Trembling, he closed his eyes and struggled to concentrate through the ringing in his ears, the pain, the fear of what Azral would do to him.
Two speedsuit agents appeared outside the door, cracking the smoked-glass pane with their armored fists. Evan pressed his fingers to his temples and yelled in desperate torment. His skin tingled with bubbles as the clock of his life spun back forty-nine seconds.
Now he found himself once again standing at the reception desk, the cool .38 back in his hand. He looked to Hannah—unmurdered, unsilenced. She continued to rail at him in all her gorgeous fury.
“Right. Hannah Banana, Always-Needs-a-Man-a. Except that man was never you. You stopped trying a long time ago, but you never . . . you never . . .”
Hannah trailed off, thrown by the sudden change in Evan’s demeanor. A moment ago, he looked ready to bare her throat with his teeth. Then his head snapped back as if he’d woken up from a nap. Now his face was white with inexplicable terror. Gemma Sunder, a girl who shared Evan’s talent but not his impression of it, would have said that he was being possessed by a future self.
To Hannah, it looked the very opposite of possession. It appeared the devil inside Evan Rander had finally fled.
He dropped his gun and raised his palms in trembling acquiescence.
“Okay. Okay, look, we’re all good here. I went too far, but it’s all right now. You’re okay.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“You’ll be fine. You and . . .” He suddenly remembered Amanda and nervously jumped away. His unstabbed leg screamed with phantom pain. He didn’t want a repeat of the real injury.
Hannah eyed him incredulously as he limped across the room. “You’re insane.”
Evan crowed a grim and broken laugh. “Maybe. I don’t know. I’ve seen the world end fifty-five times. At the very least, it’s made me cynical.”
“Then hate the universe, not me.”
“I hate the universe through you,” he told her, with a sorrowful shrug. “It’s just the way it is.”
A round white portal opened up on the northern wall, stretching from rug to roof. Evan’s stomach dropped. His pants trickled with urine. He’d been carrying a ray of hope that his transgression would go unnoticed. Of course not. Of course they knew.
He kneeled on the ground, raising stretched and shaky fingers. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I screwed up. I know it. But look, they’re fine! They’re both alive! I undid it!”
The portal continued to ripple with the quiet serenity of a spring pond. Evan’s eyes darted around in frantic thought.
“All right, listen, listen, I’ll leave them alone. I promise. Not even a phone call. I’ll . . . I’ll go to one of your facilities. Breed with whoever you want me to breed with. Just give me a chance to make things right. I’ve helped you before! You said so!”
The sisters stared at the portal with the same white horror as Evan. No one was coming out.
“Azral?”
A colossal hand of tempis burst through the surface with terrifying speed. Amanda and Hannah screamed as the man-size fingers engulfed Evan like a chess rook. As quick as it arrived, the monster arm retreated, pulling its shrieking victim into the shimmering white depths.
The portal shrank closed, leaving two siblings alone in devastated silence.
Soon the tempic bars of Hannah’s cage flickered away. She fell to her knees and scuttled awkwardly across the rug. She ran her quivering fingers through Amanda’s hair, her mind painfully perched between aching concern and the utter futility of asking her if she was okay.
As emergency lights flared outside and a speeding Dep began his thermal scan of the fifth floor, the daughters of Robert and Melanie Given wept in soft harmony. Neither of them were okay. No one was okay. Not a single damn thing in the world was okay.
THIRTY-FIVE
The tunnel was a relic of the hydroelectric age, a dank and moldy passage of steam pipes that stretched beneath the buildings of Battery Place. The last dangling bulb had burned out years ago. David lit the way with a melon-size ball of sunshine, a ghost from an even earlier era.
Mia rode piggyback on his shoulders, her thoughts swirling like drain water around her nine-hour memory hole. All she knew from David’s curt summary was that she’d been mortally wounded by Rebel and then magically unwounded by Zack.
She launched a shaky glance at her wavy-haired savior, desperate for some kind of confirmation—a sigh, a squeeze, a “thank God you’re okay.” For a man who’d pulled a feat of Christlike proportions, Zack looked as macabre as his surroundings. He kept his tense gaze on Theo as the augur scanned the latest ladder to the surface.
“What exactly are you looking for?” Zack asked.
“A mouse.”
“A mouse?”
“A dead mouse,” said Theo. “Our exit has one at the base of the ladder.”
Theo knew how crazy he sounded. Though the miracle in the magazine office had granted him fresh credibility with David, his latest plan threw Zack into the role of the angry doubter.
“Goddamn it, Theo . . .”