Twenty-Six
Parker

My body suffered through tremor after tremor on the white tile floor. My eyes burned. Every muscle ached. In addition to trying to turn me into a Taker—which thankfully still didn’t appear to be working—they’d also found ways to speed up the effects of sleep deprivation on Watchers. Our bodies and brains had been built to withstand being sleep-deprived longer than regular people, but eventually it would catch up with us. That’s what was happening to me when I met Mia. And now, in significantly less time, they’d taken me from slightly tired to the worst I’d ever felt.

How long until I started to lose my mind? How long until sanity alone became something I couldn’t reach anymore?

How long until I begged for them to just kill me?

The door to the white room opened and I recoiled against the wall until I saw it was Thor, carrying in an actual working cot and a blanket without any holes in it. When his back was to me, I noticed a lump and small cut on the back of his head. And he looked slightly off balance when he walked, like his ribs or back were hurting him. I wondered what had happened.

I knew better than to say thank you or look grateful, because those things would only make him angry. So I just rolled slowly out of the way and waited for him to finish setting it up.

Then Cooper appeared in the doorway. He was swaying from side to side with exhaustion, barely managing to focus on what Thor was doing. Once he did, he looked livid.

“What the hell is this, Joey?”

Thor—maybe, because he was my only ally, I should stop calling him that—Joey looked even angrier than Cooper. Instead of turning to answer his brother, he reached up and ripped one of the work lights in the room down from the ceiling. It went out immediately, the plug falling out of the hole. One corner of the room went a little darker than the rest and I did my best to slide into it.

“This would be me making sure we have something to trade when the ten days are up.” Joey gestured angrily back at Cooper and said, “What about you? What the hell is this, Cooper?”

Cooper frowned in confusion and his nose started bleeding. He wiped it on his sleeve as though nothing had happened. “What are you talking about?”

“What you’re doing here isn’t going to accomplish anything. You’re going to kill both yourself and him before we even get a chance to make the trade for Eclipse!” Joey glanced over at me and then pulled his brother out the door, closing it behind him. I breathed as quietly as possible and listened to his voice, which still carried through the closed door. “You have to know you aren’t thinking straight right now.”

And here was my main consolation in all of this. Cooper was in bad shape when they’d first brought me here, and he wasn’t getting better. Overseeing the experiments, and all the battles we had in our minds every night, were having much the same effect on him as on me. Breaking me down like this was a lot of work, and he’d already been nearing the end of his path. Every time I saw him he looked worse and worse …

Just like me.

The only new plan for escape that I’d been able to come up with actually hinged on that fact. If I could just find a way to hold out longer than Cooper, then maybe Joey would be put in charge and I might have a better chance of surviving.

Cooper’s tone when he answered was cold, stubborn, and tired. “I’m doing what Dad would’ve done.”

“I know you are!” Joey’s voice rose, loud and clear with desperation. “Don’t you see? This is exactly what Dad would’ve done. That is the whole problem with this situation!”

Cooper’s words became positively acidic. “You don’t understand. You’ve never understood because you aren’t one of us and you hate that.”

I heard one set of footsteps walk away, and I wasn’t sure who’d left until I heard a groan and then Joey mutter, “Well, at least my weak human genes aren’t going to kill me.”

I had to stop myself from physically reacting to his statement. From the moment I’d found out about Cooper and Chloe, I’d assumed Joey was a Taker too. We all had. And apparently we’d been wrong.

Jack had told me that having a Night Walker parent didn’t guarantee a Night Walker child; it just increased the odds a lot. It looked like their family was two for three—which actually explained quite a bit. Joey wasn’t that much younger than Cooper, but he had none of the telltale signs of exhaustion that Cooper did. Those symptoms should’ve been showing up by now if Thor—Joey—was a Taker.

It took a lot of effort, but I managed to pull myself over onto the cot. I sighed as the material eased the ache in my muscles after so many hours on the hard floor.

The door opened again suddenly, and when Joey looked my way, I thought about saying something to him. Something to let him know that not all Night Walkers thought humans were weak or inferior to us. But it was like he could see that I was thinking about talking to him and wanted to make sure I didn’t get a chance. Careful not to actually make direct eye contact with me, he tossed a new paper bag with food at my chest, hard enough that it definitely squished my sandwich. Then he dropped the water bottle on the cot beside me and hurried back out of the cell, closing the door behind him.

I opened my bag and brought out the slightly decimated sandwich. Even if I couldn’t thank him, I hoped he knew how much I owed him. My vision shook as my eyes had one of their mini seizures, so I closed them tight in an effort to make it stop.

Taking another bite, I chewed slowly for a full minute before opening my eyes again. Relieved to see that the shaking had stopped, I watched the newly dim corner of the room where Joey had torn the work light down. It started to darken, shadows gathering together.

I focused my gaze on that spot, my head pounding, but it was already gone. Nothing.

I released a shaky sigh.

I’d lived through this before. It was only a matter of time before it all happened again. No one else had ever put themselves back together after being Divided the way I had. It was pretty safe to assume that no one knew what would happen if a person became Divided twice in one lifetime. Given how awful and terrifying it had been living with Darkness the first time around, I didn’t want to face that again. Not now, when I was already this weak.

Lying back on the cot, I closed my eyes and rested one arm across them, trying to soothe the pounding ache I’d had behind my eyeballs for hours—or days now. The pain never stopped anymore. It just moved from one location to another and changed intensity. I was so tired … and every movement was becoming so hard.

I didn’t move when I heard Joey come in later and collect the garbage from my lunch. As he left, he reached into the hallway and hit switches to turn out every light, one by one. The relief from the heat and the cool darkness on my aching head was too much. A grateful sob escaped my chest. I decided I didn’t care if it made him mad. This one time I had to say it.

“Thank you, Joey,” I whispered into the quiet.

“Get some rest.” His tone wasn’t angry. He just sounded surprised and confused, and then the door closed behind him.

With Joey helping me like this, the Takers might even be less of a threat to me than what I had lurking within my own mind. After everything Cooper had done to me, I’d lost so much of my strength.

If Darkness came back again now … I doubted I’d have anything left in me to keep him from taking over completely.