Cronos and Roberta were standing by the doorway to the other stairs, both holding handguns. Roberta wore her usual smirk.
“I can’t imagine how you could have possibly found us,” Cronos continued. “Unless of course, someone told you where we were.” He laughed. “I was wondering if I should have left someone to make sure you didn’t cause any more trouble.”
Ogden pushed himself away from the keyboard, looking guilty and terrified. “I…I was just…”
Cronos stared at him. “Someone I could trust, that is.” He raised his gun in Ogden’s direction.
I stepped between them. “Cronos!” I said. “There’s no need for this.”
Roberta’s smirk suddenly looked more intentional as she moved to the side, getting another angle on Ogden. Rex moved with her, blocking her shot.
“We have a better idea,” I said. “We can just use the first part of Ogden’s malware, to immobilize all the Plants and shut down the network. It will stop Wells and all the Plants. It will shut down Wellplant Corporation and stop Wells from starting the pandemic. His plan will be exposed. He’ll be ruined.”
Cronos shook his head. “A temporary fix at best.”
“No! Each Wellplant will have to be individually reactivated. Once people find out how the network has run amok, they’ll never agree to it again. It’ll be over. There’s no need to kill them.”
Roberta’s eyes went wide, like she’d swallowed her gum. “Kill them?” Then her smirk returned, and she shook her head. “We’re not going to kill all the Plants, stupid. Just Howard Wells.”
“Apparently that plan changed,” Rex said.
Ogden stood up behind him. “It’s true,” he said.
Roberta turned to Cronos. “Is it?” She stepped forward, into his line of sight. “Is it true?”
Cronos ignored her. “I always knew you were weak, Ogden, that you would never see this through to the end. That’s why I insisted we make the process simple. So that you would be expendable.”
As he raised his gun and tried to sight Ogden, I spread out my arms and said, “No!”
Roberta moved closer to Cronos, partially blocking whatever shot he thought he had. “Is it true? You’re planning on killing all the Plants?”
“Of course!” he snapped. “It’s the only way to accomplish our goals.”
“But…so many people.”
He glared at her. “Precisely. Millions of people bent on oppressing chimeras, making us less than human. CLAD’s mission is to put an end to that oppression. This is how we accomplish that. Once and for all.”
She took a step back, away from him. “I never agreed to that.”
Cronos spun on her and snarled, “You swore an oath!”
She shook her head. “Not to that.”
He took a step toward her. “To me.” His head whipped around toward Ogden again. Toward me. “Jimi,” he said. “I don’t want to shoot you, but I will. You know that, right?”
Looking down the barrel of his gun, I felt a strange sensation on my neck and realized it was the hairs standing up. I was terrified.
Then Roberta abruptly raised her gun, as well. At Cronos.
Rex raised his arms and shouted, “No!”
But Roberta fired, a single shot, the sound of it deafening as it echoed off the brick walls.
Cronos spun on her once again, with a roar, and backhanded her across the face with such force she landed several feet away.
As Cronos went after her, I heard Claudia’s dart gun spitting over my shoulder, and I raised mine, as well. The darts were so small, it was hard to track them. They seemed to be hitting him, but then falling to the floor, like they couldn’t penetrate his clothing.
In three strides, he was standing over Roberta.
She raised her gun, and snarled, “Get back!”
But he kept going, and she fired, holding the trigger, releasing a dense spray of bullets, even as he kicked the weapon out of her hand.
Bullets pinged and ricocheted off the brick walls. One of the big stained-glass windows disintegrated, a few large pieces and thousands of tiny jagged shards of multicolored glass raining like gemstones down onto the floor, and down the outside of the tower. Through the opening, I could see the Philadelphia skyline, and at the center of it, the tallest building in the city: Wells Tower.
Cronos kicked Roberta in the ribs, and she groaned, then curled up on the floor, unconscious.
He tensed, as if he was going to kick her again.
“No!” Rex thundered again, running toward them. “That’s enough!”
Cronos stumbled slightly and dropped his gun. I thought maybe a few darts that stuck had penetrated his clothing, after all. I turned to see if Ogden was working on adapting the malware, and if not, to tell him that now would be a good time. But he was lying on the floor bleeding from his upper arm. Claudia, kneeling next to him, tore off the bloody sleeve of his shirt, revealing a round bullet hole. She looked up at me. “Give me a hand here.”
