Chapter 38
I exist, at first, in pieces.
Flash: white light.
Flash: glass walls, faces in mirror shield. A voice—my own, cataloging observations in cold, clinical monotone. “Subject stable. Reaction time within parameters. Prepare next cycle.” The words bounce off nothing, fill nothing, disappear.
Then something else: a warmth at my midsection, hands curved across my belly. Not surgical. Not Authority. Intimate, possessive. The sensation blooms inside me with a heat I can’t name. It is a memory, but it is not mine.
The hands squeeze with such tenderness. I try to turn, to look behind me, but there is no body—just the hands, just the arms, just the ghost of pressure.
A mouth at my neck, the whisper of breath: “Almost done, my love.” I try to see the face, but every time it slides away, replaced by light, pain, or static.
Fragment: my own voice, high and brittle, saying, “We’re not supposed to—”
Fragment: a row of lab rats in glass tubes.
Fragment: a hallway that never ends.
Fragment: fire.
The world arranges itself in layers. Below me: vibration, the bass thud of boot steps through soft earth.
At my back: heat and solidity, a ribcage flexing in time with my own breath.
In my nose: the ammonia tang of dried sweat, underlaid with old blood and the sharp, verdant reek of vegetation run out of control.
My hands won’t move, but I can feel my arms, limp, oscillating with each stride.
My mouth tastes like copper. My tongue is a foreign object, thick as a sponge.
Above me: blue, but not sky. Veins of indigo and violet rippling through a ceiling of transparent flesh, or maybe fungus. Pinpoints of bioluminescence drift overhead, blinking in rhythm with the pulse at my throat.
I am moving.
Someone is carrying me.
I try to speak, but the only sound is a low animal whine, the kind of thing you make when your brain has no higher function left.
The hands—real, present, not memory—shift under my legs and shoulders. I feel the scrape of stubble against my temple. A voice, familiar, somewhere above: “You’re okay. You’re okay, Dee. Almost there.” It’s not the clinical monotone. It’s rougher, worn down by panic and effort.
I cough. The taste in my mouth spikes from copper to iron. My vision fills with white for a moment, then settles into a blur. The world dips, then tilts—my body being adjusted, the sensation so sudden I nearly black out again.
We stop. The arms holding me ease, gently, careful not to jar the joint at my shoulder. I feel my back settle against something soft and half-rotted. Not concrete. Not Authority plastic. Something organic, the fibers catching at my shirt.
I open my eyes for real.
A face resolves in front of me: Kang, sweat-slicked and wild, hair in his eyes. The forest behind him is alive, writhing. Nothing Authority about it—ferns as high as men, fungus stalks painted with blue fire, vines that pulse with sap. It’s a fever dream, or maybe just the way the world is now.
He crouches down, hands bracing either side of my face. “Look at me,” he says, voice low and clipped. “You here?”
I try. My eyes focus, then lose it. I blink, slow, dragging each eyelid up like a tarp off a corpse.
“Diana,” he says, and the way he says it is not Authority. It is not even Kang. It’s just a man, exhausted, running out of options.
I croak, “That’s my name,” and my lips crack. Blood beads up, red-black against my skin.
He exhales, almost a laugh, but not quite. “You’ve been out for an hour. Maybe two.”
I nod. Or try. The motion sends a lightning rod through my right side. My arm is numb, but not dead. I can feel the blood running, slow and thick, down my bicep. The shoulder—my shoulder—is a hot, pulsing ache.
He sees it. “You’re shot,” he says, not gentle, not cruel. “You lost blood. I tried to—” He stops, jaw locking, then unclenching. “You’ll live.”
The sense memory of running comes back. The yard. The fence. The gunshots. Stitch’s face. “Stitch,” I say, the word barely sound.
His eyes go hard. He looks away, down at the ground. “She didn’t make it. The old guys did. They’re a few klicks north, safe as they can be.”
It lands in my gut like a brick. The pain in my shoulder is nothing compared to the pressure behind my eyes.
Kang pulls a canteen from his belt, unscrews it with his teeth, and puts it to my lips. The water is warm, slightly sweet, but it is water, and I drink until he pulls it away.
