00:14:41:27
The door opens.
The governor comes in, a glass of wine in her hand, flanked by two of her bodyguards. Her cheeks are flushed and her eyes glazed, and she almost seems giddy, like she can’t keep from smiling. The bodyguards seem disinterested, like most bodyguards should.
“Keith, what have you been doing back here?” she says. “Can’t you possibly take a night off? We’ve already opened the Bordeaux.”
“Hanna, this will just take a few more minutes, if you could excuse us,” he says.
Then she sees Barclay.
“Oh, Taylor, have you come to dine with us?” she says.
There’s something wrong about it. Even if she’s a lightweight, how much has she really been able to suck down in an hour? Plus, unless she’s losing her mind, she should be able to see that there’s some serious shit going down in this office right now. If she wanted to know what was going on, she could just ask. I don’t understand what her game is.
As I’m trying to sort out the thoughts in my head, I hear a car engine, and we’re briefly washed in blinding light from headlights pulling into the driveway.
I know what’s wrong.
But I’m too late, and I know it.
I’m reaching for the gun at my back, but both bodyguards have their guns out already, and they’re pointed in my direction. “Don’t even think about it, sweetie,” the governor says, her demeanor completely changed. She’s hard now and stone-cold sober. The transformation makes her look like a completely different person, and I realize how wrong I was to underestimate her.
“Hanna? What’s . . .” The director is apparently a step even behind me.
“Listen very carefully and do whatever I say,” she says. “Macon has a gun in poor Annamarie’s mouth, and he’s never liked her much. Put your guns on the floor.” She’s looking right at me, so I do it first. Maybe she’ll overlook someone else. She turns to Barclay and he removes the gun at his back and drops it on the floor. She kicks it away from him and adds, “All of them.”
He pulls the other gun from his ankle holster. Whatever advantage we might have had, it’s gone now.
The governor bends down and picks up Barclay’s gun. As she stands, she smiles at him. “I always knew you were one to watch, Taylor.” Then before I can realize what’s happening, her grip on the gun changes and she fires three shots.
Straight into Director Keith Franklin’s chest.
He’s dead before his body crumples to the ground.
00:14:38:25
It’s like all the air has just been sucked out of the room. I’m frozen, staring at the body of the director on the floor next to me. Of all the possible scenarios I’d worked up when we headed here, this was one I hadn’t seen coming.
The front door slams, and whoever is in the car that just pulled up has joined the party.
My eyes flick to Barclay, but he’s clearly as shocked as I am—he’s just staring at the governor.
I look at her, ready to dare her to make her next move, but she isn’t looking at me. Her bodyguards still have their guns trained on us, but she’s looking at the door, and the man coming through.
I’ve seen him before.
He’s tall and lanky, but with a defined build. His clothes are nothing flashy or dark, nothing to say that he’s anything but an average guy. His face is hard, and something about him gives me the same chills I got when I first saw him. His light hair is shaved close to his head, and it intensifies the effect that he’s been in his fair share of fights, and he’s not the kind of guy to mess with.
When his eyes zero in on me, he pauses, staring me down, but no emotion crosses his face, and a shiver moves up my spine.
I don’t need the introduction. I know who this guy is.
Constantine Meridian.
Last time I saw him, he was having guards pull Derek Michaels out of his cell and there was blood splattered on his shirt.
Several guys come in behind him. They’re more of the same, a little scruffier maybe, but not as scary.
“It’s about time you got here,” the governor says. “I’ve been trying to get ahold of you all day.”
He ignores her and gestures to one of his men. “Get them processed.”
The governor starts talking to him, but I’m not listening to her. He’s going to make us Unwilling. That thought fights through the cloudy shock in my brain and wakes me. I’m not about to let that happen. I’m probably going to end up getting shot if I try to fight these guys, but I can’t let them take us. I move a step toward Meridian—even though I’m not sure what I’m going to do.
I just know I need to do something.
“Don’t,” Barclay says under his breath.
