Page 64 of The Program

We were fucked.

CHAPTER 24

BROMM

If I’d had any doubts before that my time with Artemis in that web of glowing lines was real, then they were assuaged now. Not that I’d had any doubts to begin with. But she was here, holding my hand, unmasked and stunning in her determination.

Yet, even if we took away the mission and all the responsibility that rested on her shoulders, there was still a wall in place that was clear for me to see. Right there, just behind those mesmerising, earthy brown eyes, there was a shield still in place that I had yet to knock down. It stung a bit, but I understood it. When she was marooning as Arthur Mercer I’d known it then, just as I knew it now: I was going to have to work stars-damnedhardto get her to fully open up and trust me. To trust that I was here and not going anywhere. That my feelings for her were genuine and eternal.

I’d never fallen in love before, and the reason was clear. My soul had been waiting for hers.

When T’s voice drifted over to us as he spoke to someone on his holo-tab, she tilted her head ever so slightly as if she were trying to keep him in her sight, her upper lip curling almost imperceptibly into a sneer. It was a completely accidental insight into her mind, a rare external show of how she felt about the Tornu guard. It hadn’t escaped any of our notice how her distaste for him was a clue that their past went deeper than just some guard helping a subject escape, and not in a positive way.

At least on Artemis’s side. I caught the way T kept glancing at her when he thought no one was looking. I knew that look, too. It was one brimming with affection and longing, the look of a man who’d lost his chance.

I wondered if that was perhaps where her wall came from. Was it a past heartbreak? Did he still have a chance with her? If that was the case, were her feelings for me even real?

No, I wasn’t about to doubt us. I was hers and she was mine. Whatever other noise that existed around our relationship was never going to change that.

I pushed those thoughts to the side when we approached a nondescript door. T had begun discretely leading us when he overtook our clustered group, but he stopped at the door. He stood in front of it, a frown marring what little we could see of his face while he covered it with the gas mask. I was curious why he never seemed to take it off, even now. Did we need some for us, too?

Actually…

‘Hey, T?’ I called out, and the look Artemis sent me for drawing his attention our way was uncomfortable at best and disdainful at worst. She squirmed when his eyes went directly to her and lingered for a moment before finally resting on me.

‘Yes?’

‘Should we have gas masks, too?’

He froze as the question caught him off guard, but then the grim reality of our blatant vulnerabilities seemed to settle within him. ‘Probably.’

‘Do you have any to spare?’

‘I do not.’

‘Do they use gas a lot?’

‘Yes,’ he and Artemis answered simultaneously, both of them wearing twin haunted expressions.

‘So… we’re screwed,’ I concluded.

‘Don’t worry about it, Bromm,’ Artemis stroked a hand down my arm reassuringly. ‘If you all stick close I can shield us from anything they throw our way.’

‘Well, we’re not going to have to worry about that if we can’t even get through this stars-damned door first,’ T complained, turning back to scowl at the offending object.

‘I can help with that too,’ she confessed, pushing through to the front. She took one look at the door, lingered on a tiny symbol in the upper left-handcorner that seemed to be depicting some sort of cog, closed her eyes, placed her hand against the metal and suddenly I was back inside the web.

‘Woah…’ I slurred, disoriented. It was a lot like what had happened earlier in the cafeteria, only faster and more jarring.

Artemis took one look at me and rushed over, concern etching deepening grooves in her forehead. ‘How do you keep ending up here?’

‘Dunno…’ I mumbled.

‘Okay, well… It’ll only take me a tick or two to unlock the door and we can get out of here. Can you hold on?’

I held onto her and made a noncommittal noise that she took for my agreement, and then she stuck to her word. Within a few ticks the door was open and I was sucked back out of the void to find myself propped up by Foryk who’d apparently caught me after I’d collapsed.

‘You good?’ he asked when he saw me open my eyes, helping me get my feet back under me. My legs felt a little fuzzy, an aftereffect of what I could only describe as an out-of-body experience, but my strength was slowly coming back to me.

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