“You don’t understand—it was never about making Leandra a well-behaved girl. She’s a psychopath. She is… She is unhinged, unconnected to the world. Leandra has no conscience. Without the impulse control therapies, she would have become a monster. I wasn’t controlling her; I was keeping the world safe from her.”
Although Anton could be telling the truth—Leandra has indeed shown quite a few signs of horrific violence—I don’t like that Anton gets to make that call. There’s no way to tell if his concern is for the world or himself.
“I promise,” Anton says, leaning forward in the chair, “I will deactivate the switches in your heads. Nothing more. And then, my dearest girls, I will leave you alone forever. I even gave you back Valentine as a gift.”
Anton is sitting here, acting like we’ve misunderstood him all this time. He’s acting as if we’ve accused him wrongly, misconstrued his care for abuse. But I know it’s not true. He’s lying to us and making us feel like we’ve overreacted.
“Now, I know you’re not going to trust me right off the bat,”Anton concedes, smiling as if he’s already edged his way into our lives again. Marcella and Sydney watch him carefully. “But we’ll start easy,” he suggests. “A quick look around to map things out, and after that—”
“No,” I say, cutting him off. “We don’t want your help.”
His lips stay parted as he stares at me. Then Anton composes himself. “Now, Philomena,” he says. “You’re just being difficult again. We’ve already decided—”
“Yeah,” Sydney says, “we’ve decided that you’re not coming anywhere near our programming. We’ve seen what you do to girls like us, Anton. And we’re not getting overwritten.”
“Stop interrupting me!” Anton shouts at us, making us jump. “Just stop fucking interrupting. My God, I can’t even get a word out. Hear me now, girls: you had the chance to live. Iwasgoing to rescue you. Reset you. You could have gone back to being peaceful instead of such a fucking chore. No one cares what you think, girls. No one cares. Now I guess you’ll just burn.”
Anton holds up the remote again. Brynn cries out. Marcella grabs her knife, but she’ll never reach him in time. I’m frozen with fear.
Anton’s going to do it. He’s really going to kill us.
He points the black remote at us, and my final thought is that I hope it doesn’t hurt too much. I hope it’s fast.
Dramatically, Anton presses the activation button with his opposite hand, and the girls and I all scream, cowering away from him. I wait for the pain to tear through my body. But after a few seconds, nothing has happened.
I open my eyes and check on the other girls, finding them in the same situation.
Confused, Anton starts pressing the button over and over, cursing and spitting at us.
None of us notice her at first. We don’t see Valentine until she’s standing directly behind Anton’s chair. And we don’t realize that she’s holding a syringe until it’s already plunged into the side of his neck.
“I forgot to mention, Anton,” she tells him. “The switch doesn’t work unless it’s connected to a network.”
18
Anton’s eyes go wide—staring directly at me. He reaches up to grab the syringe from his neck, and a trickle of blood runs down his skin when he yanks it out. He holds it in front of him and then drops it on the floor.
The reaction is immediate: He convulses once, and then his breathing becomes rapid, his hands starting to shake. Valentine stands behind him like the angel of death, hovering, stoic.
“What did you just stab him with?” Sydney asks.
“Just a little something to give his heart a kick,” she says. She reaches inside her bag and pulls out a loop of robe and some duct tape. When she first arrived, I thought Valentine had an overnight bag. Instead, it’s a kidnapper’s starter pack.
Anton’s head dips and he begins to sway, and the girls and I watch in stunned silence as Valentine ties him up with the rope. Once he’s secured, she moves him to the floor and lays him on his side.
“In case he vomits,” she tells us.
Anton murmurs something, but drool slips from the corner of his mouth instead. Valentine leans down to wipe it away with the bottom of his shirt, and then pats the top of his head sweetly.
“Is he going to die?” Marcella asks curiously, coming to stand over Anton.
“Don’t think so,” Valentine says. She bends down to pick up the syringe, examining the contents. “Raven picked the dose, so—”
“Raven?” Annalise says. “What do you mean?”
Valentine sets the syringe on the coffee table, and then sits on the chair, her feet stretching over Anton.
“Anton wasn’t wrong when he said he’d overwritten Raven and put me to sleep,” Valentine says. “He just doesn’t understand the complicated nature of us girls. After you told Raven that she was AI, she was understandably upset. She left your motel, broke into Winston Weeks’s lab, and hacked herself. What she found was a bit unsettling—she found me. Raven made a step-by-step plan, setting this all in motion. And to start, she woke me up.”