“Oh, Ogden!” I said as I went over. “You’ve been shot.”
Almost like an echo, I heard Rex’s voice saying the same thing. “You’ve been shot.”
Kneeling next to Ogden, putting pressure on the wound while Claudia tried to bind it, I glanced back toward Rex and saw Cronos turning around, revealing three red splotches on his midsection, rapidly growing and spreading down his front. He looked down at his wounds then back up at Rex.
“Yes, I have.” Cronos turned and looked down at Roberta. “Traitor!”
He moved to kick her again, but Rex shoved him away. “I said that’s enough.”
Cronos stumbled again, but violently shoved Rex back. “Don’t you touch me.”
“Del,” Rex said. “You’re hurt. We need to get you fixed up. And then we need your help to stop Howard Wells.”
“This isn’t hurt, Leo!” he snapped. “You don’t know the meaning of ‘hurt.’ This is nothing compared to the pain I’ve been through. You wouldn’t be standing here if you’d been through what I have. But I’m better than you. Always have been. Stronger. Faster. Braver.”
He gave Rex another shove, and Rex stumbled back but didn’t fall.
“And you dare to tell me you need my help to stop Wells?! He was stopped. That problem was fixed. He’d soon be gone if you hadn’t gotten in the way.”
“We can stop him without killing millions of innocent people.”
Cronos laughed at that. “‘Innocent people…’”
“Look,” Rex said, in a soothing voice. “We all want the same thing here.”
“You don’t know what I want,” Cronos said, turning slightly, then hauling off with a mighty but clumsy swing at Rex, who ducked away from it easily. As Cronos stumbled to regain his footing, he glanced for a moment at me. “Or maybe you do.”
Rex followed his gaze, and as he did, Cronos lashed out again, this time connecting with Rex’s jaw, sending him staggering sideways.
“Stop it!” I yelled.
Rex spun out of his stagger with a thunderous punch of his own, a loud crack as he connected with Cronos’s chin.
Cronos’s head whipped to the side, then immediately snapped back. He gave Rex a dazed and deranged grin. “That’s what I’m talking about.”
Cronos took another swing, and Rex evaded it and snuck a punch to Cronos’s gut, below the bullet holes. Cronos groaned, then growled.
I winced. “Enough, dammit!” I shouted out, getting to my feet.
“Keep the pressure on, Jimi,” Claudia said, grabbing my sleeve.
Ogden draped his good arm over his face. “Oh, man, that hurts.”
Cronos laughed again, thick and wet. “I see you’ve got a little bit of that killer instinct after all, don’t you, Leo?” He tried to kick Rex in the knee, but Rex skipped out of the way and punched him under his arm.
“We don’t have to do this,” Rex said.
“Careful, though,” Cronos said. “You don’t want to be too much of a killer. Jimi isn’t crazy about the murdering type. She prefers peaceful little weaklings.”
“Del, what the hell are you talking about?” I demanded.
Claudia grabbed my wrist and pushed my hand more firmly against Ogden’s arm. “Don’t let go,” she snapped, annoyed, as she fumbled with the tourniquet she was trying to tie.
Ogden groaned in pain.
“You know it’s true,” Cronos replied. “You could never be…friends…with someone capable of making the tough decisions, of doing the dirty work that needs to be done.”
“Del!” I called out from my place on the floor. “This isn’t about you or me or Rex. Don’t you understand?”
“This isn’t about any of us,” Rex said, straightening up out of his fighting stance. “It’s bigger than that. It’s about all of us.”
Cronos ignored me and stalked toward Rex. “You don’t get to decide what this is about,” he snarled.
“Okay, done!” Claudia said, sitting back.
I shot to my feet and ran toward Rex and Cronos, the dart gun in my hand, sticky with Ogden’s blood.
I didn’t know how many darts I had left, and Cronos was covered from head to toe in fabric that was apparently dart-proof, if not bullet-proof. Roberta groaned on the floor, and I thought about getting her gun, since I knew it would work—but I didn’t want to kill Del. I didn’t want to kill anyone. And I didn’t want him to call my bluff, either.
As I approached, Cronos roared and threw himself at Rex. Blood seeped from his stomach as he grabbed Rex around the throat and they both stumbled toward the gaping hole where the window had been.
