Dying Light (23 page)

I close my laptop and slip
out of the apartment. The elevator is empty and the halls quiet.
Either everyone is out of missions, or catching some sleep. On the
64
^th
floor, I step off the elevator and walk to the end of the
hall. I stop just before a large metal door but don’t knock. The
camera twists down to look at me. Its large robotic eye dilates,
taking me in.

I wave and some mechanism in the door
clicks.

I push it open and step into the
control room. It’s big and airy in here, a lot of space to move
around. The monitoring stations are pushed to the far walls,
leaving a large space between the computers. This setup is
essential, given the traffic that comes through this room on any
given day.

Despite the volume of
bodies the room is used to, Nikki wasn’t lying when she said the
crew was minimal. Apart from Nikki, I count only five other heads,
each watching their own cluster of screens
.
I walk up behind her and place one
hand on the small of her back. I count her vertebrae, making it to
six before she turns and wraps her arms around my waist.

She places a kiss on my neck, and I
feel myself go soft inside.

“
How’s everything?” My
voice is a little deeper than usual.

“
It’s dying down. It was
chaos an hour ago, but that’s passed. Everyone is fine as long as
they know what they’re supposed to be doing.”

I picture them, Jeremiah’s tactical
units, small teams like the one I joined in Nashville, where I met
Nikki. They’re out there now, looking for the missing or injured
people created by Caldwell’s relentless search for
power.

“
Have you learned anything
else?” I ask, hopeful as I clasp my hands behind her
back.

“
She’s in The Needle with
Maisie, Caldwell’s wife Georgia, and probably Caldwell
himself—seeing as we can’t clock him on any of the other cams right
now.”

One big happy family.
Jesse must be losing her mind.

“
He’s manipulating
her.”

“
It’s pretty easy to see
that’s her soft spot. Family and
you
.” Nikki takes another step
toward me. “I don’t blame her.”

“
You wouldn’t risk
everything to save me.”

She wraps her arms around me again.
“That’s where you’re wrong.”

As soon as she says it, I know what’s
coming. My heart speeds up, afraid.

“
I love you,
Al.”

“
No.”

Nikki laughs, a terse little snort.
“No?”

“
We’ve only been dating
for a couple of months.”

“
I’ve been in love with
you since I first saw you, a year ago. You’re all I think about.
When I picture the future, the
after
of all this, I picture you. A
cabin in the woods somewhere. Two huge dogs and maybe a kid,
because I know you want one. But only if it’s cute and has this
little button nose.”

She reaches up and brushes the end of
my nose with the tip of her finger.

“
You don’t know enough
about me to know if you love me.”

She tilts her head, a hint of a smile
tugging at the corners of her mouth. “I know you’re unfailingly
kind. Considerate. You look out for people and put them first.
You’re fair, with a good sense of justice. You take things
seriously and care about the work you do.”

Too seriously, Jesse would say. I take
myself too seriously.

“
You’re smart and
resourceful, not to mention hot as hell. That alone is enough to
spend the rest of my life with you.”

The rest of my life with
you.

I stumble back and hit the control
panel. The screens go fuzzy for a moment until Nikki pulls me up
and touches a few buttons.

“
I’m not proposing.” Nikki
laughs. “Breathe.”

“
I—”

I
what? I don’t know what I want to say. Not, I love you too.
Certainly not that.

What can I say instead?
Something about
after
?

When I think of
after
I think of Jesse.
Always Jesse. I’ve been by her side since we were eleven. At
ninety, I want to look over and still see her there. Frankly, I
think Jesse will be a
hilarious
old woman.

Nikki reaches up and tucks my hair
behind my ears. “Are you okay?”

“
Yes,” I manage to say. I
release a short laugh. “You just surprised me. I didn’t realize
this is what you called me up here for.”

“
I called you up for a
kiss actually.” She flashes another sweet smile. “I was hoping to
squeeze one in.”

She leans in for the kiss but I step
back. I can’t kiss her right now. I need to think about this. Then
I remember something. “You never told me there were cameras in our
rooms. I walk around naked.”

She smiles again, though this time
it’s strained. I think she’s expecting the lecture that is sure to
follow. “I love that about you.”

“
Maybe I don’t want
whoever the hell is working the controls to see me
naked.”

“
We don’t record the
apartments. And the chance that someone was staring into the room
the moment you went to the kitchen to get some juice is really
low.”

A thought occurs to me. “Are you the
one who installed the cameras?”

It was her apartment long before I
moved in. When we came to Chicago, to Jeremiah’s headquarters, I
assumed that I would get my own room. I assumed that if they
couldn’t accommodate that request, I’d be fine sharing with Jesse.
We share beds so often that it would hardly put me out unless the
bed itself was twin. Jesse thrashes in her sleep
sometimes.

But then Nikki surprised
me.

Stay here with
me
, she said
.
It’s one of the bigger apartments.
There’s
plenty of room. And I like to think of you here, in my bed, even
when I’m away.

It had been very sweet at
the time
.

Another thought surfaces.

“
The man who came to check
the ventilation was not a repairman,” I say. “He was installing the
camera. You installed it after I moved in with you.”

“
Al—”

“
You lied to me. I can
forgive that, if you don’t
keep
lying. Why did you have the camera
installed?”

