“Let me go!” Nate yelled over the sound of Juniper’s terrified moans. He jerked his hand senselessly, ignoring the searing pain at his wrist, caught up in the momentum of her fear. “Cut these rotting ties, Juniper!”
The door fell inward, slamming down with a sound that vibrated through Nate’s bones. He drew his knees up to shield himself and watched—stretched out and helpless—as a crowd poured into the room like ants erupting from a stirred mound. They surged over the mangled bodies of the guards Nate had seen at the door before. Juniper slithered across the floor and crawled into his bunk, shaking so hard it rattled his bones.
A box of chem broke open and spilled across the floor. Snarling, stumbling people fell to their knees, palming the little white pills. Shoving them into their mouths and pockets.
Fiends.
Nate’s blood went cold. They were all chem fiends.
And they’d found Agatha’s stash.
A burly man grabbed Juniper and wrenched her out of the bed like she weighed nothing. She screamed, reaching for Nate, but there was nothing he could do but kick his legs out at the man. Unable to move, Nate watched the man bury his teeth in the soft skin at Juniper’s bare arm. Juniper screamed and sagged in his grip, her eyes going blank, as if someone had snipped a wire inside of her.
“Nothing’s happening,” the man snarled, spitting her blood down his chin. He dropped her, and she crashed against the floor, her head snapping onto the hard concrete. She didn’t move.
The fiend turned to him.
Terror washed over Nate like icy rain. He coiled his legs up, prepared to kick and fight, but he already knew it was hopeless. The man was huge, and Nate couldn’t use his hands—let alone a weapon that might make it a fair fight.
The man staggered at Nate and pitched forward as another fiend tackled him from behind. They rolled around on the floor, trading punches, blind to the others ransacking the room.
No one noticed the grating on the ceiling, high above.
The wild-eyed fiends tore open cabinets and pulled down shelves, grabbing every box and jar of chem in Agatha’s distillation room. They jostled and dented the cylinders on the still, but even crazed with want, they seemed to realize it wasn’t going to dispense what they needed, no matter how much they shook it.
“I heard if you eat a GEM’s heart, you’ll live forever,” a woman with no teeth said.
The man beside her turned red-rimmed eyes on Nate. “And never get sick.”
“Think he’s one of them?”
“Only one way to find out,” he said.
Nate stared at the man’s nose hair. It stuck out like a thorny bush from each nostril. The last thing he was ever going to see was an ugly nose.
He squeezed his eyes shut and tucked his chin to his chest. Now he understood the blank look in Juniper’s eyes. His mind could only hold so much fear and pain. He was starting to float, detached from the chaos in the room, as if he’d taken one of Alden’s sweet tinctures.
A grunt sounded, and nothing else happened. No one touched him.
He opened one eye and then the next. And then he stared. Red hair. A mess of glaring orange freckles. Strong, bloody arms.
“Brick!”
“Sorry we took so long.” Brick stepped on one fiend’s throat while she fought the other off.
“We?” Nate scanned the crowd. The fiends were fighting each other. They’d ripped down one of the stacks of bunks and were tearing apart the thick mattresses, as if expecting to find more chem in the scraps of rubber inside. Most of the crowd had already left, gone back into the front room where the sounds of shattering glass and metal against concrete made ugly music.
A few more bodies were scattered around the room, one with its head smashed in, purple-gray mush mingling with white bone and glistening blood. The poker from the furnace rested alongside the ruined flesh, iron stained with flecks of their insides.
Nate wondered if any of this was real, if he’d died in his sleep. Maybe the stillness was a nightmare—vivid and rank with the smell of sweat and hurt.
“Is Pixel. . .?” He couldn’t finish the question. Couldn’t bear to think that she hadn’t made it to the surface, away from this ruin.
Brick shook the fiend off and threw her to the floor beside the man she’d choked until he’d stopped moving. The woman rolled away and curled up, groaning and clutching her head.
“Pixel climbed right out of a drain on the street. You shoulda seen Reed’s face. He looked like he saw one of the Old Gods naked and singing about springtime.”
Nate blinked. “But she’s okay?”
