Tormented (34 page)

Phillips’s face twitched, just a little. “Can you contain her here?”

“Maybe not,” Zollers said, and oh, how I wish he had lied. You’d think he’d be good at it, what with being a former spy and telepath and all that.

“Get her out of here,” Phillips snapped and pointed at the door. “Get her in a car and drive west, the hell away from here—”

“She’s spiking!” Zollers shouted, and the medical unit became a chaotic free-for-all in an instant.

Sienna’s skin glowed blue, hotter than I’d seen her go before. Scott was already moving, directing water from a free-flowing sink in the corner into a floating ovoid shape, just hovering it over her. The dirt that Augustus had piled on as mud earlier was spread out on the bed and floor around Sienna, and I watched as it coalesced below her, flowing like water to cover her chest and legs, completely blocking out the flames. Scott’s water dropped, seeping into the soil shell that Augustus had created. Steam began to hiss, the soil began to glow—

“This one’s bad,” Zollers said, voice back to calm, but I could barely hear him over the hiss of the steam. The temporary entombment around my sister began to glow a harsh orange, cracks appearing in steadily widening fissures around it. Scott kept pouring water over it, and soon that entire corner of the room was obscured. Isabella scrambled away again, coat flapping behind her, her silken gown showing beneath it as she stooped in her barefooted run.

“You should have told me what was happening immediately,” Phillips said over my shoulder, voice laden with fury.

“You know why I didn’t?” I shot back, not taking my eyes off the steam-filled corner where my sister was baking. “This. This right here. Here we are, in the middle of a crisis, and you want to cast her out to explode on her own—”

“Where she won’t hurt anyone, yes,” Phillips said.

“She’s going to blow up as we’re transporting her off campus, dumbass!” I shouted at him. “Unless we’re working to contain this, she’s going to go off like a bomb and we’ll all die, and then she’ll just keep going off until she’s dead and the countryside around her is completely nuked. Maybe over and over for days, who knows?” My jaw hardened, my eyes cornered him and wouldn’t let him loose. “We’re trying to stop that from happening, and you’re trying to screw it up. Stop doing that!”

“I’m trying to keep this from getting worse,” he said. “You should have moved her the second this started. Your head is so far up your own ass that you can’t see clearly. You should have someone who wasn’t emotionally involved in this crisis giving the orders, telling you what to do—”

“Maybe I’ve had enough of you telling me what to do,” I said, and felt wind flare from the tips of my fingers. “Especially when it’s clear you don’t give a fig if she lives or dies.”

“Security,” Phillips said, menacing. “We need to move Ms. Nealon out of—”

“Belay that!” I shot back.

“You will follow my orders,” Phillips said over his shoulder, not bothering to look back at the black-clad men behind him.

“You’ll get us all killed,” I shouted, not daring to look away from my death glare at Phillips.

Phillips’s eyes narrowed, and the steam drifted in front of his face, making it look like he was breathing smoke out of his nose and ears. “You—”

A flare of fire interrupted him, pulsating orange and red and nearly blinding me, but this time, it didn’t come from Sienna.

It came from the hallway outside the medical unit, and it consumed the entire security team in its angry heat. The men in black danced and writhed, fire rolling up their bodies as it covered them in its hot embrace, sending black clouds billowing up to the ceiling. The clatter of their weapons falling out of their hands was nearly drowned out by their screams, and one by one the men followed, lumps of organic matter slowly cooking, the smell of burning meat overcoming the steam.

Out of the smoke, two figures emerged. I blinked as they drifted out of the leading edge, features fuzzy but becoming clear in seconds. The one in the back I knew as Cunningham immediately; his hangdog look and slumped shoulders obvious even before he cleared the black clouds.

The other, it took me a moment to identify. When last I’d seen him, he was scarred from head to toe. Now, his skin was new, flushed with pride, or pleasure or maybe even the simple effort of holding his breath as he trod through our burning security men. Either way, there was no hiding the satisfaction on Anselmo Serafini’s newly-formed face as he stepped out of the smoke to face me. “And now we meet again, Mr. Treston,” he said, “for the last time.”

And I knew, one way or another, that he was right.

