The dial went up.
Every time Victor thought the dial couldn’t go any further, the pain couldn’t get any worse, and then it did and it did and it did, and Victor could hear himself screaming even though the strap was still between his teeth and he could feel every nerve in his body breaking and he wanted it to stop. He wanted it to stop.
He begged Angie but the words were cut short by the strap and the dial turning up again and the sound in the air like cracking ice and shredding paper and static.
The darkness blinked around him and he wanted it because it meant the pain would stop but he didn’t want to die and he was afraid that the darkness was death and so he pulled violently back from it.
He felt himself crying.
The dial went up.
His hands ached where they gripped the table bars, cramped in place.
The dial went up.
He wished for the first time in his life that he believed in God.
The dial went up.
He felt his heart skip a beat, felt it grind and then double.
The dial went up.
He heard a machine warn, then alarm.
The dial went up.
And everything stopped.
XXII
TWO DAYS AGO
THE ESQUIRE HOTEL
SYDNEY watched the lines in Victor’s face deepen. He must be dreaming.
It was late. The night beyond the floor-to-ceiling glass was dark—or as dark as it could be, in a city like this—and she stood and stretched, and was about to go back to bed when she saw the piece of paper, and everything in her went cold.
The newspaper article sat open beside Victor on the couch. The heavy bars of black on the page were the first thing that caught her attention, but the photo beneath was what held it. Sydney’s chest tightened, sudden and sharp, and she couldn’t breathe. It felt like she was drowning, again—Serena calling from the patio, a picnic basket hooked on the elbow of her winter coat, telling Syd to hurry up, or the ice would be all melted, which it was, underneath that brittle shell of frost and snow—but when she squeezed her eyes shut, it wasn’t the half-frozen water of the lake that folded over her, but the memory of the field a year later, the stretch of frozen grass and the body and her sister’s encouragement and then the sound of the gunshot, echoing in her ears.
Two different days, two different deaths, overlapping, swirling together. She blinked both memories away, but the photo was still there, staring up at her, and she couldn’t tear her gaze away, and before she knew what she was doing, her hand was reaching out, stretching past Victor, toward the paper and the smiling man on its front.
It all happened fast.
Sydney’s fingers curled around the newspaper page but as she lifted it, her forearm grazed Victor’s knee and before she could shift her weight or pull back he shot forward, eyes open but empty, hand vising around Sydney’s small wrist. Without warning, pain tore up her arm and through her small body, crashing over her in a wave. It was worse than drowning, worse than being shot, worse than anything she had ever felt. It was like every one of her nerves was shattering, and Sydney did the only thing she could.
She screamed.
XXIII
TEN YEARS AGO
LOCKLAND UNIVERSITY
THE pain had followed him up again, and Victor came to, screaming.
Angie was fumbling with his hands, trying to coax them free of the bars. He shot forward, clutching his head. Why was the electricity still running? The pain was a wave, a wall, wracking his muscles, his heart. His skin was tearing with it, and Angie was talking but Victor couldn’t hear anything through the agony. He curled in on himself and stifled another scream.
Why wouldn’t the pain stop? WHY WOULDN’T IT STOP?
And then, as sudden as a flipped switch, the pain was gone, and Victor was left feeling … nothing. The machines were off, the lights sprinkled across their fronts all dead. Angie was still talking, her hands running over skin, unbuckling the ankle straps, but Victor didn’t hear her as he stared down at his hands and wondered at the sudden hollowness, as if the electricity had gutted his nerves and left only shells.
Empty.
Where did it go? he wondered. Will it come back?
In the sudden absence of pain, he found himself trying to remember how it felt, to drum up the sensation, a shadow of it, and as he did the switch clicked again, and the energy was there, crackling like static through the room. He heard the crinkle of the air, and then he heard a scream. He wondered for an instant if it was coming from him, but the pain was beyond Victor now, outside of him, humming over his skin without touching it.
He felt slow, dazed, as he tried to process the situation. Nothing hurt, so who was screaming? And then the body crumpled to the lab floor beside his table, and the space between his thoughts collapsed, and he snapped back to his senses.