But I don’t listen. Instead, I take another step, and now I’m close enough for Meridian to notice I’ve moved.
“Thought you’d be long gone by now,” he says.
For a second, I’m thrown off. I don’t get what he’s saying, and then I remember. He knows my double. He’s never looked closely at her or paid enough attention to her to recognize that I’m different. And maybe that makes sense—she left rather than stay and try to take him down. But he doesn’t know how different I am.
I can use this. I can do something unexpected, catch him off guard.
“You thought I’d be dead?” I say.
He shrugs. It’s noncommittal. He doesn’t care—he just thought she wouldn’t be here.
I haul off and punch him in the face.
00:14:34:19
My fist connects to the left side of his face, and it feels like I’ve just slammed my hand into a brick wall. Pain shoots up my arm, but I don’t stop. I ram my knee into his crotch and reach for the gun at his back.
Glass breaks behind me, several shouts move through the room, and Meridian grunts. And when my fingers brush past the gun, I think I might have it, but then I feel the sharp pain in my head, and a rough hand coiled around my hair pulls back, then pushes me down to my knees.
I feel cool metal against my temple and smell the gunpowder.
Meridian reaches down and grabs my chin, forcing my face up to him. The guy with the grip on my hair doesn’t ease up, and I can feel some of it ripping out of my head.
Meridian shakes his head, his hand falling away. “Not who I thought you were,” he says quietly.
Something about the calmness in his voice makes me flinch. Having his attention directly on me turns my stomach and makes my skin feel uncomfortable. I don’t want him to touch me again.
He doesn’t. Instead, I see his hand coming down.
And pain explodes in the back of my head.
00:09:06:30
When I wake up, I have the worst headache of my life—shocking.
And my face itches.
I’m facedown on a beige carpet, and my hands are restrained behind my back. I can’t tell how long I’ve been out, but I don’t think it’s as bad as some of my other injuries from this week. For one thing, my hands haven’t gone numb, which means they haven’t been in this position all that long.
“If we don’t find them, we’ll draw them out,” a female voice says. “Surely you understand the concept.” It’s the governor.
From where I am, I can’t see her—I can’t see much of anything.
For a split second, I debate whether I should move around, test my restraints, take stock of where we are and possibly give away the fact that I’ve come to, or just keep lying here. The second option feels a lot more appealing to my aching head. It also feels safer. I’m less likely to get hit again, less likely to get outright shot, less likely to attract attention.
But what is that going to get me in the end?
No matter what happens, I’m probably going to end up in the same place.
Dead.
I shift a little and turn my face to the side so I have a view of the room. I’m still not ready to go down fighting. Through my blurry vision, I manage to make out bookshelves lining the wall. Behind me is a desk. Across the room is a door. It’s partway open, and a girl—probably my age or a little older, with brown hair—is sitting at a desk, a high-tech computer in front of her. Her nose is crooked and half her face is black and blue with relatively fresh bruises. She looks like she either got hit with a fly ball or punched in the face. I don’t have to be too creative to assume it’s the latter.
Next to my feet is another guy, who’s restrained, conscious, and sitting up with his back against the wall. He’s been beat up pretty badly—his face is covered with blood, some dried and some fresh. He snorts, blowing a spray of blood out of his nose, and I realize it’s Barclay. He’s not quite close enough for me to touch him.
“It’s your job to handle this, both of you,” a male voice says. I think it’s Meridian, but I’m not entirely sure.
I can’t see him—or any of the people talking to him in hushed tones. Unless I’ve damaged my ears, they must be at least a room away from us, because I can only hear them when their voices are raised.
The girl at the computer looks at me. Our eyes meet, and she knows I’m awake.
00:09:01:21
She looks at the door and then back at me. She’s thinking—trying to make a decision about something. I can see it on her face, the way her lips are pressed together. I just don’t know what she’s planning.
My pulse speeds up. It feels like it’s pounding directly in the ear I have against the carpet. I look at Barclay to see if I can get his attention, but he’s got his eyes closed. He’s either passed out or hurting too much to concentrate.
