He tried to fend off his fear, but it was no use. His mind was still more powerful than he was, and it delivered its messages in the only way it knew how: through his nightmares.
Of psychons swooping down from the tumultuous sky and tearing into him, pulling him apart as he watched, until there was nothing left but a few scraps of flesh and his still-beating heart, whump-whumping on the floor.
Of the she-thing that had come to him with her threats and her warnings, promising vengeance if he defied her. He could hear the water dripping on the floor, could see her black eyes boring into him.
Of his parents, caught in a violent freeze-frame, with the disintegrating car around them, the world outside turned upside down, their eyes squeezed shut, mouths dropped open in screams. And then his father, in that same still-shot, staring at him, his face perfectly calm, saying, You did this. You did this.
Of the girl in Arizona, the waitress who had died too young, standing behind the bar at the diner, the pot of coffee in her hand, turning to him and saying, You did this, too. You did this to us.
They were swift and vicious. They were the cruelest kind of guilt, the kind that he could not control or stifle or smother. He could have told anyone about the girl from the bridge. He could have told Captain Trier, Basil, Mak. All he had to do was open his mouth. But every time he did, a jolt of fear would rocket through him, paralyzing every empty nerve and muting every imagined sensation.
If you fight me, you will fall.
And he believed her. He didn’t want to. But in just hearing her voice, he knew how powerful she was. She would destroy them all if it came down to that. And he was not going to put everyone on the Harbinger, and the souls that powered it, in the path of destruction. If there was some kind of power in him that she wanted, she could have it.
The power just needed to show itself.
* * *
Basil and Mak sat across from Rhett in the mess hall, their shoulders touching. Mak was trying to look stiff and stubborn as usual, but Basil kept nudging her with his elbow, bumping the food off her fork. Rhett kept waiting for her to get angry, but she kept laughing instead.
Rhett was poking at his lunch, decidedly not hungry after days of keeping what he knew from the others. That, paired with nights of terrifying dreams. He didn’t even want to pretend to be hungry, just for the sake of eating—normalcy had lost its glamor, it seemed.
The three of them were sitting there, waiting on Theo and Treeny, when the push slammed into them, hard, threatening to literally drag Rhett down the stairs to where the room of doors waited.
“Whoa,” he said, letting his fork clatter onto his plate, knowing all too well what that massive whump of the push meant.
Across the table, Mak and Basil exchanged a look. Their touchy-feeliness had vanished in an instant.
“Mass casualties,” Mak said, her voice low. “Multiple souls.” She stood up, her worried eyes darting around the mess hall. She was looking for something, and she found it over the top of Rhett’s head, locking on to it and nodding.
Rhett turned and saw two other groups of syllektors on the other side of the hall that had stood up, rising above the gathered mass. He counted the heads of the syllektors that were now standing—nine in total—all of them waiting while the rest of the crew continued their meal. From the first group, a tallish man with piercing eyes and a baseball cap made out of completely blacked-out fabric nodded in response to Mak. From the other group, a woman who appeared to be about Rhett’s mother’s age, her blond hair cut short and hanging down to her chin, did the same thing. Then both teams began making their way out of the mess hall.
When Rhett swiveled back around, Mak was already moving around the table to leave as well. She stopped and turned back to him and Basil.
“You guys coming?” she said matter-of-factly, even though her face was scrunched with anxiety.
The boys nodded.
The three of them, plus the two additional teams, moved down to the armory, where they met Treeny and Theo. Treeny looked more shaken than ever, as if she had just seen a psychon in the hall on the way over.
“I’ve never felt it this strong before,” Rhett said to her, trying to comfort himself as much as he was trying to distract her.
She only nodded under her curtain of red bangs.
“It’s freaky, isn’t it?” she said.
She had that right. After what happened in San Francisco, anything out of the ordinary was cause for alarm. But as Rhett looked around at his team and the other two that were apparently joining them—fifteen syllektors all told—he realized that this wasn’t really out of the ordinary at all. Mass casualties, Mak had said. Rhett was surprised that even though he had seen this kind of thing before, had even been a part of it before, it still unsettled him.
But he didn’t have time to dwell on it—the push was insistent. It was impatient. If he didn’t get downstairs right away, he had a feeling that his body would eventually be carried there by invisible hands that would simply toss him through the correct door.
They got moving.
“Anybody else have a bad feeling?” Basil asked as they descended the stairs.
Nobody responded, and that was answer enough.
* * *
Rhett headed up the oversize group as they went into the room, and he didn’t even need to stop and think about which door they needed. The push was all but carrying him toward it. It was gray wood, slightly crooked in its frame. Even though all the doors in the room looked pretty much the same at first, Rhett had learned that some of them were older than others and some of them were made out of different types of wood. This one appeared to have both of those anomalies.
