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“Ayo, stop!”

He was panting, his small body shaking, the
knife still held aloft. He winced, closing his eyes and shaking his
head. “Misha?”

“It’s me,” I said, trying not to panic. Trying
to keep my voice calm and soothing. Gideon had said implants
couldn’t turn a gentle person into a killer. Then again, the
Dollhouse could do things even the Guild knew nothing of. “Give me
the knife.”

Ayo opened his eyes, and what I saw there made
me want to cry. Desperation and fear and horror and pain. It was
like Deliphine all over again, that horrible night spent in
Gideon’s spare bedroom as Ayo bashed his own head against the
bedpost. He was fighting his program, but he’d fought that battle
before and lost.

“It wants me to kill you,” he whispered. “Oh
Goddess, Misha, the hook wants me to kill you.”

“You can beat it,” I said, trying to buy some
time. If I could only get my arm free—

“Don’t move!” Ayo yelled. The hand holding the
knife wobbled, and Ayo’s chest hitched with a muffled sob. “I can’t
fight it if you move.” He shook his head, tears flowing down his
cheeks. “Every time you move, the hook moves too.”

“All right,” I soothed, even though my heart
was pounding in fear. “I won’t move. All you have to do is put down
the knife.”

“I’m trying.”

“Everything’s going to be all right. Just put
down the knife, then we’ll leave.” But he’d killed somebody. How
long before they came to arrest him? “We’ll get on Donato’s boat
and we’ll run. We’ll go back to Deliphine, or to—”

“No.” The anguish on his face and in his voice
made my heart break. “It won’t work. The hook will still be there.
The Dollhouse will still be there. Oh Goddess, Misha, why couldn’t
they let us be? Why couldn’t they just let us have each
other?”

“We can. You can beat this. I know you
can.”

He shook his head, closing his eyes. “I’m not
so sure.”

“Ayo—”

“Don’t move,” he whispered, wincing again.
“The hook…” He shivered, closing his eyes. “It’ll always be there.
How can we go home and go to bed together knowing it’s still there?
I can try to fight it, but how long will it be before I lose?” The
knife wavered, his entire arm shaking with the force of holding it
back, and I held perfectly still. “You’re going to have to kill me,
Misha. If I can’t make myself put this knife down—”

“No! I won’t do that. We can find another
surgeon—”

“Nobody will touch me! You know that.” The
knife wavered again. His entire arm shook from the tension of
trying to keep it from slamming into me. “Maybe…” His pale eyes met
mine, but his gaze was focused inward. I saw a glint of hope there.
“I could do it myself—”

“No!”

The knife dipped, then steadied. A trickle of
sweat rolled down his temple to mix with the tears on his cheek.
“Hold still!”

I obeyed, but I wasn’t sure how long I’d be
able to. Panic was beginning to rear its ugly head. My armpits and
groin tingled with adrenaline. We were crammed into the tiny space,
my head under the lowest level of shelves, my elbows and his knees
against the wall, but my legs were relatively free. Could I lift
them and wrap him up quicker than he could bring the knife down? I
didn’t think I had enough leverage to do it. Not without moving my
upper body too, at any rate.

Ayo groaned as if in pain, and his entire body
shook with the force of another sob. He almost crumpled in on
himself, but the knife stayed aloft. “The suicide block! It’s still
there! You told me it would be gone!”

“I had no control over what the Dollhouse
did!” Because even if I had insisted on them removing it, who was
to say they would have listened? Our entire situation only proved
how little control we’d had in that exchange.

“I hate you, Misha. And I hate me, and I hate
Donato, and I hate this city, and more than anything, I hate the
fucking Dollhouse!”

“I know, Ayo. I know. But I can help
you.”

“No, you can’t!”

“They probably programmed you to kill me just
to clean up loose ends, but once we’re away from here, there’d be
no reason for you to kill me. The chip can’t change who you
are.”

