I hope so, because you have a big decision to make today.
She pushed the Dark One’s words out of her mind and chased the feeling down, only then allowing herself to articulate what she had always known: That the feeling of magic speaking to her was the feeling of something coming back to life. A new pulse, new circulation in an unused limb.
It made her into something new.
The doors to the laboratory where the prototype was held shot up and stayed, stable, just beneath the curve of the Dome. Sloane walked through the door frame, more cautious now than she had been before. The laboratory was white: white walls, white floors, white tables. There was a row of microscopes on one table, slim computer monitors on another. An eyewash station, an emergency shower. Sturdy ducts twisted together in the ceiling—which was also painted white—terminating in massive vents.
Sloane took all this in, but her focus went right to the prototype, which sat on its own lab table on a metal platform. Someone had put red tape around it. It was, as Ines had predicted, a box. Narrow enough to fit in a palm, but about a foot long, made of matte metal. Her body trembled as she approached it, the broken Needle held out.
And then: A feeling as familiar to her as air in her lungs. She had felt it only once before, that hunger, that emptiness that demanded filling—just before the Needle killed everyone on the Dive with her. Then, it had been shapeless, just a want so potent she’d been forced to give in to it.
And now she wanted only one thing: to destroy this piece of shit before it could hurt anything—or anyone—else.
Her want caught on the Needle like thread going through the eye of it, and then—
Light—
She smelled like dust and smoke.
When she came to, after, it was still dark. In a perfect circle around her body, the laboratory floor was intact and just as clean as when she had first walked in. But beyond that was rubble. The Dome was still mostly whole, but there was a huge dent in the side, like a bite taken out of an apple. The laboratory—and the prototype with it—was now just gravel and metal fragments that were too small to piece back together.
For a long time, she sat on the circle of clean floor and shook. But the sun was rising. So she forced herself to stand up, then stumbled out of the wreckage. On her way out, she saw a security guard lying on the ground near an exterior door. She was lucky she had woken up first.
Assuming he was unconscious, not dead.
She didn’t see any others. Maybe they had fled at the first sight of magic. She didn’t blame them—after all, the Dark One was the only magic-user most people had ever heard of, so the Drains had taught people that if they saw any evidence of magic, it was best to run.
The light and the sound had woken the seekers in their tents, and now they were standing as close to the security barrier as they could get. Sloane walked past a séance and a group of men talking excitedly about “his return.” No one paid any attention to her.
She got into her car and drove to a nearby forest preserve. It was still hours until the funeral. She walked deep into the woods to set a fire, gathering kindling as she went. She stacked it in one of the metal trashcans that were staggered along the paths, lit it with a match, waited for the flames to build and catch the thicker logs she added, and then stripped to her underwear.
She burned the clothes she had worn to the Drain site and changed into yesterday’s outfit. As the fabric burned down to cinders, she walked out of the woods, branches scratching her neck and ears and shoulders, underbrush grazing her ankles. She shook the dust from her hair, then braided it tightly. When she looked at her reflection in the dark screen of her phone—turned off since the night before—she couldn’t help but feel like all her efforts to look normal had been wasted. She looked crazed, her eyes too wide, her jaw bulging with tension. Matt would know something had happened. It didn’t matter.
Sloane set her GPS to take her to the monument site in the Loop and