“Rue.” Her voice is raspy and her lips tug sideways in a smile. “I knew…” She’s breathless. “Y-you’d come. I knew. Ri-ride or death… right?”

“Right. Right. I got you, always.” I blink away the stinging in my eyes. She reaches, gesturing at a bag or something across the room, and it’s then I notice Kai, leaning in the doorway, arms folded.

“Can you grab that?” I ask her.

She scoops up the bag with a grunt and shoulders it without a word. But her grimace says it all. Glass clinks against metal as Bri sifts through the bag with clumsy hands. I hold on to her as firmly as I can to keep her up.

“It’s in here somewhere…. There’s…” She pants. “Glass… blue liquid.” She rears back in pain and Jhamal chews his lip. I fumble through the bag, and my hands close around cold glass with a shimmery blue liquid in it. Bri opens her mouth and I pour it in. She lies on my chest panting as her breathing levels out.

“I-I’m going to be okay. They just gave me a lot of Extractor.” She takes the rest of the potion herself and her sickly pallor perks up a bit. She sits up on her own. “Thanks.”

“What did they do to you?” Jhamal’s expression is riddled with lines.

Probably the same thing they did to me. “Do you remember?” I ask her.

“I remember everything.” Her lips are thin, eyes sullen.

Not the same, then. She’s not weak like I was. I could hardly walk for months.

“They poisoned me, basically,” Bri goes on. “Well, first they wanted me to help them crack Rue. Apparently, they’d tried coaxing information about the cuffs out of you?”

The memory of a grinding sound of metal instruments pinching my skin claws at me. I bite my lip to bring me back to the present. “Th-they did? I don’t remember much of it, to be honest.”

Bri wrinkles her brows and Kai’s eyes flick to me. My cheeks burn. She already sees me as a screwup. Will they all see me that way? Is that what I am, then?

Burning.

Smoke.

Screams.

I suck in a breath to stuff down the panic.