I didn’t land so much as crash back into my body, which felt too small for me. For the pain I carried. For what I knew.
Logan was leaning over me. His mouth was moving but I couldn’t hear words.
I shoved myself upright. Rory was against the door of the storage room, her eyes wide, and Railius was on all fours. Svenja helped him up.
We’d all drifted. Something about the knife against my chest had brought the memory back so strongly that we were all pulled in.
I was against the lockers, sweat dripping down the back of my neck as Logan shouted my name again and again. Eventually, I heard him.
“Are you okay? Eerie?”
I looked at him.
“Yes,” I breathed. I was and I wasn’t. All at once, I was destroyed and put back together.
I turned.
Adelaide.
I am Samira, and Rory is Adelaide.
Railius.
I was remembering when I died in Salernum, when I’d stopped breathing after I begged Railius to stab me in the chest because it was better than revealing what I knew.
What I know again.
It is what Dr. Davie had discovered only days before the fire. It was the procedure he was planning on practicing on Madeline that night. He had figured out how to extract secrets from living specimens. And now I knew how. I knew the process—all the mechanics, like an equation I could recite even if I didn’t really understand it.
The Pull was finally there, but vague. Like a dull pulse at the base of my ribs.
It was everything I had to pull myself up. I looked at Logan and forced myself to actually see him. I looked to Rory. She was breathing hard as she pushed herself up. “Shit,” she muttered, meeting my eyes as understanding washed over her. “Shit.”
Railius’s eyes were wide as he struggled to get to his feet.
“What was that?” Fabian asked, reaching out to Rory.
Rory was reaching out to Fabian, and he was walking over to her, the box clenched in his loose fist.
“Fabian, wait,” I said.
It was too late.
Rory’s eyes flicked to mine, and then she lurched forward, snatching the box and running out of the room faster than I could yell.
I shoved myself off the lockers and sprinted after her, stooping to grab the gun and catching the last glimpse of her before she ran down the stairs.
“Rory! Wait!” I wanted to cower in a corner until I understood what I’d just learned. But there wasn’t time. I had to keep moving.
I ran back down to 3B, the white tiles almost blinding me. I looked in every direction. Nothing. It was 11:57.
A splintering noise ripped from the speakers on the walls, a wailing that felt like it was trying to knock me over.
“What is that?” I yelled. The hair on my arms stood up. The sound was familiar.
“They know we’re here,” Railius shouted back as he reached the bottom of the stairs.
Logan was there, then, followed by Fabian and Svenja.
“What the hell is going on?” Fabian said, and I spun around.
It was 11:58.
The noise stopped. It started, and then stopped again, the sound like an electric charge ripping through my eardrum. It came and went in intervals.
“Eerie, what was that?” Fabian was unfocused, now, and too concerned about what he’d just seen to understand, and I didn’t have time to explain.
“They’re on their way. The Internment.”
Fabian was always focused in a crisis. He’d carried me out of the forest and saved my life.
Now I had to save his.
Logan grabbed my hand, and I looked at him. He had no idea what had just happened, but he was there. He nodded resolutely.
“We have to go, Railius,” I turned and screamed in between siren blares.
“Not yet!” he yelled back.
It was 11:59.
The sound of helicopters above us beat down, the cacophonous sound clashing with the pitch of the siren. “They’re here,” Railius said.
“We have to abandon this!” I said, holding his gaze for the first time since the drift. His eyes bored into mine, and I didn’t look away.
“If we leave, any Hushed in here die,” he said.
“If we don’t, we die,” I shouted back. They burned this place down once to keep its secrets. They killed their own. They’d do it again. But Railius was right. If we left, any Hushed that appeared at midnight would be killed.
I looked down.
12:00.
The siren stopped.
The hall was the kind of silent that feels too loud. The kind of silent that stirs up a unique kind of panic. Something was wrong.
I looked down the pristine hallway. Nothing.
Then an explosion ripped through the left side of the building, shaking the floor and rattling debris from the ceiling.
Smoke slid from under the stairwell door, its tendrils reaching out like a living thing.
Another explosion shook the prison, somewhere farther down the hall.
Railius looked up.
“They’re pulling a Lit November.” He dropped his eyes to mine. “They’re dropping bombs from those helicopters, Eerie. They’ll level the whole place.”
Then we heard the first scream. It was shrill and full of terror.
I stopped when I heard it. I turned, looking down the long hallway, still reeling from the blast. Then the first Hushed walked out of the room the farthest down the hall, her bronzed skin a shock against the fluorescents. She was naked, shaking as she stumbled forward through the debris.
Another scream sounded just before another explosion, just two doors down. Railius ran after it. A man about Fabian’s age walked out of the room next to Svenja. She took off her jacket and handed it to him.
One by one, Hushed stepped out of rooms.
Smoke filled the air, and I felt my vision tunnel. The Internment dropped another bomb, and the whole building shook.
I was right back where I started. Right back at the place of my nightmares.
Clear the rest. That’s what the voice had said over the walkie-talkie the night I stirred. Kill the Harborers. They were doing the same thing, knowing Connelly was dead and that his Hushed would be here.
