Page 200 of What We Become

My head drops. Comes back up.

Stay awake.

Stay awake.

Feet.

Through the empty window frame on my side. Boots on wet asphalt, lit in red pulses. Someone is outside the vehicle.

Behind the boots, farther out, another set. Then a third. An engine idling that isn’t ours.

“In here,” I say. Or try to say. It comes out broken. “We’re in here.”

The feet stop. A figure crouches. A face appears in the window frame, backlit by the flashing red, features in shadow.

I blink the blood out of my eye.

The face sharpens. Brown hair. An expression I know. Not from the face—from the manner. Calm. Patient. One I’ve seen before. That I’ve seen across a diner counter and in surveillance footage and in the photograph Milo taped to his laptop with crosshairs drawn over it.

“Stephen?”

My body tries to react. Every muscle fires the signal—move, fight, kill—but the signal gets lost somewhere between my brain and my legs that are pinned under crumpled steel and the arm that’s holding Fury against me and the other arm that doesn’t seem to be responding at all.

“No,” I say.

His eyes drop to Fury. To her body in my arms. I tighten my grip. She shifts against me—a small sound, unconscious, the whimper of a body that’s hurt and doesn’t know where it is.

“You’re not taking her.”

The face doesn’t change.

“Fury.” My mouth is against her ear. “Sage. Wake up. You need to wake up.”

She doesn’t respond.

Hands reach through the window. Her seatbelt clicks open, and her weight drops against me. Then the hands find her shoulders and pull. Gently at first, testing my grip.

I hold tighter.

“You’re gonna have to let her go, big guy.”

The voice is calm. Friendly, almost. The voice of a man who once called himself Jamie and sat next to me at a diner counter and stood at our front door and promised to take care of the woman he was planning to kill.

“Fuck off.”

“You’re pinned, and you can barely keep your eyes open. Your friends aren’t in much better shape.” The hands adjust. Find a better angle. “Let her go and I’ll make this quick. For both of you.”

“I said no.”

The pulling stops. A pause. Then a sigh—disappointed, parental, like I’ve failed to meet a reasonable expectation.

“Okay,” Stephen says. “The hard way, then. I measured this one for you specifically.”

Something sharp jabs into my neck. A sting, then a cold that spreads down my throat, across my chest, into the arm that’s holding Fury. My fingers loosen. Not because I want them to. Because whatever he put into me is dissolving the connection between my brain and my body, one wire at a time.

“No—”

Fury slides. An inch. Two. Her weight shifts in my arms and the hands are there again, pulling, and I can feel her going and I can’t—I can’t hold⁠—