Unbreakable (Unraveling) (38 page)

Struzinski’s eyes meet mine. He looks a little sad, like he doesn’t want to do what comes next, and I can feel the muscles in my right arm starting to spasm under the tension.

“It’s over,” he says.

Then he turns the gun on himself and fires.

F
or a split second, I’m paralyzed with shock.

Then my own gun drops from my shaking hands, and I reach for Barclay. I’m not about to just let him die on me.

The blood is everywhere.

I try to stop it, to put pressure on the wound, to somehow keep that blood in his body, but it pulses against my hands, warm and thick.

I want to tell him he’s an idiot or slap him across the face. That has to have been the dumbest thing he’s ever done—jump up like that and take on four people with weapons. And Barclay of all people should have known his odds. He should have known he didn’t stand a chance.

But as his eyes flick toward me, I know he did. He knew all that, and he made his move anyway. He sacrificed himself.

To save me.

It’s almost too much to handle in a long line of things that should have been too much. My throat constricts, my eyes sting, and I shake my head. All the times that I’ve been hard on him and called him an arrogant asshole, there’s never been any question that Barclay has been a good guy. Without him, Cecily and the other Unwilling would be slaves for the rest of their lives. Without him, I’d be in the Piston, waiting to be executed.

But it’s more than that. He believed in me. He did things to protect me to make sure I’d be okay. And now I may never be able to pay him back.

I try to will my hands to stop shaking so that I can actually be of some use, and I look over at Ben, who’s crawling toward us, his blood leaving a trail on the carpet.

Elijah has his hands over Barclay’s abdomen. Halfway up his forearm he’s covered in blood. “I can’t fucking heal him!”

Then Ben is beside me, thrusting his hands into the fray.

I lean over Barclay, my free hand reaching for his face. The blood on my hands smears across the cool clammy skin of his cheek, and the faint beat of his heart thrums against my skin. I suck in my breath. His eyes are unfocused, his skin pale, and his lips are starting to turn blue. He’s got seconds before he bleeds out, and if Elijah can’t heal him—

“Tenner,” Barclay grunts. “The gun . . . the door.”

“Nothing is fucking working,” Elijah says.

“The door,” Barclay repeats, his voice strained.

I do what he says, ignoring the protest in my muscles. The last thing we need is to be caught unaware. I remember what Renee said about the guys Meridian sent on an errand.

“Is it working?” I look at Ben.

He shakes his head.

We’ve been here before, and I refuse to have the same outcome. I don’t care how tired and beat up they are, we just need to give Ben enough time to heal Barclay so we can all get out of here.

Then it hits me. They won’t be able to heal him. Not in this building.

“The hydrochloradneum shields,” I say. “You can’t open portals or heal him while we’re inside.”

“We have to get him out of here,” Ben says.

I jump to my feet. “We just have to get far enough outside the house—”

“Tenner!” Barclay coughs. “I’m fucking dying.”

“Don’t worry, we’ve—”

“I said I’m dying, Tenner. You can’t.”

“You’re being stupid,” I say, dropping to his side so he can see me.

“The window,” Ben says, reaching under Barclay’s shoulders. “We just have to get outside. We’ll do it anyway.”

But Barclay reaches up and grabs my arm. “Don’t play God, Tenner,” he says.

“Don’t be a dick,” I say back. Because I’ve just started to like him and now he’s determined to die on me.

“We can still do it,” Ben says.

Barclay coughs in response and blood coats his lower lip. It seems too dark to be real.

I open my mouth to say something else—to try to convince him somehow—but my throat is closing up. The only thing that comes out is “please.”

But I know I’ve already lost.

I look at Ben, and he takes the gun out of my hand.

Barclay smiles. “The bullets,” he says.

I glance around. I have no idea what he means.

“Hydrochloradneum . . .” His voice trails off.

I’d forgotten. Even if we got him outside the shields, IA standard-issue ammunition is hydrochloradneum-plated bullets, which create wounds that can’t be healed by their powers. Elijah found that out the hard way when Eric shot him last fall.

“We made a good team, Tenner.”

