The Sky is Everywhere

Chapter Forty-One

I hate the feel of the knife in my hand.

I hate the way the blade is wet and red with blood.

I want to throw it as far away as I can, but I don't dare. Maybe fighting is a waste of time – this isn't an exercise we're meant to escape – but the desire to live is a fire raging in my bones, fiercer and hotter than just hope. Maybe the CC will still get away with all this, maybe we will all die here, but I will not make it easy for them.

I will fight.

My ear throbs with pain where Gavin caught it with his knife, but I still don't dare touch it. I don't want to know how bad it is.

Beyond the first room is a short stretch of black-walled corridor, dimly lit by flat lights in the ceiling, and at the end of that we find ourselves in another room, much like the first, split here and there by random panels. Maybe they're for people to hide behind?

I guess that when this started, this room was also filled with Prey in boxes. They don't look like they've fared as well – three Seconds lie dead in the middle of the floor, while another is crumpled in an entryway that I assume leads to another corridor and another room.

There's no sign of Taffy, but that has to be a good thing. If she's not here then it means she's escaped.

"Stay close to me," I whisper to Sonny and Priya.

We creep towards the next entryway, and we have to step over the body blocking our path. I realise that I recognise her – she was in the box next to mine.

My blood chills.

What if Taffy hasn't escaped?

What if her body is lying in another of these horrible rooms, waiting for us to find it?

In the third room, we find more bodies, and a girl sitting in the corner, holding a knife and sobbing.

Priya squeaks and clutches Sonny's arm.

The girl looks up. I know her. She's called Faye; she's Jackie's friend.

"I killed her," she whispers.

Her face is patterned with a mist of blood drops, and her hands are red and sticky with it.

Only then do I register that one of the bodies, the one lying closest to us, is Jackie.

She must have been Prey and Faye is a Predator, and she's killed her best friend.

Faye looks up at me and her eyes are absolutely shattered.

She might be a Predator, but she's a victim too.

What happens to people like her, people who initially prove they can kill, but are then destroyed by it? Unless she recovers from this, she won't be any good as a military asset.

"What do we do?" Priya whispers.

"Nothing," I reply.

I feel for Faye but she's killed once, which means I can't trust her to come with us. My friends are my priority. And I don't want to look at Jackie's body anymore. It was only yesterday that I had thought about how we would be friends going forward, because she was so willing to help us with Boots, and now she is dead.

We move through the room to the entryway on the other side, and it's not long until we can't hear Faye crying anymore.

There is no one alive in the next room, just more bodies and more blood.

I wonder what happens if a person marked as Prey manages to kill a person marked as Predator? Do they then become Predator themselves? Or are they still targets for the others?