Dying Light (33 page)

“
Yes.”

“
Thought so. Let’s suit
you up then.” She takes my arm and leads me toward an armored truck
parked on the curb ahead.

Jesse

“G
od why did you have to bring Winston?” I ask. The pug snorts
in my arms, growing heavy. Frankly, I’m tired of him being in
danger.

“
I was holding him when
Caldwell took me,” Rachel says. “Be grateful I carried his fat ass
this long. I could’ve dropped him at any time.”

My arms are killing me, and Winston
makes it worse by squirming. We turn three corners and find
ourselves in another large room much like the one we left. The
ceiling stretches dome-like high overhead. Columns line the walls,
but there’s nothing to hide behind and no exit signs.

“
Hey, stop. Ow. Come on.”
I have to set him down or I’ll drop him. What happens is a mixture
of both. Winston hits the ground running.

“
What the hell?” I run
after him.

“
No Jessup, wait.
Christ.”

I can hear Rachel running after me,
the heels of her boots slapping against the marble as I frantically
try to catch up to Winston. His feet slide on the slick floor, yet
he manages to stay in the lead.

The cathedral trembles,
and again, I’m reminded of Liza being murdered in the other room. I
see Cindy falling down dead and my chest aches.
What could you do? I tell myself. You can’t shield her. You
couldn’t have carried her away.

Excuses, excuses
a voice says—a voice from somewhere deep inside
me.

Winston whips around another corner
and slides to stop at the feet of a girl, clutching her
backpack.

“
Hey,” I say. “What the
hell are you doing here?”

“
Enjoying the last hour of
my life,” Maisie says, scooping up the dog and pulling him into her
lap. Winston jumps all over her, licking her face
wildly.

“
You again, huh?” Rachel
snorts. “I never properly introduced myself. I’m
Rachel.”

“
Maisie,’’ she
replies.

“
Have you seen a door
around by chance, Maisie?” Rachel asks, saccharin sweet.

“
There are no doors,”
Maisie says, matter-of-factly.

“
No doors,” Rachel and I
cry in unison.

Maisie shrugs. “He renovated the
church to have no doors. He doesn’t want anyone coming in or out
without his say so.”

“
Fucking control freak.”
Rachel crosses her arms over her chest.

I’m not surprised. After seeing his
underground room and The Needle, I believe Caldwell would build a
whole world without doors if he could. Of course, we’d all starve
to death in such a world, and then who would he get to
torture?

Georgia steps from the shadows behind
Maisie and my breath hitches in my throat.

“
Maisie,” she says calmly.
“Take the puppy and scoot, my love.”

Maisie hesitates.

My shield is up again. “Get behind
me,” I tell Rachel.

Rachel doesn’t have to be told twice.
Maisie, on the other hand, still hasn’t moved.

“
You’re up and running
quick,” I tell her. “Shouldn’t you still be dead?”

“
We can’t waste time. We
have to save the world,” Georgia says. “It’s our responsibility to
make it a better place for our children. I might die, but Maisie
and I will be together forever.”

Maisie gets to her feet, holding
Winston to her chest. She slides to the opposite wall, slightly
behind her mother, farther away from me.

“
We don’t want to fight,”
I tell Georgia.

Georgia’s black ribbons of death
unfurl, stretching out into the room. “It’s too late for
that.”

Ally

“
O
ur intelligence says that he’s collected all the partis,”
Nikki says. “We’ve been monitoring all of them, with the exception
of Rachel, who we couldn’t find. They’ve all disappeared within the
last hour.”

I fake surprise, as if I didn’t know
the partis were disappearing.

“
Rachel is here too. She
was with us when we saved Jesse.” I don’t mention Gideon or how
they are able to move around the city undetected.

“
If he’s taken all of the
partis to the church, he must be trying to finish this now,” Nikki
says.

“
Finish what?” I ask. I
think I know the answer, but I want Nikki to explain. Maybe she
knows something I don’t.

“
I only know what Jeremiah
has told me.” She glances over to make sure I’m looking at her. “He
has dreams. He calls them revelations.”

“
Like biblical
revelations?”

“
He’s not religious,”
she’s quick to add. “But he says the clarity and the way they
repeat over and over again make them more than dreams.”

I understand what she means. Dreams
are vague and incoherent. Once I dreamt I was being chased by a
spider through the house, and so I put a coat on the couch, knowing
the spider would think I was the coat and fail to see me sneak out
and take a plane to Lincoln, Nebraska, of all places, which in my
dream was a place that spiders didn’t go. Only the Lincoln in my
dream was more like Hawaii, with fire dancers and pineapple
drinks.

The cathedral comes into
view at long last, and Nikki parks the armored truck on the curb. I
hop out of the truck, scraping my back on the way
down
, it’s so high up.
Nikki opens the back and lets her people out.

“
Once around for possible
entrances, then report here,” she says. “I want to know about every
door, every window, every latch or keyhole. Move.”

They disperse and Nikki gives me a
heavy look. “Will you take a gun if I give it to you?”

“
I don’t need a
gun.”

She huffs. “Stay behind my left
side.”

I let her take the lead and follow her
around the church. We see the windows on the uppermost part of the
dome, more decorative than functional.

She lowers her gun as we come around
to the place where we started at the corner of State Street. “Shit.
He did it to this church too.”

I run my hands over the smooth façade.
“No doors.”

“
All right,” she says,
slinging her gun over her shoulder. “Plan B.”

Jesse

G
eorgia steps forward. I step back.

