When I was seven, I wanted to prove I was mature enough to make the potatoes for dinner by myself. But the dish was smaller than it should have been, and the cream the potatoes were cooking in was at the lip of the glass. I knew better than to reach in bare-handed, so I snagged the square potholders from atop the counter. Then I knelt, cracked open the oven, and pulled the glass dish out. The moment I did, the cream splashed over the edges, dousing my hands in boiling liquid. I remember the pain hitting a second after the cream—a searing, blinding pain lancing up my palms and wrists. The dish hit the floor, shattering, spilling scalloped potatoes across the tile.
The second-degree burns made my hands and arms a blistered, swollen red mess for weeks. And for years after, chunks of skin onmy hands were lighter than the rest of my arms. In time the scarring faded, but the memory of the moment the cream hit my skin never did.
I try to imagine that feeling coating my whole body. That’s the death I’ve condemned all of us to if Cecily doesn’t open this door.
She realizes it, too. Her gaze flicks between us and the door at the top of the stairs.
Already the smoke is filling the hall, seeping through the cloth I have tied over my mouth.
Cecily clenches her teeth, hard, then turns to me, and says, “I’ll open it.”
As Cecily lifts her bound hands, a beeping sound comes from the keypad on the other side and the door begins to open. For a moment I think it’s Ingrid, managing tangibility long enough to save us, but then a hulking form steps through the door. Oliver Holden.
I meet Finn’s eyes. We don’t need to speak to know what to do—the instant Holden is past the threshold, we each take one of his arms and shove him down the steps.
“Go!” I say, ushering the younger kids through the door and toward the rickety ladder that leads to the hatch. Jasper, Aisha, and Sloane are first, with the girls pushing my little brother up. Cecily shoves Finn aside, lunging for the ladder, and despite her bound wrists, she makes it to the top in seconds. Finn goes next, and I follow, but when I slip through the doorway, a hand closes around my wrist, yanking me back.
Finn calls my name, but it dies behind the door Holden slams shut. Fists pound on the other side, and I launch myself at the closed door. I manage to smack the metal once before the same hands wrap around both my wrists, yanking me back, sending me sprawling down the stairs.
My shoulder smacks one step, my knee another, and there is a loud crack, the breaking of a bone. I land on the concrete floor, hard, and pain flares through me. My head swims, and my right arm is on fire. Blood fills my mouth. My teeth have torn through my cheek or my lip; I’m not sure which.
I roll onto my back, gasping for breath. With so much smoke, there’s little air to begin with.
A silhouette blocks out the light and Holden is there, leaning over me. Before I can speak or even consider fighting back, his fingers close around my throat. He is no longer the man who hid his atrocities behind pleasantries. He knows as well as I do that we’re nearing the finish line. It’s a matter of who crosses first—or who crosses at all.
He is anger incarnate, skin flushed red, nostrils flared, spittle flicking off his teeth as he huffs.
“This is your fault,” he says. “Your fault.”
I scrabble at his hands, his arms, even his chest, but his grip is too strong and I am too weak. Dark spots quickly bleed into my vision, and I know with striking clarity that he’s about to kill me.
My fingers scrape against the concrete floor, seeking anything to use against him. Almost too late, I remember the syringe filled with sedatives in my pocket. I dig the needle out, shocked to find it fared better than I did in the tumble down the stairs, the glass unbroken.
Each second drags me further into the dark, and there’s no time to consider what comes next. Fear is a snapping, sharp-toothed creature in my chest, quieting the screaming pain that comes with moving my arm as I lift the syringe and bring it down on Holden’s neck. I depress the plunger.
For a horrible moment, nothing happens. He keeps squeezing. I am still dying.
Then his grip loosens. He goes slack above me. I have enough energy to roll sideways before he topples over. Holden is a large man, and the sedatives don’t knock him out entirely, but he lies there, fingers opening and closing around nothing. He mumbles something, but the ringing in my ears and the crackling of the growing fire are too loud to make his words out. He has nothing to say that I want to hear anyway.
I give myself ten seconds to lie there, pain lighting a fire up my arm, around my neck, into my lungs.
I read once that burning alive is one of the most painful ways to die, but usually death by suffocation comes first. Like falling asleep. A quick end before the flames get a chance to reach me. It would be so easy to stay, to give in.
Another round of hard bangs comes from the door up the stairs. Like someone is pounding their fists against the metal.
Slowly, I peel myself off the floor. A wave of coughs roll through me, from the smoke or the choking or both. My balance wavers and I nearly slam into the stairs, narrowly catching myself on my hands. My right arm gives out and a cry slips past my lips, though there’s no one to hear it but Holden.
I think there is a voice on the other side of the door, but all I can make out is the rhythmic banging. And within a few more seconds, that stops, too.
I pause halfway up the stairs, sinking to my knees, one hand spread against the step. Exhaustion slams into my limbs like a flood breaking past sandbags. I don’t realize I’ve fallen until I’m back on the floor, near Holden, who hasn’t moved since he collapsed. I ease onto my back, staring up at the ceiling.
Dying. I am dying. The cloth I had tied around my face fell sometime in the scuffle, but the bunker is too full of smoke for it to do me any good. I can barely see through it.
I got lucky the last time death came for me. Another hour on that roadside and I wouldn’t have made it. But I don’t have an hour. I have minutes before I’m unconscious. I guess you can only cheat death so many times before it comes back to collect.
A bitter laugh burns its way up my chest. It turns into a coughing spasm. I let my eyes slide shut.
“You found me,” a familiar voice says.
