As the blade cuts through my flesh I kick backward. Go for his knee, his outer thigh. Remember what Javier told you, dig in with your elbows—stomach, instep, go!
In a fury of embarrassed rage, I stomp on his instep, dig my elbows backward, but he grips me tighter, the knife ripping deeper as I struggle, hot blood pouring down my shoulder.
“Signal, stop, I’m trying to help—”
Another stomp on his instep and I’m loose, running through the smoke, toward the window. And then, impossibly, Javier appears above me; he straddles the windowsill, lit up by the inferno below.
Javier twists the end of a rope to some kind of fastening under the tall square windowsill, then rappels down the wall, onto the steaming floor of the burning hayloft, lifting the collar of his shirt up over his mouth to screen the smoke.
“What took you so long?!” Erik calls to him. “Could you hold her, please?”
Javier’s expression is hidden behind his shirt as he grabs my arms and grips me like a vice. “Javier, NO!” I plead, choking on the burning air. He grabs my hair, yanks it into a tail and pulls my head to one side as Erik steps behind me.
“You got her?”
Javier’s voice, muffled: “Just hurry, all right?”
Erik’s fingers dig into the wound, right above my kill switch scar. My scream is lost in the sound of fire and something else, a knocking, a beating like a drum. Javier is saying something over and over I can’t make out, and the drum-like beating grows louder and fiercer.
“It’s out!” Erik bellows. “Take her and go! GO!”
Just as suddenly as he grabbed me, Javier releases me, and I turn to see Erik holding a chrome pill blinking like a firefly. He drops it between the broad planks of the floor, letting it fall into the fire below.
He’s cut out my kill switch.
I grab Erik’s arms, the fire behind him so bright I can’t make out his face.
“Signal, GO.” He yells before I can say anything, pushing me toward Javier.
CRACK!
The trap door flies open and the Heavenly Brides, faces streaked with ash, start pulling themselves up from the floor.
Javier’s hand closes around my arm and he pulls me toward the rope still swinging from the hayloft window.
“Erik! Come on!” I scream.
Javier pulls me up after him, up the rough timbers of the inside of the barn. I clutch at the rope, the gash in my neck still streaming as I climb. I get one arm over the windowsill and turn back around, wringing the blood from my open wound. I don’t care, I have to make sure he’s behind us.
“ERIK?!”
Below us the crowd of Angel’s followers have circled the end of the rope, their faces twisted masks of rage, their hands clawing out toward me, their shrieking at a fever pitch.
“Hell demon! Murderer!”
They want to pull me down and rip me to pieces, but they can’t, because Erik is crouched in a battle stance, knife out, ready to take them all on.
“ERIK!” I cry down to him. “Come on!”
But he doesn’t turn around. He doesn’t take his eyes off them. What is he doing?! Even if he could fight them all, the room is a hell of fire and heat. I scream to Erik again, but Javier, who is now side-saddle on the windowsill, grabs me up and pulls me tight against his chest.
“NO!” I fight against him. “ERIK!” I need to climb back down, but Javier tilts forward and we fall into the night, but then somehow fly out and across at an angle, shooting over the ground in a low swoop that ends with us sprawling across cold grass far from the barn.
Javier had fastened the rope to a post fifty yards from the hayloft window, and used that as a zip line away from the burning building. The few cult members outside don’t notice us. They’re too busy trying to save the barn and members inside with a pathetic makeshift fire brigade. Javier tries to lead me toward the fence, but I tear myself away.
Panting and coughing, I hurl myself toward the barn, or what used to be the barn and is now just a raging red fire caged in black timbers.
“ERIK!” I sprint toward the barn, my voice breaking into a hoarse wheeze. “ERIK, PLEASE!” I try to yell, but it comes out like a seagull cry.
With a thunder crack the loft falls in on the first story, its timbers crumbling into piles of molten red jewels, a pillar of smoke soaring up through the night sky, flames roaring with a sound like applause as they swallow the barn.
“NO!” I scream, sobbing, fighting to free myself from Javier’s grasp. I bend in half over his arm, trying desperately to get loose.
“We have to go!” Javier coughs, dragging me away. “Signal, we have to go!”
Javier impatiently throws me over his shoulder and starts running for the back fence. I try to yell for Erik again but my voice is gone, it’s all gone.
Just outside the fence Ray is waiting, not with the bikes, but idling in the Volvo. Javier gets us into the back seat and before he’s even slammed the door shut Ray guns the motor and we fly across the moonlit field, the car bucking and jouncing over brush and clots of earth. Sobbing, I turn to stare at the column of smoke we’ve left behind.
“We have to go back!” I rasp.
“The cops are going to be here soon,” Ray yells. “Trust me, Jenny, you don’t want to stick around!”
“There’s no way we can help him now,” Javier says softly, rocking me in his lap. “This is what he wanted. He wanted you out.”
Javier gently lifts my blood-drenched hair from the back of my neck and I hear him suck his breath in through his teeth.
“Oh hell, man, what happened to her?!” Ray yells. “She needs stitches, man! We gotta get her to a hospital!”