“
At first, I believed it
was because you were his daughter,” she says with a shrug.
“Understandable. He may not be the most loving man, but he does
care.”

I snort. “About Me, Myself, and
I.”

“
Then I saw the way he
treated you. The way he seemed to delight in your misery. I thought
perhaps it was because he still harbors a great deal of hate for
your mother. Even killing her did not make him feel any better
about her betrayal.”

Her betrayal—which one? Calling the
police on him? Having him carted off to the camps? Or marrying
another man while he was locked away?

“
I thought he saw her in
you,” she says quietly, taking another step forward as I take
another step back. One of the black ribbons tries to squeeze past
me and get at Rachel, but I shift and it hisses and crackles
against my shield like oil on a hot pan.

“
I’m sorry, ribbon dancer,
but where are you going with this?”

Her cheeks burn red and the black
ribbons darken more.

“
Uh, that can’t be good,”
Rachel murmurs in my ear.

“
He does see your mother
when he looks at you, but it’s more than that.”

Another snap of the black ribbon
reminds me a great deal of a large black snake, head reared and
striking. My shield shimmers, deflecting a second and third
blow.

“
You remind him that he
was once human,” she says. “When he sees you, he sees his own
flaws. The imperfections. He begins to doubt his cause.”

“
It would be hard not to
doubt yourself in the face of such awesomeness,” I say, and gesture
to myself. “I mean, just look at me.”

Rachel swallows a giggle behind
me.

Georgia doesn’t laugh. No surprise.
Few people get me.

“
I don’t know what kind of
weird thing you’ve got going on with Caldwell. Clearly you guys
made some kind of emotional connection while being tortured, but
what I don’t get is why you’re with him now.”

“
I love him.”

“
Weird,” Rachel and I say
in unison.

“
He wants to kill you, and
your kid. Isn’t that a good enough reason to leave his ass?” I hope
she can hear my super judgy tone.

“
I am grateful for every
minute of every hour that I was allowed to be Maisie’s mother,” she
says. “But our lives are not our own. This cause—our purpose—is so
much bigger than us.”

Georgia looks at Maisie, and something
is exchanged between them. Some kind of sad acceptance.

“
Dumb,” I say. “You sound
like cult victims.”

Georgia is about to whirl around and
lay into me, no doubt, but Rachel steps around me and shoves
Georgia against the wall. Not with her hands but with her
telekinetic thing. She shoves Georgia up into the ceiling, and
Georgia is howling.

Maisie charges us. My only warning is
Winston’s yelp and the sound of his nails scuttling on the
marble.

I get between Maisie and Rachel before
Maisie can tackle her.

“
No,” Maisie wails. “Stop.
You’re hurting her.”

“
You realize she’s going
to drown you in a tub like an unwanted kitten, right?” I say,
knocking her back easily.

Tears stream down her
face. “I don’t care. She’s my mom. Stop.
Stop
, you’re hurting
her.”

Her desperate screams tear me in half.
Dammit.

“
Rach,” I say. “You can’t
kill her mom in front of her.”

“
We’re doing her a favor.
She just doesn’t know it.”

“
Nor will she,” Caldwell
says, appearing behind Rachel.

In one fluid movement, he grabs her
and hurls her across the great antechamber.

Rachel’s body slams
against a massive column and a sickening crack rings off the walls.
A second
thwap
resounds as Georgia hits the ground, screaming out as her leg
juts bizarrely from underneath her. The angle is all
wrong.

My stomach turns.

After inspecting Georgia, Caldwell
turns on me with wild eyes. “You’ll pay for that.”

Jesse

R
achel’s body lies motionless at the foot of the
column.

I’m on fire.

The rage rolls along my skin again and
again, and all I want to do is see Caldwell bleed. I can’t think or
consider my next move. I just want to put my hands on
him.

“
Oh you’re so upset about
her fucking leg, but I can be murdered and you’re all,
meh
.” I shrug.
“
Meh
.”

I see red and lunge, but Caldwell
disappears and I’m left connecting with the marble. The impact jars
my knees and wrists, sharp pains shooting up my arms and into my
neck. I realize my shield is down, and I’m about to erect it, but a
foot connects with my ribs.

Blinding white pain erupts through me.
I swear I feel one of my ribs crack. Every breath hurts. Every
inhale is sharp and murderous.

“
You don’t know how hard I
worked for this,” Caldwell says, laughing. “I kept pushing you,
threatening you, but no matter what, you would never fully rise to
the occasion. I showed you my new family, my
better
family, and still you didn’t
hate me. I tried to complicate the bitterness with mock affection.
I killed your handler and turned your boyfriend against you. None
of it filled your heart with the hate I so desperately needed. I
thought I was going to have to kill your little bitch,” Caldwell
sneers.

“
You’re never going to lay
another finger on her,” I say. “By the end of the day, you won’t
fucking have fingers.”

I shoot a fire bomb. It bursts forth
from me, and I consider my actions afterward, as I see Maisie
clutching Winston, peeking her head out from behind a
column.

“
Stay back there,” I tell
her. “And what do you mean you turned my boyfriend against
me?”

“
Oh, did you think he
actually loved you for you?” he asks with a snort of derision. “The
moment I knew where Brinkley intended to house you, from whom he
intended to rent the office space, I capitalized on that
opportunity. I saw the way you looked at him. Waste not, want not.
And since I’ve stopped whispering orders in his ear, he’s stopped
calling, hasn’t he?”