Hyperaware oHyperaware of my heartbeat, my pulse in every tiny vein, beating blood to every locked-up limb. Static blankets my vision and crackles in my ears, blocking out everything except the wheezing of my own lungs. Beyond it: screaming. Endless, piercing screaming of someone in agony, making my blood run cold and my muscles spasm with shivers. My shaking legs ache under my weight, pressing into the floorboards with too much force, bruising straight to the bone. Tears sear my eyes, burning worse with each passing moment, and no matter how hot the tears get, they don't warm up the rest of me.

I can hear her.

I can hear her.

I can hear her.

Make it stop, make it stop, please make it stop.

My hands climb to my chest, where my heart fights to escape my ribcage. They reach my neck, then my ears, where one stays pressed with bruising force against the side of my head and the back of my neck, where the other digs in sharp fingernails as if that will help me catch my failing breath. No, no no no, no, no, no. All I want is for it to be quiet, all I want is some peace. No, no, no. I can't keep seeing them die, I can't keep watching them fall.

"Trick, can you hear me?"

I gasp at the intrusion into my cocoon of static and screaming. A warm, soft grip pulls my hand away from my jaw as easily as peeling paint off a wall. Empty, my fingers move of their own accord, clenching and unclenching jerkily until they're pressed against smooth skin. Little hairs tickle my palm, the ridge of something bitingly cold presses the edge of my hand.

"Open your eyes." Someone using Yana's voice tells me. I pry apart eyelids that I didn't know were closed, the static fades but tears blur everything in its place. "What do you see?"

I see shallow scratches on the hardwood floor, I see two sets of knees; mine, and a pair covered in thick yellow linen. I see curled hair, and crystal eyes, and a bent elbow attached to a hand attached to fingers that lace through mine, pressing an ice cube into the palm of my hand. I see the danger she doesn't know she's in, being so close to me when I'm like this.

Yana stretches out her arm to slip her fingertips over the precariously tight grip I have on the back of my own neck. "What do you see?" she asks again, while her fingers nudge mine.

"You," I breathe, fighting to stay perfectly still, to not accidentally squeeze too hard.

"And what does that mean, that you see me?"

"It means you're not safe," I rasp out, cold trickles of fear slide down my throat, my cheeks, my back. The bruises on my legs are growing still, soon all I will have is purple skin and dented bones.

"No, it means I am here to help you. You understand?"

"No."

"You are safe."

"I don't want to hurt you," I whimper, fresh tears shed from my eyelashes. I don't want to hurt anyone, I'm sick of it. I'm scared of it. Yana tilts her head, her forehead is mere centimeters from mine, I can feel her breath skirting my nose.

"You will not," she soothes.

Five finger-shaped bruises cling to the arm bridging the gap between her and I.

"I already have."

"It won't happen again."

I don't know how she can be so sure. I've never been less sure of anything in my life.

Scared and tired. Seated once again in Amiah's kitchen. Palms damp and cold from the ice cubes. That was a neat trick. Yana's lucky it worked. I'm lucky it worked. My hands are mottled and my fingernails are split and stained from scratching grooves in the hardwood. Voices buzz in the air over my head, hovering around so I can hear the words but their meaning is lost. It's a little disorienting, only hearing them on one side.

"We can't use my car."

"We need a way to get there."

"I'll get another car."

Yana's fingernails are painted indigo. The gloss catches in the sunlight while she pulls stitches from Delilah's shoulder with a pair of blunt, bent scissors.

"Are we bringing him?"

A pause in the hum.

Him. That itches my brain. Him. Me.

"No," Delilah says.

Yana brushes the pile of discarded stitches into her hand and gets p to deposit them in the trash.

"Khorosho, da skorava," Amiah says. The sound of bootsteps and a shutting door end that part of the conversation.

A cabinet door shuts, echoing the front door, and Yana straightens to wash her hands in the sink. She turns, notices me watching her.

"What you think about?" she asks, leaning her hip against the cupboard.

"Nothing," I say around a mouthful of sand.

"How do you feel?" she asks, looking at me. I manage to scrunch up my shoulders, one makes it higher than the other and the shrug ends up lopsided. It's a shock I can even manage that motion. It feels like splintery wooden spikes are being driven into my arm sockets, but more importantly, I'm still stuck outside of my body like some sort of ghost. "You look not well, dizzy?"

I am, I hadn't noticed until she mentioned it, but I am sickeningly dizzy and sweating hard despite the chill in the room.

