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“I don’t know,” Shade said.
“What did I do back there? People were screaming. I think I did that, didn’t I? Did I hurt those people?”
Shade again sought Cruz’s eyes in the mirror, pleading.
Cruz said, “You have a power, Malik. I think, maybe, you can . . .” Shade heard her hesitation. She knew, and Cruz knew, that she was pronouncing a type of death sentence. “It seems like you can project pain. Shade and I felt it. It was . . . unbearable. Like being on fire. Your pain, I think. Somehow you can inflict it on people. In morph we were mostly immune, like you were talking about with frosted glass, like we knew it was there, but it didn’t quite get to us.”
Malik’s voice was childlike in its hurt and disbelief. “You mean I hurt people?”
“Not hurt, not injure,” Shade said quickly. “It’s just pain.”
“Just pain? Just pain?” Malik said, and suddenly began to cry.
Shade had never seen Malik cry. It seemed at once impossible and not at all impossible. Malik was strong, but he was a decent human being all the way down to the bone, one of life’s good guys. And now he was a good person who could cause terrible pain to others.
“Is it still happening?” Malik asked, his voice a child’s sob.
“No, it stopped,” Cruz assured him. “It was a few seconds, maybe a minute. It may be
something you can control. Something you can, you know . . . use.”
Everything about this conversation was wrong, like walking through a psychic minefield.
“Use?” Malik said. “Like torture? That’s my power? That’s my escape from death? I can bring people pain?” The childish tone was falling away, replaced by growing outrage. “I’m going to live the rest of my life with the Dark Watchers in my head? And the only thing I can do now is hurt people? That’s my life? That’s what I am now?”
The words were on the tip of Shade’s tongue, but she would not say I’m sorry. To say it implied she thought the words meant something. As though some stupid words would lessen the enormity of what had happened.
What had happened because of her. An apology would be a request for forgiveness, and she neither wanted nor deserved forgiveness.
“I want to see,” Malik said. “I want to see what I really am. My real body, not this . . .” He flicked a finger against his biceps as if expecting to discover that he was insubstantial.
“Malik, you can’t de-morph,” Cruz warned. “The pain would—”
“Aaaaahhhhhh!” Malik cried, and to the horror of both Shade and Cruz, he was de-morphing, too-sleek flesh seeming to swirl and re-form.
“Stop it!” Shade cried, and yanked the car onto the shoulder of the road. “Stop, stop, stop! Don’t do it!”
But Malik’s clothing had turned to smoke, and the illusion of healthy flesh had given way to a creature of charcoal and angry red meat and bleached bone, and Malik screamed and screamed as Shade shouted, “Stop it, stop it, stop it!”
“Look at me!” Malik screamed, staring at the hideous stumps of his legs. “Look at me!”
Cruz said, “Change back, Malik! Right now!”
“Look at me!”
For just a second, the harder Shade emerged long enough to snap, “Goddammit, Malik, morph! Now!”
Her voice cut through the blinding, deafening, brain-shattering agony, and Malik began to change. Cruz watched in fascinated horror as flesh crept over his bones, eerily reversing the damage that superheated steam and liquid fire had done.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” The futile words came at last because the only alternative was silence. And they evaporated, irrelevant, insufficient. Pointless. Shade gripped the wheel like she was trying to break it in half, unable to look at him. Then she turned and with one hand gripped Malik’s reconstituted shoulder. “Do it to me. Make me feel it! Make me feel it! Hurt me! Just me!”
Malik was shaking his head no, no, but Cruz said, “Do it, Malik. See if you can focus it.”
“I don’t want to hurt Shade!”
“She needs to feel it,” Cruz said, shaking her head in wonder at the madness of it all, the madness and the gutting feeling that everything, everywhere was spiraling down and down and down, that the whole world was staggering to a finish line that would bring nothing but destruction.
“I’ll try,” Malik said.
