Wrath

Reagan breathes in, out. Inhale, exhale.

Inhale.

Exhale.

“Calm,” her brain whispers to her. “Steady.”

Even so, her nails still bite into her palms. Even so, her knuckles are bone-white, her heart beats in anticipation.

A simple door lies ahead, close enough for Reagan to make out a silver doorknob, wood made of the darkest ebony. It rests in the middle of the street, as if a child had thrown it down, not caring where it landed — but Reagan knows that this door has been placed here with anything but carelessness.

The quiet of the air is tangible — it rests heavy and humid on Reagan’s shoulders, brushes whisper-light fingers over her cheeks and tells her to fear what’s coming next.

“What is coming next?” she wonders, the thought breaking through the fragile bubble of pretense calm she’s built up around herself in the past few minutes. “What could possibly be next?”

Another game? Another deadly decision? Another sick, twisted price to pay?

The iron tang of blood still fills Reagan’s senses. It still drips down the side of her face from a gash above her right eyebrow, still fills her mouth with a bitter bite from a busted lip.

It still stains her fingers.

The memory of it gushing hot and slick over her hands, up and over her wrists, as she had tried to stop the bleeding, as she had cried and screamed for help, comes rushing back.

The cracked concrete sidewalk is darkening with rain, with blood. Reagan kneels as the rain pours down all around her, her palms pressed to Night’s chest, to his skin and bones, trying to hold him together.

“Stop,” her mind tells her. “Not now.”

Slowly, one by one, Reagan uncurls her fingers. The bite of her nails disappears and blood trickles warm and sticky down her palms from the crescent moon cuts.

She keeps her eyes on the door. The buildings of this ruined city rise up around her like a forest of concrete and glass, faded copper and ragged metal.

A raven lands on a lamppost a few feet away. Its guttural caw cracks through the air like a gunshot. Broken glass glitters from the ground beneath it, reflects a dark sky and heavy clouds and for a moment Reagan imagines falling through the shattered reflection, being spat out into an upside-down world where everything wrong has been turned right.

But the reality is here. Reality is now. The raven screeches once more — a signal, an announcement.

The GameMakers are watching.

The door opens.

Reagan tightens her grip on the bat in her right hand, feels the familiar weight of the wood and the smoothness of the handle under her fingers. She ignores how it’s stained crimson — brown in places but bright in others. She ignores the bruises painted up her arms, along her neck. She forgets about Jasper. She forgets about Cora and Nia and Kingston.

Most of all she forgets about Night.

“Breathe. Inhale. Exhale.”

Above Reagan’s head, the clouds begin to swirl, thicken. The street she’s on is thrown into shadow. A sharp, cold wind bites at her skin, raises the hairs on the back of her neck.

A figure emerges through the doorframe.

Reagan stands still — her pulse thrums with a frightening ferocity at her wrists.

“Inhale. Exhale.”

The door closes. The person is too far away for Reagan to see their face and for a moment neither of them moves.

The wind picks up, howls down the streets of the ruined city like the cries of the dead.

“Inhale. Exhale.”

A drop of rain hits the ground at Reagan’s feet — a brief distraction, a tiny sliver of memory.

“No,” Reagan thinks but her mind is already working, conjuring up a ghost.

Night’s golden eyes meet hers as she kneels on a cracked sidewalk. He smiles. He begins to speak.

Reagan shoves the memory out of her mind with brutal force, gritting her teeth. “No,” she thinks again.

The figure at the other end of the street begins to move, walking careful step by careful step forward.

“Steady,” Reagan’s mind tells her. “Wait.”

But her memories flash by like a train hurtling down the tracks. Cora and her innocent eyes. Nia and the way her fingers had danced over piano keys like water. Kingston and his unmistakeable smile.

Night and his eyes that had burned like shined copper.

Jasper and the tightness of his fingers around her throat.

The person draws closer, closer, closer.

Reagan buries it all. She shuts it away somewhere dark and cold, swallows down the pain and the grief — but the fury is harder to quell. It burns her skin, makes it hard to breathe. Reagan’s fingers tighten around the bat until her knuckles turn white.