The girl gets up from her desk and moves to the door that separates our rooms. She’s in jeans and a white sweater. If she didn’t have the bruises, she’d look so normal. It makes me wonder what she’s doing here. How she got roped into this.
She hesitates and looks at the door to the hallway—the direction the voices are coming from.
No one is in view.
She rushes to my side, putting her hands under my shoulder and hip as she turns me a little—just enough so I have a better view of what’s coming, and then she presses a ballpoint pen into my hands. “I don’t have anything else,” she whispers, her attention still on the doorway.
“How many of them are there?” I’m not sure what I can really do with a pen, especially if I’m still in restraints, but if I’m going to do anything, I need to know that much.
“Right now?” she says, biting her lip. “They always have four guys who are like Secret Service or something. The governor and her husband, I mean. Tonight her cousin is here. He had a few people with him, but he sent them out. They’ll probably come back, though. And then this new guy showed up.”
“So at best there’s eight of them,” I say. Not good odds. “At worst, maybe twelve?”
She nods.
“Where are we?”
Her head tilts just slightly and she says, “Governor Worth’s house.”
I’d already guessed that much. “No, I mean, the layout of the house, where are we?” Our best chance may be trying to escape while they think we’re still knocked out.
“Second floor,” she whispers. “Near the back of the house.”
Not what I wanted to hear. In the condition we’re in, the three of us aren’t going to be able to do a second-story drop and then get up and start running, and we’re obviously too far from a door.
“I think they’re coming,” she says, and as she stands up, her left hand moves past my face. She’s wearing a gold ring on her ring finger, and she’s missing most of her thumbnail.
The words pass my lips before I think too much about it. “What’s your name?”
She glances back and smiles. “Renee,” she says, and then she’s through the doorway and back at her desk, looking at the computer.
Brown hair, early twenties, half of a fingernail and a ripped sheet at the scene, Renee.
Cecily said Renee Adams worked with computers somewhere downtown, but according to the stalker files we found on her, she worked an assortment of temp jobs during the day and otherwise spent a lot of time at home on her computer.
Assorted temp jobs at big companies—ones with big databases and information that potentially could be worth something. If I wasn’t restrained or lying on the floor, I would be looking up whether those companies ever filed suits about information being stolen. I’d be looking into Renee Adams’s bank accounts and seeing what kind of major deposits were being made.
I watch her type something into the computer, and I hear someone say, “How are you possibly going to fix this?” And I try to ignore the fact that I’d know that voice anywhere.
It might be a stretch, but I wonder if Renee Adams is some kind of computer hacker.
The bigger question, of course, is what kind of work she’s doing for the governor.
But I don’t get a chance to ask, because she was right. Someone was coming.
Now they’re here.
00:08:55:26
It’s Meridian, the governor herself, two of her bodyguards, and Deputy Director Ryan Struzinski.
I push the ballpoint pen into my restraints, but they’re wire, not rope, and a pen isn’t going to do anything. I slip it into my sleeve. It still might be the only weapon I’ll get my hands on.
Through heavy lids, I track Meridian and the governor’s movements. Based on the positioning—the bodyguards are flanking her, and evil Struz is trailing them—they’re the ones in charge.
They’re also arguing. “Take care of the girl, and I’ll handle Taylor,” the governor says.
“I can use her. She’s pretty enough—not anything special—but still. Someone will pay something for her. This one . . .” He kicks Barclay’s foot. “He’ll just be trouble.”
My throat constricts as I realize what exactly they’re arguing about.
What to do with us.
Specifically, whether they should kill us. If my options are death or slavery, I’m not sure which one I’d vote for.
They’re both unacceptable. I’m not ready to die—I promised my Struz that I would come home to my family. And I’m certainly not going to get shipped off to some other world where my free will would be stripped from me in whatever manner works best.
I try to move my hands a little in the restraints. The wire bites into my wrist, but I have a little leeway. I have small hands—if I can compress them, make them a little smaller, I might be able to slip one of them out.