I clenched my fists.
Not this time. Not this fucking time.
I whipped around. Logan was there, tucking his gun into his pants.
“We have to help them,” he said, but I grabbed his shoulders and forced him to meet my eyes.
“Logan. Get Fabian out of here.” I stopped, realizing that he couldn’t. Fabian couldn’t be alone with Logan.
“I’m not leaving you here,” he said.
“You could be their Wounded. Your presence could kill them,” I explained, and his expression fell as he looked over my shoulder. “Svenja!” I shouted. She looked over her shoulder and then ran down the hallway toward me.
“Please,” I said to Svenja, “get my brother out. And make sure Logan doesn’t say a word to Fabian. Can you do that?” Svenja nodded. I looked back to Logan.
“Please. Just get out and be safe and just . . . be safe, okay?” I asked Logan as he reached out and took my hand.
He nodded. He knew I couldn’t explain anything.
Not until I found Rory.
Logan grabbed Fabian, and they disappeared with Svenja down the smoky hall.
I turned back just in time to see a figure slip back up the stairwell. Rory.
My feet were moving before I could yell after her. The stairwell was filled with smoke, but I didn’t even notice until I had to stop to cough up a lung.
There was something missing, here. A piece I didn’t understand. I had to find her. Rory was my best friend. She was the hand I held in the dark. She wasn’t my enemy, no matter what this weird effed-up history said.
Level 2B was destroyed. The ceiling was caved in, revealing slivers of night sky two levels up. Rubble covered the floor, and fires burned along the walls.
I peered into what looked like an old break room. The vending machine was on fire, and cellophane-covered snacks popped and hissed. Tables were overturned, and rock and dust covered the leather couches.
From behind the doorway, someone swung a box at my head.
I ducked, but Rory swung the box again wildly.
I launched myself at her, hitting her in the forearm. The box fell to the ground with a clatter, and she sidestepped me, swinging a leg around and catching me in the chest, sending me back into the tables. I rolled backward, ignoring the exploding pain in my shoulder and lower back.
I grabbed my gun and pointed it at her chest as she leaned down to grab the box off the floor by her foot.
“Rory! Stop!” I shouted, straightening. We were on opposite sides of the room.
She eyed me and then stood upright. Her hair was loose around her face, and she breathed heavily. Her lip was cut, making her mouth glisten red in the firelight. She looked just like the Adelaide from my memory.
“What the hell? What the hell is this?” I gasped. “Rory—”
“You saw what I saw, Samira,” she spat out. “Eerie. Whatever the hell you are.”
“If it’s all true, then we were friends. If I’m Samira and you’re Adelaide, then we’re friends. We weren’t at first, but—”
Rory took a step, and so did I, keeping my gun on her chest because the feral look in her eyes wasn’t like Rory. It was something else, and it scared me.
“You really don’t remember, do you?” she whispered.
“Is this about Railius?” I asked, remembering the kiss. “Because Samira might have loved him, I don’t know. She’s like a book I read a long time ago, Ror, and I’m just piecing it together. Please. If she did—if I loved him, I don’t now.”
She laughed, and it made me tighten my grip on the gun.
“You think this is about a boy? No. This is about us and the steps he never took to ensure our survival. I did what needed to be done. I tracked down Dr. Davie’s research and followed him to Rearden Falls. I found the only two Hushed to survive Ironbark, hoping there would be scraps of something I could use. Even as you were explaining your drifts, I thought they were from Railius. Or that you were maybe seeing mine. I never thought it was your own memory. I just thought . . .” she shook her head. Her words were thick.
“I just never thought you would be back. Exhumed are a myth. Either way, I’d written you off. You were so fucking helpless. Scared of everything. That’s why I focused on Fabian.”
Tears welled up in my eyes.
I didn’t want to believe anything she was saying, but her face was so full of something I had never seen before. Her bloody lips curled in hatred. Her eyes were lit by the room crumbling around us. It was like Rory was fading away. She looked like Adelaide. Suddenly, all her knowledge about everything made sense. She knew how to control drifting. She knew our history because she was there.
“What are you going to do?” I asked. “What good could possibly come from anything in that box? Anything Dr. Davie was doing? Even he knew it was evil, Rory!”
She smirked. “We could outnumber humans. We could pull Hushed out before humans are dead—before they can get rid of them themselves—and then we could fight back. That’s what needs to happen if we’re going to survive. Without humans, there won’t be a Pull. And there are other horrors in this box, things that can help in the coming war. Secrets and discoveries even I can’t imagine.”
She smiled at the thought.
I shook my head. Rory loved waffles and hated polka dots and cried with me when Sarah died. She wasn’t capable of this.
I threw the gun to the side, and Rory cocked an eyebrow.
I took a step toward her.
“We don’t have to do this. Whatever happened, way back when, it doesn’t have to matter now. I love you, Rory—”
“my name isn’t rory! and your name isn’t eerie!” The words splintered from her as she rushed forward, her face inches from mine. She breathed hard as her skin tightened against her skull. She shook her head. “And when the day comes, you’ll make the same choice. You’ll betray me again.”
