by Dan Krokos
His tone almost makes me smile. He could always joke in the worst situations.
“It was Nina too,” he says. “Fighting her took something out of me. I’m in pieces here.”
I want to make him whole again. He saved my identity. My life. Without him inside my head, I would be Nina right now.
The mass of Roses moves forward another few feet; they’re narrowing into a tunnel up ahead. We hang back far enough that no one talks to us.
If I get the Torch—
“You said that. I’m ready. I’m ready and I’m here with you.”
It means I’ll die.
“I’m here with you.”
But he’s not. The next second I feel him evaporate. Each time it happens, I wonder if he’ll come back. I should find some way to transfer him into a new body. As soon as he came back, he’d be happy. He’d be happy to be alive, to breathe air and see things with his own eyes.
If only I had more time.
I hear a footstep behind me and whirl, hand reaching for my sword. Olivia stands a few feet away, half hidden in the shadows, with a Black portal wide behind her. The red cloak is the only thing that keeps me from cutting her down.
“You’re going the wrong way,” she says.
I lower Beacon. “What are you doing here?”
She sighs. “Assembling the only hope your world has. I have no time.”
“What?” Rhys says helpfully.
“Either come or stay here. I have to get back before my absence is noted.”
She steps backward through the portal and disappears, as silent as stepping behind a curtain.
“I don’t—” Rhys begins.
His voice cuts off as I step through the Black, pulling him along.
The next second, I stand in the school gymnasium. Our school gymnasium, outside Cleveland. The last time I was here, it was dark and full of students, and I danced with Peter and Noah. And the DJ made an announcement, and the girl we knew as Sequel became Nina. Now it’s bright and empty, save for Peter and Noble and Sophia, who are gathered at half court. Seeing them alive brings me joy I’ve never felt before, a temporary salve for my wounds, the deeper ones that aren’t flesh.
Peter sits with his legs tucked under him, holding his arm in his lap. His armor is gone from the elbow down, ripped away, and his forearm is wrapped in bloody bandages. I go straight to him and kneel and press my lips to his. He has the strength to reach up and touch my hair lightly.
“Missed you,” he says against my lips.
“I’m leaving,” Olivia says. I turn around and she looks directly at me. “The director will meet with your creators at the top of Key Tower just before dawn to discuss plans for the new government. She will have the Torch. It will be the last chance you have to take it before the eyeless make it this far west. Send them back and destroy them. The Originals won’t dare use the Roses without the eyeless. It will buy you time.”
“I was close to the Originals,” I say. “Why can’t you kill them yourself? What are you waiting for?”
There’s too much anger in my voice; this immortal girl risked herself to reunite us, after all. Her eyes soften and I see the forgiveness before I can apologize.
“It’s never that simple. The Originals back up their identities every second, in real time. Kill them, and they will just be born again. Right now there are a dozen versions of themselves in hibernation, just in case they’re needed. And so for now, you must do what you can.”
Silence falls as we absorb that. More good news.
“I’m sorry,” Olivia says. “Be at the top of the tower before dawn. It’s all I can do for you.” She takes a step backward and disappears through the portal, which winks out of existence the second she does.
Noble has his arm around Sophia, who has red claw marks on her cheek and neck. She looks at me with fire in her eyes. “Dawn is a few hours away. I suggest we plan, before all is truly lost.” She’s wearing her handmade leather armor, a red sleeveless vest and pants, which only reminds me how different this world must seem to her. We’re the aliens now, with paved roads and clean water.
“Plan,” Rhys mutters. “What plan? The top of Key Tower is a melted mess. I doubt the creators and the director will just hand over the Torch.”
“We have to try,” Peter says, gritting his teeth when Rhys bumps his injured arm.
Rhys cocks his head to the side and squints. “Isn’t that your sword arm?”
“Enough,” Noble booms. “I will arrange transportation. I suggest you rest. Everything depends on what happens next.”
