I started running.
“John, come back!” shouted Ostler, but I ignored her and sprinted to the mortuary, shouting into the radio: “Don’t hurt Elijah!” I’d been right about him: he was good. He wasn’t working with Gidri and he hadn’t kidnapped Rose. She was defending him. The only way the other Withered could have already fallen was if Elijah himself had attacked them.
He was good.
“Officer down,” said a man on the radio. “Repeat, officer d—no, two down!”
So there was at least one Withered still up. I had to go carefully. I ran past Team Three, ignoring their warning as I dashed through the door. The hallway inside was a chaos of light and dark, and far at the end I could see Potash and a group of police locked in combat with what looked like a thick, spiny rosebush. Halfway down the hall was a bright doorway, yellow light spilling out into the corridor, so that’s where I ran.
It was Elijah’s office and it was devastated. Furniture was smashed and overturned and blood and ash covered the floor. Elijah stood in the far corner, his chest sliced open; blood and soulstuff spilled out in thick rivulets, greasy and black. Behind him was Rose Chapman, covered with cuts and bruises, staring out in wide-eyed terror, and against the opposite wall stood Diana, her rifle trained on them both. Between them on the floor lay three bodies: the first I recognized as Jacob Carl, Elijah’s counterpart on the day shift; he sprawled against the wall with his eyes wide open and his head twisted nearly backwards. Beside him was the tallest of the Withered, completely inert, and closest to me lay Gidri—young and handsome and still as the grave. I stepped toward him, feeling the familiar rush at the sight of a corpse—but no. His chest was moving. He was alive. I looked at the other Withered and saw the same. They didn’t have any visible wounds. I stooped over Gidri to examine him closer. How had this happened?
But of course there was only one answer.
“You drained them?” I asked. Elijah moved his mouth but no sound came out; the slash across his chest must have damaged his voice.
“He can only drain dead bodies,” said Diana.
“Obviously not,” I said. I touched Gidri’s throat, feeling his pulse. “If they were dead they’d turn to ash. That means he incapacitated them, and draining their minds is the only weapon he has.” It looked like he’d drained so much of their memories they couldn’t even think anymore, couldn’t even stand. They were infants—worse than infants. They were hollow shells.
“What are you talking about?” asked Rose.
Potash appeared in the door behind me, covered in blood and grease and splinters. His machete dangled from his fingers; he didn’t try to speak but simply gasped for breath. Beyond him the police were calling for medics, and I knew they’d won their fight. That shouldn’t have happened—we should have all been dead. But Elijah had turned on his own kind, and turned their four-monster army into a lone, desperate runner, and suddenly the odds were in our favor. We’d won because of Elijah.
Diana seemed to be thinking the same thing, but it hadn’t convinced her. “Protocol says we kill him anyway—”
“Protocol can wait,” I said, and I looked at Elijah. If he could drain the living, why didn’t he? What was stopping him from draining my memories, or Diana’s, or Rose’s? He could drop us in seconds, and we’d never even remember that he’d gotten away. But instead he stood there and watched me, and his face didn’t show fear or determination or anything else I would have expected in a battle scene. The corners of his mouth turned down, his brow wrinkled over his eyes. He was sad.
We’d thought he was forced to use dead memories because no one would ever take them if they could take living ones instead. We’d had him completely backwards—he could take living memories just fine, but he chose not to. What were we missing? What made a living man’s memories so much worse than a dead one’s? Why should he be so sad about a living man with no—
And then everything made sense.
“These aren’t the first people you’ve drained without killing,” I said.
His face, already sad, collapsed into a despair so deep it seemed to draw me down with it. “I never want to kill,” he said. His voice sounded ragged and raw, as if the gash in his chest were only half healed inside. “I thought I could … sustain myself without hurting anyone, but it was all wrong. I never meant to hurt him.”