Chapter 21
As though he has no idea that I’m plotting his demise, he gestures toward the chair across from his desk.
He’s gotta be fucking kidding me. I don’t sit. Neither does Mav.
“I don’t know why you’re acting so hostile, Hallie. Your case was a great breakthrough in that aspect of my research.”
Maverick makes a disgusted sound that I’d echo if I wasn’t doing everything I can not to hurl over the floor to hear how pleased the Doctor suddenly sounds with me.
With Hallie.
The Doctor ignores Maverick as though the former cop isn’t standing right there.
“You were experiencing a severe dissociative response to trauma. You rejected your own identity because it was associated with an event you couldn’t emotionally reconcile, then reconstructed yourself around the deceased twin.”
I don’t know what’s worse: the smarminess or how he’s talking down to me. That’s enough for me to swallow back the bile and snap out, “I know what dissociation is.”
“I imagine you do. You studied psychology, didn’t you?”
“How do you kn—”
He steeples his long, brittle, white fingers in front of him. “Which makes this new development particularly interesting.”
My spine stiffens. So maybe I can explain away the Doctor knowing about my most recent major.
After all, when that woman with the clipboard took our vitals, she came back with a ton of information about me.
My age. My home. My identity. So, sure, whatever database they’re tapping into probably has a record of my education. Fine.
But when a dribble of drool wells up in the corner of his mouth as he says, “Holden,” before dabbing at it with the end of his black tie… I suck in a breath.
The way he says my name makes it sound like a diagnosis—and I hate it.
“Another identity,” he continues, and I hate that it’s like he somehow got in my head.
I know he didn’t. He can’t. Doesn’t explain how he knows the name I’m going by…
unless that’s part of the intel that got back to the NRI when the goons got to Kristian…
but the fact that the Doctor wields my insecurities like the worst sort of weapon…
I hate him most of all. “Another attempt to avoid accepting the reality of who you are. Sit down. We will get to the bottom of this, you and I.”
Like hell we will.
I already know what happened. Hallie couldn’t survive losing Xandra, so my brain made me Xandra instead. Then the Doctor forced me to remember I was Hallie, and what did I do? I became Holden. So maybe I didn’t heal anything after my recent trauma. Maybe I just found a new place to hide.
It doesn’t matter. I like who I am. I like being Holden Knight, and when we finish this this afternoon, I’m going back to Camp Sunnyside, I’m going back to the Grave, and once I’m around my family and friends again, I’m going marry Chase.
But first—
“I know what happened to me,” I tell him. “When Xandra died, being Hallie hurt too much. So my brain did what it had to do. It detached me from myself and gave me someone I thought could survive.”
“Precisely.”
“No.” I smile. There’s a feral edge to the grin “Not precisely. Because you think Holden is the same thing.”
“Isn’t she?”
“Not even a little.”
Somewhere outside his office, down the hall from where we are, an alarm starts blaring.
Shit. That’s not part of the plan. Alarm…
no. I only hope that Delilah and Veronica haven’t gotten in trouble while I have this back and forth with the Doctor.
If they need our help, we’ll have to go, but Maverick didn’t even get a chance to confront the Doctor for what he did to him.
A heartbeat later, I don’t think he’ll ever get the chance.
The first explosion rocks the building.
Launching forward, averick catches the edge of the desk. I stumble sideways, grabbing the wall as something crashes in the hallway. The lights flicker, the alarm shrieks louder, and suddenly the smug bastard behind the desk doesn’t look nearly so composed.
My heart skips a beat. Chase and David. They did it.
A second blast comes from somewhere farther away, followed by the unmistakable roar of fire.
As the Doctor slowly gets to his feet, I see a flicker of nerves dance across his face.
He’s not so high and mighty now that the building is on fire, huh?
I might add more scars to my body if I get trapped by the flames, but the Doctor… he’s part lurker.
He’ll go up in flames, and the sick bastard knows it.
Isn’t that delicious?
“What did you do?”
I grin. “Got a light, Doc?”
“Hallie—”
“My name is Holden,” I say coolly. “And if you want to follow me out of this office, go right ahead.” I pull my lighter out. “Either way, I’m going to enjoy watching you burn.”
