I tore my radio from my vest and threw it down, leaving Ostler’s dead voice to whisper alone in the shadows.
Had Elijah betrayed us? I didn’t think so—he didn’t feel like a traitor—but how could I possibly trust my feelings? I didn’t even know how to use them. Elijah was nice to me, he was similar to me, and I felt that we shared some kind of … what? A bond? Because we lived on the fringes of the world, avoiding other people? That didn’t make us instant friends, it made us two people with all the more reason to avoid each other. He worked in a mortuary—for all I knew that was part of the trap, to win my confidence through association with the one thing left that I loved.
I’d built my life around this: getting to know people, making them think I was their friend, all so I could find their weak spot and hit it as hard I could. Now someone had done it to me.
But Elijah had been helping us. Even after the trap was sprung, he’d stayed with me, he’d tried to save Diana, he’d even tried to attack Rack. If he was part of Rack’s plan, wouldn’t he have turned on us? He could have drained my mind a dozen times tonight, leaving me in a blank, mindless coma. Instead he’d run away. Was he too much of a coward to fight us directly? Or had he felt the same link to me that I’d felt with him, and when the moment came he couldn’t go through with it?
Or was the traitor someone else?
I stopped running, leaning on a fence to catch my breath. I was blocks away from the scene of the attack, and once again the world was quiet—I couldn’t even hear screaming in the distance. Was Rack killing more people? The neighbors, or the EMTs who showed up to help? It seemed like the kind of thing he would do, but not tonight. He was on a vendetta and he wouldn’t stop until our team was dead—all of us. He hadn’t chased me, and I wondered if maybe he was saving me for last; the ones in danger now would be Nathan and Dr. Trujillo.
And Brooke.
I started running again, pulling my phone from my pocket. Was Brooke more Withered than human? I didn’t know, and as I ran I realized I didn’t care. She was my friend—maybe not a good friend, but I wasn’t exactly a role model either. Maybe my only friend left in the world. I didn’t know if Rack was planning to kill her or recruit her or something even worse, but either way I had to save her. I dialed Trujillo’s number.
Ring.
Snow was starting to fall, and my breath came in ragged gasps, visible like smoke in the streetlights.
Ring.
“John?” It was Nathan’s voice.
“Nathan,” I said, clenching my teeth and trying to breathe. “Where’s Trujillo?”
“I can’t find him; I didn’t even know his phone was here until it started ringing. What’s going on?”
“Were you monitoring the radio?” I asked.
“It was a closed channel,” he said. “It didn’t reach this far. Did something go wrong? You sound terrible.”
“I’m running,” I said, and paused again to catch my breath. “It was a trap, and everyone’s dead. I’m the only one left—”
“Dead?”
“Rack killed them all,” I said. “Not just us but the police. Ostler, Potash, Diana, Detective Scott—”
“That—” he stuttered. “That’s impossible. How did you get away?”
“I think he’s leaving me for last, which means he’s coming for you.”
“Dammit, John—”
“Listen, Nathan, you have to find Trujillo and get Brooke and get away from there. Check her out, break her out, do whatever you have to do. I’ll call you when I get closer.”
“You brought this on us,” he said angrily. “This is your fault, everything you’ve—”
“You can yell at me when Brooke’s safe,” I said. “Are you already moving? I don’t know how much time you have.”
“Somebody had to be on the inside,” said Nathan. “If this was a trap, someone tipped him off.”
“It wasn’t me,” I said.
“It was Elijah,” said Nathan, “which makes you just as guilty—you’re the one who brought him into the team.”
“It wasn’t Elijah,” I said fiercely. “He was … he was helping us. He didn’t leave until we’d already lost—the same as I did, he just ran away first.”
“If he was trustworthy he would have stayed to help you,” said Nathan.
“Why?” I asked. “So we could lock him up again? So we could run him over with another truck? He gave us everything he had, and we tried our plan and failed. He’s probably running right now, and we need to do the same. Get Brooke—”
“If it wasn’t Elijah then it was obviously Brooke,” said Nathan. “We know she was communicating with Rack, she must have warned him we were coming.”
“We didn’t plan this attack until after the letters were cut off,” I said. “Brooke didn’t even know about it at all—Trujillo wouldn’t let us tell her, just in case—”
“Do you think it was Trujillo?” asked Nathan.