He opened the door to an inferno.
Rhett was flung back by a blast of heat and flames, a fireball that erupted out of the open door, reaching up toward the high ceiling of the room. Everybody jumped backward, ducking their heads to avoid the blast.
Basil, Mak, Treeny, and Theo helped Rhett to his feet, their faces as concerned as he felt. When he was standing again, he could see the source of the fireball—a living hell caught within the frame of the door.
There was a short hallway with cheap plastered walls and checkered linoleum that cut off at a stairwell. A dark, splintered banister followed the stairs up and down, and another hallway extended away from the stairwell on the other side. There were apartment doors lining both hallways, and all of them were spewing flames, lashing orange tongues that swiped at the hot, empty air, looking for something to scald. Clouds of black, acrid smoke roiled along the ceiling, flickering with the lights of a fire alarm that was still giving off a faint, tinny whine. It looked as if the building had consumed a lightning storm.
People ran in and out of the doors, up and down the stairs, frantic, smudged with soot and struggling to breathe. Rhett could hear panicked screaming and banging from somewhere. He stood frozen, watching the chaos unfold.
Someone grabbed his arm.
Mak leaned in close and said, “We have to get in there. Now. Before that place sets the whole ship on fire.”
She was right, of course. Because even as the three teams of syllektors stood there watching, flames were still licking at the edges of the doorway that led back to the Harbinger. If they left the door open much longer, the fire would find its way onto the ship.
Rhett took an unsure step toward the door and then stopped.
In the stairwell at the end of the hall, a flaming hunk of debris went roaring past, falling through the opening. Rhett heard it collide with the bottom of the building in a crash of shattering wood and angry fire. The entire building was ablaze.
Rhett turned back to Mak. Was she really expecting him to lead all these syllektors into that mess? She was the leader of their team. She should be the one to lead this group. He would follow her in, if that was the call she made. But he had no intention of following the push to his ghosting with everyone else in tow.
And for the briefest of seconds, Mak looked just as unsure as he was. Her eyes shifted from the engulfing flames in the apartment building to the calm, smooth floor beneath her. After the smallest of hesitations, though, her resolve hardened across her face.
Mak moved past Rhett and took a stance in front of the open door, ripples of heat wobbling through the air around her head.
“Okay,” she called to the group. “Everyone goes in. Everyone comes out. No unnecessary risks. No heroes. Got it?” The group—including Rhett—gave her their acknowledgment. “You find a thread, and you follow it. You get a soul, and you haul ass back to this door.” She pointed behind her, where the flames were already dancing near the spot where the Harbinger ended and the apartment building began.
“What about the fire?” the man in the baseball cap asked.
“We’re not all going to find another door out of there,” Mak replied. “We leave this one open.” She hesitated again. “For as long as we can.”
The group of syllektors didn’t look happy, but they did look determined. Basil, Theo, and Treeny exchanged a look with Rhett, who only tipped his head.
“Together,” he said.
Then he nodded at Mak, who nodded in return before turning and running through the door. The fire rippled around her, like flickering orange hands trying to grab at her skin, and she was gone.
Rhett took a deep breath, gathering his courage, and followed her.
As soon as he was through, he could feel the heat and smoke weakening his body. He couldn’t actually feel it in his nerves, but his movements became sluggish, his body’s responses to his brain delayed. And he began to cough involuntarily. Up ahead, from within the haze of smoke that was getting thicker by the second, he could hear Mak doing the same thing. The fire was killing their bodies.
He made his way to the stairwell, giving himself over to the push, letting it guide him. When he got to the banister, he understood what Mak had meant by “find a thread.” The push was nudging him in several different directions at once, its lure moving both up and down the stairs and also curling around the open stairwell to the hallway on the other side.
He could just barely see Mak over there, her machete ready at her side as she stepped into one of the apartments. There was a window at the end of that hallway that was blackened by the smoke, letting in just a hint of pale sunlight.
Behind and around Rhett, the other syllektors were falling into the building, following the various threads of the push to different floors. Looking down through the opening of the stairs, Rhett could see at least three more floors below him and six or seven above him. Who knew how many people were still trapped in here with them, doomed to let the flames win?
Basil sidled up next to him, a scythe in each hand reflecting the unruly firelight in their polished steel curves.
“Hell of a way to spend an afternoon, eh?” he said. And then he took off down the stairs. Rhett wanted to call after him, tell him to be careful. But after the Golden Gate Bridge, he knew he didn’t have to give that warning. To anyone on his team, at least.
Rhett shook his head and mind back into focus and began climbing the stairs.