“The chip! We both know it can do anything
they want it to do! They ruined my life with this stupid,
Goddess-forsaken chip they stuck in my head! Everything that’s ever
happened to me is because of it. All that shame and everything
Donato did to me and the hook in Deliphine and now this! They’ll
make me kill you, Misha. They’ll make me destroy everything I’ve
ever loved, all with this stupid chip!”

“I know. And I’m sorry. But I still think we
can beat it.”

He shuddered again, his arm wavering as his
gaze suddenly moved to some distant point over my left shoulder. He
became horribly, horrifyingly still. The slow light of
comprehension dawned in his pale eyes.

“Ayo?”

“That’s it,” he breathed in awe, pulling the
knife back so he could strike. “The chip.”

“No!”

But before I could move, he brought the knife
down. The tip sank a bare half inch into his skull before crunching
to a sickening halt. Blood spurted from his head, spraying the
empty pantry shelves, splashing across my face, and he pulled the
knife free and brought the point down again into that spot behind
his right ear. I shoved him backward, off of my chest, banging my
head on the shelves again as I reached for his wrist.

Too late.

He brought the knife down a third time, and
this time, he screamed as the tip pierced his skull. He fell
backward. His head crashed against the wooden shelves. The knife
clattered uselessly to the floor as he started to
convulse.

“Ayo!”

I tried to gather him into my arms, to hold my
hand over the wound on his head, but his body was convulsing too
hard, and with each new spasm, the blood spurted between my
fingers. A wet stain bloomed at his groin, spreading down his pant
legs as his bladder let go. That, more than anything, horrified me.
That loss of control told me he was dying.

“Help!” I screamed, holding his shaking body
in my arms. “Frey, help me!”

The door flew open.

Not Frey, as I’d hoped, but Aleksey, his eyes
wide with surprise. I dropped Ayo and flew at Aleksey, reaching for
my boot with my sticky, blood-soaked fingers.

He hadn’t thought to check for a second
knife.

I’d been in knife fights before. I hadn’t ever
outright murdered anybody, but given blood loss and the possibility
of infection, I figured a handful of people had died by my hands
over the years. I’d never felt much regret then, and the only
regret I felt now, as I slammed Aleksey against the wall and sank
the blade into his throat — his blood pouring hotly over my hand,
his dark eyes slowly going blank — was that I couldn’t kill him
twice: once for Anzhéla, and once for Ayo.

I let his lifeless body fall to the floor as I
turned back to Ayo. The convulsions had stopped. I couldn’t tell if
he was breathing or not.

“Frey!” I screamed, scooping Ayo into my
arms.

I found Frey still blood-soaked and slumped on
the kitchen floor next to Anzhéla’s body.

“Help me, Frey. Please!”

There was a small table in the corner,
probably where the servants had eaten before the revolution, and I
laid Ayo across it. Frey pushed to his feet. He may have been
mourning, but he’d always been a healer at heart. His eyes showed
real concern as he leaned over Ayo, putting his ear to Ayo’s lips.
“He’s still breathing.” He turned Ayo’s head to examine the wound.
I had a feeling he was glad to have something to distract himself
from Anzhéla. “Holy Goddess, Misha. What happened?”

“Aleksey gave Ayo the command to kill Anzhéla,
then tried to use it to make Ayo kill me. Ayo did this to himself
rather than finish his job.”

Frey’s shoulders tightened. “And Aleksey?” he
asked without turning away from Ayo.

“Dead.”

“You or Ayo?”

And strange as the question was, I understood.
“I killed him.”

“Good.”

Ayo still hadn’t moved or made a sound, and
now that the adrenaline was wearing off, I found myself near tears.
“Can you save him?”

“I don’t know. He’s breathing, but his
heartbeat is weak. He’s lost a lot of blood, and there’s no telling
how much damage he did to his brain.”

I bit back a sob, squeezing Ayo’s hand. I felt
like a fiend asking Frey to help me when Anzhéla’s body was only a
few feet away, not even cold yet, but who else could I turn
to?

