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Licking my dry lips, I climb off the pipe, my burning gaze hung on her. “Explain,” I demand.
She hugs an arm around her trim waist. “The backup water supply was contaminated,” she says. “Emmons bypassed the main distribution pipes, like when the pipes need repair. I’m sure he also had Sammy out there disable the sensors?—”
“Before he killed him?—”
“—so no monitoring alarms would go off when he contaminated the tank with hemlock,” she pushes on. “So all we needed to do was enable the central pipes again.”
I hold her calculating stare. “And alert the task force of the contaminated supply.” I bite down on my lip, not sure if I’m feeling an overwhelming sense of relief or anger. “I’ll find a phone.”
She nods once, but before I disappear around the corner, she calls my name. I pause long enough to listen. “I knew if you came with me, then it would be all right. I knew this.”
I hover a moment longer, torn between debating logic over her belief system. “I need to make the call.”
Finding a landline in one of the offices, I grab the receiver and punch in the only number to the FBI I have memorized. After I leave an urgent message for Agent Rana with an operator, I reenter the room where I left Devyn, only to find her missing.
As I search the area, a sense of unmistakable dread settles deep in my stomach. This was all too simple, too anticlimactic to have been her design.
My thoughts cease when I catch sight of her through a tall casement window.
Standing on the crest in the center of the dam wall, Devyn stares out over the stream, the reservoir at her back, the sheer material of her skirt and armbands whisked around her by the wind.
I push the window open and tuck the loose hem of my shirt into my jeans before I ease onto the ledge of the platform. Then immediately close my eyes as the dizzying sensation sweeps my head. “Dammit.”
With deep inhale, I force my eyes open. “Do you always have an ulterior motive?” I call out to her.
She doesn’t acknowledge me, but I can hear a hint of a smile in her voice. “If it means anything at all, the only way I could’ve gone through with it back in the mine was to drug myself.”
“It’s good to know you couldn’t dine on me sober.” I try to keep her talking as I crawl onto the crest, my fingers gripped to the graded surface. While the width is a good bit over eight feet, the drop-off over the spillway makes it feel like a tightrope. An inappropriate laugh escapes as I think about the symbolism. “Couldn’t just keep walking a metaphorical tightrope over your abyss,” I mutter beneath my shaky breath.
“I thought…one life for the many,” she shouts, her voice cut by the wind. “I wanted them to be saved, to finish what Colter and I started before it all became corrupt.”
The choice to either take a life or sacrifice your own.Devyn said this to me in the cave as I held a weapon above her. I took her words to heart. Only now, I realize she was talking about her internal struggle with Emmons.
She’s trying to reset the balance, to correct what he’s done by trading her own life.
“I know you didn’t mean what you said in the mine. None of it. You were angry, confused. I know you really care for them.” My body trembling, I stall a quarter of the way onto the crest. “Devyn, please don’t make me come all the way out there.”
Her bare foot eases closer to the edge of the downstream slope, and I force myself to stand. “You’re right,” I say. “I need answers. I can’t leave before I have them. You owe me that.”
After a tense beat, she slowly takes a step back. “I thought you could be the answer. At least, to buy time.” As she turns my way, she smiles. “They say when you get closer to the end stages, stamina kicks in. You can have bouts of clarity, where you don’t feel sick, where you’re symptomless.” She strains to hold her smile, forlorn. “I just…needed more time.”
A heavy layer of heartache bears down on my chest, and I blink away the sting of the wind behind my eyes. Devyn is in her late stages. She believed she could use this burst of stamina to convince Emmons that she ascended, that she was recovered.
“And then what after?” I ask, chancing a step closer. “Once you started to show signs of the disease again?”
“Maybe I wouldn’t.” She offers a small shrug. “I was really ill for five years, then I was better. What do doctors know? Nothing of the mind. I believed I could reach that higher state, if only Emmons would have trusted me.” Her shoulders rise as she pulls in a breath. “But I destroyed him. You saw that room. You saw what he’s done. The man I knew is gone, driven too far over the edge.”
As she says this, she drapes her arm out over the literal edge, stopping my heart.
“I saw the room,” I say, leaving only a couple feet between us, where I can reach out and grab her. “I also saw the cage. You were the one he trapped inside those bars, Devyn. And you’re still locked inside.”
Devyn angles her face toward me. “So let me be free.”
I frantically clear my hair from my eyes. “Madness is welcomed over suffering and death,” I say. “That’s the escape, right?”
I’m speaking to her delusion, but I just have to get her off this fucking dam.
Her smile is shattering. “I’m already dead, Halen.”