Flames crawled up the walls, reaching for him. Smoke poured down his throat, and his lungs continued to reject it, sending it back out in heaving, crippling hacks. More flaming debris came crumbling from the ceiling, and he could hear it crashing from other parts of the building. The whole place was ready to buckle.
He climbed one flight, and even through the growl of the fire he could hear the murmuring of syllektors gathering souls. The push nudged him up even farther. He climbed two more flights to a spot where the smoke was unbearably thick, the flames just warbling flickers hidden by shadows. Glowing embers swirled around Rhett, landing on his clothes and singeing holes into them, into him. If he turned his senses on now, he’d feel the tiny stabs of heat across his flesh.
The push guided him down the hall, where the only things that were truly visible were the growing glow of the fire and the ugly pattern of the floor. He let it keep him on track, even as he heard other syllektors barreling up the steps behind him, moving upward still.
Rhett came to the apartment at the end of the hall, on the left. The door was open, and inside he could hear the taunting crackle of more flames, like mad laughter. Through the haze, he could make out the shapes of furniture—a couch along one wall, a coffee table, an abandoned easy chair—but they were all just mounds of darkness in the gloom. In one wall, there was a cutout that led to a little kitchenette. The fire had found its way in there, and Rhett could see the jagged angles of flame snapping at the air.
He stepped farther into the apartment, letting the push point him where he needed to go—past the living room furniture and the kitchen, to the alcove where, on the left, there was a bathroom. It had its light on, the porcelain still weirdly white and glistening, as if untouched by fire or smoke, and on the right, there was a bedroom.
There were no lights on in there. No fire. And if there was a window, it must have been covered by curtains. Just outside the door, there was an oxygen tank laying on its side, with a clear tube circling across the carpet, disappearing into the bedroom. Whoever lived here could never even have tried to escape the fire, because they probably never left their apartment in the first place.
Rhett was reminded yet again of just how unfair death could be.
He traced the tube from the oxygen tank with his eyes, moving to go into the bedroom. As soon as he had this soul, he could get back downstairs, make sure everyone else was on their way back to the Harbinger, and get the hell out of here. The thin, clear tube slipped into smoky blackness, laying on the carpet for a few inches and then twisting upward … to a pair of withered feet that dangled off the floor.
Rhett realized that he had been holding his breath, trying to fend off the smoke as best he could. But now he let it go, gasping at the sight of a massive, hulking shadow that filled up most of the bedroom doorway. It had arms that reached out and held the body of an elderly man—the owner of the oxygen tank—who was unconscious, limp in the shadow’s grip, clutched by hands that were mostly bone and shreds of muscle.
At the sound of Rhett’s gasp, it turned, still holding the old man, and glowered at Rhett through the wafting smoke with its mostly empty eye sockets and forever grin.
The psychon didn’t seem bothered by Rhett’s presence. In fact, it seemed to want him to watch as it pulled in a deep breath of smoke-tainted air. From the old man’s mouth, a thin wisp of white smoke unfurled, dancing in the air between his mouth and the psychon’s.
“NO!” Rhett yelled, and lunged at the psychon. He pulled his knuckle blade from its holster, gripping it as tightly as he could, and swung with it.
The psychon dropped the old man’s body, his soul now detached, and came at Rhett with a powerful backhand that carved a clear space through the swirling haze. Rhett ducked, dodging the swipe by just an inch, and lurched upward with his blade. He sank it into the psychon, cutting through its cloak and what little flesh there was hanging from the bones of its chest. It let out an ear-shattering scream.
Rhett yanked the blade out from between the psychon’s ribs, but as he did so, the psychon slammed its other fist into him. He came off his feet and flew into the pristine bathroom, smashing into the vanity, cracking it, breaking a pipe open and sending a shower of water arching above his head.
Through the doorway, Rhett could see the psychon step up to the old man’s soul, still hovering in the air, twisting and fluttering. The psychon stuck one of its knobby fingers into the white smoke of the soul and twirled it in the air. Something began to happen to the soul—it darkened, turning from white to an unhealthy-looking brown, mingling with the actual smoke that was still filling up the cramped apartment. The psychon kept twirling its finger, letting the soul wrap around it like a piece of fabric.
Rhett pulled himself to his feet, ready for another attack. He spread his legs, remembering that first day of training—and all the other days since—with Basil in the ring. He sprung forward …
… and without even a glance, the psychon turned and hit him with another devastating backhand. Now Rhett was launched into the living room, slamming into the coffee table. It snapped in two beneath him.
The psychon let out a deep, satisfying grumble, almost like a laugh but ten times as horrifying. It took a step toward Rhett, the ragged ends of its cloak waving around its ankles. It still had the soul caught around its finger, and the soul was getting even darker, withering like the petals of a flower, changing from brown to black and somehow getting thicker, denser.
