“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
The fire and the ice twist and dance and consume us both as the basement room comes back into focus.
“What are you—” Ezekiel asks, but he’s too late. “Stop!” He collides with me, knocking me off my feet and ripping me away from my mother’s still form. His eyes are fully black as he snarls. “What did you do?”
The room around us is so bright it hurts, and the machine’s noise shakes the floor, like some part of the gears is off balance.
When the light clears, my mother is gone. Vanished. There’s no body on the floor, or in the air, or anywhere. But it’s not over. The only way to finish this is to destroy the supervillain roaring in my face. Ezekiel’s eyes are still black, and his face is contorted with rage. His hand is on my throat, and I mirror the gesture, squeezing tight just beneath his jaw. He said it was all energy. Me, him. Even Indigo. And it turns out, now that I know how, I amverygood at moving energy from one place to another.
I close my eyes and open up. I hardly even need to flip the switch. A long exhale while I focus on Indigo’s power clashing up against mine is all it takes. Unlike at the window at Ziro Hall, I don’t fight it now. I let it in, even as it makes me gag. It’s not like the others. It’s so much more. Bigger. Uglier. His is a poison meant to kill.
“What are you doing?” His voice is a snarl. It hardly sounds like Ezekiel anymore.
Honestly, I’m not sure. It hasn’t even been a week since I learned how to do this. Not really. But all I know is Ezekiel has to be stopped. Why couldn’t he have grieved like the rest of us? There’s throwing yourself into your work and then there’s ripping through the fabric of time and mortality.
“I’m sorry,” I say. I am. But my whole childhood was spent being told that it was our responsibility to make the hard decisions. That we had to keep people safe, even when thepersonal cost was too high. And I could never do it. I couldn’t be the person I’d been told from the beginning I was destined to be. Until now. I’m not afraid of the pain. Not even afraid of dying. I’ve done it so many times now, that kind of fear is a distant memory.
I let it in. All of it. The darkness. The rage and despair.
Indigo is like venom. I choke on it, but when he tries to pull away, I tighten my grip on him, using both hands to hold him—and Ezekiel’s body—in place. The inky darkness is erasing the features I knew, dissolving it all into shadow. For a second, I panic. I can’t hold on to shadows. I try to pull Indigo in faster before he escapes. Then the shell of Ezekiel is gone, and my fingers slip through the emptiness. I scramble backward. Indigo follows, swelling to consume the light in the room.
No, he’s not following. I’m taking him with me. It’s like we’re connected, and even as he seems to get bigger and bigger around me, I can sense more and more of him inside me, writhing like an animal in a trap. I can practically taste him in the back of my throat and feel him in my veins. I know how it happened. How Ezekiel let Indigo and his sadness win, taking him to places no hero ever would. It takes all my effort to hold on to Indigo. I am the trap, like the light box two years ago, and just like the box, I’m breaking apart. Ezekiel would never have been able to fully withstand him.
I stumble toward the machine. The floor shudders beneath me. The empty chamber where my mother was is still glowing. The blue light shimmers and blinks, flashing like a warning.
Energy has to go somewhere. Ezekiel has poured four years of death and grief into this experiment, and now it needs to be contained.
The machine sounds like a monster demanding to be fed as Indigo makes one last bid for freedom, but I don’t think wecould untangle ourselves now even if I wanted to. We’re going in together.
Stepping into the machine is like stepping into a cheese grater. The connection with Indigo is torn apart, leaving me with the sensation that my chest has been ripped open. The inky black swirls away down some kind of cosmic drain. I’m left alone, watching as lights and colours spin around me. For a minute, I can see it all. Every day. Every night. Jasper’s lopsided grin, and the stain of his blood on my hands. The flash of bus lights. Then further back. My mother’s funeral. Her with Ezekiel, sitting together like they’re settling in for a night of television. I’m not even sure that ever happened. Maybe it’s what I wished for them, if their lives hadn’t been so defined by ambition and obligation to a greater purpose.
“Are you coming?” a voice that sounds like Jasper’s asks over my shoulder. “You didn’t forget, did you?”
He smiles as I turn. I take his hand. He looks like the first time I saw him. Charming. Handsome. Optimistic. This is the Jasper I want. He has to survive so we can be like this together.
“I would never forget you.”
The world blasts into shards of infinite blue and white, taking us with it.
CHAPTER 23
Iwake up in a white room. Feels like I’ve been hit by a transdimensional bus. Maybe a few of them. I run my tongue over my cracked lips and taste blood. When I stretch, my muscles feel like piano wires, and several joints pop audibly.
“Take it easy,” a voice says. It crackles worse than my joints. I need to blink several times before the face to my left comes into focus. Dark lashes, fire engine–red hair streaked with black. Red cat-eye glasses. But it’s the way Clarissa cringes in the corner, whining softly like a frightened cocker spaniel, that gives me the confirmation I need.
“April,” I say, swallowing a few times, trying to find some spit to lubricate my throat. “I’m at SPAM.”
“You’d rather be at City General?” she asks with an arched eyebrow. “I’m sure there are police there right now looking for anyone who was in the building when your lab spontaneously exploded last night.”
Individually, I understand the words she’s used. But the whole picture is a completely different story.
“The lab?”
“Ezekiel,” Clarissa says, rushing forward. “They only found two of you when they started digging. Did you see Ezekiel?”
The last time I saw Ezekiel, he was trying to kill me. I shudder at the memory. There is still the feeling of Indigo inside me, like it’s stuck to my cell walls, polluting me.
I’m going to throw up. I push onto my elbows as nausea swamps me. April and Clarissa scurry to respond, and I close my eyes, fighting to maintain a little dignity. At the last second, there’s a pop and a sizzle, and when I open my eyes, the hospital room is dark and my sheets are stiff like they’ve been hung out to dry on a cold day. At least I haven’t vomited.