I want to say,
One of the best
. I open my mouth, but I can’t get the words out.

Barclay reaches out and I clasp his hand. “I couldn’t have done it without you.” Tears spill out of my eyes, and they burn as they roll down my face.

He coughs again, his time more blood coming up. He’s pale, ghostly, even, and I squeeze his hand as if contact with the living will keep him with us just a little longer. His fingers move slightly, and then his hand is dead weight in mine.

“Janelle . . .” he says, his eyes having a hard time staying focused.

“I’m here,” I say, adjusting his head so he’s looking at me. “Right here.”

“Make sure.” His eyes close.

“What?” I say, shaking him a little.

“My monument.”

And then I’m laughing and crying at the same time. “I’ll oversee it myself if I have to.”

And then I know. He’s gone. Whatever made Taylor Barclay the conceited asshole, determined and driven to the point of obsession—whatever it was that made him my friend—that person is gone. He’s just a body now.

B
en pulls me to him, and the warmth of his body around mine is just too much to handle. We’ve both been shot, and we’re both bleeding, but we’re still here.

We’re alive.

“I thought you were dead,” I say, and I taste the salt from my tears.

“Yeah, so did he,” Elijah says.

“I would never leave you,” Ben says, his voice whispering into my hair.

“Cecily?” I ask.

“As chipper as always,” Elijah says. “And back with the Unwilling.”

“What happened?”

“I took a risk,” Ben says. “I ducked when I saw the gun, and the first shot missed me; the second grazed my arm. Two more ended up lodged in the vest. I grabbed Cecily and ran us through the closest exit: the window.”

“But the drop . . .”

“He thought it would be a good time to test these portal-opening powers,” Elijah says. “As they were falling, he thought of the hospital, opened a portal, and they fucking fell right through. You believe that shit?”

“You went back to the hospital?” I say. We should have gone back there—we should have regrouped, but I just didn’t have faith. “I thought you were dead.”

“The landing was brutal, and we were both knocked out cold on the hospital floor.”

I squeeze Ben tighter. I’m still expecting him to disappear, to wake up and realize I’d only imagined that he’s still alive. “How did you find us?”

“The guy was desperate to find you,” Elijah says. “It was pathetic.”

“I didn’t know where I wanted the portal to go, but I knew I had to find you. Instead of thinking of the location I needed to go, I opened a portal, thinking of just you. I wasn’t sure where it would take me, but we ended up in the backyard of an estate. It brought me as close to you as we could get. We tried to sneak inside but got caught by the guards downstairs. You know the rest.”

I can’t believe it. Against all odds, we might get out of this room. We’ve managed to save each other—again.

“I hate to break this up, but we have to get the fuck out of here,” Elijah says.

I nod against Ben’s chest. Who knows if or when Meridian’s guys are going to come back here?

Remembering Renee, I push back and turn in her direction. She’s crouched under the desk with her eyes closed, and I think she’s praying.

“Renee,” I say, approaching her. “Come with us, we’ll get you out of here.” I want to ask her what she’s been doing for the governor, but now’s not the time, and the governor is dead anyway. We have plenty of time to discuss that later.

Her watery brown eyes look up at me, and she looks younger than early twenties and older at the same time. I suppose being abducted can do that to a person.

“We’ll get you home.”

She stands up. “Home,” she says, and something about the way that she says it, I know she’s not talking to me. I know she didn’t think that word would have meaning for her.

I grab the gun Barclay used to kill Meridian, and check it—four bullets left. “Grab a gun. We might need it.”

“Whatever, J,” Elijah says. “This is the second fucking time I’ve gotten shot when I was with you. I don’t think we can be friends anymore.”

For some reason, the fact that we are friends makes me want to smile.

Ben pulls the quantum charger from Barclay’s pocket.

I almost tell him that we don’t need that. For some reason, I don’t want to rob Barclay of something that is so intrinsically his. Ben doesn’t need it to open portals, and I don’t know how to use it.

But then I remember that both Ben and Elijah have been shot, and are likely pretty exhausted, and I certainly know how to learn. Having a charger is the smart thing to do. Besides, Barclay would want me to take it.

