Page 4 of Victorious

Victor didn’t bother asking how she’d found him. She’d probably been with him since he left Merit three weeks earlier. Hard to spot a tail when it was always changing shape.

She gestured at the bar. “Keep this up, and someone else might find you, too.”

Victor could have pointed out that those who made an effort to conceal themselves usually ended up standing out. Or that the hotel—and by extension its bar—was in a fairly suburban corner of a city roughly a thousand miles from Merit, with a closed security system. But he knew that, statistically, it was only a matter of time before he came up on EON’s radar. He’d been working on a solution, but it required Mitch, and Victor had yet to reestablish contact with his cellmate since they’d parted ways.

Parted ways.

As if the decision had been mutual. As if Victor hadn’t severed himself from Mitch, and Sydney, and the dog. The only three things that mattered to him, especially now that Eli was dead.

They shouldn’t matter, but they did.

So he’d left.

“Killing Stell,” said June, picking at the label on her beer. “That was a choice.”

The gunshot echoed through his mind. Victor’s mouth twitched. “That,” he said, “was a long time coming.”

“A parting shot?” she mused. “One might think you were provoking EON. That, or drawing their attention off of other targets.”

Victor held her gaze.

“How is Syd?” asked June, as if they’d ended up on the subject of her obsession accidentally.

“I wouldn’t know.”

June snorted. “Come on, Victor. We both know you’re the controlling type. You don’t expect me to believe you’d actually let our girl out of your sight.”

Our girl. She said it to get a rise.

He shrugged. “I don’t know where she is. And if I did, I wouldn’t tell you.”

Her expression darkened. “And here I thought we were building bridges.”

“What do you want, June?”

She looked down at her beer. “I made a list,” she said. “Four names. The ones who—who made me like this.”

EOs weren’t born. They were made. Sometimes by accident, like Syd and her sister falling through the ice. Sometimes by intention, like Victor and Eli running their experiments, playing scientist and specimen. And sometimes EOs were the product of a violent crime, a murder that didn’t take. Like Marcella.

Like June.

“Being able to change shape, become anyone I wanted—it made it easier to get to them. And there was some poetic irony in that. I took on a few other jobs along the way, to pay the bills, but it’s not like I was thinking, oh, I will be good at this. The killing part. Only, I was—I am—I don’t know what that says about me.”

Victor thought of pointing out that EOs on the whole possessed a diminished sense of consequence, a separation between action and emotion. He didn’t.

“And then I ran out of names, the list was done, and Marcella was there, and I thought, why not? Everybody needs a purpose. And then…”

And then Marcella set out to wage a war between the ordinary and the ExtraOrdinary, intending to drag EOs into the spotlight, and make the city—the world—recognize her power. But she would have burned them all, just to keep herself warm. Victor clocked it, and eventually so did June. She turned on her boss—claimed she was protecting Sydney—and threatened to kill Mitch if Victor didn’t help put Marcella down.

“These days, I take on the odd gig, to pass the time. But…” June trailed off, frowning at the beer. Then, “There’s all these quotes about revenge. People waxing poetic. But no one talks about what happens after.”

Victor cocked his head. “Which is?”

She swept her fingers through a wet spot on the table. “Nothing.”

The word landed like a gavel, and with it, an image flashed behind his eyes. Eli, on the ground. Blood spreading from the gunshot wound above his heart, his ability to heal negated by Haverty’s serum.

Fifteen years ago, Victor had sat on the edge of a bathtub filled with ice, and watched as Eli went under, knuckles going red, then white, where they gripped the handles under the surface. He’d pulled his roommate’s lifeless body from the water, and restarted his heart, and the whole time, he’d known Eli wasn’t really gone. He was waiting, just out of reach, and it had been Victor’s job to lean into the chasm, pull him back.