“Inhale. Exhale. Control it.”

Somewhere, underneath the rage, something else shifts and turns. Something Reagan has been denying, has been holding onto with a desperate grip ever since she had been thrown into this nightmare. No - something that’s been growing even before then, something that had grown up from between the bloody cracks in the concrete that night. From up between the cracks drenched in Night’s blood.

Something dark and electric and powerful.

Whatever happens, she can’t let it go. No matter what game she has to play next.

“Anger,” a voice from a distant past laughs, as if reading her thoughts. “Anger will get you nowhere.”

Reagan’s breath catches in her throat at the voice, something hot and heavy wells up behind her eyes — but like all of the others, she lets the memory flutter past, lets it fade away with the scream of the wind.

And the person finally emerges from the shadows.

Reagan’s heart stops. Her brain goes blank. Everything, everywhere, turns upside down.

A copycat image of herself stands bold and strong before her — her dark hair blows in the wind, her eyes flash in the gloom, and slowly, as Reagan watches breathlessly, her lips curve, twist into something cold, predatory.

“Hello, Reagan,” the clone speaks. Her voice is quiet, soft, but Reagan hears it as if it has been whispered into her ear.

Reagan doesn’t respond. She can’t. The air has been sucked from her lungs and it’s horrible because after everything — after everything — the GameMakers have thrown at her, this should be no surprise.

But it is. Seeing herself like this — unblemished, strong, blood-free — is terrifying. Seeing herself like this — dark, confident, dangerous — turns Reagan’s blood to ice.

“Are you enjoying the games?” her clone asks at her silence. She doesn’t move closer, just stands there amongst the wreckage and ruin, under a sky that’s as dark as the feelings that sometimes threaten to overwhelm Reagan — the ones she’s been trying to push down for so long.

The words make Reagan grit her teeth, but still she doesn’t speak. “Calm, steady. Anger will get you nowhere.”

Her clone hums into the electric-filled air, tucks a strand of hair back behind an ear, clasps her hands back behind her back and rocks innocently on her heels.

“I can talk if you won’t,” she says. Reagan grips the bat tighter, keeps her peripheral vision on the darkness between the skyscrapers and demolished streets on either side of her. Every muscle in her body is tensed, ready.

But the clone doesn’t make a move to come any closer. She just stands there — and then she speaks.

“You’re all alone, aren’t you? Somehow you’re the only one still running. The GameMakers are very pleased, I can tell you that.”

Reagan’s mirror image smirks at Reagan’s continued silence, hums a little, her eyes dancing over Reagan’s face.

The bat rests heavy in Reagan’s hand — ready to be used again. But her clone just sways again, smiles as if they’re discussing something pleasant, stays in her place. Her next words hit Reagan all at once.

“Remember Cora?” she continues. “Remember how she fell all that way down? So many stories up… but I guess she just couldn’t hold on any longer.”

The words are a baseball bat to Reagan’s stomach. The memory flashes across her mind’s eye in horrible clarity without her permission.

Reagan holds onto the twisted metal for dear life, dangling, her shoes touching thin air and the muscles in her arms screaming. Her heart is a wild thing in her chest.

“Not here,” she thinks fiercely. “I’m not dying here.”

Above her she can hear Nia shouting, indistinguishable words over the howl of wind up this high. Jasper’s voice is there too, and Kingston. All three of them are still on the roof. They had been lucky — they had avoided the trap.

But Cora… Reagan can just see the other girl, hanging from the edge of a window, her fingertips clutching at brick. Her face is turned away from Reagan — she can’t see anything but the long spill of Cora’s blonde hair.

“Cora!” Reagan tries shouting, finally getting one foot on the thin ledge in front of her and steadying herself, sweat dripping down the back of her neck. She breaks off, focuses on inching her hands one over the other until she’s close enough to get her other foot comfortably on the ledge, pulling her body in until she’s flat against brick. An open window lies inches to her right.

To get there means letting go of the metal beam above her head, letting her fingertips cling to the brick wall and hoping a strong wind doesn’t blow her off balance. Reagan grits her teeth — and lets her fingers slip from the cold metal.

