Chapter 17 #3
Ellis sighs like I’m the one being illogical. “Look around, Willow. This world needs to be cleansed. The end will happen with or without us, but we will be rewarded in the next life for helping to bring about the word of the Lord.”
I open my mouth to ask another question, but he shushes me, gesturing violently with the gun. “Now, shut up.” It’s eerie, seeing his familiar smile in a situation like this. “Let me speak to him.”
He keeps the gun trained on me as he leans down to hit the intercom button.
I watch the barrel, waiting for it to drop. Just one small window of opportunity is all I need.
“Ellis,” Cain says immediately. “Let her go—”
“Shh.” Ellis gestures with the gun again and Cain goes quiet, his shaky breaths audible through the speaker.
He looks at me, his eyes wide and sad. “Look at me,” Ellis says, and Cain drags his eyes away from me to do so, his expression hardening as he looks at the other guard.
“You don’t have to worry, Harbinger. I’m here to set you free. ”
“I won’t go,” Cain says hoarsely. “Whatever you people want from me, I’m not going to give it to you.”
“Oh, but you will,” Ellis says. “All you need is a little push.” His teeth are bared in an expression that’s half smile, half grimace. Blood is still dripping from his nose, the barrel of his gun trembling violently. But the look in his eyes is pure reverence. “So we’ll give you one.”
I inch closer to him while he’s distracted, my eyes never leaving the weapon in his hands as it rises and dips with his gestures. But he turns to me again, and I freeze, my hands midair, still too far away to do anything.
“Give me your key card,” Ellis says.
Of course. That’s why he needed me here. I’m the only one with access to Cain’s cell.
I glance down at where the card dangles around my neck. “Come take it.” If he gets closer, I can grab the gun. Overpower him. I know I can.
Ellis huffs a laugh. “I’m not stupid. Toss it on the floor.”
“And then what? Do you think you can walk into that cell?” I lift my chin at his face, where blood streams steadily from his nose. One of his eyes is twitching. “You can barely stand in a room next to his. You think you can force him out of here?”
“I can if it’s to save you,” he says, gritting his teeth.
“Please don’t hurt her,” Cain begs, desperation heavy in his voice. “I’ll-I’ll come with you if that’s what you want. Whatever you want.”
“No—” I start, but stop as Ellis gestures with the gun.
“Key card. Now.”
The gun is shaking, but it’s still aimed at me. I can’t chance it. I slowly lift the lanyard from around my neck and toss it onto the floor between us.
He takes a step toward it, gun still trained on me. Another step. He crouches to grab the key card, but when he tries to rise again, his knees collapse beneath him. His gun hits the tile as he tries to steady himself.
In an instant, my own gun is in my hand, aimed at him. “Drop the gun,” I say.
Ellis lets out a strained laugh. Blood splatters against the tile.
“Shit,” he says, looking up at me. Red stains the whites of his eyes. “How do you…stand it? So much…power…”
“Ellis. Drop it. Now.”
He tries to stand again but collapses. A laugh bubbles out of his lips, peppering the floor with blood-tinged spittle.
“I can’t…do it,” he pants. “But that’s okay.
I already sent word. The others…will come.
” He smiles, teeth red under the flickering fluorescent lights.
Cain, I think desperately, but I can’t tear my eyes off Ellis.
“It seems you have…a bigger part…to play,” he says. “But mine, I think, is done.”
He lifts his gun. I shout, finger tightening on the trigger of my own. But instead of aiming at me, Ellis shoves the muzzle into his own mouth.
I step forward—but I’m too far, too slow.
Ellis is still smiling around the barrel as he pulls the trigger.
There’s a high-pitched buzzing in my ears. I look down at my shaking hands, noting distantly that I’ve been splattered with blood—and brains, and what looks like a glistening shard of skull. Bile rises in the back of my throat, but I swallow it back down.
After a moment, the ringing fades enough for me to hear the screaming.
Cain’s voice is staticky and distorted through the intercom.
I turn toward the window, sucking in a shaky breath as I try to compose myself enough to reassure him.
But he’s not standing at the glass anymore.
I cross the room toward it, one boot slipping against the bloody tile before I right myself.
Cain is floating in the middle of the room, arms hanging unnaturally above, palms out, in what looks like a sickening twist on a crucifixion.
His wings are spread behind him, his mouth hanging open, and his eyes have rolled back, pure red showing.
The lights flicker on and off, and the furniture in the room rattles.
Fuck. Ellis has been studying Cain the same way I have over the last couple of months. He’s seen his changes and what triggers them. Fear, pain, stress…
He said he needed a push, and he gave him one. Right into another episode.
I slam my palm against the emergency button on the desk, and the lights turn red, the alarm screaming throughout the hallways of the Facility. I yank my key card from Ellis’s limp hand and race out, reaching for the door to Room 16.
There’s a sudden, loud rumble, and the floor tilts beneath me.
I stumble off balance, swearing, and lean against the wall.
The building is shaking, an ominous rumble.
An earthquake, I register somewhere in the back of my mind, but it feels secondary to Sixteen’s plight.
I force myself to keep moving forward, clinging to the wall, until I can fling open the door to Cain’s room and stumble inside.
I grab on to his still-floating form, pulling with all my might, but he won’t budge.
His body contorts midair. As I watch, the skin on his forearm splits, and another eye breaks through in a burst of blood. Then a second one, near his collarbone. A third. Black pulses beneath his skin, and the darkness begins to spread through his veins.
The building is still shaking around us, the floor rolling beneath my feet.
The room is windowless, so I can’t see if this earthquake reaches beyond the MRF; there’s no telling how widespread the damage is, but I fear it isn’t contained to the Facility.