Rhys and Sophia talk while Noble departs. It’d be interesting to watch them, to see if they like each other, but I have different priorities. I guide Peter down the hallway toward the locker room, where the athletic trainers will have stuff to clean his wounds. I can smell the blood and sweat on him. He grimaces with each step.
“Stop hiding your limp,” I say.
He stops.
“They cornered me,” he says.
“I saw.”
“What?”
“Long story.”
We hobble down the steps, side by side. Even though I’m helping him, just feeling him against me gives me strength. He’s alive. Blood still pumps through his veins.
He tells me the story while I unwrap his bandage, exposing the deep slash underneath. It curves from his elbow halfway to his wrist, the muscle visible within, red and shiny and striated. He sits down on a bench and rests his head against the lockers, head tilted toward the ceiling. When he blinks, tears leak from the corners of his eyes. I kneel in front of him.
“I rescued this family who’d been in a car crash. The eyeless were clawing at the windows, trying to get in. They had broken the windshield and were pulling it out in one piece. But getting close enough meant…” He does a sword swinging motion with his good arm.
“This needs stitches,” I say. My stomach turns, not because I’m grossed out, but because the wound looks bad. Stitches might not be enough. There isn’t enough skin left to cover the muscle. I try not to look afraid, so he’s not.
“It can wait,” he says. “Just bind it tight.”
He groans through clenched teeth when I splash the alcohol into the gash, enough to kill whatever disease the eyeless might carry under their claws. The wound continues under his suit, where the ragged armor ends, so I make him shrug his upper half out. I peel the armor down to his waist.
“See?” he says. “No more.”
He’s right; I can’t find any wounds. Just bruises—some purple, some yellowish. Like a painting of twilight. My fingers trace over them gently, and his skin twitches under them. I poke and prod, looking for some little cut that could fester later on.
“Sorry,” I say.
He grins. “The pain isn’t that bad.”
I let my eyes fall back to his arm and continue dressing the wound. It bleeds right through, an ink blot spreading before my eyes. I have experienced more fear in the last few days than I thought possible, but this is different. This is frustration worse than dread. His arm is damaged and I can’t fix it, and it’s going to kill him.
But I hide all that for his sake. I can be strong for him.
“Tell you what,” I say. “Why don’t you clean yourself up, and I’ll try to find something better. Maybe a needle and thread.”
He looks at me for a few seconds too long. “Okay.” Then he doesn’t move.
“What is it?”
“Is Noah…?”
I turn inward, but he’s nowhere in sight. “No. He’s not here. He helped me, though. Nina tried to turn me, and it almost worked.”
Peter’s eyes widen.
“It’s okay. Noah was there. When Nina woke herself inside me, we just…beat her back. Together.”
Peter is nodding, though he seems sad. “I’m glad. I’m glad you’re okay.”
“Me too.”
Something shifts between us. I don’t know what.
He licks his lips, then stands up. S
lowly, he limps past the lockers into the communal shower area, leaving behind three drops of blood on the tile. I push myself to my feet and look through the supplies for a needle and thread, but I already knew there wouldn’t be any. I hear him turn on the shower. It runs unbroken for ten seconds, until he gets under the stream.
“There are stalls,” he calls to me, “if you want to stop smelling.”
I smile. The shower room is already steamy. Peter shampoos himself with one hand and keeps his bad arm above the showerhead. I turn my water on and spin it all the way to lava-hot, then peel my suit off. My left palm is burned deeply, and I only feel the pain now that it’s free of my suit. A black square is burned into the skin. Olivia’s gift almost killed me, but it brought me here. The mark is a small price to pay.
I wash myself quickly, working days of filth out of my hair and skin. I’m not going to say anything to Peter. If he needs distance, I will give that to him. But I don’t know what that’ll mean when this is over, if we win and I survive.
Peter finishes first and leaves his stall with his armor slung over his shoulder. He’s about to walk past my stall door, but he stops.
