Through the darkness I can see more of them now, slipping between the trees with jittery, arachnoid movements.
“Are we in danger?” I ask.
“We’re always in danger.” She gestures beyond the fence. “There are only so many of them we can contain. If that’s even what we’re doing.”
She turns and faces me, her brutal beauty searing into me, her features sharp as icicles. “You’re not going to let me come back, are you?”
“Not all the way,” I say. “No.”
“You’ll never be able to do what I do.” It’s a threat. “You’ll never be able to be me.”
“I… don’t want to be you.”
Suddenly she slaps me hard across the face. “You need to wake up now.”
With a scream, I surged awake and found myself alone somewhere dark and cold. Scrambling to my feet, I realized I was in the cabana basement. But where were the others? Had I lost them during my hallucinatory sojourn? Or were they somewhere just out of sight?
I held my aching head as I tried to gather my senses. Whatever I’d just experienced, it wasn’t a dream. It wasn’t reality exactly, either, at least not reality as I knew it. I’d been somewhereelse, some in-between space, and in it I’d learned the truth I’d been blocking all along. Charles was dead. I killed him. I never meant to, but I had. And although a grief tore at me, eviscerating me with its filthy talons, I now knew what I had to do. Like Isabelle said, I was the code. I just had to get to the control room.
Still somewhat unsteady on my feet, I managed to climb the stairs to the patio garden. The stars were still shining, but the moon was sinking into the western horizon as I walked through the French doors to my cabana. As quickly as I could, I changed, pulling on some sturdy boots, and then I set out.
But if I expected to make this last leg of my journey alone, I was to be sorely disappointed. They were all out there, standing on the path outside my cabana door. They looked awful. Aspen’s eyes were red and swollen. Finn was holding her tightly and seemed to be crying himself. Lexi looked pale, almost like she was dissociating, and Dorian just stared at his feet, clutching a travel mug.
“You know,” I said.
Finn nodded, grief infusing his every movement. “You were rambling, pretty disoriented, but we could make out most of what you said. We know about Charles.”
I bit my lip to try to stanch the flow of tears. “I was wrong about him,” I said. “He never betrayed me. He never betrayed anyone. He was trying to broker a deal to save us.”
I knew if I kept going, I was going to break down. I missed him terribly and knew that pain would never leave me. He was the only person I’d ever really trusted, and now that he was gone and I was truly alone in the world, I didn’t want to pretend otherwise.
“I need to get to the control room,” I said, and I surprisedeven myself with the coldness of my tone. “I think I should go alone.”
“No,” said Finn quickly. “We should stick together.”
I tried to resist, but Aspen pulled away from Finn and wiped her eyes. “He’s right. At this point, there’s safety in numbers. This is our one goal. We can’t let something happen to you right before we accomplish it.”
I had a bad feeling about it—the part of me that was Isabelle preferred to work alone—but I nodded and was turning to go when Dorian touched me gently on the shoulder.
“Here, drink this. It will help,” he said, and he handed me the travel mug.
Together we made our way out into the woods, out to the temple. When we were almost to the steps, I went to take a sip from the mug, but paused and sniffed. I stared into the liquid, my heart breaking just a little, and then dropped my arm to my side without drinking.
As we were entering the temple, I reached out and placed my hand on Aspen’s arm, stopping her. Silently I held out my tea for her to smell. Shock swelled in her eyes, and she glanced at Dorian. A silent communication passed between us, and then I set the tea on the edge of a display and caught back up with the group.
We made our way through the rest of the great hall and down to the observatory. A key card and thumbprint let us into the control room, but when the door buzzed open and we saw what lay before us, my heart leapt into my throat and a small scream escaped me.
It was chaos, annihilation. It looked like someone had taken a hatchet to the control panels. Screens were smashed; wires had been wrenched out like intestines splayed out mid-autopsy. It nolonger mattered that I had the code, not if the system it enabled me to access had been destroyed.
“Oh god,” Lexi said, looking around at the absolute orgy of destruction.
“Fuck,” whispered Dorian.
Aspen’s mouth hung open in horror.
Finn’s eyes were wild. “What do we do now? What the fuck are we gonna do?”
Lexi was starting to hyperventilate. “Oh my god. Oh my god. How did this happen?”
