Chapter 58
Black. Black so deep it has a temperature, colder than liquid nitrogen, the kind that crystallizes the inside of your skull. I am not here. I am not anywhere. I am unthreaded, stripped down to signals, the last echoes of Diana bouncing off the sides of a container I can no longer define.
There is a sound, eventually. A pulse. It is not a heartbeat—it is a misfire, a stuttering electrical relay, some off-brand signal meant for a different body. It tries again, and again, until the rhythm falls into the correct groove, and I realize it’s my own heart. Or what’s left of it.
Next, the pain. Subtle at first, like being kissed by the world’s laziest wasp. Then it rolls in, layered and all-consuming: scalp, mouth, inside the teeth, a churning ache in the left eye. Ribs ignite one by one. Lungs forget their training and shudder against the load.
There’s a voice, too, but it’s scrambled, run through three bands of distortion and the glass in a broken intercom.
“Diana.” It’s soft the first time, almost curious.
The second time, the urgency ramps: “Diana!” There’s a sharp edge to it, a thump of panic, and even through the hash I know who owns that voice.
Maven.
They say it again, louder, so close I can feel the syllables brushing across my eardrum. “DIANA. Answer me.” The words claw at the inside of my head, drag my name up from wherever I’ve gone and staple it to the moment.
I try to respond. Nothing. My jaw is glued shut, or maybe I no longer have a jaw.
My tongue is a lump of char. I think to wiggle my fingers, but sensation ends at the elbow, then the shoulder, then somewhere in the solar plexus, buried beneath a pressure so absolute I wonder if I am inside the node itself, crushed into paste.
Memory trickles in. Kang. The last thing I saw was Kang—his face, the way the muscles in his jaw bunched up when he tried to be brave, the sound he made when I told him I loved him.
I remember the smell of him: sweat, singed hair, copper from the blood, and something else, ozone maybe, or the charged ions from the EM field’s meltdown.
I remember thinking it would be okay if this was the last thing I ever felt.
It’s not.
The pressure on my chest isn’t just a force—it’s a body. Heavy, familiar, radiating a dying heat that even now the rest of me tries to burrow into. An arm is slung across my neck, a half-circle of bone and muscle locking me in. I know the shape, the scars. I know who this is.
I try to say his name. I try to scream. What comes out is a wet, bubbling choke that coats the inside of my mouth with a new flavor: iron and saliva and something sweet, chemical, probably the signature note of dying neurons.
Above me, the world shudders. I hear the crash of glass under boots, then a groan of shifting metal.
A voice—not Maven this time, someone younger, male, terrified—shouts, “Over here! I got movement!” Another pair of hands joins the dig, the tremor of the floor driving splinters of pain through my ribcage.
“Careful!” Maven’s voice again, but now they’re right above me, close enough to smell the antiseptic on their glove. “There’s two. Kang’s on top. Get him off, then—” Maven’s voice breaks, just for a second, a stutter of command and heartbreak. “Get her out. Now.”
Hands clamp onto the body covering mine.
I feel Kang’s weight shift, then lift, a flood of cold air smashing into my face as the makeshift barrier of his chest is peeled away.
For a split second my own lungs expand, greedy and wild, desperate to fill the new vacancy, but the emptiness hits harder than the pain. The warmth is gone. The shield is gone.
A faint keening whine—maybe me, maybe the metal, maybe the world itself—rings out as they pull him clear.
The arm that was around my neck drags across my jaw, leaving a slick trail of something wet and sticky, and I want to reach for it, want to grab on and not let go, but my own arms are dead, useless, limp as washed-out noodles.
Maven’s flashlight lands on my face, the beam cruel and antiseptic.
The breath catches in their throat—a microsecond hitch, a static pulse of disbelief.
Then Maven’s hands are on me, prying at the wreckage pinning my lower half, all gentleness gone.
I feel a finger at my carotid, a slap to the cheek.
“Diana. Hey. Don’t you dare fade now. Not after this. Not after everything you’ve done.” Maven’s voice is cracked open, raw, the command filtered through a mesh of relief and terror and something that sounds a little like gratitude, but mostly just fear.
I blink, slow, as if my eyelids are packed in wet cement. It takes three tries, but finally I manage to open my mouth. All I can manage is a breath, and then a word, hollow and shredded:
“Kang.”
It’s barely sound. It’s barely anything at all.
But Maven hears it, and for the first time in my life, I see them soften, the hard angles of their face going slack. They lean in, eyes wild and wet, and clamp both hands around my head like they’re trying to physically hold my brain together.
“He’s here,” Maven says. “We got him. You did it, Diana. You did it.”
They repeat it, over and over, each time softer, more like a lullaby than a victory chant.
“We got him. You did it. You did it.”
And I believe them.
For a second, I believe.
Then the darkness comes back, and I let it take me. This time, though, it’s not the Authority’s darkness. It’s my own, and I earned it.
The next time I surface, the world is upside down and inside out and echoing. I have no sense of time, only the taste of burnt insulation and the aftershock of all the pain I tried to leave behind.
I’m being moved, dragged by the armpits, someone’s rough hands wrapped around my torso like a child’s rag doll.
