False Sight (16 page)

open my eyes to the huge cavern we first came through, with all the tunnels leading to different cities. The lake of Black is to my left, a perfect circle two feet away. My

wounds throb anew. My stomach gurgles, and I roll over and spew black oil for the second time in two days. Some of my hair falls past my face, still auburn.

Axela has black liquid dripping from her mouth too. I push myself up slowly and blink away the disorientation. The cavern is filled with the tangled and twisted metal from the Verge’s main floor. Nina must’ve somehow collapsed the floor into the Black, which then vomited it up into the cavern, like it did with me.

The stone floor is covered in claw marks.
I realize I still hoped the Black led somewhere else, that I would open my eyes to a different world. Now even that hope is gone.

The gouges in the stone all lead in one direction—to the tunnel labeled
washington
,
dC
. That particular tunnel entrance is thick with the same gouges, while the other openings are pristine. It all makes sense now. After removing our government, the eyeless will come back and disperse through the tunnels to different parts of the country, and then around the globe.

I reach back and feel Beacon, my sword, but I lost the bow somewhere along the way, which doesn’t really matter since Gane decided to explode all my arrows. Nothing left to do here but swing my leg over Axela and ride down the tunnel.

The trip takes no time at all, less than five minutes of hard rid - ing, which means the cavern must sit directly under DC. This was the plan all along, the plan for
decades
. I keep my ears tuned for sounds of the eyeless, but everything is quiet. The tunnel begins to slope up. We’re nearing the end, I can feel it, and the adrenaline is welcome. I find myself straightening on Axela’s back, eager to get above ground. The world may be ending, but it isn’t over. “C’mon girl,” I say, urging her along. The tunnel continues its upward slope until I see stars in a black sky—
my
sky—and then we’re up and out, hooves thumping on grass in cool night air that tastes clean and fresh and just like home.

Artificial light illuminates the ground in front of me, and I turn Axela around with my left heel.
We’re next to the Washington Monument.
Right in front of me is a pile of shredded clothes covered in blood. A tennis shoe pokes out. At the base of the monument is another eviscerated pile of clothes and stuff that is not clothes, all of it red. Screams rise in the distance, layering over one another, rising, rising. I turn in a slow circle, looking for signs of life, but expecting to see none this close to the ramp. And I’m right. Axela snorts and tosses her head from side to side, thoroughly freaked at the smell of blood. “Easy, girl, easy,” I say, patting her flank for as much my benefit as hers.
The screams are loudest to the north, where I can see the tiny back of the White House surrounded by trees glowing with bright lights. If they’re going to wipe out our government, I can’t think of a better place to start. Nina might be there, in the center of everything. I spur Axela onward until she’s in a full gallop toward the White House.

Gunfire rattles in the night. A siren blares, like the kind in old war movies. Sirens from emergency vehicles mix in with the nightmare sounds.

After the monument is a wide street of six lanes, then more grass before the White House’s south lawn. Ahead is a col- lapsed fence, as if the eyeless decided it was easier to knock it down than leap over it. More gunfire crackles in the distance, like fireworks. I imagine the confusion. People don’t know what’s coming for them, or why.

The Secret Service knows, but can’t possibly understand. A hundred yards away, they burst out of the White House in dark suits. Bright white spotlights light the agents from behind, while a cluster of eyeless approach from darkness. It’s just a group of fifteen to twenty of the monsters, a pack. There’sonlytimeforafewburstsofautomaticgunfire—Axela suddenly sidesteps behind a copse of trees, tossing her head, and I struggle to move her forward again. The gun muzzles flash with orange light, and then the eyeless overtake them. Clothes shred and blood sprays and I feel empty because the men never had a chance. It happened so fast, there probably wasn’t time for much fear or pain. Axela pounds the ground, moving under me, but she isn’t quick enough. And it wouldn’t matter anyway, because I don’t mean to face the eyeless, not like this. Even if I could fight that many at once, what would it do? Nothing. The Torch is the key. It becomes a mantra in my mind. Finding Nina is the key. She has to be here. Why else would the eyeless be swarming in this direction?

The eyeless flood through the doors and funnel into the executive residence of the White House, no longer silent but screaming. The screams are of delight and hunger, so different from the screams of the dying.

I’m twenty yards away when the last eyeless slips inside. An agent groans on his back in the Rose Garden to the left. He lifts a bloody hand, like he’s waving to the sky. I stop Axela next to the agent and jump off. She spins away from me, and for a second I fear she’s going to bolt, but she just prances in a circle, eyeing the space around us.

The agent’s suit is torn open. Where his stomach is supposed to be is a blood-filled hole the size of my fist. Blood pumps out in time with his heart, soaking the grass. This man is dying here because of the place I came from.

