The fanatical light in Mary’s eyes faltered. She lowered her gaze to where Nicholas crouched in the grass.
“Give it to me,” said Sophie, holding out a hand. “Please, Mary. You don’t want to throw your life away for him.”
“Do it,” Nicholas hissed. “Light it up. We’ll burn together, you and me, Mary.”
“Mary, no. Give me the—”
Craaaack!
Mary flew backward, the detonator falling from her hands, a bullet planted between her eyes. She landed heavily on the grass and lay still, her eyes stretched open, her mouth contorted in a scream she didn’t live long enough to give. A thin line of blood drained down her face and pooled in her eye socket.
Strauss smiled. Actually smiled.
For a moment, everyone stared at the body in shock. Sophie gagged on a surge of bile.
Then, with a roar of rage, Moira fired at Strauss and missed, and everyone left on the hilltop sprang into chaos. The guards took up firing stances all over the place, but seemed uncertain whom to fire at. Nicholas crawled toward the detonator with fiendish speed despite his shattered, bloody arm, and Sophie scrambled in an attempt to beat him to it. Meanwhile, Moira and Strauss ducked behind palms and took wild shots at each other that sent splinters of wood flying; one of Strauss’s bullets hit the glass doors to the atrium, and they shattered in a magnificent, glittering crash.
Nicholas reached the detonator first, but Sophie was a breath away. She slammed into him, sending them both hard into the dirt. He threw her off and lunged away, but she grabbed his long hair and yanked him back.
Jim charged toward them and slid in as if they were sitting on home plate. He collared Nicholas, trying to get a stranglehold on him, when Nicholas clamped his teeth onto Sophie’s hurt shoulder. She howled and fell back, giving him the chance to deliver a cutting elbow jab to Jim’s jaw and breaking Jim’s hold on him. He leaped for the detonator, but not before Lux scooped it up. She danced backward, out of Nicholas’s reach, then tripped over Mary’s body and toppled down. Before she could get back on her feet, Nicholas was on her. She caught him in the stomach with her feet and threw him over her head, then rolled smoothly into a crouch. Nicholas landed heavily, howling at the pain in his arm.
“Whoa,” said Sophie, her eyes wide.
“I know, right?” Jim’s voice was hard. “Talk about teenage mutant ninja blonde. Lux, don’t let him touch that detonator.”
She nodded, clutching the detonator in both hands. Behind them, they heard a loud click.
“Ha! You’re empty!” Moira cried, and Sophie spun to see Strauss standing in the open, her gun at her side. Moira advanced on her. “And I’ve still got one left, Victoria.”
Strauss rolled her eyes. “Fine. Your round, Moira. But the board will have the final say.”
“Oh, I’m sure they will,” said Moira. “I’m looking forward to telling them all about how you shoved my Vitros into a gas chamber.”
“I hope you’ll add that one of those same Vitros turned that gas chamber into a giant bomb.” Strauss dropped her gun and held up her hands. “If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather not be around when that thing goes off. And it will. Whether or not your little psychopath sets it off, it will go off. The place is full of explosive gas, and all it will take is a spark. This whole hilltop will go up in flames.”
She turned her back to Moira and walked briskly down the hill to where the others stood, without so much as a backward look.
“She’s right,” Moira said, turning to them. “Let’s go, Nicky. Let’s—”
“You have one shot? Well, I’ve got eight.” He waved his pistol.
“Enough,” she said impatiently. “You’re bleeding out. Let me help you!”
“No, let me help you!” He struggled to his feet, wheezing and pale. “Let me help you understand what’s going to happen here. First, you’re going to back up, all three of you. Now.”
Moira, Sophie, and Jim backed away, hands raised.
“Toss the gun, Moira.”
She dropped her pistol.
“I’ve reached a decision,” he announced. “Do you want to hear it? I’ve decided to shoot all three of you. That’s right. No more games, no more talking, no more surprises. Just pop, pop, pop! And then Lux and I fly off into the sunset—oh, no, precious. Don’t even think about moving.” He held up a hand in warning to Lux. She was several paces away, just far enough to be out of reach.
