He laughs too. Then gently reassures me, “We’ll find him.”
Even if he’s lying, if he doesn’t believe that last bit, it means a lot that he said it. “I’m not going to be okay if we don’t. I’m not going to recover from this. I can feel it. He’s killing us both today.”
“Not if I can help it.” Jon swings us too fast through the entrance to Imperial College, scratching up the van’s paint job that he was so proud of. But he’s as quick as I am when we both pile out in record time and run for August’s building, stopping only briefly when we see the sign stuck to the front door:
August Blackthorne – Basement Level 3.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
BAD AUGUST
THE FINAL COUNTDOWN
Chalk dust billows up around me. All my work gone in a puff of powder. Whatever I was missing, along with all those lives, all those worlds, flowers and kittens and clouds and grass and particles of gold and silver, it’s gone. Nothing more than the memory of an equation. One that dies with me.
Leaving one person to think on those lost universes. August Blackthorne.
My heart feels like I’ve swallowed a galaxy whole. Too big, too violent, crushing, pulling, pushing, pulsing. Agony. And I have no idea how to calm it.
But I don’t need to.
Soon, it will all be over. Gone for good. Or for bad. But gone and done, and I won’t be here to worry about it.
Maybe I shouldn’t have told him.
Visions of his tear-stained face take my mind. The shock of it, the sadness I put there.
I can’t help but feel that honesty is sorely overrated.
He deserves better than that. He deserves dreams and imagination and all the beauty of the universe that I’ve single-handedly snuffed out for him.
I dust the final board clean of the past, then stack it in the corner with the rest.
I may as well leave my few belongings here. Someone will find them eventually.
Well,someonewill find them in about?—
The elevator dings outside, right on cue, and I let my back drop against the brick wall to wait for him.
Yellow light bathes his shoulders, and on sight of me, he pauses.
He raises his gun.
It looks even more menacing than it did yesterday, now that he’s got the long silencer screwed onto the front of the barrel. It whispers premeditation. Someone planning your death. Which I know he was doing anyway, so why should this shock me? “Don’t think you’re clever. I gave you directions and everything. Why do you think I came back here?”
He walks in without a sound. The elevator closes, and he’s still wearing his ski mask and sunglasses, even in the gloom of this basement. He must have put them on in the lift. He would have drawn enormous attention to himself otherwise, even on a Sunday morning.
“I won’t make it hard,” I tell him. “But you can do me a favour by making it fast.”
He reaches out, closes his hand around the door handle, and presses it shut with a soft thud.
How strange to die by his gun. He’s hunted me through so many universes. I guess I thought he might kill me, eventually. But I never thought I’d give in.
Yet here we are.
So I get down on my knees, hands behind my head, heart pounding. Maybe I’m doing that because it’s how films always show people being executed. Would it make any difference if I stand? Would I feel the fall? Maybe I should lie down. But thatmakes me feel like a coward. “I feel awful for whoever’s going to find me. Can you leave the door open when you’re done? So maybe my corpse isn’t as far gone when they do?”
He doesn’t shift, his gun pointed at me the whole time.
