The entire front half of the plane is gone, revealing nothing but blue sky and wispy clouds and the sparkling ocean far below. I’m so screwed. Jamie and I will never make it to the wedding. He’ll never become an aberrant. I’ll never see August again. Yes, if I just keep on sitting here, holding onto my chair for dear life, I’ll definitely never see my partner again.
But my training is failing to kick in. Great freaking job, Eliza. Another mistake to bring home to the Executive, one that’ll earn you several years of solitary confinement this time. That’s assuming you even make it out of this alive, by the way. You’re wearing a flimsy dress with no weapons, no tools, nothing at all that enables you to save yourself. You’re several miles up in the sky, and there’s all that water beneath you. Are you going to survive a fall? Are you going to survive the moment where you hit the ocean like it’s made of concrete?
No.
Not unless you make yourself focus.
It’s been all of five seconds since the explosion happened. The bomb must have been in the cockpit, near the pilot’s seat, and detonated either remotely or on a timer. But the rest of the plane is falling to pieces all around us, and I’m not sure if I remember how to breathe. I’m not sure if I even can breathe.
Something like this happened in Code Name Alpha. “I don’t want to die!” Epsilon shouted. Alpha smiled at her, then strapped a parachute onto his back and locked his arms around her waist. The Alpha of the comic book always smiles. “Then we’ll jump!” he yelled. “Together.”
But there’s no parachute here, at least none that I can see.
I’m pretty sure we’re going to die.
Jamie is yelling something at me as we hang onto our chairs, the jet still plummeting toward the water. “The cushions!” He’s lifting up the seat on his chair, pulling out something from underneath. I want to weep with relief.
There are parachutes after all.
I manage to retrieve a parachute and strap it onto my back, despite the rushing wind and chaos all around me. This, too, was part of our training at the Executive, not that I’ve ever actually had to use it. I can only hope that the bug transmitted part of the explosion to Alpha before it was obliterated. Even if we manage to make it out of this without dying, we’re going to need help surviving the ocean below.
Jamie is still struggling with his parachute. I lurch over to him, not letting myself acknowledge the terror washing over me, and take hold of the straps. He glances at me with surprise, but lets me finish buckling his parachute for him. We need to jump soon, and we need to get far enough away that the jet doesn’t entangle our parachutes.
“We have to jump out the back!” I yell at him.
He nods, his face pale. “Go!”
Jamie doesn’t ask me why I know how to do all this. He doesn’t ask why I know exactly where the emergency exit at the back of the plane is. He doesn’t ask why I know how to swiftly open the door without even hesitating. And when we leap out into the sky, me first and then him, he doesn’t ask why I know how to use a parachute.
None of these are things that Lily Bass would know. But I’m Eliza, an operative sent by the Executive to kill him, and I could be anyone. I could do anything.
I could even defect to his side.
When we’re far enough away, I pull the cord on my parachute and he follows suit, clearly following my lead at this point. Our rapid descent is abruptly cut short, and then we float up slightly into the sky before beginning to drift down toward the ocean. It’s cold up here, but I don’t let myself feel it. I can’t let myself feel anything right now. I was supposed to keep getting close to Jamie, and this is it. This is the part where I have to act more convincingly than I’ve ever acted before.
And if I falter for even a second, I’m going to die.
By the time we land in the ocean, I have a new plan ready to go. Already shivering in my strapless dress, I detach the parachute from my back and let it float away from me. But when I swim over to Jamie, he’s on the verge of passing out, sinking rapidly into the water. I barely manage to float him onto his back and remove his parachute. As his eyes flutter open, he begins to struggle, swallowing a few gulps of water, and it’s all I can do to keep both of us from drowning.
“Stop it,” I gasp.
When his only response is to start dragging me down with him, I haul back and slap him in the face, as hard as I can.
Jamie sputters, coughing up water. His eyes focus briefly on the sinking plane wreckage before returning to me. “Did that really just happen?”
“It’s your jet,” I snap. “You tell me.”
He raises an eyebrow at my tone. “I meant the part where you slapped me. No one’s ever dared to do that. Or wanted to, in fact.”
“I just saved your life,” I say pointedly. “I think we’re even.”
“Fair enough,” he says, flashing me a grin that seems entirely too flirtatious for the fact that we’ve only just recovered from almost dying. “So I know you’re the one trying to kill me. But who’s trying to kill you?”
The question hits me with enough force that I almost forget to tread water for a second. As far as I know, no one else wants Jamison Hart dead, which means the bomb on the jet could have been aimed at me. Even if Gallagher Hart sent the butler to take me out, he’d never risk killing his own son in an explosion. But maybe the Executive has grown tired of my repeated failures to kill my target, and they’ve decided it’s time to close the mission and retire me in one fell swoop.
Or maybe whoever killed Kilo is coming after me next.
“It has to be the Executive,” I say, going with the only response that lets me stick to my new plan. “They’re retiring me because I won’t kill you.”
“And why exactly are you refusing to kill me?” he asks.
I take a deep breath. “Because I’m falling in love with you.”
The words sound false even to me. Can he tell that all this is just an act? It feels so wrong to be claiming that I’m in love with him, even though it’s what I felt when we first met. But that was only ever a fleeting attraction, mixed up with the adrenaline rush from running up a staircase and colliding with a handsome stranger, and it’s all I can do not to think of August right now. I’ve never been so worried before that a target might not believe me.
