She took another step forward, then groaned, dropping hard to one knee.
Adrian brought up the gun, resting his hands on the edge of the canoe. He aimed first at the Detonator, then at Nightmare. He wasn’t sure what to do. They were fighting each other. They might kill each other.
The Detonator, he suspected, wouldn’t last long with those wounds.
But he still needed Nightmare alive.
Gritting his teeth, he targeted the Detonator again. The bomb hovering over her palm was as big as her head now, and still growing.
His eyes narrowed. Even at the library, he had never seen her compose an explosive device of that size. She was smiling now, a crazed, gleeful smile.
Adrian squeezed the trigger.
The dart disappeared into the grasses behind her. He cursed.
The Detonator laughed. “Now, you just wait your turn over there, sweetheart. I’ll get to you next.” The explosive was bigger than a basketball, glowing in bright, swirling blue.
“Ingrid?” said Nightmare, and the slight quiver to her voice brought Adrian’s attention back to her, even as he hurried to load another dart. “What are you doing?”
Adrian hesitated. There was something familiar about her in that moment. Something that gnawed at him. Had she ever, for a moment, appeared vulnerable when he had fought her before? He didn’t think so.
“If I’m going to die,” said the Detonator, “it’s not going to be alone.”
Nightmare shifted—an almost imperceptible change. Her stance widened. Her head tilted down. Her shoulders tensed as she turned, ready to launch herself off the stairs and away from the fun house.
The Detonator hurled the bomb at her.
Nightmare was a moment too late.
The explosion knocked Adrian onto his back. A flash blinded him, washing out the sky overhead, leaving him trying to blink the shadowy stars from his eyes. His head rang. His whole body vibrated from the impact. The world smelled of smoke and dust.
Coughing, he rolled onto his side and took off his glasses, rubbing the lenses on his uniform to wipe away the dirt. He was still plagued with sparklers in his gaze when he put them back on and pushed himself up to his elbows. The canoe had been turned over onto its side, and he wondered how much it had protected him from the surge of shrapnel and flying rubble.
Half of the fun house was gone.
Broken floorboards and a few of the interior rooms were left exposed, including the metal slide and the hall of mirrors, which was now littered with broken glass. Wooden beams and siding and roof shingles were scattered across the ground in all directions. The pitched roof was toppling inward, ready to cave onto the mound of smoking wood and plaster beneath.
The Detonator had fallen forward onto her stomach. Her hair and clothing had turned chalky gray from all the dust, and the blood from her wounds was clumping in the dirt around her. She was not moving.
Adrian searched for any sign of Nightmare, who had been standing in the very spot where the great mountain of debris was smoldering. She could have been buried beneath, or, more likely, she could have been blown apart by the explosion.
Shaking, Adrian got back to his feet and tucked the gun into the back of his pants. He stared at the exposed insides of the fun house. A few small fires were scattered throughout the wreckage, sending plumes of black smoke toward the darkening sky. Somewhere inside he could hear the jack-in-the-box laughing.
His heart started to pound erratically. “Nova…”
His disbelief was quickly overcome with denial, and he lifted his wrist. “Nova—Insomnia, where are you? Report.” Stumbling around the canoe, he picked his way through the remains of the building, searching the corners of its crumbling skeleton. “Nova!”
He was trying to navigate the destroyed outer wall when his eye caught on something shining beneath a fallen window shutter. He kicked the shutter out of the way, stooped, and picked up the slim, molded piece of steel.
Nightmare’s face mask.
Turning it over, he saw that one side of it was streaked with blood.
A tittering laugh made his skin prickle. Adrian tossed the mask aside and turned to see the Detonator on her hands and knees, still chortling. She spat, then sat back on her heels and wiped the dirt from her mouth.
She was drenched in blood.
He stared at her, stunned. He wasn’t surprised that she would survive the explosion. From what he’d seen at the library, she appeared to be immune to the blasts of her own bombs. But she had been shot so many times, she had lost so much blood …
How was she still alive? And … laughing?
With a delirious grin, the Detonator climbed to her feet. She seemed to wobble for a moment, but then she shook out her matted hair and her stance solidified. “I don’t know who’s more gullible,” she said, rolling her shoulders. “Nightmare … or you.”
Adrian was too distracted for her taunting. He found his attention constantly shifting around the park, hoping to see some sign of Nova.
The Detonator clapped her hands together, knocking off some of the dust. “That was fun, wasn’t it? That little spat of ours. It was all staged for your benefit, you know, so I hope you were entertained.”
He frowned. His pulse was beginning to race again, his instincts humming with warnings—but also curiosity.
“You see?” said the Detonator, swiping her fingers through the caked blood on her abdomen. “Fake blood. She was firing blanks. You know, Queen Bee thinks she’s the only savvy actress around, but I think I’ve proved otherwise.”
Adrian shook his head. “What are you talking about?”
“Don’t you see? We planned this all, to make you think that we were both dead. So you would stop looking for us. Get it now?”