For one, heart-stopping moment, Reagan feels as if she’ll tip backwards, as if she’ll free-fall all of the way down to the hard ground below her. But she presses flat to the wall, holds her breath, and the feeling passes. It takes one small step and then one more to the right until her fingers grip the edge of a window frame, until she can pull herself around and in, until she’s safely inside a bare room and she spins around, leaning out the window to see Cora, to tell her she’s coming to help -

Cora lets go.

Her body hangs suspended, just for a moment, like a piece of art — delicate hands, large eyes, blood trickling down the side of her face from a head wound.

She lets go and she falls. Her long, blonde hair billows up around her face, hides her eyes. Her hands reach up.

And in the breath before Reagan’s scream, Cora’s face comes into view, just for a moment. The faintest hint of a smile curves Cora’s lips, soft and sad.

Cora hits the ground below.

“And Kingston… he couldn’t stand the idea of losing another one of you could he?”

Reagan bites down hard on her tongue, tries to block out the clone’s words — but it’s no use. The bitter bite of blood fills her mouth. And another memory fills her senses.

“Go! Get out of here, all of you!”

Kingston’s eyes are wide, his voice desperate. He’s pushing them, pushing them all through the door, holding it open as Jasper slips out behind Nia and Reagan, all of them cut and scraped and bruised. Hunted.

And Reagan feels the shot more than hears it.

She sees Kingston’s body jerk, watches a bright crimson flower bloom across his chest, soak through his shirt — watches his body crumple to the floor as it spreads out around him.

She’s running before the light fades from his eyes.

“Stop,” Reagan breathes out through trembling lips. Her stomach is twisting, turning. The anger, the fury — it begins to catch fire, as easy as paper held in a flame.

Her clone laughs — a horrible sound. So familiar, and yet cold and strange. It raises the hairs on the back of Reagan’s neck.

“Getting sentimental?” she asks. Her eyes grow darker, as if someone is dimming whatever light may have once flickered within her. Reagan feels something chip away inside her own chest, feels something cold and sticky spread through her lungs.

“And poor Nia. She was weak — but you all knew that from the beginning.”

Shoes dangling inches above a floor, the horrible creak and groan of a rope looped around a bare beam in the ceiling — looped around a fragile neck.

“Shut up,” Reagan growls through gritted teeth, breaking her silence once more. ”Shut up.”

“Why?” the other her asks, suddenly taking a few steps forward, her eyes flashing, the smile dropping from her lips. “Why should I stop when I’ve just gotten to the best part? You may have somehow failed all of the others, again and again, one after the other… but Jasper was no mistake.”

Reagan’s nails bite once more into her palm, blood trickling freely down her hand. She tastes dirt on her tongue, feels fingers press bruises into her throat.

“He was trying to -,” she chokes out, choking on the accusations.

“Trying to what?” her clone interrupts, drawling the words. “Kill you?”

Reagan squeezes her eyes shut, tries not to remember how it had felt being suffocated, of having Jasper’s fingers wrapped so tightly around her windpipe and squeezing.

“But you knew he wasn’t doing it on his own,” the doppelgänger continues, something like glee oozing through her voice. “You knew he wasn’t himself. And yet you still stuck that knife in his chest. You murdered him. Easy-peasy.”

Sticky, warm. Blood on her hands again, welling up around her wrists — but different eyes this time. Ones that had cleared like the sky after a storm as soon as sharp metal had sliced through skin and muscle, had carved deep into bone.

Dark eyes instead of gold. Night and day.

Reagan’s eyes flash open. She’s teetering, she can feel it — balancing on the edge of something dark and dangerous, a fall that has no bottom.

The rage fills her lungs — it wells in her stomach, presses behind her eyes, turns everything else to ash and cinder. It hurts, burns at her bones and skin as if she is a girl made of paper. Paper held much too close to a flame.

Reagan bares her teeth, grips the bat in her hand as tight as she can.

The clone’s eyes flicker down at the movement. A slow smile spreads over her lips like honey.

