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It was a game he knew, that he’d played before.

It was called thejust stay alive a little longergame.

It was the game where Nick told himself if he couldjust stay alive a little longer,if he could just keep the kid, and Mal, and his wife alive a little longer, then he would figure some way out of this. He would find some way to save all of them.

So no, he didn’t risk that the doppelganger might kill the kid.

He didn’t risk that the sick fuck might kill Malek, either.

The other Nick convinced Nick through the link they shared that the other two seers, that all of Nick’s friends, they were all just extras.

The others were expendable.

The others, the doppelganger told him, he would happily leave behind.

Wynter was the only one who was necessary.

Wynter was the only one he really needed to survive.

Once Nick saw that much, he told Morley.

Morley listened patiently as Nick explained what the doppelganger told him, what he was now threatened he would do. Then, after the soldiers used some kind of electronic bullhorn, shouting down at them from the top of the hill with a loudspeaker that echoed up the mountain, Morley looked at Nick, and Nick looked at Morley.

The two of them then looked down at their hands, which held no weapons.

The military still hadn’t come.

Acharya still hadn’t come.

They were on their own.

“Well,” Morley said, after the soldiers finished shouting. “I guess we’d better go up there. Look for our opening.”

“Or watch everyone we care about die,” Nick muttered, looking up the hill.

“Or that,” Morley agreed.

Even now, Nick and Morley were standing apart from everyone else. Even now, they felt like they were on their own, held in cuffs under the trees maybe twenty feet from where the rest of their friends were being held.

Nick gazed up at the portal.

It didn’t look real.

How long had it been here? How many animals and people had fallen through it?

He gazed forward at the portal on the wall of the mountain and realized again why he’d never seen himself inside the painting Mal made.

He wasn’t in the painting because the painting was Nick’s point of view. When Nick stared straight ahead, the painting was Nick’sexactpoint of view.

It was eerie as fuck.

For the same reason, Nick hadn’t seen himself in the painting because how could he? If Malek painted it through Nick’s eyes, of course he couldn’t see himself. No one saw themselves inside a portrait when they were the ones who took the picture.

Nick watched the doppelganger as he walked over to where Wynter stood.

She looked exhausted, angry, defiant.

Her hair was down, hanging around her shoulders. Her deep black, tangled, gorgeous wavy hair whipped around her in a quick breeze. Her blue-green eyes blazed with fury as she watched the vampire in the black hat and coat walk up to where she stood.