Page 160 of Victorious

It didn’t matter. All that mattered was saving Sydney. If he got to kill Dr. Gray along the way, he’d consider that a plus. He turned and started back toward the path. When he sensed he wasn’t being followed, he glanced back, and found Mitch staring down at the dead EON agent, looking ill.

“What is it?” demanded Victor.

Mitch swallowed. “I’ve never killed someone before.”

Victor shrugged. “It gets easier.”

For some reason, that didn’t seem to make the other man feel better. But this time, when Victor walked, Mitch followed.

“What now?” he asked, trailing like a shadow.

Victor sighed. “We get her back.”

“We don’t know where they’re taking her.”

Ahead, the gate came into sight. They wove through the gap. The EON van was gone, along with the body of the agent. “Of course we do,” he said, nodding at the bloody stain they’d left behind.

“What if they’re going somewhere else?”

Victor faltered. He was having trouble lifting his boots. “They’re not.”

“How can you be sure?”

He told Mitch about Dr. Gabriel Gray. By the time he was done, the corners of his words were slurring slightly.

“So it’s a trap.”

“Of course it is,” said Victor as he led Mitch to the red pickup, Dol still unconscious in the backseat. “But we’re going to stop them before they get there,” he said, dragging his cell phone from his pocket. “We’re going to intercept it.”

“How?”

“Like the song says,” murmured Victor, feeling dizzy, drunk. “With a little help from our friends.”

He punched in the message, shoved the phone back in his pocket, and drew out the inhaler. He’d used the rest of the cartridge fighting EON’s puppets. He ejected the spent vial, and slotted in a full one—his last—each task getting harder as the drug overwhelmed his system, pain be damned.

“You drive,” he said, his limbs threatening to buckle as he dragged open the truck door.

He made it into the passenger seat right before the blackness closed around him.

Mitch was saying something, but Victor didn’t hear. He was too busy dropping like a stone into the dark.

XVIINOW. THEN.

3 MONTHS BEFORE THE END

LOCKLAND UNIVERSITY

TRIAL and error.

It was a common phrase in scientific circles, one that made the process sound clear-cut, simple if not linear. A sequence of test, fail, adjust, repeat, until success was eventually—inevitably—reached.

But what was on paper a matter of adjusting doses, swapping chemical ingredients, monitoring interactions was in reality a gruesome process. One that wreaked havoc on Victor’s body and his mind, pushing his tolerance for failure to its limits.

And every time the attempted progress failed, which it did, again, and again, and again, he was forced to return to the numbing poison of Haverty’s original serum, just to stabilize his heart until the next trial.

It was bad enough when a compound flat-out didn’t work. Worse, when it worked in half measures, offering a glimpse of temporary victory before collapsing like a house of cards into defeat.

Dani insisted she was making progress while Victor vomited his guts into the nearest sink.