That’s bullies for you. They can terrorize you all they want, but when you stand up to them…
they don’t know how to react. The Doctor has spent too long relying on others to do his dirty work.
He had his goons to bring him the subjects to experiment on, and he probably justified everything he did to me… to Mav… in the name of fucking science.
Now let’s have an experiment of our own. How long will it take for the fire to reach the Doctor’s office and turn him to ash?
Too bad I’m not going to find out. I have a scientist to help rescue, a pair of twins to help escape, and a fiancé to spend the rest of my life with.
I turn toward the door, suddenly sure that—despite his Injection-given strength—he won’t come after me.
I make it three steps before the gunshot stops me.
At first, I thought it was another explosion. Only Chase and David agreed to only set off two at first, and they’ve already done that. But if it wasn’t a bomb… I spin around.
Maverick is standing across from the Doctor, his gun in hand. The Doctor is sitting in his seat, sprawled rather than sitting as up-right as he was before. His mouth is hanging open, blood replacing the dribble in the corner from before. His eerie black eyes are wide open.
There’s a hole right over his heart. At this distance, it probably did more damage than if Maverick had been across the room. My ears are ringing again, because it happened so close to me. The air stinks of gunpowder and, I shit you not, satisfaction.
Blood blooms over his white button-down shirt. Maverick aimed precisely. As though he saw the knife during into Kristian’s heart and had the same realization about how to kill any of the almost-lurkers with a weapon other than fire, he shot him dead in his left pec.
And the Doctor is, well, dead.
All of that slams into my consciousness in a few short seconds. Like, I see it, and I process it, but I don’t really understand it—and that’s because I’m hung up on the fact that Maverick shot the gun.
No. It’s that Maverick even had a gun to shoot.
I knew he had it. I mean, I gave it back to Mav after we found him alive in the woods, after I knew he wasn’t going to use it on himself. There was one bullet left. He’s been saving that relic of his old life if he ever needed to use it on himself.
But he didn’t. He used it on the Doctor instead.
Not that I don’t blame him. I was satisfied to leave him there, realizing that he was boned, and that the fire was coming for him.
I don’t think it was mercy. Killing him before he burned…
that seems more like mercy on Maverick’s part than mine.
I wanted the monster to suffer as he made so many others suffer, but Mav…
He killed him. With the bullet that meant so much to him… he killed him when he didn’t have to.
“Mav.” I’m pretty sure I’m shouting, but my ears are so muffled, I can barely hear myself. “What… why did you that? You wasted it?”
He’s staring at the Doctor. For a moment, I wonder if the gunshot blew out his eardrums, too. Maybe he didn’t hear me… and then his jaw goes tight, and I’m sure he did.
I inch toward him. My hand ghosts over his shoulder before I make myself drop it to his shoulder. He still doesn’t react… until I point out, “He was going to burn.”
His head bobs. “I know.”
“He deserved to burn.”
“You’re right, kid,” he agrees. “He did.”
“Then why?”
Maverick lowers the empty revolver, still watching the Doctor as though he expects him to rise up from the dead. Finding Kristian, I’m pretty sure these almost-lurkers don’t have that ability, but when it comes to Project Phoenix, I wouldn’t put it past the Doctor to be resurrected.
That’s why he needs to burn. Try rising from the ashes, then, you monster.
The alarm is still sounding. As my hearing clears for the second time, the pulse of the noise rings in my head. I’m reminded with a start why we’re standing in the office in the first place, but before I can grab Maverick and drag him out into the hall, he shakes his head.
“I just… I needed somebody to pay for my wife’s death.” His gaze stays fixed on the man responsible for so much of what happened to him. To Lindsay. To me. To the rest of the goddamn country. “I needed to see him die.”
And he used his final bullet to do it. The Doctor is dead, and the symbol that Maverick’s used to remind himself that, one day, he’ll have to end his own life before he Turns… yeah. That sounds pretty poetic to me.
Too bad that we have to go.
This time, I do grab his arm. “Come on. We have to find Veronica and Delilah!”
I’d bet every dollar that doesn’t exist anymore that the only thing that managed to pull Maverick out of his reverie was saying Veronica’s name.
