It was supposed to be me.
Alpha fixed a glare at Valk.
“Don’t. Don’t!” I called. “Just leave!”
Alpha stepped away from the table. Her legs wobbled, then gave out underneath her. She collapsed to the floor, doubling over, her hand pressing the wound.
“Let her go,” she told Valk, panting.
Valk turned away. She pulled me through the restaurant, sidestepping tables. The exit was right ahead of us. White light spilled inside. “The helicopter is two blocks away,” she said, her voice close to my ear. “You’re not going to give me any trouble. Understand?”
“Understood,” I whispered.
Anything, as long as she left Alpha behind.
Anything, as long as it meant closing the rift.
Valk pulled me out of the restaurant.
A shot fired. I jolted at the noise.
Valk screamed. She crashed into me. I tugged free and nearly tripped on the uneven pavement. Valk fell to her knees, groaning.
Blood drenched her calf. She was on all fours, her hands pressed to the ground, still holding her weapon.
“No,” Valk said, gasping. She seemed to be talking to herself more than to me. “No. No. Please.”
I looked over my shoulder. Alpha was still inside the restaurant, leaning heavily against a table, her breathing ragged. One hand held a gun. Had to be the agent’s gun she’d kicked away earlier.
“Hazel,” Valk said. “Don’t be . . . don’t be selfish.”
I didn’t know what to do. I’d thought that once Alpha and Four were safe, the agents would grab me and I’d let them finish it. Finish me.
How was this sacrifice supposed to work if I had to do it myself? Should I say something to Alpha before I . . . before I tried to . . .
A scream.
Distant, muffled. The cry cut off straightaway. I still recognized the voice. How could I not?
“Four?” Alpha said behind me.
The sound had come from at least a block away, from the same direction we’d been running toward. The helicopter?
“Go!” Alpha yelled. “I’m fine. Trolls are coming. Go!”
I was running before I realized it.
I sprinted past the restaurant and across the street. I let the voices behind me blur into unintelligibility as I focused on the blocks ahead, trying to make out any yells or voices, any hint of what was happening. All I heard was my own labored breathing, the thumps reverberating through my body whenever my feet hit the ground.
Twice, I had to leap over cracks in the asphalt. All around me were traces of the rift: molten streetlights, mounds of rock dropped in the middle of the street, chunks torn from the huge office buildings around me. Items had crashed to the ground—everything from twisted car engines to deep-sea coral. A carcass with too many legs. A silver-blue cloud hung over the sidewalk.
The strangeness went past the tangible. The world looked overexposed. A badly edited photo. It didn’t look or feel like winter. No wind. No cold. No temperature at all. I couldn’t even smell anything—and in a place like this I should’ve been smelling fumes or trash or metal or something.
Like the world had been put on pause.
To my right, the sidewalk opened up between two identical granite-clad skyscrapers that had to be easily thirty or forty stories high. A square archway stood at the center, the entryway to a large courtyard. A helicopter stood crookedly parked with one of the landing skids on a round ledge and the other on the pavement. Something shimmery and gray had been splattered all over one side, dripping onto the asphalt in thick chunks.
Parked right beside the entryway was a van I immediately recognized as an MGA van. There was movement nearby, people looking faded in the light. I squinted. Two figures were carrying along a third. Long hair swung with every movement. Four hung slumped, held under her shoulders and by her legs.
Had they knocked her out? Or worse? Before I realized it, I was racing across the pavement, my heart thudding and my eyes fixed on Four.
Move. Please, please move.
Alpha and I shouldn’t have run. I’d thought Alpha was right, that Four would be safe with us drawing away most of the agents. But that third agent still had a damn gun. And I hadn’t even stopped to consider there might be more agents I hadn’t seen yet.
I leaped onto the platform, stepping around inactive fountain jets. The figures sharpened the closer I got. Wan color seeped into their clothes and skin. One of them was the agent from before, the small nervous one. She was shuffling toward the helicopter backward. She said something I couldn’t hear. The other person—who’d been holding Four under her arms—looked over her shoulder.
Not an agent. The glasses, the blond hair—
Torrance.
I’d been so focused on Four, I hadn’t even stopped to think . . .
Torrance was helping them.
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
“What did you do to her?” I yelled it at the top of my lungs, but my voice sounded frail, as though the air sanded down the edges and thinned the words.
The agent and Torrance had nearly reached the helicopter. I sped up and stumbled to a halt between them and the opening, my knife extended, my breathing heavy. Even up close, I couldn’t tell whether Four was breathing. “Is she—?”
“She’s—she’s sedated,” Torrance said.
“Why?” I didn’t mean the sedation; I meant everything else. But I couldn’t get past that one word. I shook my head. “I thought—You said you’d protect us!”
The agent lowered Four’s legs to the ground. Her hand went to her gun. She gauged the distance between us, her gaze lingering on my knife.
“We have to try this. We have to try something. One Hazel”—Torrance’s voice sounded as shaky as my own—“for all the others. For us. For everyone. I have a kid, Hazel, I just got custody again, I—”
“If we do nothing, we’ll all die anyway.” The agent talked fast. “Honestly? Going through the rift would give the girl a better chance of surviving than any of us have.”
“Valk was right, Hazel,” Torrance said softly. “I didn’t want this. But it’s the right thing to do.
