Thanks to the chip behind Sela’s ear, the commotion at the Anah house is now broadcast through Abram’s home stereo. But the chip doesn’t just send signals — it also receives them. At the touch of Abram’s fingertip, a button blasts a jolt of excruciating pain into Sela’s neck. It reverberates from her head deep into her spine, causing her to collapse on Mahlah’s bedroom floor.
“What the fuck is the matter with you?” Darius yells at his mother, certain she’s mid-Datura episode, craving the attention of the room.
Priya has witnessed way more than she wanted to. She spots a clear pathway to the bedroom door and runs for it.
“Please don’t go!” Darius yells. “My world is falling apart here. If you leave, I will have no contact with reality.”
Abram’s smile is menacing. He leans in for the broadcast. He believes that Darius is begging his Life Match Zuriel to comfort him.
Priya inches closer to an escape.
Sela stands back up again. This time, she assumes a different stature — one more resilient — but she closes her eyes, unsure what to do next.
“Wake up, Mom! Mahlah has a disease! They gave her a fake Death Date —” Darius is cut off as Sela lunges at him, wide-eyed with panic. She pleads with him, violently shaking her head.
“Yes!” Darius yells. “They gave her a fake Death Date so she would kill herself there!”
With both hands, Sela covers her son’s big mouth again. They wrestle, banging into Mahlah’s furniture and knocking framed photos to the floor.
“I need you to stop!” Darius manages to say.
“I know you do, but I can’t!”
Darius doesn’t know what she means.
Abram sends a jolt to Sela’s neck. She bends in pain.
“What do you mean you can’t?”
Sela leans in to whisper, “You’re going to get yourself killed.”
Abram sends two quick jolts in succession. He listens to the agonized cries of his Match. “Stop!” Sela’s words splash out the speakers and ripple through Abram’s bedroom. He smirks and sends another jolt, holding the button longer than before.
Darius tries to pry his mother’s hand from the side of her head. She jumps.
“Please stop!” Sela begs.
“Stop what? Who are you talking to?” Darius shoots a look of embarrassment in Priya’s direction.
“It’s no bother,” Priya lies. “I’ve seen Datura episodes before.” But Priya has never once experienced it to this degree.
“Darius,” Sela says. “You’re right. You’re right about everything.” She cries … partially in pain, partially in relief.
Darius steps back.
Priya waits in the doorway and watches this trainwreck.
Sela receives jolt after jolt but finds the strength to stand.
“They’re listening,” she yelps through the pain. Blood trickles between the fingers of the hand she holds against her skin. “They’re punishing me. They control us!”
“Control who? Daturas? You’re bleeding!” Guilt pangs Darius’s insides.
Sela is doubled over by the rapid-fire pulses from her puppeteer, Abram.
“I’m so … so proud of you, Darius —”
And with that, she falls to the floor.
Darius rushes to her and tries to revive her.
Priya runs out of the bedroom, down the stairs, and out the front door.
Abram leans over his technology. His hand shakes over the row of controls he just manipulated. Well aware of what he’s done to Sela, his eyes glaze over, and he stares ahead. Then, he snaps to, surges past his reflection in the mirror, grabs a sweater, and storms off.
Back in Mahlah’s room, Darius shakes his mother. She doesn’t respond.
He shakes her harder, then harder again.
Nothing.
Sela’s heavy, lifeless head falls to the side, and blood spills down her neck.
Darius’s anger yields to desperation.
“Mom?” he tries.
Although used to the despondent nature of a Datura, nothing could have prepared Darius for this level of moroseness. In his despair and confusion, Darius doesn’t know what to do other than wipe the bangs from his mother’s eyes and push back her long locks away from the blood.
As he does so, Darius inadvertently feels the spot from which the blood trails. He rubs the strange bump. Is it a muscle knot? Is it akin to First Blood pimples? What is it?
He tries to move it. It budges a bit, but it seems to be rooted.
Darius buries his head in the side of his mother’s neck. A sadness unlike anything he’s ever experienced, even worse than when his dad Left, overcomes him. He heaves, bawling, willing his dead mother’s eyes to open.
Noise from outside steals Darius’s attention — a car pulling up in front of the house and shutting off its engine. Then, the sound of two car doors being closed, but gently, as if in an attempt to be silent.
Something about the sound, or lack of it, rubs Darius the wrong way. He stares at his dead mother — longing for her guidance now, more than ever before. Her breathless, motionless being lay heavy in his arms.
Darius hears his front door ease open. His heart pounds so loudly he can barely make sense of his thoughts. He looks at his little sister sleeping soundly on the floor. He moves out from under his mother and rushes to his little sister to hoist her over his shoulder.
Footsteps try to ascend the Anah house staircase quietly, but Darius is on to them. He drops Mahlah as gingerly as he can into her closet, tucks her feet in, and shuts the door. His focus returns to his mother.
Darius hears the familiar creaks in all of the memorized spots of his upper hallway floor. Whoever is in his house is about to find him.
Darius places a desk chair against the doorknob, hoping it will buy him enough time. Before he runs to Mahlah’s window, he scoops up his lifeless mother with a strength that renders her light as a baby girl. He cradles Sela’s head against his chest and her legs hang over his arm. The bedroom door is pushed against the chair from the outside of it. The men don’t say a word, but they abandon silence as they work to break down the door. Wood splinters with their brute blows. Just as they clear a hole through the wood, Darius struggles to hang on to his mother and climb out Mahlah’s window. He escapes onto the rooftop landing, then down into his pitch-black backyard, somehow unscathed physically but annihilated emotionally.
The men look out the window, dumbfounded as to what to do next. When they return to their car, one of them asks the man in the shadows of the back seat, “Should we hunt him down, sir?”
Abram doesn’t even entertain their stupidity with a response. Rather, he digresses.
“When my father entrusted me with this position, I told him that video surveillance was necessary and that times had changed. ‘We need to watch,’ I said over and over and over. His order was to keep Zalmon running the way it was.”
“I can drive down these side streets, sir,” the beefed-up man in the front pipes up.
“We need to be sure of who else was in that room tonight.”