“We’ll handle it in the room.” Javier carefully rips my torn sleeve off, balling it up and pressing it to the back of my neck.
Their voices seem far away. I keep seeing Erik, knife out, holding back the crowd so we could escape. I keep hearing the crack as the barn sank in on itself, the horrible red heat. I can’t bear to think of him in there. I can’t bear it.
Ray hands me a flask as I sit on the floor of the motel room, my white dress half scarlet from my blood.
“You’ll need it for the pain,” he says quietly.
I take the bottle from his hand, unscrew the top and tilt my head back. The alcohol sears my raw throat on the way down.
“What happened?” I wince. Javier threads a needle from a small hotel sewing kit and Ray peels off his bandanna, which is stiff with sweat, and lets out a heavy sigh.
“When I went out to get my bike, your friend Erik appeared out of nowhere. And I mean nowhere. I thought he was one of Angel’s followers at first, but he said he was with you guys and had your car parked down the road, and how could he help. I told him to give me the keys and I’d take the car around the back fence—it’d be an easier getaway than the bikes—and that you both were in the barn. He threw me the keys and took off. I walked the bikes past the fence, parked the car out back, and took a nap for a while. Still gotta go get those bikes,” he says pointedly to Javier. “After you get her sewn up, you can drive me and my buddy out.”
Javier, who has been holding the needle in the flame of Ray’s lighter all this time, pulls it away and shakes it, then hands the lighter back to him.
“Soon as I get this done,”
“Well.” Ray takes the lighter and stands, looking down on me uneasily. “I need a smoke.” He walks out, and Javier gently pinches the flesh together at the back of my neck.
“This is going to hurt.”
He tilts the flask over the wound and the burning makes me ball my fists, but it’s welcome. I absorb all of it but it’s still not enough to distract me.
“What happened with you?” I wheeze.
Javier’s needle breaks through first one and then the other side of my wound, and there is the itchy pull of thread dragging through skin as Javier explains.
“When I went out with Compass, she led me out to some cellar and called three guys over. They were trying to wrestle me down the stairs, and they probably would have, except Erik came out of nowhere. We ended up locking the four of them in there instead.”
He lets out a sigh and begins the second stitch.
“Erik told me then he’d driven out to an internet station to check in on some chat thread he had with Dennis, and they messaged back and forth. So the good news is, Dennis is still alive.”
“Oh, thank God!” I gasp. “Where is he? Is he safe?”
“Erik said after Dennis turned off your switch, he turned off his own and Nobody’s. But HQ caught on and started locking everything down, so he and Nobody cut their switches out, ditched their phones, and drove to LA. But the Director rerouted Jada and Kurt to go after them.”
Rage heats my face. Javier’s needle bites through my skin for the third time, and I feel the pinch as he gently pulls the stitch through.
“How could Jada and Kurt do that?” I wince.
“They didn’t have a choice,” Javier sighs. “It was either bring Dennis in or get their kill switches tripped. Dennis didn’t have time to turn off all of ours.”
He hands me the flask. “Have some more of this, you’re shaking too much.”
I choke down more. When I set it down it falls on its side, empty, and the room rocks gently around me.
“So then what? Go on.”
“Jada and Kurt are currently escorting Nobody and Dennis back to camp, but they agreed to look the other way while Dennis got online and explained what went down to Erik. They figured Erik needed to know, since Kate was getting the switches back online and would have them all up and running again in a few hours. So Erik cut his out, and came back to get yours.”
“What? Erik cut out his kill switch?” I’m so confused. “How? Dennis never turned off Erik’s kill switch.”
“Yes he did, yesterday, before we got to Ojai,” Javier says quietly. “When Dennis told him you’d volunteered your kill switch, Erik insisted Dennis do his first. In case something went wrong.”
It’s like a punch to the gut. I cup both hands over my mouth.
“Hold still, hold still,” Javier says.
Erik volunteered his kill switch in my place. And I’d told him he didn’t understand real strength. That he didn’t know what it was to really help someone.
And he hadn’t said a word.
“Back at Owl’s Nest,” Javier goes on, “after the cellar, I filled him in on our plan. We snuck back around to the barn and heard you were upstairs. I knew I’d need a rope to get us out of the hayloft, since all the cult members were waiting for Angel to get done with you. I went to fix up the zipline while Erik tried to find a way in.” He swallows, hard. “You know the rest.”
It’s a while before I can speak.
“And the fire?”
Javier shakes his head. “When I was looking for rope around the barn, someone saw me. I knocked over one of the lanterns to distract them.” He snips the thread, and then there’s a sigh as he sits back against the bed. “It was my fault.”
I turn, very carefully, to stare at him.
“I thought they’d be able to put it out,” Javier says, not looking in my eyes. “I didn’t realize how fast everything … the hay and everything, you know, I didn’t know …”
“You didn’t mean to …”
“Of course not!” Javier cries angrily. I close my eyes, the room rolling around me. It’s tempting to just push it all on Javier. To absolve myself that way. It would be easier to pretend Javier caused Erik’s death than to that it’s all my fault.
Both our phones go off, and Javier picks his up. I reach for mine but he knocks it away.
