5. The Chill

Sia’s POV

I winced. It was a small drop, but it felt like being slapped by a calculator.

“Here are my rules,” Skyler said, and his voice was perfectly even. “You stay where I can see you. You don’t go anywhere without telling me. And when it comes to the cure, you don’t keep anything back. Not one detail.”

“Deal.” I nodded.

“I didn’t ask.”

He got up and went back to the front of the truck.

I let out a breath, and the text flickered again.

[Note: the target’s affection is influenced by how the host treats the people he cares about.]

Oh.

I looked around the truck. Nora, glued to the window. Lena, arms crossed, glaring at nothing. Jun, still wiping his hands. Marcus, whose eyes met mine in the rearview mirror for exactly one second before he looked away. These weren’t just the people who wanted me dead. They were his people. If I wanted his number to climb out of the hole it was in, I would have to get theirs up too.

So, the plan. It was simple, as long as I didn’t think about it too hard.

One: get to Halden Island, because that was where the cure was, and the cure was the only thing keeping Skyler in the same room as me.

Two: stay alive for thirty days.

Three: drag that number out of a hole so deep it needed a rope.

Four, which I had just discovered: do the same for every person he cared about.

Nobody had promised it would be easy. The system hadn’t even promised it would be fair.

Nobody said a word to me after that, so I took out the diary and flipped to a page I hadn’t reached yet, close to the back, where the handwriting had gotten smaller and more cramped.

[The cold came again today. In the corridor, just before the elevator cable snapped. I pulled the intern back by his collar and told everyone I’d heard a noise. He thanked me. I felt like a thief.]

[It’s always right. I don’t know why I have it, or what it’s for. I only know that it started the winter my mother died, and it has never once been wrong.]

[I don’t tell anyone. Who would believe me? They already think I’m a liar.]

I read it twice. Then I closed the book and pressed it against my chest, the way she must have done every night.

The cold on the back of my neck. The warning in my spine. I had thought it was mine, something the apocalypse had handed me because I’d needed it.

It wasn’t. It had been hers all along.

The truck rattled north through the afternoon, and I put what I knew together the way I’d have laid out a report.

The apocalypse.

It started four months ago, with an explosion in the East District lab. Nobody ever learned what had been inside it, not in three hundred chapters. The author had left that hole wide open, and the comment section had fought over it for months. A weapon, a failed experiment, something dug out of the ground. Nobody knew. What mattered was what came out of the fire, a pale, thin gas that crept through the city and settled into people.

Anyone it settled into changed within hours. Some of them could set a street alight. Some could call water out of the pipes, or crack the ground open, or throw the wind around like a fist. Fire, water, earth, wind. They called them the Four, and they all worked the same way. The longer you carried it, the stronger you got. On the third day, the power burned right through the body that held it.

Then the gas let go. It left the corpse and drifted toward the next person it liked, and the book had hinted that it liked people who were feeling too much. Grief, rage, terror. That was how it had found Skyler in the end. In the original ending, he strangled the villainess in her pink bedroom, the very girl whose body I was wearing now, and the hatred and grief pouring through him pulled the gas straight into his lungs.

So the rules were simple, and they were awful. If you caught it, you had three days to live. If you didn’t, you had to stay away from the ones who had, and stay calm enough that the gas wouldn’t want you.

I looked at the back of Skyler’s head and wondered if he knew that last part.

I had a feeling he did.

We stopped for the night in the shell of an old tram depot, with the truck backed against the wall and a small fire burning in a steel drum. Everyone ate in tired silence, in neat little circles that didn’t include me.

I didn’t sleep that night either.

I sat by the dying fire with the diary in my lap and my face in my hands, and somewhere between one bad thought and the next, I must have dozed off.

A low murmur pulled me halfway back. I didn’t open my eyes. On the other side of the drum, two people were talking near the truck, and a screen was glowing, because I could see a faint cold light through my eyelids.

“Skyler.” Eli was whispering. “You need to see this.”

Boots sounded on concrete. Then a pause. “What am I looking at?”

“The wind-type. It isn’t wandering anymore.” A small tap on glass. “It’s moving in a straight line. Toward us. Something’s pulling it, and I’ve never seen one do that.”

“How long?”

“At this speed, about ten hours.” Eli swallowed, loud enough that I heard it. “It’ll still have a full day left to burn.”

Silence. I kept my breathing slow and even.

“Don’t wake the others,” Skyler said at last, low and level. “We leave at four.”

Ten hours.

I let the number settle without moving a muscle. It was bad, but it was a bad I could measure. A head start, a road, a plan. According to Eli’s screen, the danger was a red dot on a map, ten hours away.

Then the chill touched the back of my neck.

Not a fingertip this time. A whole palm, flat and freezing, pressed against my spine. It wasn’t ten hours away. It wasn’t on any map. It was so close that if I had turned my head, I could have breathed on it.

I kept my eyes shut and my heart tried to climb out through my throat.

Whatever it was, it wasn’t the red dot on Eli’s tablet.