He sets the canteen down and, without warning, pulls the sleeve of my shirt up and inspects the wound.
The flesh is angry, red, puckered around a hole the size of a bean.
He prods the wound, then tears a strip from the hem of his uniform and wraps it around the wound, tight but not tourniquet tight.
“I can cauterize it,” he says, “or we can wait until we find a med kit.”
“Not fond of fire,” I mutter.
He almost smiles. “Noted.”
He sits back on his heels, just watching me for a second. The silence is thick with things unsaid.
The forest around us is not silent. It chatters, cracks, and clicks with the life of ten thousand insect species, most of which probably didn’t exist five years ago.
I see things moving in the undergrowth: little mammals with double tails, a centipede the color of raw chicken winding up a tree.
Above, a web glows with the caught dust of the air, strings vibrating as if plucked by invisible hands.
I stare at the sky, the light, the impossible world. “Where are we?” I say.
He shrugs, looks around as if seeing it for the first time. “Outside the radius. The woods. Sanctuary country.”
The word makes me laugh. “Sanctuary,” I repeat. “You think they’ll take us?”
His mouth goes flat. “Don’t know. Don’t care.” He meets my eyes, steady and green as ever. “I just wanted to get you out.”
The words fill me with an ache more intense than the bullet wound.
I try to sit up. He steadies me, hands at my waist, fingers splayed to brace and guide. The touch is gentle, but possessive. I let him. There is a place in me that wants the anchor, the gravity of another body.
The movement makes my vision tilt, the edges going soft. “I can walk,” I lie.
He lets the lie stand. “You can try.”
I try, and I do—knees buckling, then catching, boots finding purchase on the spongy, moss-covered ground. Kang hovers close, not touching but always there, a boundary I can lean on if I want.
I look at him, and see the exhaustion in the lines at his mouth, the bruises on his arms, the thin trail of blood at his temple, dried and flaked away. He is as wrecked as I am, maybe worse.
He gestures ahead. “We follow the creek,” he says. “It flows east. Sanctuary is two, maybe three days if we’re lucky.”
“And if we’re not?”
He tilts his head and stares at me. “We die together.”
I bark a laugh, too loud, and the sound sets off a chorus of shrieks from the trees.
I take a step, then another. My shoulder burns, but the rest of me is functional. I look down at my hands—scarred, but strong. I close them, open them. I am still here.
We walk. The trees close in, their trunks warped and gnarled, the underbrush littered with the detritus of a world gone mad. I try to catalog the flora, but my brain won’t cooperate. Every time I focus, my mind slips away, back to the hands at my belly, the voice at my neck.
“Almost done, my love.”
I shake my head, try to clear it. Kang walks ahead, checking the path, always circling back to make sure I haven’t collapsed.
The sun goes down. The world glows in shades of blue and green. We make camp in the hollow of a fallen log, the wood soft and sweet with rot. Kang builds a fire with practiced efficiency, using the resin from a strange orange fungus as tinder. The smoke is purple, acrid, but keeps the bugs away.
He sits beside me, close enough that our shoulders touch. I feel the heat radiate from him, a reminder that I am not alone.
For a long time, we don’t speak.
In the hush, Stitch’s laugh slinks back into my thoughts. Her biting humor, her absurd tales—pirate, surgeon, thief—spun with such conviction I stopped trying to sort fact from fiction. It didn’t matter. Beneath the chaos, she carried a heart too vast for this world. And now it’s gone.
Finally, I whisper, “You remember anything? Before the Authority?”
He shakes his head, looks into the fire. “No. Just fragments. Just… feelings.”
I nod, understanding too well.
He turns to me, his face washed in the shifting light. “You?”
I think of the hands, the voice, the impossible memory of belonging.
“Yes,” I say, and the word hurts more than anything else.
He nods, as if this answers every question.
We stare at the fire, together, the darkness outside absolute.
The pain in my shoulder is nothing compared to the ache in my chest. I let it burn. I let it remind me that I am alive.
In the morning, we will run.