Tears wet my cheeks as the blurred world shifted into focus. I was suspended by my wrists, my hands tingling, my head reeling, my balance shot.

I blinked at the empty chair. Maddie was gone. Empty ropes dangled from the armrests and snaked around the chair legs.

What had happened? First the safe trapped my orbs, then two explosions rocked me: stun grenades.

The first detonated inside the safe and the second slammed into me from nearby, a flash-bang erupting behind a concrete lip that protected Maddie from the full force.

And when my vision returned, the chair was empty.

How long had I been unconscious? Ten seconds? A minute? She was gone.

I touched the orbs with my mind, and felt them inside the safe. I slammed one against the interior wall, then two, with the third pressed against the opposite side, but couldn’t dent the steel.

After a good night’s sleep, I could burst through that safe like tinfoil. If my mind weren’t spinning in circles, if my eyes were weeping from pain. But I'd been exhausted forever, terrified forever, hurt forever--confused forever. Had Maddie escaped? Had she set me up?

The orbs scraped the inside of the safe as two mercenaries dragged me from the column. Down the length of a big boiler room, all concrete and pipes and ducts. The safe scraped across the floor toward me, dragged along by the orbs, but too slowly. It couldn't keep up, and in a few seconds was out of range. In the darkness, the orbs fell lifeless to the to the safe floor.

Thirty feet from the safe, the mercenaries dragged me past a bunch of their buddies who were checking their weapons and muttering to each other. Forty feet from the safe, Maddie sat at a makeshift table, tapping on a laptop. She didn’t raise her head.

They dragged me another ten feet, to where PJ stood in a puddle of blood in front of a dead man dangling by his wrists. On one side of the corpse, Rachel stood cuffed to a duct, her eyes closed and her face strained. On the other side, a geeky guy hung from his hands, beside an old lady with her wig askew.

The mercenaries cut down the dead man and hung me in his place. My shoes slipped in the puddle of blood. I looked from PJ to Spandle then back.

"What happened?" PJ asked me, his eyes wide and innocent. "Cat got your orbs?"

Spandle smiled and the lady doctor laughed, though her eyes didn’t change. Behind me, the mercenaries laughed mechanically, like crows cackling over roadkill, feeling PJ's mirth inside their captured minds. Rachel didn’t laugh. The geeky guy didn’t laugh. Maddie's lips twitched, but she didn't make a sound.

"Open the vents," PJ said.

Footsteps sounded, then the creak of metal. PJ inhaled, exhaled, inhaled, exhaled. His stench curdled the air. He wiped a bloody knife on the trembling geeky guy’s shirt and chuckled.

Rachel lifted her head. "Coward."

The knife paused. PJ looked at her. "The only reason I haven't turned you into a zombie yet is because I want you to feel this. Are you sure you want to push me?"

"You’re a joke. I know my father, and he's laughing at you. Spandle thinks you’re a clown, Maddie thinks you--"

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

PJ backhanded Rachel across the face and she lashed at him with one foot, a high kick aimed at his shoulder holster, a one-in-a-million shot. But he just stepped into the sweep of her kick and punched her in the stomach.

She folded over and moaned.

He grabbed her hair and lifted her face. "How's this for fun? You can watch your buddy die."

He flipped the knife in his hand and stepped in front of me. He didn’t look at me, because I didn’t rate his attention, just his blade. He looked at Rachel instead, trying to score a point, trying to prove something.

The tip of his knife touched my chest. Then he pushed.

The knife sliced through my shirt, an inch below my sternum.

PJ drove the blade into me. Pain flowered, and the world receded to an ember at the end of a long dim tunnel.

The tunnel swiveled and I saw Maddie, turning from her laptop to watch me die. After everything, I still loved her--the way you'll always love the first person you reallylove. But for once, it wasn't Maddie's face that I needed to see. It wasn't her face that meant everything to me.

I don't remember looking away from Maddie, but I saw Rachel's beside me. Her dark and unforgiving stare. I saw her core of strength and goodness, and realized how much I trusted her. Completely. More than Maddie. More than myself.

Something switched in me, like a light coming on. I'd loved Maddie for her sharpness and her smarts and her laughter. But most of all I'd loved Maddie because I saw myself as the guy who loved Maddie. That's how I'd defined myself. That was puppy love. For the first time in my life, a moment from death, I caught a glimpse of something bigger. Something better.

I caught a glimpse of Rachel Kravitz.

Then the blade plunged deeper into my chest. Until it stopped, scraping a hard surface behind my ribs.

I hadn't known how quietly and deeply love could take root. I hadn't know how much Rachel meant to me, in so short a time.

And I hadn't known about this. The hard surface behind my ribs.

With my wrists bound and a knife in my chest, I bowed my head and I smiled.

Trigger candy. The one shot that mattered.

A voice said: "Brace yourselves."

My voice.

PJ thrust the knife deeper and the blade scraped something inside me: woke something inside me.

I raised my head and a fourth orb burst through the incision in my chest and took PJ in the abdomen like a cannonball. It burst through him and didn’t stop--didn’t slow--the biggest orb, the fourth orb, trapped unsuspected inside my flesh until the knife touched it. The size of a softball, the density of a diamond, and the velocity of a bullet.

Apparently that's what I had instead of a heart.

After killing PJ, the fourth orb flashed toward the safe while the other three, trapped inside, hefted the safe toward it. Lofting the safe upward, flashing forward—

The fourth orb demolished the safe in mid-air and blood soaked my shirt and seeped onto my pants. My lungs seized. My brain started shutting down and every color in the world shone like the sun. Every sound rose independent of every other sound: Rachel’s intake of breath, the snick of a gun’s safety, the thrum of the ventilation.

One of the smaller orbs smashed a mercenary who’d flicked his safety and the others snapped Rachel’s cuffs with a quick twist.

PJ’s body hit the floor and two mercenaries spun toward me, raising a handgun and an assault rifle. I closed my eyes and sagged in my bonds. Seeing only through the orbs thatshot at the mercenaries as the light strobed--on off on off on--and a shriek pierced the room.

My arms were lashed above me, my head was bowed and my chest was a gaping wound.

"I don't," I gasped, "want to hurt you."

The blond mercenary started to pull the trigger and I sent an orb into his gut and another at the lady doctor lunging at me with a syringe. Two cops in riot gear stepped through the door and I slammed orbs into their helmets.

Rachel shouted--"Spandle!"--and a strange internal silence fell amid the noise: the sound of my own death. My heart wasn't beating.

The three smaller orbs swarmed toward Spandle. Her hair began whipping in the wind surrounding her, and the room darkened in time with my gasps for breath.

I saw the two remaining mercenaries raising their guns, and I saw Rachel on her knees in the blood. Then the fourth orb slammed back into my chest like a wrecking ball and carried me away.

----------------------------------------

The puddle of blood seeped through Rachel’s pants and wetted her knees as Coldeyes lifted his gun at her. She lunged at him, and slashed with PJ’s knife across his elbow.

His grip loosened and Rachel took his gun in trembling hands and fired until she clicked empty. The cops and mercenaries sagged, no longer controlled by PJ, and Rachel scanned the room. She saw the wreckage of the ventilation housing, but no Spandle.

No Maddie.

Just an open grating in the concrete floor.