“Hello? Director? Yes, it’s safe to talk. I’m fine but Signal … Signal is dead. Yes, that’s her phone. We left them in the room before going into the compound.”
He puts my phone down. It continues to ring beside me.
“Yes, Erik too. He came to help us out, I guess … In a fire, yes. I saw it myself. I can give a full, uh, debriefing or whatever when I get back. Okay. Really? Okay. Thank you, sir. We’ll speak again tomorrow.”
He clicks off the call and looks at me, his eyes flat.
And just like that, I’m just another in the body count for the Teen Killers Club.
Is this a nightmare? My eyes open from a hazy half sleep. I could swear I hear Erik moving around under the bed. But it’s just a dream. I sit up, fighting to catch my breath, when I hear banging at the window. Nobody? No.
My eyes open, I wake up again. That was the nightmare, this is real. But who is that standing at the end of the bed? Is it the Director? His hand is extended, my switch is back in my neck somehow, it’s about to go off—
I wake up again, blankets pulled over my head. They’re so heavy, I can’t pull them off, they’re suffocating me.
With a strangled, soundless scream I lurch out of the bed, awake at last, and throw myself out into the first light of dawn, gulping the open air of the parking lot. I stumble to the car, the same car where Erik kissed me not even a day before, curl up in the front seat, and sob, a pathetic wheezing sob, because my voice is gone.
A tap on the glass beside my head. I turn on the engine and roll the window down.
“Come on,” Javier says gruffly, face thick with sleep. “I’ll drive you to the bus station, get in the passenger seat.”
“My stuff?” I croak.
“I packed it all up.” Javier moves to the back of the car and throws open the trunk so he can toss my stuff inside. The driver’s side door dings in measured alarm as I get out, wobble around the back, and slide into the passenger seat.
“Camp can’t track you anymore,” Javier says once we’ve pulled out of the parking lot, “But if someone sees you and recognizes you, and camp finds out you’re still alive—”
“I won’t let that happen.”
“They’ll debrief me. I might slip up. So you need to go as far and as fast as you can. Mexico maybe.”
“And you?” I ask dully. “And Jada? And Troy, and Nobody, and Dennis? What’s going to happen to you?”
“We’ll see you in seventeen years or so.”
“Javier,” I wheeze. “It’s a lie, you don’t get retired, Angel told me—”
“Don’t,” he cuts me off, his voice so sharp it surprises me, and his bloodshot gaze cuts from the road to meet mine. “Please. Don’t.”
“You don’t want the truth?!”
“If the truth is I’m doomed, then no,” Javier says quietly.
The drive to the bus depot is quiet. We spot a police car in the lot, so Javier parks on the street and carries my backpack and bedroll for me as I get a ticket on the first bus headed out of town, departing in twenty minutes.
“You’re not doomed,” I promise. “I’m going to find a way to get you guys out of camp.”
He looks so exasperated for a moment, then he says slowly and with great intention: “That’s not what Erik wanted. He did what he did because you deserve to be free.”
My hands cover my face and his arms go around me, he holds me so tight. His head pulls back, and his mouth is so close. Just twenty-four hours ago it would have been natural to kiss him. Now it’s unthinkable. And then his arms slide away, a tide receding from a hostile shore.
The bus’s lights go on, the doors sigh open, and I move toward them, when Javier’s hand catches my elbow.
“See?” he says, and in a last moment of contact, his finger drags on the inside of my arm, the blank spot where the dandelion used to be. “It was fun while it lasted.” Javier smiles sadly. “Bye, gorgeous.”
And he walks away without looking back.
I sit in the very back of the bus. The seats begin to fill, but it’s like everyone knows to leave me alone. Maybe it’s because my face is swollen from crying. Or because I smell like smoke. Or because I’m about to cry again, watching Javier’s car slip into the flow of traffic.
When he gets to camp, will everyone be circled round the fire with s’mores, ready to embrace him? Or will they have all changed from the people I knew? Are they scarred from their encounters with the hardened assassins who graduated camp? And if they aren’t, how long will it take? Another target, another two targets? How long before everything human in them is chipped away, kill by kill, until they’re all just like Dog Mask?
No. I won’t stand for it. I will go back to Ledmonton. I have the safety deposit box key Erik found. I will figure out where it fits. I will clear my name, and then expose camp for what it is. I will end the program, I will save my friends, and that is what all of this will have been for.
But when I consider what has been lost: his mind, his voice, his smile. It’s not enough. Nothing will ever be enough again.
I knit my hands over my mouth and curl over with a sob as someone sinks heavily into the seat next to me.
“Well, well, well,” he croaks.
I whip around as though I’ve been slapped.
He’s singed, his eyes riddled with red veins making them the greenest they’ve ever been. His hair must have burnt because he never would have cut it that short otherwise.
“Didn’t even need three weeks.” The slow, wolfish grin lights up his face as he leans, wincing a little, back in his seat. “All it took was one night thinking I was gone.”
Erik. My Erik. Alive and well.
“Admit it, Signal.” Erik smiles. “You love me.”
I could kill him.