There was an uncomfortable silence, with Eve and Harmon looking away, Bjorn and Gavrikov staring down. Bastian answered for them: “Sienna…wasn’t like that.”
“That’s nice,” Graham said. “But ultimately pointless now.” He extended his hands out. “Welcome to your new world. Bid adieu to the old. Because this is your new normal,” he said, and he was rueful as anyone Zack had ever heard. “You’re here now, with us now…” He shook his head, looking once more at the door that Rose had closed on her way out. “She’s got your girl, by the way…and that end is coming up soon.” Zack felt his heart catch in his throat, but Graham did not stop. “So you might as well give up hope of rescue…because this—” and he looked around again “—this is where you are from now on.” He looked pointedly at Harmon. “And escape? Is a fanciful dream.” The president’s eyes dropped. “You may not like it, but this is simply the way things are.” Graham’s voice was low, bitter, and streaked through with sadness.
“This is how it’s going to be,” he said, a little sadly, “forever and ever. And no one…not your girl Sienna, and not any of you…will beat Rose. You’re here forever…and that’s just a fact.”
40.
Reed
“Reed?” Her voice like a hollow thing, brittle and easily broken, on the edge of cracking.
“Sienna?” I asked the question of the darkness, because I couldn’t see her. It was all darkness, all around us, deep in the dreamwalk. It always a little dark, but this was an inky, all-consuming sort of black that threatened to drown me in its depths.
The last thing I remembered was sitting on the airplane, the thrum of the engines the background noise as my brain worked through the impossible fact that we’d been ambushed, that we’d lost Colin somehow, and that we’d nearly lost Chase and Veronika, maybe would have lost the entire crew if we’d disembarked fearlessly.
“I’m here,” she said in a hushed voice. I still couldn’t see her.
“I came for you,” I said, and it was a plaintive sort of excuse. “I was in York, and—”
“Did she get you?” Sienna’s voice was quiet. Terrified.
“We got away,” I said. “I managed to get the plane in the air. We lost our pilots, but…everyone made it out okay except—”
“Colin,” she whispered.
“I sent him after you,” I said, still probing the dark. Why was there no light?
Why couldn’t I see her?
“He betrayed me, Reed,” Sienna said. Now she was cool, almost resigned. “He took me out when Rose had me on the ropes.”
“I might have gotten her, Sienna,” I said, hoping I was right. “She was coming after us, and they’d sent missiles. I steered them into her. Maybe…maybe I got lucky—”
“You didn’t.” The air of finality was punishing.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“Because it wouldn’t have finished me.”
“You’re not invincible,” I said, then strained, feeling like that was a poor point to make at this juncture. “And she’s not, now. You killed Wolfe. You’ve killed…or beaten…everyone you’ve come across.”
“She got me, Reed,” Sienna said, and I still couldn’t see her, no matter how I tried. “I’m…she got me.”
“I’m gonna come back for you,” I said, listening to that thin, reedy desperation. I couldn’t remember a time when the hope had so gone out of Sienna’s voice. “I will—I’m going to find a way and—”
“No.”
“You can’t stop me,” I said with a smile of pure, false bravado. “The others—we’re not done, Sienna.”
“If you come back,” she said, “Rose will capture you. And she’ll kill you in front of me.”
I gritted my teeth, bearing down against the darkness. “Sienna, listen to me—just because I can’t reach you right now—just because it looks like there’s no hope—”
“There’s no hope.” So quiet.
So final.
“You need to hold on,” I said. “You have to—”
“It’s over, Reed,” she said, and it was like the darkness got more complete. “I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to apologize to me!” I shouted, and it echoed in the space we were in. “Sienna—I know who you are, even if you’re forgetting. No one beats you! You don’t let them! And this Rose—she’s not going to w—”
“I think…” And she emerged out of the dark, a haggard figure, bloody and bruised. “…we should say goodbye now, Reed.” Her eyes were red, but clear, and the slump of her shoulders just…killed me. “Because I don’t know that we’re going to get another chance.”
“Sienna…” I tried to grab at her, but she was just out of reach. Tried again, and she slipped farther away. “This isn’t over. It doesn’t have to be. You can still fight! You can still—”
But the quiet was all-consuming, and my sister slipped back into the dark, her voice a mere whisper.
Now she was broken.
“It’s over, Reed. I love you.”
And then she was gone.
Without even saying goodbye.
41.
Sienna
I was jarred out of the darkness of my dreamwalk with Reed, leaving it on perhaps not the greatest note, but the one that fit for the moment.
It was dark in the dreamwalk because I was in the darkness, the world around me shrouded by black cloth that was wrapped around my head.
I was bagged, like a hostage, except…
No one was going to pay the ransom for me, because Rose…didn’t give a damn about money.
The world moved around me. A thump, and I realized I was in the back of a vehicle. Probing with my feet, I found the boundaries of my world, and they were large. I seemed to be in the back of a van or truck, my feet sliding around and making contact with metal walls. I was as gentle and quiet as I could be, trying not to let whoever was driving know that I was awake.
No need to raise the alarm, after all.
Just as I was starting to get an idea about the limits of my little world, the vehicle bounced to a stop, and I thudded my head against the rubber floor. My arm made contact with it, skidding slightly as the rubber resisted against my skin where my sleeve had been torn by Mr. Blonde hours before.
The sound of someone killing the ignition, then opening a door up front of me, came through the metal walls, muffled, but clear enough. The squeak of doors opening below my feet came next, and strong hands reaching in and dragging me out. I fought a little, but not too much. Token resistance, really, because blind and bound in metacuffs, there was no easy way to fight back.
And I was going to fight back, in spite of what I’d told Reed.
I had to.
But I also had to try and convince him not to come back. Rose had known he was coming this time—any one of a thousand things could have tipped her off, but the sudden betrayal of Colin Fannon was a worrying one—and I needed to at least try and keep Reed and the others clear of this giant mess I had gotten myself into.
Because otherwise…he’d come back, and Rose would be waiting.
And the next time…I wasn’t so sanguine about his chances of escaping her.
Case in point. Here I was, trussed up and hooded, being led across snowy ground by rough hands—
Wait.
Snow?
In summer?
The crunch of snow beneath my shoes was unmistakable, the gentle chill of winter tickling my flesh and raising goosebumps that were, for once of late, not related to the hair-raising predicaments I seemed to keep getting sucked into.
“Take that off of her,” Rose’s voice sounded from somewhere in front of me, and suddenly the world brightened as the black hood came ripping off. The light was blinding for a few seconds, but I got my bearings again pretty quickly.
Rose was hovering ahead like an angel—fallen one, maybe—smiling benignly upon me. Colin Fannon was at my shoulder, the black hood in his hand. At my other shoulder was Mr. Blonde, that jag who’d cut me open at the train station in Edinburgh before that mystery girl called him off.