“You act like you don’t care,” said Moira. “You tell yourself that—and maybe, for the most part it’s true. But you’re not as lost as you think you are. You do care, don’t you? You care about Sophie.” She looked at her daughter, then back at Nicholas, her eyes moist. “Your trouble isn’t that you can’t care; it’s that you don’t know how to care. Luring her here, these games you’re playing, this is your way of expressing that deep down you do feel a connection. You did all of this for her, right? To be with her? To find some way into her world?”
Nicholas sneered. “I did all of this for me. You see what you want to, that’s all.”
“I’m trying to make you see it! You aren’t beyond saving, Nicky! Maybe we assumed too much about you when we called you a psychopath. Maybe there is still time—”
“I’m tired, Moira,” he said, and he looked it. Bags under his eyes, shadows beneath his cheekbones and over his temples. “I’m so very tired. Tired of this place, of this life, of your constant nagging. Just . . . enough.” He raised the gun, and Moira threw herself to the side, but not before he fired; the bullet caught her in the back, and she fell with a cry of pain.
Sophie’s chest seized; she felt herself begin to hyperventilate. No, no, no, got to stay focused!
“Stop it!” she yelled. “Just stop! You don’t have to be this way! You don’t have to be this—this monster.”
“Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it? Everyone always blames the monster—but no one ever blames the one who created it. Isn’t that right?” He sneered at Moira’s limp form. “Tell me, who is the monster? The creation or the creator? It has to start somewhere.”
“You can’t blame someone else for your own actions,” Sophie said, her eyes slipping to her mom. She’s breathing! Now if I can just keep him talking. The guards below must have heard the shot. Surely they’d come running.
“Oh, fine. Blame whoever you want. While you can. Which isn’t for much longer. Hmm . . . who’s next?” He swung the pistol steadily until it was pointing at Jim, who stood with clenched fists and a scalding glare, but he said nothing.
Sophie looked from the gun to Jim, and everything he had once been to her—friend, protector, partner in crime—roared through her head, a maelstrom of memories and emotions, as if the last ten years had never happened. But it was different now, the way she felt toward him. He wasn’t just a boy she’d take the blame for when he put grapes in the microwave to watch them explode. He was a boy she’d take a bullet for. The thought struck her like a punch, leaving her breathless, amazed. She reached out and took his hand, stepping closer until they were shoulder to shoulder. She felt him stiffen, then his fingers tightened around hers, and, ludicrously perhaps, she felt safe. Calm. Whether this sudden surety flowed from Jim or from their entangled fingers she didn’t know—all she knew was that she would hold his hand no matter what came—bullets or explosions or poison gas—and she never wanted to let go.
If Nicholas’s eyes were burning before, now they raged with reckless abandonment as he stared at Jim and Sophie’s interlocked hands. He was beyond reason. He craved revenge and blood. What could you say to someone like that? What words could possibly mend the wrongs he felt had been done to him—especially when she knew that in a dark, twisted way, he was right?
She couldn’t look at him. Couldn’t bear the fury in his eyes, so she looked back at Jim and saw that his angry mask had slipped away and been replaced by horror—he wasn??
?t looking at Nicholas or the gun pointed at him, but at Lux.
Sophie saw what Jim saw.
Her heart suspended in midbeat.
“Lux,” Jim said, “don’t you dare. Listen to me! You have to do what I tell you—so don’t you dare.”
THIRTY-SEVEN
LUX
“Don’t you dare,” he said.
She fought it. The urge to obey was overwhelming, consuming, a roar in her skull. Her finger trembled on the switch. Her brain vomited images of fire and burning and heat and all the things that would unleash if she flicked the switch. She knew the words: bomb, explode, fire, pain. They sent a torrent of images through her head, images so terrible they made her want to claw out her own eyes.