My heart sputtered, and I reached for her. “What did I do? I don’t even remember! Talk to me, Rory. Please. Give me the box, and we’ll stop this. We’ll leave Rearden Falls. You, me, Fabe—”
She yanked back.
“There’s no escaping this, Eerie. You’ve run from everything, until now. Found the loophole in every situation. But now your past has found you. And you will carry it.”
“You’re the one that told me I was more than my secret. I believed you. Believe me, now.”
Rory put her hands to her head. “i was hoping you would die. Don’t you get it?”
I froze, and she held her arms out to her sides.
“It was a win-win for me. Either you would be out with Winspeare, which gave me time to get closer to Fabian and try and crack his ridiculous holier-than-thou act, or you would die and give him the push he needed to remember everything he could about Ironbark. I wanted you to die. I wanted you to give in to the Pull and die.”
Tears ripped down my cheeks as I looked at her, my eyes searching hers.
“You’re lying.”
“Am I? What do you think happened to Reed?”
My heart seized, and she tilted her head. She took a slinking step toward me.
“He was easy. You know how long it took me to convince him that he was better off dead? That he was just the shard of a monster?”
Shard of a monster. He’d said those exact words.
My hands curled into claws, and my breath was white-hot.
The tears were gone, and all that was left in me was rage.
“Ten minutes,” she continued. “Fabian needed a recall to the righteous cause, and Reed was right there, crying like you’re crying now—”
I lunged at her, screaming my throat raw as I clawed at her face and knocked her down.
She laughed as she whipped me around, reversing my momentum and throwing me across the room. I landed and rolled up to my knees.
“Eerie!” I heard Railius shout my name from down the hall.
An explosion sounded somewhere in the building.
Adelaide sneered at me as she took a step toward the metal box that lay on the floor.
The name Rory was burned through, turned to ash by the memory of Reed’s last words to me. She was Adelaide, and the hatred I felt was like fire. I stood.
Another explosion sounded, closer than the others.
Everything was chaos. The roof above creaked, caving in between us. Dust and debris flew everywhere, and I heard her shriek. I couldn’t tell if it was from pain or rage, and I was too angry to care about either.
“Eerie! Come on!” Railius was at the door.
I ran forward, grabbing the box from the floor and turning toward the hallway.
A fiery mess collapsed in front of the doorway in front of me, blocking me from Railius.
“Back up,” he called. “I’m going to kick it through!”
Behind me, I heard a strangled scream.
Don’t listen.
“Eerie!” she cried, and I saw her, trapped under a support beam, surrounded by flame and dust and debris.
“Eerie! Help! Please!”
“Do not listen to her!” Railius said as he frantically tried to clear the door.
“Please!” she screamed as the fire got close to her.
I hated that I stopped.
I hated that I couldn’t leave her to be burned alive. I couldn’t run and leave her screaming, like I’d left everyone the night I stirred.
“No!” Railius called as I bolted backward. Soot covered her face, and blood streamed down her face from a cut on her hairline.
“Thank you, Eerie,” she gasped.
“Push on three! One, two—”
It took everything I had to lift it off her. I shoved the beam so it fell to the other side.
Then her leg swung around, hitting behind my ankles, and I was on my back. She was on top of me.
“Eerie!” Railius called out, kicking the last bit of drywall as hard as he could.
Adelaide lowered her bloody face to mine. She had the gun, and she cocked it with one hand, putting the barrel to my forehead.
“You think you’re so good. And maybe you are. But that’s what got a knife in your chest the first time, and it will be what kills you this time.”
I kicked but hit nothing but air. I wrapped my hand around her wrist.
“Then do it,” I spat at her, enjoying the look of surprise on her face. “If you’re so evil, then just end it.”
She pushed the barrel harder against my head. I could feel her hand shaking.
I waited for death. For the sharpness of it, for the fade out. I squeezed her wrist three times, and she snarled, pushing the barrel deeper against my forehead.
Then she was off of me. The gun clattered to the ground.
I rolled to my knees just in time to see her grab the box and jump over the fallen table to the crumbling outer wall.
She scaled it in two seconds, turning at the top to look back at Railius. She blew him a kiss and then disappeared into the night.
* * *
Logan met us in the hallway. Of course he’d run back inside. I knew he would, regardless of what I told him to do. Railius had one of my arms across his shoulders, helping me limp-run down the hall, and Logan took the other.
It felt like the sky was falling. We barely made it up the rickety staircase before there was a crash loud enough to shake my ribs and the entire northern wing of Ironbark collapsed behind us.
We were out into the wet night, and my heart faltered as I looked up on the ravine.
Dozens of Internment officers ran down toward us.
Railius, Logan, and I stopped.
Gunshots sounded through the night, and I braced for the pain.
Except it didn’t come. The Internment officers fell, one by one, and Railius pulled us left as we ran for the dark tree line.
“What was that?” Logan asked.
“The backup I didn’t think would get here in time,” Railius answered as the shadow embraced us.