from awareness to black to light again. I thought I’d stopped dreaming because I felt safe, but now I realize more sinister machinations were at work. Did someone carry me down here at night without me knowing it? But when I stop to think, I remember the strange dots and scratches on my arm that Erik noticed in the speakeasy, and the silvery scar we discovered at the swimming pool. My torn dressing gown the morning after Jost and I broke up. The strange bruise on my leg that Valery pointed out when she dressed me for the play. The clues have been there. Kincaid’s men weren’t even careful enough to prevent them, and still I hadn’t seen them until now. That didn’t answer the most important question though.
“Why?”
“What?” Jax asks.
“Why would he do this? What’s his endgame?”
“Kincaid is twisted,” he says but there’s discomfort in his voice. He has no more idea than I do. Jax is another cog in Kincaid’s machine, but he feels the creepy, sinister implications in the X-rays, in this room. Whatever Kincaid is up to isn’t benign.
“What else do you do here?” I ask.
“We do the alterations,” Jax says, hesitating a moment. “And this is where Kincaid gets his renewal patch.”
“That’s how he’s still alive, isn’t it?” I ask. “What are these patches?”
“He uses donor threads to keep from aging,” Jax says. “We take the time strands from other people and insert them into Kincaid’s own thread.”
“
“There’s nobody more willing than the dead,” Jax says.
I recall the bright time strand I spotted within Kincaid. Was it the one pulled from Deniel after he attacked me? It doesn’t matter. It is despicable and unjustifiable however Kincaid came by it. Is this how Cormac and the other Guild officials stay alive too?
“We need to tell Jost and Erik,” I say, heading to the door.
“First, we have to take care of something more important,” Jax says. He gestures to the privacy screen, and my heart sinks into my stomach. He pushes it to the side, revealing Dante, unconscious, lying on a table. An IV runs from his arm, and a mask regulates his breathing.
“What happened to him?” I breathe.
“He’s sedated,” Jax tells me.
“Wake him up,” I cry.
“It’s not that easy—”
“Wake him up!”
Jax fumbles through the cabinets and emerges with a vial of liquid. He sucks the medicine into a long syringe and takes a deep breath.
“Hold his arms,” Jax orders me. I do as I’m told. Before I can ask him what he’s planning to do, Jax slams the syringe into the center of Dante’s chest. The effect is instantaneous. Dante’s eyes fly open and he gasps against the mask covering his face. I pull it off him and he stares at me in confusion.
“It’s okay,” I say.
“Ad?” It’s the only word I can make out. Dante’s words are confused, a jumble of consonants and vowels.
“We need to go,” Jax says. He offers Dante a hand, while I gently pull the IV needle from his arm. “We’ll explain everything in a minute.”
“We need to get to Erik and Jost,” I say, wrapping Dante’s other arm over my shoulder to help steady him.
Dante pushes us away. “I can walk.”
Jax and I exchange a concerned look, but we let Dante walk. I stay close to him in case he stumbles, but he doesn’t head for the door. He trips his way to the next privacy screen.
“There’s someone else in here,” Dante says. “I got glimpses between doses.”
“Who?” I ask, moving to push away the screen, my heart pounding in my chest.
“It’s Valery,” Dante says, beginning to tremble.
“The drugs are messing with his system,” Jax says, grabbing a scratchy white blanket to place over Dante’s shoulders.
Valery lies sedated behind the other screen. A bag drips nutrition into her arm, but from the look of her skeletal form, she’s been here awhile.
“How long has she been here?” I wonder out loud. I can tell from the sallowness of her complexion that this is more than a couple days of sedation. I barely recall Kincaid mentioning Valery was going on the mission.
“She never left the estate,” Jax says in disgust. “Kincaid lied to us. It took me a few days to piece together what was going on down here, and then I had to convince someone to let me in on the job. Kincaid doesn’t trust me, he knows I’m too close to Dante.”
“I’ll get her. She won’t be able to walk on her own,” Jax adds.
“And then what?” I ask, beginning to feel the familiar panic crawling through my skin.
“You need to get your friends and run,” Jax says.
“They’ve got the whole place on lockdown,” I argue. “There’s no way we’re getting out of here.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Jax says. Despite the seriousness of the situation, he winks at me.
“Jax is an expert at causing a commotion,” Dante says weakly.
“You’re going to distract them?” I guess. “How do you plan on distracting Kincaid’s whole security force?”
“With a very big boom.”
“And then what?” I ask. “Where will we go? We have no—”
Dante holds up a shaking hand to stop me. “We do have a plan. I know where the Whorl is.”
“What?” I ask.
“The Whorl is on Alcatraz Island,” Dante says in a small voice. “That was the intel the man who came through the loophole had. Kincaid doesn’t know, but we’ll have to move quickly. We’ll need supplies—a raft and dry suits. This place won’t be easy to get to.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Jax says. “You guys worry about getting everyone ready to go and I’ll make sure there’s a crawler waiting with what you’ll need.”
“Get ahold of Falon. Tell her what’s happened and where we’re heading.” Even in his weakened condition, Dante is coherent giving orders and making plans.
“What about Valery?” I ask. “We can’t leave her here.”
“Jax will take care of her. Get her clothes and get her to the crawler.” Dante looks to Jax for confirmation, and Jax nods.
“I’ll message Falon from Valery’s quarters,” Jax says.
I look at Dante and his face is determined as he gives one final order: “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
I rap so quietly on Erik’s door that he doesn’t respond so I knock again. When he answers his door, his shirt is untucked and his hair tousled but I can tell he hasn’t been sleeping.
“Can I come in?” I ask. It’s my job to convince both Erik and Jost to come, something I plan to approach with separate tactics, while Jax works on a distraction and gets Val and Dante out and into a crawler. The plan is straight and to the point, so I’m positive it will go all wrong.
Erik looks flustered to see me, which is unusual, but we haven’t talked about what he said to Jost. If he meant it. Or how I feel about it. Because I’m not sure yet. I duck in under his arm and push the door closed.
“I have something I need to tell you,” I start, but before I can continue Erik leans into me, resting his arm on the door behind me, and suddenly I can’t seem to breathe. He’s so close to me that I can see the golden flecks around his irises, like stars swimming in the ocean.
“We’ve needed to talk for a while,” he murmurs.
This close I can see that his lower lip is slightly fuller than the top one. I want him to lean closer. In this moment, I forget about Kincaid and Valery and Jost. I want him to kiss me.
Instead I push him away. Erik sighs and drops onto his bed, leaning his head into his hand. I’m immensely
