“That sounds awful.”
“No,” he says. “It’s exquisite.”
“I love you.”
A sharp intake of breath. Even in this darkness I see the strain in his jaw—the tension there—as he stares at the ceiling.
I sit straight up, surprised.
Aaron’s reaction is so unstudied I don’t know how I never noticed it before. But then, maybe this is new. Maybe something really has changed between us. Maybe I never loved him this much before. That would make sense, I suppose. Because when I think about it, when I really think about how much I love him now, after everything we’ve—
Another sudden, sharp breath. And then he laughs, nervously.
“Wow,” I say.
He claps a hand over his eyes. “This is vaguely mortifying.”
I’m smiling now, very nearly laughing. “Hey. It’s—”
My body seizes.
A violent shudder rushes up my skin and my spine goes rigid, my bones held in place by invisible pins, my mouth frozen open and trying to draw breath.
Heat fills my vision.
I hear nothing but static, grand rapids, white water, ferocious wind. Feel nothing. Think nothing. Am nothing.
I am, for the most infinitesimal moment—
Free.
My eyelids flutter open closed open closed open closed I am a wing, two wings, a swinging door, five birds
Fire climbs inside of me, explodes.
Ella?
The voice appears in my mind with swift strength, sharp, like darts to the brain. Dully, I realize that I’m in pain— my jaw aches, my body still suspended in an unnatural position—but I ignore it. The voice tries again:
Juliette?
Realization strikes, a knife to the knees. Images of my sister fill my mind: bones and melted skin, webbed fingers, sodden mouth, no eyes. Her body suspended underwater, long brown hair like a swarm of eels. Her strange, disembodied voice pierces through me. And so I say, without speaking:
Emmaline?
Emotion drives into me, fingers digging in my flesh, sensation scraping across my skin. Her relief is tangible. I can taste it. She’s relieved, relieved I recognized her, relieved she found me, relieved relieved relieved—
What happened? I ask.
A deluge of images floods my brain until it sinks, I sink. Her memories drown my senses, clog lungs. I choke as the feelings crash into me. I see Max, my father, inconsolable in the wake of his wife’s murder; I see Supreme Commander Ibrahim, frantic and furious, demanding Anderson gather the other children before it’s too late; I see Emmaline, briefly abandoned, seizing an opportunity—
I gasp.
Evie made it so that only she or Max could control Emmaline’s powers, and with Evie dead, the fail-safes implemented were suddenly weakened. Emmaline realized that in the wake of our mother’s death there would be a brief window of opportunity—a brief window during which she might be able to wrest back control of her own mind before Max remade the algorithms.
But Evie’s work was too good, and Max’s reaction too prompt. Emmaline was only partly successful.
Dying, she says to me.
Dying.
Every flash of her emotion is accompanied by torturous assault. My flesh feels bruised. My spine seems liquid, my eyes blind, searing. I feel Emmaline—her voice, her feelings, her visions—more strongly than before, because she’s stronger than before. That she managed to regain enough power to find me is proof alone that she is at least partly untethered, unrestrained. Max and Evie had been experimenting on Emmaline to a reckless degree in the last several months, trying to make her stronger even as her body withered. This, this, is the consequence.
Being this close to her is nothing short of excruciating.
I think I’ve screamed.
Have I screamed?
Everything about Emmaline is heightened to a fever pitch; her presence is wild, breathtaking, and it shudders to life inside my nerves. Sound and sensation streak across my vision, barrel through me violently. I hear a spider scuttle across the wooden floor. Tired moths drag their wings along the wall. A mouse startles, settles, in its sleep. Dust motes fracture against a window, shrapnel skidding across the glass.
My eyes skitter, unhinged in my skull.
I feel the oppressive weight of my hair, my limbs, my flesh wrapped around me like cellophane, a leather casket. My tongue, my tongue is a dead lizard perched in my mouth, rough and heavy. The fine hairs on my arms stand and sway, stand and sway. My fists are so tightly clenched my fingernails pierce the soft flesh of my palms.
I feel a hand on me. Where? Am I?
Lonely, she says.
She shows me.
A vision of us, back in the laboratory where I first saw her, where I killed our mother. I see myself from Emmaline’s point of view and it’s startling. She can’t see much more than a blur, but she can feel my presence, can make out the shape of my form, the heat emanating from my body. And then my words, my own words, hurled back into my brain—
there has to be another way you don’t have to die we can get through this together please i want my sister back i want you to live Emmaline i won’t let you die here Emmaline Emmaline we can get through this together we can get through this together we can get through this together
A cold, metallic sensation begins to bloom in my chest. It moves through me, up my arms, down my throat, pushes into my gut. My teeth throb. Emmaline’s pain claws and slithers, clings with a ferocity I can’t bear. Her tenderness, too, is desperate, terrifying in its sincerity. She’s overcome by emotion, hot and cold, fueled by rage and devastation.
She’s been looking for me, all this time.
In these last couple of days Emmaline has been searching the conscious world for my mind, trying to find safe harbor, a place to rest.
A place to die.
Emmaline, I say. Please—
Sister.
Something tightens in my mind, squeezes. Fear propels through me, punctures organs. I’m wheezing. I smell earth and damp, decomposing leaves and I feel the stars staring at my skin, wind pushing through darkness like an anxious parent. My mouth is open, catching moths. I am on the ground.
Where?
No