Rhett watched, helpless, as the soul that had once been weightless and pure now turned into thick, goopy black sludge. It dripped into the psychon’s waiting hand, pooling there like oil. And, with another one of those disturbing chuckles, the psychon buried its face in its hands, slurping up the sludge as if it were soup.
It devoured the old man’s soul.
There was only one thing for Rhett to do: run.
He clambered to his feet and left the psychon behind in the apartment. But even as he darted back out into the hall, knuckle blade still clutched in his hand, he heard the psychon rush across the living room after him.
Of course there were more. Rhett came running back out to the stairwell and was met by the sounds of screeching psychons, clanging metal blades, and yells from the syllektors, trying to communicate, trying to fight back.
The flames were worse than ever, wrapped around parts of the banister, consuming entire walls. Flaming beams cracked and broke apart, falling through the drywall of the ceiling and landing wherever they may. The whole world was smoke and fire and raining embers.
Rhett needed to find his team.
But first, the scratch-thump-scratch of the psychon’s boney feet running up behind him. Rhett waited until the sound was right on top of him, then dropped to his knees, spun, and plunged the four deadly-sharp points of his blade into the psychon’s gut. He used the creature’s momentum to heave it upward. For a moment Rhett could sense its massive weight on top of him, threatening to crush him, but then he gave one last shove with one hand still holding the knuckle blade buried in the psychon’s stomach and the other flat against its chest. He threw the psychon across the open, empty stairwell. It flailed in midair before colliding with the banister on the other side, which was coated in angry red fire.
The banister fell apart, but the psychon’s cloak ignited immediately, and the flames spread across the fabric as if it were made of gasoline. When the psychon rose to its feet again, it was wearing a cloak made entirely of fire. It began to squeal and flail, dropping to the ground again and rolling. Its bones turned black as they burned.
Rhett didn’t wait around to see if the psychon was going to survive—he flew back down the stairs, to the floor just below. There were three more psychons down here, each of them caught in battle with a different syllektor. One of them was Theo.
He was doing his thing with a psychon that was bigger than even he was. Theo deflected swing after swing from the psychon with his ax, holding it high up on its neck—there was little room for fighting in such a cramped space. Theo’s broad shoulders slammed against the narrow walls of the hallway, his ax carving gouges into the already disintegrating plaster, as the psychon continued its advance, pushing Theo farther and farther down into the throat of the hall. Rhett could see a tight knot of smoke billowing back there—more fire.
As Rhett descended the last couple of steps to where one of the other syllektors—the woman with the short blond hair—was doing her best to fend off her own psychon attack, Mak was coming up them.
The psychon spotted Rhett immediately, but it never saw Mak coming.
She came off the steps, swinging her machete upward, her face a raging mask. The blade swept through one of the psychon’s arms like a knife passing through water. The psychon let out a screech of pain that echoed up and down the stairwell, stumbling back from the blond syllektor. Rhett stepped up to it as it stepped past him, falling against the stairs that he’d just come down. He went in for an uppercut with his knuckle blade, colliding with the underside of the psychon’s grotesque jaw. Its remaining arm and legs spasmed briefly and then it was still.
“Do you have one?” Mak was asking the woman as Rhett stepped away from the psychon, his blade covered in the black goop of its blood.
The blonde nodded.
“Then get back to the ship,” Mak said. “Now.”
The woman looked back at the other two battles that were still going on nearby. Theo continued to spar with his psychon, not backing down. The other syllektor—the lanky guy with the blacked-out tattoos, Rhett realized, the one who’d called out to Mak on Rhett’s very first day of collecting souls—wasn’t holding up as well.
But the blonde did as Mak said, turning to go down the stairs to where the door back to the Harbinger was waiting.
“And Gwen?” Mak said. She had her hand in the crook of the woman’s elbow, holding her in place. “Make sure Captain Trier is aware of what’s going on. Get as many people on that door as you can. We can’t let a single psychon through. You keep it open until everyone from the other teams is back on board.”
“What about you?” Gwen asked.
Mak glanced at Rhett. Her eyes were bloodshot and her face was streaked with dark smudges of soot, but she looked more sure of herself than she had at any point during the last few weeks. Rhett gave her a quick nod.
“We’ll do what we have to,” Mak said to Gwen, and then let her go.
Gwen didn’t wait. She ran back down the stairs, carrying her soul with her, to the protection of the Harbinger.
Beneath and above them, the structure burned, the sounds of collapsing walls and beams filling the air.
“Where’s Treeny?” Rhett asked. He and Mak made their way around the opening of the stairwell to where the tattooed guy was starting to lose his position, falling back, blocking the psychon’s claws with a short dagger.
