is the last thing she wants to do. “Please, don’t make me hurt you more than I have to. Just tell me what I need to know, and I can make this as painless as possible.”
“This is about Roger and Dodger?”
A slight nod, as the elevator doors open and Erin pushes Smita into the hall. “I understand why you agreed when they came to you and asked for help. Who wouldn’t have been willing to help a friend? And Roger can be very persuasive when he wants to be. He doesn’t realize just how persuasive yet. He hasn’t matured fully in this timeline. I only remember snips from the ones where he has—usually because he’s ordered me to remember something before he’s hit the big redhead button—but hoo, boy. I can’t blame anyone for doing what he asks. You didn’t have a chance once he got the idea in his head.”
“Dodger asked me,” says Smita hopelessly. She’s not sure why she’s trying to argue with Erin, with this impossible woman who has somehow isolated her from the world, who pulls knives out of the air. “She said they needed to know whether they were biologically related before they tried to have their adoption records unsealed. I was just trying . . . I was just trying to help a friend. That was all.”
Erin looks at her with sympathetic eyes as she guides Smita, almost gently, back to the lab. She looks sad. She looks like she doesn’t want to be doing this, and somehow that’s the worst part of the whole situation: Smita is going to die, and it’s not even going to matter. She’s going to cease, and the person who kills her won’t be doing it out of passion, or anger, or anything other than a vague, inexplicable regret.
“A lot of us are trying to help our friends,” she says. “Some of us are trying to change the world. Where’s the research?”
Wordless, Smita points to her computer, to her notebooks.
Erin nods. “Have you posted it anywhere? Are there any backups outside this lab?”
“No,” says Smita. Then, without heat or expectation: “Please.”
“You know better,” says Erin. She puts the Hand of Glory on the nearest table before she grips Smita by the shoulder, hard, with her free hand, twisting her around until they are facing away from one another. The pain of that unexpected clutch is enough that Smita gasps, taken by surprise.
Then Erin lets her go and steps back, and both her hands are empty; the knife is gone. Smita looks down, and the knife is found, slipped between her ribs with a magician’s skill, so tidy that for a moment, it looks less like a murder weapon and more like some strange accessory. The hilt has made a seal against her skin. There’s no blood. She knows enough about anatomy to know that this can’t last. Seals break. Blood escapes. She’s not going to die; she’s already dead. The anomaly is her refusal to fall down.
“Thank you,” says Erin, and reaches for her knife.
Smita thinks, too late, to step away, to run; maybe she’s not a ghost anymore, now that she’s been stabbed, now that the seal is broken. She could scream for help, and help might come. She might find salvation in the students three floors down, or in campus security, well-meaning and bumbling as they sometimes are. She might get away. But she doesn’t think in time, and so Erin’s fingers find the hilt, and the knife slips free, and the blood follows, red and hot and so, so plentiful. Smita knows how much blood is in the human body, the volume and the purpose of it, but she’s never seen it. Not like this, flowing bright and precious and irretrievable.
The blade pierced her lung. When she tries to speak, there’s no sound, only the soft whistle of the wind, distant, almost mocking her. She moves her lips anyway, silently cursing Erin, the false friend, the fiend who’s taken everything. She curses Rodger and Dodger. Whatever they are, whatever they do or don’t know about themselves, this was their fault. This is on their heads.
Then she falls. Her last thought is of her mother, who was so proud of her for getting into graduate school, for becoming a scientist, for saving lives. “My Smita is going to save lives” was what she always said, chest puffed out and eyes crinkled at the edges, and Smita’s never going to see her mother smile like that again;