“What’s up?” My voice shakes, and my heart pounds. I curl my fingers over the top of the door.
“Forgive me,” he says. Water drips off the end of his chin.
“For what?”
“I should put you first. But I haven’t. I love you.”
I never said it back the first time. Now I say, “I love you too.”
“And you forgive me?”
“There’s nothing to forgive. You needed to keep us alive, and I couldn’t be trusted.”
He shakes his head. “That doesn’t excuse how I treated you. I was cold. Just say you forgive me.”
I reach over the door and gently pull his lips to mine. He kisses me back, once, softly, but it’s different. Noah sharing my mind changes everything. Until we figure out what to do with him, things won’t be normal. I start thinking about the rest of our lives, all of us, when the fighting is done. Peter’s kiss is different, but there’s hope in it. If we survive this, we’ll get past it. We can get past anything.
“I want to open the door,” Peter says with a shadow of a smile.
“I do too.” And I really do.
“But we shouldn’t.”
I nod and bite my lip. “Peter, when this is over and we have our lives back, we can talk. We can talk about exactly what we want. We just have to win first.”
The words taste like a lie, even as I try to believe them myself. If everything happens the way it should, I’ll be dead soon. And if it doesn’t, I’ll be dead soon.
It might be the first time I acknowledge it, truly.
To win, I am going to die.
And I’m afraid.
Peter kisses me one more time, and it’s the way it was before, suddenly and magically, and I want to cry and throw open the door and let him hold me, and tell him what I’m planning, and make him say he’ll go with me, that we can die together.
But I don’t.
“We’ll talk,” I say. “I love you.”
He smiles. “That sounds good.”
The city is empty.
A siren keens in the distance, like the one in D.C. It rises and falls. Word has spread about the invasion, and people have either fled or gone home to cower behind locked doors.
The five of us ride through the empty streets in a school bus, going over a plan that depends on the element of surprise and an escape that depends on insanity.
As we left the school, Peter and Rhys joked about something that happened last week, when things were as normal as they were ever going to get. I sat with Noble near the front. I made him agree to do something for me, something hard. He promised. With the plan set, I was able to relax for the final twenty minutes. I felt my heart beat in my chest and wondered how many beats I had left. If I failed, I would die. If I succeeded, I would die. If today was the day for me to die, it was going to be on my terms.
I waited for Noah to make an appearance, but I couldn’t feel him anywhere. When I was talking to Peter, I feared he would return, but he never did. It’s sickening to think, but I’m glad he’s gone so he doesn’t have to see what happens next. So he doesn’t have to die twice.
Noble parks a block from Key Tower, hiding the bus behind a hotel. The cap is still a ruined mess, but if Olivia says the meeting will take place there, I believe her. We pile out of the bus, full of nervous energy. To the east, the sky is purple-black. Sunrise isn’t far away. Hunger and thirst gnaw at my stomach, but I have a little strength left. I can go a little longer. Maybe I can see the sunrise once more.
We climb to the top, slow and steady, pausing to regain our strength every fifteen floors or so. It gives me time to dwell. I don’t think so much about what I’m leaving behind, but what I’m going to miss. Exploring my love with Peter. Growing older. Maybe having a family, or a job.
Of course, all of that hinges on our world being the way it was before, and I don’t think it can ever be the same.
Time is a blur until we reach the top floor. The ceiling is warped and sagging in places, a result of the H9 we used to melt the place down. The last time we stood here, Noah and Olive were alive.
I can hear voices above us, distorted through a jagged hole in the ceiling.
In the dim light of the stairwell, Rhys gives me a nod. Noble does too. Sophia smiles, and Peter gives my hand a squeeze.
I grab a jutting piece of metal within the hole and haul myself up.
