by Dan Krokos
“Yes.” And I do love him. Maybe I always did. It took the end to bring it out of me. I love Peter, but I love Noah. Without Noah, I wouldn’t be here. I’d be growing in a tank, forgotten, waiting to be sold as a weapon. “Not lying,” I say.
His pulse is weak against my palm. His blood covers me, already cooling outside his body.
“Don’t forget me.”
“I couldn’t.”
His eyelids droop. I read a word on his lips. Two words. There’s no sound, but I understand. Kiss me, he says.
I lean forward and press my lips to his cold, bloodless ones. I feel tension in his lips for a second as he kisses back. Then they go slack. I press my forehead to his and the tears won’t be stopped this time. They fall from my cheeks to his and mix with his blood.
Soon this cold, black void fills me up. It’s weird to think of it that way, a void filling you, but it does. I guide Noah to his side, gently, and run my hand over his hair.
I speak to the room. My voice is dead and flat. “Are you still here?”
My voice comes back to me. “I am.”
I stand up in Noah’s blood. It’s lukewarm between my toes. I suddenly feel sick, and my throat flexes in a half gag. Sequel sits on the table, in the lotus position, sword across her lap. I step back, out of Noah’s blood. My bare feet leave bright red prints on the white linoleum. My arms are glazed from fingernails to elbows.
“Where did you get…?” I lick my lips. Taste more blood. I can’t speak. I have so many things to say.
“The sword?”
She looks at Noah’s feet poking out from behind the table. I want to cut her eyes out of her head. She doesn’t get to look at him.
“Sequel hid it in this room,” she says. “She has one in the auditorium too. I guess she didn’t trust this place.” I should have expected this; she wasn’t the only one. I also hid a pack of throwing knives in the library on the second day. But right now they’re one floor and several hundred feet away.
“Nina.”
Nina doesn’t blink. “My name, yes.”
The message changed her in some way, brought out some new personality. I know Sequel as well as I know myself, because we came from the same place. This person isn’t her.
I sway in place, lost. Nina stares at me, unblinking. If we share the same mind, then she knows I’m not going to walk away. I’m not going to quit until one of us is dead. So I get on with it. I step forward to the nearest table and grab a beaker. I throw it like a baseball. Her sword blurs in front of her face, and the glass shatters. Shards pepper her chest and fall around her. Another beaker follows, then a scale. She bats them all away, legs still folded under her.
The void inside me doesn’t last. Something else seeps in, red and hot.
And once the rage starts it doesn’t stop. I want to temper it somehow, maintain control and precision, but I can’t.
Anger has no place in battle. Sifu Phil’s words, echoing from some long-ago lesson I never attended. It may grant you strength, but the serene warrior is the survivor. Do not mistake serene for passionless. You must temper your feelings like a blade.
I temper my feelings like a blade.
Nina doesn’t flinch as I come at her, and why should she? She’s armed and I’m not. She hops off the table and lunges forward with her sword. She stops with the point touching my throat, tenting the skin inward. I could knock it away, or step back, but I don’t. She would’ve killed me already if she wanted to, while I hovered over Noah, and I don’t know why she hasn’t. Why spare me then, and why spare me now? This is me tempering the blade.
I hold my hands out, showing my empty, bloodstained palms. Daring Nina to finish me. I want her to, I think. Then I won’t have to feel what I’m feeling.
The pressure feels good in a strange way; it gives me something to focus on. I lean in to the point and my skin breaks. Hot blood rolls into the hollow of my throat. Her eyes narrow, and I use the moment to bat the sword away and grip her throat.
I squeeze and watch her eyes turn red and her mouth open and close. I pry the sword from her fingers with my other hand. She gives it up too easily, and alarm bells go off in my head. She grabs the bottom of the hilt, under my fingers, and pulls hard. A small knife drops out. It was hidden inside the hilt. Stupid me—so much for a tempered blade. I don’t deserve to win.
She rips the tiny knife across my left forearm, the one trying to crush her trachea. My arm numbs instantly. My fingers loosen even though I try to squeeze tighter. Blood wells in the cut and rolls down the curve of my arm. I bring my forearm to my face and take a step back, almost falling. My legs are numb too.
