Page 54 of Love, Nemesis (Ocean to Ashes #2)

Feeling Lethe behind her, she tried to resist thinking about the implications of anything else.

Would all of them understand her reasoning when she, too, disappeared?

She was determined to make her choice, but that didn’t stop the intrusive questions from bubbling up the closer they seemed to get to success.

Her life had seemed easier to let go of when her time had run out. When she could count down the seconds of her life, see the minutes and the hours, she could measure everything, detach herself from all that she loved in preparation for that moment.

Life had been easier to let go of because it had been out of her control anyway.

Now, it wasn’t dying anymore that she faced.

It was disappearing—a different and unquestionably more permanent end.

More than that, she was starting to realize that by sharing her secret with Lethe, she’d become more connected to the world again.

There were still things she had to clear up with Jasper. She wanted to thank Ares. She wanted to get to know Lethe. She wanted to peel open that second page of her life.

Holding the key in the door, she felt the first real wave of hesitation.

Hesitation? No. She’d made her decision. Just a few minutes ago she’d been determined to move forward.

Lethe’s large, calloused hands moved from behind her, holding hers over the key. She expected him to turn it, usher them onward, but he simply held it there.

His touch felt strange, like an odd kind of light capable of making her reservations grow. He combed her hair back with his other hand, kissed the nape of her neck and whispered, “You don’t have to break it.”

His words were strange and out of place. She knew that. He was helping her, wasn’t he? Why of all times would he hold her hand with such gentleness, pull her back against him and whisper with such tenderness against the nape of her neck that it gave her chills.

Stranger yet, it worked. His words washed over her like a spell, and the depth of his whisper seemed to suggest that he knew that they would.

Here they were, in the middle of this tense, urgent, moment and she didn’t want to move.

With every passing second, she wanted to turn around and go with Lethe wherever he wanted to go, abandon this entire ordeal, abandon the State and simply be.

Frightened that a few short seconds could change her mind so quickly, her mind jolted and she shoved the key forward. The door gave before she turned it. Ana eased back as it was a clear indicator that it had already been unlocked.

Lethe backed away, and she exchanged glances with him. There were two questions.

The first asked what all of this meant.

The second asked how he’d managed to be so suddenly convincing.

To her relief, he offered no answers in the silence, but her mind seemed to clear as she eased away from him and leaned back against the adjacent wall.

“You know why we’re here,” she said, objecting to his previous comment which she now questioned if he’d said at all.

You don’t have to break it.

She half expected him to repeat those words.

“I do,” he whispered back in the darkness of the hallway, and for a moment she thought she saw something flicker in the hazel mixture of his eyes. Something told her to question him further, suss out his intentions, but she disregarded the strangeness she felt between them.

Hailey had somehow predicted the relevance of this day. Lethe acting the slightest bit suspicious should be the least of her worries.

She pushed the door open slowly and peered through.

It was quiet.

She slipped inside. Lethe closed the door behind them with a soft clink.

From her point of view down the narrow hallway, it was empty.

She paced carefully through the walkway, eyes focused on the room ahead with a variety of dim lights illuminating her path.

The walls opened up into rows of tall tubes, long, white tables, and walls covered in inscriptions of curses.

All at once, the sins of the State were unveiled to them both.

The deeper she walked, the more grotesque the experiments became.

Animals in dark tubes; samples of The Eating Ocean and then barrels of it; memories contained to fragile glass; cursed items locked behind cases; books with the symbols of the war; extracted minds, hearts, and what Ana could only imagine were souls.

Her feet moved silently along the floor, and she held her breath, wading deeper inward, past larger samples of black human organs, and then monsters and parts she didn’t recognize at all. There were two hallways. She and Lethe nodded toward each other before they went separate ways to explore.

Ana went down her hallway, which opened into a small room. At the end of the room, there was a clear container, something small with a subtle blue hue inside of it.

Her eyes were drawn to it as she approached, and she discovered the blue shell, cushioned there behind the glass.

She reached for it, pausing when she noticed something ripple subtly behind the glass.

She jolted back, realizing quickly it had been the wall—something she only just realized was a dark, black curtain.

Her eyes narrowed on it as she leaned back over the shell, fingers grazing the cloth.

She slipped her fingers behind it, tugging it back.

Eyes widening, Ana dropped the curtain.

She hesitated, questioning for a moment what she’d seen.

She leaned forward, pulling it all the way back.

She walked through, now between rows upon rows of shells, each one identical to the first, all with the same fine carvings inscribed into the surface.

She didn’t want to know what it meant.

She moved past them, noting how the room appeared to be designed specifically for the shells.

A sound made her stop. Her head perked up as she noticed another door, left ajar at the end of the enclosure.

She kept walking, glancing back at the shells as she neared the door. She opened it to find another hallway, more doors, and very dark, cold, stone walls. It was as if the lab went on forever. She was tempted to call for Lethe but didn’t want to alert anyone she was here.

She waded into the hallway, back against the wall as she walked sideways down it.

Dead silence.

Her heart pounded in her chest. She neared a turn in the hallway, glancing back to the lab door she’d left and the light filtering in from it.

A wet hand slammed across her mouth. Ana resisted the urge to gasp as someone collapsed against her and dragged her down onto the ground. The stone wall was damp against her back.

“Shh—shh—don’t,” she heard, the person shaking over her before stifling a cough. The voice was familiar. Ana sat up as she moved out from under the stranger.

He collapsed against the wall beside her, gasping in pain.

She saw the faint hue of blood, wiping it off her face as she saw it pooling on the ground.

The figure heaved toward her, snatching her hand before shoving a fistful of crushed shells, clumped together by blood, into her palm. “W—wrong,” he said.