But if I don’t, Nicholas will shoot him.
He’ll die.
She had seconds. Not even seconds—milliseconds.
Her mind was a battlefield. She stood still as a statue but inside she rioted. She raged against the chip, against the endless, infinite stream of numbers, the ones and the zeros that began and ended every thought, that burned on the inside of her eyelids and beeped in her ears. She could hear the chip in her brain, hear it whirring and processing, spitting out words, gathering data into neat packages and storing it away, reaching out with electric hands to every corner of her brain, scouring her from the inside. It clicked and murmured, hissed and sang; it had been there all along, every moment of her brief life, but until Moira had mentioned it she’d never known it was there. She’d thought the chip was her, and she was the chip. But no. If she concentrated very, very hard, she could find the line between them, fine as it was.
She pried at that line now, fighting back, pushing with everything she had within her, battering at the impulses it sent zinging through her body. If she weakened for the slightest breath of a moment, it would take control of her and she would obey Jim and she wouldn’t flick the switch and then Nicholas would shoot him—she could see his finger tightening on the trigger now—because she was moving, thinking, seeing at a speed outside human capacity, processing the way a computer processed, drawing in data and spinning it around and translating it at the speed of light.
It was so strong, the urge to obey. It pushed at her from the inside, battered at the lining of her skull, pushed at her eyes.
Don’t you dare don’t you dare don’t you dare Lux you have to do what I tell you so don’t you dare.
She fought it.
Tears sprang into her eyes with the effort.
She bit her lip so hard that blood ran over her chin—no, it came from her nose.
“Lux!” Jim yelled. “You’re bleeding! Sophie—why is she bleeding?”
Nicholas had turned around now. He looked at her hands, at her trembling finger, and his eyes widened. He knew. He met her eyes and—she saw it, she knew she saw it, but that didn’t mean she could believe it—he nodded, a tiny eyelash of a nod.
You can be your own person, Sophie had said. Sophie. Her sister. I can help you. Please—let me help you be free.
And even Jim had said it, so long, long ago: Lux, you don’t have to obey me.
But he didn’t understand. None of them did. They thought it was so easy, so simple to just say no but it wasn’t like that at all it was like it was like it is like pushing back the ocean like swallowing the sky like turning yourself inside out and it hurts hurts hurts—
Her vision blurred. Dark spots dotted her eyes. Her throat clogged, stopping air from flowing in and out, and her ears rang with a high, irritating buzz. But she pushed back. She fought, struggled, screamed aloud, her mouth stretching wide and she tasted blood and tears as she screamed to the sky and when the scream had all gone out of her she said it:
“NO.”
A click. A sigh. Her brain ran backward. The chip was shutting down. Her mind was shutting down. Her thoughts blinked out one by one. She felt her very cells turn inside out, wither, implode. I can turn it off, she thought. I can turn it off.
She smiled.
She looked up and saw the stars, a million billion sprinkles of light.
She was free.
She looked down at the two people she loved best in the world, and she said one last word to their astonished faces:
“Run.”
And then she flipped the switch.
THIRTY-EIGHT
JIM
Before he could move, before he could react, before he could even comprehend what had happened, Sophie grabbed his arm and pulled him toward the cliff’s edge.
Seconds passed in the form of years. He saw everything with dazzling clarity: the blood running from Lux’s nose, the swift, slight brush of her finger over the switch on the detonator, the sudden look of peace in her eyes.
But Sophie pulled him away from all of it. She sprinted to the cliff and dragged him with her. It seemed to take years to reach the edge. But why . . . ?
“Sophie!” He skidded to a halt, just in time, pinwheeled on the edge, and grabbed her to keep her from toppling over. “Are you—”
“JUMP!”
She leaped, arcing into a swan dive.
“—CRAZY?” Jim yelled after her.
Then the blast caught him.