I look up.
Two images dance around and meld into Nina’s smiling face.
“Poison,” I slur. I can barely stand. I wait for Peter and Rhys to burst through the door, but they don’t. I’m alone.
“Sit down for the next part,” Nina says. “Don’t hurt yourself falling down.”
My steps turn shaky as the poison spreads through my body. The pool of Noah’s blood splits into two crimson lakes, then snaps back to one. Another step. I use the table to guide me down. Doesn’t matter, really. If I never wake up, I made enough mistakes to deserve it. The only thing keeping me conscious is the rest of Alpha team, just a few hundred feet away, oblivious to what’s happening. They’re looking for us, probably. I can’t warn them. I can’t even save myself.
I end up on my side, looking into Noah’s eyes. They’re blank and glazed, half shut. Just like mine.
A black wave crashes over me, blotting out the light.
I wake up how I fell asleep—drugged, with my cheek against the floor.
My eyes won’t focus no matter how hard I strain. Someone beats a war drum—boom boom boom. It takes me a second to realize it’s just the blood in my ears. My left wrist is locked in a metal cuff as wide as my palm. It connects to a rusty chain looped around a thick iron pillar. The chain is locked to itself with a thick padlock. Seeing the chain and the pillar gives me that trapped animal feeling. The drug makes it worse.
I close my eyes for a full minute, trying to will the drug out of my system. When I open them, two vibrating images of the ceiling meld into one. Cobwebs cover the exposed support beams. The concrete floor is cracked and canted in places. The air smells like wet mattresses. I sit upright and wrap my arms around my knees. Blood rushes to my head, and suddenly I feel a bruise on my right cheek, the scarred one. I focus on the pain. I don’t know where I am.
Breathe.
I’m wearing my homecoming dress. Blood stains the front.
My hands shake and I shut my eyes. Tears leak out and roll down my cheeks, and there’s nothing I can do to change what happened. Nothing. My throat makes a high sound I can’t stop. I can’t breathe. I don’t want to breathe. I want to stay here and suffocate so I can see Noah’s face again.
I explode upright and put one foot flat on the pillar. I wrap the chain around both hands and pull back with everything I’ve got, picturing Noah on his side. The chain bites into my fingers. The links scrape and slide on the padlock. I strain so hard, capillaries burst in my eyes, but I don’t stop. I can’t stop. If I stop, that’s it. I’ll never have the strength I do at this moment, right now.
I stop.
And collapse, spent, heaving, sick. The chain claps back to the floor. My palms are orange-red, smeared with rust and dried blood. I rub them down the front of my dress, but it doesn’t come off. I rub and rub, and it just smears the blood deeper into my skin.
I sniff a few times and pretend this isn’t the end. I just have to try harder. In a few minutes, I’ll give it another shot. Yeah, I’ll just rest for a minute. Maybe I can climb the pillar and try to break through the wooden support beam at the top. It would help if there was some other noise down here, maybe a faulty furnace ticking and coughing, so I could hear something other than my frantic heart and raspy breath.
Seconds pass, and reality sets in. The others will have to fight on without me
. I think I’m saddest about that part most of all.
I stand up for another try anyway. As I do, a slow clap comes from the darkest corner of the room. I spin around and almost trip myself on the chain.
“A for effort. But a D for logic. Even a Rose isn’t strong enough to break iron.”
Nina steps out of the darkness. She has replaced her dress with one of our formfitting suits. The suit is layered in black scales, like a fish. It covers her fingers and toes and ends below her jaw. Her short, clinging black hair looks like part of the suit, a cowl.
Her right hand holds a gun.
I put a hand against the wall, prepared to fight if I can.
Something changes from one second to the next—her eyes. Not blank and soulless, but horrified. She looks down at the gun in her hand, like Where did this come from?
She’s Sequel again. Not Nina—whoever Nina is. There is no faking the revulsion on her face.
