She wouldn’t need to. I could give her precisely what she wanted: Me.
“Let the others go,” I said. “If you do, I’ll come with you. I’ll cooperate as long as the others are safe. You’re half right. Your plan will work, but only if you use me and not them—”
“This isn’t a negotiation. None of you are leaving. We might need—Shit!” Valk dashed back and aimed her gun. Before I could move—before I even registered what was happening—two shots went off. Three. The sound exploded around us.
The redheaded agent scrambled to aim his own gun. Not at any of us, I realized with dizzying relief. The agents were aiming to our right, behind the van.
The gunshots didn’t echo off the buildings, as I’d expected. My ears didn’t even ring. The sound died abruptly, leaving only panicky shouts and an irregular rat-tat-tat that sent alarm bells ringing in my brain.
Blurs of gray raced across the asphalt. Bulbous little bodies, rail-thin limbs, nasty stone smiles. I counted six trolls. More were turning the corner.
“Run!” Alpha yanked at my sleeve. She was the only one who didn’t seem surprised. She must’ve felt the trolls coming. “While they’re distracted!”
We couldn’t run toward the van. The agents and trolls were too close. Alpha and Torrance bolted the other way, toward the pavement, dragging Four between them. I followed before I realized it, my socks slapping the road, surrounded by the noise of guns and whizzing bullets and rat-tat-tat claws and grinding screeches and Valk yelling my name.
One of the trolls launched at Torrance. She yelled and kicked it off.
More shots. A bang, the ground trembling, a tile cracking under my foot—a bullet had hit the ground right behind me. I leaped forward.
“Hazel!” Valk stood a dozen feet away. Trolls lay scattered across the street, blown apart by the agents’ weapons. They reconstructed slowly enough that the agents could focus on us.
Behind me, Torrance was protectively holding Four. They’d fallen farther behind than I’d realized. Alpha and I should help—
“Keep running,” Alpha hissed by my ear.
The redheaded agent and Valk stalked toward us. Behind them, a troll stirred to life.
“But Four—” I started.
“Trust me!”
We turned and ran.
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
Alpha and I bolted down the street. I flinched at the hellish white bricks of a building, like sunlight glinting off snow.
Except I doubted these bricks had ever been white before tonight.
The agents followed. I heard their footsteps, their yells. Heat thumped through my veins.
“Two agents after us,” Alpha said as we ran, “means only one agent left to go after Four. And she’s got Facet and Torrance on her side. She has better odds if we run. And the agents won’t shoot us.”
“You don’t know that. You don’t”—pant, pant—“know Valk.” Though neither did I, apparently.
I frantically scanned the street. I took in buildings, trees, abandoned cars, a ghost city wrapped in white. I recognized none of it. I didn’t have the faintest clue where I was, aside from “downtown Philadelphia.”
“Don’t need to. We’re running”—she gasped for breath—“toward the helicopter. Right where they want us. Shooting would only slow us down.”
“Why do they want us in the helicopter?”
“The rift is too far up from the ground. They need to toss us in from above.”
“You have a plan?” We skidded around a corner, almost slamming into something big and metal. Looked like a crashed aircraft. Rift? Military? We automatically split up and went around it, converging again on the other side.
“Not anymore,” Alpha said. “I thought there’d be more trolls.”
The agents gained on us. Two trained agents were always going to outrun two exhausted teenage girls. Especially if one had just woke from a coma, and the other wasn’t even wearing shoes.
“Hazel!” Valk called.
My every instinct told me to slow down and listen. This was all a big misunderstanding, right? Even now that I’d seen Valk in the flesh, her gun pointed straight at me, the idea of her—of anyone—planning to actually kill me refused to compute.
She wasn’t a troll. Not a mindless, moving heap of dirt. She was a person. Valk had brought me tea during research sessions just last night. She’d been working with the MGA since before I hit puberty. She’d escorted me to mini-golf countless times. She’d even joined every now and again, her immaculate suit starkly out of place amid the miniature Liberty Bell and colorful golf balls.
I barely knew the other agents, but, God, that meant they barely knew me, too, yet they were ready to kill me.
And I needed to let them.
The thought hit me like a hammer, the same way it’d done a hundred times in the car ride here. It still felt as fresh as it had the moment Neven had said the words to me.
I needed to die.
It should’ve been simple. Valk and I wanted the same thing—the rift closed, no matter the cost.
But what if I sacrificed myself and the rift took too long to close? What if Valk thought it hadn’t worked and went for Alpha and Four next? I had to know they were safe before I gave myself up. Which meant I needed to buy time for them to escape—and for me to explain. They’d never agree to abandon me otherwise. I knew them well enough to know that.
“I talked to Neven,” I started, “and she, she said . . .” A stitch stabbed my side. I pressed one hand to it. We ran past a church, then past a building heavy with scaffolding and peeling advertisements. The scaffolding ran off into a narrow construction tunnel on one side. The moment I could, I surged off into the tunnel, blocking out the blinding-white world.
The agents were right behind us. Their heavy steps slammed on the floor panels.
I took my knife and slashed through the metal support beams. Some diagonal slices so the beams would slide away, other times slashing twice and cutting out an entire foot from the poles. A horrid metal-on-metal screech
