“It’s okay,” said Brooke, but I yanked my arm harshly from her grip.
“No, it’s not! You’re just a crazy, stupid—” I stopped myself before I said any more, knowing I was only making it worse. I screwed my eyes shut, trying to think of something, of anything that wasn’t Marci, and when Potash’s dead voice started to speak again I roared back in a rage. “Is this your big plan, Rack? To tell me how much my life sucks so I may as well become a monster? I am already a monster, and nothing you say can change that: your threats won’t work because I have nothing left to lose. Your stupid little hints about my aunt and my sister mean nothing to me, because I am already so profoundly alone that there is nothing you can do to make it worse. You want to threaten them? You can drink their hearts and cry all night in their voices and it won’t mean a thing to me because the only thing that ever mattered is already gone. I let her die because I wasn’t smart enough to save her. I watched my mom burn to death because I wasn’t good enough to keep her alive. So if my broken heart was your big trump card, and now I’m supposed to realize my life is hell and throw in my lot with yours, you can forget it. My life’s been hell for as long as I can remember, and there is nothing left that you can take away from me.”
Potash’s voice rattled through his throat like dry leaves across a grave. “I can take away your pain.”
“Don’t listen to him,” said Brooke.
“We became the Gifted by giving something up,” said Rack’s dead puppet. “The worthless human weaknesses that held us back. Your heart is broken? I got rid of mine ten thousand years ago. You don’t want to be sad anymore? I can cut your sadness out like a tumor.”
“It doesn’t work,” said Brooke. “Nobody gave away her body because she hated it, and Rack gave her the power to take any body she wanted. She hated them all, John, because her body was never the problem. Your heart was never the problem. You can’t just get rid of pain: you have to deal with it.”
“You just have to give up the right thing,” said the voice.
I’d seen so many Withered, all of them trying to run from their problems, all of them trapped in the same unbreakable cycle. Mary Gardner could cure herself of any disease, but only if she stayed in the hospital, constantly getting sick. Elijah Sexton could forget every bad experience he ever had, every loss, every pain, every death, but that only made him repeat them, over and over. His only choices were to dwell on his mistakes, like a wound he could never let heal, or to make those same mistakes again.
I pointed at the smear of ash that was all that remained of Elijah. “You want me to give up my memory of Marci? Of everyone I’ve ever lost? I’ve seen how that works and I don’t want anything to do with it.”
“Your memories only hurt because you care about them,” he said. “What if you didn’t have to care?”
And there it was.
If anything could make me turn my back on the world, it was that. For years I’d used sociopathy as a shield, as an excuse not to care about anything, not to be hurt by anything, not to love something so much that it destroyed me when it was gone. I needed it because my father was gone, and now my mother and the rest of my family. My friends. The rest of the team. Marci. If I said yes and he made me a monster, gave me some kind of devastating power that ruined the world around me, it would still be worth it because I wouldn’t care. The pain would roll off. The unwinnable bargain would corrupt me, destroy me, turn me into a Withered even worse than the ones I’d faced, but I wouldn’t care. An unholy anesthetic to hide the pain of a heart I didn’t know how to use.
I would be dead and alive at the same time. A walking corpse in an endless, unbreakable peace.
I felt myself crying.
“Don’t do it,” Brooke whispered.
“You don’t know,” I said. “You don’t know what it’s like.”
“Yes, I do.”
I opened my eyes and looked at her, thin and pale as death, lost in the folds of her coat and the thick black pillars of her oversize boots. I could snap her like a twig. How much pain was in that tiny body? How much loss? My heart had been broken once; how many heartbreaks were buried in her mind?
“Bring her with you,” said Potash’s voice. Rack stepped closer. “A link between the past and the future we’ll create.”
I looked down at Potash’s body, a bloody, crumpled heap on the floor. His mouth moved faintly, but his eyes were open and dead as glass. What had those eyes seen in that basement? He’d followed Rack down into the darkness, and said the things he’d seen would haunt him until he died. That hadn’t turned out to be very long.
What had he seen? What was so terrible that the most vicious killer I knew could be haunted by it?