His eyes widen in fear when he sees me. “You . . .” he croaks. He recognizes me.
“I’m not her. Listen, I’m not the same girl. I’m not her.

Where is she? Have you seen her?” I kneel and grip his shoul - ders lightly, then snap my head up at a noise from inside the White House. It sounded like a watermelon being dropped on concrete from ten feet.

Tell me. I can stop this.” Maybe if I say it enough, it’ll be true. “Oval...”
The Oval Office.
“Where? Where?” I try to remember my history lesson on

this place, but it’s fuzzy. The agent tilts his head and moves his eyes to his right. The Oval Office kind of bulges off the West Wing, with vertical windows taller than I am. Windows that are just openings now, the glass blown out.

Two Humvees roar behind me and turn onto the lawn, big knobby tires digging into the grass. They skid to a stop outside the East Wing. Soldiers pile out and ready assault weapons. They’re too far away for me to get their attention, but I try anyway. “Wait, stop! Stop!” My voice is drowned in the scream of a jet overhead. They fast-march into the build- ing, doomed. When I look back down, the agent is still, eyes unseeing. The lack of light in his eyes reminds me of Noah and makes me wish he were here. It reminds me this could be my last minute as myself. When I go into the Oval Office, Nina might kill me—or worse, erase me. But I’m ready for whatever comes next.

I pull Beacon off my back and sprint the hundred feet to the Oval Office, slowing just before I reach it. Thick red light spills out from the window frames, dappling the grass with blood.

take one step, then another, leading the way with Beacon’s tip. Finally I reach the window frame and step through. The Torch lights the room a brilliant red. Nina sits behind

the President’s desk, hunched forward and still. Seeing her so close, with her back to me, I almost freeze in surprise. But the hesitation fades in the next second, and I swing Beacon in a horizontal slash, intending to take her head and end the fight before it begins, knowing it means I won’t get answers from her; I won’t be able to shake her and ask why.

Nina dips her torso to the left like she’s stretching, and the blade whistles over her harmlessly, pulling me off balance. I put so much behind the strike, so sure it would land. She bursts upright and mule-kicks the chair back at me, then rolls forward over the desk. She lands on the other side and spins around with the Torch held in front of her. She’s standing directly on the presidential seal between two plush couches.

I’m already heaving and near breathless.
Sifu
Phil’s lesson is like a shout in my ears—
Erase the emotion. A calm mind delivers sure strikes.

