Chapter 7- What Joss Wanted

The silence after the siren was worse than the noise had been, because it left room for every terrible thing to be heard.

Water dripped from the vaulted ceiling of the cistern in slow, patient beats, and beneath that sound Emilia could hear Daniel breathing through his teeth with the barrel of Joss's rifle resting against his temple.

His pistol hung forgotten in his hand. She had never once seen him afraid in all the years she had known him, and she saw it now, plain as a stain across his face.

Joss tilted her head the way she used to when she was about to tell a secret at a party. She said she was sorry about the dramatic entrance, but she had waited so long to have this conversation that she could not bear to rush it.

Kaelen shifted his weight on the ledge, and Emilia felt the tension coiling through him like a drawn wire. She laid two fingers against his sleeve to hold him still, because every instinct she had said that one wrong movement would end with Daniel dead and the answers she needed dead along with him.

She asked Joss what she wanted.

Joss laughed softly, and the sound rolled across the black water like a bell rung underwater. She said it was funny how people always asked that question as though the answer were small, when the answer had never been anything but enormous. Then she told them, in that same warm and gentle voice she had once used to console Emilia after a bad day at work, that she had never regressed at all.

Emilia felt the floor tilt beneath her. Kaelen went rigid, and across the water Daniel closed his eyes as if the words were a blow he had expected for a long time.

Joss explained it plainly, the way a teacher explains a lesson to a slow class.

She said that she had no system and no second chances, because she had never needed them. She had spent three years before the Red Event working inside the same hidden project that Commander Voss now commanded, and in that time she had learned what the sky was really made of and what it was meant to do.

The red dust was never a plague, she said, but a door, and every regression since had been a consequence of what lay on the other side of it.

Emilia asked her what any of that had to do with Daniel and Kaelen, and Joss smiled at her as though she had finally asked the right question.

She said that every regressor in the world woke up for exactly one reason, and the reason was Emilia.

Each time Emilia died, the door opened a little wider and pulled a few people back with her, those who had loved her or hated her or simply watched her die with enough feeling to be caught in the pull.

Kaelen had been drawn back by his guilt, and Daniel by something Joss did not bother to name. The system that glowed in Emilia's mind was not a gift, she added, but a leash.

Emilia stood very still and let the truth settle over her like cold water.

She thought of the blue panel and the helpful warnings and the careful countdown, and she thought of how gently it had guided her through the first hours of her second life, steering her toward the observatory as though it had always known where she would end up.

She asked why Joss had needed her dead in the first life, if she mattered so much.

Joss's expression softened into something almost tender, and that was the most frightening thing she had done yet.

She said that she had never wanted Emilia dead, only broken. A person who dies with a vow in her heart makes the door open faster, and a vow of vengeance was the strongest fuel of all. Every betrayal Joss had arranged had been a careful gift, designed to teach Emilia exactly how much she could survive.

Daniel opened his eyes, and Emilia saw the horror in them, because for the first time he understood that he had never been the architect of anything. He had been a tool in a hand that smiled at him over breakfast, and Joss was already pressing the rifle harder against his skull.

Kaelen spoke at last, his voice low and rough. He asked what Joss wanted from Emilia now that the door was open.

Joss looked at him with polite surprise, as though a piece of furniture had spoken. She said that the door could be closed or it could be held open forever, and that whoever controlled the one who had opened it would control what came through. She said she was offering Emilia a place beside her in the new world, and that all Emilia had to do was walk across the ledge and take her hand.

Emilia looked at the hand that had once braided her hair, and she almost laughed. She told Joss that she would rather feed herself to the Hollows, and Joss sighed as if that were the answer she had expected and the only one she had prepared for.

She pulled the trigger.

The rifle cracked like thunder inside the stone chamber, and Emilia screamed before she could stop herself, because Daniel jerked and fell forward onto his knees at the edge of the water. But there was no blood.

Joss had fired into the ceiling, and dust and fragments of rock rained down onto the black surface of the cistern with a patter like rain.

The echo rolled through the tunnels beyond, and from every direction the clicking began.

Joss smiled and stepped back into the shadows of the tunnel mouth.

She said that she had always known Emilia would refuse, and that the Hollows would convince her faster than words ever could. Then her footsteps faded away up the passage, calm and unhurried, and Daniel was left on his knees at the edge of the water with his face turned toward the arched entrance as the first pale shapes shuffled into the cistern.

Emilia raised her crowbar, and Kaelen drew his knife, and they stood shoulder to shoulder on the narrow ledge as the horde spilled around the walls toward them.

Then every single Hollow stopped.

They stood motionless in a ring along the rim of the cistern, hundreds of gray faces turned toward the ledge, and then, one after another, they lowered their heads and sank onto their knees in the dark. They were not looking at Kaelen or at Daniel. They were looking at Emilia, and the blue panel in her mind flickered open with a single line of trembling text. Unknown entity recognizes its key.