Eve Silver - Push

I jump to my feet and back away.

The sounds from the hall—conversations, beeping, the hiss of an automatic door opening—expand and echo, too loud, like a power sander in my head. I clap my hands over my ears. I can’t breathe. I can’t think. The air rasps my lungs like shards of glass.

The brown chairs turn bronze and glow too bright.

The red type on the posters on the walls turns to bloody claws, reaching for me.

Colors too bright. Sounds too loud.

The antiseptic hospital smell burns my nose.

No. Not now. It can’t be now.

Jackson gets to his feet, so slow.

“Miki!”

My name’s dragged out, the syllables pulled like taffy.

The world tips and tilts.

Jackson leaps forward, grabs my hand.

And we’re tumbling, tumbling, falling through nothing.

We respawn in a room with no floor, no walls, no ceiling. I mean, I know they’re here—I can feel the floor under my feet and when I stretch out a hand, I can feel the smooth, cool wall—but I can’t see them. Everything is just a bright, blinding white.

This isn’t the lobby.

Were we pulled directly on a mission?

Terror bites at me. I can’t do this—not now. I don’t know what shape Dad and Carly are in, don’t know if they’ll live or die, don’t know anything about their injuries. I’m a scattered mess. How am I supposed to fight Drau like this?

I’m a danger to Jackson, my team, myself.

Jackson grabs my hand and pushes me behind him, using his body as a shield. Except, am I behind or in front? Hard to tell when the room has no doors or windows, no beginning or end.

The light ramps down. A door appears. Not because it was always there and the light was making it hard to see. It literally appears, a piece of wall sliding open to reveal a rectangle of complete blackness.

I freeze. I know this place. I’ve been here before. In my nightmares. I stare at the dark doorway remembering the fear I felt, the certainty that danger lurked on the other side. Remembering that when I walked through, Lizzie was there with her Drau weapon in hand.

I’m about to signal Jackson to see if he thinks it’s okay to talk; then I realize of course it is. We have no weapons, so we’re not here to fight. And if the open door is any indication, whoever—whatever—brought us here knows we’re here.

Whoever brought us here . . . the Committee? How could they? How can they think I can do this now? I make a low sound—part moan, part howl.

Jackson pushes his glasses up on his head and turns to me, his expression intent. He grasps my upper arms. “Miki, I know this is rough—” He shakes his head. His jaw tenses. “I know your mind isn’t here. But we don’t get a choice. Do you understand? We don’t get a choice.”

I nod. Jackson shrugs out of his jacket and wraps it around me. Only then do I realize how cold I am. I have the incongruous thought that he was wearing his jacket when we got pulled, but mine was on the seat beside me.

“You can do this,” he says. “We make it through. We go back. Your dad and Carly will be waiting for us.”

I stare at him, into his mercury-bright eyes. “Will they?” I whisper, not so sure. “And if they are alive when we get back, what shape will they be in?”

New guilt swamps me. I don’t feel like the accident was my fault now. Jackson disabused me of that. Now I feel guilty because I doubted my dad, blamed him, suspected him.

But he’s as much a victim here as Carly.

“They’ll be alive when we go back because they were alive when we left.”

Of course. We’ll respawn in the exact instant we left.

I notice he doesn’t make any comment about the shape they’ll be in. We have no way to know and there’s absolutely nothing either one of us can do about that.

“I’m scared,” I whisper. “I don’t trust myself to keep it together.”

A muscle in his jaw jumps.

“You cannot do anything for them from here. The only thing you can do is keep yourself safe. Focus on the moment, this moment, just this one. Then on the next one. Then the next. You can’t change the situation, so work with it. Think only about this.”

I catch my tongue between my teeth and nod. “I’ll try.”

I will. I just don’t know if I’ll succeed.

I think of Dad and what it will be like for him if he wakes up and I’m not there. I think of Carly and all the things I want to do for her when I get back. And I realize I have to do more than try. I have to succeed. I can’t die in the game. I won’t be the one who leaves.

“I will keep you safe, Miki,” Jackson says, and then presses his lips to mine. “I swear it.” He pulls back; his expression shifts, growing harder, colder. He tips his glasses back down, clasps my hand tight in his, and heads for the door.

“You stay close,” he warns.

“Close enough that you can hear me breathe,” I say.

“Stay behind me.”

I slide my fingers between his, then curl them in. “I’ll stay beside you.”

He glances at me and smiles, a spare curl of his lips that hints at the dimple in his cheek. “Beside me, then.”

“What is this place?”

“Don’t know,” Jackson says, his tone terse. “Never seen it before.”

“I have. In a nightmare.”

He turns his head and I can feel him studying me even though I can’t see his eyes. “Tell me.”

“It was exactly like this. The walls. The floor.” I jut my chin forward. “The door. When I went through—” I break off, hesitate.

“Tell me,” he says again.

“When I went through, the girl with the green eyes was waiting for me. She had a Drau weapon. She aimed it. Fired.” I shiver, remembering, and as I do, I can see the spray of tiny droplets of bright pain shooting toward me. Skimming my left shoulder. Missing me. “She wasn’t firing at me,” I say. “She was firing at something behind me.”

Jackson nods. “We’ll count your dream as a warning.”

Cautious, we make our way to the door, separating just before we get there, Jackson going to one side, me to the other. I’m not sure why we bother. We have no weapons and there’s no doubt that whoever brought us here knows we’re here.

I’m about to say exactly that when Jackson says, “They know we’re here. Let’s just do this. Find out who they are and what they want.”

“Great minds think alike.”

We walk through the door to a curving corridor. The sight lines suck. We can’t see what’s waiting around any corner, because there are no corners.

Despite Jackson’s jacket, I’m shivering. The air’s cold and dry and smells artificial, like there’s a hint of air freshener being pumped in.

We don’t pass any windows or doors, just smooth, white walls, white ceiling, white floor that all meld together seamlessly so I can’t tell where one stops and the other starts.

At one point I pause and stretch my hands out to both sides, wondering how wide the corridor is. My fingers extend as far as they can go, but I don’t hit anything solid. So it’s wider than my arm span.

We keep going, following the curve, until ahead we see a massive arced bank of what appears to be computers. There’s a person there with her hands on some sort of control panel. She’s dressed all in white, her back to us, her hair pulled in a high ponytail.

She twists at the waist and turns her head back toward us until we have a three-quarter view of her face.

Jackson stops dead.

Her nose. The shape of her face.

Her eyes.

“There you are,” Lizzie says, and smiles.

JACKSON PRACTICALLY VIBRATES WITH TENSION. HIS BREATHING’S shallow and faster than normal.

He wants to kill her, this shell who wears his sister’s face.