“On the ship,” Mak replied. “Basil?”
“Haven’t seen him.”
“Don’t get your panties all in a bunch!” came Basil’s voice from behind them.
Mak and Rhett turned to the sound. Basil was coming up the steps with a still-smoldering hole burned into the sleeve of his new blazer and, despite the increasing heat of the fire, his lips looking bluish. Rhett took another glance at Mak and realized that hers were the same way. He put his free hand up, examining his fingers—they were pale, losing what little color they had left after becoming a syllektor. Something else occurred to him: He was no longer coughing—none of them were. After only a second, Rhett understood why—they’d all stopped breathing. The fire had officially eaten up whatever oxygen was left in the building and replaced it with thick, poisonous smoke. It had killed their lungs.
How were they going to fix that?
“Listen,” somebody else said. It was Tattooed Guy, still ducking and dodging and blocking swipes from the psychon, who was getting angrier and angrier by the second. He must have gathered a soul as well. “I hate to interrupt, but…” He gestured frantically at the psychon, its beady, glaring eyes reflecting the stuttering light of the fire surrounding them.
Mak sighed. She made her way in that direction.
“So,” Rhett said to Basil. “Think you’re gonna find another blazer back on the ship?”
“Don’t start with me, mate,” Basil replied. Rhett couldn’t help but grin.
Mak screamed then, and her body was tossed across the opening of the stairwell. The psychon had gotten a decent punch in somehow. Her machete skittered across the linoleum as she flew through the air. Basil and Rhett were there, on the other side of the opening, to catch her before she could fall into it. She smacked against the banister, dangling however many floors up above the scorching fire below, and the wood nearly broke under all three of their weights. But the boys pulled her up just before it could collapse.
Back on the other side of the building, Tattooed Guy was losing his battle.
The psychon had its gnarly claw around Tattooed Guy’s throat, holding him up a foot off the ground. The psychon’s face was right up against the syllektor’s, its toothy grin spread apart, inhaling. Tattooed Guy was flailing, kicking out, grabbing the psychon’s wrist with both hands, trying to loosen its grip. From between Tattooed Guy’s lips, a swirl of white smoke came twisting out. It seemed to be fighting against the current, fighting to go back into the peaceful embrace of the syllektor’s body. But it was no use.
When the soul had been completely removed from the syllektor, it floated between them like a cloud, waiting to be eaten up by the psychon. In one swift motion, the psychon lifted its skeletal arm in the air, still clutching Tattooed Guy around the neck, and brought it rushing back down over the stairwell’s opening. It flung Tattooed Guy down through the center of the building, down into the inferno.
Rhett took his chance, while the psychon was still positioned over the drop and the soul was still floating in midair, helpless, vulnerable. He took two running steps … and jumped, kicking off the faulty banister, which snapped under his feet. It gave him the leverage he needed, though. He leaped across the open stairwell, glancing down at the uncontrolled flames at the base of the building, and aimed his knuckle blade right at the psychon’s face.
The creature roared, loudly, angrily. And then it brought one of its massive fists up in a wide arch. The punch hit Rhett square in his ribs, and he heard the sickening sound of something breaking inside him. His body went limp, hurled into the hallway where the fire had blackened and charred every surface.
Rhett hit the floor. Hard.
“Uh … fellas?” It was Theo, from somewhere nearby. Rhett was having trouble getting his bearings. The world felt upside down for a moment. But he could hear the faint edge of panic in Theo’s voice. He had to help him. Slowly, Rhett tried to find his way to his feet.
A second later, though, and he could hear the sounds of a scuffle back by the stairs—Mak and Basil and the other psychon, the bastard who had sent Rhett flying. There were hideous noises—bones breaking, metal twanging, tormented screeching. And then the heavy footfalls of the psychon, running, running down the hall toward Rhett.
He braced himself for another blow, one that might end his existence as a syllektor.
But the blow never came. The psychon came sprinting down the fire-choked hallway and leaped over Rhett, completely ignoring him.
Rhett turned over, finding the floor and using it to steady himself as he sat on all fours. His body was weak, breaking down. There was no oxygen in it anymore.
He looked up just in time to see one psychon join the other, both lunging at Theo, who had been backed into a dead end, with the walls and floor engulfed in flame behind him. The psychons tackled Theo, and all three of them fell together into the floor, into the fire. The wood beneath the linoleum caved in, crumbling downward. Theo disappeared with the psychons in a splash of embers and smoke.
“Theo!” Rhett cried. But it was more like a croak.
All around him, the walls began to bow and crack. The ceiling began to come down in heavy, flaming clumps. Rhett pulled himself together, denying his body its desire to fall to the floor and wait to be crushed. He got up.