My head lolls against my collarbone, mouth sticky with dried blood.
The pressure on my chest is gone, replaced with an uncooperative vacuum, as if my lungs are reluctant to admit the air outside.
Every breath is a new experiment in pain.
There’s light, hard and unfiltered, searing through my eyelids. I squint them open and immediately regret it.
Sanctuary is gone. Or more precisely, Sanctuary has been re-cast as a brutalist art project, all exposed rebar and smoking glass.
The main tunnel is collapsed, the walls at insane new angles, entire sections melted to a runny, iridescent slag.
Where the node heart was, now there’s only a crater, wires fanned out like a dead spider’s legs.
The silence is worse than the destruction. No Authority chimes, no surveillance static, no droning cycles of coded announcements from speakers. Just wind, and the wet sound of people moving through wreckage, and the distant, incongruously delicate sound of water dripping from the ceiling.
Maven’s voice, stripped of all distortion, barks orders at the edge of my awareness. “Put her there—no, the mat, not the floor. Keep her head elevated. Fuck, where is Rosie? Where is the kit?” Their voice is full volume, but the words don’t land. I drift sideways, losing chunks of the present.
Something icy is packed against the side of my head. The touch wakes up all the pain circuits at once, a flash-bang of sensation so loud I nearly retch. I blink again, and this time the world resolves:
There are bodies on the ground. Some I recognize, others are just Authority uniforms crumpled and leaking, faces erased by blast or shrapnel. There is a patch of blue at the corner of my vision—a flower, somehow still intact, embedded in the chaos.
And Kang.
He is not next to me. He is not even in my immediate field of view. But there is a line, a gravitational pull, that yanks every vector of my body in his direction. It’s not subtle, it’s not gentle; it is a primal, limbic kind of need, a compulsion so deep it overrides the pain.
My left hand is the first to rebel. I wrench it free from the slick grip of whoever is trying to stabilize me, and it slides across the mat, fingertips finding only concrete dust and fragments of glass.
I try to push myself upright. My body does not cooperate, but with enough thrashing and force of will, I manage to roll onto my side.
The world cartwheels around me, but I don’t care.
“Diana, stop,” Maven orders, but their hand is no match for the brute animal logic that propels me forward. I plant both elbows, scrape my knees bloody on the floor, and drag myself toward the only thing that matters.
He is ten feet away, laid out with cruel precision on a strip of tarp. His arms lie at his sides, the Authority jacket pulled up to reveal his bare, battered chest. There’s a pool of blood under his back, thick and blackened, a shadow on the mat.
His face is white, almost blue, lips cracked and parted as if he were about to snap something cutting.
His eyes are shut, lashes damp. I crawl the last two feet and collapse against him, cheek to bare skin, searching for a heartbeat, a pulse, any flicker of life.
My palm presses to his chest—there’s no rise, no throb—though I could have sworn I felt the faintest tremor under my fingertips. I don’t register it.
There is nothing.
I clutch his shoulders, shaking them, but his head just lolls to the side; his mouth opens and closes in the ragged rhythm of a dead fish.
Desperate, I press my mouth to his, tasting the old bitterness of vodka and iron.
“Come on,” I rasp, my voice strangled. “Come on, Kang. You promised. You said you’d always—”
Words choke off in my throat. Only salt, only water, only the hot dribble of tears and blood from my face.
Someone grabs my shoulder—Maven, probably—but I twist away, curling into Kang’s still body, wrapping my arms around his head and cradling it to my chest. I thread my fingers through his hair, sticky with dried plasma, and press kisses to his forehead, to his cold cheeks, to his stubborn lips.
“Lance,” I whisper, voice trembling. “Lance, please come back to me. You promised you’d always find me. You don’t get to quit now. Not after all this. Not after—” My voice breaks, and I’m weeping, howling. My nails dig crescents into his neck as if I could claw him back from wherever he’s gone.
“We’re free now,” I sob. “We did it. It’s over. Please don’t leave me here in the dark.” My plea sounds childish, pathetic, but it’s all I have.
Maven kneels beside me, hand gentle on my shoulder. Their gaze flicks once to Kang, sharp and assessing, before they mask it again. “Diana. Let us help him. Please. You need—”
I fling Maven away, rage and grief coalescing into pure motion. I scream, wordless, until my throat tears. I cling to Kang, burying my face in his chest, inhaling what’s left of his scent. The world contracts to two bodies, bound by grief and the slow cooling of his skin.
Minutes pass, maybe hours. Time no longer exists. Then, tentative hands slide under my arms, peeling me back. I bite and snarl, but they hold firm and roll me onto my back.
I refuse to let go of Kang’s hand. I grip it tight, interlacing our fingers, hoping to funnel my own blood into his palm. His skin is still warm beneath mine—if only I could see what I cannot.
Above us, the ceiling has vanished, and beyond it, the sky is clear. For the first time I see the stars.
I want to believe this is the end. I want it to be enough.
But as I lie bruised and broken, with Kang’s silent hand in mine and Maven’s soft voice hovering near my ear, I realize I’m still here. I am always still here.
And as long as I breathe, I will remember.
And somewhere in the ruin, another breath answers mine.