Page 52

The beeping settles. Falls into a rhythm. The same steady interval, again and again and again, a metronome of a heartbeat that has decided to keep going, and it’s that sound, that dull mechanical promise, that finally lets the red drain out of my vision and the higher rooms of my brain switch their lights back on.

Which is how I become able to follow the argument happening over her bed.

I don’t join it. I’ve got nothing useful to add to a conversation about timelines and compounds, and besides, I’ve found a job: watching her breathe.

The mask fogs and clears, fogs and clears, and I count the cycles the way I used to count the seconds between a guard’s rounds, because counting is what I do when there’s nothing left to hit. Up close, drained of all her colour, she looks younger and smaller and nothing at all like the lunatic who held a room of forty hostage with a smile.

She looks like a girl.

It does something complicated to the wreckage where my chest is supposed to be, and I decide, on the spot and without consulting anyone, that whoever did this to her is going to learn the same lesson my father did about the durability of his skull.

Lucien and Silas are calm.

The redhead—the scentless detective, Hale—is not.

She’s pacing the foot of the bed like a thing in a cage, and she rounds on the pair of them with her voice climbing toward a register the equipment probably objects to.

“What the hell is going on in this building,” she demands, “where a saw blade gets installed in a cafeteria ceiling and not one of three hundred people notices? Where a patient gets her hands on a syringe loaded with a compound potent enough to drop a grown woman in under five minutes? That drug should have killed Genevieve outright. It nearly did. If either of you had been off-site by ten minutes, she’d be on his table instead of on this bed.”

“And I would have given her a magnificent send-off,” Silas murmurs, entirely unbothered, examining his own pale fingers. “Ranunculus, I think. Something layered and secret. But alas—her fate wasn’t meant to end this afternoon.”

Hale glares at the poetry like she’d like to confiscate it.

“You,” she says flatly, “saved her. You put your own mouth on a dying woman to bring her back. Which means, whatever else is true in this circus, you don’t want her dead.”

Silas shrugs, serene.

“I haven’t had a proper color analysis with her yet,” he says, as though that explains a single thing to anyone but him. “It would be terribly premature to let her die before I have.”

The detective looks, for a moment, like her own skull might do an impression of Annalise’s—and that’s when Doc steps in, smooth as oil on water, his quiet voice cutting her spiral clean in half.

“Walk me through your theory, Detective,” he says. “You still believe she orchestrated this. So—she plotted to have a blade rigged into a ceiling she can’t reach, arranged to be injected with a lethal dose of a sedative-class compound immediately after swallowing her own lunch medications, calculated that the combination would stop her heart, and counted on being resuscitated by the precise two men in the building capable of it. That’s the plan you’re proposing. A woman engineering her own cardiac arrest as an alibi.”

Hale doesn’t answer.

“You know she isn’t running these murders,” Doc says, gentler and therefore worse. “You’ve known it since the timeline cleared her on the last one. Someone is targeting her. Someone wants her gone, or wants her buried under enough bodies that no one will look any closer. The only question worth your time is why.”

None of them have an answer.

The medbay fills with the patient beeping of the one heart in the room that isn’t scheming.

“She’s the only patient who can reach that ceiling,” Hale says finally, stubborn to the last.

“With a pole,” Doc agrees. “Which she has, in her cell, under a camera. But there’s no pole in that section of the cafeteria, Detective, and unless she’s recently developed the ability to sling webs from her wrists, scaling forty feet of bare ceiling unnoticed in a crowded room is a tall order. No one saw the blade go up, which means it was installed in a narrow window right before the lunch bell—a window during which your prime suspect was, per the footage I personally reviewed, doing exactly what she’s done for three days straight since Wren Halloway died. Spinning on a pole in a locked room. Watched. Counted. Filmed.”

The woman says nothing.

And I can’t help it.

I chuckle.

It rolls out of me low and rough, and it’s apparently loud enough in all that tense quiet that every head in the room swings my way like I’ve started speaking in tongues. They’d half forgotten I was here—the feral prisoner, demoted to furniture once the drama moved on. But I’m not where they left me. I’m at the head of the bed, lowered into a chair too small for me, and I’m holding her hand.

It’s a small hand. Clever, callused at the palm from the pole, and far too pale right now, the same drained grey as the rest of her, and I hate the color of it with a violence that surprises me. But under my thumb her pulse ticks along in time with the machine, steady, stubborn, alive, and the rhythm of it is the only thing keeping me on the civilized side of the chair.

“If you need eyes on her every minute of every day,” I say, into their staring silence, “to keep her breathing and to keep her clear of whatever’s hunting her—” I shrug, and tighten my grip on those cold clever fingers. “—then quit pretending you’ll manage it with cameras and counts that already failed her twice today. Assign a pack. One of us with her. Always. Rotate it however helps you sleep, but she’s never alone again.”

The silence that follows is enormous.