“Noel!” Aria paddled toward him. “I’ve missed you. I thought I’d never see you again.”
Noel blinked and pressed his lips together. “That’s the thing, Aria. You won’t. This is the last time.”
“W-what do you mean?” Aria asked. Why did he look so miserable?
And then she remembered. That basement room full of Ali. That poisonous gas. Ali and Nick and those guns. That bang.
It all flooded into her memory, twisting her into knots. She looked at Noel in horror, waves lapping around them. “Am I . . . dead?”
Noel’s chin trembled. Tears spilled down his cheeks.
“No!” Aria exclaimed, waving her arms, suddenly hyperventilating. “I-I can’t be dead. I feel so alive. And I’m not ready.” She stared at her ex-boyfriend, full of purpose. She wasn’t ready. She wanted to live; she wanted him back. She didn’t care about that Ali shit anymore. Everyone lied. Everyone made mistakes. They’d get over it, the way they’d gotten over everything.
She reached for him, but Noel ducked under the water. “Noel!” Aria cried out. He didn’t surface. “Noel!” She ducked under, too, but all she saw was darkness. No more fish. No more nothing.
“Aria? Honey?”
Aria blinked hard. When she opened her eyes again, she was lying on a bed in a bright room. A sheet covered her body, and a monitor beeped at her side. A blurry face loomed over her. When her eyes adjusted, she saw it was Agent Fuji.
Aria licked her dry lips. Was this another hallucination? Was she in some sort of post-death limbo? “W-what’s going on?” she heard herself say.
Agent Fuji glanced over her shoulder. Two more blurry figures shot forward. One of them was Byron, the other Ella. “Oh my God,” they both cried, clasping Aria’s hands. “Oh, honey, we were so worried.”
Mike appeared, too. “Hey,” he said sheepishly. “Good to have you back.”
Aria swallowed hard. When she shifted, her head pounded. Did dead people get headaches?
“I’m . . . alive?” she asked tentatively.
“Of course you’re alive,” came a voice next to her. Aria looked over. Emily was propped against a pillow, her eyes open and a wan smile on her face. Her sister Carolyn was next to her, tears in her eyes. Hanna was lying on her side, her mom holding one hand, Kate holding the other. Spencer had a bandage on her forehead and looked pretty out of it, but when she saw Aria’s gaze land on her, she weakly waved.
They were all alive. They’d all made it out, somehow. “How long was I out?” Aria said shakily.
“Two days,” Mike said. “But it felt like two years.”
Fuji materialized at the foot of Aria’s bed. “We pulled you girls out of that room just in time. The amount of cyanide in the air was staggering. If we would have arrived a few minutes later, you wouldn’t have lived. It’s a good thing we were keeping tabs on you that night. Someone followed you to that house. When you didn’t come out, our agent called for backup.” She patted Aria’s leg. “But we got him, honey. He’s in custody. It’s all over.”
“Him,” Aria said thickly. Nick. She thought of his eerie, wolflike smile. The gun trained in his hands. His body falling to the ground, a dim recollection of Emily knocking him out.
“He nearly killed you girls,” Fuji said. “I guess he figured out you were getting too close. Some members of my team figured out the Nick link just about the same time he captured you girls. They brought it to our attention just as he trapped you in that house.”
“How did you figure out it was Nick?” Aria asked.
Fuji rubbed the fine lines around her eyes. “One group of forensic experts was doing the computer piece, and they were able to trace everything back to Nick’s phone—all those A notes, and also the rerouting of the A notes to your phones.” She glanced at Spencer. “We did listen to you—we cross-referenced Preserve patients to see if someone from inside the hospital might be a suspect. Nick was on our list. We had other experts looking at DNA, and Nick came up a match there, too—his DNA was on record from a prior offense before he was at The Preserve. We finally ID’d the third face in the cruise basement where that bomb went off. And last night, we found Iris Taylor tied up in the woods, half-dead. She confessed that he hurt her. It was Nick. It was all Nick.”
“Iris?” Emily cried out. “So she’s . . . okay?”
“She will be,” Fuji said. “But it was a close call.”
“Wait.” There was a gap in Aria’s brain. “What about . . . Ali? Did you find her?”
Byron and Ella glanced at each other. Fuji set her mouth in a line. “Ali wasn’t there, Aria.”
Aria struggled to prop herself up on the pillows. Her head throbbed. “Yes, she was. We all saw her. You said there were people watching us at the house. They must have heard her voice.”
“Honey,” Ella said gently. “You’re just confused.”