“You know what was meant to be?” I asked, cold as the air he’d surrounded me with. He cocked his head, and I leapt at him, throwing whatever strength I had left into the jump. I landed at his shoulder and held on, fingers breaking loose ice as I clawed to get a grip. He squirmed, but it didn’t knock me loose, and when I was just steady enough, I brought my fist back for some of that face-punching I like to think of as my signature move. “You’re meant to be dead, you damned ghoul.”
I hit him square in the kisser and the ice shattered, rippling outward in a shockwave pattern that sent shards of ice spraying in all directions. I rode the destruction of his armor right to the ground, and stood there over him, looking into the cold, blue eyes of Erich Winter, his face emaciated, his skull almost showing through the skin.
“Yes,” he said, voice a rattle, as he shriveled up to bone, “become what you were meant to be … become … death.”
“I’m not death,” I said, kneeling beside him and looking him straight in the eyes. “I’m just real good friends with it. I’m like Abed to Death’s Troy. Or maybe vice versa. Which of us do you think is more misunderstood?”
He blinked, my Community reference clearly lost on his ignorant and unsophisticated ass, and I punched his head into glassy dust. The last of the light glimmered over it, like sands in the sun. I stood and took a breath. “Try and kick my ass in my own head? This is my house. What a bunch of—”
Movement stirred in the remains of Winter, something slithering beneath the surface. I froze, watching, and it exploded out at me, punching straight into my heart—
71.
Reed
“Get his rotten corpse off of her!” Isabella cried as the flames subsided, Sienna’s skin appearing under the wash of falling water and the black of charred body.
“I’m running out of strength here,” Scott called, sounding as weary as he looked. The man was drenched, obviously, like we all were, but on him it looked like it was in danger of washing him away, he was so weak.
“We might have a chance now,” Zollers said. “There’s an ebb. She’s conquered some of her fears and Gavrikov is holding off—temporarily.” He looked right at Isabella. “If you’re going to try something, this is the moment.” He swept aside the scorched remains of Anselmo, which flaked into dust and ash, scattering as they hit the ground, dispersing into the half-inch of water standing on the floor.
“I want you to put a bullet in her head,” Andrew Phillips said, causing me to jerk around to look at him. He had a black-clad man standing next to him, and he was pointing straight at Sienna. “Do it. All of our lives are at stake.”
“No!” I shot toward them, already raising a hand. I flung Phillips and his flunky out the door of the infirmary and into the hallway without an ounce of regret. I didn’t even wait until they landed before I threw my body against the door as if I could somehow block it from sliding open. Ariadne lurched out of the darkness by Isabella’s office and slapped the lock button on the door panel with a honking beep.
“Hold on!” Isabella said, and I looked back in time to see her jab a hell of a needle right into Sienna’s chest. Not gonna lie—I cringed.
There was a moment of silence as the spattering rain continued to fall on us from the sprinklers above, drowning us even as the passage of time dragged.
A hand slammed hard against the door of the medical unit. “Open this door!” Phillips called.
“If I just physically assaulted you to get you out of here, do you really think I’m going to just open it up because you ask not-so-nicely?” I shook my head at the idiocy as Ariadne looked me in the eye. I could see the fear there, the worry that we were stepping out on a limb here, one that was cracking underneath us as we—
“She’s spiking!” Zollers called, derailing my train of thought. “She’s—!”
72.
Sienna
It was so cold, so cold, so very, very cold.
And hurt so very, very—you get the point—much.
He stabbed me right in the frigging heart, and I went to punch the hell out of him, lurching forward, but gravity changed at that exact moment I flung myself forward.
Water rained down on me from above, hard and chilly, and I gagged as I came upright from laying flat, a complete reversal of the standing position I’d been in a moment earlier.
I blinked, trying to get the water out of my eyes, but the world around me was soggy, almost unfamiliar, the lights dimmed by the tide of cold water raining down on me.
