I REMEMBER THE events that followed as if they were in slow motion, but I know it all must’ve happened in an instant:
Jeb looked to his left, and I tried to move my fingers again.
My arm snapped forward like it was spring-loaded.
I plunged the syringe, which I now somehow held, into Jeb’s thigh.
The room sounded like a storm of clanging metal as Star spun forward and smashed into my gurney, but Jeb’s bewildered eyes never left mine.
Right up to the point when Kate snapped his neck.
My head still lolled to the side, but my eyes flicked between the two girls from Fang’s gang, and the man who had been my dad, sprawled lifeless on the floor.
Did that really just happen?
“Angel said you needed help,” Kate said, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. She seemed as shocked as I was that Jeb was dead.
I nodded. Angel had heard my thoughts. I had needed help. He would have turned me into a monster.
But as I stared into Jeb’s stunned face, twisted awkwardly toward me, I didn’t feel relief.
I was horrified by his crimes, but I still felt an awful loss and disappointment. I know it sounds stupid, after so many years and betrayal after betrayal, but I’d still, somehow, kept hoping he’d go back to being the old Jeb one day. Now he didn’t have any more chances to prove himself or to change for the better. In the end, he had died an evil man.
And that was devastating.
My body started to shake—from the release of panic or tears, I wasn’t sure—and Kate, who had such power inside her she could break a man’s bones with one hand, began to undo my straps with the utmost gentleness.
“I should have done something sooner,” Star said.
I shifted slightly on the paper-covered bed to look at her.
“When I first found out what that maniac was doing, I should’ve stood up to him,” Star went on.
“You were scared,” Kate said. She propped me up with sturdy arms. “We all were.”
Star started to pick her way through the shards of glass, sharp tools, and overturned carts her tornado had created in the lab, but stopped right before the door.
“Fang didn’t deserve that,” she whispered, not looking at me.
No, he didn’t, and I hadn’t forgiven Star for what she’d done.
But Fang would have. He would have been proud of her for coming now, and she should know that.
“Hero,” I mumbled, pointing at her. It was the best I could manage with drool still leaking from my mouth.
Star laughed harshly, and she finally faced me, her eyes glistening. “Yeah, well, we’re all just trying to save the world, right? Isn’t that what you flock kids keep yammering about? Let’s finish this, already.”
84
LET’S FINISH IT, I repeated as I stumbled down the hallway a few minutes later. Kate and Star had stayed to guard the lab, but I didn’t need them now. Though my body was still weak from the Taser, as my systems rebooted, the surge of adrenaline made me feel almost high. It was time to meet the Remedy.
But when I turned into the tunnel, something grabbed my arm and I almost jumped out of my skin.
“One Light,” a boy with large bloodshot eyes and open sores on his face gasped at me. I felt a stab of pity for him, though he was clawing at me murderously while choking on his own coughs.
The H8E virus, I thought, wrenching myself away from his grasp. I wondered how many of the other Doomsday kids on the battlefield were infected. My mom had said bird kids and mutants were immune, but if the Remedy was now poisoning his own, it couldn’t be a good sign.
As I ran from the sick boy, I realized how vulnerable I was here, alone, limping through an underground, closed space that we knew contained nuclear weapons. I crept more carefully, sticking to what I thought was the main passage, but I had no map, and all these dark, damp passageways looked exactly the same.