Page 16 of Tell Me Why (Tell, The Detective #5)

He would stay down-wind of them, like the old days, if he got close enough to lay eyes on the facility before dawn, but at the rate things were going, now, he didn’t expect it.

He found an upcrop of stone that would give him shade through a decent fraction of the day to come and he resigned himself to it, sitting rather than laying so that he didn’t get any more mud and dust on his clothes than he had to.

He braced his shoulders where they would stay without extra force and he waited.

It would be draining, but he would be ready by the time the sun had finished setting.

No matter what happened, after that, he owed Tina that much.

It was like waking from stone.

He breathed.

He listened.

He chose to move.

Found his feet and straightened, a mind that controlled the body without regard to the body’s capability.

He knew the direction of the sun from when he had started away from the facility, and he followed the same line, hoping that he was following the right line closely enough to find the facility again.

Dusk was getting closer, and he sped up, feeling gaunt but with a deep, stony reservoir of fury and determination that hadn’t yet let him down.

The sun was down far enough that Keon’s men would have started their mobilization. He’d badly misjudged the distance or the direction and put himself out of position for the fight.

Or.

He crested a shallow ridge and found himself looking down at the utilitarian parking lot of the exact facility he’d been seeking, as though he’d intended to walk up to it at just this moment.

He stood underneath a tree, watching as black dots swarmed down from along the road, past a security station that would be blaring the knowledge that they were under attack to the rest of the facility even this moment.

Tell would wait, watch to see which doors they had chosen to focus their attack on, see what response they got out of the facility security, and then make a decision as to where he would make his own entry.

He might have preferred a moment to rest, but he was here exactly when he needed to be, and he was going to give Tina her best chance.

He remembered this ridge.

This point of disappearing from view.

This had been the route he’d used to get out.

He was where he was supposed to be.

Now he just had to find out whether or not Tina had survived it.

“I’m kind of hallucinating a lot, right now,” a voice said. “Can you say something rational so that I can be sure whether it’s actually you?”

“Tina,” Tell said sharply, looking down at her. “How are you mobile already?”

It was much too early. She couldn’t rise in bed at this hour, much less walk or… climb a security fence.

She sighed.

“I figured,” she said.

“Tina,” he said. “What are you doing out here? I’m here to get you out of there .”

She ignored him for a moment, then looked back.

“Sorry, I guess?” she said.

He shook his head.

“How did you get out?” he asked.

Once more she looked back at him.

“You are persistent,” she said. “The flames are a bit dramatic, though, don’t you think?”

“I need to get you out of here,” he said. “It’s a long way back to the car, but I didn’t have another plan. I think I probably could have stolen one from down there, but… that seems reckless, at this stage.”

She rose from where she was squatting, wobbled a bit, then looked him dead in the eye.

“I’m not fighting another hallucination,” she said. “You aren’t here. So. If you’ll… not… mind…”

She frowned like that hadn’t come out right, then stumbled forward and fell, blinking hard and started an army crawl forward with a heartbreaking determination.

“Tina,” Tell said gently. “You did it. And you remain the strongest person I might have ever met.”

“Moles and trolls, moles and trolls,” she muttered. He knelt next to her.

“If I pick you up are you going to fight me?” he asked.

She looked at him, annoyed at the interruption of her effort.

“You have to catch me first,” she said, and he smiled despite himself. He still didn’t know what he was going to end up with, but she had a fighting chance, and an awful lot of fight left in her.

He picked her up and set off.

Light, dark.

Hot, cold.

They were things that happened outside of herself, now.

She had no idea what was actually going on, but she’d made her attempt.

They’d turned their backs, given her a moment when they thought that she was all the way gone, and she’d…

well, it was… It wasn’t fuzzy. The problem was that it had been in super-bright colors that streaked and wailed, and she thought that they’d been about to take her apart again to put something new inside of her that would remain deep down inside her chest as she healed again, but she’d taken them apart first, which was…

not like her?… or was it? She couldn’t remember.

They’d left the weapons in reach and underestimated her and she’d run.

She’d memorized the layout of the building from the inside, but it hadn’t been until near the end that they’d taken her anywhere with an external-facing door.