He weighed no more than a scrap of paper. The wave of heat flung him outward into open space; he flipped through the air like a paper clip from the flick of a giant index finger. Through space and darkness, moon and sea wheeling over each other in a dizzying, sickening blur until at last he crashed into the ocean.
The collision drove the air from his lungs with a shattering smack. His chest and stomach and face stung. The dark water sucked him down, pressed him against the ocean floor. He struggled to turn himself upright, managing to plant his feet on the sand and then push himself upward. He exploded out of the water in a fit of coughing to find the sky was on fire.
“Sophie!” he gasped, casting about. Burning debris rained from the sky like a shower of tiny flaming asteroids, littering the water around him. The blast from the explosion had thrown him far from the cliff, possibly saving his life. If he’d fallen to the foot of the cliff he’d have been killed on the rocks.
Sophie had dived before him, though. She might not have landed as far out.
He swam with all his strength toward the shoreline. Watching for any sign of her. The water burned orange around him as if he were swimming in a pool of fire. He kept calling her name, over and over until he was hoarse, choking on ash and salt water.
He dived underwater and searched, but saw only a confusion of light and sand and patches of darkness. When he broke surface again, he was much closer to the shore.
“Sophie!”
The body was floating a few yards away, facedown. He swam hard toward it, grabbed it, and turned it over—then yelled and let go. It was the dead Vitro boy who’d fallen over the cliff. His eyes were still open, and the side of his head was bashed in where it had hit the rocks. Jim’s stomach somersaulted and he gagged. He swam in the other direction, letting the body float off to sea.
The waves tossed him and crashed down on him, pulling him beneath the water. When he finally reached the shallows he stood up and wandered back and forth, bracing for each wave, coughing so hard his chest ached. Burning embers rained from the sky; would they never stop?
Lux had defied him.
She had looked as if she’d half killed herself in doing it. Her face white, her eyes nearly popping from their sockets, blood running from her nose.
But she did it. She broke free. Somehow, though sheer willpower, she broke the thread between them, snapped his hold on her. He could have cheered, could have celebrated with her— but she’d blown herself up, and Nicholas with her.
He cursed Lux as he searched for her sister. It wasn’t until he dragged himself, weary and aching, onto the shore that he realized the salt he tasted on his lips wasn’t entirely from the sea.
The current had swept him around the island, tossing him onto an unfamiliar shore, on the eastern side if he was reading the sky correctly. Most of the stars above were blacked out by the plume of smoke pouring upward from the Vitro building. He could see where the smoke began, off toward the west, behind the trees. This shore was deserted save for an old broken pier and the flock of gulls sleeping on its rotting posts.
He lay on the sand, panting, chest heaving, mind struggling to come to grips with the world around him. Surely this can’t be real. The night had a surreal quality to it, half dream, half hallucination. He felt too disconnected from his senses for this to be reality. The colors were too dim, the sounds too distant, the sand beneath his hands too coarse and hot. Like ashes and embers.
He jerked to his feet, then stumbled across the sand like a drunk as the world spun around him. He blinked repeatedly to wash the ash from his eyes and to make the whirling lights and colors stop long enough for him to get his bearings.
He tripped over a rock and landed heavily on his face, getting a mouthful of sand. Propping himself up on his elbows, he spat out the grit and looked back.
“Sophie!” It wasn’t a rock at all. She was lying in a crumpled heap; the surf rushed around her, slurping and nibbling at her hungrily. The same current that had left him here must have carried her also.
Jim gently turned her over, called her name. She groaned and tried to push him away, but she was alive. Dizzy with relief, he pulled her against his chest and murmured into her hair, feeling the pounding of her heart against his own. “Wake up, Sophie. Please.”
“Umph. You’re squeezing too tight!”
Embarrassed, he released her at arm’s length.
“You okay?”
“Oh, God,” she moaned. “That was a bad idea.”
“You must have hit the shallows. You’re lucky to be alive. You’re completely insane.”
“Yeah . . . What about Lux? Did she get away?”