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Deeper.
Into Death itself.
To Chester.
Show me the code, I hissed, weaving him with my presence, holding him, clutching, clawing. Here I was a floating harpy, a hag with sharp nails, I whisked in circles, shrouding him and shredding his flesh.Show me.
Instincts tore at Chester, and he flailed, striving to get past me and continue on his walk into death and out of this nightmare.
Over and over I asked my question.Tell me the code. Show me.
In the torrents of memories and wishes and delusions of the man who had killed my friends, I saw algebra, binary ones and twos, scattered in a spray of numerics. I caught them, ripped his secrets from him.
Numbers, and more numbers.
These. They must be them. Wanted numbers.
Numbers counting down.
I closed my dream fist ignoring Chester’s scream.
Time was ticking, he no longer mattered.
With a gasp, I opened my eyes, to blackness, opened them again. The door was here.
With great effort, I focused, pulled myself to my feet, and punched in those little numbers.
The keypad scrolled letters at me.Thumbprint.
“Fuck.” I dove for and hauled at Chester’s corpse, brought his hand upward, wiped the blood from his thumb, and jammed it onto the pad.
The door showed a smiley face and chimed as all the locks unclicked in a small, miraculous symphony.
The door swung...and inside was Val, surrounded by nothing, no creatures, his ivory shirt marred by a single splotch of leaking blood.
Mouth open, I stared.
“Unicorn horn.” He waved vaguely as he strode toward me. “Had to eliminate them all.”
Well then. I met his gaze. “This place is rigged to blow.”
“Minutes?”
“Less.”
“Then run!”
CHAPTER38
Zara
“Bomb!”We shot out onto the street screaming the warning.
I gritted my teeth, my ankle protesting as Val dragged me along, but my sprinting legs were working by the time we reached half a block. People stampeded around us while cars screeched to a halt. It didn’t matter if some of them didn’t know what was happening; it mattered that they ran.
A street away, I finally let myself smile.
“We made it.” It hurt, but I started to laugh.