As though I smacked him into being alert, his head recoils, and instead of me dragging Mav anywhere, he rushes for the door, me tripping over my boots behind him.
I have one of his arms. The other hand is holding his empty gun.
For a second, I glance at it, but instead of hiding it wherever he had it before—because, I swear, I had no idea he brought his gun with him…
even if I probably should have known—he tosses it to the floor.
His hand free, he jerks open the doorknob, and the two of us burst into the hall.
It’s not as empty as before, and when I see three people coming toward us at top speed wearing lab coats, I nearly piss my pants. The alarm sounding doesn’t help with my disorientation. I stumble, and Maverick pulls on my arm, leading me toward the trio.
“What? No—”
“It’s the twins,” he says quickly. “Look. It’s Veronica and Delilah.”
I blink. He… he’s right.
It takes me a second to notice. The fact that two of them are the spitting image of each other.
With their hair yanked back into low buns and the matching lab coats, the only difference is how Delilah is just a touch paler than her sister.
But then I see the third woman, being carried between them with the almost-lurker carrying most of the weight, and I think: now that’s pale.
Her skin is such a colorless shade of white, she’s almost clear.
Her face is gaunt, his black lurker eyes dull and unseeing.
Her feet drag as though she can’t quite summon the energy to move them without Delilah and Veronica hoisting her up.
I don’t know what color her hair is. It’s cut too short, almost buzzed to her scalp.
I get the feeling that, when the scientist refused to cooperate, they either shaved her head to humiliate her, or it was just easier to get rid of it so that it didn’t mat since it seems like she hasn’t taken care of herself at all during her captivity.
Because it has to be her. It has to be the woman we came for.
It has to be Gwen Martin.
They got her! Yes! Even better, it’s only the three of them. No one has followed behind them yet. I don’t know if that means they had to kill to get her out, if the explosions were the perfect distraction, or if we’re just super fucking lucky so far.
Veronica’s head snaps up. A flash of relief crosses her face when she sees me—and, oh, who am I kidding. She only has eyes for Maverick. I don’t even need her to take off the matching pair of shades to know that.
“Move!” Veronica shouts. “We need to move! Go back. Basement,” she adds. “Go!”
No argument here.
We have to go. The alarms are still shrieking, and smoke is collecting near the ceiling of this floor though I don’t see any fire or damage just yet.
That makes sense. If David and Chase set off the bombs they were supposed to, it left us a (hopefully) damage-free route to escape while inflicting most of the damage where the higher-ups congregate inside of the facility.
The idea was for us to get in and get out, kill as many of the staff in the first blasts, then kill the rest in the second, once we’re safe.
The first part of our improvised plan has gone off with a hitch. Now we just need to get out before anyone finds us here.
The smoke gets thicker as we move through the building.
On the plus side, that’s the worst of what we run into.
Even better, I can’t help but think about how unnervingly quiet the NRI was the last time I was inside of the building.
It was clean and sterile and terrifying.
Knowing it’s on fire? I smile a little to myself as we run.
Sue me. Being a witness to a murder and an accessory to exploding a federal building… hell, yeah, I’m feeling pretty damn giddy. That’s my mistake. I want to pull this off so badly, I start celebrating before we’re back in the SUV, heading to camp.
Were we being followed? I didn’t think so.
I mean, I spared a glance behind me once or twice when we first started running, and I swear I didn’t see anything.
I should’ve known better. I saw how fast the almost-lurkers can be.
No matter how fast we’re going, they can easily overtake us if they get us in their sight.
And that’s exactly what happens.
The five of us have just reached the sub level floor of the building, the one that has the hidden access door that’ll lead us into the subway tunnel directly beneath the NRI.
To reach it in the first place, we had to go down another side corridor that connected the sewer to the tunnel.
I thought of Aaron the entire time we trudged that way, but once we hit the ladder, Jules’s map told us we’d hit the right spot.
All we have to do is get back underground and we have a chance. We’ll hook up with David and Chase, page Simon and Nicky, and set off the remaining charges. It’s a perfect plan—
Or it would’ve been if it wasn’t for Winston.
Fucking Winston.