Seconds pass where she’s out of reach, but Nina doesn’t say the code. I’m still me.
Her right hand holds a straight sword identical to mine, save the black grip tape she wrapped around the hilt. She grins. The Torch makes it look like she has blood on her teeth. “Why are you fighting me, Miranda? Put down your sword and I’ll take you to True Earth. You can join the army of Roses.”
Despite the sickening rage in my chest, tears jump to my eyes. “Why are you doing this?” I guess I get to ask her after all.
“Because this world is like the one we just left—
sick
. One day it will reach critical mass and become a cancer that will spread to other worlds. Call it preventative surgery on the col- lective universe. Call it saving you from yourselves.”
That’s it, right there. We’re just a tumor to them. And I see it too. Maybe our world has more bad than good. We kill one another over stupid things, or we let people die. We are selfish. They aren’t wrong in those respects. And maybe the people of my world are too stubborn to change. We might always be this way, until the world destroys itself.
But it’s not Nina’s call to make. Or anyone else’s from True Earth.
“You know I’m right,” she says. “Open your eyes.”
The time to say the code has passed—I want to believe that. But something is wrong. . . . She doesn’t seem worried at all. It’s like she really wants me to join her and knows she’ll get her way in the end.
My mind is whirring, but I’m not considering her offer like she thinks.
“You’re fighting on the wrong side, Miranda.
We
’
re
the defenders. Help me. It’s what you were made to do. Think about it—how different can we really be? We’re the same person.”
I don’t want to think about that. We might be the same, but I’ve never felt I could be like her, or Mrs. North, or the director. It’s your choices that make you who you are.
And I choose to fight.
Nina is giving me one more chance, one more moment to lean toward her cause. And who wouldn’t want to join the winning side?
“Choose,” she says.
Already did. She can see it on my face now.
“Then I’m sorry. It’s time to wake up, Nina. Be free.”
A lightning bolt sears my brain, blinding me. I go to one knee, Beacon loose in my grip. I feel the copy of Nina barge into my mind with a victory scream, and I understand in that brief moment that Mrs. North did taint me with a copy of Nina, that she was inside me all along. There is the vague sen- sation of tears running down my face, and of utter darkness swooping in, pushing me aside, and one thought—
This is really happening
—before a moment of darkness so pure, I’m sure that I’m gone. But then Noah rises up within me, roaring in defi- ance, and somehow he takes my hand and pulls me out of the ether. In the next instant, I feel our combined might crush Nina into oblivion. She’s gone in a single moment. I hear a thought, either mine or Noah’s, I can’t tell—
No room for three in here.
I open my eyes.
“Impossible...” Nina says.
I’m still on one knee, but that changes when I stand up. Noah’s strength courses through me, mingling with my own. Together we’re strong enough to beat her.
“Apparently not,” I reply.
Her eyes are wide with fear.
I move right, beginning to circle around the desk. “Who are you, really?”
“I am the director’s daughter.” She seems to be regaining her composure.
“No, you were my friend. I saw you wake up on a table. So how did you get inside my friend.”
Where is she?
I want to scream.
Her lip curls in a sneer. “Your friend is gone. My true body remains in True Earth, but I loaned my identity to a new body for this mission. I spent the last few months seeing your world firsthand, hiding in the back of Sequel’s mind, and when the time was right, I put in a request with the DJ.”
The violation of having a secret observer in your mind at all times makes my stomach turn.
“Are you ready to finish this?” she says, holding her hands wide in welcome, Torch in the left, sword in the right.
I’m ready.
The desk is still between us. Outside, I hear another jet roar through the sky, and more gunfire. I want to keep her talking. If I have to make her think, she might give me an opening—just a calm second where I can lunge and end the dance before it begins.
I step forward, a feint.
Nina swipes her sword up slowly, vertically, meaning to cut me up the middle. It’s lazy. I parry down and across with Beacon and then step back, putting the desk between us again.
I visualize Nina’s blood on my blade, the way Noah’s coated hers.
Nina charges. She tries to impale me across the desk and I slap her blade down. It gouges into the ancient wood. Papers scatter sideways, seesawing to the floor.
She turns her blade sideways and tries to cut at my thighs, but I jump back, swishing my sword through the open space in front of her.
“Your plan sucks,” I tell her, trying to distract her with words. “You know they secured the President at the first sign of trouble.”
“It’s a sign,” she says, circling me around the desk. I hold my ground. Every second I waste with her spreads the eyeless infection farther. “I’m showing the world something right now. The images alone will soften them up. They’ll be ripe with ter- ror.” She lets her blade drop to the desk and scrape the surface.
We’re both behind the desk now. Nothing between us but air.
Nina slashes the air in a repeating X, forcing me to back- pedal until I parry. Sparks burst, and the hilt wrenches my wrist. I kick out my heel for the inside of her knee, and she goes down on that knee. The rush of victory floods my limbs—with her below me, she’s exposed, at my mercy. I just have to lower my blade to her throat.
Then she surprises me; she drops her sword, grabs my wrists with both hands, quick as snakebites, and falls onto her back, taking me with her. Her foot rises and plants in my stomach as she pulls me down, then lifts me over her head as her fall turns into a roll. She tosses me over her. I’m upside down when I hit the far wall and crumple on the floor, stunned. But the rage builds and gives me clarity.
The air is sweet with roses; Nina is releasing her fear waves.
I stand up. Beacon is a few feet away, between us, glowing like a ruby in the light of the Torch.
I fit my armored toe under Beacon and kick it up, then pluck it out of the air and spin, slashing horizontally, each spin bringing me closer to Nina. She intercepts the last slash with her own sword, stopping me. The hilt vibrates in my hand. And suddenly we’re chest to chest, blades crossed between us, noses inches apart. My left hand cups the back of her neck; hers does the same, pressing the Torch’s shaft against the base of my skull. The metal is hot. The red bulb burns bright in the corner of my left eye. We pull with one hand and press with theother.Ourbladesscrapetogether.Thisisthemoment.The world is stuck between two scraping blades. Hers is close to my neck. Mine is close to hers.
“Give up,” she grunts. “Kneel.”
More talking, when the time for talking is over. I snap my head forward and smash my forehead into her nose, returning the head-butt she offered me only hours ago. I feel her nose cave like wet clay, and blood that isn’t mine flecks my face. Dizziness washes over me but I slough it off.
“I owed you one,” I say as she stumbles back. But I don’t stop there. This person took not one but two of my friends, and they deserve justice. I follow her, slashing out again hori- zontally. Her neck makes the same sound Noah’s did when my sword bites into it. There’s a burst of blood and her back hits the wall.
I see my mistake, but it’s too late.
The Torch slips from her fingers, and the red bulb shatters on the floor.