Was this … was it the infirmary?
Dr. Perugini was pressed against the wall to my right, next to Scott Byerly, both of them looking more than a little red in the face. I would have chalked it up to a sunburn in Scott’s case, but Perugini actually had blisters on her cheeks.
“Oh, damn,” Augustus Coleman said, yanking my head toward him like it was on a string. He was ahead and to my left, on a hospital bed with IVs hanging off him. He had one of those white spine collars on him, and if I’d been feeling better, I might have asked him if it kept him from licking his stitches.
I saw my brother just past him, at the door, leaning against it like he was exhausted, like he was going to try and keep it closed with his own body or something. He stared at me through the falling rain in numb shock, Ariadne looking sodden next to him in a nightgown that was ready to fall off from being overly saturated with water.
“Here,” came a voice from my left, so familiar, and a sheet fell over my body just as I realized I was naked. Naked as the day I was born. The sheet was soaked, sodden, but it was folded double and covered me from my chest down to my legs. I clung to it, grabbing at it with weak and chilled fingers, trying to keep myself covered. A dark, ashy substance looked like war paint on my pale skin, at least what I could see of it.
The sheet settled, my eyes followed over to the origin of the familiar voice, and my heart fluttered.
Dr. Quinton Zollers.
My hands shook as I reached out for him, letting my fingers hover as I stretched out to see if he was real, was really there. The world I’d just been in, been trapped in, been fighting for my life in, was already falling away like every dream I’d ever been in, but parts of it remained, and remained close at hand.
The pain.
The guilt.
The … loneliness.
Dr. Zollers took my hand in his, and even though I saw the surgical gloves layered double, I didn’t care. I pulled his hand to my cheek and kept it there as the water poured down both from above and from my eyes.
“P …” I started. “P … please … don’t leave me …” And he folded me close to his drenched and sodden clothes as I shook in his arms and added my own tears to the wetness on his shoulder.
73.
Reed
I watched Sienna cry on Zollers's shoulder and it was like a gut punch to me. No one said anything. No one dared to, no one wanted to. It didn’t take a genius to connect the dots here, after all. Ariadne looked over at me, and I burned in shame.
Sienna was closer to a man who’d left years ago than she was to any of us. The old me would have blamed that on her, but the new me? I could see more than a little of my own fault for the situation.
Ariadne moved to the corner to join them as the sprinklers finally started to slacken off. Her hair was almost crimson, dark streaks through it as she slid next to Sienna, running her fingers through my sister’s wet, raven hair.
A harsh banging came again at the door behind me, and I slapped the lock and stepped through swiftly, forcing Phillips and his black-clad yes man to take a step back or have me run through them.
Wisely, they stepped back, though I saw the other guy’s pistol clenched tight at low rest.
“Crisis averted,” I said. “Sienna’s awake, and in control again.”
There wasn’t an ounce of emotion in Phillips’s eyes or in his reply. “Are you sure?”
“I’m sure,” I said, folding my arms in front of me. “Why? You worried you won’t get a ch
ance to order someone to put a bullet in her skull?”
He shifted a little, not showing the slightest sign of unease at my dig. “She’ll probably give us cause to do so again in the not-too-distant future.”
My face flushed with loathing. “The problem is solved. Cunningham and Serafini are dead, Sienna’s awake. Go schedule your press conference.”
“How did Serafini die? And Cunningham?” Phillips asked. I started to snap a reply at his ghoulishness, but he cut me off. “For the press, not me. I don’t really care.”
“Serafini killed Cunningham,” I said, and opened the door to the medical unit by stepping back in front of it. “And then Serafini got burned to ash by Sienna,” I lied. Okay, not lied, but left some stuff out.
Phillips stared at me like he was trying to ferret out the truth just from looking at my face. “All right, then,” he said, and turned on his heel and started away.
“Aren’t you even going to say you’re sorry?” I called after him. His security flunky followed a few steps behind.
