3. Where the Cure Is

Sia’s POV

His hand stopped.

For a few heartbeats we stayed like that, his fingers an inch from my throat, the diary crushed against my ribs. I could feel the heat of his palm.

“What did you say?” Skyler’s voice was low and rough, like he hadn’t used it in days.

“I know how to end it. The infection, the gas, all of it. I know where to—”

Boots pounded up the corridor.

“Skyler!” A woman’s voice, sharp and out of breath. “We’ve been calling your radio for ten minutes!”

Five people crowded into the doorway. A big man with a rifle across his chest. A thin one in glasses, carrying a medic’s bag. A kid in headphones who couldn’t have been past seventeen. A tall woman with a perfect ponytail and a face like she’d smelled something off. And in front of them, a short woman with cropped black hair and swollen red eyes, who stopped dead when she saw me.

The thin man spoke first, quietly. “We finished the east wing. Dug through it twice. Mia isn’t there.”

“No body,” the big man said. “Nothing.”

Then the short woman moved. Her hand came out of her jacket with a gun in it, and it was shaking.

“Nora, wait,” the thin man said.

She didn’t. She crossed the room in three steps with the gun up, and I did something I hadn’t known I could do.

I stepped off the line.

It was a self-defense class from college that I’d mostly attended for the free pizza afterward. Don’t stand where the barrel points. I slid left, slapped her wrist upward with the heel of my hand, and the gun went off into the ceiling with a crack that made everyone flinch. Plaster rained down on all of us. The borrowed body was slower than I wanted, but it was light, and it listened.

By the time Nora looked down at her own hand, I was already out of reach, the diary still hugged against me.

“Since when can you do that?” the tall woman said. She sounded almost offended.

I didn’t answer. Nora came at me again.

“She killed Mia,” Nora screamed, and her voice cracked down the middle. “She killed her, Skyler!”

“Everybody in this room knows what she did,” the tall woman said. “You saw the footage. And you just stood there?”

The name hit him. I felt it from across the room. His shoulders locked, and the hostility coming off him was so hot I could have warmed my hands on it. It wasn’t aimed at them. It was aimed at me, dead on.

“Enough.”

He didn’t shout it. He stepped between me and Nora, and the room went quiet.

“She says she knows where the cure is,” he said slowly, like every word cost him something.

Nobody spoke.

Then the kid in the headphones laughed. “She says what?”

“That’s the only reason she’s still standing.”

“Of course she says that,” the tall woman scoffed. “She’s had a gun in her face. People will say anything to save their necks.”

Fair, honestly. Every one of them had already decided what I was. I could see it on their faces, plain as weather.

And I knew this room. Not the pink one. A conference room on the fourteenth floor, years ago, where my boss asked who had signed off on a disaster he’d ignored my warning about, and every coworker I’d ever covered for suddenly found their coffee fascinating. That was the day I learned that when a room has made up its mind, begging does nothing. Facts do, if you say them flat.

I stepped out from behind his shoulder.

“I’m not faking it. If I were lying to save my neck, I’d have picked something easier to check.”

“Then prove it,” the tall woman said.

My mind went straight to the book. The last stretch, when the research team was running out of everything. Chapter two hundred and ninety-eight, a throwaway line I’d once yelled at my phone about, one of those loose threads readers fought over in the comments for months.

“Halden Island,” I said. “Off the northern coast. There’s an old weather station on the north shore with a sealed cold vault underneath it. The ingredient you’re missing isn’t in any lab in this city. It’s down there.”

Silence.

“We’ve been hunting for that ingredient since the explosion,” the thin man said faintly. He had gone pale. “Four months. Nobody ever mentioned an island.”

The kid’s mouth hung open. Even Nora had lowered her head a little, like she’d been handed a joke she didn’t get. And Skyler turned around and stared at me as though I’d just walked out of a wall.

He didn’t ask how I knew. Somehow that was more unsettling than if he had.

I didn’t offer, either. “If you want this apocalypse to end, you have to work with me.”

The pause went on a long time. The big man scrubbed a hand over his face. The tall woman glared at the ceiling. The thin man looked at Nora, and Nora looked at the kid, and a tired, hopeless look went around the room, the look of people who have just realized the thing they were sure they were rid of is going to be hanging around.

“Fine,” Skyler said.

“Skyler—” the tall woman started.

He looked at her. She shut her mouth.

I might have enjoyed that more if something hadn’t touched the back of my neck.

Cold.

Not a draft, because the windows were shut and the room was warm. It was thin and slow, like a fingertip dragged down my spine, and it came with a feeling I’d never had before.

Something was coming. I didn’t know what, and I didn’t know how I knew. But the chilling cold was climbing past my shoulders, and it was coming from above.

“Get out.” An instinctive command tore from my throat.

But nobody moved.

“Everyone. Out of the building. Now!”

The big man snorted. “Don’t get cocky just because we haven’t shot you.”

“Oh, of course,” the tall woman drawled. “The princess doesn’t want her peasants standing around in her precious bedroom.”

“I’m serious!” The cold had its teeth in me now. “Please. Run!”

Then the sky screamed.

It was a high, thin shriek that kept going until my teeth hurt, and every window in the room buzzed in its frame.

“Damn it,” the kid whispered.

After that, nobody argued.

We ran. I remember it in pieces. Boots on the stairs. The big man hauling Nora along by her collar. Skyler catching my wrist at the second landing and pulling me down the rest three steps at a time, while I jammed the diary under my arm and hung on.

We burst out into the street, and Skyler let go of me to shove Nora ahead of him. The tall woman was last, and she stopped on the front steps to look back with that sneer still on her face. The cold in my spine spiked so hard it made me dizzy. I grabbed her sleeve and yanked, and a slab of the front wall came down exactly where she’d been standing.

The blast of air threw the big man face first onto the pavement.

I looked up. On the roof, a figure was crouched inside a howling knot of wind, its outline blurred and wrong.

The top floor shook. Then the wall of the room I’d woken up in folded inward and came down in a roar of brick and glass and pink wallpaper, and a cloud of white dust rolled across the street and over our shoes.

It went quiet.

The big man pushed himself up, gray from hair to boots, and for once he didn’t snort. The tall woman was on her knees at the curb with her hand over her mouth, her ponytail come loose and the sneer gone.

“You’re welcome,” I said, brushing plaster dust off my sleeve. “Princess’s orders.”

The tall woman opened her mouth, and for once nothing came out. Her eyes slid to the slab of wall lying where she’d been standing. The big man stared very hard at his wrecked boots. The kid choked on a laugh and turned it into a cough.

Nobody was looking at the rubble anymore. They were all looking at me as if I’d just performed a tough miracle.

“She wasn’t like this yesterday,” Jun muttered, so low I almost missed it.

Nobody argued.