Sophie’s chest seized; she felt herself begin to hyperventilate. No, no, no, got to stay focused!
“Stop it!” she yelled. “Just stop! You don’t have to be this way! You don’t have to be this—this monster.”
“Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it? Everyone always blames the monster—but no one ever blames the one who created it. Isn’t that right?” He sneered at Moira’s limp form. “Tell me, who is the monster? The creation or the creator? It has to start somewhere.”
“You can’t blame someone else for your own actions,” Sophie said, her eyes slipping to her mom. She’s breathing! Now if I can just keep him talking. The guards below must have heard the shot. Surely they’d come running.
“Oh, fine. Blame whoever you want. While you can. Which isn’t for much longer. Hmm . . . who’s next?” He swung the pistol steadily until it was pointing at Jim, who stood with clenched fists and a scalding glare, but he said nothing.
Sophie looked from the gun to Jim, She and everything he had once been to her—friend, protector, partner in crime— roared through her head, a maelstrom of memories and emotions, as if the last ten years had never happened. But it was different now, the way she felt toward him. He wasn’t just a boy she’d take the blame for when he put grapes in the microwave to watch them explode. He was a boy she’d take a bullet for. The thought struck her like a punch, leaving her breathless, amazed. She reached out and took his hand, stepping closer until they were shoulder to shoulder. She felt him stiffen, then his fingers tightened around hers, and ludicrously perhaps, she felt safe. Calm. Whether this sudden surety flowed from Jim or from their entangled fingers she didn’t know—all she knew was that she would hold his hand no matter what came—bullets or explosions or poison gas—and she never wanted to let go.
If Nicholas’s eyes were burning before, now they raged with reckless abandonment as he stared at Jim and Sophie’s interlocked hands. He was beyond reason. He was burning for revenge and blood. What could you say to someone like that? What words could possibly mend the wrongs he felt had been done to him—especially when she knew that in a dark, twisted way, he was right?
She couldn’t look at him. Couldn’t bear the fury in his eyes, so she looked back at Jim and saw that his angry mask had slipped away and been replaced by horror—he wasn’t looking at Nicholas or the gun pointed at him, but at Lux.
She saw what he saw.
Her heart suspended in midbeat.
“Lux,” Jim said, “don’t you dare. Listen to me! You have to do what I tell you—so don’t you dare.”
THIRTY SEVEN LUX
“Don’t you dare,” he said.
She fought it. The urge to obey was overwhelming, consuming, a roar in her skull. Her finger trembled on the switch. Her brain vomited images of fire and burning and heat and all the things that would unleash if she flicked the switch. She knew the words: bomb, explode, fire, pain. They sent a torrent of images through her head, images so terrible they made her want to claw out her own eyes.
But if I don’t, Nicholas will shoot him.
He’ll die.
She had seconds. Not even seconds—milliseconds. Her mind was a battlefield. She stood still as a statue but
inside she rioted. She raged against the chip, against the endless, infinite stream of numbers, the ones and the zeroes that began and ended every thought, that burned on the inside of her eyelids and beeped in her ears. She could hear the chip in her brain, hear it whirring and processing, spitting out words, gathering data into neat packages and storing it away, reaching out with electric hands to every corner of her brain, scouring her from the inside. It clicked and murmured, hissed and sang; it had been there all along, every moment of her brief life, but until Moira had mentioned it she’d never known it was there. She’d thought the chip was her, and she was the chip. But no. If she concentrated very, very hard, she could find the line between them, fine as it was.
She pried at that line now, fighting back, pushing with everything she had within her, battering at the impulses it sent zinging through her body. If she weakened for the slightest breath of a moment, it would take control of her and she would obey Jim and she wouldn’t flick the switch and then Nicholas would shoot him—she could see his finger tightening on the trigger now—because she was moving, thinking, seeing at a speed outside human capacity, processing the way a computer processed, drawing in data and spinning it around and translating it at the speed of light.
It was so strong, the urge to obey. It pushed at her from the inside, battered at the lining of her skull, pushed at her eyes.
Don’t you dare don’t you dare don’t you dare Lux you have to do what I tell you so don’t you dare.
She fought it.
Tears sprang into her eyes with the effort.
She bit her lip so hard that blood ran over her chin—no, it came from her nose.
“Lux!” Jim yelled. “You’re bleeding! Sophie—why is she bleeding?”
Nicholas had turned around now. He looked at her hands, at her trembling finger, and his eyes widened. He knew. He met her eyes and—she saw it, she knew she saw it, but that didn’t mean she could believe it—he nodded, a tiny eyelash of a nod.
You can be your own person, Sophie had said. Sophie. Her sister. I can help you. Please—let me help you be free.
And even Jim had said it, so long, long ago: Lux, you don’t have to obey me.
But he didn’t understand. None of them did. They thought it was so easy, so simple to just say no but it wasn’t like that at all it was like it was like it is like pushing back the ocean like swallowing the sky like turning yourself inside out and it hurts hurts hurts—
Her vision blurred. Dark spots dotted her eyes. Her throat clogged, stopping air from flowing in and out, and her ears rang with a high, irritating buzz. But she pushed back. She fought, struggled, screamed aloud, her mouth stretching wide and she tasted blood and tears as she screamed to the sky and when the scream had all gone out of her she said it:
“NO.”
A click. A sigh. Her brain ran backward. The chip was shutting down. Her mind was shutting down. Her thoughts blinked out one by one. She felt her very cells turn inside out, wither, implode. I can turn it off, she thought. I can turn it off.
She smiled.
She looked up and saw the stars, a million billion sprinkles of light.
She was free.
She looked down at the two people she loved best in the world, and she said one last word to their astonished faces:
“Run.”
And then she flipped the switch.
THIRTY EIGHT JIM
Before he could move, before he could react, before he could even comprehend what had happened, Sophie grabbed his arm and pulled him toward the cliff’s edge.
Seconds passed in the form of years. He saw everything with dazzling clarity: the blood running from Lux’s nose, the swift, slight brush of her finger over the switch on the detonator, the sudden look of peace in her eyes.
But Sophie pulled him away from all of it. She sprinted to the cliff and dragged him with her. It seemed to take years to reach the edge. But why . . . ?
“Sophie!” He skidded to a halt, just in time, pinwheeled on the edge and grabbed her to keep her from toppling over. “Are you—”
“JUMP!”
She leaped, arcing into a swan dive.
“—CRAZY?” Jim yelled after her.
Then the blast caught him.
He weighed no more than a scrap of paper. The wave of heat flung him outward into open space; he flipped through the air like a paper clip from the flick of a giant index finger. Through space and darkness, moon and sea wheeling over each other in a dizzying, sickening blur until at last he crashed into the ocean.