I grab the wrist of the hand with the knife and try to force it away from me. But Tawni has somehow become stronger from the Flu, gaining superhuman strength. The knife moves closer to my chest. She’s going to kill me. I have no choice.

I close my other hand around her neck. The Flu has weakened me beyond recognition, but I use every last ounce of energy to squeeze my fingers shut, hoping to get her to drop the knife. The feeling is sickening. Horrifying. Knowing that you are literally squeezing the life out of someone. But I don’t stop, because Tawni doesn’t stop. It’s weird. Although she’s being choked to death—that much I can tell by the wretched gurgling sounds she’s making—she won’t drop the knife. It’s like killing me is more important than her own life.

So this is how it ends for us? With friends killing each other?

Her lips are moving, trying to tell me something, but I can’t understand her. Is it a trick or should I relax my grip? I’m afraid if I do she’ll cut me to ribbons. “Ha…” she chokes out.

Her face is turning blue. I loosen my grip slightly. “What?” I ask. The knife is so close to my skin, inching closer, but I have to know what Tawni is trying to say.

“You’re…you’re hal...luc…in…ating,” she breathes.

Huh?I’m hallucinating? She’s the one with the knife, the one trying to kill me. The cold steel pricks my skin, just below my neck. It doesn’t hurt, doesn’t bleed. I try to consider for just one moment that I might be the one having a waking nightmare. As soon as I do, the knife disappears. My world spins upside down and I am on top of Tawni, rather than the other way around.

I’m trying to kill her.

I’m hallucinating.

My body shakes and I wrench my hand from Tawni’s neck. Twisting to the side, I throw myself against the hard rock, panting heavily.

Next to me I can hear Tawni gasping for breath, half-gagging.

I did it to her.

I spit once more and desperately wish for water. I’d even take a hallucination of water—they are so real, after all.

I turn back to Tawni, who looks like she might throw up, her head between her knees, her matted hair clumped around her face, which has no color in it. She’s not gagging anymore, but her breathing is ragged and forced.

I did it to her.

The fact that the Flu caused me to do it provides no solace. I still tried to kill my own friend, my only friend, and I hate myself for it. I hate myself even more when I pull Tawni’s hair away from her face so I can look at her, and she visibly twitches, pulls away sharply. She’s afraid of me. She should be. I’m dangerous. Lethal. I’ve killed before and I can do it again, even if I don’t want to.

Her neck is marked with red stripes where my fingers gripped her skin and I frown as I look at them. They will surely bruise, reminding me of my sins for the next few weeks. If we make it that long.

“Tawni, I’m—”

“It’s okay,” she croaks, suddenly looking from the ground to my eyes. Her eyes are watery—not from crying, but from the pain I put her through. I start to object, but she cuts me off again, once more in a voice two octaves lower than her natural timbre. “You were hallucinating, Adele. I would’ve done the same thing. It’s not your fault. Let me guess, I transformed into a goblin, some evil monster with big eyes and tentacles?”

In spite of the way I’m feeling, I laugh. “No, you were just yourself, but you were like a wild woman, ten times stronger than normal. You were trying to stab me in the heart with a knife. But I should’ve known—”

“No, it’s fine. Really. Promise me you won’t apologize again, won’t even speak of this again.”

I shake my head. I don’t want to promise, don’t deserve to be able to make such a promise.

“Promise me.”

“Okay.”

“We’ve got to go,” Tawni says. She is playing my part.

We go. We are moving even slower than before, hobbling along like a couple of oldies. At some point we strap the flashlights to our wrists because we can’t grip them anymore. I don’t know how we even manage it, as all dexterity is gone from my fingers. Seconds pass like minutes, minutes like hours, hours like entire days.

Somehow we keep going.

My head is down; I am watching my feet scrape the ground, barely rising high enough to move forward. Instead of holding each other up, we are slowly dragging each other down into the dust. Tawni falls first, not even trying to break her fall with her hands. I try to help her up, but she has nothing left. “Go,” she says. “Find help.”

I don’t want to leave, don’t want to abandon my friend, but we will both die if I don’t. “I will come back for you. That I promise,” I say.

I leave my pack with Tawni and will my body forward, using the wall to support my left side. Struggling along, I pray for a miracle. The walls start closing in, the ceiling falling on top of me; the floor even rises slightly under my feet—all moving together to crush me. It’s a hallucination—has to be. Not real, not real, not real, I tell myself, but it doesn’t help. The stone walls keep coming.

I am crouching now, trying to get out of the tunnel before it destroys me. I see a light in the distance, dim but visible, a mere hiccup in the endless darkness before me. Stretching, reaching, extending my arm, I fight toward it, beyond desperation. My vision blurs.

I am going to die.

My legs crumble.

Without seeing my mom again.

My vision blurs.

Without seeing him again.

The dim light is gone, once more replaced with utter blackness.

Tristan.

Chapter Six

Tristan

I wake up thinking about secrets. My secrets; Ben’s secrets; whether Adele has any secrets. Heck, I am even starting to get paranoid about whether there are things I don’t know about Roc, who I think I know everything about. I guess I’m just used to knowing things, because of my father. How could I be so stupid, so naïve? After everything my father has done, after everything I know about him, how could I have trusted him so blindly? How could I have actually believed that he told me the truth about our world? Could it be that he doesn’t know the truth? I doubt it. I think he was just too arrogant to admit the truth to his own son.

And so now I wonder what other secrets he has kept from me.

When we left the train, we followed Ram and the others through a stone archway and into a tunnel lit by staggered torches on either side. I wanted information, to ask the zillions of questions I’d been thinking about on the train, but they took me directly to a stone box room with a dozen beds, leaving Roc and Elsey and me to get some rest. I didn’t want to sleep, didn’t think I could sleep, but as soon as they turned the lights out and closed the door, my head sank into the pillow and I drifted away. I guess I was more tired than I thought.

I hear movement to my left. Roc, shifting in his sleep, or perhaps—

“Roc, you awake?”

A grunt. “Barely.”

“Oh.”

“Are you awake?” Roc asks.

“I’m talking to you, aren’t I?”

“I’ve heard you talk in your sleep before,” Roc says. I can feel the grin in his voice.

“Shut up, I don’t believe you.”

“Believe what you want. It’s true. Especially recently. You keep saying some name in between snores. What name was it again? Oh yeah—Adele.”

“You’re full of it,” I scoff.

“Something about how you want to kiss her and hug her and marry her.”

“Dork.”

“Butt monkey.”

I can’t stop myself from laughing. “Butt monkey? Really, Roc?”

“I never said I was mature.”

“Good point.”

“What are we doing here, Tristan?” Roc asks, his tone turning serious in an instant.