“I can control him.” The governor laughs. “He’s just like Ryan, smart, ambitious, and hungry. We just have to find out what he wants.”
“You’ve done such a bang-up job so far,” Meridian says.
There’s a pause, and they must expect Struz’s evil twin to weigh in on the decision, because he says, “Don’t look at me.” His voice is low, gritty, and tired. “Just do whatever you’re going to do.”
Meridian laughs. It’s not maniacal evil laughter or anything, but it’s cold, like he’s laughing because he’s supposed to, not because he understands humor. I shiver and focus harder on the restraints. I’ll try to get my left hand out first—the wire will undoubtedly slice it open in a few places, but it’ll leave my right hand—the hand I need—unscathed.
“You play the innocent card so well,” Meridian says. “Especially for someone experimenting on kids.”
“I never said I was innocent,” the deputy director says, the resignation in his voice coming out like disgrace.
“Enough.” The governor crosses the room, toward Renee Adams and the computer. “Taylor wasn’t a problem until he met her. The girl is a bad influence. Just kill her and I’ll handle him.”
Silence.
I’m tempted to sit up and call bullshit. Tell her I was just a normal high-school junior with a bad attitude until Barclay showed up—that it was Barclay who came to my world and asked me for help. I don’t even want to be here in this stupid world with its ridiculous skyscrapers and people who spend their lives a hundred feet off the ground, like they’re better than everyone beneath them.
But I stay still, and I let my indignation wrap itself around me—let it steady my hands and still my body. I hold on to it so it keeps my fear at bay.
As bad as slavery would be, I’d still be alive.
The silence stretches out. None of the men in the room make any protests, as if the argument is over.
And why wouldn’t it be? Meridian might think it’s a waste to kill me, especially if he can get some money for me as a slave, but I haven’t proven to be all that weak and he’s probably already got enough money.
I shift my eyes to Barclay, wishing I could reach him and try to wake him somehow. But when I see the blue of his eyes through the bloody and swollen skin, I realize we’re in the same boat. He’s also been listening and faking being passed out.
I try to communicate with him. I try to tell him, It’s now or never with my eyes. My only hope is that he’s figured out how to get out of his restraints as well.
I’m not sure if he gets the message or not. He gives a slight shake of his head, whatever that means.
“Well?” the governor says.
“How about I just kill them both?” Meridian says.
She makes a pouting noise, but she doesn’t object.
My hands are sticky and warm from the blood, but I think I can get them out. If I’m going to do anything, it’s going to be right now. I’m not about to let Barclay or myself die without making some kind of move.
“Get her up,” Meridian says, and one of the bodyguards is in front of me. “What? You want me to shoot her while she’s passed out?” He snorts. “Where’s the fun in that?”
00:08:50:59
The bodyguard slips his hands under my armpits. With my eyes closed, I picture the room and everyone in it.
Farthest from me, about six or seven feet away, are the governor and one of her bodyguards. Renee Adams is behind them in the other room.
Struz’s evil twin is lingering by the door, about five feet away.
Meridian is directly in front of me, no more than a few feet, but just out of my reach.
As the bodyguard lifts me up, I hold my breath and yank my left hand through the restraints.
The pain is more than I would have imagined possible. At least three layers of skin from about half my hand come off, hot blood pours from my wrist to my fingertips, and I let out some kind of terrible yelp.
But my hands are free.
00:08:49:57
I open my eyes.
The bodyguard is trying to lean me against the desk. Meridian is behind him, his face blank.
I shift my right hand and let the ballpoint pen drop out of my sleeve and into my fingers.
I take a deep breath and think of my dad, of the lengths he would have gone to keep me safe. I think of Alex and how he looked at me when I asked him to take self-defense classes, how he said, I’m in. We won’t let anyone ever hurt you again. I think of Cecily and how she insisted on coming to IA with us, how she said, I was minding my own business, and some a*shole with terrible breath grabbed me, stuck me with a needle, and pulled me through a black hole.
Meridian draws his gun and taps it against his thigh.
