Push

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

JACKSON PRACTICALLY VIBRATES WITH TENSION. HIS BREATHING’S shallow and faster than normal.

He wants to kill her, this shell who wears his sister’s face.

I can feel his emotions like they’re my own.

“Stop,” Lizzie says, her smile turning to a glare. “No one’s killing anyone. Typical Jackson, bristling like a hedgehog.”

I blink at that description. Not one I would have thought of. “We don’t have much time. I can’t keep you here for long,” she says.

“Where’s here?” I ask.

She shoots me a look so reminiscent of one of Jackson’s looks that it hurts my heart to see it. “Does it matter?”

“What do you want?” Jackson asks, his voice harder than I’ve ever heard it, his expression liquid-nitrogen cold.

“I know things. You need to know them, too.” Her expression shifts to one of concern, and she turns back to the control panel ahead of her, touching things, skimming her hands over molten, glowing surfaces. “We have to hurry.”

“And why would I believe anything you tell me?” Jackson asks.

“That’s a problem, isn’t it? I have about three minutes to gain your trust.” She pauses. “The box of candy we were sharing the night we got in the accident . . . it was chocolate-covered peanuts.”

Jackson crosses his arms over his chest. “Good guess.” He doesn’t seem impressed.

“The summer you were twelve, we took a family trip to the Grand Canyon. I was scared of heights and didn’t want to go near the edge. You held my hand.”

This time, Jackson doesn’t say anything.

But I’m not convinced that info is something only his sister would know. I saw pictures of his family at the Grand Canyon. Maybe somehow, a Drau did, too.

Lizzie glances back at the panel in front of her and her breathing speeds up. “You were born with an opaque layer over your corneas,” she says, talking very fast now. “But you could see perfectly well. Your eyes changed a little at a time until you were about six, and then they’ve been Drau gray ever since.”

I remember the day Jackson told me that. We were sitting at the top of the bleachers. “You knowing that doesn’t prove anything,” I say. “Jackson told me that story. In fact, he told it to me in an open, public space. You could have been listening.”

“I could have been?” Lizzie asks, her brows shooting up.

“You,” I say. “The Drau. Same thing, right?” I glance at Jackson. He’s rigid and silent and I can’t imagine how hard this is for him, facing down Lizzie’s clone, a shell with a Drau consciousness inside it. “That’s why we have to be careful what we say outside the game. They can always listen.”

“Not quite always.” She turns back to the panel. “You’re a harder sell than I expected, Jax. I thought you’d be so happy to see me, that we’d have this awesome reunion.”

“It isn’t a reunion,” he says, his voice flat. “It’s a first meeting. You’re not my sister.”

“No?” The word sounds strained. Like she’s in pain. “Okay . . . how about this? You had a fuzzy brown bear with a blue ribbon around its neck that you slept with until you were nine. You got it when you were three. You called it Calcaneus because Dad busted his heel falling off a ladder and that was the bone the doc said he broke. Believe me now, Jax?”

His breath hisses through his teeth. Was that Lizzie’s nickname for him? Jax? And that story about the bear . . . is it true? And if it is, there aren’t too many ways she could have known it.

With her hands still on the panel, she twists again to face us, and I get a clearer glimpse of what’s in front of her.

I gasp as I realize her hands aren’t just on the panel, they’re in it. Part of it. I can see her bones through her translucent skin, and crawling all over them are what appear to be tiny spiders.

“Nanoagents,” she says. “They don’t really hurt, just sting a little. They connect me to the machine. Efficient, if a little weird. And they’re much smaller than they appear here. They’re magnified by the panel.” She pins me with her gaze. “Miki, right?” She cocks her head in a beckoning gesture. “Come here.”

I take a step forward without really thinking about it.

Jackson grabs my arm and stops me.

“I don’t think so,” he says.

She makes a dismissive noise, the kind Carly makes when her younger brothers annoy her.

“I can’t leave the panel or you’ll move through to the lobby.”

“Explain,” Jackson says.

“I need to show you something before I explain.”

“Why?” Jackson asks.

“Because it’s the only way you’ll believe a word I say.”

“Show us from there. We’ll stay here.”

Again, she makes that sound.

She closes her eyes for a second and shakes her head rapidly from side to side. “You haven’t changed much in five years. Still arguing with everything I say.”

“And you haven’t changed much in five years,” Jackson clips. “Which is why you can’t be my sister. You look exactly as she did the night she died. Like a teen, not a girl in her midtwenties. Lizzie would have aged. A shell wouldn’t.”

She sighs, glances at the panel again, then back at us. “I need a hand. Mine are occupied at the moment.”

“Use my hand. Miki stays right here,” Jackson says.

Lizzie smiles. “Right. Because she’ll be perfectly safe there as opposed to here.”

She has a point.

Jackson doesn’t move, and his grip on me doesn’t loosen.

“Fine,” she says, gritting her teeth now, thrusting her hands deeper into the panel, her skeletal fingers grasping some unseen thing. “I was just trying to spare your modesty, Jax.”

Her hands move quickly. She hunches forward.

“Now, Jax. Right now,” she barks, her hands jumping right, left, right again. “Hurry!”

I don’t know if it’s her tone or her use of his nickname, but something makes Jackson move. He sprints toward her as she says, “Lift my shirt. Do it!”

The white walls burn my eyes. The sound of her voice is so loud it hurts.

“I’m losing you!” Her words come at me way too slow, but the urgency isn’t lost. She’s panicked. Frantic.

“Shells don’t have navels. No umbilical cord. No belly button. You remember when I taught you that, right? I told you in the lobby, right before your first mission.”

She cries out and thrusts her hands deeper into the mass of skittering, clawing nanoagents. “Crap,” she snarls. “You’re gone. And I didn’t get to tell you a damn thing.”

Jackson grabs her shirt.

“Lift it,” she orders.

After a split-second hesitation, he yanks it up.

The world tips and tilts, but not before I see exactly what I knew I’d see. Her belly button. Lizzie isn’t a clone, a shell, a Drau.

But as I stare at her skeletal fingers enrobed in the moving layer of spidery nanoagents, I don’t think she’s quite human, either.

“The Committee,” she says, her tone tight and pained and urgent. “Don’t trust them, Jax. They aren’t what you think. Neither are the Drau, the battles, the game.” She jerks her hands from the console with a cry.

“Lizzie,” Jackson rasps.

I catch a glimpse of his stricken face and then I’m falling, falling, falling away.

I respawn in the lobby. Grass. Trees. Boulders.

I feel like I’m going to puke, like my head’s going to explode. I haven’t felt this awful since the first time I got pulled.

Swallowing, I push to my feet, just in time to see Jackson push to his.

His face is sheet white, his lips drawn in a taut line.

He opens his arms and I run to him, heart pounding, pulse racing.

He pulls me close. Holds me tight.

And whispers against my ear, “Incoming. Gear up.”