“Morgan, I can’t?—”
He may not be scared, but I can’t stop my heart from pounding in my chest, even as he coughs his life away.
“It’s okay,” I say, helping him lie down completely. I crouch on the floor so we’re eye to eye. “It’s okay. We’ve got this.”
He smiles at me with bloody teeth, and I wonder if this is how he felt all those times he had to watch me die on a sidewalk. Because it really sucks.
“It’s okay,” I say again.
“I’m ready,” he says. Panic bubbles inside me and I shake my head, but he holds my hand. “We agreed. Start again. It’ll be fine.”
I take a long breath. His heat is already leaching into me, even as I breathe out puffs of condensed air.
“I’ll see you soon,” I say. This will be easy. Just like last night in the bathroom. Like falling asleep. I put my hand on his chest. He groans, and I whisper apologies as I reach inside myself and find the tip of frost that is already becoming familiar.
Jasper is cold all the way through when I finally let go, but somehow knowing that I’ll be at Wench waiting for him soon doesn’t make the whole thing any better.
I glance at the laptop and the image of Ezekiel’s car. It doesn’t make sense. Why would he lie to me? And more than once?
The minutes tick by. I should get on with it. Back to Wench. But I can’t help myself when I go back to the computer. I watch the motionless car for a long time before finally clicking through other feeds.
There are no cameras in the room in the basement, but there are in the hall. The footage is so uneventful that I set it at high speed. I scan through days of footage before the first person appears. A janitor mops the floor. I wait for him to scrawl a hidden message on the wall or drag a body through one of the doors, but he finishes mopping and goes back to the elevator.
I go back further. Lots of emptiness. Then a man in a suit. I expect it to be Indigo, but as he’s about to step through the door, he glances back once, and my heart stops.
Ezekiel.
He’s there a lot. Up and down the hall. Through the door to the last room and back. He’s always alone. The timestamp I’m looking at is months after we moved to the primary assembly wing. But he can’t have built what’s behind that door by himself. I never see him carrying anything. So where did all those parts come from?
Questions for another day. Another attempt. Jasper’s waiting for me. Next time, we won’t leave the diner. Travelling takes too much time. Hopefully Vee has a cord to charge my laptop. No wonder I was never able to manage more than a little spark. It wasn’t my power at all. Like trying to run batteries in the wrong alignment.
Just as I’m about to close my eyes, though, a beam of light passes over me, shining through the window, before it arcs away. A car turns into the driveway, heading toward the main house. On instinct, I duck, but the car is already pulling into the garage.
“Jasper?” I say, though he can’t hear me. “Someone’s here.”
Ezekiel. Ezekiel is here. I glance at the time. Just after nine. On the first day, I was still awake, tweaking slides I’m starting to think I’ll never get to present. Ezekiel should still be at the office.
Is he Indigo? He couldn’t have betrayed my mother like that. Why would he have helped her and Vee build the light box to trap Indigo if it meant trapping himself? Unless he’s the reason it failed? Maybe the box was never going to work but would give him deniability when Indigo killed my mother? But that’s impossible. There were too many times where Indigo was across the world and Ezekiel was here. There were witnesses. Business meetings. There’s no way he could be both of them.
After this is all over, I hope I stay dead the final time long enough to at least get a decent nap out of the deal.
Lights come on in the house. My pulse pounds. I promised Jasper we’d do this together, but all my intuition says that something is wrong and that I need to know what Ezekiel is up to. I’ve spent the last two years working by his side, and to my knowledge he’s never lied to me. Why he’d start now, at the same time everything else goes haywire, feels all kinds of wrong.
I mutter an apologetic promise to Jasper and leave the guesthouse.
Sneaking across your own front yard like you’re trying to break into the house is weird. Even weirder is picking your way through the dogwood underneath the windows, hoping no one notices you being a creep.
Ezekiel is in his study, illuminated by the brass lamp on his desk. He’s on the phone, and I can’t hear what he’s saying, but he looks relaxed, with his tie loosened around his neck and the top button of his shirt undone. Is he checking in with some henchman of his own to see if I’ve died yet? Whoever he’s talking to, the conversation doesn’t seem very urgent. He might as well be confirming travel plans, a busy philanthropist squeezing in a few more hours of productivity at home after a long day at the office.
I’m being paranoid. Too many attempts at the same day have gone to my head. Watching my boyfriend die three times in a row—facilitating that death twice—is a big ask. I’m seeing things that don’t exist. What does Ezekiel gain from my death? We’ve essentially been brothers in arms—stepfather and stepson in arms sounds awkward—for the last two years. What does betraying me now get him?
Ezekiel’s presence at home must be explained by some kind of butterfly effect, like Jasper said. Every time Jasper and I behave differently, tiny ripples cause other things to happen. I don’t get hit by a bus, which means one of the passengers makes it home on time. I don’t call Clarissa to whine about my date, so she has time to call Ezekiel earlier to tell him about the data breach. Maybe tonight there’s no data breach at all and Ezekiel was able to come home early.
I should get back to Jasper. We can go see Ezekiel at the office together and ask him what he knows. If he says nothing, we can trust that, right?
My foot slips on a rock in the garden. Tumbling forward, I put my hands out and bang against the window frame before I drop to the ground.
Smooth. Very smooth. I glance up at the window, and the light has gone out. Great. Ezekiel will be out here to investigate any minute now and find me lurking in the bushes. I keep my head low as I get back up, risking one last peek through the window. What I see has my foot slipping again.
