Chapter 32

CHAPTER 32

"Someone's cut the power!" David yells as the operating room is plunged into darkness. Everly screams. Students in the stairwell scream. I hear people running, and someone crashes into something, enough to make my table spin to the side, and I roll off, right onto the floor in a broken heap that knocks the wind out of me.

"Help, Wes," I try to call out, trying to roll away, my limbs still useless.

Someone steps on my hand as they run, and I scream.

There's a commotion, people clamoring, fighting.

Suddenly, a gun goes off.

One blast, two blasts that briefly light up the room and blow out my ears.

More screaming follows, muffled now.

My heartbeat is so loud in my head it drowns out everything.

I think I hear Wes cry out in pain, or maybe that was David, and then something else crashes, glass shattering, metal clanging against metal.

"Michael! Michael!" Everly is screaming. "Oh my god, Michael, are you okay?"

Something heavy falls on my legs, maybe the ventilator, trapping me.

Another gunshot.

This time, it shoots something glass, shattering it.

Then there's a WHOOSH!

Suddenly, flames sprout up in the corner of the room, lighting the darkness.

From down on the floor, I can see Michael lying lifeless, blood pouring from his head, his empty gaze staring straight at me. His ice-cold stare is worse in death.

I glance up to Wes, with a handgun in his hand, breathing hard, watching the flames. "That's sodium methylate," he says to himself, then starts looking around. "Sydney! Sydney!" he yells.

"Here!" I call out just as I see Everly appearing from behind an operating table, running toward the door.

But Rav is standing there in the doorway, Hernandez beside him with a rifle, Munawar peeking between them.

Hernandez aims the rifle at Everly.

"Don't even think about it," he says.

Meanwhile, Wes runs to me and lifts the ventilator off my legs with a grunt.

I don't see David at all.

"We have to get out of here now," Wes says, pulling me to my feet. "Take short, shallow breaths. Try not to breathe the chemicals in."

He carries me in his arms and runs to the door, where everyone is gathered and Everly is trying to fight her way through.

"Everyone out now. This place is going to blow!" Wes yells.

Everly starts clawing against Rav, trying to escape, but Hernandez brings the butt of the rifle down on the back of her head, causing her to slump. Justin squeezes through to help them drag her up the stairs, the only light in the stairwell coming from the flames rapidly spreading through the operating room.

Everyone clamors up the stairs, yelling, shouting, fueled by the panic of the oncoming flames. Once the door at the top swings open to the learning lab, air blows through and stokes the fire building below us, spreading across to the other room where Clayton is being kept.

"Clayton," I cry out, trying to get out of his arms. "We have to get Clayton."

"I'm sorry," Wes says, holding me tighter as we reach the top of the stairs. "We have to let him go."

We burst out into the room just as the flames roar out of the stairwell and into the learning lab.

"Go, go, go!" Wes yells as everyone runs for their life through the lab, the heat of the flames at our back. There's a whoosh, whoosh, whoosh as various chemicals catch fire and start burning, the threat of an explosion imminent.

We scramble out into the storm, the wind blowing inside the lab behind us.

"Keep running, keep running!" Wes shouts. "To the docks, head to the?—"

The lab explodes .

Wes and I are thrown to the ground by a wall of heat. My ears ring, and Wes covers my body with his as flames reach above us. I feel like I'm on fire.

I whimper, terrified, and Wes keeps me still, his breath ragged and steady, the only thing I can hear above the din.

"Are you alright?" he asks. "We've got to keep moving."

"Yes," I whisper, and he gets off me, lifting me to my feet. I can move a little more now, so I lean on him, and we start limping toward the docks.

"Everyone alright?" Wes yells, some of the students picking themselves off the ground, covered in mud, others already running down the ramp.

"We lost Everly!" Hernandez yells.

"There she is!" someone says. "The north lodge."

We look over to see her running through the door into the building.

"We need to stop her," I say, but Wes shakes his head.

"We will," he says. "But first, we have to get all of us to safety. That fire is going to spread along the tunnels. The wind is going to carry it to the other buildings. It might be too wet to catch, it might not, but the whole compound could go up in flames, and there's no fire department to put it out."

"Good," I mutter.

He glances down at me as we reach the ramp and gives me a shaky smile. "Music to my ears, Syd. Music to my ears."

We run down the rest of the way, the students gathered around Mithrandir , which is hastily tied to the end of the dock where the floatplanes usually tie up. The storm is dying down, and though the swells are large, the waves are less choppy, and the wind is lessening.