“I feel her inside me, you know?” She shakes the words out. Her eyes are shiny with tears.
Whatever she has to say, I don’t care. I tell myself that because I want it to be true.
“Feel who?” My voice is dry.
She squeezes her eyes shut, quaking. A tear wells in her right eye, slips down the side of her nose. “I’m so sorry, Miranda.”
“Feel who, Sequel? Who?”
“Nina.”
“Who is Nina?”
“North Iteration 9-A. I can feel her.”
“What is that?”
“I don’t know.”
She grips the side of her head and squeezes so hard I wince. She’s only five feet away. A little closer and I could reach out and grab her.
“She keeps making me watch when she takes over, and I—I don’t know. When I cut…”
When I cut Noah.
“Don’t cry for him,” I say. She isn’t allowed to feel anything. I don’t care who takes over and makes her watch. I don’t care I don’t care.
Her eyes flare red, literally. She’s not wearing her contacts. “Listen to me. There is more to this. She’s in control. There’s a plan, Miranda. A plan. And I can’t stop her—”
“Why am I here? What do you want?”
“Because she wants to use you. She brought you here. But she let her guard down and now I’m here and it’s really me. It wasn’t me before, please. Believe me.” Her next words are garbled from her crying. “I didn’t want him to die.”
I believe her. My left hand balls into a fist until a knuckle pops. Can I really hurt her when she’s Sequel? If what she says is true, she’s trapped inside. She’s a prisoner like me, but worse. I still own my body. If she drifts too close, it would be my responsibility to end her before she causes more damage.
“Did she kill Noah?” I say. “Was that Nina?”
“Yes…”
I visualize how we found Sequel on the operating table in Key Tower. She had scraps of memories from the previous Miranda, like me. Mrs. North must’ve put whatever North Iteration 9-A is inside of her then. Hidden the identity underneath Sequel. Then the DJ’s message activated it somehow, the same way Mrs. North recalled memories in me last summer. Mrs. North showed me the truth, that I wasn’t the Miranda everyone had grown up with, but a replacement. A fake.
Sequel is still holding the gun at her side.
“This thing she wants me to do. She wants me to gather something, or lead something, I don’t know. I don’t know. I can’t see much. But it’s bad. It’s really bad. She wants me to find the other creators and kill them. Then she wants to…”
“Stop,” I say. “She wants you to do it, or she’s taking over and doing it herself? Which is it?”
“It’s both. Sometimes we’re both in here and I can’t tell where I start and she ends.”
“What does she want you to do?”
She closes her eyes. Her hands curl into fists. “She’s coming.”
“Give me the gun.”
She considers the gun again, like she forgot she was holding it. My heart pounds so hard I can barely hear her. “She wants me to gather the eyeless. To open the way for them. To—to lead them. I don’t know what it means.”
I just stare at her, feeling how Noah’s dried blood is thicker in the creases of my palms. Rimmed under my fingernails and cuticles, like badly applied nail polish.
Save your words, I want to say. I don’t care. Leave me alone.
But part of me can’t help but listen.
Eyeless.
Open the way.
Lead them.
Them, Mrs. North said in the memory. This is it. These are the monsters we’ve been waiting for. It has to be.
“What are the eyeless? Is it some kind of weapon? Sequel, look at me!”
She looks. Her eyes are bloodshot, and she keeps shaking her head. “No. No. No. Miranda.”
I push off the wall and stretch to the end of my chain, until it bites into my wrist. The cuff pulls the skin; the cut on my arm opens again. Warm blood rolls down my arm and inside the cuff.
“Give me the gun!”
She has something else attached to her hip. A key. She pries it off and holds it up, a gun in one hand and a key in the other. “I don’t want to die,” she says. “You’re going to kill me.”
“We can help you! We can.…” It’s a lie, and I know it. My hands are sticky with Noah’s blood. Noah is dead because of her. There will be no helping her. But if what she says is true, then Sequel is innocent. It’s the identity inside her that’s guilty.
Her eyes blink rapidly, then freeze. Looking right at me. Nina’s eyes. “I don’t need help,” she says.
