She’s going to die anyway, part of me whispered.
“But she could kill you before she does.”
I swung my head in the direction of my voice. I stared at my reflection in one of the steel drawers. She—I—shrugged my shoulders as if to say, What can you do?
My arms trembled with the effort to hold myself up, but I would not let go until I had an answer. “How do I find Noah?” I asked.
Kells was scrabbling away from the door, away from me, but kept slipping on her own blood. I pulled at her legs, and her skin seemed to come off in my hand. No. Not her skin, her stockings. “What did you do to him? Tell me.”
She didn’t answer. She stared at me and then, without warning, dove for the syringe again.
I slid with her, and in a burst of strength pulled myself on top of her and pushed down on her chest, on her neck. She gasped for air as I wrestled the syringe from her curled fist.
I couldn’t leave her alive. Not after everything. I couldn’t take that chance. But as I held the syringe, I realized I could make death painless for her, just like she’d said she would do for me.
But was what she’d done to me painless? She’d hurt me before tonight, before today. She had tortured me. She’d said she had her reasons, but then, didn’t everyone? Did reasons matter?
She was mouthing something—praying, maybe? I hadn’t seen that coming.
When I’d thought about death before, it had been so abstract. I’d thought things but I’d never felt them. But this, this was real. My face was just inches from hers. I could hear her heart beating weakly in her chest with the effort to pump what blood still remained in her body. I could smell the sweat on her skin and almost taste her blood in my mouth, hot and metallic.
The truth was, I had known since the second I’d woken up in Horizons, since the second she’d confessed what she’d done to me, since she’d showed me the list, that if given the chance, I would kill her.
“Don’t worry,” I said to Dr. Kells. “This will only hurt a little.”
12
I HALF-STUMBLED, HALF-CRAWLED ALONG THE metal walkway as the feeling returned to my legs. My hands were scored from pulling myself up the grated catwalk. When I reached a fork in the walkway, I looked left, then right, and saw Jamie and Stella standing maybe a hundred feet away.
I didn’t have to say a word before they began to run toward me. Stella slipped in her socked feet, and she grabbed the railing to steady herself, dropping some files she’d been carrying under her arm, but soon they were by my side. They didn’t ask what had happened. They didn’t say anything at all. Each of them took a shoulder, and hauled me up. They half-carried me out of the hallway that led up a brutal, narrow flight of stairs and eventually outdoors.
“We got worried you weren’t coming out,” Jamie finally said as the three of us collapsed, panting, against the concrete building we’d just escaped from.
“What about Ebola?” I asked breathlessly.
Jamie coughed and wheezed, then said, “What’s a little hemorrhagic fever between friends?”
I smiled, despite everything.
“Guys?” Stella asked. “We should probably not stay here.”
Probably not.
“We need to hide,” Jamie said. “Until you can walk.”
He was right of course, but we didn’t have too many options. The building I practically crawled out of had to be the uppermost level of the maintenance shed. It was mostly hidden by trees, but it was nearly dawn and they weren’t that thick. We could even see Horizons—part of the treatment facility, anyway—in the distance, on No Name Island. Unfortunately, that meant that someone standing on No Name Island might be able to see us, too.
I looked down at my useless legs, smeared with blood and dirt. I felt a twinge of panic. “What if I can’t walk?” I swallowed thickly. “What if—what if—”
Stella knelt at eye level. “What does it feel like?” she asked gently.
“Like parts of my feet and legs are just dead, but other parts—other parts are stinging.”
“I remember feeling like that once, in there,” Jamie said, glancing at the closed door. “I woke up and couldn’t feel my legs.”
“What did she do to you?” I asked, but I was scared to hear his answer. Why would she make it so we couldn’t walk? What had she done to us?
“It wasn’t Kells, it was Wayne,” Jamie said. “And he wasn’t exactly forthcoming.”
Not comforting. But at least Jamie could walk now. Which meant I would again, too. I hoped.
“How long did it take to wear off?”
Jamie shrugged. “There were no clocks, not that I saw anyway, so I’m not sure, but I think an hour or two maybe? I felt strange after . . . like my limbs just floated away—like they were clouds.”
“A spinal block, maybe?” Stella suggested. “So you couldn’t feel what they were doing to you.”
“You know this how?” I asked.
“My mom’s a nurse.”
“Can I just take a second to say, I am so happy they’re dead,” Jamie said, running a hand over his scalp, then over his face. He peeked at me through two of his fingers. “She is dead, right?”
Oh yes. “Yes.”
“What happened in there?” Jamie asked me.
“It wasn’t really Noah. It was just his voice. Kells recorded it, played it, played me.”
“So, ’twas a trap?”
“Yup,” I said. “You were right.” I felt his hand on my shoulder.
“I’m so sorry, Mara,” Jamie said.
“It’s okay.”
“No, about—about Noah, I mean.”
“He’s not dead.” Jamie said nothing. I pushed myself up until my spine was straight. “I don’t know how I know it, but I do. He’s out there, somewhere.”
“Then why isn’t he here?”
That was a very good question. One I would do anything to answer.
“Kells said the building collapsed,” Jamie started.
“She told me that too. But that doesn’t mean it’s true.”
There was no way to know without going back there. But even if it had collapsed, there was more to Horizons than just the treatment facility, we now knew. And if Jamie survived, and Stella survived, I had to believe Noah survived too. He was the only one of us who could heal. He had to be alive.
“Do you still have the tape?” I asked. Jamie’s forehead creased. “The tape Jude made me?”
“Stella had it last, I think,” Jamie said.
I spun around. “Where’d she go?”
Just then, a rusty hinge creaked. Our heads snapped up, but it was only Stella, emerging from the building holding three bags. One was Jamie’s, another must’ve been Stella’s, and the last one—the last one belonged to Noah.
An image of him appeared in my mind, of Noah standing with that bag over his shoulder, guitar case in hand, dripping wet from the rain, waiting to be led into the Horizons Treatment Center so he could save me. My heart leapt. “Where’d you find this one?”
“She kept our things—boxes of stuff—in a little room near the morgue,” Stella said, handing the bags to me and Jamie. “I guess if we died or something, she wanted to make sure we were in our own clothes and not hospital gowns or whatever. Stage the scene.”
I wondered what she’d done with my things. How she’d planned on staging that scene.
I gripped Noah’s bag with what was probably excessive force. “How did you know this was—” No, not “was.” Is. “How did you know this is his?”
“There were cubbies labeled with our names. And his guitar was next to it.”
His guitar. He wouldn’t have left that behind. An ache rose in my throat, but I swallowed it back down.
“Did you look in the morgue?” Jamie asked Stella.
“Um . . . ” She shot me a nervous glance. I both did and didn’t want her to answer.
“No,” she finally said.
“One of us should.” Jamie’s voice was soft.
I shook my head. “Noah isn’t in there.”