The Flynn-thing regards me flatly. “You are speaking of the one who binds us?” His head tilts slowly to one side, in a mockery of thoughtful interest, until it stops at an odd, unnatural angle. “We are not acting under his orders anymore.”
My throat tangles with a brief, insane flicker of hope at those words—but then my heart plummets as the barrel of the gun swings over to point at me.
“We are not acting under anyone’s orders anymore. We have seen what humanity is: beyond salvage.” There’s no violence, no hatred in his voice; the calm there is more terrifying than if he came at me screaming and spewing threats. He gestures with the gun toward the door, nudging Carmody’s body aside with one foot to clear his path. “And you will be the one to set us free.”
My hand closes on empty space as it reaches automatically for the gun that isn’t there anymore. I take a step back toward the door, not taking my eyes off of Flynn. Off of what used to be Flynn.
Don’t think, don’t crumble. Just keep moving.
“You don’t understand,” I say as his eyes follow me. “We want to stop LaRoux too. We’re not like him.”
“You are all like him.”
I grasp for the handle behind me, but don’t turn it yet. The creature keeps his distance, too smart to come close enough for me to think about wresting the gun from him. Flynn, I could probably disarm and disable. But after seeing what he did to Carmody…No human can move that fast.
“Lilac said you helped them,” I murmur, shooting a quick glance at the hallway through the window in the door. It’s empty, as it was before.
Flynn’s blank expression doesn’t shift. “We know this one you speak of. She was with us in the darkness for a time.”
With us? But I seize on that recognition, speaking quickly, trying to moderate my voice the way Flynn would. If only he were here, with his passion and his diplomacy; I’m only good for fighting. “Then you know her. You know she’s not like her father. Neither am I—neither is Flynn.” My voice chokes on his name.
“All patterns of data contain anomalies.” Flynn halts, though the gun doesn’t move. “Continue walking.”
I ignore his order. “Why lead us here?” I think of the light in the swamp, the green glow that looked so much like the November ghost in my dimmest memories. “Why not just force the scientists, force LaRoux, to let you go?”
“Our keeper never comes near enough for us to take him. These others, he has operated upon and made it difficult for us to inhabit their minds with any precision.” Flynn nudges Carmody’s body again, this time to roll him over onto his stomach. Beneath the mess of blood and hair, just below his ear, is a tiny scar, too straight and precise to have been from an accident.
I swallow down my nausea, jerking my eyes away from the bits of skull protruding from Carmody’s head.
He doesn’t flinch. “Before we were brought here, we existed as pieces of a single entity, part of one mind. Our keeper has learned that to be sundered from each other is the worst kind of agony we can know. When we displease him, he puts us into the dark place.” The whisper’s face, Flynn’s face, shows me nothing. No fear, no hatred, not even the flicker of remembered pain. “He will not do so again after we are free.”
It’s getting harder to breathe, my chest tightening with a kind of panic I haven’t felt in years, not since my first time in combat. No way out. No way through. I close my eyes for half a breath, focusing on the air moving through my lungs.
“Why should I help you?” I have to fight to speak my next words. “You’ve taken away the one thing I had left. You’ve taken him—”
“Because he is still in here. Because if you set us free, we will return him to you. And we will save you, and this planet, for last.”
My heart starts again with a lurch that makes my eyes water. But the rest of the creature’s words ring in my ears. “What do you mean, ‘save us for last’?” I whisper. “What will you do when you’re free?”
“We will start with our keeper,” the whisper replies, dead-eyed and soft. “We will give him the same pain he has given us. We will take his family from him, and all he knows, and every soul who has ever touched him. And then we will spread this death, as your kind has spread, and we shall make him the last of your species. And then, once he has realized the thing he has done—then we will leave him, howling, in the dark.”
My eyes blur, stinging with tears of horror and grief. “No,” I whisper. My voice shakes, but behind the tremor there’s iron, and I can feel its strength as I straighten. “No, I won’t help you. Shoot me if you want, but I’m not setting you monsters free.”
Flynn merely looks at me, mouth lax, eyes empty. He looks like a mannequin, like a doll of himself, and my heart tries to claw its way out of my chest. “All right,” he says calmly.
And turns the gun on himself, pressing the barrel to the underside of his chin.