Page 123

Jun’s blood went cold. “Wh-what? Why?”

“You can’t be here! Please don’t make me beg you. Please just go far away from here!”

“Ruki—”

Dial tone.

Jun stared at the screen. The home screen photo—all seven of them in graduation robes at Shawn’s house, smiling—stared back.

He had listened and left. He’d gone home and ate Ruki’s bento cold.

The car lurched. Jun’s body shifted, and something in his ribs ground against itself, a deep, nauseating wrongness that made him gag into the cloth. The drug pulled him under again, but not all the way. He hovered somewhere between being conscious enough to feel everything and feeling too far under to move.

He should have gone back. He’d done it before. He’d searched every hallway, every bathroom, every stairwell until he found him. There was no reason he couldn’t have done it again at Paragon. But Ruki had told him to leave, and Jun—stupid, obedient, terrified Jun—listened.

And then the news.

The blurry footage. Smashed windows. Smoke pouring from the building.

Jun froze mid-chew. Ruki’s cold bento still in his mouth. The close-up shots didn’t seem real. He couldn’t process the reporter’s words. He was too fixated on the building. Searching the footage for something, anything—

Ruki’s professional portrait filled the screen.

“Among the missing was Ritsuki Ayase, the young scientist behind Paragon’s latest medication, Nixzin.”

Jun dropped his chopsticks. Grabbed his phone. Dialed.

Voicemail.

Again.

Voicemail.

Again.

He called until his phone died. He sobbed onto the kitchen table and into the night, the food spoiling beside him. Alex had found him there the next morning.

The car stopped.

The engine cut. Silence—total, pressing, suffocating.

Jun lay in the dark, his body a catalog of damage he couldn’t fully inventory. His arms were numb. The blindfold was soaked through. The chemical fog was lifting, and he almost wished it wouldn’t, because the clarity brought everything with it.

He could have had another chance at the mall. He saw Ruki, alive, and he didn’t say what he needed to say. He let him walk away again. There was no one to blame but himself.

A car door slammed. Footsteps on gravel.

This was it, probably. Whatever came next—Luis, Covey, something worse—Jun couldn’t fight it. His body was spent. His hands were gone. His ribs screamed with every breath.

But lying there, in the dark, waiting for whatever was coming, something strange happened. The memories didn’t stop. They just changed direction.

Not Ruki this time. The others.

Kana—cross-legged on a milk crate, snipping his dead ends, telling him to stop selling himself short. You are way more capable than you think. The garbage bag poncho. The secret they swore to keep. What happens in the garage stays in the garage.

Alex—standing in the lamplight behind the gas station, telling Jun the truth about why he left the Garras. Not because Jun asked. Because Alex trusted him enough to say it: Whatever happens, you tell us, and we’ll be there.

Robin—a voice without a face, steadying him through a crisis he couldn’t see. You’re not dumb, Connor. You managed to follow my directions through the phone.