LUX
“Don’t you dare,” he said.
She fought it. The urge to obey was overwhelming, consuming, a roar in her skull. Her finger trembled on the switch. Her brain vomited images of fire and burning and heat and all the things that would unleash if she flicked the switch. She knew the words: bomb, explode, fire, pain. They sent a torrent of images through her head, images so terrible they made her want to claw out her own eyes.
But if I don’t, Nicholas will shoot him.
He’ll die.
She had seconds. Not even seconds—milliseconds.
Her mind was a battlefield. She stood still as a statue but inside she rioted. She raged against the chip, against the endless, infinite stream of numbers, the ones and the zeros that began and ended every thought, that burned on the inside of her eyelids and beeped in her ears. She could hear the chip in her brain, hear it whirring and processing, spitting out words, gathering data into neat packages and storing it away, reaching out with electric hands to every corner of her brain, scouring her from the inside. It clicked and murmured, hissed and sang; it had been there all along, every moment of her brief life, but until Moira had mentioned it she’d never known it was there. She’d thought the chip was her, and she was the chip. But no. If she concentrated very, very hard, she could find the line between them, fine as it was.
She pried at that line now, fighting back, pushing with everything she had within her, battering at the impulses it sent zinging through her body. If she weakened for the slightest breath of a moment, it would take control of her and she would obey Jim and she wouldn’t flick the switch and then Nicholas would shoot him—she could see his finger tightening on the trigger now—because she was moving, thinking, seeing at a speed outside human capacity, processing the way a computer processed, drawing in data and spinning it around and translating it at the speed of light.
It was so strong, the urge to obey. It pushed at her from the inside, battered at the lining of her skull, pushed at her eyes.
Don’t you dare don’t you dare don’t you dare Lux you have to do what I tell you so don’t you dare.
She fought it.
Tears sprang into her eyes with the effort.
She bit her lip so hard that blood ran over her chin—no, it came from her nose.
“Lux!” Jim yelled. “You’re bleeding! Sophie—why is she bleeding?”
Nicholas had turned around now. He looked at her hands, at her trembling finger, and his eyes widened. He knew. He met her eyes and—she saw it, she knew she saw it, but that didn’t mean she could believe it—he nodded, a tiny eyelash of a nod.
You can be your own person, Sophie had said. Sophie. Her sister. I can help you. Please—let me help you be free.
And even Jim had said it, so long, long ago: Lux, you don’t have to obey me.
But he didn’t understand. None of them did. They thought it was so easy, so simple to just say no but it wasn’t like that at all it was like it was like it is like pushing back the ocean like swallowing the sky like turning yourself inside out and it hurts hurts hurts—
Her vision blurred. Dark spots dotted her eyes. Her throat clogged, stopping air from flowing in and out, and her ears rang with a high, irritating buzz. But she pushed back. She fought, struggled, screamed aloud, her mouth stretching wide and she tasted blood and tears as she screamed to the sky and when the scream had all gone out of her she said it:
“NO.”
A click. A sigh. Her brain ran backward. The chip was shutting down. Her mind was shutting down. Her thoughts blinked out one by one. She felt her very cells turn inside out, wither, implode. I can turn it off, she thought. I can turn it off.
She smiled.
She looked up and saw the stars, a million billion sprinkles of light.
She was free.
She looked down at the two people she loved best in the world, and she said one last word to their astonished faces:
“Run.”
And then she flipped the switch.