“I’m sorry, Frey. I’m so s—”

“Stop. We don’t have time for it right now.”
He lifted Ayo off the table and angled past me toward the hallway.
I followed him up a flight of stairs and into the first bedroom. He
laid Ayo on the bed and began opening drawers, pulling out bottles
and strips of linen. He’d obviously used the room to treat injuries
before, and I thought again of Anzhéla, and how Frey would have
tended to her after he’d saved her from Benedict. “I’ll get him
stabilized, but then I have to report this to the
governors.”

“It wasn’t Ayo’s fault.”

“I know that. But the longer we delay, the
more suspicious it looks, and the board won’t hesitate to pin this
on me.”

“On you? But what about—”

“The two of you were never here.”

“Frey, you can’t—”

“Misha,” he said, bending again over Ayo’s
still form. “Get the fuck out and let me work.”

Frey came downstairs half an hour later,
looking like he’d aged ten years. We stood in the kitchen, both of
us doing our best not to look toward Anzhéla’s body.

“How is he?” I asked.

“He’s alive, and the bleeding’s stopped.
That’s as much as I can do for now.” He sank into a chair and put
his head in his hands. “I’m worried the wound to his head will get
infected.”

“I have some salve back at the inn. The
Dollhouse gave it to me after his last implant—”

“Go,” he said quietly. “Get it. Clean yourself
up and get him some clean clothes.” He scrubbed his hands over his
close-cropped hair and glanced up at me. “While you’re doing that,
I’m going to notify the governors. Don’t come back until you see
them leave.”

“What will you tell them?”

“That I heard a commotion. I came in to find
Anzhéla dead and Aleksey fleeing, and that I killed
him.”

I shook my head. “I’ll confess to killing
Aleksey. There’s no reason you should have to take the
blame.”

“No. The more people involved, the more it
looks like a conspiracy.”

In the end, he had his way. Not that it
mattered. The Board didn’t bother to press charges against him for
Aleksey’s death.

“I think they’re relieved, to tell you truth,”
Frey told me on the second day. “Aleksey and Anzhéla were a thorn
in their side, and I was an embarrassment. Now they’re rid of all
three of us in one fell swoop. None of them are exactly
grieving.”

We were in the second-floor bedroom that
served as Ayo’s hospital room. It smelled of blood and antiseptic
and urine but not, thank the Goddess, of infection. Frey turned to
stare out the window. I suspected it had nothing to do with the
view and everything to do with hiding his tears. “I assume Aleksey
planned to have Ayo kill me too, once you were out of the
way.”

“That was my thought as well.”

He shook his head in disgust. “I can’t wait to
get off this fucking hill.”

“Where will you go?” I asked.

“Back to the theater.”

“When?”

He glanced over his shoulder at where Ayo
still slept. “Whenever he can be moved.”

I didn’t bother to ask when that would be. Ayo
would either wake up soon, or he’d pass out of my reach. My heart
ached at the thought. I sat on the side of the bed and held his
hand in mine. He was frighteningly pale, his lips ashen, the
fingers of his right hand clammy and cold. His left was bandaged,
hiding the small blisters that had formed there. The mild burn from
the boiling water was the least of our worries.

“His heart’s strong,” Frey said quietly. “But
I have no idea how much damage he did to his brain.” He’d told me
all this before, but there was so little say. I understood his need
to repeat it. “The chip is trashed, I could tell that much. I
should have been able to feel a charge in it, but I couldn’t. It’s
dead. The question is, how much of his brain died with
it?”

I couldn’t bear to think about it. I was
exhausted. Heartbroken. Wracked with both guilt and grief. My
entire life had been darkness and desperation, up until Ayo. I’d
stolen wallets and sucked cock in refuse-strewn alleys in exchange
for a few meager coins, and I’d never once dared dream that there
might be something better. But Ayo
was
that something. He
stood against the sordid backdrop of my past like a glorious
beacon, full of light and love and purity, and when I looked
forward, trying to imagine a future without him, I saw nothing but
one black day after another.