Dom had known Neffe for centuries, and he’d worked closely with her for almost as long. He knew how to read her, and according to him, she wasn’t just flummoxed by this disease; she was afraid. Such a thing almost never happened, and that scared the shit out of me even more.

It also motivated the shit out of me. I still had Abigail’s blood all over me. Four raw, pink lines still streaked down the side of my face from where she’d gouged me with her fingernails. I was just lucky she’d missed my eye; an injury there would’ve taken a full regeneration cycle or two to heal, and I was already functioning on fumes. Thanks to the chemical burns I’d healed from earlier today, whenever the time came that I could afford to crash, I would crash hard. No doubt about it.

Ten kids had died from the disease so far, but they’d managed to take another dozen or so people to the grave with them and infect over a hundred more during the final throes of the disease. A disease that Ouroboros had manufactured. That the Senate and Initiative Industries had to have known about.

It didn’t slip past me that the rabid stage had probably been a purposeful construct of the infection. That they wanted the victims to lash out during their final few hours. And the only reason I could come up with for why anyone would include such programming in such an infectious, apparently incurable disease was for one single reason: to increase the infection rate. They wanted to spread this thing to as many people as possible.

I would find a way to stop it. To stop Ouroboros. I would find a fucking way, damn it.

“You’re certain of this?” Dom asked for the umpteenth time. “You trust him?”

I rolled my eyes, knowing full well he couldn’t see it. “It’s happening, Dom. I’m going to work with Nik, and it’s going to be awesome. So please just accept it.” I was in Dorman’s office, finishing up the final few details on a drawing of my bedroom, getting the wrinkles in the bunched-up comforter just right and adding a pile of clothes in the corner. A pile I hadn’t left there, but that showed up in the drawing anyway. Were the clothes Nik’s? Had he moved from the couch to my bedroom in my absence? My eyes narrowed, even as I added shadows to the discarded clothing. I was creating the gateway on the wall beside the still-active one to Garth’s condo, though this one was taking much longer, considering the lower hum of otherworldly energy flowing through my sheut. I was running on fumes in more ways than one.

I was adding texture to a wadded-up pair of jeans when, unexpectedly, I felt a surge of power rush through me, entering me from some other plane, passing through my sheut, and flowing into the drawing. The imagery crackled, electrified by the energy, then flooded with color. With immaculate detail. The drawing became real. It became a gateway.