“Reagan,” she says, the name like a shard of glass hitting the ground. “The others may have failed the games, but you — you were born to be here. Night was your ticket in, you know. The GameMakers needed something to pull you in and he was the perfect target… but you didn’t need it. You were born this way — cold, powerful, willing to do whatever it takes to win. Ruthless.”

Reagan tastes blood in her mouth. She can’t see past the haze filling her vision. Her heart beats with a tempo that matches the rage and fury of the storm whipping all around them, growing stronger, stronger, stronger until she’s consumed by it.

Her other self clicks her tongue, a gunshot in the quiet eye of the storm — and then she speaks the words that have been tearing at Reagan’s heart ever since that night spent kneeling on the concrete.

She speaks and the whole world holds its breath.

“And yet you were still weak enough to let Night die. The one person you ever actually cared about.”

The storm explodes.

Reagan screams, the sound ripping up her throat, clawing its way up from somewhere deep down inside her. The darkness slams down over her vision — it fills every pore, wraps around every bone.

The screech of the wind is her voice and the flashes of lightning feel as if they’re coming from the fire burning over her skin and this — this is the monster inside her.

Reagan watches as the vision of herself glitches and wavers before disappearing, sucked back into the storm — the imprint of a pleased, wicked smile is all that’s left behind before it too fades away like smoke.

But Reagan has lost all control. Her pain and her fury pull and tug at her, stretch her apart.

Wrath makes up her entire being.

“Don’t let go.” The voice is small, tiny, insignificant in the power that’s coursing through Reagan’s body as the bat drops from her fingers, hits the ground with an unheard clatter — as the wind and the sky and the storm all converge above Reagan, the crackle of electricity humming over her skin, the power of the gales rushing through her lungs.

And yet she still hears it.

“Don’t let it consume you. Anger will get you nowhere.”

Reagan drops to her knees, hugs her arms around her body as the fury eats her alive. She wants to take it out on someone. She wants to see someone feel the same pain, wants them to bleed for what she’s been through. She wants to inflict pain, wants to wreak chaos, wants to let this anger bleed out and take over someone else.

She wants someone else to feel this.

The cold concrete below her bites through her clothes, stings at her palms when she braces them against the ground. The rain begins to fall, lashing down on her shoulders.

“Anger,” the voice comes again, stronger. “Anger will get you nowhere.”

The wind howls. The sky grows darker.

The ground is wet with rain.

Reagan is the storm — she has the power. She could take down the world, could use this energy to demolish everything left on this twisted, half-dead planet. She could destroy the people who had come to her after Night’s death — the people who had promised her revenge but who had been the ones with their finger on the trigger the entire time.

She could take everything away from them — could take away the people they hold most dear, watch them suffer for their sins, watch them crawl and grovel in the same pain they had given her.

She could -

“Anger will get you nowhere.”

Suddenly Reagan is back on a different street. The ground is wet with blood. The rain is quiet here, hushed — it falls down on her shoulders like the tears of the grief-stricken.

Night lies in her arms, a gunshot wound ripped through his chest. He looks the same — still has eyes the color of honey, still has hair the color of ink and collarbones like bird wings.

He looks up at her, smiles. He speaks.

“Anger,” he laughs, choking on the blood in his mouth and breathing wetly before he regains his speech. “Anger will get you nowhere.”

Reagan sobs, the breath hitching in her throat, hands shaking. “They took you away from me,” she cries, caught somewhere between the past and the present. “They took you away and they turned me into this.”

Night lifts a hand, his golden eyes steady. He touches two fingers to her cheek.

The storm stops and Night’s voice is all Reagan hears.

“Then don’t give them what they want. Don’t turn into one of them.”

Reagan’s heart stutters at the words. She stares, tears pouring down her face, suspended in a moment of time that is torn between calm and fury.

Night smiles — and then he disappears.

Reagan is left kneeling on cold concrete, the rain pouring down onto her shoulders in a city wrecked by anger — in a world torn apart by war and violence and above all, revenge.

But something warm touches her cheek. It pushes away the darkness, if only a little.

And as Reagan stares down at her empty hands, all she can do is close her eyes and let all of it bleed away — back down into the cracks of the concrete.