"Mm," I grunt, tongue thick and heavy.

"Eat food first, then you have your medicine," she instructs.

"Hm," I grunt another time. Yana's presence, her talking to me, is dragging me back into myself and it aches. My bones are being forced apart to accommodate the parts of me that are being stuffed back inside, and it all stretches around the empty clawed-out space on the inside of my chest.

It's a slow process, uncurling myself from the chair. The spinning of the room alone is too much, and I stop after every lurch upwards to steady myself. Once on my feet, it's a little easier to keep going. I shuffle, one foot in front of the next until, twenty-seven steps later, I have a box of... cereal, I think.

The conversation carries on while I force down the dry cereal. I only hear snatches of it. Something about reporters, something about war. For lack of anything else to occupy my mind, I study the contents of the counter. Amiah is a tidy person. There is a machine with a clear bucket half-full of coffee attached to the wall, and on the other side of the flat-topped stove is a knife block missing only one out of a set of ten. The blade of one peeks out a teensy bit, teasing at a deadly sharp edge and sturdy metal. I stop studying the counter.

The front door explodes open with a deafening crack. Delilah jumps to action but before she's even halfway into a fighting stance, Sky crashes into the table.

His hair is matted, his clothes are torn, and worst of all, narrow black bands are fastened around his neck and wrists. My heart drops like an anvil. His hand is engulfed in the spidery metal prison of an external fixator. Pins burrowed deep into his flesh are soiled with grime and dried bloodstains.

They worked fast.

"Whitecoats—" His body goes rigid as the shock restraints fire. He convulses and falls to his knees gasping for breath. Yana lurches instinctively to help him, only for Delilah to yank her back when, with another ear-splitting crack, the front door flies into the room. It smashes into the opposite wall, chalk dust erupts into the air, but nobody has time to cough it out of their lungs.

Delilah and Yana scramble to get the window over the sink open, while Sky struggles to his feet, the shock restraint on his neck slipping to show agitated red skin.

And who should come strolling into the kitchen except a short, gaunt blond boy with swollen pink scars.

"Sorry about the door, somebody locked it," Dieter sighs, a slight smile on his pasty face. King enters a mere pace behind Dieter, his lip curled in disgust as he looks at the path of chipped wood and drywall dust. It's so different from the Compound out here. The walls crumble like they're made of paper. A shivering hand takes me by the elbow, nearly jolting me out of my body. It's Yana, her skin shakes against mine, but her grip is firm as she guides me towards the window. I stall. I can't leave without Sky, not after the forest.

The reluctance costs me. Dieter flicks his wrist, a wave of magnokinesis clips me, but thump and crunch of a body hitting the counter belongs to Yana. She cries out, slumping to the floor.

"Dieter, don't!" Delilah shouts. Another magno-blast whips her against the window she's trying to pry open. Fissures explode across the glass.

I crouch to help Yana to her feet. King pulls me away none-too-gently. I catch sight of the black band around his wrist, the raw wounds under it.

"Are you ignoring me?" Dieter demands, shoving his face so close to mine I can smell the rot in his teeth.

"Yes," I say, and reach over to snap the bracelet on King's wrist. Dieter flinches at the sound of the plastic shattering and flings his hand up as if to slap me. I can make out the faintest ripple of invisible energy exploding from the back of his hand all the way down to his elbow. It doesn't come towards me, it flies back, straight into Yana. The force knocks her hard into the solid lip of the counter, for a second time she yelps and crumples to the floor.

The anger that razes through me is instinctive and messy, possessing me like a living thing. I don't even realize that my fist is up until it's trapped tight in a column of stone.

"Sorry, man," King mutters, shoving me down until I'm kneeling, both hands stuck in pillars of rock above my head.

"I can't help but notice," Dieter purrs, pacing deliberately up the length of the small kitchen, "that someone is missing."

He pauses beside the knife block, turning his head to look at it. A string of drool drips from his chapped lower lip. A thin crust of dried blood lingers beside his ear, either a by-product of the shock torture or from Delilah dropping him on his head. "She's dead, isn't she?"

"That's not why we're here," King says, a warning clear in his tone. Dieter turns sharp on his toes, glowering. Then the harsh frown lines clear, and he shrugs.

"Just, checking. Wouldn't want to miss one of them, would we?" He wipes the drool from his chin. Then he flips his arm, sending off another wave that hits Sky square in the chest. Sky crashes against the corner where the wall and the hallway meet, the air leaving his lungs with an audible whoosh. "Don't think I didn't see you," Dieter says.

