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Against orders, pointed guns, and the very air of a wing I was never cleared to be standing in—I’d talked my way up here on a lie and a bribed orderly for no better reason than that I couldn’t stand another hour not knowing what she was doing, and the universe, which has a vicious sense of comedy, repaid my obsession by letting me be exactly close enough to catch her when she fell.

She drops, I catch her, and the moment her weight settles into my arms, the cafeteria floor rises up through twenty years to swallow me whole.

It all replays.

Piece by merciless piece.

The terrible lightness of a body giving up its tenancy. The soft tender voice. The dreams someone laid on me with their last breath and the promise I couldn’t keep. For an eternity that takes perhaps three seconds, I am eight years old again on a floor that smells of copper, holding the only good thing I ever had while it slips, and I am too small and too useless and too late, always too late?—

Reality slams the door on it.

Because Vex is not lying still and gentle in my arms.

Vex is convulsing—her spine arching, her limbs gone to a violent juddering mess, a thin line of pink froth at the corner of her mouth where she’s choking on her own saliva, and a thread of dark blood running from one nostril over her parted lips.

Her scent has curdled, the bright sugar of her going wrong and chemical and frightened, and the wrongness of it shrieks down every nerve I own.

I know what this is.

I’ve seen enough bodies fail to recognize the grammar of one starting to. And the recognition does the single most foreign thing imaginable: it makes me call for help.

Lucien! Silas!

They’re here—somewhere in this churning room, because everyone who matters has somehow converged on this cafeteria like guests summoned to an event none of them RSVP’d to. I find Doc first, and his pale eyes aren’t on the woman bisected and screaming her ruin out across the tile a few feet away.

They’re on Vex.

On the seizing, bleeding thing in my grip. And the cold thing that passes over his composed face tells me everything about how bad this is.

Hands close on me. Guards, trying to wrench me off her, peel her out of my arms, and something in me that doesn’t bother consulting the rest of me answers with a sound I feel in my back teeth.

I don’t fully track the next stretch.

There’s a snarl coming out of me that doesn’t stop. There’s a wall against my spine—I’ve retreated, somehow, folded us both into a corner with my body curled around hers like a fist around something it will die before it opens, and a forest of leveled weapons has bloomed in a half-circle facing me.

Every gun in the room. All of them pointed at the rabid prisoner cradling a dying Omega and growling like the animal they always swore I was.

“MOVE—AND GUNS DOWN!”

Lucien’s voice detonates across the cafeteria, and it is not the dry, mild, fountain-pen voice he usually wears. It’s the other one.

The Alpha command dropped into it like iron into water, the register men like him almost never spend because spending it admits they have it—and the entire room goes rigid and silent in a single heartbeat. The guards freeze mid-lunge. The screaming patients choke off.

Even I feel it lock my spine, the oldest part of my brain snapping to obedience before my pride can object. It’s the first time in longer than I can remember that anyone’s command has reached me at all.

And into the stillness he’s made, Silas comes.

Unhurried. Gliding, like the floor was poured for him and the emergency scheduled at his convenience, that pale candle-wax face serene above his immaculate dark coat.

He looks, crossing that cleared and frightened space toward me, like an angel descending to do the obvious and merciful work of declaring a death. But I’ve learned to read the small print on him in the days I’ve known him, and his eyes—those warm too-bright amber eyes—are doing something his serene mouth isn’t.

He doesn’t like the trajectory of this.

He doesn’t like it at all, and Silas Crowe disliking the angle of a death is the most alarming thing I’ve witnessed all day.

He reaches me in a few long strides and simply takes her, lifting Vex out of my locked arms with a gentle, total authority I’d break anyone else’s hands for. He ignores the growl still rolling out of me.

He knows that I’m only going to be loud and feral and impossible until somebody proves to me this woman I barely know and can’t stop circling is going to live to annoy me another afternoon. He files my noise under weather and goes to work.