"I'm sorry I hit you on the head," I tell him. "I'm sorry I didn't believe you. Didn't trust you."

He squeezes me close to him. "You have nothing to apologize for. I'm sorry I've had to lie to you the whole time."

We stop in front of the crowd. I see everyone, their shocked and worried faces lit up by the fire on shore: Lauren, Munawar, Rav. Justin, Natasha, Toshio, Noor. Patrick, Albert, and Christina. Hernandez, who I realize is someone new to Madrona since I had never met him before, and Janet, who was one of my good friends.

I meet her eyes, and she nods at me. Now I know I was the reason she had run out of the lab crying that day. She couldn't stand to see what they had done to me. Couldn't stand to see one of her friends die and be brought back to life as someone who didn't know her.

But I know you now , I think. And I promise I'm not the same person.

"I'm sorry I had to lie to all of you," Wes says to the group. "You're all brilliant minds. You deserved so much better than this."

"I guess we were liars too," Lauren says, looking at me. "They told us that you were a special case, Sydney. They said that you had a traumatic brain injury and you thought it was 2022. None of us were allowed to mention the year or talk about what was happening in the world."

I think that over. "Clayton kept calling me special."

"He played hardball," Wes says. "He had a harder time lying to you than anyone else."

He was constantly trying to tell me the truth. He just had a weird way of doing it.

"Wait a minute," I say, looking back to Lauren. "You said you missed watching the Kardashians. You mean that's still playing in 2025?"

She lets out a small laugh. "Sadly, yes."

"What else have I missed?"

" The Last of Us ," Munawar says excitedly. "We could have a watch party!'

" No ," everyone says in unison.

"Good lord, Munawar, what is wrong with you?" Rav asks.

Munawar shrugs. I've played the video game, and the parallels between that and the poor mutated creatures in the forest are too close for comfort.

"So what happens now?" I ask Wes. "What about the animals around here? They were experimented on." I pause, horror seizing my chest. "Oh no, was I the one experimenting on them?"

"No," he says adamantly. "That was Wes and Everly, and that was after you died. And as genius as you were, sweetheart, you are not a doctor or a neurosurgeon. You didn't do any of the operations or testing. It was just your formula that made it possible."

But I'm the one who dragged a dead girl over to them , I think, remembering bits and pieces now of what happened when I discovered Farida had died. I'm the one who…who…

"You didn't kill anyone," Wes whispers, trying to assure me. "In fact, the moment you found out what had happened to the other students, when you realized that they didn't die by suicide but that they had been purposely murdered, you tried to tell the police. But Everly had a noose around your neck."

"The NDAs," Janet says, walking over to me. "They had us all in shackles." She looks off into the forest. "The mycelia didn't take in their brains the way it did in yours. The animals won't live forever. They aren't in any pain. Everything in the rainforest here is still in perfect balance. It won't be long before they become one with the forest floor. All the different fungi here will devour them. Their remains will sink into the soil as fertilizer, giving the trees here their growth. The trees give us the air. It goes on."

The wind blows back her hair, and she wipes a tear away from under her glasses. It's only now that I notice she's wearing her pajamas under her raincoat. In fact, everyone is, having been woken up by Wes.

We're having a hell of a night.

"Look," Hernandez says.

We follow his gaze. The north dorm is on fire.

"Everly," Wes says grimly. "She's probably burning it down. She's destroying all the evidence."

"All that research," Janet says. "All those years of work, all that life-changing research going up in smoke."

But she doesn't sound sad about it. I know when I first started, all I wanted was to find a cure for Alzheimer's. I wanted to avenge my grandmother at all costs, to stop feeling so helpless over her loss.

It was enough that I let that vengeance become an obsession, let that obsession lead me down a path there was no coming back from.

I still want that, too. I want a cure. We had a cure. Madrona Pharmaceuticals was ready for it. We just needed more testing. But then I got sidetracked by something even greater—the cure for death.

Something there should be no cure for.

I lost my way.

I lost myself.

I lost my life .

And yet, somehow, I'm still here.

"I'm tired," I say softly, leaning into Wes.

"I know," he says, kissing the top of my head. "We all are." He clears his throat and looks at the group. "Unfortunately, I don't think it's wise for anyone to head back into the main lodge. Not only could it catch on fire, but I don't know where the rest of the staff is, and it's safe to say, I don't think they're on our side."

