I’m not quite sure what to do.
“Phoenix? Everything okay?”
He doesn’t answer, just keeps pressing his fingers to his temples and squeezing his eyes shut. I go over to him slowly—he hasn’t seen me yet—and put a hand on his shoulder.
He startles anyway.
“Hey,” I say. “What’s happening?”
“I can hardly hear you,” he says. “Alexa—Alexa. If you can hear me, I need you to stop talking.”
“It’s Eden,” I say. If he thinks I’m Alexa, he’s further gone than I thought.
He looks at me like I’m the crazy one. “In my head,” he says. “Alexa. She’s saying all sorts of crazy things and I cannot get her to slow down. Something about your dad.”
I spiral from break-of-dawn optimism to end-of-the-world panic in two seconds flat. “What? What happened?” Phoenix’s eyes are closed again. “Look at me, Phoenix—Alexa, can you see me? Am I on the screen?”
Finally, the chaos evaporates from him. “She’s quiet.” He waits, listens. “She sees you.”
“Okay,” I say. “Alexa—can you slow down and tell Phoenix what’s going on?”
Phoenix keeps his eyes open but stares into space as he listens. I’ve never seen a face tell such a complicated story.
“What?” I hope he will remember everything. “What’s that look?”
“Your dad communicated with Hope in her head, like this, when she woke up in . . . a cave?” he says. “Told her where to find Alexa and walked her through some complicated maze to unlock the door.” He pauses. “Whatever paralyzed Alexa was only temporary, she says. It wore off and she feels fine.”
That, at least, is a relief. But if she’s fine, why is she so frantic?
And more than that . . . if she’s talking to Phoenix in his head, that means my dad isn’t around to do it himself. Neither is Ava—but that brings its own set of concerns.
“Oh—oh.” Phoenix’s eyes shine in the morning sunlight that streams through the carved windows. Their twisty design leaves an interesting shadow on his face. “Yeah. Just a second.”
“What?” I am a broken record, breaking into more and more pieces the longer I wait.
He blinks several times in rapid succession. “There are a lot of things,” he says. “Alexa says she and Hope heard an argument on their way to your dad’s office—they tried to wait in the hall until it was over, but it just kept getting worse. They heard a woman confronting your dad about how she’d seen you on the footage, but had no footage from your perspective.” His eyebrows knit together, like he’s trying to keep everything straight. “And then she said something about a yacht being off course.”
Oh, no.
This is all very, very bad news. It seems overly optimistic now that any of us ever thought Ava wouldn’t figure out that I hadn’t been activated. We were meticulously careful about so many other things, but in the end, only one mistake mattered.
“So, what? Is she sending someone after us?”
He pauses, shifts his eyes. I’m starting to recognize this as his listening-intently expression. “I’m not putting it off, she just asked—fine.” He looks directly at me. “Eden, the woman shot your father. I’m not sure with what, and I’m not sure how critical it is. Alexa says that whatever the woman used didn’t make a noise. She and Hope went to check it out when the argument ended so abruptly, and found your father in a pool of blood.”
I blink.
Phoenix is the one with all the tears. I don’t have any.
I should have tears.
“Alexa also says she’s not sure what the woman was up to when they arrived—she was poking around with her back to them, talking into the microphone they’re using now.”
His words are just noise, but they are nothing compared with the noise in my own head. My own head is the loudest freight train, full of frantically screaming livestock, in an EF5 tornado. My own head is so loud it becomes a black hole, void of everything other than its own black hole–ness.
Phoenix touches my wrist. He doesn’t have the warmth Lonan has, but it works to call me back to myself nonetheless. “Your father isn’t dead yet, Eden. Hope tracked down someone who took him to the medical ward.”
Not dead yet.
He isn’t dead—and he never was.
“You don’t have to worry about the woman, either,” he says. “Alexa panicked when she saw what happened to your dad.”
“Ava’s dead?” I ask.
“Two blow darts at the same time are lethal, apparently. Alexa says she only meant to knock her out.” I think of how readily Dad reached for the blow dart to take out Gray earlier—he must have kept a stash of them at his disposal, scattered all over the room for easy access. Ava herself probably still had blow-dart poison left over in her system from earlier. That couldn’t have helped. “The woman stopped breathing soon after the guy from Medical left with your dad, though. Alexa’s freaking out about it.”
Phoenix’s eyes are green as jade, sparkling in the sun. I get on my knees so he doesn’t have to squint up at me anymore, look directly into the camera lenses I know he’s been fitted with.
“Alexa,” I say, with more conviction than I’ve ever expressed toward anything in my life, “thank you.”
EIGHTY-THREE
CASS FLIES DOWN the spiral staircase, but only halfway. “There’s land on the horizon, and it’s close,” he says, leaning over the railing. “Get ready.” He disappears back into the navigation deck without another word.
There is no acknowledgment of my conversation with Phoenix: I take this to mean Alexa was on a private call. But she said Ava was up to something on the microphone when she arrived—why would Ava have made a private call just to Phoenix? He seems like the least threatening of the three. Unless she called all the others individually before Alexa got to her, and Phoenix was simply the last.
Pellegrin is quick to wake, and the stairs are his first mission. It occurs to me that Pellegrin has no idea what happened with Ava, or my father. I fill him in. He mutters an obscenity.