“I’m not sorry,” Phillips said, not turning around, “and if you had your wits about you, you would have shot her in the head yourself to save this place from getting blown up.” He disappeared around the corner and his Guy Friday followed.
He didn’t leave me with any doubt he was telling the truth—about all of it.
74.
Sienna
I stepped back into my empty quarters through a shattered door to find Dog waiting, wagging his tail at me as if it was going to shoot off like it was launched by a rocket. I petted him absently on the head as I stepped around the wreckage of my door. I wondered idly why he hadn’t wandered off down the hall, then realized there really wasn’t anything for him to do out there.
“I still think you should spend the night in the infirmary,” Ariadne said, trailing behind me by a few steps. I heard the change in her voice as she exerted herself to navigate my broken door.
“Yeah, I’d love to spend the night sleeping on one of the sopping mattresses there,” I said sarcastically. “Sounds like a great way to spend my non-vacation vacation.”
“I like how you’re not calling it a suspension,” Ariadne said as she came into my living room. I was already halfway to the bedroom.
When I got there, the smell was like a punch to the face. Not one of my punches to the face, of course, because those will level you, but like a smaller, weaker person’s punch to the face. With stink. “Gyah,” I said.
“Yeah,” Ariadne said, lurking just outside. “We found you in there, behind the door. You’d been in there for days, and—”
“I get the picture,” I said. “No bathroom trips, et cetera.” For my money, Bayscape Island ought to have been a much smellier place in my delusion. I walked over to my MP3 player and hit the power button, killing my playlist halfway through Postmodern Jukebox’s version of “Wrecking Ball.” My theme song, it is.
“How’d they get you?” Ariadne asked, framed in my doorway.
“I went to the mall that morning to get some vacation clothes,” I said. “There was a note on my car when I came back, and I picked it up. It smelled kinda funny, but I didn’t think anything of it.” I held up my left hand. “In my dream, I kept imagining my left hand bleeding. Think it was a coincidence that I picked the flier up with that hand?”
“Weird. Did you keep it?” she asked, coming out of the frame. “I mean, that could be an important clue. We could get it analyzed.”
“I didn’t toss it in the parking lot, if that’s what you’re asking,” I said, as huffy as I had the energy for. “I may be a killer and a horrible person, but a litterbug I’m not.”
“Well, there’s hope for you yet, then.”
“It’s probably in the kitchen somewhere,” I said, waving behind her. I wondered how I was going to get the smell out of my bedroom. It just hung in here.
A knocking came at—well, at where my door used to be. “Come in,” I called back to the entry.
Ariadne disappeared into the kitchen and I stuck my head out the bedroom door just as Dr. Zollers came around the corner into the living room. Reed trailed behind him by a few steps, almost shyly. “Gentlemen,” I said, nodding to Zollers.
“Lady,” Zollers said, nodding back to me. “Just wanted to stop in and see how you were doing.”
“You’re not … leaving, are you?” I asked, my body strangely frozen at the mere thought.
Zollers shook his head. “I can stay for a little while, I suppose. It’s not as though I have any pressing business elsewhere, I just … want to stay out of the government’s clutches as much as possible, you understand.”
“I understand,” I said and drifted back into the living room like I was magnetically drawn toward him. “Can I ask you a question about what happened to me?”
“Let me just answer it for you,” he said, smiling enigmatically. “It’s like you thought. Your brain was shutting down, and as it did so, you were treated to a spiraling series of nightmares that you shaped yourself from your worst fears.”
“Knew I shouldn’t have watched Cabin in the Woods last week,” I said, trying oh-so-hard to flippantly dismiss the experience. The faces of Breandan, Zack, and my mother felt like they were lurking just out of my sight, ready to spring on me in my sleep. I turned my head in time to see a leaf drift by outside the sliding glass doors, and I had a sudden, vivid memory of Winter and his winds.