And again, he ran.
* * *
The hallway fell apart around Rhett as he ran as fast as he could back to where Mak and Basil were waiting. Mak was leaning against Basil, the side of her shirt torn and the flesh beneath it gouged. The sound of falling debris chased Rhett out into the stairwell, and a cloud of smoke and dust encircled him when he made it. It looked like it was just the single hallway that had collapsed. The stairs were holding strong. For now.
“We have to get out of here,” Mak said. Her lips were bluer than ever, and her eyes were bright red, leaking tears.
“What about Theo?” Rhett asked. Their voices were gravelly whispers.
“If he’s in one piece, he’ll find his way back,” Basil replied. “Now let’s get back to the bloody ship.”
They made their way back down the stairs, Basil helping Mak and Rhett leaning into his damaged side. The building seemed empty now. There were no syllektors down any of the halls and no psychons to speak of. It was just the fire and the dying building and …
Rhett stopped a floor above where they needed to be. He had been hoping to himself that the door back to the Harbinger would still be open. But now … now …
The push hummed around him, curling its unseen finger at him to follow it down the nearest hall. It pulsed in his head, heavy as a heartbeat and insistent as a drum. There was still a soul to be taken back there somewhere. He had no choice. He let the push guide him.
“Rhett?” Basil said, calling to him. “Rhett, what the hell? Mate!”
Rhett ignored him. The push wouldn’t let him go. But even as he moved down the hall, he could sense the other two behind him, there to protect him. Maybe they could feel it, too. Maybe not. It didn’t matter.
He found her half in and half out of an open apartment door, lying in a crater formed by the partially collapsed floor. She couldn’t have been older than fourteen or fifteen. Her face was calm but also pained. Fire danced around her, mingling with clusters of debris and fluttering across the fallen beam that was on top of one of her legs.
The other two peered over Rhett’s shoulders, trying to see what he had brought them here for. There was a feeling of quiet uneasiness among all three of them. How had everyone missed this girl? Why had the psychons left her behind? Maybe they hadn’t. Maybe they were going to come back for her soul any second now.
The push did its thing—it pushed. It pushed with the force of a stampede of buffalo. If Rhett didn’t get down and collect this girl’s soul, it was going to rip him apart.
He fell to his knees beside her. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Mak and Basil steadying themselves, preparing for a fight should another psychon show up. They watched the open end of the hallway.
Static filled Rhett’s ears, and buried within the static: a heartbeat. The girl’s heartbeat. She was alive but fading. He was amazed that she was still breathing, although it was hitched and labored, an unsteady wheeze. The soot-smudged window was there at the very end of the hall, open just a couple of inches. It must have been letting in enough oxygen to keep the girl from suffocating.
But her spare time was about to run out.
Rhett slipped his hand into the girl’s palm. At once, her eyes opened. They shifted and found Rhett’s. They pleaded silently, for comfort, for painlessness, for joy. It was the same as every other soul that Rhett had collected … except for one thing.
The push didn’t go away.
Normally, the moment that Rhett and the others reached the soul they were intended to take, the push fell away, clicking off like a radio. Now, though, the push persisted with the same intense, unceasing force. It wanted something else from Rhett.
He tried to concentrate, but his ears were filled with the static sound of death and the undercurrent of the girl’s slowing heartbeat. He could feel Mak watching him. He stared into the girl’s eyes.
“It’s okay,” he started, and paused. Time yawned open. Rhett’s heart gave an unexpected thump in his chest. And then another. It was an involuntary sensation, something that he felt without having to consciously switch on his senses. It thumped again … and again. He saw the image of his own limp body hanging upside down in his mother’s wrecked car. It flickered in front of his eyes like a bad film reel. He saw the waitress in Arizona and the coffee pot sinking toward the ground in slow motion. He saw the boy in Brazil. He saw the first soul he had ever gathered himself. And then he saw the red, quivering fist of this girl’s heart, flexing in her chest, sending whatever life force it could to the rest of her body. There wasn’t much left. Rhett’s heart beat again, in time with hers.
In some distant world, past all the static and flashing images and synchronized heartbeats, there was the sound of shattering glass. As if from a thousand miles away, a psychon screamed. And Rhett knew it had come for the girl. The force of her death had spread far enough to hold one of them back, it seemed. Or maybe there was something else, something awful, that kept leading the psychons back to them.
Rhett didn’t have time to think about it. He knew what he had to do.
“You’re going to be okay,” he said, and all at once the world around him snapped back into motion. The push broke away, fading like the pressurized cuff of a blood pressure monitor. The psychon roared from some other part of the building, mixing with the sounds of the building as it kept on crumbling. Basil had disappeared, maybe to try and head off the psychon. But Rhett could still see Mak in his peripheral vision, and she was staring at him with her mouth open and her eyes squinted. “You are not going to die today,” Rhett continued.