“
It isn’t what you think.”
Her face grows red. Her eyes slide away from mine and back to the
monitors. She pretends to survey the footage, but I know
better.

“
Then explain it to me,” I
say. “You said I have a good sense of fairness. I’ll understand if
it’s a good reason. Just be honest.”

She doesn’t look away from the screen,
her chest rising in a controlled inhale.

“
I wanted to know if Jesse
ever came to the room,” she says at last.

“
You’re jealous of
Jesse?”

“
Shouldn’t I be?” she
asks. Her voice hardens.

“
We aren’t,” I lower my
voice, “
secret lovers
, if that’s what you’re implying.”

She exhales. “I know.”

“
Because you’ve been
watching me.”

“
I’m the only one who has
seen you naked. I promise.”

“
It’s not that, Nick.” I
bite off my words as my voice rises. A few of the other people
watching the monitors glance my way, but no one moves to do
anything. I drop my voice. “It’s the idea that you didn’t trust
me.”

“
I do trust
you.
”

I fill in her thought. “But not
Jesse.”

She searches my face but doesn’t say
anything.

“
You said you understood
that Jesse and I are a package deal. I won’t sleep with her. I
promised you I wouldn’t do that, but you can’t make me change my
feelings. That’s not how it works.”

Her eyebrows round and her
gaze falls to her hands. “I know. I’m trying. I’m
really
trying. But it’s
hard loving you this much and only getting a little
back.”

Then it isn’t
love
, I think. Because I love Jesse no
matter what. I’d go to the bottom of the ocean to get her, if
that’s where Caldwell put her. And it doesn’t matter if she never
kisses me again, never touches me, never completely quits that
self-centered jerk, Lane. It doesn’t matter, because my feelings
aren’t based on what she does or doesn’t do for me.

“
What are you thinking?”
Nikki asks, a panicked expression on her face.

“
Nothing,” I say. “Is that
all you called me up here for? Because I need you to give me access
to Jesse’s apartment. We want to move her stuff before the building
goes down.”

Nikki punches a few keys. “The door is
unlocked, but before you go, there’s one more thing I need to tell
you.”

A few more punches of the keys change
three monitors. One monitor shows an aerial view of Chicago.
Another couple of punches and the streets and buildings go black
before erupting in an array of colors.

“
Do you see the thermal
reading?” she asks, pointing at one of the screens.

“
Yes.”

“
In the car I told you
that when a partis uses their powers, it emits gamma rays. The
white spots you see are places where gamma rays have been
emitted.”

I see one in the church where Jesse
was being held. The explosion that killed Jeremiah is probably the
source of that gamma burst. I see another in the area where
Gloria’s second hideout apartment was. Not in the apartment itself,
but just outside, like maybe someone was watching us from the
riverbank.

“
Jason?” I ask. “But I
thought the gamma output was only for active powers. After all,
it’s not picking up every time Jesse uses a shield or Caldwell
teleports. Did Jason have an active power?”

“
Not that we knew of,” she
says. “Though I guess Jesse can tell us that now, can’t she? Maybe
she acquired more than healing.”

The more power she
acquires, the less stable she’ll be.

Jesse. Hang in there, baby.

“
We need to get her back,”
I say. “She’s going through—something—and the only person talking
her through it is Caldwell.”

“
I know,” Nikki says.
“We’ll seize the first opportunity we get.”

I search her face for the jealousy,
for the fear. I don’t see it.

“
So there are other partis
in the city.”

“
When we find out more
I’ll tell you. I promise.”

Her face is so sweet and earnest that
I almost forgive her for breaching my privacy. Almost.

“
How’s
Jeremiah?”

“
Alive,”
she says
. “But I’m not
sure how long it’ll be until he’s fully conscious.”

“
I’m going to want to talk
to him. I need to find out what he hasn’t told us.”

Nikki sighs. “I was afraid you’d say
that.”

Jesse

I
fall asleep and Gabriel overtakes my dreams. He is holding me
somewhere high in the sky, above an unknown city I can’t see
because my face is pressed against his suit jacket. But I can hear
his wings beating around me, protecting me from the icy air and
clouds.

My stomach drops as we start to
descend. I swallow a terrified wail.

“
I will never let you
fall.”

“
That’s what they all say,
bud. Then you find someone else’s lacy panties in the bed and a
positive pregnancy test on the sink.”

Gabriel never laughs at my
jokes.

We land. The air rushes up around my
face as his wings stretch out one last time before tucking away out
of sight. Gabriel puts me gently on my feet, and I feel the ground
shift beneath me.

Sand.

I turn and see a house. It is sky blue
with white trim; an A-frame with great big windows and a wooden
sidewalk that leads up to the door. Patches of grass peek through
the sand surrounding it. At the back of the house, there’s the
beach, the roar of gray waves lapping hungrily at the sand. The
other direction—in every other direction I look actually—there’s
only open land. No houses, no civilization, nothing stretching out
to the dense tree line in the distance.

A gull cries overhead.

“
What the hell is this?” I
ask, the wind from the water tearing at my hair.

“
Go inside.” Gabriel
motions toward the house.

The planks echo hollow with each step
as I cross to the door. I press against the worn wood and the door
creaks open on command. A soft light pours over the welcome mat and
weathered porch.

A terror seizes me, as if something
horrible will happen to me if I enter that house.