"When I went to the generator to cut the power, I saw Roderick—guess he didn't stay subdued for long," Janet tells us. "He was with Nick, Michelle, and Handyman Keith. They got on an ATV. It already sounded like another ATV was in the distance, I couldn't be sure. Maybe the rest of the staff escaped."

"Oh my god, the barn!" I cry out suddenly. "We have to go save the animals!"

"Already done," Janet assures me quickly. "I let the goats and the chickens loose. They'll be alright." She looks at Wes. "You said there was a chance that Madrona could go up in flames. I know you always follow through."

"I don't make idle threats," he says with a shrug.

"So we have to leave our stuff behind?" Munawar says. Then he gasps. "Oh no, all my fungi shirts."

"We'll get you new shirts, alright?" Wes says. "Everyone still have their essentials on them, your passports and wallets?"

The students pat down their pockets and nod. I don't think any of them are okay with leaving their luggage and belongings behind in their rooms, but we don't have much of a choice.

"Still wish I had my phone," Lauren says.

"And that's why we always back up to the cloud," Wes says.

About half the students groan about not backing them up, and everyone starts griping amongst themselves.

Wes turns to me. "Don't worry, I have your phone. I've had it for a long time."

Realization dawns on me. "Oh, so that's why my grandmother's picture changed."

"I didn't get it right?" he asks. "Sorry, I tried. I knew you had your grandmother as your wallpaper when you first got here because I asked you about her, but I wasn't sure the exact picture. There were a lot of things that were challenging to keep up the ruse."

"Like my sneakers," I tell him. "That's why you snuck them into my room."

"You ruined them on a hike," he says. "I had to get you new ones, but they didn't arrive on time. The perils of having to take a boat to get your mail."

I remember now. Wes and I had gone hiking and foraging for the excandesco , and we got caught in a downpour. We had to hunker down in a fallen log for hours before we were able to continue through the mud.

"And my Miss Piggy shirt?" I ask.

He gives me a sheepish look. "It, uh, ripped one night."

Oh. I see. In my mind I have the vague memory of us having sex, him ripping it by accident, then tearing the rest of it up to secure my wrists together.

"I have to admit, the hardest part for me was getting your hair color just right," he says, a sobering look in his eyes.

"You dyed my hair?"

He nods, brushing a strand off my face. "I had to. You decided to go back to your natural color when you were here. Everly bought the dye, tried to match it. I think maybe I left it on for too long, I don't know. I'd never dyed anyone's hair before."

I stare up at him. "You dyed my hair as I was dead?" I picture my corpse, Wes rubbing the dye into my strands. "I can't tell if that's creepy or romantic."

"It can be both," he says. Then he cups my face in his hands. "I know that you don't remember everything. I know it will take a long time for everything to make sense. And maybe it will never make sense. But I will wait however long it takes for you to trust me again."

He kisses me softly, sweetly, and pulls back, resting his forehead against mine. "I love you, Syd. I love you with all my being. And you don't need to love me back. I know that we were broken up before. I know that this new you doesn't know me like the old you did. I know?—"

"You don't know half the things you think you do," I interrupt him, my heart expanding in my chest, blossoming and blooming at his words. "Neither do I. But my soul does. My heart does. It always has."

I run my hand over his face, relishing the feel of his beard, the softness of his lips, the drugs finally out of my system.

"I love you, Wes," I tell him, and in every essence of my being, every part old and new, deep within every neuron, I know I never stopped.

Then I kiss him, and he holds me tight, and I realize that some connections in life can't be severed, not even by death.

Someone claps.

Then, another person claps.

Sarcastic golf claps, but still.

And Hernandez says, "This is all well and good, but are we actually going to get out of here, or do we have to stay here and watch you make out?"

We break apart. We didn't pick the best time for this, did we? One moment of intimacy amidst a world of chaos.

"Well," Wes says, clearing his throat. "What do you all say? Should we get on the boat and get the fuck out of here? Or do you want to stand on the dock and watch the lodge burn?"

Munawar puts up his hand. "I vote for the burning of the lodge."

"Me too," says Lauren.

"Me three," says Janet.

So we all stand there on the dock and watch as the lab and the north dorm burn down. Soon, the fire spreads to the main lodge, then the dining hall. Miraculously, all the surrounding trees survive, their waterlogged trunks and full foliage unable to catch fire, while the wood of the buildings goes up like tinder.

Perhaps the lodge had wanted this all along.

I always thought it was like a sentient predator, waiting to pounce.

But maybe the lodge was never trying to harm us.

Maybe all it wanted was to be set free.