“Del! Stop it!” I pleaded, but he continued to ignore me, driving Rex back, their feet shuffling through the broken glass that littered the floor, perilously close to the opening in the wall.
“Del, you’re badly hurt,” I said. “We need to get you help.”
“There’s not enough help in the world for me,” he said, his voice sounding sluggish. “Not in this world.”
“There is,” I said. “Doc Guzman can help.”
“Patch…patch me up so I can go to prison?” He laughed, bitterly, easing up for just a moment. Rex grabbed at Cronos’s hand, trying to pry it away from his neck. “You’ve seen what the nonks do to us out here, Jimi, out in the open. Can you imagine what they’d be like in prison?” Then he slammed Rex against the brick wall, next to the hole where the window had been, and Rex went slack, dazed by the blow.
I continued to approach them. Over the past several months, I had found myself shooting dart guns more than I ever would have expected, and by that point I felt surprisingly comfortable with them. But still, I knew this would be a tough shot. I raised the dart gun, took a deep breath, and said, quietly, “Del, look at me.”
His shoulders sagged slightly, but his hands remained rigid as he turned his head.
I aimed and pulled the trigger.
Almost instantaneously, Cronos let go of Rex and stepped away, clamping both hands over his right eye.
Rex slid down the wall, but stopped himself halfway down, bracing himself as he coughed his throat back into shape.
“Ouch! Dammit, Jimi!” Cronos said, almost whining, sounding for a moment just like Del. He pulled his hands away from his eye and held up the dart pinched between his thumb and forefinger. “You shot me in the eye,” he said.
He flicked away the dart and tore off his hood, and I saw that he was smiling. “Hell of a shot, actually,” he said, with a crooked grin that betrayed a mouth full of blood.
He laughed softly, and through the blood, through the terrible scars and the multiple splices, through everything else that had transpired to transform him, I saw my friend Del. I saw all the phases and ages, all the iterations we’d gone through together over the years as we tried to figure out who we were, who we were going to be, all the way back to when we were little kids, before his mom died, before my dad died, back to when life was simple and good. Or at least, back to before we had discovered it wasn’t.
For an instant, I smiled at the memories. “It’s okay, Del,” I said soothingly, walking slowly toward him. “It’s okay.”
“You’re right,” he said. “I know it is.”
His eyes started to roll up in his head, and it seemed like he might drop on the spot. But he gave his head a vigorous shake and stayed on his feet. With what seemed like a great effort, he took an uneasy step backward, then another one, his feet leaving a trail of blood.
“Del?” I called out, not wanting to spook him, but concerned that he was moving toward the expanse of open sky behind him.
“I’m sorry, Leo,” he called out, smiling now, not sarcastic, but for real. It was a little-kid smile, one I hadn’t seen on him in years. Rex looked up, confused. “I’m happy for you two, you know that? Seriously. Jimi…I’m glad you’re with him. He probably loves you more than I ever could have.” He staggered back another step, closer to the ragged hole in the wall.
“Del!” I said more forcefully. “Be careful now.”
“Do you remember that day in the playground, Jimi?” he asked. “Out in the zurbs, when we were little. Those big kids came and messed with us?”
“I do,” I said, soothingly. “And you led them away from me, so they’d leave me alone. You saved me, Del.”
It was true. We were seven or eight, visiting family friends, when a bunch of teenage bullies attacked us at a park. Del and Leo were both beaten up pretty bad; in fact Leo ended up in the hospital, then his parents moved him away. It was the last time I saw him until I met him again as Rex. I had been knocked unconscious, but it could have been a lot worse for me if Del hadn’t led the bullies away from me.
Cronos glanced over at Rex and smiled sadly. “I didn’t save you, Jimi. Little Leo Byron did. I ran away, but tiny as he was, Leo went back and drew them away from you.” He shook his head. “Even then he was a better friend to you than I could ever be.”
It was a defining moment of my childhood, and it had become part of the bedrock of my friendship with Del. I tried not to think about this sudden revision of personal history right then, tried not to be distracted by it, but it shook me deeply.
I looked at Rex and our eyes met, and I just wanted to run to him and hold him. But I turned back to Cronos.
“That doesn’t matter,” I said. “We were kids. What matters now is stopping Howard Wells and getting you to Doc Guzman. He can fix you up. It’ll all be okay.”
