“Yes,” I say, and the word drops down on me like a stone in a well.
Valentine steps up to the door, scans our faces, counts again, nods once to some arithmetic only he sees. A handler’s habit. A man keeping track of how many monsters he’s responsible for.
“Seatbelts,” he repeats, and this time the word carries a warning under it.
I fumble with the buckle. My fingers don’t quite understand the mechanics when my head is busy measuring pain that isn’t pain. Hatchet’s hand – scarred, steady – reaches across and clicks it through without looking at me.
I breathe out a thank you that doesn’t make it to my mouth.
The rotor pitch changes.
The air thickens into weight.
Gravel skitters beneath the skids as the machine finds the part of itself that leaves.
As the helicopter lifts, the asylum compound shrinks. The fences become lines. The lights become dots. The building becomes geometry – blocks, angles, the clean cruelty of design. The island drops away beneath us with all its clean whitecorridors and its quiet cruelty. For a heartbeat, the black water below looks like a mouth – open, waiting, patient.
Under my skin, the implant aches. Not pain exactly. A pressure. A reminder. A low, constant hum behind the eyes, like something unfinished trying to be remembered. A leash that doesn’t need to be seen to be believed.
Kayla is out there.
The thought lands wrong – too heavy, too late. They didn’t just take her from me. They made me leave her. They reached into my head and hollowed out the space where she lived, and I walked away thinking I was whole. Thinking I was clean.
I forgot her. All three of us did. And I can’t ever forgive myself – or them – for that.
We forgot the sound of her voice, the way her presence anchored us, the promise I don’t even remember making. While she was alone, I was empty and didn’t even know it. That’s the part that makes my chest burn. Not that they erased her – but that I let the world keep turning without her in it.
Whatever they took, whatever they broke, I carry it now.
And I will carry it until she doesn’t have to be alone anymore.
Wind hammers the shell. I can feel every bolt, every weld, every prayer the pilot has ever muttered into a headset. The horizon is a bruised smear.
Do you feel that?Donnelly asks, delighted.That pull? That gravity? That’s what happens when a star goes missing. Everything else slides to fill the hole.
“Kayla,” Nightshade says, like the name is a coordinate we can navigate to by instrument.
Bones’s mouth flattens. Snow’s grin widens and thins at the same time. Honeymonster rubs his thumb and forefinger together like he’s grinding grit out of the air. Hatchet closes his eyes.
Valentine watches us like a man watching a lit fuse move toward a powder keg he is obliged to carry carefully. I wouldn’t want to be him right now.
I tip my head back to the vibrating metal and close my eyes because the inside is worse than the out. The voices walk the panes of my skull like rain.
What’s the plan?Donnelly wonders, semi-sincere.Do we burn the world in a circle and hope she’s in the centre?
We could ask nicely,Silas says.We could…we could talk to someone. We could?—
“No one will tell us anything,” I say. My voice surprises me. It sounds steadier than my hands.
Valentine’s gaze touches me and moves on, as if acknowledging I exist is enough, and anything more would be a promise he refuses to make.
Nightshade says nothing, because saying nothing is a blade he sharpens until it cuts through walls. Honeymonster says nothing, because if he opens his mouth now he’ll either try to fix something there are no tools for, or he’ll say the thing that makes this real.
Bones clears his throat once. The sound has the shape of a question and the weight of a warning.
“Where?” he asks Valentine. Just that: where.
Valentine’s eyelids flicker. “Need to know basis only. Mainland,” he says. “You will be supervised.”
