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But he was alive.
Juliette pulled him to her fiercely, locking them in an embrace.
“The monster is dead,” she whispered.
So why did she still feel empty? Why did it feel like their roles weren’t over?
“Did Paul hurt you?” Roma asked. He pulled away and ran his eyes over her to check for wounds, as if his own hands weren’t still running with blood.
Juliette shook her head, and Roma sighed in relief. He glanced to the water, where Paul’s body floated in those green-gray waves.
“He thought he loved you.”
“It wasn’t love,” Juliette whispered.
Roma pressed a kiss to her temple, closing his eyes against the dampness that stuck to her hair.
“Let’s go,” he said. “Let’s go wake Alisa.”
Thirty-Eight
One by one, the insects detached from Alisa Montagova.
They writhed and screeched as the mother host bled out, gnashing their microscopic teeth at one another. When the heart that fueled them all stopped beating, they t
oo were forced to go to their death throes, detaching from the tissues they had clutched, unhinging their jaw from the nerve they had selected. In their last moments, they started to emerge. Where their only goal had once been to bury deep, the insects now desperately tried to burrow out, thrashing and thrashing in a tangle of limp blond hair, before at last passing into death and dropping onto the white fabric of the hospital linens.
With a gasp, Alisa awoke. She bolted upright and heaved for fresh air—coughing and coughing until the pipe that had been feeding her flew out of her throat. She had risen just enough to scatter about the dozen arthropod bodies left behind on the pillowcase, already shriveling in their death. She did not dare move any more than that. She inhaled sharply and held the breath in her lungs this time, her eyes almost crossing in her attempt to look upon the barrel of the gun pointed to her forehead.
“It’s okay, Alisa,” someone wheezed from the corner of the room.
Alisa flicked her eyes to the voice. It did more to heighten her panic than it did to ease it: she found Benedikt, her cousin, with his hands up, two guns pointed upon him, and Marshall Seo in a similar predicament near the door.
“Welcome back to the world, Alisa Montagova,” Tyler Cai said. He pressed the hard muzzle of his gun into her skin. “Sorry it has to be in this way.”
* * *
The city streets remained an uproarious parade of commotion as Roma and Juliette made their way through. Everywhere Juliette looked, she saw the corpses of those who had been in the monster’s path of destruction. She saw political chaos—rioters, still intent on making themselves heard even when their fellow workers were lying dead in the gutters. In her hurry, she had lost count of how many near collisions she had made with a protester, how many times she was almost hit with their flaming torches or withering signs blowing with the wind.
But when Roma and Juliette ran to the border of Nanshi, it was quiet.
“Did we take a wrong turn?” Juliette whispered.
“No,” Roma said. “This is right.”
The tall factories were slouching in a muted, mild manner. The roads were void of rickshaw runners, void of vendors, void of even the faintest sounds from children running amok.
That was to be expected—but in the absence of the regular humdrum, they had expected pandemonium, not quiet.
“Have the riots not started here yet?”
“I suppose it is to our benefit if they have not,” Juliette said hesitantly. “Where is the hospital?”
Roma pointed. They ran. Each hard step of Juliette’s heel coming down threw shocks into her legs, until she was hurrying up the steps of the hospital with her calves throbbing and her teeth chattering. The anxiety coursing through her limbs had no other place to go.
“Hello?” Roma called, pushing the double doors open. There was nobody in the reception area. No nurses, no doctors.
“Listen, Roma,” Juliette whispered. They stilled, under the chipping paint of an archway leading into the thin corridor. A squeak of a shoe. A low murmur.