He looked down at his blood-soaked chest, the three glistening bullet holes. “No,” he said softly. “It’s too late for doctors. Too late for salamander splices and regeneration. But you’re right.” He smiled. “It will all be okay,” he said, repeating my words back to me in a singsong voice as he swung his leg back again. But he’d run out of floor, and this time, his foot was through the window, dangling in the open air. I moved toward him, but he put up a hand. “Stay back!”
He coughed, and a cascade of blood fell from his mouth. He wiped it with his forearm, then he gazed across the room, at Ogden’s Wellplant setup. “Do what you’re going to do, Jimi.” He steadied himself with a gloved hand on the raw brick edge of the opening as the breeze tugged at his clothing. “It’ll all be okay,” he said again, this time almost tauntingly, throwing it back at me, such an obvious falsehood.
His eyes closed, but I got the sense it was less the effects of the dart or the enormous loss of blood from the bullet wounds, and more the crushing weariness of his life in this world—his lives in this world, each of them filled with betrayal and disappointment and alienation. He opened his eyes halfway again, and I saw something in them, something alien and unfamiliar. It took me a second to recognize it as relief. “It’ll all be okay,” he said once more.
“Del?” I said, then I realized what he was doing. “No!” I screamed.
As I ran to him, he looked me in the eye, and then he stepped back, out into the empty space. He spread his arms and fell. He dropped from sight for an instant, but as I ran up to the opening and slid to my knees, we regained eye contact one last time as he fell.
He got smaller and smaller, as if he was shrinking away to nothing. But he didn’t. He hit the rubble hard, with a heavy thud. Then he was still.
“Del, no…” I said, shaking my head, horrified, retching but unable to look away. Maybe subconsciously I expected him to get up and disappear, so he could return one more time. But he didn’t.
Rex appeared at my elbow, looking aghast. “Jimi, I’m so sorry,” he said, his voice hoarse. He put an arm around my waist, solid and reassuring, holding me back from the edge.
I hugged his arm to me, holding it in place as he eased me away from the window. I turned in his embrace and wrapped my arms around him, squeezing as tight as I could.
I’d said goodbye to Del so many times, mourned his death so many times, it felt like his actual passing was somehow overdue. I was crushed with sorrow, but as much as I felt the pain of his passing, I also felt that, in some way, we had just exorcised his ghost, had freed his trapped spirit to go on to whatever comes next.
I’d never much believed in an afterlife, but I wanted so badly to believe in one right then. And I wondered, if I ever got there, and Del was there, too, which Del would it be? The Del I’d grown up with? Or would it be Tamil, or Cronos?
Ogden groaned, and Rex and I both turned to look at him.
“Oh, Jimi…I…” Claudia said, looking small and vulnerable. She put her hand over her mouth.
I nodded as she came over and hugged us both. The tightness in my throat rendering me silent, as well. After a few seconds, I managed to ask, “How’s Ogden?”
“He’s holding up,” Claudia said, wiping her eyes, pulling herself together. “Needs a doctor but I think he’ll be okay for the time being.”
Ogden gave me a feeble thumbs-up.
“Good,” I said, wiping my eyes, too. “Then we better get to work before we run out of time.”
“Actually,” she said, pointing at the apparatus, “there’s a problem.”
The four metal arms that had been holding the Wellplant in place were wildly out of place, each one of them still holding a tiny piece of the Wellplant.
“Oh no!” Rex said, running over and looking helplessly down onto the bits and pieces of circuit boards and crystals and housing that littered the floor.
I turned to Ogden. “Can we upload the malware without a Wellplant?”
Ogden winced as he lifted himself up onto one elbow. “I don’t know. We need some kind of node to access the network, but I don’t know what else would work, other than a Wellplant.”
“Then we need to get one. Where did this one come from?”
He shook his head. “It was defective. A reject. I stole it when I was working at Wellplant, brought it home and fixed it. The only way we could possibly get another one in time would be to rip it out of someone’s head. But apart from killing them, that would also damage the Wellplant.” He thought for a second, then said, “Wait, I do know where there’s another node, a computer we can use to access the network.”
All three of us responded simultaneously: “Where?”
Ogden pointed, out through the jagged hole in the brick wall, at Wells Tower.