I push away from Mr. Chest. The room bounces like a puppy. “What the hell did you hit me with?”
The guy reaches for me, and I throw out my arm, palm up and splayed. I stumble, but the floor doesn’t get me. “Back up. Just back the hell up.”
“Okay, okay. Take it easy.” The calm one raises his hands and keeps his distance. “He wasn’t supposed to dose you, I swear. We only gave him the stuff in case he couldn’t ditch your Shadow.”
“Emergency only,” mutters the girl. “Which it wasn’t.”
“You saw her after he dosed the guy,” Calm hisses low. “He didn’t have a choice.”
“Also a mistake,” she shoots back. “You think you can just dose one of them and get away with it? We probably have a whole Enactor contingent on our ass.”
“His ass,” Calm amends. “We didn’t dose anyone.”
“Shut up,” I say under my breath. My palms flatten on my throbbing temples so they won’t combust. I’m missing something. Darkness curls through my vision and somewhere the universe is breaking, and I can’t tell what’s real unless they all . . . “Shut up,” I yell.
They freeze. Caught midsentence in the glowlight.
“Where the hell am I?” I ask.
The calm one opens his mouth, but I hold up my hand. I may only get one question, and there’s a better question, more important. I can almost see it. Stained pavement between looming walls. Oily curls and metal-grated doors.
The power tech on the ground. The spike at my neck.
I search my skin and find the hole—small, raised, and sore as hell.
Greg.
Anger settles my bones. The room stops its shimmy and my body doesn’t sway. “Where is the power tech?”
They shift, straighten. A readying of hands and feet.
“Power tech?” asks the girl.
The calm one glances between her and me. “The Shadow?”
My fists clench, finger by finger. “I mean the man Greg dosed before me. Is. He. Dead?”
“The Shadow,” he reiterates, slower. “No, he’s fine. I made Greg drag him into the boarding tower. We don’t need that kind of trouble.”
“That’s why we pulled in the jitterbug to begin with,” says the girl. “So your tail wouldn’t catch on. Not that that’s worked.”
“You think the power tech’s a spy,” I say. Not just any spy, but from the Enactors’ hidden elite. A boarding tower live-in who fixes museum roofs. If they dumped him unconscious in the tower, his fellow boarders would have robbed him blind. Which means I’ll owe him a room, if they’re right and Greg didn’t— If Greg—
“Greg sold me out,” I say just to hear the truth of it. Feel the weight. My cousin stuck a needle in my neck and probably a bow on my pretty, packaged head. And the worst part? The ultimate, absolute ache?
I didn’t guess, wouldn’t have thought. Not that he’d attack me. Not this.
Maybe he’d steal the shirt from your back, but not the skin from your bones.
“I’m going to rip his spine out his throat,” I say, matter-of-fact.
The calm one eases a step back even as he holds out a hand. “Hey, easy now, that’s not it at all. We just needed to talk to you without the Shadow.”
“So you had him dose me?”
His fizzy eyebrows bunch in a single thick line. “I told you, that wasn’t our idea.”
“I don’t care whose—” I stop, blink, and my brain kicks in.
Fizzy eyebrows. A fit, muscled girl who could take the whole room down single-handed. A skinny, silent boy with big, pretty eyes.
The Outer Brink kids from the Low South Market.
I’m stuck in a hole in the dark with people who think my mother a god.
“She remembers,” the skinny one singsongs out of nowhere, so bright the light stutters. I jump and even the calm one flinches.
“Dammit, Sans,” says the calm one. “Give a man some warning.”
“If you remember,” says the girl to me, “then you know what we want.”
“That’d be a ‘no,’” I say.
The girl is out of the chair and in my face. “You may think this funny, but it’s our home on the line. Where the hell is Millie Oen?”
“Dead,” I say into her clear blue eyes.
Her fist rams my stomach. Pain explodes, rocketed together, pressed and screaming and I can’t, I can’t, I can’t— Scream. Don’t scream.
I stumble, hug the hole where my stomach was. Is? Hell.
“What the hell?” The calm one grabs her arm and pulls her back. “Take it easy.”
“She’s screwing around,” says the girl.
“She’s barely awake!”
“We don’t have time.” The girl shakes him off and circles the chairs, pointing at me. “Look at her! Look. Has she freaked out? Has she even screamed? You really think she won’t screw us regardless?”
As one, they turn and stare. I might be a poisonous, hissing snake. Or the daughter of vengeful god.
Next time, I’m splitting everyone’s eardrums three times over.
Metal clangs against metal, harsh, distant echoes from below or above or wherever the hell is close but not here.
The light goes out.
The calm one swears up a spark storm, while the skinny kid whispers, “They’re here.”
Hell, someone else? Decker? Enactors?