"Let's go," King says, he lifts his foot to release me, but Dieter knocks him off balance with another magnetic pulse.

"Not yet. You know, Hendrix, we're only supposed to gather you lot, bring you home. But there's nothing in the instructions about bringing you back alive." He draws the biggest knife from the block, and turns it over in his hand, examining it. He presses the tip of his finger to the glinting point of the blade and smiles when the skin breaks and a bubble of blood wells up. He sticks his finger in his mouth, slurps, and the blood leaks back out, diluted in a thick string of spit. "Maybe you'll have an unfortunate accident."

One, two, three steps to stand in front of me, wielding the knife. My heart races, my lungs are shrinking, and the static is creeping back into my eyes.

"We would have made it, if not for you and that girl. We would have been far out of reach by the time that storm hit, we could have hidden in the mountains and the Whitecoats would never have found us." He presses the blade to my neck, the point bites into soft flesh, and nobody except me is in any condition to stop him. I can feel it in my muscles, how I could kick out and knock his legs out from under him. But he's right.

He's right, about all of it, he's right. I forced Maverick's hand, I knew he wouldn't leave me to find Elle on my own.

I killed them all.

I blink, the floor is falling away. I see their faces, I hear their screams. I will never be able to close my eyes without this nightmare—my reality, ripping its claws in.

"I should kill you," Dieter snarls, and I'm sure he means it to be menacing. His broken teeth flashing, the blade pressing in, his eyes wildly unfocused. I lift my chin, and lean in, it stings when the blade splits a hairline slice in my skin. I can't bring myself to meet his gaze.

"Do it," I say, barely above a whisper. We both know this is the ending I deserve; pinned to the floor, at the mercy of someone who's second chance I took away. Besides, I can't go back to the Compound, I can't go back to the dark rooms, and the tests, and the dome fights. If he doesn't finish me off, I will. I'll snap my own neck before they ever get me out the door.

"No, you can't," Sky gasps. Dieter curves the knife, setting the handlemost edge to my throat in preparation to slash a clean, deep line. I tilt my head back and exhale for the last time.

This is okay. I'm okay.f my heartbeat, my pulse in every tiny vein, beating blood to every locked-up limb. Static blankets my vision and crackles in my ears, blocking out everything except the wheezing of my own lungs. Beyond it: screaming. Endless, piercing screaming of someone in agony, making my blood run cold and my muscles spasm with shivers. My shaking legs ache under my weight, pressing into the floorboards with too much force, bruising straight to the bone. Tears sear my eyes, burning worse with each passing moment, and no matter how hot the tears get, they don't warm up the rest of me.

I can hear her.

I can hear her.

I can hear her.

Make it stop, make it stop, please make it stop.

My hands climb to my chest, where my heart fights to escape my ribcage. They reach my neck, then my ears, where one stays pressed with bruising force against the side of my head and the back of my neck, where the other digs in sharp fingernails as if that will help me catch my failing breath. No, no no no, no, no, no. All I want is for it to be quiet, all I want is some peace. No, no, no. I can't keep seeing them die, I can't keep watching them fall.

"Trick, can you hear me?"

I gasp at the intrusion into my cocoon of static and screaming. A warm, soft grip pulls my hand away from my jaw as easily as peeling paint off a wall. Empty, my fingers move of their own accord, clenching and unclenching jerkily until they're pressed against smooth skin. Little hairs tickle my palm, the ridge of something bitingly cold presses the edge of my hand.

"Open your eyes." Someone using Yana's voice tells me. I pry apart eyelids that I didn't know were closed, the static fades but tears blur everything in its place. "What do you see?"

I see shallow scratches on the hardwood floor, I see two sets of knees; mine, and a pair covered in thick yellow linen. I see curled hair, and crystal eyes, and a bent elbow attached to a hand attached to fingers that lace through mine, pressing an ice cube into the palm of my hand. I see the danger she doesn't know she's in, being so close to me when I'm like this.

Yana stretches out her arm to slip her fingertips over the precariously tight grip I have on the back of my own neck. "What do you see?" she asks again, while her fingers nudge mine.

"You," I breathe, fighting to stay perfectly still, to not accidentally squeeze too hard.

"And what does that mean, that you see me?"

