I CAN FEEL myself being carried somewhere. And feeling is about all I can manage at the moment. That and breathing. There’s a jumble of crazy images tumbling through my mind, like pieces of a puzzle. Weird. Bizarre. Surreal. Grandma in her prison jumpsuit. TinGrins in animal masks carrying platters of food. A classroom full of kids with white foam running out of their mouths. A man in a wide-brimmed hat and red scarf running across a desert with mountains in the background. A baby wailing but making no sound. Then a burst of light that erases all of it.
Now I’m resting against a doorway with something soft behind my head.
I’m not sure if I’m dead or alive or somewhere in the middle. Khan is not here. I know that much. I can sense it. The absence of him. I also know that my arms hurt, my back hurts, my legs hurt—everything hurts. I guess that’s a good sign.
There’s smoke in the air and people all around me, crowds of them, moving past in every direction. Then two faces come into focus. Lamont and Margo. I can see them leaning over me. They’re scared. Maybe I’m alive, but dying. Kind of feels that way.
Margo is holding my hand and whispering something in my ear. But my head is ringing so much that it sounds like she’s talking underwater. All I can hear are muffled syllables. Then, all of a sudden, the ringing stops and I can hear her perfectly. She’s saying my name.
“Maddy!”
I nod my head and open my eyes wider. Margo and Lamont lean in closer. Margo is half smiling and half crying.
“You’re a fighter,” she’s saying. “You’re such a fighter.”
I don’t know what she means, exactly. Does she mean I’m good at fighting evil? Or good at fighting my way back from the dead? I’m still pretty groggy and it hurts to talk, but I manage to get out one sentence.
“I come from a long line of fighters.”
It might be the truest thing I’ve ever said.