I think of Ben, of his family who might still be executed tomorrow, of how he might be dead or bleeding out somewhere.
And I tell myself that it’s my life or this guy’s, and I have every right to do anything in my power to make sure it’s not me.
I shift my grip on the pen, so the point is facing out.
I tell myself that no matter what I do right now, it doesn’t make me as bad as them.
The bodyguard turns to look at Meridian. His lips part like he’s about to say something, but I don’t give him a chance. While he’s not paying attention, I swing my right arm around and drive the pen straight into his right eye.
00:08:46:56
The bodyguard screams, drops me, and grabs for his eye. I move with him, using his body as a shield while I reach for the gun under his jacket.
Over the screaming, someone shouts—or several people shout at one another, but I have no idea who’s saying what and I don’t care.
My fingers close on the metal grip of the handle, and I pull the handgun out and turn to aim. I haven’t thought through exactly who I should be aiming at. But I don’t need to.
Some kind of survival instinct drives me.
Meridian is the target. The governor only thinks she’s in charge—he’s the most dangerous person here.
I hear the shot as my finger squeezes the trigger.
But my right arm suddenly stops working. It drops to my side, and the gun slips from my fingers.
Confused, I look down at my arm. When I see the blood welling through the shirt covering my upper arm, I feel the pain.
Someone swears, and I look up and see I’m not the only one bleeding. I got a shot off, but it was a bad one. It looks like all I did was graze Meridian’s shoulder.
He grabs me by the throat and pushes me against the wall. Hard.
But he doesn’t stop there. He relaxes his grip and slams me back again and again. Too many times to keep count. The pain each time my head hits the wall feels like something is exploding against me. I try to kick or claw at him, but it’s like my body is useless. I’ve done too much damage to myself, and I don’t have any leverage. All I succeed in doing is wiping some of the blood from my left hand onto his face.
With his fingers pushing into my throat, and the weight of his hand over my windpipe, I’m out of air fast. Blackness edges my vision, like I’m about to pass out, and despite how weak I am, I reach up, wrapping my fingers around his hand, trying to pull it off my throat.
Suddenly he stops, his grip relaxes slightly, and as the air rushes back into my lungs, my vision clears, and I realize the bodyguard is still screaming.
Meridian raises his hand, and without a word, he fires three shots into the guy’s chest, and the screaming stops.
“What—” the governor screams.
“Keep making noise and I’ll shoot you, too,” he says.
She snaps her mouth shut, but she’s not about to take threats from him either. It looks like she’s about to say something.
But she doesn’t get the chance.
A shout comes from downstairs, then a spray of gunfire.
00:08:41:27
Two men bring in Elijah and Ben. My breath catches at the sight of them. I don’t have time to wonder what they’re doing here together or why Elijah left the hospital. I’m just so relieved to see Ben alive that it floods through my body and makes me feel weak and warm.
Their hands are restrained behind their backs. I wait for someone to bring Cecily in too, but she’s not there. I’m not sure what that means. She could be safe at the hospital; she could be somewhere else in the house; she could be injured somewhere or worse.
I look at Ben.
The position we’re in—that we’re both likely to be killed—doesn’t matter. He’s not bloody or unconscious or in an IA jail, and seeing that gives me hope.
“We had a situation.” The guy who speaks looks like he’s in his sixties, and he’s not wearing the same Men in Black bodyguard uniform. He must be the governor’s husband.
“Did we lose anyone?” the governor asks. Her husband nods.
The governor gestures to the bodyguard who’s been here. “Go with him,” she says before she turns to the new one. “You stay.”
The governor’s husband and one bodyguard leave the room, leaving Meridian, the governor herself, one remaining bodyguard, and evil Struz, who has been strangely quiet. If I wasn’t about to die, I’d be focused on the fact that we have even numbers.
I look at Ben. He’s staring at me, and I think about what he said—how most of his decisions revolve around me. He must have burst in planning to save me, but he made a fatal error.
