Shit.“No,” I say, alarm beginning to build. Holding my hands up, I take another step toward the stairs. “He wasn’t. He wasn’t angry at all. He was watching over you.” An emotional connection between them existed, surviving even death.
“He died saving me.” Her gun sags toward her lap.
“He might have done that, yes,” I say quickly. “But he was not angry. I promise you that. The man… the ghost I saw…” I fight for words to explain it. “He cared, even after he was gone. Okay? What you’re feeling, what you think you saw, it’s the device. Youknowthat. But it makes you think that everything is wrong, that—”
She moves so quickly, so unexpectedly, that I don’t understand what’s happening. One second, her weapon is lowered and pointing at no one and the next, it’s aimed directly at her temple. Exactly where I’d been aiming on Reed.
Only she doesn’t miss.
“No!” I shout, even as the gunshot echoes in the wide-open space of the atrium. Blood and brain matter spray outward, and Diaz slides sideways off her knees and onto the floor.
Damnit.
“Kovalik!” Reed shouts again, much too close. This time, I turn just in time to see him emerging from the corridor of suites. Fifteen feet away.
The left side of his face is a bloody mess. The left eyelid is torn, hanging like an uneven and damaged curtain. But the eyeball beneath is ruined, cut in two, it seems. The front part, the iris portion, is still attached, but barely. It dangles and flops, shifting with his movement.
I drag Kane down the stairs, so fast I stumble and slide down several steps at once, almost taking us both out. But we make it to the bottom.
Reed is still lurching and wheeling near the top but coming after us.
We don’t have time to stop for a suit for Kane from one of the fallen in the atrium. I have to hope we can find one somewhere else once we’ve put some distance between us and Reed. Perhaps the cargo bay itself if Shin’s team is still there in some form.
But I pause long enough to scoop up Diaz’s helmet for its light and to pull the gun from her still-warm hand, dumping the gun inside the helmet for ease of carrying.
“I’m sorry,” I say to her over my shoulder as we run.
The lower passenger and crew levels are the worst.
Screaming from all sides. Invisible fists banging on doors from the inside, until it sounds like gunfire. Cold whispers skating past my skin, from all sides and at such a rate I can no longer distinguish individual words. It’s a dizzying, never-ending ocean of sound.
And behind us—in the distance, but still not far enough for comfort—the occasional crash and rambling shout from Reed, attempting to follow us.
Becca flits in and out of the light from Diaz’s helmet, shifting from see-through to nearly solid as she moves. We’re almost to the cargo bay, but we’ve reached the level cluttered with stacks of furniture, the makeshift barricades that now narrow our path. I zip up my suit to keep from catching on anything and put the helmet on to guide our way, a necessity even though the brightness paints a giant arrow over our location—this way to kill them!—for Reed.
“Diaz, do you read?” Max demands in my ear.
Over the comms, the screams from the other security teams have died off—literally, if I have my guess—but Max continues to demand updates.
I keep one hand locked around Kane’s as we maneuver through the narrow spaces and one hand on the gun I took from Diaz.
I don’t like it. The weight of it in my hand. The power that comes with it. The temptation.
The physical effects of the MAW are much more intense down here, perhaps because we’re closer to the source. Wherever it is. Thepressure in my head, what once felt like a fingertip pressing between my eyebrows, now feels like a drill bearing down, swirling and confusing my brain matter.
Voller.Maybe he’d been trying to stop this sensation. Or make it real, at least.
I flinch. Because right now, the idea of a hole in my head feels like a relief instead of an end.
And if Kane is never going to recover, wouldn’t it be more of a mercy to…
I shake my head, as if that will make the idea vanish.
We need to go faster now. And not just because of Reed.
Finally, we reach the cargo bay airlock. Which has been left open on both sides, defeating the idea of an airlock.
Probably because a battered body is sprawled across the doorway that would open—and theoretically close—on the cargo bay side. One of Shin’s team, likely. Her body is nearly severed in two, just below her rib cage. It looks like someone tried to seal the door on her as she was trying to crawl away. The horrible gaping wound across her middle exposes organs and a pink tangle of intestines and other unidentifiable bits.
