“Okay, okay!” I say, exasperated. He takes my arm and runs with me down the hallway, stepping over the hallucinating, squirming, beautiful youth of Neia, even stepping on them when they crowd the floors too thickly. Upstairs, Hex, Wilbert, and Vera wait for us by the door, exhausted but happy. They take one glance at Cy’s face and the knife and immediately drop their smiles.
“I guess that means we really have to go, huh?” Vera sulks.
“They know we’re here,” Cy says, and in a second we’re out the door and galloping for the char. We run as fast as we can. At the char, Wilbert knocks his silver buttons askew getting into the backseat. Magically, his extra head pops into view.
“Welcome back.” Hex pats his extra head a little too roughly. Wilbert responds by rolling down the window and puking onto the street.
“What the hell is going on?” I yell.
“This was a mistake, is what.” Cy sinks the blade into a sheath tied to his right thigh, which I never noticed until now. I start up the char and drive down the deserted side streets. Cy keeps checking the mirrors.
“Drive faster,” he orders. I respond by stamping my foot on the accelerator and blasting down a back alley.
“Who was it?” Hex asks. When Cy doesn’t answer, Hex snorts. “Oh. Him. Well, it was time to leave anyway . . .”
“What is up with you and Micah?” I ask. I want to defend him, to say that he’s trying to help Dyl, but the less I say, the better.
Suddenly, the char gets deathly silent. Everyone stares out the windows as if I didn’t ask the question. I guess I’ll have to get my answers another time.
Soon, it’s clear we aren’t being followed. Vera waves off the tension and leans over to me.
“So. Did you have a good time?”
I widen my eyes. “We just ran away from a club with him”—I throw my head in Cy’s direction—“flashing that Masters of the Universe cutlery and you want to know if I had a good time?”
“Well . . . yeah.” As if Vera does this every weekend. “I want all the illegal details,” she says. “Speaking of illegal, you’ll never guess how many guys—”
“I REALLY don’t want to know!” I say, plugging an ear with one hand and driving with the other.
“In any case, I’d call this a successful night.” She beams. And then, for no apparent reason, she holds her breath in and puckers her lips, like a kid on the verge of a tantrum. It’s so odd that I jerk myself out of my anxiety-filled funk for a second.
“What are you doing?” I ask her. “I thought I was the only person with breathing problems.”
“I need more carbon dioxide when my skin is covered up,” she explains, shrugging. “I’m gonna have a massive hyperoxia headache tomorrow. My chloroplasts are cramping.”
“Sounds like female issues,” Hex snorts from the back.
“Everybody shut up. I told you to drive faster,” Cy orders from behind me.
“Fine!” I rev the engine afresh, and the char thrusts ahead with a roar. The speed is therapeutic, but does nothing to erase the memory of two very different kisses and the phantom vision of Dyl.
I glance at Cy, who’s touching his lips as if they were sore. He sees me watching him, and pointedly turns away. I turn a sharp corner and Wilbert opens the window for a second puke-fest.
I’m so ready for this night to be over. Not that it matters. Some parts of it have been stitched into my soul.
CHAPTER 14
THE NEXT MORNING, I WAKE UP STILL wearing my club clothes. I stink of stale chemicals and cigarette smoke.
My head throbs with a distinctive shade of pain I only get after oxygen deprivation. A hypoxia headache, thanks to my spell of breathlessness in Argent’s Alucinari Room. I wonder if the rest of the crew feels like this, a can of condensed awfulness. I unclasp the necklace from my neck, stretching my chest to its max with a deep inhalation. If only I could exhale all the ugliness of last night. The confusion of meeting Micah, the pain of seeing Dyl, the torture of not getting her back.
I’ve got a week to try to find what Micah is looking for. I switch on Dyl’s holo, listening to the poem again, letting her voice soothe me. And then I search her diary for mentions of traits, but there’s nothing. Like me, she’s in the dark. Unlike me, she’s being slowly killed for it.
I do a secondary search within her diary for Dad. At first, there’s nothing substantial. But then there’s this. She’s reading a different poem, when she stops.
“I wish Zel would read this one. I wanted to show her, but there’s no point. Dad says she doesn’t like poetry anymore.” She huffs dismissively. “Sucks.”
I pause the diary, shocked. Dad told me to stop obsessing over poetry to focus on cell bio classes four years ago, so I could work in the lab more. I never stopped loving poetry. I only stopped reading it because he wanted me to. I always thought Dad knew me so well.
Now I’m wondering if he knew me at all.
All those years, he guided my education, my likes and dislikes. And for what? So Dyl could have nothing in common with me?
My search leads me back to the original poem. I close my eyes, listening.
Remember the mind.
Let it shift and move like water,
First to understand
Then to turn with ease
The boulders of the earth.
Boulders. Right. I have to do the impossible. Dad always emphasized my weak and flawed body, my Ondine’s curse. But I have this brain. I’ve got to make impossible things happen. My skills in the lab were a gift that he nurtured and subsequently told me to dump. But right now, there’s no way I’m giving them up.
I have a week. I’ll get her out of there; I have to believe it, because I cannot consider the horror of other possibilities.
After a quick shower, I walk as fast as my throbbing head will allow. The common room and kitchen are empty. I don’t want to be alone this morning, not with Marka gone and Ana wandering the darker hallways of Carus.
I run through the selections on the efferent and order a huge pot of strong, black coffee and half a dozen pieces of dry toast. Some headache patches would be nice.
“Cy?” I call. At first, I’m rewarded with silence, but after a minute his gravelly voice enters the kitchen.
“What?”
“Can you . . . please . . . get some headache patches from the medic room and bring them down to breakfast? Enough for everyone?”
Cy grunts in reply. I can’t believe he didn’t cuss me out. Then again, maybe he’s still sleeping and not really listening.
I bring the coffee, toast, jam, and sunseed butter into the common room and lay out creamer and agave sugar. Might as well make enough for everyone, I figure. I put my hands on my hips and call out loudly.
“Wilbert, Vera, Hex, Cy—there’s hot coffee and toast in the common room.”
Cy walks in as I say this, rumpled and gorgeous in what must be his pajamas. A loose white T-shirt hangs off his angled shoulders and a pair of drawstring pants barely hang on to his hips. Yesterday’s tattoo mask is completely gone and his skin is uninked as yet. His face looks softer, kinder. I watch him toss several medicine-infused patches onto the table, then peel one for myself and place it on my neck as he grabs the coffee decanter.
“And there’s headache medicine too,” I add loudly to everyone.
“By god, you’re good,” Hex mumbles from his room.
Within minutes, Vera, Wilbert, and Hex all shuffle in. Vera collapses into a chair at the table and immediately puts her head down. I place a patch in her open palm, and without lifting her head, she slaps it onto the side of her neck. Her index finger lifts, as if it’s the last effort she can manage.