"It means you're not safe," I rasp out, cold trickles of fear slide down my throat, my cheeks, my back. The bruises on my legs are growing still, soon all I will have is purple skin and dented bones.

"No, it means I am here to help you. You understand?"

"No."

"You are safe."

"I don't want to hurt you," I whimper, fresh tears shed from my eyelashes. I don't want to hurt anyone, I'm sick of it. I'm scared of it. Yana tilts her head, her forehead is mere centimeters from mine, I can feel her breath skirting my nose.

"You will not," she soothes.

Five finger-shaped bruises cling to the arm bridging the gap between her and I.

"I already have."

"It won't happen again."

I don't know how she can be so sure. I've never been less sure of anything in my life.

***

Scared and tired. Seated once again in Amiah's kitchen. Palms damp and cold from the ice cubes. That was a neat trick. Yana's lucky it worked. I'm lucky it worked. My hands are mottled and my fingernails are split and stained from scratching grooves in the hardwood. Voices buzz in the air over my head, hovering around so I can hear the words but their meaning is lost. It's a little disorienting, only hearing them on one side.

"We can't use my car."

"We need a way to get there."

"I'll get another car."

Yana's fingernails are painted indigo. The gloss catches in the sunlight while she pulls stitches from Delilah's shoulder with a pair of blunt, bent scissors.

"Are we bringing him?"

A pause in the hum.

Him. That itches my brain. Him. Me.

"No," Delilah says.

Yana brushes the pile of discarded stitches into her hand and gets p to deposit them in the trash.

"Khorosho, da skorava," Amiah says. The sound of bootsteps and a shutting door end that part of the conversation.

A cabinet door shuts, echoing the front door, and Yana straightens to wash her hands in the sink. She turns, notices me watching her.

"What you think about?" she asks, leaning her hip against the cupboard.

"Nothing," I say around a mouthful of sand.

"How do you feel?" she asks, looking at me. I manage to scrunch up my shoulders, one makes it higher than the other and the shrug ends up lopsided. It's a shock I can even manage that motion. It feels like splintery wooden spikes are being driven into my arm sockets, but more importantly, I'm still stuck outside of my body like some sort of ghost. "You look not well, dizzy?"

I am, I hadn't noticed until she mentioned it, but I am sickeningly dizzy and sweating hard despite the chill in the room.

"Mm," I grunt, tongue thick and heavy.

"Eat food first, then you have your medicine," she instructs.

"Hm," I grunt another time. Yana's presence, her talking to me, is dragging me back into myself and it aches. My bones are being forced apart to accommodate the parts of me that are being stuffed back inside, and it all stretches around the empty clawed-out space on the inside of my chest.

It's a slow process, uncurling myself from the chair. The spinning of the room alone is too much, and I stop after every lurch upwards to steady myself. Once on my feet, it's a little easier to keep going. I shuffle, one foot in front of the next until, twenty-seven steps later, I have a box of... cereal, I think.

The conversation carries on while I force down the dry cereal. I only hear snatches of it. Something about reporters, something about war. For lack of anything else to occupy my mind, I study the contents of the counter. Amiah is a tidy person. There is a machine with a clear bucket half-full of coffee attached to the wall, and on the other side of the flat-topped stove is a knife block missing only one out of a set of ten. The blade of one peeks out a teensy bit, teasing at a deadly sharp edge and sturdy metal. I stop studying the counter.

The front door explodes open with a deafening crack. Delilah jumps to action but before she's even halfway into a fighting stance, Sky crashes into the table.

His hair is matted, his clothes are torn, and worst of all, narrow black bands are fastened around his neck and wrists. My heart drops like an anvil. His hand is engulfed in the spidery metal prison of an external fixator. Pins burrowed deep into his flesh are soiled with grime and dried bloodstains.

They worked fast.

"Whitecoats—" His body goes rigid as the shock restraints fire. He convulses and falls to his knees gasping for breath. Yana lurches instinctively to help him, only for Delilah to yank her back when, with another ear-splitting crack, the front door flies into the room. It smashes into the opposite wall, chalk dust erupts into the air, but nobody has time to cough it out of their lungs.

Delilah and Yana scramble to get the window over the sink open, while Sky struggles to his feet, the shock restraint on his neck slipping to show agitated red skin.

And who should come strolling into the kitchen except a short, gaunt blond boy with swollen pink scars.

