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I have no reason yet to think tonight was anything other than an ordinary, exhausting one, no different from the three that came before it, no different from whatever tomorrow’s likely to bring either.

16

HARPER

I finish the tray Nadia brought up around eight, and I don’t think anything of the faint sour note under the sauce until my stomach starts twisting about twenty minutes later. She’d stayed a moment longer than usual while I ate, watching from the doorway with an expression I chalked up to nothing more than her usual coolness, gone before I thought to wonder about it any further.

I remember thinking, briefly, that the chicken tasted slightly off, and dismissing it just as quickly.

At first, I write it off as nothing. Too much dinner, maybe, or the stress of another day spent circling the same locked doors finally catching up with my body the way stress sometimes does.

I lie back on the bed and press a hand to my stomach, waiting for the cramping to pass.

It doesn’t pass. It gets worse.

A wave of heat rolls up through my chest, sudden and wrong, sweat breaking out along my hairline even though the room isn’t warm.

My mouth floods with saliva the way it does right before you’re sick, and I sit up too fast, the room tilting hard to one side like the floor’s decided to stop being level.

The lamp on my nightstand blurs into a smear of yellow light, doubling for a second before my eyes manage to fix it back into one shape.

“Okay.” My own voice sounds strange to me, thicker and slower than I mean it to come out. “Okay, that’s not normal.”

I try to stand, and my legs don’t hold the way they’re supposed to, knees buckling before I’ve even taken a full step. I catch myself against the edge of the dresser hard enough to bruise.

My heart’s beating fast now, too fast, out of proportion to anything my body’s actually doing, and underneath the fear there’s a colder thought starting to surface, something about the sourness under the sauce, something my body seems to understand faster than my mind can catch up to.

I need to get to the door. That thought is the only clear one left, everything else dissolving into static at the edges, my vision narrowing down like I’m looking at the room through a tunnel that keeps getting smaller.

My hands are shaking too badly to be useful for anything, and my skin feels too tight all over, prickling with heat that has nowhere to go, my breath coming in short, shallow pulls that don’t seem to be filling my lungs the way they should.

I drag myself across the room, one hand on the wall, my legs barely cooperating, each step costing more than the last. My stomach cramps hard enough that I double over halfway there, a sound coming out of me that doesn’t sound like anything I’ve ever made before, somewhere between a gasp and a moan.

My knees hit the floor once, hard, and I force myself back up on sheer will alone, no clear thought left except the door, the door, the door.

My palms scrape against the wall as I go, catching splinters of pain I barely register against everything else happening to me.

The door feels impossibly far away. I reach for the handle, and my fingers don’t close around it properly the first time—some disconnect between what I’m telling my hand to do and what it’s actually doing—and I have to try twice more before I get a grip on it.

I manage to pull it open, and the hallway light hits me too bright, too sharp, and I open my mouth to call out, and nothing comes except a rough, broken sound that barely carries past my own lips.

My knees give out completely.

The last thing I register clearly is the floor rushing up faster than it should, and then a door somewhere down the hall banging open, footsteps, fast, and a voice that cuts through the static like nothing else has, closer with every second, sharp with an urgency I’ve never once heard from him before tonight.

“Harper.”

Artem’s voice.

I try to answer him, and my mouth won’t form the words right, everything sliding sideways, his face swimming into view above me, closer than it should be able to get this fast, his hands already on me, checking my pulse, my forehead, my eyes.

“Stay with me. Look at me.” His hands are on my face, my shoulders, checking me over with a speed that doesn’t match the panic underneath his voice. “What’s wrong, Harper? What’s wrong?”

I try to answer. I don’t know if anything actually comes out. His face is the last clear thing I hold onto before everything starts sliding sideways in earnest, the room folding in on itself, his voice the only anchor left in a world that’s stopped making sense entirely.

After that, everything arrives in pieces, disconnected, out of order, like someone’s cutting a film reel down to the frames that matter most and throwing away everything in between.

Cold air against my face, sudden, sharp enough to register even through the fog. Motion, fast, his arms under me, the world tilting as he lifts me like I weigh nothing at all. His voice again, closer this time, urgent in a way I’ve never once heard from him, not even the night he pulled a gun on me in his own apartment.