Elijah carries Ben, piggyback style, and we move through the house, quickly and quietly, in a single-file line. I go first, ignoring the throbbing pain in my arm and the exhaustion moving through my whole body. I hold the gun in front of me, and I’m ready to fire if I need to. I don’t know where the governor’s husband is, but I keep reminding myself that we just need to get outside. Then we can portal to safety.

Renee is behind me, and Elijah and Ben are behind her. The details are a blur.

All I know is that when we get downstairs, I see headlights—headlights that belong to too many cars for me to count—but instead of panic setting in, all I’ve got is anger.

It rolls through me like fire—anger that I’ve been shot, that I almost died twice tonight, that I’m beat up, exhausted, and in more pain than I thought possible. This needs to end, here and now. I’m not running anymore.

And that’s my only excuse for doing possibly the stupidest thing I’ve ever done.

I walk straight to the door. I don’t hear a thing Ben tells me. I throw open the door and walk out into the floodlights, gun at my side.

Because of the angle and the lights, I can’t see anything, but I hear people shouting for me to drop the gun and put my hands up. It’s so different from whatever I expected to happen that it’s like someone has thrown cold water on me.

A silhouette moves toward me. Her arms are raised, her hands are empty, and she’s talking to me.

I drop the gun and put my own arms up, as Hayley Walker’s discernible features come into view. I focus on her lips. At first all I can hear is the blood rushing through my ears, but then I realize she’s asking, “Janelle, are you okay?”

I’m not okay.

I’m not sure if I’ll ever be okay again. So I just say, “They’re all dead.” Because that pretty much sums it up.

T
he questioning lasts for hours.

The silence that follows is even longer.

After Hayley and the IA cavalry descended upon the governor’s house and found
us, they took
everyone
back to IA headquarters for medical attention and debriefing. I was
separated from Ben, Elijah, and Renee immediately. The bullet wound in my arm was looked at,
treated, and deemed superficial at worst, all on the drive in. Once my left hand was bandaged, they
sat me down in a windowless room with a cup of coffee and demanded to know everything.

So I told them.

Then I told them again. And a third time.

I even talked to a sketch artist about people like Chuckles and the guys I saw
in the Black Hole.

But somewhere between my fifth and sixth cup of coffee, when I’m not sure how
many minutes, hours, or even days have gone by, I start to put together the missing pieces:

I owe my life to Hayley Walker and her partner, Jimmy Mason.

The director never made it to the briefing room at 0600 like he was supposed to.
While Special Agent Robert Barnes briefed everyone else, Hayley knew something was wrong. She
grabbed her partner and they drove to the director’s house. When they got there and saw both he and
his wife were dead, Hayley called it in.

Barnes already had an emergency task force raid the Black Hole, confiscate all
the equipment, and arrest anyone who was there. So he put Hayley and Jimmy in charge of forming a
task force to look for us.

The director kept an organized calendar, even for his social plans. That the
governor had been there for dinner with her husband and neither of them had bled out on the floor
meant they were either part of it, or they’d been taken.

Lucky for us, the first place Hayley and Jimmy looked was the governor’s
house.

A
ccording to Hayley and Jimmy, IA found and arrested the governor’s husband. He was the link between her and Meridian. He took his wife’s name when they were married, which apparently wasn’t that unusual on Prima. Macon Meridian became Macon Worth, and the governor found herself connected to Meridian by blood.

As Prima’s longest-serving governor, she lied, cheated, paid people off, and used the Unwilling to stay in office. Renee Adams was the latest in a long line of computer hackers—the best in their respective worlds—that had been special ordered and delivered to the governor. She put them to work breaking into private accounts to spy on and destroy political rivals.

H
ours after I’ve told them everything, including the location of the Unwilling we saved from being processed, the door opens. I’ve been awake so long, the muscles in my right eye are twitching.

Hayley comes in first. Her eyes are bloodshot. She’s probably been awake as long as I have, and now that exhaustion has set in, she can’t hide the sadness that’s weighing on her shoulders.