But Jamie doesn’t seem to notice. His gaze is focused only on my lips, and I can tell that he isn’t interested in anything else at the moment, not even the possibility that I might be lying. All he wants to know is what about me is so dangerous that the Executive can use me to kill people. The fact that I might be responsible for his plane exploding is apparently the most attractive thing he’s learned about me so far.
“I was hoping you’d say that,” says Jamie, sounding satisfied. “When my father told me someone was trying to kill me, I thought it was Lawrence Fisher at first. He kept trying to talk to me about Ophidian, and he was getting way too close to my stepmother. But when the Claire exploded, I realized it couldn’t be him. And then I thought to myself, out of all the people in the world, who’s up here with me in the lighthouse right now? A girl I met only a week before, who somehow seems to be everything I’ve ever wanted, and it’s like she practically fell into my lap out of nowhere. Lily Bass, who told me her name was Eliza when we first met.”
“But you invited me to your treehouse,” I say in disbelief. “You even invited me to a wedding. Why would you do that if you knew I was trying to kill you?”
“What can I say?” He laughs. “I like the excitement of a chase. And by then I knew you wouldn’t kill me. You’d had too many chances for it. I wanted you to tell me about it on your own.”
“Well, I just told you,” I say, flushing. Is he not even going to reciprocate my alleged feelings?
“Not all of it,” he says intently. “Tell me how you were supposed to kill me. Tell me what your lips can do. I’ve been going crazy trying to figure it out.”
No, I can’t tell him the truth about my lips. It’s terrifying how much he’s figured out already. But what if this is the final test to see if I’m really baring my soul or not? And yet if he already knew the truth about my aberration, he’d be asking me a different set of questions entirely.
This is the one thing he doesn’t know.
“Electricity,” I say finally. “My lips won’t do anything on their own. But against someone else’s lips, they’ll conduct an electric current. After a few seconds, you’ll start to feel a tingling. Another minute and you’ll be dead.”
Jamie treads closer to me, fascinated by my supposed aberration. As the plane wreckage disappears underneath the surface of the water, he reaches out and grips my hand.
“Join me, Eliza,” he says. “We can change the world together.”
“Even after I was supposed to kill you?” I ask.
“Especially after you were supposed to kill me,” he says. “That’s how I know you’re on my side. You were ordered by the Executive to assassinate me, and you didn’t. You saved my life because you’re in love with me. I’ve been watching you do it again and again, so it’s time I saved yours. If you join me, I can shelter you from the Executive. I can make sure nothing like this ever happens again.”
“We were in a plane that just exploded,” I point out.
“Oh, that?” Jamie says dismissively, as if he’s already forgotten that we almost died. “Once I take over my father’s company, the Executive won’t be able to kill either of us. With you at my side, I’ll be able to show Ophidian’s board of directors that my vision is possible. I’ll represent the future, not the past. And I know you don’t want to keep killing. I can see it in your eyes. You want to use your powers for good, not evil.”
So that’s why Jamie wants me to join him so badly. He’s going to claim that the gene therapy worked on me, that I’m an example of what his vision for the future holds. The board of directors will believe him, of course, because my aberrant DNA isn’t in any registry. And maybe it’s true that I’m finding it harder to fit myself into the mindset of Echo, the operative who kills target after target for the Executive without ever asking why. Maybe it’s time I admit to myself that I never wanted to kill anyone at all. But this isn’t the time to pull at that thread, to feel any doubt about who I might have to kiss down the line.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I need a better reason than that to turn my back on everything I’ve ever known.”
“Isn’t it obvious by now?” Jamie shakes his head, as if disappointed. “I’m falling in love with you as well, Eliza. To tell you the truth, I’ve always gone from one relationship to another without any lasting interest. But you’re the first person I’ve ever met who makes me want more. I want all of you, and I want you to join me.”
It’s such an honest confession that I almost believe it as much as he does. The infamous serial dater finally wants to settle down, and it’s with me. But the second he says it, the moment those words leave his mouth, I can see what has allowed me to succeed in my mission thus far. The truth is Jamison Hart doesn’t actually feel anything for me. Not really. When he said that just now, when he said that he was falling for me, the only emotion in his expression was one of triumph. All he’s been interested in is how I might enhance his own life and help him take over Ophidian. The way I look, my attitude, even my aberration... They’re all just aspects of myself that he views as attractive trophies to make him worthy of other people’s respect, including his own.
The fleeting moment in which I thought I’d fallen in love with Jamie, back at the Woodland Castle, is long gone. I’m pretty sure it washed away with my blood as I cried in August’s arms in the shower. I can’t trust my target at all, can I? He let me continue this charade long past its expiration date, and he looks at me as a plaything, a commodity, a priceless toy that serves best to piss off his father. He doesn’t look at me as Eliza, even though he’s started to use my real name.
But I can’t let him see it. I can’t let him see that I no longer feel anything for him. I’ve somehow managed to convince Jamison Hart that I want to join him, and it’s only now, when he believes we’re on the same side, that I can finally find out everything else. By the end of the trip, I’ll have the manifest. I might even figure out who killed Kilo and who might be trying to kill me.
As a bright spotlight begins to shine on us, a patrol boat thrumming in time to the steady beat of my heart, I curve my lips into the warmest, most genuine fake smile of my entire life. “Yes, Jamie. I’ll join you.”