Ingrid.
I peer through slitted lids. She’s kneeling at my side. She’s wearing a gown like the one I found Aisha and Sloane in, and her hair falls in a sheet around her. A twisted angel of death.
“Too late,” I rasp. “You’re gone.”
Her smile is sad. Haunted.
“I’ve been gone a long time. You were never going to change that.”
I shake my head. If I can see her, really see her, I must be dead, too.
“You saved a lot of lives today. You can’t give up yet.”
I want to give up.
“He won’t take any more kids. You saved us.”
I wonder if Finn and the others have made it to safety. I can picture my family, my mom’s face shining with tears and Paige squeezing her shoulder. Margot gripping Jasper tight and vowing to never let go.
Maybe there is victory in that. But for the rest of those missing kids, their families will be getting a different call in the coming days. The worst kind of call. The one Harper’s family got.
“You need to stay awake, Jo.”
“I’m tired,” I whisper. I try to open my eyes, but it’s as if they’re pinned in place. Too heavy to pry open.
“You have to stay awake. You have to fight a little bit longer.”
“I can’t,” I say, and my voice is more of a gasp than anything. I don’t have any fight left in me. “I don’t want to.”
“Listen to me, Jo,” Ingrid says. “I have been screaming since I died, but no one heard me. Not until you. You’re stronger than I ever was. So I need you to hold on.”
There’s nothing to hold on to. But I try anyway, dragging my shirt collar over my nose, pressing my cheek into the cool floor. I take shallow breaths. My eyes fall shut.
I’m sorry, Ingrid.
But she is gone, and there’s no way to tell how much time has passed with me curled up on the concrete, choking on smoke.
A crash comes from up the stairs, and the door bursts open. I am too tired to find relief in it. I am drifting, taken away by a current.
It comes in fragments, the way it did after the car accident. But instead of red and blue lights pushing through the white snow and sirens tearing at my ears, there are tall figures in tan suits, yellow stripes catching the light through the smoke. Huge masks and hard hats. I’m being hoisted off the ground, and the pain reignites, my only tether to consciousness. Someone is carrying me, the smoke is trading itself in for clean, crisp air, and what I think is moonlight. Plastic presses against my face—a mask, maybe. And then the blue and red lights return. I’m laid down on a board, and there are so many voices, so many lights cutting through the darkness.
The barn is off to my side, and as I’m carried away, another group of firefighters bring Holden out. I don’t know if he’s alive,and I don’t care. Behind him, once the firefighters have cleared, I see a group of three or four people wearing no visible badges slink from the trees and into the barn.
I want to ask who they are, what they’re doing descending into a flaming bunker without protective suits, but I am too tired to cling to consciousness anymore. I let the world slip into black, taking me with it.
Forty-Three
The west wing on thethird floor of the Blackridge community hospital is probably fuller than it has ever been. In addition to the swarm of nurses and doctors, there are half a dozen police officers stationed along the halls, holding back the wave of reporters that have descended on the town in the last twelve hours.
I haven’t dared to check the internet, but according to Margot, every news station is covering the story. I was unconscious when we arrived at the hospital last night and woke to the bright sun in my hospital room this morning. Ample time for news outlets to catch wind. A decades-long string of lost kids attributed to a mad scientist who tried to play God. Over a dozen kids sacrificed for one. Already, it’s a media circus, and it will only get worse when Holden goes to trial.
As horrible as it sounds, I’m glad I’m not the only one in a hospital bed. Jasper’s presence in the room next door means my parents’ and Paige’s feverish energy is split. They’ve been flutteringback and forth in full mother-hen fashion, but right now, with Jasper under the doctor’s thumb, my room is blissfully quiet. There’s only Margot, who hasn’t left my side since we got here. She’s curled up in the chair beside my bed.
I thought the whole thing was a bit excessive, but my doctor says until they know exactly what I was drugged with, they can’t release me. But I’m better off than anyone else, though it doesn’t look it. My right arm is in a cast again and will be for the next few months. I have a bruised windpipe, leaving me with a croaking voice and deep bruises like a noose around my throat. A split lip and more bruises from my fall down the stairs. I’ll likely be discharged before the day is over, but Jasper is being held for observation at least another day.
It feels like the Griffin family has moved again, this time into a hospital.
I have a few minutes of peace when Margot reluctantly heads down to the cafeteria for caffeine; not coffee, because she swears it tastes like poison and is pretty sure everyone else thinks so, too, and is lying about it. I’m not allowed a cup despite pleading to my nurses.