Nina takes a step back and shakes her head. Her smooth face breaks again, crinkling. “Noah…” she whispers.
I wiggle my wrist inside the cuff, which my blood has lubricated, but it’s still too tight to slip my hand through. I fold my thumb across my palm and pull with everything in me, until my eyes see little white zooming stars.
I give up.
She drops the key. It bounces twice, ringing on the concrete floor.
“I want to live,” she says quietly, as Sequel once again. Ashamed. I can’t blame her, really. She wants to live. Would I be strong enough to kill myself if I knew I had some hidden, malign aspect of my personality? Someone guiding me, making me do things I didn’t want to do?
Taking me over?
I don’t know.
“I’ll find another way,” she says, wiping her cheeks with her fingertips. “I can force her out. I can do it.”
I sway in place, swallowing against the urge to vomit. The key is too far away. “What if you can’t? She’s going to use you. Hey.” She lifts her shame-filled eyes to me. “She’ll use you to kill us. Like Noah.”
Sequel turns away. She sticks the gun against her hip again.
“I’m going to come after you!” I scream at her. She walks up the steps, slowly, head down. “You should kill me!” Anything to make her come back. Give me the gun. Give me the gun so I can stop whatever Nina makes you do.
She says nothing, keeps climbing.
I lunge for the key and fall hard on my chest, gasping. My trembling fingers hover a few inches away. A door shuts upstairs. I stretch harder, moaning as the cuff cuts deeper into my wrist. Then I stop being brain-dead. I flip around and use my foot to pull the key to me. My feet are blood-spattered, like my hands. I was standing in Noah’s blood.
I get the key and jam it into the lock. A twist, and the cuff pops open. I charge up the stairs into a home from the seventies. Everything is dressed in yellow and dust. Cupboards filled with cobwebs stand open. The front door squeals when I shove through. It’s full dark outside, no stars. No moon. A cool autumn night, the night Noah died. The faint scent of roses is on the air, and I follow it over the damp backyard grass and up someone’s driveway. My skin is colder in the unbloody places.
A man shouts to my left. I turn just in time to see Nina throw a man out of his tiny car. She slips behind the wheel, shuts the door, and t
akes off with squealing tires. I step into the street, and the headlights fill my eyes. The engine screams as Nina pushes the pedal to the floor. The car grows and grows until it’s right in front of me, and I almost let it hit me, but at the last moment I leap straight up and tuck my legs and feel the car pass under me. The turbulent air tugs me back down. The blacktop pebbles bite into my toes, and I turn to watch the taillights shrink to red pinpricks. Five seconds later, Nina squeals around a corner and is gone.
My mind is blissfully blank until I picture Noah lying next to the table. Someone has found him by now; someone called for help even though they knew it was useless. Maybe they immediately searched for Peter and Rhys, or me and Sequel. Everyone saw the five of us together—another stupid move, even if we’ve only been in school a few weeks. I hope Peter and Rhys were smart enough to take off rather than get pulled into questioning by the police.
A thought strikes me like a bullet—I am a product of Mrs. North. She could’ve sewn some latent personality into my brain too. There could be a different North Iteration swimming inside me, waiting to hear a specific set of words or numbers. Then she’ll surface, and I’ll be a danger to everyone.
And whatever made Mrs. North so ruthless in the first place is inside of me too. I could become like her simply because we have the same DNA. Her blood, her exact blood, already flows through my veins.
It’s not fair to Peter and Rhys. I try to imagine the things they’ll say when they realize the implications. It makes me sick all over again.
Headlights swing down the quiet road. My breath fogs out. I must be some sight—a shivering girl in a bloody red dress.
The car stops like I knew it would. The driver gets out, some guy asking if I’m okay. I’m not okay. I tell him I need his car. He says, “What?” I sweep his legs out from under him and get inside and close the door.
The radio plays pop music. The clock says Noah died two hours ago.
I find the highway and drive south toward the suburbs. We moved out of Rhys’s luxury condo when we realized our funds weren’t unlimited. The three-bedroom apartment we share is cramped, but home enough.