Imagine Me (Shatter Me #6)(5)

Evie made it so that only she or Max could control Emmaline’s powers, and with Evie dead, the fail-safes implemented were suddenly weakened. Emmaline realized that in the wake of our mother’s death there would be a brief window of opportunity—a brief window during which she might be able to wrest back control of her own mind before Max remade the algorithms.

But Evie’s work was too good, and Max’s reaction too prompt. Emmaline was only partly successful.


Dying, she says to me.

Dying.


Every flash of her emotion is accompanied by torturous assault. My flesh feels bruised. My spine seems liquid, my eyes blind, searing. I feel Emmaline—her voice, her feelings, her visions—more strongly than before, because she’s stronger than before. That she managed to regain enough power to find me is proof alone that she is at least partly untethered, unrestrained. Max and Evie had been experimenting on Emmaline to a reckless degree in the last several months, trying to make her stronger even as her body withered. This, this, is the consequence.

Being this close to her is nothing short of excruciating.

I think I’ve screamed.

Have I screamed?

Everything about Emmaline is heightened to a fever pitch; her presence is wild, breathtaking, and it shudders to life inside my nerves. Sound and sensation streak across my vision, barrel through me violently. I hear a spider scuttle across the wooden floor. Tired moths drag their wings along the wall. A mouse startles, settles, in its sleep. Dust motes fracture against a window, shrapnel skidding across the glass.

My eyes skitter, unhinged in my skull.

I feel the oppressive weight of my hair, my limbs, my flesh wrapped around me like cellophane, a leather casket. My tongue, my tongue is a dead lizard perched in my mouth, rough and heavy. The fine hairs on my arms stand and sway, stand and sway. My fists are so tightly clenched my fingernails pierce the soft flesh of my palms.

I feel a hand on me. Where? Am I?


Lonely, she says.

She shows me.

A vision of us, back in the laboratory where I first saw her, where I killed our mother. I see myself from Emmaline’s point of view and it’s startling. She can’t see much more than a blur, but she can feel my presence, can make out the shape of my form, the heat emanating from my body. And then my words, my own words, hurled back into my brain—

there has to be another way

you don’t have to die

we can get through this together

please

i want my sister back

i want you to live

Emmaline

i won’t let you die here

Emmaline Emmaline

we can get through this together

we can get through this together

we can get through this

together


A cold, metallic sensation begins to bloom in my chest. It moves through me, up my arms, down my throat, pushes into my gut. My teeth throb. Emmaline’s pain claws and slithers, clings with a ferocity I can’t bear. Her tenderness, too, is desperate, terrifying in its sincerity. She’s overcome by emotion, hot and cold, fueled by rage and devastation.

She’s been looking for me, all this time.

In these last couple of days Emmaline has been searching the conscious world for my mind, trying to find safe harbor, a place to rest.

A place to die.


Emmaline, I say. Please—


Sister.


Something tightens in my mind, squeezes. Fear propels through me, punctures organs. I’m wheezing. I smell earth and damp, decomposing leaves and I feel the stars staring at my skin, wind pushing through darkness like an anxious parent. My mouth is open, catching moths. I am on the ground.

Where?

No longer in my bed, I realize, no longer in my tent, I realize, no longer protected.

But when did I walk?

Who moved my feet? Who pushed my body?

How far?

I try to look around but I’m blind, my head trapped in a vise, my neck reduced to fraying sinew. My breaths fill my ears, harsh and loud, harsh and loud, rough rough gasping efforts my head

swings

My fists unclench, nails scraping as my fingers uncurl, palms flattening, I smell heat, taste wind, hear dirt.

Dirt under my hands, in my mouth, under my fingernails. I’m screaming, I realize. Someone is touching me and I’m screaming.


Stop, I scream. Please, Emmaline— Please don’t do this—


Lonely, she says.


l o n e l y


And with a sudden, ferocious agony—

I am displaced.





KENJI





It feels weird to call it luck.

It feels weird, but in some perverse, twisted way, this is luck. Luck that I’m standing in the middle of damp, freezing woodlands before the sun’s bothered to lift its head. Luck that my bare upper body is half-numb from cold.

Luck that Nazeera’s with me.

We pulled on our invisibility almost instantly, so she and I are at least temporarily safe here, in the half-mile stretch of untouched wilderness between regulated and unregulated territories. The Sanctuary was built on a couple of acres of unregulated land not far from where I’m standing, and it’s masterfully hidden in plain sight only because of Nouria’s unnatural talent for bending and manipulating light. Within Nouria’s jurisdiction, the climate is somehow more temperate, the weather more predictable. But out here in the wild, the winds are relentless and combative. The temperatures are dangerous.