He hadn’t prepared himself for the fact that if he was going to barrel in here, he’d need to pull the trigger first and ask questions later, and that means he portaled in here with a life-threatening disadvantage. And he got caught.
“What is this?” Meridian says.
The governor’s bodyguard clearly doesn’t get that the question is rhetorical. He starts to tell us that Ben and Elijah came out of nowhere and started attacking them. He doesn’t have a chance to finish.
Meridian points his gun at Elijah first, and then he fires.
Elijah grunts, stumbles back, and slumps to the ground. The bullet went into his bad leg. Blood wells up and coats the fabric of his jeans.
“Ben!” I yell. I don’t know what I’m trying to do, if I said his name to warn him that Meridian’s aim has shifted to him, to tell him to run, or something else entirely.
But it doesn’t matter.
I don’t have the chance to finish the thought.
Meridian pulls the trigger twice, one bullet for each of Ben’s legs. He grunts with each impact and falls to the floor, his face twisting with the pain.
My breath catches in my throat. I have to think of something, otherwise we’re all going to die here.
Meridian tosses his gun to the ground.
I can’t breathe again, only it’s not because of Meridian. Tears sting my eyes, and I gasp for air. All of the relief at seeing Ben alive and the hope that we might make it out, that we were so close—it’s gone now. And the emptiness it leaves behind is crushing. Now Ben is only going to get himself killed.
“Wait!” Ben says, as the governor’s remaining bodyguard grabs his hands, pulls them behind his back, and wraps the wire around them. “Let her go. Kill me instead,” he says. “I’m the one you want.”
I start to shake my head, since that’s a terrible idea.
I’m not the only one who thinks so. Meridian says, “Why would I do that? I have you both.”
He tightens his grip around my throat, and I renew my struggle against him as he pulls something that looks like a hunting knife from his pocket.
“You caused me a lot of trouble,” he says to Ben. “Now you can watch her die before I kill you.”
He lifts the knife to my neck.
00:08:36:27
With my back against the wall and the steel blade biting into my throat, there’s nowhere to go. My eyes take in the room one more time.
To my right stands the governor with her arms folded across her chest, waiting for me to die. Behind her through the doorway, Renee Adams is cowering behind her computer monitor. Across from me, the dead bodyguard is on the ground, slumped on his side, one hand still holding his eye where I stabbed him. The other guard is standing next to Barclay, who’s got his back against the wall, a grimace on his face. Elijah is on the floor, blood staining his pants. He’s breathing normally, though, and glaring at Meridian. He doesn’t look like he’s going to die just yet. Struz’s evil twin is still loitering in the doorway.
And Ben.
Ben is across from me, on his side, his lips slightly parted, his eyes wide, struggling against his restraints. He looks too pale, but I can’t see how much blood he’s losing. I try to tell him with my eyes that this isn’t his fault, that it’s okay.
If I move the wrong way, I’ll cut open my own throat, and my ankle is still sore from Barclay pushing me into the subway. There’s no need to try to calculate my odds of escape, so I force myself to stop.
I meet Meridian’s eyes with my own. This close, I can see they’re a muted green with flecks of gold—not the color I would have imagined for someone so cruel.
“Are you going to try to bargain for your life?” he asks. “Offer to switch sides?”
I don’t answer. I hold myself straight and set my jaw.
This is it.
00:08:36:17
I’ve heard that some people accept their death when it comes—that it’s their time. I never understood that until just now. It’s not that I’m giving up or lying down. It’s that I’m going to make the choice to go proud.
This time when my life flashes before my eyes, it’s not my optic nerves firing, it’s not death, and it’s not Ben Michaels.
It’s me.
I remember my mother on the beach, pregnant with Jared, our discarded sand castle next to her.
I remember the summer I turned thirteen, when the local video store had a special on old movies: four movies, four days, four dollars. Kate and I let Alex pick four action movies with no plot, and we laid out our sleeping bags in my living room and watched all of them in a row. We let Jared watch with us until he fell asleep and then we drew aliens on his forehead in permanent marker, ate popcorn and pizza, and drank Sprite until Alex puked from eating too much. Then we rode our bikes to Black Mountain Park and watched the sun rise.