“What I want to know,” Ariadne said, “is why your souls were lashing out? Why was Gavrikov doing what he was doing? Did he just think he was protecting you in the nightmare?”
“He couldn’t hear her,” Zollers said.
“Because of the coma?” she asked.
“Because of the chloridamide,” I said. “I think, anyway. I took a big dose a couple days ago, before I was leaving.”
Ariadne stared at me, flummoxed. “Why?”
“Because they’re arguing,” I said tautly, ignoring the cause of the argument, keeping it to myself. “And I didn’t want to hear it on my drive.”
“I thought,” Reed said, finally breaking his silence, “chloridamide only worked for like … twelve hours at a time?”
“Whatever they gave her,” Zollers said, “I suspect it reacted in a synergistic manner with the chloridamide, magnifying the duration of some of its effects and dulling others. For example, normally they can’t control any part of her body when she’s taking the drug. In this case, Gavrikov was able to do a hell of a lot, even blind as he was.” His eyes settled on me. “I’m not sure I’d recommend taking chloridamide any more, since it would appear that there are people out there trying to poison you.”
“Any idea who those people are?” Ariadne asked him.
“I have no clue,” Zollers said, shaking his head. “If they were close by, I might be able to offer some insight, but no one here on the campus seems to mean actual harm to Sienna now that she’s settled down.”
“It was the Brain,” Reed said quietly. “Simmons. Anselmo.”
I processed that in an instant. Villains from the past, back to aggravate me. Then I blinked, thinking back to what Zollers had said a moment earlier. “But before I…cooled down,” I said, “someone here meant me harm?”
Reed exchanged a look with Zollers, then answered me. “Phillips ordered you shot when it looked like you were going to blow up.”
I blinked, absorbing that information. “Makes sense. I would have done the same.”
Reed blanched almost imperceptibly then looked at Ariadne and started to speak. He never got a word out, cut off by Zollers before he could even begin. “Ariadne,” Zollers said, “why don’t we go ahead and leave these two alone? I suspect they’ve got some talking to do.”
“What?” Ariadne’s eyes widened. “Someone should stay with her—”
“And I’m sure she’ll give us a shout if she needs anything,” Zollers said, gently putting an arm around Ariadne’s shoulder and steering her toward the door. “How have you been?”
“I—I’m … all right, I suppose,” Ariadne said as she disappeared around the corner with Zollers. He gave Reed a wink as he left us alone.
“Smooth operator, that one,” Reed said, stepping deeper into my trashed quarters. His hands hung at his sides, like he was having trouble deciding what to do with them.
“Knowing what people want to hear probably helps you know what to say to them,” I agreed. “Did you see Scott off all right?”
“He’s hanging around for the night,” Reed said, shrugging. “I got him into the quarters across the hall. He was pretty exhausted from moving all that water around. Same with Augustus, churning all that dirt.”
I felt my muscles tense. “Is he going to be all right?”
“Broken back,” Reed said, “but he’s recovering nicely. Isabella says he should be on his feet in a couple days. He pretty much passed out on his back after tonight, though, soggy bed and all.”
“What happened to him?” I asked. “That Cunningham guy I had to step over in the infirmary?”
“No,” Reed’s face got pinched. “No, Cunningham turned out all right. He helped save the day. It was Anselmo did the number on Augustus. On Cunningham, too, actually.”
“Anselmo Serafini? That prick?” I clenched my teeth. “I should have killed him in Italy.”
“Well, you got him this time,” he said. “Or, I guess I should say ‘we’ got him, since I ripped his lungs out before I tossed him on the funeral pyre that was you.”
I blinked, then looked down at the ash that was smeared along my neckline below the t-shirt I had appropriated from Perugini’s office. “Is this …?”
“A little overdone, but yes,” he said, nodding.
“Ewwwww!” I brushed at my chest, like I could get the smudge of black off my skin, pausing as I realized something else. “And he’s in my hair!
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