“What are you doing?” Mak said.
He ignored her, gripping the girl’s hand even tighter and holding her gaze. “This is not the way your life will end. I am your anchor. To life. To living. Hold on to me. This is not your time.”
“Rhett, what the hell are you doing?” Mak yelled.
Around Rhett and the girl, something strange was happening. The little fires that were sprinkled across the debris began to stutter and spark, turning purple. The smoke that plumed in the air was filled with tiny lightning. The beam that was crushing the girl’s leg was no longer burning but surrounded by jagged bolts of purplish-blue electricity. The beam cracked in half suddenly, falling away in two pieces, releasing the girl from its trap.
“Oh my God,” Mak breathed. “What … what are you?”
Rhett paid no attention. “I don’t know why you’re here,” he said to the girl. A single tear fell from her eye and rolled down her cheek, which was blooming with the first faint roses of color again. “But I’m telling you that you’re not ready.”
The girl’s limbs and muscles stiffened, gaining strength. She continued to stare at Rhett, but there was a focus in her eyes now that hadn’t been there before. She was seeing him, really seeing him. He was glad to have her attention.
“You are not ready to die,” Rhett said again.
The girl began to sob.
Rhett let his hand slip from hers, and as he did, the sound of the strengthening heartbeat that was nestled inside her chest dropped away. The girl couldn’t see him anymore. She was looking at everything in the hall but him.
In that same moment, the window at the end of the hall shattered inward, and a dark, shrouded figure filled up most of its frame, silhouetted by the bright sunshine behind it.
The girl screamed, and Rhett sat back in surprise.
“Ma’am?” the shrouded figure said. And as it leaned into the window, Rhett could see the shape of a helmet and the outline of a gas mask. A firefighter. “Ma’am, can you make it to the window?”
Rhett stood, watching the scene play out, feeling the sense of his own heartbeat dwindle out of him again. Strangely, he was happy to feel it fade.
Mak was there, looking at him with wide eyes. “What—”
One of the other apartment doors behind her exploded, the doorframe buckling and an eruption of plaster and dust filling the hallway. Mak spun, ready for another fight even though her body was completely devoid of color and looked as if it was about to fall over.
The girl on the floor screamed again.
“Ma’am, we need to get you out of there now!” the firefighter yelled from the window.
A psychon stepped out into the hall. It looked colossal in the small space, having to cock its head to keep from putting it through the ceiling. This close and this still, Rhett could see every gross detail of the psychon’s body, every pockmark in its bones, every red, twitching thread of muscle. Its tattered cloak hung loose and ratty around its wide shoulders, and the hood—for once—dropped a shadow across its skull face, leaving only the macabre grin of its teeth. Rhett could hear the slow, wheezing sound of the psychon’s breathing.
It stepped forward, crushing a spiderweb of cracks into the floor, its claws dancing with excitement. It looked at the girl, who was sitting up now, holding her knees to her chest, frozen with panic. She couldn’t see Rhett or the psychon, only the destruction that was raining down around her.
Come on, Rhett thought. Get up.
The psychon looked at Rhett, then back to the girl. Rhett squeezed the handle on his knuckle blade, preparing to strike as soon as the ugly-ass thing was close enough. Even though it couldn’t exactly make facial expressions, Rhett could still see a certain curiosity on the psychon’s face, in its tiny white eyes. It sniffed at the air, looking for a soul to consume … but now there was none. The soul that it had come for was no longer available.
Basil came thundering down the hall and pulled up short behind the psychon. The creature gave him a passing glance and then stared hard at Rhett. Rhett stared into the deep craters of its eyes as it tried to figure out what had happened, why the soul that it had smelled was somehow sewn back into the girl’s body.
The psychon roared in anger and frustration, the sound of it like a small nuclear bomb going off in the confines of the hall.
Then it turned and charged back through the wrecked doorway that it had come from. It vanished into smoke and darkness, making crashing sounds as it tore back through the building.
“What in the bloody hell happened here, mate?” Basil said. His voice was laced with suspicion but overcome with panic. They didn’t have much time left.
“Don’t let that psychon get away!” Mak suddenly yelled from beside Rhett. “It knows what he did! Basil, it knows what he did!”
Basil gave them both another confused look and then turned and ran after the psychon, scythes in hand.
Beside them, the girl was slowly pulling herself to her feet, staring with wide, bloodshot eyes and an open mouth at the damage, at the fire that was still crackling and snapping at the building. Rhett glanced at her, willing her to go with the firefighter … and she did. Her eyes were still red and wide, and her lower lip shook, but she was gripping the firefighter’s gloved hand, letting him help her out of the rubble and ruin of the collapsing building.
