Chapter 47 #2
She tries to recall everything he told her the first time she drank the Soma. She thinks of the espresso, which he insisted would stay hot—up until the moment she seized it and brought herself back into time.
She is already holding Jet’s eye, but when she gets to Point Mugu, she’ll need to seize something else, to come back into real time. Until then she can’t touch anything that isn’t already in her hands.
Using her hips to edge past her door, stepping outside her room into the common room, she sneaks toward Simon’s open door to confirm what she needs to be true.
Jet lies on his back with his eyes closed, his right hand on top of Simon’s head, which isn’t moving. It worked. They’re frozen in time. Dez has bought herself twelve hours to get to Asher, to save his life.
Carefully, with her sweater-covered elbow, Dez opens to the suite’s front door. Where she jumps backward, throwing her hands up protectively at the sight of Rafe blocking her exit.
It takes her a long, panicked moment to confirm that Rafe is frozen in time, too.
She backs away and takes him in. His dark hair is windswept, caught mid-motion the instant Dez swallowed the Soma. His fist is raised to pound on her door. His face is perfect in its stillness. But the look in his eyes is alive, ferocious.
He knows she ran from the Vault. Does he know what she’s planning on doing?
He came close, but he can’t stop her now. All she has to do is get by him, down these stairs, and the hell out of this place.
Except—
Something’s missing.
Jet’s eye. Dez’s hand is empty.
No.
She searches the floor beneath her feet, beneath Rafe’s. She gets on her knees, her palms about to sweep the hardwood when she remembers she can’t touch it. Her eyes scour the floor for her only ticket out of here, her only chance to save Asher’s life.
It’s gone.
Her chest heaves, and she feels like she might be sick. To have kept the eye safe all these months only to lose it now, when it finally matters. She looks up from the ground at Rafe, frozen, lording over her.
And she sees the eye, where it got caught in his closing fist, about to knock on her door.
She rises slowly, terrified, holding her breath. Is it over? Has Rafe finally won? If she takes the eye again, will she be seizing time, releasing Rafe back into the moment?
She doesn’t have a choice. She slowly reaches inside Rafe’s partly closed hand, taking extreme caution not to touch him.
There. She never thought it would feel so good to hold a disembodied eyeball. The eye that was already in slow, Soma time with her. The rest of the world stays frozen as she closes her eyes and extracts it from Rafe’s grip.
She clasps it in her hand and exhales.
Her body is still so close to Rafe’s, and she still has to get around him without tripping him back into time. She’s got to get out of here. But before she goes, she looks once more into the angel’s azurite eyes.
So many nights she spent with him. So much pleasure and comfort she had taken in his arms.
All a lie, if not in his words, in his body and his soul. A lie in the language of his mouth on hers.
She hates him. And she can see in this still-life version’s eyes that he hates her, too. That if he could, he’d do anything to stop her.
She won’t let him.
She slips under his raised arm, finding herself eye level with his crotch. How she used to yearn for him. Even now she can’t help the heat that flushes her cheeks.
But she moves around him, stepping free. She leaves him there, frozen, ever about to break down her door.
She thunders down the stairs, passing Yael on the way, who is also frozen, midstep on the landing.
How strange to be the only thing in motion. She can do whatever she wants.
She rushes outside and enters the dark and eerie labyrinth. All around her, she feels the warm reaches of the ancient pomegranate trees, taken from the Garden long ago, at the height of a cosmic war.
It’s not her war. Tonight, Dez is her own army, on a single mission.
Urgency illuminates her instinctive memory of the route she took once with Rafe. Left, right, left, right, left, right.
Finally, on the other side of the labyrinth, she takes an endless flight of stairs down to a stone landing strip carved into the mountains, where fifty dark jets gleam.
All of them look the same. At first, she’s discouraged.
Why do they need all these planes anyway, if all of them can fly on their own?
How will she ever find which one is Jet’s?
Then she remembers the panel outside Rafe’s plane.
He must have let it scan his eyes to open the door. He powered the whole plane that way.
Dez runs to plane after plane, holding up Jet’s eye. Nothing happens. The access panels stay black, unchanged. Fear billows inside her. She has no idea what she’s doing, if this will even work. Worse, she has no plan B.
Her confidence ebbs as she reaches the last row, the final plane. Dez thrusts the eye to the control panel—
And the panel makes a hopeful sound. But nothing opens; nothing ignites or whirs into action.
She tries the eye again, this time holding it in the center of the panel.
Nothing.
On the edge of panic, Dez moves the angel’s disembodied eye in a circle, rolls it roughly against the panel’s glass.
And the jet bridge swings out.
“Fucking last plane,” she breathes as she bounds up the stairs and onto the jet.