"Sorry about the door, somebody locked it," Dieter sighs, a slight smile on his pasty face. King enters a mere pace behind Dieter, his lip curled in disgust as he looks at the path of chipped wood and drywall dust. It's so different from the Compound out here. The walls crumble like they're made of paper. A shivering hand takes me by the elbow, nearly jolting me out of my body. It's Yana, her skin shakes against mine, but her grip is firm as she guides me towards the window. I stall. I can't leave without Sky, not after the forest.

The reluctance costs me. Dieter flicks his wrist, a wave of magnokinesis clips me, but thump and crunch of a body hitting the counter belongs to Yana. She cries out, slumping to the floor.

"Dieter, don't!" Delilah shouts. Another magno-blast whips her against the window she's trying to pry open. Fissures explode across the glass.

I crouch to help Yana to her feet. King pulls me away none-too-gently. I catch sight of the black band around his wrist, the raw wounds under it.

"Are you ignoring me?" Dieter demands, shoving his face so close to mine I can smell the rot in his teeth.

"Yes," I say, and reach over to snap the bracelet on King's wrist. Dieter flinches at the sound of the plastic shattering and flings his hand up as if to slap me. I can make out the faintest ripple of invisible energy exploding from the back of his hand all the way down to his elbow. It doesn't come towards me, it flies back, straight into Yana. The force knocks her hard into the solid lip of the counter, for a second time she yelps and crumples to the floor.

The anger that razes through me is instinctive and messy, possessing me like a living thing. I don't even realize that my fist is up until it's trapped tight in a column of stone.

"Sorry, man," King mutters, shoving me down until I'm kneeling, both hands stuck in pillars of rock above my head.

"I can't help but notice," Dieter purrs, pacing deliberately up the length of the small kitchen, "that someone is missing."

He pauses beside the knife block, turning his head to look at it. A string of drool drips from his chapped lower lip. A thin crust of dried blood lingers beside his ear, either a by-product of the shock torture or from Delilah dropping him on his head. "She's dead, isn't she?"

"That's not why we're here," King says, a warning clear in his tone. Dieter turns sharp on his toes, glowering. Then the harsh frown lines clear, and he shrugs.

"Just, checking. Wouldn't want to miss one of them, would we?" He wipes the drool from his chin. Then he flips his arm, sending off another wave that hits Sky square in the chest. Sky crashes against the corner where the wall and the hallway meet, the air leaving his lungs with an audible whoosh. "Don't think I didn't see you," Dieter says.

"Let's go," King says, he lifts his foot to release me, but Dieter knocks him off balance with another magnetic pulse.

"Not yet. You know, Hendrix, we're only supposed to gather you lot, bring you home. But there's nothing in the instructions about bringing you back alive." He draws the biggest knife from the block, and turns it over in his hand, examining it. He presses the tip of his finger to the glinting point of the blade and smiles when the skin breaks and a bubble of blood wells up. He sticks his finger in his mouth, slurps, and the blood leaks back out, diluted in a thick string of spit. "Maybe you'll have an unfortunate accident."

One, two, three steps to stand in front of me, wielding the knife. My heart races, my lungs are shrinking, and the static is creeping back into my eyes.

"We would have made it, if not for you and that girl. We would have been far out of reach by the time that storm hit, we could have hidden in the mountains and the Whitecoats would never have found us." He presses the blade to my neck, the point bites into soft flesh, and nobody except me is in any condition to stop him. I can feel it in my muscles, how I could kick out and knock his legs out from under him. But he's right.

He's right, about all of it, he's right. I forced Maverick's hand, I knew he wouldn't leave me to find Elle on my own.

I killed them all.

I blink, the floor is falling away. I see their faces, I hear their screams. I will never be able to close my eyes without this nightmare—my reality, ripping its claws in.

"I should kill you," Dieter snarls, and I'm sure he means it to be menacing. His broken teeth flashing, the blade pressing in, his eyes wildly unfocused. I lift my chin, and lean in, it stings when the blade splits a hairline slice in my skin. I can't bring myself to meet his gaze.

"Do it," I say, barely above a whisper. We both know this is the ending I deserve; pinned to the floor, at the mercy of someone who's second chance I took away. Besides, I can't go back to the Compound, I can't go back to the dark rooms, and the tests, and the dome fights. If he doesn't finish me off, I will. I'll snap my own neck before they ever get me out the door.

"No, you can't," Sky gasps. Dieter curves the knife, setting the handlemost edge to my throat in preparation to slash a clean, deep line. I tilt my head back and exhale for the last time.

This is okay. I'm okay.