“Ares,” Ana said in alarm. “Ares?” she said, louder.

Ares held her hands, pushing the shells harder. “We were wrong,” he said. “About ev—everything. I couldn’t—”

“Ares. Hold on,” Ana said, trying to hoist him up. He was soaked, slipping through her fingers. “Hold on,” she repeated, pulling him out of the hallway. They stumbled back into the lab, Ares falling back onto the slick floor.

Ana held her breath at the damage as Ares was laid out in the light.

There was so much blood. So many wounds she could hardly tell where the worst of it was coming from.

His body trembled, breathing sharp. He stared up at the ceiling, gritting red teeth as he coughed.

“I have to freeze you,” Ana said, reaching for the trigger on Chronos.

Ares grabbed her hand, and for the first time, she noticed a bronze ring around his wrist, broken glass inside of it.

He let her pull it off.

It was what remained of an Atlas. Ares had never owned one.

“I—I tried to save them.”

“Them?” She looked past the bronze ring to Ares, who watched her with conviction out of the corner of his eye.

He winced before he started coughing violently.

“You don’t mean—” She looked to the door. “Jasper. The Mystics.”

“Do—n’t,” Ares forced out. “Don’t go.” He rushed the words. “Don’t—” He raised his voice. “D-Don’t go!” he shouted.

Ana pulled the trigger of Chronos, only slightly with a targeted concentration. It encapsulated Ares.

She looked over at the black curtain, past all of the shells. The lab was expansive, but if she called loudly enough, Lethe would find her.

Lethe was a powerful ally, but on impulse, she resisted the urge to yell for him.

As powerful as he was, he had a real life.

He was a real person. Not to mention, if Ana were to use Chronos—which she very well would, he would get stuck in time and it would be difficult for them to retreat.

It would be best, strategically, to leave Lethe behind.

He would follow after her, she was certain, but if she went in first, froze what was down there, then perhaps much of the risk would be mitigated.

Ana stood, leaving Ares suspended in time. She walked into the hallway, fingers on the trigger of Chronos as she proceeded deeper, past where she’d found him.

There were stairs. Flights and flights of them. Adrenaline ran through her as she descended them, reminding herself that in a single second, she could freeze everything.

It was several minutes before she found the first body. A Mystic, cast on the floor, long dead. Then there were two together, four, a hallway full of them.

There were no similarities in the wounds as if every manner of weapon had been used to unstitch them.

She walked over their corpses, heart throbbing as she tried to measure her breathing. She searched their faces, turning into another dimly lit hallway with a dark room at the end.

She stared at the room, waiting in the silence before her eyes slowly combed through the area. At last, she saw him.

It was Jasper, lying still with his arm collapsed beside him, his head curled up near his chest.

Ana kept her eyes on the room at the end as she crept closer to Jasper’s body.

She knelt beside him, brushing the hair from his face as she stifled the surge of emotion inside her.

She moved his arm, seeing the large laceration across his chest and up toward his neck.

His death would have been immediate. Her hand moved to his face, and before she could say his name, she heard a whisper.

Her head jolted toward the dark room at the end of the hall and eased up.

Several whispers, pulled together in one voice, echoed from the room that lingered like an endless void ahead of her. She readied her fingers on the trigger of Chronos, wading slowly forward. The voices repeated the same words, again and again, and finally she heard them.

“Guest of hon-or.”

They whispered, all in unison.

“Guest of hon-or.”

One foot after the other, she neared the edge of the dark room, as far as the light extended.

The voices came from all directions inside, the faintest of lights visible, colorful neon circles in the blackness, vibrant like buttons from machines. They didn’t blink or move.

“Guest of hon-or. Guest of hon-or. Guest of hon-or.”

Ana activated Chronos.

Time spun out into the room.

The chanting stopped.

Ana waded into the darkness, searching the room. Some of the small lights were closer to the ceiling, some farther, some lower near the ground. Ana neared the closest of the illuminant rings, steadying her breath in the silence.

It was the only sound.

Two small, glowing yellow rings awaited ahead. Ana eased toward them, moving deeper and deeper into the room until the door behind her felt a sizable distance away.

When she was within arm’s length of the rings, she held her breath, stepping closer to them as she reached out her hand slowly.

“You’ve wandered into the world of monsters,” a voice echoed to her left like a shadow of her memories, and just as she looked, fire exploded in front of her. Ana stumbled back as a pyre lit up before her, illuminating the face with yellow rings in the irises.

Hands wrenched her arms, one deactivating Chronos, and as she saw their faces, she stopped struggling.

They pulled her to the edge of the room, setting her back against the wall as they crouched around her.

“Surprised?” One of them laughed, stroking the edge of her chin with blackened fingers before she drew her head away.

They walked around the pyre, firelight that showed walls and stairs and monuments covered in lines and lines of curses. There were statues, and art, monuments to the Great War’s Strike, artifacts collected from years of Hailey’s efforts.

They looked down on her with illuminant eyes. One of the Strike knelt down in front of Ana. This one had a ring of green in his eyes. He saw through her with those eyes. He saw her fears, her questions.

“Do you finally see?” he asked. “Why The Great Light is such a beautiful thing?”

And she realized, in refusing to speak the truth all along, in fearing it, they’d never asked questions they all should have asked. If The Great Light had brought back those dead in the war, why not the Strike as well?

In that moment, she watched them all, these creatures of legend, once long dead.

In the midst of the chaos, several in the crowd stepped aside. A figure approached, fire at his back like destruction’s crowning glory and pale, blue eyes that burned with all of the undeniability of anguish.

“Ana,” he sang, firelight cast across his face, igniting a wicked smile, “welcome to the State.”

It was Strike Ivan Rowe.