Imagine Me

The door swings open.

I’m knocked backward by the force of it, and when I look up, eyes burning, Nazeera is there. Nazeera, Lena, Stephan, Haider, Valentina, Nicolás, and Adam.

Adam.

I can’t explain exactly what happens next. There’s so much shouting. So much running. Stephan punches a clean hole through a crumbling wall, and Nazeera helps fly us all out to safety. It happens in a blur. I see things unfold in flashes, in screams.

It feels like a dream. My eyes stinging, tearing.

I’m crying because of the fire, I think. It’s the heat, the sky, the roaring flames devouring everything.

I watch the capital of Oceania—all 120 acres of it—go up in flames.

And Warner and Juliette go with it.

ELLA

(JULIETTE)

The first thing we do is find Emmaline.

I reach out to her in my mind and she answers right away. Heat, fingers of heat, curling around my bones. Sparking to life in my heart. She was always here, always with me.

I understand now.

I understand that the moments that saved me were gifts from my sister, gifts she was able to give only by destroying herself in return. She’s so much weaker now than she was two weeks ago because she expended so much of herself to keep me alive. To keep their machinations from reaching my heart. My soul.

I remember everything now. My mind is sharpened to a new point, honed to a clarity I’ve never before experienced. I see everything. Understand everything.

It doesn’t take long to find her.

I don’t apologize for the people I scatter, the walls I shatter along the way. I don’t apologize for my anger or my pain. I don’t stop moving when I see Tatiana and Azi; I don’t have to. I snap their necks from where I’m standing. I tear their bodies in half with a single gesture.

When I reach my sister, the agony inside of me reaches its peak. She is limp inside her tank, a desiccated fish, a dying spider. She’s curled into herself in its darkest corner, her long dark hair wrapping around her wrinkled, sagging figure. A low keening emanates from her tank.

She is crying.

She is small. Scared. She reminds me of another version of myself, a person I can hardly remember, a young girl thrown in prison, too broken by the world to realize that she’d always had the power to break herself free. To conquer the earth.

I had that luxury.

Emmaline didn’t.

The sight of her makes me want to fall to pieces. My heart rages with anger, devastation. When I think about what they did to her—what they’ve done to her—



Don’t



I don’t.



I take a deep, shuddering breath. Try to collect myself. I feel Aaron take my hand and I squeeze his fingers in gratitude. It steadies me to have him here. To know he’s beside me. With me.

My partner in everything.



Tell me what you want, I say to Emmaline. Anything at all. Whatever it is, I’ll do it.

Silence.

Emmaline?



A sharp, desperate fear jumps through me.

Her fear, not mine.

Distorted sensations flash behind my eyes—flares of color, the sounds of grinding metal—and her panic intensifies. Tightens. I feel it hum down my spine.



“What’s wrong?” I say out loud. “What happened?”



Here



Here



Her milky form disappears into the tank, sinking deep underwater. Goose bumps rise along my arms.



“You seem to have forgotten about me.”

My father steps into the room, his tall rubber boots thudding softly against the floor.

I throw my arms out immediately, hoping to rip out his spleen, but he’s too fast—his movements too fast. He presses a single button on a small, handheld remote, and I hardly have time to take a breath before my body begins to convulse. I cry out, my eyes blinded by violent, violet light, and manage to turn my head only in small, excruciating movements.

Aaron.

He and I are both frozen here, bathed in a toxic light emanating from the ceiling. Gasping for breath. Shaking uncontrollably. My mind spins, working desperately to think of a plan, a loophole, a way out.

“I am astonished by your arrogance,” my father says. “Astonished that you thought you could just walk in here and assist in your sister’s suicide. You thought it would be simple? You thought there wouldn’t be consequences?”

He turns a dial and my body seizes more violently, lifting off the floor. The pain is blinding. Light flashes in and out of my eyes, stunning my mind, numbing my ability to think. I hang in the air, no longer able to turn my head. Gravity pushes and pulls at my body, threatens to tear apart my limbs.

If I could scream, I would.

“Anyway, it’s good you’re here. Best to get this over with now. We’ve waited long enough.” He nods, absently, at Emmaline’s tank. “Obviously you’ve seen how desperate we are for a new host.”



NO



The word is like a scream inside my head.

Max stiffens.

He looks up, staring at precisely nothing, the anger in his eyes barely held in check. I only realize then that he can hear her, too.

Of course he can.

Emmaline pounds against her tank, the sounds dull, the effort alone seeming to exhaust her. Still, she presses forward, her sunken cheek flattening against the glass.

Max hesitates, vacillating.

He’s no good at hiding his emotions—and his present uncertainty is easily discernible. It’s clear, even from my disoriented perspective, that he’s trying to decide which of us he needs to deal with first. Emmaline pounds her fist again, weaker this time.



NO



Another scream inside my head.

With a stifled sigh, Max decides on Emmaline.

I watch him pivot, stalk toward her tank. He presses his hand flat against the glass and it brightens to a neon blue. The blue light expands, then scatters around the chamber, slowly revealing an intricate series of electrical circuits. The neon veins are thicker in some places, occasionally braided, mostly fine. It resembles a cardiovascular system not unlike the one inside my own body.

My own body.

Something gasps to life inside of me. Reason. Rational thought. I’m trapped here, tricked by the pain into thinking I have no control over my powers, but that’s not true. When I force myself to remember, I can feel it. My energy still thrums through me. It’s a faint, desperate whisper—but it’s there.

Bit by agonizing bit, I gather my mind.

I grit my teeth, focusing my thoughts, clenching my body to its breaking point. Slowly, I braid together the disparate strands of my power, holding on to the threads for dear life.

And even more slowly, I claw my hand through the light.

The effort splits open my knuckles, the tips of my fingers. Fresh blood streaks across my hand and spills down my wrist as I lift my arm in a sluggish, excruciating arc above my head.

As if from light-years away, I hear beeping.

Max.

He’s inputting new codes into Emmaline’s tank. I have no idea what that means for her, but I can’t imagine it’s good.

Hurry.

Hurry, I tell myself.

Violently, I force my arm through the light, biting back a scream as I do. One by one, my fingers uncurl above my head, blood dripping from each digit down my bleeding wrist and into my eyes. My hand opens, palm up toward the ceiling. Fresh blood snakes down the planes of my face as I drive my energy into the light.