Page 104 of Xantera
“That’s all we ask. No one will ever know you helped us. If this goes sideways, Claudia and I will take it to our stoned graves. I promise.”
“I promise,” Claudia echoes.
Eleni’s gaze stays on me, her eyebrows furrowed in a question. She motions toward me with a flick of her wrist.
“What am I going to do?” I ask, and she nods her confirmation. I swallow down the lump that forms in my throat before my voice comes out thick. “Well, I’m going to be the distraction.”
Idon’t dare shift back into my human form and break my connection with Saskia even long after I feel her consciousness slip into dreams.
As the mist thickens around me and the cold settles across my skin like a shroud, I curl up as best as I can and try to stay awake. To bask in these last few hours with the woman I never even got to have for a second, let alone forever.
Soon, though, a tug on our connection has my ears perking, my nostrils flaring as I sense Saskia’s emotions rise and her mind whirl. Dreaming. She’s just dreaming.
And I can’t help but close my eyes and experience it alongside her.
Darkness churns through her brain, eddying like a windstorm. I frown, trying to find Saskia in the middle of it all. Rain beginsto pelt me from above, pounding down and crashing against the floor—no, not rain. Objects. Clocks and jewelry and mirrors. Buttons and lightbulbs and keys. They shatter, crack, and clang at my feet, and I throw an arm over my head to squint into the darkness.
“Saskia?” I call.
She whimpers somewhere to my left, and I jerk my head, but—nothing. The ground rumbles beneath my feet, and suddenly, walls are cracking from the ground all around me, rising up with shuddering force until I’m surrounded by four of them.
Not just trapped within the Wall, but trapped in a cube of a housing unit. One spotless living room, one square kitchen, one blank screen, four symmetrical doors. A lightbulb pops on above my head, and the noise of the storm cuts off abruptly.
“Saskia?” I ask again, this time whirling around.
She’s not there, but voices murmur from beyond one of the bedroom doors.
Fuck, it’s utterly soulless in here. It’s a wonder Saskia developed a personality at all, being raised in this uniformed prison her whole life. My heart rips itself in half when I realize I’ll never get to show her what a true home looks like, where the light glows warmly, where the fire flickers in the hearth, where the seats are ripped and worn and the beds creak in welcome when you climb in.
“Saskia,” I say, this time more firmly, trying to find her subconscious within this dream, but the voices only grow louder on the other side of the door.
And I don’t think either of them belong to her.
“You have to,” a female voice wafts out, shaking and scared.
“I can’t keep doing this to you, Maribel.” That’s a male’s voice. Harsher. More firm. “You’re sick.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’renotfine. You’re going to die if it happens again.”
“Well,you’regoing to die if you don’t.”
“Then so be it. I can’t…”
The voices fade, the ground rumbles, and moonlight slices into the housing unit as thick as blood. So thick that I actually feel the wet touch of it graze my skin. But before I can try to wipe it off my arms, my hands, that same bedroom door bursts open.
A woman stumbles out after a man, and even in this lucid state, I can tell it’s Saskia’s parents. Her father has the same shade of hair, her mother the same splattering of freckles. Both would be beautiful, if she didn’t look so ghostly pale and he wasn’t clutching his throat. Spluttering. Coughing. Gagging.
Dropping to his knees, Saskia’s father begins to convulse.
Screams bounce around the room from every direction, coming from nowhere and everywhere all at once. Saskia’s mother shakes her father, trying to get him to wake up, and then she does something so peculiar I have to rub my eyes: she jams her arm into his open mouth, where… no, the foam building around his lips is too thick.
And then his convulsing stops.
But the screaming continues, finally streaming from one source.
When I whip my head to the right, I finally find Saskia—not as a little girl, when this happened, but as herself, cowering in the corner, covering her own ears while she screams.