My mind flashes to fire and blood, a red sun in a black sky, the earth splitting open to swallow Ash Valley.
Maybe more than just this little town in the desert.
Is this the end? Is it time to choose? To fulfill that awful promise I made?
No. I can’t bring myself to believe that. I wrap my arms around Cain’s waist, clinging on tighter as the world shakes around us.
“Sixteen,” I beg. “Cain. Please.”
He trembles in my arms, senseless. The darkness floods through his veins; red weeps from his eyes.
“Please come back.” I screw my eyes shut. “Come back to me!”
Cain gasps and falls, like a marionette cut loose from his strings.
I fumble to catch him, falling painfully to my knees on the tile, struggling with his weight for a moment before I roll him onto his back.
My hands hover over him in a moment of panic before I press my fingers to his pulse, force his mouth open to feel the ghost of his breath against my hand.
Alive. He’s alive. I’m so focused on him that it takes me a moment to realize that the shaking has stopped, the building still around me. I can still hear the distant wail of the alarm in the hallways, but it’s quiet otherwise, and that awful pressure has disappeared from the air.
“Cain,” I whisper, pushing sweaty dark hair off his forehead. His skin is clammy, all of his many eyes shut. The veins spread beneath them have turned black.
But finally, they slide open again, and one by one, fix on me.
“Willow…” He tries to lift his head, but I urge him back down. “Are you all right?”
“Me?” I choke out a sound that might be a laugh or might be a sob. I can only imagine how much pain he’s in, and still his first thought is for me? “I’m fine. I’m unhurt.”
“Sorry,” he murmurs, still gazing up at me, clearly struggling to keep his eyes open. “Because of me…he…”
“Shh. It wasn’t your fault.” I wipe the bloody tears from his face with a trembling hand. “God. I thought you were gone.”
He lifts a hand to grasp mine. It’s entirely black up to the wrist, now, and his fingernails have curved into sharp claws.
“I think I almost am,” he says, his voice as soft as a breeze. “I think it’s time, Willow.”
It takes me a second to catch his meaning. “No.”
He uses his grip to draw my hand closer to his cheek, leaning into my palm, eyes sliding shut. He looks so peaceful, for once. “You can’t let them get to me. Don’t let them use me as a weapon. Please.”
“Cain, I won’t—”
“You promised,” he says. He sighs, his grip dropping from my fingers, his head lolling against my hand. “I’m tired, Willow. I’m so tired.”
The weariness in his voice makes me ache. I slide my hand down to grip his chin, my thumb brushing his lower lip. “Give me a little longer,” I ask. Maybe it’s selfish, but even if he’s ready to give up, I’m not. “Fight just a little longer for me, Cain.”
He’s so still for a moment that I’m not sure if he’s fallen unconscious. But finally, he dips his chin in the tiniest nod.
Once Cain is sedated, Barnes brings me to his office to debrief.
“Sorry it took me a while to get here,” he says. “The roads are all…” He shakes his head. His expression is grim, the lines on his face making him look older than he is. “Tell me what happened tonight.”
Now that I’m finally sitting down and the buzz of adrenaline is fading, exhaustion sets in.
It’s been one hell of a night, and I’m technically not even at the end of my shift.
I force myself to sit up as I explain everything I saw and heard tonight, starting with noticing the disturbance from the CCTV room, through Ellis’s vague warnings about the cult, and ending with his suicide.
The scope of what happened is only now sinking in.
Ellis is dead. Someone I considered a friend was a traitor all along.
A goddamn doomsday cultist. The Children of the Red Sun have haunted me all my life, but now I can feel their breath on the back of my neck.
They were never truly gone, just lying in wait.
I slump forward, head in my hands.
“He came here looking for X-16,” I say. “He was planning this the whole time. Making sure Sixteen was the one he was looking for.” I shut my eyes.
All his smiles and his jokes, his attempts to get close to me…
it was just for the sake of furthering his plan.
I feel sick knowing that it worked on me.
That the note I added to Cain’s file was what finally made him certain he had found his Harbinger. “I should’ve seen it.”
Barnes sighs. “You’re always so eager to take the blame on your own shoulders, but this isn’t on you. It’s my job to vet our security applicants. I don’t know how his background didn’t raise any red flags.”
“You don’t understand.” I skipped the part about my childhood when I explained the events tonight, but though there’s an oily churning in my stomach at the thought of confessing, I owe him the truth.
If I lie now and he finds out later, it will only make the situation worse.
“The cult… I was born into a sect, too.”
I explain, in halting words, my history with the Children of the Red Sun. The cult’s beliefs. The massacre. My survival against the odds, and the preacher’s escape. Barnes listens with a furrowed brow and a hand against his mouth, making it impossible to guess what he’s thinking.
My shoulders slump as I finish. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before. I swear I didn’t think it was relevant until recently.”
“Fuck,” Barnes mutters, pushing his hair out of his face and leaving it disheveled.
“I appreciate you telling me, Willow. And I trust you. I do. But—” He winces.
“Given Ellis, I was already going to do a deeper dive into the backgrounds of everyone working here to make sure we don’t have any other infiltrators.
And I’m going to have to let the director know. ”
I nod, my chest hollow.
“I think it’s best if you take some time off, anyway, given what you witnessed tonight,” he says. The gentleness in his voice pains me. I’d rather he was harsh, angry. I feel like I need to be punished in order to be absolved. “Consider it a much-deserved break.”
Yet as I hand over my security badge and key card, it doesn’t feel like that at all. It feels like a goodbye. Like a failure.
And as I walk out the door of the MRF, I find myself wondering if I’ll ever be back again.