Rhett turned back to Mak, and she took a step away from him.
“Mak, I—” he started, moving toward her again.
“Don’t,” she said. And again she stepped back from him, this time with her machete held out in front of her.
Rhett stared at the weapon. “Mak…”
She hesitated. “I … We just have to get back to the ship.”
“Please, Mak,” Rhett tried. “You have to know I’m just as freaked out as you are.”
“Trust me,” she said. “I don’t think you are.” She took a couple more steps backward, indicating that she was heading back to the Harbinger, with or without him.
Before he followed her, Rhett looked over his shoulder again, at the open window where the girl and the firefighter had already disappeared.
“She’ll probably spend the rest of her life thinking she’s crazy,” he murmured.
He didn’t think Mak had heard him, but she said bitterly, “The rest of her life was supposed to be five minutes ago. Let’s move. Now.”
* * *
The building echoed and shuddered with the sounds of its collapse. The fire on the bottom floor was completely out of control, burning with an intensity that sent heat waves warbling up the stairwell.
Mak tried to keep up the prisoner routine with Rhett, but as the building grew less stable, she gave up and ran beside him. She held on to her machete, though.
The steps buckled and cracked under Rhett’s feet as they ran down them. At some point, Rhett realized that Basil was on the other side of him, chasing the steps down to the next floor, where the doorway back to the ship was still hopefully open.
“Bastard got away,” Basil mumbled, answering the unasked question.
The three of them dove off the steps and onto the landing just as something fell apart beneath them and the flight of stairs broke away from the wall, tilting sideways. From above, massive hunks of fiery debris came plummeting down. The sound was enormous and terrifying.
Rhett was sure that when they rounded the corner to the door, it would be closed. But as they entered the hall, he could see the open door and the inside of the Harbinger behind it. The hallway was coated in fire, licking at them as they sprinted down the hall, with the building coming down behind them.
Treeny was just inside the door, waving them on.
“Come on!” she yelled. “Run!”
Rhett heard the building roaring and whining like some kind of animal. He pushed his poor, weakened body to run faster.
He and Basil and Mak tripped over one another as they fell through the door. They hit the polished floor of the room of doors and slid.
Within the doorway, the building was collapsing in a rush of wood and plaster and dust and furniture, sending bits of debris and dust through to the ship. As the entire thing came down on top of the doorway, Treeny swung the door shut. It slammed into its frame, cutting them off from the destruction.
Everything was quiet.
Looking around the room, Rhett saw most of the other syllektors that had gone in with them. Gwen was there, and the man in the baseball cap. All of them were coated in soot and battle-ravaged. But there was no Theo.
Basil stood first. Then he helped Mak to her feet. And as soon as she was up, she brought the end of her machete down and set it at Rhett’s throat, holding him to the floor. Basil stared at her in disbelief.
“Is someone going to tell me what in the bloody hell happened back there?” he said.
Mak wouldn’t look at him, wouldn’t take her eyes off Rhett.
“Oh, I am not gonna like this, am I?” Basil said.
“You need to explain yourself,” Mak said, her voice unnervingly calm, her eyes locked on Rhett’s. “I don’t want to have to do anything either of us is going to regret, but … I can’t trust you. Not after what I just saw.”
“Mak, I swear, I have no idea what happened,” Rhett said. “The push … it did something. It … it was just different this time. I can’t explain it.”
“Well you better figure it out.” She kept the machete aimed at his neck.
Captain Trier stepped in then, weaving through the waiting party to get to where Mak was holding Rhett. There was a shadow over the captain’s face, one that seemed to apply his true age to his ageless features. When he took in the sight of Mak holding the machete at Rhett’s throat, his face fell even more. Something was wrong.
Mak stepped back and let Rhett get on his feet. Treeny joined the three of them but stood with Basil and Mak. Rhett was their prisoner now. But he didn’t wait for any of them to approach the captain.
“What’s wrong?” Rhett asked.
Trier looked at him, eyes slightly wider than usual, probably trying to pick up on signals from Rhett’s mind. “I might ask you the same thing,” he said.
“Captain, we have a problem,” Mak said, still holding the machete between her and Rhett.
“We have much more than a problem,” Trier replied.
“What do you mean?” The machete dropped away a couple of inches.
“It’s the lantern.” Trier grabbed at his beard, his eyes troubled.
Rhett remembered the lantern from his first visit to the ship’s bridge. It was the compass, the captain had said, the thing that guided the Harbinger to whatever its destination was supposed to be.
“What about it?” Basil asked, his voice frail, hesitant.
The captain swept his eyes across the group.
“It’s gone out,” he said.