Page 121 of Lovely Darkness

I was supposed to kill her?

Kill her? Why the hell would you kill her? And now Maggie—listen. We don’t have much time. They just gave you a drug to wake you up. They’re going to ask you to take another drug to get to the bottom of things. But you’re going to make a deal with them. You make this deal, OK? And I will make sure everything turns out OK.

But you’re not real.

You make me tired. Just make the deal. I’ll do the rest. We’ll talk when it’s over.

What deal?

Listen very carefully now. Because we only have one chance left to end this once and for all. There is a gun in your bed, Donovan. Your friend is helping you. She put it there. And now you’re going to do exactly what I tell you. We need the little girl, understand? We need Maggie. But first—we’re gonna cure them all. And this time, you’re not gonna fuck it up.

CHAPTER THIRTY - INDIE

“Donovan?”

His hand is cold and his face is so white, it’s almost gray. He looks terrible. My Donovan isn’t pale. My Donovan isn’t cold. My Donovan isn’t this man in this bed.

I want my Donovan back.

“Donovan. Can you hear me?” I’m whispering as I squeeze his hand. I wish I was the only one here. I wish they would all go away. Even Nathan. I just have so many things to tell Donovan. But I can’t do that with an audience.

This is the last piece. He is the last piece. If I could talk to him, we would figure this all out and we’d be fine. I just know it. I would tell him about the girls, and the place, the things, all the things… and we’d all be just fine.

Just. Fine.

But there’s no way Adam is going to leave. Not after what happened in the woods that night. Not after Donovan got caught with Maggie.

Nothing turned out right that night.

No. That’s not true. Nathan came home that night. He was the only thing right about that night.

“Keep talking to him, Indie,” Doc Bolton says. “He’s responding to your voice.” Doc points to one of the machines. It looks like a heart-rate monitor to me, but Doc says, “Brainwaves.”

But now that I’ve been given a directive, I don’t have anything more to say.

Typical. My rebellious nature always rears its ugly head at the most inopportune moments.

And this is so not the time.

So I keep going. “Donovan, you can wake up now. It’s OK to wake up.”

His eyelids flutter and so does my heart. Because once he wakes up there will be no way to stop the plan. It will move forward and that’s it, I guess.

The end of life as we know it.

The end of Old Home.

The end of Adam.

The end of McKay.

The end of all of it.

It will just be… the end.

“Look,” Nick says. “What’s that spike?” He and Doc are standing in front of the brainwave machine, not paying attention to Donovan and me. In fact, when I do a casual look around, everyone is either looking at the machine or in the process of moving closer. Only Maggie stays where she is.

Her eyes narrow down at me.