His voice is low, eerily calm. He tosses the pendant to the floor, and it slides across the tiles, slipping underneath a row of lockers. He brings his hand back to my face, gentle at first, then slides his fingers around my neck.
‘I know you’re still in there, Dax,’ I gasp, trying to claw his hand away. ‘I know you care about me. You don’t want to hurt me.’
‘Oh, but I do,’ he says, his eyes shining. ‘You don’t know how much I want to hurt you, Catarina. I want to cut your skull open and see what Lachlan left inside you.’
I close my eyes, panic thrashing in my chest. This isn’t Dax; this is something that’s taken over his body – some dark and twisted version of my friend. I don’t know how to bring him back. All I can think to do is keep telling him the truth and pray that wherever my Dax is, he’s able to hear me.
‘Dax, I need you,’ I plead, staring into his eyes. ‘You’re the only one who can read the vaccine. I can’t fix it without you.’
For a heartbeat, something flickers in his face. A hint of doubt, just the slightest sign that my words are reaching him. His gaze wavers, his hand growing loose on my neck.
Then his eyes go hard, and his lips curl back.
‘Liar!’ he yells, shoving me into the wall. My wounded shoulder smacks into the concrete, dragging a scream of pain from me. ‘Do you think I’ve forgotten how you were always better than me? Always reading Lachlan’s code like it was a goddamn picture book?’
‘No!’ I cry, my vision blurring. ‘Please, Dax! Stop it!’
He draws his hand back, curling it into a fist. Using a strength I didn’t know I had, instincts I’ve never felt, I clutch his shirt and drag him to me, smacking my forehead into his nose.
He roars, clutching his face, blood spurting between his fingers. I push off the wall and try to run, but I’m not fast enough. He grabs me by the hair, jerking me back. I fall hard to the floor, my scalp burning, the hallway spinning around me.
‘You’re dead now, Princess!’ He drives a boot into my ribs.
I gasp, spitting blood, trying to curl into a ball. He drives another kick into my side, knocking the wind from me. I choke for air as he rolls me over, flipping me to my back, and straddles me, pinning me to the floor. My shoulder is a raging, howling sea of pain. My strength is fading from me, my muscles growing shaky.
‘That’s right,’ he mutters as I shudder, my hands clawing uselessly at the floor. The ceiling is a spinning mess of shadows, my lungs clenching like fists.
‘P-please!’ I manage to cry out as he wraps his hands around my throat. ‘Dax, please! You don’t want to do this! Listen to me!’
But he’s not listening. He’s not there. His nose is bent and bleeding. He lifts his hands to wipe it, and time slows down to a crawl.
The world grows silent. He’s going to kill me. I can see it happening so clearly that it plays like a film inside my head. His hands will drop back down, stronger than mine, tech enhanced, and they will slide in a cruel ring around my neck. He’ll hold me down and squeeze my neck until I stop fighting, until my lips are blue and cold.
There’s no bringing him back from this. There’s no reasoning or begging. The man above me is no longer my friend.
‘I’m sorry, Dax,’ I breathe, in the heartbeat of time when his hands are off me, in the fraction of a second I’m able to move. ‘I really am sorry.’
His eyes grow wide as I lunge up, every muscle in my body aching, and tear his ear off with my teeth.
CHAPTER 40
Dax screams, recoiling backwards. I spit his ear out, the metallic taste of his blood filling my mouth. It’s so horrible and intimate it makes my stomach turn. I force down the urge to vomit and scramble to my feet.
My shoulder is a fireball of pain. I lurch to the row of lockers, searching frantically for the little black pendant. A glint of silver catches my eye as Dax staggers across the hallway, blood streaming down the side of his neck.
‘Come on,’ I breathe, grabbing the chain, sliding the pendant out from underneath the lockers. I twist the two ends between my fingers like Cole showed me. A jolt of electricity prickles across my skin, filling the air with the scent of burned plastic.
Dax draws one hand back to punch me, and then his panel blinks off and he falls to the floor.
I let out a cry of relief, dropping the pendant, standing over Dax’s crumpled body. His nose is broken, his ear is gone and his face is streaked with blood. He looks so pitiful that I don’t want to leave him, but I don’t have a choice. Cole said the nightstick would only work for a few minutes. I need to get outside, find the jeep and get myself to safety.
I’m the one who ruined the vaccine, and now I need to find a way to fix it.
I turn and careen down the hallway, stumbling into the lockers in a daze. Gunfire cuts through the screams outside. My shoulder throbs, the back of the bathrobe wet with blood as I run blindly past the classroom doors, searching for the exit.
There. The airtight doors. I haul them open with my good arm, scrambling into the street outside. The air is thick with smoke, ringing with gunfire. The bonfire casts a flickering light across the people in the road, and my breath catches in my throat.
Their eyes are wild and inhuman. Every face is a bloody snarl. Their forearms are all glowing the same orange as Dax’s panel. They’re fighting, biting, clawing one another apart in front of my eyes, and I’m the one who did this to them. This is all my fault.
I’m the one who crafted a piece of code to force the vaccine into each of their arms. I just wanted to help them.
Instead, I drove them all insane.
Gunfire echoes in the street. Chips of concrete hit my legs, sent flying by a hail of bullets that slams into the kerb behind me. I stumble back, searching wildly for the source, and spot armed figures leaning out of the windows of a nearby building. They’re roaring with laughter, shooting everyone below them, and there’s nowhere in the street to hide, no safe path to follow.
I’m going to have to run.
I bolt into the road, dodging the crowd, trying to remember the way to the jeep. A sudden light flashes through the windows of the shooters’ building, and a blast rips through the air like a thunderclap. My eardrums pop, the ground trembling. Flaming rubble flies up from the building, arcing parabolically through the night. A billowing cloud of smoke rises in a plume as the roof falls inwards, the building crumbling into dust.
‘Oh, no, no, no,’ I breathe, stumbling back. Debris rains from the sky. The wild-eyed people around me scatter, scrambling for cover. I turn and run, my ears ringing from the blast when I hear a voice, distant and faint.
‘Catarina!’
It’s Cole, calling out for me. Fierce, alive and sane.
The sweetest sound I’ve ever heard.
‘Cole!’ I scream, spinning round, sprinting back down the street. Clouds of ash and dust are spewing from the explosion. There’s glass on the road, and my feet are bleeding, but I’m so close. We’re going to make it out of here. ‘Cole, I’m coming!’