Extract of “Echoes”

{End of Part VIII: Imagine the Fire}

Percy remembered very little between the time he caught Ariadne and the time he was knocked out.

Almost all of it was sensation.

He remembered catching her, feeling her bare skin against his. In his good hand, feeling seemed to return almost immediately. She was warm, unnaturally warm. Her eyes had rolled back, exposing the whites. But the whites weren’t white— they were red, streaked with black. Her ears and nose had atrophied, almost leprous. Her carotid pulsed, each time turning just half a shade darker. Her hair had gone silver at the roots, extending about an inch and a half.

When she opened her eyes, she screamed.

Percy tried to calm her down, tried to tell her it was okay. Looking back, maybe she was warning him of the scientist standing behind him, the butt of Storm’s stolen rifle about to get smashed into his nose. More likely, by then she already knew she was dead. But if she knew that, on some level, she knew he was as well.

Ariadne’s pupils had bled out of the iris, ripping them into the whites. Her mouth open, he could see white sores on the back of her tongue and throat, the tonsils inflamed almost beyond recognition. The longer she screamed, black liquid, the consistency of blood but the color of petroleum, began to trickle, then flood, out of her nose.

And when she held her hand up to cradle his face, her fingernails were gone, the ends of her digits stained black, her hands even warmer than her body. Even with his eyes locked on hers, Percy saw the tendrils coming, saw the blackness began to seep into his own skin. Seconds later, he felt it, too, as his whole body became paralyzed. Pain was the only sensation as the rifle cracked against his face.

After a varying amount of time in darkness, Ariadne having disappeared, he saw the light of the aircraft, the propellers spinning, spinning, spinning, spinning like a worm in water, spinning like the infection was spinning around his heart. All Percy could focus on was a small trickle of black coming from a cut on his finger.