I’m involved. That’s why he tells me these things. And that’s why he does what I tell him to. Because without me, you would all be fucked.”
I stepped back, and Mr. Abbot’s shoulders shuddered with relief. He swiped at his sweaty upper lip as he glared at me. “You’re insane.”
“No shit? You think?” I recalled the blade and spun the knuckles around my pinkie before sliding them back in my pocket. To Dean, I asked, “How long ago?”
“Hours.”
“Where?”
“Kodiak Station. Near the airport.”
Nearby, then. Zero wasn’t moving across large swaths of land, which meant her base had to be on the island. “A hunter called it in?”
“A neighbor heard the … screams. She knew who to call if something ever happened.”
“I should go look.” My stomach twisted at the thought of seeing the children. Their small bodies. I couldn’t help but think of the aswang boy. “We have to find her before this happens again. Maybe she left something behind. At the very least, we might get a better idea of how she attacks.”
Dean nodded once, the gesture barely there. “I’ll call ahead and have a hunter waiting at the airport with a car. Take Luke and Hatter. She might still be in the area. We’re warning all the other families. She won’t stop at just one.”
“Good plan.” I walked backward toward the door. When my hand hit the handle, I winked at Mr. Abbot. “Don’t talk about me while I’m gone, okay? Or else,” I said, dropping my voice and widening my eyes, “I’ll have to get ya.”
He paled as I left.
Scaring the shit out of Mr. Abbot felt good, but the fix only lasted seconds. Halfway down the ward’s hall, the weight of the coming day bore down on me. I needed Sunny to come. Without the doctors, we didn’t have a resident coroner, meaning she had to look at the bodies. Dean was right: I needed Luke too. I hated to ask—he’d see the children and compare himself to their killer—but I trusted no one else to have my back out there. With Luke came Hatter. The Barrow duo would stay behind to manage the school without us.
Thoughts tumbled through my head as I hurried down the stairs to the lab. I hadn’t seen Sunny in hours, but she was most likely working with Nyny.
Nyny’s weird techno music thrummed from the speakers, and rounding the last bend in the stairs, I found them huddled over a series of beakers, their heads so close their goggles touched.
For a brief blip of a second, jealousy tightened my throat, but I shoved it aside, calling myself an idiot.
“Sunny!” I strode across the lab and stopped at a table. I had to smack it a couple times before Sunny and Nyny jumped and spun around. They saw me and instantly jerked closer together to block my view of their research shit on the table behind them.
I narrowed my eyes, at once suspicious.
“Ollie!” Sunny said. “Hey! What’s up? What are you doing down here?”
I didn’t bo
ther asking how much coffee she’d drunk. “We have to go,” I said. “Something’s happened.”
She was already shaking her head, her dark curls bouncing against her temples. “I can’t. We had a breakthrough with the antidote last night.” She blushed and stuttered. “We’re working through the distillation now—”
“An Original family was killed. The kids too. Dean thinks it was Zero. We have to go out there and look for ourselves.”
My words had their intended effect. Sunny’s mouth fell open. “She’s attacking Originals?”
“We think so.”
She brought her gloved hand toward her mouth but thought better of it at the last second. Whatever they were messing with back there must have been some nasty stuff. Sunny hastily pulled off her gloves and then her goggles and plastic apron. She took a shaky breath, squared her shoulders, and turned to Nyny.
“You got this?” she asked the lavender-haired Russian.
“No problem-o, dude.”
“Don’t forget the—”
“Please.” Nyny pushed Sunny away from the table. “Go help that family. They need you more than I do, since, you know, I actually went to school for this and can handle a simple acid-base titration.”
I waited at the stairs as Sunny washed out. Her hands were bright red as she turned back to Nyny. “No more explosions,” she said in all seriousness. “We can’t lose the data.”
I didn’t ask.
* * *
Sunny
Hatter flew us from the wildlife refuge Fear University was located on straight to Kodiak Station. As promised, a hunter waited with an all-wheel drive SUV. No one spoke on the drive. Occasionally, someone would check their gun, pulling the slide back to check the chamber, and we’d all twitch at the sound.
The Bautistas’ house was at the edge of Kodiak Station. The quaint red house with white shutters was nestled at the back of the property, at the end of a long drive. The driveway’s snow had been shoveled that morning, perhaps by one of the older kids as a chore before they could watch television.