The ice was suffocating, choking, killing me slowly. It covered every limb, to the tips of my fingers and toes, and washed me with a numb burning that felt like slow fire was licking at my nerve endings. I could feel it in a way I shouldn’t have been able to if it really had been fire. It was in my nostrils and sinuses, numbing my brain and burning it, all in one. I was immobile, railing against the strength of the hard ice that secured me in place, pain lancing through me from bottom to top, and I had no recourse but to stand there and feel it, feel every bit of it.

I stood there for a minute, for an hour, for an age. I flexed my fingers ineffectually, I tried to curl up without success, I screamed and cried to the heavens for help.

Shapes and shadows moved outside my frigid prison. I saw them distorted, as if through a glass, a spider web of imperfections in the ice giving the shapes a funhouse mirror look.

I saw an eye—blue, but not the blue of Winter and bereft of the green that flecked my mother’s. I saw dark hair, a young face that was too distorted to be handsome. I heard a voice, muffled, unfamiliar. “Uhhh … did I catch you at a bad time?”

For obvious reasons, I did not answer.

I saw him move, saw him work, saw him try to free me, but to no effect. “I, uh … guess I’ll come back some other time. Sorry.”

I screamed and I screamed at him, but he didn’t hear a word of it.

I waited another age. Day and night moved steadily overhead, the sun and moon visible in my burning, painful prison.

I wanted to go home.

… but I didn’t have one.

I wanted to see my friends.

… but I didn’t have any.

The ice hardened and set, the sun disappeared, and the moon as well. The darkness closed in on me like four iron walls had been dropped in around me.

I was alone.

Again.

Cut off from the world.

Again.

In the box.

Again.

Forever.

I am death,
I said to myself.
And the world would be a much happier place without me.

I closed my eyes.

The sound of a faint tapping reached my ears, a subtle vibration in the ice that sounded like someone putting their fingernail against wood, over and over again. It was slow, steady, and gradually maddening.

It grew louder, then louder still, and I opened my eyes, which had never really been shut. A faint light had appeared in the distance, glowing like a penlight in a dark room, but far away, across a moonless night at sea.

Leave me be,
I said,
for I am death, and you don’t want any of this.

“Nice,” a familiar voice said, reverberating through the ice. “But I’m pretty sure death talks a little more formal. Probably doesn’t say, ‘you don’t want any of this.’ I’m guessing he would have gone with, ‘You will receive naught but the taste of ash and grave from me!’ With an exclamation point, for emphasis, see.”

I tried to frown, but my face was frozen. Who are you?

“It’s me,” he said, and I knew it was a he. The light was larger now, like a headlamp in the fog at midnight.

Me who?

“You’ll see,” he said, and the tapping was now a pecking, the sound of frost being chipped away. The light was an open door to my room, his silhouette like that of a parent checking on their child in the darkness of slumber.

Whatever
, I said.

“Death definitely wouldn’t say ‘whatever.’ Death is not a teenage girl.”

She could be. Don’t lay your gender stereotype baggage on me. Death could be a kickass teenage girl, all sullen and emo—

“Death would not say ‘emo’ and would probably find that description insulting.”

Oh, leave me be, will you?

“No,” he said, “I will not.” The light was blinding now, his silhouette and shadow the only thing keeping me from being completely overwhelmed.

I waited, afraid to ask the question I wanted to know the answer to more than anything.
Why not?

“Because I haven’t given up on you yet,” he said, his voice warm, kind, and inviting. “Because I would
never
give up on you.”

You should, I said. You should give up now. You should leave me in here to—

“To what?” he asked. “To wallow in your guilt until you putrefy and truly become this ‘death’ that they keep pushing you to be? Sorry. I get the guilt thing, but it doesn’t work with me.”

I killed people. There are reasons I feel guilty.

“There’s a time and a place to deal with that guilt, and this ain’t it.”

It’s a perfect place to do so.

“You’re just saying that because being trapped in the dark is a familiar place for you to feel this way.” He was so close now, inches away.

I’m saying it because it’s true.

