Damn, but the kid was fast.

I started to bolt after Robin—which meant I wasn’t watching my back. Fletcher tackled me, sending both of us sprawling onto the rough concrete floor and rattling my teeth in my jaw. I tried to kick her weight off of me, and was rewarded with a gasp of pain as my foot met something solid. But she didn’t budge, and before I could kick again, harder, there was a sharp stinging pain at the side of my neck.

Almost on instinct, I reached up and batted it away. The syringe—now distinctly lighter, now distinctly empty—went skidding across the floor, spilling drops of Jabberwock as it rolled. Fletcher scrambled after it.

I dragged myself to my feet, clasping one hand to my neck. My fingers came away sticky with a strange half-pink mixture of blood and Jabberwock. It’d been a messy injection, and I hadn’t gotten the full dose. But I’d gotten most of it. The veins in my neck seemed to burn around the wound—Fletcher’d said it took a few minutes to kick in, but I had no guarantee now she’d ever been telling the truth. Fletcher, who was kneeling on the ground a few feet from me, fiddling with the syringe’s cap without even looking at me.

The gunshot’s flash was searingly bright. Fletcher’s eyes went wide as it carved a trough into the floor just inches from her. “Tell me why.”

“Why what, dear Hexel?”

“Why I shouldn’t kill you where you stand. Why you stabbed a vial full of Jabberwock into my blood.” I staggered a little where I stood. “Why I trusted you in the first place. Damn you, Fletcher.”

“It’s a funny thing,” she said. She stood, every line in her face glittering with malice. “Something about the nightmare—you trust a hospital, a doctor, most when you’re desperate, Hexel, when you’re clawing for answers, for anyone to help you. Maybe it’s primal,” she said. “It’s certainly subtle. Insidious. A useful tool against someone who’s already demonstrated she can withstand my nightmare head-on.”

I motioned with my gun. “Keep answering.”

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She shrugged. “I never lied to you. I have no loyalty to my superiors. But I know what they can offer me, and it’s a hell of a lot more than you can. The girl should have been the prize, Jabberwock making her insensate and able to answer all our questions once she woke—but you’ll do. Enough to save my hide.” She cocked her head to the side like a vulture studying its prey. “You should be starting to feel it by now. You’ll go numb first, you’ll start to lose your senses one by one. Jabberwock likes a…blank slate to play with.”

If it hadn’t been so dark, I’d have noticed my vision blurring at the edges. I took a step backwards, towards the stairs, and tightened my fingers around the trigger. “If I’m a prize…why shouldn’t I kill you here?”

“You won’t.”

I fired. The bullet zipped past Fletcher’s arm, and I smiled grimly at the way she flinched. “Don’t look very confident.”

“I’m unarmed, Hexel. I’m not raising a hand against you.” She spread her arms to demonstrate the fact. “I think you are many things. I think you are more like a nightmare than you admit—it was you that made the girl run, that scared her so. But you are not a murderer. You will not kill me in cold blood.”

Another pain seized my temple. Colored lights were dancing in my eyes. But Fletcher was right. I’d made that promise to myself: no matter how much the Outscape corrupted me, how much being immersed in nightmares day in and day out ate away at my humanity, I wouldn’t stoop that low. I’d told Robin the truth, that neither I nor Bella had ever killed anyone. And even for a treacherous rat bastard like Fletcher, I wouldn’t break my promise.

I lowered the gun, and she smiled. “I knew-”

The bullet took her in the knee, and she crumpled.

I snatched up the empty vial of Jabberwock—maybe Usher could take a look at it, if I ever made it back to him—and sprinted for the stairs. My legs were burning, and not from the effort, and the world around me was starting to sound as though it was underwater. My lungs felt as though they’d contracted to half their volume and were filled with a particularly nasty strain of algae. I couldn’t have long.

The upper floor of the warehouse was still deserted. “Robin!” I called. My voice was hoarse and foreign to me. “Robin! I’m sorry! I shouldn’t-” The door was lying open, as if someone had run through it in a hurry. “Oh, no.”

I stumbled. The floor was cool and inviting, and seemed to revolve around me like the moon’s orbit. There was a growing deadening sensation spreading out from my neck that I didn’t like at all. I crawled to the doorframe and propped myself up against it, peering out into the night. Empty. Had I really provoked her to run so far? “Robin,” I croaked. “I’m sorry…”

The numbness reached my eyes. I couldn’t keep my grip any longer, and I fell into to unconsciousness.