One little girl came toward me, her blond hair in ringlets that framed her face.
Her tiny lip trembled. “Are you here to hurt us?”
“No,” I crouched down so I was her height. “You don’t have to be afraid of me. I’m here to help.”
But all of a sudden, I couldn’t remember why I was here at all. How was I going to help? Something was wrong, there was something I was supposed to be doing—
The girl pulled away from me.
“He’s waiting for you,” she said. She pointed to a boy sitting up front with his back to me. He was bigger than the other children, and the only one who hadn’t turned around when I walked in.
I hurried to the front of the room. I didn’t have much time. Then I frowned, not knowing why the thought had arisen. Other thoughts seemed to be wriggling at the back of my mind too, but when I tried to focus on them, they evaporated.
Of course I had all the time in the world. I carefully rounded the desk and saw the boy’s face.
I knew him.
“Markan!” I leaned over and hugged him hard. My little brother. I looked around at all the other children. They watched me silently. The more I looked at them, the more something seemed wrong with their eyes.
What had felt like a peaceful sanctuary only moments before now felt sinister. There was something wrong with these children. With this whole situation.
“Come on, Markan,” I said, a chill running up my spine. “We should go.”
He didn’t say anything, but he let me pull him to his feet. I grabbed his hand and was about to tug him forward when he cried out and sank to his knees. Blood bloomed on the front of his tunic.
“Markan!” I screamed. I looked around. I didn’t see any Regs. How had he gotten hurt?
I reached to pull his tunic off over his head so I could see the wound and try to stop the bleeding, but he grabbed me with a surprisingly strong grip.
“Why didn’t you save me?” Blood bubbled out of his mouth as his face paled. “Why didn’t you save me?”
The children around us picked up the chant, a choir of accusing voices. “Why didn’t you save me?”
I reached out to pull Markan into my arms, but as I touched him, he disintegrated into thin air.
“Markan!” I screamed, pawing the empty air in a panic. No! I’d had him, he’d been in my arms!
The children continued chanting, but all of them were bleeding now, from their noses, heads, chests. I screamed.
Another figure appeared in the spot where Markan had disappeared. Milton. Half his head was crushed in and blood poured down his face and neck. He reached out his arms to me. “Why didn’t you save me?”
“No!” I screamed, backing away. “You’re not real.” I spun around, clutching my head. “None of you are real!”
I closed my eyes so I wouldn’t see them. I had to use my telek, I had to—
“Why didn’t you save me?” Another voice added to the chorus behind me. A voice I knew well.
“Adrien!” I turned around to him, and I remembered why I was here. The thought burned clear like a light piercing the fog. I was supposed to save Adrien. He didn’t look like the others in the room. He wasn’t as clean and he seemed more solid somehow.
He’d always been thin, but now he was positively skeletal. Dark, bruiselike shadows ringed his eyes. His hair was shaved and jagged, barely healed-over scars crisscrossed the left side of his head.
“Why didn’t you save me?” He didn’t reach out for me like Milton. He simply stood still looking like a broken toy. His eyes were vacant, constantly shifting this way and that as if he were seeing but not seeing.
“I will!” I said. “I will save you. Come with me. There’s a transport coming.”
He blinked and shook his head like he was clearing away a fog. “Zoe?” he whispered, as if he was seeing me for the first time.
“Oh God, what have they done to you? We have to get out of here.” I reached for his hand, but he pulled me into a hug. He was so skinny, I could feel each rib as he breathed in and out. I held back a sob. He’d known this would happen. No wonder he’d looked so haunted in the months leading up to the raid.
“Let me hold you,” he whispered so softly I could barely hear him through my helmet. “They’ve done horrible things to me. The only thing that got me through was the thought of you.”
I nodded, tears in my eyes. I glanced around me.
The children and the bright white classroom had faded. An errant thought in the back of my mind screamed that this wasn’t normal. Rooms and people didn’t just appear and disappear. But the next moment, I’d forgotten that it was strange at all.
Adrien and I were now in a room that looked like my old housing unit in the Community. It was dark with only the small sphere of the light cell near the head of my bed. Adrien pulled me down on the mattress beside him, just like he used to when he’d visit me in the middle of the night. The ceiling tile was shifted overhead, as if he hadn’t bothered to close it behind him.
“You’ve had a bad dream,” Adrien said. “I heard you cry out, so I came down. But you’re awake now.”
A bad dream. That didn’t seem quite right, but when I held him, suddenly it made more and more sense. I’d had such a very long, very bad dream, and now everything was back as it was supposed to be. Adrien and me, together and hidden away from the world in the dark sanctuary of my room.
He laughed, the sound of it gentle in the quiet room. “Zoe, why are you wearing that suit?”
His laugh made me feel warm all the way down to my bones. I looked down at my gloved hands, then laughed with him. I giggled, confused. “I don’t know.”
“Let’s get this off you,” he said, a warm smile still on his face. He put a hand to the edge of my faceplate.
I nodded. All I wanted was his touch. Suddenly I needed it more than I’d ever needed anything in my life, more than food, more than air. I let him undo the clasps and pull my helmet off. He swooped in and kissed me as if he was breathing me in.
For a moment everything was perfect. Adrien was in my arms and his lips tasted sweet, like strawberries. I noticed a slight whirring noise start up around us, like one might notice the buzz of a fly in the background. I kissed him deeper.
But when I pulled back to take a breath, my chest felt tight and I couldn’t get any air. At first I laughed, thinking about how kissing Adrien made me breathless. But the next second, I knew that wasn’t it. My tongue felt wrong. It was a thick stone in my mouth.
I knew what this felt like. This had happened before. My thoughts were sluggish, but I finally remembered.
It was an allergy attack. I was having an allergy attack. I fumbled for the epi infuser I always carried with me. It should be safely tucked in a pocket at my thigh, but when I reached for it, there was nothing there.
“Help me,” I gasped at Adrien. I clutched his arm.
He pulled away. I looked up in confusion. All the features fit—the eyebrows, long aquiline nose, thick lips— but it was like I was looking at a stranger’s face. No emotion flickered. And he was holding the epi infuser in his hand as he backed away.
I put my hands to my throat and tried to get another breath. Only a tiny bit of air trickled through my swollen throat, not nearly enough for a proper breath. Adrien watched me writhing on the bed as if I were no more than a specimen in a lab.
“Help!”
Adrien continued to back away from me. In the next blink, he’d dropped to the ground from the loft bed and pushed the door to my room open. He was leaving me.
No. I had to stop him. I was supposed to save him. He was supposed to save me. My thoughts jumbled all together, but one thought burned clear. I couldn’t let him go. I could stop him, I knew I could, if I could just remember how—
My telek! How had I forgotten about it? I cast it out immediately, reaching for Adrien. But when I did, none of it made sense. The cube projection in my mind didn’t match what I saw. I couldn’t feel the shape of my loft bed or the tiny contours of my room.
Instead, it felt like a hallway.
And Adrien and I weren’t alone. There was someone else standing right beside me. I tried to scream, but
