“Stop,” I say weakly. “Please.”
“—never truly cared for her!” Juno doesn’t hear me, or doesn’t care. “You’re just like your father.”
Valen snarls, his fangs bared.
“You only care about yourself, about your needs. Pathetic! I put the needs of the many ahead of my own needs. I gaveeverythingto this country, and how was I rewarded? How?” she bellows.
“Please.” I slump against the bars. “I can’t?—”
“Silence!” Valen roars.
The ache behind me eyes rises as Juno continues her tirade. But I can’t hear her anymore. There’s just a ringing in my ears, a high-pitched hum like when the television stations stopped broadcasting during the height of the epidemic. They’d go to static, to that horrid monotone.
That’s where I am now. Floating in static, drowning in a distress signal.
3
“You should probably drink something. Eat something,” David says quietly from my bedroom threshold.
He’s right. I should.
Instead, I stare at the stone wall, a wild litany of emotions playing through me over and over again. I can’t seem to get a grip on any of them. It would be so much easier if I were one note. Sad. Angry. Even hopeless. But this sort of grief isn’t linear. Anger is chief among them right along with grief. Sometimes a burst of happiness that Juno is still alive tries to surface, but I hold it beneath the water, keeping it there until its lips turn blue, its eyes gone glassy and still.
“Georgia—”
“I heard you.”
He sighs. “You can’t stay in here forever.”
“Wasn’t that the plan?” I roll over and glare at him. “To keep me prisoner?”
He shrugs, his black wings rising and falling beyond his shoulders. “I know just as much about plans as you do.”
“Whatever.”
“I also know that the longer you stay in here sulking, the less time you have to come up with a way?—”
“I’m done coming up with things,” I seethe and turn back to the wall. “I came up with plenty and look where it got me. Brainwashed and locked in this fucking crypt.”
“You weren’t usually so dramatic before. Are you concussed?” Juno’s voice—hers and not hers.
I turn back over and find her instead of David. A mess, her dark hair in tangles, one eye missing, and still wearing the tatty clothes from her cell. But underneath, I still seeher. Back straight, chin up, authority oozing from her pores. She steps inside and marches over to my bed, her slight limp at odds with her withering gaze, and perches at the foot to scrutinize me. “You must be concussed if you’re laying here pitying yourself when you ought to be?—”
“Shut up!” I yell it so vehemently that I surprise myself.
Juno scoffs, but I don’t let her get another word in. “You lied to me, used me—you killed us all. You’re the reason we’re here.You’rethe reason. The vampires would’ve never gotten their claws in us if it weren’t for you! You don’t get to lecture me about anything!” I scoot up the bed and sit with my back against the headboard.
She turns toward me and pulls her legs up, crossing them as if she’s simply meditating. Her one eye surveys me, her lips slightly pursed.
“You act likeyou’rethe one who was kept locked in a dungeon.”
I close my eyes and press them shut tightly. My fingers twitch to hit her, to strangle her, to slap the aggrieved tone right out of her voice. If I’ve ever felt this toward Juno before, it was simmering somewhere deep. But now, every raw emotion is on the surface. I’ve been laid bare again and again, my mind flayed until I can’t hide anywhere in the gray matter.
“You killed us all.” I let out a shaky breath. “Why?” I open my eyes and fight back the tears that threaten.
“I didn’t kill us all. You’re here. I’m here.” She shrugs one shoulder. “I did what had to be done, what Gray never had the balls to do. He was a weak president, too short-sighted to see that the vampires were the key to our future. I knew the moment Valen appeared in my office that this chance was our only hope at surviving.”
I shake my head slowly. “We aren’t surviving. The vampires are.Youare. You sent those people into the blood camps. You knew they’d be killed. You knew, and yet you kept on. You kept pushing. You sacrificed so many lives for what? Why?”