“You wouldn’t say that if they hadn’t been bulldogging you. If they hadn’t been ganging up on you, running you into the ground—”

You can just go,
I said, suddenly afraid that he was going to free me. Really free me.

Because then … where would I go?

What would I do?

Nobody wants me,
I said.
Best to just leave me in here.

“I want you out,” he said.

But—

“Come out, Sienna.”

And with a last tap, the prison ice shattered like glass and left me standing in the middle of a snowy field, alone with my rescuer. I stared into his face, blinking away my pain and surprise as the aching chill that had seeped into my bones faded.

“Jake?” I asked, not really believing what I was seeing. “Jake Terrance?”

He nodded, and smiled. “Hello, Sienna.”

I shook my head, tears forming in the corners of my eyes. “No. You’re one of them. You just … came to bring me back.”

“I’m not one of them,” he said, and took a step forward, strong hands grasping me around the arms. “I’m not. They’re guilt … shades of guilt, trying to make you feel terrible because you blame yourself for their deaths. I’m not here for that.”

I wanted to shrug out of his grasp, to run away, but didn’t. Instead I just stayed there, cautious, feeling like he was about to drop the other shoe, to tell me what axe he had to grind with me. “Why are you here?”

He smiled, and it was so warm and real that I forgot the cold for almost a minute. “To let you know you’re not alone.”

“I don’t even know you,” I said, and the tears came back to the corners of my eyes.

“Of course you do,” he said, and he pulled me close. He was so warm, his chest against mine, his arms tight around me. They wrapped me close to him, and it was like he had given me a hug for the ages. “I’m the one person whose death you
can’t
feel guilty about.”

I swallowed hard, trying to eat my emotions before they came rushing out. “But … you are dead?”

“Yes,” he said, a little sadly. “I died before you were born.” He pulled back so I could look him in the face, and it started to shift, just the way that Breandan’s had, my mother’s had, the way … Zack’s had. His features resolved into a face that I’d only seen in pictures, and suddenly I knew why Jake Terrance’s watch had kept catching my eye.

It was because once upon a time, I’d had one exactly like it. Reed had given it to me, as a hand-me-down from—

“Dad,” I whispered and fell into his arms. His hug was impossible, anguishing, something I’d dreamed of but I always knew I could never have.

And I couldn’t hold back the tears any longer.

What the hell is going on here?
Benjamin wondered as they stepped out of the smoke into the steamy infirmary. It felt like water was misting onto him, warm water condensing out of the air and running down his skin like sweat on a hot day.

The scene before him as the smoke cleared was a bizarre tableau, like something out of a surreal painting. There were people everywhere, and few enough of them were ones he actually knew. The director of the agency—Phillips? Was that it? Benjamin recognized him well enough from TV, backing away toward Reed Treston, surprisingly cool for a man who was only a few feet from Anselmo. Benjamin might have been more panicked—no, he would have been, no ‘might’ about it. The black man who’d helped try to subdue him at the office building was there as well, still in a bed and not getting up, though he was watching Benjamin with wide eyes. Another black man was a little further back, partially obscured by the thick cloud of steam that made it look as though a fog machine were going in the back corner of the room. The lady doctor stood just outside the white clouds, her lab coat undone and a—was that a—

she’s not wearing much underneath that

—a bit of lingerie?

“Oh, my,” Benjamin murmured to himself, feeling flushed at the bizarre spectacle before him, like he’d walked in on a very private moment. He lowered his eyes by instinct, embarrassed.

“Here we find each other once more,” Anselmo said, going on, “I am almost as I was when we first met. Surely this displeases you, as you wished to leave me scarred and humiliated—”

“Outside of confined to a prison,” Reed said with a snap, “I didn’t much care how I left you.”

“Oh, but you care,” Anselmo said, wagging a finger. “We have met one another, we have fought one another, and we continue to circle in each other’s orbits.”

“I get the feeling one of us is about to achieve breakaway speed,” Reed said.

“Yes,” Anselmo said, “I am going to leave you behind forever.”

“Maybe you should—” Benjamin said, trying to get out a word of warning for Anselmo.

“Hush,” Anselmo said, holding up a single hand, finger extended, pointing to him. “The men are talking.”