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“Why didn’t you answer?” He sounds panicked.
“I was in the middle of something.”
“We’re dead. It’s over.”
I stop where I am; someone cusses me out as they almost walk into me but I don’t care. Pixie. Pixie betrayed us. It feels wrong, I should have felt it, should have known. I am broken.
James is still talking. “—my father agreed to a meeting. He says Rafael Marino contacted him, said he has a Seer who can force visions on demand. Rafael.” He swears, and I should be surprised but I’m not. Rafael is definitely Lerner, then. Pixie didn’t betray us.
I betrayed her.
Better sooner than later.
“But you two were working together,” I say as calmly as I can.
There’s a pause, a pause I can fill with James scrambling to decide what lie to fill this hole with. He can’t. There are too many holes, their edges are all meeting up, it’s too big now.
“Did Mae tell you that? She’s a liar, Fia. She’s trying to come between us. I hate Rafael, you know that. I should have killed him when I had the chance,” James says. “But it’s Sadie he’s got, it has to be.” The subject change is not lost on me. “He’s bringing her in, trying to make some sort of deal. The meeting is already set; my father called me to come back for it. If he gets her, it’s all over.”
I push someone to the side, force my way to where I can lean up against the streetlamp-lit exterior of a building. I close my eyes, try to feel it out, but I can’t feel anything. I’m dead inside. “We can work around it.”
“We can’t! There are too many things we’re already hiding. I know where Adam is.”
“Adam?” Gray eyes. Sweet and gentle Adam. Safe and hidden Adam. Safe and hidden like Annie. Both with Lerner, both with Rafael, who has been playing this whole thing for months while I’ve been running around mindlessly, not even knowing the game I was losing.
NOTHING I CAN CONTROL NOTHING NOTHING NOTHING.
James talks fast, and I can hear the rhythm in his voice from his pacing. “Adam was my big North Dakota surprise. He was working in a custom lab, set up by Rafael. Apparently Annie and Eden were living nearby, but he wouldn’t say where and I didn’t have time to find them. All your dead friends in one place. I tried to call Rafael and bargain, using Adam as leverage, but he wouldn’t answer. He doesn’t need him now that he has Sadie. I can only hide so many things before a Feeler or a Reader or a Seer catches us. And if Sadie comes in, we won’t be able to hide anything at all.”
I sink down the side of the wall, sit on the sidewalk. “What do we do?”
There’s a pause, a long pause, a pause I fill with wondering what Adam and James talk about. It would be funny, really, picturing them in a conversation any other time. They could talk about brains. Compare notes about whether I’m a good kisser. Rafael could join that conversation, too. Or maybe they’d just play video games.
“I have an idea,” James says, and everything in my head explodes with wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. I am sick with it, lost to gravity, unmoored. I dig my toes into the concrete, try to curl them into the ground through my shoes.
“Fia, are you still there?”
“Yes,” I whisper.
“We’re in this together. Forever. This is the only way we can do this. We’re close, we’re on the edge, we just need a little more time. A little more time and we’ll be done.”
James. My James. He is the only person I have left. Pixie said . . . Pixie lied. James is ending this, not starting it again. A little more time.
“And this is the only way to make sure Annie stays safe,” he adds. “My father can’t know she’s alive.”
“Yes,” I whisper again.
“You have to kill Sadie.”
The tapping in my skull is so loud I don’t know if I heard him right. “I have to kill Sadie,” I repeat.
“Yes. It’s the only way. Now that my father knows Sadie exists, he’ll never stop until he has her. And we already have the answer with what you did when Casey tried to kill him. Tomorrow, during the meeting. He trusts you, trusts your instincts. You kill Sadie, slip a weapon into her clothes, and then tell him you had the same feeling. You had a feeling that she was going to try to kill him. Tell him Rafael set it all up. It’ll be easy.”
“It’ll be easy.” I think I’m laughing. Am I laughing? Someone pauses, hovers above me, asks if I’m okay. I can’t look up, can’t stop laughing, can’t breathe.
“Go to the hotel. I’ll be home in two hours. Don’t talk to anyone, and stay away from the office.”
The tapping gets louder and I want to get out of my head, need to get out of my head. I picture a drill going through my skull, making a hole to release the pressure from the tapping the tap tap tap tapping the tap tap tap tapping that never stops.
