My past was revealed to me. My father. That facility. The home my mother slapped me in. I remembered it all, and it floored me.
More laughter bubbled from Zane’s mouth, eerie and pained. “Or do you not remember?” he asked, pausing to hear any movements from me. “The orphanage. The one we were all taken from.”
I could see the building perfectly. Too perfectly. It was the one I had seen from the hostel window, with the big, green backyard. I would always search for bugs in that back yard, mind always one step ahead. To protect me.
I was abandoned. Who my real parents were, I’d probably never find out. Ladies and gentleman, I was floating in space. Floating, but I would not be broken.
I blocked it out. For so long, I lived my life putting together my memories with my father as best I could. He was absent, but so were a lot of fathers. I never thought he would lie to me. I was his little explorer. But now it was obvious why Zane wouldn’t leave me alone. He wasn’t just following orders. He saw a connection to me—perhaps not as I expected in the past. It was a deep-rooted anger, a thorn that drove into his side every single day.
My eyes widened. If I weren’t leaving with Zane, he’d terminate everyone and everything. He’d leave behind nothing. No trace. Well, I had met up my mind. I wasn’t leaving without the others.
His footsteps grew closer, despite the looming threat of being burned alive. I clutched Mag’s blade and said a light prayer. I was scared. Now that I knew the truth, I perhaps felt the opposite of what I should have. The horrors of the world sank in, and it only made me want to hold onto life more. It was so easy to fall into the negativity, to give up when it all felt so fucking hopeless. Hell, when your father uses you as a fail switch to destroy another realm, you’d think it would slow you down a little. But it didn’t.
Nothing would. If I was going to live, I was going to be stronger than the rest. My entire life, I sought to invent a purpose for myself. The three I met here taught me there was something already there, something trapped inside me worth a damn. Why didn’t I ever let it show?
I felt my strength bolster my spirit. I knelt down, but I was ready to come out and face Zane for the last fucking time. I put one foot out, carefully shielding the blade against my hip. I stepped out into the open, and my breath was stolen from me.
Zane. He took me from behind, twisting my wrist until I heard the snap. The pain followed like glass grinding down between the bones. The knife fell to the soil. As soon as he stepped onto it, it was lost from me.
“Snake!” he jeered.
“You broke my wrist,” I cried out, falling to the ground in rapturous pain. I couldn’t believe what had just happened. The shock was paralyzing me. The pain burned, and my hand felt limp and cold. Somehow, I managed to hold back the tears, but it was relentless.
He stood above me, laughing exactly like someone who was done searching. Well, I was done, too. He would end me. Surely, he would ruin me. I thought of the three men I’d left behind. How could I have been so stupid to think I could do all of this on my own?
I picked up my breathing and crawled against the soil with my free hand. I stopped at his boots and looked up with pleading eyes. “Zane. They’re human beings,” I said. “We can all live. Together. We can all do what’s right.”
“Right and wrong...” For a moment, he pretended to ponder what the two words meant to him. His smile never wavered, and he wasn’t backing down. “The good thing about this place is that no one will know what happened here, Addie. Your father did all that he could for us. We can leave this realm and the next, side by side.”
“Zane, stop. You sound—”
“There is no progress, goddammit,” he abruptly stated. “Not after this. Not after what happened.”
A life of servitude. I couldn’t imagine what he went through because he had been used so carelessly. But I had been used, too. We all fucking had, and it was about time people stopped crying about it.
Finally, he took Mag’s blade in his hand and eyed the stitching gracing the handle. “These people were human. I don’t doubt you had a connection to them. You are a scientist, explorer, and a good person through and through, but this is different, Addie. Sometimes... well, sometimes science fails. Sometimes, you have to shut it down. It’s time to deal with the reality. Come home.”
He broke my wrist. Why was I even listening to that son of a bitch?
He was wrong about it all. I wasn’t a scientist or an explorer. Not anymore. I didn’t have a god complex, no need for conquest, and I didn’t need to know what the structure of the universe meant. All I needed to know was myself. I needed to keep growing. That, and only that, was going to keep me satisfied.
I knew what I had to do now. If I didn’t accept Zane’s hand and step back into that portal with him, he would make sure to leave me behind. “Give me the knife,” I said, confidently. “I’ll go home, but you don’t get to own me. When we get back, I don’t ever want to see you again.”
Standing, he eyed me reluctantly. “If you come near me with it, I’ll be forced to injure you again.”
I kept my hand fixed around my wrist, holding steady through the suffering, throbbing agony. “I deserve some dignity, don’t I?” I asked.
The fire had spread to our standing and there was only one way out. Above us, there was a staircase that would lead to the roof. From there, we could possibly gain some higher ground, but we would still be stuck in the wildfire. In a fit of rage, he swiveled the knife outward and passed the handle to me. “Fine. I trust you,” he said. “Just get us out of here.”
He shouldn’t have given me the knife.
When I felt the leather handle, I made a split second decision to turn it all around, to end this madness once and for all. There was only one way out, and I had to act fast.
Gritting my teeth, I tried not to think about how badly my next actions would hurt. I sucked in a tired breath and wondered how bat-shit crazy I had to be to think of this as a good idea. I held my arms out, and drove the blade into my gut.
Red.
I fell to the floor, scared and trembling, the fresh black blood already starting to spread underneath me. I looked behind Zane to see a wolf-like beast, a real beast staring back at me, through the entrance. It howled, but I was not frightened. I howled back.