It had a red ‘exit’ sign over top of it, absurdly. Up to code.

She knew every inch of the ant-trails that they’d followed, taking her to and from her cell every day, so while she was reasonably sure that it wasn’t the shortest path, the one that she’d taken to get herself out, she’d known it. There had been no guesswork.

Now, whether she’d been on her feet the whole way, she didn’t have any idea, or where she’d gotten someone else’s feet, either, and her elbows hurt, but pain was good because it meant that she still cared.

The days that the pain had slipped away from her… those had scared her.

Those were the days that she had nearly died and maybe they would go ahead and harvest her because they’d pushed her too far, too fast.

They talked about it in front of her.

Someday, maybe, she was going to have to go back through all of it and try to figure out which parts were real and which were… well, whatever else had been going on.

How many men had she attempted to kill who hadn’t been there at all, and how many she’d actually made a lethal attempt on.

She didn’t think she’d actually killed anyone, because they were vampires, and a blade didn’t have the ability to take their lives, even if it was a very fancy one that… where had it ended up? She couldn’t remember.

Probably inside of one of them.

She didn’t think she’d had it when she got outside.

It had floored her, the outside lack of cover from the setting sun, and that? that moment she remembered with clarity.

That moment stood out as the only lucid thought of the entire event.

She had had to choose if she was going to live or die.

If she was going to live, she had to walk.

That was all there was to it.

She didn’t remember much about after that. Couldn’t swear that she had walked, but she’d lived, so she must have.

The rest of it from there was a hall of monsters.

Doors that opened to nothing or to everything, knowledge that she couldn’t have possibly had, which meant that all of it was hallucinated and none of it was true, things that hissed and recoiled and threatened, the grip of spiders’ legs across her skin, a voice she couldn’t turn her head fast enough to make out.

She was out, and if she died of exposure, that was better than being eaten.

If only for spite.

She wasn’t going to go easily.

A needle pierced the skin of her shoulder and she realized.

She realized that they’d caught her. That maybe she hadn’t escaped at all, that it had all been doors and mirrors and a fevered brain trying to remember what the story of reality even looked like.

The moment had been a lie, the one with the knife on the table and the binding on her wrist just a fraction loose.

She’d imagined it.

Made herself out to be the hero, the one who rescued herself.

Her time was up.

Even if she hadn’t been counting it correctly for days, it was done.

“Tina,” a voice said.

Tell’s voice.

She’d hallucinated it a dozen times, even before the faux escape attempt. She kept thinking, hoping that he really was still going to come back, that he wasn’t dead.

“Tina,” he said again. “Listen to me. You have to fight. You can do this, but you have to fight.”

Cruelty.

Here, at the end of things, he was going to tell her to fight?

There was nothing for her to do.

She pulled her arm against the restraint, just to show herself, but the arm moved freely.

She looked around.

Eyes.

It was like she’d forgotten them, they’d been so unreliable.

The room was purple and infinite, but the size of a box, up tight, the corners just… there… where she could reach out and touch them.

Tell had great, black hair that stuck out from his head like he’d been electrocuted, and his face was long, like it had been stretched.

But he was there, next to her, his chin resting on the table next to her.

She blinked, trying to make him go away.

This would be easier if she didn’t have to try to convince herself that he wasn’t here.

Just.

Let go.

She was tired.

There was gibberish from her other side, but… Tina frowned… it had been coherent gibberish, rather than incoherent gibberish. Or, rather, it had been a sequence of words that hadn’t made any sense to her at all, rather than words that were tantalizingly close to meaning something to her.

In Ginger’s voice.

She hadn’t hallucinated Ginger.

Not once.

That was new.

“They really have advanced,” the woman said. “This was my technique, you understand, but they’ve evolved past it in the most fascinating ways.”

Tina looked back at Tell.

His hair might have been smaller.

Or it might have been snakes.

“Fight,” he said, looking her in the eye. “I know you’re still in there, because you got yourself out. You have to fight, though. Don’t get lost in there.”

“I’m going to have to cut it all out of her,” Ginger said. “The sooner the better. It’s going to keep degrading her until it’s all out.”

Tell nodded, his eyes fixed on Tina’s.

“I understand,” he said.