I swallow down my nausea, jerking my eyes away from the bits of skull protruding from Carmody’s head.
He doesn’t flinch. “Before we were brought here, we existed as pieces of a single entity, part of one mind. Our keeper has learned that to be sundered from each other is the worst kind of agony we can know. When we displease him, he puts us into the dark place.” The whisper’s face, Flynn’s face, shows me nothing. No fear, no hatred, not even the flicker of remembered pain. “He will not do so again after we are free.”
It’s getting harder to breathe, my chest tightening with a kind of panic I haven’t felt in years, not since my first time in combat. No way out. No way through. I close my eyes for half a breath, focusing on the air moving through my lungs.
“Why should I help you?” I have to fight to speak my next words. “You’ve taken away the one thing I had left. You’ve taken him—”
“Because he is still in here. Because if you set us free, we will return him to you. And we will save you, and this planet, for last.”
My heart starts again with a lurch that makes my eyes water. But the rest of the creature’s words ring in my ears. “What do you mean, ‘save us for last’?” I whisper. “What will you do when you’re free?”
“We will start with our keeper,” the whisper replies, dead-eyed and soft. “We will give him the same pain he has given us. We will take his family from him, and all he knows, and every soul who has ever touched him. And then we will spread this death, as your kind has spread, and we shall make him the last of your species. And then, once he has realized the thing he has done—then we will leave him, howling, in the dark.”
My eyes blur, stinging with tears of horror and grief. “No,” I whisper. My voice shakes, but behind the tremor there’s iron, and I can feel its strength as I straighten. “No, I won’t help you. Shoot me if you want, but I’m not setting you monsters free.”
Flynn merely looks at me, mouth lax, eyes empty. He looks like a mannequin, like a doll of himself, and my heart tries to claw its way out of my chest. “All right,” he says calmly.
And turns the gun on himself, pressing the barrel to the underside of his chin.
“No—!” My voice tears from my throat, stabbing the air as I jerk forward half an inch, hand raised. “No, stop!” I gasp for air, nausea sweeping through me to follow the path of my fear. “What are you doing?”
The Flynn-thing doesn’t even flinch, watching my distress without reaction. “If you refuse to do as we ask, then we have no further use for this vessel.” I can see the barrel pressing hard enough into Flynn’s neck that the skin around the metal edge is turning white.
“Okay.” The word comes like a sob, wrenching from my lungs so painfully I have to take a breath, and another, before I can speak again. “Okay. I’ll do it.”
It’s been ten years, and every night the girl keeps searching for the November ghost. Sometimes she finds her mother or her father; sometimes the girl finds friends she recognizes, and enemies she doesn’t. She finds the green-eyed boy everywhere, and sometimes he helps her look.
She’s wandering the swamps of Avon now, alone, gliding on the water in an old, narrow boat. She’s searched the entire world and found nothing—no green-eyed boy, no people at all—and no November ghost. She looks up at Avon’s empty sky until the anguish is too much, and she drops back down into the bottom of the boat, resting her forehead against the wood.
Then something makes her lift her head.
In the water below she sees a million stars reflected, and the swamp becomes the sky, and her boat a ship. The stars are blinding, welcoming her, each one a tiny, dancing ball of light. All around her the swamp is illuminated.
MY MIND IS TOO WELL TRAINED. It keeps trying to find a way out, some tactic with which to disarm the creature, to gain the upper hand. Move more quickly around this corner, surprise him when he follows; duck inside that doorway, then slip out behind him when he passes.
But even if I could do it, even if I could wrest the gun from the thing that killed Carmody with its bare hands—what then? I can’t hold at gunpoint a creature willing to kill Flynn simply because he’s no longer useful. Even if I could point a gun at Flynn. Even if I could…
But he’s not Flynn anymore; the boy I knew is gone. There’s no warmth in his gaze, no life in his voice. It’s not him. Even if the creature was telling the truth, even if they could bring him back to me…could he forgive me for what I’m about to do? I clench my jaw. Keep it together, Jubilee.
I was never supposed to be the one on the outside of the mind control. That’s Flynn’s job. I hit things, I shoot things, I pass on the orders that are passed to me. He was supposed to be the one having to make this call, to kill me if I wasn’t coming back, to decide if I was a lost cause.
I can’t make this kind of choice alone. Flynn would never want me to sacrifice humanity to keep him alive for a few more years—or weeks, or days, I don’t know. Not even for Avon. But I cannot watch that thing pull the trigger; I can’t stand here and watch it blow Flynn away. I could more easily cut out my own heart. Flynn, what do I do?
The corridors ahead of us are empty. It isn’t until the thing controlling Flynn leads me to an elevator and I press the button that I glance back—and freeze.
Shuffling after us, filing out of the rooms and down the corridor, are the facility’s staff. Dozens of them, filling the hallway; some in the white coats of the lab techs, others in combat gear like mine. They’re silent, blank-faced, moving with a strange, disconnected gait, shoes dragging against the floor. Their slow, sluggish movements are so different from Flynn’s, hampered by the surgical procedure LaRoux used to prevent the whispers from being able to fully control them. And every single one has eyes like marbles.