pulled out the small glass vial of her personal protective charm. She dropped it. James, who might be confused, but still understood that sometimes it was better to follow instructions from the person who knew what was actually happening and ask penetrating questions later, did the same.
James didn’t have our genetic resistance to telepathic influence. We needed to act quickly. I lunged forward and grabbed Annie’s wrist, gesturing for her to do the same with James.
“Don’t freak out,” I said, and grabbed Sarah’s wrist with my free hand. “Sarah, now.”
She turned her head, whiteout eyes focusing on me without seeming to actually focus. Her voice echoed inside my skull, saying, Brace yourselves.
There wasn’t time to brace myself. There wasn’t time for anything. There was just the sudden, painful flood of numbers cascading over everything, washing the world away. Not into the comforting whiteness of her mindscape. No; that would have been too familiar, and consequentially, too kind. This was a shifting veil of figures, numbers and letters joined in an unending whirl, each one feeding into the next, none of them making any sense at all.
Someone screamed. It might have been me.
Hold on, said Sarah.
I couldn’t hear Annie or James in the mental din: we’d been partitioned off from one another, which meant Sarah was using our brains exactly the way I’d suggested. We were her off-site processors, and she was spinning the pieces of the equation through us as quickly and as efficiently as she could.
Not as quickly or efficiently as she needed to. The tide of numbers grew in both intensity and speed, until it felt like I was actually drowning. My vision blurred around the edges. I blinked hard, looking for clarity, and couldn’t find it. It was like the world was being fogged over, wiped away by something I barely had the tools to comprehend.
Sarah, I thought—or tried to think. Her name glitched and shattered in my mind, becoming a series of numbers that were actually letters that were actually images, freeze-frame components of a universe my brain wasn’t equipped to hold.
Hold on, she whispered, through everything that still remained around me, every shape and every shadow, every symbol dancing through the endless equation that unspooled through my cells like a disease. I’m going to try something.
There was an almost electric jolt through the connection we shared. The equation lightened, lifted, and suddenly rebalanced itself, spreading out across every inch of surface I had and then spreading out to cover the surfaces around me. For the first time since the formation of our chain, I could feel Annie, burning bright and furious just outside the lines of my core. There was another presence beyond her, cold and calculating and confused: James. And beyond him . . .
Mark?
How’s it going, Lilu? Looks like I’m one of the good guys after all. The amusement in his mental voice was bright and clear and incredibly self-satisfied. You found the road. I’m happy to run down it. For Cici.
Will you all be quiet? Sarah didn’t sound amused. Sarah sounded strained, like she was having trouble keeping things together. This is finicky work. If I mess it up, we’re losing Europe.
Easy there, Dark Phoenix, said Annie. Take us in nice and gentle, and don’t destroy any continents.
I’m try—
That was as far as Sarah got. Her scream filled the world, and everything went white, then gray, and finally black, as the universe collapsed into nothing, and was still.
Twenty-six
“The fact that we call being kind, or considerate, or good ‘being human’ tells you something about how much of this planet we have under our thumbs.”
—Jane Harrington-Price
In the whiteness of the infinite void, finally finishing this
THE CONNECTION BETWEEN ME and the others—my offsite processing systems, and bless Artie forever for suggesting I could even try to use their minds that way—snapped like a stalk of celery, crisp and clean and horrifyingly loud. I staggered backward, realizing as I did that I was back in the nothingness of my own mindscape. My lungs hurt, which seemed silly, since they weren’t real. I still struggled to breathe.
“You bitch,” hissed a familiar voice.
I raised my head just in time for Ingrid to slap me across the face. I yelped. She advanced, her eyes blazing white, her clothes streaked with pearlescent lymph.
“All you had to do—all you had to do—was accept the gift any other cuckoo would have been willing to die for,” she spat, pulling her hand back to slap me again. “All you had