Page 81 of Nemesis

She wouldn’t judge me. No, she loved me. We talked about everything, we were in everything together. Together or nothing.

And now I’m nothing.

I stand in the living room for a second, blinking back tears. It takes me a minute to focus, to remember what I was doing in the first place.

I lay Artemis on the couch, making sure her head ends up on a pillow. There’s blood on the backs of her forearms and elbows, her sweatpants are ripped down the fronts of her thighs, her skin dirty and scraped up. Even her shirt is messed up, with bits of rocks stuck into the cuts on her chest.

What the fuck happened to her?

I fumble with the blinds, shutting everything before I switch on the lamp.

Almost immediately, there’s a knock at the door. Before I answer it, I grab a knife from the kitchen and return, peering out the little side window.

It’s a woman.

A neighbor?

I open it roughly, and she starts.

“What?” I snap.

She fiddles with the front of her coat. “I told her not to come back,” she whispers. “I warned her that she was marked. The Cyclopes are serious about it. Is she okay?”

Cyclopes?

“She’s fine?—”

“You should get out of here. It’s not safe for her.”

I’m experiencing some weird form of déjà vu, I swear to God. The woman seems…normal. Mid-forties, maybe older. Maybe younger. Curly hair. The kind of makeup style that makes me think she might be a grandmother.

That’s kind of mean, isn’t it?

It’s definitely mean.

“Okay,” I tell her, although I’m not sure I fully understand what’s going on. “Thank you.”

“Hurry,” she says. “Just?—”

She spins on her heel and rushes away. I track her down the sidewalk, where she crosses the street and disappears into a house. No light comes from it.

Is she paranoid?

Or…

I shut and lock the door, then arm the security system.

At least I didn’t wave the knife in that lady’s face. It was in the hand braced against the door. I toss it on the counter and hunt for the first-aid kit. I locate it under the kitchen sink, which I never understood. My mom always kept hers in the bathroom. Underthatsink, but still. It’s different. Kitchen sinks are for cleaning supplies and dishwasher tablets.

The adrenaline is fading. By the time I drop down next to Artemis’s hip on the couch, my headache is creeping back at an alarming rate. I clean the wounds I can reach on her arms. There’s a gash on her face, too, that I pinch shut and tape gauze across.

All the while, she doesn’t so much as fucking stir.

I should remove her sweatpants. They need to be thrown away, with the state that they’re in. But some sort of moral… I don’t know, high ground, keeps me from doing it. So I just clean the skin that I can reach, shift her legs over my lap so I can sit more comfortably on the couch, and lean back.

My eyes close.

It’s not too late to forget everything, a little voice in my head whispers.

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