A gunshot shattered the silence, the echo ricocheting wildly through the chamber’s collapsing rings. With a meager little cry, she crumpled, knife spinning from her fingers in a perfect, symmetrical spiral.
I whipped around. Max stood there, lowering his pistol, face drained of blood. He took two steps forward and sank to his knees.
Trembling, I crawled immediately toward Louisa, who was shaking even harder. Clumsy elbows, useless fingers—I clawed for anything to stop the bleeding at her neck, finally grabbing a rough wool blanket and balling it up against the thin red line along her jaw. She rested her head on my shoulder, pressing into me closer than she had after the blast, if that was even possible. There were tear tracks on her cheeks. Old or new, what did itmatter? She’d cried enough. She’d criedfuckingenough on my behalf.
God, she just looked sotired.
It’s over,I wanted to tell her, just whisper it in her ear and cradle her against me. But I didn’t. Because it wasn’t.
I tried to take a deep breath and only coughed. “Guys,” I rasped. “I don’t want to alarm you, but I figure you’re already alarmed enough.” They turned toward me, Louisa’s breath still hitching, Max still staring at something I couldn’t see. “The air. It’s, uh, highly toxic.”
They stared.
“And, well, we’ve all been breathing it in since the collapse.”
Louisa didn’t say anything at first. Then, fingers trembling, she reached for her flashlight, its weak beam sweeping toward our intended escape route. The tunnel—our only way out—was choked with debris and shattered rock. An impassable wall. She gasped, shrinking back, her shoulders rising and falling with each quick, sharp breath. I didn’t even have to look at her to know exactly what she was feeling—stomach twisted into knots, lungs working too hard, panic creeping up her throat.
Thiswas what I’d been trying to hold off as long as I could. It was inevitable, but she’d been doing sowell.
“There’s another way out,” I coughed, my lungs tightening with each word. “Max”—I barely swallowed the next hacking fit—“Max said so.”
She clung to me as we struggled to our feet, both of us staggering. The key now was just to buy enough time before we lost consciousness.
“Max, what?—”
But he wasn’t listening. He wasn’t even looking.
Dark hair obscured his face like a shroud as he kneeled over Resi, blood seeping through his fingers as he pressed them to her gushing wound. His other hand brushed back her hairfrom her face. Her strange, glassy, angelic face, still twisted in something almost divine in its ancient anguish. Max laid her down delicately, like a bouquet of white nightshade—precious, poisonous, already dead. When he bent to kiss her brow, amid the dust streaking his cheek, I saw a single tear track. A mark he, like all of us, would wear forever.
Louisa stared at them.
“You don’t need me anymore, kid,” Max said. “You’re practically free already.”
Apparently, he hadn’t noticed the number burned into my arm.
“Max!” Louisa bit her lip, her body wracked with sobs trying to break free.
But there was nothing else to say. Ten tons of rock buried us, andthisweighed more.
She just stood there, rigid, eyes staring at nothing. “We can’t.” She gasped. “We can’t go.”
“What?”
“Without Max, how can we?—”
Removing someone’s chip doesn’t make them not a slave. It just makes them a slave who’s breaking the law.
Without Max—without the offshore accounts, the private jets, the forged documents—what could I do? Run?
And Icouldn’trun. Physically or any other way. Louisa, albeit hysterical, was right. What the hell were we escapingto?
“We have to try, Lou. I?—”
“But Maeve—and Daddy still—and you’re still—we can’t go back. We—”She gasped for air, eyes wide and unfocused.
And something in me snapped. I might have failed at everything else, but I hadonejob, one job I couldn’t fail at no matter what: saving her. Andshe—the girl who had done everything to save me—was stopping me from doing it.
“Lou, I love you and I’m sorry, butshut up,” I rasped. “And for the last time,quit holding your breath. What have I told you? If you stop breathing, I guarantee you,you will die. You willnotmake it out of here.”