The roof is a mess of lumpy fused steel, as though the top floors had melted halfway to liquid, then cooled before they could lose shape completely. Which is exactly what happened. The sky is unobstructed in all directions, but it isn’t boiling black like Commander Gane’s world. It isn’t golden, either, like True Earth. It’s purple and full of stars. My true sky.
Three people stand in the center, where the floor is most even. Two of our creators wear fresh versions of our black armor—Peter and Olive. They’re the same age as Noble, as old as our parents would be if we had any. Mrs. North and the elder Noah are absent. The last person is the director. She holds the Torch in her right hand. The ball glows bright red, reflecting off the shiny scales of her suit. The light turns her golden scales into rubies.
For the first time in a long time, I am without fear.
Though I hide in the shadows, the director somehow knows I’m here. She turns around, along with the creators, and her eyes settle on my hiding place.
“I’ve never met a daughter so resilient.” She doesn’t try to hide the awe on her face.
I step out of the dark and pull Beacon from my back.
“She and her friends have caused us some trouble recently,” the elder Olive says. We searched for the creators for so long, and now here they are, and it doesn’t even matter. They are the least of our worries—pawns, like us.
The director laughs. “I’ve spent eons controlling thousands of Roses, and you three couldn’t control a few teams of five.”
I release a wave of fear on the off chance it will affect the creators. They look mildly discomforted, but it doesn’t send them running.
“That’s the spirit,” the director says.
Then her eyes widen at something over my shoulder. I turn around and see my team standing behind me.
“Hello, Rhys,” the elder Peter says. “Long time.”
“Hello,” both Rhyses reply.
The elder Olive sneers. “Where have you been, Noble?”
“Here and there,” he replies. “Where’s Noah?”
“Gone,” is all the elder Peter says.
The director thumps the Torch on the roof. “Why did you come?” She seems to be asking all of us.
“I doubt that’s a real question,” Peter says next to me.
The elder Peter wears a bulky glove like the Original Olivia. Lightning quick, he draws a circle in the air behind him, and the Black emerges, hovering vertically in the air.
/>
“Don’t you dare flee,” the director says to him.
Noble pulls a revolver and shoots the elder Peter just as he’s stepping backward into the Black. As he falls into the portal, we charge. Gunshots ring out and get swallowed by the sky, but I only have eyes for the director.
She swings the Torch at me like a baseball bat, and I can’t avoid the hit to my ribs, because she’s faster. It knocks the wind out of me, but I get my hands on the Torch as I fall away. As soon as my fingers touch the staff, the eyeless scream in my mind, annoyed by the presence of another. Every instinct screams, Let go! while every thought screams, Hold on!
The director pivots, trying to swing me off the Torch like I’m some dog that won’t give up its toy, but I hold on. My feet drag over the rough, uneven floor, toes scrabbling for traction. She stops at the end of her swing, eyes flaring angrily, and brings her leg up to kick me off. That’s when I pull the Torch to me in one violent motion, snapping my head forward at the same time. The head-butt glances off her chin, but it’s enough to loosen her grip on the Torch. I rip it from her grasp and feel the eyeless presence double in my head, a sudden weight around my ears and on top of my skull. Countless minds turn their eyes toward me, the intruder. I feel their hunger. The emptiness is so black and immense that I understand them. I know why they have to feed on world after world. It’s the only thing that eases their pain.
My feet are moving away from the director the second I’m free.
Stop, I tell the eyeless. STOP, I think. Then I scream, “I GOT IT!” at the top of my lungs. The elder Olivia is dead on the floor. The portal is still black and steady against the purple sky, but the elder Peter is gone.
I sprint for the edge of the roof. The director catches me two feet away and screams in victory. Her fingers dig into my shoulders, pulling me back, but I turn around and lift her up in a bear hug and carry her the final foot. One step is on solid ground, and the next is air.
We fall over the side as I bash the Torch’s shaft into the director’s mouth. Her lips split and blood spatters her cheeks. I shake the Torch from her hands and piston off her chest with both feet, then tuck into a backflip in midair.