“I have one more idea,” she said. “Another place to look.”
Chapter 50
Joe’s eyes burned so much he could hardly see Celeste and Leandro. Every breath scalded his throat and lungs. His body convulsed with coughing, and each cough drew more contaminated air into his lungs. Based on his current rate of decline, he probably didn’t have five (brown) minutes left where he’d still be able to function.
He looked to where Leandro stood on the edge of the roof, his hand on the grips of Celeste’s wheelchair. After Joe died, Leandro would pull her over the side. She would know that Joe had been too weak to help her. Her last thought as she fell to the pavement would be that Joe had let her down.
“Let her go,” Joe yelled. That small effort started another coughing fit, and he fought to keep from doubling over.
“She’ll make her choice, too,” Leandro said. “I think she’ll choose to go with me.”
The gas had pooled on the floor now, snaky tendrils of yellow-green wrapped around his wheels. A long ago chemistry class had taught him that chlorine gas was heavier than air. He would die faster on the floor.
Joe stood, bent at a weird angle because his wrist was still zip-tied to the wheelchair. His ankle hurt, and he ignored it. He took a step toward the glass door, but when he got to the band of sunshine across the floor, he stopped as if he had run into a solid wall.
It was ridiculous, but he couldn’t take another step forward. His heart beat so fast it was a constant roar in his head. His breaths rushed fast and shallow, drawing in the poison gas. Dread radiated from every cell in his body.
He was trapped.
His choice had been made for him.
Chapter 51
Ziggy stood with his back to the city. Cold wind buffeted him, and he tightened his hold on the heavy wheelchair. He didn’t want to be swept off the roof without her. They must fall together. They had come into the world together, and they must leave it the same way. Their destinies had always been intertwined.
“Is there really poison gas in there?” she asked.
He knew she wanted him to lie to her, to tell that her Tesla was safe, but he wouldn’t. Not now. “Of course.”
“You can’t kill him.” A touch of panic, quickly controlled. Zag was always tougher than he.
“He’s killing himself. All he has to do to save his life is take a few steps and open the door. It’s simple.”
“You know he can’t go outside.”
“The drug makes it harder, perhaps, but who’s to say he can’t overcome it with enough power of will? That he can’t choose to be otherwise?” Perhaps Tesla could succeed in changing his nature, even as Ziggy himself had failed.
She twitched her head violently. It was the biggest movement that he had seen from her in weeks, and it reminded him how trapped she was inside her ruined body.
He leaned down to whisper in her perfectly formed ear. “What about you? What do you choose?”
“I choose for you to save him.” She hadn’t hesitated before she spoke, and he hated her for it. She cared so much about that man.
“He must save himself. Those are the rules. We will watch to the end, to see if he changes his mind.” They would stay because Ziggy longed to watch the life drain from Tesla’s eyes, and to make sure she knew that Ziggy was the last man in the world who loved her.
“I’ll go off the roof with you.” Her blue eyes held no guile. “Gladly.”
“I know you will.”
“But only if you let him live.”
He stroked her cool cheek, and she didn’t move away. “You’re too stubborn, Zag.”
“I want to go off the roof with you,” she whispered. “We have reasons for wanting to die, but we can’t take Joe with us.”
“This is a kindness. If he loved you, he wouldn’t want to live without you.”
“Nobody else loves me like that,” she said. “Just you.”
Warmth welled inside him. She loved him, and she knew that he loved her. It didn’t matter what that man had told her. She still knew what was most important.
But then he went cold. Her words were true, but they felt like a lie. She would manipulate him to save Tesla. She would do that. Even now, she would do that.
“I won’t go to him,” he said. “I can’t. He has to make his own choice. Just like the women in the tunnels. Just like us.”
She rested her cheek against his hand. Even wasted by the disease, she was so beautiful. Suffering had tempered her into something delicate and fine. He smelled her hair and recognized the shampoo she had started using in her teens and never changed, cucumbers and lemon. It smelled fresh and clean in the cold wind.
“Please don’t kill him,” she said. “Leave him alive to remember me.”
He slapped her perfect cheek so hard her head rocked back against the wheelchair’s headrest. Tesla wasn’t supposed to remember her. That man’s memories of her as the artist, the woman, the lover must die, too.
“Please,” she said, “let it be just us. Zig and Zag.”
The red imprint of his hand marred the alabaster perfection of her cheek, and he couldn’t look at it.
Chapter 52
Joe dragged the wheelchair around to face the door that led back to the house. Maybe he could find another way onto the roof, or at least get some clean air into his lungs so he could think. He pulled at the handle, but the door was locked. It was metal, a fire door installed to let the occupants flee to the rooftop.
He checked for hinges, thinking to remove the pins, but they were on the other side. He coughed again, holding himself upright against the wall. Whatever happened, he wasn’t going out that way. That only left the glass door.
He struggled to hold his breath. Breathing was death, and he had to save himself to save Celeste.
Desperate, he looked around the room again. His gaze fell on the EEG cap. It was mostly covered in sunlight, but the tip was still in shade. A small triangle of fabric was within his reach.
“It’s the persistence of memory,” Celeste said. “That’s what I mean.”
Joe walked toward it. The cap was only one step away.
“He’s getting so close, Zag,” said Leandro. “Do you think he’ll make those last few steps into the sunshine to save himself?”
He wouldn’t be able to make those steps. But he didn’t have to.
“He’s as rooted as one stark tree,” she said.
That didn’t make any more sense than her comment about the persistence of memory. His fingers closed on the cap. He snatched it back out of the sunshine and pulled the wheelchair to the back of the room. It was darker there. It felt safer, although he knew it was more deadly. The chlorine smell grew stronger with each step backward, his death pumping quietly out of the heating vent.
“What are you talking about?” Leandro asked Celeste. Apparently, it didn’t make sense to him either.
“Just something I saw once,” she said. “A tree in front of the sea.”
“At the summer house?” Leandro sounded uncertain.
Joe clutched the cap. He didn’t know how to work it. He’d had it designed to respond to thoughts in Celeste’s mind, and she would have set it up to control the wheelchair using her own images. He had no idea what those were.
“Joe knows what I mean,” she said.
He didn’t, but her words brought him up short. He replayed the last things she had said. A tree in front of the sea. One stark tree. The persistence of memory.
In a flash, he knew. She was telling him what he needed to know to make the cap work. It was from a conversation they’d had a long time ago. She was talking about Salvador Dali’s painting The Persistence of Memory, the one with the melting clocks. Clocks were the clue.