A voice broke the silence from my left—first, scaring the shit out of me, then filling me with far more horror than I’d realized I could even hold.

“It’s my heart,” Jada whispered. “What’s it planning to fix of yours?”

36

“And I will wait, I will wait for you…”

I closed my eyes and sagged limply against the table.

No, no, no, I screamed inside my head. Not this. Anything but this.

Then I surged violently from head to toe, trying to explode from my bonds. I flailed, shuddered, and flopped. Minutely.

I got nowhere.

“No,” I finally managed to whisper. And again more strongly, “No.” Not Dani. Never Dani. No one was “fixing” anything about her, and certainly not her bodacious heart.

“So,” she prodded in a whisper. “What’s it fixing on you?”

“You’re strapped to a table, about to be fixed, and you’re curious?”

“If I hadn’t told you first, wouldn’t you be curious about what it thought my problem was?” she whispered back.

“How do you know its purpose is to fix things?”

“Pretty obvious from the images, Mac,” she said dryly.

“How did you know I was here?” I hadn’t known she was. I hadn’t bothered looking to my left. There hadn’t been any sounds over there. Perhaps our would-be surgeon had already set up her instruments before I’d regained consciousness.

“Superhearing. You’ve been sighing. Occasionally, a snort. Can you reach your cellphone?”

“No,” I said.

“Me either.”

How had she gotten here? Had the wraiths broken out a window in BB&B, swooped in and plucked her unconscious body from the bed? Had they always possessed the power to defeat Barrons’s wards and just been pretending? And why? As far as I knew, my ghouls hadn’t been stalking her. Had the Sweeper simply tucked her into its cart like a grocery store customer indulging in a buy-one-get-one-free deal because she’d been handy and according to its nebulous and highly suspect criteria was “broken,” too?

“How did it get you?” I asked woodenly.

“I looked out the window and saw you walking down the alley.”

“I thought you were unconscious.” Damn it, she should have been unconscious! Then she wouldn’t be here.

“I was waiting for everyone to finally leave. Ryodan finished my tattoo today. I had someplace to go. But I looked out the window and saw you following what looked like a walking trash heap.”

“Following it?” I’d never even seen it. Apparently the noisy, rattling heap could cast a glamour.

“It was about twenty feet ahead of you. Then I heard Barrons’s voice coming from it and knew something was wrong. The minute I stepped outside, the ZEWS were on me. I didn’t even have time to access the slipstream.”

They’d straitjacketed her, too, I realized. Smothered her and knocked her out, and like me, she’d awakened restrained from head to toe.

“Slipstream?”

“Used to call it freeze-frame.”

“Got any superhero ideas?” I said. I wasn’t hopeful. Restrained, even her extraordinary gifts were useless.

“Everything I learned Silverside requires use of my hands. Can you move at all?”

“Only my head and only a little.”

“Ditto,” she said.

I searched for something reassuring to say but could find nothing. Barrons would have no reason to look for us beyond the eight-block circumference of the storm, and I doubted we were in that part of the Dark Zone that was inside it. I’d underestimated my ghoulish stalkers. I wasn’t making that mistake again. I had to assume anything that put so much premeditation into its “work” would put an equal amount of thought into choosing a place where it would not be interrupted.

We couldn’t count on Barrons for a rescue. And certainly not Ryodan.

It was just the two of us.

“I’ve been in worse situations,” Jada whispered.

I winced and closed my eyes. I really hadn’t wanted to hear that. “Jada—”

“If you’re going to tell me you’re sorry again, stow it. It was my feet that took me where I went. That night and tonight. We make our own choices.”

“And there’s your responsibility dysmorphia showing again,” I said coolly.

“Responsibility dysmorphia is you being so arrogant you think your actions are the only ones that count. You chased me. I ran. That’s two people doing two things. We can split it fifty/fifty if you want. I planned on going Fae-side anyway. I was hungry for adventure. I never thought ahead. I lived in the moment. You weren’t responsible for that.”

I remembered her laughing as she’d leapt into the mirror, deep from the belly, no fear. “I should have come after you.”

“I would have darted into the nearest mirror in the hall. You know what those were? They showed pretty, happy places, sunny islands with white castles on sand. It took me a while to figure out what was on the other side wasn’t what they showed. Barrons was right. You following me would have killed me.”

“You know about that?”

“Lor told me. And once I’d gone through that first Silver, you had no chance of finding me. There are billions of portals in that hall, Mac. That’s not a needle in a haystack—that’s a billion needles in a gazillion haystacks.”

“But you lost so many years,” I whispered.

“There you go again. I didn’t lose them. I lived them. I wouldn’t undo a bit of it. It made me who I am. I like who I am.”

That hadn’t been how it looked at the abbey, and I told her that.

“It’s hard to be alone,” she said. “You do what makes survival possible. Otherwise you don’t make it.”

Like talking to the equivalent of a ball for five years? I didn’t say. However crazy it was, it had gotten her through. Who was I to judge?

And now here she was, strapped to a table, and the part of her the Sweeper wanted to work on was her heart—that amazing, luminous, live-out-loud in every possible color part of her that, given enough time, could heal and become luminous again.

But not once the Sweeper had worked on it.

I didn’t think for a moment it intended to make her more caring and emotional. I was pretty sure if either of us walked out of here after having been “fixed,” we wouldn’t be remotely the same, probably some Borg-like creature, a distant, collective automaton. I shuddered at the thought of losing my individuality, especially since I’d been altered to live a very long time, with my personality blotted out by the stamp of something that fancied itself an improver. How dare anything tamper with our innate structure? Who the hell was it to decide what was right and wrong with us?

And Dani—so unique, complex, and brilliant—what might it turn her into?

I closed my eyes. Tears seeped out the corners. “Can you forgive me?”

“I keep telling you, you didn’t do anything to forgive.” Then after a long pause she said, “Can you forgive me, Mac?” And I knew she meant Alina.

“I keep telling you—” I said.

We both sort of laughed then, and I cried harder, silently. We’d had to be tied up in the same room together to finally say what we’d needed to say.

The Sweeper was right. My brain was flawed. It couldn’t be relied upon. My heart would always overrule it. Like it had when I’d been determined to bring Barrons back from the dead. Like it quite possibly had in bringing Alina back. There was no way Dani was getting worked on. I would never let it happen. No matter the cost. Right or wrong, wise or foolish, liberating or damning, I wouldn’t allow the Sweeper to harm her.

“I don’t like how quiet you are, Mac,” she whispered. “What are you thinking in that messed up head of yours? It’s your brain, isn’t it?”

I must have made a sound of irritation because she sort of snickered.

“I knew it,” she said. “It’s planning to fix your brain!”

“It’s not funny.”

“It is, too. Admit it,” she said. “We’ve been analyzed by a pile of junk that looks like it’s going to fall apart if it takes one wrong step, and found lacking. My heart. Your head.”