His fingers close around my neck.
The pressure is immediate, crushing, and I can’t breathe, can’t think, black spots already dancing at the edges of my vision. His grip is impossibly strong—of course it is, he could snap my spine without effort, could crush my windpipe like tissue paper—and I’m going to die here, in this white room, at the hands of the man I?—
No.
Not like this.
I reach up with hands that are clumsy and weak, the restraints not letting me stretch very far, and I grab his chin. Force him to look at me. His eyes are a husk but I stare into them anyway, searching for something, anything.
“Nate.” It comes out as a wheeze, barely a whisper. “I know you’re in there.”
The pressure increases. My vision starts to tunnel.
“I know—” I’m choking now, the words barely forming. “I know what they did to you. I know it’s not your fault. But you have to fight it.Please.”
Nothing. His face is a mask. Julia’s voice drifts in from somewhere far away: “Finish it, Vanguard. Complete your mission.”
My lungs are burning. Seconds left. Maybe less.
I stop fighting his grip. Let my hands fall from his face to rest on his forearms.
“It’s okay,” I whisper, knowing that I might not reach through him this time and knowing there’s some part of him that is still inside, still hearing me. “It’s okay, Nate. I forgive you.”
Something flickers in his eyes.
“I forgive you,” I say again, or try to—there’s no air left, the words are just shapes my lips are making—“for Cal. For this. For everything.”
He blinks, shakes his head.
“Milkshake,” I whisper.
The flicker becomes a tremor. His whole body shudders. And then?—
He lets go.
I suck in a breath so sharp it feels like inhaling glass, coughing and gasping, and when I look up at him through streaming tears his face has changed. The emptiness is cracking apart like an egg. His eyes are wet. His hands are shaking violently now, and he’s staring at them like he doesn’t recognize them, like they belong to someone else.
“Mia,” he breathes. His voice breaks on my name. “Oh god.Mia.”
“There you are,” I manage, and I’m crying too now, or maybe I’ve been crying this whole time, it’s hard to tell when one eye is swollen shut and the other is blurred with tears and blood. “There you are.”
He reaches for me—gentle this time, so gentle, his fingers brushing my bruised cheek—and his face crumbles.
“I almost?—”
“But you didn’t,” I whisper roughly. “You?—”
A sharp electronic beep cuts through the moment.
Julia. She’s pressing buttons on her remote frantically, her composure finally cracking. “Vanguard. Comply. I saidcomply?—”
Nate moves so fast he becomes a blur.
One second he’s in front of me, the next he’s across the room, the remote crushed to fragments in his fist. Julia gasps, stumbles backward, but he’s already grabbed her by the hair, lifting her clean off the ground. Her feet kick uselessly in the air, her heels flying off. She claws at his wrist, making sounds I’ve never heard from her—high, panicked,human.
“Marsh!” she shrieks. “Call Paragon! Get reinforcements, NOW!”
I see Marsh’s face through the observation window—pale and terrified—and then he bolts from the room.