I remember coming back to life on Torrey Pines Road, with Ben’s silhouette leaning over me, his hands warm on my skin. His first memory of me flooding my mind—when I was ten, in my pink flowered bathing suit, pulling him from the water, like I was some kind of angel.
I remember Jared’s birthday this year. It was just me, Struz, and two of Jared’s friends, a cake from a box with soymilk and egg substitute and frosting from a jar. We sat outside and passed around a flashlight telling the creepiest horror stories we could think of until the batteries died, and then Struz surprised Jared by getting one of the helicopter pilots to take him up for a quick midnight spin.
I remember my first date with Ben. When he took me to Sunset Cliffs and we ate takeout from Roberto’s and watched the sun set over the water. The warmth of the sun, the smell of the ocean, and the sound of the waves—the taste of Ben’s lips against mine for the first time.
I remember my dad. The way he used to come in and read to me as soon as he got home from work, the way he managed to make it to all of my swim meets despite his job, the way he looked at me every day—like he was radiating pride.
And I remember that day at Disneyland. The smell of popcorn and funnel cake, the bright colors, the balloons, and little kids on vacation laughing and screaming, Jared and I gorging ourselves on chili bread bowls and Mickey Mouse ice cream, waiting in line for Space Mountain and the Tower of Terror twice, then watching the Jedi training show and the fireworks at Cinderella’s castle.
I don’t even blink as I tilt my chin up and think of everything I’m about to leave behind—in my own world and here in Prima. Something warm trickles down my neck. I’ve left my mark on the lives of all the people I saved—the ones Ben and Barclay and I set free, the ones IA will be able to free once they take Meridian down.
I was here.
I lived.
I mattered.
This is a good way to go.
“It’s a shame I have to kill you,” Meridian says.
He readjusts his grip on the knife, and right before he drags it across my throat, I pretend I can see Ben in front of me, smell soap, mint, and gasoline—
00:08:36:16
Everything seems to happen at once.
I don’t actually register it at first. It’s just a series of noises.
A grunt and a sort of gurgling noise.
Then a gunshot, and something warm sprays my face.
Shouts, a struggle, the pressure against my throat gone, and another gunshot.
And another.
I touch my face, and my hand comes away covered in blood. I lean forward and put my face in my hands, feeling around, but I can’t tell if I’ve been shot. Someone grabs me by the shoulders and turns me to face them, shouting something at me, but I can’t concentrate on their words.
Fighting to get my bearings, I focus on the room.
It doesn’t make sense at first. There’s a body on the ground next to Ben, lying in a pool of blood, something sticking out of his throat. The governor is lying facedown in a crumpled heap on the floor. So is Meridian, in front of me, and his face is gone. A bullet is lodged in the wall a few inches above my head. The man who is not Struz stands in front of me, a gun in his hand. For a second it looks like it’s pointed at me, but then I realize he’s just holding it, holding it like someone who’s just used a weapon and done something he didn’t think he was capable of, and now he’s at a loss for what to do next.
When I see Barclay on the floor, a gun in his hand, blood pouring out of the hollow of his throat, Elijah crawling toward him, I know what happened.
00:08:36:09
Barclay rescued me.
He must have been in the process of trying to escape when I made my run for it too early. That’s what he was trying to tell me—what he wanted me to know.
I was just too focused, and too arrogant to pay attention.
When I was reliving the moments of my life, with Meridian holding the blade to my throat, Barclay finished breaking out of his restraints. He grabbed the ballpoint pen from the dead bodyguard’s eye and drove it straight into the jugular of the live one, while in the same movement reaching for the guy’s gun.
And before anyone could react, he shot Meridian in the back of the head.
But that’s as far as the element of surprise could get him. The governor had a gun too, and as he turned on her next, she shot him.
Barclay killed the governor’s bodyguard and then Meridian. The governor shot Barclay—
And someone shot her in the back.